Daughter of Ash and Bone
Daughter of Ash and Bone is a mythological fantasy with a strong romantic thread, the kind of book that drops a modern woman into an old war and then asks what survives when buried history starts breathing again. Alice Reed begins as a chemist trying to hold together a quiet, carefully built life, then inherits a strange Norse pendant from a relative she never knew and gets pulled into a world of tokens, gods, dreams, and old violence that never really ended. What starts as an eerie inheritance mystery widens into a story about identity, legacy, and the dangerous pull between the mortal present and mythic past.
I liked how grounded the book tries to keep Alice, even when the story gets bigger and stranger. I liked that she isn’t introduced as some already fearless chosen one. She’s tired, wary, practical, and a little stubborn, which makes her easier to believe in. The early scenes with the package, the apartment, the cat, the office, and the slow creep of dread do a lot of work. They give the fantasy something solid to push against. I also think the author has a real feel for momentum. The book keeps feeding you just enough mystery to make you keep going, whether that is the changing pendant, the dreams, or the shifting loyalties around Alice. Sometimes the dialogue and emotional beats feel a bit heightened, but in this kind of fantasy romance, that intensity is part of the engine, and it works.
I was especially interested in the author’s choice to build the story around Norse mythology without making it feel like a cold mythology lesson. The gods and their history arrive through conflict, family damage, and personal cost, which makes the lore feel lived in instead of pinned to a board. Beckett and Alice’s connection gives the book warmth, and I appreciated that the romance grows beside danger rather than replacing it. Tia, Freya, Campbell Graves, and Loki also help widen the emotional field of the novel. Loki, in particular, comes across less like a flat villain and more like an old wound that learned how to speak.
Daughter of Ash and Bone is easy to sink into and easier than I expected to care about. It feels like an urban fantasy and mythic fantasy blend with romance at its center, written for readers who want magic, emotional stakes, ancient grudges, and a heroine who has to piece herself together while everything around her is coming apart. I would recommend it most to readers who enjoy modern settings crossed with old gods, character-driven fantasy, and stories where attraction, danger, and destiny all arrive at the door together.
Pages: 352 | ASIN : B0GTFG3C9D
Black Is My Ethnicity: American Is My Nationality
Black Is My Ethnicity, American Is My Nationality argues that Blackness in the United States is better understood not merely as a racial label but as an ethnicity formed through forced displacement, shared historical trauma, cultural reconstruction, and consistent systemic treatment. The book moves from a broad discussion of ethnicity and ethnocentrism into precolonial African civilizations, the wreckage of the transatlantic slave trade, and the making of a new collective identity through language, religion, music, kinship, and foodways. From there, it widens into Reconstruction, suppression, Black economic life, and the modern machinery of exclusion, insisting that redlining, school segregation, employment discrimination, and criminal justice disparities are not scattered facts but parts of one long pattern. Its central claim is clear from the outset and never wavers: Black identity in America is a historically produced peoplehood, and the language of ethnicity names that reality more precisely than the language of race does.
The author writes like someone trying not just to make an argument, but to rescue a framework from distortion, and there are moments when that urgency gives the book real heat. I found the sections on cultural reconstruction especially compelling, because they shift the book from taxonomy into lived human texture: hush harbors, spirituals carrying double meanings, fictive kinship, jumping the broom, AAVE as structure rather than “broken” speech, foodways shaped out of memory and deprivation. Those passages have life in them. They show the book at its strongest when it starts revealing. I also admired how often the author refuses the deadening abstraction that can flatten books like this. The emphasis on survival, adaptation, and continuity gives the work a heartbeat.
I think the book is more persuasive in conviction. There’s a lawyerly quality to the writing, especially in the prefatory and structural passages, that gives the book rigor. The prose favors repetition. Some case studies and examples are vivid, like the Zong, Mansa Musa, Eatonville, or the discussion of how school funding and redlining reproduce inequality. The ideas are powerful. It’s not coy, not detached, and certainly not interested in false neutrality. It wants accuracy, naming, and historical continuity, and it pursues all three with unusual steadiness.
I found Black Is My Ethnicity, American Is My Nationality intellectually earnest, emotionally charged, and most moving when its historical argument becomes cultural witness. It’s not a subtle book, but it’s a deeply intentional one, and its strongest pages carry the weight of someone trying to name a people in full rather than leave them trapped inside an old and inadequate vocabulary. I finished it feeling that, whatever one makes of every turn in the argument, the book has genuine stakes and a real pulse. I’d recommend it most to readers interested in Black identity, American history, ethnicity, and the language we use to describe collective experience, especially those willing to engage a book that is less interested in polish for its own sake than in saying something it believes urgently needs to be said.
Pages: 353 | ASIN : B0FHSH4X4S
Nurse Dorothea® Presents Depression and Accepting Resources to Help
Depression and Accepting Resources to Help is a children’s informational picture book about a girl named Amisha who visits her school nurse, Nurse Dorothea, because she thinks she may be dealing with depression. From there, the book walks through symptoms, risks, causes, treatment options, warning signs, and ways to ask for help, and it ends with Amisha telling her dad what she learned so they can make a doctor’s appointment before things get worse. It’s very much a health-focused educational story more than a traditional plot-driven tale, and that feels true to what the book wants to be.
I think readers will like how direct the writing is. Author Michael Dow doesn’t circle around the subject or soften it into something vague. He lets Nurse Dorothea speak clearly about sadness, hopelessness, suicidal thinking, medication, therapy, and emergency help, which makes the book feel serious in a way I respected. I kept noticing that the book carries a huge amount of information. Sometimes it reads less like a story and more like a guided lesson inside a picture book. It is worth noting that the emotional arc is a bit thinner than the educational one. Amisha gives the book a human center, but the real engine here is explanation.
I also found myself thinking about the author’s choice to frame all of this through a trusted school nurse. That was smart. It gives kids a clear model for what asking for help can look like, and it makes the book feel steady instead of scary. The illustrations help with that too, almost like the book is saying, sit down, breathe, let’s talk this through. I appreciated that the ideas stay practical. The message isn’t that one brave conversation magically fixes everything. The message is that support matters, treatment can take different forms, and learning the signs early matters. That grounded approach felt honest to me.
I would recommend this genre blend of children’s picture book and mental health education resource most for adults reading with kids, school counselors, nurses, teachers, and families who want a structured way to open a hard conversation. It’s especially useful for children who may be starting to notice sadness, worry, or changes in themselves or someone they love. Kids looking for a playful storybook may not connect with it in the same way, because this book is really built to inform first. But for readers who need clarity, reassurance, and a calm entry point into a difficult topic, I think it has real value.
Pages: 95
Raising Awareness
Jackdaw Affliction follows Billy from a rough-edged 1980s English childhood into adulthood, where grief, love, and the advancing grip of ataxia turn survival, dignity, and endurance into the heart of the story. What drew you to tell Billy’s story across such a long emotional and physical arc?
My desire in writing this novel was to keep things real and plausible. I have lived experience of Ataxia and strong connections with peers across a wide range of disabilities. To stay truthful to what many folk experience, it was necessary to have an arc where Billy loses everything. Or at least perceives he loses everything.
The beginning of the novel – Youth – is about the growth and making of the man. The second half of the novel is about diminishing abilities and the effects on the mind. The frightening thing about ataxia and all degenerative conditions is that they slowly chip away at you until there is nothing left. Often, the mental health side of this is not explicitly discussed. I wanted to change that.
How did you balance the intimacy of Billy’s voice with the wider family-saga feel of the novel?
I wrote this book with the aim of raising awareness of a rare condition. But also, I wanted to give readers an insight into the mind of someone who slowly loses all that made them who they are. Mental health is a real and delicate thing. It is for me, and it is for many people with debilitating conditions.
The book was always about Billy’s story. Always predominantly his narration. After my first draft, it became apparent that I needed more structure and readability. This is when the vignettes from his family members came in. Both to tell the story from other perspectives, but also to offer some unquestionable truth and reliability to the manuscript. The family was always a vital cog in Billy’s wider story, even when they were no longer present in his life.
Music feels like a quiet current running through the book. What role did it play for you while writing?
Music helps set the theme, feel, and time stamp this story. Almost by chance, I had found myself listening to certain tracks whilst writing and developing the book. Each track helped me set the scenes and characters to a specific point in time. Whilst not a historical novel, it is set over 35 years, so being accurate on the recent past was a necessity.
Also, if you pay really close attention to each song in the book, you can almost see a story told by the track listings.
As important as music is, it was also important to have an absence of music during Billy’s darker times. For this reason, almost all of part 4 is devoid of music.
When writing Billy’s experience of ataxia, how did you approach portraying disability, humiliation, and endurance without slipping into sentimentality?
The aim from the outset was to portray a plausible, real character. Inspiration porn was not the goal. By this I mean it was important that all characters made mistakes, had flaws, and had mischievous thoughts, rather than paint them as some kind of saint or martyr. Hopefully, the book balances vulnerability with agency. The idea was not to have characters as symbols or lessons, but to present flawed, authentic human beings. As mentioned, it was great to draw on my experiences and those of my peers to keep the story feeling as genuine as possible.
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From bike rides through the suburbs of 1980s Hampshire to the claustrophobic grind of adulthood, Billy Cooper’s life is shaped by loss, fractured family ties, and the creeping onset of a degenerative disease. As his body betrays him and grief corrodes what remains, Billy turns inward—into recollections that blur, narratives that contradict, and personas that may never have existed.
Jackdaw Affliction is a descent into memory’s labyrinth, where trauma, illness, and longing distort the line between truth and invention. Told with brutal honesty, warped humour and hallucinatory edge, S. G. Hyde’s novel explores what it means to live when the ground of reality keeps shifting beneath your feet.
At once harrowing and tender, it is a story of survival through imagination, self-deception, and the desperate human need to stitch meaning out of chaos. A haunting meditation on identity, illness, and loss, sprinkled with dark comedy, this is fiction at its most unsettling and raw.
Corruption Isn’t Explosive
Broken Shields is a crime thriller in which Internal Affairs detective Kat Booker investigates the murder of a friend and uncovers a web of corruption, predation, and buried truths. What were some sources that informed this novel’s development?
Broken Shields was shaped by a mix of real-world cases, crime fiction, and an interest in the gray areas within law enforcement. I kept coming back to stories where the line between “good cop” and “bad cop” isn’t clear. It shifts.
I was especially drawn to stories about internal investigations, where the protagonist is forced to turn inward and investigate their own department. Films like Internal Affairs explore how deeply corruption can take hold, and how personal the pursuit of truth becomes.
More broadly, I was influenced by procedurals that lean into psychological tension—where solving the case isn’t the hardest part. At its core, Broken Shields came from a simple question: what happens when doing the right thing means tearing down the system you’ve sworn to protect?
How did you balance the procedural side of the novel with its deeper focus on grief and moral injury?
I didn’t treat them as separate tracks. The investigation is how Kat processes grief. Every interview, every report, every decision forces her to confront what she’s lost and what it’s cost her to stay in the job.
The procedural side gives the story structure, but the emotional weight comes from what those steps mean to her. I was less interested in how a case gets solved and more in what solving it does to the person doing the work. In Internal Affairs, you’re not just chasing a suspect. You’re turning on your own. The job demands detachment, but the closer Kat gets to the truth, the harder that becomes to maintain.
Tideview feels vividly damp, decayed, and compromised. Was the setting inspired by a real place, or did it emerge entirely from the book’s themes?
Tideview was born from my time living in Vallejo, with Mare Island sitting there in a kind of quiet decay after the Navy pulled out. That image stuck with me. This place that once had purpose is now slowly deteriorating. I started to imagine what it would look like if an entire city grew up around that very foundation.
The environment mirrors what’s happening inside the department. Nothing collapses all at once. It’s erosion. Structures left unattended and problems ignored. The dampness, the decay, it all ties back to the idea that corruption isn’t explosive. It’s slow, it’s tolerated, and at some point, it simply becomes part of the system.
The novel is skeptical of institutions while still caring about justice. What were you most interested in exploring about that tension?
What interested me wasn’t just corruption. It was how it survives. Institutions tend to protect themselves first: reputation, control, continuity. Justice is disruptive. It threatens all of that.
Kat sits right in the middle of that conflict. Her job is to hold the system accountable, but doing that makes her a liability to it. The tension comes from the fact that justice isn’t clean or rewarding. It isolates you. It costs you relationships. And sometimes it doesn’t fix anything. It just exposes what’s already broken.
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The case looks airtight.
It isn’t.
When a Tideview police officer is found murdered, the evidence points conveniently to a single suspect. Too conveniently for IA Detective Kat Booker.
The timeline fits.
The motive is obvious.
The department is ready to close the case.
Kat isn’t.
As she continues the investigation, a small circle of suspects begins to emerge—each with something to hide, each with a reason to want the victim dead. The deeper Kat digs, the more the story unravels, exposing contradictions, long buried secrets, and a past that refuses to stay buried.
Because this isn’t just another case.
Twelve years ago, on the same dock, Kat lost everything.
Now the truth is circling back.
With pressure mounting from inside the department and the clock ticking toward a wrongful arrest, Kat must untangle a web of lies before the real killer disappears for good.
Everyone is a suspect.
Everyone is lying.
The only question is—can you figure out the truth before she does?
God, Love, and Family
Marion, Faith & Ice Cream follows an eight-year-old’s simple question about believing in God as it unfolds across one day, where family love, sensory wonder, and everyday beauty teach her how to see faith for herself. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration was my daughter’s family. The gift of becoming a grandparent is being able to view the development of a child from 30 thousand feet. As a parent, you are in the thick of the day-to-day duties and responsibilities, but as a grandparent, your experience allows you to see what really matters. Therefore, God, love, and family are the central elements.
How did you balance writing about faith for children in a way that feels gentle and discovered?
Thank you for asking the question this way. Children are so much more sensory-focused than intuitive, so it was important to me to connect the faith to something they can observe with their own senses. The unseen concepts of air and wind are ones children understand, so drawing the connection gives them a tangible connection to believing versus simply a spiritual one.
Marion’s father, being a scientist, adds an interesting dimension to the story. What drew you to pairing scientific observation with spiritual belief?
My son-in-law is an MD, so pairing a science angle that relies on “proof” with a child’s desire for something concrete seemed like a natural fit.
What do you hope children, and the adults reading with them, feel or talk about after they finish the book?
That God is calling us all to take a leap of faith. I think we all have a deep yearning to believe in something beyond what we can see. Therefore, I hope it gives children (and maybe even some adults) the simple framework to connect this tangible world with the spiritual one.
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Marion isn’t sure. She’s eight years old, full of questions, and she’s never seen God. So how can she know He’s real?
Everything changes during one breezy Saturday. As she watches eagles glide above her, leaves swirl around the yard, and delights in a sparkling lake that seems to wink at her, Marion discovers that the world is filled with things she can’t see but still knows are true. And, maybe faith works the same way…
A beautiful picture book that helps children explore faith, family connections, and the amazing wonders all around us. With loving guidance from her dad, Marion learns that belief is so much more than just what meets the eye.
A Balanced Perspective
Spirit of the Cowboy is a poetry collection in which you use the cowboy myth to explore desire, wounded masculinity, and the emotional fallout of America’s inherited scripts. What inspired you to write and publish this collection?
This probably sounds extremely left-field, but I was watching a documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the reporter said something along the lines of, “Every great artist has a throughline in their work that gives the collective whole a unified vision.” That night, a chord was struck in me as I had a slew of test dummy projects under my belt, but didn’t understand what I was creating for other than therapeutic self-expression. Spirit of the Cowboy was born the moment I realized that my life’s work is and will be Coding a New Masculinity.
What first drew you to the cowboy as the central figure for thinking about masculinity and desire?
Brokeback Mountain only scratched the surface for me, reinstating the cowboy as a quintessential symbol of both perception and longing, but left me needing more than another closet to cry in. I wanted to bust the entire privilege of being born a man wide-open, digging deeper into the open wound that being a male attracted to another male entails in the 21st century. We have more language and societal awareness than perhaps ever before in history, yet we are still bruising each other as we become either more or less ourselves in the process of living.
How did you balance personal vulnerability with the larger political and cultural critique running through the collection?
In pursuit of a balanced perspective, I approached this project with a sort of directorial lens, reminding myself often that in order to honestly interrogate my origins, I must also extend the frame to capture America’s.
When writing this book, what did you hope readers might recognize in themselves?
I hoped readers might recognize that the resilience founded upon their rough edges and sharp tongues can co-exist with a genuine sense of belonging and a desire for softer expressions of love.
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Empower Readers
Exit Signs follows an eighteen-year-old girl with plans to graduate early and attend Stanford, who has it all ripped away when her mom throws her out with nothing, leaving her homeless and vulnerable to coercion disguised as love. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Thank you for that question. For years, I kept this close to my chest due to the lingering shame, but the truth is: my own life was the inspiration. This actually happened to me. The story began years ago as a cathartic exercise titled Abandoned, which sat on my computer for a long time. However, after losing my eldest son to cancer, I felt a profound need to tell his story—and he had such a beautiful life. To tell his story properly, I realized I had to start from the very beginning. Stella’s journey is the result of that, and readers can expect her narrative to unfold across three books in this series.
The book emphasizes the practical realities of homelessness—money, hygiene, parking, paperwork. Why was that level of detail important?
I wanted the reader to truly inhabit Stella’s world. Those specific, gritty details aren’t just creative choices—they are drawn directly from lived experience. To write about such a sensitive topic with precision and impact, I felt it was a necessity to include the small, often overlooked realities that define a person’s survival from day to day.
The novel explores how control can disguise itself as generosity. What drew you to that theme?
That question actually makes me laugh a little because it hits so close to home. In my own life, generosity has often been the “front door” of my relationships, while control was the way they ultimately went wrong. I wanted to explore that theme to empower readers. My goal is for them to realize that they ultimately hold the power over their own lives and destiny. I hope Stella’s story serves as a reminder: do not let someone else’s “generosity” become your cage.
Can you tell us what the second book will be about and when it will be available for fans to purchase?
The second book is currently living in my head, and the characters—especially Stella—are screaming to be unleashed! While I am juggling a few other projects at the moment, fans can expect the sequel to arrive sometime in 2027. Of course, if the writing process goes particularly well and I stay “in control” of my schedule, perhaps we’ll see it as early as the end of this year!
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When you have nowhere to go, any door looks like open arms.
Some doors don’t close; they slam. At eighteen, Stella Hart had a plan: early graduation, a Stanford acceptance letter, and a future she’d built from scratch. Then her mother threw her out with nothing but a pile of clothes and a slammed door, and everything Stella thought she’d earned disappeared overnight.
Homeless, broke, and alone in the SF Bay Area, Stella finds shelter in the arms of a man who seems like salvation. Jim offers safety, stability, and love. But safety, she will learn, can be a cage, and love can be a leash dressed up as loyalty.
As Jim’s generosity quietly hardens into control, Stella begins to see what she almost missed: the exits were always there. She just had to choose one. Exit Signs is a raw, unflinching story of a young woman who did everything right and still had to fight her way back to herself, through homelessness, coercive control, and an unplanned pregnancy, armed with nothing but her intelligence, her instincts, and the stubborn belief that her future still belonged to her.
For readers who know what it means to survive the people who were supposed to love you.
