2X Book Of The Year Finalist (2026)
Gold Book Award - Literary Titan
2nd Place - Four Seasons International Book Awards
Perfect 85 out of 85 score - Reader Views
Reader Views 5 Star - “Raw, real, and riveting” “took my emotions on a roller coaster” “his colorful writing and storytelling are clear and to the point.” “…his stories had me white-knuckled and worried for him, as well as proud and joyous, as if I knew him personally.”
Literary Titan 5 Star - “Profane, funny, angry…” “An intimate, messy, frequently funny, spiritually charged story.” “There’s very little distance between the narrator and what he’s feeling.”
OnlineBookClub.org - “Truly a book that will keep readers engaged.”
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Pivoting From Blue is the raw, gut wrenching, and often hysterical story of Skip Van Gardner, a man who endured a year in which life seemed determined to break him completely. Facing the simultaneous collision of personal upheaval, a dying parent, an Alzheimer’s parent, a crisis of faith, and the terrifying phenomenon known as Psychological Death, Van Gardner found himself in a place so empty he no longer knew who he was or what he was in this world.
Written with the unvarnished honesty of a man who has nothing left to lose and everything to find, this story moves between the harrowing and the absurd with startling agility. One chapter plunges readers into a life threatening Atlantic crossing aboard a 1967 Hatteras named Blue, where two friends grip each other through thirty miles of black water and nine foot seas. Another reckons quietly with hospice hallways, courtrooms of the mind, and the strange grace of painting with a keyboard. Music threads through every chapter like a lifeline, from Fleetwood Mac to the Black Pumas, each song a small act of salvation.
Van Gardner does not pretend his journey was noble or graceful. He lets the craziness, the bad decisions, and the desperate humor stand for what they were, trusting that time softens everything if we allow it to.
What emerges across these twenty-eight chapters is not merely a survival story but a complete dismantling and rebuilding of a life. Van Gardner confronts the questions most people spend decades avoiding, tears apart everything he thought he knew, and fights his way toward answers that are hard won, deeply personal, and profoundly universal. For anyone who has ever stood in the wreckage of the life they planned and wondered how to begin again, this book offers not a tidy formula but living proof that the human spirit, stubborn and imperfect, can pivot toward light.
One Year of Death, Divorce & Discovery
PIVOTING FROM BLUE
Available in paperback, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook.
GOLD BOOK AWARD
September 2026 - Literary Titan
Four Seasons International Book Award
Nominated for Book of the Year by Literary Titan and by the Four Seasons International Book Award
