Angel & the Town Curmudgeon

By Roger E. Bruner

Description:

Angel Montgomery is attractive and quite intelligent, but she unknowingly turns off potential friends by trying to meet them at her level rather than coming down to theirs. Mistakenly viewing her as uppity, they can’t respect or accept her as the loving person she is.

Claude Robertson has lost the respect of Christians throughout the world because of untruths written about him in a vindictive magazine article. Forced into retirement from the church he’s pastored for more than fifty years, he moves to Sunnydale to live in the old broken-down country store he’s inherited from an uncle.

When the locals bug him mercilessly to fix the exterior up, something he can’t afford to do, he reacts defensively, irritably, and irascibly. The citizens of Sunnydale label him “The Town Curmudgeon.”

Angel and Claude—“Mister Claude”—hit it off almost immediately, and he and Angel’s parents become good friends as well.

Being the townspeople’s object of scorn is bad enough, but when Claude becomes the enemy of the local newspaper owner, he and Angel face several tough challenges.

In order to leave his curmudgeon reputation behind and please the Sunnydale townspeople, Claude accepts Angel’s help to fix up the interior of the store and open it for business to earn enough to spruce up the exterior.

More challenges lie ahead, though.

But they’re attempting to follow God’s lead. So it’s not a question of “whether” but of “when” and “how.”

Book Takeaway:

Christian teens and old people of different races can not only be best friends, they can really help each other.

Why the author wrote this book:

For years I had a story idea that was too complex for me to write as a novel. Recently God not only brought that idea back to mind, but showed me how I could simplify it. Because I'm 73 I wanted a white older male protagonist. I felt led to use a black teen girl as the female protagonist.