Smelling Roses

Charles Montgomery is an unlikely hero. An eleven year old identical twin, he is torn from his God-fearing family, and institutionalized for his strange pronouncements. On the eve of his eighteenth birthday, he mysteriously disappears, only to return a decade later, transformed. The heros journey traverses the religious, psychiatry-obsessed 1950s, into the turbulent, revolutionary sixties. It is meshed within a tapestry of human connections interwoven with dark threads of addiction, abuse, and mental illness, and woven with golden threads of compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude. Implied in the title is a scent of mysticism. Sprinkled with serendipity, and interspersed with lucid dreams, the story hints at unseen forces at play in everyday life, and glows with channeled messages of universal truths illuminating its pages.