A toddler in an emotionally explosive and unstable family has her leg amputated. In spite of significant hurdles, she powers through to become a successful career woman and equally successful single parent.
Wendy Sura Thomson is a 5-star author of Summon the Tiger, The Third Order, The Man from Burnt Island, and Postcards from the Future (as a contributing author.) She has several more works underway. She lives in Michigan with her beloved Setters and covets sipping coffee outdoors first thing in the morning, rain or shine., listening to the waterfall and the birds and watching [often with amusement] the pups explore.
It wasn't enough to leave college for a sea-faring adventure, headed around the world.... no, within the first several hours we were hit by an international commercial freighter, piloted by an Englishman, that missed the west-bound channel and collided with us. That was a telling omen.
Book Excerpt
Summon the Tiger
Our send-off from Detroit was well-publicized: all the local papers covered this great adventure. So we took off one cold November morning and headed east, out of Lake St. Clair and into the channel. The Detroit River is not particularly wide – at its narrowest it’s only a half mile across. It takes a significant amount of freighter traffic, and it has islands that dot the middle. Every one of us were in the wheel house that November morning as my dad piloted the ship. We sailed around Belle Isle, under the Ambassador Bridge, and headed towards Lake Erie. And then trouble began. We were downriver, and foreign freighter “Manchester City” was headed west (Detroit is actually north of Windsor: the river runs east and west at that point). At 9:26 PM the Manchester City, having missed the entrance to the East Outer Channel, corrected course – right across our bow. We ended up with a 12” hole in the starboard chain locker. I ducked under the chart table, Warren took off his glasses and sat on the floor, Tracy grabbed on to the wheel. It’s the strangest thing seeing a monstrous ship running into you. You simply seem to accept the fact calmly at the time and act accordingly – afterwards, my mother started picking up things. Warren and Jimmy went fore to assess the damage. And I went to the radio-telephone and hailed the nameless ship: “This is the Brigadoon WZR2964 calling the ship we just hit.”
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