Monthly Archives: March 2018

The Importance of Stories — Why We Need Them

Clean Teen Reads

Clean Teen ReadsBecause the Clean Teen Reads site is all about books, reading, stories, and teens, I’m sharing this powerful article about the importance of stories. As a fiction author I think of myself as a story-teller. I’m addicted to stories.

Of course there are stories everywhere, but my favorite stories are found in BOOKS!!

This is my favorite line in the article:

Finally, why do we read? Why do we tell ourselves stories in books and movies? Because there isn’t a big enough campfire for all of us to sit around, we need to multiply the storytellers.

See what you think. Check this out:

Recently I heard that the Bushmen of the Kalahari spend a mere fifteen hours a week gathering food. The rest of the time they tell stories and interact. That sounds like fun—a kind of early retirement for the whole tribe. More to the point, I wondered how a people could spend so much time telling stories. Then it occurred to me that I spend a lot of time, especially in the winter, watching movies, reading books and watching TV like many people in our culture. We all spend vast amounts of time being engaged with stories—stories about other people and their lives and mishaps and loves. Why are we so absorbed in mysteries and science fiction, murder and natural disasters and the twists and turns of soap opera lives? Is it …?     Read More HERE. 

Clean Teen Reads

Now On the Shelves of Many Libraries

Brought To You By The Color Drab is now on the shelves of three branches of the OKC Metro Library system, the Tulsa City-County Library system, as well as a number of other towns and cities in Oklahoma and Kansas. Soon to be on the shelf at the Austin, Abilene, and Ft. Worth, TX, libraries. Check with your local library. If it’s not there, please make a request. Librarians listen to their patrons! Clean Teen Reads

Clean Teen Reads

Brought To You By The Color Drab

 

And speaking about great stories… My teen action novel Brought To You By The Color Drab is all about a guy (Race Paloma) who knows firsthand what it means to face insurmountable obstacles, to struggle, and to learn what it means to overcome.

You can read the first two chapters right here. Just click below.

Download Chapters 1 & 2 of Color Drab FREE

CLICK HERE!

Clean Teen Reads

Clean Teen Reads

Clean Teen Reads

Glowing Review for Brought To You By The Color Drab — Teen Action Novel

Clean Teen Reads
Clean Teen Reads

Teen Action Novel – Brought To You By The Color Drab

Glowing Amazon Review for

Brought To You By The Color Drab

Below is the most recent Amazon review for Brought To You By The Color Drab

The writer has a skilled style that brings the reader right into the story line from the first paragraph – one brother frantically trying to get to another after hearing gunshots. Race knows it’s his brother Vince. The author powerfully creates a frightening gang life setting – Five buddies, Race, Wynn, Toon, and Pinky and Hawk, Wynn’s cousins. They were a rough pack of teenage boys resisting gang affiliation and running their own crimes of survival on the south side hood of Cincinnati known as Over The Rhine


The author brings her readers into the desperate home life of the boys where survival is a frightening struggle that is complicated and raw and demands crime as a way to live, to stay alive.

The pack began to fall apart without Vince and Wynn locked up. The writer adds a compassionate dimension where Race sets up a safe haven in an abandoned trailer in a salvage yard and becomes good friends with the junk yard dog he calls Monty Mutt. A wonderful element of hope amidst such tragedy. And as part of Race’s probation status after getting caught shoplifting he had to have a job and go to an alternative school. His job which he resisted begins to show him how other people live and treat one another. He is a driver for a blind man named Stan who fixes pianos and each home they go to offers Race one more opportunity to see life differently then he has lived.

The writer is brilliant in her style to balance good and evil. Race is in a war with himself to choose a broken loyalty to his pack and life of crime or begin to choose a better honest path he never thought was possible for him. The struggle for Race for loyalty to his old way of life and the promise of a new way of life tormented him terribly.

The writer has a powerful way of bringing this reader into every emotion as Race struggled to make the right choices so that his world could be colored brightly instead of drab like his brother Vince always said it would be. Anyone who has ever struggled with loyalty, right and wrong, how to survive against all odds, a conversion of heart where there was once no hope and just one person shows you that there is. This was an amazing book that moved me to tears as the dramatic life-changing events unfolded. I recommend it highly.

Clean Teen Reads

Now On the Shelves of Many Libraries

Brought To You By The Color Drab is now on the shelves of three branches of the OKC Metro Library system, the Tulsa City-County Library system, as well as a number of other towns and cities in Oklahoma and Kansas. Soon to be on the shelf at the Austin, Abilene, and Ft. Worth, TX, libraries. Check with your local library. If it’s not there, please make a request. Librarians listen to their patrons! Clean Teen Reads

Clean Teen Reads

Brought To You By The Color Drab

 

My teen action novel Brought To You By The Color Drab is all about a boy (Race Paloma) who know firsthand what it means to face insurmountable obstacles, to struggle, and to learn what it means to overcome.

You can read the first two chapters right here. Just click below.

Download Chapters 1 & 2 of Color Drab FREE

CLICK HERE!

Clean Teen Reads

Clean Teen Reads

Clean Teen Reads