BUILD FAITH IN YOUTH WITH THIS NEW NOVEL

Build Faith in Youth with this new novel:
Joe the Dreamer: The Castle and the Catapult

I apologize for not posting on my blog for a few weeks. I’ve been ill and I also have been working on the last proof of my new teen novel, Joe the Dreamer: The Castle and the Catapult.
I’m feeling much better and today I’d like to tell you about Joe the Dreamer.
The fictional character, Joe, and I met when I was teaching an after-school and summers program for upper elementary school and junior high students as an extension of our church’s day care. I had recently retired as a newspaper reporter for The Pueblo Chieftain in Colorado.
After a few weeks teaching in the program, which I named “The Dunamis Academy,” I decided I needed something beyond the gospel lessons, Bible memorization, the fun and field trips. I wanted to interest the youth in the Bible so much they would read it for themselves when I could no longer teach them. Many of them were unchurched.
So I started the story about Joe, age 14. One night his parents disappear, and the same evening someone breaks into his house while he and his sister hide. Days, weeks, pass. A non-Christian aunt and uncle take them in. Raised by parents dedicated to God, Joe begins to read the Bible to see if he can believe God answers prayer, and then when he sleeps he often slips into the skin of Bible characters and experiences what happened in their lives. But sometimes he wakes up shouting or screaming and his uncle assumes he has a mental illness.
His uncle’s best friend is a psychiatrist.
In the sub-plot, the reader knows what happened to Joe’s parents. A radical group dedicated to erasing Christianity from America snatched them from a hospital parking lot. The radicals want a computer design Joe’s dad created which could be an advance in the prevention of epileptic seizures. They want him to change it so they can use it to cause seizures in influential Christians.
The parents are being held at a nearby castle in the mountains, taken over by the radicals. They plan to make it a center to train terrorists to kill Christians. A whole group of local Christians also were abducted and are being used to build a wall around the castle before they begin bombings.
Joe and an East Side gang team up to find his mom and dad. The Christian gang is dedicated to preventing and solving crime with ordinary, harmless things such as noise, water and a pet skunk instead of blades and bullets. The enemy is fully armed—even with a robot programmed to kill.
Joe and the gang are beginning to suspect his parents are being held at the castle when Joe lands in the juvenile unit of a mental hospital.
Will he be stuck there forever? Will his parents ever be found? Or will God answer prayer and deliver?
The book should be released on Amazon in a week or two. This is a great book for you, your children and grandchildren because, although it’s not preachy, it contains faith-building facts as characters defend their beliefs. Beyond that, as is the goal of every fiction work, it’s a good story filled with suspense and even humor.
Look for Joe the Dreamer: The Castle and the Catapult under my name on Amazon. It will be available as a paperback and for Kindle and should be on Barnesandnoble.com and other websites in the immediate future.