Melanie Wallace Books In Order

Blue Horse Dreaming

Blue Horse Dreaming is the riveting story of Abigail Buwell, who is kidnapped by a Native American tribe and later redeemed by U.S. military troops. Distraught at being returned, Abigail views her redemption as yet another captivity with freedom still agonizingly out of reach. Ultimately, she remains a captive on many levels in the shackles of otherness, language, physical confinement, womanhood, and motherhood.

Blue Horse Dreaming is also the story of Major Robert Cutter, the man into whose hands Abigail is delivered. Through his tormented eyes, we see a vividly compelling portrayal of life on a far flung military outpost in the aftermath of the Civil War where troops and civilians suffered from crushing poverty, famine, and illness, just beyond the traces of an emigrant trail whose way is marked by gravesites.

This is a novel of hauntings and of the haunted, in which the ghosts of the past, both beloved and despised, raise their heads to compete for the souls of the living left behind.

About the Author
Melanie Wallace is the author of Blue Horse Dreaming and The Housekeeper. She and her husband live in Myloi, an agrarian village below the Ohi mountain range in Greece, and in Paris.

The Housekeeper

When Jamie Hall comes across a boy tied to a tree, she sets him free and unwittingly unleashes a force of evil that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Set during a violent winter in the wilderness of a mountain and valley watershed area whose residents mirror the harshness of rural American life with lawless brutality, The Housekeeper is a tale of the past’s relentless grip. A teenage runaway whose only beloved possession is a dog, Jamie entrapped by circumstance and poverty becomes seemingly incapable of escaping the place where her maternal grandparents were born. An ancient postmaster lives through and for his memories of Jamie s grandmother, the woman he loved who was never his. Margaret, the retired photographer who employs Jamie as a housekeeper, leaves behind a pictorial chronicle of the watershed s history. And Galen, an ex convict, finds himself confronted by everything he has tried to erase from his life when he and Jamie, whom he loves, are threatened by his childhood friend now a murderous poacher Harlan. The feral boy, malevolent yet uncomprehending of good or evil and obsessed with Jamie s dog, obstinately trails her; Harlan searching for the boy because of his relationship with a junkyard family who fears the boy because of the havoc he wreaks comes to believe that Galen is protecting him; and Galen is left no choice but to find the boy himself. When he and Jamie return in a blizzard from the mountains, where they futilely attempted to track down the boy, they find that whatever life they might have had has been destroyed. They resolve to move on, to break away from the unremitting winter and Harlan s violence, only to be halted in their tracks on the reservoir s ice, where the boy and Harlan, Galen and a wounded deer, meet their fate as Jamie her dog beside her, and upon a granite outcrop that is part of her past helplessly looks on.