At the moment this novel is only available as an audiobook which can be downloaded from Podiobooks.com or from iTunes (at no charge!)
Clear Heart:
The words that keep coming as feedback from listeners are "humor, joyful, down-to-earth, warm, heart-healing, humane." I thought I was more serious than that, but I'm usually the last person to understand what I've written. Apparently, Clear Heart is a down-to-earth, heart-warming story about getting nailed. Or something like that.
Anyway, it's a story of carpenters and craft, love and friendship and comedy. It's about working hard for people who don't seem to work at all. It's about taking pride in what you do, putting your hands and your body at risk to make something worth keeping. It's about loving a good tool - loving it beyond reason, beyond caution and good sense. It's about growing up - whether you're 18 years old, or 55. One word of warning: It's about rough characters who use rough language.
Wally and Juke are building a mansion for a dot-com multimillionaire in the Silicon Valley of California. As the dot-com's stock keeps rising, the size of the house - and the owner's ego - keep growing. Wally and Juke may be into something that's over their heads. When little guys work for bigshots, who gets nailed?
Wally meets Opal, a newspaper photographer with puppy eyes who catches him at a painfully embarrassing moment. Juke meets Lenora, otherwise known as Lenora from Gomorrah. When carpenters meet women who won't be treated like boards, who gets nailed?
Wally hires a couple of teenage apprentices for the summer. One is Abe, a preppie on his way to Princeton. The other is FrogGirl, a dropout runaway who believes "Cute people suck." Can opposites attract? Can they even get along?
From bungling to burglary, from demolishing concrete to racing beltsanders, from love of tools to falling in love, a colorful crew of characters come up against Wally's Laws of Construction - or are they laws of life? Each House, it seems, is a Miracle.