Jacqueline Holland Books In Order

Publication Order of JacquelineHolland Standalone Novels

Jacqueline Holland
Jacqueline Holland grew up in Southern California and Columbus, Ohio. She went to college in Chicago, moved with Peter Holland (her artist husband) from Chicago to Honduras, New York City, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Lawrence, on back to Chicago, and then back to the Twin Cities, first with just one son coming along for the ride, and then another.

Jacqueline has her MFA from The University of Kansas, and her short fiction has been recognized and published in a variety of contests and magazines.

She was inspired to write “The God of Endings” during her first year of her MFA program. She was walking home from classes thinking about odd things, like she always does, and the particular odd thing she was considering was what would you do with your time if you were never going to die? How would you truly pass your time, and how would this feel?

All of a sudden this woman started speaking to her, explaining to Jacqueline in great detail what she’d done to pass her time for the centuries that she had already been alive. So Jacqueline got her phone out and started recording in voice notes everything this woman told her. Then when she got back home, she grabbed her computer and started typing it furiously. It was this genuine frenzy.

However a novel is more than just a monologue from just one main character, and she is certain that the inspiration for the novel’s core was already there just germinating in her subconscious. She was a young mom, with a three year old son and a son under a year old. Her older son has autism, whose symptoms at that point were very challenging. Lots of battles and fits.

And she didn’t always respond to him the way she wanted to with endless patience and consistent gentleness, and it killed her. She’d always been flawed: selfish, easily frustrated, prone to mood swings and depression. In the past, these flaws only affected her and people that could walk away if she became more trouble than she was worth. however these flaws now also affected a tiny and innocent child to whom she was pretty much the entire world and for whom she wanted nothing but good things.

She would wonder, like a lot of moms do, how much bad is too much? How much will make you a bad mom? And the book is about this horrible painful parsing and weighing that people do to ourselves as we try figuring out if we’re good or bad people. If we’re more of a blessing to the people around us or more of a curse.

Collette’s vampirism felt like the perfect vehicle for this struggle, this question. She’s got this insuperable destructive flaw which makes her so dangerous, and her immortality means that she is unable to bow out. She is genuinely trapped between a rock and hard place (as moms can often feel they are), so she’s forced to figure out a way to reconcile with her darkness, to reconcile the inescapable fact that she’ll always both be a curse and a blessing to the people that she loves, and be both cursed and blessed by them and the rest of the world, which is shot through with this same exact painful and beautiful duality.

It took her about six years and eighty Word documents to write the novel. Supposedly every ten years, people will swap out all of the cells in their bodies for new ones, which makes them essentially new people on the cellular level. Jacqueline believes that the timelines for books in progress is fairly similar, and she’d be curious to see an analysis of her book to learn just how many words from the first draft made it into the final draft. Yet, just like people, the bigger organism somehow maintains this surprisingly recognizable and consistent shape despite all of these continual changes.

She feels pretty lucky with the process of writing the book. It started life as this novella that she wrote during her first year of grad school. What is great about this is she was able to workshop a completed work, a bit like an abridged version. She got a ton of brilliant feedback from her helpful and super smart peers, plus a bunch of encouragement without which she’d probably have forgotten all about it and just moved on. Later, when she decided to turn this into a full length novel, this process was primarily one of dreaming up more (which is her favorite part of writing) and adding this new material in.

Jacqueline did not consume too much vampire media while writing the novel. In her research for the book, she focused much more on the lore and history of vampires, reading a lot of “Montague Summers”, rather than on the actual literature. This was because she didn’t want to be reacting to other works and creating around them, at least not at first. Jacqueline didn’t even read “Dracula” until she’d finished the first draft. However then it was just fun to go back and stick little resonances and references in. Now that she’s finished with the book, she’s much more enthusiastic to take in more vampire literature.

“The God of Endings” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2023. Enchanting and suspenseful, this debut novel spans history, and weaves a story of family, love, myth, and history that’s seen through the eyes of an immortal woman.

Collette LeSange has been hiding this dark truth: She’s immortal. In the year 1834, her grandpa granted her the gift of eternal life and since then, she’s endured centuries of heartache and turmoil.

Collette, almost 150 years later, is just a lonely artist that runs an elite fine art school for kids in upstate New York. However her life gets upended suddenly by a stalking presence from her past returning into her life, the arrival of this gifted child from a troubled home, and her own mysteriously growing hunger for blood.

Combining breathtaking suspense with brilliant prose, “The God of Endings” by Jacqueline Holland serves as a bigger exploration of the human condition in all of its complexity, asking us the most fundamental of questions: is life in this world a curse or a gift?