andrew tertes

Jacob Goldman is a deeply conflicted man. Having dismissed his own Jewish heritage as lackluster and irrelevant, Jacob’s route to spirituality has been cobbled together through his affinity with the natural world, and through his marriage to Sheila, a full-blooded Native American with deep alliances to her tribe and her culture.

A journalist who was once renowned for his ardent championing of environmental causes and his struggle for social justice, the failure of Jacob’s writing to effect any real change, or to save what he loves the most has finally shattered his idealism.

When tragedy devastates his family while on vacation in Hawaii, Jacob’s world shatters and he is forced to examine who he has become, as well as the shaky foundation of his faith, all through the lens of loss. This search for identity and meaning takes Jacob from his native San Francisco to the Salt Grass Reservation, and then back to Hawaii in an attempt to confront it in its wild and dangerous beauty, and to find redemption.

His is a heroic journey in which he must surrender his fiercely held beliefs in order to reconcile nature and tradition, and that which threatens them.