Blog Archives
Brought Me to Incredible Places
Rapid City Summer follows a resentful fifteen-year-old runner whose move from Chicago to South Dakota leads her toward new friendships, family healing, outdoor adventure, and a stronger sense of identity. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
There were a few sources of inspiration; the most prominent being my work as a middle school ELA teacher. Students in that age group (ages 12-14) are starting to get too old for most middle grade books, and some young adult titles have more mature themes and content. I wanted to write a novel that fit this young teen age group, with characters and topics they could relate to and learn from. I was also inspired by how the outdoors has shaped who I am today, and I wanted to share that with readers, too.
Why did you choose running and fly fishing as the activities that shape Natalie’s growth?
Running and fly fishing are both passions of mine that have greatly shaped who I am today. Both sports have taught me lots of important lessons, such as patience and delayed gratification. They have brought me to incredible places and connected me with great people. I also enjoy reading stories that include more “niche” topics, and you don’t see a lot of fiction that includes fly fishing!
How did you develop the warm but complicated relationship between Natalie and her grandmother?
Natalie’s grandmother was inspired by my relationship with my own grandma (except she was around my entire childhood, unlike Natalie and her grandmother). Growing up, my grandma was like a second parent to me, and I value all the time I got to spend with her. As a reader, I gravitate toward stories with complicated family dynamics, so I wanted to infuse some of that into this story, too. Ultimately, I wanted to showcase how meaningful and valuable grandparent/grandchild relationships are, and the scenes with Natalie and her grandma were some of my favorite scenes to write.
What research or personal experience helped you portray the landscapes, wildlife, and outdoor culture of South Dakota?
My husband’s family is from South Dakota, and we’ve been traveling there together for the past decade. We’re both teachers, so we spend part of our summer break fly fishing in different states, including South Dakota. I brought a lot of my personal experiences into this story, with some fictional fishing stories mixed in, too. While writing Rapid City Summer, I wanted to share the beauty of South Dakota and Montana with readers, without giving away all my favorite spots, so I did change the names of certain locations! I hope readers feel like they are transported to the mountains and rivers when they read Rapid City Summer.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
When her mother takes a new job in Rapid City, South Dakota, Natalie is forced to trade her friends, her track team, and the life she loved for something completely unfamiliar. Now she’s stuck navigating a new town, a complicated relationship with her estranged grandmother, and unexpected feelings for the boy next door.
Nothing feels like home. But the Black Hills have a way of changing people.
As Natalie learns to fly fish, she begins to find confidence, independence, and a new sense of purpose. What starts as a reluctant summer becomes something more—a chance to discover who she really is. Then everything changes.
After a trip to Montana, Natalie is faced with news that will test everything she’s learned. Now she must decide: retreat to the comfort of who she was, or step forward into who she’s becoming.
Rapid City Summer is a heartfelt coming-of-age story about resilience, identity, and finding your place when life takes an unexpected turn. Perfect for readers who enjoy emotional YA fiction, strong female protagonists, and stories set against the backdrop of the American West.
The Aphorism Club
Tracey Lee’s The Aphorism Club is a historical coming-of-age novel centered on Ruby Pearl Hart, a gifted young woman born in Melbourne in 1910 with a prominent port-wine birthmark. Ruby enters a family that regards her appearance as a defect and her existence as a burden, but her great-aunt Minerva provides the affection, education, and confidence that her father and grandparents withhold. After illness and loss dismantle this early sanctuary, Ruby must repeatedly adapt to new homes and expectations. The novel follows her from childhood into early adulthood, tracing the formation of a writer whose intelligence and ambition steadily outgrow the narrow roles prescribed for her.
Ruby’s development is shaped by communities of women, artists, teachers, and social outsiders who recognize her potential. Minerva establishes the novel’s moral vocabulary through her instruction to “Look up and find a light,” followed by the more forceful advice, “And if you can’t find the light, bloody build a fire yourself.” That combination of hope and defiance guides Ruby through bereavement, bullying, family neglect, and institutional restrictions. Her eventual move to Tasmania brings her into contact with journalists, performers, writers, and artists whose informal collective gives the novel its title. Within the Aphorism Club, creative work becomes both a profession and a means of claiming authority over one’s own life.
The novel is especially effective when it connects Ruby’s personal growth to the social changes surrounding her. Women’s education, suffrage, labor conditions, reproductive autonomy, sexuality, artistic freedom, war, influenza, and class prejudice appear through the experiences of the characters. Lee’s lively ensemble cast gives these concerns emotional range, while Ruby’s observant, frequently sardonic voice keeps the story energetic even when its subject matter is painful. The early distinction Ruby recognizes between “the family you got and the family you made” becomes one of the book’s central ideas. Family, in this novel, is created through protection, intellectual fellowship, honest disagreement, and sustained acts of care.
The Aphorism Club is a novel about authorship in its broadest sense. Ruby learns to write stories, report on injustice, interpret her own history, and direct the course of her future. Her birthmark remains an important part of her experience, but the narrative gradually enlarges the reader’s understanding of her until her appearance no longer determines the boundaries of her identity. By concluding with several credible paths available to Ruby, Lee presents independence as the capacity to choose among meaningful possibilities. The result is a compassionate and socially engaged portrait of a young woman discovering that love, education, creative purpose, and freedom can belong within the same life.
Pages: 228 | ASIN: 192351735X
The Holding
The Holding is a literary fiction novel about two siblings who live close to each other without truly understanding each other. Nine-year-old Simon is energetic, impulsive, and absorbed in a virtual reality game, while his older sister Anna carefully manages school, friendships, family expectations, and the complicated work of being a teenager. Their contrasting perspectives make the book feel like both an intimate family drama and a contemporary coming-of-age novel. What begins with ordinary household friction slowly reveals a mysterious connection between the children, their dreams, the animals around them, and the private places where they feel most at home.
The novel’s rotating viewpoints are one of its greatest strengths. Simon’s thoughts move with playful, unpredictable momentum, while Anna’s chapters capture the constant calculations of adolescence with painful accuracy. The animal perspectives, especially those of the elderly cat Auggie, bring warmth, humor, and an unusual emotional intelligence to the story. These sections give the book its magical realism flavor without pulling it away from the everyday details of shared custody, sibling resentment, screen time, friendship problems, and family routines.
As a character-driven family drama, The Holding is especially interested in what it means to notice another person. The speculative elements aren’t treated as a puzzle to be solved so much as a language the characters are slowly learning to share. Virtual reality, horseback riding, dreams, drawings, and animal instincts all become ways of exploring connection. The writing often lingers on tiny gestures, repeated sounds, open doors, and familiar routines, allowing emotional shifts to happen gradually. That patience makes the relationship between Simon and Anna feel lived-in, and their moments of understanding carry real weight.
This coming-of-age novel has a tender, observant heart, but it also understands how cruel children can be and how easily families can miss what’s happening inside one another. Its most memorable passages find meaning in the ordinary: a cat choosing where to sit, a brother trying to stay still, a sister waiting at the corner, or a parent quietly watching something change. The Holding is a thoughtful blend of speculative fiction, magical realism, sibling story, and multigenerational family drama. It’s the kind of book that invites readers to pay closer attention to the people and animals holding their lives together.
Pages: 326 | ASIN : B0H6GRHG6H
A Small Memory
Robert Dyer’s A Small Memory is a heartfelt coming-of-age novel about friendship, responsibility, and the lasting effects of trauma. Set in Ohio during the 1970s, it follows Mike Youngstown, an eighteen-year-old college basketball player who moves into a group home with his best friend, Ted Dirksen. The two young men work as live-in counselors for adults with intellectual disabilities while balancing school, relationships, and their first real taste of independence. Their arrangement begins as an exciting new chapter, but it becomes far more demanding after Ray, a troubled new resident, enters the home.
The relationship between Mike and Ted gives the novel its emotional center. They tease each other constantly, compete over everything, and communicate with the ease of people who’ve known each other for years. Beneath the jokes, though, there’s genuine devotion. Early in the book, Ted tells Mike, “We’re in this together,” a simple statement that becomes increasingly meaningful as their lives change. Dyer makes their friendship feel lived-in through private nicknames, late-night conversations, petty arguments, and small acts of loyalty. Because that bond is established so carefully, the later scenes carry real emotional force.
The group home setting also gives the story warmth and depth. Stuart, Mark, Paul, John, Kevin, and Ray aren’t treated as a single interchangeable group. Each has his own habits, fears, abilities, and relationships. One especially revealing moment comes when Stuart resists a job promotion because he’s afraid success will separate him from his friends. He finally admits, “I don’t want to be alone.” Moments like this show how independence can be both a goal and a frightening prospect. They also push Mike to become more patient and observant, even when his confidence tells him he already understands the people around him.
Mike’s narration is direct, energetic, and emotionally open. He can be protective and generous, but he’s also impulsive, stubborn, and convinced that determination can solve nearly anything. After Ted suffers a devastating brain injury, that confidence turns into guilt and a desperate desire to repair what has been damaged. The second half of the novel follows Mike as he tries to support Ted’s recovery while holding on to basketball, college, and his relationship with Karen. At times Mike’s thoughts circle repeatedly around blame and forgiveness, but that repetition suits a character who can’t simply reason his way out of grief. His growth comes from learning that caring for someone doesn’t always mean controlling what happens to them.
A Small Memory is a tender story about the many forms friendship can take after life changes it. Its most affecting scenes are often quiet ones, such as a returned hug, a remembered nickname, or a familiar joke emerging through confusion. The novel handles painful material with compassion while still making room for humor, romance, and the ordinary messiness of college life. Dyer’s book asks what it means to remain loyal when a person can no longer return to the life everyone expected for them. Mike’s answer isn’t perfect, but it’s deeply human: he stays, adapts, and keeps choosing the friendship they built together.
Pages: 304 | ASIN : B0H6GQ6SW6
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.
