The Progression of Women’s Rights
The Crones’ Tales gathers five women from different eras of the feminist movement in a cottage to drink wine, trade stories, debate ideas, and retell a classic fairy tale through the lens of their own generation. What inspired the idea of gathering women from different feminist eras into one story?
The short answer is that it evolved. A few years ago, I had an idea for an anthology of fairy tales written by different female authors. I talked to the women in my local writer’s centre. There was a lot of interest but no action so I decided to move on to other things. Still, the idea of fairy tales told by different voices stayed with me and then last year I set myself a challenge – I would publish a short story every two weeks on my website. During this challenge, I wrote the story What’s In A Name and realised that that story had a distinctive voice. That made me wonder if I could return to my original idea but instead of different writer’s voices, I would write with different story teller’s voices. That meant that I needed to figure out what these women had in common and what would bring them together. I considered story telling frameworks like the travellers (Canterbury Tales), the strandees (The Decameron), the desperate (The Thousand Nights and One) and then I remembered a movie called My Dinner With Andre. The plot sounds terribly dull – two men eat dinner and talking – and yet it’s one of my favourite movies. With this idea of a dinner conversation in mind, I remembered reading about Mary Wollstonecraft attending dinners thrown by her publisher, Joseph Johnson at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard Lane in London. It was the Age of Enlightenment, an age when men were focused on their rights and freedoms. Johnson invited these radical thinkers to sit around his dining table, eating, drinking, talking. Mary wasn’t the only woman to attend these dinners, but it was her Vindication of the Rights of Women that made her stand out. She didn’t want to only be a woman who wrote, she wanted to be a woman who could support herself with her writing. While she never achieved her goal, her voice came to represent that of the movement that would much later, become known as feminism. It was this slow progression in the fight for women’s rights, the progress and the regression, that led me to ask the question – how have women’s ideas of ‘their rights’ changed over time.
How did you approach representing different waves of feminism through the five women, and what tensions between generations were most interesting to explore?
That’s a great question. Beatrice is modelled on Mary W — only mellowed a bit with age — because she pre-dated any formal movement. Women before and during the Enlightenment, were like lone voices struggling to create their own lives. She witnessed the women of the French Revolution being murdered for demanding the same rights as men. She never achieved the financial independence she longed for and she died, like so many women of her age, in childbirth. While her daughter, Mary went on to become famous as a writer, Mary W and her treatise and her life were debased by her husband William Godwin. Her treatise lay dormant for years until it was revived by the Seneca Falls Convention which produced the Declaration of Rights and Sentiment written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Magret is not based on Stanton alone – but perhaps her prickliness is — because she was part of a movement. That movement for women’s rights was an off shoot of the abolitionist movement which not only pushed to free the slaves but also pushed for black men to receive the right to vote. In 1870, black men won that right, but women wouldn’t get the same right in America until 1901. That’s a 30-year gap. In those 30 years, WW1 wiped out so many young men that women had to fill the gap. Then WW2 again asked women to take the place of men. Each time they stepped up, they gained confidence in their ability to keep the home fires burning. So why did they abdicate their newfound freedom in the post-war years? The simple answer seemed to be that women were told they were no longer needed and that coincided with the media building an image of a fairy tale life in the suburbs. Initially I planned a Rosie the Riveter character, but I didn’t think that adequately portrayed why so many women retreated to home and hearth. Women, especially those who knew what men endured during the war, were much more complex than that. So what, I wondered would convince that woman to take up the role of the traditional housewife? The solution was to choose a woman who knew exactly what she was giving up. Someone who understood that it was an act of sacrifice. For younger women today, I think the 50s of America looked like a peaceful, domestic age when women vacuumed their immaculate houses in heels and pearls while their husbands went to work in the cities. Ginger isn’t that woman. If anything, she and her husband strive jointly to create their own safe haven. I think, that’s why she has a vested interest in upholding that image. As for Verna, the 70s feminist, she is the one who’s internally most conflicted. Her generation demanded the same sexual freedom as men while also railing against being treated as sex objects. They entered the work force demanding the same jobs as men but settled for less pay, thus reducing worker’s wages. They changed divorce laws and found themselves raising children on their own. They toppled the male dominated house of cards but failed to provide a firm foundation for the next generation of men and women. That internal conflict, that desire to have it all, Verna pushes onto her millennial daughter. It’s Chloe who is told she needs a career to feel fulfilled but also feels the need to be the wife and mother that the boomers traded for success in the boardroom. Verna’s fairy tale speaks for both her and Chloe. And finally, there is Florence, the Gen Z woman. While the storm rages outside and she sits in her cosy cottage, she wants a world without conflict – one that gives everyone an equal chance. The question is, will she hide in her cosy cottage or will she step outside and face the storm?
What do you hope readers take away from the conversations between these women?
The current backlash against women’s rights, places the rights of all people in jeopardy. And that is frightening and demoralising. What I want readers to take away is that we have weathered such storms before and in the process become stronger. We’ve encountered schisms in our movement and learned from them. And finally, in terms of my writing, I want readers to take away that the current night may have come to an end but there are more evenings to come.
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A Vivid Dream
Shiloh follows a paramedic who discovers and cares for a wounded wolf that mysteriously disappears and is replaced by a stunning woman who bears the same wound. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for Shiloh was a result of a surreal dream I had one night. The dream was so vivid, I was compelled to write down as much of it as I could remember the following morning. Over the course of several years, I would review those notes and add ideas and notations. When it came time to sit down and write the story, it only took a couple of months. The story basically wrote itself – it was like watching a movie play out in my mind’s eye.
Why set the story in the remote forests of northern Idaho?
I wanted a location which was close to British Columbia in Canada – someplace fairly remote and isolated. Someplace where wolves are also prevalent. In choosing Bonners Ferry for the location, the area seemed to fit perfectly into the overall plot and mood of the story.
How did you approach writing a character who exists between human and animal?
That was easy. It was all a part of the dream I had. I just had to figure out a way to characterize the wolf and the woman into a fairly believable tale.
Do you see this story as complete, or is there more to explore in this world?
The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I’m not sure if we’ll ever fully know or understand how it works the way it does. Mental health issues are all too real in this day and age, and I wanted to tell a unique love story, one which was based on what the mind created. Shiloh literally became Sam Henderson’s “dream” lover.
Then he meets Shiloh – a strong, enigmatic and beautiful woman – and his world begins to shift. Their connection is intense, improbable, and deeply human. It also harbors undertones of something more sinister.
Set against the rugged beauty of northern Idaho, Shiloh is a gripping psychological thriller that explores the boundaries between man and nature, love and obsession, control and surrender. As secrets surface and tensions build, Sam is forced to confront the unpredictable forces around him and within him.
In the end, the question isn’t will he survive, but will he recognize the man he’s become?
Poetic Mind 2: The Collection
Poetic Mind 2: The Collection felt to me like a long, earnest conversation between bravado and vulnerability. Across poems about self-belief, grief, love, fantasy, war, exhaustion, and social cruelty, John Nevel keeps returning to the same central impulse: to turn pain into encouragement, and imagination into a kind of shelter. The book moves from the chest-thumping creative comeback of “Return of the Machine” and “Born a Legend” into more tender and wounded terrain such as “Shadows,” “PTSD,” and “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” then loops back toward resilience in poems like “Like a Phoenix” and “Change.” What held it together for me was that sense of a mind trying, over and over, to wrestle darkness into language and come out with something useful for another person.
What I responded to most was the book’s emotional directness. Nevel isn’t coy, and he isn’t interested in hiding behind irony. When “Shadows” lingers with the dead through scent, television reflections, and the strange comfort of almost-seeing someone again, it has a real ache to it; when “Take My Hand” and “Keep Your Head Up” insist on dignity for the lonely, the poor, the traumatized, and the judged, the tenderness feels lived rather than borrowed. Even the poems that lean hardest into uplift carry some friction under them, because again and again the speaker sounds like someone who has actually been bruised by the world he’s trying to repair. I liked that sincerity.
The collection is at its strongest when the swagger relaxes and the image gets room to breathe. The blizzard in “Snowfall,” the resurrected beast of “Revenge of the Dragon,” the handmade panic and recovery in “Destruction of Words,” and the barracks-to-Iraq movement in “Operation Iraqi Freedom” all gave me something concrete to stand inside. At the same time, the book’s habits are very clear: it loves repetition, declarative endings, motivational refrains, and an almost performative intensity. Sometimes that gives the poems a pulse and a stage voice. Even when I found the rhetoric a little relentless, I rarely doubted the conviction behind it. And I did admire how fully Nevel commits to his ideas, especially his belief that poetry should comfort, testify, and push back against humiliation, prejudice, and despair.
Poetic Mind 2 is heartfelt and thought-provoking. It’s not a chilly, mannered collection that wants to be admired from a distance. It wants to reach across the table, grab you, and tell you to keep going. I think that urgency is the book’s identity. I’d recommend it most to readers who like accessible, emotionally candid poetry, especially anyone drawn to themes of resilience, recovery, faith, military memory, and everyday encouragement. This is a book for readers who want poetry to mean what it says.
Pages: 193 | ASIN : B0GSKK2TWC
The Fix Your PTSD Handbook
Are you struggling with anxiety, depression, bouts of anger, addiction, negative internal language, or trauma and PTSD? If you are, The Fix Yourself Empowerment Series is for you. Get all the information you need to understand what is keeping you from the happy life you deserve. Learn the action steps you need to create a powerful new direction in your life. The latest book, The Fix Your PTSD Handbook, covers everything you need to know about trauma and how it develops into PTSD. Look for our new documentary” Aftermath”, coming soon. Become the master of your own destiny, and live your life as the powerful, happy person you were meant to be. The Fix Yourself Empowerment Series: available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and at your local retailers.
Adelaide: Painter of the Revolution
Janell Strube’s Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution follows Adélaïde Labille-Guiard from her girlhood in Paris through her ascent as an artist, her struggle to be taken seriously in institutions built to exclude women, and her entanglement in the upheaval of the French Revolution. The novel binds together artistic ambition, political violence, love, rivalry, and survival, while keeping its eye on one central question: what does it cost a gifted woman to insist on making work, and making a life, in a world determined to reduce her?
I admired how fiercely this book inhabits its subject. Strube doesn’t treat art as a decorative background; she makes it feel physical, exacting, almost perilous. Studios, pigments, patronage, gossip, and public reputation all matter, and that gives the novel a grainy authority I found deeply persuasive. What I liked most was Adélaïde’s will: not a modernized swagger, but a hard-earned, thinking persistence. She’s often cornered, sometimes thwarted, sometimes heartbreakingly visible only when she is useful to men or history, and yet she keeps returning to the easel. That repetition becomes its own kind of heroism.
What I responded to even more was the novel’s refusal to make triumph easy. This isn’t a lacquered tale of genius effortlessly recognized; it’s a story of doors opened a crack and then slammed shut again. The emotional texture comes from that bitter rhythm. Even the romance and companionship in the book carry the pressure of unequal worlds. By the end, I felt I had read not just a historical novel, but a study in erasure: who gets remembered, who gets relabeled, who gets demoted after doing the real work. The afterword sharpened that ache by showing how thoroughly women artists were pushed to the margins, even after everything they achieved.
I would hand this to readers of historical fiction, biographical fiction, feminist historical fiction, art historical fiction, and French Revolution novels, especially anyone who likes books where craft, intellect, and social danger share the same room. Fans of Tracy Chevalier will likely recognize the pleasure of watching an artist’s interior life rendered with tactile care, though Strube’s novel feels more combustible, more crowded by politics and public consequence. Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution is a novel for readers who like their beauty singed at the edges.
Pages: 420 | ASIN : B0FSNZ4Y49
Verified
Verified is a dystopian science fiction thriller that follows Maya Chen, a respected journalist living inside a near-future American verification regime where implants sort people into tiers of worth, while Emma Brennan fights to survive and resist from the margins, and FBI agent Marcus Webb begins to realize the system he serves was built on a lie. What starts as a conspiracy story widens into something more unsettling and more human: a book about complicity, bureaucracy, and the slow, painful work of pushing back when truth itself has been fenced off and managed.
The writing has a clean, steady intensity to it, and the book knows how to make cold systems feel intimate. The repeated sensation of the implant pulsing behind the ear could have become a gimmick, but instead it turns into a quiet little horror that keeps reminding us how control gets under the skin. I also liked that Mercer writes with texture and atmosphere without losing momentum. The rooms smell like ozone, bleach, dust, old paper. The checkpoints, offices, clinics, and corridors all feel lived in, but never overdecorated. The prose leans on that polished dystopian seriousness, and I could feel the novel working to keep every scene loaded. Still, I’d rather have that than a flat book, and here the intensity usually earns its place.
I also appreciated the author’s choices about character and structure. Maya is the center that gave the book its real moral weight for me, because she is not evil and not naive either. She is talented, careful, and decent in ways that still leave her tangled inside the machine. That is a much more interesting choice than giving us a simple rebel hero from page one. Emma and Marcus broaden the book in smart ways, one pushing from outside the system and the other from deep within it, and together they give the novel a wider argument about what change actually takes. I was especially glad the ending does not offer a neat triumph. The reform is partial, compromised, and already under pressure, which felt honest.
I felt like I had read a novel that wants to do more than warn. It wants to ask how ordinary people get trained to accept comfort as truth, and how hard it is to unlearn that. I’d recommend Verified most strongly to readers who like dystopian fiction with a political conscience, especially people who enjoy stories where systems matter as much as plot and where the tension comes from moral pressure as much as physical danger. Readers of near-future speculative fiction, surveillance-state novels, and character-driven thrillers will probably find a lot to hold onto here.
Pages: 336 | ASIN : B0GQDKM7B6
The Beyond is Part of the Here Now
The Beyond is Part of the Here Now is a spiritual memoir built from a series of lived episodes, each one presented as a personal testimony rather than an argument. June Raleigh structures the book as a chain of encounters that begin in childhood and move across decades, from seeing Santa’s sleigh over military housing in Japan to visions of Jesus, ghosts of relatives, unexplained time loss, UFO sightings, angelic rescues, and visits from the dead. What gives the book its shape is the author’s steady belief that earthly life and a larger unseen reality are constantly brushing against each other. She says early on, “I’m not trying to define, merely to present what has already transpired,” and that statement becomes the book’s method.
What makes the book readable is the way Raleigh roots extraordinary events in ordinary details. She’s not floating in abstraction for long. She’s building snowmen, bartending in Los Angeles, fencing in tournaments, driving through California, grieving her father, rescuing a kitten, and trying to make sense of the strange things that interrupt everyday life. That groundedness matters because it turns the book into more than a catalog of paranormal stories. It becomes a life story in which work, family, sports, faith, and danger all sit on the same level as visions and apparitions. The result feels conversational and direct, like listening to someone who has been carrying these memories for years and has finally decided to set them down in one place.
The strongest through line in the book is that love is the force that ties the visible world to the invisible one. Raleigh returns to that idea again and again, especially in chapters about Dave, her father, and Opie the cat. Those sections give the memoir its emotional center. The supernatural isn’t treated as spectacle so much as continuation. Loss doesn’t end connection. It changes its form. That’s why one of the most revealing lines in the book is also one of its simplest: “God is alive.” In Raleigh’s telling, that conviction reaches into grief, memory, loyalty, and even the small tenderness of being found again by a beloved animal.
The book also has an interesting tonal mix. Part of it reads like devotional writing, part of it like old Hollywood memoir, part of it like a family record, and part of it like frontier ghost lore. Raleigh can move from scripture and metaphysics to Frank Sinatra’s preferred drink, from a near abduction in Los Angeles to a cowboy ghost in Wyoming, without sounding like she thinks these belong to separate worlds. For her, they don’t. That blend gives the book its personality. It’s sincere, sometimes startlingly blunt, and often most compelling when it’s simply reporting what happened and moving on. Even the reflections at the end stay true to that impulse, widening from autobiography into a broader meditation on existence, human choice, and the fate of the earth.
What stayed with me most is that The Beyond is Part of the Here Now is a book of witness. It asks to be read as a record of one woman’s experiences and the meaning she’s drawn from them over time. Whether she’s describing a cloud ring, a glowing visitor, or a late-night voice that sends her back to a lost cat, Raleigh writes with the same basic aim: to tell the story clearly and let the reader sit with it. That gives the book a distinctive kind of intimacy. It’s less interested in proving than in sharing, less interested in performance than in testimony. By the end, it feels like a memoir about how a person builds a life around the conviction that the world is fuller, stranger, and more connected than it first appears.
Pages: 62 | ASIN: B07QQCQ4WX
