The Story Even Tricked Us
In The Crow’s Ring, readers follow a group of friends who find themselves pulled into a long-buried robbery when they try to save a beloved tugboat from the scrap pile. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
We planned from the beginning that the protagonist and his friends would get older in each of the three books. In The Crow’s Ring, the kids are going on fourteen, so we knew the opening could be suspenseful and more complex. And by book three they had formed very strong friendships, so we wanted all of them to be involved in the opening drama.
On a personal level, as a young boy living in Iceland, Thorir loved making regular trips to the harbor to watch the ships come in. He remembers having a special interest in the tugboats with their rugged character and charm. Those memories were translated into the storyline of Captain Hodges’s tugboat, the beloved Maryanne. Middle-grade readers love the challenge of solving puzzles, and this inspired the cold-case mystery. We have to admit sometimes when we were writing, the story even tricked us.
Did you draw on a real place or community when creating Riverside and Stony Creek?
Since writing the series, we’ve learned that the name Riverside is among the most common city names in our county, found in forty-six of our fifty states. However, our Riverside is fictitious, inspired by our days living in the shadows of the nation’s capital, near Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, a charming historical town where we were married. It also sits by the river, providing access to the Atlantic Ocean. On the other hand, the concept of Stony Creek has no connection to us. It rose organically in Thorir’s mind as he was writing.
Ralph isn’t just a fun addition—he actively drives the plot. What made you decide to give the crow such an important role?
Yes, we made the crow a star! In The Big Dream, book 2, we planted a seed for Ralph’s leading role. This happened when he flew to Brandon’s rooftop with what the boys thought was a junk ring, and then he eventually took off with it. Now, the ring is back… what did Ralph do with it? The kids are older, and their friendships have deepened. Likewise, they know and love Ralph, and he interacts with all of them. However, they are keenly aware of the strong connection between Brandon and Ralph.
Realizing many young people make lasting memories with their pets, we highlighted Ralph helping Brandon. Since crows are notoriously smart, it was realistic for him to do many of the antics in this quirky and humorous mystery. It would be something this boy would never forget. He and his crow… working together to solve a hometown crime!
Can you give readers a glimpse inside the next book in this series? Where will it take them?
The Crow’s Tales was intended to be a three-book series. However, we’ve drafted book four, but its fate remains undetermined. The Crow’s Ring (without spoilers) ends with a hint on the closing page. If there is book four, it may take place on an island in the Atlantic Ocean. “Holy ravioli!”
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Another Rollicking Adventure
What begins as a fun summer turns wild and crazy when thirteen-year-old Brandon Woodberry and his best friends meet a salty old sea captain with ties to an unsolved 1930s jewelry heist. Determined to both crack the case and save the captain’s tugboat before it’s hauled off for scrap metal, Brandon & Co. follow their noses and a series of enticing clues.
But the heat is on after Brandon’s pet crow, Ralph, turns up with a valuable missing ring, and the line between hero and villain gets murky. Can Brandon and his friends — both feathered and non — solve the cold case, clear their names, and rescue the tugboat before time and luck run out?
Join Brandon for another adventurous summertime romp as he searches for the truth and discovers a curious bond to the sea.
Don’t forget to read THE BIRD CAPER and THE BIG DREAM in The Crow’s Tales series. Laugh-out-loud mystery adventures to entertain young readers and adults, too!
THE BACKSTORY
The Crow’s Ring was always going to be a mystery adventure, like the rest of the series. The Captain’s tugboat, the Maryanne, is key to the story. It’s based on Thorir’s childhood in Iceland, where he’d go to the harbor and watch the ships his father sailed on. He especially loved the look and character of the tugboats.
Another interesting point is that in book two (The Big Dream), Brandon’s pet crow, Ralph, finds a ring. The ring turns up again and plays an important role in this story. Look at the ring on the book cover—it’s a copy of the one Victoria’s dad gave her many years ago when she was a young girl. The ring is meaningful to her since she didn’t have her dad in her life growing up.
Near the end of the story, Brandon and Josh are served a beautiful Corn Flake Cake. This is a delicious cake with pineapple, whipped cream, and cornflakes. Thorir’s Icelandic mother used to make this, and we both miss this tasty dessert. His sister, Ragnhildur, knows how to make the cake, but unfortunately, she lives far from us. We’re hoping to try and bake it someday!
Is The Crow’s Ring the last book in TheCrow’s Tales series, or is there more to come? We originally intended to write only one book, the 1st edition of The Big Dream, for our grandchildren, as a gift for them for the holidays. Little did we know we would fall in love with writing for middle-grade and with the fun and heart-warming characters we had created. It didn’t take long to figure out there was more to young Brandon’s story and his adventurous relationship with his pet crow, Ralph.
Instead of a series of loosely connected stories, we decided to focus on the characters’ journey through middle school. This allowed us to show how our protagonist, Brandon, and his friends matured in their interests and relationships. In book one, The Bird Caper, Brandon is 10 years old. In book two, The Big Dream, he’s 12. And in book three, The Crow’s Ring, he’s 13, turning 14. As the stories’ characters — Brandon, Josh, Penny, Skip, and Sophie — age, their challenges become increasingly complicated and exciting. This approach to the series has opened the door to endless adventures and insights.
So, if you’re wondering, “Will there be a book four, five, or even more?” The answer is mostly up to you, the fans!
Something In It For Everyone
A Life Manual-Finally! is a practical guide covering a multitude of self-help topics and arranged as an eighteen-month course designed to help readers become more capable, cultured, and self-possessed. Why was this an important book for you to write?
It was needed years ago, and everyone can benefit from a life manual. There is something in it for everyone.
The book feels like a conversation rather than a lecture. How did you develop that kitchen-table, companionable tone?
I want the reader to feel I am helping them, not standing over them wagging my finger. That is how one of my school teachers treated my class, and we hated it. So I wanted to do the opposite.
How do you decide which skills are essential for modern life versus simply interesting or enriching?
I literally went back to basics. I sat down for weeks thinking what to put in first, but all my life I knew we needed a manual.
If you had to summarize your philosophy in one sentence, what would it be?
Modern and everyday essential practical philosophy.
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What’s Inside?
Back to Basics
Start with the essentials. From proper cleanliness and wardrobe choices to basic manners and table etiquette, you’ll build a strong foundation for personal refinement. Learn how to present yourself, manage your time, and even host a party with flair.
General Knowledge
Expand your horizons with fascinating insights into ancient Greek philosophers, world religions, proverbs, and even weird facts. Discover the flags of the world, sports basics, and the wonders of nature, all while cultivating a deeper understanding of global cultures and current events.
Living in the Real World
Prepare for life’s challenges with practical survival tactics, climate change strategies, and lessons in self-sufficiency. From primal survival skills to modern-day stockpiling, this section equips you to thrive in any situation.
Exploring the Real World
Unleash your creativity and curiosity. Learn the arts, dance, poetry, and even a new language. Dive into antiques, heritage sites, and fine dining, or plan a weekend city break to Ireland. This section inspires you to embrace the richness of life and explore the world with confidence.
With chapters dedicated to everything from home cooking and mindfulness to martial arts and future planning, A Life Manual – Finally is more than just a book—it’s a roadmap to becoming the best version of yourself. Whether you’re refining your personal habits, expanding your knowledge, or exploring new passions, this manual will guide you every step of the way.
Embark on this transformative journey and master the art of living today!
Marion, Faith & Ice Cream
Marion, Faith & Ice Cream follows an eight-year-old girl through a single sunlit Saturday that begins with a sincere nighttime question: how can she believe in God if she’s never seen Him? By the end of the next day, after leaf piles blown apart by wind, a bald eagle riding unseen air, a sparkling lake that seems to wink, and the small glory of a chocolate-vanilla swirl cone from the Snack Shack, Marion arrives at an answer that feels less imposed than discovered. It’s a very simple book in structure, but its simplicity is the point. It takes a child’s doubt seriously, then answers it through sensation, family intimacy, and the quiet accumulation of ordinary wonder.
What I liked most is the book’s gentleness. It doesn’t treat Marion’s question as disobedience or something to be brushed aside. Instead, her father meets it with patience, and that emotional steadiness gives the story its real center. I found that genuinely touching. The best moments are the ones where the idea of faith is grounded in lived experience rather than preached abstractly: the cool breeze you can feel but not see, the eagle borne by invisible air, the lake “winking” in the evening light, the children instinctively answering that they can feel love even when they can’t point to it. Those scenes have a softness to them that lingers. There’s a lovely domestic warmth here too, in the bedtime routines, the sibling teasing over the scattered leaves, the teddy bear tucked close, the almost comically important perfection of the swirl cone. The book understands that for children, the sacred often arrives tangled up with the sensory and the everyday.
I also think the writing succeeds best when it leans into that warmth and concrete imagery, though it’s not equally graceful on every page. Some lines are direct, but even there, the book’s heart is evident, and for a picture book aimed at young children, the clarity makes sense. I liked the way science and belief are placed beside one another. Marion’s father is a scientist, and the story uses observation, weather, birds, and motion to build its spiritual argument. I appreciated that. It gives the book a thoughtful little hinge: faith here isn’t framed as the opposite of curiosity, but as something a curious child can approach through the world she already loves.
The artwork is glossy, bright, and instantly inviting, with the kind of polished, big-eyed charm that recalls contemporary animated family films. Its colorful palette and soft, rounded character designs give the book a cheerful, Disney-Pixar-like warmth that makes every page feel sunny, gentle, and easily gets a child’s attention.
I found Marion, Faith & Ice Cream sweet in the true sense of the word: tender, earnest, and a little wistful, with enough specificity to keep it from floating away into sentimentality. I’d recommend it for families who want a gentle, faith-forward picture book that opens space for children’s questions, especially those who like stories where belief is discovered in the textures of a day rather than handed down as a rule. It left me with the feeling that the book’s real subject isn’t only God, but the quiet way love teaches a child how to see.
Pages: 32 | ASIN: B0GBP2R1N2
Heidi Horn – Through the wall
Anna Kling’s Heidi Horn is a historical coming-of-age novel that follows Heidi from adolescence in East Germany into the upheaval around the fall of the Berlin Wall, tracing her first sexual experience, her impulsive bond with the dangerous and magnetic Rainer König, and the way family, politics, religion, shame, love, and loss all knot themselves into her sense of self. It opens in 1989 with Heidi feeling less liberated than hollow after reunification, then circles back to show how she got there. That structure gives the book a built-in ache from the start, because even in its livelier early scenes you can feel history leaning over the characters’ shoulders.
This book has a voice that’s bold, strange, funny, raw, and often deliberately excessive. Sometimes it reads like folklore, sometimes like a dream, sometimes like a teenage girl trying to make sense of a world that keeps naming things for her before she can name them herself. I admired how the author lets Heidi be naive without making her small. The novel keeps close to the heat of her inner life, and that makes even the sharp tonal swings feel intentional. The fairy-tale language, the religious imagery, the bodily detail, the family rituals, all of it gives the book a kind of handmade texture. I also think the novel is strongest when it shows how private feelings and public ideology bleed into each other, especially in Heidi’s family life and in the absurd, punishing systems around school, sex, and respectability.
I was also pulled in by the author’s willingness to make the book messy in the real sense, not the fashionable one. Heidi’s love for Rainer is not cleaned up. Her grief is not cleaned up. The world around her is not cleaned up either. There are parts that are ugly on purpose, and parts that made me stop because the novel pushes hard into prejudice, cruelty, and emotional extremity. I came away feeling that the author is trying to show how a person can be shaped by a broken moral atmosphere and still remain painfully human. The later sections, especially as loss piles up and reunification arrives without delivering the clean freedom people expect, gave the book a tragic weight I did not see as just historical backdrop. It feels central to the point. Freedom arrives, yes, but not as a miracle cure. More like a door opening onto weather.
I’d recommend Heidi Horn most to readers who like literary historical fiction and coming-of-age novels that are emotionally intense, stylistically unusual, and unafraid of contradiction. This isn’t a comfort read. It’s more jagged than that, and more interesting for it. Readers who appreciate novels about girlhood, family pressure, political change, and the collision between innocence and ideology will probably find a lot here.
Pages: 408 | ASIN: B0FV87T3VV
Spirit of the Cowboy
Spirit of the Cowboy is a lean, bruising, often striking poetry collection about masculinity, queer desire, American mythology, and the psychic wreckage left behind when those forces grind against one another. Author Cody Draco takes the cowboy, that old national idol of hardness and freedom, and turns him into both a fantasy and a wound. Across poems that move from erotic memory to political indictment to self-invention, he keeps asking what kind of man can be made after the inherited script has already done its damage. The result is a book that feels restless and intimate at once, full of dust, shame, lust, rage, and a stubborn, searching hope.
I found the collection’s emotional candor very compelling. Draco doesn’t write about queer longing as something neat or safely resolved. In poems like “Spirit of the Cowboy,” “Spanish Moss,” and “Your Mouth Heading South,” desire comes tangled up with humiliation, danger, nostalgia, and genuine tenderness. That tension gives the book its pulse. I felt, again and again, that he was writing from inside a conflict rather than about it from a comfortable distance. Even when the language veers into confrontation, there’s a vulnerable human ache under it. The best poems understand that longing can make a person feel exalted and trapped in the same breath, and Draco is especially good at catching that paradox before it slips away.
I was also taken by how ambitiously the book tries to connect the personal to the national. Sometimes that reach is thrilling. “Guns Are Our Babies,” “Alzheimer’s is an American Tradition,” and “Ramblings of a Soapbox Prophet” show a poet trying to diagnose not just his own inheritance, but the country’s, and I admired the nerve of that. He has a real instinct for memorable phrasing, and when his voice locks in, it can feel serrated and luminous at the same time. There are moments when the rhetoric outpaces the poem, when declaration crowds out discovery. But even then, I never doubted the force behind it. The writing has conviction, and more importantly, an authentic heat.
Spirit of the Cowboy is a book about trying to speak oneself into being while staring down the dead weight of gender, religion, memory, and America itself. I found it raw, intelligent, and unexpectedly moving, especially when its bravado gave way to grief or yearning. I’d recommend this vivid collection most to readers who like contemporary poetry with teeth, readers interested in queer reimaginings of masculinity, and anyone drawn to work that would rather risk excess than settle for bland safety.
Pages: 43 | ISBN: 1300307544
Tides of Light
Tides of Light feels to me less like a conventional poetry collection than like a long, shimmering meditation on love, memory, grief, imagination, and human connectedness, arranged as a journey through different “forms of light,” from the prologue through sections like “Radio Waves,” “Visible Light,” and “Entangled Light.” The book keeps returning to the same emotional and philosophical currents: the beloved as mirror, poetry as bridge, memory as a tide, and consciousness itself as something radiant, unstable, and shared. The prologue makes that ambition plain by treating poetry as a way of riding emotional waves and finding “a safe shore,” and the later “Entangled Light” section sharpens the idea into a worldview, where perception is always partial and truth arrives as reflected light rather than certainty.
Verde Mar writes as if feeling deeply is itself a moral act, and I found that moving. Again and again the poems reach for tenderness through images of eyes, rain, music, moonlight, tides, memory, and desert light, and when that imagery lands, it lands beautifully. Pieces like “Only Your Eyes Can Stop Time,” “The Shared Poetry of a First Kiss,” and “Polishing Cherished Memories” have that dreamy, ache-filled romantic charge the book does very well, where longing becomes almost atmospheric and intimacy feels suspended outside ordinary time. I also liked how often music enters the poems, not as decoration but as structure, as if songs and poems are different weather systems of the same emotional world.
What kept the collection from fully overwhelming me, though, is also part of its identity. The language is lush to the point of saturation. At times I was completely swept up by that incantatory excess, and at other times I wanted a little more silence, a little more resistance, a sharper edit. The constant return of certain motifs can feel hypnotic, but it can also blur individual poems together. That said, I don’t think the book is merely dreamy or abstract. There are flashes of anger and public grief that cut through the romantic and metaphysical haze with real force, especially in poems like “Please,” “American Eulogy,” and “The Fall of the American Empire,” where the voice turns outward and the emotional register hardens. I appreciated that tension. It kept the book from becoming weightless. Under all the cosmic imagery and quantum vocabulary, there’s a very human insistence here on empathy, loss, injustice, and the need to remain emotionally awake.
Tides of Light feels like it’s a book more interested in resonance than precision. It asks to be entered rather than decoded. I don’t think every poem is equally strong, but the collection’s emotional weather is unmistakably its own, and its best passages have a bruised, searching beauty that stayed with me. I’d recommend it most to readers who enjoy lyrical, image-rich, philosophically inclined poetry, especially anyone drawn to love poems, meditations on memory, and language that wants to sing before it explains. It’s a book for readers willing to drift a little, and be changed by the drift.
Muppit Boy and the Allergies of Evil
Muppit Boy and the Allergies of Evil follows Elmo Fitzroy, a seventh grader cursed with the internet nickname “Muppit Boy,” as a morning of schoolyard humiliation turns into a wild conspiracy involving a chainsaw-wielding hearing-aid thief, a super slug, a sinister figure called Dr. Drug, and eventually a rocket launch that could poison the atmosphere. What begins as a funny, bruised, very kid-scale detective story with Elmo and his friends Kash and Barn snooping around San Pedro grows into a stranger, bigger adventure about identity, loyalty, and what it means to be seen clearly for the first time.
The book never treats Elmo’s pain as a prop. The jokes are constant, and often very funny, but underneath them there’s a real ache. His embarrassment over the old videos, the way every nose comment lands like a fresh bruise, the awful feeling of being turned into public entertainment before he could even understand what was happening to him, all of that gives the story an emotional undertow I genuinely didn’t expect. I also found the relationship with Ari unexpectedly moving. Ari isn’t just the dependable adult in a children’s adventure. He’s the emotional anchor of the whole thing, and every time Elmo returns to that reassurance of “my boy” and “we’re a team,” the book steadies itself. Even the sillier material, like Barn’s shoelace catastrophes or the absurd horror of a slug bursting through masonry, works because Bowler lets the comedy and the hurt occupy the same page without canceling each other out.
I also liked how strange the ideas are, and how confidently the book commits to them. “Allergies of evil” is such a gloriously off-kilter concept, and Bowler leans into it with real gusto, folding in nanites, bioengineering, a condor named Charlie, and a villain whose plan is both comic-book ridiculous and faintly unsettling. The plotting feels gleefully overstuffed, and there were stretches where I thought the tonal shifts from goofy to high-stakes were a little abrupt. But even then, I was never bored. The voice keeps pulling the whole machine forward. Elmo’s narration has snap, self-mockery, and vulnerability, and I liked that the book doesn’t offer him a neat fairy-tale fix. He becomes stronger, but also more complicated. The ending lands on something bittersweet and oddly brave, where being special is inseparable from being changed forever. That gave the book more emotional aftertaste than I’d expected from a premise this gleefully weird.
This book is scrappy, funny, tender, and much sadder in the best way than its title first suggests. It has the velocity of an adventure serial, but what stayed with me was the boy at the center of it, trying to turn shame into something like self-respect. I’d recommend it most to middle-grade readers who like eccentric sci-fi adventures, outsider heroes, and stories where friendship matters as much as spectacle, but I think it would also speak to kids who know what it’s like to feel singled out for the wrong reasons. It’s a weird book, and a warm one, and that combination gives it its own beating heart.
Pages: 211 | ASIN: B0GLKXVTS4
Raw, Girthy, & Cut: Business School for Bastardos
Raw, Girthy & Cut: Business School for Bastardos is a foul-mouthed, self-mythologizing blend of memoir, business-school refresher, and anti-establishment rant, written by someone who clearly believes spreadsheets can reveal character. Author J. Bo Lawrence moves from stories about class resentment, college football, and corporate absurdity into practical lessons on accounting, reporting, statistics, technology, time value of money, and debt, all while insisting that analysis should be sharper, cleaner, and less sentimental than the world usually allows. The book’s throughline is simple: learn to think in numbers, distrust received wisdom, and don’t let institutions, status games, or your own sloppiness make a fool of you.
What I found most compelling was the book’s strange, undeniable energy. It doesn’t read like a polished business manual. It reads like someone leaning across the table, half laughing, half furious, trying to shake you awake. At its best, that voice is genuinely memorable. The section on the “Douche of Elitist Fundraising” is crude, but it also works because Lawrence turns a grudge into a real lesson about bad assumptions and lazy segmentation. Likewise, when he starts with a weed dealer who can’t manage cash and somehow arrives at a primer on reconciliation, cash flow, and financial discipline, the move is ridiculous and effective. I kept feeling that the book is powered less by elegance than by force of personality, and sometimes that’s enough to carry a reader much farther than I expected.
That said, my reaction was divided in a way I think the book almost invites. I admired the author’s conviction that numbers matter, that vague feelings are no substitute for clear thinking, and that business language doesn’t need to be wrapped in sterile corporate politeness to be useful. Some of the teaching is genuinely lucid, especially when he breaks down reporting distortions, bell curves, or the simple truth that a dollar today is not the same thing as a dollar a year from now. But the humor is relentless, sometimes determined to offend, to the point that it can flatten the more interesting parts of the argument. There were stretches where I wanted less sneering and more trust in the material, because beneath all the sexual jokes, political swipes, and cartoon-villain portraits of office life, there is a smart and disciplined book.
In the end, I came away with a mix of appreciation and respect, which is honestly a more interesting response than bland approval. It’s abrasive, sometimes funny, and often sharp on business mechanics. I never doubted that it came from lived experience rather than borrowed jargon, and that gives it an authenticity many business books lack. I’d recommend it to readers who can tolerate a lot of swagger in exchange for practical finance-minded thinking, especially early-career professionals, analytically minded founders, and anyone who likes their business advice served with bruises instead of polish.
Pages: 174 | ASIN: B0G6LCLMF1
