Welcome to the World of Jim Prothero's Books
From young adult fiction, to thoughtful explorations of the ideas and writings of C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle, to fantasy writing, poetry and adventurous historical fiction, this world is a place that questions the difficult and explores the human experience in terms of faith, paradox, the darkest and brightest moments of the human experience. You may start with the page for each type of writing.
Just published!
The Wind and the Blood is a true story of the American West, without the Hollywood nonsense, as well as a true picture of the American nation, what we were and why we have become what we are.
CS Lewis and Theology
Theology and CS Lewis
James Prothero writes about the thought and theology of not only CS Lewis, but of other issues of faith that challenge belief in our time.
Sunbeams and Bottles
Lots of people want to pigeon-hole CS Lewis as a conservative, or a liberal, or a libertatarian. He is none of these. But what is he? Sunbeams and Bottles explores this question thoroughly.
Gaining a Face: The Romanticism of CS Lewis
This book is about all the details of the Romanticism of Lewis' theology and his vast debt to the poet, Wordsworth. In one of his books Lewis asks how we can face God until we have a face of our own, know ourselves truly. This book traces the roots of that idea.
Sacred Land: Finding Faith in Desert, Mountain, and Forest
This is a collection of essays about faith and nature, and landscape. People often say that they find God in nature. But it is far more complex than that.
The Form of Faith
This is the author's story of his own journey of faith from childhood to present. All of our journeys are both dark and light, filled with unexpected turns. This book explores those winding paths.
Simply Mary
In the wake of a inexplicable experience, the author looks into the life of the Mother of Christ neither with cynicism, nor hagiography. Mary was a real woman. What could she have really been like? Not a hovering buddha-like goddess, nor a plodding no one. Who was that girl?
The Stable Door: C.S. Lewis, Belief, and the Paradox of Recognition
Why is it that some of us feel a strange stirring in our hearts when we read about Aslan? Why did some of us think of him as Christlike even before he dies for Edmund? Why do we read the Gospels, and as C. S. Lewis said, encounter a person, or perhaps a personality of overwhelming familiarity? Lewis called this “Recognition," and explored how this Recognition, though still an inexplicable mystery, inhabits the unknown theological space between predestination and universalism. When in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, "My sheep know me," just what does that mean? The disciples on the road to Emmaus caught a lesson in Old Testament prophecy, but it they only made sense of it when they recognized Jesus. Did C. S. Lewis underpin his Christology on this mysterious tug many of us feel in our hearts?
YA, Historical, Adventure
Novels for Adults and Young Adults
These are historical fiction and YA adventure stories. Plus, here there is a series of thriller-adventure novels set in the French Revolution. All good fun.
Ana Sanchez and the Coyote Murder
The first of a three book series, this is about a high school senior whose brother is murdered, presumably by a rival gang. The police have given up on finding the culprit. But Ana cannot give up. Her life depends on her finding the killer before he finds her.
Ana Sanchez and the Hidden Assassins
Ana is back and this time the drug gang that tried to kill her father are after her as a key to finding him. She is going to college in Albuquerque under an assumed identity. But can she hunt them all down before they find her?
Ana Sanchez and the Kokopeli Mystery
Ana's boyfriend is about to propose any day, but suddenly, he and a university physics professor vanish, along with a very secret machine that threatens national security. Can Ana rescue her Luis?
Maggie of Long Hollow
Maggie is a young Quaker girl living in rural Virginia--in the middle of the Civil War. She has friends both blue and gray and she is at war with her faith and her father. Can she find a peace that she can live with?
The Wind on the Grass
Fourteen year old Sam Plunkett is an orphan in St Louis in 1832, or so he thinks until he discovers that his father is alive and living as a mountain man somewhere in the Rockies. Sam runs away from his aunt and grandfather and into the dangers of the Great Plains and the Rockies, into Indian country to find his life.
There Darkness Makes Abode
Book 2 of the Darkness Series: Young Romantic poet, James de Courcy, the ne'er-do-well younger son of an English earl, sets forth to find out for himself about the Revolution in France. There he quickly finds himself in the role of British spy, and in danger of the guillotine.
Darkness Before and Danger's Voice Behind
Book One of the Darkness Series, this is the fictional diaries of the young poet, William Wordsworth, as he stumbles through college under the disapproving eyes of his guardian uncles, and ventures out into a world of love and death in Revolutionary France.
Substance and Shadow, Light and Darkness
Book 3 in the Darkness Series. James de Courcy escapes France and the guillotine, but he leaves behind the love of his life and she is pregnant. Can he rescue them out of France before his enemies can capture and execute his new family?
The Coming of the White Wolf Girl
First book in the Firemaker Series. Mahaijena is a native young woman in a neolithic world, cast out with a few family and friends from her tribe. They venture south across the bleak tundra to look for a new life, which hold promise and deadly danger. She has been gifted with strange powers she is just discovering. Can she use these powers in hopes of her little band surviving?
Literary Fiction and Poetry
Literary Fiction and Poetry
These are novels that explore the darker edge of life, and the collection of over 20 years of poetry, both free verse and written in the forms of the 19th century, one of my great literary loves.
The Sun is But a Morning Star
Paul and Eddie McCabe are twin brothers, but as different as possible. Paul is artistic and sensitive; Edie is strong, violent, and has an insatiable appetite for experience, no matter who it hurts. They come to blows and rocket apart into two vastly different worlds, each trying to satisfy the hunger in the souls in radically different ways.
A Perch of Hands
This is the collection of Jim Prothero's poetry, both modern free verse and Romantic 19th century style.
New, published by Wipf and Stock fiction
The Wind and the Blood
Sam Plunkett is fourteen years old when he leaves St Louis for the last time in 1833 and goes to live in the Rocky Mountains as a fur trapper and marry a Cheyenne woman. His life, from that year till his death in 1906, is a story of a man with his heart amongst Native American people facing conquest by the American nation. As a renegade, he is caught in between. This is a true story of the American West, in which race, tribe, language, and intentions can either gain you allies, or get you killed in a matter of seconds. Among these beautiful mountains and prairies, when death can ambush you in an instant, Sam Plunkett must find a life, and find the truth about race, about love, and about how life should be lived.
