This month’s WFWA list opens the page to secrets and lies. These novels showcase journals and letters that unlock family secrets, answer age-old heartaches and send readers on twisty journeys of discovery.
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Greetings From Tucson (Poppyseed Press, 2021) by Cherie L. Genua
A coming-of-age story with true love at its core, Greetings From Tucson tells the heartwarming and uplifting story of four sisters’ lives through the lens of handwritten letters. In June of 1945, tragedy struck and sisters Cookie, Frankie, Dottie and Connie were torn from everything they knew — their parents, their home and, most importantly, each other. Forced to live thousands of miles apart, they feared their bond would be broken. The four sisters began writing letters to share every detail of their young lives, celebrating milestones and mourning heartbreaks from afar. Through these letters, found decades after they were written, they strengthened their relationship when the odds were so stacked against them. That is, until one sister’s secret from the past changed everything. Would she break the fragile bond they worked so hard to nurture after their split so many years ago?
No Names to Be Given (Admission Press, 2021) by Julia Brewer Daily
When three young unwed women meet at a maternity home hospital in New Orleans in 1965, they are expected to relinquish their babies and return home as if nothing transpired. One of them is a songwriter/singer who writes daily in her journal. 25 years later, they are brought back together by blackmail and their secrets threatened with exposure — all the way to the White House. No Names to Be Given is told from the three women’s perspectives in alternating chapters and explores the societal pressures on women in the 1960s who found themselves pregnant without marriage.
Circumference of Silence (Black Rose Writing, 2021) by Jacquie Herz
It’s been a week since the funeral, and Mali is at her mother’s Manhattan apartment ready to pack it up — at least that’s what she thinks — until she discovers a manila envelope, propped up against the back of her mother’s desk, and filled with a mass of unsent letters. Her mother’s handwriting on the lined notepaper is so familiar, and the slight German accent Mali hears ticking through her words, so haunting. Mali reads the memories of her mother’s Jewish childhood in 1930s Berlin, then her life in war-torn London. But when she comes to her mother’s account of her too-early marriage and the divorce that forced her to leave her young daughter in London and go to New York, Mali is thrust back into her own unhappy childhood, where that relentless ache for her absent mother, lodged like a stony pit inside her, must now be reconciled.
Forget Russia (Tailwinds Press, 2020) by L. Bordetsky-Williams
A story set in 1980, Moscow. Anna is studying abroad in Russia at the height of the Cold War. She’s a second-generation Russian Jew who grew up hearing the family history of abandonment, Czarist-era pogroms and Soviet-style terror. In Moscow, Anna dodges date rapists, KGB agents and smooth-talking black marketeers while navigating an alien culture for the first time. She discovers a journal that helps her to understand what it meant for her grandparents to actually return to the Soviet Union in 1931 after originally leaving the country for the US earlier in the century. With its intricate insight into the everyday rhythms of an almost forgotten way of life in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, Forget Russia is a multi-generational epic about coming of age, forgotten history and the loss of innocence.
A Feigned Madness (Cynren Press, 2020) by Tonya Mitchell
In a fictionalized account of the woman who would come to be known as daredevil reporter Nellie Bly, Elizabeth Cochrane has a secret. She isn’t the madwoman with amnesia the doctors and inmates at Blackwell’s Asylum think she is. In truth, she’s working undercover for the New York World. The protagonist communicates clandestinely with her love interest through the language of flowers sent on postcards. When the managing editor refuses to hire her because she’s a woman, Elizabeth strikes a deal: in exchange for a job, she’ll impersonate a lunatic to expose a local asylum’s abuses. When she arrives at the asylum, Elizabeth realizes she must make a decision: is she there merely to bear witness, or to intervene on behalf of the abused inmates? Can she interfere without blowing her cover? As the superintendent of the asylum grows increasingly suspicious, Elizabeth knows her scheme — and her dream of becoming a journalist in New York — is in jeopardy.
What’s Left Untold (Red Adept, 2020) by Sherri Leimkuhler
Every secret has its price. Anna Clark and Lia Clay were unlikely best friends in high school, but their yin-and-yang personalities drew them together in a sister-like bond. Then during college, Lia inexplicably walked out on their friendship and disappeared, leaving Anna hurt, confused and disillusioned. 20 years later, Anna discovers a letter that her estranged best friend Lia wrote the summer after they graduated high school. That letter contains a cryptic postscript concealing a devastating truth. With her 20-year high school reunion approaching, Anna moves closer to uncovering the secret in Lia’s letter and the heartbreaking consequences it set in motion. As the layers of deceit and betrayal begin to unravel, Anna is forced to question everything she believes and come to terms with what it means to forgive the one person who hurt her in the worst way imaginable.
The Vice (Jennifer R. Jensen, 2021) by Jennifer R. Jensen
Harper is a piece of work. At 28, she’s found herself stuck in a cycle of perpetual anger, drug and alcohol abuse, and constant self-loathing. Her reflection in the mirror is a girl she no longer wants to be. A sudden chain of events leads her to face the traumas she has been trying to keep buried with her numbing vice. Harper writes in her journal to communicate better with her therapist, and although the nagging voice in her head continues to poke at her insecurities and drag her down, she starts to believe that there might be light at the end of the tunnel — an end to the chaos in her life that she’s so desperate to reach.
The Road and Beyond (Twelfth Night Publishing, 2014) by Marilyn Brant
Aurora Gray is no stranger to tragedy. In the summer of 1976, when she was just 16, her world turned upside down when her big brother Gideon and his best friend Jeremy disappeared. For two years, there’s no word from either of them. No trace of their whereabouts. But then, shortly after her high-school graduation, she unexpectedly finds her brother’s journal and sees that it’s been written in again. There are secret messages coded within the journal’s pages and Aurora is determined to follow where they lead, no matter what the cost. She confides in the only person she feels might help her interpret the clues: Donovan McCafferty, Jeremy’s older brother and a guy she’s always been drawn to … even against her better judgment. They set out on a road trip of discovery and danger along America’s historic Route 66, and the mystery they uncover will forever change the course of their lives.
