Blog Archives
Spy. Fight. Survive.
Mission: The Figueroa Cipher follows two elite teenage spies on a mission that takes them around the globe to locate stolen nuclear launch codes before they can be used to start WWIII. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The original idea was the bad guy hacked the ICBM system to cause the missiles to self-destruct in their bunkers simultaneously, or change their targets in-flight. When I did research, I found out 1960s technology didn’t exist to perform either function. So I backtracked down the launch sequence to codes used.
James and Dakota’s chemistry really drives the story. How did you develop their dynamic, do they represent different philosophies of espionage or just different personalities?
James and Dakota are different personalities, a variation of “opposites attract.” I’ve attended, as well as performed and directed, a lot of theater since before high school. Their dynamic is probably a conglomeration of characters I’ve seen/played/directed over the years. So when I write, I put them “on stage” in my mind and see what bubbles up.
The book leans into riddles and coded clues. What makes that structure satisfying for you as a writer?
Treasure hunt books are always fun, regardless of genre!
I hope the series continues in other books. If so, where will the story take readers?
The third book takes place in London, Amsterdam, Basel (Switzerland), and the Philippines.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon | Website
James Vagus and Dakota Walker are teen agents in America’s covert MIS-X program—trained to think fast, fight smart, and trust no one except each other. What starts as a routine assignment in Rio de Janeiro turns into a global scavenger hunt when nuclear launch codes vanish, threatening to ignite a World War III.
From the streets of Marrakesh to the casinos of Monte Carlo and the deserts of Nevada, every clue draws them deeper into a shadowy world of double agents and false alliances. But when they’re forced to team up with two Soviet operatives—Nadya and Sasha—the line between friend and enemy blurs fast. Can rival spies work together long enough to stop a possible global catastrophe, or will old loyalties destroy them first?
Spy. Fight. Survive.
The Crash of Worlds
The Crash of Worlds by Alisse Lee Goldenberg is a fantasy adventure about what happens when disaster, grief, politics, magic, and family loyalty all collide. The story opens with the destruction of Coralnoss after Marcus’s warnings are ignored, then follows Zayna as she tries to save what is left of her people, Lucas as he searches for a way to reach her, and Audrina as she faces hard questions about love, duty, and whether she truly wants the throne. It’s a deep fantasy novel, with kingdoms, spells, royal conflict, sea voyages, and magical communication, but its real weight comes from human problems: fear, prejudice, pride, loss, and the need to ask for help.
I like how grounded the book feels, even when the world is full of magic. Goldenberg does not treat the disaster as a quick plot device. Zayna’s chapters linger in the mud, hunger, ruined homes, and the awful silence after a community has been broken. It gives the fantasy stakes a physical heaviness. At the same time, the writing is direct and accessible, which makes the emotional turns easy to follow. Some moments are blunt, but that plainness also works in the book’s favor. Grief is not always elegant. Sometimes it’s just one foot in front of the other, carrying supplies, calming a baby, and trying not to fall apart.
I also found myself thinking a lot about the author’s choices around leadership. Audrina’s storyline is not just about being a princess in love with Gertrude. It’s about the cost of being visible in a world that may not accept you. Her conversations with Navor are some of the warmest parts of the book, and they give the story a tender center. Then there’s the contrast with Parven, whose cruelty shows how family and power can become dangerous when pride is mistaken for principle. The book is curious about what makes a ruler good, but it’s also candid about how institutions fail people. The council ignores Marcus. Coralnoss pays for it. Later, survivors still hesitate to accept help because old fears are hard to shake. That felt painfully believable.
I would recommend The Crash of Worlds most to readers who enjoy character-driven fantasy with royal drama, found family, queer representation, and emotional stakes that matter as much as the magical ones. Readers who like sincere storytelling, big feelings, and a fantasy world built around loyalty and survival will likely appreciate it. It’s best for fans of accessible YA-style fantasy who want adventure, heart, and a reminder that rebuilding after loss is rarely clean, but it’s still possible.
Pages: 282 | ASIN : B0GY65N8BK
Mission: The Figueroa Cipher
Mission: The Figueroa Cipher is a young adult espionage thriller with a strong adventure streak, and it opens with a sharp hook: two teenage agents, James Vagus and Dakota Walker, go from a seemingly easy surveillance job in Rio to a race against time after stolen nuclear launch codes set off a Cold War scavenger hunt. What follows is a globe-trotting mission shaped by riddles, shifting alliances, and a moral argument about power, peace, and who gets to play god with the fate of millions.
What I liked most is that the book understands that spy fiction lives or dies on chemistry, and James and Dakota have it. Their banter gives the story a pulse. James is quick, polished, and a little theatrical, while Dakota feels more instinctive and grounded, and that contrast keeps even the exposition moving. I also appreciated how author C.W. James leans into old-school espionage pleasures without making the book feel dusty. There are coded messages, hidden gadgets, hostile pursuers, and puzzle-box clues, but the writing stays readable and direct. It never feels like the author is trying to impress me with complexity for its own sake. It feels like he wants to tell a good story and keep me turning pages.
I also enjoyed the book’s focus on ideas, especially once Eduardo Figueroa enters the picture and turns the mission into more than just a chase. His argument with James gives the novel a harder edge. Beneath the action, the book keeps circling a real question: what does moral certainty look like in a world built on mutually assured destruction? It wears its themes openly. Sometimes that makes the dialogue feel a touch staged, yet it also gives the story conviction. Later hints of uneasy cooperation across Cold War lines gave the book a wider emotional range than I expected, and I found that genuinely interesting.
Mission: The Figueroa Cipher is a brisk, puzzle-driven spy adventure with youthful energy, clear stakes, and just enough philosophical friction to keep it from feeling disposable. I would recommend it most to readers who enjoy Cold War thrillers, YA adventure fiction, and stories where friendship and wit matter as much as danger. Anyone who likes clever clues, international settings, and a more classic, clean-lined style of suspense will have a good time with this one.
Pages: 208 | ASIN : B0GL4L3K5N
Inner Space Aliens
Inner Space Aliens picks up with real momentum, taking Erik, Finna, and Kalli out of the afterglow of their earlier victory and dropping them into something murkier, stranger, and more subterranean. This time, the threat isn’t just a villain bent on conquest, but a whole hidden system of corruption under Iceland itself: Fjólsvin inherits Loki’s plans, the Morphytes dig toward geological catastrophe, and Erik, with his tetrachromacy and his ability to read Óðin’s aurora messages, is pushed into the role of leader whether he wants it or not. Along the way, the book braids together volcanic tremors, Huldufólk politics, Reme’s grief-haunted testimony about the attack on his village, and a cavern climax where Erik’s athletic discipline finally becomes destiny when he uses an arrow like a javelin and blinds Fjólsvin in the middle eye.
What I liked most is that the book understands Erik’s fear and doesn’t cheapen it. He isn’t brave in that polished, effortless way that can make young fantasy heroes feel prepackaged. He’s frightened, uncertain, analytical, often overwhelmed, and the novel lets that matter. His scenes have a nice inward pressure to them, especially when he’s trying to decode patterns in the aurora or convince himself he’s capable of carrying what Óðin expects of him. I also found the mythology unexpectedly affecting. The material around the Huldufólk, the fractured glyphics, and Queen Borghildur’s grave understanding of what Loki exploited gave the story a sadder undertow than I was expecting. Reme, too, adds a bruised human ache to the novel. His memories of seeing impossibly tall invaders with a third eye could have been handled as mere plot fuel, but they land with genuine trauma behind them, and that gives the book moral weight.
The writing itself is earnest, vivid, and sometimes wonderfully odd in ways I found charming. When it leans into landscape and atmosphere, it can be quite evocative. The northern lights as a coded language, the glittering blue caverns, the steaming grotesquerie of Fjólsvin’s lair, and the waterfall reveal near the end all have a bright storybook intensity that suits the novel’s mythic ambitions. The prose is a little overinsistent, and the dialogue can state emotions rather than letting them appear subtly. Still, I kept feeling the force of the imagination behind it. The book’s ideas are more interesting than they first appear to be. Beneath the adventure, there’s a recurring concern with inheritance, diluted power, betrayal born from resentment, and the burden of being chosen before you’re ready. I was especially drawn to the notion that lost grandeur and envy make the younger Huldufólk vulnerable to Loki’s promises. That gives the conflict a tragic contour rather than reducing it to simple good-versus-evil machinery.
Inner Space Aliens is imaginative and surprisingly tender beneath all its lava tubes and cosmic peril. It’s the kind of sequel that expands its world by making it weirder and sadder, while also giving Erik a satisfying turn at the center. I finished it feeling that the book’s heart is one of its strongest qualities, especially once the surviving characters come back together and the victory is shaded by the warning that the struggle underneath Earth is not over. I’d recommend it most to readers who enjoy YA fantasy with Nordic myth, hidden worlds, earnest heroism, and a taste for adventure stories where emotion and lore are allowed to sit side by side.
Pages: 230 | ASIN : B0GM8X2TSF
Exit Signs
Exit Signs opens with an eighteen-year-old girl, Stella Hart, being thrown out by her mother after a lie at work detonates her already precarious life. From there, the novel follows her through car-sleeping, couch-hopping, cheap rooms, fragile friendships, predatory arrangements, and the long, humiliating mathematics of survival in the Bay Area, all while she tries to hold onto the future she imagined for herself, Stanford, stability, self-definition, even as pregnancy, coercion, and family damage keep redrawing the map. It is, in plain terms, a novel about homelessness and control, but it is also about the subtler violence of being treated as temporary in every room you enter.
Author Dawnette Brenner understands that catastrophe is not only dramatic; it’s logistical, sensory, and repetitive. The novel keeps returning to money, soap, gas, laundry, parking lots, hunger, paperwork, doors, and the freighted atmosphere of other people’s houses. That accumulation gives the book its tensile strength. I felt Stella’s vigilance in my own body. I also admired the way the prose often moves in clipped, pressure-built units, then suddenly opens into a more lyrical sentence when Stella’s mind slips from survival into grief or recognition. The result is a voice that feels both young and sharply weathered. At its best, the writing has a granular honesty that refuses uplift on credit.
What I liked even more was the book’s understanding of control: how it masquerades as help, how gratitude can be weaponized, how a girl trained to be “good” can be made legible to everyone except herself. This is where the novel has real bite. Stella’s progress is not a clean ascent but a series of grim recognitions, and I appreciated that the ending leans toward clarity rather than false closure. At times the interior monologue reiterates a point the scene has already made, and a little pruning would sharpen the writing. But I never lost faith in the emotional intelligence behind it. Brenner is writing from a place of close observation, and that gives the story moral weight without turning it into a sermon.
I would hand Exit Signs to readers of contemporary coming-of-age fiction, domestic drama, survival fiction, trauma fiction, literary women’s fiction, and character-driven social realism, especially readers who want emotionally immediate prose and a heroine whose resilience is hard-won rather than ornamental. It feels closer to a more intimate, female-centered cousin of Demon Copperhead than to conventional “issue fiction,” and readers who admire authors who can braid precarity with psychological precision will find plenty here. This is a bruised, clear-eyed novel about how survival can become a way of seeing.
Pages: 600 | ASIN : B0GPPH2WKJ
Sincerely Yours…Written In The Stars And Inked In Destiny!
In Sincerely Yours, Sonia D. Hebdon drops readers into Haven Cove in 1989, where Josie, a sharp, music-soaked teenager with a gift for language, falls into a charged romance with her new neighbor Blaine while secretly writing an advice column called “Sincerely Yours.” What begins as an 80s-inflected love story of mixtapes, eyeliner, and illicit nights out steadily opens into something stranger: a paranormal narrative about writing itself, about stories that breathe, unfinished worlds, and the frightening possibility that words do not merely describe reality but conjure it. The novel openly frames itself as a paranormal love story rooted in 1980s music and in the idea that certain writers can create literal worlds, and that premise becomes the book’s true engine.
What I liked most was the book’s unabashed sincerity. Hebdon is not aiming for cool detachment; she wants feeling, and she goes after it in full view. Josie and Blaine are drawn with the kind of heightened, romantic glow that suits the novel’s cassette-tape heart, and the pages are thick with Cure songs, club lights, handwritten letters, and the intoxicating self-invention of adolescence. I found that atmosphere persuasive even when the prose grew ornate, because the book’s emotional weather is so clear: loneliness, awakening, first love, artistic hunger, the longing to be seen as oneself rather than as a role assigned by family or town. The advice-column scenes also give Josie a moral and emotional gravity that keeps her from becoming just another dreamy heroine; her anonymity becomes its own form of courage.
My reaction to the novel’s second half was more mixed, but still engaged. Once the Whitlock Society and the metaphysics of authorship move closer to center stage, the book shifts from nostalgic romance into meta-paranormal fantasy, and that turn is genuinely intriguing. I admired the ambition of a story that asks what happens to unfinished narratives and imagines rare writers as conduits who generate actual worlds. The book feels stuffed with mood, mythos, sentiment, and soundtrack, but that excess is also part of its personality. I never had the sense of a cynical machine at work; I felt the presence of a writer who loves 80s music, believes in the numinous charge of words, and is willing to let teenage feeling burn bright instead of sanding it down into irony.
I’d recommend Sincerely Yours to young adult readers, especially those who enjoy YA paranormal romance, clean fiction, coming-of-age fantasy, and music-laced stories with a gothic shimmer. Readers who love emotionally direct fiction and retro atmosphere will probably be its natural home crowd. In spirit, it sits somewhere between the swooning supernatural pull of Twilight and the mixtape melancholy of an 80s-mad Sarah Dessen alternate universe, though Hebdon’s metafictional streak gives it its own curious voltage. My verdict: this is a heartfelt, melodramatic, odd little spell of a book, and when it works, it reminds me that sincerity is not a weakness but a strength.
Pages: 170 | ASIN : B0FDWQSZLJ
THE SECRET BUTTONS
The Secret Buttons by Ellen Shapiro presents a measured yet deeply affecting portrayal of wartime displacement, seen through the perspective of two young Jewish sisters. Anni and Rosie are forced to leave their home in Austria and travel alone to England as the threat of war rapidly closes in. Cut off from their parents and surrounded by instability, the girls must adapt to an unfamiliar world where fear and suspicion shape everyday existence. Shapiro captures the quiet anxiety of exile while sustaining a current of resilience and hope.
Shapiro is particularly effective in depicting the sisters’ daily efforts to adjust. A new language. Wartime shortages. Teasing and mistrust from others. These challenges unfold alongside the children’s attempts to maintain a sense of normalcy. The burden placed on Anni becomes increasingly clear. Her maturity is tested in moments of real danger, including a tense scene in which she must question a Nazi soldier and depend entirely on her instincts. As Anni and Rosie help support their household and reconnect with Jewish traditions such as Passover and Shabbat, those rituals gain heightened meaning in exile. Memories of life before the war appear throughout the narrative, offering contrast and emotional depth. Their gradual fading reflects adaptation rather than loss, suggesting survival without forgetting.
Caterina Baldi’s illustrations further enrich the novel. Opening each chapter and woven throughout the text, the artwork adds warmth and visual texture. Period details emerge through subtle choices in clothing, food, and setting. These images reinforce the emotional atmosphere while underscoring the care and research behind the story.
Inspired by a memory from the author’s mother, The Secret Buttons succeeds as both historical fiction and a broader reflection on courage, identity, and displacement. By placing young girls at the center of the story and allowing them to confront fear with intelligence and creativity, Shapiro delivers a moving and empowering narrative. The result is a meaningful, hopeful read that affirms young readers’ capacity to face even the most daunting circumstances.
Pages: 210 | ASIN : B0F5ZCPHXH
Rewind to Us
Rewind to Us follows Big, a burned-out K-pop idol desperate to escape a suffocating industry, and Kelly, an ordinary young woman who finds herself pulled into his world by chance and fate. Their connection grows into something real amid chaos, danger, and the strange appearance of supernatural “dealers” who trade in human desires. The story builds from a tense escape narrative into a romance, then finally into grief as Big’s life is cut short and Kelly must navigate the aftermath with those who loved him most. It is a blend of real-world pressure, fantasy elements, and emotional fallout, tied together by a central yearning for freedom and belonging.
I found myself swept up in Big’s restlessness. His unhappiness sits right under the surface, and the writing shows it in a simple, raw way that hit me harder than I expected. I could feel his exhaustion and the tiny sparks of hope that appear whenever Kelly enters his thoughts. I loved how the book lets their relationship grow slowly, almost shyly, in the middle of everything falling apart around them. At times, the dialogue feels blunt, which works because it mirrors how trapped Big is and how unsure Kelly is about her own life. The supernatural dealer concept surprised me. It comes in quietly, then starts echoing through the whole story until it becomes a major force. That little creature showing up at the end made me stop and think about the whole journey in a new light. It added a strange, eerie charm to the book.
There were points where the pacing jumped fast, especially when the story shifted locations or introduced new conflicts. Yet there is an honesty in the writing that kept me reading. Characters say exactly what they feel. Sometimes it is messy. Sometimes it is harsh. Sometimes it is sweet. I liked that because it gave the story a heartbeat.
Rewind to Us is a heartfelt story for readers who enjoy character-driven romance with a twist of the surreal. It is especially suited for fans of K-pop fiction, soft fantasy, and emotional journeys that do not shy away from pain or complicated endings. If you like stories about people trying to rewrite their lives and finding love in unexpected places, you’ll enjoy reading this book.
Pages: 230 | ASIN : B0FTDTGBGW
