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The Arbiters
The Arbiters by Brook Lenker is a coming-of-age adventure set in eastern Pennsylvania in 1975 and 1976, where the pleasures of being young gradually collide with a much bigger question about who gets to decide what happens to the natural places people love. Reily Watters and his friends spend their time fishing, hiking, swimming, chasing romantic interests, getting into trouble, and exploring the Mannequin Creek watershed. When a proposed pumped-storage hydroelectric project threatens to transform that landscape, their familiar woods and water take on new importance. The environmental storyline grows naturally from Reily’s attachment to the creek, so the book’s interest in conservation feels personal. It’s as much about young people discovering what matters to them as it is about saving a place.
One of the book’s most enjoyable qualities is its ensemble of characters. Reily is the emotional center, curious about nature, girls, friendship, and the person he’s becoming, but the supporting characters develop lives and ambitions of their own. Wil’s dry wit and interest in writing give the group a different kind of intelligence, while Boom’s scientific curiosity becomes especially important as he and Cindy investigate the snakes living near the proposed reservoir. Eddie may be the biggest surprise. His rough, impulsive personality sits alongside a genuine artistic talent and a growing confidence that gives him more depth as the story progresses. Even Merle Darkes, the developer pushing the hydroelectric project, gets his own chapters, allowing the novel to show how ambition and self-interest can shape the way someone sees a landscape. The shifting viewpoints make the story feel less like one teenager’s crusade and more like a community of people moving toward choices that reveal who they are.
Lenker also has a strong affection for the texture of the 1970s, and the novel is packed with music, television, cars, clothes, food, slang, and other period details. Those references create a lived-in world. Just as important, the landscape itself becomes one of the book’s most memorable presences. Fishing holes, waterfalls, forests, quarries, farms, and creeks accumulate meaning because the characters keep returning to them. The plot can be leisurely and episodic, particularly when it follows romances, school life, sports, and the group’s everyday escapades, but that spaciousness serves the coming-of-age story. By the time the fight over the dam reaches its resolution, the reader understands exactly what could be lost. The government’s eventual rejection of the project therefore lands as more than a bureaucratic victory. It’s the preservation of the physical world in which these friendships and discoveries have taken shape.
I recommend The Arbiters most to readers who enjoy character-driven coming-of-age fiction, outdoor adventures, environmental themes, and stories with a strong sense of place. It should have particular appeal for people who remember the 1970s, since they’ll recognize plenty of cultural touchstones, but younger readers interested in conservation and friendship can connect with its central concerns just as easily. The book understands that learning to care about something often happens before a person knows what to do about it. Reily and his friends begin with fishing, swimming, crushes, jokes, and afternoons that seem endless. They come away with a clearer sense that the places they love can be vulnerable, that their own talents can have a purpose, and that speaking up can matter. That combination of youthful adventure, friendship, humor, and environmental stewardship gives The Arbiters its distinctive identity.
Pages: 231 | ASIN : B0DS6BN31G
The Origins of Lawton Passage
Lawton Passage follows a man from his childhood in small-town Tennessee through the joys and hardships of adolescence, college, and adulthood, and through grief, and back to his hometown. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
In 1990 my Mom got it into her head to write her autobiography after spending a week with my Dad at a Lawrence Welk Resort out in San Diego. After many years of working through her stories, she had a partial draft readied, and declared to her four kids (with me being the youngest), “Each of you need to write your own stories.”
That’s when I began writing what I entitled “The Wavettes” which I shared with my siblings and my parents. The first one covered our strategies to get my parents to stop smoking. Another one was a collection of memories of all our pets that we lost to the highway. A third recounted my exploits in learning how to drive, and the fourth one talked about my early impressions about religion. My dad wouldn’t say whether or not he liked that one, he just said he didn’t quite know what to make of it. I felt that as a kind of disapproval that I indicated that I should be all in about religion around my Dad.
What was really nice about the Wavettes period in the development of Lawton Passage was that these were stories that my parents got to see before they passed away. The sixth and final Wavette was a kind of therapy piece for myself after being with my dad during the last week of his life. It was in that story that I recounted how my cousin told me the night before my dad’s service that his parents used to get into the biggest fights every season whenever the annual Christmas newsletter arrived. “You can’t write that!” Mom told me on the phone after she read the story.
That was the day I discovered the prominence of the annual Christmas newsletter in our family, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell any interesting truths, if they happened to be inconvenient.
Looking back, was Liam’s emotional journey always clear to you, or did it emerge gradually as you wrote?
When I began I just thought it would be Liam’s stories all told with a bit of humor. Except for the very last one (which is not in Lawton Passage), the Wavettes tended to be funny, light-hearted, and tongue-in-cheek. Once I reached the period where I would write about junior and senior high school, the tone had to deepen to stay real because tragedy began to enter the environment. I felt this keenly when my childhood friend passed away at the age of 46, but it would take another ten years before I began writing it down because these were stories that I had kept from my parents. I waited until my Dad was gone and my Mom was under the cloud of Alzheimers before setting pen to paper on that segment.
The journey further deepened in 2021 when Liam returned to Lawton to attend the funeral of his cousin during the time of Covid. So many had been lost, so it became a reflection of not only the loss of friends and family, but also the loss of home. It wasn’t really until I had written it all down, and edited the book again and again and again and … well, you get the picture … that I realized that the end of the book was all about getting closure. Closure with the bridge incident, closure with leaving home, closure with being right with Dad and closure with being right with Mom.
The Christmas newsletters provide a fascinating frame for the novel. What inspired you to use them as a storytelling device?
Most of the stories had already been written before I ever thought of using the Christmas newsletters. I realized they had a special prominence on that day when Mom had said “You can’t write that.” Then I discovered a bound set of newsletters from Dad in a stack of papers in the entertainment center in 2021. It was a couple of months before my siblings and I were scheduled to meet on my birthday at my parent’s gravesite to bury their ashes.
We’d already spent most of our sadness regarding our loss of each of them during their first services years prior. The burial of their joint ashes took on more of a tone of celebratory closure. So I found choice excerpts from Dad’s newsletters about each of us kids, and told a funny story that contrasted with the innocent image that Dad portrayed in the newsletters. I read those over their ashes so we could all share a good laugh the day they were buried. Those excerpts found their way into Chapter 51 of Lawton Passage —- “Wind-Up.”
As I began dividing up my work on Lawton Passage as individual short stories to be released as Lyle’s Weekly Reader, I thought it would be cool to put a fitting excerpt from my Dad’s newsletters to begin each of those stories that depicted a period before junior high school. For junior high school and beyond, I did not initially use excerpts from the Christmas newsletter. Instead I began those stories with excerpted stanzas from rock and roll songs which were current during that day. However, when I learned that I could run into royalties issues, I dropped that idea and used excerpts from the Christmas newsletter all the way through.
Are there more stories from Vale Hollow or Liam’s world that you hope to tell?
The initial draft of Lawton Passage ran approximately 80 pages longer with a section called “Embarkation.” I felt the inclusion of that section would make Lawton Passage too long and would push publication of the book into 2027. The story involves my final days with my dad in hospice. To extend the content to make it a fuller book, I am exploring taking material from three interviews I videotaped with my dad about his life before I was born.
Another story option I am considering would be a fantasy, which would involve time travel between the current day and 1976 in Lawton, Tennessee. It would draw on high school characters introduced in Lawton Passage and intersperse them with a modern-day cadre of armchair philosophers and a wealthy entrepreneur. Together they would travel back in time to stop the murder by a chicken farmer of his wife with a wooden coat hanger.
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Tim Duning’s Lawton Passage follows Liam, a boy raised in his ancestral country home built in the 1840s, as he adjusts to small-town rituals, and the quiet pressures of Southern life during the 1960s and ’70s. Through thefts and schoolyard hijinks, swimming pool accidents, séances, paper routes, and first loves, Liam navigates a childhood and adolescence shaped by faith, family, and friendship—always measuring the perfection his father presents against the messy realities he experiences.
From the explosive humor of sabotaged cigarettes to the tragedies of peer loss, the memoir captures the grit, grief, and laughter of growing up in a town that refuses to stay small. Forty years later, Liam returns to Lawton, tracing the echoes of his past, realizing that home and family live most vividly in stories, not land. Lawton Passage is a poignant, funny, and deeply honest meditation on legacy, memory, and the Southern art of storytelling.
Saving Moses
Steve A. Twitty’s Saving Moses is a coming-of-age adventure built around one unforgettable summer in 1961. The novel follows Milty Marshal and his three friends, Mark, Davy, and Floyd, as they roam the woods, canals, and abandoned dumping grounds surrounding their South Florida mill town. What begins with bike rides, a tree house, neighborhood pranks, and clashes with local bullies grows into a plan to protect Moses, a huge alligator the boys discover in Black Creek Canal. The story is framed by the older Milton returning to the remains of Dillardtown with his daughter and grandchildren, finally ready to explain the event he’s carried for decades. The author describes the book as fiction based on actual events in South Miami, which gives the boys’ world a lived-in quality even when the adventure becomes larger than life.
The book’s greatest strength is its detailed sense of place. Twitty fills Dillardtown with terrazzo-floored company houses, backyard swimming pools, rattling model trains, comic books, bicycles, banyan trees, coral rock, afternoon storms, and the constant presence of the sugar mill. These details do more than establish the early 1960s. They show how completely the boys belong to their surroundings. The wilderness isn’t just scenery to them. It’s their private country, with its own landmarks, rules, hideouts, dangers, and legends. Twitty also spends time inside each boy’s home, so their behavior makes emotional sense. Milty’s nervousness comes from living with a bitter, gambling father. Floyd’s need to prove himself is tied to insecurity and a lingering disability. Mark’s confidence and Davy’s inventive curiosity grow out of more supportive households. Even Randy, the neighborhood bully, is given a painful family history that helps explain his anger.
Readers who enjoy Stephen King’s The Body, better known through the film Stand by Me, will recognize a similar mix of friendship, danger, humor, and adult hindsight. Both stories follow boys whose casual summer expedition leads them into experiences they aren’t emotionally prepared to handle. Twitty, like King, understands how childhood friendships can be affectionate and cruel in the same conversation. The boys tease one another, compete for status, make reckless promises, and then risk themselves when a friend is genuinely threatened. Saving Moses has a sunnier, more adventure-driven rhythm for much of its length, with plans involving alligator food, scavenged raft materials, stolen paddles, and homemade engineering. That playful energy makes the later violence land harder because the reader has spent so much time sharing the boys’ excitement.
Saving Moses is a story about the way children assign themselves adult responsibilities before they understand adult consequences. The boys believe they can tame danger through loyalty, ingenuity, and a good plan, whether they’re confronting a bully or attempting to save an alligator. When their adventure ends in tragedy, Milton turns one terrible moment into a lifelong judgment of his own character. The present-day chapters give the novel its emotional purpose, as his friends help him understand that memory has preserved his guilt more faithfully than it preserved the truth. Twitty’s storytelling is direct, visual, and often shaped like a screenplay, with plenty of action and sharply staged scenes. The result is an earnest, bittersweet novel about friendship, responsibility, and the stories people must finally tell before they can forgive the children they used to be. I recommend Saving Moses to readers who like heartfelt coming-of-age stories about friendship, difficult choices, childhood adventures, and the lasting impact of the memories we carry.
Pages: 254 | ASIN : B0B218STTK
Complex Relationships
The Sawmillers Daughter follows a woman from her childhood in a Depression-era timber settlement through marriage, motherhood, bereavement, and the creation of a sawmilling legacy. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I have family that has been generational Sawmillers, the setting of the Eastern Dorrigo Plateau is a real location and once was a thriving community, and that’s where I drew my inspiration for my story. I also listened to people’s stories about what life was like back in the day in those locations, so I guess the history of the place also inspired me.
Maggie’s relationship with her mother, Dotty, is one of the novel’s most emotionally complex threads. Was it important to you that readers understand Dotty without necessarily forgiving her?
Absolutely, I believe that with all complex relationships, it might be easy to forgive, but it’s important to never forget, but it was also important to me that Maggie’s life wasn’t defined by her mother or their relationship and that she could forge her own path without that determent.
The novel moves across several decades at a brisk pace. What challenges did you face in balancing the sweep of history with the intimate moments of Maggie’s personal life?
I guess, like everyone’s life, the older you get, the faster life goes as we get so busy with work, children, family life, that it passes by so quickly. I also wanted to be able to show significant historical events that create a timeline, but also life milestones that become significant in a person’s life. For example, I can still remember the day Princess Diana died, I remember where I was and what I was doing, and to me, even that is a historical event.
If Maggie could meet the young girl she was at the beginning of the novel, what do you think she would tell her?
Never give up on your dreams and to always believe in yourself, and that she is stronger than she thinks.
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As the Great Depression and World War shaped her world, Mags transformed ambition into action, mastering the Canadian saw and dreaming of building her own timber enterprise. Along the way, she confronted bitter rivalries, devastating losses, and family secrets that threatened everything she had worked for.
The Sawmillers Daughter is a sweeping saga of grit, loyalty, and determination. It tells the story of a woman who carved a place for herself in a man’s world, built a lasting legacy in Australia’s timber industry, and ensured that her family—and their mill—would endure for generations to come.
Natural Chaos
Mixed Messages follows Lana Miller and Liam Livingston as one combustible night grows into a cross-city romance shaped by desire, fear, family loyalty, and the courage it takes to stop mistranslating love. Which came first for you as a writer: the spark between them or the emotional wounds they needed to confront?
The spark came first. Both Liam and Lana are in my two previous books, but not completely fleshed out. I knew from Cutting Losses (book 2) that Liam, who is the cousin to Josh, the MMC of that book, is outrageous and flamboyant, with an active dating/sex life. In Cutting Losses, he first sees Lana at the bar, and I thought they would be an interesting pairing because she is very career-focused and not interested in dating at all. The chapter I wrote for them in that book was so hot that I knew they needed their own book. It was when I started developing Mixed Messages that I began to wonder why Lana was straitlaced and why Liam was the opposite. The question for me with my characters is always “WHY?” Why are they making their decisions? Why are they acting a certain way, etc.
The chapter-opening texts give the novel a modern, fizzy rhythm. What inspired you to use messages as part of the story’s structure?
Since Lana and Liam live in separate areas of the country, they needed a way to communicate, and I know from experience how easy it is to miscommunicate when texting. People read a text from their point of view, not the POV of the sender, so I liked the idea of that natural chaos being involved in their romance. Plus, texting makes it modern, yet writing is also a very romantic form of courtship, no matter the form.
Lana is intelligent, ambitious, guarded, and deeply shaped by insecurity and betrayal. What was the most challenging part of writing her emotional journey?
Acknowledging Lana’s pain but also not letting her be bogged down by it. I didn’t want her to be jaded; I wanted her to be still somewhat naive and vulnerable, and that’s what Liam sees in her and takes care not to hurt. Having her private life be almost non-existent while her professional life is booming was tricky also because I didn’t want her to be boring.
Liam has a charming exterior but carries real hurt around being underestimated. How did you balance his warmth and humor with that more wounded side?
It’s easy being the class clown when everyone needs a laugh, but it’s difficult having people take you seriously, then. I wanted to show that on the outside, Liam may seem like nothing bothers him, but I made sure to make him deeper than most people suspect. Writing for him was so impactful because he hides his pain so well until he doesn’t, and it was this sensitivity that made it easy to imagine that once he invests himself in someone, he is completely devoted.
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When two strangers collide in a crowded New York City bar, Lana Miller and Liam Livingston ignite a spark neither of them expects—and neither can forget. Their chemistry is instant and electric, but by morning, they part ways still knowing nothing real about each other…except that something between them felt undeniably right.
Brilliant but cautious, Lana has been burned by love twice—once by someone who should have protected her, and again by someone she trusted too easily. Now a dedicated doctor, she shines in her career but drifts through life feeling unseen, uncertain where she truly belongs. Liam, on the other hand, has always hidden behind charm and two-month flings, deflecting expectations and masking the quiet ache of never being taken seriously. Beneath his easygoing exterior is a man longing for a place—and a person—who feels like home.
Neither knows that their lives are already intertwined through the people they care about most. And when fate brings them face-to-face again, they must decide whether the connection they shared was a moment of magic…or the beginning of something real.
A heartfelt, magnetic story of found family, irresistible chemistry, emotional healing, and love that refuses to let go.
Lawton Passage
In Lawton Passage: As Told by a Tennessee Storyteller, author Tim Duning follows Liam Menschen from his childhood at Vale Hollow in small-town Tennessee through adolescence, college, adulthood, grief, and return. Framed by his father’s polished Christmas newsletters, the book becomes a memoir about family mythology, Southern manners, church, friendship, mischief, race, class, memory, and the strange ache of outliving the world that made you.
I found the book most alive when it lets childhood look at adult life from under the table. The cigarette smoke, cocktail parties, school bus rides, church pews, Kroger gum, and family performances all carry a comic charge, but Duning is not merely being nostalgic. He has a fine eye for the absurd choreography of respectability: the way a family can cultivate manners while quietly avoiding certain truths, the way a Christmas letter can be both love song and scorecard, the way a child can understand more than adults think and less than he imagines.
What stayed with me was the book’s gradual deepening. Early chapters have the bright, anecdotal snap of porch storytelling, but later sections gather a more elegiac gravity. Duning writes about parents, old friends, hometown rituals, and return without embalming them. His tone can be funny, rueful, tender, and sly within the same scene. At times, the abundance of episodes gives the book a meandering, oral-history feel, but that looseness is also part of its charm; it reads like someone pulling chairs closer as the night gets longer.
This book will appeal to readers of Southern memoir, coming-of-age story, family history, small-town Americana, and nostalgic literary nonfiction. Readers who enjoy Rick Bragg’s work, especially his blend of humor, family devotion, and regional memory, will find a familiar warmth here, though Duning’s voice is more shaggy, conversational, and quietly self-interrogating. Lawton Passage is a loving inventory of a vanished place, told by someone wise enough to know that home is never as simple as memory makes it.
Pages: 354 | ASIN : B0H3WV4RQ4
The Pebble in the Pond
The Pebble in the Pond is a work of fiction, and it reads to me like Southern women’s fiction with a strong small-town family drama at its core. It follows Miriam Llewelyn, who arrives in Stuarts Landing, Virginia, after bankruptcy and grief have knocked her life off balance, only to find herself pulled into old local loyalties, class tensions, women’s power struggles, and the long shadow of her grandfather’s past. What begins as a story about starting over gradually opens into something larger: a novel about reputation, memory, belonging, and the way one person’s arrival can unsettle an entire community.
What stayed with me most was the book’s steady interest in women as they actually are, not as symbols. Author Suzanne Groves gives us Miriam, Louise, Emma, Bitsy, Pearl, and the Webster sisters with enough room to be difficult, wounded, funny, controlling, generous, petty, and surprisingly tender. I appreciated that. The writing has an easy, readable flow, and it often feels as if you are being quietly let into the social life of Stuarts Landing rather than formally introduced to it. I also liked how Groves builds tension through everyday moments: a church luncheon, a grocery store encounter, a tense conversation in a parlor. The drama comes from pride, history, and the thousand little ways people test one another. That felt true.
I was especially interested in the author’s choice to center class, status, and female friendship without sanding off the rough edges. Louise, in particular, is written with enough sharpness that she could have become a caricature, but she never quite does. That is one of the book’s strengths. Even when I found her maddening, I could still see the fear and conditioning underneath the polish. Miriam, on the other hand, gives the novel its moral warmth, though I think what makes her work is that she is not naive in a flimsy way. She absorbs a lot, she missteps, she keeps going. The title ends up feeling earned too. The book is interested in ripples, in the way old secrets and fresh acts of courage move outward through a town that pretends it cannot change.
By the end, I felt I had spent time somewhere real, with people I could argue about on the drive home. That is usually a good sign. I would recommend The Pebble in the Pond most strongly to readers who enjoy character-driven fiction, Southern-set novels, and stories about women navigating family history, social pressure, and reinvention. Anyone who likes novels where the emotional stakes matter more than speed, and where a town can feel almost as alive as the cast, will probably find a lot to appreciate here.
Pages: 420 | ASIN : B0GQCNB5VW
The Cultural Threat
Dollartorium follows a struggling corndog shop owner who chases a too-good-to-be-true business scheme, only for the fallout to expose the hollow promises of hustle culture. Did this novel begin as satire, social commentary, or character study?
The Dollartorium began as a play, inspired by Aristophanes’ Clouds, but instead of satirizing philosophers (not much a target these days), I thought better to take on that new class of hustlers and the culture they have created. Like most satire, it became social commentary and, sadly, even more relevant now than when I began.
The Dollartorium scheme feels disturbingly familiar. How closely did you model it on real-world programs? Were you more interested in exposing the scam itself or the conditions that make people vulnerable to it?
Ha! It is disturbingly familiar to me as well. The Dollartorium is a critique of the many ways our culture, especially business culture, creates a numbness in ourselves and in our relationships with others. The Dollartorium is more about the cultural threat, the scam itself, but of course, the scam would hardly be a threat if we, like Ralph, weren’t vulnerable to it. Fortunately, Ralph and Phyllis recover with the help of a more reality-grounded Stella.
The novel is funny, but there’s an undercurrent of anger beneath the jokes. How do you balance humor with critique?
Without humor, I’d go mad. The heart of the book is in the lectures at the Dollartorium. I use each lecture to ridicule one thing. If the book revealed the totality of living under the culture of uncontrolled capitalism, it would be humorless and unbearable. These little things, from sex in advertising to dilution of food, are pieces we all experience, and up close they are both funny and disconcerting. To see their absurdities enables us to distance ourselves from them a bit. But to be so used, so often, makes me angry.
The book closes on a realistic, not idyllic, note. Why was that the right ending?
I would be gratified if the ending were realistic, that we simply open our eyes and live and work doing what we can as best we can, bearing in mind the needs of others. After a brutal journey for Ralph and his daughter, I hope the ending shows that things do not have to be the way they have become, and that the journey to a saner world is a personal, as well as social, responsibility. Even Phyllis finds pleasure in honest work. Still, the Money Master endures, intent on his own selfish worldview, doesn’t he?
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