Harper’s Ferry
Author
Joshua Herdt
Author Bio
Joshua Herdt graduated with a degree in Sociology and Anthropology from VCU. He currently resides in Richmond, VA with his wife Michelle and daughter Isabelle.
In regard to literature, he enjoys science fiction, commercial fiction, fantasy, and non fiction.
Description
Charles Taylor has spent his post-college years waiting for that one special opportunity, the one that will change his direction, identity, and life. When he’s reunited with Harper, a missed opportunity and the girl who got away, he can’t help but take advantage of it, setting in motion a series of events that guarantees the change he has so badly wanted.
Harper’s Ferry is set in Richmond, Virginia, follows Taylor and his friends from their socialite beginnings to their eventual epiphanies. It is a story about transition, growing up, and the hard truths we all learn on the road outside of adolescence. Like any story worth telling, it begins and ends with a girl. It’s a love story, and well, something a little more.
Book excerpt
It was sunny the day she walked back into my life. I remember because it was the first sunny day in a week saturated by rain. May is a water logged month in Richmond. We get a year’s worth of rain in just a few weeks. It’s like a monsoon or something. It squats over the city and floods the banks of the James River. The water becomes a flat murky sheet of green that froths and foams during its march down stream. The rapids disappear and whatever moisture doesn’t make it into the soil lingers in the air.
It felt good to be outside, to be out, and liberated from the anxieties that troubled me back then. I darted across a car filled street and stood in front of The Stonewall. It loomed overhead, casting a long shadow that blanketed me and the street corner. This was our headquarters and had been since my friends returned. Stella, Derrick, and Blake had all run off to Blacksburg after high school. They were Hokies through and through. They had left me alone to wander the home front. I had been less enthusiastic about my education. While they attended Virginia Tech I maintained a quiet vigil at VCU, the Very Casual University. I don’t know why I chose that place, especially when it was so far away from my friends. Like I said, I was probably lacking a certain amount of enthusiasm and inspiration. I guess the same thing could have been said about my life.
They’d been home a year now. Nearly every day since had been spent at The Stonewall. It was like we had taken part time jobs as stool pigeons. The building itself was antiquated, retaining some of the architectural grandness of decades past. It had to be a hundred years old. The tavern took up only the first floor, which left the second and third stories in question. I assumed the owner lived up there. The inside still had the original crown molding and tiled ceiling. The bar area was a throwback to the saloons of days past. When you walked inside it was like a field trip into a different age. There were names carved into the counter that belonged in history books.
I’m not sure where the name came from. Supposedly Stonewall Jackson had visited there during the Civil War. That would certainly fit Richmond’s Confederate image, but I was unsure. Something told me there was a metaphorical element to the name.
Author Website
https://www.facebook.com/joshherdtauthor
