Dawn Lee McKenna
Those things I wrote
See You: a love story
Sometimes the promise of something is so good that it's worth having, even when you know that you can't keep it.
See You is not a romance, but it is a love story, one filled with the rawness of risk and redemption and the dry humor that is the backbone of the South.
Emma has loved Jack since she was a little girl. But he was more than 20 years older and was raised by her grandmother, Miss Margret, so he's always been more of an uncle than anything else. He's never seen Emma as anything but a child.
Jack's been gone since Miss Margret died ten years ago, and Emma has become content with her small life in her small Alabama town, raising her daughter in the same house where both she and Jack were raised. She tells herself that nothing is missing, but she's never been able to love anyone other than Jack.
Now Jack has come home and he has a plan. If Emma agrees to it, she knows she'll be volunteering for a pain she can't prepare for. Jack has made no secret of the fact that he'll be dead within a year. He does have one secret though, a secret he's protected for years; and that secret could change everything.
Can something be so good that it's worth allowing it to break your heart? Emma and Jack are about to find out, because this homecoming won't be anything either of them expected.
You will laugh loudly. You will cry ugly. But you will find it hard to forget Jack and Emma.
The Cricket Jar (coming March 2015)
Rural Alabama in the 1970s is no place for dreamers and Katy Faye Lovett knows it.
Nobody else is going to raise her brothers and sisters, trust is for the irrational and romance is for the stupid.
The only things on her mind are keeping everybody fed and trying to make a home for her white family on the poorest road in colored town. That, and trying to outrun her family’s history of being violent and defective.
Katy firmly believes the only heroes worth her faith are the ones she finds in books filled with “long, beautiful, curvy words,” and the only loves in her life will be the dead authors that wrote them.
But Katy finds a lot more on her dirt road than a place to hide and a place to sleep. It’s there that she makes her first best friend. It’s there that she comes to understand true courage. And it’s there that she opens her door one day to an unlikely young man with beautiful brown eyes, questionable optimism and a jarful of crickets.
Sometimes poverty doesn’t make you poor, a dead body isn’t necessarily a bad thing and the unlikely ones make the best heroes.