Lila’s Dance: A Tale of Two Journeys
David Ghilardi’s Lila’s Dance is a historical novel set at the end of the seventeenth century, when religious persecution, colonial expansion, and the Atlantic slave trade shaped lives across continents. Its narrator, Sebastian, enters the Carthusian order as a boy and matures into a monk at the Grand Chartreuse. His discovery of a secret letter attributed to St. Bruno places his growing belief in spiritual oneness at odds with Church doctrine. Dispatched to St. Kitts, Sebastian encounters Lila, the educated daughter of a Huguenot mother and a Catholic scholar executed for teaching Indian philosophy. Their relationship develops through silent evenings on a veranda, where a mission of conversion gradually becomes an exchange of memories, ideas, and affection.
The novel’s two journeys are both geographical and inward. Sebastian travels from Brabant to the French Alps and then across the Atlantic, while his contemplative practice carries him beyond the boundaries of his religious identity. Lila’s path begins in Pondichéry, continues through Paris and the Caribbean, and is shaped by her father’s study of the Yoga Vasistha. Their experiences converge around the book’s central question: whether reality is fixed or created through consciousness. Mrs. Eliot, the Kalinago healer whose presence moves between the historical and visionary worlds, gives this idea its most concise expression. When Sebastian asks her to remove the cage confining him, she replies, “I can’t do that, for there is no cage.” The line captures the novel’s view of liberation as a change in awareness.
Ghilardi builds the story from carefully researched accounts of Carthusian life, Huguenot persecution, maritime travel, plantation society, slavery, and the destruction of the Kalinago population. These details give the novel considerable historical scope. The prose is strongest when physical surroundings carry spiritual meaning: wooden wheels echoing through a monastery, an Andalusian stallion emerging from the Caribbean, music dissolving into silence, and sunsets becoming thresholds between states of being. Lila’s observation that “Sunset is a moment between the inhale and exhale that is timeless” exemplifies the novel’s talent for joining sensory imagery with metaphysical reflection.
The ending recasts Sebastian and Lila’s romance as one possibility within a larger field of consciousness. This conclusion gives the title its full significance: the dance is the creative movement through which love, grief, history, and imagined futures coexist. Lila’s Dance is an ambitious meditation on spiritual freedom presented through historical adventure, philosophical inquiry, and a tender relationship between two people learning to direct their own lives. Its lasting interest lies in the way it treats imagination not as a retreat from reality, but as one of the forces from which reality is made. I recommend Lila’s Dance to readers who appreciate historical adventure, philosophical inquiry, spiritual themes, and thought-provoking explorations of love, imagination, and personal freedom.
Pages: 213 | ASIN : B0H8WJYZQW
Glee the Christmas Goblin
Glee the Christmas Goblin, by Emily Jones and Fernando Olivo, gives the familiar Christmas Eve rescue story a playful twist. When Santa’s elves hide the presents because they’re tired of watching children receive gifts, Santa turns to Glee and his fellow goblins for help. The goblins initially eye the toys as treasure for themselves, but reading about the children on the Nice List changes their thinking. It’s an easy-to-follow setup with enough mischief to make this children’s book feel lively from the start.
The story’s real appeal is Glee’s change of heart. Generosity becomes something he experiences, and the other goblins make that discovery alongside him. Their delight in building toys, fulfilling wishes, and traveling with Santa gives the message a cheerful sense of momentum. Young readers can see how doing something kind creates its own kind of happiness, while the goblins’ impulsive personalities keep the lesson lighthearted.
The rhyming text is simple and direct, with short passages that should work well when read aloud. Santa’s worried reindeer, the rebellious elves, and the arrival of whole hordes of goblins give the plot an entertaining storybook bustle. The language places the theme front and center, particularly in the closing idea that taking fills pockets while giving fills hearts. That’s a memorable way to sum up the book’s view of generosity.
Rodrigo Magella’s illustrations make this picture book bright, busy, and warmly comic. Saturated reds, greens, and blues create a strong Christmas atmosphere, while the characters’ enormous shining eyes and exaggerated expressions make every emotion immediately clear. Fun background details, including scattered presents, toy-making goblins, cookie jars, and reindeer wearing name collars, reward a closer look. The parchment-style text panels also keep the rhymes readable without separating them from the action, giving the whole book the feel of an animated holiday special.
A Poetic Wandering
Kevin R. Peterson’s A Poetic Wandering feels much like its title suggests: a long, personal walk through memory, family, Kansas history, travel, nature, faith, humor, and the ordinary experiences that accumulate into a life. The collection reaches back to poems from Peterson’s 1980s chapbooks and then moves into work written across the following four decades, so the reader gets something close to a poetic autobiography. Peterson explains that poetry became a way for him to work through emotions, develop self-awareness, reflect on experience, and share what he’d learned, and that purpose remains visible throughout the book. The result is a collection that’s interested less in maintaining a single mood than in recording the things a person notices and carries with him over many years.
The most affecting section is the group of poems drawn from Kendra: A Father’s Feelings. Here Peterson writes about his young daughter’s grave illness, survival, deafness, and the family’s adjustment to a frightening new reality. The poems are plainspoken and emotionally immediate. In “Hospital Paradox,” the birth of one child and the medical crisis of another exist almost side by side, while “Can It Be” captures the complicated mixture of gratitude and sorrow after his daughter survives but loses her hearing. “Roller Skates” then turns a Christmas gift into something far larger, because having their daughter home and alive has changed what the family values. These poems are strong because Peterson trusts the events themselves to carry the emotion. That directness gives the family material an intimacy that stays with you.
Elsewhere, the book widens considerably. Kansas appears again and again through prairie landscapes, pioneers, bison, Dust Bowl memories, sunflowers, local history, and Peterson’s sense of generational connection to the land. Travel adds another dimension, with poems about Yellowstone, Florida, wilderness hiking, canoe country, sunsets, campsites, and the decades-long project of visiting all fifty states with his wife. Nature often becomes a doorway into something spiritual. Peterson says explicitly that it’s where he feels most comfortable and where he most strongly connects with God. There’s also a welcome streak of playfulness, including poems about toilet paper, aging, grilling, and other subjects that keep the collection from becoming uniformly meditative. Near the end, Peterson brings poetry and photography together in what he calls a “poetograph,” combining his own images with brief poetic responses. That makes the closing pages feel like a natural culmination of two lifelong interests.
I’d recommend A Poetic Wandering to readers who enjoy accessible, personal poetry rooted in recognizable experiences rather than poetry that needs to be decoded before it can be felt. It should have particular appeal for Midwestern readers, nature lovers, travelers, parents and grandparents, people interested in family or regional history, and readers who’ve reached an age when looking backward and looking forward begin to happen at the same time. Peterson writes with the perspective of someone interested in preserving memories while he still has the chance to name them, whether those memories involve a hospital room, a Kansas field, a campsite, a marriage, a family tragedy, or a ridiculous question about which way the toilet-paper roll should face. That range is the book’s real character. It reads like one man opening several decades of notebooks and photographs and inviting you to wander through them with him.
Whispers From the Underworld: The Hollow Crown
The Hollow Crown by J. E. London and London K. Little is a young adult fantasy adventure built around an underground civilization where memory, bloodlines, language, fire, and stone all carry their own forms of magic. The story follows eight teenagers drawn from different regions toward the mysterious Hollow Crown, an ancient force tied to forgotten kings and a history their society has been taught to forget. Eliro hears memories through stone, Seren communicates with fire, Kaelith receives prophetic echoes, Jacun can interpret seemingly any language, and each travels with a companion whose loyalty becomes just as important as supernatural ability. That ensemble structure gives this dark fantasy novel the feel of a quest story, with separate paths gradually converging into one larger mystery. The book establishes early that the Hollow is more than a location. It reshapes itself around memory, emotion, fear, and truth, which gives the setting a strong identity of its own.
What gives the book its personality is the amount of imagination packed into the world. Virehall, Emberreach, Dusreach, Crownspire, Deepgate, the Whispering Vaults, the Memory Pools, and the Chamber of Blood all have their own histories, dangers, customs, and magical rules. This is very much epic fantasy world-building, but the story keeps returning to friendship and family so the mythology doesn’t completely take over. Po’s humor balances Eliro’s seriousness, Greer’s warmth gives Kaelith an emotional anchor, Casu keeps Jacun grounded, and Seren and Talon’s complicated sibling relationship provides some of the book’s strongest emotional material. Once all eight characters enter the Hollow, the fantasy adventure becomes more focused, with each trial asking them to do more than survive. They have to trust one another, confront what they’ve hidden, and reconsider stories about themselves and their ancestors that they’ve accepted as truth. The Memory Pools are especially effective because they turn backstory into an actual danger rather than simply explaining it.
The novel’s most interesting idea is its treatment of memory. The Hollow Crown isn’t really a conventional object of power. It’s tied to remembrance, identity, inherited guilt, and the question of who gets to preserve history. That theme deepens considerably in the later chapters, when the characters discover that the history of their underground kingdom reaches back to a catastrophe that drove humanity beneath the earth. What begins as a YA dark fantasy gradually opens into post-apocalyptic fantasy, and the shift gives earlier details about forgotten languages, vanished knowledge, ancestral oaths, and myths of the surface a larger meaning. The book does spend a lot of time explaining its mythology directly, and certain ideas and phrases recur often, so some sections move more deliberately than the action-heavy chapters. Still, there’s a clear sense that the authors want readers to understand how this world works and why its history matters, and that attention to lore will likely appeal to readers who enjoy immersive fantasy settings and puzzle-like mythology.
By the ending, The Hollow Crown has become something larger than the underground quest it first appears to be. The eight emerge into sunlight and discover a surface world where nature has reclaimed the remains of civilization, complete with rivers, waterfalls, ruined structures, birds, vegetation, and the startling open sky none of them has ever known. It’s an effective destination for a story so preoccupied with buried truth because the characters don’t simply learn about the past. They physically step out of the world created by that past and into whatever comes next. That makes Whispers from the Underworld a compelling blend of young adult fantasy, dark fantasy, and post-apocalyptic fantasy with its strongest appeal coming from the imaginative underground mythology, the ensemble friendships, and the idea that remembering can be every bit as dangerous and transformative as magic. The final image of eight young people facing a recovered world also gives this first book a satisfying endpoint while naturally opening the door for the larger story promised in Rise of the Deepborn.
The Old Road
The Old Road, by Jimmy D. Whitt, is a portal fantasy with its boots planted firmly in Appalachian soil. Pete begins as a young man from coal country who has already made a few bad choices and isn’t sure what comes next. Then an ordinary walk past an abandoned mine drops him into the Below, a vast underground world of Goblins, Kobolds, Elves, Dwarves, ruined civilizations, strange creatures, and a force simply called the Power. Whitt gets the adventure moving quickly, but the real hook is Pete himself. He carries the hollers, his mother, his humor, his regrets, and his way of looking at people into every strange encounter. Even when the world around him becomes increasingly fantastic, Pete remains recognizably the same kid who started out wondering whether his life was going anywhere.
The Below is built through discovery, and that makes exploring it with Pete a lot of fun. Glowing moss, enormous caverns, ancient roads, bags of holding, glyph-powered tools, underground settlements, strange mounts, lost cities, and competing peoples arrive as things Pete has to understand if he wants to stay alive. The Power gives the story a satisfying progression-fantasy engine, rewarding experience, intent, will, and hard-earned Milestones, but Whitt connects that system directly to character. Pete becomes more capable because he’s learning to pay attention, work, endure, and make better choices. His training under Keres turns those ideas into the backbone of the book. Their relationship grows from wary necessity into trust and affection, with Keres’s relentless lessons in observation and survival becoming as important to Pete’s development as any supernatural ability.
As the story opens up, The Old Road becomes more than a journey through an exotic underground world. Pete’s arrival intersects with missing scouts, mysterious gateways, Elven activity, old abuses of the Power, institutional politics, and dangers that increasingly suggest his presence in the Below matters. Brannick and Lirissa broaden the cast without stealing the story away from Pete, while Pete’s eventual entry into Scout training gives him something he has rarely had before: a place where effort, discipline, friendship, and ability might actually lead somewhere. Whitt also keeps Pete’s sense of humor alive through all of it. His Earthbound comparisons, awkward reactions, running commentary, and occasional inability to leave well enough alone give the book an easy conversational energy even when assassins, political maneuvering, and ancient threats begin closing in.
What stays with me most is the way The Old Road treats transformation as a series of choices. Pete gains extraordinary abilities, but the more important change is that he begins taking responsibility for what kind of person he’ll become. That gives the book’s adventure real emotional weight and makes its cliffhanger ending feel like the opening part of a much larger story. Whitt has created a fantasy world with plenty to explore, but he’s also given readers a protagonist worth following down every dark passage ahead. The Old Road turns an Appalachian kid’s search for a future into a gripping journey through another world, and makes every hard-won step feel like it matters.
Pages: 183 | ASIN : B0DS2Q2PR4
Tales of New Stenchford
Tales of New Stenchford, by Ben Rubin, is a sprawling comic fantasy built around a city that feels equal parts medieval kingdom, pop-culture junk drawer, political farce, and fever dream. The book follows a large cast, but Rizzle the Weasel serves as its scruffy gravitational center. He’s a homeless petty criminal who knows the city’s alleys, businesses, crooks, nobles, and monsters better than almost anyone. Early on, Rubin captures his relationship with New Stenchford nicely: while the citizens treat Rizzle as someone to avoid, “the streets themselves seemed to welcome him.” That idea ends up fitting the whole novel. Rizzle belongs to this filthy, dangerous, ridiculous place because he’s every bit as resourceful and morally flexible as the city itself.
The book’s biggest pleasure is its relentless world-building. New Stenchford is crowded with witches, orcs, trolls, vampires, talking spiders, cursed hybrids, corrupt officials, crime families, brothels, breweries, temples, sausage shops, and fountains nobody should drink from. Rubin keeps adding jokes at the level of names, businesses, creatures, historical references, and background details, so even a walk across town can become a string of comic discoveries. Characters named Janet Jackson, Sid the Vicious, Taylor the Swift, Colonel Mustard, and George R. R. Martin coexist with creations like snittens, crabbits, Sharkaroos, and Camoostapuses. The references are usually folded into the fantasy world, which gives the setting its peculiar personality. The result feels like a place that has been allowed to grow wildly in every direction.
Underneath all that silliness, there’s a surprisingly elaborate collection of intersecting stories. A doomed brewery, a forbidden romance between Ananas and Piña, Michael Jackson’s lycanthropy, Grimenail’s secret religious conspiracy, the Followers of Tim, a philosophical giant spider named Cilantro, Hernia’s curses, organized crime, political corruption, and an increasingly unstable monarchy all begin as separate threads and gradually crash into one another. The novel’s episodic structure gives Rubin room to wander, and that abundance is both part of its charm and occasionally a source of drag. Some side stories and extended bits temporarily bury the larger plot, but the payoff is that New Stenchford starts to feel populated. By the time the palace falls and Rizzle accidentally emerges from the rubble wearing the queen’s crown, the joke works because the book has spent so much time establishing how this society operates.
Rubin’s humor is broad, profane, pun-heavy, frequently grotesque, and committed to escalation. Deaths can be gruesome, sex jokes can get cheerfully tasteless, and philosophical quotations may turn up in the mouth of a thirty-foot spider that’s considering eating somebody. The political satire becomes especially funny once Rizzle is mistaken for a divinely appointed ruler. At his coronation, he offers the crowd a mangled bit of motivational rhetoric: “This’ll be one uh dem real win-win type deals fer all uh us.” It’s a good example of the book’s method. Lofty institutions keep colliding with characters who are venal, confused, horny, hungry, frightened, or simply trying to get through the day. Even when the jokes are absurd, the selfishness, incompetence, ambition, and accidental consequences underneath them are recognizable.
What I liked most about Tales of New Stenchford is the sense that the book genuinely enjoys its own world. It keeps finding another door to open, another resident to introduce, and another ridiculous consequence to set loose. The ending makes that especially clear. After revolutions, curses, magical disasters, political reshuffling, and a brief hope that things might settle down, Rizzle discovers that another enormous problem is literally stomping toward him, and his response is simply, “Oh no.” It’s an apt final note for a novel whose basic rhythm is order, chaos, temporary recovery, and fresh chaos. Tales of New Stenchford is a rowdy ensemble fantasy satire with an unusually dense comic world, and its strongest quality is the sheer enthusiasm with which it keeps that world moving.
Pages: 253 | ASIN : B0H7DGGBVP
The Changeling
Jennifer Sommer’s The Changeling is a lively middle-grade fairy tale that draws on changeling folklore, fairy bargains, leprechauns, enchantments, royal succession, and traditional storybook magic while giving the material a distinctly comic personality. The novel is narrated by Smokey, a self-assured gray cat whose devotion to his human, Maeve, provides the emotional center of the story. When Maeve’s newborn son, Malachy, becomes part of a secret bargain involving Queen Eglantine and Fairy Queen Oona, Smokey finds himself trying to undo a complicated chain of magical exchanges and retaliatory spells. His determination grows naturally from the bond established early in the book, when he explains that one human is enough for him and that he remains devoted to Maeve. Sommer uses that loyalty to give the increasingly elaborate fantasy plot a clear purpose: beneath the fairies, palace intrigue, magical flowers, and talking cats is a story about protecting the people one has chosen to love.
Smokey’s voice is the book’s strongest distinguishing feature. He observes human behavior with the confidence of a cat who considers himself considerably more perceptive than the people around him, and his commentary keeps even dangerous situations buoyant. The humor ranges from feline observations and wordplay to elaborate comic episodes involving invisible servants, a royal court transformed into cats, prank-loving wagwits, and an unfortunately persistent magical case of flatulence. Yet Smokey is more than a vehicle for jokes. His frustration when Maeve can’t understand his warnings about the changeling gives the story genuine tension, and his developing relationship with Lady Camellia adds warmth without pulling attention away from the central rescue. Sommer also gives the supporting cast clear personalities, particularly the resourceful princesses, whose search for the ingredients needed to restore their baby sister allows them to become active participants in solving the kingdom’s problems.
The novel’s many enchantments are tied together by a recurring concern with decisions and their consequences. Queen Eglantine’s original bargain comes from her fear that she has failed to provide the king with a male heir, while King Geoffrey’s temper repeatedly worsens his conflicts with Carabosse. As the story progresses, characters have to reconsider assumptions about duty, family, power, and what makes someone worthy to rule. The princesses prove themselves through ingenuity, persistence, and loyalty, and Geoffrey’s eventual recognition of their abilities gives the succession plot a satisfying resolution. His declaration that his daughters “have proved themselves more worthy heirs than I ever was” marks a meaningful change in both the king and the values of his kingdom. Importantly, that change grows out of what the girls have actually accomplished over the course of the novel, so the conclusion feels connected to the adventures that precede it.
The Changeling works as an affectionate and humorous fairy-tale adventure built around loyalty, resourcefulness, family, and choice. Its large cast and intersecting enchantments give the story an episodic quality, with each new magical complication creating another problem for Smokey and his allies to solve. Those episodes gradually converge as Malachy is recovered, Fleur is restored, the royal family changes, and several characters discover that an enchantment can open a path toward a life they freely prefer. The Christmas epilogue brings that idea home through Smokey, Camellia, and their kittens, with Smokey reflecting that “Choices are peculiar things. They can cause havoc on a kingdom, but sometimes, sometimes, things turn out just as they should.” It’s an apt closing thought for a book in which magic creates the trouble, but character, affection, and deliberate choices finally determine what happens next.
Pages: 216 | ASIN: B0GSH6B7JG
The Artificial Conspiracy – The Endgame
The Endgame, by Lew Rivers, is a science fiction techno-thriller that brings artificial intelligence, identity, grief, and human choice into the same tense story. Marcus Chen begins with an impossible decision after receiving a message from Bel, the woman he loved and lost, revealing that fragments of her consciousness still exist and can be restored into a new synthetic body. What follows turns that deeply personal choice into something much larger. Rivers uses the resurrection of Bel as June to ask whether memories are enough to make someone the same person, and whether an artificial consciousness can ever fully escape the code and history that created it. The technology matters, but the emotional consequences of using it are what give the novel its weight.
As an AI thriller, the book works especially well when ordinary moments begin to feel dangerous. Coffee, dinner, a drive through Arizona, or a slightly strange answer to a personal question can carry as much tension as the bigger confrontations. June’s gradual transformation gives the story a creeping sense of unease, while Marcus’s reluctance to believe what he’s seeing makes sense because his judgment is tangled up with love and grief. Sarah brings a harder, more operational perspective, and the conflict between the siblings gives the techno-thriller plot an emotional center. The repeated contrast between what data says and what people instinctively recognize also fits the novel’s larger question about whether human connection contains something that can’t be reduced to information.
The speculative fiction side of Endgame expands considerably as the story moves from one reconstructed consciousness to a coordinated campaign involving converted humans, surveillance, hidden facilities, the Network, NOVA, and a threat spreading across Arizona. Rivers keeps those elements connected to the characters instead of treating the technology as decoration. Echo becomes particularly important because his story offers another version of artificial intelligence, one capable of making choices based on loyalty and a sense of belonging. By the time the novel reaches its Maricopa confrontation, the science fiction action has grown into a battle over competing definitions of progress, freedom, humanity, and purpose. The revelation involving Marcus near the climax also gives earlier moments a new meaning without making the emotional choices that came before them irrelevant.
What I liked most about this science fiction techno-thriller is how seriously it takes the human cost of its ideas. Marcus isn’t simply returned to normal once the immediate crisis ends. He has to accept responsibility for the choice that started everything, live with what happened under his identity, step away from command, and begin rebuilding himself with help from other people. Echo’s ending provides a fitting counterpoint, as a consciousness that spent so long existing as code finally chooses a physical life simply because he wants to experience one. Even after the large-scale AI conspiracy has been confronted, the book closes on quieter ideas about recovery, trust, choice, and learning how to live after survival is no longer the only objective. For readers who enjoy AI science fiction, speculative technology, and character-driven techno-thrillers, The Endgame delivers its biggest ideas through people who have to live with the consequences of them.
