Blog Archives
The 12 Bad Dates Before Christmas
The 12 (Bad) Dates Before Christmas, by N.L. DiDeo, follows Evie Holliday, a hardworking architect whose quiet single life is upended when her mother issues a holiday ultimatum: go on twelve dates before Christmas or surrender her romantic future to the “Church Cupids.” What begins as a parade of dating-app calamities becomes something warmer and more surprising when Evie repeatedly crosses paths with Ryan, a charming police officer and single father whose presence feels less like a rescue and more like a well-timed miracle. Set against the festive sparkle of St. Augustine, this clean holiday romance turns bad dates, meddling family, and emotional-support donuts into the scaffolding for a sweet love story.
I had fun with this book because it understands the comic misery of dating without becoming sour about love. Evie’s voice is chatty, self-protective, and genuinely funny, especially when she is cataloging each romantic disaster like evidence at a crime scene. The book’s humor works best when it lets ordinary humiliations swell into operatic little catastrophes: garlic rolls withheld like sacred relics, a karaoke ambush, a mother treating a dating profile like a surveillance operation. There is a buoyant absurdity to the premise, but the story stays grounded through Evie’s affection for her family, her friendship with Lanie, and her growing recognition that being busy is not the same as being fulfilled.
Ryan gives the romance its steadier pulse. I appreciated that he is not written as a flawless fantasy dropped into Evie’s life to solve everything; he comes with responsibilities, a daughter he adores, and enough patience to meet Evie’s chaos with warmth rather than swagger. The relationship develops with a light touch, and the closed-door approach keeps the focus on banter, trust, family integration, and the small rituals that make two lives begin to rhyme. Some of the setups are broad, and the bad dates lean deliberately cartoonish, but that theatrical quality feels baked into the charm. The book is not trying to be austere. It is a frosted sugar cookie with a surprisingly sturdy center.
The target audience is readers who enjoy clean romance, holiday romance, small-town romance, romantic comedy, and Christmas fiction. Fans of Debbie Macomber’s cozy seasonal stories or Jenny Hale’s Christmas romances will likely feel at home here, though N.L. DiDeo brings a more antic, sitcom-bright dating-app energy to the familiar holiday-love framework. This is a cheerful, low-angst read for anyone who wants family meddling, festive settings, sweet chemistry, and a love story that believes embarrassment can be a doorway. The 12 (Bad) Dates Before Christmas is a merry reminder that the road to forever may begin with one truly terrible first date.
Pages: 295 | ASIN : B0GX2YLJJQ
Where the Kaleidoscopes Turn
Where the Kaleidoscopes Turn, by Joan Enockson, follows Cody, an eleven-year-old boy who’s carrying the quiet sting of a rough school year, as he visits his grandpa in Pocahontas County, Iowa. What begins as a family trip becomes a tour of giant kaleidoscopes scattered through small-town parks, each one opening into a memory, a lesson, or a new way of seeing the world. With Grandpa Russell, Cody’s new puppy Molly, and the legacy of Leonard Olson guiding the story, the book becomes less about sightseeing and more about learning how beauty, community, and perspective can change a person from the inside out.
I really appreciated the heart of this book. I felt drawn to the way it treats Cody’s unhappiness without making it too heavy for young readers. He’s not written as a dramatic problem to solve. He’s a child who is hurt, withdrawn, and a little stuck, which felt honest to me. The relationship between Cody and his grandpa is the emotional center, and it’s handled with a gentle patience I found moving. Grandpa doesn’t lecture so much as notice, wait, tell stories, and lets Cody arrive at understanding in his own time. That felt true to childhood, and also true to good parenting.
The writing has a homespun, reflective quality that fits the rural setting well. The lessons are stated clearly, but I can see why that directness would work for younger readers. The ideas are lovely, especially the way each kaleidoscope becomes a metaphor for change, memory, courage, family, community, and choosing what we put into the world. I also thought the artwork gave the book much of its charm. The illustrations have a soft sketchbook feel with bursts of watercolor-like color, and that splashy brightness mirrors the kaleidoscope theme beautifully. The images of the small towns, parks, farm scenes, and Cody with Molly add warmth and texture, making the book feel both personal and rooted in a real place.
I found Where the Kaleidoscopes Turn to be a tender, thoughtful book with a strong sense of place and a sincere belief in the value of looking at life differently. It’s earnest and full of affection for grandparents, small towns, old memories, and children who need a little help finding their footing again. I’d recommend it for elementary and early middle-grade readers, especially kids who enjoy family stories, gentle life lessons, dogs, road trips, or books that leave them feeling steadier and more hopeful by the end.
Pages: 98 | ISBN : 978-1958023648
Hard Things
Hard Things is Marc Hopkins’s memoir of training for and running the Bigfoot 200, a brutal 206.5-mile endurance race through the Cascade Mountains, but the race itself is really only the outer trail. The deeper journey is inward, through old grief, heart trouble, divorce, fatherhood, family silence, anxiety, love, and the aching need to prove oneself worthy. Hopkins moves from a sweltering training run where he’s reduced to counting steps, through snow-blocked roads, river crossings, a folded shoe insert he refuses to fix, and finally into the long, delirious miles of the race, where aid stations, pacers, his son, his mother, and Jenni become part of a hard-won lesson: strength isn’t the same as pretending not to need anyone.
What I admired most is how honestly the book lets discomfort stay uncomfortable. Hopkins doesn’t polish himself into some heroic endurance-machine version of a person. He gives us the man who drives himself to the hospital with heart symptoms, jokes through a 99 percent blockage, signs up for a 200-mile race partly as a defiant gesture against death, and then slowly realizes that his compulsive toughness has a shadow side. The “rock in the shoe” moment stayed with me because it’s so simple and so revealing. He’s literally hurting because his insole is folded under his foot, yet he keeps going because that’s what he’s trained himself to do emotionally, too. That’s the book at its best: physical pain becoming a quiet little door into something larger.
The writing has a loose, conversational immediacy that fits the subject well. Hopkins is funny in a self-deprecating way, especially when he lets the absurdity of ultrarunning breathe, like searching for a hidden trail that seems to have vanished into a river, or mistaking a stump for Bigfoot when sleep deprivation starts playing tricks on him. At times, the book circles familiar emotional territory, especially around worthiness and the need to appear strong, but I found that repetition mostly honest rather than tedious. Long races don’t reveal things neatly. They return the same fears again and again, under different weather, with worse feet. The best passages have a rugged sensory clarity: the blast zones, the old-growth forest, the stale exhaustion of aid stations, the strange anticlimax after the finish.
By the end, what moved me wasn’t simply that Hopkins finishes Bigfoot 200, though that achievement is staggering. It’s that he finishes with a softer understanding of himself, and that softness feels more courageous than the miles. Hard Things is a thoughtful, bruised, humane book about endurance, not as conquest, but as a way of listening to the life you’ve been trying to outrun. I’d recommend it to runners and endurance athletes, certainly, but also to anyone who has confused self-reliance with healing, or who needs a reminder that doing hard things doesn’t require becoming unbreakable.
Pages: 210 | ASIN : B0GYQL3KG8
Spell Roma Backwards
Spell Roma Backwards is Debbie Barrow Michael’s tender, grief-soaked continuation of her family’s story with Roma, the spirited Russian boy she adopted after what she describes as a direct call from God. The book follows Roma from his magnetic childhood into the turbulent years of young adulthood, through rebellion, rehab, radiant faith, reunion with his birth family, and finally his devastating death after a fall. What begins as an adoption memoir becomes something larger and stranger: a meditation on obedience, motherhood, divine mystery, and the way love keeps speaking after loss.
I was moved by how unwilling the book is to flatten Roma into either a miracle child or a cautionary tale. He’s charming, maddening, funny, impulsive, tender, and impossible to contain. I kept thinking about the boy who forgives Rocky again and again, inviting him to play baseball even after being bullied, and then the young man who can turn a punishment into “a nice adventure” after walking to practice in the rain. Those moments make the later darkness hurt more, because the reader has already fallen for him. Michael writes motherhood with an aching honesty I admired. She doesn’t pretend that faith made parenting simple. Her “tough love” is full of trembling. Her prayers are sometimes brave and sometimes desperate. That felt true to me.
The writing has the intimate, gathering quality of testimony, and at its best, it glows with lived-in detail: the lonely basketball hoop, the pink roses blooming where they shouldn’t, the eerie repetition of the number seven, the taxi in Georgia filling with Beatles songs while two families, divided by language and history, sing through tears. This is about a mother trying to make meaning without reducing pain, trying to keep hold of God and her son at the same time. The idea at the heart of the book, that Roma spelled backward becomes amor, lands not like a clever title but like a hard-won benediction.
By the end, I felt less as though I had read a neatly shaped memoir than as though I had been entrusted with a family’s sacred archive. Spell Roma Backwards is sorrowful, searching, and unexpectedly bright, a book about a son who could not be managed, explained, or forgotten. It closes with grief still breathing, but also with gratitude strong enough to stand beside it. I’d recommend it especially to readers drawn to Christian memoirs, adoption stories, testimonies of loss and faith, and books that treat grief not as something to solve, but as something love learns to carry.
Pages: 307 | ASIN : B0DPDX3Q4Y
The Falcon and the Songbird
The Falcon and the Songbird, by Susan Kay Harris, follows April Winford, a perceptive girl coming of age in the Texas Hill Country during the early 1960s, as her private world of horses, family tensions, first love, and friendship is overtaken by the public tremors of Kennedy’s presidency, his assassination, racial injustice, land greed, and the fight to protect a fragile natural habitat. What begins as a young girl’s intimate remembrance widens into a story about conscience, how it wakes, how it wounds, and how it asks ordinary people to become braver than they planned.
I was drawn first to the novel’s strong sense of place. The Hill Country is not merely scenery here; it breathes, with its rain-starved grass, limestone ridges, ranch roads, birdsong, and the half-wild freedom of Moona, April’s horse. Harris writes April’s girlhood with a vivid inwardness, catching the awkwardness of adolescence without making it small. April is romantic, stubborn, naïve, observant, and sometimes painfully wrong, which makes her feel alive. The book is at its best when it lets innocence brush against danger before April fully understands what she has encountered.
I loved the way the novel braids personal awakening with historical disillusionment. Kennedy’s assassination does not sit in the background as decoration; it alters the moral weather of the book. The story can be sprawling, and at times its political conversations become more explicit than subtle, but I appreciated its ambition. It wants to connect a girl’s first difficult loyalties, to her mother, to Clay, to Ronnie, to the land itself, with the larger betrayals of a country entering a darker age. That gives the novel a raw, earnest charge, a kind of flint-struck sincerity.
I think this book is best suited for readers who enjoy reflective historical fiction, coming-of-age novels, Southern fiction, and stories about moral courage. Readers who admire the ethical awakening and regional atmosphere of To Kill a Mockingbird may find a familiar gravity here, though Harris’s novel is more openly political and more meditative in its treatment of land, memory, and loss. The Falcon and the Songbird is a heartfelt and searching novel about the hour when childhood ends, and conscience begins to sing.
Pages: 320 | ISBN : 978-2839949330
Deep Human Angst
The Telltale Lie follows a prickly Vancouver schoolteacher as a strange clue after his father’s death sends him searching for his true identity, only to uncover a dangerous web of secrets, wartime history, and political unrest. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of defining one’s identity. Staking a claim in who we are seems to be of critical importance and takes up an extraordinary amount of our time in our lives, from toddlers, through our teenage years, and well beyond. So, I thought it would be fun to explore an aspect of this as a globe-trotting identity mystery. I love history and digging into the past – you never know what you’ll find. And I found some remarkable things while researching this story that truly resonated with this theme.
Treyton Chase is witty, wounded, and often difficult. What inspired his sharp-edged voice?
I wanted to create a character who comes across as confident, smart, and perceptive, but a character whose confidence and abrasiveness are his flaws. It makes him less aware of the lies he tells himself. His obvious competence is often undermined by these flaws. I think of him as a loveable jerk. But his humor and wit allowed me to soften his abrasiveness – to make it palatable – which I believe is critical to following his character development.
Why did you choose 1968 Vancouver and Paris as the backdrop for Trey’s search for identity?
Originally, I was attracted to the idea of starting a character in a familiar new world (Vancouver being one of the youngest cities on the planet) and slowly pushing him deeper into the past (Paris, then Istanbul, and finally Van, Turkey) as he uncovers forgotten personal and national history. He starts in Van and ends in Van – the past-is-present sort of thing. The original title was ‘This Same Sun’. And, while a skeleton of this idea remains, the story steers more towards a deeper dive into identity.
I’ve long been fascinated by the perpetual protests in France. It seems every time I visit, there is some strike going on that incapacitates some critical part of the infrastructure. I believe these have their roots, in large part, in the spirit of 1968, where those protests essentially shut down a country. It wasn’t an isolated thing either – there were significant protests throughout the world that year. They can’t be painted with a single brush, but they reflected a deep human angst about the times, the politics, and class identity that was expressed disparately and clumsily by students and others as the angst gathered steam. I’ve always felt that these kinds of events are as much about defining yourself and bonding with individuals who appear like-minded as they are about justice, and therefore a perfect canvas for a story about identity.
The novel explores the lies families and nations tell. Which part of that theme was most important for you to examine?
Treyton’s personal story is the anchor, of course, but it allowed for the exploration of bigger ideas. There are several moments in the story where Trey reflects on his greatest sin, the sin of self-deception. He’s consciously aware of this, and yet he falls for it all the same, fueled by anger and resentment. We see him convincing himself of things (and perhaps convincing the reader at the same time) that the truth is a lie or a lie is the truth. Every one of us is guilty of this. Most readers of my book fall for the same simple deceptions (and they’re not always particularly subtle), and are genuinely surprised at the end of the story. I think being made aware of this process – going through it via Trey’s story – is critical to exploring the theme. And I think it’s critical to understanding the times in which we live. We humans are capable of deceiving ourselves into voting for corrupt leaders who are obviously motivated by their own self-interest. We often get caught up in someone else’s agenda, particularly when it’s fueled by feelings of anger and resentment. And we bond with others who feel the same. Sure, genuine ignorance plays a role, but empathy and altruistic thinking tend to realign our compass. As a famous disciple once said, “Love covers a multitude of sins.” That is where this story naturally led me.
Author Links: Website
God’s Plants
GOD’s Plants, by Carol Allen Gipson, follows three children, James, Marlene, and Robert, as they spend a sunny afternoon with their great-grandparents, Nana and Grandpa. What begins as a playful visit turns into a gentle backyard adventure when the children discover “biblical plant signs” placed among flowers, herbs, vegetables, and trees. Through their curiosity, Nana introduces them to the Bible, God, Jesus, prayer, and the meaning behind plants like mint, herbs, palm, and the Crown of Thorns.
There’s a sweetness in the way faith is presented through ordinary family time, not as a lecture but as a conversation that grows out of children noticing the world around them. I especially liked the garden setting because it gives the spiritual lessons something tangible to rest on. A child can smell mint, see a palm tree, touch a leaf, and then connect that sensory moment to a Bible verse. That idea feels thoughtful and memorable. The writing is warm and direct. The grandmotherly voice has a comforting quality, and I could feel the author’s desire to pass down faith, family memory, and a love of growing things.
The artwork gives the book a soft, welcoming atmosphere. The characters look kind and expressive, and the garden scenes have a glowing, storybook warmth that fits the tone beautifully. I was most drawn to the pages where the children explore among the herbs and signs, because those illustrations make the learning feel alive and playful. The Crown of Thorns section carries more emotional weight, and I appreciated that the book doesn’t avoid the seriousness of Jesus’ suffering, while still framing it gently for young readers. Some of the transitions can feel a little abrupt, especially when the story moves from plant hunting into deeper theology, but the tenderness of Nana’s explanations helps smooth that shift.
GOD’s Plants is a faith-centered picture book with a clear purpose and a deeply personal spirit. It’s best for Christian families, Sunday school settings, grandparents reading with grandchildren, or parents who want to introduce children to biblical ideas through nature and gardening. I’d recommend it especially for young readers who enjoy gentle family stories and hands-on connections between faith and the natural world.
Pages: 43 | ASIN : B0G5BQ1F9N
A Plea for Freedom
A Plea for Freedom, by Raymond Hackney, is a historical novel set during the American Revolutionary War that follows fifteen-year-old Daniel Asbury as he leaves his Virginia home and embarks on a journey filled with danger, hardship, and unexpected challenges that test his courage and shape his understanding of what it means to be free. At its heart, this work of historical fiction is about the cost of freedom, not just as a national idea, but as something felt in the body, tested in fear, and reshaped by suffering.
Hackney writes Daniel’s story in the first person, and that choice gives the novel the feel of a remembered life rather than a polished legend. Daniel is brave, yes, but he is also young, impulsive, frightened, and often unsure of himself. That makes him a highly relatable character. The early scenes on the family farm, with meals, chores, church gatherings, hunting trips, and arguments with his parents, ground the story before it moves into danger. It gives the later hardship more weight because we know what Daniel has left behind. The writing can be plain and direct, sometimes almost old-fashioned, but that style fits the story’s journal-like shape. It does not try to be flashy. It tries to carry a life across time.
The book is clearly invested in history, but it is also trying to handle difficult material with care, especially in its portrayal of Native American characters and frontier violence. Some scenes are hard to read. The punishment of Tories, the captivity, the prison conditions, and the violence along the frontier all push against any simple idea of heroism. That was one of the stronger parts of the novel for me. Freedom is not treated as a clean slogan. It becomes complicated, even uncomfortable. Daniel wants liberty, but he has to learn that everyone is living under some kind of pressure, whether from war, loyalty, hunger, fear, grief, or faith. The novel does lean into faith more strongly as it moves toward its conclusion, and readers who enjoy spiritually framed historical fiction will likely find that meaningful.
I would recommend A Plea for Freedom to readers who enjoy historical fiction rooted in real lives, family memory, Revolutionary War history, frontier survival, and stories of faith under pressure. It’s best suited for someone who doesn’t mind a steady, earnest style and who appreciates a novel that feels less like a modern thriller and more like sitting beside someone as they tell you what happened, what hurt, and what stayed with them.
Pages: 296 | ASIN : B0GX2NDFG8
