Away Home
Book Details
Author(s)L K O'Neal
PublisherWinds
ISBN / ASINB00H87QKDO
ISBN-13978B00H87QKD1
Sales Rank458,796
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
"Away Home" is a story that will tug at your emotional heartstrings akin to "Its a Wonderful Life" and the play "Our Town." It will show you the way to your own hometown, and the twisted route it sometimes takes to find your way out of a difficult life and into the one you were meant to have. It is the perfect holiday story. This Christmas story will make you laugh and cry all at once with emotional force to last a lifetime. Beautifully written.
Author's note:
A few years ago I attended my grandmother’s funeral in a small town in Pennsylvania. She was buried in an even smaller town nearby on a hillside cemetery where many of my relatives have been buried over several centuries spanning a stretch of time back to the birth of the United States. It was the place my parents and grandparents and great grandparents and generations before them had grown up and lived most of their lives.
For the first time in my life, all of this seemed remarkable. Even more remarkable, this small hometown, really just a cluster of homes spanning two small hillsides, was the same as I remembered the last time I had been there as a kid some 30 years before. Nothing had changed, not the houses, the three church steeples, not the barely paved road that pretended to be Main Street, not anything. It didn't seem that one warn clapboard or porch railing spindle had changed. It was still a farming community with a cluster of homes in the midst of a bucolic landscape not really near any urban center nor with anything of interest that anyone else would ever want to visit.
Yet the changelessness was stunning. Everywhere else I had been, everyone I knew, everything I knew had changed in that 30 year span, and not just a little, but a lot. So I fell in love with a place that, for a few, anchored generation after generation and defied the sea changes that whipped lives, communities, cities and towns into a frenzy across the globe. My mother would call her hometown the most boring place on Earth, yet she could never give her up.
So I wrote “Away Home†which is as much about a place as it is about the lives of those who would “give up†a small hometown. In this regard it has similar threads to Bedford Falls and the story “It’s a Wonderful Life†and Thornton Wilder’s play, “Our Town.â€
I am a new, undiscovered, author and I deeply hope you enjoy the book and, if so, please leave a comment to guide other readers. Thanks.
L K O'Neal
Author's note:
A few years ago I attended my grandmother’s funeral in a small town in Pennsylvania. She was buried in an even smaller town nearby on a hillside cemetery where many of my relatives have been buried over several centuries spanning a stretch of time back to the birth of the United States. It was the place my parents and grandparents and great grandparents and generations before them had grown up and lived most of their lives.
For the first time in my life, all of this seemed remarkable. Even more remarkable, this small hometown, really just a cluster of homes spanning two small hillsides, was the same as I remembered the last time I had been there as a kid some 30 years before. Nothing had changed, not the houses, the three church steeples, not the barely paved road that pretended to be Main Street, not anything. It didn't seem that one warn clapboard or porch railing spindle had changed. It was still a farming community with a cluster of homes in the midst of a bucolic landscape not really near any urban center nor with anything of interest that anyone else would ever want to visit.
Yet the changelessness was stunning. Everywhere else I had been, everyone I knew, everything I knew had changed in that 30 year span, and not just a little, but a lot. So I fell in love with a place that, for a few, anchored generation after generation and defied the sea changes that whipped lives, communities, cities and towns into a frenzy across the globe. My mother would call her hometown the most boring place on Earth, yet she could never give her up.
So I wrote “Away Home†which is as much about a place as it is about the lives of those who would “give up†a small hometown. In this regard it has similar threads to Bedford Falls and the story “It’s a Wonderful Life†and Thornton Wilder’s play, “Our Town.â€
I am a new, undiscovered, author and I deeply hope you enjoy the book and, if so, please leave a comment to guide other readers. Thanks.
L K O'Neal
