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Bones of Black Saints follows two civil rights attorneys defending a young Black activist accused of shooting a white police officer while confronting racial injustice, police solidarity, and competing versions of truth in Durham, North Carolina. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I represented a young man named Carlos Riley in Durham. Bones of Black Saints is a fictionalized take on his trial.
How did you develop Zenko’s mixture of anxiety, humor, faith, intelligence, and self-doubt?
I wanted a passionate, committed trial attorney who struggled with mental health issues.
Why was it important to portray accomplished attorneys who also struggle with mental health?
I’ve grappled with my own mental health demons. Realistically presenting these issues was a goal of mine in this and in the series of other books, such as The Girl Wore a Hockey Helmet. We trial attorneys bring our personal baggage into the courtroom as much as we try to keep it out. Substance abuse, alcoholism, and depression disproportionately affect lawyers. That’s the reality. One of my clients was sent to Death Row in N.C. because he had a drunk trial attorney. After almost thirty years, the Governor commuted his sentence to life without parole.
What responsibility do you think fiction has when engaging with painful historical events?
Fiction can help us learn and make sense of racial injustice and prosecutorial misconduct. As a writer, I feel a responsibility to confront injustices of the past. That is the first step in combating such inequities in the future.
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Bones of Black Saints
Alex Charns’s Bones of Black Saints is a legal thriller and courtroom drama rooted in the politics, history, and racial tensions of Durham, North Carolina. The case centers on Marcos Salazar, a young Black Lives Matter activist accused of shooting a white police officer during a traffic stop. His defense rests with veteran civil rights attorneys Star Gwiazda and Zenko Luczek, who believe the officer shot himself and that the police department has closed ranks around him. From jury selection through closing arguments, the novel turns legal procedure into a contest over whose version of reality will survive.
Zenko’s first-person narration gives this crime novel its distinct personality. He’s anxious, funny, devoutly Catholic, obsessed with hockey, and deeply shaped by his Polish family’s experiences during World War II. His thoughts move freely among the trial, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the Greensboro Massacre, old wounds, and elaborate hockey metaphors. Those digressions make the story feel intimate and politically alert, though I did feel that their frequency can slow the courtroom suspense at times. They also reveal how history lives inside Zenko’s daily choices, especially his determination to recognize fascism and institutional abuse before they’re allowed to hide behind respectable appearances.
The courtroom scenes are the strongest part of this police corruption thriller. Charns, a civil rights attorney, writes with a practitioner’s command of motions, evidence, jury selection, witness preparation, and cross-examination. Star is especially memorable, confronting hostile witnesses and prosecutorial misconduct with theatrical nerve and sharp legal instincts. Her relationship with Zenko brings humor and affection to proceedings charged with danger. Their shared mental health histories add further depth, showing two capable advocates who rely on medication, routines, friendship, faith, and hockey to remain steady under extraordinary pressure.
As social justice fiction, Bones of Black Saints connects one contested traffic stop to racial profiling, white supremacy, economic inequality, police solidarity, and the limits of courtroom justice. Its humor keeps the political argument lively, while its detailed trial strategy makes the eventual verdict feel earned. The final development lands with particular force because it exposes acquittal as one moment in a much longer struggle. This is an impassioned legal thriller about lawyers fighting for a client while wrestling with their own histories, blind spots, fears, and stubborn faith in justice. I recommend Charns’s novel to readers who enjoy thought-provoking legal thrillers that explore racial injustice and the complex pursuit of justice.
Pages: 419 | ASIN : B08F75MNK2
A Black Magic
Joseph Stone’s A Black Magic is an expansive work of historical dark fantasy that combines Gothic horror, a multigenerational family saga, and a coming-of-age story. Set primarily in 1974, the novel follows Fran and Mary Jane as they investigate Daedrian, the possessive spirit bound to Fran’s maternal bloodline. Their research leads into the memories of Máirín and Violet Ralston, two eighteenth-century women whose encounters with violence and witchcraft shaped the family’s inheritance. Stone develops the supernatural system through three linked forces, blood, intention, and spiritual light, giving the mystery both emotional significance and coherent internal rules.
The relationship between Fran and Mary Jane provides the novel’s strongest foundation. Their handwritten exchanges combine analytical discipline, mordant humor, and profound loyalty, allowing them to investigate experiences that can scarcely be discussed aloud. The line “You will be the grief. I will be the clock” captures how effectively their contrasting temperaments work together. Fran possesses the inherited power and bears its physical cost, while Mary Jane supplies structure, skepticism, and strategy. Their gradual shift from frightened researchers to deliberate adversaries gives the narrative a satisfying sense of intellectual and moral progression.
Stone also places the supernatural conflict within a richly developed family drama. Laura’s struggle with widowhood, Richie’s experience as a gay teenager in a volatile Catholic household, and Carla’s attempt to rebuild a life after abuse broaden the novel’s consideration of secrecy and survival. These storylines show how domination can pass through families without magic, while acts of recognition can interrupt that inheritance. The novel treats sexual violence directly and at considerable length, but its deeper concern is the aftermath: how survivors interpret memory, recover agency, and decide which truths can safely be shared. As Fran observes, “The truth was a house with no doors,” a metaphor that aptly expresses the burden carried by nearly every major character.
A Black Magic has the scale and patience of a family chronicle. Its alternating timelines steadily clarify Daedrian’s history, Máirín’s tragedy, and the flawed act of witchcraft that binds them all together. Stone’s prose is atmospheric and frequently lyrical, particularly in its descriptions of houses, weather, grief, and unseen attention, though the density of figurative language occasionally slows scenes that already carry substantial dramatic weight. The conclusion rewards the novel’s long preparation by resolving its central conflict through character, knowledge, and sacrifice, then extending its consequences across fifty years. The result is a thoughtful, unsettling novel about inherited harm, the ethics of power, and the difficult work of seeing another person clearly.
Pages: 561 | ASIN : B0HJ78S7BS
Jack & Will
D.E. Ring’s Jack & Will, the fourth volume in The Scandalous Memoirs of General John Torrance, is a historical espionage novel set amid the European partition of East Africa. Narrated by the older Jack Torrance as a record of his intelligence work in the 1880s, the novel begins with his escape from the fallen city of Khartoum and follows him into Zanzibar, the German and British competition for influence, and the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Its extensive cast includes diplomats, monarchs, soldiers, merchants, missionaries, and spies, many drawn from history. Jack moves among them as an observer, interpreter, servant, and occasional strategist, giving the political contest an immediate human perspective.
The memoir form suits Jack’s candid, dryly humorous voice. He’s perceptive about vanity and institutional failure, but his self-awareness prevents his judgments from becoming merely cynical. Ring combines political conversation with scenes of physical danger, from a cyclone in the Indian Ocean to the concluding operation at Pangani. The dialogue is especially effective at revealing how governments and commercial interests convert ambition into policy. Historical exposition is substantial, and the middle portion sometimes advances through long conversations, but those exchanges establish the competing motives behind the action and make the eventual violence feel consequential.
At the book’s center is the moral cost of imperial expansion. Treaties are written in languages local rulers can’t read, commerce provides the rationale for occupation, and public narratives turn failure into heroism. Ring also gives meaningful attention to Africans who understand the political transformation around them, including Pera Dandji, Tippu Tib, Nuru, and Hasani. Tippu Tib’s observation, “Our world is over. We play this game for ourselves alone,” captures the novel’s sense of people adapting to decisions imposed from elsewhere. Jack’s friendship with the German intelligence officer Wilfried Tapken adds another dimension: they remain loyal to their countries while recognizing that facts, restraint, and personal trust can matter more than national posturing.
The title gathers several relationships around Jack, particularly those involving Prince Wilhelm, Wilfried Tapken, and William Stairs. Each man represents a different response to power and experience. Stairs provides the most affecting thread, returning from the jungle hardened, bereaved, and estranged from the hopeful young cadet Jack once knew. Jack’s description of his own moral compass, “The ten-year-old Jack. The best I ever was,” gives their reunion its emotional weight. Jack & Will is an intelligent, humane historical adventure whose wit, political detail, and reflective first-person voice support a serious examination of loyalty, identity, and the stories nations tell about conquest.
Pages: 293 | ASIN : B0H6KHFPBN
A Very Human Question
Bella Santini in the Land of Everlasting Change follows a fourteen-year-old girl who enters a magical fairy realm and discovers that her mysterious connection to its magic may reveal a hidden truth about her identity. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Bella Santini was born from my own experience of feeling different as a child. I was highly sensitive and deeply aware of the emotions around me, but I did not always understand what I was sensing or where I belonged. I wanted to create a character who carried some of that same uncertainty.
Fantasy gave me a beautiful way to explore those feelings. Bella begins the story believing she knows who she is and what her world is, even though she has never felt completely at home in it. Then she enters a place where everything she understands about herself begins to shift. The magic is part of the adventure, but underneath it is a very human question: What happens when you discover that the things that made you feel different might actually be part of who you are?
That became the heart of the Land of Everlasting Change. Bella is entering a magical world, but she is also entering a deeper understanding of herself.
Bella enters the fairy realm almost by accident. What did you want her unexpected journey to represent?
Life rarely announces the experiences that are going to change us. We can be moving through an ordinary day and suddenly find ourselves somewhere we never expected to be, emotionally or literally. Bella does not choose a grand quest. She falls into one.
I wanted that unexpected journey to reflect the experience of growing up, particularly during the tween and early teen years. The world begins changing around you, relationships change, your awareness of yourself changes, and suddenly the rules that once made sense do not seem quite as certain.
The Land of Everlasting Change makes that experience visible. Bella cannot control everything that happens around her, but she can learn to understand what she feels, make choices about how she responds, and discover what those choices reveal about her. For me, that is where courage begins.
Yelimoon Fairy School adds a magical-school element to the story. What was most exciting about creating the school and its magical curriculum?
Yelimoon was tremendous fun to create because it grew out of a real place that captured my imagination. I lived in Cheltenham, England, and often admired the beautiful buildings of Cheltenham College. Their historic architecture became the visual inspiration for Yelimoon Fairy School. I loved taking something that existed in the real world and imagining what might be happening behind those walls if they belonged to a school for fairies.
From there, I could let my imagination run free. I created magical classes, unusual teachers, creatures, friendships, mistakes, and all the delightful complications that happen when young people are learning abilities they do not yet know how to control. What interested me most, though, was that Bella could not simply master a spell and suddenly master herself. She has to experiment, make mistakes, become frustrated, try again, and learn whom she can trust. Yelimoon teaches magic, but the experiences Bella has there teach her about herself. That is one of the things I love about writing fantasy for young readers. You can give a child an extraordinary world while still speaking to something very real in their life.
What can readers expect from Bella’s continuing adventures in the Land of Everlasting Change?
Bella’s world continues to grow, and so do the challenges she faces. Each adventure explores another layer of growing up through fantasy, friendship, difficult choices, misunderstandings, consequences, and, of course, magic.
In Troll War, Bella begins discovering that understanding another person requires looking beyond what we have been told about them. In Princess Bella Visits the Dragon’s Lair, her choices become increasingly important, and she learns that even well-intentioned decisions can have consequences. As the series continues, the world expands further, and Bella’s understanding of herself becomes more complex.
There are larger mysteries unfolding as well, including questions about Bella’s connection to this world and where she truly belongs. I want readers to have the pleasure of following an ongoing fantasy adventure while growing alongside Bella. She does not become fearless or suddenly have everything figured out. She becomes more capable of listening to herself, understanding others, making choices, and meeting change when it arrives. That, to me, is a much more interesting kind of magic.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
When Bella follows a trail of glowing lights into the woods, she’s suddenly swept into the Land of Everlasting Change, a magical realm where nothing stays the same for long and courage is tested in unexpected ways. Taken to a mysterious fairy school, Bella must face a series of magical trials that challenge not just her abilities but also her confidence, her choices, and her belief in herself.
As Bella navigates strange rules, powerful fairies, and friendships that test her heart, she begins to discover that real strength isn’t about being fearless, it’s about learning how to stand steady when things feel uncertain.
Bella Santini in the Land of Everlasting Change is the first book in a heartfelt middle-grade fantasy series about resilience, identity, and finding courage from within. It’s a story for sensitive readers, children who have felt out of place, and anyone learning how to trust themselves in a world that keeps changing.
Perfect for middle-grade readers who love magical worlds, brave heroines, and emotionally meaningful adventures.
Good Intentions
Glee the Christmas Goblin follows a group of mischievous goblins who set out to save Christmas after Santa’s elves hide the children’s presents, discovering the joy of giving along the way. What draws you to write children’s literature?
Jones: Children’s stories are often where our earliest ideas about courage, kindness, and identity begin. Before children can explain those values, they can already recognize them in the characters they love.
Olivo: We wanted to create a story that encourages positive behavior without using threats, shame, or fear. Glee is mischievous, imperfect, and still learning, which makes his growth more meaningful. Children do not need perfect heroes. They need heroes who show them that making a mistake does not define you, but what you choose to do next can.
The elves hide the presents because they’re tired of watching children receive gifts. What inspired this unusual twist on the traditional Christmas story?
Olivo: We began with a question: What if the people responsible for giving Christmas presents became convinced that children had forgotten how to give? That allowed us to reverse the traditional roles. The elves, usually seen as Christmas heroes, create the problem because their disappointment leads them to make the wrong choice. Meanwhile, the goblins, who are expected to take and cause trouble, become the unlikely characters capable of putting things right. That reversal reflects something we deeply believe: people are more complex than the labels placed on them. Good intentions can still lead to poor decisions, and someone with an imperfect past can choose to do something extraordinary. In our story, Christmas is not saved by the characters who appear to be the best. It is saved by those willing to change.
How did you develop the personalities and relationships among Glee and the other goblins?
Jones: We approached the goblins as a group of imperfect friends rather than as a collection of moral examples. They have different instincts, fears, strengths, and definitions of what it means to do the right thing. Those differences naturally create humor and conflict, but they also make the group stronger. Glee became the emotional center because he is caught between the goblin he has always been and the person he is discovering he can become. His friends challenge that transformation in different ways. Some encourage him, some question him, and others would be perfectly happy returning to ordinary goblin mischief. Their relationships reflect a lesson we wanted to explore honestly: change rarely happens in isolation. The people around us can resist our growth, complicate it, or help make it possible. Friendship does not require everyone to be the same. It asks them to keep choosing one another while they learn how to become better.
If Glee could return for another adventure, what kind of Christmas or holiday trouble might he find himself in?
Olivo: Glee would probably learn the right lesson and then apply it in the most spectacularly wrong way. Perhaps he decides that if giving brings joy, the answer is to give everyone everything they could possibly want.
Jones: Soon, the workshop is empty, the sleigh is dangerously overloaded, and Christmas has become complete chaos. Glee would then have to discover that generosity is not measured by how much we give, but by how carefully we understand what another person truly needs. That feels like the heart of any future Glee adventure: a well-intentioned mistake, plenty of goblin-sized chaos, and a deeper lesson hidden somewhere inside the trouble.
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The Power of Authenticity: Find Your Own Superpowers, Purpose, and Path to Success
Michelle Chappel’s The Power of Authenticity: Find Your Own Superpowers, Purpose, and Path to Success is a hands-on personal-growth book built around a playful but serious idea: each person has a distinctive combination of strengths, interests, instincts, and creative abilities that Chappel calls “superpowers.” Rather than treating purpose as one perfect career or a single grand talent, she introduces the idea of a “Constellation Calling,” where several gifts and passions combine to form a life that feels genuinely yours. The book develops that idea through 42 short chapters divided into five parts, moving from identifying the forces that keep people disconnected from themselves to discovering their strengths and putting those strengths into action. Chappel brings an unusual résumé to the subject. She’s a Princeton-trained cognitive psychologist who left academia to pursue music, and her own journey from professor to singer-songwriter, coach, and consultant becomes one of the book’s central case studies.
What gives the book its personality is the way Chappel mixes psychology, pop culture, music, memoir, and coaching exercises. Jungian ideas such as the persona, shadow, and “golden shadow” sit alongside Superman, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Iron Man, Batman, Star Wars, and Barbie. The superhero language could easily have been just decoration, but Chappel uses it as an organizing metaphor for the whole process: understand your origin story, recognize the abilities you’ve hidden, confront your personal “kryptonite,” and learn to use your strengths more deliberately. Part 3, for example, looks at family roles and social expectations as masks that can obscure a person’s deeper identity, while Part 4 asks readers to pay close attention to what comes naturally, what creates curiosity, what makes time disappear, and what they loved before other people’s expectations took over. The recurring songs, reflection questions, creativity projects, and chapter-end lessons make the book feel less like something you simply read and more like a course you participate in.
The strongest material comes from Chappel’s stories about students and coaching clients. Again and again, someone who has been living according to an inherited definition of success notices a neglected ability and begins experimenting with it. Those discoveries don’t always lead to dramatic career changes. Chappel is refreshingly open to the idea that a calling can be expressed through a hobby, volunteer work, creative project, or side pursuit while a perfectly serviceable job pays the bills. One young photographer, for instance, chooses to keep photography as a serious pursuit outside her stable career. That flexibility makes the book’s central argument more useful. Its message isn’t simply “follow your dream.” It’s closer to “pay attention to what repeatedly gives you energy, develop those abilities, and find practical places for them in your life.” The later chapters extend that idea into resilience, failure, grief, intuition, confidence, and community, emphasizing that becoming more authentic is an ongoing practice.
I’d recommend The Power of Authenticity to people who feel competent on paper but strangely disconnected from the life they’ve built, especially anyone reconsidering a career, returning to an old creative interest, recovering from burnout, or wondering why a conventionally successful path doesn’t feel especially satisfying. It would also work well for readers who enjoy doing exercises and journaling, since Chappel repeatedly asks you to stop, reflect, experiment, and revisit what you’ve learned. Her conversational voice is energetic, personal, and sometimes deliberately goofy, which fits a book that wants self-discovery to feel lively. By the end, her argument has widened beyond career satisfaction: she sees authenticity as a way of becoming more whole, forming stronger communities, and contributing something distinctly your own. The final invitation is essentially to keep noticing what calls to you, keep developing it, and accept that the answer may evolve as you do.
Pages: 224 | ISBN : 978-1963667431
