Paradise
resident Maurice "Big Mo" Huffman is known in the music scene for his
melding of blues, Southern rock and funk with his award-winning Big Mo And The
Full Moon Band (bigmoblues.com). After he and his wife Robin moved to
California in 1989 he began telling their son Miles a bedtime story featuring a
ten-year-old orphan named Jake Foster and a talking mouse named Milton.
"Jake
And The Hot-Air Balloon" ($11.95 in paperback from Page Publishing; also
for Amazon Kindle) is the first in a planned series featuring the intrepid
adventurers.
Jake's
parents had drowned in a Caribbean storm. His only relative, aunt Hilde, died
when he was five, and Jake wound up in a Colorado orphanage.
He
"was a tough boy and knew that this was what life had dealt him, but even
the toughest boy can face moments that are too hard and where he needs
somebody. Jake was alone though, left with his dream of being high up in a
hot-air balloon."
Word comes
of a nearby hot-air balloon race, and Jake desperately wants to go, but an
older bully and his minion at the orphanage get Jake into trouble. He's forced
to make the biggest decision of his young life, disobeying those in charge and
sneaking off to the races and right into the area where the balloons are set to
lift off.
You just
know something will happen and, sure enough, Jake finds himself aloft in one of
the balloons where he meets Milton the talking mouse, a resident of the balloon
basket. It's Milton's job to keep Jake safe, and, it turns out, that's a tall
order.
Along the
way, sailing over the world, the balloon is shot down by a group of very odd
and friendly people on a floating mountain whose job it is to shoot holes in
Swiss cheese but who aren't very accurate. Their balloon eventually repaired,
Jake and Milton travel to the Caribbean, rescue a girl named Lilly, search for
her scientist parents, and fight off a some bad guys.
The action-packed
story ends with a few threads hanging, a big yellow bird, and a hint of the
adventures to come.
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