This website introduces Jonna-Lynn’s three completed historical novels which are in the process of being published so if the volume you are interested in is not yet available, please send me your contact information and I will include you in an email notice as soon as the book is published.
MALARIAL FEVERS, a historical novel based on Harriet Sage Bennett's personal
diaries and papers, documents her journey from the Kansas prairie to Mozambique
in the late 1880s.
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UNSPOKEN FAREWELL is a novel based on Jonna-Lynn's life as a missionary nurse in Africa. It begins with her language study in Lisbon, deportation from Mozambique and her experiences in Swaziland and Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
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During Jonna-Lynn's professional career in international health she resided for extended periods in Lisbon, Portugal, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Prague in the Czech Republic and Manila, The Philippines. Her writing focused exclusively on professional needs for overseas program development and the use of ethnographic methods to pursue missiology (the study of missionaries) in the analysis of missionary publications in Mozambique during the first half of the twentieth century.
Jonna-Lynn's academic and professional background prepared her to work with Harriet Sage Bennett's diaries and papers which documented the daily lives of pioneer missionaries to Mozambique in the late 1880's in a time when no one understood the cause or appropriate treatment for malaria. Involvement with Harriet's papers prompted Jonna-Lynn to write MALARIAL FEVERS.
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In 1969 Jonna-Lynn became a missionary nurse for the United Methodist Church
and was assigned to Mozambique. The experience of living in countries with
extensive secret police networks (PIDE/DGS) and which were also at war prompted
her to write a novel about her life in Africa, UNSPOKEN FAREWELL. This book
is Jonna-Lynn's second historical novel encompassing the years she lived
in Portugal, Mozambique and then, Rhodesia. It begins as Amanda Bechtel
goes to Lisbon to study Portuguese and lives a boarding house with other
university students. She discovers what it means to live in a country with
informers, censorship and secret police.
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A third novel came to be as Jonna-Lynn made a transatlantic voyage with
her husband and pondered the scenario of a lone survivor encountering the
soldier who ordered the massacre of her entire family and village during
Mozambique's war for independence. This novel UNPREDICTABLE CROSSING is
based on actual events documented by a Catholic priest during the war. Some
of the characters from UNSPOKEN FAREWELL help relate the events in this
book. The setting is aboard a cruise ship ten years after Mozambique's war.
Tristeza Vilanculos, the only survivor of a village massacre the war, encounters
the man who gave the order to annihilate her family.
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