Blog Archives
Pivot Turns to Freedom
Louis Tong’s Pivot Turns to Freedom is a coming-of-age novel about Leonard Pan, a Singaporean ophthalmology trainee who moves to England in the 1990s and starts building a life beyond the expectations of his family and profession. Leonard’s work takes him through hospitals in Great Yarmouth, Sunderland, and Nottingham, but ballroom dancing becomes the real thread holding the story together. What begins as a private interest grows into a competitive ambition, complete with demanding coaches, changing partners, financial strain, injuries, and a troubling sponsor who turns encouragement into control. The novel follows Leonard across four years and thirty-nine chapters, giving his search for freedom plenty of room to develop.
Leonard is an entertaining narrator because he’s restless, observant, vain, insecure, funny, and frequently wrong about other people. His medical training shapes the way he sees everything, so dance movements become anatomy, hospital routines resemble choreography, and personal problems are treated like conditions he can diagnose. That habit creates much of the comedy, but it also reveals his central weakness. He’s so intent on proving himself that he sometimes treats dance partners, colleagues, and friends as pieces in his personal success story. The book’s most satisfying movement comes when Leonard begins to understand that freedom isn’t simply getting away from his father or winning medals. It’s learning to make choices without being ruled by pride, resentment, or someone else’s approval.
The novel has something in common with Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, since both stories follow a protagonist who leaves familiar surroundings to pursue a dream and gradually discovers that the journey is changing him in ways the original goal couldn’t predict. Tong’s approach, though, is grounded in the awkward details of adult life: temporary contracts, immigration limits, petrol costs, aching feet, difficult personalities, and the challenge of finding someone willing to practise on a Tuesday evening. Leonard’s dream isn’t presented as a clean spiritual calling. It’s tangled up with ego, family history, loneliness, attraction, and the desire to be noticed. That messiness makes the book feel more like a personal memoir shaped into fiction than a polished fable.
The book’s strongest quality is its specificity. The medical scenes, British regional settings, Singaporean family dynamics, and technical descriptions of ballroom dancing give Leonard’s world a distinctive texture. At times, his elaborate observations slow the pace somewhat, and the late psychological mystery involving Joseph adds an unsettling note that I didn’t feel was fully resolved. Still, that ambiguity suits a novel about a man who’s spent years misunderstanding both himself and the people around him. Pivot Turns to Freedom is ultimately a warm, eccentric story about ambition becoming perspective. Leonard reaches the competition he’s chased, but his more meaningful achievement is recognizing that a full life depends on collaboration, gratitude, and the freedom to value the people beside him.
Pages: 280
Homage to the Beatles
The Word is a work of speculative fiction that presents a world in which John, Paul, George, and Ringo are worshipped as gods, and their songs are treated as scripture. What inspired you to write this book?
It was partly the result of a mildly drunken evening with an old friend, a fellow Beatle fan. The talk was of their enduring appeal and the seeming religious language that was used to describe them as they faded into history. They were often described as Gods and certainly John Lennon seemed to have been made into a secular saint in many people’s eyes. One of us remarked that it would make a good book to describe a world in which they had become an actual religion. And hey presto, I wrote the first book, Love Them Do, about a world set in the future where there was One True Religion, and it was based on the songs and ‘teachings’ of the Fab Four.
The letters between Paula and John become one of the book’s emotional anchors. Why did you choose that correspondence as the primary way to explore belief versus skepticism?
This is the second in the series, and the first featured a narrator who was somewhat sceptical of the divine nature of the Beatles. This was partly to highlight the silliness of some aspects of the religion, but also the narrator was a follower of John, a truth seeker and sceptic who famously sang in his song ‘God’, shortly after the break-up of the Beatles, ‘I don’t believe in Beatles’. I felt he therefore represented John’s own open-minded truth seeking. In this book, The Word, the narrator is a follower of Paul and a true believer in the divine nature of the four Gods from Liverpool. I felt this reflected Paul’s love and belief in the band. He was probably the most upset when they split in 1970. The correspondence is therefore between the sceptical narrator from the first book and the true believer of the second, which I felt allowed for a nice interplay between them.
The humor comes from treating everyday moments in Beatles history as profound religious events. Did writing the novel change the way you think about celebrity culture or the stories people tell about their heroes?
Yes, it was quite fun to write in terms of imagining all the religious Orders that appear that follow a particular God or saint in their story and also interpreting quite normal events through the lens of them being divine. In many ways, of course, their story is remarkable, so it wasn’t always a huge leap to give a religious slant to aspects of their story. The book is partly a homage to the Beatles (it is, after all, a nice religion, based on peace, love and laughter) but it is also about the stories we are willing to believe to make our lives bearable, however irrational they might seem to outsiders, which, it seems to me, is how religion works. If you believe my slightly far fetched stories I will give you everlasting life etc. (in Beatle Heaven in this case!).
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
You won’t be surprised to hear that my next book is the third in the series and features a follower of George. It is called Our Sweet Lord and will hopefully be out early next year.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Reel Around the Fountain
Roy Edward Jackson’s Reel Around the Fountain is a coming-of-age novel about JP, a gay boy growing up in a working-class Michigan town amid illness, alcoholism, Catholic guilt, and a family that expresses love through caretaking, teasing, sacrifice, and the occasional hustle. The novel begins with JP learning that his birth coincided with several family upheavals, including the accident after which his father, already living with multiple sclerosis, never walked again. From there, JP tries to assemble the truth from relatives whose stories are shaped by grief, guilt, exaggeration, and self-protection. His questions about the past run alongside his growing awareness of his sexuality and his understanding that, in his world, becoming an adult often means knowing what must remain hidden.
The book’s most striking choice is its second-person narration. Calling JP “you” gives the story the intimacy of someone revisiting a younger self, sometimes compassionately and sometimes with exasperation. It also suits a novel preoccupied with memory. Scenes don’t unfold as a clean historical record but as stories retold, revised, and connected through songs, objects, hospital rooms, bars, Catholic rituals, and family sayings. Records are especially important. Music gives JP and his father a shared language, while scratched vinyl, skipping songs, cassette tapes, and 45 adapters become ways of thinking about damaged memories and lives that keep circling back to the same moments.
Jackson handles painful material with an earthy, observant sense of humor. JP’s attention can land on a dirty carpet, a strange phrase, a record label, or the social rules of a funeral home even when something devastating is happening nearby. That voice keeps the novel grounded in the physical details of working life and poverty. It’s also where the book finds much of its emotional force. JP’s family members are vivid because their care is practical and imperfect. GG manipulates systems, Paw Paw gives up trucking to become a caregiver, Anna turns pain into blunt jokes, and JP learns to work, write obituaries, take photographs, and tell stories. Even after abuse leaves him tangled in shame, the narrative stays attentive to the difference between what was done to him and what he’s been taught to blame himself for.
The novel is episodic and deliberately repetitive, shaped more like an album of connected tracks than a tightly plotted drama. Its recurring phrases and memories occasionally slow the pace, but they also create the feeling of a mind worrying at old wounds until their meaning changes. By the end, JP’s writing, music, and move to Chicago offer him a future built from the people he’s lost rather than an escape from them. The record-adapter tattoo he receives becomes a fitting symbol of that inheritance, something small that connects the music to the person carrying it. I’d recommend Reel Around the Fountain most strongly to readers who appreciate queer coming-of-age fiction, complicated family portraits, working-class settings, and novels in which pop music carries as much emotional history as dialogue does.
Pages: 324 | ISBN : 978-1590218013
Life-Changing Revelation
The Exiled Kin follows a sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican teenager with autism whose world is changed by bullying, betrayal, loss, and the shocking discovery of a truth about the father he thought was gone. What inspired you to create this foundation for the story?
As an autistic author who is also of Puerto Rican descent, I felt it was important to represent my community in my stories. Growing up, I didn’t always see that on paper or on screen, so when I had an opportunity to showcase a character that looked like me, I took advantage of it. Basing my main protagonist, Luke, off my own personal history was easy since I live those experiences in my daily life. An important aspect of autistic individuals is routine, and when that gets broken, disrupted, or upended, it can be difficult to adapt. Luke’s discovery of his father’s whereabouts is a life-changing revelation that would shake anyone’s world. For a teenager with a strong sense of justice and a deep reliance on structure, the impact is even more profound.
How did you approach writing a character whose differences are an important part of him while also showing his humor, strengths, fears, and ambitions?
Authors usually write what they know, and it’s vital to be self-aware of one’s own strengths and weaknesses, and how to apply them so you’re not in a tough situation. An important realization as I got older is that having a disability makes one different, not less. People get so focused on what makes individuals on the spectrum different that they fail to see our similarities. So, fleshing out Luke to showcase his humor, fears, strengths, flaws, and ambitions humanizes him to the reader and thus humanizes people on the spectrum.
The story explores Puerto Rican identity within a late-1990s Tennessee setting. How important was it for you to include cultural experiences, family traditions, and questions of identity in Luke’s story?
I was raised in New England, so I knew and met many people of different backgrounds throughout my young adult life. A highlight of my books that readers have mentioned is that the characters are so diverse that there’s someone relatable for everyone. When it comes to Luke, I felt it was important for the audience to understand his experience as a young Puerto Rican male on the autism spectrum. The best way to do that was to emphasize his family, his culture, and his struggles. Additionally, I grew up in the 2000s when there wasn’t a lot of representation for certain cultures or groups, so making identity a prominent focus in my stories wasn’t mere creative choice; it’s something deeply personal to me.
Can you give us a peek inside the next book in the Looked Down Upon series? Where will it take readers?
So far, I have written and published two books in the Looked Down Upon series, and as I grew as a writer and a person, Luke grew alongside me. I wrote The Exiled Kin right after high school and A Masked Wickedness while in college. Now that I am an adult, we’ll get an idea of what Luke is like as a full-fledged adult in the workforce and what challenges he has to go through in the final book of the trilogy series. Without giving too much away, one of those challenges will involve the Outcasts, a group I introduced in book two. Their return will play an important role in Luke’s journey and the conclusion of the series.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
But everything changes when Lucas discovers the truth about his father’s supposed death. Furious and determined to bring his deadbeat father to justice, Lucas embarks on a dangerous mission that takes him on a journey of self-discovery and redemption. Along the way, he grapples with issues of faith, love, and the complexities of family dynamics.
Rumors of Love
Rumors of Love, the sixth book in James Nathaniel Miller II’s Cody Musket series, is a near-future Christian thriller that combines political conflict, covert rescue missions, family drama, and young romance. Set mainly in 2042, the story begins with Cody Musket Jr. and his adopted daughter Kennedy delivering painful news to a family in Honduras. Their personal mission quickly becomes a national crisis when they learn that fifteen-year-old Joshua Scott, a courageous opponent of an authoritarian movement, is about to be executed. From there, the novel expands into an international adventure involving coups, earthquakes, advanced aircraft, attacks on Musket Villa, hostage rescues, Russian soldiers, Israeli forces, and even a hidden community of giants. It’s a large-scale story, but its emotional center stays with the Musket family and the young people learning where they belong.
Kennedy and Josh give the novel much of its warmth. Their relationship develops through danger, awkward conversations, gentle humor, shared faith, and the kind of intense loyalty that makes sense for two teenagers who’ve already survived extraordinary suffering. Kennedy’s growth is especially important. She begins the book carrying guilt over Raquel’s death, but the compassion of Raquel’s family helps her move toward forgiveness and emotional freedom. Josh has his own unresolved pain concerning his parents, especially the truth about his father’s sacrifice. Their romance isn’t separate from these struggles. It becomes one of the ways they learn to trust, accept care, and imagine a future beyond the next emergency.
Readers familiar with Ted Dekker’s Christian thrillers will recognize a similar interest in placing spiritual conviction inside high-pressure action. Like Dekker, Miller treats faith as an active force that shapes decisions, courage, and sacrifice rather than as background decoration. Miller’s approach is more family-centered and openly sentimental, with several generations of Muskets participating in the story and regularly talking through what events mean to them. The result feels like a combination of an international action serial and a family saga. The book moves from one crisis to another, and its futuristic technology gives the heroes plenty of imaginative ways to cross borders, escape traps, and confront enemies.
The novel’s greatest strength is its wholehearted belief in rescue, redemption, and the value of young people. Its heroes are remarkably capable, but they’re also allowed to grieve, fall in love, question themselves, and depend on one another. The dialogue can be direct, and the steady stream of revelations, speeches, disasters, and missions gives the book an energetic, larger-than-life rhythm. Readers who enjoy clean thrillers, explicit Christian themes, affectionate family relationships, and unapologetically heroic characters should find plenty to enjoy. Rumors of Love is a story about people who refuse to leave the vulnerable behind, even when helping them means stepping into another war.
Pages: 231 | ASIN : B0H51XTYWC
Saving Moses
Steve A. Twitty’s Saving Moses is a coming-of-age adventure built around one unforgettable summer in 1961. The novel follows Milty Marshal and his three friends, Mark, Davy, and Floyd, as they roam the woods, canals, and abandoned dumping grounds surrounding their South Florida mill town. What begins with bike rides, a tree house, neighborhood pranks, and clashes with local bullies grows into a plan to protect Moses, a huge alligator the boys discover in Black Creek Canal. The story is framed by the older Milton returning to the remains of Dillardtown with his daughter and grandchildren, finally ready to explain the event he’s carried for decades. The author describes the book as fiction based on actual events in South Miami, which gives the boys’ world a lived-in quality even when the adventure becomes larger than life.
The book’s greatest strength is its detailed sense of place. Twitty fills Dillardtown with terrazzo-floored company houses, backyard swimming pools, rattling model trains, comic books, bicycles, banyan trees, coral rock, afternoon storms, and the constant presence of the sugar mill. These details do more than establish the early 1960s. They show how completely the boys belong to their surroundings. The wilderness isn’t just scenery to them. It’s their private country, with its own landmarks, rules, hideouts, dangers, and legends. Twitty also spends time inside each boy’s home, so their behavior makes emotional sense. Milty’s nervousness comes from living with a bitter, gambling father. Floyd’s need to prove himself is tied to insecurity and a lingering disability. Mark’s confidence and Davy’s inventive curiosity grow out of more supportive households. Even Randy, the neighborhood bully, is given a painful family history that helps explain his anger.
Readers who enjoy Stephen King’s The Body, better known through the film Stand by Me, will recognize a similar mix of friendship, danger, humor, and adult hindsight. Both stories follow boys whose casual summer expedition leads them into experiences they aren’t emotionally prepared to handle. Twitty, like King, understands how childhood friendships can be affectionate and cruel in the same conversation. The boys tease one another, compete for status, make reckless promises, and then risk themselves when a friend is genuinely threatened. Saving Moses has a sunnier, more adventure-driven rhythm for much of its length, with plans involving alligator food, scavenged raft materials, stolen paddles, and homemade engineering. That playful energy makes the later violence land harder because the reader has spent so much time sharing the boys’ excitement.
Saving Moses is a story about the way children assign themselves adult responsibilities before they understand adult consequences. The boys believe they can tame danger through loyalty, ingenuity, and a good plan, whether they’re confronting a bully or attempting to save an alligator. When their adventure ends in tragedy, Milton turns one terrible moment into a lifelong judgment of his own character. The present-day chapters give the novel its emotional purpose, as his friends help him understand that memory has preserved his guilt more faithfully than it preserved the truth. Twitty’s storytelling is direct, visual, and often shaped like a screenplay, with plenty of action and sharply staged scenes. The result is an earnest, bittersweet novel about friendship, responsibility, and the stories people must finally tell before they can forgive the children they used to be. I recommend Saving Moses to readers who like heartfelt coming-of-age stories about friendship, difficult choices, childhood adventures, and the lasting impact of the memories we carry.
Pages: 254 | ASIN : B0B218STTK
Extraordinary Childhoods
The Summer of ’71 follows four military kids in West Germany whose search for a hidden World War II bunker turns into a life-shaping journey through friendship, grief, history, and the mysteries people leave behind. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The story is based on true events. I am a military brat and brats are different. We lived extraordinary childhoods. Overall, we have seen more of the world than a lot of people. We typically speak more than one language, and we have an innate ability to read a room instantly. Living in Germany during the early 1970’s gave many brats exposure to the relics of WWII. We played in what were war zones of heavily mechanized military forces. That coupled with the fact that friendships were fleeting, and learning to trust each other quickly, gave me the vision of making this fascinating demographic of our American melding pot visible. The book is inspired by experiences. I like to term my experiences as the scaffolding and creative license as my paint.
How did your own understanding of military-brat life shape the friendships and sense of instability in the novel?
It is what it is. Military brat life is by nature transient. We moved every 2-3 years. New schools, new housing, new commissary, new gym and swimming pool, new Officers Club, new Scout Troop-you get the idea. The kids came to understand at an early age that friendships were short-term for the most part. Our paths sometimes crossed more than once. That was cool if it happened. The instability was a stability in its own way if that makes sense.
Bobby carries much of the story’s emotional weight without saying too much. How did you approach writing his grief and quiet loyalty?
The characters Bobby, Galen, Rusty, and Pascal are composites of kids I knew. The names have not been changed to protect the innocent but rather the characters have been changed to protect the guilty. So, there was a kid I knew named Bobby. We were scouts together. His dad was enlisted, but that did not matter because in short order we became best friends. Then his dad got orders to Nuremburg and he was gone. He was kind of the first kid I missed as a good friend, and I was always sad about that. The character of Bobby is an expression of that grief and quiet loyalty that friends have for each other. Bobby died in his mid-40’s due to Lime Disease. I was able to visit with him and his family a few years before he died. I miss him.
What do you hope readers take away from the boys’ adventure once they reach the end of the story?
A sense of appreciation, and understanding for this almost invisible military brat demographic hidden in plain sight, in our American society. The story is personal. The adventure is universal.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
Four American military kids slip through a base fence before dawn and walk eight kilometers into the German countryside – past dragon’s teeth, past a farmer’s dog, past the edge of everything they’re supposed to know. What they find is a sealed WWII bunker on the old Siegfried Line. What’s inside has been waiting twenty-six years: four gold coins, a soldier’s Bible, a photograph of a woman whose name no one knows, and scratched deep into the west wall – I was here. I loved her. Written by a man who died in that room the same day he wrote it. On the east wall of the bunker “KILROY WAS HERE” is inscribed with an arrow points down. Galen Rodriguez has been trying to write this story for fifty years. He’s tried and stopped, tried and stopped, because every time he starts, Bobby’s face comes back – the way it looked that summer, twelve years old and carrying something no twelve-year-old should have to carry. The way it looked when he smiled, just once, in a limestone shelter during a thunderstorm, talking about his dead brother. Some secrets aren’t meant to be kept. Only carried for a while. The Summer of ’71 is a story about four boys, a promise made in the dark, a one-armed German farmer who asked only one question in return for everything he gave, and the fifty years it took one man to finally write it all down.
Rapid City Summer
Connie Richardson’s Rapid City Summer is a young adult coming-of-age novel about Natalie, a fifteen-year-old runner whose family moves from the Chicago suburbs to Rapid City, South Dakota. She arrives resentful, lonely, and doubtful that her new home has much to offer, asking, “What’s so great about South Dakota besides a mountain with some old guys’ heads on it?” Her outlook begins to change when she meets Adam, the boy next door, who introduces her to fly fishing and the landscapes of the Black Hills. As Natalie joins a new cross-country team, forms friendships, and reconnects with her spirited grandmother, the move becomes an opportunity to reconsider who she is and what she values.
Richardson gives the novel a strong sense of place through its creeks, trails, wildlife, fishing trips, and wide western skies. Fly fishing is more than a recreational detail. It provides Natalie with patience, confidence, and a way to become attentive to the world around her. Running serves a similar purpose, linking the person she was in Illinois with the person she’s becoming in South Dakota. These activities keep the story active while supporting its larger themes of independence, resilience, and belonging. The outdoor scenes are especially effective because they’re grounded in physical details and in Natalie’s believable mixture of curiosity, fear, and excitement.
The novel’s emotional center lies in Natalie’s changing relationships. Her growing bond with her grandmother is warm, lively, and complicated by longstanding tension within the family. When her grandmother suffers a stroke, Natalie’s grief and determination add greater weight to their planned 5K. Her friendship with Adam also develops thoughtfully through mistakes, apologies, shared risks, and honest conversations about his family. At the same time, Natalie’s fading friendship with Syd and her connection with new teammates show that growing up can involve recognizing which relationships encourage personal growth. Richardson handles these developments in a direct, accessible style that suits Natalie’s age and perspective.
Rapid City Summer presents adolescence as a period of active discovery shaped by new places, meaningful relationships, and the courage to try unfamiliar things. Natalie’s transformation feels convincing because it unfolds through repeated choices. By the end, she has found a community, a creative purpose through her outdoor social media channel, and a clearer sense of herself. Her conclusion, “South Dakota was the place where I finally felt like me,” captures the novel’s central achievement. Richardson has written an engaging, hopeful story about finding identity through movement, family, friendship, and the natural world.
Pages: 243 | ASIN: 1685135927
