MY CHAMPION
Tess is a ten-year-old farm girl who loves freedom and adventure and dreaming. Over four seasons’ time, she and her workhorse companion Star learn from “the school of the wild” as they create a dream home by the sea out of driftwood and castaway treasures. In these moments, Tess’s thoughts of self-doubt disappear, as does her secret unhappiness that she lacks the fine show horses her peers have.
Dreams change and time passes until one day Star discovers his proud draft horse ancestry. In the face of nature’s fury, Tess uses ingenuity and courage together with Star’s spirit and power, to prevail in a heroic rescue. The realization that they are “good enough” just being themselves is profoundly felt as horse and rider are forever changed. This transformation resonates throughout Carnes’ vivid oil illustrations and leaves readers simultaneously awed and gratified.With master storyteller Ernest Pugh narrating this timeless story prefaced by the words of John McCutcheon’s song “Like Water From a Another Time” on the accompanying CD, it is clear that author and illustrator Susan K. Carnes has struck gold with My Champion. Indeed, the book won a gold medal in the “Spirit” category from Moonbeams.For more information,
click here: skcarnes.wordpress.com
My Champion is available at: Amazon Books
Autographed Copies from author
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THE WAY BACK
A Soldier’s Story
Devastated by news that the dairy barn on her Wisconsin farm is being pulled down and sold off in pieces, Lori Moyer pleads to save it, “It is not just a barn. It is an icon—a way of life!” When a journal is found hidden in a beam of the hayloft, only Lori remembers its author, John Chapman, a soldier survivor of World War I, who Lori’s family hired to finish the new barn. John was solitary, fearful of interaction, and estranged from his own family—but to her, he was a father figure and a storyteller who saved her life and her father’s life too! Now, she wonders if she really did know this man? Struck with the notion that he may have suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, she queries the Internet and discovers a secret world John never shared with her. When Lori reads John’s journal, his legacy to her, entitled “The Necklace of Words,” it resounds with loss, longing, love, anger, and fear. Powerful images spark Lori’s own memories of tragedy and joy spent in her long-ago beloved home. The phrase she used playfully, “My barn burned down and now I see the moon” is manifest, and out of the ashes arises the phoenix of self discovery.
Available in All e-Book Formats
ISBN: 9781483520735
https://bit.ly/SoldiersJourney for Amazon Kindle
Reviews at http://skcarnes.com/book-reviews.html
Audiobook at : http://adbl.co/2f0UeOp
Listen to Sample at : https://susancarnes.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/retail-audio-sample.mp3
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EPIPHANY: Starting Over in Oregon
Empty and sick at heart over what she is leaving behind her, threatened by a punishing blizzard descending from the north, Lori Moyer drives white knuckled across Montana toward her dream of romance and adventure in the far west. Suddenly her car and trailer hit black ice hurling into a death-defying spin. Years of experience driving Wisconsin’s icy roads, tell Lori not to touch the brakes, and she emerges unscathed but paralyzed by fear and tossed into a storm of self-doubt. Heart beating wildly, her wide eyes fasten on the image of the Western Star emblazoned on the freight liner lumbering up alongside. When the teamster calls down from the cab “Santa put Lady Luck in yer sock,” she realizes she has another chance, feels grateful and embraces the Western Star as her talisman to shine away thoughts of being too old, alone and out of place. She continues to spare the brakes on her midlife quest for a meaningful life, calling up all she knows to help out the children of Lucky Strike Oregon. Indeed Lori spins by starlight through the “valley of alone” steering headlong into the arms of a host of Oregon’s colorful characters. It is a gem of a story set in the Cascades as hauntingly beautiful as a Holly Blue agate flanked by wild mountain iris— but as dangerous as black ice.
With passion and sensitivity, Carnes explores one woman’s effort to teach what she most needs to learn, that her life is her own. Along the way, themes of facing fear, cultivating creativity, following bliss, surviving violence, finding strength in disaster, paying the toll for a road taken, and learning about love, resonate with the ideas her companions share on the way to self-actualization. This tribute to living fully, will leave readers laughing and crying, and wanting to know what is next in the journey of an optimistic fool, perhaps an overachiever, who learns to piece experiences together like stained glass, to create a masterpiece.
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Hotel Belmar: The Ghost Has The Key
Lori Moyer is so enthralled by the energies within Hotel Belmar that she begins to interview people who remember the glitz and glory of this revered icon of Mazatlán, Mexico. If only the ghosts rumored to haunt the old hotel would tell ‘first hand’ tales of this historic place!
Enter Lori’s estranged best friend, Cynthia, who checks into Hotel Belmar seeking a new life. Once a dancer, Cynthia desperately flees the ghost of the man who has left her destitute and broken. As Lori struggles to make a book of Belmar stories, she secretly hopes to rekindle the friendship, while Cynthia plunges into the mysteries and dreams of the commoners and celebrities, some living—some in phantom form, who like her, and like the hotel, dared the dizzying heights of greatness.
Will they discover secrets in boarded-up rooms, locked tight as unforgiving hearts? Ahhhh—The ghost has the key.
