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The Silver Screen
Jeremiah Bass’s The Silver Screen is a contemporary supernatural fantasy with a strong romantic core, but its real subject is memory and the strange ways people reshape their lives after death. Wyatt Gaumond believes he’s an eighty-eight-year-old widower living in an abandoned Minnesota movie theater, even though his body has mysteriously stopped aging. He can charge old cinema screens with “lifeforce” and step through them into an endless hallway of doors, each opening onto another theater somewhere in the world. When he encounters Emma, a sick and frightened young woman who increasingly resembles his late wife, their journey turns into an exploration of Wyatt’s past, his fractured mind, and the truth about where they are.
Wyatt is a compellingly difficult narrator. He’s funny, abrasive, protective, arrogant, traumatized, and often unreliable, sometimes within the same scene. His memories stretch from childhood and World War II to Vietnam, family losses, dementia, and his long marriage to June. Emma’s chapters gradually challenge his version of events, giving the story emotional tension beyond the central mystery. Their marriage feels especially convincing because Bass treats it as a lifetime of affection, secrecy, irritation, sacrifice, and mutual dependence. The book understands that loving someone for decades means knowing their tenderness and their damage, even when neither person knows how to talk about either one.
The novel’s closest popular relative may be Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Both books use the afterlife as a place where a person must revisit a lifetime, understand old wounds, and accept that it’s time to continue onward. Bass’s approach is rougher and more expansive, with profanity, violence, war memories, horror imagery, and an elaborate mythology built around abandoned theaters. The hallway of doors is a terrific central image because it works as supernatural transportation, a map of Wyatt’s memory, and a reminder of all the choices he can’t make again. Where Albom tends toward fable, Bass writes more like a storyteller unpacking decades of family history at the kitchen table, wandering occasionally but finding revealing details along the way.
The Silver Screen takes its time, especially when Wyatt recounts wars, assignments, relatives, and old grievances. That breadth makes the middle feel heavy in places, but it also gives the final revelations real weight. The mystery eventually becomes less about how the screens work and more about why Wyatt needs to believe they work. Once Emma understands that they’re both dead and that Wyatt has become trapped in an in-between world shaped by dementia and grief, her mission is heartbreakingly clear: she has returned to help the man she loved recognize his life and let it go. The ending earns its sentiment because Wyatt doesn’t simply recover a few happy memories. He accepts the fear, cruelty, love, regret, and joy as parts of one full life, making the book a moving supernatural drama about being remembered, being forgiven, and finally being ready to leave.
Pages: 317 | ASIN : B0FV7M23ZM
Our Past and Our Memories
Forgiveness: A Novel centers around a seventy-year-old artist who finds herself revisiting the defining moments of her life—memories shaped by love, loss, and difficult moral choices. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
After I wrote What a Trip, the prequel to Forgiveness, I couldn’t stop wondering what happened to Fiona after the book’s ending. I missed her and wanted to learn more. With an abundance of time on my hands during the latter part of the Pandemic, Fiona began speaking to me, telling me her story and how the present and past had shaped her life.
I also wanted to explore and contrast the social and political climates of the 1970s with those of today. What better way to do that than with my favorite protagonist?
Fiona spends much of the novel reconsidering choices she made decades earlier. What interested you about the process of looking back on one’s younger self?
We are nothing without our past and our memories. As important as it is to “live in the moment,” those moments are a product of the infinitesimal choices we make each day.
Fiona achieved success in her life, but at a great personal cost. The fiftieth anniversary of her friend’s death, coupled with the Pandemic and her husband’s injury, helped her come to terms with the finite quality of life.
No one gets to age seventy without regrets, but what’s most important is how we handle them. I’ve come to believe forgiveness is freedom. I’m sure Fiona came to that realization also.
The Vietnam War, the draft, women’s rights, COVID-19, and January 6 all shape Fiona’s life. Why was it important to connect personal experiences with larger historical events?
We are all shaped by the times in which we live. History is more than dates, wars, and public figures. It’s how those events affect every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat to our cultural and personal beliefs.
The Vietnam War and the draft affected all young men of that era and their families. Many lost their lives; others like Fiona’s husband, Reuben, stood up for their anti-war beliefs and emigrated to Canada. Had Fiona not been influenced by the women’s rights movement, she wouldn’t have had the courage to follow him.
COVID-19 changed our culture and our lifestyles more than any event in the last seventy-five years. Life suddenly became more fragile, and the time we spent in isolation gave us time to reflect on our past and current way of living. Fiona spent that time coming to terms with her personal history and forgiving herself for events long gone.
Images from the January 6 Insurrection will stay with us forever. The democracy we’ve taken for granted could disappear if we don’t stand up for our rights and freedom. Fiona and her husband were personally affected by the event.
While writing Forgiveness, I asked myself whether the Vietnam War era or the present was more politically charged, more dangerous. Sadly, I feel we have more to fear today.
If Fiona could offer one lesson to readers about regret and renewal, what would it be?
We can’t change the past; we can only change how we view it. Life is too short to live with regret. Fiona’s art helped her come to terms with forgiving herself and her loved ones. For those of us who don’t have a creative outlet, we can journal, meditate, seek counseling, or share our stories with loved ones.
Renewal can happen at any time, at any age.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Facebook | Website | Amazon
On New Year’s Eve 2020, as political unrest erupts in Washington, D.C., seventy-year-old Fiona Goldberg confronts a reckoning far closer to home.
When her husband, Reuben—a journalist covering the January 6 Insurrection—is injured, Fiona is left alone with the past she has spent decades trying to quiet. The memories return in fragments: the Vietnam War protests that first bound them together, a fatal accident that shaped her youth, an affair that nearly destroyed their marriage, and a secret she has carried in silence for nearly half a century.
As Fiona revisits the choices that defined her life—love, betrayal, ambition, motherhood denied—she begins to question the stories we tell ourselves about loyalty, aging, and redemption. Against a backdrop of American political upheaval, Forgiveness explores the intimate terrain of a long marriage and the fragile architecture of memory.
A continuation of the story begun in What a Trip, this literary novel examines what it means to grow older with someone who knows your deepest failures—and whether true forgiveness is ever complete.
For readers of thoughtful, character-driven literary women’s fiction, Forgiveness is a meditation on regret, resilience, and the courage to confront the truths that shape us.
Forgiveness: A Novel
Susen Edwards’s Forgiveness is a contemporary women’s fiction novel centered on Fiona O’Brien, a seventy-year-old artist whose memories of love, loss, and moral compromise resurface during the first days of 2021. The novel begins fifty years after Fiona survived the New Year’s Eve collision that killed her best friend, Melissa. As she plans a series of paintings about forgiveness, she revisits her decision to follow her anti-war activist boyfriend, Reuben Goldberg, to Canada during the Vietnam War. Their years in Toronto, later separation, eventual marriage, and present-day life in Greenwich Village form an expansive portrait of a relationship shaped by both devotion and secrecy.
Edwards structures the story through frequent movement between the early 1970s and the politically unsettled winter of 2020–21. Fiona’s recollections reveal her estrangement from her parents, her difficulty establishing an identity apart from Reuben, an affair, an abortion she conceals, and the professional ambitions that give her an independent sense of purpose. The historical settings are more than scenery. The Vietnam draft, changing attitudes toward women’s health, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the January 6 attack on the Capitol all reinforce the novel’s interest in how private lives are altered by public events. Fiona’s conviction that “I’m a survivor” captures the resolve that carries her through repeated periods of displacement and reinvention.
The novel’s greatest strength is its sustained attention to an older woman examining her life with unusual candor. Fiona’s art provides a persuasive organizing metaphor, since each planned work requires her to transform an experience rather than simply remember it. Her reflections also give forgiveness a demanding definition. It involves recognizing responsibility, releasing blame for events beyond one’s control, and accepting that love can coexist with serious failures. The therapist’s observation that “We’re all human and fallible” becomes central to Fiona’s gradual willingness to extend compassion to her parents, Reuben, and herself. Edwards’s direct prose and conversational dialogue keep these ideas accessible, while Fiona’s self-questioning gives the narrative emotional continuity across its long time span.
The novel delves deep into Fiona’s feelings and historical circumstances, and its many flashbacks slow the momentum of the present-day plot. Yet the deliberate pace also suits a story about a woman sorting through half a century of experience. The later chapters deepen the marriage by allowing Fiona and Reuben to disclose what each has carried silently, making their reconciliation feel grounded in knowledge rather than sentiment alone. Forgiveness is an emotionally open account of aging, artistic self-examination, and a partnership that survives because its participants finally confront the full complexity of their shared past.
Pages: 378 | ASIN : B0GX2Z38G5
The Last Pirouette: A Novel in Three Acts
Janette DeFelice’s The Last Pirouette is a psychologically charged work of contemporary women’s fiction and family drama set inside the demanding world of professional ballet. The story centers on Victoria, a former dancer who has poured her abandoned ambitions into her gifted teenage daughter, Delia. When Delia earns a prestigious opportunity in New York, what looks like a career breakthrough exposes a deeper struggle over identity, control, and the difficult boundary between devotion and possession. The novel’s theatrical structure, presented as a story in three acts, fits its preoccupation with performance, fate, and the roles people play for one another.
The mother-daughter relationship gives this ballet novel its emotional force. Victoria can be intrusive and frustrating, but DeFelice lets us see the grief, trauma, thwarted ambition, and genuine love beneath her behavior. Delia is just as carefully drawn. She loves the physical and artistic experience of dance, yet she’s unsure whether the life built around it belongs to her. That tension makes the book more than a familiar coming-of-age story. It becomes a sharp examination of how a parent’s sacrifices can turn into debts a child never agreed to repay, and how hard it can be to separate your own desires from the expectations that shaped you.
DeFelice’s background in dance is evident in the detailed descriptions of technique, rehearsal, injury, and the strange combination of pain and transcendence that ballet demands. Readers who enjoy dance fiction, psychological fiction, and mother-daughter novels will find plenty to absorb here. The recurring birds, rain, mirrors, wings, and prophetic visions give the narrative a dreamlike, sometimes surreal quality, while the alternating timelines show how unresolved experiences repeat themselves across generations. Some passages linger over physical sensation and interior thought, but that intensity suits characters who understand their lives through movement and through bodies that are constantly being trained, judged, desired, and pushed past their limits.
As the novel grows darker, its early sense of possibility becomes increasingly uneasy, and the closing act carries the momentum of a tragedy whose warning signs have been visible all along. Even so, The Last Pirouette remains deeply interested in choice, autonomy, love, and the question of whether people can stop handing their pain to the next generation. It’s an emotionally demanding literary family drama with a vivid ballet setting, complicated women, and a theatrical sensibility that makes every revelation feel as though it’s happening under stage lights. The result is unsettling, intimate, and likely to stay with readers who appreciate character-driven fiction that doesn’t look away from the damage people can do while believing they’re acting out of love.
Pages: 328 | ASIN : B0FWZX8Z64
Mari’s Light Burning Bright
Kaitlyn Marquart’s Mari’s Light Burning Bright is a young adult contemporary fiction novel about Mari, a teenage girl trying to live with memories of childhood abuse, self-harm, a family move, and the fear that she may never feel whole again. As the sequel to Amber Luna My Bright Light, the book follows Mari after Camp Evergreen as she enters Northstar Wellness Center, meets other young people carrying their own pain, and slowly begins to understand that healing is not a straight path. It is messy. It is brave. And sometimes it starts with simply letting someone sit beside you.
Mari’s voice is raw without feeling forced, and Marquart gives her room to be angry, funny, scared, judgmental, tender, and wrong. I appreciated that. Teenagers are not tidy people, especially teenagers in crisis, and the book does not try to polish Mari into someone instantly inspirational. Her thoughts loop, flare, retreat, and return. That rhythm felt honest to me. The scenes at Northstar could have easily become heavy in a flat way, but the author balances them with small flashes of humor and human detail, like Scrabble games, awkward meals, and characters who are much more than the reasons they are there.
I also found myself thinking a lot about the author’s choices around faith, family, and recovery. Mari’s Mormon background is not treated as a simple answer or a simple problem, which makes the story more interesting. Her family loves her, but they often miss what she is trying to say. That hurt to read because it felt real. People can care and still fail to understand. The book is candid about pain, but it is careful with it. It doesn’t turn Mari’s suffering into a spectacle. Instead, it keeps asking a quieter question: what does it take for someone to believe she is worth saving when shame has been speaking louder than everyone else? The answer comes slowly, through therapy, friendship, memory, music, and the fragile courage to try again.
I would recommend Mari’s Light Burning Bright to readers who appreciate reflective young adult fiction with emotional depth, especially stories about mental health, trauma recovery, friendship, and finding a voice after silence. It’s not a light read, and readers sensitive to self-harm or childhood abuse should approach it with care. But for those who value hopeful, character-driven fiction that understands healing as a long walk rather than a sudden rescue, this book has a steady glow.
Pages: 153 | ASIN : B0H56ZX1V8
The Write-In
The Write-In by James A. Brandt is a political fiction novel with strong elements of inspirational drama and political thriller. It follows Jake Kilthread, a retired Army colonel turned local news anchor in Lawton, Oklahoma, whose offhand suggestion that voters write in his name for president turns into a national movement. What begins as frustration with two deeply flawed candidates becomes a surreal rise to the White House, complete with legal challenges, family strain, faith, public pressure, and the early tests of leadership.
I liked how earnest the book is. It wears its heart right on its sleeve. Brandt isn’t trying to write a cynical Washington novel full of smoky rooms and clever betrayals. He’s writing about what leadership should feel like to ordinary people: honest, service-minded, grounded in family, and willing to speak plainly. I enjoyed that. Jake is almost idealized at times, but that seems intentional. He’s less a messy antihero and more a wish cast into fiction, the kind of leader people imagine when they are tired of being disappointed.
The writing is big, direct, and emotional. Sometimes it leans on grand descriptions and affirmations of Jake’s goodness. I found myself wanting a little more friction inside Jake himself, more doubt, more moments where the answers were not so clear. Still, the author’s choices make sense for the genre. As political fiction, the book isn’t just asking “what if?” It is asking “what if the country remembered its better self?” That question gives the story its pulse.
One other thing I liked about the book was the way it keeps Jake’s family close to the center of the story. His rise is national and dramatic, but the scenes with Carol, Keith, and Kyle make the book feel warmer and more personal. They remind us that Jake isn’t just a symbol or a candidate. He’s a husband and father trying to stay grounded while the world around him gets louder.
I would recommend The Write-In most to readers who enjoy patriotic political fiction, faith-informed storytelling, underdog narratives, and stories where family values sit beside national stakes. Readers who want a hopeful, sincere, and very American fantasy about a regular man being called into extraordinary service, this book will be a great read.
Pages: 222 | ASIN : B0GSSJNCT7
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Little Pink Houses follows a forty-seven-year-old former corporate executive who flees Los Angeles for Ambergris Caye, Belize, hoping to reinvent herself, write a novel, and finally live outside the gravitational pull of family damage. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Little pink houses! The abandoned resort in the book is real place on Ambergris Caye, and it’s every bit as fantastical as portrayed in the story. So I knew I wanted to use that as a setting. I kept imagining this little boy there, and because stories rely on tension, I needed the protagonist to be someone with completely different life circumstances, hence a wealthy woman who is childless by choice.
As for the plot itself, I jumped off the true history of the resort, though I did embellish quite a bit. For one, the information available online is sketchy. But the Y2K stuff? It’s a rumor, but as soon as I read it, I knew I could use that to add the humor and quirkiness I wanted to infuse into the novel.
Cole goes to Belize seeking reinvention, but the novel resists that fantasy. What drew you to the idea that starting over is never clean?
To use a cliché, wherever you go, there you are, right? Like Cole, I’m at an age in life where many people start looking back and saying, What if? But we can’t go backward or erase old mistakes. Things in our pasts may fade, but they never go away. All we can do is find peace around them and keep on moving forward.
The island feels humid, alive, and slightly uncanny. What role did Belize play in shaping the emotional tone of the novel?
Belize—Ambergris Caye in particular—completely shaped the novel. It embodies the isolation Cole feels and serves as a juxtaposition of the Hollywood materialism Cole is running away from. Because I wanted to capture the magic of Belize, I leaned into Mayan spirituality which is still very present in the lives of native Belizeans. It’s very tied to the natural world, but because it is so sacred, there’s a lot of mystery surrounding it. So while I used it to add a playful element to the book, I took great pains to be respectful of the culture and its traditions.
The book blends humor, grief, romance, and introspection. What do you hope readers take with them after finishing this novel, and what has stayed with you after writing it?
I like to weave multiple themes into my fiction. This book touches on forgiveness, the damaging power of assumptions, and the subjectivity of memory, to name just a few. The plotline veers into addiction, ecological issues, and cultural dilemmas. Because reading is a very personal journey, I hope readers will find something they need—something healing—whatever that might be.
For me, the biggest lesson is the one Cole learns. That fear can be used as a tool to move forward, rather than stopping you. It takes a lot of courage to put your words out in the world, and very proud of how the novel turned out.
But ultimately, I hope that when people get to the last page, they’ve had so much fun reading that they’re sad to say goodbye.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Webpage
Cole Lavetsky is done. Done with Hollywood exploitation, done with her high-stress executive career, and done living in the shadow of her golden-boy twin brother, a former teen heartthrob. With her vintage guitar and the beginnings of a revenge novel, Cole retreats to a rent-free condo on Ambergris Caye, Belize to reinvent herself.
No surprise, island life comes with charms and complications. What Cole didn’t expect was to have her imagination hijacked by a fantastical pink painted resort—now in ruins—and a seven-year-old prodigy, Elías, who “camps” there. When she meets Thatcher Ames, the island’s infamous (and infuriatingly good-looking) philanthropist, Cole reluctantly accepts that she’ll have to team up with him to help the boy.
As meetings on the beach blur into sunset dinners, Cole tells herself she’s got things under control—with Elías, Thatcher, and her book. Until Elías’s grandma, an elderly Mayan mystic, reveals an uncanny insight and Cole begins to fear that in hiding her past, she’s put Elías’s future—and the hearts of everyone involved—in jeopardy.
Darkly funny, achingly candid, and vibrantly atmospheric, Little Pink Houses is a multilayered story about the messy grace we owe ourselves, and the astonishing things that happen when we find the courage to act in the face of fear.
False Bay
False Bay is a literary novel with strong elements of magical realism, ghost story, family saga, and social history. Set around Cape Town’s False Bay, it moves through the lives and deaths of a wide cast: Ella, Veronica, Sebastian, Godfrey, Manuel, Mother Angels, Father Innocent, Mary, Liz, and others whose stories overlap through love, trauma, faith, race, sexuality, apartheid, memory, and the sea. The book is not built like a neat plot machine. It feels more like a chorus of voices calling across water, each one adding another piece to a strange, painful, often funny picture of a community marked by beauty and damage.
Dunn lets almost everyone speak, including the dead, the wounded, the guilty, animals, saints, ghosts, and people who have been ignored or pushed to the margins. That choice could have become messy, but mostly in a way that feels true to the book’s world. Life here is not tidy. Grief interrupts jokes. Violence sits beside gossip. A drowning can be tragic and absurd in the same breath. I found the shifts in voice especially effective when they revealed how differently people remember the same wound. No one owns the whole truth. Everyone carries a shard of it.
The writing has a plainspoken sharpness that I appreciated. It can be blunt, even shocking, but it rarely feels careless. Dunn writes about sex, abuse, disability, addiction, racism, queerness, Catholic guilt, and spiritual hunger without polishing the edges too much. That gave the novel force. At times, I did want a little more space to breathe between tragedies, because the book piles pain upon pain. Still, the humor saves it from becoming grim. Veronica’s theatrical wit, the recurring Bloody Marys, the cats, the braais, and the local Cape texture all keep the book alive and human. The genre blend also works well: as literary fiction, it is interested in memory and voice; as magical realism, it lets ghosts and visions feel as ordinary as weather; as a Cape Town social novel, it keeps asking who gets seen, who gets forgiven, and who is left outside.
I would recommend False Bay to readers who like layered, character-driven literary fiction that is strange, candid, and emotionally full. It will especially appeal to people interested in South African stories, queer histories, Catholic imagery, family secrets, and novels where place becomes almost a character of its own. For readers willing to sit with discomfort, contradiction, and dark humor, False Bay offers something memorable: a haunted, salty, bruised novel that keeps listening to the people history usually leaves underwater.
Pages: 204 | ASIN : B0FPN7VT82
