Blog Archives
JOSEPH of Africa and America
Joseph of Africa and America, by Kwadwo Abrokwa, is a sweeping African historical fiction novel told through the memories of Joseph Senu, an elderly immigrant sharing his life story with his grandson, Caleb. Beginning with Joseph’s childhood on cocoa farms in rural Africa and following him through school, university, migration, marriage, parenthood, and retirement, the novel covers more than eight decades of personal and political change. Its grandfather-to-grandson framing gives this immigrant fiction story the warmth of a long family conversation, with soccer matches, snacks, and everyday questions connecting Caleb’s comfortable American childhood to Joseph’s difficult beginnings.
The strongest passages come from Joseph’s early years in Pram. Abrokwa fills this coming-of-age story with concrete details: kerosene lamps, unreliable trains, muddy roads, school fees, farm labor, funeral customs, and the small metal trunk that follows Joseph through boarding school. Education becomes the engine of the plot, but family members such as Papa, Mama, Uncle Sam, Emma, Matt, and even the troublesome Bruda give the story its emotional shape. As a multigenerational family saga, the book shows how one person’s future can depend on another person’s sacrifice, advice, generosity, or poor decision.
When Joseph reaches California, the novel expands into African diaspora fiction and an American Dream story shaped by culture shock, racism, financial uncertainty, and professional ambition. His rise from a struggling graduate student to a CPA and international banking executive is carefully documented, as are his return to Africa, his eventual move back to the United States, and his later career in higher education. The narration is deliberately plainspoken and lesson-minded. Joseph repeatedly weighs hard work against luck, faith against uncertainty, and honest achievement against fraud and easy money. The patient, episodic structure makes the book feel like an oral history, with personal anecdotes opening into reflections on colonialism, military rule, immigration, business ethics, family duty, and health.
What stayed with me most was the way success and vulnerability remain intertwined throughout Joseph’s life. Career achievements, beautiful homes, and family celebrations sit beside abandonment, bereavement, chronic illness, heart disease, and the deaths of lifelong friends. That balance gives the inspirational fiction elements real substance because Joseph’s perseverance grows from specific experiences. Readers interested in African immigrant novels, historical family fiction, and cross-cultural stories will find a remarkably broad life captured here. By the time Joseph looks back from his Redondo Beach home and imagines an Africa where young people can build fulfilling lives without leaving, his story feels both deeply personal and connected to a much larger hope.
Pages: 284 | ASIN : B0HF8GZY3Z
The Duchess
Virginia Lee Mattie’s The Duchess is a sprawling Southern family novel wrapped around a personal mystery. Navy Seaman Sissy Beddoes learns that her top-secret security clearance has been delayed because of questions surrounding her mother’s past, including a connection to India and a mysterious Dr. Voss. That investigation sends her back through childhood memories, half-heard conversations, hidden photographs, family legends, and the many suspiciously convenient explanations she received growing up. The novel’s 22 chapters move between Sissy’s military life and the complicated history that produced her, making the search for one man part of a larger effort to understand what her family has concealed, embellished, or simply misunderstood.
The center of the book is Twomomma, Sissy’s formidable grandmother, whose opinions, schemes, grievances, and dramatic pronouncements influence nearly everyone around her. She’s funny because she approaches ordinary life with the urgency of a constitutional crisis, but she’s also more emotionally complicated than a collection of eccentric habits. Her controlling behavior is tied to grief, pride, fear, and a fierce desire to keep her family intact. Sissy makes an appealing counterweight. She’s observant, intelligent, devout, and capable of turning even a trip to the library into an undercover operation. Her mix of earnestness and quiet rebellion gives the novel much of its humor, particularly when her military discipline collides with the Beddoes family’s creative approach to facts.
Mattie writes with a strong sense of place and an obvious affection for the rhythms of Southern family storytelling. Kitchens, church gatherings, schoolrooms, piano recitals, cotillions, political campaigns, and crowded family visits receive generous attention. Meals are described with such enthusiasm that food begins to function as its own language of care. The novel often lingers over anecdotes and conversations, so the central mystery develops gradually. That spaciousness works best when the family’s personalities are bouncing off one another, though some episodes could be tighter. The book’s real momentum comes from accumulation: each memory adds another piece to Sissy’s understanding of her mother, her grandmother, and the difference between protecting someone and denying them the truth.
I’d recommend The Duchess most strongly to readers who enjoy character-rich family sagas, Southern humor, intergenerational secrets, and novels that feel like listening to a gifted relative tell stories around the dinner table. It should also appeal to readers interested in women’s military experiences, small-town social life, and families whose love is expressed through teasing, meddling, feeding, arguing, and showing up when it matters. The mystery provides a satisfying thread, but the lasting pleasure comes from getting to know the Beddoes family in all its noisy, affectionate complexity. Since this is the first book in The Twomomma Chronicles, it also leaves the sense that Sissy’s discoveries have opened a door.
Pages: 453 | ASIN : B0GT6QSJS8
Messy and Unpredictable
The Last Revision follows a man reflecting on his life as he navigates present-day physical limitations while revisiting vivid memories of childhood, family, romance, art, work, Buddhist practice, and life in New York City. What inspired you to structure the story around these reflections?
The structure of the book came from an intersection of three things. First, I was approaching my sixtieth birthday and was having a hard time of it, unlike approaching my 50th, which I relished and celebrated. At sixty, I was asking myself, “What happened? What’s left?” and I was fearful of forgetting, as I entered my third act. So, I wanted to write everything down before I forgot. In fact, I didn’t set out to write a memoir at all. It was an exercise in documentation. Secondly, I had always said I wanted to live to be a hundred years old, to see a century — how amazing would that be?! And lastly, my sister, author Patience Bloom, encouraged me to join the NaNoWriMo challenge (i.e., write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November). With that deadline looming, an idea popped into my head: a “memoir hypothesis.” Tell my story from the end of my life, from 100 years old. So, everything to 60 years old is true. Or mostly, as memory is imperfect. The rest is speculation. The original idea was to have two timelines intersecting. Chapter 1 would be the end, at 100. Chapter 2 would be the very early years. Chapter 3 would be somewhere in the early 90s, and so on until the timelines intersected. But somewhere along the way, like memory does, my mind drifted here and there, to the “present” and backward and then sideways. The title, The Last Revision, is the main character’s (and my) attempt to concretize what Bill remembers.
The novel explores LGBTQ+ identity across different periods of social change. How did you approach portraying the fears, challenges, and freedoms that shaped Bill’s life?
Because this is partially a work of auto-fiction, many of the experiences are my own — I didn’t have to research them. From being bullied as a child to feeling society’s tacit (or not so tacit) disapproval of anyone across the LGBTQ+ spectrum, there is a wealth of material to draw from. Anyone who has felt “different” from an early age carries those feelings with them, and it is important to know them and grapple with them so that one can live freely in the world. I imagined that, based on Bill’s (my) own experiences as a young and subsequently middle-aged person, Bill wouldn’t become truly fearless and comfortable in his own skin until later in life, which he does. I’ll also add that writing this book further helped me in my own journey of living freely in the world. I mean, I’m an out gay man, but with the publishing of this book, I’m really out.
Bill’s relationship with Andres is one of the emotional anchors of the novel. What did you want to explore about love, vulnerability, and the process of allowing oneself to be fully seen?
I wanted to explore the ups and downs of a relationship, of a marriage. We see so many stories on TV and in films in which relationships are one thing, good or bad, or they are good, then bad, then amazing. But it’s not that simple. Relationships can be incredibly challenging, inspiring, infuriating, titillating, moving, comforting, scary, and beautiful — all at the same time. They are messy and unpredictable, and ultimately rewarding. I wanted to show that one can — one has to — be oneself in a relationship, in a marriage, and that good things come from actively working on this.
What message do you hope readers carry with them after spending time with Bill?
My hope is that readers will feel seen in some way. Bill goes through many, many ups and downs throughout his long life, but he never gives up. As a practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism with SGI for nearly 40 years, I embrace our motto to “never be defeated.” This doesn’t mean that we won’t have disappointments or that we will get everything we want. Rather, the goal is to never let one’s spirit be defeated, to never lose hope for the future, no matter what happens. If The Last Revision can instill an iota of this hope in a reader, I will be very, very happy.
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His journal.
And the memories begin.
The Last Revision moves through an entire life—from an Easter morning in upstate New York, through childhood moves across continents, a hard-won coming out, years of solitude in a New York City studio apartment, a late and lasting love, and a world that slowly, then all at once, changes beyond recognition. Bill has lived all of it. And on the eve of his hundredth birthday, he is finally willing to look.
Written from the imagined perspective of a man forty years older than the author, the novel blends lived memory with an invented future—reconstructing the past as it was, and imagining what might come after. The result is a life seen whole: remembered, revised, and, at last, understood.
At once intimate and expansive, The Last Revision is a novel about what it feels like to hold a life in your hands all at once—the losses and the luck, the curtain calls and the heartbreaks—and discover, with something close to astonishment, that it was a joy.
Cosmic Acquaintances
Helium centers around a guarded young woman who slips into the orbit of a roadside refuge for people entranced by flying saucers and cosmic messages. Why did you choose the late 1940s as the setting for Joan’s story?
I never really had a choice. History dictated the story’s time frame. The strange little commune in which Helium plays out was a real place called Palomar Gardens. It sat at the bottom of a long, winding mountain road running up to the newly constructed Palomar Observatory. It was where a would-be spiritual guru named George Adamski reinvented himself as a purveyor of universal truths supposedly revealed by cosmic acquaintances from other worlds. He became the most famous member of a small cadre of earthbound messengers known as the “contactees.” These were people who claimed not only to have witnessed flying saucers, but to have met the extraterrestrial ebeings who piloted them. Adamski’s stay at Palomar Gardens stretched from the 1940s to the 1950s, so there was never really any question in my mind that that was when Helium should take place.
Joan is both skeptical and deeply longing for something beyond herself. How did you develop that tension within her character?
It was a slow and meandering process. When I started to write Helium, I had only a vague idea of who Joan was. As time went on, I became convinced that she should embark on a search for hope—one based on a conviction that anything, no matter how unlikely, is possible. I also knew that I wanted to put her in conflict with a fictionalized version of George Adamski, even if I wasn’t sure at first what the basis of that conflict should be. Eventually, I decided to create in her a deep longing rooted in a fantastical “gift” that parallels the metaphysical aspects of the 1950s flying saucer craze. The parallels initially strengthen Joan’s relationship with George before resulting in a rupture of betrayal and comeuppance.
How much research did you do into postwar California, Palomar Mountain, and early UFO culture?
A lot. I started researching America’s mid-century flying saucer phenomenon during the mid-1990s. Over time, I became something of an amateur expert in what’s admittedly a rather obscure subject. I made two trips to Palomar Mountain. With my background in television, I originally aimed to turn my research into a documentary. That went nowhere. Then I tried other things: a screenplay, a blog, a podcast. Each time, utter failure. Finally, I turned to fiction. Bingo! It took three decades, but my flying saucer obsession has finally resulted in something solid: this novel called Helium.
What do you hope readers are still thinking about after they finish Helium?
While writing Helium, I took unexpected comfort in exploring the intersections of hope and uncertainty. I like to think that at least some of my readers will come away feeling something similar. Helium takes place during a historical period when it seemed like everyone was seeing impossible things in the sky. I’m not sure the things they saw were extraterrestrial, but what if they were? If the impossible is possible, if mystery can exist alongside certainty, then maybe we have the excuse we need to stop doom-saying and doom-scrolling. Maybe there are answers we’re still unable or unwilling to see. I hope that when readers put down Helium, they will at least be more willing to entertain those possibilities.
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Joan has a gravity problem-and she’s desperate to keep it hidden. Haunted by a loss too heavy to bear, she drifts to Palomar Gardens, a tiny Southern California commune where hope hovers and teases. Here she encounters George, a charismatic mystic whose lofty visions will soon captivate the world.
Drawn into George’s orbit, Joan finds her footing. But the line between wonder and deception is thin, and her hold on reality slips. Improbable machines appear in the sky, only to vanish without explanation. Beautiful lies masquerade as truth. Her secret unmoors with consequences she cannot foresee.
Helium is a story of faith, folly, and the fragile human longing to touch the stars-of searching for a place in the cosmos where the possible and the impossible carry equal weight.
Helium
Helium follows Joan, a guarded young woman who arrives near Palomar Mountain in the late 1940s and slips almost by accident into the orbit of Palomar Gardens, a café, roadside refuge, and gathering place for people entranced by flying saucers, cosmic messages, and the possibility of rescue from ordinary life. At the center is George, a fry cook, would-be mystic, and self-styled guide to extraterrestrial truth; circling him are loyal women, skeptics, misfits, believers, and opportunists. Joan brings her own private mystery with her, an uneasy relationship with gravity, memory, faith, and grief, and the novel watches her decide what kind of wonder can save a person, and what kind merely sells tickets.
Author Dave Kenney doesn’t rush toward spectacle, even though the subject matter practically begs for blinking lights and pulp theatrics. Instead, he lets the uncanny seep in through diner counters, cigarette smoke, cheap cabins, desert gatherings, and the odd tenderness of people who need the sky to answer back. Joan is a sharp, damaged, often funny narrator to follow, not because she explains herself neatly, but because she resists being reduced to a case study. Her skepticism and longing live in the same room, and that friction gives the novel its charge.
The book is also quietly ruthless about charisma. George isn’t flattened into a villain, which makes him more interesting and more dangerous. I found myself pulled between sympathy and suspicion, exactly where the novel wants me. Its historical texture feels lived-in rather than lacquered: the Big Eye, Palomar Observatory, postwar restlessness, roadside California, the saucer faithful gathering in shabby hotel rooms and desert outposts. At times, the density of the milieu slows the pace, but even that slowness has a purpose. The novel feels like a long exposure photograph: what first looks dim eventually gathers shape, then shadow.
I think this would be great for readers of historical fiction, literary fiction, UFO fiction, midcentury Americana, and character-driven novels about belief. Fans of Emma Cline’s The Girls may recognize the unsettling magnetism of a community built around longing, while readers of Michael Chabon will appreciate the blend of American history, oddball obsession, and melancholy wonder. Helium is a novel about looking up without losing sight of the ground. A strange, sorrowful, and luminous book about the lies that lift us, and the truths that bring us back down.
Pages: 398 | ASIN : B0H1K5XYYR
A Plea for Freedom
A Plea for Freedom, by Raymond Hackney, is a historical novel set during the American Revolutionary War that follows fifteen-year-old Daniel Asbury as he leaves his Virginia home and embarks on a journey filled with danger, hardship, and unexpected challenges that test his courage and shape his understanding of what it means to be free. At its heart, this work of historical fiction is about the cost of freedom, not just as a national idea, but as something felt in the body, tested in fear, and reshaped by suffering.
Hackney writes Daniel’s story in the first person, and that choice gives the novel the feel of a remembered life rather than a polished legend. Daniel is brave, yes, but he is also young, impulsive, frightened, and often unsure of himself. That makes him a highly relatable character. The early scenes on the family farm, with meals, chores, church gatherings, hunting trips, and arguments with his parents, ground the story before it moves into danger. It gives the later hardship more weight because we know what Daniel has left behind. The writing can be plain and direct, sometimes almost old-fashioned, but that style fits the story’s journal-like shape. It does not try to be flashy. It tries to carry a life across time.
The book is clearly invested in history, but it is also trying to handle difficult material with care, especially in its portrayal of Native American characters and frontier violence. Some scenes are hard to read. The punishment of Tories, the captivity, the prison conditions, and the violence along the frontier all push against any simple idea of heroism. That was one of the stronger parts of the novel for me. Freedom is not treated as a clean slogan. It becomes complicated, even uncomfortable. Daniel wants liberty, but he has to learn that everyone is living under some kind of pressure, whether from war, loyalty, hunger, fear, grief, or faith. The novel does lean into faith more strongly as it moves toward its conclusion, and readers who enjoy spiritually framed historical fiction will likely find that meaningful.
I would recommend A Plea for Freedom to readers who enjoy historical fiction rooted in real lives, family memory, Revolutionary War history, frontier survival, and stories of faith under pressure. It’s best suited for someone who doesn’t mind a steady, earnest style and who appreciates a novel that feels less like a modern thriller and more like sitting beside someone as they tell you what happened, what hurt, and what stayed with them.
Pages: 296 | ASIN : B0GX2NDFG8
Rituals and Prayers
Under Two Flags follows a young Jewish woman who leaves Boston for Berlin in search of an amazing new life, but instead finds herself in the throes of World War I. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I discovered Josephine Marzynski’s memoir, With Old Glory in Berlin, when my brother showed up on my doorstep with an original 1918 edition he’d pulled from his bookshelf, and tucked alongside copies of our grandfather’s novels. Although Josephine’s name graced the cover, the foreword was written by the book’s editor, Eliot H. Robinson, our grandfather. As I read the book, it became clear he had done far more than edit. The voice, cadence, and style mirrored his fiction so closely that I surmised he had essentially ghostwritten the memoir.
Josephine’s voice — literally her singing voice — functions as both passion and protection. What does opera represent to you in this story?
Whenever Josephine dared to use her voice, on and off the stage, she spoke and sang of her passions. The arias I chose to include in different scenes underscored the tension and emotional responses of the characters. Josephine found her solace in the beauty of those arias. I sprinkled them in to give her comfort during dark times. For example, I had Josephine sing “Habanera” from CARMEN during her first class at the conservatory in Berlin. The aria is written for a mezzo-soprano, which was within Josephine’s range as a confident and strong woman. Within the libretto, the words mirror Josephine, “Love is a rebellious bird – that none can tame.” Her rebellious nature shines through even with the choice itself. She sings Bizet’s opera in its original French, a language forbidden in Germany at that time during the war.
Were there moments in your research that surprised you or changed the direction of the novel?
After reading Josephine’s memoir, With Old Glory in Berlin, I was struck by what Josephine didn’t include, namely, any reference to her faith. In my research, I discovered she identified as a Jewish woman. Whether she felt it wasn’t relevant or chose to omit it amid the growing undercurrents of antisemitism in 1918, we can’t know. But I found that silence fascinating. In moments of fear and homesickness, people often reach for the rituals and prayers of their faith to anchor them. It felt authentic that she would have done the same, so I wove those quiet expressions of faith into the story to deepen her emotional landscape and sense of identity.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Although I can’t reveal too many details because I’m deep into the research phase, I can share that a hint of the historical event I’ll be writing about is alluded to in Under Two Flags. It’s also set during World War I, alternating between Boston and a foreign city. The expected release date is December 2, 2027. The date is significant in Boston.
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In October 1916, eighteen-year-old Josephine Therese Marzynski leaves Boston for Berlin to pursue her dream of studying opera at Germany’s most prestigious music conservatory. Living with family friends and immersing herself in German culture, she finds unexpected beauty and friendship in the heart of enemy territory.
But when America enters the Great War in April 1917, Josephine’s world transforms overnight-from welcomed student to enemy of the state. Trapped in Berlin as rationing tightens and suspicion mounts, Josephine must navigate daily police check-ins, bureaucratic interrogations, and the constant threat of internment. Her survival depends on German friends who risk their own safety to protect her, while she struggles with divided loyalties between her American identity and the people who have become her chosen family.
Based on the true story from Josephine’s memoir and set against the backdrop of a city slowly starving under the weight of war, Under Two Flags is a gripping tale of resilience, moral complexity, and the transformative power of music in humanity’s darkest hours. As Josephine fights to secure passage home, she confronts impossible choices that will test everything she believes about loyalty, survival, and the true meaning of patriotism.
Under Two Flags: A Novel of World War I
Under Two Flags by Janis Robinson Daly is historical fiction that reads like a staged memoir: Josephine Therese Marzynski, a young Jewish woman from Boston, goes to Berlin in late 1916 to study opera, only to find herself living inside the tightening grip of World War I, where suspicion, rationing, propaganda, and fear seep into everyday life. The book opens in 1918 with Josephine back in Boston, preparing to tell her story with the help of a publisher, framing everything that follows as a deliberate act of witness and persuasion.
What grabbed me first was how Daly builds Josephine’s inner life through concrete moments instead of speeches. The arrival sequence is a gut check. We watch Josephine get inspected like a threat, even while she’s carrying “harmless sheet music,” and we feel the private defiance of her sewing an American flag into her skirt and later hiding it in her pillowcase. The writing leans into bodily details, the hot embarrassment, the cold air, the nervous calculation of what to say and what to swallow. It makes the big theme of “patriotism” feel small and personal, like something you tuck into a hem and hope no one notices.
I also liked the author’s structural choice to treat the novel like an opera in itself, with an Overture, Acts, Scenes, and even musical notations sprinkled in. It could have felt gimmicky, but for me it mostly works because it matches Josephine’s mind. She hears life in cues and crescendos, and she uses performance as survival. There’s even room for humor when it fits, like the bitter, half-laughing talk among women who are stuck eating carrots over and over, trying to make scarcity feel normal for one more day. Those lighter beats do not erase the dread. They just make the dread more believable, because that’s how people cope.
What stayed with me after I closed it was the tension baked into the title. Josephine is always balancing, not just between nations, but between versions of herself: dutiful daughter, ambitious musician, “good girl” who knows when to wink and when to keep quiet. The book is also honest about how identity can be both shelter and target. She’s American, she’s Jewish, she has German roots, and none of those labels stay simple once the war machine starts deciding who gets to be “safe.” I appreciated the grounding too: Daly is upfront that this is fiction inspired by real events and tied to a memoir (With Old Glory in Berlin) connected to her own family, which adds a quiet sense of responsibility to the storytelling.
If you enjoy historical fiction, especially stories that zoom in on one woman’s day-to-day choices inside a huge world event, this one is worth your time. I’d recommend it most to readers who like war-era settings without wanting only battlefield scenes, and to anyone curious about the intersection of art and survival, like how a voice trained for opera can double as armor. If you want an immersive, human-scale WWI novel with music in its bones, you’ll heartily enjoy Under Two Flags.
Pages: 290 | ISBN : 978-1685137328
