Blog Archives
Breakfast at Bernie’s: Waffles and Wisdom
D. L. Norris’s Breakfast at Bernie’s is a novel about friendship, aging, and the stories that shape a community’s understanding of itself. Set in Columbus, Wisconsin, it begins at a café where four longtime regulars gather over coffee, breakfast, and familiar disagreements. Ed’s enthusiasm for storytelling, Bill’s stubborn confidence, Grant’s quieter grief, and Leo’s pastoral patience establish a lively social rhythm. The arrival of Myra Davis, a composed newcomer with a notebook and an interest in local history, introduces questions that reach beyond the breakfast table. Norris builds the story through conversation and observation, allowing the café’s daily rituals to acquire greater significance as personal loyalties meet the demands of truth.
The ensemble’s appeal rests on the way humor and vulnerability occupy the same conversations. These men tease one another about birthdays, physical ailments, and romantic prospects, while their exchanges reveal the uncertainty of life after bereavement. Norris gives their desire for companionship dignity, along with room for vanity, defensiveness, and mistaken judgment. Lou Dyer, the café’s experienced waitress, brings particular energy to the narrative. Her quick replies keep the regulars in check, and her watchfulness gives the novel an emotionally complicated perspective on safety and trust. Her observation that “Most people in this town consider privacy a temporary inconvenience” neatly captures the mixture of intimacy and intrusion that defines Columbus. Through Lou, familiarity becomes both a source of comfort and a responsibility requiring self-examination.
The book’s central interests deepen as it considers who gets included in a community’s account of its past. Family memory, religious authority, and civic pride all influence how people understand belonging, and Norris asks readers to consider the human consequences of those influences. Leo’s conviction that “An ounce of kindness is worth a pound of religion” expresses the novel’s ethical emphasis with useful economy. Care takes practical forms here: noticing an absence, offering work, listening carefully, or helping someone face an unwelcome task. The story also examines how protective impulses can become entangled with fear and personal need. That tension gives its warmth substance. The characters’ affection for one another carries obligations, including the willingness to question assumptions they’ve lived with comfortably for years.
Norris’s descriptive writing makes Bernie’s easy to imagine through the clatter of dishes, the smell of bacon, worn furnishings, and the changing Wisconsin weather beyond the windows. Dialogue supplies much of the book’s movement, with Lou and Ed providing especially effective comic timing. The prose turns toward reflective commentary, spelling out the emotional meaning of gestures and conversations. Repeated images of shelter, silence, and coffee create cohesion, though their frequency sometimes slows the pace. The novel is most persuasive when a small action carries the feeling, particularly in the exchanges between people who know how difficult receiving kindness can be. Breakfast at Bernie’s will appeal to readers who enjoy a patient, character-centered story with a strong attachment to place. Its lasting interest lies in the everyday effort of making room for other people and accepting the changes their presence asks of us.
Pages: 262 | ASIN : B0HJ14HMLJ
Brave New Game
S.K. Michalowski’s Brave New Game follows Charlie Gold, a thirteen-year-old whose height attracts attention he’d happily avoid. He’s gifted at math, devoted to basketball, and trying to find his footing after losing his parents. His late father’s reputation as a local basketball legend adds another layer of pressure: people see the family name before they see the kid. Living with his older sister, Cecilia, in a drafty farmhouse near Lake Erie, Charlie worries about everything from fitting into a classroom desk to keeping the electricity on. It’s an engaging setup for coming-of-age sports fiction, giving the novel a clear sense of what’s at stake each time Charlie steps onto a court or makes a decision away from one.
The basketball scenes have a satisfying physical immediacy. Shoes squeak, players scramble for rebounds, and a few seconds on the clock can stretch into a whole page of tension. Michalowski also gives this basketball novel a distinctive angle through Charlie’s fascination with statistics. He looks at players, lineups, and possibilities through numbers, and that way of thinking shapes both his confidence and his blind spots. College recruiting, player transfers, and the money surrounding athletics become part of the story’s everyday conversation. Those details give the fictional St. Hildegarde’s program a working life beyond game night. The town’s attachment to its Hedgehogs feels especially convincing, with basketball supplying a shared language for people whose lives and bank balances look very different.
The relationships are what kept me invested. Cecilia is funny, protective, exhausted, and ambitious, often within the same conversation. Her Shakespeare habit gives their sibling banter a recognizable rhythm, while the practical demands of raising her brother make her feel like someone with a life of her own. Charlie’s friendship with Jalen has the comfortable teasing and occasional friction of two kids who’ve known each other for years. Zoey brings sharp humor and an independence that challenges Charlie’s assumptions. Around them, adults and athletes have their own loyalties, pressures, and imperfect judgment. Charlie’s anxiety comes through in physical habits and private thoughts, making his fear of disappointing people easy to understand. His intelligence sits alongside a very believable hunger for approval, belonging, and financial security.
Michalowski’s short chapters and direct prose keep this contemporary teen fiction moving, even as it takes on grief, bullying, public scrutiny, and questions of personal responsibility. There’s plenty of goofy humor, especially in the food-centered conversations and awkward exchanges between friends, and it gives the heavier scenes room to breathe. Some explanatory dialogue and encouraging speeches spell out ideas that the surrounding scenes already communicate, so a lighter touch there would’ve made the emotional moments sharper. Still, the book’s affection for its characters gives those conversations warmth. Readers drawn to young adult sports fiction will find detailed basketball action alongside a thoughtful look at how a young person handles expectations. Brave New Game is strongest when it lets us feel the daily effort of being Charlie: talented, worried, sometimes impulsive, and eager to matter to the people he loves.
Pages: 285 | ASIN : B0HFT8XCC7
Legends Unearthed: The Lost Bitcoin
A billion-dollar treasure hunt starts with an ordinary piece of computer hardware in Sutton Lewis’s The Lost Bitcoin. This second installment follows Sam, Riley, Ava, and Jonah to London, where a family vacation provides cover for their search for a discarded hard drive containing access to a Bitcoin fortune. Its owner, Hannah Collins, has spent years trying to recover it, and the friends suspect that the official blocking her efforts has interests of his own. It’s an inviting setup for a middle-grade adventure novel: an enormous prize, a distinctly unglamorous hiding place, and four kids convinced they can solve a problem that’s defeated the adults. The story quickly makes room for both the mission and the cheerful disorder of traveling with three families.
The friends’ personalities give this children’s mystery much of its appeal. Sam brings research, careful observation, and a concern for fairness; Riley keeps things moving; Ava supplies engineering talent and confidence in nearly equal quantities. Jonah’s appetite, dramatic complaints, and questionable negotiating skills create a steady supply of trouble. Their conversations feel like an ongoing contest to see who can land the next joke, but there’s affection beneath the teasing. Sam’s frustration over extra treasure his friends secretly kept from their previous adventure gives their friendship a useful complication. Trust requires some repair, even among people who work well together. Ava’s landfill rover, Trash Panda, and her drone, Sky Fang, also develop surprisingly memorable personalities through the kids’ reactions to them. A solemn ceremony for a battered robot is one of the book’s funniest expressions of that attachment.
London gives the adventure plenty to work with. Westminster Abbey, the British Museum, the Tower of London, afternoon tea, and a visit to the Harry Potter studio tour become occasions for curiosity and comic mishaps. Sam’s interest in architecture and Ava’s fascination with security systems and special effects make those outings feel connected to who they are. Readers who enjoy STEM adventure stories will appreciate the emphasis on designing equipment, studying a search area, and preparing for setbacks. The explanations of Bitcoin keep the treasure’s significance accessible, while the gadgets invite readers to enjoy some generous imaginative license. Lewis favors short paragraphs, lively dialogue, and escalating slapstick. The recurring jokes about an outdated guidebook, missing luggage, and glitter establish a familiar rhythm, though some run longer than they need to. Replaying an extended confrontation through recorded footage also slows the story’s forward movement.
Reginald Pemberton-Smythe, the council official with extravagant royal ambitions, gives the book a wonderfully specific comic target. His fixation on ancestry, status, and the things a fortune could buy makes his increasingly ridiculous behavior easy to follow. That outsized greed gives the friends’ effort to help Hannah a clear purpose. The closing visit with her adds a quieter emotional note, allowing the reader to feel what recovering something lost can mean to its owner. Across the book, friendship, ingenuity, and responsibility emerge through choices and consequences, with room for the kids to be selfish, impulsive, and funny along the way. For readers drawn to humorous children’s fiction and treasure-hunt mysteries, The Lost Bitcoin offers an entertaining mix of inventive machinery, family antics, and a mission worth caring about.
Pages: 182 | ASIN : B0H58X2F4B
Beauty of Nature
The Nature Art of Steven B. Wills traces your journey from landscape photography to vivid digital and imagined scenes, shaped by curiosity, resilience, and care for nature. What changes in your creative decisions when you begin with a phone photograph, a found object, or a text prompt?
I take photos and make art from them with apps and photo editors. I use different apps each time, and that is why they are different.
How did your early landscape photography shape the way you now compose dreamlike images that move beyond recognizable natural places?
Over the years, my interests have changed from nature photography to urban, coastal, and also some AI images.
When you transform flowers into spirals or repeating patterns, what tells you which details to preserve and which to reinvent?
I can completely change how an image looks or create an image out of two colors.
How do you hope the gallery’s shifts between intimate blossoms, broad landscapes, and fantastical scenes affect readers’ sense of environmental care?
I hope the reader will appreciate the beauty of nature as much as I do.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Amazon
Trust and Unconditional Love
Uncommon Strangers follows a writer and the men he creates as they confront family trauma, sexuality, masculinity, loneliness, and the difficult journey toward accepting themselves and the love others offer. Why did you choose to explore these themes through a combination of memoir and fiction?
I enjoy moving back and forth as author, narrator, character, and as a person in dialog with readers, taking them through multiple levels of experience as we engage in the creation of meaning. Mixing genres of memoir and short-story forms allowed me to explore my own past in a way that provides readers with the means to insert themselves in the underlying themes without feeling they are merely passive observers of a narrator’s story and confessions. My goal is always to reach toward the universals of the human experience and invite readers to reflect upon their own lives and their place within the human community and then to act upon their insights.
Dorr Reed functions partly as an alter ego and is himself a writer. What does that additional layer allow you to explore?
Dorr allowed me to step into the potential that is in people who others write off as odd or too far gone to spend time with, to help, and nurture. He wanders from place to place, drinks, uses drugs, won’t commit to anyone. And yet, his writing represents a depth of thought and feeling, a need for love and compassion that so many find missing in their lives. In many ways, he is what is left after the devastation of war and the disappointment that comes with learning that the values and beliefs he held as a young man are compromised by the decisions and behaviors of others. I see him as the potential that can be found when trust and unconditional love mitigate the trauma of living.
How do friendship and romantic love help the characters challenge the stories they have believed about themselves?
Friendship and human interconnection are essential ingredients of the human need for community and feelings of safety in living our lives. In many ways, at least for my generation of men, feelings that moved beyond friendship into romantic feelings for persons of the same sex produced a firestorm of hostility within the culture. The blatant messages we received were that we were sick, bad, perverted, terrible human beings worthy of beatings and death. The psychological restraints forced many of us to feel bad about ourselves and to think we had to fit in somehow, learn how to fit the images of masculinity available to us as presented by the majority. I think the stories I have created in Uncommon Strangers allow for my characters to learn earlier than I did that the only way to deal with being different is to accept that difference and find ways to be whatever we are, find people who love us and care for us, and go about the task of living, following our own unique dreams, and using our talents to help others become more accepting of differences among human beings. The bonds of friendship, love, and respect among the central characters provide the means for them to accept themselves and one another as men without labeling them according to their sexual proclivities.
What do you hope readers who have struggled with expectations surrounding identity, sexuality, or masculinity recognize in these characters?
The bottom line for me is that human beings learn to accept themselves and others for whatever they are without culturally imposed limitations related to issues of sex, race, creed, religion, skin color, sexual identity, or any other superficial restraints human beings use for sorting and feeling superior to others. I would hope that people who have struggled with identity, sexuality, or definitions of masculinity will find that they are not alone, that they are worthy human beings, that they have as much right to function in the world as anyone else, and that, though many people are still lost in myopic views of what it means to be human, those struggling with self-worth and identity can learn to accept that it is society at large that is the problem, not them! It took much of my lifetime to come to this conclusion. I hope my words help others long before too much of their lives have been spent.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Building on his own life story the author looks at the impact of growing up in a poor and dysfunctional family and engages his fictional characters in the pursuit of their own truths about themselves and their attempts to deal with the problems of the human condition while they search for answers to the essential questions we all face.
Orson Welles is credited with saying, “Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for a moment that we’re not alone.” The author demonstrates in Uncommon Strangers that art, too, creates the necessary illusion.
More Than Monsters
My Girlfriend Is a Werewolf follows an ordinary man who falls for a woman living with a curse, causing him to have to navigate the supernatural world, including old secrets, dangerous loyalties, mysterious rituals, and enemies unwilling to leave them alone. What inspired the setup of your story?
I was thinking about what would happen if my girlfriend wanted some alone time every month and not for the usual reasons; then why would she want that alone time? So the next step was obvious to me: make her a werewolf.
What aspects of traditional werewolf stories did you want to preserve, and where did you want to create your own mythology?
I wanted to turn the tides on the typical Werewolf mythology, making them more than monsters, giving them emotions and the feeling of being trapped in a situation they have no choice but to accept.
What did you want Jack and Selina’s romance to explore about loving someone whose life and experiences are very different from your own?
I wanted them to explore the unknown together, trusting each other to accept their love and whatever life brings, whether supernatural or not.
What does Selina’s inherited curse allow you to explore about family history and the parts of ourselves we didn’t choose?
Selina’s history began with her great-great-grandmother, who inherited the curse from a gypsy chiefess after accidentally killing her werewolf son; the curse she placed on her transversed through time to her daughters and great-granddaughters. Selina’s reluctance to send her curse to her own daughters led her to stay single until that fateful day she met with Jack.
Author Links: Barnes & Noble
Jack Colby’s life is a perfectly aligned blueprint, until a captivating woman named Selina Jenkins shatters his logical world. Her magnetic pull is undeniable, but her elusive nature and the strange occurrences that follow her hint at a truth far wilder than Jack could ever imagine. Soon, his meticulous order is replaced by a gnawing suspicion that Selina harbours a secret as ancient as the moon itself.
As their connection deepens, the pointed observations of a nosy neighbour and Selina’s disappearing acts force Jack to confront a reality that defies every rational explanation. His search for answers leads him to an eccentric local vet, Dr. Thorne, whose unsettling knowledge of the supernatural only fuels Jack’s growing dread. Can he truly trust the woman who has stolen his heart, or is he blindly walking into a primal danger?
With the unwavering support of his sister, Clara, Jack must navigate a treacherous landscape where love is shadowed by untamed instincts. Their budding romance becomes a test of loyalty and trust, as dark truths about a hidden society claw their way into the light. He’s about to discover that Selina’s world is far more complex – and dangerous – than he could have ever conceived.
Can Jack’s heart truly embrace the wild within Selina, or will the ancient forces threatening to tear them apart prove too powerful for their forbidden love?
