Blog Archives
My Dad, My Hero
My Dad, My Hero, by Kacey Hoysted, is a short, rhyming picture book about a kid whose father serves in the army. The child talks about Dad’s “cams and combat boots,” the obstacle courses, the late nights, the gear, and the long stretches apart, then circles back to how much fun they have together and how he is their hero who helps keep them safe. The last pages invite children to write a letter to their own hero parent and add a picture, and there is a heartfelt note from the author, plus a closing “Lest We Forget” spread filled with poppies and a glowing sky.
I really liked how simple the writing is. The rhymes feel natural and light, and they roll off the tongue when I read them out loud. There is no heavy explanation of war or danger, just small kid-sized details like painted faces, staying awake until sunrise, and missing Dad when he goes. It lets the big emotions sit in the gaps between the lines. The repetition of “my dad” and “my hero” gives the book a steady rhythm, like a heartbeat in the background, and it makes the story feel like a little poem a child might actually come up with.
The book treats military life as something real and tough, but also full of love and pride. I felt a tug in my chest when the art switches to silhouettes in the poppy field and again in that final “Lest We Forget” page, because it nods to sacrifice without spelling it out. The activities at the end are a sweet touch. They turn the book into a keepsake, not just a quick bedtime read. Kids can claim their own hero, whether that parent is deployed, training, or working odd hours, and that feels both comforting and empowering.
I would recommend My Dad, My Hero to military families and especially to kids who have a parent in the army or any service role that takes them away from home. Hoysted’s book is idea for classroom discussions about remembrance days or service and sacrifice because it offers a very soft, age-appropriate narrative. It is short, warm, and easy to share, and it opens the door to big conversations without feeling scary.
Pages: 26 | ASIN : B0GKD3542T
Wisdom From My Grandmothers
Jo Ann Fawcett’s third memoir is an unusual act of intergenerational excavation. Through a series of channeling sessions with the Hedda Foundation, Fawcett interviews the spirits of five maternal and paternal ancestors, beginning with Rosanna Blue, a full-blood Cherokee woman born in 1764, and moving forward through generations of German immigrant farmwives, a Depression-era single mother, and finally Fawcett’s own mother, Betty. Each woman’s chapter blends recovered family history with spiritual dialogue and closes with a curated list of wisdom teachings. The book’s animating thesis is that generational trauma, specifically the suppression of women’s voices and autonomy across centuries of patriarchal society, flows invisibly through family lines, and that naming it is the first step toward breaking it.
What surprised me most was how genuinely moving some of these portraits are. Dorha, Fawcett’s great-grandmother, is particularly vivid: a farm wife who quietly asserted herself in her marriage bed, who gave up her dream of becoming a pianist, who baked mile-high apple pies during the Depression and infused them with a love her circumstances rarely permitted her to express openly. There’s real tenderness in how Fawcett renders these women, and it comes through even in the plainest prose. The writing itself oscillates between genuinely lyrical observations and passages that read like transcribed notes, but when Fawcett slows down, something quietly profound emerges. The thread connecting Rosanna’s forced silence in the white man’s world to Grandma Lella’s workplace navigation of predatory male colleagues to Fawcett’s own seven marriages is drawn with honesty rather than melodrama, and that restraint earns the reader’s trust.
Readers who approach the channeling premise with open curiosity will get more from it than those who don’t, particularly in the wisdom summaries that close each chapter. I found myself caring less about the literal veracity of these communications than about what the project represents: a woman in her seventies doing the painstaking work of understanding why she kept choosing partners who diminished her, and finding, through imagination or spirit or sheer willpower, the language her ancestors never got to use. The book is most affecting when Fawcett is honest about her own damage. Her admission that she didn’t fully reckon with her own molestation until she was seventy, or her mother stating that loving her father was like pouring water into a cup full of holes, are the moments where the memoir earns its emotional weight. The underlying impulse, to locate yourself within a lineage and decide consciously which parts of it you’ll carry forward, is genuinely valuable.
Wisdom from My Grandmothers is not a conventional memoir. It’s a personal reckoning. I’d recommend it to anyone navigating the aftermath of difficult relationships, anyone curious about ancestral healing frameworks, or anyone who has looked at their own patterns and suspected they didn’t start with them.
The Woman in the Third Floor Front
Richard Scharine’s The Woman in the Third Floor Front is a story collection arranged in sections: Utah, Law and Order, Past Lives, and Close to Home, and it moves through romance, regional fiction, political reflection, memory, family, and elegy with unusual ease. The title story opens with Jack, hobbled after a motorcycle crash and freshly divorced, stumbling by chance into a stopover town where an airline delay, a widow who runs a hotel and massage business, and a child grieving his father turn accident into reprieve; elsewhere, the book ranges from a journalist’s reckoning with western land politics in “When I Go, I Leave No Trace” to intimate, family-centered pieces later in the volume that turn more openly autobiographical and reflective. What binds the collection is Scharine’s interest in people who are no longer where they thought they would be, yet are still trying, stubbornly, to make a livable meaning out of the remainder.
What I admired most was the book’s tonal confidence. Scharine is willing to let a story be earnest without turning syrupy, and willing to let intelligence arrive wearing ordinary clothes. In the title piece, music is not decoration but structure: standards and country songs keep surfacing as emotional evidence, almost like witness testimony, and by the time Constance answers “He’ll Have to Go” with “He’ll Have to Stay,” the scene has become both a small-town performance and a public act of choosing life again. I also liked the collection’s tolerance for crookedness, for wounded people, compromised people, people who embarrass themselves before they improve. Jack is not noble at the outset; that matters. The redemption here is not glossy. It limps. That gives the best stories a hard-earned warmth rather than a prefab glow.
Scharine sometimes overexplains a motive or theme just after dramatizing it well, and now and then the narration steps in with a teacherly finger raised when the scene has already done the work. But even that has a strange charm, because it feels continuous with the book’s larger personality: learned, conversational, unembarrassed by references to songs, politics, Shakespeare, journalism, and grief all sharing the same table. I came away feeling that the collection’s real subject is not plot but afterlife in the secular sense, the second act after divorce, bereavement, disillusionment, professional diminishment, or the long weathering of a place. Several later pieces deepen that feeling by turning toward kinship, memory, and haunting, making the book less a display case of separate stories than a cumulative meditation on what remains.
I’d recommend The Woman in the Third Floor Front to readers of literary fiction, short story collections, regional fiction, character-driven fiction, and contemporary historical fiction who like humane books with a little grain in the wood. Readers who admire the plainspoken emotional intelligence of Kent Haruf, or the way Elizabeth Strout lets ordinary lives carry uncommon weight, will probably find familiar pleasures here, though Scharine is more discursive and more musically inclined than either. This is a book for people who believe stories can be rueful, civic-minded, romantic, and haunted all at once.
Pages: 164 | ASIN : B0GGF1V3BC
Albert DiNardo: The Last DiNardo
The Last DiNardo tells the story of the DiNardo family, starting with Ubaldo and Mary leaving hard ground in southern Italy and landing in Fremont County, Colorado, right in the middle of harsh immigration laws and local prejudice. The book tracks their years of loss and grind, the birth of twins Albert and Mario, the deaths of two older sons, the fire that takes their first house, and the slow building of a new life in a banana-belt valley that is good for fruit and tough on people. Out of one small moment, when the twins get paid in cherries instead of cash, comes a juice stand that grows into DiNardo’s Farm Market and its famous cherry cider, a local institution tied to coal mines, orchards, church, and community for decades. The closing chapters look at how the business grows, changes, gives back to its neighbors, and what it means for Albert to be “the last DiNardo” carrying that weight into old age.
I felt the writing worked best when it stayed close to the family kitchen table. The plain voice, the straight talk, the little asides about social media or modern politics all give the book a very human sound. It feels like sitting with an older relative who has a box of clippings and documents laid out on the table. The photos of passports, cemetery deeds, school records, and ads for the stand make the story feel solid and real. The author is not shy about their opinion. He pushes back on how farmers get talked down, calls out the Johnson-Reed Act, and gets pretty blunt about how easy many of us have it now compared with a family that loses two sons and still keeps going. I liked that direct style. At times, it even stung a bit, in a good way.
The history of immigration law and the local Klan is important. It gives context, and it shows the pressure sitting on this one Italian family. Still, in a few places, the commentary on today’s generation or on public figures stretches out and slows the family story. Albert and Mario are interesting, from the cherries and the tap dancing and the way one twin loves the field while the other loves the counter. The structure is mostly straight-line, which makes the story very clear. The middle chapters are very detailed, discussing every twist of the business, every license, and every product. I admired the completeness.
This is a strong choice for readers who like real-world immigrant stories, small-town history, and tales of family businesses built from nothing but sweat, stubbornness, and a lucky break with some cherries. If you are happy with a grounded, no-nonsense account that still carries a lot of heart, I would recommend The Last DiNardo without hesitation, especially to anyone who has ever worked a family shop, tended a garden, or wondered what it really takes to “keepa go.”
Pages: 290 | ASIN : B0GKGDWTX7
The Observer Effect
Waves of Light and Darkness is a short story collection centered on themes of grief, desire, family, duty, and fear. Why was this an important book to share with readers?
I do not view this book as a message I needed to deliver, but rather as an investigation I needed to conduct. I did not write these stories to teach the reader something important, but to explore a specific question: How do we construct meaning when the lights, literal or metaphorical, go out?
The collection is an experiment in the observer effect. I wanted to look at how we survive the indifference of the universe through stubborn, necessary acts of human connection. If the book is important, it is only because it asks us to look at the labor required to truly see one another through the dark.
The collection frequently moves from social realism into moments where reality seems to bend. What attracts you to that blend?
I am drawn to that instability because strict realism often fails to capture how life actually feels during a crisis. Grief, trauma, and intense desire have a way of warping our perception; they make the ordinary world feel dreamlike or fractured.
By blurring the edges of reality, I can map the interiority of my characters more accurately. I am not interested in just recording the physical world; I want to show how a character’s emotional state literally reshapes the reality they inhabit. That bending is not fantasy; it is the psychological truth of being human.
What does the short story form allow you to do that a novel wouldn’t?
A novel can be, although not necessarily, a long journey with a single destination. A short story collection is like walking down a hallway and opening thirty different doors. The short story form allows for intensity without the obligation of a neat resolution.
It liberates me to explore the same theme, like the fragility of memory or the physics of loss, from dozens of different angles, ages, and backgrounds. In a novel, like my Entanglement-Quantum and Otherwise, you normally have to sustain one reality; in a collection, I can pivot from a domestic dinner to a cosmic mystery in the span of a few pages, creating a mosaic that feels larger than the sum of its parts.
But then, a third possibility, which I have explored and will soon publish, is a novel-in-stories. It is still a collection of short stories or novellas, but they tie together with one or more obvious common threads and symbols. I have titled this yet-to-be-published novel-in-stories, The Dying Cat.
Which story changed the most from the first draft to the final version?
I have no idea. It is not something that I track. I spend hours and days revising each story in minute detail. No story ends up close to the first draft since I work with concepts and ideas, which then are honed into stories and polished.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Whether they are set in the past or the future, in a Kansas farmhouse or a potentially supernatural cave, these short stories share one commonality: a search for something beyond what one knows is needed. Through a multitude of unexpected perspectives (a cat, a coma patient, a ventriloquist), this utterly novel collection of stories examines and reconfigures universal themes of life, death, and human connection.
Learning and Adventure
Glimpses of Grace is a collection of personal essays that traces your journey through motherhood, caregiving, and vision loss, revealing the quiet moments of grace that give life meaning even as your sight begins to fade. Why did you choose essays instead of a traditional memoir format?
I had long been interested in the essay form and in fact took several online courses in essay construction, but then began writing my first memoir, then the second, then a more spiritual book. Glimpses of Grace grew out of my experience with failing vision. It became a little harder to manage the technology of writing, and it seemed short essays might be the most useful form. I wanted to capture the daily joys and gifts that appeared for me in this journey.
What role does spirituality play in how you understand aging?
I believe we are all spiritual beings, simply living on this planet in our “earth suit.” In looking back over my life, I see that I have always been led to follow a particular path, always connected to the intuitive and spiritual self. There is new learning in every breath of life.
What has aging taught you that younger readers might not expect?
Aging is not a “season of loss” as someone once said. It is a season of letting go of what is no longer needed and looking forward to the learning and adventure that continues to invite us.
How do you recognize grace in your life today?
Oh my. Grace is part of every day. It is in the riches of nature, the small kindnesses shown to us, a smile, the laughter of children, and the new challenges that bring us to new understandings of those around us.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Most beautifully, Bowen illuminates the sacred connections that bind 1s—fleeting exchanges with strangers that change everything, the trust between patient and caregiver, the revelations that pass between teacher and student, and the deep roots of family love. Each encounter becomes a meditation on how we truly see one another, how we honor the precious gift of being alive together on this earth.
Family: A Christian Historical Mystery
Family, by KT McWilliams, is a historical fiction novel with a strong thread of faith and a steady mystery engine. It follows Elizabeth Bowmar in London in 1619 as she grieves her father’s murder, chafes under the strict protection and reputation-guarding rules of her guardian Edmund, and gets pulled into a growing danger around threatening “pay” letters and a missing sender. As Elizabeth and a small circle of allies try to trace the threats, the investigation cracks open something bigger than street crime: a family secret that reshapes how she understands loyalty, love, and the people she thought she knew.
Elizabeth’s inner life is intense in a way that feels earned. She’s smart, bruised, devout, and stubborn, and she finds herself in situations where those traits clash. Sometimes that clash is almost funny, like when “basic kindness” turns into a social catastrophe because London is watching and Edmund is keeping score. Other times it’s heavier, especially when her fear of losing Edmund starts echoing her earlier loss, and you can feel her trying to think her way out of panic. I also appreciated how the faith element is woven in as a lived posture. “God’s plan” shows up as something characters wrestle with, not something that magically fixes the plot.
McWilliams makes some clear authorial choices that shape the reading experience. One is the emphasis on “family” as a moral problem, not just a warm theme. The betrayal isn’t treated like a twist for shock value. It lands like a winter draft through a room you thought was sealed, and the aftermath is where the book does its real work: the stunned bargaining, the anger, the exhausted attempt to keep living anyway. Another choice is how plot and relationships braid together. The mystery around the letters and the contract pressure keep things moving, while the social world pushes Elizabeth toward decisions she does not want to make. I’ll be candid, the prose occasionally leans hard into explanation or repeated reminders of the social rules. But it also delivers small, tactile moments that ground the story, and the dialogue-driven scenes tend to snap into focus fast.
I’d recommend Family most to readers who like historical fiction that feels emotional and values-driven, with clean romance energy and a mystery plot that is more about people than puzzles. If you enjoy stories where characters grow through pressure, especially pressure framed through faith and conscience, you’ll probably settle into this one quickly. If you want a reflective, story-first read about what we owe our families, what they owe us, and what happens when the truth finally gets daylight, you’ll enjoy this book.
Pages: 305 | ASIN : B0GKYJB57Q
Leila: The Unheard Woman
Leila: The Unheard Woman drops readers into a locked psychiatric ward and asks them to sit with Leila, a mother who has been turned into a “case.” The book moves back and forth between the hospital present and the life that led her there. Readers watch her give birth, hurt, ask for help, get brushed off, and slowly disappear behind labels like “unstable” and overly emotional. They see her marriage, the quiet grind of duty, the pressure to be a good wife and a happy mother, and then the breaking point, when fear for her child and the cruelty of her in-laws collide with a system that would rather sedate her than listen. Out of this, the novel builds a tight, painful portrait of a woman who is always seen and never truly heard, and of a society that calls itself safe while pushing her out of sight.
The prose is stripped down, almost bare, and the repetition works like a slow drumbeat. Short lines. Simple images. Iron doors. Cold floors. Keys that jangle at the edge of every scene. The hospital chapters in particular have this numb, almost hypnotic rhythm that made me feel stuck there with her, counting footsteps and pills. The way the book loops phrases and images made the whole thing feel like memories. It can be heavy, yet that weight fits the subject. I also liked how the author refuses big speeches or neat explanations. The worst moments often happen in small exchanges, in tired phrases like “everyone has their own cross,” or in the silence after a question that no one bothers to answer. That restraint gives the book a peculiar power and lets the ache build.
I appreciated the way the author represents women’s bodies and voices. Leila is in real pain after childbirth, and the people around her treat it as moodiness, as nerves, as something she should push through for the sake of the baby and the family. Her “no” does not count, in the bedroom or in the doctor’s office, and that slow erasing of her choices felt almost more violent than the scenes that are clearly abusive.
The psychiatry on display is chilling because it is so ordinary. The doctors use polite words. They note down facts. They talk about stability and safety. Yet no one asks what she feels, or what she wants, or what would actually help her live with her son. The system treats her like a problem to be managed, not a person to be met. That hit me hard, especially in the scenes where she tries to hold on to Gega’s name in her mind, almost like a last thread tying her to the world. The book turned abstract ideas like patriarchy and medical power into something intimate and raw, and I found myself thinking deeply.
By the end, I felt moved and more awake to a certain kind of quiet cruelty that can hide inside “care.” I would recommend Leila to fans of literary fiction who are willing to sit with hard topics, to people interested in women’s mental health, postpartum experiences, and the history of psychiatric institutions, and to book clubs that like to debate and dig into ethics and power. Readers who prefer narratives that hit like a punch and want a story that lingers beyond the last page will want to delve into Leila’s world.
Pages: 81 | ASIN : B0GHPWHJWX
