The Girl In The Butternut Dress

Gabrielle Pryor, an illegitimate orphan, comes of age on the eve of the Civil War, when her neighborhood comes violently apart in divided loyalties. She finds her loyalty when she goes to work on a farm, which it is secretly a station on the Underground Railroad, and she helps escaping slaves.

Gabrielle should never have fallen in love with a Southern-sympathizing neighbor.

But she did.

Random Truths

Random Truths is a saga of “haves” and “have-nots.”  During the Great Depression a wildcat well strikes oil. Big oil means big money. “Dirt poor farmers” soon have more money than they’d ever imagined, old moneyed families lose stature and big city criminal elements bring gambling and prostitution to the small community. Add to the mix, greed, sibling jealousy, contentious neighbors--and a sheriff on the take.

Abandoned

Will Fletcher doesn’t believe his father died in the Civil War. When his mother received a telegram from the War Department seeking clarification about an orphan living in Corinth, Mississippi, whose father was a Vachel Fletcher, Will, now a young lawyer, see this as evidence his father did survive the War. With dogged determination, fueled by long-held resentment, Will sets out on a quest.

But is this Vachel Fletcher his father?

Abandoned draws back the curtain on the romance of the days of the burgeoning railroad era, when the country convulsed in war against itself and suffragettes left Victorian decorum aghast at their demands. Against this backdrop, Violet Fletcher Austin, Will’s mother, lost the love of her life and now plays the role of a small-town judge’s wife. Will Fletcher, the ambitious, driven son, knows the heartache of being abandoned and is determined to find the father who left them. Addie Rose, Will’s wife, believes the time has come for the world to hear the voices of women. Abandoned is a story of betrayal, vindictiveness, ambition, the anguish of war, and social reform, but above all…love.

Joanne Hardy received Daughters of the American Revolution’s National Recognition of “Women in the Arts” for her historical novels The Girl in the Butternut Dress and Random Truths. Her Civil War novel, The Girl in the Butternut Dress, received Honorable Mention in National League of American Pen Women’s Fiction Contest. Joanne has covered community events as a reporter for the Desert Sun Newspaper for eleven years. She holds an MA in Education, an MA in history and participated in the UCLA Writers Program.  She lives in Palm Desert, California