Blog Archives
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Fiction
The Literary Titan Book Award honors books that exhibit exceptional storytelling and creativity. This award celebrates novelists who craft compelling narratives, create memorable characters, and weave stories that captivate readers. The recipients are writers who excel in their ability to blend imagination with literary skill, creating worlds that enchant and narratives that linger long after the final page is turned.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Literary Titan Silver Book Award
Celebrating the brilliance of outstanding authors who have captivated us with their skillful prose, engaging narratives, and compelling real and imagined characters. We recognize books that stand out for their innovative storytelling and insightful exploration of truth and fiction. Join us in honoring the dedication and skill of these remarkable authors as we celebrate the diverse and rich worlds they’ve brought to life, whether through the realm of imagination or the lens of reality.
Award Recipients
God’s Salvation Manifesto by James Hales
SANJIVANI SCROLLS by Harshad Bhatt
Y by J.D.M. Sullivan
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Margaret Ann and the Reckoning
In Margaret Ann and the Reckoning, Cindy Cortez Prieto drops readers into a cemetery where death is not an ending so much as a strange continuation: Margaret Ann, a dead girl living among other spirits with her grandpa and her friends Hazel and Marco, investigates the suspicious death of wealthy Florence Mason while also facing the return of the Gazer, a malevolent force hunting her essence. The book braids a murder puzzle with a supernatural struggle, and that combination gives it an unusually lively pulse for a ghost story aimed at younger readers.
What I liked most was the book’s tonal oddity in the best sense. It can be eerie, then playful, then unexpectedly tender. Prieto has a real affection for her cemetery world, and that affection keeps the novel from turning merely grim. I liked the way the dead still squabble, joke, investigate, worry, and form makeshift family bonds. That emotional logic matters more than strict realism here, and it gives the story a homespun sincerity that I found winning. Hazel, in particular, adds warmth, and Margaret Ann’s mix of bravery, irritation, curiosity, and vulnerability keeps the novel from feeling embalmed in sweetness.
I also appreciated the novel’s willingness to be melodramatic. The wicked voices, the family greed, the spectral menace, the sense that a child detective can step straight from library research into metaphysical peril, none of it is shy. Sometimes the prose is a little blunt, and some scenes land with more earnestness than polish, but there is energy in that directness. The book doesn’t smirk at its own haunted premise. It commits. And because it commits, the spooky set pieces and emotional beats have a kind of old-fashioned crackle. And that makes the story vivid.
I would hand this to middle-grade and young YA readers who enjoy paranormal mystery, ghost adventure, supernatural suspense, cemetery fiction, and kid-detective stories with a strong streak of heart. Readers who like Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book may recognize a similar fascination with childhood among the dead, though Prieto’s novel is less lyrical and more openly earnest, with a warmer, more familial glow. This is a spooky-hearted mystery that prefers soul to slickness, and that is its own kind of magic.
Pages: 143 | ASIN : B0GQ6V5D7P
Silver Lake Birthright
Silver Lake: Birthright is a paranormal romance that’s also a family saga, a small-town fantasy, and a story about spiritual inheritance. It opens with Robert and Lena already bound together by prophecy, desire, and danger, then lets that bond ripple outward into the wider life of Silver Lake, Kansas, where magic sits right next to church culture, racial history, animal care, old grudges, and everyday survival. The novel’s world is crowded on purpose. It wants love, folklore, ancestry, and conflict all in the same room, and that ambition gives the book its particular identity.
I liked how fully the book treats Robert and Lena as a pair. Early on, Robert says, “We are interconnected,” and that line turns out to be the emotional and supernatural center of the whole novel. Their relationship isn’t just attraction with extra sparks. It’s presented as a joining of temperaments, gifts, histories, and obligations. The author makes that connection feel physical, fated, and chosen all at once, which is a tricky mix to pull off. Lena’s grounded, funny, stubborn voice plays well against Robert’s more intense, protective one, and together they give the book its heartbeat.
The book also explores community, especially the messy kind. It doesn’t settle for keeping the spotlight only on the central couple. It keeps widening the lens through its many points of view, pulling in Bertha, Tina, Deidre, Anthony, the sheriff, and even darker figures circling the town. That structure makes Silver Lake feel lived in rather than staged. People carry class tensions, racial tension, old shame, family memory, and private longing into the fantasy plot, so the magic never feels sealed off from real life. Even the sanctuary setting, the horses, the wolf Belfast, and the lake itself add to the sense that this is a place with its own spiritual weather.
The author’s style is earnest, direct, and unafraid of intensity. This is a book that likes big feeling, dramatic reveals, prophetic language, and emotional sincerity. Sometimes it moves like oral storytelling, with voices that want to tell you exactly who they are and what matters to them. That works especially well in the novel’s reflections on love and hardship. The novel embraces complication, but it always keeps faith with devotion, survival, and the possibility that love can be sacred without becoming abstract.
Silver Lake: Birthright is a story about marriage in the largest sense of the word: not just romance, but covenant, ancestry, witness, and shared destiny. Its final pages bring together danger, ceremony, and blessing in a way that feels true to everything the book has been building toward. What author D.D. Franklin has written here is a supernatural love story with a strong family pulse and a real sense of place. It’s dramatic, heartfelt, and fully committed to its own vision, and that commitment is what makes it memorable.
Pages: 626 | ASIN : B0GWQ8X7J4
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Fiction
The Literary Titan Book Award honors books that exhibit exceptional storytelling and creativity. This award celebrates novelists who craft compelling narratives, create memorable characters, and weave stories that captivate readers. The recipients are writers who excel in their ability to blend imagination with literary skill, creating worlds that enchant and narratives that linger long after the final page is turned.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Literary Titan Silver Book Award
Celebrating the brilliance of outstanding authors who have captivated us with their skillful prose, engaging narratives, and compelling real and imagined characters. We recognize books that stand out for their innovative storytelling and insightful exploration of truth and fiction. Join us in honoring the dedication and skill of these remarkable authors as we celebrate the diverse and rich worlds they’ve brought to life, whether through the realm of imagination or the lens of reality.
Award Recipients
A Musical Journey into Healing – The Holy Spirit’s Desire to Make You Whole by Domenic Ferrone
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Joshua Creed: Keeper of Worlds
Joshua Creed: Keeper of Worlds is a middle-grade portal fantasy with a strong coming-of-age thread, and at its core, it follows twelve-year-old Joshua as his already-shaky life cracks open even further. His parents are divorcing, school feels like a minefield, and then his strange blue eye starts pulling him into another world, where prophecy, dangerous magic, and creatures like Wormly, Selia, and Gonthragon force him into the role of a keeper between worlds. What makes the book more than a simple quest story is that Joshua is not just trying to save a fantasy realm. He’s also trying to understand his family, his anger, and the fear that he ruins everything he touches.
I liked how directly the author, Dawnette Brenner, writes Joshua’s inner life. The fantasy setup is big, but the emotional entry point is small and human: a tetherball game, a suspension, a kitchen table conversation, a kid trying not to cry. I think that choice works great. It gives the book real footing before the world-hopping begins, and it keeps the stakes personal even when the plot expands into prophecy and interdimensional danger. I also liked that the magic has rules and consequences. The idea that crossing between worlds costs Joshua something, even time from his own life, gives the story weight and keeps it from feeling too easy.
I felt the book was at its best when it slowed down and let character and emotion breathe. Joshua’s bond with Jonah, his guilt over his mother being hurt, and the way fantasy becomes tangled up with family pain all land well. Those parts felt honest. The novel throws a lot at the reader: prophecy, magical tools, multiple creatures, vision lore, world rules, and escalating threats. Some readers will enjoy that rush. I respected the author’s instinct to make this adventure about responsibility instead of simple wish fulfillment. The book keeps asking a solid question: what does it actually cost a kid to become “chosen”? That question gives the story its backbone.
I’d recommend this most to readers who like middle-grade fantasy that blends portals, prophecy, and magical objects with family strain and emotional growth. Kids who enjoy stories in the lane of classic quest fantasy, but want something more grounded in school, home, and identity, will probably connect with it. I think adults who read middle grade closely will also notice the heart behind it. This is a fantasy novel, but it is really about carrying too much too young and learning that bravery is not the same thing as pretending you are fine.
Pages: 281 | ASIN : B0GPP1XLTD
