Blog Archives
The Crash of Worlds
The Crash of Worlds by Alisse Lee Goldenberg is a fantasy adventure about what happens when disaster, grief, politics, magic, and family loyalty all collide. The story opens with the destruction of Coralnoss after Marcus’s warnings are ignored, then follows Zayna as she tries to save what is left of her people, Lucas as he searches for a way to reach her, and Audrina as she faces hard questions about love, duty, and whether she truly wants the throne. It’s a deep fantasy novel, with kingdoms, spells, royal conflict, sea voyages, and magical communication, but its real weight comes from human problems: fear, prejudice, pride, loss, and the need to ask for help.
I like how grounded the book feels, even when the world is full of magic. Goldenberg does not treat the disaster as a quick plot device. Zayna’s chapters linger in the mud, hunger, ruined homes, and the awful silence after a community has been broken. It gives the fantasy stakes a physical heaviness. At the same time, the writing is direct and accessible, which makes the emotional turns easy to follow. Some moments are blunt, but that plainness also works in the book’s favor. Grief is not always elegant. Sometimes it’s just one foot in front of the other, carrying supplies, calming a baby, and trying not to fall apart.
I also found myself thinking a lot about the author’s choices around leadership. Audrina’s storyline is not just about being a princess in love with Gertrude. It’s about the cost of being visible in a world that may not accept you. Her conversations with Navor are some of the warmest parts of the book, and they give the story a tender center. Then there’s the contrast with Parven, whose cruelty shows how family and power can become dangerous when pride is mistaken for principle. The book is curious about what makes a ruler good, but it’s also candid about how institutions fail people. The council ignores Marcus. Coralnoss pays for it. Later, survivors still hesitate to accept help because old fears are hard to shake. That felt painfully believable.
I would recommend The Crash of Worlds most to readers who enjoy character-driven fantasy with royal drama, found family, queer representation, and emotional stakes that matter as much as the magical ones. Readers who like sincere storytelling, big feelings, and a fantasy world built around loyalty and survival will likely appreciate it. It’s best for fans of accessible YA-style fantasy who want adventure, heart, and a reminder that rebuilding after loss is rarely clean, but it’s still possible.
Pages: 282 | ASIN : B0GY65N8BK
The Jezebel Tracks
The Jezebel Tracks is a searching and fiercely theological essay collection in which author Gardner Landry examines family abuse, covert Christian narcissism, addiction, spiritual warfare, and survival through the figures of his grandmother Mema and his father Fred. The book moves from cigarette smoke in a River Oaks bedroom to New Orleans streets, from Houston’s oil-soaked identity to John Kennedy Toole, from the wound of an “anti-father” to the author’s painful conviction that his life was bent by forces both psychological and demonic. At its center is a survivor’s attempt to name what nearly destroyed him, and to insist that evil was not, finally, his destination.
Mema’s Silva Thins and Virginia Slims become more than cigarettes; they become little instruments of poise, entitlement, concealment, and control. The image of her propped in bed, coolly observing that the author is “on a slow burn,” stayed with me because it has the chill of something both intimate and merciless. Landry’s prose can be ornate, even feverish, but at its best, that intensity feels earned. He writes like someone sorting through ash with his bare hands. The essays on Houston and New Orleans give the book needed oxygen, and I admired the way he can turn from family wreckage to civic portraiture, seeing Houston as blunt, masculine, commercial sunlight and New Orleans as lunar, seductive, Catholic, haunted, and alive with ritual.
Landry’s framework of the Jezebel spirit, witchcraft, generational iniquity, and demonic principalities will resonate deeply with some readers and unsettle or alienate others. The book isn’t merely trying to accuse; it’s trying to understand how charm, piety, money, family hierarchy, and fear can form a beautiful cage. The strongest idea here, to me, is that abuse often survives by dressing itself in respectable language. Whether in Mema’s prayer group, Fred’s sadism, the Vanderbilt law school rupture, or the long meditation on John Kennedy Toole, Landry keeps returning to the terrible cost of being trapped inside someone else’s story.
In the end, I came away moved by the book’s strange mixture of anguish, conviction, literary appetite, and hard-won defiance. It’s not a neutral book, but it has the pulse of lived experience and the moral urgency of testimony. I would recommend The Jezebel Tracks to readers interested in memoirs of family trauma, Christian spiritual reflection, narcissistic abuse, Southern place-writing, and essays that risk excess in pursuit of truth. It’s a dark, wounded, intensely personal book, but its final force is not despair; it’s the stubborn, luminous claim that a life can be damaged without being finally owned.
Pages: 281 | ASIN : B0GT21HVWH
La Llorona: The Awakening
La Llorona: The Awakening is a grief novel wrapped in folklore, family drama, and psychological suspense. Mary Romasanta builds the story around Ruth and Mi-Ra, two women tied together by love for the same family and divided by old wounds, cultural expectations, and the kind of pride that keeps people from saying what they actually mean. From the preface’s plain statement, “Grief is an unwelcome guest,” the book tells you exactly where it’s headed: into the rooms grief takes over, and into the strange things people start to hear, see, and believe when loss has nowhere else to go.
What makes the book compelling is the way it treats the supernatural as both literal and emotional. La Llorona and Mul Gwishin aren’t just spooky figures hovering around the edges of the plot. They’re part of how the book thinks about sorrow, motherhood, guilt, and inheritance. Water shows up again and again as danger, memory, temptation, and purification. The scares work best when they feel intimate, like a drip in the dark or a voice calling from just beyond what a character can prove.
The heart of the novel is really Ruth and Mi-Ra’s relationship. Their early scenes are sharp with resentment, especially around family traditions, fertility, food, and John’s attention. Mi-Ra can be cruel, but the book spends enough time inside her grief that she becomes more than a difficult mother-in-law. Ruth, meanwhile, has her own guardedness and ambition, yet she keeps choosing care when bitterness would be easier.
The pacing is intense, especially after John’s death shifts the book from a tense family gathering into a story about survival after devastation. Romasanta leans into big emotions, and the prose often has a cinematic, high-pressure quality: kitchens feel like battlefields, bathrooms become haunted spaces, and ordinary objects take on unbearable meaning.
La Llorona: The Awakening is an emotionally driven novel about how grief can isolate people, distort them, and still leave room for connection. It’s part ghost story, part family reckoning, and part meditation on the stories cultures use to explain pain. Its strongest moments come when folklore and domestic realism overlap, letting a haunted house, a strained marriage, a mother’s envy, and a grandmother’s longing all feel connected. The book stays with the question of whether sorrow will pull its characters under or teach them how to reach for one another.
Pages: 272 | ASIN : B0DQLXJB83
Kindness Is A Powerful Choice
Hop’s Tales: The Kind Bunny is a rhyming picture book in which a school-loving bunny learns to recover from a hurtful remark, reclaim his confidence, and answer cruelty with empathy. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration came from everyday moments children experience but don’t always know how to process. I wanted to create a familiar, safe environment where young readers could see themselves reflected. The classroom setting allowed me to explore how a single unkind moment can impact a child’s confidence, while also showing that those moments don’t have to define them. At its heart, the story is about helping children understand that kindness—both toward others and themselves—is a powerful choice.
How did you approach writing Hop’s emotional journey so it would feel tender and true without becoming too heavy for young readers?
It was important to strike a balance between honesty and hope. Children are incredibly perceptive and they recognize hurt feelings. But they also need reassurance and resolution. I focused on keeping Hop’s emotions authentic but gentle, allowing readers to feel his sadness without lingering too long in it. By guiding him toward empathy and self-confidence, the story models emotional resilience in a way that feels empowering rather than overwhelming. The goal was always to leave children feeling safe, understood, and uplifted.
What role did rhyme play in shaping the tone and pacing of the story?
Rhyme played a huge role in making the story feel approachable and engaging. It creates a natural rhythm that helps carry readers through emotional moments with a sense of lightness and flow. For young children especially, rhyme adds a musical quality that makes the story more memorable and comforting. It also helps soften heavier themes, allowing important messages about kindness and empathy to land in a way that feels gentle rather than intense.
What kinds of conversations do you hope this book sparks in homes and classrooms?
I hope it opens the door for meaningful conversations about kindness, empathy, and how our words affect others. More importantly, I hope it encourages children to talk about their own feelings—times they’ve been hurt, or even times they may have unintentionally hurt someone else. In classrooms and at home, this book can be a starting point for discussing how to respond to unkindness with courage and compassion. Ultimately, I want it to reinforce that being kind isn’t just the right choice. It’s a strong and powerful one.
Author Website
Educators teaching social-emotional learning
Classroom read-alouds and discussion starters
Children learning about kindness, friendship, and confidence
Kids who love fun rhymes and lovable animal characters
Key Features:Engaging rhyming text that makes reading fun
Positive messages about kindness and self-confidence
Relatable friendship challenges for young children
Ideal for preschool, kindergarten, and early elementary readers
A thoughtful gift for birthdays, classrooms, and young readers who love animals
A sweet and inspiring story that helps children discover that being kind, brave, and true to yourself is the coolest thing of all.
The Next Generation of Emergency Management: AI, Drones and the Human Element: Building Resililent Disaster teams
The Next Generation of Disaster Response is a forward-looking study of how artificial intelligence, drones, and human leadership are reshaping emergency management. Author Dr. Todd D. Brauckmiller moves from ancient flood-control systems and bucket brigades to Hurricane Harvey, COVID-19, Maui, Rwanda’s drone medical delivery network, and a projected 2035 model of integrated human-machine response. The book’s central argument is clear and steady: technology can map, predict, deliver, and accelerate, but it can’t replace empathy, judgment, trust, or ethical command.
What I appreciated most was the book’s insistence that innovation must remain answerable to human need. The strongest sections are the ones where the machinery becomes intimate: drones finding heat signatures through smoke, AI models warning of wildfire spread, medical payloads crossing impossible terrain, and incident command teams turning aerial maps into triage decisions. I found the discussion of Hurricane Harvey especially compelling because the book doesn’t treat the 300 drones as a shiny statistic. It understands that a map only matters when someone uses it to reach a stranded family. That moral center gives the book its warmth. It’s not afraid of technology, but it’s also not dazzled by it.
The writing is clearest when Brauckmiller blends operational detail with lived perspective. His military background gives the drone chapters a grounded authority, especially when he compares force protection and reconnaissance to civilian search, rescue, and lifeline restoration. The prose uses institutional language, with acronyms, frameworks, standards, and citations crowding the page. The book feels written by someone who has stood close enough to crisis to know that elegant theories collapse quickly unless they can survive mud, smoke, bureaucracy, fear, and bad weather.
I found this a thoughtful, practical, and quietly urgent book about the future of resilience. Its best insight is also its most humane one: the next generation of disaster response won’t be built by machines alone, and it won’t be built by human courage alone, but by disciplined collaboration between the two. I’d recommend it to emergency managers, public safety leaders, drone operators, disaster researchers, policy makers, and students who want a serious but accessible look at where crisis response is going and what values must guide it when it gets there.
Pages: 122 | ASIN : B0G7XGZLR7
Confessions of a Female Dominant
Confessions of a Female Dominant follows Anastasia, Mistress Ana, a Soviet-born single mother in Sweden whose life is split between corporate polish, meticulous parenting, and the uncompromising world of BDSM. The novel traces her independence from childhood, her migration to Sweden, her life as a mother, and her intense entanglements with men such as Gabriel and Sven, turning what might have been a straightforward erotic confession into a story about control, loneliness, grief, class, desire, and the ache of being truly seen.
I found the book most compelling when it refused to flatter its narrator. Ana is funny, exacting, ruthless, tender, vain, exhausted, and sometimes startlingly self-aware. She can discuss laundry rooms, Swedish parental leave, kink etiquette, and heartbreak with the same unsentimental precision. That tonal collision gives the book its charge: domestic realism keeps walking into erotic extremity, and neither side is treated as a costume. The title promises provocation, but the deeper drama is not shock; it’s the narrator’s hunger for recognition beneath all her competence.
Ana may be a dominant, but the emotional weather often belongs to the people who withhold, disappear, need, or fail to understand her. The prose is sometimes blunt, but that roughness suits a narrator who thinks in schedules, appetites, wounds, and verdicts. I admired the moments when the book lets grief and absurdity sit side by side: a kink bag beside school routines, erotic command beside bodily fatigue, a woman performing strength while quietly begging not to vanish inside her own usefulness.
The target audience is mature readers drawn to erotic fiction, BDSM fiction, psychological fiction, women’s fiction, and unconventional romance. Readers of Fifty Shades of Grey may recognize the BDSM framework, but this book feels closer in spirit to the emotional candor of Melissa Broder or the severe self-examination of Catherine Millet than to glossy fantasy. Confessions of a Female Dominant is raw, idiosyncratic, and unexpectedly domestic. A book about a mistress who discovers that control is easier to command than tenderness. It’s not a story about domination so much as a story about the terror of being known.
Pages: 276 | ASIN : B0GS96HLFD
1521: The Defiance
1521: The Defiance is a historical fiction novel about the days around Magellan’s arrival in Zubu, the conversion of Humabon’s court, and the Battle of Mactan, but it’s really built around the pressure that gathers before people decide who they are. Author Charleston Lim frames the story through several points of view, especially Lapulapu, Magellan, Enrique, Pigafetta, and Humabon, so the book feels less like a single-hero legend and more like a crowded shoreline where faith, ambition, fear, pride, and survival all meet. The opening image of foreign ships approaching Mactan sets the tone well, and Lapulapu’s answer to Bulakna, “Then we will show them ours,” gives the novel its heartbeat.
What works best is the book’s sense of place. The mangroves, reefs, boats, market life, tattoos, weapons, food, rituals, and local gods aren’t just background details. They give the Visayan world texture and dignity. Lim clearly wants the reader to feel that Zubu and Mactan are living societies with their own laws, politics, rivalries, humor, and sacred customs before the Europeans arrive. The glossary and author material reinforce that the novel is rooted in historical record while imagining the private motives and conversations that history didn’t preserve.
Magellan is written as a man of faith and command, but also as someone whose certainty keeps hardening into control. Humabon is more than a passive convert. He’s a ruler reading the balance of power and using the strangers as part of his own political world. Enrique may be the most quietly compelling figure because he’s caught between languages, masters, memories, and a promise of freedom. His later line, “I saw a man who, like me, remembered who he was,” works because the book has spent so much time showing how identity can be bent, traded, performed, or reclaimed.
The later chapters are vivid. The violence has weight because Lim gives the conflict emotional stakes long before it erupts. When the story reaches its most intense moments, the action feels both personal and historically grounded, shaped by loyalty, pride, fear, and conviction. Lim also gives the aftermath a solemn restraint, letting victory, grief, honor, and warning share the same space. The book is interested in defiance and in what people carry with them after defiance costs them something.
1521: The Defiance is an earnest, cinematic, and culturally grounded retelling of a famous encounter, written for readers who want history to feel immediate and personal. Its prose is dramatic, but that suits the scale of the story, and the alternating perspectives keep the conflict from becoming flat. The novel treats Mactan as a battlefield and as a home, a political crossroads, a spiritual landscape, and a place where people understood exactly what was at stake when strangers arrived with gifts, guns, and a cross.
Pages: 218 | ASIN : B0GTPP1FPP
Asking For Help Is Not Weakness
Travis Heights follows your journey from a violent 1970s Austin childhood to military service, career survival, and a fraught final reckoning with the father whose love and harm shaped your life. Why was this an important book for you to write?
For most of my adult life I carried that story alone. After I left home, I “put my feelings in a box in the back of my head.” The Marines taught me to accomplish the mission and move on: you don’t dwell, you don’t complain, you drive on. That worked well enough until it didn’t.
When I called my father near Austin, and he needed help, I had a choice: stay stuck in twenty-five years of distance, or go get him. Writing the book was how I made sense of everything that led to how I got to where I am today. What I didn’t expect was how much I’d find in that box.
Decades of compartmentalized experience don’t just sit quietly forever. They shape how you lead, how you love, and how you show up for the people who need you. And here’s what that taught me: the mission I thought I’d completed — surviving, building a career, moving on — was only half the work. The other half was understanding what I’d carried to get there, and deciding what was worth keeping.
I also kept thinking about the kids who are living what I lived. If one person reads this and decides to ask for help instead of walking out the door alone, it was worth every uncomfortable page.
How did you choose which “rules” to include, and did writing them change how you understood those lessons?
The rules chose themselves. Each one represents an important life lesson for me at that time. I’d be deep in a scene, like leaving home, the library, or hitchhiking, and I’d realize there was something I learned there that I still carry.
Some of them I was proud of. Others I had to sit with because writing them out made me see they were survival strategies that had outlived their usefulness. But I still needed to capture them, examine them.
The Marine Corps gave me a framework for rules and discipline, but it also reinforced the walls I’d built around the harder stuff. Putting the rules on the page forced me to ask whether I’d actually learned what I thought I had. What I found was that some of those rules had been running my life quietly for decades — shaping decisions I thought I was making freely. That’s the thing about survival mode: it works so well you forget you’re still in it.
Was it difficult to write about your father and Beulah with both honesty and complexity?
My father was the hardest. Beulah was easier in a way. The hypocrisy, the racism, and the manipulation were clear-cut, and time had given me enough distance to name them plainly.
My father was different. He could be genuinely warm and funny and present, and then the switch flipped. Writing him meant holding both of those things at once without letting either one cancel the other out. I didn’t want to write a villain. I wanted to write the man I actually knew — which was more unsettling than a villain would have been. Because if he were just a monster, I could have put him down and walked away clean.
The harder truth is that I loved him, and that love is what made the distance of twenty-five years hurt as much as anything he ever did. Writing that cost me something. But it’s also the most honest thing in the book. And I think that honesty is what readers feel. The people who’ve reached out to me after reading it don’t say “I hated your father.” They say “I understood him.” That’s the response I was hoping for. Not absolution, not condemnation, but recognition. Because most of us didn’t grow up with monsters. We grew up with complicated people who didn’t always know what to do with us.
What do you hope readers from chaotic or abusive families take away from your story?
That reconciliation doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t happen. You don’t have to forgive and forget, and you don’t have to stay stuck in the wound either. What I found — slowly, and not without resistance — was that I could tell the truth about what my father did and still choose not to let it define the rest of my life.
That distinction matters, because a lot of people I’ve talked to believe those are the only two options: bury it or be consumed by it. There’s a third way, and it’s harder than either of those, but it’s the one that actually lets you move forward.
I also want readers to know that asking for help is not weakness. I wish I had. If you’re in a situation like the one I grew up in, there are people who will show up for you. Covenant House International exists for exactly that reason, and ten percent of the net profits from this book go to support their work with homeless, runaway, and trafficked kids.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
Then Ray made a choice: he reached out.
It wasn’t the reconciliation either of them expected. No apologies. No pretending. No going back to who they were. Just two men — changed by time, shaped by separate lives — choosing to find each other anyway.
Travis Heights is the story of what happens when healing requires not forgiveness, but transformation.
Some broken things can be repaired, even after twenty-five years. For every family that went quiet. For everyone who wonders whether reaching back is worth the risk.
It is.
