Angol
She built a new life with her own hands. He built hers into it.
At forty, Jocelyn Connors returns to Hope, Missouri with a pottery wheel, a dissolved marriage, and the quiet determination to find out who she is when she stops being someone else's idea of herself. She doesn't come home expecting Jack. She doesn't come home expecting anything except the work.
Leopold "Jack" Jackson has been the man Hope calls when something needs fixing for twenty years. He knows the bones of every old house in town. He has known, since the age of seventeen, exactly how he feels about Jocelyn Jones. He has also spent twenty-three years being patient in a way that looked like nothing happening - until she walks back across the Founders Day square in a blue coat he's never seen, lifts her hand across the distance, and everything that has been waiting begins.
What begins is a year of the right order of things:
A pottery wheel in a cold garage. A Victorian house on Birch Street that needs everything but has bones worth saving. A shelf built in January that is not just a shelf. The first market Saturday, a blue-grey bowl, four words that are exactly right. A renovation that runs from the foundation up - sealed, porched, windowed, discovered - while two people learn the grammar of each other's presence. Thursday afternoons at Lucas's café that become the best part of the week. A slow dance under the October stars between the towns. A ring at an estate sale in December, carried until the moment is right.
Hope Rebuilds is the story of two people who knew each other at seventeen and spent twenty-three years becoming the people who could finally say the true thing. It is a love story told in the language of craft and restoration: what it means to rebuild a house, to rebuild a self, to recognize that the original material was worth saving all along.
Inspired by Sleeping Beauty - rewritten for what the story is actually about.
Not rescue. Waking up.
Readers who love this book also love:
Small-town romance with slow burn and real emotional depth Dual POV Dual character growth arc Second-chance romance Grown-up love story Found family community Craft and making as metaphor Books with a strong sense of place
Hope Rebuilds stands alone but is best enjoyed as part of the series.
ALSO IN A HOPE ROMANCE SERIES
Hope Begins (Book One)
Mason Reed & Amelia Clarkson
The youngest mayor in Hope's history. The schoolteacher who came to restore a farmhouse and stayed to restore something in herself. A Cinderella story about faith, belonging, and the courage to let good things be good.
Harvesting Hope (Book Two)
Johnathan Hale & Samantha Reyes
The farmer who has worked the same land his great-grandfather cleared. The woman who inherited a farm she didn't ask for and had to decide what to do with the deciding. A Beauty and the Beast story about two people who are each right about their own ground - and have to learn that different doesn't mean wrong.
Hope Over the Counter (Book Four) - Coming Soon
Lucas Brennan & Rebecca Hartley
The café owner and the innkeeper have been in each other's orbit for seven years. Two people of exquisite perception who have spent years reading everyone else correctly while missing the most obvious thing: each other. A Princess and the Pea story - about finally feeling what was always there.
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PRAISE FOR THE HOPE ROMANCE SERIES
"A Hope Romance is the kind of series you read slowly, on purpose, so it lasts longer. The town of Hope feels as real as any place I've ever lived."
"Claudia Marie Grace writes romance the way good carpenters build - with patience, craft, complete attention to what things are actually made of."
"T
