Get Involved However You Can
Worth of a Girl centers around an eight-year-old girl from Uganda whose young life is altered forever when she is forced into a trafficking ring disguised as a trade school. Why did you choose to tell the story through eight-year-old Bibi’s perspective?
I chose a young girl’s point of view to show perspective. The innocence of a child who trusts adults to do right by them and to help, not hurt, them provides a stark contrast. It reveals truth versus the ugly evil of the world. A child tells the story much better than an adult.
How did you approach writing trauma in a way that is honest but not overwhelming or exploitative?
My books are about children and the evils they face, whether it addresses abandonment, exploitation, or abuse and loneliness. Because the plot is meant to be inspirational, I want to give the reader a sense of the trauma without actually telling it with explicit words. Grueling words, swearing, or foul language are not necessary if the author can show the action. One’s imagination can play a bigger role if the reader is told what to think. It’s been proven: ‘you’re more afraid of what you can’t see. ‘They’ll understand and see it, feel it, if it’s written honestly and plainly without a lot of detail.
The contrast between promise (school, clothing, opportunity) and reality (exploitation) is powerful. How did you develop that tension?
First, and foremost, I pray and ask God to help me write words that convey reality and tug on readers’ heartstrings. Then, I put myself in the main character’s head as much as possible. Although I’ve never faced these terrible conditions, I can imagine what it must feel like. I’m probably not even close. I do know, however, what failed promises feel like and the disappointment that follows. Extensive research (over three years) went into this book from interviews with African missionaries to documentaries and other reading. I learned what many girls had to do and endure to survive. Many of the incidents in the book were derived from real testimonies.
What kind of conversations do you hope this book starts among readers, churches, or communities?
The goal of this book is awareness of child exploitation. The awful plight of innocent children who are taken and abused, tortured, and sometimes killed needs to be known. It doesn’t just happen overseas. It’s close to home; it might even be happening down the block from where you live. Who would know? I hope readers will get a sense of urgency to help these children in some way, even if it’s through their church in helping children, fostering kids, or opening their hearts to volunteer. Not everyone can donate money. Many communities have groups that minister to children in some way. I sew dresses for girls overseas. It is known that if they have a new dress, especially with a label on it, it means they are being watched — thus, less likely to be taken by a predator. If I’ve helped just one girl in that way, my mission and goal have been fulfilled. I hope others get involved in any way possible.
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When Bibi faces challenges beyond her control, her bold, unshakable faith guides her with courage and strength. But how will she endure her fate? What will it take to save her?
When the new missions doctor, Dr. Steve Warden, arrives in Uganda, he suspects something nefarious is going on at the trade school. He never expected to unearth the dark underbelly of Evil directly beneath those who vowed to help the children. With righteous indignation ignited, he determines to seek justice for the children and rescue Bibi, even if it means taking down his own colleague and well-known people of the community.
The Radiant Word: Reflections in the Orthodox Tradition
V.K. McCarty’s The Radiant Word is less a conventional theological study than a gathering of lived sermons, meditations, and keynote reflections that move through the Orthodox liturgical year while lingering over Scripture, icons, saints, hymnody, and patristic sources. The book begins in light, with the Transfiguration and the idea that Christ’s radiance reaches into “the complicated corners of our lives,” then widens into reflections on the Theotokos, desert mothers, Mary Magdalene, the Prodigal Son, the Jesus Prayer, Kassia’s hymn, Pentecost, Basil, and finally love and beauty in pandemic life. What binds it all together is McCarty’s desire to make ancient sources feel not archival but immediate, devotional, and warm.
What I admired most was the book’s intensity of attention. McCarty doesn’t write about doctrine as an abstract system. She writes as someone who has spent time with icons, stood in candlelight, listened hard, and let texts work on her over time. The most arresting pages for me were the ones on the Mandylion icon, where her encounter with the face of Christ becomes almost physically unsettling: tired, dirty, painfully alive, even a little repellent before it turns mesmerizing. That passage has real voltage. It’s intimate, vulnerable, and odd in the best way. I also liked the way she reopens familiar material through unexpected angles, as when the Prodigal Son becomes a question about “Prodigal Daughters,” or when the Dormition meditation frames Mary not as a static emblem but as a figure of action, stillness, assent, and eschatological hope all at once. At her best, McCarty has a tactile, sensuous prose style that can make theology feel inhabited rather than explained.
McCarty’s voice is ardent, recursive, and devotional, and that makes the book can feel luminous for long stretches, but also rhetorically saturated. The imagery is often beautiful. I respected the seriousness of the vision. She is trying to restore a scriptural and patristic imagination she thinks modern Christians have thinned out, and the argument lands most powerfully when she centers women whose authority has often been reduced or sidelined. Her pages on the Desert Mothers, on Mary Magdalene, on Kassia, and on early Christian women at prayer give the book a distinctly generous moral texture. Even the closing reflection on pandemic life, with its idea of the Church as an “Arc of Safety” and its insistence that strange online intimacies could become occasions of grace, carries a tenderness.
The Radiant Word is a personal book disguised as a collection of sermons, and that personal quality is what gives it its pull. I never doubted the depth of McCarty’s reading or the sincerity of her spiritual imagination. This is a book for readers who want theology with incense still clinging to it, who don’t mind being asked to feel as much as think, and who are open to finding beauty in the old, the liturgical, the icon-filled, and the unabashedly reverent. For readers drawn to Orthodox spirituality, sacred art, women saints, and reflective devotional prose, I’d warmly recommend it.
Pages: 176
Twenty Years & Then Some: The Year the Compass Broke
I found Twenty Years and Then Some to be a restless, intimate novel about a woman trying to make sense of desire, faith, memory, and selfhood while moving between London, Iraq, and later Mashhad, all under the pressure of romantic entanglements that never quite become refuge. Aisha’s story unfolds through encounters with men like Mustafa, whose gentleness can’t kindle love, and Diyaa, whose emotional evasions wound precisely because the chemistry feels real, while her spiritual life keeps pulling her toward shrines, graves, prophecy, and questions of intercession that are not ornamental to the plot but the plot’s deepest engine. What emerges is less a conventional romance than a record of inner weather, a book about a woman whose compass is broken not because she lacks intelligence, but because feeling, belief, and longing keep pointing in different directions.
The book’s voice has a confessional intensity that can be startling, sometimes almost feverish, and when it works, it really works. I kept thinking of the scene in Najaf where shared laughter with a grieving woman breaks the heaviness for a moment, and of the visit to the grandmother’s grave, where longing for marriage, fear of death, family history, and theology all gather in one charged space. Those moments feel lived rather than engineered. The prose often reaches for grandeur, but it also knows when to come down into a sharply human detail, like Aaliya arriving with thyme pastries and Arabic coffee, or Aisha watching Diyaa’s restraint on the sofa and feeling that non-kiss as a form of intimacy more unsettling than an actual touch. I admired how often the writing refuses embarrassment. It’s earnest in a way many contemporary novels are scared to be, and that earnestness gives it heat. The novel can sometimes circle the same emotions, the narrator’s self-awareness sometimes deepens the feeling, and sometimes merely names it again. Still, even that repetition began to feel like part of the design, the rhythm of someone who knows the lesson intellectually long before she can bear to live it.
I was equally taken by the book’s ideas, especially because they’re inseparable from the narrator’s emotional life. This isn’t a novel that treats faith as background decoration. Its Shia spiritual imagination, its meditations on shrines, the dead, intercession, visions, and historical erasure give the whole book a metaphysical charge that sets it apart from more familiar breakup fiction. I found the contrast between Aisha and Diyaa especially revealing: he reaches for Helen Fisher and the anatomy of love, trying to reduce heartbreak to something legible and clinical, while she insists that love belongs as much to myth, intuition, and holiness as it does to biology. That tension gives the novel real intellectual texture. I also appreciated the passages where private suffering opens onto political and sectarian history, especially the reflections on demolition, memory, and the Wahhabi project. Those sections are bold and deeply felt, though they can be more essayistic than dramatic. I liked that the novel had something serious to say, but there were moments when I felt the fiction briefly gave way to argument. Even so, the argument is never hollow. It comes from a bruised inner life, which gives it conviction.
I came away from this book feeling I’d spent time inside a mind that is ardent, contradictory, wounded, and fiercely searching. It’s strongest when it allows romance, theology, and memory to collide without trying to tidy the mess. I’d recommend it to readers who like emotionally candid literary fiction, especially those interested in faith, sectarian identity, diasporic loneliness, and the unnerving gap between knowing what’s good for you and wanting something else anyway.
Caterina by Moonlight
Caterina by Moonlight is a historical novel that feels most alive when it stays close to Caterina’s own senses: the smell of herbs in the convent infirmary, the shimmer of painted robes, the noise of Florence’s streets, and the constant pull between obedience and curiosity. The book begins with a child being left at Le Murate and grows outward from that wound, following her into marriage, court life, political violence, travel, and eventual self-possession. What struck me most is that this isn’t just a Renaissance backdrop with costumes pinned onto it. It’s a coming-of-age story built out of religion, class, art, gender, and survival. From the start, the novel gives Caterina a clear emotional center, and that makes the long historical sweep easy to stay inside.
What the book does especially well is make Renaissance Florence feel inhabited rather than displayed. Author Kim Gottlieb-Walker fills the novel with workshops, convent routines, carnival songs, court spectacles, paintings, bargaining, spices, horses, manuscripts, and public ceremony. The detail rarely reads like research being shown off for its own sake. Instead, it becomes the medium through which Caterina understands the world. A tiny moment like the market pastry, when “It tasted like heaven,” says a lot about the novel’s method: history arrives through appetite, wonder, and bodily experience, not through lecture. That grounded sensory approach gives the book a warm pulse even when the plot turns dark.
Caterina herself is the reason the novel holds together over so many years and events. As a narrator, she begins with a child’s literal-minded innocence, then gradually becomes sharper, sadder, more observant, and more self-directed. The best parts of the book come from watching her mind at work as she absorbs contradictory lessons about holiness, beauty, marriage, desire, and duty. She doesn’t arrive as a ready-made heroine. She becomes one by learning how power actually works, then finding ways to move within it. That development gives the novel its shape. Even when the story leans into romance or court intrigue, it still feels like Caterina’s education in how to live inside her era without surrendering her inner life.
The novel is also deeply interested in women’s lives as networks of constraint, improvisation, and mutual recognition. Convent women, noblewomen, servants, mothers, lovers, and widows all occupy the book differently, and the story pays attention to the bargains each of them has to make. That gives the narrative some real heft. The historical figures and events, from Medici politics to foreign courts, matter here, but they matter because of how they shape private lives. By the time the book reaches its final movement, it has become a story not only about one woman’s endurance, but about how intelligence, memory, and affection can slowly create a life that feels chosen. When Matteo says, “Here begins a new life,” the line lands because the novel has earned it through hundreds of pages of loss, risk, and persistence.
Caterina by Moonlight is an immersive, character-centered historical novel with a generous heart and a strong sense of place. It’s interested in art, faith, politics, love, and danger, but it keeps returning to the same central question: what kind of self can a woman build when so much of her life is arranged by others? The answer the book gives is hopeful without feeling flimsy. It believes that knowledge matters, that pleasure matters, that loyalty matters, and that a life can widen even after it’s been narrowed. I came away feeling that the novel’s real subject is not simply Renaissance Florence, but the making of a woman who learns to see the world clearly and still choose joy inside it.
Pages: 297
Class Is In Session: Teaching Through the Chaos
Shantel N. Patt’s Class Is In Session: Teaching Through the Chaos is a plainspoken and deeply felt account of what it means to teach in conditions that are equal parts absurd, exhausting, and sacred. Framed through vivid classroom stories and direct reflections, the book moves through student behavior, bad professional development, overcrowded classrooms, burnout, parent communication, and the quiet moral labor of showing up for children who are often carrying far more than the adults around them realize. What stayed with me most was its insistence that the real work of teaching lives beyond data and policy, in the daily choice to keep seeing the child in front of you, whether that means understanding the “wild” student because you once were that child, celebrating a small win on the “Wins Wall,” or remembering that a kid may be acting out because they’re hungry, ashamed, tired, or simply aching to be noticed.
What I admired most about the book was its candor. Patt doesn’t write like someone trying to polish the profession into something tidy and inspirational. She writes like someone who has stood at a jammed copy machine with her forehead nearly against the lid, breathed through the moment, and gone back in anyway. That honesty gives the book its pulse. I found myself especially moved by the way she links discipline to memory and mercy. Her recollection of being a volatile, misunderstood student herself becomes the emotional foundation for a teaching philosophy built on empathy without softness, on boundaries without cruelty. There’s a tough warmth in that, and it feels earned. Even the funniest bits, like the student sniffing her armpits on picture day or the accidental saving grace of Kesha on the drive to work, don’t just land as comic relief. They reveal humor as a survival tool, almost a form of spiritual stamina.
Its writing has energy, personality, and a real voice. The book’s authority comes less from polish than from proximity. Patt knows the texture of this life. She knows what it means to have too many students in one room, to see a child’s file say “problem” while your own instincts tell you something gentler and truer, to want to save everybody and learn, painfully, that you can’t. She’s not pretending better lesson plans can fix structural neglect. Her best argument, quietly threaded through the whole book, is that schools ask teachers to carry impossible weight and then act surprised when they break. That idea feels personal rather than theoretical, and that gives it force.
I found this book affecting, relatable, and convincing. It reads like a seasoned educator telling the truth in a voice sharpened by fatigue, faith, humor, and hard-won tenderness. I came away feeling that Patt understands something many books on education miss: children do not only need instruction, and teachers do not only need strategy. They need dignity, steadiness, and the feeling that someone is still willing to believe in them when the system has reduced them to numbers. I’d recommend this book especially to classroom teachers, paraprofessionals, school leaders who want to remember what the work actually feels like on the ground, and even parents who need a clearer view of the invisible emotional architecture of a school day.
Pages: 81 | ASIN : B0GJFVGGK1
Pippin and the Prickly Dilemma
Pippin and the Prickly Dilemma by Julia Seaborn is a charming, heartfelt children’s story about a small dog named Pippin and his loyal friend, Blossom the possum. What begins as a simple trip to the park soon unfolds into an unexpected adventure. The story opens with a situation that will feel familiar to many young readers: meeting someone new who is not especially kind. When Pippin and Blossom encounter Meatball, a much larger dog who barks at them because of their size, the book introduces intimidation and unfair judgment in a gentle, accessible way.
What makes this story especially meaningful is its strong emphasis on kindness in the face of unkindness. The narrative does not simply dwell on events. Instead, it draws attention to the choices the characters make, and that is where its message shines most clearly. Pippin and his friends respond with compassion, even when compassion is not deserved. As a result, Meatball’s eventual accountability feels earned, sincere, and believable. The story suggests that empathy can soften hostility. It shows that offering help, even to someone who has treated you poorly, can open the door to growth and understanding. That moral feels organic rather than forced, which makes it all the more powerful for young readers. Beyond the story itself, the book also includes enjoyable extras such as a maze, trivia questions, and interesting facts about dogs, adding an educational dimension to its entertainment value.
Richard Hoit’s illustrations add another layer of warmth and perfectly complement the tone of the story. The artwork is colorful, inviting, and undeniably cute, making the book instantly appealing to young audiences. One of its greatest strengths is the animals’ expressiveness. Their emotions are clear and easy to read, whether they are showing confrontation, concern, or joy. These visual details make the story even more accessible, especially for children who are still building confidence in their reading skills.
Pippin and the Prickly Dilemma is a wonderful choice for young readers, parents, and educators seeking a story that promotes empathy, forgiveness, and friendship. It is highly recommended for children who enjoy animal-centered stories with meaningful lessons and interactive elements that continue the experience beyond the final page.
Pages: 32 | ASIN : B0GNZFSZ36
The Call I Almost Missed: 365 Days Without a Cell Phone and What It Taught Me About Love, Presence, and the Lies We Live
Tommy Short’s The Call I Almost Missed is a yearlong spiritual and emotional memoir told as a sequence of short letters to his daughters, and that shape gives the book its heartbeat. The premise is simple enough to hook you fast: a father turns off his cell phone for 365 days after his daughter asks, “Daddy, why are you always on your phone?” But the book quickly grows beyond experiment or stunt. It becomes a running conversation about attention, fatherhood, ambition, fear, faith, and the private ways people drift away from themselves. The letter format keeps the book intimate, and the repeated “What if” chapter titles give it a reflective rhythm that feels less like an argument and more like a man thinking out loud in real time.
What makes the book work is that Short writes with the urgency of someone who knows he’s been sleepwalking and doesn’t want to waste the wake-up call. He’s strongest when he ties his big ideas to ordinary scenes: a bedtime routine, a haircut gone sideways, a walk with his wife, a quiet panic attack, a rainy stop at the park before school. Those moments keep the book grounded. When he writes, “Presence isn’t proximity. It’s attention,” he lands on the book’s central claim in a way that feels real, not packaged. That line keeps echoing because the whole book is an effort to prove it, one family moment at a time.
The book is also a self-portrait of a man shedding identities that once made him feel valuable. Short writes about officiating basketball, speaking work, masculinity, control, and the reflex to stay reachable at all times. That gives the memoir a real arc. It isn’t just about removing a device. It’s about watching performance fall away and seeing what survives. I liked that he understands this process as both tender and disruptive. The book keeps returning to the cost of becoming more honest, especially in marriage, family life, and faith. Even when he gets intense, there’s a real vulnerability underneath it, and that’s what keeps the book from feeling abstract.
Stylistically, this is a devotional memoir with a motivational streak. Some readers will find the repetition calming; others may find it a bit much, but the repetition is part of the design. The book wants to ponder, not rush your thinking. Short’s best image for that approach comes early, when he says, “This book is not a map. Maps promise routes and destinations. But life rarely works that way.” That line explains the whole reading experience. You don’t move through this book to gather a neat system. You move through it to sit with its questions, and to notice how often it asks you to reconsider the life you’re building while you’re busy trying to manage it.
What I liked most is how clearly the book knows what it wants to be: a record of choosing presence on purpose. It’s a father’s testimony, a spiritual inventory, and a collection of letters meant to outlast the season that produced them. By the end, the phone itself almost feels secondary, which is exactly the point. The real subject is a human life becoming more awake. If you like memoirs that lean into reflection, family, and hard-won tenderness, this one has a lot to offer. It feels personal without being sealed off, and sincere without hiding its rough edges.
Pages: 294 | ASIN : B0GNX3WK9Q
Escala’s Wish
If you like your fantasy with a big “someone tell this chaotic gremlin to stop touching magical laws” energy, Escala’s Wish is a fun ride. The story has genuinely high stakes, with heart, jokes, and some genuinely high-stakes.
The whole story is framed like a live tavern performance, told by Wigfrith Foreverbloom, a bard who’s equal parts charming hype-man and messy gossip connoisseur. He’s pitching the tale to get people into The Stag (and keep them buying drinks), so you get this playful, conversational narration that leans into crowd-work humor while still delivering real plot and emotion. At the center is Escala Winter, a pixie from the Court of Dreams, who makes one reckless choice that spirals into tragedy and consequences. The fey legal system is intense, they’re not just worried about “don’t mess with mortals,” they’re obsessed with protecting the True Cycle, and the punishments (like the Wane) are nightmare fuel.
Instead of taking the obvious route, the story sets up a compelling “redemption quest” angle: Escala is sentenced to the material plane to “remove the boulders from the True Cycle,” which becomes this mix of literal helping-people moments and bigger moral/identity questions. And yes, there is betrayal, revenge, and court politics underneath it all. Morvena’s grudge is the slow-burn, generational kind, and it’s the sort of villain motivation that feels petty in a very fae way… until you realize how long she’s been planning.
The narrator is a blast. Wigfrith gives the book a “sit down, I’m about to tell you something wild” feeling, and it keeps even the lore-heavy parts moving. There are also some cool Fey mechanics plus consequences. The True Cycle / Wane / Court-of-Dreams justice system isn’t just set dressing; it drives choices and stakes. The quest has personality as well. Escala earnestly trying to get people to write down that she removed a “boulder” from their True Cycle is both funny and kind of sweet, like watching someone speedrun growth while still socially face-planting. When the story goes big, it really goes big. The latter set pieces feel cinematic: with a dark green vortex, and void-magic horror, party split, and a kind of everything-is-on-fire energy.
This is a lore-forward story. If you’re the kind of reader who wants the worldbuilding to chill for a second, there are stretches where Wigfrith explains fey society and cosmic rules pretty directly. Personally, I didn’t mind because the voice keeps it entertaining, but it’s definitely a style. The framing device is constant. You’re always in “tavern story time” mode, which is great if you like that theatrical feel, less great if you want a fully immersive close-third without commentary.
Under the jokes and action, the book keeps circling back to love as something you do, a choice with a cost, which lands well when everything hits the fan. And it gives Escala an arc that actually feels earned: she starts as reckless curiosity and ends up much more aware that actions have consequences.
Read this if you like fae courts, oaths, and “rules of magic” that actually matter. As well as found-family party dynamics (with banter), redemption arcs and morally loaded wishes, and fantasy that can be funny and go dark. It’s lively, cinematic, and built around a narrator with enough charisma to make you forgive the occasional lore-dump. If you’re into fae politics plus quest fantasy with a strong storytelling voice, I would heartily recommend this book to you.
Pages: 662 | ASIN: B0G1XRP6DW
