About the Book

Book: The Samaritan’s Patient

Author: Chevron Ross

Genre: Contemporary Fiction / Teen Christian Fiction

Release Date: January 25, 2024

Teenager Paige Abernathy awakens after a severe beating to find that she suffers from amnesia, and that everyone seems to hate her.

She has only flashes of memory until the night a grieving parent attacks her in her hospital room. Paige then remembers her role as creator of an online group where members talk about ways to commit suicide.

After recovering from the beating, Paige embarks on a journey of penance to atone for a disaster born of good intentions. Her odyssey launches her on a mission of mercy and into new danger.

The Samaritan’s Patient is a thought-provoking novel about navigating the treacherous waters of social media.

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My Thoughts:

A girl with no memory due to a rather graphic attack lands in the hospital to recover. As she slowly regains her health, her memory is also slow in coming. However, other people are acting strange around her, whether it be the nurses, other patients, even the janitorial help. She also is unable to watch the television as hers is disconnected. This leads her to focus on what is going on. Then everything rushes back, and Paige wishes she didn't remember anymore.

This is one girl's journey as she delves into a social media assignment from school that does not go quite the way she planned. She learns firsthand how it can get out of control and how one can become the scapegoat. She comes from a pretty good home, but even her parents are having issues and not dealing with the events transpiring at all well.

This story deals with a rather graphic attack, the evils of social media, suicide, broken family relationships, and how one girl must navigate life's journey when it seems the whole world is against her.

I was provided a copy of this novel from the author. I was not required to post a positive review and all views and opinions are my own.

About the Author

Chevron Ross is a pseudonym for someone unimportant. He is not a writer, but God keeps putting ideas into his head that somehow turn into stories. If you like them, be sure to offer God a prayer of thanks.

More from Chevron

Behind the Scenes

This novel might never have been born had I not seen an interview on PBS with two New York Times writers, Megan Twohey and Gabriel Dance, on December 16, 2021.

These reporters did an extensive investigation into a website on which subscribers discussed committing suicide and shared methods for doing so. Most visitors to the site were thirty or younger. There were 1.2 million messages. At least forty-five suicides in multiple countries were linked to the site.

At the time of this broadcast, I had just completed my second novel, The Seven-Day Resurrection, and was wondering what to do next. The PBS interview was so shocking that I could not stop thinking about it. What motive could a person have for encouraging strangers to kill themselves? What could one possibly gain from such an endeavor? And what could provoke someone to throw away the gift of life at such a youthful age?

Each of my novels has been the result of an inspiration from God. Once He puts an idea into my head, it consumes my imagination until I cannot stop working. As you might imagine from the title, The Samaritan’s Patient is a blend of two stories: the famous parable of Jesus in the Bible, and a young person with good intentions who gets caught up in a social media nightmare.

God did all the work on this book. He created the character of Paige Abernathy and told me how to build the novel around the circumstances of her personal life—her parents, her friends, and most of all, her Christian faith. He also created the crisis that launches her on a journey of new experiences and personal growth.

I am amazed and grateful that God would choose someone so ordinary and unaccomplished as myself to do this work. Each novel God has written through me has been a great personal gift, and a reaffirmation that God has a plan for each of us. I pray that The Samaritan’s Patient will be as great a blessing to its readers as it has been to me.