Blog Archives
Voyagers: Homeland to Heartland
Voyagers: Homeland to Heartland is a tender family saga about Norwegian immigrants carrying memory, faith, and stubborn hope from the old country into the American Midwest. Author D. L. Norris follows Kittil, Marte, and their descendants through prairie hardship, household rituals, courtship, grief, weather, work, and inheritance, moving from the dream of America to the complicated reality of building a life there. The book lingers on objects and moments that become emotional anchors: Marte’s rocking chair, Otto’s care for the calf and Porker, Mathea’s rare smile, Snip’s arrival, the Schoolhouse Blizzard, Sophia’s difficult marriage, Omer’s heartbreaking loss, and the family’s final reckoning with love, silence, and truth.
I liked the book’s sincerity. It has the feeling of someone opening a family trunk and taking out each folded memory with both hands. The early chapters especially worked on me: Marte sitting in the old chair, half in Nebraska and half in Norway, made the immigrant ache feel physical rather than abstract. I also found Otto’s gentleness genuinely moving. His devotion to Porker could’ve been sentimental, but the scene carries a hard little lesson about farm life, love, and necessity. The book understands that tenderness doesn’t protect anyone from loss. Sometimes it only teaches them how deeply they can feel it.
The writing is at its best when it slows down and trusts domestic detail: bread cooling on the counter, a child watching from a window, a train pulling into the station, a yellow telegram darkening the kitchen. Some chapters lean into summary or moral reflection. Still, there’s a steadiness to the voice that suits the material. The ideas are plainspoken but not shallow: heritage is a blessing and a burden, faith can steady a person without saving them from pain, and family loyalty can become either shelter or silence. Sophia’s storyline, especially, gives the book a darker grain. Her struggle to honor her heart, then later to protect her children, complicates the warmer immigrant-family portrait in ways I appreciated.
By the end, I felt less like I’d read a plotted novel than like I’d spent time inside a family’s remembered weather, its storms, hymns, kitchens, funerals, and stubborn acts of love. Voyagers is heartfelt in a way that feels earned, and its best passages carry the quiet ache of people trying to keep the past alive without being trapped by it. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy multigenerational family stories, immigrant history, Norwegian American heritage, faith-inflected historical fiction, and books that value emotional inheritance as much as outward adventure.
Pages: 196 | ISBN : 1977290469
Forgiveness is Key
Second Chance Highway follows a young woman fleeing an abusive relationship with her infant daughter, who drives west in search of the mother who abandoned her and discovers that escape is just the beginning of healing. Why was a road trip the right structure for this kind of emotional and spiritual journey?
Ginny was stuck, but because of her supernatural encounter with TC, she realized she needed to be in another place, both physically and mentally. How better to get to your destination? You take a road—preferably one that leads you to the correct destination. I took a road trip to gather information for this novel. We planned nothing. We simply climbed into the truck and took off, much like Ginny did. Frankly, I’ve never had a more rewarding experience.
Faith is central to the novel. What role do “unexpected helpers” play in Ginny’s transformation?
They play the role of being the hands and feet of Jesus, so to speak. They help her overcome doubts, fears, and the trauma that led her to the destructive relationship with her abusive fiancé. God put them in her path just to keep her on the path He sought for her.
The relationship between Ginny and her mother carries a lot of weight. What drew you to that dynamic?
Thankfully, my mother never abandoned me. She is an excellent mother. However, in my years as a writer, I’ve met people who struggle with past, very deep wounds caused by people who were supposed to protect them. In some cases, these traumas have led to self-destructive behaviors that have kept them, at least for a while, from pursuing the call on their lives. Forgiveness is key to wholeness and healing. It’s a message I discuss a lot—probably to remind myself of my own unforgiving heart.
I hope the series continues in other books. If so, where will the story take readers?
I’m writing another book now, but it tells the story of another fictional character, Lulu, who is grappling with the effects of a disintegrating family.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Ginny Carmichael feels trapped in her abusive relationship until an otherworldly visit ignites her determination to break free. With her baby daughter in tow, she embarks on a courageous road trip that not only takes her away from danger but also leads her to unexpected kindness, genuine connections, and profound forgiveness.
Along the way, she meets a compassionate waitress, a spirited aunt, and ultimately her estranged mother, who may hold the key to her healing. As Ginny approaches her destination-and the truth about her worth-she discovers that escape was never the destination. Wholeness was.
Second Chance Highway is a poignant tale of faith, friendship, and the path to restoration and redemption, and is the sequel to the award-winning Always Think of Me.
The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik
The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik is a historical fiction novel set in 1937 and 1938, during the Depression, and it follows Vesta Blonik, an unmarried farm woman in rural Minnesota whose father quietly arranges a future that leaves her behind. As Vesta realizes just how precarious her place in the world is, the story widens to include Gordon Crenshaw, a grieving man in North Carolina whose family’s desperate plan draws the two of them together through letters, half-truths, and the possibility of a new life. This is a novel about survival, dignity, and the strange, fragile ways hope can arrive when life has already taken a hard swing at you.
Author Denise Smith Cline writes with a plainspoken steadiness that feels exactly right for Vesta, and that choice gives the book a lot of its force. The prose trusts small details to do the heavy lifting, whether it’s the smell of damp wool, the ache of farm work, or the comfort Vesta finds beside Lottie the cow. I liked that the writing never begged me to feel something. It just kept laying honest detail beside honest detail until the emotional weight built on its own. That kind of restraint is harder to pull off than it looks, and here it works.
I also admired the author’s patience with her characters. Vesta could have been written as a symbol of rural hardship, or as a simple underdog to cheer for, but she feels much more lived-in than that. She is proud, lonely, watchful, capable, and sometimes a little awkward in ways that made me trust the book more. Gordon, too, could have turned into a neat plot device, but the novel gives his grief and uncertainty real room. What interested me most was how this historical novel keeps asking quiet questions about dependence, gender, class, and who gets to make decisions for whom. None of that feels forced. It just sits there in the story like cold air coming through a crack in the wall.
I came away thinking this book will mean the most to readers who like character-driven historical fiction with emotional depth, especially novels that move at a decent pace and care more about the characters’ inner lives than spectacle. I would recommend it to people who enjoy stories of resilience, complicated family ties, and hard-won tenderness, and to readers who like their historical fiction grounded, compassionate, and just a little bruised. It’s thoughtful, intimate, and quietly sure of itself.
Pages: 337 | ASIN : B0FGZMVZ7D
Second Chance Highway
Second Chance Highway opens in motion and panic: Ginny Carmichael has fled an abusive fiancé in Atlanta, her baby in tow, and heads west toward Las Vegas in search of the mother whose absence helped deform her sense of love and worth. What begins as a physical escape quickly becomes a spiritual and emotional reckoning, with a Route 66 diner, a sharp-tongued waitress named Oralyn, and a widening circle of unlikely helpers turning the novel into more than a chase story. Author Lori Keesey builds the book around pursuit, forgiveness, and providence, braiding domestic suspense with redemptive family drama and an overt current of Christian faith.
What I responded to most was the book’s sincerity. Keesey doesn’t write from a cool, ironic distance; she writes with her whole heart on the page, and that gives the novel a kind of old-fashioned voltage. Ginny’s fear feels bodily, not decorative, and Jacob’s manipulation is rendered with enough vanity and menace to make him feel less like a stock villain than a man rotted from the inside out. I also liked the way the novel lingers with side characters who could have been mere waystations. Oralyn and Monty, especially, give the book warmth, comic grain, and a lived-in small-town texture that keeps the story from becoming airless. The result is a road novel with a bruised, hopeful pulse.
I was also struck by how unapologetically the book insists on grace without softening the uglier facts of trauma. Its theology isn’t ornamental; it’s the engine. Sometimes that directness makes the novel feel a touch sermon-forward. But I admired the book for knowing exactly what it believes and for pressing that belief through every relationship in the story: mother and daughter, abuser and victim, stranger and rescuer, living and dead. By the end, the novel shifts from a mere escape narrative into something more searching and restorative, and that change gives it real force.
I would hand this to readers of Christian women’s fiction, inspirational suspense, faith-based family drama, redemptive road-trip fiction, and domestic emotional suspense, especially anyone who wants a novel about survival that refuses to leave healing as a vague afterthought. It reminded me less of a conventional thriller than of Francine Rivers at her most earnest, with a little of the heartland hospitality of Jan Karon carried onto the highway. Second Chance Highway is for readers who like their fiction wounded, watchful, and ultimately lit from within.
Pages: 386 | ISBN : 1684881609
The Weight of 100% Perfection
A Child’s Dream centers around a girl who repeatedly dreams that her Appalachian community builds a silver sled for children and Santa and his elves as they face a mysterious plague. Where did the idea for this story come from?
I was inspired by my own dream while visiting a friend who lives in Niagara Falls, and imagining people with many of their own tools coming together to build a sled.
Why was the theme of second chances an important one to incorporate into your storyline?
Absolutely! As young people can feel fearful about their future and the risks they face, the weight of 100% perfection can be crushing when those plans do not work out as intended. Even when we get the air knocked out of us like a football player, we take our breaks but get back on the field, and that’s our second chance for our Super bowl win.
Where did you get the inspiration for Krystal’s traits and dialogue?
Krystal’s traits are those of that friend we have who loves laughter and pranks, but in a pleasant way, you don’t know what she’ll do next. Shuffling her feet to create static electricity, she’ll probably shock you. Lol. Mixed with some middle child energy.
Can we look forward to more children’s books from you soon? What are you currently working on?
Absolutely, it’s in the works, and it’ll also be focused on action and adventures for young adults and teens, and a mix of silly and serious. After all, hopefully we can all have a lot more silly in life that we all know comes with seriousness.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
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“A Child’s Dream: Santa’s Parking Ticket & an Empty Sled.”
A Child’s Dream: Santa’s Parking Ticket & an Empty Sled
A Child’s Dream follows Krystal, a sleepy middle kid in an Appalachian town who keeps seeing the same wild dream of her whole community building a shining silver sled for the children. The book then zips up to the North Pole, where Santa is staring down a weird elf plague, a possible Christmas with an empty sled, and even a parking ticket, all while a whole cast of elves, doctors, and family members stumble through big problems, big feelings, and goofy adventures until everything comes together in a huge snowy Christmas parade.
Anita Yates’ writing is wonderfully talky and dramatic, with lots of arguments in kitchens, bus rides on twisty mountain roads, and Santa trying to fix things with karaoke and a Journey song. I liked how often the story slows down for tiny details, like stale biscuits that no one wants to eat or thrift-store finds that suddenly feel like treasure, because these little bits ground the wild North Pole stuff and made the people feel real. At the same time, the book is rich with scenes that jump from Krystal’s messy bedroom to medical lectures with elf interns to fashion makeovers for Mrs. Claus. I still found myself smiling a lot, especially in the funny family arguments and the moments where characters try hard to cheer each other up, even when money is tight and the future looks shaky.
What really stuck with me was the mix of silly and serious ideas. Under all the jokes, there is a heavy focus on second chances, being prepared for the moments that matter, and choosing purpose over comfort. You see it in Krystal, trying to help her parents by joking about those awful biscuits instead of complaining, in Lisa wanting to be a doctor after saving a baby on a mission trip, and in Robert walking away from sports glory to study medicine so he can treat wounded soldiers. The story also keeps circling back to grown-up ideas like job loss, the elders who refuse to leave home, refugees, and faith. Sometimes the shifts in tone felt a little jarring for me, like one page had me giggling at silly elf diseases and the next page dropped a heavy quote about suffering or sacrifice, yet I could tell the author cares a lot about every theme and wants readers to feel both seen and challenged.
I had fun with this book. A Child’s Dream feels like a full season of a holiday TV show rather than a quick bedtime read. I would recommend it for tweens who prefer busy stories with tons of side characters, plus adults who grew up in or care about Appalachian communities and enjoy Christmas tales that lean hard into hope, faith, and service. If you like chaotic family energy, heart-on-its-sleeve moral lessons, and a Santa who messes up, sings, and learns right along with the kids, then this is the perfect book for you.
ASIN : B0DY7JQSPX
Give Me You
Give Me You circles around memory, aging, love, desire, and the messy strands that tie people to their past. The story follows Hilda and Rose as they move through late life with sharp tongues, scattered memories, and old passions that still burn under layers of time. Their histories unfold in fits of humor and heartbreak as the book jumps between present frustrations and vivid recollections of a wilder youth. The novel paints aging not as a slow fade but as a strange and fierce second act full of old secrets, bruised pride, and a surprising amount of longing.
I was pulled in two directions while reading this novel. Part of me was laughing at the bluntness of Hilda’s voice. The other part kept sinking into a quiet sadness as she drifted between clarity and confusion. The writing hits hard because it never settles. Scenes move fast. Thoughts jump. Memories interrupt simple moments and turn them into something richer. I enjoyed that unpredictability. It made the story feel alive and relatable. The language is sharp, witty, and shameless. I kept stopping to take in a sentence, either because it cut deep or because it cracked me up.
Rose’s chapters hit me differently. Where Hilda is all fire and stubborn grit, Rose feels like a softer ache. Her memories open slowly and with more regret and tenderness. Those sections pulled me into the emotional weight of love that lingers far longer than it should. I kept thinking about how people carry their past lovers. The book does not shy away from messy intimacy or moral gray zones, and I really respected that. Still, there were moments when the narrative wandered so far into memory that I lost my footing. I enjoyed the wandering, but I also wanted to come back to the present. I wanted more time in the room with these women as they are now because they are captivating in their contradictions.
Give Me You would be a great read for people who love character-driven stories and for anyone who wants a novel that honors aging without softening it. It is perfect for readers who enjoy family drama, sharp humor, and emotional complexity. I would hand this book to someone who likes stories that make you laugh in one breath and swallow hard in the next. Give Me You is a fierce and funny story that shines a bright light on the desires we never outgrow.
Pages: 116 | ASIN : B0G67C3DPH
The Capricious Nature of Being
The Capricious Nature of Being is a collection of short stories about the unpredictable turns life takes, and how ordinary people stumble, resist, adapt, or come undone as fate nudges them down unexpected paths. The book opens by framing life as a kind of “Secret Santa,” full of surprises we never signed up for, and the stories that follow lean into that idea with characters who face moments they never planned for and can’t control. In story after story, we meet people caught between who they thought they were and who life seems determined to make them become.
As I read, I kept pausing to absorb the way author Richard Plinke writes about internal struggle. His characters are flawed in ways that feel human rather than dramatic. They think too much. Or too little. They cling to old hurts or old hopes. In “The Safe,” Hope’s entire life tilts because of a single discovered date, and the writing lets her unravel in a quiet, almost tender way. I found myself nodding along, feeling that tug between wanting the truth and wanting the comfort of not knowing. Plinke seems to enjoy letting readers sit in discomfort, not to punish us but to remind us that most turning points in real life aren’t big cinematic events. They’re small realizations that land with surprising weight.
What struck me in many of the stories is how the author uses familiar settings to explore less familiar emotional terrain. A sales manager on a bike ride. A widow cleaning out a house. Someone facing the remains of a broken relationship or a restless conscience. The ideas in the book aren’t complicated, but they’re honest, and the writing doesn’t hide behind fancy language. Sometimes the sentences hit like a quick tap on the shoulder. Other times they stretch out, winding through a character’s history the way a person might ramble when they finally feel safe enough to tell the truth.
By the time I finished the last story, I felt like I’d been listening to a friend talk through the strange business of being alive. That’s probably what I appreciated most. The book has a reflective quality that never slips into preaching. Instead, it invites you to think about your own unexpected turns and how you handled them, or didn’t. If you enjoy character-driven fiction, if you like stories that pause on the small moments where everything quietly shifts, or if you simply want a collection that feels both grounded and thoughtful, this one will likely speak to you.
Pages: 357 | ASIN : B0FFWGLNP7
