Anna's Healing is the first book in a brand-new collection from popular author Vannetta Chapman. These stories of love and family and Amish community in Oklahoma tell of the miracles that can happen when lives are lived in service to God and to one another. When a tornado strikes the farms surrounding Cody's Creek, Anna Schwartz's life is changed forever. She suffers a spinal cord injury and suddenly finds herself learning to live as a paraplegic. Three people—Chloe Roberts, Jacob Graber, and Ruth Schwartz—join forces to help Anna through her darkest days. Chloe is an Englischer who writes for the local paper. Jacob has recently arrived in town and stays on as a hired hand at her uncle's. And Ruth is her grandmother, a woman of deep faith and a compassionate spirit. Then one morning Anna wakes and finds herself healed. How did it happen? Why did it happen? And what is she to do now? Her life is again turned upside down as the world's attention is drawn to this young Amish girl who has experienced the unexplainable.

Anna Royer and her daughter Elizabeth are haunted by the raw Wyoming landscape they left behind years before. Their memories of the immensity of sky, the breadth of distance, the demons of weather and spirits of the "Old Ones" conspire to draw them back to see what remains of their life there. What they find confronts them with confusion and death and changes their lives forever.

Princess Anna takes an interest in fighting at an early age. She grows up to become a skilled and renowned warrior. But there’s little place in her kingdom for her, seeing as she’s also the youngest of three children. She chooses to leave her kingdom and explore the surrounding region. She hopes to learn more to benefit her father the King and her brother, the Prince and heir to the throne. Anna quickly finds war, injustice, and slavery. She refuses to let good folk suffer at the hands of bad rulers. She vows to fight for what is right, even if she must side with outlaws and common villagers. She also finds her affections challenged in a most unexpected way. Princess Anna journeys not only away from home but away from the life she was certain she’d lead…

A writer’s suicide sends ripples through the world she left behind: “A wonderful book…moving and tender and tough and unsentimental, all at the same time.”—Chicago Tribune An accomplished author with a string of devoted lovers, Anna Hand savors life in all of its bittersweet, fleeting moments. So when she gets a letter and discovers her brother has a daughter he never knew about, she sees a major part of life that has passed her by: a child to love. Desperate to unite this young girl with her father, Anna moves back to Charlotte, North Carolina, to rediscover her family and convince him to accept her. Caught between the politics of her upper-crust family and love for a married man, Anna finds her health in serious danger. When her bad days catch up with her good ones, she must finally face the disease that had been hiding just beneath the surface. Not willing to resign herself to months of aggressive treatment, and knowing the outcome will be the same regardless, she takes matters into her own hands, and surrenders her body to the sea. But it isn't only Anna's death that shocks her family. The papers she left behind may lead her sister Helen to discover more about Anna than she, or any of the Hand family, need to know… "Gilchrist excels in drawing the bonds of love and resentment in sexual and family relationships, and no one who encounters her characters here or in her earlier works will want to miss reading about them again." —Publishers Weekly

Publisher description

Anna came home from school crying every day. The kids at school would make fun of her because she prayed over her food. Anna came from a Christian home, where they believed in thanking God and blessing their food before they ate. Deborah, Annas mother, didnt quite yet know what she was going to do. She thought maybe she would talk to the principal because not only did the kids laugh, but also a girl named Tabitha bullied her every day. Tabitha always told her she was ugly because she wore glasses and wore funny clothes. Anna always wore nice dresses, and Tabitha made fun of that. She told Anna she was a nerd and called her four eyes. All Anna would do was cry and run away. Sometimes, the other kids would laugh. But her best friend, Julie, tried to console her.