"...Then Like The Blind Man: ORBIE'S STORY grabs you from the very first page and carries you along, breathless and tense, until the very last, very satisfying sentence."
--- The San Francisco Book Review ---At nine, Orbie seems to live his life along a precipice. He is burdened with an overabundance of difficult choices which would be beyond the capacities of most boys his age—but Orbie is about to discover that he's no ordinary boy. In the debut novel from artist and poet Freddie Owens, nothing is ever precisely what it seems: prejudice is not innate, the dead aren't really dead, and those in positions of power cannot be trusted.
Orbie finds himself deposited at his grandparent's home in Kentucky one summer, his stepfather, Victor, having had a change of heart about including him on a family prospecting trip to Florida. Except "heart" doesn't seem, to Orbie, quite the right word to apply to his stepfather, whose tempestuous temper took him from the widowed family's salvation to its most dangerous element in one outburst flat.
With no end to his stay in sight, Orbie finds himself settling into routines all but unthinkable weeks before. He becomes fast friends with the Kingdom Boys, who he'd have happily kept himself segregated from back home in Detroit, though he now finds that skin color is not the best indicator of trustworthiness. He forms a strong bond with Willis, the stunningly talented, physically disabled black boy connected to his grandparents via their mysterious friend Moses, who may call down the rain.
...Dreams melt into prophecy; Orbie learns to part the clouds and peer into the past, with charismatic Moses as an occasional guide. He'll need these newfound abilities, and the curious new maturity they bestow, when Victor and his mother unexpectedly return, tumult behind them and an incredible storm at their front. Orbie watches as his world is rent and, as his family slips closer to the maelstrom, finds himself wondering this: at the last, why do we wish to save that which we once needed to destroy?
Then Like the Blind Man is an electrifying porthole to the South of the '50s, where, though inane prejudice may have dominated, kindness and justice also had a place. Orbie's sharecropping grandparents, by defying convention with unnerving grace, become founts of colloquial wisdom whose appeal is impossible to resist, and the Orbie they nurture—the best version of a boy who may otherwise have been lost—is someone the reader comes to love.
Michelle Anne Schingler | ForeWord Reviews - ABNA Quarter Finalist
- Received IRDiscovery Award for Best in Literary Fiction
- Finalist for Kindle Book Review's Literary Fiction Award
- Received Kirkus Review's STAR for exceptional Merit
- Featured in Kirkus Review's Trade Magazine
- Honorable Mention: Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards
- Retailers, Libraries and Educators can get the book through Ingram Wholesale
- Now available in Bookstores Nationwide!
- An Amazon Bestseller!
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Acknowledgements:
I must thank my grandparents. Had I not been exposed to their homespun, wizened and sometimes carping ways I would not have have been exposed to traits crucial to creating the grandparent-characters in the novel. For similar reasons I must thank my dear, goodhearted parents who survived the bad times to enjoy the good.
I also must thank Judith Guest (Ordinary People) and especially Rebecca Hill (Among Birches) for early and essential writing guidance. Without their unsparing feedback and mentoring I might not have dealt adequately with the "false and unlikely" as it was wont to manifest in the early drafts of the manuscript.
Literary agents Ned Leavitt and Robin Mizell deserve special thanks for their deft editorial comments and for the considerable time and energy they invested in making them. I must extend Kudos to Dave King as well for a thoroughly professional editing of the manuscript. (Google: Dave King Editorial Services and his book Self-Editing For Writers.) No writer I feel would manage long without such editorial guidance a Dave King provides.
Much appreciation goes to editors Tom Jenks and Winn Blevins (Stone Song), painter and tea master Shoshana Cooper, writer Rabbi David Cooper (God Is A Verb) and Boulder psychologist Ina Robbin for support and guidance. I wish also to convey gratitude to all those good friends and writing workshop attendees who gave this work their studied and undivided attention. Their critical comments and suggestions were invaluable.
Inspiration came also from encounters with Native American Shamanism, Advaita Vedanta and Tibetan Buddhism, the latter two conveyed in the teaching discourses of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.
Finally, this book would not have been possible at all without the help and unflagging support of my loving wife and lifelong helpmate, author and psychologist Karen Kissel Wegela (The Courage To Be Present).
