Eight-year-old Charles Thomas has a mission: He’s lookin' to find Jesus on Johnsontown, a tiny, fast-eroding Chesapeake island that’s home to 400-plus souls. He’s been hearing about Jesus forever, but it wasn’t until that Visitin' Preacher came to the New Believers’ Church on Father’s Day that Charles Thomas thought he might could find Him right there on the island, just the way that Visitin' Preacher said. Livin’ right among them. It made sense to Charles Thomas since all the people he knew talked about knowin’ Jesus the way they talked about knowing their neighbors, so Charles Thomas figured, if Jesus lived among them, it had to be one of the people he knew. If he could find Him, maybe his Lord and Savior could perform a miracle or two for him, and God knew Charles Thomas could use a miracle. For starters, He could fix up his broke arm, and if he could do that, maybe He could even bring back his father.
PUBLISHER DESCRIPTION
Inspired by an intimate knowledge of the people on isolated Tangier Island, VA, Fortenbaugh has conceived a tale of the innocence and sustaining power of hope despite the challenges that the people of Johnsontown face — discouragement and the failing economics of the rural working class, wresting a living from a beleaguered Bay, the loss of regional micro-dialects, traditions, and the cultures they reflect, all colored by conflicts of race, class, and identity. These challenges have been a part of our nation from its beginnings, yet all are surging in these turbulent times of tremendous change and the inevitable backlash that always accompanies such change.
“I feel,” author Pete Fortenbaugh says, “that Johnsontown is a perfect petri dish to explore the complex dynamics of small community life in the face of an ever-changing world.”
The rich cast of characters is fully realized, from kind, steady Uncle Furry, who relies on The Lord to guide him and is convinced that climate change is bunk, to Calhoon Greenhawk and his sometime girlfriend Marsha, who is called ‘whore’ by the island's church women as casually as hanging out laundry, to black Mr. Abe Johnson, the island’s librarian and only accountant, whose grown son, Rodney, has the mind of a five-year-old.
Charles Thomas’s more personal struggle to find Jesus and apply to Him for specific cures for what ails his own life is poignant, funny, wry and ultimately a parable for our times.
Early Reviews
Pete Fortenbaugh’s Monday After Father’s Day delivers on its promise of revelation, a novella with the literary weight of a novel sung in the earthy tones of American vernacular. In eight-year-old Charles Thomas we have a Tom Sawyer for the 21st Century, a boy in search of a father who has forsaken him, a quest that leads us on a pilgrimage through heard-earned truths conjuring a coming-of-age for us all. Set in Johnsontown on the Chesapeake Bay and staged in the human heart, this beautifully wrought parable of a boy waking to the wonders and horrors of the world allows us a readiness for love in a time of crisis.
—Robert Mooney, author of Father of The Man, Executive Director Etruscan Press
Add a crisp new voice to the sea shanty, precocious instigator Charles Thomas, aged 8, and add his creator, too, Pete Fortenbaugh, a writer with a firm grip on the tiller and a keen eye on the fast-rising tides of the Chesapeake. He’ll take you on a wild ride into a world and way of life you’ve likely never experienced and, sadly, one day soon will cease to exist.
—Ernest Thompson, Academy Award-winning author of On Golden Pond
A can’t-put-it-down paperback
—Trish McGee, Kent County News
ABOUT Pete Fortenbaugh
Pete Fortenbaugh’s family roots go back to 1693 on the Delmarva Peninsula. The Chesapeake – its stories, culture and complicated human history – are in his blood. His earliest experiences were on boats, including six-months in his adolescence living aboard a catamaran with his family, a trip that whetted his appetite for traveling the world. He spent months trekking throughout Latin America, for two years lived in Spain where he taught English in public and private schools and earned a Masters in Teaching through the Universidad de Alcalá in 2018, then lived in Dakar, Senegal for eight months teaching English, which also helped to improve his French.
Regardless of where he roams, his heart remains on the Eastern Shore. Informed by the close friendships he made while living and working as a carpenter on isolated Tangier Island, Fortenbaugh’s work explores with humor and compassion the characters and the often-complex relationships of the people of fictional Johnsontown, a racially mixed community of four hundred-plus souls.
A finalist for the prestigious Sophie Kerr Prize, the largest undergraduate literary award in the country, Fortenbaugh’s work has been published in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies including: Niche Literary Magazine, Little Patuxtent Review, and Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s 2021 anthology This is What America Looks Like. This is his first novella.