When I was a youngster, my parents took me on 6-week journeys across the United States by car. We'd stop in a small town each night, and I would explore on foot and meet other kids at the swimming pool or ice cream shop. That slow mode of travel has become my default, and I've spent years exploring back roads, small towns, and bywaters by car, bicycle, and sailboat. I write about the strangers I've found and the "candy" I've gotten from them: strangers have lessons for all of us and are not as dangerous as we've been told.
In this novel, a pregnant teenager gets abandoned in a small town where she doesn't know anyone. She begins connecting with strangers, one at a time, studying them and deciding which ones are safe to talk to. Eventually, the main character has built a complete support network for herself and her child. I love the way author Billie Letts describes the process of talking to strangers and connecting with them until they become some of our closest friends. It's the same way I get candy from strangers in real life.
A 17-year-old pregnant girl heading for Califonia with her boyfriend finds herself stranded at a Wal-Mart in Oklahoma, with just $7.77 in change. But she's about to be helped by a group of down-to-earth, deeply caring people, including a bible-thumping nun and an eccentric librarian.
I’m a romance writer who moved around often as a child. Whenever I started a new school, I’d bring a book with me. Even now, I always run errands with a print book and my Kindle as I’m a writer, wife, and mother of four. Two of my children have medical conditions, and I’ve spent time in various doctor and hospital waiting rooms. I’ve taken books into MRI booths where I’d read while my daughter underwent an MRI. I gravitate toward emotional romances that keep me entertained while possessing a thread of humor or something unique about them so I can lose myself in their world anytime, anywhere.
I’m fortunate that I can read as a passenger on car trips or on an airplane, but I gravitate to shorter romances that I can read in one sitting while I’m traveling. For me, Tina Radcliffe is my go-to writer for these type of journeys.
I loved Lucy and Jackson’s story in Claiming Her Cowboy as Lucy is the director of Big Heart Ranch for orphans and Jackson is the attorney sent to evaluate the funding. Can he stay objective or will he fall for the beautiful woman who gives her all to the orphans on the ranch? I found myself reading at gas stops and caught up in the story as I got closer to my vacation destination. This was the perfect book while traveling: short, emotional, and thought-provoking.
Attorney Jackson Harris regularly goes toe-to-toe with the world’s toughest lawyers—but none of them compare to Lucy Maxwell. The feisty director of Oklahoma’s Big Heart Ranch for orphans is as stubborn as she is pretty. But Jack must stay focused; he’s only there to evaluate the ranch’s funding. Falling for Lucy and the sweet children she protects is out of the question. Though Lucy is determined to keep the ranch, she’s not about to give control to a city slicker—even a devastatingly good-looking one. But as they bump heads, Jack…
I’ve always let my imagination wander wild, like a modern-day Anne Shirley—which is one of the reasons I became an author. I love reading (and writing) books that add fantastical elements to our world or the worlds of far-off characters. As an author and die-hard bookworm, I love to genre hop within the Young Adult age range. You can find me nose-deep in anything from science fiction to a gritty paranormal fantasy.
I’ve always thought there was something magical about midnight, and The Secret Hour proved me right. Monsters, mysterious powers, and a bloody act haunt the small town in this story. The secrets are teased out slowly over the course of the book through the POVs of teenage misfits with unique abilities and backstories. Though, the more I learned about the midnight hour, the more thankful I became that this book is fiction. Hungry things come out to play while the rest of us are asleep…
A few nights after Jessica Day arrives in Bixby, Oklahoma, she wakes up at midnight to find the entire world frozen, except for her and a few others who call themselves 'midnighters'. Dark things haunt this midnight hour - dark things with a mysterious interest in Jessica. The question is why?
THE SECRET HOUR is a compelling tale of dark secrets, midnight romance, eerie creatures, courage, destiny, and unexpected peril.
I have no wilderness survival skills and certainly no wish to be thrown into any of the scenarios in the books I’ve recommended. What I do have is great empathy for those who struggle to survive loss—in whatever form it might come—be it loss of home, or security, or family. I know what it is to struggle through darkness and survive what I would have previously thought “unsurvivable.” That’s why two of my middle grade books, but especially MacKenzie’s Last Run, are about speaking up when you’re hurting or frightened. Lost in the dark woods or lost in grief–it’s all ultimately about survival.
I confess, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy this novel. I began reading it primarily to see what was percolating in slightly younger middle grade titles and in particular in books that are rooted in stories about differently-abled characters. Was I ever delightfully surprised when I fell in love with Ellie! I thought the novel was going to be about a lot of mean treatment by kids at school, but in truth, there wasn’t nearly as much of that as I expected (which was an enormous relief!). If you’re thinking, wait, I thought this was going to be a novel about survival, I’m here to tell you that every single day in Ellie’s life is its own survival story.
Surviving being left out of nearly all the activities the rest of the kids find fun; surviving the humiliation of having an aide take her from class to class,…
"A big-hearted story that's as sweet as it is awesome." -R.J. Palacio, author of Wonder "An honest, emotionally rich take on disability, family, and growing up." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In the tradition of Wonder and Out of My Mind, this big-hearted middle grade debut tells the story of an irrepressible girl with cerebral palsy whose life takes an unexpected turn when she moves to a new town.
Ellie's a girl who tells it like it is. That surprises some people, who see a kid in a wheelchair and think she's going to be all sunshine and cuddles. The thing…
A world of research goes into every David Grann book, and this one is no exception.
I appreciate how the author painstakingly re-creates the mood and history of the time—Osage County, Oklahoma, in the 1920s—aided by documents and period photographs. It’s a fascinating, suspenseful true crime story, a tale of greed and betrayal. When oil is discovered on Native lands, the tribal members suddenly find themselves awash in wealth.
The Osage are assigned guardians by the government to oversee their newfound riches, but the guardians may not always have the tribe’s interests at heart.
After the early indifference of the authorities to a wave of suspicious deaths of tribal members, the Osage finally find a champion when the FBI is assigned to the case. The fledgling organization, represented by one very dogged and fearless agent, begins to unravel the murderous web of corruption and villainy and bring the perpetrators to…
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. As the death toll climbed, the FBI took up the case. But the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, its young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. Together with the Osage he and his undercover…
I’ve always been drawn to realistic stories of moral dilemmas, hidden secrets, and unexpected twists. To do that in my novels, I draw from real-life experiences. I enjoy researching all my book locations and situations—everything from Amish special needs schools to Amish camel farms. Striving to be as authentic as possible, I spend time with my Amish friends, so the problems my characters face often are based on real-life events they’ve faced, and I have an Amish reader who checks the novels accuracy as I strive to write life-changing, heart-tugging novels of faith, hope, and forgiveness.
Titus Returns isn’t a typical Amish story, and I like that it delves into serious topics that many Amish romances avoid—prison, PTSD, depression, and alcoholism.
When Titus returns after five years in prison, he’s a different person and no longer at home in his Amish community. He’s been through experiences no one could possibly understand, leaving him struggling with his faith, his identity, and PTSD.
He desires to make amends, but faces temptation from his now-married, former girlfriend along with the anger of the twin who blames him for her brother’s death. Despite all Titus’s problems, I appreciated the way this story of tragedy and loss turned around through the healing power of forgiveness.
Wells Landing (Book 5) Five tumultuous years ago, Titus Lambert had a tragic car wreck that left him serving time for vehicular manslaughter. He may not belong in peaceful Wells Landing anymore, but he must make amends. Visiting the Kings, whose son Alvin died that terrible night, he finds their farm in disrepair. They need his help. Honest toil and his friendship with Abbie King slowly help Titus’s soul to heal.
The Black Experience is my experience. Through living that experience, and with the benefit of education, my passion for storytelling—for sharing oft-neglected Black history from a Black perspective—evolved. Professionally, I am a Harvard-educated attorney who writes, lectures, teaches, and coaches in the general area of the Black experience and in the broader realm of diversity, equity, and inclusion. My ten books focus on aspects of the Black experience in America. I have received many honors and accolades for my professional and community work, including induction into both the Tulsa Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.
Murder in the Streets is a unique, first-person, contemporaneous account of the massacre through the eyes of a Native American (Choctaw) man who was not identifiably Native and lived the life of a white man. The man, Choc Phillips, became a Tulsa police officer and wrote the book as a memoir later in his life. This is a rare, contemporaneous account of one of the low points in American race relations.
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre occurred over two days, May 30 and June 1, 1921, when a white mob destroyed the African American section of Tulsa, Okla., known as the Greenwood District. As a result, more than 1,250 homes and businesses were destroyed, thirty-five square blocks of Tulsa leveled, and hundreds of innocent people were injured or dead.
There have been numerous book and news articles written about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, but most of the first-person accounts were given by African Americans. However, William C. "Choc" Phillips was part white and part Native American and an eyewitness to…
The seventh child of a seventh son of a seventh son. Mother spoke of my sleeping nights and alert days…felt I was curious, observant. She was convinced I’d be the writer in the family. Named me Jerome after the librarian St. Jerome and Mark after Mark Twain, her favorite author as a child. Mother read to us daily, during high school time, a chapter a night. My brother Fred mailed me a word a week to look up. My freshman year in college I earned money writing compositions. And so it began. I sat on the floor and listened to the world war from Pearl Harbor to D-Day and Hiroshima.
Steinbeck can see through his character’s eyes. I get chills when he captures private moments.
Faces on pickers being pushed off land in the dustbowl during the Depression. I tasted abject poverty when supper was passed out on pie tins—one tablespoon of beans in each. Dimes were gas money to follow a dream of picking work a brochure of orange orchards in California promised, not for bread.
The hardships mesmerized me—burying Grandpa along the highway; daughter Rosasharn rocking her swaddled stillborn to ward off the suspicion of border inspectors. In an abandoned railroad car as a night’s shelter a man was dying from malnutrition.
I was moved by the statement of character when the childless momma kneeled and offered the dying man a breast letting her dead baby’s milk save him from death. Steinbeck inspired me to become a writer—this novel and his Of Mice and Men.
'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'
Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.
As a gay writer who has navigated some difficult life changes of my own, including cancer, a gay bashing, and the death of an early love, I always enjoy finding writers whose gay characters must deal with their own challenging life issues. Whether it's a coming-of-age tale, a puzzling mystery, or a suspenseful fantasy, each character comes to terms with accepting who he is in an often hostile world.
All the Croy books are so descriptive and imaginative, well-plotted, and with great characters the reader cares about. It's been fun seeing them grow, change and develop through the series, set in the small, fictional town of Croy. Rumor has it this is the last in the series, but I'm hoping for more.
Set in the same Oklahoma town as the rest of the cycle, this fourth and final book in the series starts on the same afternoon that ends Book 3, but on the other side of town. Characters that appeared only in the wings before-gender-fluid Beau and robust farm boy Frank-suddenly take center stage. Beau follows his dream of starting a rock band, and Frank faces the devastating end of his only real connection in life and the disintegration of his family. Their lives intersect with the three young adults readers have come to know: Joanie, with her insatiable curiosity and…
I grew up on my family’s land run farm north of Enid before coming to the OKC metro for school, giving me a view of the quiet rural spaces and the hopping city life Oklahoma pushes for today and more!
It wasn’t until HBO’s Watchmen that most people learned of the Tulsa Race Massacre, though a few of us who paid attention in tenth-grade history remember a line or two about a “riot” back in Tulsa before the book moved on to talk about something else. This book gives chilling firsthand accounts, both from the author as well as other survivors, who experienced the demolition of an entire community strictly out of prejudice, fear, and hate. It’s a good reminder that it can happen anywhere, any time if we let it.
Mary Parrish was reading in her home when the Tulsa race massacre began on the evening of May 31, 1921. Parrish's daughter, Florence Mary, called the young journalist and teacher to the window. "Mother," she said, "I see men with guns."
The two eventually fled into the night under a hail of bullets and unwittingly became eyewitnesses to one of the greatest race tragedies in American history.
Spurred by word that a young Black man was about to be lynched for stepping on a white woman's foot, a three-day riot erupted that saw the death of hundreds of Black Oklahomans…
