richard merriman

Okie Boy II: Julian’s Journey continues the fictional story of the Milligan family as they struggle to escape the clutches of the Great Depression and attempt to establish lives for themselves in and around the city of Wenatchee in the state of Washington. As the first Okie Boy volume ends, the family has completed the trip west and is still struggling to find work. They have worked at various jobs and have already relocated in the area several times. They found thus far only temporary fixes, short-term jobs, and apt-to-fail personal relationships.

Book II deals with the family’s renewed struggle to survive and to maintain some sense of the kind of people that they want to be.

In this work of fiction, the author draws upon bits and pieces of some actual events and sets them in real places. If events, characters, places, and problems in this tale seem to the reader like events he or she has witnessed or experienced, if characters remind the reader of real people that he or she knows or has known, if places are familiar enough to recognize, and if the reader has experienced some of the many problems that the Milligan family have to deal with — all that is as the writer would have it be. Real people and real problems are of primary concern. Samuel Milligan’s only son is the focus of Book II but the lives of all nine of Samuel and Martha Milligan’s unforgettable offspring play large roles in the twelve years presented in this novel.