MAGICAL REALISM & FANTASY. This novel is full of powerful lessons disguised as a fun, coming of age tale. It is appropriate for anyone ages 10-110. The novel is intended to help readers recognize the power of unwavering faith, understand the beauty of unending love and enjoy the freedom that comes with absolute forgiveness and to help deal with loss as well as help us recognize our own mortality and overcome the fear of death. The book is set in Southwest Virginia in 1984 and is narrated by ten-year old Katie who finds some old bones when playing with her sisters. While investigating the bones, she accidentally discovers a portal to another world. When she comes back out, she and her sisters make up a chant, "Old bones, old bones, rise and see, Old bones old bones, rise and be free..." She gets struck by lightning while holding the bone and her whole world changes; now she can see an expendable life force present in everything around her. Meanwhile, the alternating story is of an almost 12 year old boy named Terry who suffers a tragic accident and passes away in September of 1943. His story is about everything that happens to him before, during and after his death and the things he experiences and sees when he is in the realm of the "In-between" - the space between heaven and earth. When he is granted the opportunity to come back to earth to make amends with someone he hurt before he died, he discovers that forty years have passed and things have changed. Terry and Katie become friends and when Terry's angel presents him with a difficult choice, he must decide if he wants to go or stay. EXCERPT FROM BOOK: beginning on Page 61 "I looked at the world around me in awe. Everything was living and breathing around me. Everywhere I looked, there were wisps of expended energy and as it silently gathered to float into the atmosphere, I noticed it was as dense as an early morning fog after a rain. I looked up to the sky. Where did the energy go? Was it returning to God?Just then, I became aware of something moving in the woods behind the underbrush in the edge of the forest that lay beyond the clearing. I turned my attention to the woods. It was a deer. A large one. A buck with antlers that were already growing big and strong, even though it was still just the last week of June. It was the kind of deer that hunters waited their whole lives for. I watched as it ran. It wasn’t in rut. It was too early for that. His antlers were still velvety soft, and he hadn’t reached his peak yet, but he was full of energy. I could see his life force glowing as bright as a hand-shaped star from all the way across the clearing. As he leapt over a log, I noticed the dark decay of rot in the log below him. I stopped tracking the deer and zeroed in on the log. In the depths of the rotting log, I could see and smell the decay. Even from where I stood near Goliath in the clearing, I could see the wood-boring beetles, the termites, and the carpenter ants busily boring channels into the wood so they could more easily make their way to the roots. That’s where the nutrients were kept. It made me think of the marrow inside our bones.I looked at the bone in my hand and I could see something happening deep inside it. Cells were regenerating and multiplying even as I held it in my hand. The bone was creating marrow from the energy in the wind. I could feel the process happening. The old bone was coming back to life. I could sense it. I held the bone up again, fascinated by the process of the reversal of decay. I knew what things looked like when they died, but now I was seeing what they looked like when they came back to life. The bone was beginning to generate heat and I could see a spark, a glowing ember of life beginning to take shape deep inside it. I began to feel a little bit scared. I had asked God to bring the bones back to life, but I hadn’t really believed he would. I had just been playing."