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People Are Slow To Change
The Catchings Press follows a 15-year-old girl navigating race, integration, gender expectations, and the Vietnam War after her family moves to a small Texas town to run its newspaper. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
We’re still navigating the things that Annette Calvert was navigating more than 50 years ago. Racial justice, gender expectations, and war are national issues, but also local, and very personal. As the reviewer says, Annette’s fight is essentially about “who gets to make choices and who’s expected to obey.” We’re still deciding this today.
How did the idea of a family-owned newspaper shape the story?
My parents owned a newspaper when I was a child, so I saw what it was like to run a family business that’s enmeshed in the local community. People really do pull their ads because of a single story! A novel about a family trying to cover the news and still stay in business, not to mention keep the family from falling apart, seemed too good an idea to pass up.
How did you develop Sam as both a father and newspaper publisher?
Let’s face it: At home, Sam is kind of a jerk! He [spoiler alert] tries to manipulate his wife with a “family vote,” and, when Danny gets bullied at school, tells his son to suck it up. But at work, he’s shrewd and smart and decent: He doesn’t hesitate to cover the school board’s shenanigans, and insists on publishing, against his staff’s objections, a wedding story about a local African-American girl, a decision that costs him a major advertiser. Eventually, Sam realizes that the issues facing the town and the nation are issues he and his family are facing, too.
If Annette could see the world today, what do you think would surprise her most?
I think what would surprise her most is not how much things have improved in the areas of racism, sexism, and bullying, but of how that progress is slowly being clawed back. But maybe I’m saying that because I’m writing this in 2026, in a world unravelling before our eyes. Near the end of the novel (don’t worry: no spoilers), Annette realizes “people are small, and narrow, and slow to change.” But I’d like to think she retains the optimism she had when she told Danny, in one of his darkest moments, “As long as people dream of a better world, the world has to get better.”
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On a hot day in 1968, while lining up for the daily dress check at school, Annette Calvert yanks out her hem. The dress represents everything she’s been simmering about since her father, an ambitious journalist, bought the newspaper in Catchings, Texas: the rule-crazy high school; the powerful businessmen pulling their ads from her family’s paper; the war on TV.
Annette is tired of trying to obey an impossible rule. One week into her junior year, she gets hundreds of students to sign a petition against the dress code and presents it at a packed school board meeting that her father, afraid he’ll lose more ads, forbids her to attend.
Set against a backdrop of national turmoil not unlike that of today, The Catchings Press is about a young girl coming into her own, and a celebration of the small battles we wage in life that cause the world to change.
With Love, Karen
John Michael Langley’s With Love, Karen is a deeply personal coming-of-age story built around an extraordinary week in the summer of 1975, when Langley was working at New Jersey’s Garden State Arts Center and unexpectedly formed a relationship with Karen Carpenter. Langley describes the book as a Bildungsroman based on actual events, with some dialogue recreated and certain details compressed or combined. That description fits because, although Karen Carpenter is the person who immediately draws our attention, the book is just as much about the young man telling the story. His friendship with Danny, his work at the Arts Center, his motorcycles, his uncertainty about his future, and his habit of overthinking practically everything give the story an everyday quality. Then Karen enters his life, and what begins as a remarkable celebrity encounter becomes something much more intimate.
One of the book’s strongest qualities is the amount of ordinary life Langley allows into the story. Karen isn’t presented primarily as the famous voice behind the Carpenters. She jokes, teases, talks about music, walks on the beach, eats lunch, hides beneath floppy hats, gets angry, falls asleep on the sofa, and occasionally seems delighted simply to be treated like everyone else. Langley’s conversational narration works especially well in these scenes because he pays attention to the small exchanges that make two people feel comfortable with each other. The long trips to Sandy Hook and the Jersey Shore are particularly important. Their conversations gradually move from playful banter into discussions of family, success, insecurity, love, and Karen’s feeling that she has very little control over her own life. Knowing what eventually happened to her gives those conversations an emotional weight that grows quietly as the book continues.
The book reminded me of Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County. Both stories revolve around a brief relationship whose importance becomes much larger than the amount of time the couple actually spends together. They’re also interested in the choices people make when love arrives at an inconvenient moment, and in the strange way a handful of days can influence an entire lifetime. Langley’s story has its own texture because it’s anchored in his recollection of real events and in the recognizable public life of Karen Carpenter. The celebrity element could easily dominate a story like this, but the emotional center is much more personal: two people recognize something in each other at exactly the moment when their lives are headed in different directions. Like Waller, Langley understands that a relationship doesn’t have to last for decades to become a permanent part of someone’s identity.
What stayed with me most was the way the book broadens as it moves from remembered events into reflection. Langley isn’t simply looking back on Karen Carpenter or on an unusual chapter of his youth. He’s examining how memory changes with age, how love can remain significant long after circumstances change, and how old choices can take on new meanings when viewed from decades away. That gives With Love, Karen more emotional depth than its celebrity connection might suggest at first. It’s a love story, a memoir of the 1970s, a portrait of Karen Carpenter as remembered by someone who says he knew her privately, and a meditation on grief, affection, memory, and the questions people continue carrying long after a relationship has ended. The result is intimate and reflective, with an emotional resonance that comes from the persistence of memory itself.
pages: 286 | ASIN: B0DKDM5N8Q
The Catchings Press
Robin McMillion’s The Catchings Press is a thoughtful historical fiction novel set in small-town Texas during the upheaval of the late 1960s. Fifteen-year-old Annette Calvert is uprooted from Houston when her father buys a semi-weekly newspaper in Catchings, a community where tradition carries real authority and everybody seems to know everybody else’s business. Annette quickly discovers that moving has dropped her into the middle of conflicts over school integration, race, gender expectations, the Vietnam War, and the limits adults place on young people. At the same time, her family is learning that owning a newspaper means much more than putting stories on a page. Reporting the truth can cost advertisers, friendships, and social standing. The result is a coming-of-age historical fiction story in which national tensions become intensely personal.
One of the book’s strongest elements is the way the Catchings Press itself becomes part of the story. McMillion gives readers the clatter of the Linotype, the smell of hot type, the financial pressure of keeping a local paper alive, and the constant question of how far a publisher should go when the truth threatens the bottom line. Sam and Marian Calvert gradually find themselves confronting school officials, closed meetings, discriminatory customs, and advertisers willing to use money as leverage. That gives this historical fiction novel about journalism an appealing tension between everyday family life and larger questions about civic responsibility. Annette watches all of it, and her growing understanding of what journalism can accomplish becomes just as important as anything she learns in school. The novel makes local news feel consequential because, in Catchings, it clearly is.
Annette also gives the book much of its warmth. She’s funny, observant, occasionally insecure, and still young enough to discover that her assumptions about other people don’t always survive contact with their experiences. Her friendship and attraction to Bobby Calhoun gradually expose the distance between her relatively privileged life and his experience as a Black student in a recently integrated school. Meanwhile, her brother Danny’s antiwar idealism, Manuel Ramirez’s treatment at school, Marian’s return to reporting, and the increasingly oppressive behavior of Superintendent Bic Harold and teacher Fred Frasier give the novel several overlapping sources of conflict. McMillion handles these threads as parts of the same 1960s coming-of-age story, showing how racism, sexism, bullying, political power, and family expectations can all spring from the desire to decide how somebody else should live. Annette’s fight against the school dress code eventually becomes less about hemlines than about recognizing who gets to make choices and who’s expected to obey.
What stayed with me most about The Catchings Press is its interest in small acts of resistance. Annette doesn’t become a different person overnight, and Catchings doesn’t suddenly transform into an ideal community. Change comes through reporting, uncomfortable conversations, public meetings, a student petition, a parent willing to speak up, and people deciding that fear has had enough influence over their choices. This historical coming-of-age novel has a satisfying sense of scale. The novel connects one Texas family’s turbulent year with the much larger struggles of the 1960s without losing sight of ordinary details, relationships, humor, and consequences. It’s a story about journalism, family, first love, civic courage, and the slow process of learning that speaking up can matter even when the battle seems small.
Romance in Unexpected Places
Remember, It’s Just in Your Head follows a university student navigating grief, anxiety, identity, guilt, and the difficult journey toward choosing to live after the suicide of his close friend. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I am someone who never really acknowledged the mental health of others around me when I was growing up. I realised as I grew older that it’s important to be conscious of everyone who is around you, because their presence can be very beneficial to recovery when you feel low.
Life can take a major turn without any warning, so Reuben personifies how unpredictable these scenarios can be.
Guilt comes because of reflection on decisions that have had consequences that could’ve been avoided. The struggle is that you can’t change the past, and that in itself is a feeling you have to overcome.
How did you balance the novel’s darker themes with its moments of humor, friendship, romance, and hope?
All our emotional responses are built upon interwoven experiences; ruminating on darker themes would make the story too morbid. Reuben as a character’s life still needed to progress even if he was faced with such profound, depressing challenges.
I made Reuben an intuitive character who explored himself as a person and worked out how to tackle his vulnerability by seeking support when he realised he needed it. Humour is a way of relieving stress and anxiety, connecting with people to find positives out of awkward or uncomfortable situations. The story explores this by expanding upon the various personalities you come across in day-to-day life.
Finding romance in unexpected places helps Reuben develop as a character; he learns about his sexuality by exposing himself to people who can relate to it themselves. Nathan is a fundamental character in that plot arc and shows that there are people out there who are going or have gone through similar experiences.
How did you approach writing Reuben’s memories of Ava without reducing her character to her death?
Reuben reflects on several occasions throughout the story when he is faced with objects or situations that give him nostalgia.
Ava has a relationship with him that has lasted many years, and this is depicted by how well they know each other. This is shown in how much they open up to each other and how they promise to be there for each other when they’re struggling. They share sanctuary spaces around town that Reuben feels connected to and comfortable escaping from the harsh community that he is exposed to.
Ava is represented both in life and in death by her Polaroid Camera and how she insists that Reuben takes pictures of “the good stuff.” She shows him how to find beauty in the ordinary and turn something plain into something special.
The story explores art in various forms to show how much someone can connect with their natural passion. Reuben knows by the end of the story that whether Ava is alive or dead is irrelevant to how influential she has been in supporting him mentally in his acceptance of himself.
What did you want readers to understand about queer love within a story that is also centered on grief?
That LGBT+ people are not alone when they’re nervous about coming out. That mental health is a journey that encompasses acceptance regardless of how long it takes.
Sexuality and gender are not something that should define you, in the same way that anxiety shouldn’t. Just be true to yourself and take your time with the hurdles that you come across.
If you love someone, you should make it count, whether they’re the same or opposite sex. Missing opportunities is not something you’d want to dwell on in the future or regret.
Grief is not something that you should have to endure all through life; it shouldn’t trap you. However, all things that are close to our heart take time to heal.
Make sure you value yourself and everything around you because life is never guaranteed to be stable. Make things as easy as possible for yourself to achieve the happiest well-being.
Reuben never chose to be gay, but he learns this from finding solace. Any reader who can relate to this needs to know that life is always about focusing on the “good stuff.”
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Haunted by what might happen and burdened by his secret, Reuben is trying his hardest to cope. With him sharing sanctuary spaces with his close friend Ava around town, the two have places to relieve stress, where no one can find them.
When Ava’s own pain proves deeper than anyone knew, Reuben is left with grief, guilt, and the impossible question of whether he got caught up in his own spirals too much to notice. Remember, It’s Just In Your Head is a tender contemporary novel about friendship, loss, self-forgiveness, and making sure that anxiety isn’t something that defines you.
“Photography isn’t about capturing perfect moments. It’s about finding beauty in the ordinary, and turning something so plain into something special.”
Remember, It’s Just in Your Head
Remember, It’s Just in Your Head, by Ben Dylan, is a contemporary LGBTQ+ coming-of-age novel about grief, identity, and the difficult work of choosing to live. University student Reuben Fletcher is already struggling with anxiety, suicidal thoughts, family pressure, and his hidden sexuality when his close friend Ava dies by suicide. Her death leaves him replaying every missed warning sign and unanswered call. From there, the story follows Reuben as he carries his guilt through lectures, orchestra rehearsals, friendships, and a campus culture that can be both cruel and unexpectedly supportive.
As mental health fiction, the novel is intensely direct about depression, disordered eating, panic, and bereavement. Reuben’s first-person narration keeps the reader close to his spiraling thoughts, especially when ordinary moments become loaded with fear or regret. The recurring images of rooftops, photographs, and chemical reactions give shape to emotions he can’t easily explain. Ava’s Polaroid camera becomes the book’s strongest symbol, connecting memory with her final request that Reuben keep looking for “the good stuff.”
The queer coming-of-age story develops alongside Reuben’s grief, particularly through his relationship with Nathan and his frightening experience of being publicly outed by Xan. Dylan captures the exhausting calculations that come with hiding, as well as the relief Reuben gradually finds in being known. The supporting cast gives the campus novel a generous emotional range. Ryan, Sophia, Taylor, and even Reuben’s abrasive classmate Nadia are carrying private pain of their own. Their stories reinforce the book’s central idea that kindness often begins when someone takes the time to look beneath another person’s performance.
The prose favors emotional clarity and repeated motifs, occasionally restating Reuben’s guilt and fear more often than the moment requires. That repetition also reflects a mind caught in rumination, making his eventual return to music feel genuinely earned. This is a grief and healing novel with a tender gay romance, a strong awareness of student mental health, and a sincere belief in human connection. Remember, It’s Just in Your Head offers an openhearted portrait of survival as something built slowly through friendship, creativity, accountability, and the decision to keep showing up.
Pages: 243 | ASIN : B0HCTPJ9YV
The Last Poet on Wall Street
Michael Goodwin’s The Last Poet on Wall Street is a coming-of-age novel set against the money, ambition, art, nightlife, and social climbing of 1980s New York. At its center is James Alexander, a gifted young poet from Tennessee who gives up a Yale fellowship for commodities trading with his wealthy college friend Lark Campbell. That choice opens the door to spectacular profits, an expensive apartment, Italian sports cars, glamorous parties, and a Manhattan crowd where artists and financiers seem to be chasing different versions of the same thing: recognition. Goodwin makes James’s transformation the real story. He arrives in New York still carrying poetry, Sarah, his family, and an idealistic sense of beauty with him, even as he grows increasingly fluent in money and status. The novel is explicitly framed as fiction about Wall Street, coming of age, finance, relationships, and love, and all of those threads stay tightly connected throughout James’s rise and fall.
What makes the book especially interesting is the way James’s love of poetry keeps rubbing against his appetite for success. Early on, he and Sarah are young idealists talking about reviving poetry, and James’s own poem “Autumn Turning” ends with the idea of continually returning to oneself. That idea quietly becomes the architecture of the whole novel. James keeps reinventing himself as trader, millionaire, social insider, lover, and would-be movie producer, but the earlier version of himself never disappears. The finance scenes have genuine momentum, particularly when James and Lark make and lose staggering amounts of money in short bursts, yet the book is just as interested in what happens after the adrenaline fades. James repeatedly reaches a moment of triumph only to discover a strange hollowness underneath it. That tension gives the novel more weight than a simple story of Wall Street excess. It’s about a young man trying to decide whether achievement can tell him who he is.
Goodwin also has fun with the sheer weirdness of the era. His Manhattan is crowded with debutantes, aristocrats, hedge fund clients, artists, models, club regulars, hustlers, and people whose identities seem partly invented for the evening. The scenes can be flamboyant and funny, with James moving through them as both participant and observer. In that respect, the book reminded me most of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Both novels treat New York as a giant machine for producing appetite, status anxiety, spectacle, and self-invention. Wolfe spreads his satire across a large social ecosystem, while Goodwin keeps returning to James’s divided inner life, particularly the tug between his literary sensibility and his growing hunger to be someone important. There’s also a touch of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City in the clubs, drugs, late nights, and emotional disorientation, but Goodwin gives his protagonist a more philosophical temperament. James can be ridiculous, selfish, perceptive, wounded, and unexpectedly tender within the same stretch of pages, which makes his unraveling feel personal rather than merely symbolic.
The closing movement is the strongest part for me because the book eventually brings its concerns about money, family, ego, art, memory, and mortality into the same space. After the fortune and the social identity collapse, James is forced into a much simpler encounter with himself. By the final pages, he reaches something he describes as a kind of equanimity, and the ending turns toward the possibility that losing the identity he constructed might be the beginning of a more genuine one. Goodwin resists turning that realization into a neat conversion. Instead, James is only beginning to understand what’s happened to him and how much ego he still has to dismantle. The final image is wonderfully ordinary: food, evening light, gratitude, and the recognition that something can be mysterious, nourishing, and good in the way a good poem can be. The Last Poet on Wall Street reads like a novel about appetite in all its forms, and about the difficult work of figuring out which hungers are actually your own.
Pages: 318 | ASIN : B0GHSRSFG6
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
Beyond the Sky’s Edge
In Beyond Sky’s Edge, by Pat Wahler, readers are transported to the year 1912 to follow the transformative journey of eighteen-year-old Olivia “Livvie” Newcomb. Living in St. Louis under the thumb of her protective and traditional parents, Livvie chafes against the societal expectation that she marry her childhood friend, Leonard Wyatt. Her world is cracked open during a trip to Kansas City, where she experiences the exhilarating freedom of a tethered hot air balloon ride. This brief taste of the heavens ignites an obsession with aviation, a passion further fueled by the real-life exploits of female pilots like Harriet Quimby and Katherine Stinson. When her family is suddenly plunged into financial ruin and social disgrace after her father is unjustly dismissed from his drafting job, Livvie decides to take her destiny into her own hands.
The novel is a beautifully paced historical coming-of-age story that masterfully contrasts the restrictive domestic spheres of the early twentieth century with the expansive, untamed arena of early aviation. Wahler excels at capturing the sensory details of the era, from the oppressive summer heat of St. Louis and the rustle of restrictive petticoats to the oil-scented, wind-whipped thrill of the airfield. At its heart, the book is less about the technicalities of flying and more about a young woman’s struggle for self-determination. Livvie is a compelling protagonist whose stubbornness and vulnerability make her intensely relatable as she navigates parental disapproval, a bittersweet falling out with a well-meaning but betraying suitor, and her own physical battles with vertigo.
Wahler gracefully charts Livvie’s transition from a sheltered daughter to the pragmatic head of her household. After selling a precious family heirloom to fund her secret flight lessons at Kinloch Field, Livvie begins to see the true cost of independence. The emotional weight of her father’s subsequent illness and death, paired with her mother’s descent into grief, forces Livvie to grow up quickly. She begins to view her headstrong nature not as a rebellion, but as a necessary tool for her family’s survival. Her training under the quiet, scarred mechanic Jake Fleming serves as a crucible, teaching her that “flying takes courage” and that she must “respect the power you hold in your hands.” Through this mentorship and her growing friendship with Katherine Stinson, Livvie finds a community of trailblazers who refuse to let the earth hold them down.
Beyond Sky’s Edge is an inspiring and emotionally resonant novel that celebrates the resilience of the female spirit. It vividly captures the dawn of aviation when flight was a dangerous, poetic adventure, and women had to fight for every inch of sky. By the time Livvie finally takes the controls for her first solo flight, fans of historical fiction will find themselves thoroughly swept up in her triumph. Wahler has crafted a rich historical narrative that reminds us how stepping into the unknown, though terrifying, is often the only way to truly find ourselves.
Pages: 368 | ASIN : B0HCT5WY7Z
