'So Teach Us To Number Our Days' grew from hearing of the increase in child and teenage suicides resulting from depression and, in particular, bullying. It can take many forms like stalking and harassment or verbal slander and physical assault. And, while it is not a new form of cruelty, bullying is worse for being so easy and far-reaching through anonymity over the internet.
Written here is a depiction of the rippling effect of the pain and destruction from being bullied; linked in time with generations beginning with a young girl in a small town. Rachel loses her only protection from her tormentor when her brother goes off to war and is no longer there to watch over and defend his sister. Rachel's life and future are stuck in time until, in her old age, she encounters and reaches out to a young boy sleeping in the woods in terrible need of help. Interlaced with their unfolding story are Bible Proverbs and other wisdoms which represent the revival of the faith her mother gave her.
Rachel had been a journal-keeper, but her hidden books don't turn up until the boy she loved and protected has grown up with a family of his own, that he includes her in, and she becomes the children's 'GiGi.' Liam inherits Rachel's secret-filled nineteenth-century home, unchanged since GiGi's childhood, and he opens up the mystery of the reclusive woman who had saved him, discovering in the process he had also saved her from her lonely isolation.
Through Rachel's journals, and Liam's own memories of his childhood, an old unsolved murder of a young bully comes to light, as well as an answer for the mysterious disappearance of Liam's own mother. Young bullies grown up are apt to be bullies yet, just made more dangerous by the protection of social and political status. In this fictional story, the young bully is given a short life, murdered by someone unknown about two generations earlier. But the same bloodline produces another just as bad who becomes a cowardly assassin who, when justice happens, will live a long life-behind bars.
There are many mysteries, twists, turns, and even a skeleton with no identity turning up in this tale that will keep readers engaged.
Read, ponder, and then find a way to take a personal stand against bullying-being a Rachel, a Gabriel or an old Alan Ortonson!
