Blog Archives
Eliminate the Stigma
In Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness, you blend memoir, humor, and practical guidance through Annie’s lively perspective, using the bond between you and your beloved dog to explore hope, healing, and resilience following your struggle with major depression. What inspired you to share your story?
I wanted to make the point that mental and physical illnesses should both be treated with compassion. It was my effort to eliminate the stigma by outing myself to change the way those with a mental illness are viewed.
Why was humor important to you when addressing such difficult subjects?
I believed that alternating dark subjects with humor would make it a more enjoyable read. My goal was a hopeful and joyful book despite the heavy subject.
What does your relationship with Annie reveal about the healing power of companionship?
Friendship with our pets and with our friends is essential to healthful living. Doctors should prescribe dogs and companion animals to the depressed and lonely.
After sharing this deeply personal journey, what does healing and resilience mean to you now?
I don’t feel ashamed anymore. My depression doesn’t define me. I don’t have to hide in the shadows. My recovery is complete, one day at a time.
Author Links: X | Facebook | Website
Across twenty-six compact chapters, Charns presents wellness as a collection of mutually reinforcing habits. Walking, medication, talk therapy, meditation, sleep, faith, friendship, reading, volunteer work, political participation, and gratitude all contribute to a balanced life. The book’s structure reflects this philosophy, moving briskly among personal memories, observations, photographs, and Annie’s comic complaints. Her demands for walks, games of fetch, and generous portions of dog treats give the narrative an appealing rhythm and keep its advice grounded in daily experience.
The book gains depth from Charns’s account of intergenerational trauma. His mother’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland, her later struggles with post-traumatic stress, and his own early encounters with Holocaust history illuminate the fears that shaped his family. Charns writes with particular honesty about psychosis, suicidal thoughts, sleep deprivation, and the stigma surrounding psychiatric hospitalization. The chapters on treatment and family support are direct and humane, presenting recovery as sustained work supported by professional care, meaningful routines, and personal relationships.
Annie’s humor gives the book its distinctive personality, but its strongest quality is the sincerity beneath the jokes. Charns’s affection for his dog becomes a way of expressing gratitude for the people, practices, and communities that helped restore his health. When Annie defines canine devotion by saying, “That is the power of the dog. Love. Love. And more love,” the line also summarizes the book’s central conviction. Concise, intimate, and encouraging, Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness offers an accessible portrait of recovery rooted in companionship, purposeful activity, and care.” Literary Titan Review.
A Family Across Town
Aynah V. Askanas’s A Family Across Town is a candid memoir about growing up inside a secret whose effects were visible long before its facts were known. Askanas’s father, a Los Angeles pediatrician, maintained two households for more than thirty years, dividing his time between six children and two women. The memoir begins with the revelation of that double life, then returns to the family histories and childhood experiences that preceded it. This structure turns a startling discovery into a broader examination of secrecy, inheritance, and the emotional atmosphere parents create for their children.
Askanas writes in an intimate, conversational voice, building the family portrait through sharply remembered domestic details. Her mother’s cracked hands, her father’s closed bedroom door, an altered wedding photograph, and holidays celebrated on the wrong day all become evidence of a reality the children could sense but couldn’t name. Askanas captures that experience vividly: “Like corpses in an attic, the secrets emitted an odor that permeated our home, though my siblings and I didn’t know where it came from.” Her humor, often dry and self-questioning, provides necessary relief while preserving the gravity of the story.
The book’s emotional reach extends well beyond its central revelation. Askanas traces how the concealed family shaped each sibling differently, contributing to depression, aggression, substance use, perfectionism, and her own prolonged insomnia. She also places her mother’s choices within the economic and social constraints faced by women of her generation. These reflections give the memoir historical and psychological breadth. At times, Askanas presses the secret into service as an explanation for nearly every illness or misfortune, including physical disease. That interpretive consistency gives the narrative coherence, though some connections remain more speculative than demonstrable.
I think what distinguishes A Family Across Town is its willingness to hold affection and anger together. Askanas recounts her father’s deceit and cruelty while acknowledging the confidence, education, and love of reading he gave her. Her mother emerges as wounded and complicit, but also stylish, funny, devoted, and increasingly independent after the secret is exposed. The later chapters, which include a cruel dispute over paternity and the gradual softening of old judgments, deepen the book’s moral complexity. This is a clear-eyed family reckoning that finds healing in truthful testimony and in the durable bonds among those who survived the same divided home.
Pages: 256 | ASIN : B0GPDMYWJM
Love, Humor, and Hope
The Little Book of Emmy is a heartwarming story of a tiny blind dog’s journey from danger and hardship to rescue, friendship, and a loving forever home. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
It’s a real story based on reality and our experience with Emmy. We thought she was an extraordinary personality and her story needed to be told.
How did you balance the difficult moments of rescue and loss with the book’s warmth and hope?
The balance really came from Emmy herself. She had every reason to be fearful or defeated, but that simply wasn’t who she was. She was joyful, trusting, curious, and incredibly resilient. I tried to let her spirit guide every creative decision in the book. Even when the story moves through rescue, uncertainty, and loss, Emmy’s personality keeps bringing us back to love, humor, and hope. In that sense, the balance wasn’t something I had to manufacture. It grew naturally out of who Emmy was.
What do you hope children understand about animals with disabilities after meeting Emmy?
I hope children understand that being different doesn’t mean being less. Emmy couldn’t see, but she still found her way through the world with curiosity, courage, and a lot of joy. She loved, played, trusted, and connected with people just like any other dog. I’d love for children to come away from her story feeling more compassion for animals with disabilities—and maybe for anyone who experiences the world a little differently.
How do you hope the book influences the way families think about rescue animals?
I hope the book helps families see rescue animals for who they can become, not just for what they’ve been through. Many of them arrive carrying fear, uncertainty, or physical challenges, but they also bring an incredible capacity for trust, affection, and joy. Emmy taught me that giving an animal a second chance can change both lives—the animal’s and the family’s. If her story encourages even one family to look at a rescue animal with a little more patience, compassion, and possibility, that would mean a great deal to me.
Author Links: Website
My (2D Shape) Family
My 2D Shape Family, by Lisa M. Weckbacher, turns an introductory geometry lesson into a friendly family gathering. Circle serves as the narrator, welcoming readers and introducing relatives that range from Oval and Triangle to less familiar figures such as Heptagon, Nonagon, and Decagon. The family idea gives this children’s book a warm structure while reinforcing its central message: shapes can share important qualities and still look quite different from one another.
The book builds understanding through familiar objects, thoughtful comparisons, and plenty of direct questions. Children identify shapes in a button, pizza slice, checkerboard, soccer ball, and honeycomb before meeting the corresponding character. They’re also invited to trace Circle, measure width, count sides, and consider why some shapes look different when turned or tilted. These prompts make the picture book especially well suited to reading aloud, since an adult can pause for predictions, counting, and conversation.
Katrina Snyder’s illustrations give each shape its own lively personality. The characters have expressive faces, thin arms and legs, and little visual details that help distinguish them without distracting from their geometry. Bright colors, generous white space, and clearly drawn everyday objects keep the pages easy to follow. The illustrations are particularly effective when shapes are rotated, stretched, or placed beside similar family members, allowing readers to see the differences the text is describing.
There’s an impressive amount of material here, from the meaning of two-dimensional to length, width, curves, sides, points, and orientation. Even the nine-sided and ten-sided shapes receive memorable introductions, giving children vocabulary they may not encounter in many early shape books. The closing reference pages gather the whole family in one place, making it easy to review what readers have learned. With its chatty narrator and hands-on questions, My 2D Shape Family offers a playful, substantial introduction to recognizing and comparing geometric shapes.
Pages: 38 | ASIN : B0H9VR4LBM
The Demon’s Spawn
Christine Triner’s The Demon’s Spawn is a sprawling supernatural horror novel built around an irresistible idea: twin sisters separated at birth remain psychically connected, even as one is drawn toward goodness and the other becomes an instrument of demonic violence. The story begins amid the terror of seventeenth-century Salem, where the demon Baleth sets a generational plan in motion, then follows that evil into the modern lives of Eliza and Eloise. One grows up surrounded by affection in England, while the other is raised in neglect near Salem. Their eventual collision gives the novel its emotional center and its gathering sense of dread.
Triner tells the story through short, rapidly shifting chapters that move among the sisters, their families, Baleth, and the people caught in their path. That structure makes the book highly readable despite its substantial length. The parallel lives of Eliza and Eloise create a steady rhythm of contrast, and their mysterious connection pulls the reader forward long before either young woman understands it. Baleth’s presence adds another layer of suspense because the reader can see the larger design taking shape while the characters are still struggling to name what’s happening to them.
This is graphic, full-blooded horror, and Triner commits to its brutality. The violence is visceral, the demonic menace is openly malevolent, and Eloise’s growing appetite for revenge makes her both frightening and strangely compelling. Beneath the bloodshed, though, the book is interested in the forces that shape a person: family, abandonment, privilege, resentment, and choice. Eloise’s cruelty is never softened, but her damaged childhood gives the story a human ache. Eliza’s warmth and Tilly’s fierce loyalty provide the counterweight, making the novel as much about devotion and loss as corruption.
As the action travels from Salem to England, the supernatural horror and crime-thriller elements lock together in a tense final act. The ending closes the sisters’ story with real consequences while opening the door to something even more dangerous, giving this first volume a satisfying shape and the trilogy a potent future. Triner has created a dark family saga in which evil travels through blood, trauma echoes across generations, and love must fight for every inch of ground. Christine Triner turns the bond between twins into a live wire stretched between love and damnation.
Pages: 449 | ASIN : B0H5TMNTZG
You Probably Won’t Read This: A Book of Poetry
Gene Larson’s You Probably Won’t Read This is a warm, plainspoken collection of 45 short pieces that finds poetry in animals, language, marriage, television, golf, mortality, and the oddities of everyday life. Most of the poems move with an easy rhyme and a storyteller’s timing, often building toward a pun or comic reversal. Larson writes as though he’s sharing observations across the kitchen table, and the spacious page design gives each piece room to breathe.
The humor is the book’s most constant pleasure. Poems such as “Ears to You,” “None of Your Business,” and “Get to the Point” turn familiar phrases inside out, while “Over and Over” uses its visual shape to make the joke part of the reading experience. The tightest pieces land especially well because Larson knows how to set up a rhyme, delay the payoff, and exit quickly. Longer comic poems sometimes settle into a predictable rhythm, but their genial voice keeps them moving.
A deeper current emerges whenever Larson writes about love, loss, and growing older. “Lucky Me,” the collection’s autobiographical prose interlude, recounts meeting the woman who became his wife and spending 65 years with her. Its tenderness gives added weight to “Missing You” and “That Which Was Still Is,” where simple language carries real grief. Poems about a locked church, a lonely restaurant meal, vanished childhood touchstones, environmental damage, and spiritual doubt also reveal a writer taking stock of a long life. That movement between silliness and sorrow gives the collection its personality.
This book will appeal most to readers who enjoy accessible, rhyming verse, gentle wordplay, nostalgic humor, and reflections on companionship and aging. It’s particularly well suited to people who like poetry in small, inviting portions, as many pieces can be read in a minute and remembered for much longer. Larson’s voice is companionable, curious, and openly sentimental, making the collection feel less like a formal literary exercise and more like an afternoon spent listening to a witty older friend tell stories.
Pages: 78 | ASIN : B0H63BMD13
One Inch at a Time
One Inch at a Time, by Alyssa Herrera, is a tender children’s book about developmental progress, disability, and the many ways children communicate, move, and grow. Built around the idea of “inchstones,” it treats a wiggle, blink, sign, step, or brave attempt as an occasion worth noticing. The opening contrast between a caped child taking off and a baby taking their time quickly establishes the book’s generous outlook: each child follows an individual path, and each bit of progress carries meaning.
Herrera’s short, rhyming lines make this picture book easy to share aloud. The repeated “some kids” phrasing creates a reassuring rhythm while introducing speech, gestures, communication aids, mobility equipment, and physical support in language young readers can understand. Phrases such as “almosts,” “not yets,” and “nearlys” give families an encouraging vocabulary for the long stretches between milestones. The text gradually expands from individual achievements to a wider invitation for patience, kindness, and inclusion.
Mayssa Kennouche’s bright, softly textured illustrations carry much of the emotional storytelling. Children appear using wheelchairs, braces, orthotics, medical tubing, signs, sounds, and other forms of communication, surrounded by attentive families, classmates, teachers, and friends. Mobility aids and medical equipment are presented as familiar parts of everyday life. Spacious character vignettes focus attention on small actions, while fuller scenes at the playground, pool, track, classroom, and birthday table show the joy of belonging to a community. The varied faces, bodies, cultures, and abilities give the book’s message real visual substance.
One Inch at a Time offers a cheerful and practical way to talk with children about growth that happens at different speeds and in different forms. Its final pages bring everyone together in celebration, then close with a personal note from the parents of Mack and Mila, grounding the idea of inchstones in lived family experience. Parents, teachers, therapists, and caregivers will find plenty here to begin conversations, but children receive the most important message directly: their efforts matter, their way of growing belongs, and even the tiniest win deserves a cheer.
Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness
Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness, by Alex Charns, is a warm, candid blend of memoir, humor, and practical guidance. Narrated by Annie, a German shepherd and husky mix, the book follows Charns’s recovery after hospitalization for major depression with psychotic features. Annie’s lively perspective makes difficult subjects approachable while establishing the bond between dog and owner as the book’s emotional center. Her declaration, “I rescued Alex and the whole family,” neatly captures the reversal on which the narrative is built.
Across twenty-six compact chapters, Charns presents wellness as a collection of mutually reinforcing habits. Walking, medication, talk therapy, meditation, sleep, faith, friendship, reading, volunteer work, political participation, and gratitude all contribute to a balanced life. The book’s structure reflects this philosophy, moving briskly among personal memories, observations, photographs, and Annie’s comic complaints. Her demands for walks, games of fetch, and generous portions of dog treats give the narrative an appealing rhythm and keep its advice grounded in daily experience.
The book gains depth from Charns’s account of intergenerational trauma. His mother’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland, her later struggles with post-traumatic stress, and his own early encounters with Holocaust history illuminate the fears that shaped his family. Charns writes with particular honesty about psychosis, suicidal thoughts, sleep deprivation, and the stigma surrounding psychiatric hospitalization. The chapters on treatment and family support are direct and humane, presenting recovery as sustained work supported by professional care, meaningful routines, and personal relationships.
Annie’s humor gives the book its distinctive personality, but its strongest quality is the sincerity beneath the jokes. Charns’s affection for his dog becomes a way of expressing gratitude for the people, practices, and communities that helped restore his health. When Annie defines canine devotion by saying, “That is the power of the dog. Love. Love. And more love,” the line also summarizes the book’s central conviction. Concise, intimate, and encouraging, Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness offers an accessible portrait of recovery rooted in companionship, purposeful activity, and care.
Pages: 78 | ASIN : B0H699ML1N
