The Flog – The Fabry Log

The Best Reason to pre-order The Promise of Jesse Woods

My hope with each story is that it will grab you by the throat because you care about the people in the story.

I took a couple of weeks away from the office and came back to an email that thrilled me. I want to share some of it with you. This is someone who received a copy of the book from the publisher before it releases in two weeks.

I wanted to write my review this evening, but my husband picked up the book, and, well, there goes that. Just you try prying that book out of anyone's hands once they get sucked into that story.

For anyone who likes getting in on something good from the get-go, this book is the next To Kill a Mockingbird. It felt like the child of the classic, all grown up and refocused for today's reader.

This story is one that sticks to your ribs; the ending was quite satisfying although I sure didn't see it coming.

Rebekah said she thinks it will be a bestseller. Well, that would be wonderful. But my main goal is to move you like I was moved as I wrote the story. I think you'll fall in love with Jesse and Daisy Grace and Matt and Dickie. I think there's a lot of hope in the middle of the pain of their lives. I think there's hope for you and me as well.

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Music is critical to me getting my fiction right. I use songs of the period or soundtracks from films that get me in the right mood for the scenes I'm writing. When I was helping write Left Behind: The Kids, 35 books in the apocalyptic, end-times series, I listened to a lot of Hans Zimmer. When I wrote Almost Heaven, I had an online bluegrass channel I kept going.

For The Promise of Jesse Woods there was a group of songs I listened to every day for the six months it took to write the book.

#1. "Lean on Me," Bill Withers
#2. "A Thousand Miles," Vanessa Carlton
#3. "Long Way To Go," Augustana
#4. "The Road Not Taken," Bruce Hornsby

These songs provide the longing, the heart, the pain, the anguish, and the joy of running back to the hills again.

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Setting is important to every story—and in the ones I tell, I try to make the setting so much a part of the tale that you feel as if you are there. My friend Sharon wrote and said, "When I was growing up, I never imagined I could go back home through a book. Thanks."

In The Promise of Jesse Woods, you'll taste potato salad at a church potluck that didn't turn out lucky for my friends. You'll see fireflies rise from the earth like prayers and smell the smoke of a campfire on the hill that overlooks Dogwood. Feel the humidity of June. And the bugs and gnats. And the cool breeze in the evening.

One of the principal characters is Jesse Woods. She lives in a ramshackle house "on the side of a hill that hung like a mole on the face of God."

As I wrote, I pictured the spot on the road by our house that led to a gas well and a "V" in the hills. When I was a kid there were no houses in sight on that spot, just trees and brush. My friend Rex drove there the other day and took these pictures.




On the flat spot at the bottom of the hill are three crosses. I have no idea where they came from or who put them there, but as I drove past them recently, I gasped. That was the very spot I pictured Jesse's house. Then I had to laugh. You can't make this stuff up. What a setting for a story.

I hope you get to read about Jesse's promise, her life, how much Matt loved her, and what happens 12 years later.

Photo credit: Rexford Chambers

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Our first apartment in Chicago was at a place called Atrium Village. It was built at the edge of the Cabrini-Green housing project, just across the El tracks. To the east was a thriving, burgeoning downtown area. The west was intense poverty and violence.

We lived on the third floor of 300 W. Hill Street. Because my salary was so low, we qualified for government assistance. We also qualified for government butter and cheese that was handed out every few weeks.

In the new novel, The Promise of Jesse Woods, Matt Plumley lives in this apartment. In fact, the first chapter shows Matt with his friend Dantrelle, who lives in Cabrini. Matt has come to Chicago to help inner-city kids escape poverty and hopelessness. Then he gets a call from a childhood friend that changes his life.

Throughout the book, there is a theme running through that shows that you and I make lousy "saviors." Matt doesn't understand this at the beginning of the story, but by the end he has a better handle on part of the problem he brings to the people he is trying to help.

This link to real life is another reason to put The Promise of Jesse Woods on your summer reading list.

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Find out more about The Promise of Jesse Woods

I think we all have pivotal years in life—when internal and external forces collide to shape us. For me, 1972 was pivotal because that was the year I became a full-fledged Cincinnati Reds fan.

And what a year it was. The Big Red Machine was rolling down the track and I was on-board for every game, listening on my transistor radio to Al Michaels and Joe Nuxhall.

Fast-forward 12 years and I'm in Chicago rooting for the Cubs. Internal and external forces had moved me to the city from the country—and the playoffs that year brought a heaping helping of pain.

The Promise of Jesse Woods looks at these pivotal moments through the lens of the life of Matt Plumley—a Pirates fan transplanted in a little West Virginia town where the Reds are exalted.

Matt falls in love for the first time in that pivotal year and returns 12 years later to make sense of all the promises, hopes, and dreams.

I hope this is the one you take to the beach this summer.

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Find out more about The Promise of Jesse Woods