Route 66 Dreamer is Michael Lund's tenth novel set in the historical background of Route 66, the Nation's "Mother Road." Earlier novels depicted life as it was in the Midwest during the early golden ages of interstate highways and experiences of related characters in "Growing Up on Route 66." The current 5-volume series, headlined At Home and Away, chronicles an American family during times of peace and war from 1915 to 2015. The first book, Route 66 Sweetheart (2011), is set mostly in and around Rutherford, New Jersey, during the 1930s. Route 66 Dreamer (2012) features the son of a Swedish immigrant who pursues his dreams of American success in Kansas and Missouri in the early 1940s. However, in both books some family members move away to distant countries and unexpected challenges. The third volume, Route 66 Looking-glass (2013), will take place primarily in Missouri in 1965, but characters also travel far from home and familiar experiences. Book Four (2014) follows another generation of family members, this time from Missouri to Southeast Asia where many learn, sadly, "how to not tell a war story." In the final volume of the series (2015), the next generation travels to Europe and the Middle East to understand their identity in a multi-national community.

HOW TO NOT TELL A WAR STORY is a collection of short stories about veterans who went to war but left without a war story to tell. Forty years after their experience, these veterans begins question if there is something more to say about their military service. Among other things, they come to appreciate the lovers, friends, and family who helped them shape a new, post-war identity. " . . . when the courage of NFL star Tillman was referred to, or Jessica Lynch was rescued, they all found themselves thinking back to their long-ago tours. Did they have stories? Maybe memory had played tricks on them, obscuring what would come to light at last. Back then, they hadn't studied forms for the narration of danger, but now, more aware, could they reshape their experience for the new era? What, after all, about their friend, Butterball?" Explore with Michael Lund the lives of these veterans who discover being in the service is not something to be edited out of a personal history, but an experience that stays in memory, not an ending but the beginning of a measure of peace, no matter how short the stint, or inglorious. Michael Lund is the author of nine novels about Route 66 and the generation that grew up in the Midwest in the 50s, including Route 66 to Vietnam: A Draftee's Story, all published by Beach House Books.

Route 66 Sweetheart tells the story of a young woman growing up in Rutherford, New Jersey, in the 1930s. Marion (Mid) Lacy, who traces her ancestry back to the early New World Settlement of Nantucket, worries that she is overshadowed by more brilliant siblings and friends. In an era restricted by economic hard times and haunted by the prospect of approaching world war, she learns that all are counted in the creation of history, even the "sweetheart" of a distant admirer who travels "the Mother Road."

In Route 66 Choir Stanley Measure takes early retirement just before September 11, 2001, and his impulsive decisions participate in an unraveling of confidence in the American way of life. His wife Felicia finds that everything she holds dear is in danger of coming apart: her marriage, her church, her business, and even her country. Who or what can orchestrate the recovery of harmony necessary to sustain the spirit of the Mother Road?

In the fifth novel of Michael Lund's Route 66 Novel series, the lives of four young Missourians are changed when a bottle comes to the surface of one of the state's many natural springs. Inside is a letter written by a girl a dozen years after the end of the Civil War. Lucy Rivers Johns' epistle contains a sad story of family failure and a powerful plea for help. This message from the last century crystallizes the individual frustrations of Janet Masters, Freddy Sills, Louis Clark, and Roberta Green, a group of kids growing up near Route 66 around 1960. Their response to the past charts a bold path into the future, a path inspired by the Mother Road itself. About Michael Lund's earlier novels: "extremely heartwarming and nostalgic look at young people's angst during this age of wonder," says ROUTE 66 FEDERATION NEWS "funny stories of adolescence in the 1950's," says MISSOURI LIFE "a good read," says ROUTE 66 MAGAZINE

When the forces of progress threaten the foundation of small town life-a small church-five senior citizens, a mysterious newcomer, and one young couple band together in an unlikely campaign to save it. The embattled meeting point of old and new is Route 66 Chapel, a building curiously linked to America's "Mother Road."

In the fourth novel of Michael Lund's Route 66 Novel Series, Susan Bell tells the story of her candidacy in Fairfield, Missouri's annual beauty contest. Now married and with teenage children in St. Louis, she recounts her youthful adventure in this small town along "America's Highway." At the same time, she plans a return to Fairfield in order to right injustices she feels were done to some young contestants in the Miss Route 66 Pageant. Throughout this journey she wonders what, if anything, was feminine in the "Mother Road" of the 1950s.

This novel takes characters from earlier works in the Route 66 Novel Series farther west than Los Angeles, official destination of the famous highway, Route 66. Mark Landon and Billy Rhodes find the values they grew up on challenged by America's role in Southeast Asia. But elements of their upbringing represented by the Mother Road also sustain them in ways they could never have anticipated.

Route 66 Kids, the second in Michael Lund's Route 66 novel series, is a Babyboomers' coming-of-age story, reminding us that children always wonder about their origin. When kids asked "Where do I come from?" in the 1950s, they were really asking about sex, the biggest mystery for those growing up in an age of American innocence. Cold War children also wanted to know more about their parents and the community which surrounded them. Central characters in this novel, Mark Landon and Marcia Terrell, find out about the past in the structures of the Missouri small town they live in, which is located along "America's Main Street." Route 66. Throughout their story this great highway endures as a symbol of the promise this nation enjoyed at mid-century. Praise for Growing Up on Route 66 (The first novel in this series) "I finished your novel . . .and was struck by how perfectly it seemed to encircle (of course) the world of childhood and its heady veering toward adulthood.It's a loving and funny book . . .and made me recall with mingled pleasure and embarrassment all the twinges and itches and passions of adolescence.Well done, and thank you or putting it into my hands." --Carrie Brown, author of Lamb in Love and The Hatbox Baby "A wonderfully well-wrought novel, set in a place that's still the stuff of myth, about coming of age in a simpler time when sex was giddily mysterious and life was filled with endless possibilities." --Bernard Edelman, editor of Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam and Centenarians: The Story of the 20th Century by the Americans Who Lived It "Growing Up does what every good novel does: creates a time, place and characters that the reader can see and feel.And like every good serial, you want the next installment.Mr. Lund has learned the lessons of Dickens, Anthony Trollope and the other great serialists.Having grown up in a small town on Route 66 myself, I felt Mr. Lund had been reading the childhood diary I never kept." --Harry Fuller, TV Executive, currently with CNBC Europe "In Growing Up on Route 66 Michael Lund gives us a loving look through the telescope of memory, resurrecting forgotten feelings in the idiom of adolescence sharpened by the lens of age--and wisdom.He takes us back to a time when the road ahead was a winding one, just right for joyrides, meant to be wandered, with curious roadside attractions and shady stops along the way.Reading this book is like returning to a summer night when you were young, when life was full of promise, mystery, and terror, that time at twilight, before your mother called you in to wash up and go to bed, when you were playing a leisurely game of kick-the-can and wished that the game could just go on and on.Fortunately, Lund promises that it will go on, in the second book in his series, Route 66 Kids, and, I hope, many more to come." --Eric Kraft, author of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy "A book that takes us back to a quieter time - when learning about life and love was a pleasant journey, and the nights were full of childhood adventures." --Bob Moore, managing editor, Route 66 Magazine "an entertaining story of small town life"--Route 66 Magazine "funny stories of adolescence in the 1950s"-- Missouri Life "clearly an original "--Farmville (VA) Herald

Growing Up on Route 66 is set in a Missouri small town along "America's Main Street." Most of the action takes place in a neighborhood known to the children growing up there as the "Circle." That time and place are remembered by the novel's narrator as ideal, but closer scrutiny repeatedly--and often humorously--complicates this innocent picture. In growing up we continually confront things that do not make sense. Then, in sudden moments of inspiration the pieces come together. For those growing up in the 1950s, the biggest mystery of childhood was sex. And central characters in this story, Mark Landon and Marcia Terrell, are repeatedly surprised as parts of this great puzzle take shape in and around them. We are determined to a large degree by the material world in which we live, our own bodies and the world around us. The landscape Mark Landon comes to appreciate contains the great promise this nation enjoyed after World War II. For those living west of the Mississippi especially, this prospect was symbolized by The Mother Road, Route 66.