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A Place For People Like Us
Danila Botha’s A Place for People Like Us is an intimate novel about Hannah, a university student trying to build a stable identity after an upbringing in an abusive spiritual commune. Her life becomes divided between two powerful attachments. Jillian, a charismatic musician, offers artistic freedom, sexual possibility, and the intoxicating promise that “there’s a place for people like us.” Naftali Goldwater offers romantic devotion, financial security, and entry into Toronto’s Orthodox Jewish community. Rather than treating these worlds as simple opposites, Botha shows how each gives Hannah something she genuinely needs while also asking her to surrender parts of herself.
Hannah is a compelling narrator because her hunger for belonging shapes both her insight and her blindness. She recognizes manipulation in others, yet she remains vulnerable to anyone who makes her feel chosen. Her relationship with Jillian is especially vivid, moving among friendship, collaboration, desire, rivalry, caretaking, and mutual dependence. Jillian’s magnetism is rendered with enough force that Hannah’s loyalty feels emotionally credible even when the friendship becomes destructive. Naftali’s appeal is similarly grounded. Hannah’s observation that “I liked the person I was when I was with him” captures the deeper attraction of their relationship: he seems to offer not only love, but a more coherent version of herself.
Botha writes with directness, dark humour, and an attentive eye for the social meaning of clothes, food, money, music, and domestic spaces. The novel’s detailed portrayal of Orthodox practice gives Hannah’s conversion emotional and material weight, from study and ritual to marriage, hair covering, and family expectations. These details support a broader examination of how communities create identity through shared language and customs. It is worth noting that the large supporting cast can occasionally crowd Hannah’s central conflict, and the later plot moves through several dramatic turns in quick succession, but the accumulation also conveys how thoroughly her private choices become entangled with families, institutions, and public appearances.
A Place for People Like Us is a novel about the price of being welcomed. Hannah repeatedly enters spaces that promise safety, first through Jillian’s artistic refuge and then through the Goldwater family’s religious and social structure. Botha’s strongest achievement is her refusal to reduce belonging to either rescue or confinement. It can nurture, seduce, discipline, and distort, often at the same time. The closing pages bring Hannah to a painful but credible recognition that a life built around other people’s certainty can’t replace the work of knowing herself. Botha’s work is ideal for readers who enjoy emotionally charged stories that examine trauma, intimacy, faith, and the difficult freedom of choosing one’s own future.
Pages: 229 | ISBN : 978-1771839808
Payoff for the Reader
By Any Other Name follows a struggling young writer who is horrified when she happens upon a novel in an airport bookstore that is certainly based on her own unpublished manuscript. What drew you to explore authorship and ownership through the structure of a mystery?
I found out last spring that my work had been included in one of the online datasets that had been illegally downloaded to train AI language models. So authorship and ownership were heavy on my mind as I was writing the story. It was a helpless feeling knowing that my work had been taken, and not knowing what (if anything) there was to be done about it, and I leaned into that in crafting a mystery that tried to answer those questions: How did this happen? What can I do about it?
Were there particular mystery writers or literary thrillers that influenced your approach?
I’ve listened to a lot of John Grisham audiobooks on road trips, but I admit I otherwise don’t generally read a lot of mystery/thrillers. I have a TON of respect for serial mystery writers, especially now that I have completed my own. It’s hard to be clever and come up with plot twists, red herrings, and “whodunits?” that readers don’t see coming. One thing that was stylistically important to me in writing this mystery was that it fit real life. I didn’t want my protagonist to have help from unlikely sources. No best friend who happened to have access to the DMV database. No dad who used to work for the FBI. No former college roommate who happened to be into surveillance. Just the tools that most of us would have at our disposal – like Google search and social media stalking.
Which scene was the most satisfying to write?
The reveal of who Beatrice Mitchell was was particularly satisfying because I knew it would be the payoff for the reader. It’s the moment they get to find out if any of their hunches are right, and I enjoyed crafting a scene that answered all the questions and tied up the loose ends (while still leaving some intrigue for the final 50 pages!) I also love writing a good breakup scene, and I got one of those in there, too.
The novel seems especially suited for book club conversations. What discussions do you hope it inspires?
The book is ultimately about authorship and creativity, and I think we live in a time where the importance of that (and what it even means to create or author something) is really being questioned and tested. I hope it inspires people to value the time, effort, energy, and heart that authors pour into their work, but maybe more importantly, I hope it inspires people to value the creative process as a whole – including how it shows up in their own life, the writing they do, and the stories they have to share. We now have the ability to have a textbox on the internet to tell our stories for us, and I hope people talk about the dangers of that. And I hope people resist. Not because AI is inherently evil all on its own, but because storytelling is the most innate thing we do as humans, and if we give that up, then who are we?
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Fresh out of her MFA program, she’s bombed an interview at Columbia, collected a stack of rejections from agents and publishers, and stalled out in a spiral of writer’s block. Meanwhile, her best friend is thriving in a PhD program, and her boyfriend is climbing the tech ladder.
Then a delayed flight pushes Jordan into an airport bookstore, and everything changes. On the shelf, she finds a debut novel: The Unbearable Weight of Secrets by Beatrice Mitchell. Just a few paragraphs in, her exhaustion turns to shock. The book isn’t just familiar. It’s hers: a manuscript she drafted, revised, and workshopped years earlier, but never published.
Stunned, Jordan launches a desperate search for answers. Who stole her work, and why? A critique partner who read an early draft? An ambitious classmate eager for a leg up? Her mentor, with the most access to her writing but the most to lose by risking her own, successful career? Or someone else entirely, a stranger who inexplicably knows Jordan’s voice as well as she does?
To reclaim her story, Jordan must be willing to risk everything: her relationship, her future career, and her already fragile belief in herself. Because unmasking Beatrice Mitchell isn’t just about justice. It’s about proving, once and for all, that Jordan Marlowe isn’t just chasing the dream of being a writer. She already is one.
By Any Other Name
By Any Other Name, by Kate Laack, is a contemporary literary mystery about Jordan Marlowe, a stalled young writer who finds a published novel in an airport bookstore and realizes, with growing horror, that it is almost certainly based on her own unpublished manuscript. What begins as a personal search for the person who stole her story becomes a wider look at authorship, ambition, artistic insecurity, and the uneasy place where creativity meets technology.
I liked how grounded the book feels, even when the premise takes a strange turn. Jordan’s panic is not treated like melodrama. It feels physical and believable, the kind of disbelief that would make you reread the same page again and again just to prove you are not imagining it. Laack gives the story the shape of a mystery, with suspects, clues, awkward conversations, and red herrings, but the emotional pull comes from Jordan’s bruised confidence. She’s not only trying to prove that the book is hers. She’s trying to prove that her voice matters.
The author also makes some smart choices in how she handles the larger ideas. The book could have become a lecture about AI, publishing, and plagiarism, but it stays close to Jordan’s hurt, confusion, and anger. That makes the bigger questions easier to sit with. I found myself thinking less about abstract debates and more about the quiet terror of seeing something deeply personal removed from your name and handed to the world without you. The pace is strong, the conversations are sharp, and the book has a satisfying sense of momentum.
What I appreciated most is that By Any Other Name understands writing as more than output. It’s memory, doubt, effort, ego, longing, and revision. It’s also the strange courage of putting your name on something before anyone else agrees that it deserves to exist. I would recommend this novel to readers who enjoy contemporary fiction with a mystery engine, especially book lovers interested in creative ownership and the personal cost of chasing validation. It would also make a strong book club pick because the central question is simple but sticky: who gets to claim a story, and what happens when the answer is not as clean as we want it to be?
Pages: 280 | ASIN : B0G44DPVN4
Amber Unscripted (The Scarlet’s Harlots Trilogy Book 3)
Amber Unscripted, by Kirsten Pursell, is a contemporary women’s fiction novel with a strong romantic thread, following Amber as she returns to Sullivan’s Island after divorce and begins sorting through the stories she has told herself about love, family, regret, and identity. As the third book in The Scarlet’s Harlots Trilogy, it centers on friendship, second chances, and the brave, messy work of choosing a life that actually feels like your own. Amber’s past includes reality TV fame, a painful marriage, family secrets, and a lost love named Christian, but the heart of the book is really about her learning to stop living by old scripts.
What I appreciated most was how the book balances humor with emotional weight. Amber could easily have been written as a glossy former television personality with a predictable comeback arc, but Pursell gives her more texture than that. She is funny, wounded, sometimes guarded, and often more self-aware than she gives herself credit for. I liked the way the women around her, especially the Harlots, create a kind of chosen family that lets the story breathe. Their conversations are sharp, warm, and occasionally ridiculous in the best way. The book understands that friendship between adult women can be both a lifeline and a mirror, and that sometimes the people who tease you the hardest are also the ones who will sit with you when the truth gets heavy.
The story moves between Amber’s personal reckoning, Audrey’s late-blooming romantic awakening, the group’s book club discussions, and the pull of old mysteries. At times, it feels packed. There are family secrets, past trauma, divorce, grief, fame, lost love, and a trip to Greece, all woven into one emotional arc. That could have become too much, but for me, the abundance fits the story. Women’s fiction often works best when it honors the full clutter of a life, and this novel leans into that. I especially liked how books within the book, from The Bridges of Madison County to the club’s other reads, become quiet pressure points for the characters. They are not just talking about stories. They are using stories to figure out what they still want.
I would recommend Amber Unscripted to readers who enjoy contemporary women’s fiction about reinvention, female friendship, and romance after heartbreak. It will especially appeal to anyone who likes emotionally reflective stories with humor, coastal settings, and characters who are old enough to know better but still brave enough to want more. This is a thoughtful, candid, and ultimately hopeful novel about stepping out of the role other people handed you and finally writing the next scene yourself.
Pages: 254 | ASIN : B0GX2RYWQ9
May Flowers at The Three Coins Inn
May Flowers at The Three Coins Inn is a work of contemporary women’s fiction with a strong romantic thread, set around an Umbrian agriturismo in Todi where a fresh round of guests arrive carrying private disappointments, old grief, and the quiet hope that a change of place might also become a change of life. Author Kimberly Sullivan brings together characters like Lisa, reeling after a public heartbreak, Antonio, an aging artist haunted by love and regret, Sharon, trapped inside a polished life that feels emotionally thin, and Margherita, a blocked novelist pushed out of isolation, then lets their stories brush against one another in ways that feel warm, restorative, and gently transformative.
I liked how readable and welcoming the novel feels. It has that lovely “settle in and stay awhile” quality that good comfort fiction can have. Sullivan clearly enjoys people, and that comes through in the way she gives each character a distinct ache, a private embarrassment, or a stubborn little defense mechanism that makes them feel human. I also liked the choice to structure the novel through multiple points of view. It creates a sense of emotional crosscurrent. Everyone arrives at the inn carrying something heavy, and the book keeps asking what happens when people are given beauty, routine, food, conversation, and just enough kindness to lower their guard.
I was especially drawn to the author’s interest in second chances. This is a story that understands that people bring themselves with them, even to beautiful places. Lisa’s hurt, Antonio’s bitterness, Sharon’s dissatisfaction, and Margherita’s fear do not disappear on command. They soften slowly. That felt honest. The book leans into coincidence and comfort in a way that is in line with its genre, and readers who like their fiction sharper or less emotionally tidy may notice that. Still, I found that the novel earns much of its warmth because it pays attention to loneliness, pride, and the awkwardness of starting over. It knows healing can be quiet. It can happen over coffee, over conversation, over the simple relief of being seen.
May Flowers at The Three Coins Inn is the kind of book I would recommend to readers who enjoy character-driven women’s fiction, cozy armchair travel, and romances where the emotional reset matters as much as the pairing off. It would especially suit someone who wants a hopeful read with an Italian backdrop, an ensemble cast, and a generous belief that life can open up again even after disappointment. For readers in the mood for something reflective, comforting, and quietly life-affirming, I think it will be a very satisfying stay.
ASIN : B0GLTQ967Q
Trade-Offs
Crossfire follows a high-powered executive who is struggling to juggle corporate pressure, family expectations, and the uneasy beginnings of an environmental partnership that pushes her boundaries. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I am fascinated by the impact of each choice we make in life, and each benefit requires a sacrifice, no matter how small. I wanted to use the green energy debate to show how small decisions really add up over time. For the series inspiration, I think we have so many books focused on coming-of-age stories, decisions that define the original trajectory of a life in early adulthood, but few dealing with middle age, which is where I wanted to focus. This first book series looks at a woman in the middle of her life, reflecting back on all those trade-offs she’s made—like choosing career over family, or balancing what she believes about the environment with what’s actually practical. I was most inspired by the idea that all these choices we think are separate actually connect and end up shaping where we land in life, but one or two different decisions can change everything at any point.
There was a lot of time spent crafting the character traits in this novel. What was the most important factor for you to get right in your characters?
It was important that Moirin, the main character, remained deeply committed to her convictions while being unyieldingly tough and independent in the workplace, yet vulnerable and yearning in her personal life.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
This series explores the experiences of women in midlife, and a common theme is the impact of life choices, such as prioritizing work over having a family or vice versa. I wanted to explore this with the extra layer of the moral, ethical, and financial choices made on behalf of a corporation. Every choice each of us makes impacts not only what we expect, but often has implications we could have never imagined. The results end up being our legacy in life, and the ultimate choices Moirin made.
What will the next book in that series be about, and when will it be published?
The next book in the series follows Jo Sanderson, Moirin’s best friend, who is dealing with the midlife financial challenges of a widow who loses her job, but a deeper struggle is at play with overcoming decades of loss and grief. As a result of her history, she developed a people-pleasing personality, constantly seeking to support the dreams of others, even those deceased, at the sacrifice of her own. It’s another story of growth that has a lot of cowboy and Wyoming outdoor influences. It will be available by mid-year 2026.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Everyone around her marked the passage of time through celebrations of weddings, anniversaries and graduations, measuring life success through joy in family portraits. Everyone else had a life with husbands and wives, children, grandchildren. Moirin has a cat named Orson.
After decades spent building her grandfather’s Denver-based energy company into an international corporation, she’s poised to be the next CEO, when the Board of Directors announced a rigorous vetting process, ostensibly to avoid nepotism. It should have been a formality, but the challenges of an environmental impact study, resolving a string of increasingly suspicious management issues, and a vindictive business associate aren’t helping her pass their scrutiny.
When she meets a state brand inspector and team roping cowboy, his pragmatic outlook and life philosophy challenge her ideas about environment, life, and legacy. On the verge of achieving everything she’d worked for, Moirin Garrett wonders – had she made the right choices in life? At this stage, was it too late to change her legacy?
Crossfire
Crossfire follows Moirin Garrett, a high-powered executive juggling corporate pressure, family expectations, and the uneasy beginnings of an environmental partnership that forces her into the political, personal, and ethical “crossfire” she’s spent a career avoiding. From the first chapters, the story grounds us in her world of boardrooms, complicated family brunches, and the shimmering social circles where everyone wants something from her. As the plot widens, the book becomes a layered look at ambition, reinvention, and the messy overlaps between public responsibility and private longing.
Reading this in first person, I found myself rooting for Moirin even when she frustrated me. She’s sharp, driven, polished on the outside, and quietly unraveling beneath the surface. The writing makes room for that contradiction. The scenes move with a steady rhythm, sometimes clipped and tense, sometimes opening up into softer, more reflective moments that show how lonely success can feel. I liked how Herman lets small details do the emotional lifting: the staleness of office coffee, the weight of a family legacy, the flicker of discomfort when Moirin realizes she’s being sized up not just as an executive but as a woman in a room full of men with agendas.
What stood out most was the author’s choice to frame the story’s tension around both career stakes and personal awakening. The environmental study storyline sets up a believable moral tangle, especially as shady players circle around Moirin’s work. At the same time, the book gives her space to question what she actually wants beyond the next professional milestone. Moments with her friends feel warm and real, and her slow steps toward vulnerability make the corporate drama feel more human, not just high-stakes business maneuvering. The writing stays simple, grounded, and clear, letting the emotional beats land without theatrics.
The book feels like a story about a woman stepping out of a life she mastered and into one she’s still learning how to want. It’s women’s fiction with corporate intrigue woven in, built for readers who enjoy character-driven arcs, workplace complexity, and the slow burn of personal transformation. If you like stories about strong women navigating reinvention in midlife, or if you enjoy fiction set at the intersection of power, family, and identity, Crossfire will hit the mark.
Pages: 365 | ASIN : B0FTDX5MML
Time to Tell Her Story
Beyond the Sky, written in two parts, follows a young woman through her college years and her involvement in the civil rights, and traces her ancestry from immigration from Ireland to the mountains of Hidden Valley. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When Tillie first showed up in Hidden Valley in my debut novel, New Tomorrows, I knew she would be the one whose mysterious background would take her away from the valley to be involved in the activism of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. My intent as a writer is to create engaging stories that readers can not only enjoy but also be drawn in to explore real, contemporary issues with characters they can relate to. I identified the racial tension our country has faced and dealt with, in one form or another, throughout our history, as one of several important issues I wanted to help my readers explore. I myself enjoy stories that have a touch of romance, but not in the traditional way romance is presented in many books in that genre. I see romance as just one aspect of human connections, and I wanted my stories to be about connections, especially in families and communities.
When I first imagined Tillie, we were witnessing legislative and societal changes influenced by my generation begin to erode or disappear. As a writer, I feel a responsibility to speak about the past to shine light on the present. It was time to tell her story.
I was deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement myself in the 1960s. I decided to bring Tillie to the same University I attended, letting her arrive as a freshman the year I was a senior. Her story is not at all biographical, but I was able to write about a time period and events that I personally experienced. While the events are real, both those that are part of our well-known (and some not so well-known) history or the local events in Pittsburg, the characters all spring from my imagination.
What is it that interests you most about historical fiction?
Let me first share my perspective on fiction vs. non-fiction. I like to define fiction as learning through imagination, whereas non-fiction is learning through facts. Reading fiction gives us an opportunity to spend time in a life quite different from our own. I believe folks can often learn more history through fact driven, engaging fiction than they might from a history book. When that happens to us, we often come away with a new understanding or a wider perspective of what life is like living in another person’s skin, both figuratively and realistically. My hope with all my books is that readers might gain increased awareness, understanding, and empathy for the marginalized in our society who struggle daily for justice, inclusion, and dignity.
I have always been a bit of a history buff; my college degree is in Creative Writing, but my minor was history. If I am going to write about human connections, part of who we are is defined by where we can from – the ancestors of yesterday who built the foundation for who we are today. That was especially true for Tillie. Her story was not complete without the stories of the strong woman who came before her and the choices they made, along with the men who loved them.
How did you go about finding your characters’ voices while planning your writing?
First, let me say a word about my writing process. Some folks divide writers into two groups – the plotters, or the seat-of-the-pants writers. I’m a combination of both, but my plotting is very sketchy with only major plot turns in my mind. It’s no more a brief list, rather than a plot outline. My writing is very character driven and sometimes even those major plot turns change as I become more immersed in the life of a character. As I wrote and got to know my characters on a deep personal level, they often sent me off on an unexpected side trip. One such side trip was quite literal when Percy told me to take him back to Quebec because he had to talk to his grandmother and get the pearl ring she had promised him. I didn’t even realize the ring had a pearl instead of a diamond until Percy first heard Taynay’s song about the moon.
One of the greatest joys of writing Tillie’s story was getting to know the six generations of mountain women who came before her. I imagined these women, along with their families, making choices that were often difficult. Choices that went beyond the traditional thinking of their time period. Each one was different, so they spoke and acted in their own unique way.
My original intent was to reference their journals with quotes as Tillie was reading and learning more about her generations of grandmothers. As their situations and choices came to light, and as their words began to paint a picture of the challenges of her time period, I realized I could not merely include snippets of their lives. These women deserved to have their whole stories told, thus I created the entire second half of the book to include their entire first-person narratives.
Where will the next book in the Hidden Valley series take readers? When will it be available?
The next book is already in progress, but I have as usual, been doing a bit of research into its topic and only have a few opening chapters written. The title is One More New Chance: A Vet Tech Romantic Suspense. The male protagonist is Brink, but I won’t reveal the name of the female protagonist because it would be a spoiler. I will drop a brief hint that she is a character readers have met in a prior book, however briefly. Brink is struggling with two issues – his dedication to tracking down the criminal rings that are staging the dog fights in various remote hollers in the valley and his own personal identity conflict due to bullying he has experienced as a result of his bi-racial background. It will be out in 2026, but I do not have a firm date right now. In truth, it has briefly been placed on the back burner while I’ve been doing some minor revisions and reformatting of my first book in the series, New Tomorrows. That slightly revised book will be live soon, to coordinate with October being National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
The passion of activism flourished on college campuses in the tumultuous sixties, and Tillie embraced it as a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh. Descended from Irish immigrants known in their Appalachian community as Granny Women – the healers – her compassionate nature drew her into the Civil Rights Movement. She could never have predicted how dramatically her life would change. When family journals reveal shocking news about her history and lineage, she’s forced to re-define her path to the future.
Which road will she choose?
After navigating new horizons, she may have to look for answers that lie Beyond the Sky.
Join readers on a thought-provoking journey through the divisions of the Civil War into the ardor of an era when our country’s youth led the way to a better national consciousness.
