Jacqueline Sheehan Books In Order

Publication Order of Rocky Pelligrino Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Jacqueline Sheehan
Jacqueline Sheehan, PhD, is an essayist and novelist. She is a New Englander to her very core. However spent twenty years living in the western states of New Mexico, Oregon, and California doing a variety of things, including clerking in a health food store, freelance photography, house painting, newspaper writing, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers.

She has published numerous radio pieces and essays, travel articles (Winter in Soviet Georgia), short stories (one in the Berkshire Review).

In the year 2005, she was asked to be the editor of an anthology called Women Writing in Prison. This anthology was the culmination of eight years of writing workshops sponsored by Voices From Inside, an advocacy group for incarcerated women.

Jacqueline seriously questions if there is actually such a thing as writer’s block. She can get stumped by a plot line, not sure about a character’s motivation, or just in need of doing a bit more research. And life events will also move writing to the side. The death of a dear friend, followed by her brother’s death left her no room to write for almost six months. But then you go on. And you continue writing.

“Truth” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2003. Sojourner Truth, born a slave, survived a free bondwoman, and reborn an outspoken abolitionist, died a heroine of graceful proportions. However the story about her inner struggles is a provocative and powerful as her accomplishments is and could only be captured in fiction. This emotionally searing novel beautifully infuses the historical atrocities of the 1800s with psychological speculation about who Sojourner Truth actually was, beyond her political and social persona. This novel tells the story of Sojourner like it’s never been told before.

Sojourner rode to Earth on a comet’s backside. Thus starts Jacqueline’s marvelous debut book, based largely on Sojourner’s early life. Born just at the turn of the nineteenth century to slaves of a New York State Dutch gentleman farmer, young Isabella got sold off at the age of nine to a succession of different owners—some indifferent, some cruel, all of them assuming that she, as a colored girl, would ever think or feel as anything but a child. On the contrary, because Isabella has fears and dreams, and a deeply felt faith that somehow sees her through the indignities and beatings that she’s got to tolerate.

Once Isabella achieves hard won freedom, though, the path that she walks as Sojourner Truth is riddled with obstacles: her son (who’s still a slave), gets sold into the harshest of brutalities, just to get saved by her relentless efforts to get him back. Her young daughters have to likewise remain enslaved until they come of age, their family is adrift and scattered.

Her newfound religion leads her into a cultish environment of charlatans and frauds, and she just barely avoids getting accused of a dearly loved friend’s murder. Ultimately, she triumphs once more against the most enormous of odds and reunites her family under a single roof, just to get called by God to speak out against slavery, and for women’s rights for as long as she continues drawing breath.

Jacqueline puts the story back into Sojourner’s voice, lending the telling a naked, crystalline quality which transports the reader to a time when survival could mean sacrificing little pieces of one’s soul. “Truth” is a testament to a single woman’s strength, and is a powerful lesson in courage.

“Lost & Found” is the first novel in the “Peaks Island” series and was released in 2007. A story about loss, love, and moving on, with the help of one not-so-little dog.

Bob, Rocky’s husband, was only forty-two when she found him lying lifeless and cold on the bathroom floor, and it changed Rocky’s world forever. Chopping all her hair off, quitting her job, and she leaves Massachusetts, reinventing her past and taking a job as Animal Control Warden on Peak’s Island, just a tiny speck right off the coast of Maine and a million miles away from everything else that she has lost.

She leaves her career as a psychologist behind, just to find friendship with a woman whose brain misfires in the most wonderful of ways and one young girl who’s attempting to vanish. Rocky, a fallible and quirky character, finds the healing process to be agonizingly slow.

However she then meets Lloyd. He’s a large Black Lab, and enters Rocky’s world with this primitive arrow sticking out of his shoulder. And so starts a remarkable friendship between a wounded woman and a wounded yet lovable beast. While the unraveling mystery of Lloyd’s accident and missing owner leads Rocky to an archery instructor that draws her in even while she finds every single reason to not trust the guy, she finds the life changing revelation that grief can be transformed, and joy does in fact exist in unexpected places.

“Picture This” is the second novel in the “Peaks Island” series and was released in 2012. Peaks Island, Maine vibrates with a special magic all its own, a unique flow to life which knits together the tiny community which calls it home. The animals, the people, and even the houses have this personality and charm all their own. Just ask Rocky Pelligrino, who was devastated by her husband’s sudden death, and found hope there because of Lloyd, a relentlessly loyal Black Lab.

A new job (as Animal Control Warden) and warm friends have helped her chart a course toward a promising future. She is even ready to try at love once again with Hill, the gentle and patient archery instructor. And there’s this old house haunted by lost love and forgotten secrets which speaks to her very soul.

However a phone call from this troubled young woman that’s looking for her biological dad shakes Rocky’s newfound joy. Could this young girl actually hold a tendril of the man that was the love of her life? Or could this girl’s appearance throw Rocky’s world all into chaos and leave her with her heart shattered all over again?