July 2026 Review Issue
Fantasy & Sci Fi
Literature
Mystery & Thrillers
Elvener’s
Legacy
Debra
Koehler
Crescent
Place
Press
979-8-9907429-2-5
$4.99
eBook
Website:
www.debrakoehler.net
Ordering:
https://www.amazon.com/Elveners-Legacy-Amoran-Chronicles-Book-ebook/dp/B0GXFS56XK
Elvener’s Legacy is the second book in the Amoran Chronicles cozy fantasy series, opening with a seeming ordinary grocery store checkout scene – until first-person narrator Meiri (aka Kerrin) digresses from everyday matters into a smooth recap of past events:
I was well acquainted with how short life can be, seeing as I’d actually died twice last year. The Foreseers brought me back from the dead the first time, allowing me to complete my mission as a Vortex Guardian. But repairing the vortex to save Earth and Amoran from annihilation had cost us.
It provides a fine review for newcomers and whose who may have left the first book some time ago, segueing neatly into the latest adventure in which Kerrin’s return to Amoran on a mission to locate her missing Twin Light Ashi turns into a battle to save Amoran and Earth.
Readers will appreciate the injections of philosophical reflection which are peppered throughout to accompany this journey as the tale evolves:
“We should all appreciate Life as much as Eliasser does. To live from the depth of our Hearts.”
Equally powerful are the personal touches of emotional connection which not only bind the characters together, but lead readers to care about their relationships:
To be so close to someone as to actually be that someone, and he to be you in the form of a joined entity. To exist, even for a short time, as one consciousness, one light-body, one heart, one mind. If only we had been able to remain in the Glen for a few hours, physically close, then slowly retreat. That would have been much kinder, far less painful, and I wouldn’t have been sitting on the ground, suddenly sobbing.
As struggles indicate that entire realities need to shift – not just the inhabitants of both planets – readers receive a vivid adventure packed with moral, ethical, and decision-making consequences that lend to reflection about the impact of choices, fear, and magical possibilities.
Ari, Meiri, and others interact on a playing field packed with potential as the milieu of two very different worlds and their peoples comes to life with reflective, sometimes fun descriptions:
“What’s the worst that can happen? Maybe a fissure will suck me inside and the folks at the other end of the rainbow will provide me with some answers this time.”
Librarians and readers will appreciate how this story embraces many elements, from love and betrayal to the costs of world-changing efforts and the impact of interpersonal relationships on bigger-picture thinking and goals.
Replete with threats and portents that impact a mission to bring a soul mate home, Elvener’s Legacy sparkles with truths revealed, possibilities considered, and relationships tested, concluding neatly while paving the way for Book Three.
Elvener’s LegacyReturn to Index
Return
of the
Visitor
David Gittlin
Entelligent Entertainment,
LLC
979-8985860597
$.99
eBook/$1.99
Audiobook
https://www.amazon.com/Return-Visitor-Silver-David-Gittlin-ebook/dp/B0GX2V2X41
Return of the Visitor adds the sixth book to David Gittlin’s Silver Sphere series, employing the same attention to a romp through aliens, space adventures, androids and AIs which has gained the series an audience of space opera-loving fans.
The tale opens with AI Arcon leaving his three human charges in danger as he’s forced to shut himself down after absorbing undetected radiation. This happens on the cusp of alien Silenna’s return to Earth in a starship which appears to be an alien threat to the planet’s military defenses.
Amy and Jacob Casell have their hands full not only evading forces which ordinarily would be welcoming, but navigating the possibility of setting aside their galaxy-hopping past to settle down and raise a family.
As they survive their initial re-entry into human society and the politicians and quandaries of government bureaucracy and alien interactions, the Casells tackle Silenna’s ambitious visions for their future, new scientific possibilities and promises, a President’s death and murderous influences, and more. Return of the Visitor becomes a series of social and political conundrums many won’t see coming from previous book events.
David Gittlin cultivates the impact of these changes on presidents and ordinary people as the story unfolds satisfying twists and turns:
“I’m a better person when I’m around you. And, I believe your presence will help me stay in my right mind. Together, we have to keep the world from collapsing around us until we find a way through this.”
A deepening international crisis blends with a mission to help Humans transform, creating a fast-paced adventure that both compliments prior series books and makes it easy for newcomers to step into the personalities and challenges tackled in this sixth adventure.
Libraries seeking sci-fi series space opera creations that embrace metaphysical elements, androids, AI potential, and human fallacies alike will find Return of the Visitor a powerful addition, whether it’s intended for prior fans or as a first-time acquisition.
Its ability to juxtapose danger, challenge, and personal and political struggle with high-tech possibilities and unusual relationships between aliens and AIs sets Return of the Visitor apart from most sci-fi adventures.
Return of the VisitorReturn to Index
Six:
Book Three of
the Numbers
Trilogy
a.a. clifford
Hardbooks Publishing
9798257729119
$7.99 Kindle 12.99 Print
19.95 Audio
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0H1F68YYB
Six: Book Three of the Numbers Trilogy adds to a.a. clifford’s sci-fi thriller series with another foray into a future in which science and religion are entwined, the end of the world appears near, and the singularity looms.
In this setting, starting with the book’s opening salvo in 2098, readers are introduced to background events through an entry in Dean Clarkson’s war journal in which he reviews how his best friend Austin Corrigan was “turned into a demon by science and sent forth in the name of religion to destroy the world.”
Dean’s journal was begun because he thinks his days (and possibly humanity’s) are numbered, and he wants to tell the truth as his legacy. An exciting, tense series of actions and events emerges to immerse readers in a milieu in which demons, power plays, bots, and military interests clash in unusual ways.
Clifford portrays a host of characters and futuristic scenarios. As the tale winds through the perspectives and special interests of the protagonists, moral justifications for killing, Austin’s evolving special abilities (which the government seeks to hone and direct), and the special challenge of vanquishing unbeatable quasi-demon Aeon, a messianic figure who has risen from the dead, the immersive, action-packed encounters create unexpected twists and turns readers will find captivating.
Readers interested in firm intersections between science, faith, and military and social struggle will find Six thoroughly engrossing. While it complements the prior books in the series, Six cultivates background reviews and references that allow newcomers to easily settle into its futuristic battles.
Be forewarned, however - those newcomers who imbibe will likely wish to turn to prior books Four and Five to fill in some blanks to thoroughly appreciate the routes and direction these characters and their society choose.
Six: Book Three of the Numbers TrilogyReturn to Index
War
Machines
Gregory Peterson
Six String Press
978-0-578-28191-9
$14.99
Paperback/$3.99 eBook
www.thesixtringwordsmith.com
War Machines is a sci-fi thriller of military might that opens with an unexpected beating when Aloysius Leigh’s wry sense of humor tweaks the wrong goons:
“I love what you’ve done with your hair. How did you get it to grow out of your nostrils that way?”
Assigned to steal a new piece of technology, Aloysius instead finds it embedded into his body in a heist gone dangerously awry, leading to an accusation of him being a murderer.
Everyone is after him - the Russian mob, the FBI, and his former counterterrorist unit – and as the war centers around finding him as the lynchpin that could turn the battle to the finder’s side, Aloysius finds himself challenged to stay human while evolving into something he didn’t even know could exist.
His initial confrontation with Mort continues to develop, as well. Other characters, from programmer Emma Burr to originators of the “project” who are all destroyed, their knowledge of his condition vanished, enter the bigger picture.
When a devastating truth about the past recipients of this technology is revealed, Aloysius realizes his time is limited in more ways than one when Chuckie reveals a potential death sentence whose consequences could ripple into everything around him – including daughter/niece Jeni, whom he struggles to support despite the price tag on his head.
Unlike most sci-fi military stories, Gregory Peterson embeds his character with wit, personality, and psychological developments that lend to readers appreciating this flawed but likeable protagonist’s quandaries and choices. The focus on these developments over military clashes alone and the additional consideration of how a high-tech dilemma becomes a personal mandate for transformation makes War Machines accessible to a wide audience – especially those drawn to exceptionally well-done characters whose dilemmas are realistic and absorbing.
Readers care about Aloysius and his world, including the origins of good and bad decisions alike, and this adds to the story’s immersive appeal as an ex-Marine-turned-thief contemplates how many sacrifices he’ll make to save his daughter.
Vivid descriptions, unexpected twists, and the juxtaposition of bio-nanotechnology with personal dilemmas keeps all kinds of readers thoroughly engaged – even those usually not drawn to military or thriller escapades.
Librarians seeking a genre crossover title that promises to reach an exceptionally wide audience with a thoroughly compelling read will find War Machines is much more than about war and battle. Its probe of matters of the heart creates an unrelentingly action-packed read powered by a caring character who must ultimately embrace a force that threatens to make him less human.
War MachinesReturn to Index
Wolf
Magick
Paula Cappa
Crystal Lake Publishing
9781968532574
$15.99
Paperback; $4.99
Ebook
https://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Magick-Secret-Mysteries-Draakensky-ebook/dp/B0GYXX9MMT/
Wolf Magick is a novel of dark Gothic fantasy that revolves around the actions of a wolf warrior, an Otherworld shapeshifter, Finnwolf. His influence as Lord of the Wolf translates to an ability to navigate Otherworld realms as wolf and man, employing wolf magick, which impacts his human life as Matthew Liam Sexton.
The prologue that introduces Matthew and his abilities dovetails nicely into the first chapter that focuses on Marc Sexton, who resists the shape-changing power he inherited from his father and its accompanying mandate that he, too, must navigate the realms.
Marc’s father warned him about shadow wolves before he died, but Marc wanted nothing to do with any of this. Despite his resistance, Marc finds himself navigating uncertain territory as the increasing presence of shadow wolves hunt him, forcing Marc to not just reconsider but accept the transformative nature of his being.
His love, artist Charlotte Knight, is drawn to his dark side and the promise and possibility of magick. Her own magickal powers seem to portend she’ll be a suitable mate, but before this can happen, the two must confront, individually and together, the specter of darkness that threatens their world of Draakensky.
Paula Cappa creates a compelling, unusual saga of wolves, empowerment, legacy, and choice as she surveys the nature of wolves and humans alike. Surprising revelations such as the multifaceted nature of Finnwolf emerge within the unfolding books of this novel. Vulnerabilities are exposed and explored—and the nature of love under siege from the self is revealed by Marc:
If you want to walk out on this, no one would blame you. I hid this because I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. I would have preferred to be the romanticized Merlin who shapeshifts into a thrilling owl soaring the sky, but I wasn’t given that gift of metamorphosis.
How can Charlotte have a life with such a man? As the couple steps into their individual mandates and powers, readers receive a compelling saga of transformation that evolves beyond the wolf/human connection and into matters of the heart.
Cappa crafts a magickal story embedded in the personalities, heritage, desires, and legacies of individuals forced to investigate the origins of courage and what it means to live a life of magick.
Libraries and readers seeking a forceful story of dark magick and inner inclinations will relish how these and other themes dovetail with romance, realization, and revolution in a manner that imparts a thorough appreciation for wolves, magick, and the real costs of eternal life.
Wolf MagickReturn to Index
Literature
The Black Angel
and Other Tales
Paul H. Hughes
Independently Published
979-8234006752
$24.00 Hardcover/$19.99
Paperback/$3.99
eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Angel-Other-Tales/dp/B0GPTBN74R
The Black Angel and Other Tales gathers short vignettes that originated from the author’s time in the 1970s attending college and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Initially written for a 1970s audience, they have been revised for modern times but retain their atmospheric feel of decades past, offering snapshots of a time of life in which perceptions and possibilities were very different.
The process of rewriting, for Hughes, involved “finishing the old material from my youth and expanding upon the themes I once only vaguely understood and tried to explore.” The polished results here may not accurately represent their originals, but are likely transformations that prove wiser and more impactful for the test of time and revisiting them from the vantage point of older age and experience.
Take the first story, “Light is Spent.” Here, a summer for a youth of the 1960s comes to life, juxtaposing the play and world of Tom and John with italicized bigger picture insights. These include a war that suddenly became part of daily life, insights about how a first-born is the “light in his father’s eyes,” and how the protagonist becomes “old for the first time” as life and death cross the threshold of home and enter into and change family and friendship’s carefree summer countenance.
Contrast this with “Everything is Jake,” a story that opens with Jake’s “angry man dreams” and the isolated life he leads working in a bakery after a childhood of being bullied. He develops a relationship with Carol, who lives in his house, calls him “little brother,” and uses him to hide from foster dad Ben’s unwanted attention.
The currents of Jake’s life, childhood influences, foster home, and relationships lead into adulthood, where isolation and ennui are an acceptable price for safety and consistency.
Each story offers a narrowed focus on a character that comes of age and faces the currents of personal and political influences that direct their course. Each features literary excellence, pointing out how these influences are incorporated, navigated, and affect daily life and personal growth.
Libraries and readers seeking a collection set in 1970s America which is replete with thought-provoking insights perfect for book club discussion will find The Black Angel and Other Tales an outstanding contemplation of different individuals on the cusp of transformation.
The Black Angel and Other TalesReturn to Index
Connie’s
White
World: Jazz Noir
Stories
Sam Newsome
Some New Press
979-8246074725
$5.99
Paperback/$2.99
eBook
www.somenewmusic.com
Connie’s White World: Jazz Noir Stories presents music-infused stories that were “built like a record,” with each segment pulling in readers and, like a good concert, creating segues between music and meaning that turn prose into songs.
Author Sam Newsome is a musician himself, whose creations reflect his sentiments that “everything must swing.” And swing they do, to a beat of various jazzy notes that support musical characters who uncover pieces of their identities both on and off stage as the short stories evolve.
The stories often contain underlying themes and notes of discovery, as in the opening to the title track “Connie’s White World,” which maintains that “Playing what’s honest isn’t always enough, if they’re listening for something else.”
The story opens with pianist Connie Shaver’s morning, which “hums in quiet harmony” as the romantic Connie listens to jazz by Bill Evans as a background to her music-infused life. She is shaken by a review of her latest concert that holds the accusation of her heading a “whites-only trio” and accuses them of not really capturing the essence of the blues they play.
Racial considerations enter her musical picture as her manager points out that “Whites are under a microscope,” he says. “The bandstand is no longer a haven.”
Will she consider hiring young Black musicians to thwart these accusations? What about her fellow musicians in the band?
Music infuses with social considerations in a manner readers may not anticipate, but which captures the milieu that exists between politics, musical notes of discovery, and the fine art of making music.
Each story provides different celebrations of music, intention, creation, and the challenge of authenticity and presentation.
Readers who love jazz will be entranced at the dance between music and musicians’ lives and choices which brings the tales to life in unexpected ways.
From the story of a white boy in the bayou gifted with the ability to play swing in “Country Love, Country Hate” to accounts of romance and musical interludes, these short works delve into personalities and possibilities infused with musical and psychological discovery, as in “House Husband Rules”:
Jazz, like life, is all about choices. Chord changes. But sometimes, you don’t choose the changes. Sometimes, the changes choose you.
Librarians looking to add excellent works into their literary or music holdings will find Connie’s White World: Jazz Noir Stories a standout steeped in all kinds of reflective notes. It captures the feel of a jazz piece and the progressive movement of musicians and individuals forced to grow in new directions.
Connie’s White World: Jazz Noir StoriesReturn to Index
Reckless
Disregard
& Other
Stories
Linda Griffin
Mint Hill Books
978-1-964277-83-7 $18.95
www.mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/reckless-disregard-linda-griffin/
Reckless Disregard & Other Stories is a collection of short-stories that opens with the actions of Kristin Bennett, a city councilman who is falsely accused of a hit-and-run, and the detective assigned to the case.
Fifteen stories of varying lengths describe different life struggles and reactions that chart the progression of a range of characters whose choices are challenged by ordinary life, from journal editor Finn and young Starbucks barista Maris to Christopher Reisner, a loner who has no connections and no desire to improve himself, and Amanda, whose imaginary brother of childhood comes to impact her life as an adult as she faces the memory of tin soldiers in the garden even though she couldn’t have had a brother old enough to go to war.
The diversity of these explorations is amazing. The short story “Weeds,” for example, portrays a life overcome by the ordinary:
It was like The Day of the Triffids out there. Not just the entire yard and climbing the walls in such numbers that I was surprised I hadn’t noticed any encroaching on the windows, but in the cracks of the sidewalk, more cracks than I remembered. Tall snakes slithered up over the roof, covered the solar panels in places, tangled around the satellite dish, and yes, behind the curtains they were beginning to obscure the windows as well. Sneaky of them to leave the windows until last, so I wouldn’t realize. That was crazy thinking of course; weeds are not sentient. Are they?
Each short piece adds a different perspective about adaptation and insight, exploring lives that resonate with readers in unusual, touching ways. This occurs via the experiences of diverse individuals who face everything from grief and funeral rites to the tenacious, screaming weeds that threaten to consume life in a quasi-sentient manner.
Librarians and readers seeking a literary gathering of individual lives, personalities, and seemingly disparate but psychological interconnected worlds will relish how Reckless Disregard & Other Stories creates vignettes about all kinds of life forces to be reckoned with.
Reckless Disregard & Other StoriesReturn to Index
The Burn List
Julie Cruse
Atmosphere Press
979-8891329300
$30.75 Hardcover/$19.99
Paperback/$9.99
eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Burn-List-Memoir-Higher-Education/dp/B0FZXPTX9N
The Burn List: A Memoir of Abuse from Home to Higher Education charts a course of early violence, flight and silence, and Julie Cruse’s later determination to publish her experience of academic exploitation and childhood abuse in an effort to vanquish the ghosts and admonitions of silence from her life.
The Burn List is the result: a damning record of storms, dreams, academic double blinds and repression, and growth against all odds in which Cruse points out from her opening lines:
This isn’t a story about what I know now. It’s a story about how long I didn’t.
From misreading danger and accepting violations as norms to avoiding conflict and exposing the truth, Cruse navigates the battles in her life with an astute eye to revealing the root causes of repression that buffeted her and can similarly impact others in academia and personal life.
The Burn List rips off the covers of academic abuse and forces light and enlightenment into reader realizations about the courses and pathways such abuse takes, and its deadly ramifications and even acceptance by those most vulnerable to its mandates.
Most of all, Cruse’s weave of the circumstances of her own life and acceptance of these actions provide concrete, powerful examples of how women can be drawn into supporting their abusers in an effort to stay safe:
Once in New York City, Max was rarely around; when he was, he was packing for a new apartment, soliciting me to carry boxes. Who was I to refuse? A lowly grad student on the outs with her faculty, I couldn’t risk being smeared among his powerful allies. When he asked me to come see a show of his, he just strapped his camera around my neck and asked me to photograph. He’d started all this with promises to collaborate with me, yet here I was, reduced to documenting his work with others. How many other people had he conned into photographing his shows to make himself seem important?
The result is an exceptionally vivid, hard-hitting chronicle that should be on the reading lists of anyone interested in higher education, patterns of control and victimization, academic repression, and a wider range of subjects circling around abusive patterns than most genre memoirs which focus on childhood impact alone.
Rich in its specific examples of how such abuse is prevalent and employed, The Burn List is a top recommendation for readers, libraries, academic participants, psychologists, and anyone operating in the circles of abuse identification and recovery, whether they be victims, therapists, or those interested in tackling the systems that support such actions.
The Burn ListReturn to Index
Come
Up Big
Charles
W.B.
Wardell III
BookGo
979-8998535772
$32.00
www.bookgo.pub
Come Up Big: My Journey Through Vietnam, Harvard, the White House, the Department of State, and as CEO in Corporate America follows the path of Charles W.B. Wardell III’s life as he moves from an uncertain future and academic failure to becoming a Vietnam draftee. There, he finally rises to his full abilities, resuming the momentum towards academia and success upon leaving the military.
His entry into Harvard, then his involvement with the White House in 1973, where he survives the Watergate scandal to then become the CEO of a top global executive search firm, demonstrates not just ability, but tenacity and talent as Wardell navigates his life, considering the many lessons gained from military, political, and corporate involvements:
In the fall of 1969, I was at home and thinking, “What the hell am I going to do here?” The military wanted me to come back and make a career of it. I’d been a very good soldier and had been highly rated in my efficiency reports. But I was never going back to the military. My job had been to ask people to do things in the field for their country, and then some of them would wind up dead because of my ask. I couldn’t do that anymore.
Wardell’s experiences capture many of the social currents of the times, from the prejudice and anger Vietnam vets faced upon their return home to what it means to be a survivor.
His outline of these challenges and their consequences proves inspirational as well as reflective of this era, and will encourage readers facing their own life changes to consider the impact of their choices within the bigger picture of their achievements and desires.
Libraries seeking memoirs replete with social and political insights as well as psychological discovery will welcome the accessible and inspirational events of Come Up Big, which demonstrate handily how attitude and perspective can influence and redirect a life.
Filled with moments of philosophical and social reflection and peppered with unexpected hilarity, Come Up Big is an inviting journey that memoir readers will appreciate.
Come Up BigReturn to Index
Grumpy
Old Dan
Dan Remmes
GFB
978-1-967510-74-0
Ebook: $9.99, Paperback:
$18.95,
Hardcover: $28.95
https://www.danremmes.com/
Grumpy Old Dan: Reflections from the Edge of Fame, Fatherhood, and Frustration captures the life, ideals, and experiences of author Dan Remmes, who uses the personal essay format to present “...a fun and eclectic buffet of gripes, foibles, prejudices, screw-ups, and relationship fails, along with a disproportionate measure of medical humiliation.”
It opens with the consideration of his role as his parents’ firstborn ‘Practice Child’ and he and his wife’s unusual choices, in their thirties, to emulate their example. Then it moves to wider-ranging considerations of biology in later years, family ties, end of life concerns, and handling a daughter’s request for a therapy pony.
The diverse subjects and transition points of these stories are satisfyingly fun, intriguing, thought-provoking slices of life that are often unexpectedly hilarious:
There was a cricket in the car. We couldn’t see it, but the unmistakable chirp was coming from somewhere in the back seat. It was midday, but it sounded as if we were deep in the woods at midnight. I announced the obvious. “I think there’s a cricket in the car.”
She agreed.
A few minutes later, she remarked, “It really emphasizes our lack of conversation.”
From formative years of life to moving on and away from New York City and other major moves, Grumpy Old Dan offers a satisfyingly diverse set of escapades and life encounters. These hold the uncommon ability to reach a wide audience of general-interest readers and intellectuals alike.
Flavored with family and personal moments of transformation and discovery, Grumpy Old Dan illustrates how the personal essay can inject the memoir format with a literary immediacy that will appeal to a wide audience, and is highly recommended for library lending and book club pursuit alike.
Grumpy Old DanReturn to Index
I’ll Be
Awesome
Tomorrow
Marian Sandmaier
Flying Cloud Press
979-8-9957238-0-6 $19.95
paperback /
$9.99 ebook
Website: www.mariansandmaier.net
Ordering:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H34M572C
I’ll Be Awesome Tomorrow: A Memoir of Chasing Perfection and Letting Go opens with Marian Sandmaier confessing to her year-long boyfriend Dan that she needs to die – at age twenty-two.
Sandmaier spent most of her years battling perfectionism, searching for transformation and change that would allow her to value life as something worth living and pursuing. Initially, her relationship with Dan gave her purpose and newfound strength, but at this point, she’s back to thinking about suicide.
Her confession to Dan changes everything.
I’ll Be Awesome Tomorrow moves into her future and challenges with a powerful eye to exploring the foundations of hopelessness and achievement. She reviews her life for the wellsprings of this depression and returns some powerful revelations about the major influencers and attitudes that have buffeted her life for years:
I flashed on my time with Kim at Sacred Heart, when she’d alternately belittled me and sworn her love. I didn’t know what that behavior meant about her, exactly. But as my father sat with me, I understood that she’d just injured me, brutally, without caring how I felt. Or, in a weird and scary way, caring way too much.
These emotional milestones come to light in the course of a life memoir that explores therapy, family, friendships, and evolving influences. Many surprises emerge during the course of these considerations, giving fellow readers struggling with perfectionism, going into therapy, or reconsidering their relationships new food for thought:
...for a millisecond, I’d thought my psychiatrist was making a move on me. Whatever he’d been doing, I felt ambushed. The whole thing seemed icky and fake. In no way had his embrace made me feel cared for.
From struggles and disenchantments to forging a meaningful life independent of depression, the opinions or influences of others, and the toxic messages assembled from her past, Sandmaier reveals the rudiments of growth and recovery that stem from experience and analysis on many different levels.
This translates to an emotionally powerful memoir that may challenge sensitive readers, but ultimately creates new possibilities for a forward momentum away from perfectionism and suicide.
Libraries seeking hard-hitting memoirs equally suitable for book club recommendation will find I’ll Be Awesome Tomorrow an involving, revealing acknowledgement of the special challenges involved in being and interacting with someone on the cusp of collapse:
I would have fooled him forever if I could have, since depression is obviously terrible for the person who suffers it but a nightmare, too, for anyone close to that individual, because no amount of pep-talking or airtight logic—You have friends! You’re so talented! I love you!—can crack the hard shell of that desolation. To spend much time with a clinically depressed person is to know helplessness in the extreme.
I’ll Be Awesome Tomorrow offers a lesson plan for upward momentum that will prove appealing and educational not just to those struggling with their lives and influences, but those loving and supporting them, as well.
I’ll Be Awesome TomorrowReturn to Index
The
Light of
Ordinary Days
Carolyn Brigit Flynn
GFB
978-1-967510-46-7
$21.95
Paperback/$9.99 eBook
Website:
Ordering: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DBSRC6RB
The Light of Ordinary Days: An Irish American Journey of Healing and Homeland is a memoir of returning to one’s ancestral roots to fill in blanks about family stories and history.
A century after her grandparents immigrated to America, Carolyn Brigit Flynn returned to Ireland to probe her family’s stories there. What she found not just filled in blanks, but added a whole new story about love, poverty, trauma and hardship which, in turn, expanded her sense of self and family ties.
Flynn’s saga opens with a powerful reflection on Irish luck, history, and connections as she visits her cousin in Ireland and considers the circumstances that brought her full circle back to the old country:
My ancestral homeland has a long, ancient, heartstopping story with great epochs of world-renowned innovation and stability, as well as centuries of wrenching colonization, poverty, and famine. As a writer who almost became a professional historian, for the last decade I have immersed myself in Ireland’s epic history. And I slowly found that what my cousin said was true. I am lucky in an Irish kind of way, with great and heartbreaking fortune mixed in.
Flynn’s journey takes the form of a historical and spiritual pilgrimage to some of Ireland’s shrines and relics, during which she recalls her parents’ stories in light of the reality she observes around her.
Thoughts about poverty, hardship, difficult choices, and contrasts between past and present decision-making influences heavily weigh this memoir in favor of a historical review - which may surprise readers who thought the family story would take center place.
It does – but within the context of Irish psychology, precedent, and history – and herein lies the special quality of The Light of Ordinary Days. Its connection between healing, a sense of place, and new discoveries invite readers to walk alongside Flynn as she contemplates the nature of what is revealed and celebrated of the past and what can remain hidden:
I was stunned that something so impressive, akin to Machu Picchu or the Great Pyramid of Giza, actually existed on the little island of Ireland. How had I never known this?
Libraries and readers seeking a blend of travelogue, memoir, family and country history, and Irish lore and spirituality will relish how deftly The Light of Ordinary Days weaves together all these facets to create an inviting, contemplative journey readers will want to take for themselves.
Rich in historical consideration – especially the choices involved in highlighting or repressing history - The Light of Ordinary Days will reach a wide audience of history buffs, Irish expats, and memoir enthusiasts who look for an exceptionally strong sense of culture and place from their reading.
The Light of Ordinary DaysReturn to Index
Seeing
Through the
Storm
Dr. Olive Sono Shisana
Mango Moon Media
978-1-0492-7051-7
https://www.mangomoonmedia.com/
Seeing through the Storm: Leading through Crisis and Change is the autobiography of a professor whose childhood in rural South Africa led her to assume a leadership role at the forefront of public health and social justice movements. It follows a life that became a pursuit for empowering women and others disenfranchised by life circumstance.
Readers who anticipate the usual self-examination of a memoir will be surprised and delighted to learn that Dr. Olive Sono Shisana draws upon academic studies, policy documents, and public reports to augment her insights. These embrace growth, decision-making challenges, and issues that formed the nexus of how she evolved under South Africa’s shifting apartheid and international policy-making changes.
They supplement and expand the scope and nature of her life and its examination in a manner that will especially appeal to fellow decision-makers and health industry workers at all levels of domestic and international government, considering the nature and pressures of decision-making processes and their concurrent moral and ethical demands.
Readers interested in South Africa’s evolution will be engaged in her personal encounters with its changes, while those concerned about policy-making’s foundations and influences will relish how Dr. Shisana draws deep connections between activism, civil service, and the evolution of public health strategies.
Her pandemic experiences provide history from a vantage point uncommon in the many personal accounts of Covid-19 lockdowns and changes:
I had to address many challenges, including increasing staff numbers, securing funding for the program, coordinating work across the organization, and designing a coherent program with a unified mission for the health sector’s response to the pandemic at a time when the disease was spreading exponentially in some countries of the South... It was clear that we needed a global program aligned with the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS. My motivation for this advocacy was straightforward: Africa bore more than two-thirds of the world’s HIV burden, yet existing programs were woefully inadequate for both prevention and treatment. With mortality rates rising, I saw no reason not to be ambitious.
These reflections offer important insights into African experiences and the evolution of policies for all, which tend to receive less attention from mainstream readers. Another plus are the candid assessments of science and health intersections which pull no punches about their importance in the greater scheme of political decision-making about health:
As a scientist myself, I have always championed evidence-based policymaking, which is why we founded Evidence-Based Solutions in 2015. I remain proud to live in a country that not only values scientific input but acts on it. That cannot be said of all nations; in some, science denialism costs lives.
The result entwines autobiography with bigger-picture thinking in a manner that enhances a survey highly recommendable to a wide audience, from those involved in domestic or international healthcare policy-making and management issues to fellow scientists, medical workers, decision-makers, and students of moral and ethical discourse.
Librarians will find all these audiences, as well as general-interest readers and book clubs, will be interested in learning more about how health networks, support systems, and policies evolve in many different forms.
Replete with important bridges between the personal and the political, Seeing through the Storm charts a powerful journey from rural South African roots to becoming a pivotal leader in formulating global health policies.
Seeing Through the StormReturn to Index
A
Somewhat
Manic Expression of the Truth
Adam
Levon Brown
Alien
Buddha
Press
979-8337509686
$11.25
https://www.amazon.com/Somewhat-Manic-Expression-Truth-Mental/dp/B0DJ33DJ41
A Somewhat Manic Expression of the Truth is Adam Levon Brown’s mental health memoir of a journey through mood swings and mental challenges. It cultivates a gritty truth that translates to passages marked by passion as he reviews his quest for sanity in a chaotic world of psychosis.
The path goes beyond most mental health focuses on therapy sessions and revelations, delving into the impact of incarceration and public reactions to mental health issues that affect personal suffering:
I wanted to tell him about the suffering inflicted upon me after my arrest and during my stay at the hospital, but there were no words. If you haven’t experienced it first-hand, you cannot know what being incarcerated, being completely under the control of people who may or may not care about you, is like.
The lessons that stem from incarceration and mental issues are presented in language and connections even readers without prior experience will find enlightening and moving:
I learned that people, particularly people who are imprisoned and whose brain chemicals are off kilter, can resort to pure, unadulterated violence at the flick of a switch, for any reason.
Lest readers believe this journey will be one of all darkness, Brown also embraces the light of hope and achievement that juxtaposes nicely with the darker days and experiences he outlines:
It had been a season of shame, but it ended in hope. Hope, a renewal set in the stone of my mind’s shelf. When the litany of despair had finally lifted, the fog seemed to escape from my mind, and I could see that connection and hope were not a dual-sided coin, but a fortune within. And it was only to be found when opening my life to those around me...
His note about the impact of people, support systems, institutions, and social perceptions of the mentally ill makes for a particularly valuable note that turns the memoir into a broader reach for understanding:
The journey from ignorance to knowledge, from dark to light, begins with the first step, just as they say. That is, if you have the right people on your side.
Readers interested in not just the personal experience of mental illness, but social and medical system reactions will find A Somewhat Manic Expression of the Truth candid, revealing, and packed with insights ranging from the origins of despair and hope to the choices and routines that help.
Filled with enlightening moments and powerful descriptors, A Somewhat Manic Expression of the Truth is a memoir that is powerfully rendered and highly recommended.
A Somewhat Manic Expression of the TruthReturn to Index
Birds of Prey
Don’t Sing
Joe Cary
Tuddy Press
9798993804606
$19.99 Paperback/$29.99
jacketed
hardcover
Website: www.joecary.com
Ordering: www.amazon.com
Birds of Prey Don’t Sing follows the routines and challenge of assassin Michael Harrier, whose work always involves two steps: killing, then framing someone else for the murder. Luckily, Harrier is very skilled at placing the blame on other than those who hire him. Unluckily, he undertakes a massive new challenge in murdering a pedophile priest and blaming God for the death.
Readers won’t expect the philosophical, moral, and ethical quandaries which arise in the course of nonstop events involving confrontation and adaptation - but part of what makes this thriller especially inviting is these moments of revelation, which will prompt readers and book clubs to pause and absorb unusual food for thought:
“What do you do with guilt?”
“In what regard?”
“Arguably, what we do with guilt defines us.” He rubbed the broken edge of the leaf along the scar on the back of his wrist. “What do you do when conscience serves you guilt? Bear it, ignore it, despise it, rationalize it? Does guilt change you, or does it become shame about a behavior you can’t or won’t change?”
As Harrier confronts priest Carducci and faces questions about prayer and God, readers are invited into a realm in which Harrier’s schemes are probed by LAPD homicide sergeant Jordan Becker, raising issues of redemption and purpose on all sides.
Joe Cary’s multifaceted story embraces social and spiritual quandaries, giving it a depth and unexpected sense of discovery that enriches its investigative progression.
From drug abuse and murder to Buddhist mandates to “not destroy life” and encounters with redemption and painkillers, Cary creates a powerful world-romping story of death and survival tactics that delves into a killer’s methods and mind to reveal underlying motivations, beliefs, and clever lies.
Librarians interested in psychological thrillers that delve into the mindsets and hearts of perps and investigators alike will find Birds of Prey Don’t Sing engrossing and involving.
More so than most suspense stories, it unlocks matters of the heart in spiritual, social, psychological, and investigative crossfires of purpose and perspective that keep readers not just involved or guessing, but reflecting:
“There are two kinds of criminals,” Harrier said. “I deal with the new-brain criminals, and leave the old-brain criminals to you.”
Birds of Prey Don’t SingReturn to Index
The
Building
Kevin G. Chapman
First Legacy Publishing, LLC
978-1-958339-34-3
$27.99 (hardcover), $14.99
(paperback),
$4.99 (ebook)
www.KevinGChapman.com
The Building is a thriller steeped in corporate intrigue, politics, and community involvements. It centers around business achievement and decision-making processes, offering readers an absorbing story that combines leadership challenges with considerations of new opportunities that test alliances and relationships.
As Kevin G. Chapman unfolds the story, a host of characters find their special interests intersecting and becoming challenged by personal and business objectives.
As Jameson Z. Conrad’s project devolves into the specter of ultra-modern apartment building residents murdering one another, challenging ideals of common care and greater good, decisions surrounding the Utopia Tower’s cohort change and the impact of Bernard Johnson’s murder challenge lawyer Antonio and others with decisions that test their moral and ethical foundations.
Chapman shakes these ideologies with discussions that revolve around the safety and future of The Building and its promises. From fealty to the philosophical principles that are the foundation of the community to the investigations of detectives Dru and Mariana as they uncover an ever-increasing embrace of political and special interests willing to kill for their objectives, The Building takes on a life of its own as residents, managers, investigators, and businessmen clash.
Libraries will find it easy to recommend The Building to thriller audiences who look for more than whodunit mysteries. Its depth in exploring the personal and community interests involved in an elite high-tech building on many different levels offers excellent tension and gripping contrasts in personalities and objectives. It’s a fine story that moves in directions most thriller audiences won’t see coming.
The BuildingReturn to Index
Cadillac
Wheels
Scott Saxberg
GFB
978-1-967510-62-7 $7.99
eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Wheels-Scott-Saxberg-ebook/dp/B0G6D1ZJ5P
Cadillac Wheels blends country music, tragedy, and thriller in a gripping story of two seemingly disparate individuals whose pasts coalesce in a dangerous manner.
Musician Tanner Banks is busking on the streets, haunted by the accidental death of his beloved girlfriend, when he encounters businessman Jack Strong, whose own painful past leads him to connect with the young man who reminds him of his dead son.
Original recorded songs (as well as familiar standards from Elton John, Johnny Cash, Alabama and others) drive a plot in which Tanner and Jack dance between revelation and revenge as both are forced to confront past, present, and revised possibilities for their futures.
Scott Saxberg delves into motivations, rationales, and personalities with the deft precision of a surgeon as he develops chapters that reflect Jack and Tanner’s different perspectives on life:
Jack’s staff at Manser Capital would jump at the opportunity to come to his house. This kid was different. He had learned to survive on his own, living on the street, and didn’t need anyone. Jack had to work to keep them together so Tanner would stick around.
Intrigue surrounds Tanner’s relationship with Sarah, Jack’s memories of his son Aiden, and other influences on unexpected developments, with observations and character psyches described in chilling detail:
Jack watched an SUV full of screaming teenagers make a hard turn onto Fourth Street. Don’t they realize it could all end at any moment? It felt like someone had boiled his blood over a blowtorch and injected it into the back of his neck.
The song-driven story also adds an extra dimension of attraction with a realistic backdrop that will especially please thriller readers interested in musical interludes and influences – several of the foundations of this story.
Librarians and readers seeking an inspirational story that opens with two strangers drawn together by street music whose relationship develops in unexpected ways will find
Cadillac Wheels a powerful, compelling story of homelessness, connection, and performance that is as engrossing for its evolution to on-stage appearances as it is for its surprising forays into success, failure, and redemption.
Cadillac WheelsReturn to Index
Class
Reunion: Keep
Your
FRIENDS Closer
Gail Ward Olmsted
Black Rose Writing
978-1685137991 $18.95
www.blackrosewriting.com
Class Reunion: Keep Your FRIENDS Closer blends a legal thriller with the issue of friendship ties and a murder that impacts it.
Attorney Lennon Gallagher has spent years trying to escape her past, including former law school classmate Erin Cooper, whom she once bonded with. When Erin is accused of murder, Lennon is called upon to help her - even if her choice impacts her career and forthcoming marriage.
The story opens in the present with Lennon’s first-person reflections on her busy life before a phone call from Erin changes everything – including her romance with Nick Russo.
Gail Ward Olmsted creates scenarios surrounding these events which explain and explore Lauren’s relationships, motivations, and inclinations:
I met Nick for the first time at one of his family’s restaurants while having dinner with Roger—not a date, ugh—I would never think of giving Roger credit for anything. He had taken me, basically against my will, to dinner, under the guise of discussing problems within our study group. His real goal had been to intimidate and threaten me.
This contributes a strong sense of personality and place which leads readers to care deeply about Lauren’s psyche and life. With this approach, Olmsted lays the foundation for future connections to trial proceedings which test the attorney on personal as well as professional levels:
“I’ve been speaking with Roger Stevens concerning his testimony. I was planning on calling him to the stand after you.”
“Okay . . .” I knew this already. If I could avoid being in the same room as him, that would be terrific, but I assumed his testimony was critical to portraying Erin as a stable individual with no predilection for violence. I also knew he would say whatever he needed for her to be found not guilty. What was I missing?
The result marries legal process with personal special interests in a manner that will reach beyond the usual legal thriller reader to attract those interested in character-driven stories that are hard to put down because of their interpersonal relationship dilemmas.
Supercharged with confrontations, realizations, and unexpected twists, Class Reunion: Keep Your FRIENDS Closer examines not just legal quandaries, but those immersing and testing the hearts and minds of friends, lovers, and legal professionals alike.
Libraries will find it easy to recommend Class Reunion: Keep Your FRIENDS Closer to readers who don’t normally choose legal books, but appreciate compelling stories surrounding personality clashes and surprising motivations for not just murder, but love.
Class Reunion: Keep Your FRIENDS CloserReturn to Index
Dreidels
and Dead
Ends
Nancy J. Cohen
Orange Grove Press
978-1952886393
$16.99
Paperback/$4.99
eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Dreidels-Dead-Ends-Hair-Mysteries/dp/1952886392
Dreidels and Dead Ends, the 19th book in Nancy J. Cohen’s Bad Hair Days series, sees hair salon owner Marla Vail set to speak at a local history museum. It is supposed to be a fun event – until a thief steals a valuable hairbrush and injures the security guard.
Museum curator Becky Forest, Marla’s friend, begs her to investigate and resolve matters before the town mayor can cut the museum’s funding on the charge that she has created a scandal. Further complicating matters is that the brush was cursed – which seems to be spreading ill fortune throughout the town.
On the cusp of Hannukah and birthing her second child in her forties, Marla again finds herself entwined in more than one serious situation, spinning an investigation that reveals not a singular motive but a host of interconnected possibilities revolving around various community members.
Salon atmosphere and characters swirl around a tale in which Marla is faced with too many possibilities. A thread of humor also runs through these evolving events, adding to the story’s spunk small-town atmosphere and personalities:
“What do you think happened?” she asked. “Did Gary die from natural causes or…?”
“The M.E. will make that determination.” Gaston placed the items inside an evidence bag.
“I hope he didn’t choke on those donuts. That would be an awful way to go.”
From town loose cannons to false accusations and insights about too many people who would kill for an antique hairbrush, Dreidels and Dead Ends crafts a satisfying mystery that branches into the community’s spirit and members to create an inviting story of schemes and crimes.
Libraries seeing prior enthusiasm for Cohen’s works will of course want to acquire her latest; but newcomers with no prior familiarity with the haircutting detective will find the story easy to access, superior in its characterization and twists and turns, and invitingly fun.
Dreidels and Dead EndsReturn to Index
Ice Blue
Murder
David E. Feldman
Eface Media Publishing
979-8-9926798-2-3
$19.99
Paperback/$5.95 eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Ice-Blue-Murder-Mystery-Thrillers/dp/B0GSZ2ZPRX
Ice Blue Murder is Book 5 in the Hammer & Sharpe Noir Mystery Thrillers series, but no prior familiarity with its predecessors is required in order for newcomers to dive right into its shifting story of a pregnant woman’s murder that stems from her participation in a demonstration.
Detectives and a P.I. work together to uncover the truth about the cop’s wife’s death, uncovering uncomfortable facts that challenge status quo and assumptions as issues of privilege, justice, and power follow Beth to the grave and her husband Cliff into dangerous territory.
David E. Feldman’s story moves between “Now” and “Then” as past precedent sets the stage for present-day anguish. These movements bring Beth and her world to life in an unusual manner for a crime story in which one of the main characters dies.
At the heart of this crime is a deeper cover-up of intentions and characters whose special interests drive subterfuge and secrets.
As motives remain mercurial, the participating investigators uncover many possibilities and uncertain connections:
Cortez spoke, “It would be Mrs. Haine who has motive.”
“Unless there’s more to the picture than meets the eye,” Green added. “And there often is.”
“Well,” Gold reasoned, “she may have been there to confront the vic, but that doesn’t prove she killed her.”
“Doesn’t mean she didn’t,” Green retorted.
The conspiracy that evolves will delight readers because the action rests as strongly on character development as it does on unexpected twists and events which identify not just motivation, but bigger purposes and quandaries.
Details about forensic investigations, an evolving affair that requires secrets, and detectives Abe Gold and Barbara Cortez’s constant re-examination of evidence and individuals makes for a heady, engrossing story that proves hard to put down or predict.
Librarians and readers seeking thrillers steeped in the motivations of not just perps, but investigators and community members will find Ice Blue Murder rich in unexpected developments and insights that make for a delightfully involving whodunit.
Ice Blue MurderReturn to Index
The Lie
Jude Berman
She Writes Press
979-8896363606
$17.99
Paperback/$12.99 eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Lie-Novel-Jude-Berman/dp/B0FWZX6PVP
Readers of techno thriller fiction well know the usual progression of its formula approaches, but Jude Berman’s The Lie takes a satisfyingly different foray into metaphysical and magical realism realms with a story that cultivates the unexpected and breaks new ground. The result is original and intriguing, all in one.
The story is initially narrated in the first person by Jedd, who finds himself trapped and tied up in a tunnel. Of the four friends connected in this story, cyber-savvy Jedd is the most level-headed because “Darah can run scared. June likes to run fast and is known to charge off on tangents.”
The world is a very different place, in this future. California, still a democratic state, may not remain so for long. Darah’s mother, who was deported under the dictatorship that the U.S. became, is one example of what can happen to the innocent. Jedd feels there are too many possible enemies.
The story moves the perspectives of June, Jedd, Beers, and Darah in chapters whose headings clearly denote the shifting narrator voices. This allows the experience and perspectives of these diverse characters to dovetail.
As the tale unfolds, each character falls under the crosshairs of various opposing forces in a battle conducted in both political and psychological arenas.
Jude Berman builds her story with tension, good character development, and the injection of moral and ethical issues that emerge within the confrontation of good and evil forces:
The twins seem ready to call it quits, but I’m not. Not when we’re dealing with the likes of the Dick. I bet he doesn’t expect me to stand up to his level of evil, to push back against his cruel actions.
Between its near-future setting and the juxtaposition of different realities, the plot drives a thought-provoking focus that keeps readers thinking and wondering as various struggles unfold. From corruption to AIs, drone technology, deepfake candidates, and clever plots, The Lie’s deceptions, truths, and realizations emerge in unexpected ways.
While thriller readers will be its main audience, The Lie crosses genres to reach readers of magical realism and philosophical fantasy. Its intellectual characters are forced to reconsider their beliefs, actions, and social consequences in a series of chained events that are fast-paced and unexpected.
Librarians and readers seeking stories that break the boundaries of traditional thriller writing will find The Lie a perfect choice. Its evolving insights, from campaigns of deception to special interests, hold much food for thought for book clubs and reading groups about the future nature of oppression, freedom, and resistance.
The LieReturn to Index
Loose
Arrows
Lynn Horton
GFB
978-1-967510-54-2
$19.95
Paperback/$9.99 eBook
Website: https://lynnhorton.com/
Ordering: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GHX51GB2
Loose Arrows is a thriller that opens with Nina Abrams’s first-person reflection on the beauty of Moscow and the miracle of her four-year-old daughter Katarina, born despite her proclivity for putting work ahead of intimacy.
Her job – and life – mask her work as a CIA operative, but both seem over when her daughter is kidnapped and the Agency sends her home in a storm of grief and loss.
Fast forward seven years, when a father’s dying secret sends Nina on a journey to recover powerful nuclear weapons which could start – and win – another world war.
At first, this seems to have little to do with the missing Katarina – but in actuality it has everything to do with this, as another attack similar to the one during which Katarina vanished convinces Nina that the nukes and her missing daughter are oddly connected.
If she finds the bombs, she could recover her daughter. But she’s not the only one looking, and the clock is ticking on both.
Lynn Horton’s powerful thriller places readers alongside Nina’s first-person experiences:
I stayed out of sight: Russians were painful reminders of my daughter. The well-lubricated—vodka loosens tongues, and every other body part that can get a person in trouble— and loud conversations began in the studio, so I monitored the visits from the kitchen.
As she navigates various scenarios, possible perps, and “holy moments” of revelation, Nina discovers that everything is possible and nothing is clear. Readers joining her for this romp through secrets and discoveries will especially appreciate the logical, fast-paced developments that keep them on their toes.
Packed with unexpected twists, a sense of urgency and personal involvement, and cat-and-mouse games, the saga is simply riveting:
Two exits later, I turned off Highway 82 to implement Moscow Rule #26: “Execute a surveillance detection route designed to draw out your opponents over time.” You can’t dodge pursuers if you don’t know they’re there. The more stops you make on an SDR, the better your chances of spotting someone.
Librarians choosing Loose Arrows for their collections will find its proactive, powerful female protagonist not just believable, but admirable – the perfect force to power a thriller that navigates the underbelly of U.S. and Russian interests alike.
Filled with compelling scenarios that keep readers guessing about motivations and outcomes, Loose Arrows is a top recommendation.
Loose ArrowsReturn to Index
The
Model Patient
Lucy Ashe
Union Square &
Company
978-1454960775
$27.67 Hardcover/$18.99
Paperback/$9.99
eBook
www.unionsquareandco.com
The Model Patient represents historical thriller writing at its best, surveying the tumultuous relationship between a therapist and patient in 1960s London.
Evelyn Westbrook is seeing a psychotherapist because of nightmares that begin when she and her husband contemplate starting a family. Highly recommended Dr. Daley at first seems the perfect choice for helping her confront her past to make positive changes in her future, but his determination to return her to buried memories not only encourages her to confront her demons, but to develop an unhealthy attraction to him as he oversees her journey.
Set against the backdrop of the 1960s and its social and political turmoil, Evelyn’s journey becomes one of exploring the connections between men, women, life circumstances, and repressed past influences. These turn a model patient into an example of dangerous transference processes that neither doctor nor patient adequately grasp.
As boundaries set by the professional relationship dissolve, Evelyn and the good doctor embark upon and solidify dangerous connections that lead to some surprising changes:
Beneath the laughter, Evelyn could feel a tension loosening within her. It moved inside her, something dangerous and thrilling, full of awesome rage, and it took her to new depths that she did not know she possessed. The good girl, the dutiful daughter, lover, wife: they were slipping away. Instead, there was something darker, a monster, or a demon, rising to the surface.
Lucy Ashe does more than craft a thriller. She creates a novel of exquisite psychological tension in a dance between an evolving personality and her guide that probes the delicate balance between psyches and personal experience which influences them both.
Dialogues between doctor and patient solidify the tension and possibilities as each explores the depths of these connections:
“What more am I supposed to say? How can I give you any more of myself? It’s frightening to think that . . .” She stopped herself. She did not know if she could say the words.
He took a step towards her, his eyes penetrating. “You were about to say something else. What is it frightening to think?”
Of particular note is the venture into too-close connections between love and angst which emerge within Evelyn’s journey, creating many insights into the roots of obsession and the facets of healthy and unhealthy approaches to life, love, and coping with both.
Librarians and readers interested in works of psychological tension and suspense that entwined both elements in unexpected ways will relish how this probe of therapist and patient evolves in directions many won’t see coming.
Filled with insights about the underlying power of the professional psychotherapist, The Model Patient will also provoke astute discussions in groups ranging from book clubs to classrooms and psychotherapist circles about the nature and impact of doctor/patient relationships:
While I know that I need to refer her to someone else, that treating her myself is fraught with complexities, I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s an opportunity, both for her and for me. Sometimes, when I look at her sitting there opposite me, I hate her. I can feel all that unresolved rage, everything I tried and failed to talk about in my own psychoanalysis when I was training. This, now, is my chance.
The Model PatientReturn to Index
Murder
at
University Park
Cheryl Miller Dellasega
She Writes Press
979-8896363569
$17.99
Paperback/$12.99 eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Murder-at-University-Park-Novel/dp/B0FWZW5BXW
Murder at University Park is set in 1998 when university professor Dr. Lacey Redd, who is up for tenure, begins to suspect that her department chair’s research is questionable. When she investigates with a colleague who is then murdered, this doesn’t quash her investigation.
Readers may expect the story to open with mystery, but Cheryl Miller Dellasega chooses to build Lacey’s personal world with her best friend Sandy Kaye. This injects the personal touch of family and friendship into the story early on to build Lacey’s character and world outside of university political involvements.
The time taken to build the connection between these characters pays off nicely, immersing readers in Lacey’s quandary when something, indeed, proves very wrong (and ultimately unfixable, thanks to evolving threats). But this is only the beginning of the story.
Family health crises, personal conflicts, and professional challenges build as powerfully as the mystery component, giving Murder at University Park a rich sense of possibility and purpose as events unfold in sometimes-surprising directions readers won’t see coming.
Campus politics, crime, and special interests weave an intriguing atmosphere of higher education and ambition that immerses Lacey and her readers in unpredictable situations.
Librarians and readers interested in a mystery that delves into such topics as a female professor striving to cement her professional identity, troubled relationships between spouses, friends, and colleagues, and career-building or destroying events will find Murder at University Park an involving read that raises many discussion points that book clubs will enjoy debating and considering.
Murder at University ParkReturn to Index
Path to
Redemption
Jim Dutton
Redwood Publishing, LLC
978-1-966333-50-0
$17.99
www.redwooddigitalpublishing.com
Path to Redemption returns Nick Drummond, the protagonist of prior books Path to Justice, Path to Revenge, and Path to Atonement, to a concluding adventure in the four-part legal thriller series, following Nick into prison, where he is serving a sentence for murdering a drug cartel leader. There, he uncovers an international arms operation.
Luckily for justice, his team succeeds in getting him released. Unluckily, perhaps, for Nick, his early prison release deal involves setting aside his legal expertise to go undercover, there to journey the world in pursuit of truths about the arms organization and its terrorist activities.
Simultaneous to his pursuit of justice is his personal quest for healing which offers side-by-side forays into previously-unfamiliar worlds filled with Bedouins, an unexpected friendship with Hamza, a man he calls “brother,” and cultural encounters as he and his team pursue the truth.
Readers interested in action-packed international thrillers will find many heart-stopping moments in Nick’s confrontations, while those looking for backdrops that more than lightly incorporate cultural encounters with such ordinary moments as preparing food will find these instances of relief from the action provide realistic scenarios of cooking, traveling, and living in the unfamiliar world of the Middle East.
Other characters inject adventure and observation into Nick’s encounters:
Asta and Ove set the pylons and roped in the back of each person’s harness when it was their turn to hang over the abyss. They then, one at a time, let out the rope so that the harnessed tourist, with his feet firmly on the edge of the crevasse, was fully extended over the void. Muhammed, the interpreter for the representative of ISIS in the Greater Sahara, shouted in delight as he stretched out over the crevasse, dropping a snowball into its depths. Jerry thought, Ah, the exuberance of youth. I wouldn’t mind being that spontaneous and carefree again.
The result is a vivid pursuit of personal and political justice that places Nick in the center of a swirl of events that threaten not just his personal values and strengths, but the world.
Librarians and readers interested in a thriller that takes the time to build a vivid world-hopping backdrop and tests of moral and ethical values surrounding justice and redemption will find Path to Redemption not just thought-provoking and hard to put down, but worthy of book club recommendation.
It holds many discussion points about healing, growth, and progressive investigations of self and situations that will lead readers into many intriguing moments of reflection.
Path to RedemptionReturn to Index
Striking
Justice
Michael E. Jimerson
Elwood Jimerson Farms, LLC
979-8-9986605-3-5
$4.99
eBook/$21.99
Paperback
https://www.amazon.com/Striking-Justice-J-Kane-Mystery-ebook/dp/B0DCXQYCNW
Striking Justice is an E.J. Kane mystery that takes place decades after a beauty queen’s murder involves an innocent man and a young lawyer who manipulates justice to further his career.
Disgraced former ranger E.J. Kane becomes immersed in this cold case while pursuing his own innocence, with his daughter Sharla also drawn to dangerous matters that have not been laid to rest by past events and the results of a warped judicial decision.
Michael E. Jimerson’s personal connection to these fictional events stems from his own thirty years in pursuit of truth in Texas, which lends a realistic atmosphere to the fiction which considers how matters of court and heart intersect in unusual ways.
While Striking Justice is the third book in a trilogy, it can be obtained as a powerful standalone novel, which will delight libraries seeking series additions that can function either way.
Readers may not anticipate drone attacks, the follies of Carol Ash who, despite her financial resources, remains vulnerable to her own anger when scorned, or the injection of daughter Sharla’s personal struggles which lead to bigger-picture confrontations and scenarios - but all these facets entwine in a survey of justice, redemption, and truth which invite readers to reconsider their own life approaches and influences.
Texas culture and suspenseful moments draw readers into a vivid story of justice that will also readily appeal to book clubs interested in thrillers and mysteries steeped in accounts of courage, perseverance, and discovery.
Filled with exciting twists and reflective moments created by the intersection of characters whose lives build upon ideals and past and present dilemmas, Striking Justice is more than a mystery, but a powerful survey of flawed individuals and systems that do their best against all odds.
Striking JusticeReturn to Index
Trafficking
in
Sex, Secrets and Lies
Trisha Sugarek
Writer at Play
9781687000057 $6.95 eBook
www.writeratplay.com
Trafficking in Sex, Secrets and Lies follows Detectives Jack O’Roarke and Stella Garcia from a case which seems to involve a typical homicide into the underbelly of sex trafficking efforts that result in the deaths of young girls. Their probe reveals a network of influence that is powerful and seemingly immune to the law.
Jack and Stella harbor different investigative strengths – and a few secrets which may explain why Jack is willing to risk both their lives to get at the truth.
As the story unfolds, a dangerous undercover probe that Stella resists embraces them both in a deadly series of events that reveal further undercurrents of involvement and shocking possibilities.
Trisha Sugarek crafts a powerfully compelling thriller investigation that follows a myriad of characters drawn into this dangerous game.
Others step into the bigger picture, from young handsome groomer Geoff Wetzstein to lawyers who speak of coercion and liability, lending extra dimensions of legal and ethical concern to unfolding events.
Sugarek weaves together all these facets of the trafficking investigation to create a moving story that will entertain, enlighten, and give food for thought to a wide audience.
The social and ethical ramifications of Trafficking in Sex, Secrets and Lies will please book clubs and reading groups seeking entries into higher-level thinking, while the personal dilemmas the two detectives face during the course of their pursuits will attract thriller readers who enjoy stories wrapped in personal challenge.
Libraries that choose Trafficking in Sex, Secrets and Lies for all these attributes and the fact that it’s a impressively involving read will find it easy to recommend to a wide audience.
Trafficking in Sex, Secrets and LiesReturn to Index
A
Weaponized Mind
Bruce M. Perrin
Mind Sleuth Publications
978-1-955114-13-4
$3.99
(eBook);
$16.99 (paperback)
Website: www.Brucemperrin.com
Ordering:
https://books2read.com/u/31NDJn
A
Weaponized Mind
is the
ninth book in the Mind Sleuth series and will delight prior fans who
have enjoyed stories of the interaction between modern-day technology
and human thought, reasoning, and behavior. Unfortunately, sometimes
that interplay turns toxic.
Rebecca Marte, of Marte
Investigative Services, tackles a case brought by new young client
Lauren Beckwith involving the murder of Wilford DeBeer, the president
of DeBeer Wealth Management, and his killer, her
cousin Henry
Jansen.
But while the question of Jansen’s role in the killing of DeBeer is open and shut, Lauren is baffled by her cousin’s motive for murder. What drove him to kill a man he had never even met? But before she could ask, he, too, was found dead.
Were Jansen’s services bought by someone who profited from DeBeer’s death, and then the assassin was killed to keep his employer in the shadows? Or was Jansen somehow coerced by one of DeBeer’s detractors, then murdered? Or, as the police speculated, was Jansen simply the victim of a random mugging gone wrong?
Rebecca’s slate of possible suspects is vast, but the case against any of them is convoluted and constantly shifting. No one is who they first seem.
Against the backdrop of this baffling case, Rebecca realizes that it’s time to make some difficult decisions about the rest of her life; her long-time boyfriend won’t keep proposing forever. But will these questions become a fatal distraction?
Bruce M. Perrin’s juxtaposition of science and technology, PI investigative processes, and psychological discovery creates a thriller exquisite in its survey not just of murder, but of hidden human motives and how they are shaped by technology.
Libraries selecting A Weaponized Mind can highly recommend it to thriller/mystery readers as well as those interested in our ever-growing understanding of technology’s effects on human behavior. It will spark book club debates about subjects as varied as personal validation by a virtual community to doom scrolling on social media.
A Weaponized MindReturn to Index
Avengers of the Sun
K.W.
Davis
Current
Words Publishing
978-1-957224-70-1
$19.99
US (paperback);
$4.99
Kindle/ePub and audiobook
www.currentwords.com
Avengers of the Sun is a historical novel steeped in the ancient past which opens in a small Roman villa near Colonia Glevum in the Britannia Summer of 333 CE. The prologue introduces narrator Lupis, whose father was a Roman centurion who served in Persia and served under the emperor Diocletian.
As he reflects on historical events, readers receive an effortless backdrop that requires no prior familiarity to make the story accessible:
The true history of the Milvian Bridge battle cannot be told. After Nicaea, the new religion’s leaders wanted those war tales buried. Brave deeds were scraped away, obliterating every mention made by those of us who fought along the Tiber. True heroes went unsung, erased by fire and sword, replaced by slavering secondhand accounts written by Lactantius and Eusebius, devotees of Constantine, and quick to do his bidding. Those of us who lived the truth knew that if one dared speak it aloud, he would be no more.
As a veteran of the conflict, he’s in a fine position to narrate the story of Aetius, Constantine’s war with Maxentius, religious sentiments and arguments about man’s ultimate free will, and more.
Historical novel readers with a special interest in ancient Roman affairs receive an intricate story not just of struggles and battles, but the religious, social, and political perspectives that drive a host of participants to make difficult, controversial decisions about the course of their lives.
Characters include Lupis of Legio XV, members of the Praetorian Guard, servant Senara, Emperor Maxentius, and more. Each represent different levels of social and political connection.
The events that turn Senara into a leader and challenge participants to change their frames of reference about devotion, trustworthy companions and causes, and the wellsprings of wealth and power’s connections and quandaries creates bigger-picture thinking not just about Roman times, but modern social and political dilemmas.
As Lupis reveals the true story of the Milvian Bridge battle to his grandchildren and future generations, readers receive a powerful story marked by reflections about finding and embracing truth and purpose in life.
Libraries seeking historical novels set in ancient times that hold many lessons for modern readers but require no prior familiarity with these historical events will find Avengers of the Sun an enlightening read containing many surprising passages that can be applied to contemporary issues.
Avengers of the SunReturn to Index
Being
Laramie
Buchanan: Another
Boulder Girl
Cynthia
L. Clark
Outskirts
Press
978-1977290427
$24.95
Website:
https://cynthialclark.com
Ordering:
https://www.amazon.com/Being-Laramie-Buchanan-Another-Boulder/dp/1977290426
Being Laramie Buchanan: Another Boulder Girl is a coming-of-age story that adds to the Boulder Girl series while standing nicely on its own.
Laramie Buchanan enters her twenties full of enthusiasm about what life will bring. A series of setbacks and challenges test her enthusiasm, shaking the upward trajectory she had been enjoying in her teens. Suddenly faced with mystery, heartbreak, uncertain relationships, and friendships tested, Laramie begins to wonder how she can ever create and maintain a meaningful romance.
The story opens with Laramie’s graduation, which is missing the one element which would have made it a perfect occasion - the handsome gentleman who had wooed her. She’s proud of her accomplishments, but without Vick to cheer her on, suddenly they seem hollow.
So does her life, as Laramie ventures into realms she has no training to handle and discovers that uncomfortable situations permeate daily affairs in many different ways.
As Chance Griffin enters the bigger picture to introduce mystery and new possibilities, Cynthia L. Clark shifts the viewpoint from a focus on Laramie to Chance and others whose life-changing moments add to the mix of mental challenge and healing that swirl between characters and situations.
Prior readers of Clark’s series will appreciate how these lives dovetail, how characters expand or are built up in Being Laramie Buchanan, and how the special interests and encounters of each lend to a bigger picture of life and love that pull not just Laramie but those around her into new directions.
As events swirl full circle (Vick has never completely left the picture, but returns with a vengeance), new realizations push each character to evolve in ways that readers will find delightfully unpredictable.
Many of the undercurrents of modern living, including violence, buffet the characters. Readers interested in how these influences contribute to revised perceptions of what love means and brings will find many moments of contemplation in Being Laramie Buchanan.
Libraries seeing popularity with Clark’s prior series titles will want to add this to their collections, recommending it and others to book clubs and readers interested in stories about how men and women adjust to new adulthood, navigate revised lives, handle mysteries, promises, and danger, and ultimately contribute to the wild ride of their twenties.
Being Laramie Buchanan: Another Boulder GirlReturn to Index
Cherry
Creek
Linda
Griffin
The Wild
Rose Press Inc.
978-1-5092-6593-0
$2.99
EBook/$5.99
Audiobook
Website:
https://www.lindagriffinauthor.com/cherry_creek.htm
Ordering:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX2TH5Q5
Cherry Creek is a novel set in 1850s Ohio that opens with a fiancée’s death, prompting Eileen to say that she is “free” of John – a statement that puzzles the narrator, her younger sister Molly. Years later, her sister’s words come back to haunt her own life as she faces similar limited choices and comes to understand their impact.
Young adult as well as adult audiences will appreciate this tale of Molly’s evolution, which presents her initial quandary over her sister’s changed future:
I puzzled over those words for a long time, for years. Was John such a tyrant, or was love itself? Was loving someone, planning your life with him, so terrible? Was being enslaved by love so fearful a thing?
As she marries, leaves her husband Andrew after realizing the follies of her youth, and embarks on a journey that brings her new possibilities as well as regrets, Molly finds herself still bowing to the visions and fortunes of a man rather than her own desires:
After several days of sharing the journey in such close proximity, I knew him better than I knew Andrew, better than I wanted to. He had tricked me into this by sharing my foolish dreams, and even worse, he clung to his optimism, still certain his fortune lay in yonder, beckoning Eldorado.
Her search for meaning, musings about her decision over Andrew and the possibilities they could have had if he’d taken some of the adventurous steps of her travel companion Hugh, and the possible future possible creates a moving story of travel and realization:
If we could have traveled here together and started a new life on our own, what heaven it would have been. It was too late for that, of course. I had severed my relationship with the MacLeiths. But if only Andrew knew what an opportunity was here… With the equipment he could transport from Ohio and the knowledge and experience he had acquired at the mill, he would be an important citizen indeed.
Readers interested in a vivid novel about a 1800s woman on the cusp of changing times and her own revised possibilities will find Cherry Creek a winner. Libraries will find it easy to recommend to leisure readers looking for vivid female characters set in historical times where women didn’t have many choices, but often made the most of what cards they held to observe and realize new opportunities against all odds.
Cherry CreekReturn to Index
The
Connection
in Everything
Rich
Marcello
HarvardTown
Press
979-8-9870885-7-9
$19.99
paperback,
$24.99 Hardcover, $9.99 Kindle
Website:
www.richmarcello.com
Ordering: https://www.amazon.com/Connection-Everything-Rich-Marcello-ebook/dp/B0FKBN7RNN
The Connection in Everything is a novel about how sixteen-year-old visionary genius Amaro Marzano observes connections in what he learns in school, but feels his family life is filled with disconnections he cannot seem to overcome. Thus, the library and his school become refuges where he can expand his mind beyond the limits imposed by family members and structure.
Enter two new connections in the form of a mentor and a possible romance, both of which shake Amaro’s world and lead him into new possibilities for reinventing his life and his place in it.
A romantic component opens the novel with a vivid observation:
At Elm Park, I was totally taken by the magician-mime, the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
Even though, like a black hole, his father pulls his attention away from deliverer, message, and family dynamics, Amaro continues the evolution of becoming a petulant, rebellious teen as the May festival winds up and he confronts his domineering father and his own intellectual and social isolation:
I was lonely and pretty much struggled with it every day.
As he enters into a relationship with Ginnevra Poppoli that gives him the added power to continue to grow and confront his family, Amaro finds the intersections between mentor, girlfriend, and family drawing closer together in unpredictable ways.
Rich Marcello outlines the life of a boy who considers rules and how and when to break them, edicts for his future, and connections between different age groups that assume disparate roles in Amaro’s life.
When his family steps up to forbid mentor David Butler’s influence, it’s too late – Amaro is becoming an adult with all the choices, consequences, rejections, and rebellions this brings.
The result is a coming-of-age story especially rich in portraying the dynamics of an Italian family, which places an evolving family crisis at the heart of the growth process which will intrigue a wide audience.
Librarians and readers seeking stories about teens who step into maturity with the aid of outside influencers and ideas will find The Connection in Everything poses questions, answers, and experiences in such a way that opportunities and vulnerabilities become thoroughly absorbing.
Laced with topics and ramifications that invite debate, The Connection in Everything is also recommended for book clubs seeking coming-of-age experiences nicely rooted in family dynamics.
The Connection in EverythingReturn to Index
Debt
Wade
Parrish
Picket
Fire
979-8-9917614-3-7
$17.95
www.Picketfire.com/shop
Debt is the satirical comedy of two lawyers who scheme to escape their financial issues, cultivating a wry tone of inspection that lends a unique voice to the evolving saga:
Bill’s midlevel killed himself last weekend. Seemed a little off Thursday. Told Bill late Friday he’d be out of pocket, dealing with some personal matters and could Bill cover? Thanks! Client needed a .zip of Board consents and some vendor novations. Just updating the dates in the precedent docs, really, swapping out the entities, reordering the Whereas… Now Therefore Be It Resolved. No one who goes out this way leaves behind much.
From bright ideas and legal divisions to friends who can joke about dire situations, Wade Parrish creates a series of encounters and dialogues between disparate characters whose lives dovetail in unexpected ways:
Albie slept next to a Buzz Lightyear nightlight that looked two decades old and had that layer of irremovable grime you only see at foreclosure yard sales and deep country Goodwills. All of this was sort of annoying to Bill, but Albie was probably his best friend and so it was also very endearing.
“Are you an assassin?” asked Albie without turning from his screen.
“I’m a lawyer,” said Bill.
As lives and ironies coalesce, the novel spins not just a satisfyingly unpredictable story, but an atmosphere that ties neatly into each character’s experiences and personality:
Albie lived out in Far Rockaway and Bill thought Far Rockaway was an appropriate place for Albie to live. There was something wrong with the streets out there. A damp wretchedness, even in the summer. A wet November Sunday juiced Far Rock, compounding the principal of its essence and as the train crashed between stops Bill couldn’t name, he felt the wretchedness swell.
Deaths, negotiations, legal political wrangling, and Bill and K’s evolving relationship and pending marriage all dovetail in a story filled with ironic inspection and discoveries that juxtapose debt concerns with murder and indiscretions conducted on all sides.
Libraries seeking novels original in tone and surprising in their developments which contrast legal shenanigans with moral and ethical predicaments will relish how Debt weaves psychological and legal inspection with murder, love, and ethical concerns.
Replete with surprising twists many won’t see coming, Debt is a vivid, unpredictable escapade that’s hard to put down.
DebtReturn to Index
Elco
Parks
Sandro
Laudadio
AOS
Publishing
978-1-990496-99-8
$24.96
Paperback/$7.25 eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Elco-Parks-Sandro-Laudadio/dp/1990496997
Elco Parks is a satirical novel set in 2008, where the new religious group the Striationists find their ideals and unusual perceptions of spirituality challenged by scandal which arises from their own ranks.
Their legal counsel, Carlo Buonsante, encounters a group of eccentric believers, con artists, international influencers, and unexpected challenges to justice when he finds himself embroiled in conflicts that stem not just from judicial confrontations, but personal values.
The first note is about the tone and delivery of social observation embedded in Carlo’s encounters, which offer delightful, wry inspections of and contrasts between cultures:
It was the commercials in America that startled him the most. Canadian commercials were characteristically wry; Italian ones most often appealed to an uneasy mix of an imagined bucolic past and sensuous sexuality. Shapely female rear ends were used to market everything from ricotta to floor wax. Here, they initially seemed almost comically earnest, but eventually demonstrated their inevitable underlying guile. Advertisements for prescription medications at first touted their miraculous benefits, soon to be replaced by a hushed, male monotone in the background that enumerated dire afflictions that would befall people foolish enough to put the product into their mouths.
Sandro Laudadio’s ability to juxtapose and inspect the ironic lends to a fine consideration of justice, appeasing crooks, scientific and social reflection, and a comedy of errors involving power, relationships, and ideals.
From fun reflections such as how women on exercise bikes could attach them to power-producing sources for maximum gain to strange schemes that draw together a host of incongruent personalities that seem to shoot themselves in the foot more often than not, Carlo’s venture into financial and social eccentricity creates a romp through British Columbia’s communities. This offers biting observations backed by emotional draws and comical, albeit dark characters.
Libraries seeking outstanding contemporary examples of satirical observations of justice, culture, and community will find Elco Parks the perfect blend of dystopian thriller and social examination. It offers books clubs and readers plenty of fodder for reflection and amusement.
Elco ParksReturn to Index
The Fern
Flower
Kathleen
Shoop
Independently
Published
9798247241553
$4.99 eBook
www.kshoop.com
The Fern Flower is a historical novel that focuses on early 1900s Russian dancer Mila, who is preparing for her debut with the Imperial Russian Ballet. The introductory narrator of her epic story is unusual – the first-person observer is the moon, “...called Grusha by the Belovs. And I’m watching, spilling light rays over the snow-packed French Embankment, illuminating their way, safeguarding their steps.”
Political, social, cultural, and psychological observations thus evolve from an unusual perspective from the novel’s opening lines, drawing readers with metaphorical flourish and descriptive, intriguing passages that require no prior interest in either turn of the century Russian affairs or ballet, but later chapters assume a more familiar third-person perspective as Mila’s world shifts and her ambitions and perceptions change with it.
Readers won’t expect the mystery that swirls into revolutionary action as Mila and her peers evolve the innovative ballet The Fern Flower, stepping into new roles that juxtapose with her life with beloved nanny Lottie, the challenges that emerge from family revelations and secrets, and her own mandate to keep some herself:
Mila had learned to keep secrets, to hold them tight. If she didn’t remind herself, she might forget they were lies at all.
As Russian ways and superstitions permeate daily life’s changes, Mila faces many changes, from departures and loss to the uplifting revelations of honing her dancing abilities:
For that moment, Mila felt as though she herself had shed a cocoon, that she’d become a dancer, one who pulled the audience along on her silken thread, teasing with silence then filling them with crashing, booming glee.
Through all these personal and social changes, Kathleen Shoop focuses on a story steeped in the Russian landscape and replete with the fates of ballerinas, politicians, and ordinary people, bringing to life the various facets and forces not just of Mila’s world, but Russian society in general.
These lend moments of depth, perception, and understanding to the times even for readers with little prior interest in or familiarity with Russian history and culture.
As chaos embraces issues, egos, and ambitions, Shoop captures the transformation of a young girl’s world in a manner all kinds of readers will find fascinating – even those normally not attracted to historical fiction.
Librarians can thus highly recommend The Fern Flower’s wide reach to audiences who will relish the story for its insights into Russian ballet, politics, and society as presented through the eyes and experiences of a young girl who comes of age in a new age of revolutionary opportunity and angst.
As for the moon – it comes full circle to influence, abet, and reflect events in a satisfyingly original manner that readers won’t see coming.
The Fern FlowerReturn to Index
Fetish
Jamey
Gittings
Atilla
Press
979-8-9921827-8-1
$32.99
Hardcover
www.attilapress.com
Fetish is a novel about magic – but that doesn’t mean that it deserves a place on the fantasy shelf. It utilizes Native belief as a backdrop for a story which centers on an old cigar box of Zuni fetishes which sends Tasha Kor Grabil on a journey of discovery far from the familiar financial circles she has made her foundation because she wanted “something clean.”
The contents of the box, recognizable from her youth, spark thoughts of her now-turbulent relationship with her father, the cerebral palsy which has marked her life and opportunities, and the odyssey she undertakes after her father’s death.
Jamey Gittings delves deeply into Zuni tradition as Tasha’s story evolves. He moves into magical realism as Tasha’s unexpected transformation and education about employing the fetishes leads her to confront a sheriff unwilling to label her father’s death as anything but a suicide, a search for an obsidian knife and fetishes, and a journey that ultimately pushes her back to the womb in a vastly altered reality.
Readers of Fetish will be those who delight in magical encounters, unexpected confrontations with self and a revised world, and metaphors for “the development of both an individual and a society.”
Much food for thought is injected in the course of Tasha’s adventure and revelations, which move from insights on disability and ability to adaptive processes which trap her in a metaphorical realm and reality.
The result is a novel that may be difficult to categorize, but which will lead librarians to highly recommend Fetish to a wide audience, whether they be readers of Native tradition and myths, those interested in the proactive efforts of a woman who struggles to reinvent her world, or readers intrigued by the intersection of ancient wisdom and myth and modern society.
FetishReturn to Index
The
Fourth Cross
Spike
Adams
CJ
Sparrow Publication
979-8-218-51294-1
$4.99
eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Cross-Spike-Adams-ebook/dp/B0FBS8LH5Q
The Fourth Cross is a story of miracles, racism, revenge, and the abuse of power. It weaves together all these elements in the story of young Tyrene Horn and his mother, who face the fallout from a day of bullying and a lifetime of prejudice.
When Tyrene explodes during policeman’s son Wally’s latest cruelty, he finds himself facing not peer judgment, but the brutality of adults and the simmering evil of a racist society that comes down on his actions like a ton of bricks.
His fretting mother has already lost one son to violence. Is she about to lose another?
Spike Adams profiles satisfyingly disparate characters that reinforce various levels of American experience with prejudice and violence on all sides, from within the police community to lawyers, Black professionals, and neighborhood residents who band together to combat repression in their own ways. Young men coming of age are forced to choose sides and battles in a simmering stew of repression.
Adams touches upon judicial and prison systems, networks of good old boys and church community support systems, and individuals required to make extraordinary choices to either support or try to quash racism in their lives.
This broad swatch of lives and perspectives lends a realistic and thoroughly absorbing tone to the plot as events lead to a conclusion at once thoroughly logical and completely unexpected.
Libraries and readers seeking novels that explore racism and prejudice from both sides of the picture, yet retain a bigger-picture perspective on its impact, will welcome The Fourth Cross’ many thought-provoking moments of revelation.
The characters often form unexpected relationships, grow in different ways as prejudice buffets their community, and reflect challenges all too familiar to the Black landscape as systems designed to protect instead engrain their own belief systems over notions of right and wrong.
The Fourth Cross is especially highly recommended reading for book clubs and groups discussing the rise and incarnations of prejudice in all kinds of communities. Its ability to contrast the personalities of a variety of players whose choices and actions affect the bigger picture makes for a story hard to put down and intensely thought-provoking in its outcome and observations.
The Fourth CrossReturn to Index
Gandy
Dancer
Doc
Richter
Atmosphere
Press
979-8901742303
$17.99
Paperback,
$30.99 Hardcover, $8.99 ebook
www.atmospherepress.com
Gandy Dancer is set in Alaska during World War II and tells of seventeen-year-old Josh Sparks, who works building the Alaska Northern Railway. This isn’t a story of his efforts alone, but a serial killer who stalks women through that wilderness and its small communities, and what happens when Josh runs headlong into him.
The first note about Doc Richter’s story is how thoroughly it immerses its readers in Alaska’s backdrop. Richter takes the time to paint this frontier world from the novel’s opening lines:
Clouds flew high over the Kenai Mountains and blocked the summertime sun from the high-up glaciers and
sparsely-treed, stone-covered tall peaks. The green slopes of the lower mountains were dark outlines against the sky. The cold breeze blew hard over Resurrection Bay and scattered the town’s wood and coal smoke in fast-moving streaks.
Invigorated by the sights, smells, colors and nature of Alaska, readers are carried into Josh’s experiences of this world in a manner which lends to appreciating its atmosphere, weather-driven choices, and the special challenges which face the frontiersmen who operate in its milieu.
The killer (“The Wolf”)’s perspective evolves alongside Josh’s as Josh worries about his family, works his job as a gandy dancer alongside his coworkers on the rail line, and faces the ongoing challenges of a rugged Alaskan environment.
Insights about frontier resources, justice, and weather coalesce in a powerful blend of investigation and Alaskan wilderness challenges:
“With the Army gone, we’re back to dealing with this ourselves. I can’t believe we haven’t nabbed the bastard. Serial killers normally focus on specific traits or ages, but this guy is all over the map. No way to know who he will strike next. The paper will print an article today, and I’m having bulletins posted again. I wanted to let you know.”
“Thanks,” Bud said. “Inform me if I can help with anything.”
“I will. Crap, we still don’t know how he’s getting around. Car? Rail? Boat?”
Readers interested in murder mysteries and serial killings set rugged wilderness towns will find Gandy Dancer a vigorous novel of discovery and action that proves hard to put down.
Packed with interludes of romance and family affairs tempered by struggles with danger and Alaska’s unique environment, Gandy Dancer will appeal to a wide audience.
Gandy DancerReturn to Index
Gershwin's
Bess
Lisa K.
Winkler
Atmosphere
Press
979-8901741979
$8.99 eBook
www.atmospherepress.com
Gershwin's Bess is a novel grounded in the competitive atmosphere of Julliard, the determination of soprano singer Anne Wiggins Brown to succeed in the hardcore music world as she navigates the opera milieu of the late 1920s–1930s, and her involvement in composer George Gershwin’s determination to write a controversial opera that features “Negroes” as stars.
She not only embraces her role as Gershwin’s first “Bess,” but dictates to him the boundaries of her character’s performance and depiction as she steps into a world that challenges her music and social status alike.
Lisa K. Winkler captures Anne’s world and ambitions with a powerful eye to depicting the influences and challenges that contributed to Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” - but her novel does more than capture musical moments. Readers experience New York City through newcomer Anne’s eyes:
Groups of older men playing chess and checkers atop old wooden crates, children scurrying like mice playing stick ball and tag in the street, hopscotch on the sidewalk, women sitting on stoops, smoking cigarettes, gossiping. A man sold baked sweet potatoes from a cart. The smell tingled her nose, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten much all day.
As she falls in love with Theo, moves between Baltimore and New York milieus, and tries to remain optimistic in the face of encroaching winter and the Depression, readers absorb the underlying influences on Gershwin’s times and Anne’s choices. Especially astute are the moments in which she reflects on the outcome of her audition and participation in a revolutionary new opera:
To stay focused, she read and reread Porgy, the story of a crippled street beggar living in the black tenements of Charleston, South Carolina. She found the dialogue difficult as the characters spoke Gullah, a Creole dialect. Envisioning an opera, she hummed fragments of the songs she had sung with Gershwin, admitting to herself more than once that she enjoyed the long audition, his lavish apartment, and sitting next to the eminent composer. Yet maybe it was too different for her. Her classical training developed her voice for traditional operatic, soprano roles. She knew her parents, especially her father, would not approve.
Libraries and readers seeking novels steeped in a sense of times, place, musical developments, and the intersection of prejudice and art will find Gershwin's Bess a thoroughly absorbing recreation of the story of Anne Wiggins Brown, her relationship with George Gershwin, and the creation of Porgy and Bess. It envisions her story, the scenes and considerations that likely dictated her life and choices, and the real people that occupied her world.
There are no books about Anne Brown, but this novel’s reimagining of her life embraces all facets of the times and its influences to create a memorable, thought-provoking survey based on real events and fictional possibilities that are vividly portrayed and thoroughly thought-provoking.
Gershwin's BessReturn to Index
The
Horse Who
Became My Eyes
Patrick
D. Caffrey
Precocity
Press
978-1972561003
$18.95
Paperback/$9.95
eBook
www.precocitypress.com
The Horse Who Became My Eyes is a novel of disability, adaptation, and horses. It will reach horse-loving young adults and adults who enjoy vivid stories of courage and resilience.
Farm boy Keenan Kelly is slowly losing his vision. With this comes a renewed appreciation for what he can see of his world and, especially, for unwanted horse Lucy, with whom he bonds.
Lucy proves a centering force in his rehabilitation and engagement with life as Keenan adapts to his slowly shifting world and future possibilities and includes Lucy in his mandate for regaining not his vision, but his life.
Unlike other stories about sudden blindness, Keenan’s observation of a slowly-evolving series of limitations offers a different take on the adaptation process:
As I grew older, the challenges I faced due to my visual impairment became more pronounced as my condition, retinitis pigmentosa, progressed. Simple tasks that others took for granted, such as navigating through the farmyard or finding my way in unfamiliar places, required immense mental energy and determination. The whispers of pity and then people talking to me much louder than at normal conversation volume only intensified my sense of isolation.
Patrick D. Caffrey uses the first person to cement these experiences, leading readers into Keenan’s world with special consideration of the impact not just of blindness, but its perception by others.
He adds realistic notes, from family worries about farm and parental health to Keenan’s attraction to a girl and the roots of public opinion which offer additional barriers to his goal-setting capabilities:
One of the most persistent challenges I faced was societal prejudice. Many people in our small community doubted my ability to ride a horse, let alone develop a deep bond with one. Whispers of “He’s blind; he can’t handle a horse” or “It’s too dangerous for him” echoed through the town, often reaching my ears. These comments, though hurtful, only fueled my determination to prove the naysayers wrong — something, I must admit, I liked to do.
The result is a different take on disability and navigating a changing world providing plenty of food for thought about all kinds of subjects, from adaptation and positivity to the importance of different forms of vision and connection in the world.
Librarians who choose The Horse Who Became My Eyes for young adult reading will find it easy to recommend not just to YA leisure readers, but adults as well as book clubs looking for vivid fiction about disability, rehabilitation, and growth.
The Horse Who Became My EyesReturn to Index
House
of Teeth
Anne
Shaw
Heinrich
Speaking
Volumes,
LLC
979-8-89022-457-6
$5.99
eBook
https://www.amazon.com/House-Teeth-Women-Paradise-County/dp/B0GYTRS77Z
House of Teeth is the third book in the Women of Paradise County novel series, continuing the story of Jules Marks and his five younger sisters. Their parents are now in jail and relatives have arrived to care for them, so they can relax into their lives and stop taking on the responsibilities of adults. Or, can they?
Forces soon emerge to test their newfound family stability as new trials begin, both emotional and physical, that propel Jules into early adulthood with moral, ethical, and social challenges he feels ill-equipped to handle. Alongside the return of familiar characters from God Bless the Child and Violet is Blue is the introduction of newcomer Wendy Saunders, whose mother “used to openly fantasize about all the things she was going to do once my father died” and bitterly regrets her ill health and choices made before she finally passes.
Wendy joins the Marks siblings in navigating small-town life in Poulson, trying to identify and hone her role there and in life in general as she and others test their abilities and face what comes their way.
It’s easy for readers to become immersed in these characters and their lives. Anne Shaw Heinrich delves into their motivations, dreams, desires, and perceptions so richly that each character, from Margaret Burns to Wendy and Jules, come to life as they consider love, illness, family ties, and more. The lyrical language Heinrich employs is the bait readers will grasp as the currents of Poulson carry them into these lives:
How on this good Earth did I end up with two people who loved one another like that? If I had not seen it with my own eyes and been pulled into their glow to warm myself by their fire, I would never have believed that a love like this was possible.
While House of Teeth can operate as a standalone novel, it would be a shame to acquire or present it sans the supportive strength of its predecessors. Each book expands characters, small-town milieu, and the kinds of life experiences that demand growth and response. The stories build upon one another to expand the characters and these processes.
Librarians and readers seeking a warm, vivid story of family and community relationships and changes will welcome how House of Teeth captures circumstances of disparate lives connected by love, happenstance, and the effort to not just survive, but grow.
House of Teeth ’s warm embrace offers just the right tone and ticket for a revealing, involving saga of building life connections.
House of TeethReturn to Index
Remember
Me Not
Sherry
V. Ostroff
Independently
Published
9798196832840
$17.99
Paperback
www.amazon.com
Remember Me Not is a novel that brings medieval times to life as it traverses the landscape of early 15th century England and the circumstances of a Jewish woman who converts to Catholicism in order to survive. The devout Lady Anchoress is sealed in a room, only her basic needs for food and drink met until she goes to heaven.
Healer Gracia’s herbal knowledge weaves into the story as ancient remedies and lore contast with the prejudice of English people who are superstitious about the healing arts.
Insights about these treatments and their applications blend with reflections about treating men, women, and all kinds of ailments:
I spent most of my days treating female disorders concerning conception and birth. I often heard complaints of heavy bleeding or menses that were erratic, painful, or both. Some suffered from back and joint pain or headache during their time. These ailments could often be alleviated with an herbal tea made with tansy, shepherd’s purse, blind nettle, or lady’s mantle. Barrenness was more difficult to treat.
Sherry V. Ostroff creates a powerful historical novel that surveys the lives of the English Jews who converted under duress if they were to survive. It surveys the years before it became common to expel them from not just England, but France, Austria, Portugal, and other nations.
Much research went into creating this novel, but its characters, atmosphere, and concerns require no prior historical familiarity with the times.
As healers, gatekeepers, relationships and deaths evolve, Remember Me Not proves a powerfully captivating survey of a period of English history many readers won’t previously know about, making the story thoroughly engrossing and especially attractive to readers of historical fiction.
Libraries seeking a moving story of religious encounters between different people will find Remember Me Not packed with thought-provoking moments that invite reading groups and individuals to consider prejudice, faith, and the intersection of lives directed by opportunity and the will to survive.
Remember Me NotReturn to Index
The
Shape of His
World: Holding Them
Both
Kristen
A. Peters
ISA
Therapy, LLC
979-8233711534
$25.95
https://www.amazon.com/Shape-World-Holding-Them-Both/dp/B0GW9MFVH9?nsdOptOutParam=true
The Shape of His World: Holding Them Both is a literary novel about mother Iris, who is raising two sons who are autistic in dissimilar ways. Their different ways of perceiving the world as they grow and a mother’s dance in choreographing the worlds in a manner tolerable to them as they mature makes for a story rich in insights that is especially highly recommended to anyone familiar with or seeking a better understanding of autism’s impact on a family.
Kristen A. Peters offerings striking contrasts from the start:
From the outside, it might have looked like control. From the inside, it was choreography. Dylan hummed as he ate, a low sound that vibrated somewhere between his chest and the table. Jesse rocked slightly in his chair, eyes fixed on the far corner of the room where two walls met at a sharp angle. Iris sat between them—not physically, but attentively—tracking cues, anticipating needs before they could sharpen into distress.
A good morning comes not from outside forces, but tends to be because “nothing has gone wrong.” Vivid inspections capture this and other driving forces in Iris’s life, but it’s the weaving together of family emotions and dynamics which makes this novel so provocative:
Jesse watched him like he was watching weather. Iris watched Jesse like she was watching the future. And somewhere underneath the fatigue, underneath the calculations, Iris felt the edge of that question press again—quiet, dangerous, forming itself without her permission. Not a prayer. Not yet. But the shape of something that would become one: Let me understand what I’m missing. She didn’t say it out loud. She just kept breathing. And kept counting.
As the story moves into circumstances that outsiders impact without quite understanding, topics move from contrasts within the family to the forces that buffet it with manifestation determinations, placement options, and perceptions of the boys which layer judgment without true understanding – which almost thwarts Iris’s own wisdom in accepting and raising her children:
Iris watched the rocking and felt herself resist the old urge to make it smaller, to make it quieter, to make it less visible. The old part of her still wanted to edit Dylan for the world, even when the world wasn’t there. The new part of her could feel the cost of that editing. Rocking was not the problem. Rocking was the solution.
More so than most fiction about family autism, The Shape of His World: Holding Them Both provides a powerful study in all kinds of contrasts both within and outside of the family circle, creating a powerful series of insights not just about autism, but parenting choices.
Librarians and readers seeking exceptional works that will provoke many discussions within families, book clubs, reading groups, and psychological and parenting circles will want to place The Shape of His World: Holding Them Both high on their lists of “must have” recommended reading.
Its powerful examination of living with autism embraces the entire family and those outside of it as values and child-rearing challenges come to light.
The Shape of His World: Holding Them BothReturn to Index
Sleeps
With Wolves
Neil
Bockoven
Rare
Bird Books
9781644285831 $28.00
https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Neil-Bockoven/258798631
Sleeps With Wolves is a standalone novel that follows and ties into Neil Bockoven’s prior prehistoric world creations, Moctu and the Mammoth People and The People Eaters. It takes place more than a decade later, capturing now-grown hybrid Elka’s world and new trials.
Elka, half Neanderthal, half Homo sapiens, has always lived on the outer periphery of her tribe. An attack that kills her brother propels her to leave the tribe on a course of vengeance which, in turn, challenges her very survival as she enters a snowy milieu. The fourteen-year-old confronts the world and her despair over clashing tribes and peoples:
There’s just too many… Too many have been killed or wounded on both sides, so something needs to change. I’m just… so tired.
Nuri, Moctu, and others emerge from previous stories to complement Elka’s struggles with her own inclination to stoke the fires of hate. When she is captured and slated for sacrifice, Elka confronts Pele and Mia, only to discover that love, hate, and understanding sometimes coexist too close for comfort.
Bockoven does an outstanding job of capturing the settings, motivations, disparate tribes, and individual pursuits of this ancient world. He creates a particularly intriguing character in with hybrid Elka, who not only doesn’t fit neatly into either Neanderthal or Homo sapiens circles, but cultivates her own growing sense of moral, ethical life choices which often work against her primitive urge for revenge and confrontation.
These elements create fast-paced action, unexpected moments of newfound, powerful cooperative thinking that traces the evolutionary processes of very different peoples as they embark on an unusual, conjoined mission.
Libraries seeing popularity with Bockoven’s other works, as well as Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear and others set in these early times, will find it easy to highly recommend Sleeps With Wolves to a wide audience, from readers of action and adventure stories to those with special interest in the evolving, changing world of the Neanderthal as they confront the new Homo sapiens species in novel ways.
Sleeps With WolvesReturn to Index
Slicing
Clouds
Richard
D. Ross
Steel
Door Publishing
978-1-0694610-2-5
$19.95
www.richarddross.com
Slicing Clouds represents a departure for mystery/thriller writer Richard D. Ross, exhibiting his talents in crafting an historical drama novel. It surveys a family history and ties, the impact of war on a young man who joins the RAF, and the turbulence which emerges when a fellow hospital patient’s wife, Skye Ferguson, takes an interest in his life just when it seems to be approaching its end.
Skye’s impulse to probe Edward Bolton’s life comes from a foundation question about how people react to life and find themselves transforming because of it:
What makes a person overflowing with rudeness and bitterness suddenly transform into someone filled with compassion and love?
Skye never aspired to become a writer, but somehow Edward’s experiences and mystery draw her to create a story about a man she only met briefly at his life’s end, “...his life feeling like something fragile she’s been entrusted to hold.”
The story that evolves begins in 1925 Birmingham, England and moves through Edward’s schooling, trade apprenticeship with a story of growing up, RAF experiences, and the process by which he is forced to “watch his old life burn to ash” in order to save it when all seems lost.
Ross helps a reader take to the air alongside Edward as he crews a plane through the war, takes to the skies, and somehow keeps finding his way back home against all odds:
Edward smiled, and for the first time since France, he didn’t feel like he was running from anything. They had made it home, just like always.
The many ways he navigates this world and successfully survives and changes to adapt to its nuances makes for engrossing reading that brings the hardship of maturing, war and its impact to life.
As he confronts both mortality and disability, Edward’s reflections can spark many a book club discussion not just about growing up in the 1900s, war, and adaptation, but the price of survival:
If he was totally honest, he’d have admitted he was afraid. Not of dying - everyone did that, eventually - but of the slow, grinding humiliation of being dismantled by degrees. There was no dignity in it.
Librarians seeking a powerful novel about battles internal and external, survival tactics, and ultimate health challenges will find Slicing Clouds renders a compelling story about a man’s life and its choices and influences.
Packed with reflections about the making of a quiet hero and his process of leaving a lasting legacy to the world, Slicing Clouds is riveting, thought-provoking, and should be central to any novel collection centering on the hardships of life in the Great Depression and World War II’s experiences and aftermath.
Slicing CloudsReturn to Index
Song
of
Hummingbird Highway
K.M.
Cookie
Koehler
Books
979-8-88824-993-2
$34.95
Hardcover/$23.90 Paperback/$9.99 eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Song-Hummingbird-Highway-K-Cookie/dp/B0FZF1TN24
Song of Hummingbird Highway is a novel steeped in a cross-cultural journey undertaken when Midwesterner Terri journeys to Belize; there to face paradigm-challenging circumstances surrounding a near-death experience, Mayan cosmology, and belief systems that challenge her Christian upbringing with impossible events.
In a manner reminiscent of Native spiritual storytelling, K.M. Cookie brings this world and its magic to life, imbibing it with realistic observations by Terri, who wonders why relationships have been a lifelong challenge for her as others seem to “slip easily” into their embrace. Perhaps its because she defies the notion of the type of woman who enjoys such men:
Terri’s blood boils. “Here’s a wild thought. Maybe there are men out there who have something to say. Who might even”—she gasps in mock horror—“use their brain. I’d rather be single than cater to another guy who barely notices I exist.”
As early as she can recall, she’s been in physical pain. Mental pain accompanies this and shapes her worldview and belief system. Belize offers her something different: the opportunity to absorb entirely new thinking through events that heal some of her pain while introducing sometimes-frightening new possibilities that shake the foundations of how she’s built her life and long-held survival tactics:
She survived, not needing anyone. No one wanted to befriend the girl who looked and walked funny. She didn’t mind being alone. At least, that’s what she told herself.
Cookie presents a story that evolves on many different levels. From magical realism and mother/daughter struggles to metaphysical and spiritual revelations and cross-cultural encounters, Song of Hummingbird Highway creates a powerful inspection.
Especially notable are powerful self-analysis and reflection that stem from these experiences and Terri’s walk out of everything familiar and assumed:
She can’t deny the change she feels—a subtle yet profound shift within her core. More than physical recovery. Her essence has been recalibrated, refreshed, and restored. This indescribable feeling defies logic, residing in the realm of intuition and lived experience. Despite this undeniable change, Terri’s skepticism persists. The rational, scientific part of her mind wages an internal war, struggling to reconcile her lived experience with her deeply ingrained beliefs about medicine and healing, a cognitive dissonance that leaves her both exhilarated and unsettled.
The result is enlightening, compelling, and thought-provoking, all in one. Song of Hummingbird Highway will draw readers interested in stories that simmer with transformation and realization, employing gripping encounters with self and the world to present the specter of a young woman on the cusp of a truly different approach to her life.
Libraries that acquire Song of Hummingbird Highway will also want to highly recommend it to book clubs and women’s reading groups, especially, for its enlightening force and many threads of discussion fodder.
Song of Hummingbird HighwayReturn to Index
The St.
Charles
Bible
Fritz
Westenberger
Mars+Pan
Books
979-8234006547
$31.99
Hardcover/$4.99 eBook
www.marsandpanbooks.com
The St. Charles Bible opens with a literal bang as a LGBTQ+ bar scene explodes. The prologue is set in the French Quarter in New Orleans in summer of 1973, under circumstances which might leave trans woman Reneé dead before she can transition into her dream, “left halfway between what was and what was meant to be.”
This cruel, ironic possibility then jumps ahead in time in Chapter 1 and 1978 New Orleans, where a tour of the Delacoeur family’s Maison de l’Ange, a mansion rumored to be haunted, outlines the basics of the family’s history and influence. Ree Osterberg is drawn back to the family home and circumstances which involve his great-grandfather’s cruel legacy of impoverishing his grandmother Margarethe even as Ree strives to support her. She has always supported his struggle to embrace his gay identity.
Margarethe’s own beloved brother René was driven away for being gay, so she has a vested interest in supporting her grandson – but when she comes to believe that Ree could become a willing vessel for René’s now-otherworldly spirit, danger enters the home anew—the spirit may not actually be that of her brother.
As close-held family secrets about René’s reality come to light, powerful insights about motivations for family connection, disconnection, and psychological incentives are simply a delight to consider:
Maybe she knew this was the most likely story – René had put her in his past with their father – but couldn’t accept this and would spend her life turning coincidences into new paths her fable of Margarethe and René could take to a happier conclusion. Keeping René secret from everyone kept her dreams of a reunion safe from the sledgehammer Ree’s dad and grandfather took to anything she believed in.
As Ree navigates male influences, his grandmother’s mission, ghosts, and father Hank’s efforts to teach masculinity to his sons via “wasteful whims,” he steps into ever-increasing ugly battles where he is both caught in the crossfire of his father’s intentions and confronts him as an equal.
Readers who select The St. Charles Bible for its New Orleans backdrop will be especially attracted to its atmospheric cultural and historical observations as Ree traverses this world:
An African-American home was a place unknown to Ree, his only references being a dee-luxe apartment in the sky and a junkyard, and his nerves were coming back as Evie wove through the University and Broadmoor neighborhoods to get to Central City. This part of New Orleans was off limits to a sheltered suburban kid, so he was getting his first real education on the unique socio-economic tic-tac-toe of central New Orleans, where the boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ areas shifted as arbitrarily as the ground beneath the houses. On one block, a tony row of Belle Epoques competing for garden-of-the-month turned a corner right into a barren land of barely-standing shotgun doubles landscaped with discarded appliances and dead succulents.
The story imagines that Renée was one of the two unidentified victims of the tragic UpStairs Lounge fire, a well-known event to the LGBTQ+ community, and gives voice to a marginalized, unrecognized victim.
The St. Charles Bible skirts the edges of a coming-of-age novel, a historical review, a LGBTQ+ story of a young man’s connections to past and present dilemmas surrounding his gay identity, and a mystery surrounding family choices and influences.
Librarians seeking a multifaceted novel replete with exquisite tension, realistic characters who struggle not just with each other but their inner demons and truths, and haunted portents of family legacy will find it easy to highly recommend The St. Charles Bible to a wide audience.
Its ability to weave an engrossing story that embraces gay identity, family struggles, supernatural elements, and the reality of channeling trauma and transformation make the story a winner.
The St. Charles BibleReturn to Index
To Catch
a Sinner
Dylan
Allen and Lucy
Wilson-Tagoe
Blue Box
Press
979-8903270255
$19.99
Paperback/$6.99
eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Catch-Sinner-Blurred-Lines-Duet/dp/B0GN5JSQ8S
To Catch a Sinner is a romantic suspense story that revolves around Sin Sackey, whose near-death experience upends her life.
Sin’s move back home to Washington, D.C. is supposed to portend healing and a new start. Instead, old habits and ghosts return to plague her efforts to recover and begin anew, leading to scary new possibilities on different levels.
Candid moments of self-inspection and mutual understanding evolve between Sin and Kwame, reaching out to involve readers in the conundrums and potentials of building love:
Why didn’t you stop when you saw me? I want to ask him so badly. But that would leave room for him to ask why I didn’t walk away. I can’t answer him…because I honestly don’t know.
As Sin’s journalistic background invites new investigations on personal and professional levels, readers become immersed in her choices, reflections, expectations, and challenges as suspense and mystery dovetail with romantic interludes and realizations.
Dylan Allen, writing as Lucy Wilson-Tagoe, crafts an intriguing, inviting story immersed in the steamy atmospheres of romance and Washington D.C. events. They create an interplay of intentions and special interests in two powerful characters whose entwining lives offer unexpected opportunities as well as surprising insights about repeating choices of the past or avoiding present-day possibilities, though Sin admits that “I didn’t get where I am by playing small or being a doormat. Nor have I ever hid my ambition. Where would I be if I’d waited for someone to give me a chance? I’ve always made my own luck.”
The result is a simmering romance that weaves various facets of influence into a story designed to appeal to both romance and suspense readers.
Librarians that recommend To Catch a Sinner to either audience will that find it holds just the right balance between love story and a tale of intrigue and discovery.
To Catch a SinnerReturn to Index
Under an
Indiana
Sky
Lynne
Hugo
Blank
Slate Press
9781966103066
$20.95
Paperback/$9.99
eBook
www.amphoraepublishing.com
Under an Indiana Sky is a novel about how addiction starts, how it can grab lives and take them over, and finally the spreading, devastating effect on an ever-widening circle of family and friends. At its heart, the novel portrays sisters whose relationship is changed by a boyfriend whose presence sparks conflict between them.
Angie’s new boyfriend Brock Varon prompts her to seek time off from her shared duty with sister Denise to care for their disabled mother, which doesn’t endear Brock to Denise; but when Angie is injured and keeps getting worse, Denise’s anger mixes with worry and suspicion.
The dynamics between the two sisters are outlined from the start:
“Angie went on, rhapsodizing about how Brock had some free time coming soon and how he hoped she would too, trying to wheedle Denise into coming over to take care of their mom more so she could go out. It was the same as Angie pushing the Go button for Denise to send her fighter planes down the runway.”
This sets the stage for further clashes between Brock and Denise over addiction, good intentions gone awry, and accusations of purposeful ill intention and blame. What the police labeled accidents ... could something sinister have been involved? Denise, of course, blames Brock, but is she right?
Lynne Hugo develops these family ties and conflicts with an eye to revealing how pursuits of justice, loss, and poor decisions intersect in a bigger way than individual loss and choice.
Brock and Denise are left grappling with loss in different ways as a detective tries to get at the truth and other characters, such as Mercedes (nee: Mabel) take advantage of Indiana laws and processes in different ways, their own dreams and ambitions intersecting during the process of pursuing their lives.
Hugo develops each character and dovetails their personalities and special interests in intriguing ways. This builds a story filled with fascinating questions about characters that use one another, belief systems that stem from disparate experiences, and behaviors between men and women that contribute to either growth or death.
Libraries seeking an insightful novel about addiction that includes a blend of family and romantic ties, rural crime, and pursuits of justice and redemption will find Under an Indiana Sky creates many intriguing moments of discovery. These offer food for thought about a wide range of subjects, from commitments and life changes to what individuals will attempt and sacrifice in the name of love. Excellent for book clubs.
Under an Indiana SkyReturn to Index
The
Valley of the
Blue Moon
C. K.
Bougae
Current
Words
978-1-957224-74-9
$15.99
paperback; $4.99
ePub/Kindle;
$4.99 audiobook
www.currentwordspublishing.com
The Valley of the Blue Moon is a fantasy novel set in a medieval-inspired milieu that opens in 1565 with the death of a king. This sparks the journey of Leo when the king’s eldest son (his friend Augustin, the Black Prince) steps into the newly vacated leadership role. War brews on the horizon, and Leo is tapped to help plan a defensive strategy to address an impending invasion by the neighboring kingdom of Dartmoor in Northumbria.
Buffeted by loss and the portent of chaos and revolution, twenty-year-old Leo finds himself in a pivotal position during changing times. His call to action and the choices outlined in The Valley of the Blue Moon brings readers into this world and Leo’s duties as a knight, his quest for peace with a country that has always sought to destroy theirs, and his involvement with Brother Juniper, who teaches him flowers and rituals. These foster the elusive peace Leo has long reached for:
In the days and weeks that followed, Leo planted each flower, contemplating the symbolism of their blossoms and his own life. He planted all colors of roses for those with whom he shared love and would share love. When planting the daffodils, he thought about those whom he needed to forgive and those who needed to forgive him. The lilies symbolized both those in his life for whom he was grateful and the new life this journey was creating for him. Finally, as he planted the tulips, he thought of the love and passion missing from his life.
As C. K. Bougae crafts the courses of Leo’s world and its political and personal influences, readers step into a realm on the cusp of as many changes as Leo contemplates for his life.
From blossoming romantic potential to pilgrims, spiritual evolution, life-changing connections and moments, and choices that lead Leo through the Valley of the Blue Moon with the lure of different forms of treasure, Bougae creates a moving saga that requires no prior medieval knowledge or appreciation of the intersection of history and fantasy in order to prove thoroughly compelling.
Rich in a sense of place, purpose, and changing times and perspectives, The Valley of the Blue Moon invites with new possibilities and revised ideals.
Libraries can heartily recommend The Valley of the Blue Moon to readers of fantasy and quasi-history alike, who enjoy accounts of discovery as Leo absorbs the Four Lessons that come to chart the course of his life.
The Valley of the Blue MoonReturn to Index
Zombies
of the
Upper East Side
Jason
Zeffir
It’s
Alive!
Books
979-8-9999784-2-4
$18.99
Paperback/$27.99 Hardcover/$9.99 eBook
www.jasonzeffir.com
Zombies of the Upper East Side represents satirical fiction at its best with a foray into a New York housewife’s messy divorce and the dark forces which are concurrently arising in the city. Satire unfolds from the novel’s opening salvo:
The scourge had begun, but I wasn’t aware of it yet. I just thought it was another hairy Thursday night in the city. I was content to blame it on the rowdy bridge-and-tunnel crowd, whom locals like myself despise.
Charmaine is poised to remark her life - but life is posed to remake it for her in an entirely different way as she engages soon-to-be-ex Darren in a series of conversations about family changes, confronts “a game of Russian roulette or a very sad Choose Your Own Adventure,” and confronts zombies in an original way:
I quickly created as much space as possible. Most of the time, they would lose interest and return to what they were doing, which consisted of eating the Street Meat avail ‐ able or fishing victims out of the smashed-out storefronts on Madison Avenue, where people were hiding in dressing rooms or behind sales counters.
Vodka, death rattles, friends and enemies, and angry women coalesce in a romp through sinister undercurrents of happiness and angst that will leave readers laughing and thinking as Charmaine hones not just survival tactics, but new opportunities in her life amidst disaster.
Jason Zeffir’s novel will especially delight readers of zombie scenarios who will find in Charmaine’s world an entirely novel perspective on the matter. Scenarios shift, characters find their own best interests conflicting with revised pathways towards surviving as human rather than zombie, and the nature of these changes lead Charmaine to question the vastly revised reality of her world:
Nothing felt real. It was as though I was watching what was happening, even though I was there, living it.
The result is a story supercharged with irony and satirical social observation which proves simply delightful in its forays into zombie circles.
Librarians and readers seeking a very different, fun survey of zombie uprisings and survival that melds New York culture into the mix will appreciate how Zeffir avoids the typical constructs of survival tactics and molds them into new adventures and opportunities many won’t see coming.
Zombies of the Upper East SideReturn to Index
Clever
Girl
Millionaire
Bola
Sukanbi
John
Wiley & Sons
9781394313648
$29.87
Audio/$24.95
Paperback/$16.87
Audio/$15.00 eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Clever-Girl-Millionaire-Build-Wealth/dp/1394313640
Clever Girl Millionaire: A Guide to Redefining What’s Possible, Turning Ambitions into Actions, and Dreams into Millions is not your usual get-rich guide. It comes not from a business coach, but from a self-made Black woman millionaire who founded Clever Girl Finance, one of the largest personal finance media/education platforms for women in the US. Bola Sukanbi wields not theory, but tested business strategies as she advises not just on business approaches that lead to success, but mindsets and attitudes that help accumulate wealth.
Chapters apply financial principles to real-world scenarios, showing readers exactly how embracing a short but essential list of financial basics can lead to not just earning income, but managing and growing it more successfully. They also are designed to serve as workbooks, reviewing actionable steps, thoughtful prompts, and practical exercises to help readers apply what they are learning here to their lives. Of course, this request a special kind of reader devoted to not just absorbing information, but reflecting it via actions and revised choices.
Sukanbi also emphasizes the bigger picture beyond wealth and business acuity:
What’s the point of working so hard to pay off debt, budget, save, and invest, if you’re not giving yourself permission to enjoy what you’re building? Life is meant to be experienced. You don’t want to get to your goal, look around, and realize you missed all the moments that made the journey meaningful because you were too focused on the destination.
This emphasizes the rationale behind reading this book and absorbing its values and advise in the first place – something missing from too many focuses on wealth strategies – and keeps the focus on attitude and the consequences of choice:
Debt isn’t just about numbers. It affects your mindset, your stress levels, and your ability to move freely with your money. When you’re constantly making payments toward high-interest debt (hello, credit cards), that’s money that’s not being used to invest, build, or grow. In other words, it slows you down.
The result stands head and shoulders above most books about wealth and business, offering readers a unified theory of tested, world-wise approaches to life and living better that will especially please readers concerned about cultivating not only money, but resilience and winning, uplifting life approaches.
Libraries and readers that pick Clever Girl Millionaire over others will also find its lively tone, concrete approaches, and especially its encouraging, warm advice to women in particular will make the book a winning discussion topic among book clubs and reading groups of all kinds, including women’s groups and those devoted to money and life savvy.
Clever Girl MillionaireReturn to Index
Controlled
Chaos:
Lessons They
Didn’t Teach You in Teacher School
Eric Hall
Mission
Point Press
978-1-968761-13-4
$19.95
Hardcover/$15.95 Paperback
www.missionpointpress.com
Controlled Chaos: Lessons They Didn’t Teach You in Teacher School focuses on the classrooms Eric Hall taught for nearly thirty years. It gathers tales, memories, escapades, and growth opportunities that emerged from his teaching efforts, and will delight fellow teachers and anyone interested in the process of reaching and teaching new generations.
Fun and chaos descriptions emerge in the form of intriguing lessons (“Lesson 7: The April Fool Becomes the April Fooled: A Lesson in Confidence and Eating Something You Definitely Shouldn’t Have
As a rookie teacher, I tried to prank my fifth graders with “bugeating” antics, and the joke took a stomach-turning twist.)
At a time when teacher efforts are under-appreciated and sometimes only lightly described, the engaging focus of Controlled Chaos stands out for its special blend of inspiration and reflection on the process:
The Battle is back, and it’s more than just books—it’s about creating memories, fostering teamwork, and showing every student that they, too, deserve a standing ovation.
What did I learn from all of this? Traditions may fade, change, or even disappear for a while—but if they’re rooted in something meaningful, they have a way of coming back, often stronger than before. Watching former students revive the Battle of the Books reminded me that the real legacy of what we do isn’t found in lesson plans or trophies—it’s in the spark we light in others.
These stories, always accompanied by “What did I learn from all of this?,” give fellow educators the opportunity to reflect on their own teaching skills and approaches to education, which in turn will inspire and enlighten a host of readers interested in how educational processes result in new opportunities and realizations for teacher and student alike.
From identifying and imparting “values that mattered to me and my students” to adopting creative approaches to transmitting these ideals and ideas, Eric Hall’s survey is exceptionally lively, inviting, vigorous, and creative.
Unlike fellow teacher memoirs, his book is designed to educate, inspire, and promote new pathways to learning.
That’s why librarians and readers will find Controlled Chaos thoroughly inviting. Its blend of creative teaching approaches, fun stories and insights, and student/teacher relationship analysis offers many opportunities most education books fail to teach – and in a manner that is as entertaining as it is enlightening. This invites a wide audience to rethink the potential of growth and how its opportunities are delivered.
Controlled Chaos: Lessons They Didn’t Teach You in Teacher SchoolReturn to Index
Creative
Fluency
Gary Izzo
Precocity
Press
979-8-9941476-7-2
$19.95
Print/$9.95
eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Fluency-Tools-Curious-Mind-ebook/dp/B0H3QZ1NTQ
Creative Fluency: Tools for the Curious Mind views creativity not as an inherent talent, but as a muscle which can be developed, strengthened, and applied to all kinds of endeavors. Like a chameleon (one of the running themes of this descriptive model), creativity can adapt to all kinds of situations, “shifting to fit the moment” and personality.
Gary Izzo focuses on the nuts and bolts of developing creativity, offering exercises that are easily followed and designed to break routines, challenge patterns of thinking, and encourage adaptations and routines more conducive to the creative process.
For building the “creative flow state,” for example, exercises include involving memory recollection, focusing on its sensory details, applying a physical gesture that helps readers instantly connect memory to reaction, and strengthening this “anchor” so it more readily connects to one’s emotional and physical state of mind for maximum creative perception.
Each step-by-step exercise offers opportunities for change. Each encourages readers to embark on a “wild ride” of redefining creative impulses and better understanding of what supports or thwarts the creative flow. With these insights come better strategies for supporting that flow in all manner of endeavors.
Creative Fluency is highly recommended for self-help readers who would do the legwork to apply its principles and suggestions to supporting their own creative impulses. Objectives and setups are clearly outlined so readers don’t have to guess at how these creative exercises will translate to their lives, but can easily determine their success and applications.
Librarians that choose Creative Fluency: Tools for the Curious Mind will want to highly recommend it to those readers seeking self-help exercises and insights that boost their creative impulses. Its clear strategy for improvement makes for a powerful series of opportunities for sustaining the wellsprings of creative inspiration.
Creative FluencyReturn to Index
Do the
Hustle
Don Kurz
Munn
Avenue Press
978-1969679353
$27.99
Hardcover/$19.99
Paperback/$7.99
eBook
Website:
https://www.DonKurzAuthor.com
Ordering:
https://www.amazon.com/Do-Hustle-Championship-Lacrosse-Boardroom/dp/1969679352
Do the Hustle: Life Lessons from Studio 54, the Championship Lacrosse Field, and the Boardroom blends autobiography with philosophical insights on influences that come not from educational institutions or business encounters, but life experiences, from dance floors to career-ending injuries.
It opens with an unabashed promise:
Reading this book and following its principles will lead to a happy and fulfilling life.
Don Kurz operated in circles ranging from football and lacrosse to participating in the disco craze, including being a regular at New York’s iconic Studio 54 and serving on the boards of elite educational institutions. These multifaceted experiences gave rise to realizations and life lessons that could not have stemmed from a singular approach or interaction.
Readers can anticipate lively accounts of these lessons, which stem from all kinds of life encounters. The conclusions Kurtz reaches translates to wisdom often buried in similar-sounding books about growth and life understanding:
So how do you move on, versus wallowing in I can’t freaking believe I put myself in this untenable situation? When the EMAK debacle was finished, I had pissed away what was once tens of millions of dollars. I knew that I could very well never make that type of money again. How did I sleep at night? By keeping the underlying mistake in perspective: it was just a bad decision, underpinned by a very bruised ego. And everyone makes them. And if you don’t truly accept and embrace that bad decision, you are destined to a life of misery and bitterness.
The business insights from these life encounters will also appeal to leaders interested in fine-tuning their approach to management, team-building, and the impact of their decisions:
Do you have the necessary conviction to fire a star performer because they are disruptive to the team? I struggle with this issue like everyone does, because you can’t help thinking, Damn, she is really good at her job. But I have nevertheless terminated a number of those people in my career, and I’m proud to have done so. Again, this is what you have to do to make sure the team, and not the individual, is paramount.
Advice ranges from addressing the jealousy of others who view success as a reason for resentment to being involved with community and teams on the path to victory.
Do the Hustle’s unique blend of wide-ranging life lessons and personal achievement is highly recommended for audiences interested not just in applied life lessons, but their wellsprings of inspiration and adaptation.
From discussions of risk aversion to the costs of staying timid, Kurz provides a blueprint for adaptation, change, and possibility that librarians and readers will find inspirational, thought-provoking, and the perfect fodder for sparking lively book club discussions:
The lesson here is that you can’t risk-manage your way through life. You can avoid making foolish mistakes, like not wearing your seatbelt or smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, to manage your risk. But not all of life’s risks can be managed—or even predicted—and by trying to avoid all of them, all the time, you run a different kind of risk—you risk missing life-transforming opportunities.
Do the HustleReturn to Index
The
Essential
Ingredient
Keri
Mangis
Curiosa
Publishing
978-1-7329912-2-4
$21.95
www.theessentialingredientbook.com
The Essential Ingredient: Remaking Ourselves in Times of Crisis is a philosophical and social examination of how adversity can lend to hope and new pathways – in this case, by reworking goals, ideals, and values to turn turbulence into transformation.
Many books advocate this concept, but few offer the nuts and bolts of the process of reinvention as does The Essential Ingredient.
Chapters delve into the underlying principles of purpose, human impact on the planet, cultural reflections about the nature of good and evil, and how to tackle life-changing moments on a personal and social level.
Keri Mangis delves into what makes the work of a social alchemist important and relevant to all kinds of choices and perceptions:
What is the point of endlessly trying to fix systems and paradigms that are showing signs of imminent breakdown? Why continue to appease, quiet down, or shrink down to fit within the existing structures? Once you think like an alchemist, you realize these are not the only choices in front of us. We can reject these lazy, half-measures and instead, return to first matter, where we imagine and create something not just better, but something evolved.
From how beliefs reinforce life pathways to imagining new paradigms where foundations of living are reconsidered and reconstructed, Mangis offers readers much food for thought:
What if we pondered the idea that there is much we can never possibly comprehend? What if there is no ultimate good reason, no lesson learned, no rebalancing of the divine scales, no moral arc bending toward justice? What if the lining is not silver, the disguise does not reveal a blessing, and the proverbial lemons are spoiled?
These, in turn, will inspire book clubs, reading groups, philosophers, and those interested in bigger-picture thinking to debate life trajectories, draw important connections between ego, psyche, and existential crisis, and consider the myths, realities, and possibilities of reflecting on current events and future prognosis in a different way.
Librarians interested in books that sparkle with discussion possibilities will find The Essential Ingredient: Remaking Ourselves in Times of Crisis especially relevant to modern times.
Recommended for political and social thinkers, those involved in psychological and personal transformation, individuals undergoing life transitions, and readers struggling with changing times.
The Essential IngredientReturn to Index
The
Frankenstein
Fix: Why Big Tech
Goes Astray & What We Can Do About It
Gabriel
Cohen
Edgewood
Avenue Press
979-8-9934624-0-0
Paperback: $15.99/
ebook $9.99
https://www.amazon.com/Frankenstein-Fix-Tech-Astray-About/dp/B0GXCFYSKM
The Frankenstein Fix: Why Big Tech Goes Astray & What We Can Do About It surveys the influences that push technology in dangerous directions. This narrowed focus provides more insight and analysis than the usual identification of “bad” or “good” technology, considering the very human forces at the helm of technological change and direction.
Readers who anticipate a doomsday scenario from the Frankenstein reference will be pleased to note that reason drives analyses in this book. Chapters delve into not just problems and solutions, but the underlying psychological and social influences of decision-making processes, both poor and acceptable, that drive technology’s applications.
Gabriel Cohen weaves history and culture into his surveys of investors, ideologies, and other forces at work which direct technological possibilities. He offers a full-bodied consideration that goes beyond prediction alone to consider the input and analysis of industry professionals, from psychologists and entrepreneurs to scientists and politicians:
Psychologist Katy Cook recalled meeting a woman at a social media firm who spoke of “the industry’s growing arrogance as stemming from a belief that no problem existed that tech could not solve. Such conceit becomes problematic, she explained, when lessons that could be learned from other industries, the past, or the experiences of others are ignored, which might potentially make the products and services of the industry better, safer, or more ethically informed. When I asked why this attitude was so prevalent, the woman described a systemic belief, particularly among executives, which held that those in the industry were the smartest and best suited to solve the problems they were tasked with, and therefore couldn’t ‘really learn anything from anyone else’.”
Endnoted references will delight fellow researchers seeking source material backup for the quotes and contentions here, while general-interest readers interested in works that tap authority from a wide range of sources will note that The Frankenstein Fix represents not an opinion piece, but a well-researched study of human ideals, efforts, and the positive and negative results of tech dreams.
From applied ethical principles to visions of better conduct that are sometimes radical but always thought-provoking, Cohen gathers many ideas for bettering the world:
Rather than just hoping that tech companies and the government will protect adolescents from the harmful aspects of social media, Jonathan Haidt advocates for actions that we can take now, on a more personal, local level. He believes that parents shouldn’t give their kids smartphones until they reach high school, and shouldn’t allow them to access to social media before age 16.
The result is especially highly recommended for book club and classroom discussion. The Frankenstein Fix will delight librarians and readers interested in considerations of technological potentials and applications that do more than present either laudatory or doomsday scenarios, but encourage reasoned discussion and thought about where humans are heading with the wonders they create.
The Frankenstein Fix: Why Big Tech Goes Astray & What We Can Do About ItReturn to Index
Heart-Centered
Connections
Niki
Elliott, PhD
Page Two
978-1-77458-682-2
$20.95
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1774586827
Heart-Centered Connections: Seven Essential Skills for Helping Neurodiverse and Marginalized Children Thrive is a specific approach to supporting neurodivergent kids that will gain an appreciative audience of therapists, parents, teachers, and others who work with and support these children.
It goes where few books dare to traverse in its wide embrace of decades of research, gathering thousands of diverse experiences from not just parents and teachers, but therapists, school principals, and social workers to give a much broader set of insights on interactions with these kids than the usual narrowed lens of experience.
Dr. Elliott also blends in the latest research along with best practices which support revised, concrete approaches to not just working with individual kids, but pairing them in teams that recognize and support their contrasting mindsets and skills, as in the Open and Closed Mode models of learning:
Ideally, we want every child (and adult) to be able to do both: Open and Closed Mode. We all have the capacity to do both, when given the right conditions and environment. Most children will show a natural aptitude towards one or the other. Many neurodiverse youth are Open Mode dominant and brilliant in this area, while many neurotypical children have been rewarded for being Closed Mode dominant and excel when it comes to completing linear tasks. Both can learn and be inspired by one another—and with their powers combined, they form an unstoppable team. This is why I encourage teachers to help students form work teams based on how well their modes of thinking complement one another.
Specifics include how to partner with young people, interact more effectively with them, guide them more mindfully, and better understand and work with the experiences of marginalized learners as a whole.
The result, though directed to those engaged in educational pursuits with these kids, will appeal to a far broader spectrum of participants who all can benefit from the studies, experiences, and applied teachings of everyone featured in this book.
Librarians will thus wish to recommend Heart-Centered Connections to readers interested in building better, more concrete approaches to education and working with children. This audience will also benefit from the vivid book club discussions which will most certainly evolve from a group effort.
Heart-Centered ConnectionsReturn to Index
Unstuck!
Find
Clarity, Break Free,
and Take Action
Norm
Gustafson
Current
Words
978-1-957224-76-3
$19.99
https://currentwords.com
Unstuck! Find Clarity, Break Free, and Take Action is highly recommended reading for anyone who feels boxed in, trapped, or stuck in their life trajectory or options, from professional courses to personal relationships and living situations.
Anyone who feels like they have little to no control over their lives will want to consider Unstuck! not just a game plan for improvement, but a course in reinventing their approaches and expectations to escape self-limiting feelings and responses.
To this end, Norm Gustafson builds a transformative program to not only hone better choices and decision-making, but delve into the deeper meaning of life and the opportunities which lead to not just an acceptable life, but an amazing one.
Chapters eschew the usual customized training approach in favor of tackling bigger-picture thinking, from life’s meaning and one’s role in effecting changes to creating broader value through better choices.
They delve into circles many similar-sounding books don’t touch, including how people can either promote positive change or thwart the process:
Who tries to talk you out of change? Family and friends push their self-interests, make demands, and influence your time, resources, goals, and thinking. Who makes you abandon your needs and goals? Who is a constant critic?
Obstacles to this growth process (Gustafson points out there will be many) are addressed alongside approaches that support change:
Your determination can be a tremendous differentiator. People notice that. People are attracted to it. (Some people won’t like you for it. Don’t let them stop you.) Know what to focus on, and when to change your focus.
All these elements and more elevate Unstuck! from the usual milieu of self-help, business, or career success guides, making its transformative potential applicable to a much broader range of life philosophy approaches than most books.
This is why librarians will want to select Unstuck! for a wide range of readers, display it outside of the usual self-help or inspirational categories, and highly recommend it to book clubs and reading groups interested in uplifting discussions of real change and how it is promoted or thwarted.
Such opportunities to inspect life trajectory are rare – and, here, will prove invaluable.
Unstuck! Find Clarity, Break Free, and Take ActionReturn to Index
Conductoid
M.B.
Lehane
Pounce
Publications
978-1-7635945-0-0
$11.38
Paperback/$2.99 eBook
www.conductoid.com
How can a fantasy superhero live an everyday life in the real world?
Conductoid is the first book in The Conductoid Chronicles for preteens and young adults, and opens with Jack McKay’s participation in a championship game. The calm dispassion he cultivates during playing is followed by a flight from the game’s outcome and his entry into a home and world powered by more than games and winning. The game he plays there holds deadly ramifications for the future and is infused with high-tech devices and an enemy who threatens all life.
The satisfying contrast between an ordinary atmosphere and one in which Jack faces down the dark, evil Varilees is created in just a few pages, providing immediate gratification to readers who will be grabbed, not just drawn, into a vivid plot.
With a twist of action, the beastly encounter morphs into a classroom in which Jack once again has not been paying attention. These shifting scenes arrive with wry humor and observations that deftly capture and contrast the very different environments Jack navigates during the course of daily life:
Butch Redden loved teaching swimming. The man was a walking tank, with muscles growing upon muscles and hands made for hitting things. Swimming gave Butch the chance to parade around like a peacock in uncomfortably small togs—uncomfortable for the wearer and the watcher. While in parade mode, he’d glare down at Jack with those beady eyes of his. Eyes that never blinked. Then the Shark would sneer, pushing Jack back into the treacherous deep.
Jack’s real-world persona struggles with school even as he envisions himself a world-protecting hero in disguise. Kids will readily relate to the shifting differences between reality and fantasy, especially appreciating how the spillovers between them begin to direct Jack in very different courses of action and choices in both worlds.
M.B. Lehane sets the stage for a vivid tale in which Jack’s reality steadily moves into a milieu in which nothing (not even his family) can be predicted. The tension builds upon these realizations and bigger-picture dilemmas that move beyond games, school, and familiar territory into unexpected sci-fi encounters.
Heroism and everyday courage are presented as adjuncts to the revised roles Jack is forced to assume as he steps into a different reality that demands he reconsider not only relationships and life perceptions, but his own role in saving and navigating his world(s).
Even his best friend Ty doubts Jack’s revised understanding, responding to a surprising revelation with a wry description of his own:
Jack searched for the tell-tale twinkle in his friend’s eye. ‘You know, I’m not joking.’
‘Me neither,’ said Ty. ‘My powers were obtained as per usual. I was pecked by a constipated bush turkey who’d been bitten by a radioactive stinkbug, also constipated, but born in Gotham City, having spent its teenage years fighting off villains, bats, and pimples.’
Wry humor enhances action-paced encounters with insights and sometimes-jaded responses that offer psychological depth and reflective opportunities to Jack’s readers. As the nature of Conductoids is revealed, so the future of Jack’s choices and actions become steeped in complexity.
His changing relationship with twin Phoebe and friends around him, powered by the Conductoid vision of new possibilities, nicely juxtaposes dreams and their impact with adventures that redirect Jack and Phoebe’s growth.
Libraries seeking a fantasy that holds revelations about dreams, reality, growth, heroism, and extraordinary circumstances will find this first book in the trilogy to be thoroughly compelling.
Packed with unexpected twists and turns as Jack navigates his dreams and an increasingly bizarre reality, Conductoid will attract middle grade to young adult leisure readers with a fast pace and progressive realizations that pave the way for the next book in the series.
Please be a dream. Please be an incredible fantasy turned nightmare.
He wasn’t sure whether he spoke the words out loud or whether they were simply pleaded from deep within. What was certain is that he’d never wanted anything so much to be true.
ConductoidReturn to Index
Eyes Shut
Cecilia
Kae
Independently
Published
9789819454440
$12.99
Paperback/$6.99
eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Shut-Cecilia-Kae/dp/9819454441
Eyes Shut is a visionary literary novel that blends magical realism, sci-fi, and social observation set in Singapore and seen through the eyes of eighteen-year-old Robyn Hannah Yuen, who has suffered years of betrayal and abuse in her young life before an accidental overdose leads to the visions that will change and redirect her world.
The story opens in 2004 Korea, where Robyn is witnessing the first realization of her very first vision:
It was hard to maintain composure with the rush of déjà vu attacking her senses. It was as unsettling as it was unexplainable. She knew this dream well. In each iteration from the past three years, she had internalized it. When walking down the steps from the stands, she knew where to locate the restroom and the exits. If she turned to the right, she knew there would be that yellow signboard with huge Korean words on it. Closing her eyes and taking in the sounds of the spectators, she had to convince herself that this was really happening.
Contrasting sharply with Robyn’s rapid rise to fame and fortune is the dramatic decline of her former best friend, Jason. From the petty crimes they committed in their youth, he descends into a world of triads and drug trafficking in adulthood. Equally compelling as a character, Jason appears destined for ruin, his downfall seemingly beyond redemption. Yet his eventual fate is both surprising and thought-provoking, leaving a lasting impression on readers.
In
all,
it is easy to
identity with
Robyn's moral and ethical concerns as she tackles some of the most
challenging moments in her life.
What
would you sacrifice to
change the
future? In Robyn’s case, pieces of her self and values erode in the
face of efforts to control and direct her life, introducing further
quandaries that will thoroughly absorb readers in not just Robyn’s
shifting world, but the cast of characters, Jason, Ethan, and Rene.
Singapore forms the backdrop of the story, but this is a markedly grittier version of the city-state than the polished image often presented. The heartland settings illuminate the everyday struggles and realities of lower-income communities, revealing a fascinating and seldom-explored side of the nation.
Cecilia Kae creates a vivid inspection of precognizance and its possibilities. Robyn’s long-standing dilemmas and opportunities to revise her life and redirect it are especially engaging as more and more is revealed about the impact of her prophetic dreaming.
Especially notable are the italicized moments of description that augment Robyn’s reality:
She’s been primed to expect something monumental to take place when she moves forward in time. Her forays into future pivotal matches always had something key she took with her; a fatal flaw, a minor detail or even just how she felt in that moment were clues. Everything was important, it seemed to tell her. Pay attention! It seemed to scream. And she always did.
The result is a novel that will broadly appeal to readers of sci-fi, magical realism, and engaging stories of people trying to reinvent themselves.
Librarians will find it easy to recommend Eyes Shut to a wide audience, from mature teens to young adults reading in different genres that look for vivid stories suitable for reflection, whether individually or in book club settings.
Eyes ShutReturn to Index
JoJo
Chinese Songs
for Baby &
Me: Big Feelings
Christine
Yang Barry
JoJo
Learning (JoJo LLC)
9798990447905
$24.99
www.jojolearning.com
JoJo Chinese Songs for Baby & Me: Big Feelings is an interactive musical board book that provides an early introduction to Mandarin through song, rhythm, and parent–child interaction. As Book 5 in a six-book series recommended for young language learners ages 0–3 (it’s suitable for children up to age 5) Big Feelings features built-in press-to-play audio buttons on every page that allow children and caregivers to listen to each song and sing along together. The recordings provide pronunciation support and make the songs accessible even to families who do not already speak Mandarin.
Thirty-six original songs introduce over 300 everyday Mandarin words through themes accessible by the very young, from bonding and body awareness to exploration, imagination, feelings, and independence, with each volume introducing language through experiences that reflect a different stage of early childhood development. Rather than presenting isolated vocabulary lists, the collection introduces Mandarin through original songs rooted in family life, play, everyday experiences, and aspects of Chinese culture. Adults who interact with children on this musical journey will find the songs accompanied by added instruction for exploring maximum educational opportunity within the lyrics.
From tips on understanding how Mandarin is perceived and absorbed by the very young and familiar moments represented by the songs, in both Mandarin and English, adults striving to make Mandarin a daily part of language education receive plenty of guidance as they apply appealing music to the learning process.
Bright, colorful illustrations accompany Simplified Chinese text, Pinyin pronunciation guides, and English translations, portraying children of all colors as they absorb not just the lessons of language, but unity.
Libraries and educators interested in applying early Mandarin instruction to babies, toddlers, and the very young where adults are interested in interactive opportunities will find JoJo Chinese Songs for Baby & Me: Big Feelings a winning approach.
JoJo Chinese Songs for Baby & Me: Big FeelingsReturn to Index
Shadows
of
Murwood: Book 1 - The
Shadow of Justice
Mila Khon
Murwood
Press
979-8295730955
$28.99
Hardcover/$2.99
eBook
https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Murwood-Justice-Mila-Khon/dp/B0GVBVG34V
Book 1 of the children’s picture book Shadows of Murwood series, The Shadow of Justice, integrates lessons on integrity, courage, respect, and facing bullies with a vivid adventure story surrounding ordinary kittens. The Meowxas face their world with curiosity, kindness, and good intentions for influencing life around them.
Teachers and parents seeking early lessons on developing moral fiber will find these resonate in an adventure geared to a wide age range (3-10) in a story that moves beyond identifying right from wrong to help children feel a sense of empowerment in their choices of interacting with the world around them.
As the actions of bullies and the brave ones who confront them emerge, young listeners and readers receive dialogue and insights that are both whimsically fun and thought-provoking:
“You,
Tubby, keep
a sharp
lookout!” Furdinand threatened. “If you see Principal Fang, give
me a whistle. And don’t mess up like last time when you got
distracted by that burger!”
The
sense of fun makes the
delivery of
more serious lessons about choices accessible as the Shadows of
Furbin Hood step up.
Numerous picture books promise lessons in integrity, but few add an appealing adventure component embedded into the delivery which not only will encourage kids to read or listen, but to think about their own actions as the twin kittens evolve a strategy for change.
Librarians will appreciate the large-sized, vividly colorful illustrations by Mila Khon as well as the opportunity to help young readers understand justice and responsibility at an earlier age than is typical for such lessons.
Shadows of Murwood: Book 1 - The Shadow of JusticeReturn to Index