Found
An upmarket fiction and bookclub work, Found presents age-old questions with a modern twist—a must-read in light of today’s culture.
The novel follows the lives of an American long-married couple who, while celebrating their 45th anniversary in Italy, rescue an abused, abandoned child of a jihadist refugee. Choosing to foster the boy, they create a home for him in the Deep South where each confronts the past: the child’s rage against the severe trauma inflicted upon him by his father, the wife’s shame over the ripple effects of her generational prejudice, and the husband’s struggle with wounds from his emotionally distant parents. Their scars shadow their choices, leading each on a path toward either total destruction or freeing redemption.
“There was no mistaking the sound. It was tiny, fragile, desperate, muffled. And it chilled her to the bone. This . . . was a child’s cry.”
These were the first words I wrote as I began my novel, Found, more than five years ago following my life-changing inspired dream. To this day, I can feel the child’s frantic clutch around my neck in my dream, and even now, chills ripple my skin with the memory. In my dream, I was there, rescuing this refugee child of color, saving him, becoming a good human.
My childhood years were shaped by the image of my mother as the “Queen of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama at sixteen years old. She still reigns, the one and only. My dashing father was Selma High School’s star quarterback and their love affair lasted twenty-five years. The stuff romance novels are made of, yet everyone knows that Selma does not represent all sweetness and joy. Rather, it has represented white boss men vs black help, extravagant antebellum homes shadowing rotting shotgun houses, country club ladies sipping Bloody Marys at the bridge table while determined Black protestors march, ironically, over my mother’s bridge. I spent summers in the heart of Alabama barefoot with my cousins where I absorbed it all. This is the life I knew in the Deep South of America.
A personal experience led to a bombshell moment when I realized that I was completely and utterly saturated in racial prejudice. I was exactly like the good ol’ folks. And I despised myself.
This truth propelled me to write Found, the story of Piccolo, a Middle-Eastern refugee as the foster child of Elli and Ben, an aging couple living in the Deep South, who struggles to overcome the evil ways thrust upon him as a child and become a good human. My hope is that it it exposes the horror, the damage, and the shame that bias thrusts upon us.
I seek to bring light to others existing blindly in this darkness through my novel, a must-read in light of today’s culture of rampant prejudice in every form as millions of people flood our land bringing with them different skin color, cultural values and religions. Hard questions need to be addressed:
Do good deeds make one a good human?
Are families made by blood or bond?
Is prejudice mankind’s universal sin?
Is repentance required for redemption?
This novel now consists of only the one story, but a second one is being developed. Therein, the novel delves deeper into the young adult’s journey to find forgiveness and redemption. A possible third story about his pursuit of love and contentment is also being developed.