"Your dad has given you away," his stepmother said with a sinister smile. These haunting words would follow young Olan for the rest of his life. At nine years of age, he wondered, "Can your daddy really give you away?" Can he do that? He would soon discover that he could, and he did. His life was about to change forever. In Given Away, a book made available through Authors Tranquility Press, Olan Hill, Jr. shares his true life story, revealing the depth of pain and hardship, adventure and ...

It was one of those cool October days when the California wind was slowly bringing the air a chill. October in California can be bleak and a little depressing. I was about to find out how depressing it could be. I was nine years old, on that cool October day. As I came home from school I noticed all my belongings; clothes, shoes everything I owned in a cardboard box on the front porch of the little clap board house where we lived, in bean town, just outside Clovis California. As I climbed ...