Amanda Skenandore Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Amanda Skenandore is a bestselling historical fiction author from Las Vegas Nevada. She made her fiction writing debut when she published “Between Earth and Sky” in 2018.

Her debut novel would garner critical reviews as it was a winner of the Best Historical Fiction for the RUSA Reading List of the American Library Association and was a Book selection for the Publishers Marketplace Buzz Books.

Since she works part-time as a nurse, many of her novels have a medical component including leprosy, embalming, and nurse training schools.

Right from when she was a child Amanda Skenndore loved writing and used to live in her head for quite a bit. She was lucky that she comes from a family of dyed-in-the-wool scientists who use the Vulcan salute when they should wave goodbye and tell corny jokes about irrational numbers.

Her mother was a mathematician, her father a movie buff and physicist, and her sister was a flute-playing astrophysicist. Amanda Skenandore would go on to become an infection prevention nurse even though writing was always her first love.

Despite their scientific minds, the family loved reading and their home was full of books and the kids often spent most of their weekends at the library.

While Amanda was dyslexic and a slow learner her parents never gave up and encouraged her to read everything from historical, fantasy, literary, science fiction, and paranormal romance fiction.

She was also lucky that she married a man of enduring flexibility and great character who told her to go for it when she told him she wanted to quit her job and become an author. When she went five years without finding an agent or selling her manuscript he encouraged her to keep trying.

While Amanda Skenandor loved writing, when she went to college she flirted with several majors before she went for nursing. While she hated it, it was the most sensible profession at that moment.

However, just before she turned 30, she enrolled in a short story workshop and this rekindled in her the love of writing. Telling herself life was too short, she decided to pursue her passion. She quit her day job and took a part-time one as an infection prevention nurse.

While it only took her a few months to pen her manuscript, it would take six years before she found an agent. In 2013, she submitted to Pitch Wars and while this got her a mentor and agent she never got published.

It was only after cycling through several agents and getting several of her submissions rejected that she finally published “Between Earth and Sky” under Kensington Publishing.

Amanda currently makes her home in Las Vegas where she lives with her husband. When she is not writing or reading, she can be found hiking, swimming, and walking outside.

Amanda Skenandor’s “The Second Life of Mirielle West,” tells the real story of Carville the Louisiana leper colony and the only of its kind in America. It was a place where thousands were branded as lepers, stripped of their rights, and slapped with quarantine for most of the twentieth century.

One of these people is a socialite named Mirielle West who is married to a film star that has gone silent. The powerlessness and isolation of the leper colony is too much for a woman that was used to the star-studded parties and bootlegged champagne of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Things had started going bad for her when she visited the doctor who noticed a pale path on her skin and branded her a leper. She was immediately banished to the leper colony and takes a new name to spare her famous husband and family the shame of being associated with leprosy.

Initially, she believed her exile would end soon but anyone sent to Carville usually does not come back as the disease has no cure. Instead, she may need to find purpose and community within the colony as she struggles to redefine her identity and deal with a difficult fate.

“The Nurse’s Secret” by Amanda Skenandor is a spellbinding and unflinching new story. The work is inspired by the take of the first nursing school in the United States. It is the place where in the 1880s, a young female grifter named Una who lives in New York has been evading law enforcement.

She cons her way into the training school for nurses at Bellevue Hospital, even as a series of murders continues to dog her steps while she attempts to leave the grimy city streets behind.

The training college is based on the nursing principles established by Florence Nightingale and is the first in the US to do so. In earlier times, nurses were assumed to be unskilled and ignorant, but Bellevue takes them to be moral and disciplined intellectuals and hence only takes in young women of good breeding.

Initially, Una the lead balks at the doctors’ endless commands and her prim classmates but life on the streets made her ready for the disease and injury in the wards. Over time she slowly gains self-respect and gains friendship.

Just as she is finding her footing, Una begins suspecting that there is something fishy about a patient’s death. But if she pursues that line she may have to choose between exposing her identity and her instinct for self-preservation.

“The Undertaker’s Assistant is the story of former slave Effie Jones. She had fled and managed to escape the south and headed to the Union when she was just a kid.

During the Civil War, she had been taken in by a doctor and his wife and learned to write and read, tolerate the sight of broken bodies and of blood, and forget things that are sometimes too painful to bear.

At the opening of the novel, she is a young woman who has gone back to New Orleans and works with a steady hand as an embalmer helping her incompetent white employer.

Serious and tall, Effie does not interact much with her colleagues as she finds the most satisfaction in her work. However, while she is very reticent, two encounters with Adeline a young Creole, and Samson Greene a charismatic legislator will change her life.

She is introduced to the life of social ambition, protests, soirees, and activism. Effie makes the decision to investigate the past she had blocked out for the longest time and try to locate her relatives.

But New Orleans is grappling with growing racial turmoil and he also has to face heartache and loss if she is to finally find her place.

One Response to “Amanda Skenandore”

1. Cindy Adams: 8 months ago

   For Amanda Skenandore
   I have read all your books, looking forward to your new one this year. I am also a nurse, about your MIL’s age (I am thinking). I have been a nurse since 1968 and am still working 1 day a week in a skilled facility. I marvel at your words, so visceral, so descriptive in writing. Your books are difficult to put down. Your characters are so believable and ‘real’. Your environments ‘come alive’. YOu are sooooo gifted!! Thank you so much for persevering in your first novel, it was unforgettable!!! Someday I hope to meet you at one of your events. I live in Ohio about 30 miles East of Cleveland. Sincerely, Cindy Adams

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