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Seven-year-old Hanna Shelby has one big problem: everyone thinks she’s Johnny Shelby. She’s not only miserable, in 1950s rural Colorado, a boy could get killed acting even a little girlish. So, she buries her doll and tries to fit in. On her twenty-first birthday while working at the embassy in Bonn, Germany, she finds herself teetering on a bridge over the Rhine River. She realizes the risk of not being Hanna is greater than being, and returns to college in the United States presenting as a woman.
She’s disowned by her family and is fortunate to find a home with a German couple. Just as she’s feeling fully at ease in her feminine life, a man sexually assaults and flogs her almost to death. She awakens from a coma acting like a child, with nearly complete amnesia, and speaking only German. Hanna and her adoptive family move back to Germany to build a new life. But she must confront her unresolved trauma in order to find her hidden dreams. Although a work of fiction, Jayna Sheats thinks of Hanna's Ascent as the autobiography that could have been if she had taken a different road, and much of it comes from her own life. Hanna's Ascent takes the reader on a singular journey of persistence, survival, and a reminder that good can happen in surprising and unexpected ways. |
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"I loved the theme of tolerance that takes center stage. Sometimes people are prejudiced against minorities simply because of a lack of information, and this book starts an important dialogue on transsexuals. I loved how vivid Jayna was with the descriptions of events and the emotions of the well-developed characters. This made them relatable." — Readers' Favorite
"Sheats is a dramatic and expressive storyteller . . . Sheats’ prose made me feel like I was there with Hanna, whether it was hiking a mountain or walking along the river. She expertly wrote about Hanna’s emotions and thoughts in age-appropriate ways as Hanna progressed and her psychological healing progressed exponentially… with occasional regressions." — Goodreads Review
"Hanna’s Ascent written by Jayna Sheats is an emotional, eye opening work of fiction about what we now call a transgender individual, a person of one sexual identity, in this case a girl/ woman who was born into the physical body of another identity, so born with the physical traits of a boy/man. I am happy to recommend it." — Goodreads Review
"Jayna's attention to detail, to the intense evolution of emotions in this character's life, is well worth the read. For me, it ultimately gave me a little more hope for humanity." — Goodreads Review
"Sheats is a dramatic and expressive storyteller . . . Sheats’ prose made me feel like I was there with Hanna, whether it was hiking a mountain or walking along the river. She expertly wrote about Hanna’s emotions and thoughts in age-appropriate ways as Hanna progressed and her psychological healing progressed exponentially… with occasional regressions." — Goodreads Review
"Hanna’s Ascent written by Jayna Sheats is an emotional, eye opening work of fiction about what we now call a transgender individual, a person of one sexual identity, in this case a girl/ woman who was born into the physical body of another identity, so born with the physical traits of a boy/man. I am happy to recommend it." — Goodreads Review
"Jayna's attention to detail, to the intense evolution of emotions in this character's life, is well worth the read. For me, it ultimately gave me a little more hope for humanity." — Goodreads Review
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