Today, Steve Watkins, the author of What Comes After is here with an author bio, courtesy of the Teen Book Scene. We gave him the option to write up a bio that could be as funny, random or as serious as he wanted to be. Thank you for being here today, Steve! You can follow along with the blog tour for What Comes After here, or by clicking through the banner. Enjoy!
When I was 22 I fell off the side of a mountain in India and tore a three-inch hole in my liver. I’d spent the night before sleeping on the floor of a cave near the holy site of Pondupol, in Rajasthan, where Hanuman the Monkey God saved the people from drought by putting his fist through solid rock and opening up a natural spring. I was riding a bike down a rocky road when I crashed. I spent a day there before my friend David was able to rescue me. When he got me to Alwar, the nearest city, the hospital there had dirt floors and no diagnostic facilities. My injuries were all internal so they didn’t know what to do except crank me full of morphine and blood. I was delirious for a long time. I spent months in hospitals in India and, eventually, back in the States. I nearly died several times during several major surgeries, and ended up with a maze of train-track scars all over my abdomen, severed stomach muscles, metal sutures that still give me problems thirty years later, and a hole in my back from a procedure called a marsupialization. I lost 60 pounds. I contracted pneumonia and malaria and an all-but-untreatable abdominal infection. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
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A gripping portrait of a teen’s struggles through grief and abuse - and the miraculous power of animals to heal us.
After her veterinarian dad dies, sixteen-year-old Iris Wight must leave her beloved Maine to live on a North Carolina farm with her hardbitten aunt and a cousin she barely knows. Iris, a vegetarian and animal lover, immediately clashes with Aunt Sue, who mistreats the livestock, spends Iris’s small inheritance, and thinks nothing of striking Iris for the smallest offense. Things come to a head when Iris sets two young goats free to save them from slaughter, and an enraged Aunt Sue orders her brutish son, Book, to beat Iris senseless - a horrific act that lands Book and his mother in jail. Sent to live with an offbeat foster family and their "dooking" ferrets, Iris must find a way to take care of the animals back at the farm, even if it means confronting Aunt Sue. Powerful and deeply moving, this compelling novel affirms the redemptive power of animals and the resilience of the human spirit.
Synopsis taken from goodreads.
1 comment:
This sounds like a very powerful book! I completely believe in the healing power of animals.
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