About Tares among the Wheat by H. Melvin James
Superstition, mysticism, and religion weave like tangled vines through the tales of Amelia’s newly discovered ancestry. As a widow struggling to sustain herself and her ten-year-old son, Amy’s modest life is tragically disrupted when a dubious lawyer determines her late mother, adopted at birth, was the estranged daughter of the recently deceased Lexington McClary. Although the net worth of the once enormous estate is petty, Amy decides to travel several hundred miles to attend the funeral, in the hope of at least learning a semblance of her newfound ancestry.
After the interment, alone in the secluded rural cemetery, Amy trips and bashes her head against a tombstone, suffering a coma and complications requiring medical care and
convalescence for several months. While precariously recovering, Amy is visited in the depth of nights by a mysterious woman who tells stories of Amy’s maternal grandparents, their families, and acquaintances. The tales of her ancestors reach back nearly a century and include their immigration from Ireland to New York City and their migration westward to Indian Territory.
Poignant remembrances of her own life and the altered world into which she regains
consciousness portray the unconquerable but elusive human spirit, confronting failure in the wake of triumph, tragedy dispelling romance, madness shaming war of its glory, and the cruelty of murder in defiance of reason.
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Author Bio:
H. Melvin James was uniquely prepared to write this epic novel. Few writers have such wealth of broad relevant personal experience and rich cultural heritage from which to draw in developing such diverse characters and far-flung settings as included in this saga.
Melvin was born the seventh of eight siblings of Oklahoma farm family. After leaving the
farm at seventeen he utilized his farming and ranching skills to hire into commercial jobs, paying his way through two college degrees. Mr. James’s varied work experiences, throughout his career, contributed authenticity to the fictional characters and their situations as described in his writing.
Mr. James’s grandparents took part in the Indian Territory’s celebrated Cherokee Outlet Land Run of 1893. They were the sons and daughters of immigrants, from first-generation to twelfth-generation Americans, including Irish, German, Czech, Dutch, and English. They participated in America’s history, from the Revolutionary War and through
the great westward expansion. Their rich and colorful cultures, customs, and superstitions are the legacy from which Mr. James drew in creating his characters, plots, and story lines.
Cherished tales of his relatives’ experiences during the dramatic eras of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially from the perspective of the southern Great Plains, keenly contributed to Melvin’s writing. Glimpses of the momentous events of the era, timelines of this novel, World War I, the influenza epidemic of 1918, oil booms, the decadent Roaring Twenties, the doom of the Dirty Thirties, and the horrific Dust Bowl, are woven into the pages of this intriguing tale.
When not engaged in their love of travel, Mr. James and his wife reside their energy efficient house of his personal detailed design, constructed between forest and meadow on the farm where he was raised.
“Tares among the Wheat” is rated by readers “five stars” on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and 4.6 Stars on Goodreads.
This classic literary fiction novel includes mystery, romance, history, war, pandemic, and horrific natural disaster, all real to the unique era and setting of the framed storylines.