Books
Echo Her Lovely Bones (2022)
with Foreword by Silas House
Much like the sturdy bones of the centuries-old house, the women who have inhabited its rooms are bound together through the letters they leave in the attic. In these letters that form the novel, the women reveal their dreams, their disappointments, their griefs, and their hope. Each letter moves us through the female experience that is shaped as much by historical context as it is by each woman’s own life.
The women of Echo Her Lovely Bones include: a daughter reluctantly leaving the comfort of her family in northern Virginia to settle in the harsh Kentucky frontier as a new bride; a now-freed slave learning what it means to be free; a young law student in the Roaring Twenties testing her family’s as well as cultural expectations for women; a woman wrestling with a dark family secret and a debilitating depression; a traditional wife and mother beginning to question those traditional values; her now-grown daughter living out the repercussions of her mother’s abandonment; a woman forced to strike out on her after divorcing her husband of two decades; and her daughter, twenty years later, sorting out family issues in the midst of a global pandemic.
These memorable women echo the resilience of generations of women and affirm the importance of women finding their own voice.
(Originally published in 2009 as My Secrets Cry Aloud)
“Perhaps the greatest gift of Robinson’s novel, written in a variety of distinct voices which are all linked by her well-crafted prose, is that she’s given us characters we will not forget because they are simultaneously completely new creations yet are like so many of the women who have shaped our own lives.” — Silas House, New York Times best-selling author and author of Lark Ascending
“Sherry Robinson has the ability to go right to heart of things: a family, a relationship, a personality….She does not gloss over or neglect the real complexity of life.” —Lee Smith, New York Times best-selling author and author of Blue Marlin
Blessed (2019)
Grayson Armstrong’s vision for a dying church has everyone in small-town Mercy, Kentucky, talking. The truth is everyone had been talking about Grayson ever since this dark-haired twenty-eight-year-old preacher with shoulder-length hair and an ill-fitting suit drove into town twelve years before in his silver convertible with his pretty wife and two rambunctious boys. It’s his untimely death, though, that has everyone trying to understand who they thought he was.
This vivid, poignant, and heart-breaking story is told by multiple characters whose paths intersect with Grayson: a homeless Vietnam veteran haunted by demons of war; the local diner’s young waitress grappling with her family’s dark history; aggrieved and supportive congregants and townspeople confronting change and the power of love and hate; and Grayson’s wife and his coming-of-age gay son, struggling to understand their own feelings about Grayson.
During a time when communities and countries are split apart, Robinson’s calming prose and timely story encourages us to put aside our fears, hate, and biases and to open our hearts and challenge our perceptions. Blessed is ultimately a story of hope and of the power of forgiveness.
Shadows Hold Their Breath (2022)
In 1979, after suffering the loss of her dear friend and sister-in-law, Kat Hunter begins to question everything about her traditional life. With a backdrop of the 1970s feminist movement, Kat decides the only way she can discover who she was meant to be is to leave her husband and her three young daughters. She discovers that the decision has unintended outcomes and leads her down an unexpected path until she confronts her incomplete grief.
This novel picks up the story of Mary Catherine Hunter from Echo Her Lovely Bones.
“Like [Henrik] Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and [Kate] Chopin’s The Awakening, Shadows Hold Their Breath explores one woman’s decision to leave her husband and children rather than crumble under the weight of patriarchal roles. Kat is also burdened by grief and an unspoken love that perhaps even in her nascent self-awareness is still taboo. The novel offers no easy answers, no pure absolution, just Kat’s honest quest to accept—and live—her truth,”—Marie Manilla, author of The Patron Saint of Ugly