My First Novel: About "Facing the Clouds"

In the introductory post of this blog, I mentioned that I am working upon a Young Adult novel set in WWII. In this post, I am going to focus upon that novel and try to tell you a little bit about it!

The novel, which I have titled Facing the Clouds, is set in WWII, and is told in the first person point-of-view of a teenage girl named Amy Weston.

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Amy lives with her Mother in a fictional place called Riverton, Ohio. She has no father, for he was killed in a railroad accident when the train he was working as a fireman on derailed and the boiler exploded, killing him and three others.

Now, five months after the accident and with Hitler raging through France, Amy's mother is being courted by a new man, Henry Winters.

Poor Amy feels that her mother doesn't believe Amy can take care of herself without a father-figure around and because of this feeling, refuses to treat Mr. Winters as anything more than a temporary annoyance.

When Amy's best friend has to answer the draft call and report to the Air Corps base in South Carolina, Amy is devastated. Taking only her late father's wallet and some of his clothes, she hops a train on a spur-of-the-moment impulse and ends up following her friend to South Carolina without intending to.

Now alone in a strange town and determined to prove she can take care of herself without a father-figure, Amy disguises herself as a man and joins the Air Corps, only to find that life as a fighter pilot isn't all the easy glory she thought it would be, and that by running from her problems at home, she's run right into a killing storm.

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From home-sweet-home to crawling through No-Man's-Land, Amy must face her fears and emotions one by one and conquer them with the silent help of a God she is beginning to doubt even exists.

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I hope that when it is finished, Facing the Clouds will remind people that the only way they can deal with their problems is to face them, and that running away is only going to make things worse.

However, I also hope it will encourage someone and remind them that, even in the darkest storm, when all seems lost, there is a God who brings hope, and that when the storms end at last, we will see that He was there, guiding our path all along.

Brooke Johnson