Blog Archives
Life-Changing Revelation
The Exiled Kin follows a sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican teenager with autism whose world is changed by bullying, betrayal, loss, and the shocking discovery of a truth about the father he thought was gone. What inspired you to create this foundation for the story?
As an autistic author who is also of Puerto Rican descent, I felt it was important to represent my community in my stories. Growing up, I didn’t always see that on paper or on screen, so when I had an opportunity to showcase a character that looked like me, I took advantage of it. Basing my main protagonist, Luke, off my own personal history was easy since I live those experiences in my daily life. An important aspect of autistic individuals is routine, and when that gets broken, disrupted, or upended, it can be difficult to adapt. Luke’s discovery of his father’s whereabouts is a life-changing revelation that would shake anyone’s world. For a teenager with a strong sense of justice and a deep reliance on structure, the impact is even more profound.
How did you approach writing a character whose differences are an important part of him while also showing his humor, strengths, fears, and ambitions?
Authors usually write what they know, and it’s vital to be self-aware of one’s own strengths and weaknesses, and how to apply them so you’re not in a tough situation. An important realization as I got older is that having a disability makes one different, not less. People get so focused on what makes individuals on the spectrum different that they fail to see our similarities. So, fleshing out Luke to showcase his humor, fears, strengths, flaws, and ambitions humanizes him to the reader and thus humanizes people on the spectrum.
The story explores Puerto Rican identity within a late-1990s Tennessee setting. How important was it for you to include cultural experiences, family traditions, and questions of identity in Luke’s story?
I was raised in New England, so I knew and met many people of different backgrounds throughout my young adult life. A highlight of my books that readers have mentioned is that the characters are so diverse that there’s someone relatable for everyone. When it comes to Luke, I felt it was important for the audience to understand his experience as a young Puerto Rican male on the autism spectrum. The best way to do that was to emphasize his family, his culture, and his struggles. Additionally, I grew up in the 2000s when there wasn’t a lot of representation for certain cultures or groups, so making identity a prominent focus in my stories wasn’t mere creative choice; it’s something deeply personal to me.
Can you give us a peek inside the next book in the Looked Down Upon series? Where will it take readers?
So far, I have written and published two books in the Looked Down Upon series, and as I grew as a writer and a person, Luke grew alongside me. I wrote The Exiled Kin right after high school and A Masked Wickedness while in college. Now that I am an adult, we’ll get an idea of what Luke is like as a full-fledged adult in the workforce and what challenges he has to go through in the final book of the trilogy series. Without giving too much away, one of those challenges will involve the Outcasts, a group I introduced in book two. Their return will play an important role in Luke’s journey and the conclusion of the series.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
But everything changes when Lucas discovers the truth about his father’s supposed death. Furious and determined to bring his deadbeat father to justice, Lucas embarks on a dangerous mission that takes him on a journey of self-discovery and redemption. Along the way, he grapples with issues of faith, love, and the complexities of family dynamics.
Looked Down Upon: The Exiled Kin
Jordan Lopez’s Looked Down Upon: The Exiled Kin is a big-hearted coming-of-age novel that blends family drama, young romance, social conflict, psychological suspense, and a dangerous quest for justice. Set in late-1990s Tennessee, it follows sixteen-year-old Luke Ramirez, an autistic Puerto Rican teenager whose carefully ordered life begins to unravel as he faces bullying, betrayal, grief, and a devastating secret about the father he believed was dead. Luke’s recurring visions of the sinister Masked Haunter give the story an unsettling edge, turning his private fears into a presence that follows him as the stakes rise.
Luke is the clear emotional center of the book. His literal thinking, sensory experiences, anxiety around change, and desire for independence shape the story. Lopez lets him be funny, stubborn, frightened, romantic, angry, and courageous, which gives him the fullness of an actual teenager trying to understand himself. His struggle with faith is especially compelling because it’s tied to concrete losses: his grandmother’s illness, his father’s absence, his family’s secrets, and his uncertainty about whether suffering has any meaning.
The strongest part of the novel is the circle of relationships surrounding Luke. Bonnie and Drew are lively, loyal companions whose teasing and arguments make the friendship feel lived-in, while Luke’s mother and grandmother bring warmth, cultural identity, and generational complexity to the Ramirez household. Bonnie’s fierce devotion gradually becomes one of the book’s most affecting threads. Even Natalie’s mistakes contribute to the novel’s larger interest in guilt, forgiveness, and second chances. The story repeatedly returns to the idea that family can be inherited, chosen, repaired, and sometimes painfully confronted.
Lopez tells the story with an earnest, direct style that keeps the emotions close to the surface. The plot moves quickly through school confrontations, romance, bereavement, institutional prejudice, domestic abuse, and physical danger, creating the heightened momentum of a young adult adventure with the emotional intensity of a family melodrama. Some characters are drawn in broad strokes, but that boldness suits a story built around moral choices and urgent consequences. The later chapters, in which Luke and his friends pursue the truth about his father, bring the book’s themes together in an action-heavy climax that tests Luke’s courage without separating it from his vulnerability.
At its core, Looked Down Upon: The Exiled Kin is about a young man discovering that being supported doesn’t make him dependent, being afraid doesn’t make him weak, and being autistic doesn’t place any limit on his capacity for love, purpose, or heroism. Lopez has written an intensely personal story that speaks openly about exclusion while celebrating loyalty, self-advocacy, cultural pride, and the difficult work of moving forward. With fierce heart and hard-won hope, Looked Down Upon turns an exiled boy’s search for belonging into a powerful declaration that no one is defined by the people who underestimate them.
Pages: 316 | ASIN : B0CCHKXMFY
Heroes of the Empire Book 4: The Captive
Heroes of the Empire: The Captive (the concluding volume in the quartet) follows a three-front reckoning: Saga Barindaughter claws her way through occupation-era Savoria with an axe in one hand and grief in the other; Emperor Honzio tries to stitch the Empire back together while pursuing a quiet investigation into Devorin’s queen; and Aria infiltrates Castle Yakh, chasing the last request of her dead brother, finds Jaxon Tana, only to find a castle that feels less like a seat of power than a laboratory built out of nightmares.
Reading it, I kept feeling how the title’s “captive” isn’t just a plot condition, it’s a texture. Saga’s chapters have the briny, clenched-jaw intimacy of survival, where even tenderness comes barbed. When the book finally lets her say, aloud, that captivity is over, it feels like a door unbolting in your chest. I loved how Azizi doesn’t soften the moral bruises: characters aren’t merely brave; they’re scarred into bravery, and sometimes they mistake spite for oxygen. If there’s a cost, it’s that the emotional pitch stays high so often that quieter beats can feel rare, like a candle you keep expecting the wind to take.
What surprised me most was how effectively the court-intrigue thread goes cold, not elegant, not witty, but clinical. Aria’s discoveries in Castle Yakh read like a page you shouldn’t be holding: lists, experiments, “statuses,” the bureaucratic handwriting of cruelty. That darkness gives real ballast to Jax’s arc, which is less a heroic return than a painful, partial unmaking-and-remaking of a self. And then the epilogue pivots, unexpectedly, into something almost tender: Jax, a ragged figure in the capital, telling stories to children who only know him as “Master Hand.” It’s a strange kind of mercy, and it worked on me.
Book 4: The Captive is for readers who like epic fantasy, romantic fantasy, dark fantasy, multi-POV political fantasy, and rebellion/court-intrigue storylines that don’t flinch from trauma but still insist on complicated hope, especially if you enjoy endings that tie off wars while leaving emotional loose ends on purpose. If you’ve ever mainlined Sarah J. Maas for the big-feelings momentum and battlefield romance, you’ll recognize the addictive glide, though Azizi’s palette runs a little more wintry and iron-streaked.
Pages: 394 | ISBN : 978-1958688083
Three-Dimensional Character
The Metamorphosis of Marna Love is a coming-of-age novel centered around a sixteen-year-old girl in Iowa with a love for existentialism who has a growing suspicion that her mother is keeping a dark secret. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The image of a strange man protecting a little girl popped into my head one day for no particular reason. I had no idea where this was heading, but I fleshed out possibilities and explored potential plots to see where they would take me. I knew if I was going to write about a sixteen-year-old girl, I needed something to make her distinct and original to avoid cliches and stereotypes. I thought back to when I was sixteen and remembered a modern lit class my sophomore year in high school that blew my mind as I discovered existential writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. It struck me that a similar fascination is what could make Marna stand out as an interesting three-dimensional character.
Did you begin with Marna’s inner life, or did the story’s central mystery come first?
I felt Marna’s inner life needed to be developed first. If she was going to remember something, she would need to have first forgotten something that would more fully display what was at stake. People have asked if this story was a mystery, but I see it more as a revelation, a discovery. There are elements of mystery, but I think the real story is what – and how – Marna learns about herself.
The relationship between Marna and her mother, Barbara, feels especially layered and tender—how did you build that dynamic?
I stumbled upon a Girlmore Girls re-run shortly after completing the novel and I thought that’s them! Marna and Barbara were Rory and Lorelai. Maybe they lacked the rapid-fire dialogue and parallel storylines that were a hallmark of the Gilmore Girls, but in this story, there is something in the dynamics between the mother-at-sixteen and her now sixteen-year-old daughter that shone through.
What do you hope readers carry with them after finishing Marna’s story?
As I was writing the story, I saw Marna blossom into an interesting three-dimensional character who began to fascinate me as a distinctly interesting character. With her at times daring, at times endearing approach to life, I see this as more of a coming into consciousness story with qualities that charm readers, leaving them thinking about her.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
When unsettling dreams and hazy memories hint at a long-held family secret, Marna embarks on a journey of self-discovery that challenges her intellect, tests her independence, and awakens a hidden strength she never knew she possessed. From first jobs and chaotic friendships to grappling with modern teen struggles-bullying, identity, and the pressures of growing up-Marna learns to balance her emerging maturity with the everyday challenges of adolescence.
The Metamorphosis of Marna Love is a thought-provoking, emotionally rich coming-of-age story about curiosity, resilience, and the transformative power of questioning the world around you.
The Pressures of Abuse
The Reluctant Bully follows a group of children who try desperately to make sense of the existing pain caused by bullying that occurred long ago. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The characters were originally introduced in my first book of the trilogy, The Lunch Money Treasure. Without giving away the ending of the first book, I wanted to offer different perspectives on bullying, and my intention was to write a more nuanced story for TRB that demonstrates the different ways children handle the pressures of abuse.
What drew you to include the 1982 storyline alongside the 2006 narrative?
Two reasons, and again, I do not want to give away any surprises in either book. I always planned to provide backstories for some characters from TLMT in future books, and the 1982 storyline drives adult decisions in the 2006 narrative. In both books, you are introduced to an adult with a calm demeanor. However, as with a river, what you see on the surface might appear calm, but you do not know what turmoil lies beneath.
Did any of the characters evolve in unexpected ways as you were writing?
Lynn, better known as Smoochie, was supposed to simply be a Nancy Drew-type character in my stories. However, as I was writing TRB, I decided that she would also become a more hardened character and occasionally demonstrate “bull-in-a-china-shop” traits.
What do you hope young readers take away from Lynn’s journey?
That the impossible is possible. I want readers to believe that they can determine their own endings, because they can.
Author Links: GoodReads | The Reluctant Bully | Facebook | Website | Amazon
The Metamorphosis of Marna Love
Tom McEachin’s The Metamorphosis of Marna Love follows a sixteen-year-old Iowa girl whose strange dreams, appetite for existential literature, and growing suspicion that her mother has hidden something immense from her begin to braid together into a deeper reckoning. What starts as a sharp, observant coming-of-age story about jobs, boys, school, friendship, a bowling alley that feels like sensory warfare, gradually opens into a mystery about memory, violence, and the buried aftermath of a supermarket shooting from Marna’s childhood. The novel’s real engine is not plot alone but Marna’s inward change: she moves from skittish curiosity to moral urgency, and then toward a harder, more adult kind of self-knowledge.
I liked how intimately the book inhabits adolescent consciousness without making Marna flimsy or precious. She’s funny, exasperating, bright, vain in small human ways, and often startlingly earnest. Her running arguments with Kafka and her teacher, her awkward experiments with dating, her loyalty to Kate, and her instinctive but imperfect love for her mother all make her feel lived-in rather than designed. I especially liked the way McEachin lets her mind dart: one moment literary, the next petty, the next wounded, the next brave. That movement gives the novel a supple realism. I also found the mother-daughter relationship unusually affecting. Barbara is not merely withholding information for plot purposes; she is a woman who has survived something and then tried, perhaps clumsily but lovingly, to make a habitable life after it. Their conversations have a bruised tenderness that resonated with me.
What surprised me was the book’s moral texture. A lesser novel might have turned the mystery at its center into a clean revelation, but this one keeps asking messier questions: what memory owes truth, what gratitude owes reality, whether one act of courage can coexist with a damaged life, and how a young person learns to judge others without becoming glib. I liked that the novel grows more serious without becoming pompous. I do feel that some passages could have been trimmed, and now and then the dialogue explains a touch too much, but the book’s emotional candor more than compensates. By the final pages, I felt the story had earned its tenderness. It doesn’t confuse transformation with polish; Marna’s metamorphosis is awkward, costly, and incomplete, which is exactly why it feels true.
I would recommend this novel to readers of young adult literary fiction, coming-of-age fiction, psychological fiction, family drama, and mystery-inflected contemporary novels, especially anyone who likes books where interior life matters as much as events. It should resonate with readers who enjoy the introspective intelligence of John Green, though this novel is earthier and more quietly feral in its emotional weather. I read The Metamorphosis of Marna Love as a novel about how identity is not discovered in one flash but assembled, painfully and beautifully, from memory, language, and the courage to look straight at what hurt you. This is a coming-of-age novel that understands growing up is less a bloom than a reckoning.
Pages: 252 | ASIN : B0GKCJDYGD
The Reluctant Bully: A Smoochie Family Story
The Reluctant Bully is a heartfelt story about kids trying to make sense of pain that didn’t start with them. What I liked most is that author Gary Rivera doesn’t treat bullying as a simple good-guy/bad-guy setup. The book keeps circling back to the idea that cruelty often grows out of fear, shame, and hurt, especially through the parallel thread about Miguel in 1982 and the 2006 story centered on Lynn, her brother Matthew, and Jordan. That structure gives the novel a lot more emotional weight than a typical school story.
Lynn’s voice is a big reason the book works. She’s funny, sincere, dramatic in a believable middle-school way, and easy to root for. Her family life gives the story real warmth, too; the “Smoochie” nickname, the cookies with Luna, and the small everyday moments at home keep the book grounded even when the subject matter gets heavy. I also liked how the story slowly opens up from Lynn’s earlier lunch-money mystery into something deeper involving Matthew, Jordan, and the damage bullying can do when it follows a child home.
What stayed with me most is how compassionate the book is without going soft on the harm. Jordan isn’t written as a neat lesson; he’s guarded, hurting, and hard to read, which makes him feel real. Matthew’s role in the story adds another strong layer, especially as he moves from embarrassment and distance toward trying to help. By the end, the book lands on something hopeful without pretending everything is magically fixed, and that felt earned. Mr. Cavanaugh’s connection to Jordan and the final turn toward safety and care give the story a satisfying emotional payoff.
Like Wonder by R.J. Palacio, The Reluctant Bully looks closely at how children treat one another and how empathy can change a life. It also has some of the emotional honesty and family-centered warmth that readers often enjoy in books like Because of Mr. Terupt. One of the book’s strengths is the time it takes with its characters and their day-to-day lives. That steady, detailed pacing gives the relationships room to grow naturally and makes the emotional moments feel even more powerful when they arrive.
I’d call The Reluctant Bully a warm, earnest, emotionally thoughtful read that cares a lot about its characters and has more to say about family, kindness, and second chances than its title first suggests. I would recommend Gary Rivera’s moving story to anyone seeking a story featuring characters grounded in reality who leave readers pondering their own actions long after the last page.
Pages: 288 | ASIN : B0FH6BL6BV
Friendship and Abandonment
High School Epic follows a teenage girl through her high school years in the early 1990s who struggles with issues of abandonment and with discovering who she is and who she wants to be. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
My own life is definitely the inspiration for High School Epic. I had a friendship and boyfriend breakup at the onset of high school that resulted in a type of heartbreak that only emphasized the feelings I had buried of abandonment from when my father left us (the first time) when I was six. Although he did return and remain with my mother for another 11 years, their relationship was shaky at best. Deep down, I was always anticipating when he would leave again for good.
In many contemporary coming-of-age novels, authors often draw on their own life experiences. Are there any bits of you in this story?
Yes! Every event is based on real events from my middle and high school years. Characters are derived from real friends and classmates. The main character has traits that are similar to me, but she really is her own person and not me.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Friendship and abandonment are the most important themes in the book, even within the context of the romance that happens.
What is the next book that you’re working on, and when can your fans expect it out?
I have a current project that is part memoir and part short story collection, all with the themes of relationships, love, loss, and heartbreak. I’m hoping it will come out sometime by the end of next year.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Left behind, Dani meets Kevin Martin, an outsider who seems to give her everything her world is missing. Until betrayal cuts deep, leaving her reeling once more. Dani’s circle keeps reshaping again and again: new friends like Ryan O’Leary offer comfort, while old wounds resurface.
Through each season of high school, Dani is tested through heartbreak, mistakes, and hilarious missteps, as she wrestles with who she is and who she wants to be.
Told in a unique blend of letters and chapters, Hannah R. Goodman’s HIGH SCHOOL EPIC captures the chaos of teenage life in the early 1990s with raw honesty, humor, and heart.
