Shadow Walkers
Shadow Walkers is a Christian supernatural fantasy thriller that follows Lisa and Jason, a married couple pulled into a hidden spiritual war where gifted women and their paladin partners hunt demons, confront possession, and answer to an old sacred order. This mission starts with a gathering at Fletcher Mansion, where the team learns that something in their usual pattern has gone wrong, their gifts have not gone dormant, and a far larger battle is coming. The story then opens out into a dangerous campaign involving demon law, possessed people, undead forces, and a mission in Haiti that feels bigger than a single assignment and more like the start of a wider storm.
The book’s tone is intense, but it also makes room for warmth, teasing, and domestic tenderness, especially in the way Lisa and Jason talk to each other. Their banter gives the novel a human center, and at its best, it keeps the story from becoming all lore and combat. I was drawn to Lisa as a lead because she isn’t written like a fearless action machine. She worries. She hesitates. She carries the strain of leadership in a way that feels personal rather than theatrical. That choice gave the book a grounded pulse. Some scenes land with real momentum, while others repeat emotional beats or overexplain. Even so, I kept feeling the author’s sincerity on the page, and that counts for a lot.
I was also interested in the author’s wider choices. Bob Leone builds the book around spiritual hierarchy, ritual, duty, and moral tension, not just around monsters, and that gives the fantasy elements a distinct identity. The friction between Lisa and Magdalana adds real texture because it turns leadership into more than a title. It becomes a live question. Who should lead, and what kind of person should lead when the rules are old but the danger keeps changing? I thought the Haiti mission, the bokor, and the undead raised the stakes in a way that pushes the story into darker and broader territory. Sometimes the book feels like it’s carrying a lot at once, romance, action, theology, team drama, military-style planning, supernatural lore, but there’s also something compelling about that ambition. It reads like a story that genuinely believes good and evil are not abstract ideas. They’re close enough to touch.
I would recommend Shadow Walkers to readers who enjoy faith-infused supernatural fiction, especially people who like demon-hunting stories with a strong relationship at the center and a clear moral framework. Readers who value heart, conviction, and a fast-moving spiritual warfare premise will likely find a lot to appreciate here. It feels best suited for fans of Christian speculative fiction, paranormal thrillers, and team-based fantasy adventures that care as much about calling and loyalty as they do about the next fight.
Pages: 340 | ASIN : B0GFY8MPYR
Obadiah and the Last 100 Prophets of Edom
Obadiah and the Last 100 Prophets of Edom, by Tony Olmetti Schweikle, is a biblical historical novel that reads like a sustained act of witness. It takes the world around Ahab, Jezebel, Elijah, Naboth, and Obadiah and turns it into a landscape of drought, persecution, flight, and stubborn belief. From the opening battle scenes to the cave hideouts and tense village encounters, the book keeps returning to one central conviction, stated again and again in different emotional keys: “There is only One God.” That refrain gives the novel its spine and its sense of purpose.
What makes the book work is its seriousness. The author isn’t treating this material like a distant legend. He writes it as immediate, physical, and costly. Crosses line the road into Jezreel, Naboth’s vineyard becomes a site of both injustice and sacred memory, and Obadiah’s loyalty is measured in hunger, grief, and risk. The novel is full of kings, soldiers, priests, shepherds, traders, and villagers, so faith never feels abstract. It’s social, public, dangerous, and tied to land, bread, water, and survival.
I also liked how the book handles its characters in moral terms without flattening them into symbols. Ahab is brutal, but he’s also uneasy. Jezebel is cold and forceful, and the book gives her a real presence whenever she enters a scene. Obadiah, though, is the center of gravity. He isn’t drawn as flashy or invincible. He’s steady, grieving, practical, and quietly persuasive. That matters because it lets the novel become not just a story about defiance, but a story about endurance and teaching, about how belief gets handed from one frightened person to another.
The prose itself is direct and emphatic. It uses strong images, sharp confrontations, and declarative endings. Sometimes that gives the book the feel of oral storytelling, and sometimes it leans toward something almost cinematic, especially in the long middle stretch where action, dialogue, and visual staging take over. That hybrid energy turns out to be part of the book’s identity. It feels like a novel written by someone who can already see the scenes onscreen. Even when the language is simple, it’s aiming for momentum, clarity, and conviction rather than ambiguity.
What I liked most was that the book understands faith as something lived under pressure. It’s there in the markets, in whispered conversations, in stories told by lamplight, and in the refusal to surrender what is holy. A line like “The truth remained, unchallenged and eternal” captures the book’s posture. This is a novel of declaration, pursuit, and testimony, and it knows what story it wants to tell. If you’re open to a fervent, dramatic retelling of biblical conflict with a strong devotional core, this book has a clear voice, and it commits to it completely.
Pages: 142 | ASIN : B0GPLSLY4P
Finding Our Voice: A Story of Leadership in Crisis and the American Spirit Abroad
Finding Our Voice is part memoir, part leadership manifesto, part archive of speeches delivered while Adam Castillo led AMCHAM Myanmar through coup, sanctions, economic collapse, and disaster. What gives it shape is his “Three Acts of Leadership” model, moving from proving competence, to enduring pressure, to offering people a reason to believe, but what gives it pulse is the lived texture around that framework: the ex-Marine who washes up in Myanmar half-broken, builds a company from a couch he still keeps, stays when others evacuate, and tries to turn a frightened business community into something like a moral community. The book’s range is wider than its premise suggests. It moves from Marine Corps formation and post-service disillusionment to chamber politics, hotel ballroom speeches, a refugee’s testimony, and earthquake relief work, always circling the same core conviction that jobs, dignity, and belief matter most when history gets ugly.
What I admired most is that Castillo writes with the urgency of someone who feels he has earned the right to be emphatic. The book has a driving, spoken quality. You can hear the podium in it. But even when it swells toward rhetoric, it rarely feels bloodless. I kept thinking about the small, disarming details that save it from abstraction: that battered couch doubling as bed, desk, and command post, the local hires he treats not as placeholders but as future leaders, the image of him in the black Ford Ranger navigating Yangon during the coup, and later the surreal electricity of a July Fourth event where children wave little American flags, “Wild Thing” blasts, and the room tilts from ceremony into something like collective release. Those moments give the book warmth and grain. They make the ideas legible because they show what belief looked like on the ground.
I also found the book more interesting and more affecting when it let its certainty crack a little. Castillo is plainly a man of strong opinions, especially about sanctions, American power, the failures of institutions, and the obligations of leadership. At times, that forcefulness veers into self-mythologizing, and there are stretches where the prose presses so hard on its own importance that I wanted more room for complexity. Still, the book earns much of its moral intensity.
The inclusion of the Burmese refugee’s testimony deepens the narrative by shifting the lens away from Castillo’s own heroism and toward the human consequences of policy and abandonment. Likewise, the later sections on the earthquake and the Rebuild Fund, with their focus on water points, latrines, health workers, blocked transfers, and practical relief, pull the book back from grand theory into the stubborn world of actual need. I didn’t agree with every conclusion, but I never felt the ideas were merely posed. They’ve been lived in, argued through, and paid for.
I found Finding Our Voice uneven in the way many deeply personal books are, but never inert, never timid, and often genuinely stirring. Its best passages carry real heat, and its best insight is a simple one: leadership in crisis is less about charisma than stamina, witness, and the ability to make people feel they still count. I’d recommend it to readers interested in memoirs of service after military life, leadership under pressure, Myanmar, or the uneasy border where commerce, politics, and conscience meet. I finished it feeling that Castillo’s conviction gives the book its force.
Pages: 300 | ISBN : 978-1544551630
We Are Never Far From Wild Landscapes
The White Wolf follows a struggling young vet tech whose bond with a stolen white wolf pup drives her into a fierce pursuit through a world where cruelty, commerce, and survival are tightly entwined. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Several experiences shaped the concept of the novel. First, all my life I’ve loved canines, both wild and domestic. Especially memorable was the time my high school teacher, internationally renouned wildlife artist Robert Bateman, took some of his students up to the wolf research station in Algonquin Park where they allowed us to go in and play with some wolf pups. I’m an ardent environmentalist alarmed by the loss of wildlife in our communities and the barbaric practice of trophy hunts. And I once stumbled upon a riveting Anishinaabe story about how the Creator out of all animals chose the wolf to be a brother to man. When it came time for them to be separated, the Creator said that although they would lead separate lives, what happened to one would aways happen to the other.
How did you approach writing from both human and animal points of view without losing emotional credibility?
Thank you for the compliment. I regarded the portrayal of the wolf as especially important and indeed, difficult to accomplish but I knew I did not want to mirror the device many authors use to express the animal’s viewpoint as though it were talking in first person. I think the distance of third person worked. And I tried to avoid anthropomorphizing the wolf’s experiences. Even though they are different species, having spent my life in the company of dogs one gets to understand their communications – vocally, through body language and actions. Also, lots of research and learning from people who worked with wolves. As to the humans, I felt on stronger ground having come from farming families. Even in cities, in my home country, we are never far from wild landscapes.
Jade and Niko are both displaced from home in different ways. How conscious were you of building the novel around that shared dispossession?
That didn’t start out to be a major theme but grew organically as I wrote the book. Again, the overarching concept of “what happens to one will also happen to the other” helped me to deepen the novel along the lines of losing one’s home.
The ranch is such an effective symbol of polished cruelty. What inspired that setting and its “family-friendly” facade?
Early on my research turned up the presence of many ranches that offered canned hunts and trophy hunts to wealthy individuals. The tourist or educational aspect of the ranch is made up but the operation of these places is very real indeed.
Author Links: Facebook | Website
The author’s earlier novels, historical thrillers, have been praised by international bestselling authors, Louise Penny, Alan Bradley and Katherine Neville.
Niko is a rare white eastern wolf. Snatched from his den by a hunter when barely a week old, he’s raised by Jade, a young woman. The hunter returns promising he’ll take the wolf to a sanctuary, instead, he sells Niko to a hunting preserve. Jade risks everything to rescue the wolf as trophy hunters track Niko through the shimmering beauty of the Adirondack mountains.
The deep attachment we all feel to home entwines the fates of three principal individuals: Jade, grieving the loss of her family farm, Conrad Lang, a hunting guide who could lose his ranch as it teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, and Niko raised in captivity, who finds the early trust he placed in humans threatens to become a curse. The young wolf too, longs for home – his birthplace high up on Mount Seymour. But to survive, he must learn how to be wild again.
This story is a testimony to the passion and courage of all three.
“Much of the novel is from the wolf’s point of view, but he is not anthromorphised in any way, and Westbrook has done a sterling job of representing him as he grows, determined to set his own fate. The human characters he encounters are fully realized, both the good and the bad, those wanting to help the wolf, those wanting to make money off him, and those fixated on hunting him. A thriller like no other, with a deep heart, compelling message, brilliant writing, and a deep seated love of nature in all its complications.”
Vicki Delany, National Bestselling Author
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature blends social criticism, philosophy, and spiritual reflection. Author Chet Shupe argues that human beings were shaped for intimate, interdependent life, but civilization pulled us away from that design by teaching us to live for rules, institutions, and imagined futures instead of felt reality. Across chapters on emotional pain, language, law, marriage, war, and “spiritual home,” he keeps returning to one core claim: modern life has cut us off from our emotional intelligence and from one another, and that loss sits underneath much of our loneliness and distress.
Shupe does not tiptoe around his thesis. He states it, circles it, pushes it harder, then looks at it from another angle. At times, that gives the book a sermon-like intensity. I could not deny the force of his voice. He writes like someone who has been sitting with these ideas for a very long time and has reached the point where he needs to say them plainly. When he describes modern life as a place of compliance, emotional repression, and spiritual homelessness, the book can feel stark, even severe, but it doesn’t feel half-hearted.
I found myself both pulled in and pushing back. That was part of the value of reading it. Shupe’s contrast between “spiritual obligations” and legal ones, and his argument that language helped turn humans away from the present and toward anxious future-control, are bold ideas. They are also sweeping ones. I didn’t agree with every leap, but even then, I kept thinking. The book has that effect. It presses on sore spots most people already know are there: loneliness, numbness, strained relationships, the strange emptiness that can sit underneath a well-organized life. In that sense, this book works less like a tidy argument and more like a long, insistent conversation that wants to shake you awake.
I would recommend this book most to readers who enjoy reflective nonfiction that is willing to be provocative, speculative, and deeply personal in its philosophy. If you like books of social critique that overlap with psychology and spirituality, and you do not need every argument to arrive in a strictly academic package, there is a lot here to wrestle with. Readers who are open to a candid, searching, sometimes repetitive, often arresting meditation on what modern life has cost us will probably find it worth their time.
Pages: 275 | ASIN : B0FVPQJZCX
ABBA- The Making of an Unstoppable Musical Phenomenon
Michael Mascioni’s ABBA: The Making of an Unstoppable Musical Phenomenon is less a conventional band biography than a wide-angle study of how ABBA became a durable cultural ecosystem. The book moves from the obvious milestones, Eurovision and “Waterloo,” the peculiar alchemy of Agnetha and Frida’s voices, the immaculate pop construction of songs like “Dancing Queen” and “The Winner Takes It All,” into something more expansive: the Mamma Mia! empire, ABBA Voyage, the museum, tourism, tribute acts, fan communities, solo careers, and the strange elegance with which ABBA transformed from a recording group into a living global franchise. Mascioni is quite clear that he isn’t trying to tell the whole history of the band. What he wants to trace is the machinery of endurance, and in that respect, the book is unusually focused and often genuinely interesting.
What I liked most is that the book understands ABBA as both music and atmosphere. Mascioni keeps returning to that tension between emotional melancholy and radiant surface, and I found that persuasive because it gets at something essential in ABBA’s appeal. He’s especially good when he lingers over the afterlife of the songs, how Mamma Mia! recontextualized them, how Voyage turned nostalgia into spectacle, how even the museum and fan travel to Sweden become part of the meaning of the music rather than mere merchandising. The examples accumulate in a way that can feel repetitive, but they also create their own force. By the time he’s discussing audiences singing along with tribute bands, fans visiting Stockholm because of the group, or the band’s music being carried forward through theater and curated multimedia experiences, you feel the scale of the phenomenon rather than just hearing it asserted.
There’s real enthusiasm here, but the prose can be citation-heavy, and sometimes more compilative than shapely. Mascioni often builds chapters through long strings of quotations and testimony, which gives the book breadth. That method lets the book feel communal, as if ABBA’s story can only be told through the many people who’ve orbited it: musicians, scholars, producers, curators, fans. I also appreciated that the later chapters don’t simply circle the old hits. The sections on Agnetha’s and Frida’s solo work, on Chess and Kristina från Duvemåla, and on the sheer persistence of fan culture give the book a fuller, more textured emotional register than a nostalgia piece usually allows.
I came away feeling I’d been shown something real about why ABBA still matters, not just as a beloved pop group, but as a carefully sustained emotional world people keep choosing to reenter. That lasting resonance is the book’s strongest argument, and Mascioni makes it with conviction. I’d recommend it most to committed ABBA fans, pop-culture readers interested in legacy and branding, and anyone curious about how songs become institutions.
Pages: 136 | ASIN : B0DQ6F5953
The Galloping Snapper Confesses Everything
The Galloping Snapper is a memoir of reinvention. Dave “Letterfly” Knoderer begins in the ache of surrender, selling the six-pony liberty act that had given his young life shape and meaning, and then follows the long, uneven road by which performance, painting, horsemanship, family, love, and recovery slowly braid into a new self. What stayed with me most was the way the book keeps turning loss into motion. A man leaves Canada grieving his ponies, finds his way into painting ornate scrollwork on a restored calliope truck, returns to the fairgrounds and circus ring with Bingo, and eventually arrives at a harder, deeper transformation through Alcoholics Anonymous, spiritual surrender, and the making of a home and vocation that feel earned rather than merely desired. It’s a classic American road memoir in some ways, but also more intimate than that, because it never lets the outward adventure eclipse the inward reckoning.
Knoderer is very good at the tactile particulars of his world: the old White Horse van waiting for circus scrollwork, the bank of brass calliope whistles he studies stroke by stroke, the smell and clatter and competitive glitter of the midway, the gossip in the popcorn trailer, the hard practical labor behind all that spectacle. Those passages have real charm, and more than charm, they have authority. I felt the book’s affection for handmade work on every page, and I liked that its reverence for art isn’t abstract. Painting here isn’t a lofty pose. It’s weather, deadlines, ladders, gloss ruined by rain, and the stubborn joy of making something vivid enough to pull strangers closer. The prose can sometimes be very earnest, but even when the language grows florid, I rarely doubted the feeling underneath it.
What gave the memoir its emotional weight for me, though, wasn’t the carnival color but the accumulation of moral and spiritual change. The early wound of selling the ponies, the tenderness of Hayes telling him the sight of those “yellow ponies” on pasture had stayed with him, the later healing with his father on the fair circuit, and the shift from beer-soaked drift into recovery all give the book a real arc instead of a mere sequence of adventures. I was especially moved by the way the narrative keeps circling back to companionship, human and animal alike. Bingo isn’t just a horse but a partner in craft and performance. Gail arrives not as a convenient happy ending but as part of a larger reordering of life around sobriety, discipline, fellowship, and love. The AA material is openly devotional and will probably land differently depending on the reader, but I found its conviction more affecting than preachy because it grows out of ruin. The book’s deepest idea, I think, is that a life can be rebuilt not by denying its mess but by putting that mess to work in service of something steadier and more generous.
The Galloping Snapper is warm and vivid. What I came away with was less the image of a daredevil life than the harder thing: a man teaching himself, over many years, how to turn appetite into vocation, loneliness into fellowship, and spectacle into meaning. I’d recommend it most to readers who love memoirs of craft, travel, recovery, horsemanship, and old, odd corners of American show business, especially those who don’t mind a voice that runs fervent and full-hearted.
Pages: 408 | ASIN: B0CZ8TY3LS
Nurse Dorothea® Presents Distress Tolerance and Contentment, and Why We Need to Develop Those Skills
Distress Tolerance and Contentment and Why We Need to Develop Those Skills, by Michael Dow, frames itself as an after-school class led by Nurse Dorothea, who speaks directly to children about how big feelings work, what unhealthy coping can look like, and which practical tools can help. The first half focuses on distress tolerance, naming triggers, noticing distorted thoughts, and practicing strategies like “emotional surfing,” STOP, TIPP, ACCEPTS, and radical acceptance, while the second half turns toward problem-solving and contentment, urging kids to tell needs from wants, protect their time, and build steadier inner ground.
As a parent, I admired the book’s seriousness. It doesn’t speak to children as if they are decorative little optimists; it assumes they can confront anxiety, avoidance, shame, impulsivity, and loneliness with honesty. I found that bracing and, in places, genuinely heartening. There is a humane impulse underneath the instruction, the repeated insistence that mental health can be discussed openly, that distress is survivable, and that skills can be learned even when feelings arrive like weather fronts. This is much more didactic than lyrical. It reads less like a conventional picture book and more like a classroom script or guided workbook.
I liked the book’s practical texture. It asks children to journal, reflect, pause, observe, compare choices, and rehearse healthier responses rather than merely absorb a moral and move on. As a parent, I can see real value in that. I could imagine reading sections of it with a child who is old enough to discuss them, then stopping to talk rather than hurrying to the next page. I also think some families will need to mediate the material carefully: the examples of self-harm, binge eating, smoking, vaping, and drug use are frank, and the vocabulary lands closer to social-emotional curriculum than bedtime fare.
I would recommend Dow’s guide most strongly for older children, tweens, middle-grade readers, counselors, classrooms, and families looking for children’s mental health nonfiction, social-emotional learning, psychology for kids, or therapeutic read-alouds rather than a snug narrative picture book. In spirit, it sits closer to an educational companion than to the emotional parable of The Rabbit Listened, where that book comforts through quiet metaphor, this one teaches through direct instruction. This book is useful and earnest, less a lullaby than a toolkit, and sometimes that is exactly what a child needs.
Pages: 99
