The Quarry
The Quarry is a literary historical crime novel set around an Absheron stone quarry and the shifting criminal and political world of late Soviet Azerbaijan. It follows the rise and decline of Sani Absheronski, a legendary “thief in law,” and his uneasy rivalry with Malikajdar, the village “Aga” who builds an empire on fish, flowers, and quiet deals with generals. Around them orbit people like disabled ex dancer Maria, her sharp granddaughter Samaya, and Malikajdar’s son Hatam, whose secret love affair ties the families together. The story moves from the 1950s settlement days, through prison intrigues and black market schemes, to a violent tangle of betrayals that ends in Sani’s murder and the silence of Black January settling over Baku.
I felt like I was being let into a long, layered village conversation, where one story leads into another, and nobody ever starts at the real beginning. The writing has that oral, “come closer, let me tell you” feeling, especially in Maria’s long confession about the war, exile, and how she ended up in the quarry and in Sani’s bed. I sometimes got a bit lost in the flood of names and nicknames, and the translation keeps some awkward turns of phrase, but it also preserves the local flavor, the mix of Azerbaijani, Russian, and Tatar criminal slang. The novel is most alive when people are talking around a table, passing tea and money and half truths. As a literary historical crime novel, it moves more by memory and gossip than by big set-piece scenes, which makes the world feel lived in, even when the timeline slips, and I had to mentally backtrack.
I liked how the book keeps rubbing together the sacred and the dirty. Malikajdar runs a sanctuary and hires boats, bribes a general and still worries about who gets his blessing. Maria loses her legs to the saws of the quarry and then drags herself from shrine to shrine, trying to bargain with God for a different ending to her life. Samaya holds up the whole fragile family and still gets pulled into an affair that can only hurt her. The author keeps asking small, human questions inside big historical ones. What does loyalty look like when your “brothers” are criminals. How far can kindness go in a corrupt system before it breaks. By the time Sani is shot by a man calling him “brother,” and the crash and the roar of military planes fade into the bloody quiet of Black January, the metaphor is not subtle, but it is effective. Personal feuds feel tiny against the weight of tanks, yet the book insists they matter.
The Quarry is not a sleek thriller, and if you want a fast, twisty crime plot, this will probably feel slow and heavy. But if you are up for a grounded, talkative, sometimes messy literary historical crime novel that opens a window on late Soviet Azerbaijani life, with all its compromises and quiet courage, The Quarry is worth the time. I would especially recommend it to readers who enjoy character-focused sagas, who do not mind following a big cast across decades, and to anyone curious about how crime, family, and politics get tangled together on the margins of empire.
Pages: 229 | ASIN : B0882YSFVB
The Duel
The Duel follows Johab, an enslaved rice grower and root doctor in 1770s Carolina, whose gift for medicine and spirit-work keeps pulling him into other people’s peril. When rebels torch the Loyalist plantations, Johab is torn between saving chained strangers and protecting his own wife Oriza and their son Adam, a choice that sends the family scattering across the Lowcountry and into the orbit of the Toombs brothers, August and Oliver, whose feud culminates in the rainy, haunted duel that gives the novel its title. From the burning rice fields to a desperate crossing through storm-flooded marsh, and finally a hard-won journey with Adam toward refuge in the Muscogee valley, the book braids escape, grief, and quiet acts of resistance with moments of the supernatural, including a luminous epilogue where love briefly bridges the worlds of the living and the dead.
I felt most gripped by how embodied this book is, rice chaff in the air, sweat and river mud on skin, the weight of shackles and the ache of a splinted leg. Even the magic has texture: Johab’s confrontations with a boo hag and other spirits aren’t airy fantasy; they’re smoky, bone-deep episodes that leave bruises and blood behind. The duel itself, with Johab holding out the pistols like a midwife presenting a newborn while August quietly turns spiritual power into a last, sly weapon, manages to be both suspenseful and strangely intimate. I came away feeling that the “duel” is less a single event and more a lifelong contest between mercy and survival, faith and fury, in every choice Johab makes.
I also appreciated that the story refuses to flatten its characters into symbols. Johab is a healer who sometimes chooses the wrong patient; Oriza is both fierce protector and a woman carrying unspeakable violation; Adam grows from frightened child into someone who can shoulder grief without becoming brittle. Even among the white characters, evil isn’t one-note: Oliver is monstrous, but August is compromised rather than simply redeemed, and Elizabeth’s calculations about land, love, and safety feel chillingly pragmatic. The spiritual closing vision with Oriza and the twins could have tipped into sentimentality, yet it landed for me as something quieter, a benediction that doesn’t erase what came before but lets the living keep walking.
I’d hand The Duel to readers who seek historical fiction, Southern Gothic, and a touch of magical realism that grows organically from African and Gullah Geechee traditions rather than being pasted on. Fans of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad or the haunted interiority of Toni Morrison’s work will recognize a similar mix of brutality, tenderness, and the uncanny. This is a book for anyone who wants a slavery narrative that honors terror and beauty in the same breath. The Duel is a storm-lit story of bondage and belonging, where every act of love is its own quiet revolt.
Pages: 249 | ASIN: B0FNT2HCPV
I KNOW WHAT I AM. BIBLICAL AND BIOLOGICAL
I Know What I Am: Biblical and Biological is a fast-moving mashup of faith talk, human origins, and Black history, with the author jumping from fossils like “Dragon Man” and questions about Cain’s DNA to genetics, melanin, and big-picture identity claims. It also swings through Ethiopian Jews and Zionism, Byzantine icon history, Italy’s war in Ethiopia, Black military service in the US, the Herero and Nama genocide in Namibia, and modern media topics like Hollywood stereotypes and The Matrix.
The book has real momentum. It feels like someone talking straight from the heart. Sometimes I nodded along. The voice can be intense and punchy, with lots of bold questions and sudden pivots from science to scripture to politics. That energy kept me turning pages. The structure leans toward info bursts and quick claims.
The book aims for a grand bridge between biology and the Bible, and it ties that bridge to race, power, and historical memory. That’s a huge swing. I respect the ambition. The book sometimes stacks controversial statements next to fact-sheet style passages. The section on the Herero and Nama genocide hits hard, and it lands with moral weight. The chapters that connect media narratives to public beliefs have bite as well, especially the parts on racist film tropes and how stories get shaped in plain sight. The writing can slide from careful summary into certainty, then back again.
I appreciated how wide the images range in this book. One page might drop in a modern celebrity, then the next swings to an old statue, then you’re staring at a historical photo or a piece of artwork. That mix kept me alert, like the book was nudging me to see connections across time instead of staying stuck in one lane. It also made the ideas feel more real and less abstract, since I could actually see the faces, the symbols, and the history the author was trying to pull into the conversation.
I think this book works best for readers who like big themes, sharp opinions, and a collage style that mixes history notes with personal fire. I’d recommend it to curious readers who enjoy challenging material, who can sit with messiness, and who don’t mind stopping to fact-check and reflect as they go.
Pages: 137 | ASIN : B0GFPZ74BY
Frankie Saves the World
Frankie Saves the World is about a tiny Havanese puppy named Frankie who starts life in a nasty puppy mill setup, stuck in a crate and a small fenced circle. A scrappy stray cat named Apollo helps her escape, and they race through the outside world to a rescue farm led by a huge wise cow called Big Cow. Frankie learns she has weird powers like fire and flight, then gets sent on a scouting mission to a hidden puppy mill, and things go off the rails when she decides she cannot just watch animals suffer and does something about it.
I felt for Frankie right away. That lonely swing from having siblings, to being picked over like a product, to sitting by herself hit me in the gut. The writing has this cozy, chatty vibe, then it snaps into danger fast. I liked that. It kept me moving. Apollo was my favorite. He talks like a streetwise goof, and it made me smile even when the story got dark. Also, the farm scenes felt like a warm exhale. Mud massages. Karaoke ducks. Chaos in the best way.
The ideas are big and kind of bold for a kids book. Puppy mills. Cruelty. Rescue. Fear. Moral choices. Frankie wants safety, then she wants freedom, then she wants justice. That felt real. The magic angle was fun too, and it gave the story a comic-book pop. Frankie turning bright red when she gets mad made me laugh. The mission part got intense, and I was honestly tense reading it. I had moments where I wanted more clarity on how stuff worked, and why some rules existed. Still, the heart of it is loud and clear. Do the right thing. Even when it is scary. Even when grown-ups tell you to wait.
By the end, I was rooting for Frankie. The story stops on a to-be-continued, and that totally fits because it feels like her story is just getting started. I would hand this to kids who love animal adventures, magical powers, and fast dialogue, and also to adults who like stories with a rescue theme and a big soft spot underneath the jokes. If you want a sweet hero story with some bite, this one will do it.
Pages: 56 | ISBN: 1838757643
The Sin of Angels
The Sin of Angels is a big, old-school historical saga that follows the Marquand family from an 1850 Kentucky slaveholding farm into the chaos of the frontier and the coming Civil War. It starts with a brutal little powder keg in a barn loft, where Edward’s secret relationship with the enslaved Sally explodes into violence with his twin brother John, and it keeps widening from there into logging camps, army posts, political halls and battle clouds. The book tracks how these men and the people around them stumble through slavery, war, ambition and love, and it keeps circling the same hard question. What does it cost a person and a family to live comfortably inside a system that is rotten at the core?
The narrative voice is smooth and clear. It reads like a classic twentieth-century historical novel, not a modern minimalist thing. Scenes like the opening in the hayloft or John’s fight for his life during the Indian attack are vivid and easy to picture. The action is staged cleanly, the stakes are obvious, and the dialogue has a plain, almost theatrical rhythm. I found myself turning pages because I wanted to see how far John would fall, whether Edward would ever really face what he had done, and how characters like Allen, Sally, and Matilda would get out from under the damage the twins leave behind. The book is long, and it sometimes lingers on exposition and political detail. There are stretches, especially in the sections about secession politics and militia organization, where I felt the energy slow, but I understand that the information matters to the bigger picture.
The writers do not hide how ugly slavery is, yet they stay very close to the white family’s point of view. Sally’s early scenes are electric and painful, and Matilda’s story has real weight, but they still mostly appear as part of the Marquands’ moral journey. I also enjoyed the romantic beats in the later chapters, especially Bob and Shirley’s storyline. Parts of it are genuinely sweet and give some welcome breathing room from all the violence and scheming, and at a few points the tone leans toward melodrama. I enjoyed the big emotions and how neatly some of the turns play out. The last act left me with that heavy, restless feeling a family epic should give. People live, love, hurt one another, and history keeps grinding on.
The authors press hard on responsibility. Not just the obvious villains, but also the charming, clever, “good” people who benefit from bondage and then from war. John’s story, in particular, shows how charm and talent can curdle into cruelty when no one tells you no soon enough. The book also digs into how a border state like Kentucky tried to stand apart while being pulled in two directions, and that tension feeds the family drama in a satisfying way.
I would recommend The Sin of Angels to readers who enjoy long, character-driven historical novels set around the Civil War and the antebellum South, and who are comfortable sitting with both moral discomfort and old-fashioned storytelling. If you like sprawling family sagas, clear scene work, and a mix of frontier action, politics, and romance, this will hit the spot. The Sin of Angels is an emotionally stirring novel, and I think that blend will appeal to a lot of history-minded fiction readers.
Pages: 534 | ASIN : B0792LD3PT
Sista, Can You Feel A Brother’s Pain?
Sista, Can You Feel a Brother’s Pain? is a deeply compassionate and spiritually grounded exploration of the hidden wounds many men carry from childhood into adulthood. The book weaves Scripture, lived experience, and the author’s years of ministry with incarcerated men into a guide that explains how unhealed trauma shapes identity, relationships, faith, and emotional expression. The heart of the message is clear and powerful. Men hurt. Men hide. Men hope. The chapters walk through silence, shame, verbal wounds, abandonment, generational cycles, and the long reach of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. At the center of it all is God’s restorative love and the author’s call for understanding, accountability, and healing.
I kept pausing while reading because the writing lands with a kind of emotional weight that really resonated with me. The tone is warm and firm at the same time. I appreciated the way she confronts harsh truths without making the reader feel attacked. I found myself thinking about how many men really do move through life with silence wrapped around their pain like armor. The emotional rawness, the stories of boys treated like grown men, the confusion, the shame, the longing for safety. All of it stirred something in me. The simplicity of the language actually made the message sharper. Nothing felt dressed up. Nothing felt distant. It felt like someone sitting across from me telling the truth that everybody knows, but nobody says.
The chapters on emotional and verbal abuse spoke to me personally. The idea that a man can be well built on the outside but crushed on the inside felt painfully accurate. The writing made me think about how often we misinterpret withdrawal as arrogance or indifference. There is a lot of grace in these pages. A lot of patience. A lot of spiritual encouragement. At the same time, the author does not excuse harmful behavior. She keeps accountability right there on the table. I like that balance. It made the message feel honest. The prayers and reflection questions added a gentle rhythm that slowed me down and made me sit with what I had just read. I noticed how often the book circles back to hope. Even in the darkest chapters, there is this steady reminder that God sees what happened, knows what still hurts, and invites healing anyway.
I walked away moved and encouraged. I would recommend this book to women who want to understand the emotional landscape of the men in their lives, to men who are tired of pretending they are fine, and to anyone involved in pastoral care, counseling, or community leadership. It is also a meaningful read for people who simply want to love better and communicate with more understanding. The book feels like a bridge between worlds that rarely speak to each other. It shines a light on wounds that deserve attention, compassion, and truth so real healing can begin.
Pages: 78 | ASIN : B0GMLN6NJ3
Legacy of Valor
Legacy of Valor follows Major Liam O’Connor, soldier, husband, reluctant legend, bookended by the sight of a spaceport’s lights pulling him home. In the prologue, he’s greeted not by one newborn, but a tidy ambush of three, and that quiet domestic jolt becomes the heartbeat under the armor. Eleven years later, the wider fuse is lit: Marshal Kergan’s rebellion seizes Treespo, a methane-skied mining moon stuffed with rare elements, and the Alliance throws together a hybrid special-ops company, Neo-Etruscan SPEC CO plus New Terran Marines, under Liam’s command to carve out a landing zone and hold it in an atmosphere where a bad seal can turn you into a torch.
What surprised me first was how much tenderness the novel dares to keep on the page while everyone is carrying rifles. The triplets aren’t just “stakes”; they’re texture, little gravitational bodies pulling Liam’s thoughts back toward mercy even when the mission wants him reduced to a tool. And the dreamscape element, this half-mystical, half-disciplined mental terrain, doesn’t feel pasted on as a flashy gimmick; it’s intimate communication, spiritual practice, and battlefield vulnerability all at once. When Liam has to drop into trance while rounds fly, it reads like stepping onto thin ice: you can be brilliant and still go under.
I also liked the book’s willingness to let war be complicated without getting coy about it. The antagonist side gets real oxygen, Kergan isn’t a cardboard tyrant, and when the fighting turns personal, the consequences land with a dull, ugly thud. The dreamscape combat sequences, in particular, have a sharp, almost tactile choreography, less “wizard duel,” more knife-fight conducted in belief and misdirection. Some briefing-and-spec passages linger a beat too long, but even then the author’s fondness for practical detail (suits, procedures, unit culture) gives the story a grounded, lived-in smell, like hot metal cooling after a firefight.
This is for readers who want military science fiction, space opera, psychic fantasy, and alien-contact adventure braided into one campaign narrative, especially if you like competence under pressure, squad dynamics, and a dash of metaphysical weirdness that still behaves by rules. If you’ve enjoyed the disciplined military heft of David Weber (with a more mystical sub-current), you’ll likely settle into this world fast.
Pages: 442 | ASIN : B0CW974QW3
The Dark Feminine Path: Shadow Work, Past Lives, and Reclaiming Your Manifestation Magick
The Dark Feminine Path is a guided journey into shadow work, framed as the missing step before any kind of manifestation can truly stick. Anna J Walner mixes Jungian psychology, tarot, dark goddess archetypes, inner child and ancestral healing, plus past life regression and ritual, to walk the reader from theory into practice. She lays out what the book is and what it is not, spelling out that it is a layered process, not a quick five-step fix, and she is very blunt about how much participation she expects from the reader. Each chapter builds on the last, starting with Jung’s ideas about the shadow and projection, moving through why standard “good vibes only” manifestation fails, then into goddess work, card-by-card tarot explorations, regression techniques, spellwork, and finally daily integration plans with journaling prompts and spreads. I finished the book with a clear sense of its core thesis: you do not manifest from your vision board, you manifest from your unconscious, so the work is to descend, look honestly at what lives there, and reclaim it as yours.
I found the book surprisingly direct and very readable, even when the topics got heavy. The foreword sets the tone straight away, telling the reader this is not a standard manifestation book and inviting them to “descend” into the parts of themselves they have avoided, which gave me a sharp little jolt of both anticipation and nervousness. Walner’s voice is warm, conversational, almost like a mentor who will hug you and then tell you what you really need to hear. She repeats herself on key points, especially her insistence that you actually do the exercises and go slowly. I also see how that repetition will steady someone who feels shaky. The structure inside chapters is very consistent, which I liked: explanation, examples, then questions and practices. In the tarot section, for instance, each Major Arcana card gets an image description, a light expression, a shadow expression, then shadow work questions and an integration practice, so I always knew what was coming next and could pace myself. Sometimes the sheer volume of content felt dense, almost like a course manual more than a casual read, and I had a sense that this is a book to live with rather than breeze through.
I felt both challenged and reassured. Walner’s argument that unhealed trauma, inner child wounds, and unconscious beliefs set the real “signal” for manifestation made emotional sense to me, and her critique of toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing felt grounded and compassionate rather than snarky. I appreciated how often she points back to therapy and professional support, and how clearly she states that her rituals and regression practices do not replace medical or psychological care. The integration of Jungian concepts with tarot archetypes and the dark goddesses felt rich, especially when she explores how a card like the Magician can show up as both ethical creation and manipulative control, then links that to childhood experiences about power and desire. At the same time, I felt a bit of distance from the more esoteric claims around past lives and spirit guides. For readers who already work with that worldview, those sections will probably feel thrilling and affirming. For someone who wants evidence-based psychology, those parts may feel more like symbolic storytelling than literal truth. Even then, the practices still landed for me as metaphors that help surface hidden material.
I would recommend The Dark Feminine Path to readers who are already comfortable with spiritual language, who like tarot, goddess work, and ritual, and who feel burned out on cheerful manifestation advice that tells them to “just be positive” without touching their history. It will fit best for women and femme readers who want to reclaim power, boundaries, and desire in a rooted, embodied way, and who are willing to journal, pull cards, and sit with hard feelings over many weeks. For the right reader, this feels like a brave and generous map for walking into the dark and coming back with more of yourself.
Pages: 503 | ASIN : B0GDJ9V7QD
