The Saga for Donna

By Keith Adler

Akron, Ohio. 1987. A fire takes everything Christopher has - and the city has already decided what's next isn't worth saving.

Fifteen and newly orphaned, Christopher is sent to live with an uncle he's never met, on the fortieth floor of a housing tower the city calls Building B and everyone else calls home. He arrives with one duffel bag and no plan beyond getting through the summer. Then Donna knocks on his door with a warm dish and a name for the boy nobody else in the building has bothered to ask about, and for the first time since the fire, something in him starts moving again.

It's 1987, and a Black girl and a white boy holding hands where the wrong person can see it is its own kind of danger - the kind Donna's mother has already buried a sister to. But underneath the summer they're building together, something worse is coming for all of them: fire doors propped open on a schedule, a construction crew that builds nothing, and a friend pulled in over his head by people who've already decided this building is worth more burned down than standing. Christopher starts counting doors before he understands what he's counting toward.

Carried by a family's own language for love - we don't say goodbye, we say be good instead - The Saga for Donna is a 1987 love story about who a city decides is worth saving, and who decides for themselves. It has the aching first love of The Fault in Our Stars and the unflinching eye of If Beale Street Could Talk.

Soon to be a motion picture.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H9JDFDK9
• ISBN13: 9798187893119
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 132 Pages
• Weight: 0.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"