Most Popular Books by Martha Brooks

Seventeen-year-old Odella is haunted by family secrets. Why doesn't her great-aunt Gloria visit anymore? Why does her mother, Sally, drink so much? Sally's tragic car accident on a frozen lake when she was sixteen seems to have cast a spell over her life that no one can break. Odella tries to hold her family together, but when her mother runs off, the family is left reeling. Then Odella meets Jimmy Tomasson, whose dreams of prophetic flying fish seem to have led him to her. In the heat and tenderness of their deepening feelings and in his belief in her, Odella begins to find the strength to unravel the web of secrets that has ensnared them all.

This stunning novel, written in spare, elegant prose and told from multiple points of view, explores the lives of three generations of women in one family, revealing what happens when you don't have the courage to follow your own heart, and what can happen when you do.

True Confessions of a Heartless Girl

It would have been the easiest and the best thing, Noreen thought, to just get back in the truck and take off. But she couldn't think of where to go. In fact, she couldn't think at all.

Bone Dance

Life is full of surprises, and sometimes the good and the bad get all bunched up together.” Alexandra's beloved grandfather said this often. But nothing could have prepared her the death of her father a man she never knew and his legacy a cabin on prairie land near an ancient Native American burial ground. It is at the cabin that she meets Lonny, who seems more troubled than Alexandra. Lonny's stepfather had once owned that very same cabin and land and always wanted it to go to Lonny. But Lonny, tormented by guilty memories and disturbing visions, refused to take it. Who would have thought it would it end up in the hands of a city girl like Alexandra? He tries not to like her, but is drawn to her nevertheless.

As their story unfolds, Lonny and Alex are haunted and guided by spirits that draw them to the land and to each other in this moving and tender tale about two unforgettable teens.

Being with Henry

"You never know where this life will take you," Henry Olsen tells Laker Wyatt when he finds the boy could, penniless, and sleeping on the street. Raised by his hapless, childlike mother, Laker has often had to act more like a caretaker than a son. It's become easy for him to soothe her with a cup of tea or fake a phone call to her boss on a bad day. But when stepfather number two, Rick the Prick, comes on the scene, everything changes. After Laker fights with Rick, his mother, Audrey, does the unimaginable: She kicks her son out. Drifting aimlessly, Laker meets Henry, eighty-three, a widower with family troubles of his own. Being with Henry brings its own challenges, as well as surprises. How these two disparate souls -- an angry, homeless teenager and a lonely, crotchety old man -- come to know and care for each other makes a sometimes funny, often poignant, and ultimately moving novel about truth and family and the courage it takes to search for these in unexpected places.

Mistik Lake