Tunnels in the Briar Patch (The Adventures of Roland McCray)

These stories follow the life of a boy named Roland McCray growing up during the massive social changes of the 1960’s in a southern town that’s immersed in Civil War history. Roland enjoys the things that all children do- rides his bike, flies kites, plays in the fields and woods, and catches frogs and salamanders in the creek behind his house… But Roland notices that the world he sees around him and the things adults do don’t match what he’d been told in school and church. He learns that people aren’t always honest and that prejudice between races and religions hasn’t completely changed in a hundred years.. Doubts grow in his developing conscience about what to believe and he’s influenced by his grandfather’s way of life: faith isn’t a thing to be shown, the way it is at his church, but is a quiet, unwavering certainty that all things work out for the good of those who truly seek the good in life. Roland wants that same certainty his grandfather lives and begins to seek his own Path, his own way to finding the good in life and living the way God intends he should live. A nostalgic tale of a young man growing up in the south and losing his religion to find God.
“These stories are woven in such a way that you feel what the boy feels, they are not all lightness and brightness, but more like real life remembered in all of its shaded details.”