Building Continuity Across Books
Encountering Empire follows an eighteen-year-old Irish leader as he journeys from Ériu to Hispania, confronting Rome’s expansion, pirates, political intrigue, and unfamiliar cultures while reflecting on a life shaped by courage, strategy, and survival. What is the most rewarding aspect of writing a series?
Building continuity across books – political, cultural, and personal. The research – and ensuring each volume deepens the world rather than repeating it. I have learned a lot in the process and taken the opportunity to experience the world of the scela by visiting the many archaeological sites that still exist.
Which historical sources were especially valuable while developing the novel?
My most influential sources include P.W. Joyce’s A Social History of Ancient Ireland; Barry Raftery’s Pagan Celtic Ireland; and work by J.P. Mallory, John Peddie, and Lionel Casson. I also draw on J.K. O’Doherty’s Derriana for regional context and perspective. Beyond these, the research base is broad – archaeology, maritime history, Roman military studies, and early Irish literature.
Did you think of the novel as an imagined oral history or archive while writing it?
Yes. The framing device with Calgach and Padar is deliberate. The narrative is shaped as remembered experience – layered accounts, disagreements, omissions, and inherited stories. It mirrors how early societies preserved history.
What do you hope readers understand differently about Rome and the Celtic world?
That Rome was not monolithic, and the Celtic world was not primitive. Both were complex, adaptive, and interconnected. Power moved through trade, obligation, hospitality, and information – not only through conquest.
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The Trouble With Hector
The Trouble with Hector, by Bonnie Denmark, is a playful children’s book about a boy who spends his carefully saved $3.98 on a lizard who has already been returned to the pet shop nineteen times. Hector quickly proves to be affectionate, unusual, and a little combustible. When he’s worried, hungry, or sad, his breath heats up until sparks and flames start flying, which turns ordinary moments at home and school into escalating comic disasters. The story moves at a lively pace, and Denmark’s rhyming text gives it the kind of bounce that should work especially well when read aloud.
What gives the story some emotional weight is the boy’s loyalty to Hector. He doesn’t give up on his pet when things get difficult. Instead, he tries meditation and yoga with him, comforts him after he’s sent out of the classroom, sneaks him food, and eventually builds him a cozy treehouse when Hector can’t stay indoors anymore. That relationship keeps the book warm even while the jokes get bigger and smokier. There’s also a nice childlike logic to the whole setup: of course a bargain-bin mystery lizard might breathe fire, and of course the kid who bought him would still think he was worth every cent.
Mina Sešek’s illustrations are a major part of the picture book’s personality. Hector’s bulging eyes, curled tail, purplish-and-green markings, and increasingly sooty face make him expressive even before the text tells us what he’s feeling. The images also carry plenty of visual humor, from the pet-shop sign warning customers to “BUY AT YOUR OWN RISK” to the burned curtain, smoking seesaw, and school-lunch chaos. The soft, hand-drawn look and generous use of pinks, greens, oranges, and muted pastels give the book a friendly visual warmth that keeps Hector’s fire-breathing from ever feeling threatening. I especially like how the later treehouse scenes open up the setting and give the story a cozy, almost storybook-hideaway feeling.
The ending gives Hector’s fiery problem an unexpectedly sweet solution when he meets a girl lizard and immediately settles down. From there, the book closes on an affectionate joke: Hector may be calm now, but he’s still occasionally useful for roasting marshmallows. It’s a charming finish that fits the book’s lighthearted tone and brings the story back to the bond between the boy and his very strange pet. The Trouble with Hector is an energetic and funny picture book with a memorable creature at its center, a warm sense of friendship, and illustrations that give kids plenty to notice beyond the words.
Pages: 32 | ASIN : B0GSSLG3HF
Charlotte’s Journey Home
James A. Brandt’s Charlotte’s Journey Home is a warm, reflective historical novel about a young British girl evacuated from London during World War II. Charlotte is only four when a bomb crater near her home convinces her mother that staying in London has become too dangerous. She’s sent north as part of the wartime evacuation of children, carrying a small suitcase, her rag doll Rosie, and the promise that her parents will keep writing. From there, the novel follows Charlotte across five years as she grows from a frightened child into a capable nine-year-old shaped by two families and two very different homes. The book’s inspiration is especially meaningful: Brandt explains that the story grew from his own mother’s childhood memory of being displaced during Operation Pied Piper, while the characters and events themselves are fictional.
What gives the novel its emotional pull is the way Brandt keeps the war at a child’s level. Charlotte doesn’t understand military strategy or politics. She understands an empty chair at supper, a mother waving from a railway platform, letters that take too long to arrive, and the relief of discovering that the countryside sky contains birds instead of bombers. The Whitaker family, who take Charlotte into their Yorkshire farm, become the heart of the middle section. Arthur teaches her about crops and seasons, Margaret provides the steady affection she desperately needs, and Emily and Samuel gradually become a sister and brother in every meaningful sense. Brandt also uses small objects particularly well. The embroidered handkerchief hidden by Charlotte’s mother, the brass kangaroo given to her by an Australian soldier, the worn family photograph, and the carved wooden lamb all become physical reminders of people who’ve loved her. By the epilogue, those keepsakes have become a record of an entire childhood.
Readers familiar with Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mister Tom will recognize some common ground. Both stories center on British children evacuated from cities during World War II and explore how an unfamiliar country household can become a genuine home. Brandt’s novel, though, is built more like an adult remembering childhood than a child experiencing events entirely in the present. Charlotte frequently looks back from old age and interprets moments she couldn’t fully understand when they happened, especially her mother’s sacrifices and the complicated feeling of belonging to two families at once. That gives the book the quality of a family story passed down across generations. There’s also an echo of authors such as Michael Morpurgo in Brandt’s interest in ordinary people caught inside enormous historical events. The war provides the setting and pressure, but the real subject is how kindness, routine, letters, and family bonds help a child build a life while history is rearranging everything around her.
The final chapters bring the novel’s central idea together especially well. Victory means Charlotte can finally return to London and reunite with both parents, but by then “home” has become much more complicated than a single address. Leaving the Whitakers hurts because the farm is no longer a temporary backdrop. It’s where she learned to read, work, make friends, care for animals, and grow up. Her reunion with her mother and father is deeply satisfying precisely because Brandt allows that happiness to coexist with her grief at leaving the second family she loves. The epilogue carries that idea through the rest of Charlotte’s life, including continued visits to the Whitakers and her decision to place Margaret beside her mother at her wedding. Charlotte’s Journey Home is a tender family-centered novel about displacement, memory, courage, and the surprising capacity a child has to belong fully to more than one place. Its strongest moments come from that simple insight: being sent away changes Charlotte’s idea of home, but it also enlarges it.
Pages: 105 | ASIN : B0H96FMHGH
Many Unresolved Feelings
The Rug Dealer is a candid memoir of desire, reinvention, and self-deception, tracing your lifelong fascination with a charismatic Turkish rug dealer from a teenage romance in 1980s Konya to the consequences of the choices that followed. What was the inspiration for you to share your story with readers?
When I started writing The Rug Dealer, I believed I was telling a simple coming-of-age story. I didn’t realize the extent to which I was still consumed by the fixation I had on Mehmet and his country. I thought I’d let it go years earlier, but I was so wrong.
As I wrote I was, in a sense, reliving my experience, and my fascination and fantasies were reactivated.
By the time I got to the final chapters I was able to process many unresolved feelings and let go of my fixation, mostly.
Was there anything you discovered about your past while researching or reconstructing the story?
Yes, I discovered how fearless and frightfully naïve I’d been.
What does your memoir suggest about the stories we create around the people we desire?
I hope it suggests that we can be blind to reality when we’re smitten.
If you could speak to the teenage Martha who first met Mehmet, what would you tell her?
I’d tell her to listen to her heart, follow her dreams and go for it.
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Some loves find you before you are ready for them. Some stay with you long after you think you have let them go.
The Rug Dealer is the true story of a young American woman who travels to Turkey and falls into an obsession she does not have a name for yet. Part coming-of-age memoir, part love story, part portrait of a world she was never meant to belong to, this is the account of what happens when a life collides with a culture, a person, and a feeling that refuses to be filed away neatly.
Readers have described it as a book they read in two sittings and thought about for weeks. A story that pulls you somewhere you did not expect to go and does not let you leave until it is ready.
The Ghost of Pickleball Past – Book 2 of the Pickleball Chronicles
Rob Munden’s The Ghost of Pickleball Past is a wild blend of sports fiction, murder mystery, supernatural story, and broad comedy, all built around a group of characters whose lives have become inseparable from pickleball. The novel picks up with serial killer Peter Weatherford serving a massive prison sentence while Keisha, Randall, Rusty, Robin, Mathew, Elijah, Debbie, and the rest of “The Crew” try to move forward after the violence of the past. That peace doesn’t last. A professional pickleball player suddenly dies during a match, Hollywood arrives to make a movie about the previous murders, and questions begin piling up about whether another killer is at work. Meanwhile, Peter begins seeing Elaine Stewart, one of his victims, who seems determined to send him on a strange spiritual mission. From there, the story keeps expanding, bringing together crime, pickleball tournaments, movie stars, prison life, romance, faith, and some deliberately ridiculous situations.
What makes the book especially interesting is Peter’s storyline. He’s still responsible for terrible crimes, but the novel spends a surprising amount of time exploring what happens when a narcissistic killer begins developing empathy. Elaine forces him to confront the fear, humiliation, and pain he once inflicted on other people, and Peter gradually recognizes those emotions in himself. At one point, the book names the change directly as “empathy,” and that idea becomes one of the novel’s central themes. His journey eventually grows much bigger than his own survival, particularly when his actions help save thousands of prisoners and employees from the destruction of Lansing Correctional Facility. That gives the book an unusual moral tension. Munden isn’t simply asking whether Peter can do something good. He’s asking what genuine remorse, love, faith, and responsibility might look like in someone who has already done things that can never be undone.
This book is similar to Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels. Like Evanovich, Munden builds a crime story around an eccentric ensemble. Serious danger can be followed almost immediately by flirting, arguments, slapstick, food jokes, sexual humor, or some completely unexpected bit involving pickleball. Characters such as Andre, Debbie, Edna, Randall, and even Pacheco the squirrel give the novel the feeling of a large comedy cast that has wandered into a murder investigation. That tone becomes part of the book’s personality. Even near the climax, when Debbie and Andre are trapped with poisonous gas, their escape depends partly on Pacheco chewing through peanut-butter-covered screws. Readers who enjoy Evanovich’s combination of mystery, danger, romance, and deliberately over-the-top personalities will recognize a similar kind of energy here, although Munden filters it through Kansas culture, Christian faith, and an almost encyclopedic enthusiasm for pickleball.
The Ghost of Pickleball Past feels less like a simple sports mystery and more like a sprawling comic adventure about second chances, friendship, trauma, and the strange ways people rebuild their lives. Several characters get meaningful movement forward, including Elijah coming out of his shell, Randall and Edna deepening their relationship, and Keisha deciding what kind of future she wants after everything she has survived. The final revelation involving Peter and the mysterious Trish also gives the supernatural storyline a satisfying payoff, connecting Peter’s emotional transformation directly back to Elaine Stewart. Munden clearly loves these characters, Kansas, sports, and especially pickleball, and that enthusiasm gives the novel its distinctive voice. It’s big, strange, funny, violent, sentimental, and deeply committed to its own world, which makes it the kind of book that leaves you feeling as though you’ve spent a few hundred pages hanging around with The Crew.
Pages: 369 | ASIN : B0H79FBFQ9
Sophie Moon and the Honeybees
Sophie Moon and the Honeybees is a warm, gently educational children’s book built around Sophie’s visits with her grandfather through spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each season brings another stage in Grandpa’s beekeeping and another small challenge for Sophie, so the book develops on two tracks at once. Readers learn how a hive works, what queens and workers do, how honey is harvested, what bees do in winter, and even why they sometimes gather outside a hive. At the same time, Sophie is learning how to speak in front of her class, make and lose a friend, respect rules, and keep trying when she feels uncertain. The seasonal structure gives the story a pleasing rhythm, while Sophie’s recurring “Doodle Notes” make the bee facts feel like discoveries she’s collecting.
The relationship between Sophie and Grandpa is the heart of the children’s book. Their time together has a lived-in coziness to it, with tea, honey, fires, shopping trips, painting hive boxes, snowy walks, and Grandpa’s familiar scent of coffee, Old Spice, grass, smoke, or sunshine changing slightly with the seasons. Sophie also feels like a child with an actual inner life. She worries that she won’t be good enough during school presentations, wonders whether other children will accept her, breaks a rule even though she knows better, and struggles when Catalina moves away without saying goodbye. The bee colony often becomes a way for Sophie to think through those feelings. The queen’s need to be accepted connects naturally with Sophie’s decision to befriend Catalina, while the idea that bees live and work together helps her make sense of friendship, separation, and loneliness.
There’s also more emotional weight here than the cheerful beekeeping premise might suggest. Catalina’s family troubles, Sophie’s memories of her father’s death, her fear of public speaking, and the consequences of sneaking out at night give the story real stakes. I especially liked that Grandpa usually teaches by asking questions, demonstrating something, or letting Sophie arrive at an answer herself. When she breaks her promise and secretly visits the hives at night, he follows through on the rules and sends her home early, yet their relationship remains loving. Later, Sophie understands those rules as part of caring for one another. That combination of affection, consequences, curiosity, and second chances gives the book a sturdy emotional center.
The illustrations use soft, colorful, storybook-style imagery to make Sophie, Grandpa, Catalina, the cabin, and the hives feel immediately approachable. Some of the strongest pictures are also closely tied to memorable moments, such as Sophie and Grandpa examining the queen, Sophie and Catalina lying among white flowers, the girls sneaking toward the hives under a huge moon, and Sophie and Grandpa building a snow bee. The bright painted hives and warm countryside scenes reinforce Sophie’s love of color and drawing, while the winter images shift into quieter whites and blues without losing that sense of warmth. Together, the illustrations and the hands-on bee facts make Sophie Moon and the Honeybees feel like a children’s book meant to spark curiosity as much as tell a story, with friendship, family, art, and the natural world all buzzing around the same hive.
Pages: 54 | ASIN: B0GXWQGZ26
Economic Problems in a Nonlinear World: A Complexity Economics Inquiry into Inequality, Inflation, Debt, Markets, and Crisis
Lawrence R. Kunkel’s Economic Problems in a Nonlinear World is an ambitious work of complexity economics and political economy. Its governing proposition is stated early and directly: “the economy is not a machine. It is a complex adaptive system.” From that premise, Kunkel develops an account of economic life shaped by feedback loops, thresholds, network effects, path dependence, cumulative advantage, institutional power, and changing expectations. The book treats inflation, inequality, debt, housing, labor, finance, technology, supply chains, and climate as interconnected processes whose effects can compound or change abruptly. This systemic perspective also carries a moral argument. Economic arrangements distribute security, risk, influence, and opportunity, so judgments about resilience and justice belong inside economic analysis.
The book’s fifteen chapters follow a deliberate progression. The opening chapters establish the limitations of equilibrium thinking and introduce the concepts of nonlinearity, emergence, tipping points, and cascades. Later chapters apply that vocabulary to major economic problems. Inflation becomes a conflict among scarcity, expectations, pricing power, wages, and public trust. Debt becomes a network of future claims whose stability depends on collateral, interest rates, leverage, and the location of financial buffers. Inequality appears as a cumulative advantage machine in which wealth purchases assets, influence, education, and insulation from risk. Particularly effective discussions show how housing appreciation strengthens incumbent political power, how lean supply chains convert local efficiency into systemic fragility, and how financial markets can manufacture the signals they subsequently interpret. These applications give the book coherence across an unusually broad field.
Kunkel writes in lucid, forceful prose, frequently using parallel structures and recurring examples to connect abstract concepts with recognizable experience. His method is primarily interpretive synthesis, supported by a compact bibliography and examples drawn from the global financial crisis, the pandemic economy, digital platforms, labor displacement, housing scarcity, and ecological stress. That form gives the book considerable reach and makes complexity theory accessible to general readers. It also creates some repetition, especially when later chapters restate the central contrast between mechanical and adaptive systems. I think some causal claims would carry greater analytical weight with more sustained engagement with data, competing explanations, and specific policy outcomes. Even so, the repetition reinforces a consistent conceptual vocabulary, and the book’s breadth allows readers to see relationships that specialized treatments often separate.
The final chapters turn the analysis into a program for governance built around resilience, institutional learning, prevention, democratic accountability, and fair burden sharing. Kunkel summarizes the practical implication crisply: “Complexity is not an excuse for inaction. It is a demand for wiser action.” This is the book’s most consequential contribution. It presents public policy as the work of identifying leverage points, monitoring feedback, preserving buffers, anticipating adaptation, and revising interventions as conditions change. Economic Problems in a Nonlinear World is therefore best understood as a wide-ranging framework for economic diagnosis and democratic institutional design. It will be most useful to readers seeking a rigorous conceptual language for connecting familiar economic crises and for evaluating prosperity through stability, capability, legitimacy, and human well-being.
Pages: 458 | ASIN : B0H85K34L7
