Blog Archives
Trouble at OverTrails Farm: A Journey of Challenge, Persistence, and Awareness
Suanne Lewis’s Trouble at OverTrails Farm follows Nina Walters and her friends as a joyful day at a therapeutic riding academy turns into a murder investigation after stable co-owner Shayne Langley is found dead. When Alex, a kind teen with an intellectual disability, becomes an easy target for suspicion, Nina, Meredith, Miguel, and even Nina’s dog Harry begin piecing together clues involving gambling debts, hidden money, property developers, and a dangerous attempt to cover the truth.
I liked how the book makes friendship its real engine. The mystery matters, but Nina’s fierce defense of Alex gives the story its pulse. Her anger is not reckless melodrama; it comes from moral clarity. She sees how quickly a vulnerable person can be misread, patronized, or used as a convenient answer, and she refuses to let that calcify into “truth.” That emotional through-line gives the investigation more weight than a simple whodunit.
The farm setting also works beautifully. Horses, trails, barns, tack rooms, and the rhythms of therapeutic riding create a textured, quietly absorbing world. At times, the prose explains more than it needs to, but the book’s sincerity really draws you in. I was especially drawn to the way Lewis treats disability, anxiety, and self-worth not as decorative “issues,” but as authentic realities that shape how characters move through danger, friendship, and trust.
The target audience for this cozy mystery and friendship adventure includes readers who like suspense with a strong ethical center. Readers who enjoy Nancy Drew-style sleuthing but want a gentler, more socially conscious contemporary story will feel at home here. Trouble at OverTrails Farm is a warm-hearted mystery with a bridle in one hand and a moral compass in the other.
Pages: 174 | ASIN : B0GX1TL9NV
Shameful Silence: What You Don’t Know About Domestic Violence
In Shameful Silence, author Alexandra Lozano argues that domestic violence against men remains painfully underrecognized, not because it’s rare or simple, but because shame, masculinity, immigration fears, legal systems, and public narratives often make it nearly unspeakable. Drawing on survivor stories, research, and her experience as an immigration attorney, Lozano widens the frame beyond physical violence to include emotional abuse, financial control, administrative abuse, false allegations, parental alienation, and the quiet devastation of men who don’t fit our cultural image of a victim.
Lozano writes with a lawyer’s urgency, but her best passages feel less like argument than witness. Miguel’s story, with the police lights outside his Burien apartment after he called for help against Guadalupe, is haunting because it turns on disbelief as much as violence. The threats of deportation, the deleted contacts, the children asleep in the next room, all of it gathers into a portrait of a man trapped by love, fear, obligation, and invisibility. Tristan’s story affected me even more. His slow erosion, taking extra jobs while being gaslit into apologizing for things he never said, captures emotional abuse as a weather system, something that changes the air until a person forgets what breathing normally feels like.
I also admired the book’s willingness to enter uncomfortable rooms without pretending they’re tidy. Lozano is careful to say that focusing on male victims doesn’t diminish the reality of violence against women, and I think that distinction matters. The strongest idea in the book is that compassion isn’t a scarce resource. I found myself wanting more exploration of the policy-heavy sections, especially around false allegations, family court, and systemic bias. Those chapters are provocative and necessary, and the arguments move fast. The writing is at its most powerful when it slows down, as it does with Bernie Fitte’s 31-year marriage, his isolation, the debt, the way escape arrives not as one cinematic revelation but as a cumulative, aching clarity.
By the end, I felt that Shameful Silence is not only a book about male victims of domestic violence, but a plea for a more honest moral imagination. It asks readers to look past the familiar scripts and recognize suffering even when it arrives in a body we haven’t been taught to pity. I’d recommend it to readers interested in domestic violence, trauma, law, gender, immigration, and family systems, as well as advocates and professionals who want to think more expansively about who needs help and why they might not ask for it. This is a difficult, compassionate, and deeply necessary book.
Pages: 240 | ISBN : 978-1394430277
From Coercion to Courage: Rising from the Ashes of Past Pain and Outdated Paradigms
From Coercion to Courage is a hybrid of memoir, moral argument, and trauma-informed exhortation. Dr. Stevie Carnegie sets out to name coercion in all the forms people too often minimize or miss, from childhood conditioning and coercive control to workplace sexual pressure, victim-blaming, and the institutional rot exposed through #MeToo and the Epstein files. The book moves from definition to testimony to ethical challenge, then finally toward recovery, arguing that what coercion damages most profoundly is not just safety but identity itself, and that healing begins when that damage is named without euphemism and met with courage rather than shame.
Carnegie doesn’t write as a detached observer. She writes as someone who has lived inside the confusion she’s trying to explain, and that gives even her more didactic passages a raw legitimacy. I found the personal material especially powerful when she describes the long afterlife of manipulation, the way an old message from childhood can become a trapdoor under adult life, or when she revisits her own #MeToo experiences with that awful mixture of self-reproach, disgust, and belated clarity. The imagined challenge in Chapter 7, where the reader is asked to stop blaming victims and inhabit their vulnerability from the inside, struck me as one of the book’s strongest moves. It’s a direct moral demand for empathy.
I think the author is at her best when she’s concrete. The distinction she draws between coercion and brainwashing is genuinely clarifying, and the family examples, particularly the story of being manipulated into making her husband’s parents her sole purpose, give the argument a bruised human texture that abstraction alone couldn’t carry. The book prefers insistence. It repeats, circles back, underlines, and capitalizes. I came to feel that the repetition is part of the book’s emotional logic. Carnegie is writing against a culture of denial, and she clearly believes some truths have to be said again and again before they penetrate. I admired the fierceness of the project, especially in its refusal to separate private suffering from systems, culture, and ethics. The final movement toward post-traumatic growth and courage as a habit of character gives the book a hopeful lift. I appreciated that she aims not merely to diagnose harm, but to imagine a life after it.
From Coercion to Courage is impassioned and sincere. I read it for the conviction and for the hard-won intelligence of someone trying to turn private pain into public clarity. I’d recommend it most strongly to readers interested in trauma, coercive control, survivor testimony, and the ethics of power, especially those who want a book that speaks plainly and feels lived rather than clinically packaged. It’s the kind of book that will matter most to readers willing to meet it heart-first.
Pages: 177 | ASIN : B0GRQ7HHB9
Nurse Dorothea® Presents Bullying and How to Create a Culture to Prevent It
Bullying and How to Create a Culture to Prevent It, by Michael Dow, feels less like a conventional storybook than a guided classroom session turned into a book. Nurse Dorothea leads an after-school mental health club and walks a group of children through what bullying is, the forms it can take, and the damage it can do, from insults and exclusion to cyberbullying, humiliation, extortion, and workplace cruelty. Along the way, different kids speak up with examples from school, work, and daily life, and the book keeps returning to the same core conviction: bullying shrinks a person’s sense of self, but communities can answer it with courage, candor, and mutual protection.
The book doesn’t treat bullying as a minor social hiccup or a rite of passage. It treats it as something corrosive, something that stains a whole environment. I found that persuasive, especially in the moments where the children’s comments give the lesson a human pulse, like Frida describing insults as social pollution, or Azamat recalling the humiliation of being shamed by a teacher in front of classmates. Those moments give the book a bruised, lived-in feeling. Even when the language is direct and didactic, there’s an unmistakable sincerity underneath it, a real desire to protect children and to name harms that adults often dismiss too quickly.
The writing is earnest and clear, and it often speaks in declarations, so it can feel more instructional. This isn’t a book driven by plot so much as by accumulation. Example after example, consequence after consequence. Yet I didn’t mind that because the ideas are unusually expansive for a children’s book. It isn’t content to say bullying hurts feelings. It follows the damage outward into anxiety, isolation, sleep problems, burnout, lower performance, family strain, even housing instability, and fear of deportation. That reach gives the book a grave, almost civic imagination. It wants children to understand not only that bullying is cruel, but that it distorts whole cultures if nobody interrupts it. I respected that ambition because the book is trying to build conscience, not just deliver a tidy lesson.
This book is blunt, compassionate, and deeply invested in the idea that young readers can handle serious conversations about power, shame, and self-worth. I would absolutely recommend it for classrooms, counselors, parents, and older children who are ready to talk openly about bullying in a structured, reflective way. It’s a children’s book for readers who need language for what they’ve lived through, and for communities trying to become braver on purpose.
Pages: 123
Litter Lady Leads: in a Litter-Filled Land
Litter Lady Leads, written by Martha Goldner, is a sweet and simple story about an older woman who cannot stop tidying the world around her. Page after page, she strolls through beaches, parks, trains, ballparks, grocery stores, even windstorms, always scooping up trash with her pointy-tipped cane. Kids adore her. She feeds them cookies, picks up after everyone, donates useful things to people in need, and somehow keeps going even when she is tired. By the end, the kids learn to help her clean, and the whole picture book wraps up with a cheerful idea that we can all make the world a brighter place.
I found the whole book very charming. The writing is short and punchy, which fits a children’s book, but it still gave me little bursts of feeling. I kept smiling because Litter Lady is drawn with this stern face that kind of hides how soft-hearted she is. The pictures on the pages add a funny mood, too. They are colorful, a bit messy, and that rough style works because the story is about mess itself. It made me feel like the book was hand-colored with real love.
I also caught myself thinking about the book’s message more than I expected. It is simple. It is repetitive. Yet it got to me because I know people like her–people who clean up without asking for thanks and who make small corners of the world better just because they care. When the kids finally asked if they could help, I felt a tiny lump in my throat. Her not having cookies for them at the bus stop made me worry about her as if she were my own neighbor. This book surprised me with how much heart it carries in so few words.
I would recommend Litter Lady Leads in a Litter-filled Land to young kids, early readers, teachers, and anyone who wants a gentle story about kindness and caring for your community. It is simple in the best way. It is warm and sweet and gives a little nudge to be helpful. If you like picture books that mix humor with a feel-good lesson, this one will certainly make you smile.
Pages: 32 | ASIN : B0CZ6SRBTZ
Think Critically and Deeply
In Beyond Power, you present the idea that Western society is departing from its moral core and the ideas on which democracy was founded. How long did it take to research and compile this book?
I developed it over a period starting when there were severe tensions in Israel over democracy 2022 and strong anti-Israel post October 7th, 2023.
Did you learn anything while writing Beyond Power that surprised you?
Many of the issues plaguing society seem to have a common conceptual cause.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from your book?
To think critically (and deeply) about all we see, hear, and are told.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
At first glance, these may seem like separate struggles, political, cultural, or geopolitical yet they are deeply connected.
By tracing the tensions between power and ethics, this work explores how successful democracies evolved, why politics so often devolves into hostility, why societies fracture, understanding more deeply the progressive agenda and why Israel in particular stands at the center of so much global controversy. It examines how democracies are corroded from within, how oppressive regimes weaponize ideology, the dynamics of geo political tensions and how Western progressivism redefines compassion.
Rather than despair, the book points toward renewal, offering diagnoses, practical proposals, within the context of a profound conceptualization of the notion of state itself, one capable of transcending today’s divisions.
I Love the Me I See In You
In Hope on the Border, you address existing misconceptions surrounding the US–Mexico border and offer an honest look at life in this perilous area. Why was this an important book for you to write?
America is in trouble. We are more divided and unhappy than ever. In the 2024 World Happiness Report, people under 30 in the U.S. ranked 62nd globally out of 143 countries in happiness and life satisfaction. And this abysmal ranking is plummeting. Suicide is now one of the leading causes of death for American preteens (ages 8–12). How can this be when roughly 95% of the planet is financially worse off than the average American?
(Of interest, Mexico ranked 25th in the 2024 World Happiness Report.)
At our four-decade-old Rancho Feliz Charitable Foundation, Inc., we have a proven solution, and America needs to know what we have to offer. So I decided to write a book.
Ensnared in technology’s frenetic pace, many youth and young adults in America are experiencing a poverty of purpose, meaning, and connection in an environment of unparalleled abundance. Paradoxically, this poverty fosters the same primal fear, alienation, loneliness and emptiness that haunt the poor and underprivileged in Mexico, on the U.S. southern border. In fact, both have the same negative symptoms, just on opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.
Rancho Feliz’s volunteer program allows both sides of the charitable transaction to be simultaneously donors and recipients, thereby thriving in tandem. In a very real sense, the volunteers feed the stomachs of the poor and, in turn, the poor feed the souls of the volunteers. It’s an equal exchange of energy with no logical end—and it transforms the lives of everyone.
This two-pronged approach of serving the poor and creating purpose for the privileged fosters a symbiotic relationship—one in which givers become receivers and receivers become givers. Everyone benefits equally from the same service transaction. We call this reciprocal giving. Under this operating mandate, we have changed thousands of lives on both sides of the border.
To run a successful volunteer-based charity, the greed of human nature must be recognized and harnessed. In other words, service work is foremost in your best interest, and the recipient benefits as a result.
10,000 years of failed religious teachings have taught us that presenting charity as a sacrifice, an action grounded in lack, doesn’t work.
Rather, Rancho Feliz appeals to the driving force of basic human self-interest. Out of selfishness, a form of altruism blossoms.
This isn’t about helping Mexicans – it’s about helping ourselves (by which the Mexicans get helped in the process). This is a true win-win.
In light of our current situation, Americans need to hear this message now more than ever.
How long did it take to research and put this book together?
“Hope on the Border” is a collection of lessons and experiences I gleaned over 38 years of volunteering on the Mexican border, coupled with a lifetime interest in the workings of the mind. My interest in the mind led me to five expeditions into Tibet’s Himalayan “Hidden Lands of the Blossoming Lotus” A.K.A. “Beyul Pemakö” where I studied with several learned Buddhist monks and indigenous ascetics. I firmly believe that in the arena of the mind, what we believe to be true is.
To this end, I also had an early interest in hypnosis and visualization. In the late 1970’s this fascination led me to the Institute of Noetic Sciences which, in turn, led me to studying eastern philosopher Paramahansa Yogananda and his self-realization teachings. Though Yogananda was a Hindu, this study led me to a profound interest in Tibetan Buddhism. In 1993, I took my Bodhisattva Vow of Compassion directly from His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. This experience further strengthened my resolve to help others as a path to a rich and full life.
I attended Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa’s “Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior” classes in Boulder, Colorado, and completed all 12 levels of the meditation teachings in 1998. It’s important to me to note that I do not consider myself a Buddhist – rather I am a student of Buddhism and how our minds work.
It has been my experience that meditation changes us. It changes our brains. It changes the way we think and relate to our world and to each other. It breaks down the hard boundaries that separate us. As a life-long meditator, I have experienced this firsthand. Likewise, when I am in service, the distinction between me and you is blurred. I see myself in others.
At Rancho Feliz we have created a venue where our volunteers can see themselves in others less-fortunate. When this true view is mastered, the only logical conclusion is to serve – for in serving others you are serving yourself.
Both meditation and serving others unveil the interconnected nature of all things. This awareness further strengthens one’s resolve to help others as a path to a rich and full life.
And this is what led me to start Rancho Feliz. I began seeing myself in others. I could no longer default to ‘empathic blindness’ as I realized that the only difference between me and the poor on the border was ‘luck’ – just blind luck.”
Did you learn anything in the course of writing Hope on the Border that surprised you?
Yes. I came to understand the difference between the statements, Love thy neighbor as thyself and I love the me I see in you. I learned that the worn-out and ineffectual statement Love thy neighbor as thyself is a gullible and simply impossible moral imperative that doesn’t work. It goes against our basic instincts of self-interest. To love a stranger is treacherous. It’s a dualistic love. It assumes a separateness, a distinction between you and your neighbor. And all divisions invite conflict. All I had to do was look at our border wall for proof of that.
I love the me I see in you, on the other handis the “true view”(as the Buddhists would say) of our human condition. We are not separate and independent from each other. Rather we only exist in relation to, and are dependent upon, everything else as strands in a universal web of cause and effect.
I love the me I see in you is personal and reflective. It concentrates on unity and shared being. It’s about recognition and connection. It’s self-referential – focused on how the other person reflects you back to you. It suggests that when you look at another human being, you see yourself – echoing the same emotions, wants, needs, hopes, joys, and vulnerability of our shared experience. And you love them because they mirror what is familiar in you.
This is love based on recognizing our “oneness” – the sense that you and I are not truly separate. Love here comes from seeing ourselves in the other and recognizing our shared existence – our shared humanity. We’re all in this together. None of us knows exactly why we’re here, yet we’re all doing the best we can with the circumstances we were born into. This is a non-dual love – a love that dissolves the boundary between self and other.
In writing “Hope on the Border” I was forced to define what made Rancho Feliz different from other charities and religions. Working in one of the most divisive atmospheres on earth – the U.S./MX border – made me contemplate deeply what approach to charity is in sync with our basic human nature and what approaches are not. I attribute much of Rancho Feliz’s success to this simple but all-powerful understanding.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from this book?
We all have a hand in the maladies that plague our southern border. And the pain, suffering, desperation, misunderstanding and divisive contempt will continue until such time as we truly take to heart the fact that you can best serve yourself by serving others.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook-Author | Facebook-Book | Website-Author | Website-Book | Instagram
The U.S.–México border is more than a line on a map. It’s a place of hardship and resilience, inequity and generosity, division and connection. In Hope on the Border, Gil Gillenwater draws on nearly four decades of firsthand experience to bring readers face-to-face with the realities of the world’s most dangerous migrant corridor—and the hope that still thrives there.
Through vivid storytelling and dramatic photography, Gillenwater reveals the heartache and humanity that define life on both sides of the border. His unflinching accounts expose the shared responsibilities of two nations, while his insights point to a deeper truth: Mexico’s material poverty and America’s spiritual poverty are intertwined.
Readers will discover:
Authentic border experiences free from partisan narratives and media distortion.
Stories and photography capturing resilience and humanity.
Insights into poverty on both sides of the border.
A blueprint for hope through reciprocal giving.
A challenge to reflect on personal responsibility.
Hope on the Border won’t just inform you—it will transform how you see division, compassion, and your own capacity for change. If you’re willing to move beyond comfortable assumptions and discover what truly has the power to unite us, this book will be your guide.
Join the movement. Start reading Hope on the Border today.
$5 of each book’s proceeds will support Rancho Feliz’s life-changing work on the U.S.–México border.
Hope on the Border
In Hope on the Border, author Gil Gillenwater dismantles the misconceptions surrounding the U.S.–Mexico border with rare honesty and humanity. Drawing on nearly forty years of personal experience as founder and president of the Rancho Feliz Charitable Foundation, Gillenwater offers a deeply moving exploration of what life is really like along the world’s most perilous migrant corridor. The result is both a visual and emotional journey, one that enlightens as much as it inspires.
This is not a book about politics; it’s a book about people. Through gripping stories and stunning photography, Gillenwater captures the contradictions that define the border: suffering and joy, despair and resilience, inequity and generosity. He introduces the concept of “reciprocal giving,” an approach to charity that rejects dependency and instead emphasizes empowerment and mutual respect. In the villages of Agua Prieta, where Rancho Feliz operates, residents “earn” their homes through fair rent-to-own programs and participate in community-driven initiatives that uplift both givers and receivers.
Gillenwater’s message extends far beyond the borderlands. He challenges readers to reflect on the dual poverty that afflicts both nations, Mexico’s material deprivation and America’s spiritual emptiness. His argument is both searing and hopeful: true transformation begins not with policy, but with personal responsibility and human connection.
Every page of Hope on the Border radiates with color and life. The photographs are vivid, compassionate, and unflinching, and offer more than illustration; they act as testimony. Smiling faces, vibrant murals, and rugged landscapes bring the narrative to life, emphasizing the beauty and strength found in even the harshest environments.
Hope on the Border is a call to conscience. Gillenwater offers readers a rare gift: the opportunity to see the border not as a place of division, but as a landscape of shared humanity. His blend of storytelling, activism, and introspection makes this a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the deeper truths behind one of the world’s most misunderstood regions. A masterpiece of empathy and vision. Part photojournalism, part personal odyssey, and entirely transformative, Hope on the Border reminds us that the most powerful walls we can dismantle are the ones within ourselves.
Pages: 318 | ASIN : B00OH0HUHK
