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Beyond the Sky’s Edge
In Beyond Sky’s Edge, by Pat Wahler, readers are transported to the year 1912 to follow the transformative journey of eighteen-year-old Olivia “Livvie” Newcomb. Living in St. Louis under the thumb of her protective and traditional parents, Livvie chafes against the societal expectation that she marry her childhood friend, Leonard Wyatt. Her world is cracked open during a trip to Kansas City, where she experiences the exhilarating freedom of a tethered hot air balloon ride. This brief taste of the heavens ignites an obsession with aviation, a passion further fueled by the real-life exploits of female pilots like Harriet Quimby and Katherine Stinson. When her family is suddenly plunged into financial ruin and social disgrace after her father is unjustly dismissed from his drafting job, Livvie decides to take her destiny into her own hands.
The novel is a beautifully paced historical coming-of-age story that masterfully contrasts the restrictive domestic spheres of the early twentieth century with the expansive, untamed arena of early aviation. Wahler excels at capturing the sensory details of the era, from the oppressive summer heat of St. Louis and the rustle of restrictive petticoats to the oil-scented, wind-whipped thrill of the airfield. At its heart, the book is less about the technicalities of flying and more about a young woman’s struggle for self-determination. Livvie is a compelling protagonist whose stubbornness and vulnerability make her intensely relatable as she navigates parental disapproval, a bittersweet falling out with a well-meaning but betraying suitor, and her own physical battles with vertigo.
Wahler gracefully charts Livvie’s transition from a sheltered daughter to the pragmatic head of her household. After selling a precious family heirloom to fund her secret flight lessons at Kinloch Field, Livvie begins to see the true cost of independence. The emotional weight of her father’s subsequent illness and death, paired with her mother’s descent into grief, forces Livvie to grow up quickly. She begins to view her headstrong nature not as a rebellion, but as a necessary tool for her family’s survival. Her training under the quiet, scarred mechanic Jake Fleming serves as a crucible, teaching her that “flying takes courage” and that she must “respect the power you hold in your hands.” Through this mentorship and her growing friendship with Katherine Stinson, Livvie finds a community of trailblazers who refuse to let the earth hold them down.
Beyond Sky’s Edge is an inspiring and emotionally resonant novel that celebrates the resilience of the female spirit. It vividly captures the dawn of aviation when flight was a dangerous, poetic adventure, and women had to fight for every inch of sky. By the time Livvie finally takes the controls for her first solo flight, fans of historical fiction will find themselves thoroughly swept up in her triumph. Wahler has crafted a rich historical narrative that reminds us how stepping into the unknown, though terrifying, is often the only way to truly find ourselves.
Pages: 368 | ASIN : B0HCT5WY7Z
The Origins of Lawton Passage
Lawton Passage follows a man from his childhood in small-town Tennessee through the joys and hardships of adolescence, college, and adulthood, and through grief, and back to his hometown. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
In 1990 my Mom got it into her head to write her autobiography after spending a week with my Dad at a Lawrence Welk Resort out in San Diego. After many years of working through her stories, she had a partial draft readied, and declared to her four kids (with me being the youngest), “Each of you need to write your own stories.”
That’s when I began writing what I entitled “The Wavettes” which I shared with my siblings and my parents. The first one covered our strategies to get my parents to stop smoking. Another one was a collection of memories of all our pets that we lost to the highway. A third recounted my exploits in learning how to drive, and the fourth one talked about my early impressions about religion. My dad wouldn’t say whether or not he liked that one, he just said he didn’t quite know what to make of it. I felt that as a kind of disapproval that I indicated that I should be all in about religion around my Dad.
What was really nice about the Wavettes period in the development of Lawton Passage was that these were stories that my parents got to see before they passed away. The sixth and final Wavette was a kind of therapy piece for myself after being with my dad during the last week of his life. It was in that story that I recounted how my cousin told me the night before my dad’s service that his parents used to get into the biggest fights every season whenever the annual Christmas newsletter arrived. “You can’t write that!” Mom told me on the phone after she read the story.
That was the day I discovered the prominence of the annual Christmas newsletter in our family, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell any interesting truths, if they happened to be inconvenient.
Looking back, was Liam’s emotional journey always clear to you, or did it emerge gradually as you wrote?
When I began I just thought it would be Liam’s stories all told with a bit of humor. Except for the very last one (which is not in Lawton Passage), the Wavettes tended to be funny, light-hearted, and tongue-in-cheek. Once I reached the period where I would write about junior and senior high school, the tone had to deepen to stay real because tragedy began to enter the environment. I felt this keenly when my childhood friend passed away at the age of 46, but it would take another ten years before I began writing it down because these were stories that I had kept from my parents. I waited until my Dad was gone and my Mom was under the cloud of Alzheimers before setting pen to paper on that segment.
The journey further deepened in 2021 when Liam returned to Lawton to attend the funeral of his cousin during the time of Covid. So many had been lost, so it became a reflection of not only the loss of friends and family, but also the loss of home. It wasn’t really until I had written it all down, and edited the book again and again and again and … well, you get the picture … that I realized that the end of the book was all about getting closure. Closure with the bridge incident, closure with leaving home, closure with being right with Dad and closure with being right with Mom.
The Christmas newsletters provide a fascinating frame for the novel. What inspired you to use them as a storytelling device?
Most of the stories had already been written before I ever thought of using the Christmas newsletters. I realized they had a special prominence on that day when Mom had said “You can’t write that.” Then I discovered a bound set of newsletters from Dad in a stack of papers in the entertainment center in 2021. It was a couple of months before my siblings and I were scheduled to meet on my birthday at my parent’s gravesite to bury their ashes.
We’d already spent most of our sadness regarding our loss of each of them during their first services years prior. The burial of their joint ashes took on more of a tone of celebratory closure. So I found choice excerpts from Dad’s newsletters about each of us kids, and told a funny story that contrasted with the innocent image that Dad portrayed in the newsletters. I read those over their ashes so we could all share a good laugh the day they were buried. Those excerpts found their way into Chapter 51 of Lawton Passage —- “Wind-Up.”
As I began dividing up my work on Lawton Passage as individual short stories to be released as Lyle’s Weekly Reader, I thought it would be cool to put a fitting excerpt from my Dad’s newsletters to begin each of those stories that depicted a period before junior high school. For junior high school and beyond, I did not initially use excerpts from the Christmas newsletter. Instead I began those stories with excerpted stanzas from rock and roll songs which were current during that day. However, when I learned that I could run into royalties issues, I dropped that idea and used excerpts from the Christmas newsletter all the way through.
Are there more stories from Vale Hollow or Liam’s world that you hope to tell?
The initial draft of Lawton Passage ran approximately 80 pages longer with a section called “Embarkation.” I felt the inclusion of that section would make Lawton Passage too long and would push publication of the book into 2027. The story involves my final days with my dad in hospice. To extend the content to make it a fuller book, I am exploring taking material from three interviews I videotaped with my dad about his life before I was born.
Another story option I am considering would be a fantasy, which would involve time travel between the current day and 1976 in Lawton, Tennessee. It would draw on high school characters introduced in Lawton Passage and intersperse them with a modern-day cadre of armchair philosophers and a wealthy entrepreneur. Together they would travel back in time to stop the murder by a chicken farmer of his wife with a wooden coat hanger.
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Tim Duning’s Lawton Passage follows Liam, a boy raised in his ancestral country home built in the 1840s, as he adjusts to small-town rituals, and the quiet pressures of Southern life during the 1960s and ’70s. Through thefts and schoolyard hijinks, swimming pool accidents, séances, paper routes, and first loves, Liam navigates a childhood and adolescence shaped by faith, family, and friendship—always measuring the perfection his father presents against the messy realities he experiences.
From the explosive humor of sabotaged cigarettes to the tragedies of peer loss, the memoir captures the grit, grief, and laughter of growing up in a town that refuses to stay small. Forty years later, Liam returns to Lawton, tracing the echoes of his past, realizing that home and family live most vividly in stories, not land. Lawton Passage is a poignant, funny, and deeply honest meditation on legacy, memory, and the Southern art of storytelling.
Lawton Passage
In Lawton Passage: As Told by a Tennessee Storyteller, author Tim Duning follows Liam Menschen from his childhood at Vale Hollow in small-town Tennessee through adolescence, college, adulthood, grief, and return. Framed by his father’s polished Christmas newsletters, the book becomes a memoir about family mythology, Southern manners, church, friendship, mischief, race, class, memory, and the strange ache of outliving the world that made you.
I found the book most alive when it lets childhood look at adult life from under the table. The cigarette smoke, cocktail parties, school bus rides, church pews, Kroger gum, and family performances all carry a comic charge, but Duning is not merely being nostalgic. He has a fine eye for the absurd choreography of respectability: the way a family can cultivate manners while quietly avoiding certain truths, the way a Christmas letter can be both love song and scorecard, the way a child can understand more than adults think and less than he imagines.
What stayed with me was the book’s gradual deepening. Early chapters have the bright, anecdotal snap of porch storytelling, but later sections gather a more elegiac gravity. Duning writes about parents, old friends, hometown rituals, and return without embalming them. His tone can be funny, rueful, tender, and sly within the same scene. At times, the abundance of episodes gives the book a meandering, oral-history feel, but that looseness is also part of its charm; it reads like someone pulling chairs closer as the night gets longer.
This book will appeal to readers of Southern memoir, coming-of-age story, family history, small-town Americana, and nostalgic literary nonfiction. Readers who enjoy Rick Bragg’s work, especially his blend of humor, family devotion, and regional memory, will find a familiar warmth here, though Duning’s voice is more shaggy, conversational, and quietly self-interrogating. Lawton Passage is a loving inventory of a vanished place, told by someone wise enough to know that home is never as simple as memory makes it.
Pages: 354 | ASIN : B0H3WV4RQ4
Societal Rules and Rituals
Nebraska Avenue follows a lonely Brooklyn boy in 1976 Long Island as he joins a crew of paperboys whose neighborhood adventures, comic rituals, and risky scheme to clear their boss’s name teach him about courage, loyalty, friendship, and home. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for the story was my own experience moving from Brooklyn to Long Island in the 1970s, leaving behind my school, friends, and “block”, and needing to start over. My twin sisters, two years older than me, had a much easier time adjusting to our new environment. I was indeed a paperboy for Newsday, and most of the “shenanigans” depicted in the book actually happened.
Vinny’s world feels rich with period details, from paper routes to banana-seat bikes. Were these drawn from personal memory, research, or a mix of both?
I have vivid memories of that time period, which I supported with research to make sure my memory knew what it was talking about! I only wish I had kept my Royce Union bicycle all these years – although I’m pretty sure I still have the milk crate I used to deliver newspapers,
The novel treats childhood like its own small society with rules, rituals, and economies. Was that perspective central to the story from the beginning?
An examination of childhood societal rules and rituals was not at all planned. My intention was just to tell a story about paperboys (and one girl paperboy). But by Chapter 2 – beginning with Wally’s sister becoming annoyed at Artie’s immaturity – it became apparent that some of the most interesting things about growing up happen “between the lines.” Recounting the manner in which interactions between the characters were conducted became fun for me. For example, the frequent punches in the arm were essentially the way the paperboys kept order, with each of them having the authority to render judgment when someone stepped out of line. I recall receiving my fair share of (well-deserved) punches, all in good fun and with no lasting damage.
How did you balance nostalgia with the more tender emotional undercurrent of Vinny’s homesickness and need to belong?
I think most everyone is nostalgic for their formative years and could write a story about it if they put their mind to it. My eyes would sometimes tear up when I was writing about Mr. R’s struggles or the loneliness I felt after moving to Long Island. It would have been a very sad story if I remained in that space, so I tried to concentrate on the lighter moments. Fortunately, my summers as a paperboy were filled with those lighter moments – and way too many fireworks.
Being a paperboy gave me friends and confidence, not to mention the best financial lessons an early teen could hope to learn. Best of all, I remain good friends with some of the “characters” depicted in the book. I only wish today’s children could experience what my friends and I did fifty years ago.
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But the easy rhythm of morning routes and Fourth of July mischief doesn’t last. When a string of burglaries hits homes along Vinny’s route, suspicion lands on the boys—and a local cop with a long memory is more than willing to make it stick.
With no one else on their side, the crew sets out to prove the truth themselves—following the only lead they have and risking more than they bargained for in the process.
The news is only for a day. The legend of Nebraska Avenue is for a lifetime
The Atmosphere of War
Sawadika American Girl follows an American teenager in Vietnam War-era Bangkok, as music, first love, and shared sorrow help her find a place for grief, longing, and belonging. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Most people aren’t aware that during the Vietnam War, Thailand served as a major US military outpost, with over eight military bases scattered throughout the kingdom. In addition, thousands of American families lived in Bangkok with fathers who worked for the American Embassy, USAID, the CIA, the US Military, and as private contractors. All in direct or indirect support of the war effort. On top of that, in 1968, the year my novel takes place, nearly 5,000 GI’s were pouring into Bangkok each month on R&R, bringing their turmoil with them. This created a ‘little America’ that was complex and combustible and often at odds with Thai sensibilities and culture. Having grown up in Thailand, I understood these underlying tensions and knew it was fertile ground for a story. Making it a coming-of-age story with a 17-year-old female protagonist struck me as a powerful and unexpected way to shed light on this overlooked pocket of history.
Music feels central to Piper’s emotional life; how did you approach writing piano as both technique and feeling?
Music anchors Piper emotionally in a world that doesn’t make sense. The act of playing the piano becomes a private space where she works out her emotions. Her piano teacher is a Thai Prince who had studied with the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau. Arrau’s technique was legendary for centering the body for maximum emotional expression. This is what the Prince teaches Piper. Her efforts to master this technique symbolize her struggle to come to terms with what is going on in her life.
The character of the Thai Prince who studied with Arrau is based on a piano teacher I had. There was a vibrant classical music scene in Bangkok at this time. Renowned musicians had Bangkok on their concert tours. This made sense because the Thai King was a talented jazz musician and composed his own music. And as a young girl, the Queen studied classical piano in Paris. I love that thread of the story because no one expects it, but it is absolutely true.
Jack and Piper’s relationship is brief but deeply affecting. What did you want their connection to reveal about war, loneliness, and belonging?
Life is always precious. But war, even the atmosphere of war, perverts that value, making life more precious and less precious at the same time. Piper and Jack experience this intensity from different vantage points, but each is tuned in to the sense of loneliness and dislocation that proximity to war brings. Most of the story unfolds during a single week, about the length of a soldier’s R&R. Under such conditions, time stretches. Three, four, or even five days together mean everything. That perception of time is woven into the fabric of their relationship.
How did you balance the intimate story of Piper’s coming of age with the larger historical forces surrounding her?
The bulk of the novel unfolds over a single week in 1968. That is on purpose. The assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy had happened, the Tet Offensive had occurred, and the casualty rate for soldiers and civilians in Vietnam was at a high point. All of that darkened the mood for Americans working in Bangkok. There were tensions with the Thai government. As a dependent, this increased the pressure for Piper to behave a certain way and not put a foot wrong. That kind of control is at odds with an individual’s ability to come of age, which is by definition about asserting one’s independence in a way that produces some kind of personal and intimate transformation. This put Piper on a collision course with the forces around her.
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One night, Piper ditches the American Teen Club to party with an older crowd. Sparks fly when she meets Jack, a 19-year-old GI on R&R from Vietnam. Defying the Army’s non-fraternization policy, they pledge to spend his leave together. As the hypocrisy of the war closes in on them, Jack’s name surfaces in a drug investigation and Piper discovers a disturbing truth about her father, forcing both to decide what they are willing to risk for a few more days together.
Sawadika American Girl is the story of a young American woman coming-of-age on the periphery of a brutal, unjust war.
The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik
The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik is a historical fiction novel set in 1937 and 1938, during the Depression, and it follows Vesta Blonik, an unmarried farm woman in rural Minnesota whose father quietly arranges a future that leaves her behind. As Vesta realizes just how precarious her place in the world is, the story widens to include Gordon Crenshaw, a grieving man in North Carolina whose family’s desperate plan draws the two of them together through letters, half-truths, and the possibility of a new life. This is a novel about survival, dignity, and the strange, fragile ways hope can arrive when life has already taken a hard swing at you.
Author Denise Smith Cline writes with a plainspoken steadiness that feels exactly right for Vesta, and that choice gives the book a lot of its force. The prose trusts small details to do the heavy lifting, whether it’s the smell of damp wool, the ache of farm work, or the comfort Vesta finds beside Lottie the cow. I liked that the writing never begged me to feel something. It just kept laying honest detail beside honest detail until the emotional weight built on its own. That kind of restraint is harder to pull off than it looks, and here it works.
I also admired the author’s patience with her characters. Vesta could have been written as a symbol of rural hardship, or as a simple underdog to cheer for, but she feels much more lived-in than that. She is proud, lonely, watchful, capable, and sometimes a little awkward in ways that made me trust the book more. Gordon, too, could have turned into a neat plot device, but the novel gives his grief and uncertainty real room. What interested me most was how this historical novel keeps asking quiet questions about dependence, gender, class, and who gets to make decisions for whom. None of that feels forced. It just sits there in the story like cold air coming through a crack in the wall.
I came away thinking this book will mean the most to readers who like character-driven historical fiction with emotional depth, especially novels that move at a decent pace and care more about the characters’ inner lives than spectacle. I would recommend it to people who enjoy stories of resilience, complicated family ties, and hard-won tenderness, and to readers who like their historical fiction grounded, compassionate, and just a little bruised. It’s thoughtful, intimate, and quietly sure of itself.
Pages: 337 | ASIN : B0FGZMVZ7D
Butterfly Effects of Globalization
MERRY-GO-ROUND BROKE DOWN features nine connected stories that lead back to a high-stakes hostage crisis in a Manhattan hotel in 2008. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
We borrowed the structure from Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play La Ronde. In that play, the characters are connected through a chain of sexual relationships. In our book, the characters are connected through money.
Merry-Go-Round Broke Down explores the butterfly effects of globalization. The hostage crisis that brings the story together reflects both the darker side of globalization and its unintended consequences: in a tightly interconnected world, the same forces that create winners can also create losers.
What is it that draws you to the thriller genre?
We wanted to write a serious book that could also reach a wide audience. We thought the thriller genre—with its suspense and fast pace—would be the right vehicle for telling a complex story and the best way to bring the story of globalization to life.
Do you have a favorite scene in this thriller? One that was especially fun to craft?
My co-author and I have different favorites. Hers is the third chapter, about Simon, a British proprietary trader. Mine is the eighth chapter, about Arkady, the son of a Russian oligarch. Both stories are fast-paced and dramatic, with surprising endings.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
We are working on a few different projects, but no timetable yet.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Fall 2008. The Waldorf Astoria New York. Two armed men storm the hotel’s famed bar and hold the occupants hostage: an American corporate raider, a Chinese tycoon, a British hedge fund manager, a Japanese housewife-turned-celebrity, a Mexican undocumented worker, a Wall Street bond salesman, and a Norwegian environmentalist.
Who are these terrorists? What do they want? And what ties them to their captives?
Merry-Go-Round Broke Down is a genre-breaking novel that explores globalization’s “butterfly effect”: how choices made in one corner of the world ignited an unstoppable chain of consequences that upended lives across continents.
Choices Impose Responsibility
Drinking From the Stream follows two young men in 1971 who are on the run and attempting to escape their pasts by traveling to East Africa, where their personal reckonings unfold alongside violence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Sometimes great events touch us deeply.
In June 1972, when I was twenty-two years old and hitchhiking across Africa, I was sitting in a student cafeteria at the University of Luanda reading the International Herald Tribune. Angola was then a Portuguese colony, but armed African guerrillas in the countryside were fighting to overthrow white-minority rule. I had been hosted at the Zaire border by conscripted Portuguese soldiers who had seen combat with MPLA guerrillas. An article caught my eye that morning about ethnic killings in Burundi. I had been within fifty miles of Burundi, having hitchhiked from Ethiopia through Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, then to Zaire (Congo) and Angola. The article described a bloody uprising in late April 1972, where Hutu rebels had used pangas — machetes — to kill hundreds of unsuspecting Tutsi citizens with the idea of sparking a civil war to end Tutsi rule. Even more shocking were the slaughters by the Burundi army that followed. It turned out that unemployed Hutu school teachers — unable to find a job in Tutsi-ruled Burundi — had led the revolt. Burundi’s solution to the unemployment problem was to kill all the educated Hutus they could find. The Tutsi-led army countered the Hutu death squads with a much bigger, much better-organized ethnic bloodletting of their own, killing any Hutu who had completed the fourth grade. Tens of thousands were already dead, the report said, and the killings were gathering momentum with no end in sight. By 1973, well over 200,000 Hutus had been murdered.
This made a deep impression on me. How could so many people be murdered so quickly? More importantly, why was the world ignoring it? And why and how did it come about? What if I had decided, as was entirely possible, to visit Burundi myself? And if I had, I would have been on the spot when the killings broke out. What then? The entire African continent seemed to be on a bloody run. A year or two back, peace had been restored to Zaire, formerly the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after ten years of mayhem and revolt. Mass ethnic killings were in full swing in 1972 in Uganda, when I was there, led by the Ugandan army under Idi Amin. Rwanda had seen bloody spasms of anti-Tutsi violence even before independence in the early 1960s. And all of southern Africa, not just Angola, was in revolt against white minority rule. The 1994 Tutsi holocaust in Rwanda was still twenty-two years away.
This is a coming-of-age novel, but a harsh one. What does “growing up” mean here?
I spent three years in Africa when I was quite young. I worked construction jobs in the bush and at line camps, I bumped into white supremacists. Basically, they were American nazis. I kept my distance even though they sometimes tried to recruit me. They spoke openly of violence against Jews and Blacks. Listening to them made me extremely angry. They had no idea I was Jewish. But what would happen if I weren’t Jewish and one of them thought I was? That was the inspiration for Jake Ries.
The characters discover that their choices impose responsibility that must be faced and borne; there’s no magic that will make it disappear, and its weight increases over time. Knowledge imposes its own burden. And it doesn’t matter if they never wished to make those choices or learn those things in the first place. Maybe they never asked for them, but they still can’t put them down.
What scenes were hardest to write—not technically, but ethically?
This may sound funny, given the extent of political chicanery in the plot, but the parts of the book that gave me the most trouble were working out Karl’s relationships with his girlfriends, first Helen, then Swee’Pea. Karl might have been conflicted about both those relationships, particularly in combination, but I wanted to present them as believable dilemmas not only for Karl, but for both women, while trying to be fair to all three.
What lessons from the 1970s feel disturbingly contemporary?
What I see today is that resentments never cease, that humanity is easily misled and memories are short; that peace is fragile, something not to be taken for granted; that politicians can seduce thousands, or millions, to contemplate unspeakable acts; that the great issues of the past, which we thought were finally settled, are never really settled; and that active individuals following the ancient moral codes or their own personal compass to judge right from wrong can do a great deal of good.
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Jake Ries, a twenty-two-year-old Nebraska farm boy turned oil roughneck, turns fugitive when he unintentionally kills a homicidal White supremacist on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. On the run, he meets Karl Appel, a restless Oxford dropout and former anti-war activist struggling with his own personal demons. Together they throw caution to the wind and plunge into the Ethiopian and East African hinterland, where they discover that dictatorship and mass murder are facts of life.
