The Road to Delano by John DeSimone and Meet the Author #Historical

The ’60, Cali, and a troubled young man. It’s the perfect recipe for a great story.

The Road to Delano by John DeSimone released in March in the Historical novel genre.

It’s 1968, and a strike by field workers in the grape fields has ripped an otherwise quiet central California town down the middle. Jack Duncan is a Delano high school senior who is on his way to earning a baseball scholarship, hoping to escape the turmoil infesting his town. His mother has kept from him the real cause of his father’s death, who was a prominent grower. But when an old friend hands Jack evidence indicating his father was murdered, he is compelled to dig deeper. This throws him and his best friend and teammate, Adrian Sanchez, whose father is a striking field worker, into the labor conflict led by Cesar Chavez. Road to Delano is the path Jack and Adrian must take to find their strength, their duty, and their destiny.

Monday at lunch, Jack and Ella settled on the grassy school quad. The morning haze, a gray dullness, hung over them. Ella in a long skirt and T-shirt printed with her favorite saying played her guitar. Jack ate slowly, as Ella gently strummed a Joan Baez song.

She let the last chord vibrate in the air. “You look far away today, Jack.”

“Just thinking.”

“Worried about the big game?” She strummed a C chord.

“Not really. I’m ready for those guys.” As crucial as the Arvin game was to his chances for a scholarship, his head spun with Herm, the sheriff, and lost combine. He needed to set all that aside.

But how?

“You’re worried about losing that combine, aren’t you?”

He shrugged and glanced off into the haze. Herm’s beat-up face filled him with too many questions, ones he would rather not ask.

“What do you think happened to it?”

Jack did his best to suppress a frown. He spent the next twenty minutes explaining how Sheriff Grant found Herm Gordon face down in the mud and how their combine had gone missing. Short of stealing someone else’s machine and selling it to pay the taxes, he didn’t have too many ideas about what he could do to save his mom’s place.

“Jack, you have to protest. Write to the newspaper. Make noise until the sheriff finds your combine. Someone knew you needed that money to save your property.”

Ella’s sense of urgency hovered over her, an impending sense of doom that required her to stand up and shout to drive it away. She had been this way since he first met her, always ready to protest. Vietnam had taken up most of her attention. But it was their trip to Berkeley a couple of years ago that had set her on fire, and had almost got Jack arrested in front of Sproul Hall.

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

John DeSimone is a novelist, memoirist, and editor. He’s co-authored bestselling The Broken Circle: A memoir of escaping Afghanistan, and others. He taught writing as an adjunct professor at Biola University and has worked as a freelance editor and writer for nearly twenty years. His current release, a historical novel, The Road to Delano, is a coming of age novel set during the Delano grape strike led by Cesar Chavez. BookSirens said, “It’s more than a little Steinbeck, in a good way….” He lives in Claremont, Ca, and can be found on Goodreads and at www.johndesimone.com

What do you want the readers to take away with them from this story?

Readers will take away from The Road to Delano what is most relevant to them. Some readers will enjoy the sports scenes, some the lives of the main characters, and their struggles to find meaning in the midst of their crisis. But if all readers learned one thing, I would like it to be the awareness that the battle for equal treatment in the workplace, in life, in our society is not a given. It must be constant and enduring struggle that will not be won in a moment, through a raft of new legislation, or through fiery protests that seek to destroy the very society they want to participate in. There is a method of change that works and is transformative. It’s nonviolent action. Nonviolence can never be defeated. It eventually breaks down the barriers we are so good at constructing in our hearts. The obstacles that separate us from others based on prejudices and traditions. Nonviolence has the power to transform intractable situations.
Cesar Chavez demonstrated the power of transformative action. Nonviolent action unleashes the creative spirit of humans and finds new ways to communicate. That’s what Cesar Chavez has taught us. I believe.