Publisher's Synopsis
Jack Corey O'Neill's mother warns him to stay out of trouble. But like most twelve-year-old boys in 1980's America, he can't help himself. It's a natural phenomenon that adolescence and disaster go hand in hand. After all, we learn from our mistakes. Unfortunately, Jack's bad decisions often include his kid brother Frankie who follows his older sibling as devotedly as Woodstock does Snoopy. In The Smell of Lightning and Dust After the First Raindrops Fell traipse alongside Jack, Frankie, and their best and only friend Danny Kuzmick as they come-of-age one fateful summer day.
Fleeing her present life, Charlotte Parker follows her dreams and flies to jolly ole England. Once there, she discovers that although dreams can come true, they do so at a steep price. Yet is Charlotte willing to pay the ultimate cost to achieve those dreams? Her humanity. In the gothic romance Your Garden Variety, fairy tales are not just fictions but reality. Journey with Charlotte to Bradford England, home of the Brontë sisters and the world-famous Cottingley Fairies, where an underground river realm holds the secret to an ancient treasure.
Author and illustrator, Pat R. Steiner is an award winning illustrator in the long running Illustrators of the Future contest. He is the author of the short novel Enlarge Your Tentacles Overnight and the novellas Wyrd and The White Hart. His short stories have appeared in Eric Flint's Grantville Gazette and Written Backwards' Chiral Mad and Qualia Nous. He lives in Wisconsin with his family. Learn more about him at patsteiner.com or follow him on Facebook.
