Search results for ""Author Wayne M. Johnston""

For Bill, the end has always been in view. His life has seen a series of unlikely extensions. When he was young, he hated his father and contemplated suicide. Later in his life he was diagnosed with leukemia and expected to die within months. Bill's childhood was spent on a communal evangelical mission, but eventually Bill began to question his parents' strict religious beliefs. His father reacted with violence and Bill felt trapped between the dishonesty of trying to conform to his parents' beliefs and the conviction that he was doomed to hell for questioning them. Eventually he provokes his father into a confrontation that leads to an outcome that redefines their relationship and alters the course of both of their lives. By midlife, Bill has been married for twenty years and has his own family. The challenges he has faced at sea as chief engineer on tugboats have helped him heal. His thoughts of suicide have faded. His father's recent descent into Alzheimer's Disease has created an avenue for the reconciliation the two have worked on for years. Then, unexpectedly, a story emerges about his father, involving his sister, and Bill is confronted once again with the dark side of his father's personality.

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Dreams of escape from her privileged but empty life are only fantasies until Kristen finds a Canadian birth certificate under her mother's jewelry box. Kristen has no memories of her early childhood or her biological father. Her stepdad controls her secretive mother, and Kristen cuts on herself. Even her best friend, Natalie, doesn't know she is haunted by thoughts of suicide. The questions raised by the birth certificate are so unsettling that Kristen decides to run away.Corey was alone the night that Kristen ran away. He has a past and he is known as a trouble maker. He is blamed by both the authorities and kids in school for having murdered Kristen, though her body has not been found. Even his mother believes he is guilty. Natalie, who has her own reasons to despise Corey, grieves for Kristen and also blames Corey.But Kristen has crossed into Canada and is making a new life for herself, unaware what is happening in her absence back in Washington state. She finds a kind of peace she's never experienced, until what started as an innocent relationship with an older man becomes dangerous. Now, stalked by a real predator, she must decide whether to stay and resolve her new problem or return home and confront her former life.The three main characters tell their stories separately as first-person written responses to an English class assignment to keep a personal journal. Each struggles to face life with integrity while entangled in a web of difficult situations. To triumph, each must confront the challenge of forgiveness.

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