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"30 Years of Dust: The Saga of Bambi & Lisa"
Lance (Bambi) Masterson is the captain of his college basketball team, Dakota State University, and the story opens in the last few seconds of the game that could send his team back to the locker room for the season, or on to the national championships for Division III colleges in Kansas City, MO. Bambi is able to execute a risky play as the ball leaves his hands just prior to the buzzer and the shot is good. In the aftermath of such an emotional win, Bambi's first action is to rush to his cheerleader girlfriend, Lisa and propose marriage. The second book in a series of five, More Than Dust in the Wind takes the reader through 30 years of... More > life with Bambi and Lisa Masterson, through the good times, as well as the bad. Donald James Parker includes those milestones in life that many people go through. The agony of searching for a job and hoping that you find the right one, the loss of a child, the birth of another, career changes, dealing with cancer, and through it all keeping your faith strong. In fact, on many levels, I find parallels in my own life. My husband is in the midst of a career change after having served 20 years in the US Coast Guard, and is currently searching for a job, we lost a child during pregnancy, I lost my father to cancer, and yes, have faced all of these trials daily working to keep my faith strong. Perhaps it is because of these parallels that I felt that Mr. Parker tried to put too much into one book for the length. Thirty years is a lot of time to cover within 208 pages, and because of that there is a feeling of skimming the surface rather than getting into the depth of the characters and situations.

Being the second book in the series, there are some references to situations which occurred in the first book, which is always the case when dealing with books in a series. There is a need to provide some back story with the subsequent books in the series so that readers who pick up the series in the middle are not out to sea. While Mr. Parker does provide some back story details that give insight to the character of Bambi and some of the situations that have caused him to be the man he is at the start of book 2, some items remain in question.

Despite some of the issues with More Than Dust in the Wind, Donald James Parker is a good solid writer. The relating of the basketball games pulls the reader straight into story and the writing flows easily. I especially enjoy his characterization of the relationship between Bambi and his daughter Maria. Their interactions with one another, even down to the corny phrases that can irritate a young teen-age daughter, rings true. One of the things that Mr. Parker does the best is painting the picture of Bambi as a man facing his own mortality, unwilling to give up, but fighting to the bitter end. My own father carried that same attitude toward life and death, and it took cancer 33 years and five iterations to finally bring him down. Parker builds a nemesis, Angela Hawkins, for Maria to give the counterpoint to her father's fight against illness. Maria and Angela are considered the best two runners in the state, but Maria loses to Angela year after year, which just strengthens Maria's resolve to beat her the next time out. The culmination of this rivalry comes at a time when Bambi is so ill, he is no longer able to walk, but continues to support his daughter at the track meets in a wheel chair.

To read the full review, go to The Lulu Book Review
LK Gardner-Griffie is the author of Misfit McCabe < Less