Julia Park Tracey
I’ve Got Some Lovin’ to Do: The Diaries of a Roaring Twenties Teen (1925-1926)
It is July of 1925 when fifteen-year-old Doris Bailey decides to keep a diary -- a place where she can openly confide her dreams, hopes, and ambitions. Doris is flirtatious, untamed, and romantic. These true diaries of a Roaring Twenties teen will charm you and open the world of 1920s Portland, Oregon, from a young girl's view.
More info →Reaching for the Moon: More Diaries of a Roaring Twenties Teen (1927-1929)
"I'm glad I'm alive!" Doris Louise Bailey, a teen in the Prohibition era, struggles with a life-threatening bout of scarlet fever. And it's an apt summation of how she lived in the years following her brush with death.
More info →Amaryllis: Collected Poems
“Julia Park Tracey’s Amaryllis is potent and true; clear, personal, risk-taking, breath-swiping, and above all, rewarding.”
–Dan Brodnitz, poet and webmaster, The Richard Brautigan Poem of the Day
Silence: A Novel
After three grievous losses, Puritan woman Silence Marsh dares to question God aloud in the church, and that blasphemy lands her in trouble—she is silenced for a year by the powers that be. Broken in heart and spirit, Silence learns to mime and sign, but it isn’t until a new Boston doctor, the dashing Daniel Greenleaf, comes to her backward Cape Cod village that she begins to hope again. Rather than treating Silence with bleeding or leeches, Dr. Greenleaf prescribes fresh air, St. John’s Wort, long walks—and reading.
Silence has half a hope of getting through her year of punishment when the cry of witchcraft poisons the village. Colonial Massachusetts is still reeling from the Salem Witch Trials just 20 years before. Now, after demanding her silence, she is called to witness at a witchcraft trial—or be accused herself.
A whiff of sulfur and witchcraft shadows this literary Puritan tale of loss and redemption, based on the author's own ancestor, her seventh great-grandmother.
More info →The Bereaved
Based on her research into her grandfather’s past as an adopted child, Julia Park Tracey has created a mesmerizing work of historical fiction illuminating the darkest side of the Orphan Train.
In 1859, when her husband dies and her children become wards of a predator, Martha—bereaved and scared—flees their beloved country home taking the children with her to the squalor of New York City. But as a naive woman alone, preyed on by male employers, she soon finds herself nearly destitute. The Home for the Friendless offers free food, clothing, and schooling to New York’s street kids and Martha secures a place temporarily for her children there. When she returns for them, she discovers that the Society has indentured her two eldest out to work via the Orphan Train, and has placed her two youngest for adoption. The Society refusing to help and with the Civil War erupting around her, Martha sets out to reclaim each of them.
More info →