Sometimes I feel as though I have spent most of my adult life in college---I changed majors more often than my friends and classmates changed their hairstyles. Growing up on a small Arkansas farm, I couldn't afford an education beyond my high school years.

But once out in the workforce, I found that my employers were more than happy to support my growing habit of the urge to learn. Luckily for me a few creative writing classes were thrown in for good measure.

Attending Eastfield College in Mesquite, Texas I began my college career. From there I went to Crowley's Ridge Community College, Mississippi Community College, and finally Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

Although I have done very little professional writing---college and high school newspapers and entertaining my friends with comical writings while in school---I have always been a lover of the written word. I was told early on in my career to write about something that I knew, but for many years I guess I didn't know what I knew because I never wrote. Now I realize that what I knew was what I grew up knowing---people. I have always loved people and just recently I became acquainted with someone very special---God. And now that I have come back to my roots, living in Paragould with my husband Donnie and with several grandchildren close by, I want to do what I should have started doing years ago and write about the people I love.

REVIEW

For AMOS JAKEY:

Sandra Graham has woven the classic orphan adventure tale made it seem as if it was an everyman's tale. In reading this novel I began to think through stories in my own family that had as many stops and starts and twists as that of Amos Jakey. These are the stories we'd hear at our great aunts' knees.

Amos Jakey was an ill fated child who lost his mother at eight years old when she gave birth to his younger sister. A very short while later Amos lost his father to the grief of being without his life's mate. The plot here takes very unusual twist Amos Jakey was found by some Mexican laborers, one of whom, Mequidez - affectionately known as "Mel" took Amos under his wing and brought him to a new life in Eagle Pass, Southwestern Texas.

It was here under the tutelage of Luis Perez and is wife Vikki, the owners of the ranch that Mel had brought Amos Jakey that the little cowboy learned his horsemanship, a trade that would become his life's love. Amos was to grow up spending his formative years on this ranch and have many great adventures there, from wild horse round ups to capturing a murderous outlaw who was working on the ranch and going alone on a rescue mission when one of Luis's daughters, Cheyenne, was abducted and taken deep into Mexico. But as Amos matured and finally realized that he loved Cheyenne as she said she loved Amos, he'd learn his first lesson in heartbreaks. Her heart would be stolen by another ranch hand, Amos's number two. This caused Amos Jakey to leave the only home he knew in the night.
And no, there is not a romantic twist here as I just made it sound. But to go any further in this part of the story, which leads to Amos's return to Arkansas after thirty-eight years, would be unfair and give away the power of Sandra Graham's ending. You will need to read it yourself.

I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed Amos Jakey and I can think of lots of other folks back home who would too. This is a story of the common man - a story I believe we all can relate to. It is a story that could have happened in your own family. And speaking of family, I am going to send some of my family members a few copies of Sandra Graham's book!

Reviewed by Gary Dale Clearley

For NICOLINA:

"From Nicolina Wanda Lee Adams' harsh beginnings on her family's farm onwards, entering married life at the tender age of thirteen, this beautifully crafted tale vividly portrays Southern life for a young girl in the nineteen forties and beyond. Spanning five decades, with characters that come to life easily in your mind's eye and descriptive settings, Sandra E Graham's talent for storytelling makes writing look deceptively simply as she weaves together the threads of Nicolina's life and times in this novel.

Thank you, Sandra, for sharing such an entertaining story with us. It was a joy to follow the life and times of Nicolina.. Certainly a book to curl up with on a cold fall evening. By the end of it, Nicolina feels like she's a part of your family....such is the place where she carves a niche in the reader's mind and heart. Thank you again for a wonderful piece of writing.

Reviewed by: Kay Elizabeth
The Megaphone Magazine

EXCERPT

From AMOS JAKEY:

Amos continued his trek towards Bakersfield, but this time winding up in San Diego, taking a watchman's job at a beachside hotel and befriending a young girl with an entrepreneurial spirit and her grandmother. When the young girl's grandmother suddenly died leaving this child with no known relatives, Amos and the hotel owner stepped in and claimed the child as family - making Amos himself the guardian of the girl. Of course, this new familial responsibility caused Amos Jakey to grow roots, however shallow, in San Diego until the child grew into a woman an married a young lawyer. In Amos's early San Diego years he had befriended a local rancher who allowed Amos to ride his horses whenever he liked. And through his horseback riding on the beach Amos met a young woman who changed his life forever...

From NICOLINA:

When fate, in the form of an apparition of a blue-eyed boy, finally liberates Nicolina from this terrible man, she is a homeless widow destitute on the streets of Chicago, still only a child and unknown to her, hunted by the police and suspected of causing her husband's death.

Alone in the big city, Nicolina's strength of character emerges and she finds a way to pull her self up from the depths of despair to a life of near normalcy, but her desire to go back to her roots and home takes her back to where she grew up.