About Tessa’s Heart: A Texas Story
It’s 1952 and in the small town of Yoakum, Texas, Tessa Louise Carter—a quirky, sassy, back-talking nine-year-old—finds herself torn between her deeply religious but foul-mouthed grandmother and her beautiful bed-hopping mother.
Tessa doesn’t have many friends and takes solace from talking with the ghosts of her dead great-grandmother and great-aunt—which doesn’t sit well with her mother or grandmother.
What Tessa wants and needs more than anything is a father figure, but the men her mother brings home are either mean and cruel or are totally uninterested in the musings of a nine-year-old. When her mother becomes pregnant by the local pastor, he flees, and out of convenience she marries yet another of her men friends. Tessa is miserable and is sent back to live with her grandmother.
When Tessa finds a human skeleton, half-buried in the mud outside her grandmother’s home, the family’s ghastly dark secret is revealed. Tessa becomes haunted by the spirit of her great-grandfather, which won’t leave her alone—but her nightmare is only just beginning…
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Author Bio:
Jackie Lewis was born in Santa Monica, California. At the time her mother, Joyce Reynolds, was under contract to Warner Brothers. During her early years, she watched her mother’s movies on television.
During her youth, she moved quite often and lived in many different locations in Los Angeles and moved back and forth between Los Angeles and Houston quite a few times. She also lived in Virginia and Arizona. Living in different cities broadened her knowledge of different kinds of people.
Her father’s family lived in Texas and her grandmother took her in the summers to the family’s ranch outside of Junction, Texas.
Her parents were divorced when she was two years old and her mother was married five times. Growing up with four different stepfathers gave her a lot of humorous and tragic experiences to draw upon later in her writing.
By the time she had graduated from Hollywood High, she had attended twelve different schools.
She attended California State University at Northridge and received B.A. in Art. She went on to attend University of California at Los Angeles and earned an M.F.A. in Screenwriting.
She studied acting at Lee Strasberg Theater Institute in Los Angeles.
For many years, she was a member of The Writer’s Group in Studio City, California and developed plays in that group.
She’s had three plays produced in Los Angeles: Birds of a Feather Stuck Together, Two Nowhere Men, and Sitting on the Edge of the Chair.
She currently lives in Santa Monica, California and is studying creative writing with author, Jim Krusoe.
Tessa’s Heart: A Texas Story is Jackie Lewis’s debut novel.
Contact Jackie Lewis on author website or on Facebook
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jackiewrites3@gmail.com
04/08/2023