Ivy in America

by Diane Helentjaris

When indentured Irish woman Ivy O'Neill marries her wealthy master and presents him with his newborn son, she believes her life's trajectory is set on a new, glorious path. She has a kind, strapping husband and healthy child. Her friend Jane begins to teach her midwifery. But tumult fills the 1702 world of the British Colony of Maryland. Pirates, like those who kidnapped her a few years earlier, harass the colonists. She risks imprisonment if the authorities discover she still practices her Catholic faith. Crops fail. Neighbors cannot always be trusted. And then the unthinkable happens. Shaken to her core, Ivy must make a decision - one which will shape her future and that of everyone she touches.

Ivy in America, Book Two in the series "The Life and Adventures of Ivy O'Neill," is a stand-alone book. It carries forward Ivy O'Neill's story from its beginnings in The Indenture of Ivy O'Neill.

320 pages, Paperback

Published August 28, 2026

About the author

Diane writes often about the fascinating, but unsung lives of the overlooked and forgotten. Her historical novel The Indenture of Ivy O'Neill is a winner in the 2026 PenCraft Seasonal Book Award in Fiction - Historical and won the 2024 Maryland Writers' Association Novel competition in the category of romance and historical. A sequel Ivy in America is being published August 28. Her book, I Ain't Afraid, is the first-ever biography of Wild West bronco-riding star Lulu Bell Parr.
Born and raised in southern Ohio, Diane was educated in the snows of Michigan and Quebec. After a successful career as a medical doctor, she returned to her humanities roots. She is a popular speaker and now lives in the Blue Ridge Piedmont of Virginia.
Active in the writing community, Diane is a member of the Hellenic Writers Group of Washington, DC and the Maryland Writers Association. Follow her at www.dianehelentjaris.com.

Reviews

[Linda Sittig]

Three cheers for Ivy O'Neill! Diane Helentjaris has penned the further adventures of Ivy as she carves out a life in colonial Maryland. I found myself pouring over each page, loving the crisp dialogue and detailed descriptions of colonial life. The plot propelled me to turn each page, curious and anxious to see where Ivy's new life leads her.

[Alan Thederahn]

Ivy in America — Diane Helentjaris

The book opens with a scream, and it's Ivy's own — she just doesn't know it yet, watching herself from the rafters in a haze of pain before the midwife's touch brings her back into her own body. It's a small, sly piece of craft, and it sets the terms for everything after this is a novel about a woman who keeps having to recognize the life she's landed in as hers.

Sold for a barrel of tobacco after pirates took her off the Irish coast, Ivy has married her buyer and, by 1702, made something like a home on the Patapsco. Then George drowns pulling his son out of a frozen pond, and at twenty she's a widow holding an estate in trust for a stepson, unable to read the will that governs her. Her lawyer's advice is brutally practical: remarry, quickly, and learn to love him. She does. The novel's real interest is in what those costs are, and what it slowly gives back.

Diane Helentjaris, an Ohioan and a physician turned historian, is best on the texture of work — the cool sunken dairy, a six-year-old stitching an alphabet sampler to advertise herself to future suitors, the year-long grind of tobacco. Sixty short chapters, each stamped with a date, give the book a ledger-like forward motion that suits it.

Not everything lands. A pirate threat is stoked for chapters and then quietly abandoned, and a devastating late subplot involving an indentured girl arrives too near the end to be fully absorbed. But Ivy herself — prickly, practical, and slow to forgive — is worth the passage.

Alan Thederahn, Columbus, Ohio