Braking Kane: the Struggle to Stop may be read as a stand-alone novel or as part of the series entitled Tara's Family.
The books in this series are: Jayce Recovered?; Braking Kane; From the Valley .
Tara Wilson watched her late husband try to help both his brother and her brother, as the two boys struggled with Substance Use Disorder. So, she is not thrilled with the idea of dealing with this in her own home ...again. Tara, a teacher and the mother of four, has given up trying to understand the reasons for substance abuse among the young men in her family. Her conclusion is that "prevention is the best cure", and that's how she is trying to raise her four kids. But when her young nephew, Kane, shows up on her doorstep - a runaway, sick, and majorly under the influence - how can she turn him away? At age thirteen, Kane already knows that he's in trouble. In a desperate attempt to leave "people, places, and things" behind, he steals from his parents and flies across the country, hoping to make contact with his mother's sister, Tara.
This series of books was written to help the author, herself, to explore the many issues surrounding Substance Use Disorder and to "shore up" her own level of compassion toward those who are most often suffering with the onset of this dis-ease: adolescents and their families. This is a work of fiction. In today's world, treatment of addictions is best done in a professional setting designed to help the addict into a successful recovery. Ms. Dell hopes that these books will, also, provide insight for, and engender compassion among, those for whom this is not an issue, so that they may better understand their neighbors, friends, and even other family members, who are struggling.
Each book comes with Discussion Questions, both for the General Reader and for those who find themselves "in the trenches" (perhaps as counselors-in-training, family members, teachers, law enforcement, or in other capacities in the community).
May it serve the purpose.
About the Author: As a middle school teacher for over thirty years, Ms. Dell spent much of her life with early adolescents, and, to this day, feels great compassion for those in this very challenging stage of life. In the mid 1970s, concerned about drug use among her students, she took a summer job writing for the Do It Now Foundation (DIN), a publishing house for harm-reduction literature, in Phoenix, AZ. While there, she spent the weekends "riding along" with Terros, an ambulance service, commissioned exclusively to respond to drug overdoses. She finished the summer with a 10-day stay at Synanon, the "great grand-daddy" of many of our, currently operating, therapeutic communities. One of the life-changing ideas that Ms. Dell gleaned at Synanon was that addicts needed to be "re-parented", that they needed to re-learn certain basic life skills in order to re-enter society as self-sufficient adults. Ms. Dell used this information to create a prevention-based, lifestyling course, for young adults, entitled Omniology: the Study of Everything (c. Laura L. Dell, 1981, currently in revision.) At that point, Ms Dell decided to try her own hand at parenting and became the single adoptive mother of three, now adult, children, a boy and two girls, who "came home" from an orphanage in South America, at ages 4, 7, and 3, respectively. In 2003, Ms. Dell completed the coursework for the NYS CASAC (Certificate in Alcohol and Substance Abuse Counseling), and a number of volunteer hours in the adolescent unit of a treatment hospital. "Braking Kane: the Struggle to Stop" was written as the author prepared to begin the coursework toward the CASAC. It served as a way for her to review everything that she had previously learned before she began her training in formalized AOD (Alcohol and Other Drug) treatment. Although this is a work of fiction, Ms Dell hopes that it will further the conversation regarding the existence of, and the need for early intervention and treatment for, our younger adolescent drug abusers, who are struggling with the early stages of this disease. .
