Gayle Eggen Aanensen

Greater than Gold

Illustrator: Aanensen, Timothy

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

My novella, "Greater than Gold," is a short, meaningful Christmas story, written for middle grade and up readers. Parents and grandparents who buy the book, will also enjoy reading this emotional story that revolves around two troubled boys and their two Christmases-Oscar in the present day, and Omar back in biblical time. A good description would be "The Polar Express" meets the "Book of Luke". After all, if a magic train ride can restore one boy's belief in Santa Claus, why can't an angel time-travel another boy back to Bethlehem, where he discovers the peace, joy (and danger!) of the very first Christmas? Twelve-year-old Oscar Olsen is missing his soldier Dad, and he wants nothing (repeat, nothing) to do with Christmas this year! He acts out his anger on his Mom, his friend, Melissa, and even the strange new kid in church, Albert. A young, inexperienced angel, still struggling to control her wings, appears in Oscar's bedroom. She whirls him back to 2,000 years ago, where he becomes Omar, an orphaned camel-boy, riding with three learned men. Omar is a brand-new person in the traditional nativity story, and he leads the reader to smell the stable, feel the camel's hair, and hear the bleating sheep. Young readers will be drawn into the boys' two parallel stories, told in alternating chapters. Without giving away the whole story, each chapter brings both boys closer to the great paradox of life-it is in giving, that we receive. Sacrifice is at the heart of both stories. Each chapter begins with an original drawing, further enhancing the story. Lots of cute picture books for little ones fill the bookstores at Christmas, but where is the book with deeper meaning for kids in the middle grades? This novella-length book can fill that gap. "Greater than Gold" is a fast-reading adventure story of camels and kings, deserts and Dads, and a slightly inept angel. The book makes a great stocking-stuffer gift that will enrich Christmas for young readers.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Lulu Press
• Seitenzahl: 88
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. November 2014
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 140mm x 5mm
• Gewicht: 113g
• ISBN-13: 9780983690528
• ISBN-10: 0983690529
• Artikelnr.: 46971118

Autorenporträt

Gayle Eggen Aanensen was born in Maine to rambling parents, and she grew up in seven different towns in New York, Florida, Iowa, and New Hampshire. She was constantly the "new kid in class" until seventh-grade, and she turned to books for comfort and companionship. Her love of books is what fuels her writing. Gayle graduated from Portsmouth High School in NH, and Upsala College in East Orange, NJ. She learned writing and editing on-the-job with three national magazines, two in NYC and one in NJ: Science & Mechanics Magazine, Companion Magazine, and The Antiques Dealer. She dropped full-time work to help in her family's home-remodeling business (Aanensen's) while raising three now-grown children with her husband, Ted. She retired after 30 years and plunged back into the writing life. Her writing group, Tri-Muse, published two anthologies, and morphed into an even bigger group, the Jersey Shore Writers, which recently finished a noir anthology, Darkness Falls at the Jersey Shore, available online. Gayle's first two books of historical fiction are set in 1905 in her town of Ocean Grove, NJ: The Little Rough Rider at the Jersey Shore in 2007 and Summer of the Suffragists in 2011. Amazingly, both books won Honorable Mentions in the Writer's Digest Magazine International Self-Publishing Contest.