Contributed by Jess Lederman
The idea for my novel Hearts Set Free – an Amazon Best Seller in Contemporary Christian Fiction for the past two months – came to me not long after my first wife passed away, while I was living in Wasilla. The first chapter, which is narrated by one of the story’s heroes, Luke (Uukkarnit) Noongwook, opens in the Alaska Territory in 1925. The first few paragraphs are provided below.
From Chapter One of Hearts Set Free:
My father deserted my mother and me when I was thirteen years old. He had become famous that winter on the Great Race of Mercy, one of the Athabascan mushers who brought diphtheria serum to Nome and saved ten thousand lives. He’d done the impossible, a blind run in the howling darkness, crossing the open ice of the Norton Sound, the temperature falling to sixty below, the sun a distant dream. He was our hero, our North Star.
And then he was gone.
He left us, of course, for a woman. A blizzard had hit him at Unalakleet, a storm so powerful that it travelled four thousand miles, till at last it reached New York and froze the Hudson River. The woman lived in just that far-away land, on the wild island of Manhattan, and her name was Kathleen Byrne. The Hearst papers had been giving the Great Race front-page headlines; Kathleen was a reporter, lean and hungry, she’d go to the ends of the earth for a good story, and one day she got her chance.
No one in my home town of Nenana had seen anything like her, a slender redhead with emerald eyes, smoking Lucky Strikes and exhaling expertly through her nostrils, this coolly confident young woman with fiery hair.
She wanted details that would bring the story to life, so father brought her to our home to show off his sled dogs. At least, the ones who’d survived; for three he had raised since they were pups had died on the trail. Somewhere in the madness of that journey he’d forgotten to cover their groins with rabbit skins, and they’d perished of frost bite in the unfathomable cold.
I gaped at her stupidly.
“Excuse my son,” said my mother. “He has no manners.”
Eighty-six years have passed since that time, but from old photographs I understand just what my father must have felt. She seemed audacious and yet fragile, and she had the sort of smile that made men who’d known her barely fifteen minutes want to say, “if you smile that way at any other man, I’ll lose my mind.” I’m not talking about lust, you understand; rather, a sort of greed combined with something barely distinguishable from rage.
And what did Miss Byrne want with my father? Ah, but what an outrageous trophy to bring back from the Arctic frontier! His native name was Taliriktug, strong arm, but he went by his English name, Victor. He was sinewy, powerful, and, for an Athabascan, unusually tall. His maternal grandfather had been an Orthodox priest, a Russian who came to Alaska as a missionary and proceeded to lose his faith in this strange new world. He joined some fur traders, then married a native woman, my great grandmother. All local legend, all stories overheard when my father and his friends had been drinking, for the Russian and his wife both died years before I was born.
When Kathleen left, my father went with her. He said there’d be interviews with The Saturday Evening Post, and on something called radio that could send his voice into a hundred thousand homes, maybe more. He said Miss Byrne had reason to think the Lambert Pharmaceutical Company might pay him a lifetime’s wages for endorsing a product called Listerine. He said he’d write letters and be back in just a few months.
But I was the only one he fooled.
You can read or listen to the complete first chapter here: https://www.jesslederman.com/hearts-set-free
"Hearts Set Free enthralled, entertained, and enchanted me from the very first page! If you are a reader who is tired of reading the same old books, take a chance with this one because I promise that you will not be disappointed!"
– Aimee Ann, redheadedbooklover.com
"This is a soaring historical epic… Jess Lederman has given us unforgettable characters…”
– WisePath Books
“…uplifting and compelling… a powerful and inspiring novel.”
– Foreword Clarion Reviews
Hearts Set Free is available in paperback or for Kindle at amazon.com. It’s free for anyone who subscribes to Kindle Unlimited.
