The Journey to Mara Prose
by Mara Prose Publishing
Everyone asks why she stayed. No one asks who taught her to wait.
Before he ever said hello, she was already fluent in the only love she'd been taught: the kind that calls but never comes. A fourteen-year-old girl in her good shoes, standing at a window, giving every passing headlight her father's face.
That girl grew up. And the man who found her knew exactly what he'd found.
The Journey to Mara Prose: A Poetic Testimonial is memoir told the way no one dares to tell it: as evidence. In poems that read like a psychological thriller, Mara Prose traces how a girl becomes the perfect target long before the predator arrives. The childhood that trained her to carry everything. The family that called her difficult for sounding the alarm. The community that named her lucky while her body screamed not this. The two weddings she called off. The four ultimatums that cornered her yes. And the wedding day her own memory refuses to hold, where the groom had to walk the aisle to collect a bride whose spirit had already left the building.
This is not a book about a woman who didn't see the signs. This is the story of a woman who saw every one of them, and the world that taught her to apologize for looking.
Written in layers that reward every reread, these poems hide their revelations the way her marriage hid its truth: in plain sight. The disappearances that always ended exactly when her healing began. The rescues that arrived for emergencies he created. The love that came beautifully wrapped, with nothing at the center. By the final section, you won't be reading her story. You'll be a witness to it. And witnesses can be called on later.
For every woman who was handed a life and told it was a gift. For every reader who has ever been loved in the lobby and laughed at in the vault. For every book club ready for the discussion that follows the women home.
The testimony stops where the truth changes questions, and one eye, long closed, finally opens. What that woman does next is another book.
This one is where it all began.
Let the record show.
Includes a full author's reflection and "Questions for the Women at the Table," a complete book club discussion guide. The journey continues in The Woman I Answer to Now.
More books by Mara Prose Publishing
The Queen of Marriage
New York City’s most sought-after wedding planner, Ella Grace, can turn even the most demanding bride’s dream into a flawless fairytale.
Her own love life, however, is less champagne toast and more emergency exit.
After a streak of unforgettable dating disasters, including a catfish, a conspiracy theorist, and one man with a horseback-riding injury she will never fully recover from hearing about, Ella begins to wonder if she is destined to be the queen of everyone else’s happily ever after… but never her own.
Then Michael enters the picture: handsome, successful, attentive, and smooth enough to make even Ella consider lowering her guard.
But just when she starts imagining a future that feels safe and steady, Alex returns to the edges of her heart. He is the man who once made her believe in something rare, until misunderstandings, unfinished feelings, and bad timing sent everything spiraling.
With her best friend Niyah offering equal parts wisdom, sarcasm, and well-intentioned meddling, Ella must navigate high-profile weddings, impossible clients, and the uncomfortable truth that love does not always arrive neatly dressed for the occasion.
As her professional and personal worlds collide, Ella has to decide whether she will keep protecting her heart, or finally risk it for the kind of love she has spent her career creating for everyone else.
Romantic, witty, and full of heart, *The Queen of Marriage* is perfect for readers who believe love is unpredictable, inconvenient, hilarious, and still worth every beautiful risk.
The Davenports
A Battle of Wills
The Davenports: A Battle of Wills is a gripping saga of legacy, ambition, and the brutal cost of power.
Behind the towering gates of Davenport Industries lies a family built on wealth, dominance, and carefully buried secrets. For generations, the Davenports have ruled their empire with an iron hand—but beneath the polished exterior, fractures are forming.
At the center of the storm stands Alessandra Davenport, brilliant, composed, and dangerously underestimated. Groomed to be a symbol rather than a successor, she quickly learns that survival in her family requires more than intelligence—it requires strategy, restraint, and the willingness to strike first when necessary. As corporate politics collide with personal betrayal, Alessandra must navigate a world where loyalty is currency, and bloodlines mean nothing without control.
As betrayals surface and power is challenged, each character must decide what they are willing to sacrifice: love, morality, or blood itself.
The Davenports: A Battle of Wills is a story of corporate warfare disguised as family drama—a tale of ambition, manipulation, and the emotional wreckage left behind when legacy becomes law. In this world, love is leverage, silence is survival, and trust is the most dangerous gamble of all.
Because in the House of Davenport, nothing is inherited without a fight.
The Davenports
Crescendo
Book Two of The Davenports Series
Alessandra Davenport thought surviving a corporate coup was the end of her battles. She was wrong.
In The Davenports: Crescendo, the saga continues as the war for Davenport Industries escalates and betrayal moves from the boardroom into the bloodline itself. As Alessandra fights to maintain control, long-buried secrets surface—threatening not only her position, but her freedom. The man she once trusted now stands on the opposite side, and the family she believed she understood proves far more dangerous than any rival corporation.
Makhail Davenport no longer pulls strings from the shadows. His moves are bold, calculated, and designed to destroy. Steven Kane is trapped between the ruthless ambition of his father and his love for Alessandra, forced into choices that could cost him everything. And as loyalties fracture, a single revelation threatens to bring the entire empire crashing down.
This is not just a story about power—it is a psychological battle where every decision carries consequences, every alliance hides an agenda, and survival demands sacrifice.
Listen to the twists. Feel the deception.
The Davenports: Crescendo is where the fight becomes personal.
Lone Star Rhythms
Where city sass meets country soul
City sass meets country soul in Lone Star Rhythms, a sexy, emotionally rich romance filled with sharp banter, Southern charm, and the kind of chemistry that lingers long after the final page.
Maya Jefferson has spent her life chasing success. As a driven New York advertising executive with designer heels, sharp instincts, and a promotion finally within reach, she’s learned how to survive in a world that rewards ambition over vulnerability. So when she’s sent to Texas to secure a career-defining campaign, Maya plans to close the deal, impress her firm, and head straight back to the city she calls home.
Then she meets Eli “Jay” Carter.
Ruggedly handsome, effortlessly grounded, and deeply connected to the ranching life Maya can barely understand, Eli is everything she never planned for. He’s slow dances under Texas skies, blues music drifting through warm summer nights, and a kind of peace Maya hasn’t allowed herself to want.
What starts as playful tension quickly turns into something deeper. Beneath the flirtation and culture clash lies a connection neither of them can ignore. But as Maya falls harder for the cowboy who’s stolen her guarded heart, the life she worked so hard to build in New York begins pulling her in the opposite direction.
Now Maya is faced with an impossible choice: return to the city with the promotion she’s spent years fighting for, or risk everything for a love that feels more like home than anything she’s ever known.
Filled with unforgettable characters, emotional depth, witty dialogue, swoon-worthy romance, and a cinematic blend of luxury and Southern soul, Lone Star Rhythms is perfect for readers who love:
• opposites-attract romance
• strong, ambitious heroines
• emotionally intelligent cowboys
• city-girl-meets-country-boy tension
• heartfelt stories with humor, heat, and heart
From award-winning, nationally recognized author Mara Prose comes a love story about ambition, identity, healing, and discovering that sometimes the life you never planned becomes the one you can’t live without.
The Woman I Answer to Now
The Woman Forged Beneath the Crushing
What if surviving was only the beginning?
What if the real work began when the danger passed, the noise quieted, and you were finally left alone with the woman survival had created?
For years, Mara Prose believed strength meant enduring. Love meant staying. Resilience meant carrying what should have broken her without allowing anyone to see the weight. She survived abandonment, betrayal, addiction, illness, loss, fractured relationships, and the exhausting demand to remain strong for everyone around her.
But survival has a cost.
Sometimes the armor that protects us in one season prevents us from receiving love in the next. Sometimes the wounds we did not create still become our responsibility to heal. And sometimes, the most difficult truth is admitting that while we were hurting, the people who loved us were hurting too.
The Woman I Answer to Now: The Woman Forged Beneath the Crushing is the powerful continuation of The Journey to Mara Prose: A Poetic Testimonial. This time, Mara does more than revisit what happened to her. She turns the mirror inward and confronts the choices, patterns, silences, and fears that followed her out of survival.
Who did I become while trying to survive?
Who did I hurt while I was hurting?
What did my silence teach my children?
How do I honor the woman who saved me without allowing her fear to control the woman I am becoming?
Through intimate poetry, personal testimony, visual storytelling, journal prompts, self-awareness exercises, and moments of startling confession, Mara leads readers through the descent, the awakening, the becoming, and the return. She writes about motherhood and the wounds children inherit, loving from behind emotional walls, losing trust in her own body, reaching for what hurts, learning to receive healthy love, finding her voice, and surrendering the need to perform strength.
This is not a polished testimony written from the safety of a perfect ending.
It is the honest record of a woman learning to hold two truths at once: she was wounded, and she sometimes wounded others. She was abandoned, and she also disappeared. Trauma may explain some of her choices, but healing requires her to answer for what pain cannot excuse.
There is accountability here, but there is no shame.
There is faith here, but no pretending.
There is hope here, but it has been earned.
These pages are for the woman who has spent years being everything for everyone and can no longer remember who she is without the weight. They are for the mother wondering what her children absorbed from the battles she thought she hid. For the woman learning that peace is not numbness, boundaries are not cruelty, and softness is not weakness. For anyone who has survived the storm but still does not know how to live without bracing for the next one.
This is not a book to consume quickly. It is an excavation. Some pages will comfort you. Others will confront you. Some will feel like mirrors. Others may feel like memories you thought you buried.
Take your time.
Tell yourself the truth.
Meet the woman beneath the crushing.
Because you may have taken the long way home, but the woman waiting for you there is the one you answer to now.