Book excerpt: When a deceased southern Appalachian grandmother delivers a mysterious message to her adult granddaughter in a waking dream, she sparks a mystical adventure that helps the young woman turn her life around. The Garden of a Desert Rose, a spiritual novel, is a modern-day, Jungian takeoff on A Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge is a sweet-natured, Southern single mother (in red snakeskin heels, no less) who spouts Bible verses and basic Jungian concepts with equal enthusiasm. Feeling defeated by her life choices, thirty-two-year-old, twice-divorced Lenny has little energy for launching a journey of self-discovery. Raising two children and holding down a job as a secretary for the coaching staff of the University of Tennessee football team keeps her days busy. But Lennys nights open a portal to a series of vivid, lucid dreams overflowing with rich archetypal images. Buoyed by the support of friends and her unflagging sense of humor, Lenny sees her inner desert transform into a blossoming oasis with one final Christmas Eve dream. This is a work of real-fiction that tries to capture the reality behind the known world. The tools in author Deborah L. Kelleys hand are her colorful imagination and a lifetime of personal happenings, visions, and spirit communications. Inspired by C. G. Jungs writings encouraging people to discover their personal myths, Kelley imagined her own myth to the surface. She named her hero Lenny and, with many additional archetypes dancing in her head, revisited Christmas of 1982. It was a time in her own life in which profound mental transformations took place. The Garden of a Desert Rose is a novel that seeks to ignite in your own imagination a deeper awareness of the myth youve been living.