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    The Stone Necklace: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Stone Necklace: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Stone Necklace: A Novel
    Ebook417 pages5 hours

    The Stone Necklace: A Novel

    By Carla Damron and Patti Callahan Henry

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Named a 2017 STAR AWARD winner by the Women's Fiction Writers Association

    Clawing chest pains and a fiery car crash take one life and change the destiny of four others. The Stone Necklace braids together the stories of a grieving widow, a struggling nurse, a young mother, and a troubled homeless man, reminding us of the empowering and surprising ways our lives touch one another and how, together, we can recover from even the greatest of losses.

    Carla Damron weaves the stories of four people in Columbia, South Carolina, whose seemingly disparate existences intersect through tragedies realized and tragedies averted. Lena Hastings survived breast cancer and marital infidelity but now faces an uncertain future and crises with her teenaged daughter Becca without the support of the one person she has always counted on. Intensive care nurse Sandy Albright, newly released from drug rehab, confronts temptations from her past and false accusations threatening her career, leaving her to wonder if a drug-free life is really living. Tonya Ladson, a mother whose child is injured in the wreck, must decide if her domineering husband is right and a lawsuit will solve their financial problems. Joe Booker, a homeless man who sleeps in a graveyard, loses his gentle benefactor and must either succumb to the real and imagined evils of his world or find the heretofore-untapped courage to care for himself and for others as a stranger once cared for him. Weighted down by their respective pasts, the characters must make life-altering choices that reverberate into the fates of the others, ultimately bringing them together in unexpected but healing acts of compassion, forgiveness, and redemption.

    The Stone Necklace includes a foreword from former nurse turned New York Times best-selling novelist Patti Callahan Henry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of South Carolina Press
    Release dateJan 26, 2016
    ISBN9781611176209
    Unavailable
    The Stone Necklace: A Novel
    Author

    Carla Damron

    Carla Damron is a social worker, advocate, and author whose last novel, The Stone Necklace (about grief and addiction), won the 2017 Women's Fiction Writers Association Star Award for Best Novel and was selected as the One Community Read for Columbia, South Carolina. Damron is also the author of the Caleb Knowles mystery novels and has published numerous short stories, essays, and op-eds.Damron holds an MSW and an MFA. Her careers as a social worker and writer are intricately intertwined; all of her novels explore social issues like addiction, homelessness, mental illness, and human trafficking. Damron volunteers with the League of Women Voters, Sisters in Crime, Palmetto Chapter (president), and Mutual Aid Midlands. She lives with her husband, Jim Hussey, and their large family of spoiled rescue animals.

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    Reviews for The Stone Necklace

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      "She wore her sins like a stone necklace." This one of the first descriptions of Lena Hastings as the novel starts. Lena has just survived breast cancer and reconciled with her husband as the story opens. She has had the bad luck in her life and she feels that now is the time for life to be good. However, that day, her husband is in a horrific car crash that takes his life. This is the story of how the family and other interconnected characters deal with life without Mitch to hold it together for them. There are a lot of characters but they are all touched by Mitch's death -- there is his widow, Lena who is an artist unable to paint since her cancer scare, her sons Sims and Elliot, her daughter Becca who is trying to control her life by self-harming and then three other main characters who play a large role in the novel but are not part of the family - Sandy, the nurse in ICU who is on probation for using drugs and Joe, the homeless man who lives in the cemetery and has been helped out by Mitch over the years and Tonya who was injured in the car crash with Mitch along with her small son. It sounds like a lot of characters but there is no confusion and they are all part of the central theme of the novel - that no matter what happens in our past, there is hope for the future by showing compassion to others - both within our families and to the other people whose lives are intertwined with our own.I enjoyed this book and getting to know these characters. I loved the way that the author managed to interweave their lives and make it all so believable. The author has a background in social work and it's very apparent that she has a great understanding of life for homeless people based on her story line about Joe, the homeless man whose story line is so important to the novel.One more comment -- I usually don't pay a lot of attention to who publishes a book but I have read three books this year published by Story River Books, a publisher of fiction based at the University of South Carolina, and all of them have been excellent. I plan to look for the books that they publish in the future because they publish books that I enjoy and that need to be read!I definitely enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to all of my reader friends.
    • 4/5
      The Stone Necklace by Carla Damron The necklace brings together many from different tragedies.Starts out with Leena: cancer, surgery, chemo. Mitch, the husband tries to keep it all together.Joe the homeless man who does chores for them. He had left a stone and it appears in Mitchs briefcase every morning.Follows Tonya in a car that gets in an accident-her son Bryon is ok, she blames herself for texting..... Mitch had run a red light and crashed into her car due to his medical emergency.Story also follows Becca, Sims and older brother who all gather at the hospital for their father. Also Sandy who's a recovering addict hat is a nurse in the hospital.Confusing at times as everybody has so much going on.Like this book because it is about a lot of different people, different ages, different careers and they have one thing in common...I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).