UNBREAKABLE TEXAS WOMEN
By JOANNE KUKANZA EASLEY
NEW COVER REVEAL
Showcasing new covers for all four books in the series.
*** THE BOOKS IN ORDER ***
SWEET JANE
She ran from her mother’s life. Then she had to go home and face it.
By six, Janie already knows what most children never have to learn: vodka doesn’t just make Mama mean — it destroys everything it touches. Growing up in the dust and hard living of 1950s Odessa, Texas, she vows she’ll never become her mother. At sixteen, she runs, hitchhiking west just as the Summer of Love begins — chasing freedom, and finding instead the same old patterns of pain in new places.
Seventeen years later, Jane looks like she’s won. She’s sober, married to a psychiatrist, working toward her graduate degree — a life rebuilt from the ground up. But when news of her estranged mother’s death pulls her back to Odessa, the past she’s spent two decades outrunning finally catches her. Old wounds. Buried truths. A discovery that forces her to question everything she believed about the woman who raised her—and the woman she’s become.
Told in alternating voices — young Janie’s raw first person and adult Jane’s reflective third — Sweet Jane is a dual-timeline story about family secrets, generational wounds, forgiveness, and the long, unglamorous work of healing from it. Winner of the Texas Indie Author Project and a finalist for the Sarton and Eric Hoffer Awards, this is West Texas storytelling with an authentic drawl and a hard-won hopeful heart.
I’LL BE SEEING YOU
Some women spend a lifetime running from the past. Others finally find the courage to face it.
Even as a girl in Palo Pinto County, Texas, Ruby Eaton knew she would never become a ranch wife. At sixteen she’s spotted at the 1940 Fort Worth Stock Show and swept into Manhattan as Lauren—a Powers Girl chasing glamour, jazz clubs, and a life that looks nothing like the one she left behind. When the dream collapses, she drowns the wreckage in liquor, lovers, and one-way tickets. Widowed and divorced by twenty-four, she keeps running, certain every fresh start will erase the woman she used to be.
Now sixty-one, sober for twenty-four hard-earned years and successful in Austin, Lauren believes she’s finally made peace with her past. Then Brett—the husband she left more than three decades ago—walks back in and asks for a second chance. Unsure, she turns to the one person who knows every scar: Jane, the unforgettable heroine of Sweet Jane.
I’ll Be Seeing You is a raw, sweeping saga of ambition, addiction, shattered dreams, and the long, gritty road to redemption.
HIGHER LOVE
At sixty-one, Lauren has finally found a peaceful life with Brett. Then a teenage girl arrives at her door: Stephanie, claiming to be her granddaughter, the child of the baby Lauren gave up for adoption over four decades ago. Family secrets split open. With Brett’s steady presence beside her, Lauren must raise a wounded, complicated girl while confronting the past she thought she had buried.
Told in raw, alternating chapters from Lauren’s and Stephanie’s points of view, Higher Love traces the long reach of intergenerational trauma and the uneasy dance between blood ties and chosen family.
When financial disaster threatens Stephanie’s future, Lauren sacrifices nearly everything to send her granddaughter to college. Then a bittersweet twist of fate—one that echoes the deepest regrets of Lauren’s own youth—forces the family to find a new way forward.
An unflinching multi-generational saga of extraordinary emotional depth, Higher Love will resonate with readers of Mary Beth Keane, Ann Patchett, and Elizabeth Strout.
JUST ONE LOOK
Dani Marek firmly believes the first cut is the deepest and sets out to prove she’ll never love again after the tragic loss of her first love. As she grieves, her life spirals, bereft of self-examination. After trying to break as many hearts as hers has been broken, she marries a man she doesn’t love, planning to use him for college tuition, then leave him.
After a night Dani would rather forget, an unplanned pregnancy derails her ambitions. Dani achieves her freedom from the loveless marriage in an unexpected way, and at the age of twenty-four, she’s left with a baby, a small fortune, and two ghosts.
Set against the backdrop of the turbulent 60s and 70s, Just One Look is the story of a woman who learns to navigate loss, shame, and redemption, arriving at a place where she can love again.
Perfect for the readers of Anne Napolitano and Mary McGarry Morris, this novel is a beautifully written coming of age story that will pull at your heart strings.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joanne Kukanza Easley, is a retired registered nurse with experience in both the cold, clinical operating room and the highly charged world of psychiatric hospitals. She, lives in the Texas Hill Country, where she writes fiction about complicated, twentieth-century women. Her multi-award-winning debut, Sweet Jane, was named the adult fiction winner at the Texas Author Project and shortlisted for the Sarton Award and Eric Hoffer Award, among others. Just One Look, Joanne’s second novel, was a May 2022 Pulpwood Queen Book Club Pick. I’ll Be Seeing You, her third novel, features characters from Sweet Jane. Higher Love, the fourth in the series released in spring 2025. Her prize-winning short stories and poetry have appeared in several anthologies.
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*** GIVEAWAY ***
One winner receives ebook copies of all four books.
Giveaway ends November 16.
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