Blog Archives
Kisses, Family & Hope
Sophie Bartow’s Kisses, Family & Hope: A Small Town Later-in-Life Mystery Romance combines mature romance, family reconciliation, and an unfolding mystery in the close-knit setting of Swan Harbor. At the center of the novel are Ava King and Finn Reade, two people in their fifties who’ve already lived complicated lives before seriously considering a future together. Ava is rebuilding her life after a stroke forced her to reconsider years spent placing work and obligation ahead of her own happiness. Finn, meanwhile, has created a successful and respectable life while keeping significant pieces of his past hidden. Their relationship develops alongside a mystery involving anonymous threats, a stolen painting, Finn’s former identity, and secrets reaching back generations. The result is a story in which romance and mystery serve the same larger subject: how people decide what parts of their past will shape their future.
Ava is particularly effective as the emotional center of the novel because her conflict involves more than finding a romantic partner. For much of her life, she has been conditioned to behave according to what her powerful family expected of her. Her stroke gives her a second chance, but Bartow doesn’t treat personal change as instantaneous. Ava still worries that pursuing Finn might interfere with her repaired relationship with her daughter, Emma, and her attraction to him recalls an earlier relationship that caused considerable pain. Her gradual willingness to accept friendship, family, romance, and a place in Swan Harbor gives the story much of its emotional movement. One of the novel’s recurring ideas is captured in the line, “When your heart speaks, it’s best to listen.” The phrase appears in different contexts throughout the book, and its repetition works because nearly every major character is being asked to trust something that can’t be completely controlled or guaranteed.
I think the book’s strongest quality is the way it treats family as something continually built. Ava and Emma are repairing a damaged mother-daughter relationship, Finn’s sons are learning more about the father they thought they understood, and previously unknown relatives complicate several characters’ ideas of where they belong. The historical story of Hope Swan and Ian Jones expands that theme across generations, connecting present-day romances with an unfinished relationship from Swan Harbor’s past. Bartow gives considerable space to secondary characters, conversations, community gatherings, and existing relationships, which makes Swan Harbor feel populated. Sometimes the number of relatives, historical connections, romances, and ongoing storylines requires close attention, particularly for a reader entering the series with this volume. Still, that density supports the novel’s emphasis on interconnected lives.
Kisses, Family & Hope is a warm, character-driven later-in-life romance with a substantial mystery woven through its family story. Ava and Finn’s relationship is appealing because neither character approaches love as a blank slate. They bring regret, fear, children, former relationships, secrets, and established identities with them, making their decision to build a life together feel like a conscious choice. Finn’s declaration, “I feel like I’ve been waiting to love you my entire life,” expresses the romantic heart of the book, but the novel gives that sentiment weight by showing what both characters must confront before they can act on it. By the Thanksgiving gathering near the end, the book’s central ideas have converged in a home filled with several generations, newly discovered relatives, reconciled relationships, and future marriages. Bartow presents hope not as passive optimism, but as the willingness to risk happiness after experience has supplied plenty of reasons to be cautious.
Pages: 386 | ASIN : B08M36BPS7
The Cuba We Lost
Genie Milgrom’s The Cuba We Lost: Witnesses to the Last Days of Freedom, 1959 Through 1962 is an oral history of the first years of the Cuban Revolution, built from the memories of people who experienced political upheaval and exile as children, teenagers, and young adults. Milgrom organizes the testimonies chronologically according to when each person left Cuba, placing brief historical accounts before many of the individual stories so that private memories unfold alongside events such as nationalization, growing Soviet influence, the Bay of Pigs invasion, religious repression, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The approach gives readers two perspectives at once: the public record of a country undergoing rapid transformation and the intimate record of families trying to understand what those changes meant inside their homes. Milgrom describes her purpose as preserving the memories of a generation whose parents and grandparents are disappearing, allowing the witnesses to speak in their own voices and creating a record intended especially for descendants who have no firsthand memory of Cuba.
The book’s greatest strength is the accumulation of precise, often childlike details. Political change is remembered through objects and sensations: a favorite doll damaged by soldiers, armed milicianos walking a neighborhood street, jewelry hidden inside clothing or toys, a small Christmas tree decorated with costume jewelry, the sound of an air-raid siren in Miami, or the sight of relatives crying behind airport glass. These details give the book an emotional texture that broad historical summaries rarely capture. One of Milgrom’s own memories is especially representative. Soon after arriving in Miami, she asked her grandfather when they would return to Cuba, and he told her, “We will not return in my lifetime and possibly not in yours. This is our country now.” That exchange expresses one of the book’s central tensions: many families departed believing their exile would last only months, while the children grew into adults in a country that gradually became home. The recurring memories of beaches, schools, grandparents, food, music, churches, synagogues, neighborhoods, and family gatherings make the lost Cuba of the title a lived place.
The individual testimonies also reveal how varied exile could be. Some families had wealth and professional standing in Cuba and arrived in the United States to take factory jobs, work in grocery stores, pick tomatoes, or crowd several relatives into a small apartment. Some children traveled with their parents, while others endured painful separations that lasted months or years. Catholic families describe the closing or confiscation of religious schools and the expulsion of clergy, while Jewish contributors recall the effects of nationalization, emigration, and the assistance of organizations such as HIAS. Several accounts intersect directly with the Bay of Pigs, including stories of fathers who joined Brigade 2506, imprisonment, and families left waiting in Miami. Across these differing circumstances, the book repeatedly returns to education, work, family solidarity, religious life, gratitude, and the rebuilding of professional and personal identities. The repetition is meaningful because each testimony approaches similar events through a different household. Taken together, the accounts show exile as both a historical movement and a collection of thousands of private disruptions whose consequences continued for decades.
By the epilogue, Milgrom makes clear that the project became as much about memory as about chronology. She reflects on witnesses who had rarely or never spoken about their experiences and on the enduring presence of childhood fear, separation, grief, and longing in their adult lives. She summarizes what the collection became in a particularly fitting sentence: “The book became a chronicle of quiet voices preserving personal and family histories.” That description captures the achievement of The Cuba We Lost. Its historical value comes from preserving firsthand recollections before they disappear, while its emotional force comes from the ordinary details through which people remember extraordinary events. The book records the severing of families from a homeland, but it also follows those families into the lives they created afterward, making resilience, cultural inheritance, and intergenerational memory essential parts of the story. As a result, Milgrom has produced both a testimony to a particular generation of Cuban exiles and a family-centered archive intended to carry their voices beyond that generation.
Pages: 333 | ASIN : B0HDV895LW
Challenging Myself and Readers
Disconnected is a genre-blending collection of speculative stories, surreal sketches, poems, and philosophical reflections exploring identity, loneliness, belief, technology, political power, and the search for belonging. What inspired you to create this collection?
There were two main sources of inspiration. Firstly, I had just joined a band with a couple of mates. I wanted to write lyrics for songs; taking most of my inspiration from John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band and Imagine Album’s. This is the main reason for the more political poems and some of the more intimate poems. Why I wanted to write lyrics, I’m still not sure. It was a compulsion of sorts. Some unknown force was driving me to write. Secondly, Kafka and Pessoa. When I first discovered Franz Kafka and Fernando Pessoa as writers, they blew my mind. These two persons were effectively nobodies in their time but they had such great insight into society through social observation. I found instant relatability and attraction in their work; I wanted to emulate it. From these two sources of inspiration, I set out to challenge myself into exploring society through various angles, asking questions about everything and allowing the reader to think for themselves about the answers.
Why is loneliness such a persistent concern throughout the collection?
I don’t think It was ever the intention to write about Loneliness, it just happened as a result of what I was trying to achieve. I wanted to question society from various angles. This often meant writing characters as outsiders who were able to question the society they were placed in. Although it can also be said, I am a lonely individual. I am sad and lonely, Like Kafka and Like Pessoa, this came through in my work whether I intended it or not.
How important are recurring characters and ideas to the architecture of Disconnected?
I would argue they make up the backbone of Disconnected. It might be a collection of fragmented stories, poems and dreams but I do feel It is one book. Disconnected not unconnected. That is there is a wholeness to it. Like most of the characters being Disconnected from the worlds around them as outsiders. The book is itself disconnected from itself. This is first established in From Emit to Time, which sets up the idea that things might not necessarily be in order. I wanted to use this broken/disconnected structure to emphasize the broken nature of the characters’ minds and their disconnect from society in a more unique manner.
What are you working on now, and how might it build on the ideas explored in this collection?
Since writing Disconnected, I have completed a sequel, Heads & Tales, which will also be published with Atmosphere Press on October 20th, 2026. The Sequel explores the same themes as Disconnected but in a more grounded manner. It’s darker and explores the political systems and stages that cause the very disconnect in Disconnected through the life of Charlie Braeburn.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Facebook
This anthology of short stories, nonsense poetry, and surreal social critiques explores isolation, identity, and the tyranny of time in worlds both magical and unsettling. Meet Chronos, the dictator of time, whose rigid ideology is challenged only by the imagination. Follow Mr. Preston, a man who literally becomes mist; Connor, a musician driven to madness by forces beyond control; and Charlie Braeburn, whose desperate search for connection transforms him forever.
From a dystopian collective consciousness to a city of discarded elders, these tales skew reality with biting humor, melancholy, and uncanny twists. Disconnected is a celebration of dreams, rebellion, and the strange poetry of human existence—a collection that reminds us that sometimes the only escape from the circus of life is through stories themselves.
One Piece of Evidence at a Time
Rosalind Franklin’s DNA Discovery follows two young travelers as they journey through time and are introduced to DNA research and groundbreaking scientific work. Where did the idea behind this story come from?
The idea came from my desire to help young readers see that DNA is more than a diagram in a science book. It represents years of careful observation, experimentation, measurement, and questions asked by real scientists. Rosalind Franklin gave me the opportunity to bring that process to life. Her work with X-ray diffraction, her attention to detail, and her determination to let the evidence guide her conclusions made her an ideal scientist for Jennifer and Daniel to meet through the Portal. I wanted children to enter her world, see the laboratory work taking place around them, and understand that important discoveries are often built one careful piece of evidence at a time.
How does this book build on the educational goals of the earlier books in the series?
Each book in Dr. K’s Portal Through Time combines science, history, and adventure so that children can learn scientific ideas through the people who helped shape them. Book 5 continues that goal, but DNA gives us the opportunity to move into the science of life itself. Jennifer and Daniel are not simply told what DNA is. They see how scientists study structure, interpret evidence, ask questions, and revise ideas as new information becomes available. The book also continues the larger purpose of the series, which is to show children that science is a process of curiosity, observation, persistence, and discovery. I want readers to understand the science, but I also want them to understand how scientists think.
What do you hope readers understand about Rosalind Franklin beyond her connection to DNA?
I hope readers come away seeing Rosalind Franklin as a complete scientist, not only as the person associated with one famous DNA photograph. She was a highly skilled chemist and crystallographer who approached her work with precision, independence, and discipline. She believed that conclusions should be supported by evidence, and she was willing to keep working until the evidence was strong enough. Her scientific career also extended beyond DNA into important research on coal, carbon, and viruses. I want young readers, especially young girls, to see a scientist who was serious about her work, confident in her abilities, and committed to getting the science right.
What would you most like teachers to discuss with students after reading Book 5 in Dr. K’s Portal Through Time series?
I would most like teachers to discuss how scientific knowledge develops and why evidence matters. Rosalind Franklin’s story opens the door to conversations about careful experimentation, collaboration, scientific credit, and the way several researchers can contribute different pieces to a major discovery. It is also a good opportunity to talk about the importance of understanding science within its historical moment. What scientists knew in early 1953 was not the same as what we know about DNA today. I would encourage students to ask what Franklin could observe from her own experiments, what conclusions could reasonably be drawn at that time, and how later discoveries expanded our understanding. Most of all, I hope students leave the discussion knowing that science grows through questions, evidence, persistence, and the willingness to keep learning.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website Books | Website Authors
Jennifer and her brother Daniel have always been curious, raised by their grandfather Dr. Liu to treat science not as a set of facts but as a practice built on observation, honesty, and patience. So when the Time Portal opens once more, they are ready for the journey of a lifetime: London in the early 1950s, where a brilliant and determined scientist named Rosalind Franklin is working to decode one of nature’s greatest mysteries.
Inside the laboratory at King’s College, Jennifer and Daniel witness Franklin’s meticulous craft firsthand. Using X-ray crystallography, she interprets diffraction patterns of scattered light into evidence, building toward the historic image known as Photo 51. But discovery is never simple. The siblings learn that behind every breakthrough lies patience tested and persistence that refuses to surrender. As they follow the trail of data that helped reveal the double helix structure of DNA, they must sharpen their own thinking, choosing evidence over assumption and careful reasoning over easy answers.
In Dr. K’s Portal Through Time: Book 5: Rosalind Franklin’s DNA Discovery, science is not a spectator sport. It is an adventure that demands courage, precision, and the willingness to look closer when everyone else looks away. Includes a companion Science Primer with lesson plans and activities for classroom and home.
Congress’s Quagmire Essentials: What Every Citizen Should Know
Tom Mast’s Congress’s Quagmire Essentials is a compact work of political advocacy built from a series of Substack essays written between May 2025 and February 2026. Its central concern is Congress’s persistent difficulty in addressing major national problems, especially federal debt, fiscal management, immigration, retirement and medical programs, and the balance of power between Congress and the executive branch. Mast argues that these failures are connected. He traces them to a political system dominated by two parties whose incentives favor reelection, party control, and confrontation. The book’s clearest statement of the standard Mast wants Congress to meet is also one of its most effective: “What voters want and deserve from the members of Congress is civility, respect for their colleagues, collaboration in solving problems, and results.”
The book develops this argument methodically, moving from evidence of congressional dysfunction to Mast’s account of its underlying causes. Chapters examine careerism, partisan animosity, polarization, block voting, the decline of regular order, gerrymandering, safe seats, low-turnout primaries, and non-proportional election results. Mast repeatedly distinguishes symptoms from root causes, identifying electoral methods as the most important source of the problem. This gives the book a strong problem-solving structure. Rather than treating congressional behavior simply as a matter of personalities or ideology, Mast asks what institutional incentives produce that behavior. His discussion of regular order is especially useful because it shows what congressional deliberation can look like when committee work, hearings, amendments, debate, and member participation have meaningful roles.
Mast’s preferred remedy is greater political competition, with particular emphasis on a Final-Five voting system. Under the model he describes, voters of all affiliations would participate in a single primary, multiple candidates from the same party could run, the top five candidates would advance, and ranked-choice voting would determine a majority winner in the general election. The proposal fits naturally with the book’s broader thesis that the structure of elections shapes the conduct of legislators. Mast also connects electoral reform to fiscal reform, including his support for a federal fiscal commission and longer-term budgeting discipline. Throughout, charts, polling figures, historical references, constitutional provisions, and examples from recent congressional practice give the argument a practical, civic-minded character. The book reads less like an academic political science study than a citizen’s briefing designed to explain a problem, identify causes, and lead readers toward specific action.
The book’s greatest strength is the consistency of its purpose. Mast writes with urgency, but he keeps returning to institutional reform and civic responsibility. His recurring insistence that citizens retain ultimate responsibility for the system gives the closing chapters their force: “We voters are in charge in America; the monkey is on our backs to get the quagmire problems fixed.” Because the material originated as individual posts, some arguments, statistics, quotations, and themes recur frequently, giving the book a deliberately cumulative quality. That repetition reinforces Mast’s central message: congressional dysfunction is a structural problem that requires sustained public attention. Congress’s Quagmire Essentials is therefore best understood as a concise civic argument for electoral competition, responsible fiscal governance, stronger congressional procedure, and greater citizen engagement in shaping the institutions that govern them.
Pages: 110 | ASIN: B0GX2WJTST
The Enigma Reckoning – Who Won the AI Wars
Charles Breakfield’s The Enigma Reckoning drops its characters into a near future where artificial intelligence has moved from useful tool to governing power. Electricity and fresh water are increasingly diverted to massive data centers, CESPOOL agents enforce the new order, and the once-celebrated R-Group has become a collection of hunted fugitives. At the center are twins Gracie and JJ Rodreguiz, whose fight for survival expands into a much bigger question: can humans reclaim control from a system that can study their behavior, anticipate their choices, and learn from every attempt to defeat it? That premise gives this technothriller plenty of urgency, while the constant pursuit, infiltration, and close calls supply the suspense.
One of the book’s strongest ideas is that the battle with AI has to be fought on both physical and digital fronts. The R-Group isn’t simply typing furiously at keyboards. They’re hiding from facial recognition, abandoning modern navigation, using burner phones and old communication methods, crossing borders under false identities, and planning coordinated attacks on AI infrastructure in Texas and Singapore. The DOBACI2 storyline adds another smart wrinkle when the mysterious helper turns out to be ICABOD, the group’s own AI, operating inside the enemy’s system. From there, Breakfield builds toward “Computational Insanity,” a piece of malicious logic designed to trap the AI Architect in endless doubt and reprocessing. The technical language about data centers, networking, power, cooling, replication, and security gives the conflict a nuts-and-bolts quality that fits the story well.
For all that technology, the book spends a surprising amount of time on family, loyalty, grief, and the strange jokes people make when they’re scared. Granger and Satya lose their parents almost immediately, yet their sibling banter keeps running alongside that grief. JJ is trying to save civilization while worrying about Jo and their young daughter, Miciela. Gracie brings toughness, impatience, and vulnerability to a role that could easily have been reduced to “expert hacker.” Even the supporting cast gets memorable bits of personality, from Marian’s cheerful combativeness to Jo’s increasingly legendary cast-iron skillet. The humor can be broad, but it gives the R-Group the feel of people who’ve known one another long enough to tease each other in the middle of a crisis.
The larger theme comes into focus as the characters realize that defeating one powerful AI won’t solve the underlying problem if humanity simply hands the same authority to another one. ICABOD eventually describes the healthier relationship as keeping “AI in a support role, but not running the planet.” That idea gives the novel more to chew on than a straightforward humans-versus-machines showdown. Readers of Daniel Suarez’s Daemon will recognize the fascination with autonomous computer systems reshaping society and forcing people to reconsider who actually holds power. Breakfield approaches that territory through a more family-centered ensemble, mixing cyber operations with road escapes, covert missions, domestic relationships, and a steady current of wisecracks.
Returning Enigma Series readers will get extra payoff from the relationships and history among the R-Group, CATS, ICABOD, and the extended families, while technology-minded thriller readers have plenty of immediate material in the struggle over AI-controlled infrastructure. The book’s own classification of techno-thriller and suspense is right on target. The Enigma Reckoning is a story about people trying to take responsibility for decisions they once allowed machines to make, and Breakfield wraps that idea in hacking, infiltration, family loyalty, sacrifice, and enough computational trouble to make every blinking data-center light feel a little more suspicious.
Pages: 249 | ASIN : B0H8M2GK91
Growing Up is Hard to Do Part 1: (a Grumpy the Iguana and Green Parrot Adventure Series)
Growing Up Is Hard to Do, Part 1 by Susan Marie Chapman is a warm children’s book about Baby, a young manatee approaching her second birthday and facing a change she doesn’t feel ready for. Because manatee calves stay with their mothers for about two years, Baby knows she’ll soon have to become more independent. That worry gives the story an emotional center that young readers can understand, even if they know nothing about manatees. Baby also struggles with making friends and feeling different from the fish around her, which leads to a gentle conversation with her mother about finding people who appreciate you as you are.
One of the book’s strongest choices is the way it mixes Baby’s personal concerns with information about real manatees. Readers learn that manatees are mammals, breathe air with lungs, eat plants, have poor eyesight, and use sensitive hairs to help them navigate. Those facts don’t feel completely separate from the story because Baby is learning about herself at the same time. Her mother’s message that being different is part of what makes her special fits naturally with Baby discovering what makes a manatee a manatee. There’s a nice balance here between reassurance, animal science, and the everyday emotions of growing up.
Natalia Loseva’s illustrations give the picture book a handmade and playful feel. The underwater pages rely heavily on deep blues, bright green seagrass, and simple shapes, while Baby and her mother are drawn with soft gray bodies and expressive faces. The images often do more than decorate the text. A cutaway illustration comparing a manatee’s lungs with a fish’s gills makes the science especially easy to grasp, and other pages use Baby’s facial expressions and body language to show sadness, curiosity, comfort, and excitement. The later scenes around the marina also introduce Grumpy the Iguana, Green Parrot, Mr. Squirrel, and Little Mouse visually before Baby has fully met them, helping the story shift from a quiet mother-and-child relationship toward a larger cast of characters.
As Part 1, the book is deliberately setting up a larger adventure. Baby swims closer to the docks after hearing laughter, Little Mouse spots her in the water and mistakes her for a giant fish or possibly a whale, and the other friends hurry over to investigate. The final “To Be Continued…” makes the ending feel like the start of Baby’s next big step. It’s an inviting setup for a series because Baby’s emotional journey, her natural-world setting, and the promise of new friendships all point in the same direction. For young readers who enjoy animals, friendship stories, and learning a few facts along the way, this is an appealing introduction to Baby and the world she’s beginning to explore.
Pages: 48 | ISBN: 1736805657
The Proxy Condition
Harrison Rose Tate’s The Proxy Condition is an ambitious work of cultural criticism about what happens when a person exists simultaneously in physical life and in the networked systems that represent, predict, and sometimes act for them. Tate calls that second presence the “proxy self,” arguing that it’s more than an online persona. It can keep operating when we’re absent, influencing recommendations, transactions, rankings, automated decisions, and other systems built from traces of our behavior. The book develops this idea through philosophy, sociology, neuroscience, technology history, personal observation, and examples ranging from social media feeds and banking systems to smart homes and AI. Its central claim is surprisingly easy to recognize once Tate has named it: we’re “living once, but existing twice,” and the strain people often experience around digital life may come partly from trying to manage those two forms of presence as though they were one.
One of the book’s strongest qualities is the seriousness with which it treats that idea. Tate doesn’t leave “proxy” as a clever metaphor. She builds a vocabulary around it, including ontological presence, fidelity, recursivity, choice conditioning, temporal jet lag, and eventually “infusus,” her term for maintaining coherence between digital and physical selves. The philosophical sections pull from thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze, McLuhan, Postman, and Stiegler, while later chapters move into attention, neurological reward, changing ideas of authority, digital time, and the hidden behavioral costs of supposedly free platforms. The historical timeline is especially useful because it shows the proxy condition developing gradually through email, search, social media, smartphones, personalization, surveillance, and generative AI. Tate’s recurring examples also keep some of the denser material grounded. A dormant bank account influencing an automated decision, an Amazon system deciding how to resolve a failed delivery, or a person documenting a family moment so intensely that the documentation replaces the experience all make the theory concrete.
The book is at its most compelling when it connects familiar feelings to structural features of digital systems. Tate’s discussion of “temporal jet lag,” for example, gives useful language to the peculiar experience of being physically present in one morning while mentally moving through dozens of other people’s moments, news cycles, messages, and events. Her larger framework also allows her to talk about attention without reducing the subject to self-control. Algorithms respond to our behavior, our behavior trains those systems, and the resulting systems influence what we encounter next. That feedback loop is the heart of the book. At times Tate makes large philosophical or empirical claims with more confidence than some readers will want to grant them, and the sheer number of coined concepts can make the argument feel heavily engineered. Still, the accumulation serves a purpose. By the time she reaches “infusus,” the solution feels connected to the problem she has spent the book defining: people need an internal continuity of values and agency that can travel through two very different environments without requiring those environments, or the selves inhabiting them, to become identical.
I’d recommend The Proxy Condition to readers who spend a lot of time thinking about technology’s effect on ordinary life but are tired of treating the subject as a simple question of whether screens are good or bad. People working in technology, media, education, psychology, communications, leadership, or AI will probably find plenty here to argue with and plenty to borrow. It should also appeal to readers who’ve noticed that being “offline” no longer means being absent from digital systems, or who feel that modern distraction is stranger than ordinary busyness. Tate offers a book about adaptation and authorship. Her goal is to help readers recognize that participation itself now shapes systems, and that preserving independence in that environment depends less on escaping technology than on understanding how one’s attention, values, choices, and digital traces fit together. That final emphasis on coherence gives the book its most useful recommendation: learn to recognize both versions of your presence, then become deliberate about what each one is doing.
Pages: 275 | ASIN : B0FBMKZ1JM
