Lee Denaro has awakened suddenly to the fact that he is old. The job market does not want him, despite his new PhD. Young at heart, athletic, and reasonably good-looking, on occasion he finds himself still appealing to women much younger than his actual years. Now without rose-colored glasses, he sees that plan A is a long shot. He has no plan B. But he is not giving up. He draws again closer to God to plead for a change in fate. To end a loser? No! It cannot be. Not one by nature to reminisce, nonetheless, Lee finds himself deep into introspection. Where did he go wrong? He is struggling in every manner of life. He is barely hanging on financially and finds himself alone, without a wife or a girlfriend. Meanwhile, Abigail-Abby, Lee's childhood crush-has her own problems. Contrary to Lee, she is married, wealthy, and bored with life. And she has another major problem. She hates sex. To get Lee, that is a major hurdle. Sh-Boom is-and is not-a love story. Nor is it just about a man's struggle with his god. True, it is the story of one man's life from early boyhood to late manhood. But it is more so about life itself. It is really about The Way of the World-not Congreve's-as the protagonist himself discovered it in a drunken state in Paris. Long in volume, Sh-Boom presents an honest-to-goodness look at life with its twist and turns, highs and lows, betrayals, romance, sex, disappointments, and perhaps violence, but only in the mind of the protagonist from life's frustrations. The action moves from California to Florida to South Carolina to Germany to Paris to Moscow to China. It is a story worth telling and a story worth reading.
About the Author: The title The Way of the World came into being from a near drunken stupor after several glasses of wine on the third day of the author's arrival in Paris in 1971. He was pursuing a dream. He was there to challenge life, but equally to find himself. At 26, his life was in turmoil. Could he fulfill that dream and become the hero of his own life? Michael Jian received his bachelor's degree from the Citadel in 1966. He received graduate degrees from the Sorbonne in 1976. In 2013 he earned his doctorate from Claremont Graduate University, having lived in four foreign countries and worked in or traveled to twenty-three others. I shall become a writer, he told himself that night in Paris long ago. He wrote forty-six pages that night. Waking up the next morning, he tore them up. Great expectations, Mister Dickens, he muttered. Decades later he was to remember Owen. The author lives in Newport Beach, California. He visits family in China regularly.