Kathy M

Based on the real-life experiences of the author, A Leaf in the Stream tells the story of a young history teacher and coach from Indiana who, on a student’s dare, quits his job to walk across the country during the economic turmoil of the Carter years. While set in the late 1970s, the book also delves into the more distant past, as protagonist Jonathan Allen follows the footsteps of westward moving emigrants, including the Donner Party and those who traveled the Santa Fe Trail.

A casualty of the bloody Civil War Battle of Antietam, he wants nothing more than to drift into the comfortably numb embrace of his chosen medicine—forgetting his life before the conflict and the one he’d planned with his fiancée for the aftermath. Instead, the former schoolteacher, stumbles through the seedy margins of a fraying nation—fading in and out of consciousness and finding himself somehow marooned on a stark, grey New England island at the onset of winter.