The Dawning
Zoe Nauman’s The Dawning is an ambitious young adult portal fantasy built around faith, free will, and the seductive pull of power. In Amaris, the former celestial Arielle has sacrificed her wings and immortality to guide a collection of increasingly divided clans. Her frustration makes her vulnerable to Abaddon and the dark ruler Sephtis, who transform her into the formidable Sathariel. Meanwhile, a prophecy summons three wounded teenagers from Earth, Fatiha, Cosmo, and Jiyanu, whose blood may provide the key to containing her. It’s a large-scale story filled with dragons, underwater kingdoms, living trees, stone giants, magical gateways, and enough sacred objects to keep the heroes constantly moving.
I think the book’s most compelling idea is that Sathariel’s fall grows from recognizable emotions. Her resentment, loneliness, and desire to be appreciated give the temptation of darkness a personal foundation. The three Yasha reflect that emotional focus in different ways: Fatiha carries the pain of betrayal, Cosmo lives with grief and anxiety, and Jiyanu struggles with anger after witnessing terrible violence. Their experiences make the novel as interested in emotional recovery as it is in battles and prophecy. Nauman also creates some memorable settings, particularly Mariam’s ocean realm, the Vanavashtha forest, and the dragon riders’ mountain home. The multilingual names and spiritual traditions give Amaris a deliberately multicultural identity, while the scene in which leaders of several Earth religions unite against Sathariel makes the book’s message especially clear.
Readers of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time will recognize a similar blend of interdimensional adventure, spiritual symbolism, and young people confronting a darkness that thrives on fear and conformity. Like L’Engle, Nauman treats love as an active force. Her approach is broader and more ensemble-driven, moving among clan leaders, celestial beings, villains, and the three teenagers. That scope gives the story an epic quality, though it also means the opening half carries a substantial amount of mythology, prophecy, and explanation before the Yasha arrive. The prose favors vivid sensory description and states its moral ideas plainly, creating a style that feels accessible and earnest.
What I liked most was the novel’s belief that unity requires choice. The people of Amaris don’t overcome their differences because they suddenly agree on everything. They choose to cooperate because protecting one another matters more than preserving old divisions. The final confrontation gives that principle real emotional weight, and victory comes with a cost that keeps the conclusion from feeling too tidy. The Dawning is a sincere, imaginative fantasy about turning grief into purpose, resisting the appeal of control, and finding strength in people whose lives and beliefs differ from your own. It leaves Amaris secure for the moment, while giving the wider series plenty of magical and emotional territory to explore.
Pages: 313 | ASIN : B0GX3CW7R2
Peanut Butter Finding Grape Jelly
Peanut Butter’s Problem follows a lonely jar of peanut butter who searches the refrigerator for the perfect sweet companion and discovers friendship, persistence, and belonging along the way. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration of the story comes from happy memories as an elementary school teacher seeing my second and third grade students eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hearing conversations between the children on what tastes good with peanut butter. I then got the idea to write a story about a jar of peanut butter (looking innocent and adorable) feeling lonely, and he goes looking for the ideal mate for long-lasting friendship. Peanut butter would have food character friends to help him on his journey.
How did you develop the distinct personalities of Ketchup, Lemon, Butter, Hot Sauce, and the other refrigerator characters?
My goal for the food characters was to go beyond their domestic and every day eating purposes and give real distinct emotions to the characters. I wanted to show how they can relate and talk to one another in comforting ways that you would hope kids find in their friendships. I didn’t want all the characters to act and behave the same way. I pictured in my mind how each character would look and sound and then acted out the story and the way the characters would talk to each other in front of the mirror.
What do you hope young readers take away from Peanut Butter’s disappointment, persistence, and eventual friendship with grape jelly?
I hope young readers walk away realizing that being on your own for a while is okay as long as you value who you are and that your unique qualities can’t be duplicated and eventually you will find others that will realize that also and want to be around you. Disappointments happen in life but they’re usually temporary and can teach you important lessons with the right attitude. Peanut butter finding Grape Jelly led to loving connections and wider friendships because he didn’t give up.
Hot Sauce gets an opportunity to acknowledge his unkind behavior at the end of the story. Why was it important to you to include that moment of accountability and growth?
It was important to show that even though Hot Sauce had flaws in his character being icy, intense, and a little obnoxious, he was capable of change. Hot Sauce realized he made a big mistake in his domineering manner and had to admit he was wrong just like young children need to do by owning up to their mistakes which can lead to their emotional growth. I wanted to show that the resolution isn’t always neat, but it can lead to an open door in doing better and can improve our relationships with others.
Author Website: briantaylorbooks.com
Alchemy of Adversity – How Emotional Intelligence Transforms Trauma Into Leadership Strength
Sarah Staley’s Alchemy of Adversity is a hybrid of memoir, trauma-informed leadership study, and practical guide to emotional intelligence. Drawing on the accident that killed her husband, Sean, and left her with severe injuries, Staley examines how traumatic experience can influence judgment, relationships, workplace behavior, and leadership. The book’s argument is carefully qualified: “Adversity does not automatically create strength”. Growth, she contends, emerges through the deliberate integration of experience. Its five-part structure reflects that process, progressing from personal devastation through neuroscience and emotional development to organizational practice and renewed purpose.
The memoir sections give the book its emotional authority. Staley describes the accident, hospitalization, grief, physical recovery, and responsibility of raising her young son, Eli, with directness and considerable sensory detail. Her image of the “gray world,” a period when color remained visible but had lost emotional meaning, conveys the numbing effects of trauma with unusual precision. These chapters also trace the uneven nature of recovery through therapy, gratitude, family support, work, and the gradual restoration of agency. The epilogue, which follows her relationship with Cody and the family life they build, provides a fitting conclusion to this personal narrative by showing a life broad enough to contain grief, gratitude, memory, and new love at once.
The book’s analytical center connects Staley’s experience to research on the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, memory, nervous-system regulation, post-traumatic growth, and the window of tolerance. Staley then converts those concepts into the ALCHEMY framework and the four emotional-intelligence domains of self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, and relationship management. Case studies involving a grieving leader named Chris, organizational crises, and Satya Nadella’s leadership at Microsoft widen the book’s scope beyond individual recovery. Reflection questions, regulation exercises, narrative-reframing practices, and the four organizational pillars of safety, trustworthiness, choice, and empowerment make the later chapters particularly useful for managers and teams. The material’s recurring formulations give it the cadence of a leadership seminar, reinforcing its main principles while occasionally slowing the narrative momentum.
Staley’s strongest contribution is her treatment of emotional intelligence as an embodied discipline shaped by both pain and practice. “Self-awareness didn’t make me perfect. It made me present,” she writes, a statement that captures the book’s practical ethic. Leadership here means remaining regulated under pressure, recognizing distress beneath performance, preserving accountability without humiliation, and creating conditions in which people retain agency. Alchemy of Adversity offers leaders, trauma survivors, coaches, and organizational-development professionals an accessible framework for understanding how personal healing can affect entire systems. Its blend of intimate testimony, research, and workplace application presents leadership as a human responsibility grounded in awareness, ethical power, and sustained relational care.
Pages: 311 | ASIN : B0GQQ32QXL
The Desperation of Humans
Earth’s Last Hope follows a retired general and his family as they retreat underground after a catastrophic eruption from Yellowstone, where they encounter an alien civilization that offers humanity a chance at survival. What larger questions about humanity did you want to explore through an extinction-level crisis.
I wanted to portray the underground bunkers at the Denver Federal Center as fully working bunkers, because in real life these bunkers do exist, storing ice cores and the like. NORAD was researched heavily and all written about NORAD is true. I wanted to portray the desperation of humans, and the depravity one can succumb to. I wanted to portray that hope remains, if one does the right things, and one works together for the common good.
How do prayer, marriage, childbirth, family traditions, and celebrations contribute to the community’s resilience?
Each person must see the pure hope in any situation, and they must pull and do their share in the bunkers, as they are working bunkers, and adding in prayer, marriage, childbirth, family traditions, and celebrations bring a semblance of continuity of real life and arr cause to feel happy and more content, it also offers ways in which one can change their surrounds in a positive manner.
What does humanity’s relationship with the Nyard reveal about cooperation and accepting help in the face of overwhelming problems?
Six Nyard have been on Earth since their ship crashed in Roswell, NM in 1947. The commander, Kryonn, was hurt in the crash and all six plus their ship were taken to Area 51. Humans tried to help Kryonn as best they could to help heal him. Kryonn realized that not all humans do bad things. None were treated as test subjects or anything like that since they crashed. The six Nyard stayed to see what was happening on Earth worldwide. The wars and those from other countries not allied with the USA doing harm to the world bothered them. So, the Nyard, helped with new tech for military assets. Humans respected the Nyard and so the Nyard respected the humans they worked side by side with the same. Accepting help was easier after the president was made aware of the Nyard, when they actually crashed, and the help provided since 1947. The president knew she could trust them.
Does Earth’s Last Hope open the door for further stories about humanity and the world that emerges during reconstruction?
Earth’s New Hope will be out by November 2026. What happens is amazing and shocking.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
What would you do?
What if you thought you had two or more years of warning before the caldera of Yellowstone would erupt as a super volcano, and suddenly you are told you have one day at best to survive?
Dr. Theodore Grey decided that the scientists under him had their measurements wrong or there was a glitch in the system. Yes, Yellowstone was rumbling, but it did that every day, and the scientists at the USGS Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO), led by Scientist-in-Charge Dr. Theodore Grey, utilized a sophisticated network of GPS sensors and seismometers to monitor the heartbeat of this active super volcano. All the movement in and around the caldera that is Yellowstone National Park is monitored and measured every day, 24/7, with computerized resources. Many scientists and technical people are necessary to monitor the computers, all the equipment, and cover Yellowstone’s large expanse of crater and park land. Yellowstone has thousands of small quakes each year. The subtle Chicago-sized area of ground deformation near Gibbon Falls had buckled upward by one inch in January 2026, but these new numbers must be wrong! Even the newly discovered magma cap 3.8 km deep in January rose sharply overnight! Seven inches of rapid, sustained uplift? No way. That was too phenomenal for the caldera. Seven inches meant high-pressure fluid movement and is indicative of a significant magma intrusion. Real-time information stared back at him from the monitors. Real-time quakes were more pronounced in and around Yellowstone, and some areas close to Yellowstone certainly felt this shift and change. Dr. Rick Long confirmed what Dr. Grey saw in front of him. SEVEN inches in ONE day!! The ground was tilting and rising by inches, not centimeters! The Earth’s crust was reaching its breaking point! The energy built up was too much, too fast. Dr. Grey knew he had to update the President right away. Time was critical. Everything was critical. So much for having a ten to twelve year plus warning! That powerful atmospheric river and a “monster blizzard” projected to drop up to twenty feet of snow over much of the US, including Yellowstone, would not stop the eruption!
Can Earth be saved? If so, who or what will save Earth?
Infinity Dreams
C.P. Schaefer’s Infinity Dreams is a science-fiction thriller built around a wonderfully provocative idea: what if the experience of a life flashing before death were actually a doorway through time? In 2048, FBI investigator Henry Bowman and bioethics official Selene Finley discover that scientist Marcus Emery has learned to follow dying people into their memories and beyond. His strange, hovering orb turns the afterlife into something measurable, navigable, and dangerously open to interference. What begins as an investigation into a bombing soon grows into a sprawling conflict involving altered presidents, future agents, nuclear terrorism, and rival factions fighting over humanity’s timeline. It’s an ambitious blend of metaphysical speculation, political drama, and military adventure.
The opening sections are the book’s strongest. The burned euthanasia center, Emery’s laboratory inside an abandoned prison, and the nighttime experiments among the ruins of Chaco Canyon give the story an eerie identity of its own. Schaefer also creates an appealing ensemble. Henry’s cynicism hides old grief, Selene’s moral certainty is repeatedly tested, and Michael Porter brings both scientific curiosity and a welcome streak of vulnerability. Chief provides the group with warmth and perspective, while Lyra gradually becomes the novel’s driving force. Her transformation from disciplined guardian to vengeance-fueled warrior gives the later chapters a darker edge. The characters’ campfire conversations, meals, romances, and teasing help the story remain personable even when governments and entire cities hang in the balance.
This book reminded me of Michael Crichton’s Timeline. Both novels turn a complicated scientific premise into an accessible adventure, and both are more interested in the consequences of using time travel than in presenting a perfectly airtight theory. Crichton approaches the subject as an engineering problem and lets historical immersion carry much of the excitement. Schaefer connects it to consciousness, spirituality, and the fear of death, then widens the story into a war over competing futures. His scope is considerably broader, sometimes thrillingly so. That breadth also produces long stretches of explanation, repeated debates, and action sequences that follow similar patterns. The dialogue tends to state motives and themes directly, while Soren Webb’s almost effortless political authority can make her feel more symbolic than human. Still, the book moves with the earnest energy of someone determined to chase a huge idea wherever it leads.
What I liked most was the novel’s uneasy treatment of moral compromise. Nearly every major character begins by claiming to protect life or history, yet many eventually accept killing, torture, secrecy, and coercion in the name of a better future. Schaefer doesn’t always interrogate those choices as deeply as the premise allows, but the accumulating violence gives the ending a bitter force. Victory keeps slipping into catastrophe, powerful inventions survive attempts to erase them, and history behaves less like a line than a recurring temptation. The final glimpse of the third millennium brings the story back to curiosity, the quality that created both its wonders and disasters. Infinity Dreams is a big, sincere, idea-packed thriller that will appeal most to readers who enjoy speculative science, geopolitical stakes, and stories willing to ask whether humanity could ever possess godlike power without reaching for it again.
Pages: 420 | ASIN : B0HGMNJBN9
Troutfishing on the Tees – Me and Tony Blair
Patrick Dransfield’s Troutfishing on the Tees: Me and Tony Blair is a sprawling comic novel about work, masculinity and political disillusionment in the North East at the turn of the millennium. Its hero, Dr Steve Hemmings, is an intelligent but spectacularly unself-aware chemical-industry manager whose life revolves around corporate advancement, amateur cricket, unsuccessful romance and an increasingly fanciful correspondence with Tony Blair. Steve’s employer, BCG, is undergoing the kind of “restructuring” that everyone understands except him, while his beloved Outcasts cricket club is consumed by petty feuds and rigged elections. These parallel worlds give the book its shape. Both are institutions in decline, both reward the wrong people, and both use pompous procedures to disguise personal agendas.
Much of the pleasure comes from the book’s crowded social world. Geoff, the manipulative Outcasts chairman, is a wonderfully relentless companion, while Karen, Paula, Stuart, Debbie, Amir and the canteen “Septics” keep exposing different sides of Steve’s character. He can be vain, crude and maddeningly selfish, particularly in his treatment of women, yet he’s also creative, vulnerable and capable of recognizing the absurdity of corporate life. The running jokes about the elusive company car, health and safety rules, management jargon, sexual frustration and the club’s dreaded potty award create a distinctive rhythm. Dransfield also has an excellent ear for workplace speech, especially the way redundancies become “transition” and genuine problems disappear beneath talk of synergies, innovation and personal development.
Steve often resembles an adult, more sexually preoccupied cousin of Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole. Like Mole, he records his habits and ambitions with solemn confidence while revealing far more than he intends, and both characters imagine a special connection to major political figures. The comparison is especially apt because Townsend used private vanity to capture public moods. Dransfield does something similar with New Labour Britain, filtering deindustrialization, managerial culture and regional neglect through one man’s complaints and delusions. His approach is broader, bawdier and more densely packed with cricket lore, popular music and Teesside references. The songs, news stories and political events fix the novel firmly in 2000, giving it the feel of a comic social archive as well as a character study.
The novel’s abundance is both its signature and its main challenge. Scenes often expand into extended routines, and the accumulation of sexual jokes, digressions and historical asides can make the middle feel episodic. Yet that excess also makes Steve’s world convincing. His distractions keep him from grasping the danger gathering around him. When BCG finally declares him surplus to requirements and his supposed bond with Blair collapses, the book’s comedy turns sharply into tragedy. The ending is deliberately brutal, and the epilogue widens Steve’s fate into an angry argument about lost manufacturing jobs, weakened communities and a political movement that learned to speak the language of ordinary workers while accepting their disposability. That final turn gives the earlier farce a bitter aftertaste and makes Steve more than a comic embarrassment. He becomes a messy, memorable casualty of his place and time.
Pages: 352 | ISBN: 1068251905
Point First
Nannette Potter’s Point First is a globe-spanning political thriller with a strong romantic-suspense core. Professional knife-thrower Genevieve “Blade” Broussard is investigating why the powerful Andrews family wants her dead when her search leads from a Charleston estate to Oxford and the oil-soaked waterways of Nigeria. Meanwhile, Chase Maserati and the Soldati di Cristo uncover a network connecting massacres, child labor, stolen crude, and a presidential campaign. The converging storylines give the novel considerable momentum while making its conspiracy feel both personal and international.
Blade is the book’s center of gravity. She’s physically formidable, stubborn, emotionally guarded, and genuinely vulnerable when questions about her parents begin dismantling the story she’s inherited. Her relationship with Chase works because their conflict isn’t simply romantic uncertainty. They’re negotiating trust, independence, faith, and the dangerous instinct to protect someone by excluding them. Alec Quinn also adds welcome moral friction. He’s calculating and self-interested, yet his better choices arrive when they cost him something. Among the supporting cast, Ngozi Kalu makes the deepest impression because her courage gives the Nigerian storyline its human and ethical weight.
Readers of David Baldacci will recognize the brisk chapters, rotating viewpoints, political corruption, covert operators, and powerful families protecting old crimes. Potter brings a different energy to that familiar territory through Blade’s theatrical background, the faith-driven Soldati, and the sustained focus on environmental exploitation in the Niger Delta. The oil conspiracy is more than scenery. It links historical atrocities to modern finance and shows how respectable institutions can distance themselves from violence while continuing to profit from it. At times, the large cast and frequent viewpoint changes crowd the narrative, but they also create the sense of a hidden machine being exposed piece by piece.
I found the novel’s interest in inheritance compelling. Blade receives family blood, buried evidence, grief, and eventually a choice about which parts of that legacy she’ll carry forward. The title becomes especially fitting near the end, when truth lands with the precision of one of her knives. Point First delivers muscular action and a satisfying conspiracy, but its real subject is the moment when survival turns into commitment. It’s an ambitious, earnest thriller about choosing loyalty, accountability, and hope after discovering exactly what power has tried to conceal.
The Bloodline Between Us
Matthew Caldwell’s The Bloodline Between Us is a literary novel set deep inside Alaska’s sled-dog culture, but the real terrain it crosses is family. Sisters June and Raven have spent years carrying different versions of the same inheritance: their mother Nora’s kennel, the dogs they grew up raising, and a history neither of them has fully escaped. When an injury leaves June unable to run her team, Raven returns to the life she walked away from and slowly finds herself back on the runners. Caldwell tells the story through all three women, including Nora, who watches her daughters from beyond the grave with the uncomfortable clarity of a mother who can finally see where love, pride, and control became tangled together.
The dogs aren’t decoration here. They’re characters, partners, teachers, and sometimes the clearest judges of what’s happening between the humans. Toby’s steadiness, Rooster’s restless intelligence, Runt’s quiet precision, and the complicated history surrounding Anchor and Keel all give the novel an unusually lived-in feeling. Caldwell understands that a working dog team is built through attention, and some of the book’s strongest moments come from watching Raven relearn that relationship. The repeated idea of trusting the lead dog grows into something larger as the story unfolds. It becomes a way of thinking about control, instinct, responsibility, and the difficult business of letting someone else become capable without insisting they do it your way.
June and Raven’s relationship gives the novel its emotional weight because Caldwell lets their reconciliation happen through work. They feed dogs, repair equipment, argue over money, train, make mistakes, and gradually learn how to stand beside each other again. June has to face the possibility that the kennel can continue without her at the center of it, while Raven has to decide whether returning means surrendering the independent life she fought to build. Nora’s chapters deepen that tension by showing how family traditions get created, justified, and passed down, sometimes long after anyone remembers the fear or mistake that started them. Even the Bloodline Trail itself becomes part of that examination, with its rules about pedigree revealing how easily people can dress exclusion, pride, and anxiety in the language of heritage.
By the time Raven reaches the final miles of the Bloodline Trail, the race matters because of everything that has changed before she gets there. The victory isn’t simply a finish-line payoff. It completes a shift in how these sisters understand the dogs, their mother, the kennel, and each other. Caldwell writes Alaska as a place where weather, animals, money, history, and human stubbornness are constantly pressing against one another, and he gives the quieter moments after the race as much importance as the race itself. The Bloodline Between Us understands that inheritance is more than what a family hands down. It’s what the next generation chooses to carry, what it finally puts down, and what it learns to make its own. This is a tender and fiercely grounded novel about the bloodlines we inherit, the bonds we choose, and the courage it takes to trust who’s beside us on the trail.
Pages: 294 | ASIN: B0HFM9Y6VX
