The Ways of Water

A Novel

Teresa H. Janssen

2024 Southwest Book Award Winner
2025 Eric Hoffer Award Book Award Winner in Historical Fiction
2024 Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award Winner in Modern Fiction
2024 Western Heritage Award Winner for Outstanding Western Novel

Inspired by the author’s own family history, The Ways of Water follows Josie Belle Gore, the daughter of a Louisiana train engineer and a Texas seamstress, as she journeys through the rugged American Southwest in the early twentieth century.

When unforeseeable events force the separation of her family, Josie begins an odyssey that takes her from New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto to Bisbee, Tucson, Los Angeles, and finally post-WWI San Francisco—experiencing betrayal, pandemic, and survivor’s guilt, as well as the compassion and generosity of friends and strangers. Once she lands in San Francisco, like a river meeting the sea, Josie has nowhere else to run—and she realizes that she must make peace with the past and make good on her promise to the family she loves. In the vein of Jeanette Walls's Half Broke Horses, The Ways of Water is a lyrical tale of loss, hope, and forgiveness set in the boom-and-bust Southwest that, like Josie, is growing up in fits and starts.

“An exceptional account of the triumph and bravery of a singular young girl.” —Donna Everhart, USA Today best-selling author of When the Jessamine Grows

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• I. The Desert
• II. Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico (1907–1909)
• III. Austin (1909)
• IV. Chihuahua (1910–1911)
• V. Engle and Cutter (1911–1916)
• VI. Bisbee (1916–1917)
• VII. Cutter (1917)
• VIII. Tucson (1917–1918)
• IX. Los Angeles (1919)
• X. San Francisco (1919–1921)
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Selected Titles from She Writes Press