When did you stop believing that saving one life really could change the world?

An eighty-year-old retired history teacher. A devastated 36-year-old woman.  A 12-year-old thief.  Together they embark on a suburban adventure that saves one life, ends another, and transforms an entire town into a place where magic still exists. 

Grieving an unimaginable loss, spiraling into a dangerous relationship, and tormented by a memory she can’t escape, 36-year-old Clare Lyndsay returns to her childhood home of Kinderkamack, NJ with a plan to leave the world as quietly as she came. But on the night she decides will be her last, a knock at the door ends with Clare waking up to an adventure that just might save her life.

The man at the door is Clare’s next-door neighbor and childhood guardian angel, Albert Henry Hallam—recently widowed and long ago retired high school history teacher. Albert has a new plan for Clare, a rescue operation that involves a bag full of contrabanded birdseed, a stolen garden gnome, and a very special purple cloak…

On this same night, Albert’s soon-to-be accomplice, 12-year-old Cee-Cee Lushington, is enjoying the first warm evening of the summer that will change her life forever. Officer Ben Light has just come from the hospital and is desperately searching for Clare and Ben’s grade-school bully—the man who’s now a meth addict with a string of violent relationships behind him. And Jared Crocker sits in his truck, rejected, shaking with rage, and watching Clare’s house. A gun in his glove box and a murder charge in his future. 

What starts as a playful heist, escalates wildly out of control as Clare and Albert race to complete their rescue, while Jared stalks them both, and Clare’s grief threatens to sabotage them all. In the end, their success comes down to one question: Can Clare let go of the one she lost, to rescue the ones she can still save…including herself?

At its heart, The Goose Waltzer is a story about the restorative mysteries of the natural world and the healing power of community.  And it’s a story with a compelling reminder—there is far more that unites us in this life than divides us.

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