Fantasy Hockey Trade
D.J. Wemple’s Fantasy Hockey Trade is a middle-grade sports adventure built around youth hockey, friendship, fantasy sports, and an unexpected body-swap premise. The story centers on Easton Montgomery, Trevor Mitchell, and Alexis, three close friends and teammates on the 12U AA Gladiators in Michigan. Easton and Trevor begin the novel as enthusiastic but sometimes insecure young players who regularly face ridicule from teammates Nicky and Carson, while Alexis is the confident friend who consistently stands beside them. Their decision to create a fantasy hockey league gives the story its initial competitive framework, with Easton and Trevor drafting NHL players Hunter Dangle and Cameron Wheels and treating the league as a chance to test their hockey knowledge. From there, the novel gradually expands beyond the familiar settings of practices, locker rooms, school, and friendship into a much larger fantasy adventure.
The central turn comes when Easton and Trevor accidentally spill an experimental substance on themselves and are later locked in a steamy sauna as part of a prank. They emerge having switched bodies with professional hockey players Hunter Dangle and Cameron Wheels. That transformation gives the book its most distinctive premise: two twelve-year-olds suddenly have the physical abilities, responsibilities, schedules, and public identities of NHL players, while the professionals occupy the boys’ younger bodies. Wemple uses the situation to deliver plenty of wish-fulfillment, including NHL games, roaring crowds, interviews, road trips, and the experience of performing at hockey’s highest level. At the same time, Easton and Trevor discover that professional success carries pressure and expectations that they hadn’t understood from the outside. Their growing desire to return home gives the fantasy plot emotional weight because what begins as the ultimate hockey dream becomes a way for them to recognize the value of their own lives, friendships, and identities.
I think the book’s strongest through-line is its emphasis on character and sportsmanship. Bullying appears repeatedly, but the story treats it as part of a broader examination of how teammates choose to treat one another and how young people respond when they’ve hurt someone. Alexis often serves as the clearest moral voice, telling Carson, “Fun doesn’t come at someone else’s expense,” and reminding the team that support can make them better players and better people. Easton’s father expresses the same idea from an adult perspective when he explains that “the only thing we can control in our lives is how we choose to respond,” encouraging kindness, humility, and self-control when others behave badly. Those ideas shape more than the conflicts with Nicky and Carson. They also influence how Easton and Trevor handle their time as professionals, how the bullies eventually confront their own behavior, and how the Gladiators come together for the championship.
Fantasy Hockey Trade develops into a story about belonging as much as hockey. Easton and Trevor find their way back to their own bodies in time to rejoin the Gladiators, bringing home lessons learned from competing as professionals without losing the excitement they feel for the game itself. The championship sequence gathers together the book’s recurring concerns with effort, trust, teamwork, forgiveness, and friendship, while the later glimpse into the characters’ futures gives their childhood experiences a sense of continuity. Hockey supplies the novel with its vocabulary, action, humor, and competitive energy, but the relationship among Easton, Trevor, and Alexis provides its emotional center. Wemple ultimately presents the rink as both a sporting arena and a place where young people learn how to compete, make mistakes, repair relationships, and grow into the people they want to become.
Pages: 302 | ASIN: B0H9V7477H
What We Are
Lynn McIntyre’s What We Are is a speculative historical novel that reimagines the United States after the Civil War. In McIntyre’s alternate history, the war ends not with reunification but with the continent fractured into several nations, including the Confederate successor state of Bethel, the British-controlled Victoria, and the Union of States. The novel moves between 1865 and a technologically advanced present day, allowing readers to see both the creation of this political order and its consequences generations later. The 1865 story follows Elizabeth Livingston and the formerly enslaved people closest to her, particularly Sam and Rebecca, as they leave New Orleans for Victoria. The contemporary story centers on Mona Graf, a teenager raised in the Union of States, where racial, religious, and cultural distinctions have been suppressed in the name of social harmony. McIntyre establishes the novel’s alternate-history premise immediately through Elizabeth’s observation that “America ain’t unique. We’re not the first country to fall.”
The book’s strongest structural choice is the way its two timelines speak to each other. The nineteenth-century sections show an ideology being conceived by people who sincerely believe they can prevent future hatred, while the contemporary sections reveal what happens once that ideology has hardened into institutions, regulations, surveillance, ancestry scores, and reproductive controls. Elizabeth and Mona are particularly effective counterparts because neither initially understands the systems surrounding her as clearly as the reader eventually does. Elizabeth’s affection for Sam and Rebecca coexists with assumptions inherited from slavery, while Mona’s confidence in the Union’s Unity Policy coexists with increasingly obvious evidence of coercion. McIntyre uses those contradictions to make character development part of the novel’s political and historical argument. An early line from Elizabeth, “Perspective is funny like that,” becomes increasingly significant as both timelines expose how profoundly perspective can be shaped by family, government, education, fear, and belonging.
What We Are is a novel about memory and identity, especially the danger of believing that human conflict can be solved by erasing the differences from which conflict sometimes emerges. Bethel preserves racial hierarchy, religious nationalism, and rigid gender expectations, while the Union and early Victoria pursue peace through enforced sameness. McIntyre develops the tension between these systems without reducing the story to a simple opposition between two societies. Characters repeatedly discover that ordinary people are more complicated than the governments that claim to represent them. Mona’s encounters with Louis and Rachel, her growing awareness of Finn’s concealed history, and her exposure to identities that the Union has taught her to regard as threatening gradually loosen the certainty with which she has interpreted the world. The historical narrative gives that transformation additional weight because readers watch Elizabeth and Sam participate in the early normalization of the very Unity policies that will govern Mona’s life generations later. The result is a disturbing depiction of how humane intentions, fear, and moral confidence can combine to make repression seem reasonable.
McIntyre closes the novel by bringing its concern with memory into sharp focus. The contemporary characters’ confrontation with suppressed history connects directly to the earlier characters whose experiences have been simplified, forgotten, or repurposed by later institutions. That connection gives the title particular resonance: What We Are concerns not only personal identity but also the histories, relationships, inherited stories, contradictions, and cultural memories from which identity is formed. The book’s mixture of alternate history, dystopian fiction, family drama, romance, and political thought experiment gives it an unusually broad scope, while its young narrators keep those ideas rooted in friendship, grief, love, fear, and the desire to belong. By showing an ideology at its hopeful beginning and then again after generations of institutional power, McIntyre turns the novel into a sustained examination of how societies remember, how they forget, and what can happen when forgetting becomes a civic virtue.
Pages: 247
The Machines Will See You Now: A Human Roadmap to Autonomous Health Care
Anmol Madan’s The Machines Will See You Now takes on a big question: what happens when artificial intelligence moves from assisting doctors to making meaningful health care decisions itself? Madan calls this future “Autonomous Health,” and he builds his case by tracing the progression from telemedicine and digital health to AI systems capable of diagnosis, treatment recommendations, personalization, and ongoing care management. The comparison to self-driving cars gives the book an accessible starting point, but Madan quickly shows why medicine is a much more complicated problem. A machine caring for a person has to understand far more than data. It has to account for context, behavior, communication, risk, and eventually the sensory information that an experienced clinician picks up almost instinctively. The book’s three-part structure moves logically from that vision into the technology required to make it possible and then into the practical questions surrounding implementation, regulation, equity, and jobs.
What made the book especially engaging to me was Madan’s willingness to move between technical explanation and personal experience. He draws on his background in machine learning, digital health, telemedicine, and health care startups, so many of the ideas come with examples of what happens when AI leaves the research lab and has to work for actual consumers and organizations. Chapters on automated diagnosis, personalization, hybrid care, and passive sensors make the technology understandable without turning the book into a textbook. I found the discussion of personalization particularly compelling because Madan connects familiar recommendation systems to a much higher-stakes goal: finding the intervention, message, or care experience most likely to improve an individual person’s health. Throughout the book, he also keeps returning to an important constraint. Medical AI needs more than impressive language skills. It needs reliable information about the person it’s treating and ways to recognize when its own capabilities aren’t enough.
The later chapters give the book more weight because Madan turns from what the technology can do to what organizations and society will have to do with it. His sections on building AI products, regulating automated care, reducing inequity, confronting algorithmic bias, and retraining the health care workforce turn the book into something closer to an operating guide for the next stage of digital medicine. His perspective is clearly optimistic, and he often writes as though significant health care automation is a question of when. That confidence gives the book momentum and makes its predictions interesting to wrestle with. It also means some readers will probably be more cautious than Madan about the pace of adoption or the ability of AI to reproduce parts of clinical judgment and human interaction. Still, the book earns its optimism by spending substantial time on validation, safety, regulation, bias, workforce disruption, and the practical difficulty of moving from a promising model to a trustworthy health care system.
I’d recommend this book to people who are going to have some responsibility for deciding how AI gets used in health care. Health system executives, digital health founders, product managers, clinicians working with new technologies, investors, policy professionals, and students entering health technology will find plenty to think about here. It’s particularly useful for someone who already understands that AI will influence medicine but wants a clearer picture of how all the pieces fit together, from data and clinical decision-making to economics, regulation, and staffing. Madan has written a forward-looking guide that treats autonomous health care as an organizational and social transformation as much as a technological one. Even readers who don’t share every prediction are likely to come away with a sharper set of questions about who will build these systems, how they should be tested, what doctors will do alongside them, and what kind of health care experience they could create.
Pages: 272 | ASIN: 1421455056
The Adventures of a Florida Boy
Jim Melvin’s The Adventures of a Florida Boy is a lively and affectionate memoir of growing up in and around St. Petersburg, Florida, during the 1960s, when a kid’s day could stretch from breakfast until dark with barely an adult in sight. Coquina Key becomes more than a setting. It’s the sprawling playground that gives the book its personality, filled with Tampa Bay, sandy fields, docks, trees, bicycles, fishing poles, neighborhood dogs, alligators, mosquitoes, and whatever trouble a group of inventive boys could find. Melvin says early on that he wants the book to be lighthearted, funny, and capable of stirring readers’ own childhood memories, and that’s exactly the spirit that carries through the memoir.
The book works especially well because Melvin understands that childhood memories are often preserved in oddly specific details. A five-foot shark on a fishing line, three coveted ravioli squares at a church dinner, a G.I. Joe sealed inside a homemade diving bell, a spider monkey biting the head off a lizard inches from his mother’s face, a Frisbee stranded on the roof, and a model rocket accidentally flying sideways toward an unsuspecting golfer all become miniature adventures. The stories are told with the enthusiasm of someone who still remembers exactly how enormous these moments felt when he was ten or twelve years old. There’s an appealing rhythm to the book, too. Longer chapters are broken up by short interludes that often deliver a quick jolt of danger, disgust, or comedy before sending the reader into the next story. From the beginning, Melvin establishes this as a childhood spent climbing trees, digging forts, swimming in Tampa Bay, and inventing entertainment with neighborhood friends.
I think what gives the memoir more staying power than its funniest stories is the older Melvin’s presence behind the boy he’s describing. He can laugh at the kid who stole a Giant SweeTART or tried to burn a fire ant mound with gasoline, while also recognizing the cruelty, danger, fear, guilt, and occasional loneliness tucked inside those memories. The chapter about the classroom toad carries genuine remorse. The Little League story becomes unexpectedly moving when a patient coach gives him the encouragement he wasn’t getting at home. And the account of nearly being struck by a car at age ten gives the whole collection a quiet sense of contingency. So many of these adventures depended on a boy surviving his own fearlessness long enough to remember them. Melvin doesn’t weigh the stories down with reflection, but when he does turn serious, the shift feels earned.
The Adventures of a Florida Boy captures the texture of a particular childhood with an easygoing storytelling voice that makes the memories feel shared. Readers who grew up in the same era will recognize bicycles, neighborhood freedom, record players, G.I. Joes, dime stores, Little League, and parents who often had only a vague idea where their children were. Younger readers get something just as interesting: a window into a world where boredom had to be solved with imagination, nerve, friends, and whatever happened to be lying around the garage. By the end, the book’s real subject isn’t simply Florida or even the 1960s. It’s the strange durability of childhood, the way a shark, a coach’s shout, a rubber frog guarding a bedroom door, or a forgotten woman behind the wheel of a black sedan can remain startlingly alive more than half a century later. Jim Melvin turns one wild Florida childhood into a warm, funny celebration of the adventures that make us who we are.
Pages: 140 | ASIN : B0DV3RCKVB
The Nature Art of Steven B. Wills
The Nature Art of Steven B. Wills is a visual arts book built around one artist’s enthusiasm for the natural world. Wills began with landscape photography and now works across photography, digital art, and images inspired by places beyond nature. The book pairs an account of that journey with a large, varied gallery. Flowers, coastlines, mountains, animals, and open skies appear alongside scenes with a dreamlike or fantastical quality. For readers drawn to a nature photography book, its appeal lies in seeing how many directions a familiar subject can take. A blossom might invite close attention to color and shape, while a mountain scene opens up a wider sense of space. The collection feels guided by curiosity: Wills keeps looking, experimenting, and finding another way to share what catches his eye.
The images give this digital art book its energy. A vivid purple flower and a red bloom bring the viewer close to details that are easy to pass by outdoors. Elsewhere, shorelines and mountain valleys offer room to linger. Wills also turns natural forms into repeating patterns, spirals, and bright compositions that draw attention to texture as much as subject. Some pieces have the immediacy of a photograph; others look like illustrations or imaginative scenes. That range makes browsing the gallery an active experience. You start to notice recurring interests in bold color, reflections, flowers, and expansive views, even as the treatment shifts from page to page. It’s a generous selection, and the changes in style give readers plenty of chances to discover which images stay with them.
The accompanying text explains how Wills approaches his work. He describes taking pictures with a digital camera or phone, then using editing apps and other tools to explore color, effects, and composition. At times, he brings found objects such as leaves or stones into the process; he also discusses experimenting with images made from text prompts. Those details help connect the finished pieces to an artist who enjoys trying things out. The writing returns often to resilience, grief, remembrance, and the comfort he finds in nature. These themes give the gallery a personal thread, though the book sometimes repeats its introductions and process descriptions, and some passages still read like notes for a developing ebook. Even so, the recurring ideas make Wills’s purpose clear: making art helps him keep a close relationship with the world around him.
As an art and nature ebook, The Nature Art of Steven B. Wills invites readers to spend time with that relationship. Its strongest moments come when an image lets a small subject fill the frame or turns a landscape into a place you want to look at for another minute. The broader mix of wildlife, city views, night scenes, and digitally transformed pictures shows how far Wills’s interests have grown from his photographic beginnings. His hope that viewers will appreciate and protect the environment runs through the book, giving the visual variety a shared direction. Readers who enjoy fine art photography, colorful digital compositions, and an artist’s account of his creative practice will find a collection shaped by sustained attention and a willingness to keep exploring.
Pages: 15 | ASIN: B0CQW2FMXS
Pulsar: The Time Traveler
Pulsar: The Time Traveler is a big and restless science-fiction adventure built around grief, time travel, friendship, and one man’s refusal to let the past stay where it belongs. The novel opens with the destruction of Rhaland during a galactic war, giving Chase Monadi a childhood wound that ends up shaping nearly every major choice he makes afterward. More than a century later, Chase is still carrying that day with him while trying to finish a time machine that can travel backward. From there, the story grows into a sprawling interstellar journey involving bounty hunters, alien black markets, strange planets, superhuman Gifts, hidden communities on Earth, and an expanding group of people who gradually become important to Chase whether he wants them to or not.
One of the book’s strongest qualities is how comfortable it feels moving between enormous science-fiction ideas and extremely ordinary life. Chase can be dealing with a galactic empire in one scene and worrying about hot sauce, transportation, bad food, or somebody’s broken furniture in another. Rachel and Jason help ground the book even further. Their introduction through college stress, job applications, money problems, friendship, and an eclipse gives the early Earth section an almost slice-of-life quality before the wider universe comes crashing into it. That attention to mundane details continues once they leave Earth, which makes the alien worlds feel like places where people actually have to eat, sleep, earn money, repair things, argue, and get from one place to another. Even Coba’s aging ship, the Intimidator, develops personality through all its mechanical problems and cramped living arrangements.
That mixture of cosmic adventure and everyday character interaction reminded me most of Becky Chambers, particularly The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Both books are interested in the people aboard the spaceship as much as the destination, and both spend time on food, conversation, culture, technology, and the small habits that make unfamiliar worlds feel lived in. Pulsar, though, has a much more volatile energy. Its humor can sit right beside graphic violence, chases, strange creatures, arguments about time-travel theory, and long stretches of emotional fallout. The prose also has an enthusiastic tendency to explain how things work, from spaceships and gravity to alien commerce and time machines. That level of detail gives the novel a distinctive personality, although some scenes could move more sharply if a few explanations were trimmed and the strongest character moments were given more room to carry the information themselves.
What gives the book its emotional shape is Chase’s changing relationship with the past. His time machine begins as a technological project, but the story gradually reveals it as something much more personal: an attempt to negotiate with grief. The later revelation that Chase has built machine after machine trying to solve the same impossible problem makes his obsession much sadder than it first appears. Coba becomes especially important because he represents another response to loss. He has suffered, wandered, aged, formed relationships, helped people, and learned to value the life that followed the catastrophe. By the final chapters, their relationship brings the novel’s huge collection of planets, battles, jokes, powers, and inventions back to a surprisingly intimate question about whether loving someone means changing what happened to them or carrying them forward with you. The ending answers that through Chase’s choices, and his decision to hand over the time machine and go after Jason and Rachel gives the story a satisfying sense of movement. Pulsar: The Time Traveler is an exuberant space adventure with a bruised emotional center, and Chase’s journey gives all that cosmic machinery a very human reason to matter.
Pages: 407
Do Something Today For Your Future
No Zero Days Movement is an inspiring memoir and personal growth guide that follows your journey from poverty to entrepreneurial success, revealing how discipline, resilience, and the courage to show up for people can transform a life. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This book was written to inspire the world, Do something today for you future, for your faith and for your family, do it today as tomorrow may not come. I am not a motivational speaker as motivation fades in 10 minutes. I am here to build a legacy for my readers life in just taking one small step everyday to move their life forward, as you move forward with discipline, not motivation. No Zero Days is based on three simple principles:
- Win the morning
- Move the needle
- Make it better
If you follow these three simple principles every day. You will build a legacy for yourself.
What was the most valuable lesson your stepfather taught you?
My stepfather taught me to shine his shoes and after I would finish then he would inspect the shoes for perfection. If they were not finished property, then I would redo them. Lesson: Anything that you do, give the best that you can. He would give me a quarter for the finish product and then he taught me that four quarters could get a dollar bill, five dollars could get me a five dollar bill as he was teaching me about saving money to build more. He taught me to make my bed every morning before school and not just throw the covers over the pillow as I had to fold the corners of my sheets and pull the tightly, place the covers over the sheets making sure equal distance on both sides of the bed, pulled tightly with no wrinkles on the covers. Again, anything worth doing is worth doing correctly. A lesson that I still practice 60+ years latter.
How can someone start practicing the No Zero Days philosophy?
Follow the three simple principles of No Zero Days every day to create discipline for yourself as making your bed every morning means you Win The Morning and after a stressful day at work, you come home to see the made up bed and it changes the attitude as you created that with discipline. One day at a time and build your goal to win. Don’t set a goal that you will fail as that will send you back to depression. On Day at a time, one small step daily.
What legacy do you hope to leave your children?
My father believed in others as all he ever wanted to do would be to teach the world, One Small Step Eveyday with discipline not motivation.
Author Links: Website | Instagram | Facebook | TicTok | YouTube
Firecrackers
Firecrackers by A.W. Baldwin is a lively middle-grade adventure mystery built around the kind of summer where four fourteen-year-old boys have too much freedom, plenty of imagination, and access to far more fireworks than anyone should probably trust them with. Nash and his friends Bug, Leroy, and Stevie spend their days staging pirate battles, building traps around their tree fort, launching homemade contraptions, and generally treating their Colorado neighborhood like their own private adventure park. Then Nash hears a woman wailing behind the old Harris House and spots what looks like a ghost. His curiosity pulls the boys into a mystery involving Alice, an elderly woman living there, two intimidating men they nickname Blackbeard and Son of Blackbeard, surveillance cameras, strange stones, and a secret that turns their pretend adventures into something very real.
What makes this middle grade mystery especially fun is Nash’s voice. He tells the story with the absolute confidence of a kid who knows his latest terrible idea is probably brilliant, at least until something catches fire. His running pirate commentary, Bug’s spectacularly bad jokes, Leroy’s hustling instincts, and Stevie’s enthusiasm for building things give the friendship its own rhythm. The boys feel like a genuine crew because they tease each other, get scared together, argue over what to do, and still show up when somebody needs help. Baldwin also understands how a fourteen-year-old imagination can transform an ordinary setting. A creepy house becomes a haunted fortress, a suspicious man becomes Blackbeard, and a homemade PVC cannon becomes legitimate pirate artillery. That blend of reality and imagination gives this humorous middle grade adventure much of its personality.
The mystery grows steadily as the boys realize Alice really is frightened and the danger surrounding her isn’t imaginary. Their investigation sends them sneaking around the Harris House, following clues, tracking vehicles, discovering disguised criminals, and eventually uncovering a cache of stolen diamonds and a connection to someone they thought they could trust. The story has an old-school kids adventure quality, with bikes, woods, forts, homemade inventions, and friends solving problems largely on their own. At times the repeated experiments, pranks, and close calls make the book feel deliberately episodic, but that structure also captures the loose rhythm of a long childhood summer. As the stakes rise, seemingly separate pieces such as the fireworks, pirate cannon, mysterious stones, and the boys’ obsession with adventure begin feeding directly into the main crime story.
Under all the explosions and pirate talk, Firecrackers is also a coming-of-age adventure about courage, loyalty, and learning that grown-ups can be complicated people. Nash’s developing friendship with Alice gives the ending unexpected warmth, especially after so much of the book has been fueled by suspicion and comic chaos. The final chapters bring the mystery to a satisfying conclusion while letting the boys remain exactly who they’ve been all along: curious, reckless, inventive, loyal, and ready to turn the next ordinary afternoon into a story worth telling. Readers looking for a funny middle-grade mystery, friendship adventure, or action-packed coming-of-age story will find plenty here, particularly if they like secret treasure, homemade forts, neighborhood legends, dangerous villains, and the occasional firecracker going off where it absolutely shouldn’t.
Pages: 139
