Blog Archives
Tom Ryan’s Shoes
T.A. Keenan’s Tom Ryan’s Shoes is a famine tale told as family legend, with one foot in hard history and the other in Irish folklore. The book opens in 1933 Connecticut, where an old manuscript tucked inside a pair of shoes brings an 1846 story back to life. From there, it turns into a road story, a courtship story, and a ghost-tinged inheritance story all at once. What gives it shape is the sense that memory itself is part of the plot. This is a book about how families carry things forward: land, grief, jokes, warnings, and stories polished by retelling.
What I liked most is the way Keenan lets the famine stay present without reducing every scene to misery. Tom and Frank move through a countryside full of hunger, cruelty, and fear, but the novel keeps making room for talk, oddball humor, local characters, and flashes of generosity. That balance matters. It gives the book motion and humanity. The pig Toto is a smart touch too. She could have been a gimmick, but instead, she helps keep the story earthy and lively, which suits a novel so interested in survival at the level of the body.
The strongest thread running through the book is its belief that folklore and practical life belong together. The bean feasa, the raven, the little men, and the story of Lady Edith all deepen the novel rather than floating above it as decoration. Keenan uses the uncanny to talk about care, justice, and obligation. One of the book’s best lines is, “Farewell! May you never wear a soldier’s buttons.” That lands as both blessing and warning, and it captures the novel’s moral core better than a speech ever could.
The prose has a storyteller’s ease. It likes voices, side characters, and scenes that feel as if they were meant to be read aloud near a fire. Sometimes that means the book wanders a bit, or leans into anecdotal charm more than momentum, but even then it stays readable because the voice is so enjoyable. I also liked that the ending doesn’t just wrap up a romance. It circles back to storytelling itself, and to the way embellishment becomes part of family truth. When Quill says, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” I felt like the book is smiling at you and admitting exactly how it works.
This is an affectionate and imaginative historical novella that treats Irish memory as something lived, argued over, and handed down. It’s interested in courtship, class, famine, faith, and the strange half-magic logic of oral tradition. More than anything, it feels made by someone who wants these people, and this inheritance, to remain vivid. I came away thinking less about plot twists than about atmosphere and lineage: worn shoes, old roads, family voices, and the stubborn desire to keep going.
Pages: 132 | ASIN: B0GRV2NV9D
Thomas and the Magic Violin
I found Thomas and the Magic Violin to be a deeply moving picture book that I would be delighted to share with children in my classroom. The story follows Thomas as he works hard to prepare for a spring concert, facing the frustration, self-doubt, and perseverance that are such familiar parts of learning something worthwhile. What I loved most is the book’s gentle message that growth often comes through patience, encouragement, and the quiet support of others. It presents musical practice honestly, while still wrapping the story in warmth and wonder.
This book stands out because it treats children’s emotions with real respect. Thomas is discouraged, embarrassed, determined, and hopeful, and those feelings are shown in a way young readers can understand. The relationship between Thomas and the older violinist across the courtyard is especially beautiful. Their connection is not built through long conversations, but through music, listening, and kindness. From a teacher’s perspective, that makes the story especially powerful, because it shows children that mentorship can be quiet, meaningful, and life-changing.
Illustrator Sofia Panchyshyn’s artwork is soft, expressive, and full of feeling, using warm pastel colors, floral details, and flowing musical lines to create a calm, magical atmosphere. The pictures help tell the story by showing Thomas’s changing emotions, the beauty of the courtyard setting, and the almost dreamlike presence of the master violinist’s music. I was especially taken by the scenes where the music seems to travel through the air, turning sound into something children can see.
I would highly recommend this book for classrooms, libraries, and families. It opens the door to thoughtful conversations about practice, resilience, artistic expression, grief, and gratitude, all in a way that remains accessible to young readers. Most of all, it is a lovely reminder that encouragement can leave a lasting mark on a child’s life. Thomas and the Magic Violin is a tender, memorable book that I loved, and I believe many children will find both comfort and inspiration in its pages.
Pages: 38 | ISBN : 978-9528206088
The Wind Blows Sometimes Gently or Wildly
Away from the City follows the journey of a maple leaf, leaving the noise behind and finding calm in the wild, made even more moving by your real-life reflections on family, travel, and nature as comfort during ALS. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
There are so many inspirations for the story, and none of them are specific to any one order. Fall is my favorite season of the year, especially when it has just started. The green is still very present, but yellow and orange decide they want to be a part of the aesthetics. The wind blows sometimes gently or wildly, while that swoosh sound is all you hear. It’s peaceful. When I was younger, we would often go wood hauling to prepare for the Winter season. My mother grew up in the Chuska Mountains, and my dad grew up near Gallup, NM, where the Cibola National Forest and the Zuni Mountains are accessible. My family lived near large hills, so my sisters and I were always up in them for hours. My parents always took my sisters and me on nature drives, so some of my best memories are from those trips. If we stayed at home, we planted or gardened, but we were always outside, and there was nothing better. As my parents grew older, our trips lessened, but I ended up working in Yellowstone National Park for five seasons as a younger woman. It was the absolute best experience of my life. Later in life, my mom was diagnosed with ALS, which was very frightening for my family. Even at her weakest, my mom loved nature until the very end, even when all she could do sometimes was look out the window. There was comfort in knowing that nature still brought her inner joy.
How did you decide which “stops” the leaf would make, and did any scenes get cut along the way?
I have loved writing poetry for many years. I have many poems that no one has read before. I wrote “Away from the City” about a beautiful leaf envisioned. I have seen some beautiful waterfalls while living in Yellowstone National Park, and I have seen just beautiful scenery from where both my parents grew up. I used those memories as a stop for the leaf to visit because they are magical. Because the story started off as a poem, thankfully, I didn’t cut any scenes.
The artwork balances peaceful melancholy with warmth and light. What visual choices were most important to you in showing that seasonal transition?
I envisioned all the colors of early fall. It’s so vibrant. The colors are prominent and pop. The green looks greener, and the leaves are in transition from green to yellow, orange, and brown. It’s just beautiful how that happens. The Earth lets you know it’s alive, and it changes just like people do. The sky has this wonderful way of somehow matching the fall hue. As for the photos in the book, my agent, Amanda Zillman, thought it would be a unique touch to add photos. She added beautiful notes to each of my photos, clarifying some of the memories that inspired my first story.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I am a Native American from the Navajo tribe. My next children’s book is a hommage to my cultural roots. It’s called “The Hogan that Cheii Built.” I have many stories to share, and I hope the readers will love them.
Author Links: Amazon | Website
Away from the City is a short melodic story about appreciating Autumn’s vibrant colors in the fall season while giving credit to nature’s beauty.
Spunky Spirit
Kali the Elephant Learns from Socrates the Philosopher follows a young elephant being teased at school who wishes she could change how she looks, until she meets a philosopher who helps her change her perspective. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration was hearing about my granddaughter and other kids getting teased, and being unhappy about the usual responses recommended in children’s books, as well as in real life. I wanted to show kids that they could stand up for themselves and use humor to get the teasers to back off. They didn’t need to take revenge or wait for adults to do something about it. And then I remembered how Socrates used humor to respond to his teasers and win a beauty contest! So that gave me a chance to introduce Socrates to my readers, and imagine how Kali would respond to her teasers.
What makes Kali relatable for children facing teasing or insecurity?
Children will be attracted to her spunky spirit and be inspired by the fact that she manages to solve her problem with good humor, win her classmates’ admiration, and thus solidify her friendship with them.
How did working with illustrator Ady Branzei shape the final book, and how important are illustrations in conveying emotional nuance in a story like this?
Ady Branzei’s illustrations do a marvelous job of conveying Kali’s varying states of mind: her eagerness to go to school, her feelings of hurt when her friends tease her, her decision to take matters into her own hands and “shrink” her features, and failing that, her decision to follow Socrates’ lead and prove to her friends how lucky she is to have the features she does.
Do you plan to explore more philosophy-inspired children’s stories?
Yes, I have already started exploring an idea based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Kali the Elephant | Website | Amazon
Kali the Elephant is hurt when her elementary-school friends make fun of her big ears, long trunk, and too-big-for-an-elephant eyes. She tries everything to shrink her features, but sadly, nothing works. She then turns to her comic books and discovers that the ancient philosopher Socrates was also teased for his appearance. How did he respond to his friends? With a twinkle in his eye, Socrates used humor to turn the teasing around. Inspired by his wisdom, Kali finds the perfect words to reply to her friends, a reply that leaves everyone laughing and wishing they looked like her!
This beautifully illustrated picture book seamlessly weaves a classic philosophical story into a modern, relatable tale for children ages 3-8. It gently tackles themes of:
* Dealing with teasing and bullying
* Building self-esteem and resilience
* Using humor and emotional intelligence to solve problems
* Celebrating what makes you unique.
“Kali the Elephant Learns from Socrates the Philosopher” is more than just a story, it’s a conversation starter for parents and teachers about friendship, kindness, and critical thinking. It has received multiple 5-star editorial and customer reviews and is perfect for fans of books by Janna Levin and Kobi Yamada. Grab your copy today and join Kali on her journey of self-discovery!
Realistic Meat Substitute: Poems and Whatever Else
Realistic Meat Substitute is a jagged, feverish collection of poems and hybrid pieces that feel steeped in the fumes of late-stage American life. Across sections like “Uncanny Valley,” “Thoroughly Cooked,” “Frankenstein Complex,” and “Kool-Aid or Hemlock,” author Chris D’Errico writes out of a world saturated by conspiracy, commodification, digital alienation, political hysteria, ecological dread, and a stubborn, battered hunger for something more human.
What stayed with me most was the book’s texture: its collision of the grotesque and the lyrical, the absurd and the mournful. One moment we’re in the carnivalesque overload of “Post-Organic Afterworld” or “The Idiot’s Guide to Coup D’etat,” with their clang of slogans, grift, and synthetic identity, and the next we’re in something unexpectedly tender and elegiac, as in “Rock Formations,” with its dead friend Reggie and its gentle ache of memory, or “Departures,” which softens into grief, time, and farewell.
I admired the momentum of the language. D’Errico has a gift for startling phrasing and hard, memorable turns of image. He can be funny, ugly, and very beautiful in the space of a few lines. “Truth Is a Bust” turns truth into a whole unstable, disreputable character, grubby and theatrical and impossible to domesticate, and that poem captures much of the book’s method at its best: personification pushed until it becomes social diagnosis. Elsewhere, pieces like “NOLA Elegy” and “A Love Supreme” show he can do something looser and more melodic, letting place and music carry emotional weight without losing his edge.
I also loved the recurring fascination with sound, rhythm, performance, and noise, the sense that music is one of the few surviving ways to get back to the body, to breath, to soul. The book’s density occasionally asked a lot of me as a reader. Its mode is often accumulation, barrage, and incantation, which can be exhilarating, though in a few poems I felt the intensity of the language overshadowed some of the deeper emotional or reflective movement.
This is a collection deeply suspicious of false transcendence, macho mythmaking, internet brain-rot, and the various ways people trade complexity for certainty. Again and again, D’Errico returns to the emptiness of slogans and the seduction of ideological theater, whether in “Resist the Fallen World,” “Your Motherboard Doesn’t Love You,” or “The Mirage,” where he cuts through delusion with the plain imperative to go outside, listen to birds, pay attention to rain, traffic, physics, reality. The book is full of contempt for fraudulence, but it isn’t nihilistic. Under all the snarling satire, there’s a real plea for honesty, listening, embodiment, and moral wakefulness. Even the title starts to feel right in that context. So much here is about substitutions: synthetic feeling for feeling, performance for conviction, algorithm for conscience, spectacle for life. And beneath the book’s wild surfaces, I felt a sincere grief over what gets lost when we accept the fake thing as enough.
Realistic Meat Substitute wants to scrape, taunt, lament, and sing, sometimes all at once. That won’t be for everyone, but for readers drawn to politically charged poetry, surreal imagery, beat-inflected verbal riffing, and work that wrestles openly with the psychic junkyard of contemporary life, I think this book has real bite and real feeling. It left me unsettled, impressed, and more moved than I expected. I’d recommend it most to readers who like their poetry feral, intelligent, and unafraid of mess.
Pages: 63 | ISBN : 978-1917272131
May Flowers at The Three Coins Inn
May Flowers at The Three Coins Inn is a work of contemporary women’s fiction with a strong romantic thread, set around an Umbrian agriturismo in Todi where a fresh round of guests arrive carrying private disappointments, old grief, and the quiet hope that a change of place might also become a change of life. Author Kimberly Sullivan brings together characters like Lisa, reeling after a public heartbreak, Antonio, an aging artist haunted by love and regret, Sharon, trapped inside a polished life that feels emotionally thin, and Margherita, a blocked novelist pushed out of isolation, then lets their stories brush against one another in ways that feel warm, restorative, and gently transformative.
I liked how readable and welcoming the novel feels. It has that lovely “settle in and stay awhile” quality that good comfort fiction can have. Sullivan clearly enjoys people, and that comes through in the way she gives each character a distinct ache, a private embarrassment, or a stubborn little defense mechanism that makes them feel human. I also liked the choice to structure the novel through multiple points of view. It creates a sense of emotional crosscurrent. Everyone arrives at the inn carrying something heavy, and the book keeps asking what happens when people are given beauty, routine, food, conversation, and just enough kindness to lower their guard.
I was especially drawn to the author’s interest in second chances. This is a story that understands that people bring themselves with them, even to beautiful places. Lisa’s hurt, Antonio’s bitterness, Sharon’s dissatisfaction, and Margherita’s fear do not disappear on command. They soften slowly. That felt honest. The book leans into coincidence and comfort in a way that is in line with its genre, and readers who like their fiction sharper or less emotionally tidy may notice that. Still, I found that the novel earns much of its warmth because it pays attention to loneliness, pride, and the awkwardness of starting over. It knows healing can be quiet. It can happen over coffee, over conversation, over the simple relief of being seen.
May Flowers at The Three Coins Inn is the kind of book I would recommend to readers who enjoy character-driven women’s fiction, cozy armchair travel, and romances where the emotional reset matters as much as the pairing off. It would especially suit someone who wants a hopeful read with an Italian backdrop, an ensemble cast, and a generous belief that life can open up again even after disappointment. For readers in the mood for something reflective, comforting, and quietly life-affirming, I think it will be a very satisfying stay.
ASIN : B0GLTQ967Q
The Hermit’s Hut
As a parent who absolutely loves children’s books, I found The Hermit’s Hut to be such a lovely surprise. It has that rare storybook feeling that makes you want to slow down, snuggle up with your child, and read every page a little more softly. The story follows Francis, an author who becomes discouraged by the noisy, rushed world around him and heads to the mountains in search of peace. That setup alone feels wonderfully unusual for a children’s book, and it gives the whole story a gentle and thoughtful heart.
Francis’s journey from sadness and frustration to connection and purpose is tender and meaningful, and his friendship with the goatherd Erasmus adds warmth and humor in a very natural way. I especially loved how the story turns knitting, storytelling, and kindness into something almost magical. It’s the kind of children’s book that opens the door to great family conversations about feelings, loneliness, creativity, and how people can care for one another.
The illustrations are dreamy, quirky, and absolutely packed with atmosphere. The mountain scenes, glowing campfires, tall trees, yarn, goats, and quaint little hut all make the book feel like a fairy tale wrapped in a hand-knit blanket. There’s so much to look at on every page that younger kids will enjoy browsing the pictures even when the themes are a bit deeper. Visually, it feels both whimsical and calm, which is honestly a delightful combination for bedtime reading.
This isn’t a super silly, bouncy read-aloud; it’s more of a quiet gem, perfect for families who enjoy heartfelt stories with a big message. I’d recommend it especially for kids who like reflective books and for grown-ups who want stories with a little soul in them. The Hermit’s Hut felt cozy, thoughtful, and genuinely moving, a book with a kind voice and a warm cup-of-cocoa spirit. I’d happily add this one to our home shelf.
Pages: 44 | ISBN : 978-9528202424
You’re Not Too Old, and It’s Not Too Late: Weekly Practices for Meaning, Mindfulness, and New Possibilities at Midlife and Beyond
You’re Not Too Old, and It’s Not Too Late is a warm, research-informed companion for midlife and later adulthood, structured as fifty-two short chapters of reflection and practice rather than a single linear argument. Author Ilene Berns-Zare writes out of positive psychology, mindfulness, and lived experience, urging readers to rethink aging not as a narrowing corridor but as a season still open to meaning, creativity, resilience, and renewal. The book moves easily between scientific findings and intimate personal images: a chain link fence that comes to stand for fear of what lies beyond retirement, the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi as a way of honoring cracks rather than hiding them, and a red maple tree whose stubborn growth becomes a tender emblem of endurance. What emerges is less a manifesto than a weekly invitation to ask better questions of one’s life and to answer them with attention, gentleness, and action.
Berns-Zare is earnest, but not brittle. She writes like someone who has had to coax herself, morning by morning, toward steadier ground. I felt that especially in the passages where she admits to feeling unsettled by aging, by loss, by transition, and then slowly turns those anxieties into inquiry instead of denial. The chapter built around the gratitude letter to her high school music teacher gave the book an unexpected depth of feeling. It reminded me that her central subject isn’t really optimization. It’s reverence. Reverence for teachers, for family, for inner life, for the possibility that even now, after disappointment or fatigue or grief, something unfinished in us may still want to bloom.
I also admired the way the book keeps trying to braid ideas with practice. Berns-Zare returns to a familiar constellation of themes: growth mindset, gratitude, mindfulness, purpose, supportive relationships, self-compassion, and flow. I think these are sturdy and worthwhile ideas, and she presents them with clarity and conviction. Because the chapters are designed as weekly meditations, a few insights arrive in slightly different clothing. Even so, the writing has a sincere luminosity that carried me through those repetitions. I was especially moved by her refusal to make aging sound glamorous. She makes it relatable. Bodies falter, identities shift, energy changes, grief enters the room, and yet she keeps pressing toward a broader, kinder language for what a later life can be.
I found this to be a generous and thoughtful book. It offers companionship, perspective, and a believable faith that a person can still grow wiser, more open, more alive. I’d recommend it most to readers in midlife and beyond who want reflective, research-aware encouragement rather than hard-edged self-help, and also to anyone standing at a threshold, wondering whether change still belongs to them. This book’s answer is yes.
Pages: 252 | ISBN : 978-1957354958
