Follow Your Dreams is the sequel to Larry B. Gildersleeve's 2016 Amazon bestselling debut novel Dancing Alone Without Music. In it, he brings forward memorable characters, especially Marla Taylor, and introduces Josephine Gilpin, an African-American entrepreneur who is Kentucky's most successful business woman and philanthropist. After knowing her for only a short period of time, Marla describes Jo as "the most remarkable woman I've ever known."
Marla and Jo are drawn together when Marla encourages Jo to share her life experiences by writing a book, with Marla's help, to encourage other women. Jo is in the process of transitioning the ownership of her company to her employees, but things begin to go wrong, terribly wrong, professionally and personally. Things that would have defeated a lesser woman.
Just when she thinks she has things under control, events begin to conspire against Jo in unanticipated ways and with terrible consequences. And she's running out of time. But Jo is not alone. She finds herself in the loving embrace of friends she has helped and inspired throughout her life, and they come together to help. But there is one thing all of them are powerless to change. This is a contemporary story of people "of faith" facing life's challenges in the real world. They sometimes say bad words, and they have romantic lives with the ones they love. But their Christian faith keeps them centered.
Follow Your Dreams covers only seven months in the life of Josephine Gilpin, yet reaches back in time to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's to understand what shaped this remarkable woman. It's a suspenseful, page-turning story of love and loss, happiness and heartache, tragedy and triumph that readers will find truly uplifting.
As an added bonus, there is a book within the book. Gildersleeve has embedded an inspirational book in the "self-help" genre entitled My Way. While non-fiction, he uniquely positions it as the book that brought Marla and Jo together, thus he makes Jo the author.
Two-books-in-one from Southern Christian author Larry B. Gildersleeve, who dedicates this latest offering "To every women who followed her dreams."
