From the Christy Award-winning Author of Levi's Will "You never know what the day will bring..." Mick Brannigan, a construction worker, loses a good-paying job because of some freak accident, sort of his fault but not his fault. Adding insult to injury, he finds himself playing nursemaid to his three kids. "Mick's whole life felt like an accident..." Even more flustered is his wife, Layne, now forced to get a job to keep a paycheck coming in. Mick isn't the stay-at-home-dad type, she's sure. He's a good dad--when she is there to supervise it all…the unrelenting daily stuff. Keeping the house clean, food in the fridge. Attacking the ever-mounting laundry. Supervising their five acres of land and the menagerie of animals.... "It wasn't his idea to stay home with the kids..." A lot is on the line, and just how the Brannigan family will survive--that is, without anyone getting seriously hurt or killed, the kids not ending up psychologically and emotionally damaged, the laundry not undoing their marriage--all remains to be seen.... Packed with humor, true-to-life characters, and themes to enlighten the soul, Summer of Light is altogether poignant, witty, entertaining, and delightfully down-to-earth.
DALE CRAMER was the second of four children born to a runaway Amishman turned soldier and a south Georgia sharecropper's daughter. His formative years were divided between far-flung military bases, yet he always maintained his mother's sense of place, remembering the knee-deep snows of Maryland, chasing horned toads in El Paso, or a sun-rippled macadam road at his grandparents' Georgia house. True to his Amish roots Dale skipped college and went to work with his hands, earning a living as an electrician, all the while reading widely and voraciously. The thought was never far from his mind that someday he would like to write books.
In 1975 he married his childhood friend Pam, and eventually they settled in the country south of Atlanta. They have two sons,Ty and Dusty. After keeping the boys in daycare for a year, Pam and Dale decided to make whatever sacrifices were necessary to provide a full time homelife. The decision came with unexpected results when Dale became a stay-at-home dad. He took on small construction projects in the evenings, both for the sake of his sanity and to help make ends meet. One of these jobs led to his first published writing, an article in Industry Week.
Having gained a taste for writing, he decided to pursue the avocation, studying technique, reading books, and writing during his sons' naps. Over the next two years he published short stories in several literary magazines, and in 1997 Dale began work on his first novel. Sutter's Cross was eventually published to great acclaim in 2003.
His second novel, Bad Ground (2004), owes a great deal to the author's own experiences as a construction electrician. The industrial setting is based on a real water treatment plant on the south side of Atlanta. One of the main characters, badly burned in an explosion, gains a unique measure of authenticity from the author's own experience. Publishers Weekly selected Bad Ground as one of the "Best Books of 2004", as did Library Journal and Booklist. The novel also won a Christy Award from the Christian Booksellers Association.
Dale's third novel, Levi's Will, follows the life of runaway Amishman Will Mullet, who must reconcile himself to his roots before he can find true redemption. Loosely based on the life of Dale's father, Levi's Will has also found critical acclaim and netted Dale a second Christy Award.
Summer of Light, Dale's fourth novel, released in 2007, is a much lighter read, a humorous and sometimes poignant romp through the daily grind of an ironworker who reluctantly becomes a stay at home dad to three free-spirited kids, a menagerie of animals and a diabolically intelligent dog.
