Blog Archives
WE SHOULD NOT ALL BE FEMINISTS
We Should Not All Be Feminists by Lakshmi Raj Sharma explores the lives of several women and their complex relationships with men, their personal struggles, and the societal expectations imposed on them. The story revolves around Emelia, a thoughtful and introspective woman navigating her identity, personal losses, and ideas of feminism. The novel also introduces Rajni, Vibha, and Clarissa, among others, each representing different facets of womanhood, relationships, and the feminist movement. Through their interconnected lives, the novel delves into themes like empowerment, love, and the often contradictory expectations placed on women.
The emotional depth with which Emelia’s inner thoughts are portrayed really draws you in, especially as she contemplates her relationship with Neville and her self-worth. Her reflections, like those following her dreams or the loss of her mother, feel raw and real. Emelia’s journey as she tries to reconcile her romantic life with her growing political awareness is incredibly engaging, particularly her thoughts on Lady Jane Grey and her budding feminist outlook.
What stood out the most for me was the novel’s handling of relationships and power dynamics. Emelia’s relationship with Neville, Vibha’s marriage, and the tumultuous connection between Rajni and his wife all reveal different aspects of the struggle for balance in love and autonomy. For example, Rajni’s attempts to reconnect with his wife after arguments are portrayed with a painful realism. It’s awkward, uncomfortable, and relatable. Similarly, Vibha’s struggle within her oppressive marriage and her attempts to find solace and solidarity in the Women’s Emancipation Cell poignantly reflect the real-life frustrations many women face. The contrast between Vibha’s personal challenges and Emelia’s internal battle between her past with Neville and her feminist awakening made me feel like I was exploring a mosaic of modern womanhood.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in nuanced depictions of women’s inner lives and the complexities of relationships. I think it’s especially suited for readers who enjoy exploring feminist themes without wanting a straightforward or preachy narrative. We Should Not All Be Feminists offers rich insights into the lives of women trying to find themselves in a world that often seeks to define them.
Pages: 244 | ASIN : B0DCVFVQTJ
A Southern Enchantress
Deborah Trahan’s A Southern Enchantress transports readers to the mystical streets of New Orleans, where magic, love, and fate collide. At the heart of the story is Suzanne, a clairsentient enchantress who has long resisted embracing her magical heritage. Raised by a powerful hoodoo conjurer, she turned her back on the craft, determined to live a normal life. However, when she crosses paths with Max, a charming yet morally questionable rogue at a Garden District soirée, her destiny takes an unexpected turn. As their relationship deepens, Suzanne begins to experience supernatural encounters, each demanding she avenge past evils. Confronting her family’s legacy and the shadows of history, she must quickly master the magic she once rejected if she hopes to survive.
On the surface, A Southern Enchantress is a tale of magic and enchantment, but beneath that lies a story rich in themes of family, self-acceptance, and love. Trahan weaves an enchanting narrative that explores revenge, pain, greed, and sorrow, all told through evocative and lyrical prose. Her vivid descriptions of New Orleans create a setting so immersive that the city itself feels like a character. Every scene is painted with such care that the imagery leaps off the page, bringing the haunting beauty of the French Quarter and its surroundings to life.
Suzanne, the novel’s protagonist, is a character that I absolutely loved. Trahan develops her as a deeply human character that is complex, flawed, and relatable. Her internal struggle with her powers and her past adds a layer of emotional depth that resonates throughout the book. Suzanne’s journey of self-discovery and growth is as much about accepting herself as it is about mastering her magic.
The novel’s dual timeline, while ambitious, can be challenging. Although I typically enjoy stories that alternate between time periods, I felt that the structure made the story occasionally hard to follow. It takes some time to adjust to the shifts, and this can disrupt the flow of the story. Despite this, the richness of the narrative and the depth of the characters more than compensate for the timeline’s shortcomings.
In A Southern Enchantress, Trahan blends multigenerational tragedy with magical realism, creating a story that is both enchanting and moving. The vivid imagery, compelling characters, and emotional depth make it a captivating read. It’s a novel worth reading for its beautifully crafted world and unforgettable protagonist.
Pages: 391 | ASIN : B0CLWF2S4J
Where Dark Things Grow
Andrew K. Clark’s Where Dark Things Grow is an enthralling blend of mystery, horror, and emotional depth that captivates readers from start to finish. For fifteen-year-old Leo, life has reached its bleakest point. His younger sister is on the brink of death, and his mother’s mental health is unraveling due to his father’s mysterious disappearance. Forced into the role of provider, Leo faces constant bullying and poverty, all while carrying the burden of his family’s survival. When his mother pleads with him to find his estranged father, he reluctantly sets out on a journey he dreads, confronting his past and inner demons.
Set against the backdrop of the Appalachian Mountains during the Great Depression, Where Dark Things Grow immerses readers in a world steeped in racism, poverty, and survival. The atmosphere in the novel is thick with a foreboding sense of dread, and the tension lingers on every page. Clark’s vivid descriptions transport the reader to this haunting landscape, where every scene is meticulously crafted and every emotion raw and palpable. I could almost feel the damp chill of the woods and hear the rustling of leaves as Leo ventured deeper into the supernatural. The characters are richly developed, each distinct and compelling, while the dialogue flows with poetic elegance. I found myself especially captivated by Leo. His mix of curiosity, innocence, and toughness feels authentic, especially in the way he’s shaped by his circumstances. This coming-of-age story forces its young protagonists to confront the darkest corners of their world and themselves too soon.
Where Dark Things Grow is a must-read for fans of Southern Gothic, folklore, and dark fantasy. Andrew K. Clark weaves an atmospheric, eerie narrative that’s as much about survival as it is about confronting the shadows within and without. I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a haunting, slow-burn story set in a richly imagined world. It’s perfect for readers who love tales steeped in mythology, magic, and the dark undercurrents of human nature.
Pages: 335 | ASIN : B0DG6WZBYZ
Create From the Inside Out
Little Fortified Stories is an entrancing collection of flash fiction that plunges readers into a series of surreal, evocative realms. What was the inspiration for the original and fascinating idea at the center of the collection?
A few years ago I was introduced to what was then called short-short fiction, essentially micro or flash fiction. I won a scholarship to attend the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, a city steeped in the past but roaring into the future, with an arts culture that fascinated me, whether it was Paula Rego’s startling, fairy-tale inspired artworks, Pessoa’s idiosyncratic, modernist writing, or the gut-wrenching emotion of Portugal’s native fado music. It all poured into me and influenced my first faltering efforts at writing flash fiction, efforts that took place in Lisbon’s Port Institute after my short-short fiction classes. It was here that I sat in the dimly lit room and sampled the national drink (port) and in my own “act of distillation,” produced compact, weird, touching, unsettling stories which would grow to become Little Fortified Stories. I immediately knew this was my genre.
Was it important for you to deliver a moral to readers, or was it circumstantial to delivering entertaining stories?
My interaction with the reader starts with my interaction with the deep material lurking inside my subconscious. Writing, for me, is more about “translating” voices or lived experiences than educating readers. That being said, in my writing I operate in an empathic sphere, trying to illustrate a range of human emotions and situational states that move characters toward some kind of change, however small. Like the great master, Chekhov, whose work I cherish, I don’t operate on a moral basis. Fiction’s purpose, in my take on it, is to share human experience, allowing the reader to reach their own conclusions.
The cover for this book is interesting. How did you create the cover for Little Fortified Stories?
I’ve always been drawn to theatre. My first two years in university were in theatre. I had a knack and maybe even a yearning to inhabit the characters of other people, to “occupy” someone’s physicality and inner world. Little Fortified Stories is an outcome of this desire. Although I didn’t continue pursuing theatre as a career, I turned instead to studying English and writing and my approach to writing is, rather than artificially planning a story structure, to create from the inside out. As Ray Bradbury said, “Your subconscious is smarter than you are.” In the Ancestral Fabrications section of Little Fortified Stories, I reach into both the factual and mythic elements of my ancestry. The story, “The Jaeger Family Theatre,” depicted on the cover is based on my maternal Swedish heritage but steeped in a wildly imagined past when people interacted with pagan gods and occupied their native landscapes as if they were an integral part of it. In this world, the narrator’s mother dies and as a jaeger bird, flies back to her avian origins in Sweden’s north. The narrator, in her mourning, remembers her childhood as a kind of family “theatre” where all members of her family acted out their lives. I thought this story was an ideal illustration of what I’m doing overall in the collection, and so I chose to collage it for the cover, showing the narrator as a young girl performing her role as the fifth born of the Jaeger clan—in both human and bird form. In a way, many of the stories in Little Fortified Stories are fragments of my own inner or remembered life, steeped in a dreamlike other-place. Many other stories, however, are sheer fiction!
Will there be a follow-up book for this collection? If so, what can readers expect in the next book?
Little Fortified Stories is a collection of loosely linked stories, tethered to broad themes. My next work, possibly a novella in flash, will, although told in flash chapters, have an overarching connection, be anchored in a timeframe from the early 1800s to 1980s and set in a partly imagined community on Canada’s west coast. Considering the unusual characters already hanging out in my brain, I predict it won’t be a traditional narrative and it will likely feature my oft-cited “poetic prose.” Of course, the muse might have other ideas.
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Life Is an Unknown Journey
A Prophecy Awakened follows a young woman who, on her eighteenth birthday, is given an old diary and sent through the veil on an unknown journey. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Before I outlined A Prophecy Awakened, I knew I wanted a main character who lived in a world with challenges and obstacles. I wanted her to have to fight for what she wanted and for what she didn’t. I wanted her to fail and I wanted her to succeed because most importantly I wanted her to show tremendous growth from her first to her last chapter. Life is an unknown journey. We all have stories and experiences that have forced us to get back up and that’s what I wanted for Charlotte. My desire for her was to experience “life” and for her readers to run alongside and cheer her on!
When creating Charlotte did you have a plan for development and character traits or did it grow organically as you were writing the story?
I think a little of both. I knew magically that Charlotte would have a special touch with nature and that overall her personality would be gentle. At times during my writing I found that if I veered away from her peacefulness it pulled away from the story and made my writing awkward, so I would delete and get back on track. It’s interesting how characters can let the author know when something just isn’t right for them.
In fantasy novels, it’s easy to get carried away by the magical powers of characters. How did you balance the use of supernatural powers?
My desire was not to create a world that was completely fictitious, but rather one that was partially grounded with settings and opportunities that were both tangible and relatable to the reader. Gifted people walk beside us every day, so I imagined a realm where the supernatural played a role in human society, allowing some of their previous human qualities to emerge while they maintained their hidden talents.
I hope the series continues in other books. If so, where will the story take readers?
YES! There will be a third book, the final in the Immortal Wounds series. It is titled, Ravenglass, and it is where the prophecy will unveil. Ravenglass is in the early stages of writing but I am anticipating a publishing date late 2025.
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Family. Destiny. Magic. Lore.
Forced to leave behind her only known family, on the night of her eighteenth birthday Charlotte Delgado flees through the invisible veil that has granted her safety since birth, with only an age-old diary to guide her. Given less than a day to read the four-hundred year-old tales scripted amongst its pages, she barely understands the predetermined path her ancestor writes of, let alone believes it.
However, despite the dangers the journal warns of—supernatural creatures that will hunt her along her journey—it’s the ominous twist of fate that surrounds the last bloodline witch in her family that fills Charlotte with the most fear.
Is she that witch or merely a pawn moving the prophecy forward?
Strength and Resiliency
Immortal Wounds follows a woman with magical abilities who travels back in time after witnessing her mother and husband’s death by a vampire claiming to be her father. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Well, I have to confess that Immortal Wounds began because I got a bad case of FOMO (fear of missing out!). One evening during my night writer’s group many of the authors had started new stories, all of them about vampires. I was currently writing a crime thriller but thought “Hey! I LOVE vampires too!” I am definitely a “Twihard”, a loyal follower of Anne Rice, and who doesn’t love Dracula! At the time, I was also hugely obsessed with the series, Outlander, which was my definite inspiration for time travel. I immediately filed the thriller away and began a new story.
History intrigues me, particularly the times of the witch trials in both Europe and America and the suppression of women. I also find fascinating the idea of supernatural abilities, and how fear can force a (logical) belief when there is no viable explanation. I immersed myself in books like The Discovery of Witches, Practical Magic, and Hester, along with several other fiction books that contained excerpts of real diary entries from women who were accused of witchcraft. Then having no idea what I was doing I took a deep breath and started writing a story that entangled bloodline witches with my most favorite supernatural creature, the vampire.
How long did it take you to imagine, draft, and write the world your characters live in?
Once I got started on Immortal Wounds I would say it took about two years from the first rough draft to publication. My imagination went crazy with my story idea, but it was actually a 75,000-word manuscript I wrote two years prior, under a different title, and whose plot points came to me in a dream that brought the world of Immortal Wounds to life. When I finished writing that earlier manuscript I realized that the story had ended, but yet the whole story had not been told. Being a new writer it took me a few weeks to figure out that what I needed to do was write was the beginning, Immortal Wounds.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Family, individual strength and resiliency, naivety, and fate were the most important themes I hoped to portray. I strongly believe that these themes impact real life and our response to situations within each of them is what makes us who we are.
What is the next book that you are working on and when can your fans expect it to be out?
Luckily for fans, there is no wait! A Prophecy Awakened, book two in the Immortal Wounds trilogy, was released June 13, 2024. And while it does pick up where Immortal Wounds left off, there are also some new (amazing) characters that take the reader through the middle part of the story.
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After witnessing the brutal deaths of her mother and husband, Isobel overhears a confession from one of the murderers, a ruthless vampire who claims to be her father. For fear that she and her unborn daughter’s death could come next, Isobel uses the only magic she possesses and summons a portal to take her two hundred years into the past to revisit an ancestor in Scotland who she believes may know the truth of her parentage. However, in her haste, Isobel lands in the wrong century. Before she realizes her mistake, she stumbles upon a family: a ferocious Highland warrior and his two sisters, one of whom is a witch with secrets of her own who instantly draws Isobel in.
Isobel could not have prepared herself for what she discovers during her stay: the vampire who claimed to be her father, alive three hundred years in the past! With the help of Meg, the youngest sibling, and Mariam, both women’s ancestor, Isobel finds herself belonging in a world she never dreamed of—one entangled with vampires and webbed with revenge, curses, and a prophecy that has dictated all of their lives for the last four hundred years. Did Isobel make an error in landing in the wrong time, or was it part of her destiny?
A Call To Action
Like a Lily Among the Thorns follows a young woman longing for a family connection who meets a woman who becomes more than a friend; she helps transform her life. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
To me subconsciously, we all assign roles to acquaintances in our lives based on our unfulfilled needs. In this particular narrative, the MC has a real need for connection. Sometimes my muse uses my personal experiences but in others like this story my natural empathy for people in distress carries the load.
What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think make for great fiction?
The pursuit of happiness, connection, and dignity.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
One main theme the reviewer failed to mention was the purpose of this book for me. I believe it is a call to action for the climate crisis that may possibly end life on this planet as we know it. Just like the characters in this story, the awareness of the danger is slow in forming and even at the end of this novel the lack of action to totally change one’s life in anticipation of this problem is just too much work. Eveyone hopes the problem is exaggerated and will just disappear. Like is actually happening right now.
What next book are you working on, and when will it be available?
My next novel explores the notion of what is reality. Can we move through different realities by choice? Scientists have postulated that the multiverse exists. In this work, I take the liberty of having proof that multiverse exists and that we can somehow move around these alternate worlds at will. It also is a nod to my gloomy attitude of the possible demise of humanity due to climate change. Enlightened souls will have the ability to save our species by traveling to another reality where climate issues do not exist yet.
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At a local small library in New York City, one such family was born. And just like so many capricious happenstances in life, this family unit embraced newcomers and grew exponentially. But this clan was also charged with far more than spreading love and joy and a sense of belonging. This clan was formed by divine Providence to help save the planet.
Gabrielle Bernstein, the MC of Like a Lily Among the Thorns, is a woman in her twenties and has started her career as a librarian at a NYC public library. Abandoned by her father as a young girl and now orphaned by her deranged mother, Gabby longs for a family connection. Coincidentally, she finds this connection at the same time she inherits a B&B in Vermont from her estranged and now-deceased father. This enchanted inn is under the watchful eye of goddesses of myth and legend who have been tasked to save mankind from destroying itself and this planet. These goddesses will use their powers to try and stall the onslaught of the effects of droughts, floods, and rising temperatures. But as a safety net, they have collected human saviors all over the planet to erect safe havens at high altitudes away from flood waters and blistering temperatures.
Woven through this tale is Gabrielle’s inherent understanding that she must be grateful, mindful, and present in this journey called life.
Author’s note: In response to the feedback from several reviews, I offer some clarity to the book’s ending. As a call to action, the other message of this book is the reality that humans would prefer to do nothing when all appears normal. Doing nothing and waiting for the worst to happen is a terrible approach and has been the mindset for a long time no matter the solid info that has been available for many years.
Little Fortified Stories
Little Fortified Stories is an entrancing collection of flash fiction that plunges readers into a series of surreal, evocative realms. Each tale, confined to just a few pages, draws you into atmospheres rich with historical references, enigmatic characters, and moments that blur the boundaries of reality. Inspired by an eclectic mix of influences, from spirituous drinks and art to the author’s own heritage. This anthology weaves a complex tapestry where the real and the imagined seamlessly intertwine. Each story offers a brief but potent experience similar to savoring the last drops of a rare, aged wine.
As I delved deeper into the collection, I found Black’s prose both captivating and disquieting. Her mastery of language is evident in every sentence. Stories like “Blood and Oranges” showcase imagery so vivid it verges on cinematic, leaving scenes etched in your memory long after the final word. Her characters, often ensnared in moments of deep introspection or unsettling situations, are hauntingly lifelike despite their surreal contexts. The author’s ability to evoke such powerful emotions within the span of a few pages is nothing short of remarkable. From the subdued horror of “The Bones of Amundsen” to the magical realism in “Where a Dark Heart Burns,” Black effortlessly navigates between genres and tones, keeping the reader perpetually on edge, never knowing what to anticipate next. This variety ensures that while some stories may resonate more strongly with certain readers, others may leave different impressions. Black’s writing often borders on poetic, with sentences that beckon to be reread and savored. In “Stitching,” for instance, the prose is so meticulously crafted that each word seems chosen to evoke a specific emotion or image.
Little Fortified Stories is a remarkable anthology for those who cherish literary fiction that challenges and enchants in equal measure. Barbara Black’s skillful blending of history, surrealism, and profound human emotion makes this collection a must-read for aficionados of flash fiction and for anyone who enjoys stories that linger long after they’re told.
Pages: 197 | ISBN : 1773861409
LITERARY TITAN 