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My Life Story
The book follows Tess, a young woman moving through a world that feels half dream, half reality. From her childhood prayers beneath the stars to her adult wanderings through galleries, cafés, and shadowy streets, she is haunted by questions of love, loss, and meaning. Along the way, she encounters figures like Jules, Samuel, and Sara, each carrying secrets and desires that pull her deeper into a web of longing and reflection. The novel drifts between memory and the present, mixing photography, magic, and fleeting encounters with moments of aching stillness. The story is a meditation on how people search for beauty and truth in a fractured world.
I felt a tug in two directions reading this book. On one hand, the writing is lush and cinematic, clearly born from its origins as a screenplay. Scenes play out like film reels: light shimmering on water, footsteps echoing in an empty church, faces caught in camera flashes. That worked beautifully for me, giving the book a dreamlike quality that made me want to live in its world. On the other hand, the density of description left me craving more dialogue and more movement. Still, the mood was so strong that I let myself get carried by it.
What I really liked was how the novel handles its ideas. It’s not just a story of Tess and Jules or Samuel and Sara, it’s about the ways we carry grief and desire through our lives. The characters often feel like symbols more than flesh-and-blood people, yet that abstraction made the book feel universal. I found myself frustrated at times because Tess keeps drifting, Jules hides behind charm, and Samuel slips away into the shadows. But that frustration mirrored the characters’ own struggles. It left me unsettled, and I liked that.
My Life Story feels like a novel for readers who enjoy atmosphere more than plot, who don’t mind stepping into a story that blurs the lines between memory, fantasy, and reality. I’d recommend it to anyone who loves lyrical writing, who wants a book that feels like cinema on the page, and who doesn’t mind sitting with unanswered questions. It isn’t a fast read, but it’s a rewarding one if you let yourself drift in its tide.
Pages: 128 | ASIN : B0FCCBB2BG
The Two Dogs Who Stayed
The story follows Rusty, a quiet man living alone in Alaska, who stumbles upon an injured dog beneath an abandoned porch on his fifty-eighth birthday. What starts as an act of compassion turns into a bond that reshapes his life. The book drifts between his routines, memories of lost love, and the growing companionship with the dog he names Goober. Along the way, he reconnects with people from his past, builds unexpected new relationships, and faces the ghosts of his solitude. It is, at its core, about second chances, about what it means to be seen, and about the quiet power of loyalty.
The writing is plainspoken. It’s stripped down, direct, almost conversational. That style made me lean in, like I was hearing Rusty tell me these stories over coffee instead of flipping through pages. I enjoyed how ordinary details, like the smell of cedar or the sound of snow under boots, were given weight. It reminded me that the small, everyday things are where life actually lives. Rusty’s reflections sometimes circled the same ache. Still, that’s part of what made it feel real. Grief and love do repeat themselves.
What surprised me most was how emotional I got. Goober isn’t just a dog in the story. She’s a mirror. She reflects Rusty’s loneliness, but also his stubborn hope. Watching him wrestle with old wounds while learning to trust her presence was touching, even frustrating at times, because it reminded me how often people push away the very thing that could help them heal. I felt protective of Rusty and Goober, like they were people I knew. And when the book delved into his lost love and family tensions, it cut deep. Not because the writing was fancy, but because it was honest.
I’d recommend this book to readers who like slow, thoughtful stories that don’t rely on spectacle. If you’ve ever loved a dog, or if you’ve ever carried the quiet weight of being alone longer than you wanted, this book will hit you where it hurts and where it heals. The Two Dogs Who Stayed is a tender and heartfelt story that I enjoyed reading.
Pages: 232 | ASIN : B0FQ3CC7FN
Eden’s Apple
In a whirlwind of emotions and laced with tragedy, the lives of two women are laid out in Pamela Blake’s Eden’s Apple. Both of their lives are fraught with heartbreak, circumstance and secrets. Between drugs, sex and violence these women barely eek out an existence. Both are tainted, both are damaged. One of them will recover, the other will not. Rose and Lucy; our two heroines who are connected to each other by the special bond mother’s and daughter’s share will lose themselves for the sake of love and at the hands of love. Barely out of childhood Rose finds herself forced to endure her father’s expression of love that ends up changing her life forever. Lucy, a product of that illicit union is damaged not because of who her parents were, but because of the loss of love that she should have been entitled too. One woman will break from her burdens and the other will fracture almost irreparably.
The books opens with a scene of violence: Rose is being raped by her father. While readers won’t be aware of who the man is until chapter 2, Blake handles the violation with a strange sense of delicacy. It is through Rose that the reader will understand how damaging to her mind the act is. Set in early 1930’s in England Rose faces more discrimination and humiliating isolation than a modern woman would hopefully need to bear. The regret and self-loathing her father goes on to feel throughout the book seems a bit unrealistic, but it lends to the story.
Rose is damaged by this act of love; an act that is supposed to bring two people together. She bears her incestuous child, only to leave little Lucy with her parents and attempt to live a life that a girl of her age is entitled to. Blake does a good job of showing the delicate state of Rose’s mind as she struggles to understand what happened to her and what she needs to do to regain her sense of self. This is a dangerous path for writers to tread: too much realism can make a reader uneasy. However, not lending an air of reality to how a character handles such critical moments can be damaging to the novel as well. Blake teeters on the edge of this line. As we move forward through Lucy’s life and her experimentation of drugs and sex, the lack of consequences seems unfathomable. While one of her children does suffer from illness later in life, the fact that she gave birth to two healthy children while being addicted to opiates and other drugs steals some credibility from the tale.
The story itself is a captivating read. While Rose certainly had her life altered against her will at such a young age Eden’s Apple is more about Lucy and her struggle to find the love she should have received as a child. She struggles with loving too much and desperately needing confirmation of love in return. Pamela Blake tells this story of two women scorned by fate who struggle to overcome the cards that have been dealt to them. Eden’s Apple is a devastating tale of desperate love, true love and the agony laced between.
Pages: 260 | ASIN: B01C4F5QCU
LITERARY TITAN 