A perceptive blending of fact and fiction, STICKS AND SHADOWS: Scars on a Soul reveals the wide-ranging impact of child abuse on the multiple facets of one's life, while concurrently highlighting the ability of the human spirit to survive. It is a story about lost hope and unsung heroes. It contains elaboration of losses sufficient for hope to be among them. It contains insights to quiet troubled minds so heroes might more often prevail.

The story portrays transitions through anger and despair, to acceptance, understanding and, finally, peace, during the search for lost hope. It is a roller-coaster ride through paths strewn with loss and recovery - loss of first love, of family, of sanity, of hope - a journey through brokenness to healing.

The narrative is fashioned around a series of therapy sessions in which the main character, an adult victim of child abuse, is confronted through hypnosis with his feminine side, during which his final psychotic break is characterized as the loss of his shadow beneath the darkness of Mud, followed by a Humpty-Dumpty-type search to put the two parts back together again.

In order to capture the range of emotion experienced in this odyssey, the story is told in an unusual voice, varying from the lucid to the schizophrenic. The content is rich in philosophical insights, often stated in poetic form.

Tens of thousands of us periodically lose hope. We all have the tools for recovery, if only we can release them from the prisons of our minds. The introspective dialogue in this book holds out hope for those who fear that recovery from the ultimate loss is beyond their reach.