Blog Archives
Happy Thoughts: Going to the Beach
This sweet little children’s book follows Emma, a young girl with autism, as she heads to the beach with her friends Harper and Jerry. The day is full of excitement, sandcastles, and learning moments. Emma communicates using special waterproof cards her mom made, and through her friends’ kindness and understanding, the story shows how love and patience make adventures fun and safe for everyone.
I really liked how real the story felt. It didn’t sugarcoat things but still stayed gentle and positive. The way Emma’s excitement sometimes turns into overwhelm was so true to life, and the way her friends helped her made me smile. The writing is simple, but it fits perfectly for kids. I felt a lot of warmth from it, like a big sunny hug.
What really stuck with me was the message about friendship. Harper and Jerry never judged Emma, and that’s such an important thing for kids to see. The story didn’t feel preachy, just kind. The vibrant, cartoon-style illustrations depict heartwarming scenes of diverse characters. The illustrations are colorful and happy, matching that summer beach vibe. The writing has this rhythm that makes it feel like a conversation with a child, curious, honest, and full of energy.
I’d definitely recommend Happy Thoughts Going to the Beach by Lisa Jacovsky for kids around preschool or early elementary age. It’s perfect for storytime, especially for families or classrooms that want to talk about autism and inclusion in a positive way. It’s the kind of picture book that teaches empathy without even trying too hard. A good one to curl up with before a trip to the beach or anytime you just need a smile.
Pages: 29 | ASIN : B0FHL3Q61L
The Flight Enigma
The Flight Enigma dives straight into a storm of suspense, mixing high-tech intrigue with small-town drama. The story follows JJ and Jo, a couple seeking peace in Magnolia Bluff, only to be drawn into a national crisis when JJ’s friend Mike Hayes becomes entangled in the disappearance of secret stealth technology. What starts as a relaxing getaway spirals into a labyrinth of danger, deception, and loyalty. The narrative blends the technical precision of an espionage thriller with the warmth and humanity of a cozy mystery, creating a fast-paced tale that balances high stakes with emotional depth.
The writing is brisk, packed with sharp dialogue and layered scenes that pull you along. I loved how the authors make the technical parts feel real without bogging the story down. The tension builds naturally. It doesn’t rely on cheap tricks, just the slow burn of secrets unraveling. Sometimes, the shifts between domestic scenes and government-level suspense threw me off rhythm, but that unpredictability worked in its favor. It reminded me of life’s chaos, where personal drama and big events collide. The authors write with clear affection for their characters, and that sincerity gives the story its punch.
What really stuck with me was how human the book feels beneath all the mystery. There’s loyalty, fear, love, and betrayal, all tangled up like wires in a jet engine. Jo’s empathy and Mike’s vulnerability make the stakes feel real. I could feel their confusion and desperation, especially as they faced situations beyond their control. The writing style is smooth. It’s emotional, sometimes raw, and full of little moments that make you stop and feel. I caught myself rooting for them even when things looked hopeless. That’s a rare thing in thrillers nowadays.
The Flight Enigma is a thrilling read that surprised me with its heart. It’s perfect for readers who love mysteries with real emotional gravity, and for anyone who enjoys smart characters thrown into impossible situations. Tech lovers will appreciate the details, but it’s the relationships that make the story soar. The Flight Enigma feels like a modern twist on Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, but with more heart, sharper humor, and characters who feel like real people caught in extraordinary danger.
Pages: 266 | ASIN : B0FKKNQSB4
Bloodless We Go Buried: An Earth Mother Horror
Bloodless We Go Buried unfolds as an Earth Mother horror story that blends myth, ancestral memory, and a feeling of something old waking beneath the everyday world. The book moves through dreamlike scenes where the natural world feels alive and watchful. Its language carries a poetic rhythm, and the Proto Celtic threading through the chapters adds a strange and ancient pulse. The story works like a long walk through dark woods where every shadow seems to breathe, and where the characters find themselves caught between fear, kinship, and something that feels like a summons from the deep past.
The voice of the book has this raw and intimate quality that made me feel like I had stepped into someone’s private ritual. The writing style is bold and emotional. It plays around with language in ways that sometimes made me pause and reread, not because it was confusing but because it felt like I had stumbled into a hidden doorway. I liked that the horror leans more toward mood and spirit than monsters. It creeps instead of jumps. Every time I thought I knew where the story was going it would slide sideways and make me rethink what I thought I understood about the characters and the land.
At times, the prose leans into its own intensity, and I found myself both loving it and wanting to come up for air. Some passages feel almost like a personal journal or a field notebook. That mix made the book feel alive. I appreciated that the author was not afraid to be weird or tender or blunt. There is humor tucked between the shadows, too. A kind of self-awareness that kept me grounded while the story tried to lift me into stranger places.
In the end, I walked away feeling stirred and a little haunted. I would recommend Bloodless We Go Buried to readers who enjoy literary horror, mythic fiction, poetic language, and stories that feel more like a dream you carry with you afterward. If you like books that make you slow down and sink in, this one might be exactly what you are looking for.
Pages: 324 | ASIN : B0F463PNKY
Seven Magic Bullets
The Hole in Your Life is a compassionate and practical guide to navigating grief and bereavement, shared from a place of not just professional expertise, but lived personal experiences, making it relatable in a way other books are not. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I get a great deal of satisfaction, even joy, when I can relieve suffering. If you like, you can think of this as selfish: I’ve been cursed with way too much empathy, so, for example, the daily news is a horror show. I cannot avoid it because being informed is necessary for my job as a Professional Grandfather (striving for a tomorrow for today’s youngsters, and a tomorrow worth living in), so if I don’t take precautions, I shed sympathetic tears of blood in response to war, environmental disasters, inhumane treatment of people and the like.
This book sets out how I deal with deep distress of any kind including this second-hand grief, but also the death of my daughter, and what I have taught to lovely people during decades of my counseling psychology practice. And the good thing is that these tools are all science-validated.
All sentient beings are apprentice Buddhas, apprentice Jesuses. So, when I remember (but never when I don’t), I act as if I were already enlightened. The Dalai Lama has said, “My religion is kindness,” and “The aim of enlightenment is to be of service,” so this book is an important step on my chosen journey.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
First, life is too short for the seriousness it deserves. There is no point in being gloomy when writing about sad topics. In fact, fun is one of the “seven magic bullets” that shoot down monsters like depression, chronic anxiety, irrational anger. When you put a good dose of the seven magic bullets into your life, you are a pogo stick: the harder life bounces on you, the higher you rise. You’ll find them described at http://bobswriting.com/psych/firstaid.html
Second, whatever is, is. Acceptance, what in Buddhism is called equanimity, is the most powerful way to deal with any problem. This doesn’t mean condoning evil, but is part of being an effective change agent.
Third, forgiveness (including self-forgiveness), gratitude, and generosity are the most important tools of positive psychology, which is the scientific basis of my work.
Oh… about generosity. I have a long-standing policy: anyone sending me proof of purchase of one of my books, and anyone subscribing to my blog, Bobbing Around, has earned a free (electronic) book.
What was the most challenging part of writing your book, and what was the most rewarding?
I love all my children. That includes the real physical two-legged beings who call me Dad, and also the children of my imagination. On three occasions, these two groups have overlapped, giving me the opportunity to give double love.
My fictionalized autobiography, Ascending Spiral, has my children in it with their genuine personalities, and the events in their lives, but fictionalized names. (How surprising is that?)
Anikó: The stranger who loved me is my biography of a remarkable woman who achieved the impossible and survived the unsurvivable more than once. She is my mother. I visited her in Hungary during her dying days and returned with a huge amount of material. I couldn’t even look at it for two years, then wrote the book, which has won four awards.
The third book is of course The Hole in Your Life: Grief and Bereavement. It uses the story of how I dealt with the death of my daughter, Natalie, so there she is, loved twice over. Is that challenging enough?
And this is also the most rewarding part. Unlike my mother’s biography, this book was almost completed weeks after Natalie’s death, thanks to all I have learned in the past twenty-four years.
What do you hope is one thing readers take away from The Hole in Your Life?
Your wonderful reviewer has pinpointed it. The best way to deal with suffering is through it rather than avoidance. This gives us the opportunity for growing from the experience. Hmm… I should be about 50 ft tall by now. Hold it, that’s not the kind of growth I mean.
Thanks to the handicap of a scientific training, I don’t believe anything but go with the evidence. So far, I’ve spent a brief 82.75 years collecting that evidence, so I won’t list it all here. There is a part-completed draft of a book hiding in my computer about that. But the conclusion is that the purpose of life is spiritual growth. There is no point in change when everything is perfect. Suffering is the spur to growth. It doesn’t feel nice—but ask a teenager about growing pains.
A major loss is awful, but it is also the opportunity for a new start.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Bluesky | Facebook | Website
A Mother’s Determination
Born in Space: Unlocking Destiny follows a mother who donated her eggs to science, only to discover that they were used to conceive seven infants in space, who were raised in isolation and destined to define the next stage of our evolution. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I wanted to explore what happens when the most intimate human act–creation–becomes an instrument of science and survival. The idea came from real debates about fertility research, genetic engineering, and the ethics of creating life beyond Earth. I asked myself: what if the first humans truly born in space were not astronauts’ children, but part of a scientific project designed to save humanity? From that spark came Teagan Ward, a mother who gave something of herself to science, only to find herself blocked from contact with the babies she loved by the doctor who incubated them.
Your novel explores the morality and the cost of continuing the human race. What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think make for great fiction?
I’m fascinated by the contradictions within us-our capacity for love and empathy alongside our drive for power and control. When survival is at stake, morality becomes fluid, and that’s where stories come alive. Science fiction allows us to push those questions to their limits: What does it mean to be human when birth, love, and even consciousness are engineered? I think great fiction mirrors that tension between our ideals and our instincts, between the need to preserve what makes us human and the temptation to perfect it.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
At its heart, Born in Space is about motherhood, identity, and the ownership of life. I wanted to examine who controls our future-corporations, governments, or the individuals who dare to resist them. There’s also an environmental undercurrent: as Earth falters, humanity’s reach for survival shifts outward, to space, but our flaws follow us. And beneath the science and technology, there’s a deeply emotional core: a mother’s determination to reunite with her children, no matter how far apart they are.
Will there be a follow-up novel to this story? If so, what aspects of the story will the next book cover?
Yes. Born in Space is the first in the Sci-Fi Galaxy series. The follow-up, Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse, takes place years later on the Moon, where humanity’s survival depends on a genetic seed vault built into the regolith. Teagan’s story continues through her naturally born daughter Diana, who becomes a symbol of both hope and fear, a genetically engineered child hunted by those who believe they can control evolution itself. The moral and emotional questions deepen as the struggle shifts from reproduction to survival: who decides which forms of life deserve to endure?
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website | Tik Tok
CAN TEAGAN WIN THE COSMIC CUSTODY BATTLE OF A LIFETIME?
When Teagan Ward donates her eggs to science, she never imagines that the consequences will ripple across the cosmos. As Earth crumbles under the weight of conflict and climate disaster, Teagan discovers that seven children, born from her donated eggs, are the centerpieces of a daring experiment to populate the stars. Determined to reunite with her children, she finds herself entangled in a web of greed, betrayal, and cosmic ambition.
In the year 2068, humanity’s hope for survival lies beyond the confines of Earth. Orbiting space habitats offer sanctuary to the privileged, while the rest fight for survival on a deteriorating planet. Teagan’s journey to reclaim her children pits her against powerful adversaries: a ruthless mining magnate obsessed with the treasures of the universe, a morally ambiguous doctor bent on creating life in space at any cost, and a disgraced general seeking redemption and control.
As Teagan navigates the treacherous shoals of interstellar politics and corporate greed, she uncovers secrets that could change the fate of worlds. Her children, each with unique abilities and destinies, hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe and possibly saving humanity from itself.
Talthybius
Talthybius is a haunting and visceral reimagining of the Trojan aftermath. Told through the weary eyes of a messenger caught between glory and guilt, the story dives deep into the moral wreckage that follows victory. The book begins with the fall of Troy and never looks away from the ruin. Each chapter walks through ash and blood, following the Greek soldiers who linger among the dead and enslaved, unraveling their sanity as they prepare to sail home. The prose is poetic yet brutal, a steady rhythm of horror and reflection. It feels like a lament for everything war strips away, honor, innocence, and the very idea of home.
There’s no clean hero here, just men rotting in their own triumph. I liked that honesty. The dialogue is sharp but weary, like every word costs something. The authors paint the world not with beauty but with a kind of grim elegance, and I couldn’t stop reading. What struck me most was how small everything feels. Even the mighty Odysseus seems shrunken, his cunning dulled by time and grief. The narrator’s voice trembles between obedience and revulsion, and I found myself rooting for his silence to break. The violence is constant, but it’s never mindless, it feels like a slow confession.
The writing is so rich and dense that sometimes I had to stop to take it all in. It’s emotional as well. The scenes of cruelty are written with precision, and that makes them harder to stomach. Yet I admired that courage, to write without flinching. The book feels ancient and modern all at once. It asks what it means to be human when the gods have left, and the answer isn’t comforting. By the end, I felt like I had watched something sacred decay. And somehow, I couldn’t look away.
I’d recommend Talthybius to readers who want to feel something raw. If you love stories that peel back myth and stare straight at the people underneath, this is for you. The book belongs to those who appreciate tragedy not as spectacle, but as truth. Reading Talthybius felt a lot like stepping into the moral shadow of The Iliad, but with the raw intimacy and emotional weight of The Song of Achilles stripped of romance and steeped instead in regret and blood.
Pages: 273
Who Doesn’t Dream of Escape?
Sitnalta follows a young princess trapped in a kingdom ruled by cruelty and fear, who becomes restless, yearning for freedom, and escapes her captivity to embark on a journey of self-discovery. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Originally, Sitnalta began as a short story written for a school project. So, for all budding writers out there: don’t throw away old stories, and inspiration can strike in the most unlikely of places.
In grade seven, my English teacher put up a tic-tac-toe board on the chalkboard and said to make a line. In the line I chose were the words “coin, princess, escape”. From there, the story I was supposed to write should have been two pages. I handed in twelve. This short story just wouldn’t leave me alone. When I got into university, I pulled it out and reread it. Aside from the fact that I found the writing and some of the characterization a little juvenile (I was thirteen!), I felt that there was something there. I worked at it and eventually had a novel, and plans for five more.
Sitnalta was born at a time when most young people can feel trapped. I myself had issues with a bully at school, I didn’t know where I belonged. My friends and I were all figuring out who we were, who we wanted to be, and the character of Sitnalta was very much an extrapolation of that. Who doesn’t dream of escape?
In many contemporary coming-of-age fiction novels, authors often add their own life experiences to the story. Are there any bits of you in this story?
I am very much all over the story. The character of Aud is in many ways inspired by my grandmother who lived with me while I was growing up. Everyone used to say that she was a second mother to me. Aud’s nature, and her relationship with Sitnalta is very her. Sitnalta herself is an amalgamation of my childhood best friend, and characters from books I loved as a child. I used to say that she is my friend Marilyn superimposed on Anne Shirley. Sitnalta’s relationship with Najort, their time together, and how they speak with one another is something that came from every person’s desire to be seen, to be loved for who they are, and the need to be heard.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
I wanted to convey the importance of choice. Sitnalta feels that she has hers taken from her continuously. She looks at the world from a place heavy with loss, however, when her back is to the wall, she finds that there is always a choice to be made. It may not always be the best one possible, but it always exists. Everyone has the ability to take their lives into their own hands and run with it. I found that to be an important theme, how even the smallest person can make a choice and better their world.
Can you tell us more about what’s in store for Sitnalta and the direction of the second book?
Well, I don’t want to give too much away, but that pesky coin still exists, and we see so much more of the world Sitnalta lives in, even beyond the shores of Colonodona. The next book is called The Kingdom Thief, and you can read into that title whatever you want to. It’s an adventure book, and may or may not have some hints at a burgeoning romance.
Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads | Website
But Sitnalta has other ideas. Before her father can come for her, she sneaks out of her bedroom window, scales the castle walls, and enters the magical forest that surrounds her kingdom. There she meets Najort, a kind-hearted troll, who was tasked by a wizard decades earlier to protect a valuable secret—with his life, if necessary.
But King Supmylo has vowed that nothing will stop him from returning his daughter to Colonodona, and forcing her to go through with the royal wedding. With the help of friends from both kingdoms, Sitnalta and Najort flee ahead of the rabid king. For if they are captured, Supmylo will become so invincible, no one could stand against him
LITERARY TITAN 