Ka Hancock Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Ka Hancock
Ka Hancock was born and grew up in Utah in the shadow of the most spectacular mountains on all of Earth, the Silicon Slopes. She is a woman with opinions, a fair bit of common sense, good health, a decent education, solid set of core values, and zero tolerance for cruelty.

She is a lifelong learner with two degrees in nursing, with her expertise being in the field of mental health. She has loved this career since her very first day on the job where she got to know this little man suffering from severe Anorexia. Ka (which is pronounced to sound like “Kay”) is a psych nurse by profession and a writer by passion.

Somewhere between attending school, raising her family, working, and getting the laundry done, she managed to pen a novel which takes a look at imperfect love, bipolar disorder, and loss. Her underlying faith in the resiliency of human spirit shines through in “Dancing on Broken Glass”, which is her debut novel. It was published by Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.

She has four kids, a pretty stellar husband, and some grandkids, as well as some devoted friends that she would die for but would rather not. Ka is a mom worried about mom things, a wife that worries about wife things, and is pretty certain that her trust in Jesus Christ is the only reason she has yet to be chewed up by this world. And people just fascinate her on a regular basis.

“Dancing on Broken Glass” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2012. An unvarnished portrait about a marriage which is both extraordinary and ordinary, this takes the reader on an unforgettable journey of the heart.

Michael “Mickey” Chandler (a club owner) and Lucille “Lucy” Houston (a teacher) probably should not have fell in love, let alone gotten married. They are each plagued with these faulty genes: he’s got bipolar disorder, while she has a ravaging family history of breast cancer. However when their paths cross the night Lucy turns twenty-one, sparks start flying, and there isn’t any denying their chemistry.

They wind up together. What follows is a novel that alternates voices in the present and the past. First there is Mickey’s dated journal entries which start every chapter and Lucy following immediately where she reminisces about their ups and downs as a loving couple.

Cautious each and every step of the way, they are determined to make this relationship of theirs work out, and they put their commitment to each other in writing. Mickey will take his medication, and Lucy will not blame him for things beyond his control. She promises patience. He promises honesty. Just like any marriage, there are bad days and good days, and some incredibly bad days, too. In dealing with these unique challenges of theirs, they make the heartbreaking choice to not have kids.

However when Lucy shows for this routine physical shy of their eleventh anniversary, she gets this impossible surprise which changes everything. Absolutely everything. All of a sudden, every single rule of theirs gets tossed right out of the window, and the couple has to redefine what love truly is.

This is a powerfully written debut novel which offers up an intimate look at a couple’s unconventional marriage which survives against all of the odds. This is a couple that took the leap to love each other despite all of the hurdles they face, deciding that their love is stronger than anything that might come their way.

The novel touches on relationships between parents, relationships between sisters, but especially relationships between spouses. These are fantastic relationships that she is developing here, and you truly get pulled into each of their lives, because they do feel like they’re real people, people that you recognize. And while tragedy does have its day, it is love that is strongest. The love in the story also includes love of community and love of family.

Fans of the novel found themselves rereading Mickey’s letter upon finishing the novel. And in doing so, they could hear Mickey’s voice, which by the end was screaming right off the page. They could see this man in their mind’s eye Mickey was writing this letter right to them, attempting to outrun his illness, and attempting to capture each word before it overtook him. Right in the center of his madness, in the eye of his terrible storm, here was his heart, both aching and open for any and all readers on display to see. And fans could not imagine not loving the guy, and they loved him broken.

Readers finished this novel with tears streaming down their faces with a box of Kleenex by their side. This is certainly one of the saddest and most emotional books that some readers have ever checked out.

Ka Hancock delivers a rather touching novel, one that is filled with sadness, love, heartbreak, and, above all, hope. It’s a hope that anybody that reads the novel is going to understand and be compassionate about the debilitating disorder of bipolar, and the ravaging disease of cancer.

For some readers, they may have finished this novel a week ago, but they are still thinking about what happened. This is a special book, because it hits right at the heart strings and genuinely gets you wondering ‘if it was you in that same exact situation, what would you do’? Something that only a select few novels can hope to offer the reader.

This is also a scary novel, because Ka never makes you ever feel as though there is just the one right answer. But it’s not preachy either, instead it’s a messy book. Get your Kleenex boxes at the ready, because you’ll be in a heightened emotional state of mind.

The connective tissue of the book consists of pills, weeping, protestations, recriminations, and sobbing. And then, the book concludes with a final wringing of the readers’ collective tear ducts, which are now exhausted by this point in the novel, via a trifecta of death, birth, and Christmas Eve.