Product Description
Finalist, 20th Annual National Indie Excellence® AwardsHe was ten years old, sitting alone in a bus depot on Skid Row, waiting to find out which parent would take him — and which one wouldn't.Neither wanted him. He would learn to stop being surprised by that.The Cloud Grows Thin is the story of what a childhood like that does to a person — and what it takes, years later, to become someone who can raise his own sons differently. Michael LaFleur grew up between a father darkened by Vietnam and a mother who had already chosen her own life over his. He moved through instability, poverty, and a faith that got tested past any reasonable breaking point. He learned, young, to face what came — tornadoes, threats, loneliness, silence — without anyone to face it with him.This is not a memoir about being rescued. It's about a boy who had to become his own reason to keep going — and a man still reckoning, honestly, with what that cost. Including with the God he kept reaching for even when the evidence pointed the other way.Readers who found themselves in The Glass Castle or Educated will recognize the terrain. But this book goes somewhere those don't: into the specific question of grace — not as comfort, not as rescue, but as the thing none of us deserve, which is precisely what makes it what it is.For anyone who survived a childhood that asked too much of them. For anyone still figuring out what to do with that. Read more
