Last Thursday, approximately 200 people visited Lake Country Books & Gifts at Harmony Crossing to support author Paul Casola in his first book launch.
For more than two hours, people stood in line to get their book signed, enjoyed wines and special appetizers arranged and made by Paul’s wife, Sharron, and shattered any record for the largest crowd ever to converge on the bookstore.
Casola’s book, The Space Between, A Reluctant Memoir is a story of a man’s journey that begins in 2006 with unimaginable trauma that made national headlines. This book is about what it takes to get to the other side, about forgiveness that comes reluctantly, and faith that is tested and reshaped. It is not just a story about what happened; it is about life as it is.
“This book arrived in my mailbox yesterday and I started reading it right away. And it’s not a short book, but before I knew it, it was the middle of the night, and I had reached the back cover,” wrote Clay Benfield of Clayviation Films. “I teared up, I laughed, and I reflected on my own challenges, all in one story.”
The Space Between is a deeply personal memoir, but not a comeback story. It presents a story that began in horror when his wife, two sons, sister-in-law, and young niece were deliberately run over by a deranged driver, not once but four times.
It presents the series of tragedies that followed, and how one man got through it all.
“I knew this book would ask me to share some of the hardest parts of my life.
I didn’t know what it would feel like to look up from the signing table and see a room full of people who chose to be there,” Casola said.