Uncovering Amy
Uncovering Amy follows herbalist and coach Amelia South as she tells the story of how she went from a chaotic, abusive childhood to a full-blown mental and spiritual crisis, then to what she calls “true mental health.” The book traces her early trauma, her toxic relationships, her heavy drinking, and her obsessive search for meaning in pagan and Indigenous spiritual traditions. From there she describes hearing an internal voice she names “Robert,” going through exorcisms, wrestling with the idea of schizophrenia or Dissociative Identity Disorder, and finally working with Bryan Redfield’s “Super Team” brain training method to integrate her inner Parent, Adult, and Child into a single unified self. The result is a hybrid of memoir, spiritual testimony, and lay self-help that argues DID is misunderstood and that her method can “cure” it.
The book feels raw and very direct. I felt like I was sitting across from someone who decided to tell me everything, swear words and all. The early chapters about her family, her stepfather’s cruelty, and her string of relationships have a blunt, almost confessional rhythm. Sometimes that worked really well for me. Her anger, shame, and loneliness come through in plain, sharp lines, and I could feel the teenage girl who learned her worth was tied to her body and her usefulness to men. At other points, the storytelling meanders. Scenes with drum circles, graveyard visits, and spiritual chats sometimes pile up.
I admire the courage it takes to frame your own mind as “broken,” lay out the ugliest moments, then insist that healing is possible and that you are living proof. Her focus on self-responsibility, on ending generational harm, and on giving tenderness to the scared inner child felt powerful. The way she gradually recognizes “Robert” as Amy, her young self, and then starts to love that part instead of fighting it, hit me in the gut in a good way. She is confident that the Super Team method works every time, and very sure that DID can be resolved if you do the work she describes. There is also a mix of spiritual explanations, dowsing rods, ancestors, demons, and telepathy.
I believe that Amelia is telling the truth as she understands it, and I respect the sheer effort it took for her to claw her way out of despair and claim a life that feels stable and whole. I also think this book works best as a personal testimony. I would recommend Uncovering Amy to readers who like spiritual memoirs, people interested in alternative or experiential approaches to healing, and survivors who may feel less alone seeing their own confusion and rage mirrored on the page. For me, it is a raw, messy, and relatable story that can spark reflection and hope.
Pages: 220 | ASIN : B0GKJLXPFC
Her Masks & His Truth
Nataly Restokian’s Her Masks & His Truth opens on a jittery nightmare. Anna, a former television star now living in Quebec City, fears losing control of her own story, then settles into her real unrest: a love-marriage stretched thin by infertility, displacement, and a private hollowness she can’t name. When Simon Levesque, an older political candidate collecting signatures, appears at her door, their conversation becomes a hinge: Anna is drawn to his unbothered serenity, and his quiet certainty points her toward a meeting she thinks is with a man…until it becomes clear she’s being introduced to Christ.
What I didn’t expect was how insistently the book braided the domestic with the doctrinal. One moment, I was inside a marriage argument that feels granular and authentic, money, family pressure, language-barrier shame, the raw ache of failed IVF, and the next I was in a confessional rush of spiritual autobiography that speaks directly to the reader. That gearshift could have felt jarring, yet it often works because Anna’s inner life is already a storm: she’s performative, defensive, funny in flashes, and then suddenly pierced by a sharp sentence. The prose isn’t trying to be coy; it wants to testify, and there’s a kind of firm candor in that.
I also found myself appreciating the book’s portrait of pride as a costume. Success and beauty are masks that don’t quite suffocate you, but do keep you from breathing deeply. Anna’s history (celebrity glamour, a complicated past, a marriage forged in sacrifice) adds friction to the conversion arc beyond a simple “lost to found” template. Still, the narrative’s strongest scenes for me weren’t the big declarations; they were the smaller, human moments where love is messy but durable, Joe’s tenderness, Anna’s bruised humor, Simon’s patience that refuses to escalate into ego. The story’s faith-forward intent is unmistakable, but it’s most persuasive when it lets longing stay complicated instead of instantly neat.
I think Her Masks & His Truth is perfect for readers who actively seek Christian fiction, inspirational romance, faith-based contemporary drama, and redemption narratives, especially those who like spiritual mentorship threads and conversion-centered storytelling. It will likely resonate with fans of Francine Rivers’ emotional, testimony-leaning style (think the spiritual-romance sweep many readers associate with her work). Her Masks & His Truth is a tender and unflinching reminder that the most convincing rescue is the one that reaches the heart without flattering it.
Listening Length: 8 hours and 18 minutes
The Fifth Anomaly: A Threshold Chronicle
The Fifth Anomaly follows a small urban exploration group that prides itself on debunking hauntings with cameras, notes, and skepticism, until they meet Hillrose Penitentiary, a prison with too many basements, missing records, and a pattern of investigations that always start in October and never quite finish. As Marcus, Riley, Sam, and Kevin descend through Hillrose, their footage, their chat logs, and even their sense of time start to bend around the anomaly. The story keeps zooming out, until we meet David, a writer who realizes he is somehow channeling their ordeal into the very book I am holding, and the act of publishing the story becomes part of the horror itself. It is a cosmic horror tale about patterns that want to be seen and a book that may not want to stay fictional.
I really liked how the book feels. The Discord transcripts, reports, chat logs, and more traditional scenes flow together in a way that reads fast and keeps the world grounded. The author even opens with a frank foreword about “just trying to finish a book,” which sets a scrappy, human tone that I found charming and disarming before the story gets weird. The writing leans into clear, conversational language, so even when the concepts get big, the sentences stay readable. Sometimes the momentum gets ahead of the polish. I could feel a bit of repetition and a few cumbersome transitions, especially when Kevin is info-dumping research or when the group re-states the pattern one more time. But I never felt lost. The scenes in Hillrose’s lower levels, the tallies on the walls, the long grind of “observation duty” all landed for me with a heavy, tired dread that fit the characters and the premise.
What I liked most was the book’s attitude toward observation and authorship. The core idea that “some patterns demand to be observed, and observation changes the observer” runs through everything: the Discord channel, the cameras, the tallies on concrete, the way David’s hands become a kind of meat keyboard for something else that wants the story finished and uploaded. I felt genuinely unsettled by the suggestion that my act of reading joins that pattern. The meta twist, where The Fifth Anomaly exists inside its own last chapter as a runaway book that writes and distributes itself, is clever and creepy. It also brushes up against real-world questions about AI, co-writing, and who is really in charge of the words. Riley’s arc in particular hit me harder than I expected. Her mix of competence, fear, and longing for a “normal” life gave the cosmic stuff a human anchor, so when the story asks her to pay the price for seeing too much, I felt that loss.
I would recommend The Fifth Anomaly to readers who enjoy cosmic horror with a tech-age vibe, people who liked House of Leaves, creepypasta, or “found footage” stories, and anyone curious about metafiction that plays with Discord chats, documents, and author notes as part of the scare. It is not for someone who wants neat answers, clean timelines, or a cozy ending. The book leaves some edges rough, both in prose and in lore, and it leans into existential dread more than jump scares. I closed the last page feeling spooked and impressed that a debut horror novel managed to make the simple act of opening an ebook feel like joining a very old, persistent experiment.
Pages: 469 | ASIN : B0G8LTJQR5
One Grain of Sand
One Grain of Sand is a near-future dystopian novel that follows two lives on a collision course. Parlisse Hardamon grows up in a world of Category Six hurricanes, collapsing ecosystems, and insulated privilege, while Noah Harpster is a poor kid turned repeat offender who ends up serving a brutal fifty-year sentence in Hood State Penitentiary. Through Noah we move into a nightmare of prison violence, game-show politics, and a chilling “rehabilitation” effort called the Rahu program, a medical trial that offers freedom in exchange for becoming a human test subject for new avian flu vaccines. Around them, the Hardamon family wrestles with their own role in this world: Doc Hardamon builds strange machines and new technologies, Parlisse grows into an activist whose movement takes the name “One Grain of Sand,” and in the end Noah’s path circles back toward both the Hardamons and his own scarred childhood, with a closing image of cardinals, a tree, and a final fragile sense of inner freedom.
Some pages were fast, sharp, and emotional. Noah’s sentencing to fifty years for petty theft, handed down in an almost empty courtroom, made me angry in a very real way. The prison sequences are soaked in detail: the cardinal hopping along the fence, the guards taking bets on whether Noah will survive a gang attack, Weller’s slow, awful death traded for a carton of ecigs. The book conveys sensations that most stories rush past. That heavy descriptive style works. It slows everything down so you sit with the ugliness of the world instead of gliding over it. At times, I did feel worn out by it. Yet I also never doubted the reality of this future. It feels like an exaggerated version of what we already know, not a cartoon.
The novel leans into systemic cruelty, and that part really stuck in my head. The Rahu program is a perfect example. It is framed as “rehabilitation,” wrapped in clinical language about survival statistics and public health, but in practice, it is a state trading the bodies of the poor for a shot at safety for everyone else. The book does not debate this in abstract terms. It shows Noah sitting in front of a robot counselor that praises him with “Good job, inmate” while quietly stripping away his rights with a digital contract that waives any appeal. I liked that the story keeps the focus on lived experience rather than speeches. Noah’s flashbacks to shoplifting food and toilet paper, his father’s gambling and violence, his mother sobbing over a coat that falls apart in her hands, make the politics feel very close and very personal. I think the late shift into more overt science fiction, with Doc Hardamon’s transdimensional portal and ultradimensional beings, felt like a curveball. It adds a cosmic layer that hints at something larger than this broken America, and I liked the ambition. For me, that thread was more intriguing than satisfying.
Noah’s last emotional break, in front of the fence, watching cardinals at the birdhouse that mirrors a vision Parlisse gave him, has a small, quiet power. He lets go of his parents, forgives them without excusing them, and chooses to move on. There is no big speech. No neat fix. Just a man who has survived a lot, deciding not to carry it all anymore. That felt honest to me. The title clicks there, too. The book keeps returning to sand, to beaches that never offered Noah peace, to one grain that jams the machine, oils it, or simply lies there while the tide rolls in. It is a simple image, yet after watching these characters grind through so much, I did not mind the lack of subtlety.
I would recommend One Grain of Sand to readers who like dystopian fiction that leans more on character and social critique than on gadgets or action. If you appreciate slow, sensory prose, tough themes like abuse, poverty, and prison violence, and a story that mixes grim realism with a touch of speculative weirdness, this will be a good book for you. For me, it worked best as a long, rough meditation on pain, survival, and the tiny, stubborn ways people push back against systems that want them silent.
Pages: 473 | ASIN : B0FBHGYJDL
Haunted Day and Night
Haunted Day and Night follows Anastasia “Ana” Day, a young paralegal in York, Pennsylvania, who buys a crumbling 1887 Victorian row home that turns out to be a lot more crowded than the real-estate listing suggested. As she scrapes carpet, patches plaster, and fights with her controlling boyfriend Blake, strange things start happening in the house. Doors swing open on their own, cabinets sit wide open, a saw accident in the basement feels almost pushed, and messages appear in candy-apple red lipstick on the bathroom mirror that tell her to leave. Paranormal investigators eventually help her uncover the story of Eliza and Eva Klinger, former residents tied to women’s rights, whose restless presence nudges Ana away from toxic love and toward a stronger, more honest version of herself. The book blends haunted-house chills with a slow-burn story about walking out of unhealthy relationships and rethinking faith, family, and what it means to have a voice.
I really enjoyed how grounded the horror felt. The house is vivid in my mind, from the stained powder-blue carpet to the mahogany banister and those bay windows that keep catching Ana’s eye while everything else falls apart around her. The early scenes with Blake in the basement and the “LEAVE” message on the mirror genuinely made my stomach tighten, not because of jump scares, but because the danger feels emotional as much as supernatural. The writing leans descriptive and sometimes lingers on details or explanations longer than I personally wanted, yet that same patience helps the creepy moments land. I liked how the dialogue shows Blake’s gaslighting and need for control without turning him into a cartoon villain; I could imagine real conversations like the ones about “helping” her and “fixing” her house and life. Side characters like Bob the handyman and Ana’s coworkers give the story warmth and a hint of community, which makes the isolation in the house hit harder when things go sideways. At times, I wanted a bit tighter pacing, especially in the middle, but overall, the narrative flow kept me turning pages to see what the house would do next and what Ana would finally do about Blake.
What surprised me most was how much the book leans into questions about belief, the afterlife, and women’s agency, and how emotional that became for me as a reader. The ghosts are not just a spooky background; they are women with their own history of fighting for rights, and their presence feels like a protective line of ancestors standing behind Ana. I liked that she wrestles out loud with heaven, hell, reincarnation, and religious dogma, and that different characters give different answers without the story shoving one “right” view in my face. The connection between restoring the house and restoring her sense of self is pretty on the nose at times, yet it still worked for me because it felt sincere rather than gimmicky. I found the EVP scenes with Nate and his team strangely moving: hearing the names “Eliza” and “Eva” come through while Ana has just done her own historical digging gives the whole thing a bittersweet weight. The feminist thread, especially around women ignoring red flags, surviving control, and learning to trust their own instincts, hit me harder than the ghost plot at some points. Every now and then the message tilts a bit preachy, but I never doubted the heart behind it, and I appreciated that the spirits are there to empower Ana rather than just punish or terrorize her.
I would recommend Haunted Day and Night to readers who like their ghost stories emotional and character-driven, with more haunted feelings than graphic frights. If you enjoy old houses, slow-build supernatural tension, and stories about women untangling themselves from bad relationships while questioning inherited beliefs, this will probably be right up your alley. It is a good fit for book clubs that like to talk about themes like spiritual abuse, intuition, and generational female strength, and for fans of softer paranormal fiction who do not need constant jump scares. For everyone else who loves a creaky Victorian, a stubborn heroine, and ghosts who have opinions about patriarchy, I think this book will be a satisfying and sometimes surprisingly comforting read.
Pages: 400 | ASIN : B0BXJTKG4M
The Mermelf: A Fable for Our Times
The Mermelf is a quirky and dreamlike fable that mixes myth, science fiction, folklore, and a bit of social warning all in one sweep. The story follows Xiu, a strange blue mermelf who arrives in the world of Merbay without wings or a tail, and whose journey collides with talking mice, Firefliers, portals, lost histories, and a future Earth ruled by the grim Nomenclature. The book moves between worlds, between tones, and between forms of storytelling. Sometimes it reads like an old myth whispered around a fire. Sometimes it shifts into a stark dystopian diary. The result feels like a tapestry woven from many voices, each calling out to imagination and memory at once.
Reading it, I found myself pulled in two directions. One part of me loved how bold the writing is. Hines leans into lyrical language with no hesitation. The book feels alive with rhythm. Sentences tumble and twist, and I could sense the author having fun with the sound of words. That energy kept me turning pages. I also liked how the characters, even the smallest ones, carry little sparks of mischief and hope. At times, some scenes jump so quickly that I had to pause just to understand where I had landed. But I did enjoyed the ambition.
I really liked the ideas behind the story. The way it plays with truth, imagination, and the consequences of forgetting what makes us human felt surprisingly timely. The Nomenclature sections in particular gave me a jolt. They are bleak and sharp, and they contrast wildly with the warm magic of Merbay. I liked that contrast. I also liked how the book keeps nudging the reader to stay curious and playful and brave. I did find the structure a bit chaotic. Threads drift in and out. Characters vanish and return. The story behaves like a dream, which is beautiful and frustrating at the same time. But I admired how it kept reaching for something big.
I’d recommend The Mermelf to readers who enjoy mythic stories that do not follow straight lines. It is perfect for imaginative kids, for adults who want to reconnect with their inner child, and for anyone who likes books that surprise them at every turn. It asks you to lean into wonder. If you are willing to do that, you will find a strange and heartfelt tale full of charm, courage, and wild invention.
Pages: 80 | ASIN : B0D3T6NNH6
Helping Matters
Cruise of a Lifetime: Mac in Montevideo follows Macaroni Penguin who manages to become the star entertainer on a cruise ship after sneaking aboard to search for food. Where did the idea for this book come from?
Author Alexandrea Kleinsmith came up with the idea of Mac wandering onto a cruise ship for food after following her own nose on a tour of a cruise ship.
I thought it would be great for Mac to became the star entertainer after winning over the hearts of both the crew and passengers at the talent show.
Do you have a favorite scene in Mac’s story? One that was particularly fun to craft?
I loved crafting Mac fixing the eyebrow-less penguin parade float in Montevideo. It is chaos with purpose. It’s funny for everyone. Kids can laugh at the silliness. Adults can laugh at the absurd logic.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
Helping matters. Mac notices the float is missing eyebrows. Which is meant to demonstrate that you don’t need permission to care. Small problems are worth fixing. And helping can be joyful and creative.
You can be brave in small, everyday ways. Mac doesn’t save the world. He saves a parade moment.
Can we look forward to more adventures from Mac? What are you currently working on?
Cruise of a Lifetime: Mac in Rio de Janeiro will be published on February 13th.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
On a voyage to Montevideo, Uruguay, Mac dives beak-first into a string of hilarious misadventures involving sushi, syrup, and one very surprised crowd. When he spots a parade float shaped like a penguin-without eyebrows-Mac knows he has to help. What could possibly go wrong?
Full of laugh-out-loud humor, colorful international flavor, and adorable chaos, Mac in Montevideo is a warm, funny early chapter book perfect for fans of Narwhal and Jelly, Magic Tree House, and The Bad Guys.
Will Mac save the day-or the parade? Either way, it’s sure to make a splash!
We Are Not Monsters
In Out Of Step, you share your experiences in the military during the Vietnam War, from the rigors of Basic Training to family pressures, shame, and the social physics of the Army. Why was it important for you to share your story?
The first question about that war for those of us who were there is “What the Hell happened? And how did we end up on the wrong side of history, vilified as monsters and baby-killers? It is a little-known fact that ninety percent of us were not in the Hollywood version of Combat. We were the clerks and jerks, the cooks, truck drivers, supply and logistics specialists who played defense. I sat through about ninety mortar attacks but, aside from one time at the range, never fired my weapon. I cleaned it everyday. I arrived a month after the Tet Offensive and did my job…or rather jobs. I had five of those simultanously. I was part of the most effective intelligence collection system of the war but had to add contributions from John Wadje and John A, Reid to create a full picture of what happened at my unit and brief paragraphs from other ASA soldiers. That’s the other thing, I wasn’t really in the Army but a uniformed part of the NSA with compartmented access to protect “sources and methods”. I had to wait fifty years for NSA to declassify most of it so I can provide a wider context. I think it is important to correct the popular culture image and provide a narrative without the guts and glory meme. That’s just for the other ninety percent who were not so-called “front line” soldiers. I’m a novelist so this written as one without the fiction.
I appreciated the candid nature you use in writing about your darkest days. What was the most difficult thing for you to write about?
The humiliations I suffered in training. I think this is where most of my PTSD comes from. Vietnam was easier. I was never really afraid and I never thought I would die there. I was seriously thinking about making the Army a career. The reasons I didn’t are in Part Two. The main reason was an invitation to attend the Iowa Writers Workshop. Even the re-enlistment NCO thought I’d be a fool to turn that down.
Looking back on your writing process, is there anything else you now wish you had included in your memoir?
No. It was already too long. That’s why I split it into two parts. In Part Two I go from the hot war to the Cold War as a General Staff NCO at the European headquarters of ASA. It was a unique path. The most surprising thing about it was the anti-Vietnam veteran prejudice even within the Army. The resentment was palpable. But I ended up in the Public Information Division. That was my first paid job as a writer.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from your story?
That Veterans of all the wars after World War Two, the so-called “Greatest Generation” also deserve respect. And I do not mean that “thank you for your service” BS that most utter and do not mean. That’s just patronizing and demeaning.
