Songbird Books in Order

The Songbird series, co‑written with country music artist Sara Evans, traces one extended story across three novels. At the center are Jade Fitzgerald and Max Benson, a couple whose love is real but often strained by past wounds, complicated families, and mistakes that do not stay buried.

In The Sweet By and By, readers meet Jade in Whisper Hollow, Tennessee, where she runs a vintage shop and is preparing to marry Max, a dependable lawyer from a respected Southern family. Jade has done everything she can to distance herself from a chaotic childhood that included a drifting, hippie mother and a father who walked away. A simple wedding invitation forces her to invite her mother back into her life, dragging up shame, anger, and unanswered questions. The book follows Jade as she faces her history, confronts old relationships, and decides whether she can build a future without making peace with yesterday.

Softly and Tenderly opens after the wedding. Jade and Max now own boutiques and appear to have the kind of polished life she once envied. Underneath, she is aching for a child while dealing with her mother‑in‑law’s failing health and the fallout from a marriage that is not as solid as it looks. When Jade discovers that Max has a small son he never told her about, born from a short‑lived relationship before their wedding, her world tilts. Retreating to her family farm in Iowa, she must decide what forgiveness looks like when the betrayal is personal and ongoing.

By Love Lifted Me, the couple is trying again. Jade loves Max’s little boy, Asa, as her own, and Max genuinely wants to be the husband and father his family needs. A chance to coach high‑school football in Texas offers a clean break from old patterns in Whisper Hollow. The move gives them new community and fresh hope, but also introduces fresh pressure as Max uncovers troubling issues in the football program and Jade faces news that could shatter his fragile confidence.

Across all three books, Hauck and Evans weave in elements of Southern culture, small‑town gossip, and the music world without losing sight of the heart of the series: the slow, often painful work of healing. These are not tidy romances with instant fixes. Instead, the novels follow one marriage through infidelity, infertility, addiction, and reconciliation, always circling back to the idea that grace is not abstract. It has to take root in real people, imperfect families, and hard choices.

Readers who enjoy messy, emotionally honest Christian women’s fiction that still lands in a hopeful place will likely find the Songbird books a satisfying, if sometimes challenging, journey.