In the Shadows of the Oaks

This is the hard hitting story of life in an inner city. Sean Allen reluctantly accepts a teaching position in an urban school and witnesses chaos, intimidation, racism and corruption within the school system, and the city. Encouraged by a basketball buddy, Sean joins a home tutoring program and meets Landi, the mother of a student, who repudiates his presence from the very beginning.
The more Landi spurns him the more infatuated he becomes with her and the more he is torn between her and Brenda, a teacher he dates. Their lives become intimately entangled in the present and the past and are punctuated with romance, love, hostility and betrayal.

While his encounters with Landi and Brenda spin out of control, the community also spins out of control – a vicious mayoral election, the murder of an innocent youth, an accidental murder, a precipitous battle between warring street gangs and a public outcry regarding his relationship with Landi and Brenda.

Filled with tension, hostility and passion this novel exposes the corrupt state of affairs in the schools, the city, and the country in a manner that is sometime politically incorrect.
Although fictitious, many parts of it are played out every day in school districts throughout the country and it is the author’s intent to show that despite all the outward differences between races, there are more similarities than what first meets the eye.