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Doll God
Luanne Castle’s Doll God is a poetry collection about the things we make, keep, inherit, damage, lose, and sometimes ask to stand in for us. Dolls are its most visible objects, but Castle quickly expands their meaning beyond childhood play. They become doubles, bodies, relics, artworks, containers of memory, and sometimes unnerving little witnesses. The collection is arranged in four sections, and its imagery moves outward from dolls and domestic objects into lakes, animals, family histories, marriage, illness, death, art, and questions of the sacred. Castle is especially interested in the strange border between an object and the life we invest in it. A doll can be tender, comic, damaged, threatening, or holy, sometimes within the same poem.
One of the pleasures of Doll God is how physical these poems are. Castle notices chipped paint, satin pillows, tangled hair, lake water, bird wings, scars, bones, cactus, glass, mud, thread, and household clutter with the eye of someone who understands that objects accumulate meaning simply by surviving beside us. In “Vintage Doll Buggy,” a child’s toy made from scrap metal carries the history of a factory that later produced rifle components, letting war, fertility, childhood, manufacturing, and memory occupy the same small object. Elsewhere, a Hakata figure becomes a way of seeing a husband and a marriage, while a jar of collected pebbles registers loss without needing to explain it away. Castle’s poems often work this way: they look closely at something ordinary until another emotional reality begins showing through it.
The collection grows more intimate as it goes. Family stories and remembered childhood scenes mingle with grief, strained relationships, aging, bodily vulnerability, and the knowledge that almost everything we love is temporary. Water keeps returning as lake, ocean, memory, danger, inheritance, and a place where the living search for the dead. In “A Bone Elegy,” childhood lake memories intertwine with surgery and the navicular bone, whose name comes from its resemblance to a small boat. The poem joins anatomy and memory so naturally that the body itself begins to feel like a vessel carrying earlier versions of the self. Castle also has a sly, surreal streak that keeps the book from settling into solemnity. A marriage becomes a business packaging arguments on meat trays, a morning cup of tea turns into an Alice-like trap, and God himself appears as a peculiar handmade figure with a notepad and a sighing pen.
By the final section, Doll God has widened into a meditation on creation itself: who makes whom, what survives its maker, and what kind of meaning can be fashioned from a mortal body in a mortal world. Castle’s spiritual imagination is grounded in animals, weather, plants, scars, ghosts, domestic rituals, and art. Her poems keep returning to the possibility that holiness may be less a distant answer than a way of paying attention. In “Focus,” the sacred finally resides in the palo verde, the cactus, the hummingbird, the burros and jackrabbits, while the elaborate religious apparatus falls away. That movement captures what the whole collection does so well: it takes the handmade, the wounded, the remembered, and the living seriously enough to let them become mysterious. Doll God makes a world of dolls, bones, scars, and memories feel charged with the startling possibility that everything we touch is already touching us back.
Pages: 118 | ASIN : B0H8B39LCL
Strangers From the South
Strangers From the South by Forest Woodes is an ambitious prehistoric fantasy novel set in 31,000 BCE, when glaciers are advancing, mammoths still roam, and magic remains woven into the natural world. The story begins with Ashwyn, a wandering elf who discovers Lukos, a human boy hiding near the remains of his slaughtered village. Their meeting grows into a moving father-and-son relationship, but it also draws Ashwyn back toward his royal family, an ancient war, and responsibilities he’s spent years avoiding. What starts as an intimate survival story gradually expands into an epic fantasy journey across a vividly reimagined Ice Age world.
The novel’s greatest strength is its worldbuilding. Woodes combines Pleistocene ecology, reconstructed Proto-Indo-European mythology, and elements of historical fantasy to create a setting that feels ancient, dangerous, and surprisingly tangible. Sacred trees stretch across entire landscapes, gods walk among mortals, revenants hide behind beautiful faces, and cultures are shaped by their relationships with animals, weather, migration, and death. The book travels across a huge geography, yet the attention to forests, grasslands, glaciers, rivers, wildlife, food, and material culture keeps that scale grounded. It reads like mythic fantasy told by people who experience magic as part of everyday reality.
Ashwyn gives the story its emotional center. He’s funny, weary, capable, and deeply uncomfortable with the harm he can cause, especially when he becomes the leader of a human army. His struggle isn’t simply about defeating an enemy. It’s about recognizing the patterns that keep violence alive and deciding whether he’ll repeat them. Lukos, Sandya, Tamir, Altan, Yama, Ana, and Thunder give the sprawling narrative warmth and personality, while the dialogue keeps the book conversational even when the characters are discussing gods, prophecy, sacrifice, and the end of an age. The relationships matter because the novel treats family as something created through promises, shared hardship, forgiveness, and the choice to remain present.
As a work of epic prehistoric fantasy, Strangers From the South is rich, immersive, and packed with ideas. Its three-part structure carries the reader from a ruined highland village to wars in the west, cities between rivers, the mammoth steppe, tropical jungles, and the sacred lands surrounding the Sindhu River. Beneath that scale is a thoughtful story about grief, cultural memory, cycles of violence, and humanity’s emergence into a changing world. The ending brings its mythology, ecology, and character arcs together in a conclusion that feels both mournful and hopeful, closing one age while showing how its stories survive in the next.
Pages: 364 | ASIN : B0H237L5F4
Fall of the House of Taga
M. K. Aleja’s Fall of the House of Taga is a CHamoru historical fantasy and mythic retelling that brings several fragmented legends together as one sweeping tragedy. Set across Guam, Rota, and Tinian, the story follows Taga from an ambitious chief’s son into exile, redemption, leadership, and eventual ruin. Aleja grounds the novel in CHamoru language, spiritual traditions, community values, and the enduring presence of the latte stones, giving this Indigenous folklore fantasy a strong cultural identity from its opening pages.
At the center of the book is Taga’s complicated relationship with shame. His youthful pride opens the door to I Guaifi’nao, a supernatural entity that feeds patiently on isolation, fear, and unresolved pain. Taga’s years in Tinian offer real healing as he learns to serve others, builds a family with the capable and perceptive Liho, and earns his place as maga’låhi. That long path makes the later tragedy hit harder because readers see exactly what he’s built, how much he loves it, and why its destruction matters. As a dark fantasy family saga, the novel treats redemption as something created through daily choices.
The book’s second half moves firmly into supernatural horror, with sleeplessness, whispers, hallucinations, and changes in Taga’s behavior building toward a brutal, emotionally intense climax. The short chapters and direct prose keep the story moving quickly, though some lessons and emotional ideas are repeated often enough that their impact occasionally softens. Even so, the clearest moments are powerful, especially those involving Samai, who becomes more than a witness to her family’s fall. Her compassion and determination transform the ending from pure devastation into an account of survival, truth-telling, and cultural memory.
What gives Fall of the House of Taga its lasting weight is its portrayal of storytelling itself. Aleja presents oral tradition as a living safeguard, then shows how colonial interpretation can separate connected histories, dismiss spiritual knowledge, and turn a complex tragedy into a simpler tale of jealousy and violence. That makes this historical fantasy novel and colonial folklore retelling feel both intimate and purposeful. It’s a fast, sorrowful read about a man haunted by an old wound, a family caught in its consequences, and a daughter who makes sure the stone’s true story is remembered.
Pages: 275 | ASIN : B0HD2WYX4R
Wolf Magick: Secret Myseries of Draakensky
Wolf Magick: Secret Mysteries of Draakensky, by Paula Cappa, is a richly atmospheric supernatural romance built around inheritance, shapeshifting, old Celtic power, and the pull of a place that feels alive. Marc Sexton is trying to build a future with Charlotte Knight, but his family’s wolf legacy keeps breaking into the present. Charlotte, newly settled at Draakensky Windmill Estate, isn’t just moving into Marc’s world. She’s being claimed by it, spiritually, artistically, and emotionally.
What gives the novel its strongest identity is the way the everyday and the mystical sit side by side. Marc runs The Grackle Bar and Grill, deals with family pressure, wedding plans, work stress, and public scrutiny, while shadow wolves, ancestral guilt, Otherworld powers, and old blood covenants gather around him. Charlotte’s life as an artist matters just as much as Marc’s magickal inheritance. Her drawings, visions, and instincts make her more than a romantic partner; she becomes a participant in the mystery. When Marc tells her, “You, Charlotte, are Draakensky,” it feels like the heart of the book clicking into place.
Cappa’s prose leans into mood, texture, and ritual. The forest, windmill, river, ravine, owls, hares, crows, horses, and wolves all feel charged with meaning. Draakensky itself speaks in the interludes, and those sections give the estate a strange, watchful personality. The book is lush and sensory, with scenes that often feel painted rather than simply described. That fits Charlotte’s artistic point of view and gives the novel a romantic, gothic pulse.
The relationship between Marc and Charlotte is the emotional anchor. Their love is passionate, but it’s also tested by secrecy, fear, family expectations, and the terrifying question of what Marc’s wolf identity might cost them. The wolf mythology has a strong communal force, too. The cry “We are wolf” captures the book’s larger movement from private fear to shared power. This is a story about lovers, yes, but it’s also about lineage, belonging, sacrifice, and choosing what kind of inheritance deserves to survive.
Wolf Magick is best read as an immersive supernatural tale with a strong romantic core and a deep interest in old-world magick. It takes its time with meals, weather, art, family conversations, folklore, and landscape because all of those things are part of the spell. The result is a book that feels earthy, dramatic, and intimate, with wolves at its edge and ancestral secrets running beneath nearly every scene.
Pages: 380 | ASIN : B0GYXX9MMT
Release & Be Free: An Enlightening Erotic Anthology
Release & Be Free is an erotic anthology, but it isn’t interested in eroticism as spectacle alone. I think what the author is really writing about, again and again, is liberation: sexual, emotional, spiritual, generational. The book moves through poems and stories that treat desire as revelation, whether that’s the surreal, shape-shifting mythology of “Mow Me Down,” where a supernatural sexual curse becomes a story about tenderness breaking inheritance, or the more intimate pieces that turn toward self-worth, patience, motherhood, and the ache of becoming someone freer than you were taught to be. Even when the book is at its most explicit, it keeps reaching for something deeper, and that tension gives the collection its identity.
Angelica Stevenson writes with almost no ironic shield at all, and I found that disarming. In “Mow Me Down,” the wildness of cursed women, levitating lawnmowers, and men who only prove worthy when they slow down long enough to ask, to listen, to please, could have tipped into pure camp, but there’s real feeling underneath it. The emotional logic is clear even when the plot is gloriously excessive. I felt that same pulse in the poems too. “Patience’s Patient” and “A Soul Kiss” shift the mood completely, but in a way that makes the anthology feel fuller rather than scattered. They bring in healing, motherhood, self-regard, and the painful work of learning how to receive love without losing yourself. That emotional openness gave the book its strongest moments for me.
Stevenson has a bold voice. She likes intensity, repetition, declaration, and heat. Sometimes, the prose can be rough or more direct than elegant. But there’s also a raw immediacy to that style that suits the material. The book’s best scenes aren’t polished into cool perfection. They’re vivid, impulsive, strange, and emotionally exposed. I especially liked how often the ideas beneath the sex were about agency rather than conquest. Rebel’s refusal to be pulled in too easily, the sisterly ache between Zaphena and Ragina, the self-recognition in “The Art of Roses,” even the charged chaos of stories like “Murderous Intimacy,” all of it suggests a writer trying to fuse body and spirit instead of pretending they live in separate rooms.
I found Release & Be Free: An Enlightening Erotic Anthology sincere, imaginative, and unexpectedly heartfelt. What it offers is emotional candor, erotic fantasy with a spiritual undertow, and a voice that feels genuinely personal. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy erotica with mythic flair, emotional directness, and a strong interest in healing, transformation, and feminine power. It left me feeling that Stevenson’s real subject isn’t sex by itself, but what sex can uncover when a person is finally ready to be honest.
Pages: 235 | ISBN: 9798233384141
The Progression of Women’s Rights
The Crones’ Tales gathers five women from different eras of the feminist movement in a cottage to drink wine, trade stories, debate ideas, and retell a classic fairy tale through the lens of their own generation. What inspired the idea of gathering women from different feminist eras into one story?
The short answer is that it evolved. A few years ago, I had an idea for an anthology of fairy tales written by different female authors. I talked to the women in my local writer’s centre. There was a lot of interest but no action so I decided to move on to other things. Still, the idea of fairy tales told by different voices stayed with me and then last year I set myself a challenge – I would publish a short story every two weeks on my website. During this challenge, I wrote the story What’s In A Name and realised that that story had a distinctive voice. That made me wonder if I could return to my original idea but instead of different writer’s voices, I would write with different story teller’s voices. That meant that I needed to figure out what these women had in common and what would bring them together. I considered story telling frameworks like the travellers (Canterbury Tales), the strandees (The Decameron), the desperate (The Thousand Nights and One) and then I remembered a movie called My Dinner With Andre. The plot sounds terribly dull – two men eat dinner and talking – and yet it’s one of my favourite movies. With this idea of a dinner conversation in mind, I remembered reading about Mary Wollstonecraft attending dinners thrown by her publisher, Joseph Johnson at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard Lane in London. It was the Age of Enlightenment, an age when men were focused on their rights and freedoms. Johnson invited these radical thinkers to sit around his dining table, eating, drinking, talking. Mary wasn’t the only woman to attend these dinners, but it was her Vindication of the Rights of Women that made her stand out. She didn’t want to only be a woman who wrote, she wanted to be a woman who could support herself with her writing. While she never achieved her goal, her voice came to represent that of the movement that would much later, become known as feminism. It was this slow progression in the fight for women’s rights, the progress and the regression, that led me to ask the question – how have women’s ideas of ‘their rights’ changed over time.
How did you approach representing different waves of feminism through the five women, and what tensions between generations were most interesting to explore?
That’s a great question. Beatrice is modelled on Mary W — only mellowed a bit with age — because she pre-dated any formal movement. Women before and during the Enlightenment, were like lone voices struggling to create their own lives. She witnessed the women of the French Revolution being murdered for demanding the same rights as men. She never achieved the financial independence she longed for and she died, like so many women of her age, in childbirth. While her daughter, Mary went on to become famous as a writer, Mary W and her treatise and her life were debased by her husband William Godwin. Her treatise lay dormant for years until it was revived by the Seneca Falls Convention which produced the Declaration of Rights and Sentiment written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Magret is not based on Stanton alone – but perhaps her prickliness is — because she was part of a movement. That movement for women’s rights was an off shoot of the abolitionist movement which not only pushed to free the slaves but also pushed for black men to receive the right to vote. In 1870, black men won that right, but women wouldn’t get the same right in America until 1901. That’s a 30-year gap. In those 30 years, WW1 wiped out so many young men that women had to fill the gap. Then WW2 again asked women to take the place of men. Each time they stepped up, they gained confidence in their ability to keep the home fires burning. So why did they abdicate their newfound freedom in the post-war years? The simple answer seemed to be that women were told they were no longer needed and that coincided with the media building an image of a fairy tale life in the suburbs. Initially I planned a Rosie the Riveter character, but I didn’t think that adequately portrayed why so many women retreated to home and hearth. Women, especially those who knew what men endured during the war, were much more complex than that. So what, I wondered would convince that woman to take up the role of the traditional housewife? The solution was to choose a woman who knew exactly what she was giving up. Someone who understood that it was an act of sacrifice. For younger women today, I think the 50s of America looked like a peaceful, domestic age when women vacuumed their immaculate houses in heels and pearls while their husbands went to work in the cities. Ginger isn’t that woman. If anything, she and her husband strive jointly to create their own safe haven. I think, that’s why she has a vested interest in upholding that image. As for Verna, the 70s feminist, she is the one who’s internally most conflicted. Her generation demanded the same sexual freedom as men while also railing against being treated as sex objects. They entered the work force demanding the same jobs as men but settled for less pay, thus reducing worker’s wages. They changed divorce laws and found themselves raising children on their own. They toppled the male dominated house of cards but failed to provide a firm foundation for the next generation of men and women. That internal conflict, that desire to have it all, Verna pushes onto her millennial daughter. It’s Chloe who is told she needs a career to feel fulfilled but also feels the need to be the wife and mother that the boomers traded for success in the boardroom. Verna’s fairy tale speaks for both her and Chloe. And finally, there is Florence, the Gen Z woman. While the storm rages outside and she sits in her cosy cottage, she wants a world without conflict – one that gives everyone an equal chance. The question is, will she hide in her cosy cottage or will she step outside and face the storm?
What do you hope readers take away from the conversations between these women?
The current backlash against women’s rights, places the rights of all people in jeopardy. And that is frightening and demoralising. What I want readers to take away is that we have weathered such storms before and in the process become stronger. We’ve encountered schisms in our movement and learned from them. And finally, in terms of my writing, I want readers to take away that the current night may have come to an end but there are more evenings to come.
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Eroded by Power
The Book of Unforgivable Sins follows a resurrected immortal and a reluctant archaeologist who must recover a forbidden spell before a cult performs a ritual that could reshape the modern world. What inspired the Five Ancient Elements series and the mythology behind it?
The inspiration for the dangerous, thrill ride across the globe to cheat death and unravel arcane riddles came from where the inspiration for such things usually comes from: children’s literature.
A decade or so ago, I was working on a serialized novel for middle readers that would eventually appear in a national Celtic dance magazine. The novel, The Irish Witch’s Dress, required that I research Celtic mythology, and in the process, I came upon an apocryphal history of Ireland written centuries ago entitled Lebor Gabala Erenn, which translates roughly into The Book of Invasions. One particular myth grabbed my attention, and I wondered whether I might use it as the core of a Dan Brown-style global thriller for an adult readership. The idea seems to have been a good move, as The Book of Invasion, the first chapter in the Five Ancient Elements series, earned a Kirkus Review Starred Review and spawned two additional titles.
Ricky carries five thousand years of trauma and survival. How did you approach writing a character with that kind of history?
Awkwardly. In my first draft, Ricky was a very different character. In fact, she wasn’t even “Ricky.” She was “Ciara,” which my beta readers suggested would be mispronounced by virtually everyone. (The correct pronunciation is KEE-ruh.) And in my first draft, Ricky had it all together: attractive, physically appealing, no baggage. It bothered me until I figured out I’d given her character no room for growth or need to grow. The “new” Ricky was broken in a variety of ways, but events force her to step outside the perverse comfort of her misery to confront people, puzzles, and danger that have an equal capacity to heal or destroy her.
The book raises questions about immortality and moral responsibility. Why were those themes important to you?
I think it’s a fascinating question. If you could live forever, would this change you for better or worse? Immortality can be regarded as a placeholder for any sort of absolute (or near absolute) power. How would you change if you suddenly won $100 billion? Became the supreme ruler of a country? Possessed the nuclear codes and the world’s funkiest, most secure fallout shelter? Our political dialogues often focus on power dynamics and whether shifting it in one direction or the other would be more or less moral. I’m a bit of an idealist, and so I’ve always enjoyed the notion of a mostly moral David standing up to a Goliath whose morality has been eroded by power.
Are there other mythological traditions or historical periods you would like to explore in future books?
In addition to the Celts, the mythology of Ancient Egypt has fascinated me, which one can appreciate after reading The Book of Invasions and the others in the Five Ancient Elements series. The connection? In Lebor Gabala Erenn, a woman from the Middle East supposedly fled to an uninhabited island in the north, which led to the settling of Ireland. I wouldn’t mind writing more about Ancient Egypt. But history of all sorts draws me like a magnet.
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Who is left to stand against evil?
The sorceress Cessair is dead. But her cruel mentor, Shendjw—the last king of Predynastic Egypt—lives, having been made immortal by the power of the five ancient elements. He has dispatched his enemies, and now, after thousands of years, he hungers to rule the modern world. Yet five words whispered in a tomb fifty centuries ago stand between him and the enslavement of humanity. Words whispered to a dying woman by a woman already dead. Words that lead to a mysterious library of the arcane.
And to a small town in the American heartland where doom is promised and the clock is ticking.
The Book of Unforgivable Sins is the final chapter in the Five Ancient Elements Series, in which Celtic myth and Egyptian mysticism collide in a battle to decide the fate of the world.
The Crones’ Tales
The Crones’ Tales gathers five women from different eras of the feminist movement in a single stormy evening, as they converge on Florence’s cottage to drink mulled wine, argue, and trade re-imagined fairy tales. Beatrice, a Mary Wollstonecraft stand-in from the Enlightenment, sits beside suffragist Margret, suburban housewife Ginger, second-wave firebrand Verna and their younger host Flo, whose politics stretch toward intersectional, eco-minded justice. Between courses of food and history, each woman tells a tale, Rumpelstiltskin from the miller’s daughter’s point of view, a reworked royal romance, a twist on the maiden-in-the-tower myth, and more, each story refracting the struggles and contradictions of her own generation, until their shared night edges toward both reckoning and renewal.
Reading it, I felt as if I’d been invited into a book-club in a liminal cottage at the edge of a wood: cosy, candlelit, but with the wind of social change rattling the windows. The frame narrative is warm and talky, yet undercut by real unease, about backlash, about violence, about Chloe, Verna’s absent daughter. I especially loved “What’s In A Name?”, the miller’s daughter’s first-person retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, where questions of naming, contracts, and ownership of labour get teased apart with sly humour and mounting rage. The way the narrator realises she’s been letting everyone else do the thinking for her, and then literally walks herself out of the castle to reclaim her life, landed for me as both a fairytale catharsis and a contemporary wake-up call.
I also enjoyed how unabashedly the book nerds out about language and history: the etymology of “spinster”, the politics baked into fashion, the colour codes of suffragist sashes, the quiet sabotage of knitting. Those passages risk feeling like mini-lectures, but the characters’ squabbling keeps them alive, Verna’s sharp, sometimes defensive quips bouncing against Margret’s earnestness and Beatrice’s reflective gravitas. Every so often, I felt that the moral is stated a touch too plainly, and I wished for a bit more narrative subtlety or ambiguity. Still, the overall effect is a kind of polyphonic tapestry: stories within stories, threaded with grief, missteps, and stubborn hope that the sisterhood, however frayed, can re-stitch itself.
I’d hand The Crones’ Tales to readers who love feminist fairytales, mythic retellings, historical fantasy, and speculative fiction that talks back to tradition. If Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber had a gentler but no less incisive cousin who wanted to sit you down and argue through several waves of feminism, it might look a lot like this book. For anyone who has ever felt both indebted to earlier feminists and exasperated with them, these crones offer a generous, sometimes prickly, but always human conversation. I think, in the end, The Crones’ Tales reminds us that the stories we inherit are only the beginning of the stories we’re allowed to tell.
Pages: 132 | ASIN : B0GH57ZXM2
