What If?
Pixie follows a real pixie who accidentally steps through a portal into Comic Con, where a human family helps her discover that belonging isn’t always about where you come from, but who makes you feel at home. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
After watching videos of Comic Con on social media, a thought struck me: what if one of the attendees actually was what they appeared to be?
How did you develop Luna Brightwing’s personality and her combination of curiosity, vulnerability, and courage?
I based her personality on the curiosity, innocence, and innate courage of a four-year-old child.
How does Pixie examine the difference between being noticed for what makes someone unusual and being genuinely understood?
Luna did not mind being noticed, she always had difficulty being understood which is why her innocence led her into our world.
What do you hope readers consider about individuality, acceptance, and the importance of finding a place where they can be themselves?
I hope that my readers gather that it is ok to be different, ok to be themselves and never fear anyone that challenges them for it is usually their own insecurity showing who they are rather than who the reader is.
Art Is For The Creator
All the Things I Want to Tell You transforms the emotional intensity of adolescence into poetry that explores what it means to feel deeply in a complicated world. What inspired you to begin writing poetry, and how did that passion develop into this collection?
In all honesty, I have no idea why I began writing poetry. I pretty much just sat down at my dining room table one day and started a journal entry that somehow became a poem. After that, I continued writing because I had a few people tell me that my poetry was good and I realized I enjoyed writing it. It became a collection by accident, really. My publisher, Nick, happens to be a long-time friend of the family, so when my mom mentioned to him that I’d begun writing, he asked to see it and I sent some stuff over. He liked it a lot and asked if I’d be willing to work with him to publish my writing and of course I said yes, and here we are!
What have you learned about accepting contradictions within yourself, such as feeling confident and uncertain at the same time?
I’ve learned that it isn’t necessarily bad to feel multiple or even opposing feelings toward someone or something. Emotions are complex and often intense, and that’s okay; they’re part of what makes us human. Some of us feel things more deeply than others, or at least are able to better show or communicate their feelings, but I think I can safely assume we’ve all had mixed emotions about something at one time or another. Labeling feelings as either good or bad doesn’t get me anywhere. Mostly I just try to be aware of when I’m feeling negatively about an emotion and do my best not to feel guilty or think of my emotions as wrong in any way. It’s hard, but I’m getting better at it.
How can poetry and other creative outlets help encourage empathy and more open conversations about mental health?
If people choose to share their poetry or other art, it can be helpful for others to see that they aren’t alone in their struggles. Often, when people have depression or other mental illnesses, they feel like they are the only ones experiencing that type of hardship and it gets very isolating. Just being able to see themselves in someone else can be helpful. Art is also a great way to help people who don’t have mental health issues understand what it’s like for those who do. There have been multiple times when I’ve shown a poem to one of my parents and they’ve been like wow, I had no idea that was true for you or that was what you were dealing with and they’ve been better able to support me because of the conversations my poetry has started.
What advice would you give teenagers who want to express themselves creatively but feel hesitant about sharing their work?
First of all, you don’t have to share anything! Art is for the creator, not the audience, and you should never be pressured into showing off something that you don’t feel comfortable sharing. If you do want to show someone, start with someone you know will react well to it. For me, that was my mom and a close friend. They were both people that I had a lot of deep conversations with, and as a result, they already knew me very well. I knew that if they liked my writing, they wouldn’t be shy about complimenting it, and if they didn’t, that they would say so kindly. From there, I slowly expanded that circle of people I shared my work with until I’d had enough people tell me that my writing was good that I could mostly ignore the people who inevitably disagreed. Also keep in mind that it is okay if someone doesn’t like your art—not everyone will, and that’s okay. Again, your art should be made because you enjoyed creating it, not because you wanted others to like it.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
To Build Something Meaningful
Do the Hard Things draws on your 50-plus years of success, failure, and reinvention to show how discipline, resilience, and values-driven choices can help people build lives worth living. How did your experiences as an entrepreneur, investor, and business leader shape the philosophy behind this book?
Over the course of my career, particularly through my work in sales and the many professional and business groups I’ve been involved with, I’ve met people from all walks of life. One thing I’ve observed is that the founders of successful businesses are often willing to work hard and make sacrifices to build something meaningful. But with each successive generation, that willingness can sometimes diminish. There’s a reason so many family businesses struggle to survive into the third generation.
I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to work 60-hour weeks or sacrifice everything else in their lives. But I do believe that success requires making difficult choices and being willing to make sacrifices when necessary. If you never have to step outside your comfort zone or give something up to achieve a meaningful goal, you may not be pushing yourself hard enough. That lesson, drawn from decades of experience, is at the heart of Do the Hard Things.
Why do you believe modern society has become increasingly focused on convenience, and what might we lose when we consistently avoid discomfort?
I often think about our great-grandparents and the generations that followed them. Many served in the First and Second World Wars and made extraordinary sacrifices for their countries and for future generations. When I look at society today, I sometimes wonder how much that sense of collective responsibility has changed.
Increasingly, it seems that we elect governments based on what they can do for us, even when that means borrowing from the future, rather than asking how we can contribute to something greater than ourselves. I think we’ve lost some of the emphasis on sacrifice, service, and doing things for the common good. And this isn’t just an American or Canadian issue; I see it across much of North America and Europe.
I also see it in the experiences of immigrants who come to the United States and Canada. Many make tremendous sacrifices to build better lives for themselves and their families. They’re willing to work hard, take risks, and go without things that others might take for granted. When I compare that determination with the expectations I sometimes see in younger generations, it concerns me. I believe we risk losing our sense of gratitude, resilience, and personal responsibility when we expect everything to come easily.
What is the difference between choosing meaningful difficulty and simply making life harder than it needs to be?
I think it comes down to awareness and intention. The goal isn’t to make life difficult just for the sake of it. It’s to recognize which challenges are worth taking on because they help us grow, strengthen our families, or make the world a better place.
I believe we should focus our efforts on things that have a meaningful purpose and lasting value. That means being strategic about where we invest our time and energy, rather than simply working harder or staying busy. I call it strategic effort, not blind work. The important question is whether the difficult things we’re choosing to do are moving us toward something that truly matters.
What advice would you give someone who has spent years prioritizing professional success but now wants to invest more intentionally in health, family, and personal fulfillment?
I would start by asking them to define what success really means to them. We’re accustomed to setting goals and measuring results in business, but we don’t always apply that same discipline to our health, our families, or our personal lives.
In my own life, I set specific goals in different areas. For fitness, for example, I’m focused on improving my VO₂ max and becoming healthier. With my family, I want to instill strong values and establish a consistent rhythm around those values in our daily lives. I believe it’s important to be intentional about what we want to achieve and to make a genuine effort to get there.
Ultimately, doing the hard things isn’t just about working longer hours, making more money, or building a successful business. It’s about identifying what matters most, setting meaningful goals, and being willing to put in the effort to achieve them. Success should be measured not only by what we accomplish professionally, but also by the kind of people we become, the relationships we build, and the lives we lead.
We live in a world designed to remove friction. We can avoid uncomfortable conversations, outsource inconvenience, distract ourselves from boredom, and find shortcuts around almost anything. But there is a cost to always choosing easy.
After more than fifty years as an entrepreneur, investor, mentor, and business leader, Garnet Morris has learned that the experiences we most want to avoid are often the ones that shape us most. He has built extraordinary success and watched it disappear. He has faced bankruptcy, loss, painful truths, health challenges, and the consequences of his own mistakes. And each time, the way forward required something familiar: Doing the hard thing.
But this is not a book about grinding harder, glorifying suffering, or pushing yourself until you break. It is about choosing meaningful difficulty on purpose. In Do the Hard Things, Garnet explores how challenge builds capacity and how the choices we make when no one is watching shape our health, relationships, businesses, leadership, character, and legacy. Drawing on personal experience, science, philosophy, and lessons learned from decades of building businesses and mentoring others, he examines why discipline matters more than motivation, why values make difficult choices possible, why resilience must be practiced before we need it, and why freedom requires self-mastery.
Most importantly, he asks a question that can change the direction of a life: What is the harder choice and who would you become if you made it?
You cannot eliminate difficulty from your life. But you can decide which difficulties are worth choosing. Choose the hard that strengthens you. Choose the hard that aligns with your values. Choose the hard that builds the person you want to become. Because the goal isn’t simply to succeed. It’s to build a life worth succeeding in.
Griffy, the Golf-Loving Gopher
Francesca Falcetta Morrell’s Griffy, The Golf-Loving Gopher introduces a gopher whose fascination with golf is easy to understand: he loves the sights, the sounds, and the possibility of playing himself. That enthusiasm gives this children’s book an inviting starting point. Griffy has the eagerness of a child discovering an activity that feels made for them, and his excitement makes him good company. The golf course provides a pleasantly specific setting, with its leafy edges, carefully kept greens, and distinctive equipment. Families who enjoy the sport will recognize plenty of details, while Griffy’s personality gives other readers a reason to join him.
The story’s rhyming text suits its playful main character, and the repeated sounds of golf balls being struck and landing lend themselves to an animated reading aloud. You can have some fun with those noises, especially with a young listener who likes joining in. There’s also physical comedy, supported by words that invite a reader to emphasize movement and effort. The rhythm varies in places, and a few longer lines need a little adjustment when spoken, so reading it through once helps the delivery. Its strongest passages capture Griffy’s excitement with direct language and a sense of motion that makes his enthusiasm feel contagious.
I heartily enjoyed Claudia Gadotti’s illustrations. Soft, watercolor-style washes of green, yellow, and blue make the course feel sunny and spacious, while visible sketchlike lines add texture to the foliage, clothing, and Griffy’s fur. His rounded shape, prominent front teeth, and expressive eyes make him immediately recognizable across the spreads. The pictures communicate emotion through his posture as well as his face, which gives children something to notice alongside the words. I especially like how the artwork moves between broad outdoor scenes and smaller illustrations surrounded by white space. That change in scale keeps this picture book visually varied and gives readers room to appreciate Griffy’s expressions and the little details of his world.
The book also offers useful openings for conversation about confidence, persistence, and how people treat someone pursuing an unfamiliar ambition. Those themes connect naturally with the experience of trying a new sport or joining an activity for the first time. A glossary at the back explains golf vocabulary in accessible language, giving curious readers and adults a handy place to check unfamiliar terms. The author’s note adds a personal connection to the sport through her daughter’s experience, which helps explain the affection running through the story. With its enthusiastic central character, gentle visual palette, and attention to the pleasures of golf, it’s an appealing read to share with a child who’s excited about learning something new.
Pages: 31 | ASIN : B0H9WCDJ7T
It Starts With How We Vote
The Bipartisan Path Forward argues that split-ticket voting can reduce political polarization, encourage bipartisan cooperation, and hold elected officials accountable for effective governance rather than party loyalty. What inspired you to write this book?
I started writing The Bipartisan Path Forward because I felt that what we were doing as a country simply wasn’t working. Despite our differences, Americans increasingly share a frustration with a federal government that seems unable to solve our biggest problems. After years of analyzing federal election results and corresponding voting data, I wanted to find a practical solution that everyday Americans could actually implement. As I outline in my book, the solution is quite simple and attainable for all Americans: it starts with how we vote.
What was the most surprising finding in your research about the relationship between voting patterns and lawmakers’ behavior?
What surprised me most was how much our voting habits shape politicians’ incentives. As voters have increasingly prioritized party affiliation over individual candidates, politicians have had more reason to protect their party than to deliver results. When reelection depends on party loyalty, cooperation becomes a liability rather than an asset. Even more encouraging, it takes only a relatively small shift in voting patterns to change the balance of power in Washington (only a 1% change in voting patterns in fact), meaning individual voters have more influence than they might realize. My book outlines how we leverage that power to our advantage.
Can you share an example of a meaningful conversation that changed someone’s political perspective, and what made that conversation successful?
I actually spend a considerable portion of my book on this very point. An example I quite enjoyed detailing was regarding Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, two uniquely intelligent, passionate, consequential Americans, whose beliefs were so disparate that it led to the formation of the first two political parties in the US. Further, they were known political enemies. To provide a brief excerpt:
“Rather than allow their justified self-reliance and open antagonism blind them to the views of others, they embraced the concept that their political opponents may have a point. Rather than bicker, they listened to one another to learn and refine their judgments. In doing so, they gained new information, and their opinions changed. By pushing away their respective prides and embracing the sound arguments offered, they governed more effectively, and the country and the world are indebted to them for it. Jefferson and Hamilton show that even for the very men who wrote the founding documents, they alone did not possess the definitive answers for how our nation shall move forward.”
If they both understood the importance of meaningful conversation, then we as fellow Americans can as well.
What do you hope readers will do differently the next time they enter a voting booth?
I hope readers will look beyond the letter next to a candidate’s name and consider that person’s character, qualifications, and commitment to public service. You don’t have to abandon your political beliefs to make a difference. By being willing to split your ticket and vote for the best candidate for each position, you can change the incentives politicians face and help build a government that works for everyone.
Author Links: Goodreads | Facebook | Website
The Bipartisan Path Forward presents a practical and revolutionary solution to political polarization and gridlock in America’s capital. Drawing on his expertise in data analytics, Cunniff explains the power of split-ticket voting and shows how small shifts in voting patterns can fundamentally reshape the federal government and the future of American democracy.
Urgent and constructive, The Bipartisan Path Forward charts a realistic path toward a healthier and more functional democracy. As polarization intensifies and trust in institutions erodes, Cunniff points to a surprising source of renewal: Americans willing to act strategically at the ballot box.
The Rabbi’s Suitcase
An old leather suitcase is a wonderfully fitting starting point for Robert Kehlmann’s The Rabbi’s Suitcase: it holds the traces of lives spent crossing borders, carrying memories, and hoping the next destination will offer something better. Drawing on his family’s history and a collection of intimate letters, Kehlmann follows several generations from Lithuania to Jerusalem and into the uncertainties of American life. The novel has the generous scope of a family saga and the close attention of someone studying a beloved photograph. Its people have daily needs, private ambitions, and strong opinions about what everyone else should do.
Kehlmann’s gift for physical detail makes these journeys easy to inhabit. You can smell the cramped ship’s hold, feel the silk of an inherited prayer shawl, and appreciate the extraordinary pleasure of fresh food after weeks of making do. Religious observance shapes the rhythm of meals, work, courtship, and travel. Folk beliefs and moments of enchantment give the early chapters a distinctive atmosphere, particularly through young Yosef’s fascination with the possibilities of written words. There’s humor here, too, in family teasing, elaborate jokes, and the small absurdities that persist through hardship. That mixture gives the story warmth without softening the difficulties its characters face.
The book’s emotional center is Zipora, Yosef’s granddaughter, whose hunger for education and independence feels immediate and recognizable. She’s bright, restless, affectionate, and often unsure how to reconcile what she wants with what the people she loves expect from her. Kehlmann pays attention to the labor behind those expectations: the cooking, sewing, childcare, and earning that keep a household going. A girl’s wish to study becomes especially poignant when you’ve seen how much of her day already belongs to others. Zipora’s attachment to her family gives her choices their weight. You understand why claiming time and space for herself can feel both necessary and painful.
Her relationship with the ambitious Reuven adds another layer of tension. Their letters carry desire, tenderness, jealousy, and arguments about the future, sometimes within the same exchange. Kehlmann lets you hear how eloquence can express devotion and exert pressure, and how two people can give very different meanings to the same shared experience. The substantial historical context creates a measured pace, with room for political debates and the changing circumstances of Jewish life. Those passages ask for attention, but they also clarify the competing ideas of home that run through the novel. For these characters, a destination carries promises about faith, opportunity, belonging, and who they might become.
There’s something especially affecting about a son making room for the young woman his mother was, with her desires, mistakes, and possibilities still ahead of her. Kehlmann approaches that task with curiosity and an evident emotional investment. Photographs and family records deepen the sense of contact with the people behind the fiction, while the recurring suitcase gives their movements a tangible continuity. Readers who enjoy historical fiction rooted in the intimate workings of a family will find plenty to care about here. The Rabbi’s Suitcase carries the weight of generations while making one woman’s right to her own future feel urgent and personal.
Pages: 376 | ASIN : B0F85WD18L
Tune Into A Tragedy
Mortal Vengeance II follows the survivors of a deadly academy tragedy as they navigate fame, fractured relationships, and a reality television circus, only to discover that their terrifying past is far from finished when a sinister killer returns. What new ideas did you want to introduce in part two?
The first two books relied heavily on Excelsior Academy conditioning the students to keep quiet—a silence that is already deeply ingrained in Dominican society. In Mortal Vengeance II, it’s quite the opposite. Shane wants them to speak, to expose their ugly truths and scars, and, ideally, to break down on camera. Ultimately, though, the core struggle remains the same: someone else is trying to control their identity and their voice.
I also wanted to explore as realistically as possible what would happen in the aftermath of the first book’s events. How would society react to this tragedy? There’s a popular saying in Spanish, “pueblo chico, infierno grande” (small town, big hell), which refers to how fast news travels and how everyone knows everybody else’s business. What would that actually look like on a national scale? What makes people tune into a tragedy?
Last but not least—and I hope this really comes through on the page—I wanted to ask: in this scenario, who is the true villain? Is it the Grim Cojuelo? Is it Shane Harper, the producer? Or is it the audience, including the readers themselves, consuming that trauma as entertainment?
How did you approach Alex Herrera’s moral complexity and his relationship with Melissa Rocha while balancing romantic vulnerability, lingering suspicion, and the threat of violence?
Alex was a massive challenge. In the first book, his morality is intentionally ambiguous—you’re not always sure if he’s the hero or the villain. When I wrote the prequel, A Grim Tale, I really upped the ante on his “villainy,” exploring who he was eighteen months prior. For the sequel, the struggle was continuing his arc realistically without sanitizing him. I had to preserve what makes Alex who he is, without undoing the growth he experienced by the end of Book 1. And how would that look? Would his actions inadvertently trigger another round of murders? That was going to be the original route, but instead of perhaps going to the obvious path, and in order to find that balance, I had to look inward.
Alex is partially based on me—at the very least, he inherited my borderline personality disorder. I had to really meditate on my own growth and struggles since my BPD diagnosis. How do I cope with it? What does it actually mean day-to-day? I wanted to bring that to the page as honestly and realistically as I could.
It’s funny, because when I was fifteen and wrote the original Mortal Vengeance draft back in 1999, I actually did write a trilogy. But with the reboot for the 2020s, a lot had to change. The 2025 ending is completely different and the “reboot” sets up this reality TV circus—which I initially wrote as a joke, knowing I’d eventually have to pay it off! Plus, back in 1999, A Grim Tale didn’t exist to inform his backstory.
When returning to Alex and Melissa’s relationship, there were elements from that original draft I wanted to keep. Amongst them, where they are at the end of that story. But because the new ending shifted everything so drastically, making their dynamic feel earned was a huge challenge. I absolutely refused to eliminate Melissa’s agency or make her naïve, just as I refused to make Alex’s growth a lie. The lingering suspicion and trust issues had to remain intact, especially when the threat of violence makes trusting the wrong person potentially fatal.
Without spoiling the reveal, the tension shows up early — in Melissa and Ana Sofía’s first conversation in Santo Domingo — and later, in the Real Scholars episodes, her fear actually comes to life. They hide from the show’s audience and from readers how their relationship evolved. Yet there are hints — in that same chapter and later ones — of how Melissa goes from “just a friend” at the end of Mortal Vengeance to where they are now.
Most importantly, Melissa is never a damsel in distress, or just “the female love interest,” she has her own agency and we see how she could potentially even rival Alex’s own methods.
What inspired you to transform the survivors of Excelsior Academy’s tragedy into reality television stars, and how does that premise deepen the story’s psychological tension?
The idea grew out of observing influencer culture and the pressure to turn everyday life into content. People put on these performances and adopt haughty personas that really make you wonder: are they actually like this? Their lives revolve around capturing everything on camera, which creates this false sense of invincibility—as if recording makes them untouchable. The real-world cases of influencers being attacked mid-filming prove otherwise.
From a storytelling perspective, the reality show first appeared as a joke at the end of Book 1 that I knew I’d eventually have to pay off. It could’ve just been a footnote for the sequel—something that happened in the years between books—but where’s the fun in that? In Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale, there’s a scene where Julián’s mind is almost completely gone, and he hallucinates his friends and the faculty as part of a reality TV show. In such a dark story, it brought a needed moment of levity, which ultimately convinced me to fully commit to the premise.
I love a good reality TV show—The Real Housewives, Below Deck, RuPaul’s Drag Race. We watch these people and think we really know what they’ve been through, but do we? After every season of Drag Race, queens come out to reveal production secrets; after every Housewives episode, they’re online, on the aftershows, or on Watch What Happens Live! breaking down what was truly happening. We only ever get half the story. That’s why you always have to watch Untucked. But sometimes those cameras capture things the cast doesn’t want seen—secrets caught on hot mics, or displays of wealth that don’t match the story they’ve been telling.
All of this makes us believe we know them—that we have a right to know what’s going on. Viewers can become so invested in a relationship like Kyle Richards and Mauricio Umansky’s that the heartbreak doesn’t stay theirs. They go online trying to get them back together, scolding them, having meltdowns over it. We believe that since we watch them on TV, they owe us. It’s the same dynamic between the British royal family and the public. And what does that make the audience? What does that make the readers?
Well, in Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real?, the real villain is the reader.
How many podcasts and TV shows are out there just feeding our obsession with people who have suffered? Look at the Jeffrey Dahmer show on Netflix, or the massive obsession with true crime podcasts. We, as an audience, enjoy it, consume it, and believe it’s our right to have it. The worst part is that we are not passive participants—we don’t just sit and watch. We love to report on it, engage in online discussions, attack celebrities online while disregarding whatever situation they might be going through, and worst of all, just like the audience in the book, if we have the chance, we pull our phones out and record them. We actively create the content. In the story, Shane Harper might bring the product to the people, but the people demanded that product—she’s just capitalizing on it. We keep forgetting that the people featured there—whether they’re the heroes, the victims, the survivors, or the ones who didn’t make it, along with their families—are real people. They aren’t just content.
That inherent disconnect is exactly how the premise deepens the psychological tension. By removing the narrator during the reality TV moments and broadcasts in Mortal Vengeance II, I was able to hide the characters’ interiority, reflections, and true intentions. It allows the reader to see exactly what is being presented on screen—surface level only—and leaves them wondering, only to blindside them later with what was really happening or what was edited out.
Plus, it perfectly sets up the mystery for the third book. Let me put it like this: the cast desperately wanted the raw footage from that Casa de Campo trip, and some characters had no idea there were cameras installed in their homes. Trust me, you are going to want to see what’s on that USB.
How do Santo Domingo’s cultural traditions, class dynamics, and Dominican humor shape the characters’ identities and influence their responses to fame and trauma?
When I started writing the Mortal Vengeance series, I never set out to make Santo Domingo the selling point. To borrow from Mean Girls, I wasn’t trying to “make fetch happen.” I wanted to explore themes of guilt, complicity, and silence. Yet slowly but surely, the cultural, historical, and social elements of the city naturally shaped the characters and the narrative.
Santo Domingo is a city of extremes; there’s extreme poverty right next to extreme wealth. The reality of everyone’s household is different, and I wanted to show that through Shane’s assistant and characters like Camila and Mario. But I didn’t want to make poverty a comedy beat or something for the reader to view with pity, just as I didn’t want to rely on the cliché that wealth automatically equals bad or spoiled. There’s a lot of nuance there. It was important to understand exactly why characters like Rafa, Camila, and Valeria would join the TV show and willingly accept being labeled as villains, and conversely, why characters who had money—like Alex, Melissa, Mónika, and Lucía—would stay on the show when they didn’t have to. But hey, did Lisa Vanderpump join The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or Vanderpump Rules because she needed the money?
After college, I left Santo Domingo and moved to New York to get my master’s degree at NYU, living there for four years before moving to Spain. In both the US and Spain, whenever I discuss growing up in Santo Domingo, one of the things that consistently shocks people is the fact that I grew up with maids. Having domestic help was normal in the environment I grew up in. But upon hearing this, people immediately formed an opinion about who I was, how much money my family had, or assumed we were exploitative. I knew introducing Mary, Alex’s maid, was going to invite that exact same judgment upon him. I wanted to show the deep love Mary and Alex have for each other without pretending that affection erases the inequality within that relationship. In a society where people like Mary have limited employment options, domestic work can help support their families and give their children a real chance to escape poverty, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t question the conditions that limit those options in the first place. Shane’s assistant is the same story told from a different angle: the job looks like proximity to power, but it comes with the same precarity—the same limited options, the same dependence on someone else’s goodwill.
I also wanted to bring balance to the depiction of religion in the Mortal Vengeance universe. I’m a man of faith—the full católico, apostólico, romano—and there’s a clear distinction in the book between faith itself and religious authority. In the Dominican Republic, religion is a massive aspect of our lives, and I wanted to be honest about that, showing that not all priests are evil and depicting how families genuinely rely on their beliefs. That distinction shows up most personally in Doña Silvia, who is entirely based on my mom. If Alex is based on me, Doña Silvia is my mother on the page. In the story, she retells taking Alex to a basilica to ask la Virgen de la Altagracia to save him because of health issues he had as a baby. I pulled that straight from my own life; I had those health issues, and my mom really did take me there. And if you asked her today if it worked, she would most likely give you the exact same answer Doña Silvia gives: “Have you met Alex? I’m not sure that little head of his is screwed on tightly.”
Beyond their reasons for joining the show, class shapes how much each character can afford to lose. It also influences how they are viewed and treated, something the scene at Restaurante Julieta shows perfectly. The b-roll sections deepen the question further: would people really care as much if the victims had been children from poor families? Class is also what ultimately drives the wedge between Alex and Mario. What does it do to someone’s self-esteem to be surrounded by so much wealth—money spent carelessly—while they can barely afford to be in the room? To be constantly watched, knowing you are one mistake away from poverty? There’s a huge disparity in the Dominican Republic, and we see that displayed in Mario’s story: his job, the opportunities he has, and how living in the exact same city and facing the exact same storm can affect families so differently.
When it comes to humor, Dominican humor can be quite inappropriate. We often joke and laugh even through our tears; it’s one of the ways we cope and keep going. That comes through heavily in how the characters process grief and trauma in the story. Fair warning, though: my mother finds my dark humor “not amusing,” and perhaps a bit cruel. Some would say it’s just British humor. I don’t know about that. I just know that growing up surrounded by a lot of hypocrisy, humor was the tool that helped me process it and call it out.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
Three years ago, they survived the Grim Cojuelo massacre at Excelsior Academy. Now they are the stars of the reality show built on top of it.
The Real Scholars of Excelsior Academy has turned Santo Domingo’s most infamous survivors into household names: Melissa, the Final Girl who pulled the trigger. Alex, the bad boy whose prank started everything. Mónika, who carried a missing girl’s evidence to the police and brought the school down. Mario, who would like everyone to stop calling him the sidekick.
Now the missing girl is back. Lucía Salgado left behind the evidence that exposed Excelsior’s darkest secrets. After nearly three years gone, she has returned to Santo Domingo and joined the cast. She still won’t say where she was.
For executive producer Shane Harper, Lucía is the Emmy. The rest of her cast is healing, and therapy doesn’t win awards. So for Season Three she hides cameras in every home, hands a trio of fame-hungry newcomers their orders to draw blood, and waits for Lucía to crack.
Then, an ocean away, the priest who escaped Excelsior’s reckoning opens an unsigned letter: THE DEVIL WILL COME AND COLLECT HIS DUE. By midnight, carnival bells are ringing in the dark.
Someone has put the mask back on, and every name on the list leads back to Excelsior. As the bodies drop and the ratings climb, the survivors have to work out which is more dangerous: the killer hunting them, or the producer who needs the footage.
Told in prose, broadcast episodes, confessionals, chyrons, and comment sections, Mortal Vengeance II: To Reel or Not Too Real? is a Caribbean Gothic slasher and a merciless satire of reality television, where trauma is content, grief is a storyline, and nobody is safe from the edit.
Inside:
A masked killer inspired by Dominican carnival
The Dominican Republic in full: country clubs, convents, Casa de Campo, and a matriarch armed with a jug of Aperol
A “Previously on…” prologue for new viewers and a glossary of Dominicanismos
The survivors of Mortal Vengeance, winner of the Literary Titan Gold Award and the IndieReader Discovery Award, meet the unfinished business of Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale.
Content note: graphic violence and gore, and themes of abuse, grooming, suicide, and self-harm. For mature readers.
