The Fruit of The Spirit
Pari the Panda Learns About Patience follows a young panda whose frightening escape from a trap teaches her some important lessons in patience. Where did the idea for this story come from?
I wanted to write a series of picture books for children based on The Fruit of The Spirit. I also wanted to use different animal characters that children would be interested in learning about. I already had a beta group of children and took suggestions from them as I developed each story in the series.
What drew you to using a panda as the character who learns this lesson?
I also found it fun to use an animal that began with the same letter as the fruit: P for Panda and Patience.
Why do you think patience can be such a difficult lesson for children to learn?
Many people, young and old, find themselves in a bind because of acting on impulse. Waiting for what we desire while trying to remain in good spirits is tough.
What do you hope readers remember most about Pari long after they finish the story?
I hope readers will contemplate their actions, recognizing the potential for negative repercussions from hasty choices. I also hope that kids will embrace the “safety first” mentality.
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to do everything.
One morning when Pari decides to swim right after breakfast and suffers
from a stomach cramp, she decides to lie down to rest on a grassy bank.
But little does she know that her simple choice has just led her into a scary
situation. Pari the Panda is about to learn a hard lesson about the importance
of patience in keeping herself safe.
In this cautionary story for children, a panda bear learns the hard way that
being patient in life will help her avoid potential dangers.
How I Understand It
How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience is a deeply personal blend of poetry, memoir, therapy-informed reflection, and guided self-inquiry. Author Margaret Bryden writes from the overlapping places of therapist, mother, former spouse, wounded person, and stubbornly hopeful human being, moving through love, belonging, divorce, pregnancy, aging, trauma, grief, parenting, imperfection, and creative resilience. The book’s central idea is simple but surprisingly fertile: “bad poetry” can be a brave, playful way to tell the truth, make sense of pain, and build a more compassionate relationship with yourself.
I appreciated the book’s refusal to act polished in the ways books about healing often do. Bryden’s voice can be funny, blunt, tender, profane, and oddly ceremonial, sometimes all within the same page. I found that tonal looseness disarming. A poem like “Making Love Alone,” with its cookie, its solitude, and its sweet redefinition of intimacy, captures the book at its best: warm, strange, embodied, and quietly radical. I also liked the way Bryden keeps returning to personal responsibility without turning it into punishment. In poems about boundaries, codependency, and divorce, she doesn’t soften the bruises, but she also doesn’t linger in helplessness. The writing is not traditionally elegant all the time, and it doesn’t seem to want to be. Its charm is more ragged than refined, more alive than sculpted.
The ideas in the book stayed with me because they’re grounded in emotional reality rather than neat self-help slogans. Bryden’s treatment of grief, especially the long case-study sequence on grief avoidance, is messy and uncomfortable in a way that feels honest. Her reflections on pregnancy and motherhood are just as affecting, particularly when the body becomes both a site of wonder and bewilderment. I was moved by how often the book turns toward paradox: selfishness as a path to deeper love, boundaries as a way of drawing the right people closer, success as boring and humble, and death as a reason to live more fully. There’s a real pulse here, a sense that the author has earned her insights by walking through the smoke herself.
By the end, I felt that How I Understand It is less concerned with being a perfect poetry collection than with becoming a companion for people trying to hear themselves clearly. Its ending, especially the defiant tenderness of “Imposter Syndrome Can Go Fuck Itself” and the practical invitation to make one’s own poems of resilience, gives the book a satisfying sense of arrival. This is a heartfelt and emotionally generous book. I’d recommend it to readers who like therapy-adjacent writing, reflective poetry, journaling, and books that speak plainly about love, grief, trauma, and the difficult art of becoming kinder to yourself.
Pages: 234 | ASIN : B0H2FPMTS9
Albanian Downfall
Shefqet Meko’s Albanian Downfall is a political and emotional novel about Maks Prifti, a young journalist in late-communist Albania who wants to believe in the system even as the system keeps proving how little room it has for honesty. The story begins in 1987, when Maks is rejected as a Party candidate because of his father’s political past. That rejection sets off a chain of losses, first his standing, then his engagement to Ema, and eventually his faith in the language and ideals he’s spent his life serving.
What makes the book interesting is how closely it ties private heartbreak to national collapse. Maks doesn’t experience politics as something abstract. It reaches into his job, his friendships, his love life, his sense of manhood, and even his sanity. He’s a journalist, so words are his work and his refuge, but he’s also trapped in a country where words have been drained by slogans. One of the sharpest lines in the novel comes when Maks thinks, “Power rests on two legs: fear and loyalty.” That idea runs through the whole book as fear begins to weaken, loyalty starts to crack, and people who once performed belief begin looking for exits.
The novel has a wide cast, but Maks remains its restless center. Ema gives the story its deepest wound, while figures like Landa, Roza, Miço, Adnan Lufta, and Ndoc Drini help show the many ways people live inside a decaying political order. Some comply, some scheme, some dream, some break, and some try to leave. Meko is especially drawn to people caught between belief and disillusionment, and that gives the book a lived-in texture. It doesn’t just tell the reader that a society is falling apart. It shows the collapse through gossip, offices, student protests, sealed envelopes, whispered rumors, and the strange theater of public loyalty.
The style is intense, reflective, and often feverish. Maks’s inner voice can be dramatic, sometimes spiraling from political thought into memory, fantasy, or despair within a few lines. That rhythm suits a character who’s trying to make sense of a world where every relationship feels political and every political decision feels personal. The book’s final movement, with Maks and Ema reunited and then shattered by flight across the sea, turns the national exodus into a tragic love story. By the epilogue, when Maks says, “Now that I’ve gone mad, I understand the emptiness of a life built on communist ideals,” the line lands as both personal ruin and historical judgment.
Albanian Downfall is a dense, passionate novel about the end of an era and the people who were psychologically shaped by it. It’s part political chronicle, part love story, and part portrait of a man discovering that survival can cost nearly everything. Meko writes with the urgency of someone trying to preserve the emotional truth of a vanished world, not just its events. The result is a book about Albania’s communist collapse that feels deeply human because it keeps returning to the same question Maks can’t escape: what happens to a person when the dream he served becomes the force that destroys him?
Pages: 414 | ASIN: B0D99GSXWQ
The Great Awakening
Blake Anderson’s The Great Awakening begins with a miracle: nearly everyone on Earth wakes from the same luminous, near-death-like dream and returns to life remade by love, peace, and spiritual certainty. Raymond Brunson embraces this new world almost instantly, while his old friend Tyson Burgess, one of the rare “Unawakened,” is left stranded in the ruins of the old one. What first looks like a global salvation story gradually darkens into a disturbing examination of conformity, coercion, artificial enlightenment, and the terrible cost of removing human suffering by force.
I was immediately pulled in by the novel’s audacity. Anderson does not merely ask what would happen if humanity became kinder overnight; he asks what kindness becomes when it hardens into an unquestionable social order. The early chapters have a strange, dewy beauty, full of heightened senses, softened egos, and people suddenly able to live without the old machinery of greed and fear. Yet that beauty is never entirely comfortable. The phrase “love and peace” begins as a benediction and slowly curdles into something almost bureaucratic, a password of the converted. That tonal drift is one of the book’s sharpest pleasures.
Tyson’s pain gives the story its moral gravity. Raymond’s serenity is seductive, but Tyson’s confusion feels recognizably human: jealous, frightened, ashamed, furious, and still deserving of compassion. The Discovery Centers are especially chilling because they do not look like villainy from the outside. They are immaculate, gentle, therapeutic, and full of radiant language. Anderson understands that control often arrives wearing clean white clothes and speaking softly. The final revelations push the book into more explicitly technological territory, but the emotional question remains older and thornier: if peace requires surrendering agency, is it still peace?
This book is for readers drawn to science fiction, dystopian thrillers, spiritual fiction, techno-thrillers, and AI ethics. Fans of Blake Crouch’s high-concept suspense will recognize the same appetite for big questions made intimate through ordinary people under impossible pressure, though Anderson’s novel is more metaphysical and morally nettled. The Great Awakening is a provocative and unsettling debut that treats enlightenment not as an answer, but as a locked door with light leaking under it.
Pages: 209 | ASIN : B0GYFRFW7T
The science of telepathy
The Science of Telepathy is part memoir, part metaphysical field guide, and part argument for treating telepathy as an electrical, biological, and social reality rather than a superstition or pathology. Author Barry Aubin begins with his own awakening, including the striking childhood and adult experiences that led him to understand himself as a “Telepathic Icon,” then moves through an ambitious architecture of ideas: linear telepathic processing, telecasting, remote viewing, dream casting, auras, telekinesis, anti telepathic rooms, legal reform, psychiatry, crime, climate change, and the future of global health. The book’s central claim is simple but immense: thoughts are electrical signals, consciousness is electronic, and humanity will change once it accepts that minds are not sealed rooms.
I enjoyed the book most when Aubin writes from direct experience, because those passages carry a strange, candid pressure. The scene of asking a neighbour for the time across an alleyway, then checking the clock and finding the answer correct, has the quiet force of a private revelation. So does the recurring image of him driving, hearing music, voices, and radio presences as part of a telepathic weather only he can fully describe. What moved me here was not merely the insistence that telepathy exists, but the loneliness beneath that insistence. Aubin writes like someone trying to build a vocabulary for sensations most people are trained to dismiss. His language can be rough, urgent, and looping, yet that very repetition sometimes feels less like a flaw than a record of pressure against silence. He’s not polishing mystery into prettiness. He’s trying to drag it into daylight.
The ideas are often bold. I found the sections on telepathic etiquette, answering the sixth sense with the sixth sense and ordinary speech with ordinary speech, especially persuasive as lived wisdom. The chapters on double speaking, hear blocking, and transferring tastes and smells also have a practical intimacy that makes them memorable. Other claims, particularly those involving organized crime, molecular damage, cloning, and large-scale institutional infiltration, are more unsettling. Still, the book retains a moral seriousness I respected. Aubin keeps returning to safety, conscience, hospitals, self-care, and the need not to act destructively on inner voices. That grounding matters. The writing is not conventional science prose; it’s closer to testimony crossed with speculative systems building, and at its best it feels like a mind mapping an invisible continent by lantern light.
I came away from The Science of Telepathy feeling that I had read something sincere, intense, and brave. It’s a book with conviction, and a rare willingness to speak from inside an experience that most public conversations flatten into fantasy. Its finest achievement is not that it settles every question, but that it asks readers to imagine a future in which the electronic, the spiritual, the medical, and the ethical can be discussed in the same room. I’d recommend it to open-minded readers interested in telepathy, consciousness, anomalous perception, spiritual science, or first-person accounts that challenge the boundaries of accepted reality.
Pages: 60 | ASIN: B0C5K2JKK6
Over Brooklyn Hills
Over Brooklyn Hills, by David Guenette, is a literary climate fiction thriller set in 2035, where climate change is no longer a warning on the horizon but a daily pressure shaping politics, money, migration, housing, violence, and ordinary private life. The story follows Davin Caine, now seventy, as he moves through a Berkshire County strained by rising costs, climate migration, and civic unease, while larger threats involving fossil fuel interests, international tensions, and the climate terrorist group No One is Safe push the novel into darker territory.
Guenette isn’t just interested in disaster as spectacle. He’s interested in the way disaster becomes routine. A hot spell, a housing meeting, a town budget, a person trying to keep a home, a young worker needing air conditioning, a local government trying to respond without losing its soul. These details give the novel its weight. I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.
The writing has a restless, observant quality that I found both engaging and, at times, intentionally uncomfortable. Guenette moves between characters with a wide lens, and his choices make the book feel crowded in the way real life is crowded. Davin’s reflective passages slow the story down in useful ways, giving the thriller elements more moral texture. Then the violence and conspiracy threads cut back in, sharp and ugly, reminding me that this is still a thriller with real stakes. I appreciated that balance. The book doesn’t let anyone stay clean for long, not activists, not politicians, not industries, not regular people trying to get through the week.
I would recommend Over Brooklyn Hills to readers who like climate fiction with a political pulse, especially those who want a thriller that thinks as much as it moves. It will appeal to readers who enjoy near-future stories grounded in realistic social consequences rather than end-of-the-world spectacle. If you like fiction that blends suspense, civic anxiety, personal reflection, and big-picture questions about responsibility, this book has plenty to offer.
Pages: 355 | ASIN : B0GYV5L6SJ
Unavoidable Element of Time
What’s It Like To Be Old? is a candid poetry collection that addresses what happens when the self still feels vividly alive, but the body has other ideas. Were there any poets or other writers who influenced your work on this collection?
I guess life was the main source of ideas and insights for this book. I have always admired Thomas Hardy’s excellent poetry, much of it written in the context of his old age. And of course Dylan Thomas and W. B. Yeats made famous statements about old age. But those tended to the heroic, and I wanted to explore the day-to-day consciousness of being old, a rather different thing than a defiant whoop. I did not find many writers who looked steadily at the life of the old, happy, painful, resigned, or entered into a psychological state that I defined as ripeness from Shakespeare’s touching lines.
How do you know when a poem is truly finished?
My poems often come out from a deeper place in my mind where they seem to be always already finished. I might struggle to find words for the middle, but the beginning and end seemed already written, and when the final lines came out, though I might mess with them a bit, I knew the poem was written: a rather mysterious process, I grant.
What was the biggest challenge you faced in putting together this poetry collection?
I had a great number of poems on the subject of what it is like to be old. I had recently entered into the life of older people, my 70s, when I would hit upon a statement, or a dramatic voice of someone, or a point of view, and so on, and I would create a poem. I edited all the poems very carefully, but then came the hard part: picking the ones worth putting in a book of poems on the subject. If they had made it through my editing process, they had some value, and it was hard to know which to select. I settled on distributing them into a kind of plot of poem sections that would eventually constitute the major sections of the book. It was then easier to see in a comparison of those in each section which would provide a new perspective and a superior poetic statement. Still, I was sorry to see certain ones have to go.
Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
I have finished four more books that are already slated for publication: these are a book on life in the unavoidable element of time, entitled Being in Time and Change, a work that follows many of the themes of time in What’s It Like To Be Old? Another is called Political Poems and asks the reader to think about our national and social hopes and despairs– so potent just now; it focuses on dominations and their harm. Next is a book of vivid impressions of life as we experience it daily; it is called Seasons: Moments and explores directly our brilliant or terrible life on the planet. Then there is another book of poems focused on my wonderful dog, Maisie, and her remarkable experiences in a life outside in Central Park.
I am now pulling together and editing a collection of reflections on dying and death, and our response to these realities. As with my other poems, they offer a panoply of points of view, personal, social, or eternal. I am liking these poems as I go through them, even though the subject itself is so unlikeable.
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An Exciting And Rewarding Challenge
Cherry Creek centers around a young woman living in 1850s Ohio who grows restless in her marriage and leaves for the Pikes Peak gold region, only to find difficult lessons in survival and independence. What draws you to the historical fiction genre?
I find it fascinating to imagine the lives of people who lived in periods so different from ours, especially the pioneers whose struggles enabled the much easier life we lead. As a former reference librarian, the research involved is an exciting and rewarding challenge.
Were there real historical accounts or people who influenced the story?
Yes, much of my research into the details of the Colorado gold rush involved contemporary letters and reports from the mines. Horace Greeley of “Go west, young man” fame wrote vividly of his own arduous journey on the Pike’s Peak Express.
Which character surprised you most while writing?
Molly pretty much told her own story in her own words, and I just took dictation, so she surprised me frequently. Sometimes writing is more like channeling than creating.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
My current project is a collection of five stories on the theme of captivity. The material is not suitable for the Wild Rose Press, who published all my genre fiction titles, so if and when it will be available will depend on finding another publisher.
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