To Climb a Distant Mountain Book Tour and Giveaway!

To Climb a Distant Mountain By Laurisa White Reyes
Genre: Historical True Memoir

In 1974, at the age of twenty-six, Cynthia Ball White was diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes. Today, it is estimated that 1.25 million Americans suffer from what is now referred to as Type I diabetes, compared to 38 million who have Type 2 (adult onset) diabetes. It is a merciless disease that often leads to blindness, neuropathy, amputations, and a host of other ailments, including a shortened life span.
Despite battling diabetes for forty-five years, Cyndi beat the odds. Not only did she outlive the average Type I diabetic, but until her last week of life in 2021, she had all her “parts intact”. Her daughter often called her a walking miracle. But more impressive was Cyndi’s positive outlook on life, even in the midst of tremendous loss and suffering.
The author hopes that in sharing Cyndi’s story, others may be inspired to face their own struggles with the same faith, courage, and joy as her mother did.

Excerpt:

I’m going to tell you about my mother. Yes, that is the story I will tell. No other story really matters. I know that now. Funny, how you can spend a lifetime conjuring up magical tales of dragons and enchanters and heroes who will never exist except in your own head and on sheets of paper, when the stories that matter most happen every day all around us. I’ve spent most of my life making up stories. It’s what I do. But now that Mom is gone, I have no stories left. At least none that I care about more than hers.
My first distinct memory of my mother (I was five or six) was in the hospital. I’d come to know that hospital well. It’s in Panorama City, half an hour from where I live now, half an hour from where I lived then, two different cities—two points on the circumference of a circle with the hospital at its center. It’s where all five of my children were born, where my youngest brother was born—and died. It’s where Mom would spend too much of her life. But not yet. That would come later.
I remember the elevator doors opening and Dad pushing Mom out in a wheelchair. She wore a yellow robe that a friend had bought her when she got sick. She had crocheted me a hat. It was yellow too, criss-crossed strands like a spider’s web, with a green band. She gave it to me there. I wore it often as a child. Somewhere, I have a picture of me wearing it. The hat is in my mother’s hope chest now, the one she passed on to me when I got married. Been in there for years. Decades. It’s still a treasure.
I remember her disappearing back inside the elevator, waving, the doors sliding shut, swallowing her. I still feel sick, tight and hollow inside, when I think of that memory.
In the weeks leading up to that hospital stay, which would be the first of dozens, she’d been sick. She’d lost weight and felt very ill. She thought she was dying of cancer, but she postponed seeing a doctor because she had recently enrolled in Kaiser Permanente medical insurance through Dad’s employer, and she thought they had to wait for their membership cards to come in the mail. By the time she walked into the ER, she was on death’s door.
Her doctor smelled her breath, which Mom thought was an odd thing to do. And then he called in other doctors to smell her breath. It smelled sweet, like decaying fruit. Mom was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, which they used to call Juvenile Diabetes. It meant that her pancreas had completely malfunctioned, and she would be insulin-dependent the rest of her life. She learned how to give herself insulin by injecting oranges. She was twenty-six years old.
Mom actually felt relieved because it wasn’t cancer. There was no way to know then what diabetes would do to her, how it would shape not only her life but the lives of her husband and children and grandchildren, how it would gradually destroy her body a little at a time until it finally robbed her of life itself.

Links To To Climb a Distant Mountain

Last Summer in Algonac By Laurisa White Reyes
Genre: Fictionalized Family Biography

From the Spark Award-winning author of The Storytellers & Petals…
The summer of 1938 is idyllic for fourteen-year-old Dorothy Ann Reid. She’s spent every summer of her life visiting her grandparent’s home on the banks of the St. Clair River in Algonac, Michigan. But unbeknownst to her, this will be her last. As Dorothy and her family pass their time swimming, fishing, and boating, they are blissfully unaware that tragedy lurks just around the corner. Last Summer in Algonac is a fictionalized account of the author’s grandmother and her family’s final summer before her father’s suicide, which altered their lives forever. Inspired by real people and events, Laurisa Reyes has woven threads of truth with imagination, creating a “what if” tale. No one living today knows the details leading to Bertram Reid’s death, but thanks to decades of letters, personal interviews, historical research, and a visit to Algonac, Reyes attempts to resolve unanswered questions, and provide solace and closure to the Reid family at last.

Excerpts

We all noticed the silver Cadillac when it first turned onto our street. Sleek and shiny as a brand new silver dollar. But when it parked in front of the house, even the men laid down their hands to look.
The driver’s side door opened, and out stepped a short, squat woman with hair all white, curled and set to perfection. She wore round silver spectacles on her nose and a lilac dress. She shut the car door with a confident slam and perched her fists on her hips, taking in several deep breaths.
“Well, I’m here now,” she said with a self-assured grin. “Which one of you fellers gonna fetch my luggage from the trunk?”
I felt Mother stiffen beside me and noted her fingers tighten around her lemonade. There was a distinctive moment of hesitation before she set down her glass on the stand beside her and stood, smoothing down her dress.
“Mother,” she said, giving Father ‘the look’ before heading down the steps to greet our unexpected visitor.
Father elbowed Charles, who then leapt up from his chair and bounded off the porch to the car. “Hello Grandma,” he said, planting a kiss on the older woman’s cheek.
Father took his time leaving the table, but also made his way to the car and kissed his mother-in-law.
Clara was born in 1864 in Henrietta, Ohio. Christened Clara Petronella Peabody, a name I’ve always been fond of, she was the seventh of thirteen children. “Smack dab in the middle,” I’d heard her say. She’d married her first of three husbands, Charles Noble, in 1882 and had three children, of whom Mother was the youngest. Her third husband’s name was Pratt, so even though they weren’t together anymore, we often called her Grandma Pratt.
In my favorite photo of her, taken later in the 1940s, she posed alongside her favorite dog and wore a full-length fur coat. She looked absolutely regal.
“Is that my little Dottie?” said Clara, coming up the porch steps. I flew into her outstretched arms and allowed her to swallow me in a tight embrace. She kissed the top of my head, then held me out from her by my shoulders.
“All grown up, I see,” she said happily. “Sprouted a good foot or two since I last seen you.”
“Grandma, I just saw you at Christmas!”
“I know it. I know it, but you look so darn tall these days, and ladylike. What have you been feeding this child, Dorothy May?”
Mother forced a smile. “She eats the same as everyone else,” she said. Charles lugged Clara’s two carpet bags into the house.
“I take it you’re planning on staying here with us?” asked Mother.
“Just give me the sofa,” said Clara. “I’m only staying for a few days. I just come from your sister Leila Grace’s in Mount Pleasant. Stayed on a few weeks there. And I promised to spend the 4th with your brother’s widow, Lillian. Now that Frederick Jr. has gotten married, she’s all alone in that big old house of hers. Might as well we two ladies spend some time together.”
Clara spotted the card table and the two men sitting at it.
“John. Harry. Nice to see you both.”
“You two, Clara,” they both drawled.
“What are you playing?”
“Five Card Draw,” said John.
There was an uncomfortable silence as Clara regarded each man through narrowed eyes. “Got room for one more?” she asked.
John and Harry looked at each other, then shrugged and scooted their chairs closer together.
“Charles!” Clara called into the house. “Bring out another chair, and one of them cold glasses of lemonade.”

Links to Last Summer in Algonac

About Author:

Laurisa White Reyes is the author of twenty-one books, including the SCBWI Spark Award-winning novel The Storytellers and the Spark Honor recipient Petals. She is also the Senior Editor at Skyrocket Press and an English instructor at College of the Canyons in Southern California. Her next release, a non-fiction book on the Old Testament, will be released in August 2026 with Cedar Fort Publishing.

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