author
Terri Krueger
THE BOOKS
A Summer Song is my debut novel. My second novel, Eastland Street, is anticipated for release in late 2020 or early 2021. Wending Home, my third novel, is also underway with a projected completion date in 2021.
A Summer Song
ISBN-9798667120933
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Reed Whitley is comfortable in his married life but struggles as an architect, a profession he never fully embraced. Odd manifestations of an undiagnosed condition begin to blur the edges of reality. Long buried but vivid memories begin to surface, including a promise he made twenty-five years ago to the first girl he ever loved. Before dawn one morning, Reed follows the impulse to drive back to Smithville, Texas, the town of his teenage summers and first love, leaving his unknowing wife puzzled and worried. In a mix of poignant memory and present awareness, and against the backdrop of his mind-bending pathology, we meet seventeen-year-old Reed arriving at his Granny’s for a last season of freedom and adventure. We follow Reed through the people and events of 1969 that change him forever to 1994, twenty-five years later. The time has come to keep the promise he made so long ago. Doing so proves to be his salvation.
Eastland Street
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​The McCutcheon family lives in the West Texas oil town of Odessa. The early 1960s sees John Henry working long, hard hours in a dangerous profession on rigs in the Permian Basin. His wife Anne, his partner in all things, takes care of their four young daughters and makes the most of what John Henry provides. Eastland Street is their home. This neighborhood at the edge of town looks west out to the seemingly endless desert. It is from where the husbands head out to work on oil rigs in blazing heat, sleet, and sandstorms. It is where the wives both cheer and console each other over morning cups of coffee and at fence lines. It is where the children play like brothers and sisters and chase lightning bugs at dusk. These young families know hardship and loss, but they are also blessed with an abundance of the simplest of joys. The McCutcheons’ time on Eastland Street is woven into a tapestry of love, endurance and hope.