Atlanta, Georgia Nov 9, 2026 (Issuewire.com) Some stories insist on being told. For Georgia author Marlo Y. Ettien, that story is Branches From The Same Tree: Whether Broken or Reaching, her premiere novel a deeply personal work of healing, resilience, and family that draws from her own lived moments to explore how people move past pain, even when it feels stubborn, toward wholeness and progress. The novel has earned a five-star rating from Readers’ Favorite, and readers have praised it for its raw emotional truth and its strong spiritual undercurrent.
Ettien dedicates the book to her grandmother, Lillie Mae “Ms. Lil” who, she writes, needed her to know what love is, and whose wisdom has carried her through every transition in her life. The novel is also written for, in her words, “those courageously seeking wholeness underneath the brokenness.” At its heart is a conviction that runs through all of Ettien’s writing: there is joy in unburdening, joy in overcoming and healing itself is a sacred space, one that asks to be treated with gentleness, respect, and quiet.
“Words can be both a healing balm and a sword,” Ettien says. It is the belief behind everything she writes: she enjoys and celebrates words in ways that offer solutions, inspiration, and wonder, and Branches From The Same Tree puts that belief to work on the page meeting brokenness honestly, and refusing to leave the reader there.
Readers have answered in kind. Ettien’s first book club meeting, with the Onyx Book Club in Atlanta, ran for three and a half hours as readers worked through the novel’s questions of family, pain, and renewal together the kind of conversation the book was written to start. That reception affirms what Ettien hoped when she set out to write it: she says she simply had something to say, and that writing was the best way to express her ideas.
Ettien comes to fiction with a serious writer’s foundation. A Wiley author, her work appears in the 2006 Pfeiffer Annual: Training “Narcissistic Managers: An Impediment to Organizational Development” and her article “Culture of Deception,” published by American Chronicle in 2009, has been used in a Media Ethics class and shared among university professors. Her love of writing began in childhood, listening to books on record; the novel brings that lifelong relationship with words to the most personal subject she has taken on.
Branches From The Same Tree: Whether Broken or Reaching is available now on Amazon, and as an ebook through Smashwords. For every reader who has ever felt cast down by the broken places in a family’s story, Ettien’s novel offers a different ending: find the joy and in finding it, find the fuller, freer self that was there all along.
Find the Book: Branches From The Same Tree: Whether Broken or Reaching by Marlo Y. Ettien available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/00ZCwAmZ Learn more about Marlo Y. Ettien and her books: https://www.BENspiredbooks.com
About the Author: Marlo Y. Ettien lives in Georgia. She is a wife, mother of two beautiful children, author, poet, and Navy veteran. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communications from Chatham University. As a Wiley author, her work appears in the 2006 Pfeiffer Annual: Training as “Narcissistic Managers: An Impediment to Organizational Development,” and her article “Culture of Deception” was published online in 2009 by American Chronicle and has been used in a Media Ethics class. Her premiere novel, Branches From The Same Tree: Whether Broken or Reaching, received a five-star rating from Readers’ Favorite, and she is also the author of I Am A Beautiful Flower: What Every Flowering Girl Should Know. Her love for writing started as a young child who listened to books on record; according to Marlo, words can be both a healing balm and a sword, and she celebrates words in ways that offer solutions, inspiration, and wonder.
Source :BENspired Books
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