Finding Home

✍ Scribed by Weger, Jackie

• Publisher: Written Musings
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 119 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

A rich tapestry of wit, grit, and humor...

Twenty-four-year old Phoebe Hawley is on a quest to find her family a home. On the road with two siblings, twelve-year-old Maydean and five-year-old Willie-Boy, Phoebe is out of money, out of gas, and out of patience. The only things she owns in abundance are backbone and pride--neither of which she can trade for food or gas.

A collision with Gage Morgan puts Phoebe's mission in even worse jeopardy--until Phoebe discovers Gage owns the perfect place for her clan. However, she soon discovers that Gage is the unlikeliest man in the universe to offer a helping hand.

Phoebe wields all the country smarts she owns to worm her way into Gage's heart, but nothing works. With time running against her family, she plies one last inducement--her scarce feminine wiles. **

Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Fun romance
Believable characters with distinct personalities. Thought-provoking and snarky dialogue. - Top #1000 Vine Voice Reviewer

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I highly recommend this book
I loved this book. I want Phoebe to be my friend as well as Gage and the rest of the Hawleys. - Vine Voice Reviewer

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Downright amazing!
"This wasn't just a great love story, with characters you get to know so well and feel so much for, it was an amazing work of art!! I was thoroughly impressed by the author's ability to really convey the realism with her use of language." - J.C. Lee (California) AVP

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A B.R.A.G. Medallion Honoree We are proud to announce that FINDING HOME by Jackie Weger is a B.R.A.G. MedallionHonoree.

From the Author

As a rule, major characters in every novel have a back story. Back stories are essential to a character's personality. It defines how they think, move, speak, and interact with other characters before they ever step on page. Back stories seldom find their way into a simple romance novel because they slow the pace of the story. In truth, a back story is only essential for character development. Yet, back stories are the very essence of a character. Here is Phoebe Hawley's back story.

Phoebe's ancestors migrated and set up tiny secluded homesteads deep within the Okefenokee Swamp and Suwannee River basin in Georgia and North Florida. Her people came from England--many were runaway indentured servants from the colony General Oglethorpe brought to Georgia. For more than two hundred years, her ancestors existed as a secluded tribe of swamp people. They were the purest Anglo-Saxon stock in America, and their speech, undiluted by contact with modern America for more than two hundred years, was Chaucer's; Elizabethan. The swamp settlers were wild, wary, witty, fiercely independent, and shrewd. They hunted and trapped every wild creature from deer, bear, and wild boar to feed and clothe themselves. They fished, grew their own food and herbs, spun their own cotton, tanned leather for shoes, and carved canoes to navigate the swamp. They didn't hold with government and laws that poached on independence and pride. Excursions to the outside world were few and only to sell alligator hides and trade that cash for sugar, flour, salt, kerosene, and perhaps a bolt of sturdy denim or sewing needles.

Isolated deep within the Okefenokee, two-hundred years of progress, wars, and the Great Depression passed them by until 1942, when Roosevelt, gearing up for war and needing wood from the massive swamp forests of cypress and pine, forced the people out.

The people didn't go far, only to the saw mills at the edge of the swamp and when the saw mills closed, they went to work in the paper mills; when the paper mills along the coasts of Florida and Georgia 'dragged up', they migrated into mill towns. And here, for the first time, the former swamp women came into their own. They put away their spinning wheels, their quilt-making, their cast-iron soap-making pots and went to work in cotton mills spinning thread and filling bobbins. Years went by. Then cotton mills across the South began to close and the people began to migrate once again. Living as 'outlanders' had acclimated them to 'Ameriky' and most had lost much of the Elizabethan dialect, but the rhythm of the language hummed on, as did their elemental code of independence and moral rightness. If anything, six generations of living as outlanders had sharpened their intelligence, hardened their pride and increased their independent spirit. Yet, one thing never changed--when practical choice allows the privilege, the descendants of those early swamp settlers gravitate to land and water.

Which is why Phoebe Hawley, an out-of-work-mill girl, six generations removed from the Okefenokee Swamp, and on a mission to find her family a home, aims her old truck South--toward the coast and finds exactly the right place in the tiny fishing village of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, where a half-dozen great and small rivers and canals flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Phoebe recognizes G.G. Morgan's kissing lips, but is more impressed with the calluses on his hands--a working man's hands. Moreover, she is instantly enamored of G. G. Morgan's land, long before she's enamored of the man himself.