Until We're Called To Rise

Until we're called to rise, explores the myriad of new choices that confront us in our daily lives and the internal and external forces that keep us anchored to a life that is all too familiar. This conflict unfolds through the eyes of well-developed, identifiable characters, navigating through the gauntlet-like blows they receive in their search to unravel an ever deepening mystery. The book examines the terror of risk-taking and the consequences of choosing discomfort over comfort in the hope of attaining individual growth and a richer life meaning.
Amy Kessler is a plain, frumpy, thirty-five year old unmarried schoolteacher who is a couple of shot glasses and pill bottles away from killing herself. She is, at her core, a caring, sensitive, and highly intelligent young woman who is trying to find her voice in life. Instead she hears the incoherent mumblings of a man in a trash bag who has parked himself on the stoop of her apartment building. She pays him little mind but her unchained curiosity blended with her inherent compassion leads her to perform a simple act of kindness that opens the door to romance and other unexpected changes in her life. She is propelled into a world of a fluid and terrifying political mystery wrapped around deeply disturbing psychological abnormalities that have the very real potential of harming her.

Amy is perpetually haunted by the suicide of her stoic, emotionally damaged father, and the clingy, phobia-laden hysterics of her mother.

Supporting characters are lovers, jill and garrett. Jill, amy’s best friend and fellow schoolteacher, is an absolute knockout. She is slender and physically beautiful, dressing to enhance all of her prodigious endowments. Yet she is sensitive and openly caring about her increasingly downward-spiraling friend, willing to do almost anything to ensure her friend's well-being.

Garrett is an honest, opinionated investigative newspaper reporter, who has received an unusual assignment from his editor. Garrett has been requested by presidential candidate new york governor dornan prusser to live in the latter’s home and report on his daily activities. Prusser’s point is to show “all the people of america that I have nothing to hide,” especially by hiring garrett, his ideological opposite. Prusser has a cadre of guards who are conspicuously equivocal about garrett residing in the governor’s home. however, not everyone feels this way, especially the governor's wife, claudia. locked doors are left ajar and cryptic messages appear on garrett's investigative journey amidst a thickening cloud of suspicion.

Against this setting, Amy turns another page in the chapter of her drab and bleak life. temporarily forgetting about those incoherent mumblings of that homeless man (Don), she is thrust back into his life, as he rescues her from a mugging. Thinking he’s injured, during the fight, amy rushes him to a hospital and is told that his injuries are not life threatening, except for the fact that he is blind. However, the doctors are unable to find a physiological reason for this condition.

Amy pursues answers to the increasing mystery surrounding don, while still supplying the kindling keeping the fires of her self-loathing, alive. However, Amy’s fragile dance with life slowly and painfully uncovers a kindred spirit in Don. Gradually, they reveal the childhood terrors each endured steering them into their current lives of despair and alienation. Nonetheless, they succumb to the powerful and unique feelings of love that are developing between them.

Amy persuades don to see her psychotherapist, fully comprehending that the therapeutic goal is to help restore Don's sight, thereby allowing him to "see" amy. As the novel gallops to its conclusion and don's demons are laid bare, Amy becomes increasingly convinced that Don is at the core of the prusser mystery.