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Keep Close
Kristen Wade’s Keep Close is a tense, family-centered survival novel set after red meteorites strike Earth and unleash creatures that hunt people who are isolated. The book follows Ren Haley and her siblings after a sailing trip goes terribly wrong, while also tracking Lee, a young man in Oregon, trying to keep his own family alive as society breaks down around him. From the opening idea that “The yearning to protect those we love is the most noble virtue we all have in common,” the story makes its priorities clear: this is an apocalypse novel built around loyalty, grief, fear, and the stubborn pull of family.
Ren is the emotional center of the book, and her journey gives the danger real weight. She’s carrying guilt over her father’s death, distance from her siblings, and a sharp sense that she’s failed the people she loves. Being stranded at sea, rescued under suspicious circumstances, and then forced across a devastated Pacific Northwest doesn’t magically fix her, but it does push her into action. Her relationship with Peter and Lizzie is especially strong because it’s messy in a believable way. They snap, retreat, protect each other, and keep going.
The novel’s creature concept is simple but effective: survival depends on staying physically close. That idea turns the title into both a rule and an emotional demand. When Hank tells Ren, “I’ll keep close to both of you,” it lands as more than a promise to follow the rules of this new world. It’s also a promise of care, and the book keeps returning to that kind of protection in different forms. Parents, siblings, strangers, and even flawed people like Lee are all measured by what they’re willing to do for those they love.
Wade keeps the story moving with short chapters, shifting points of view, and plenty of immediate danger. The sea survival scenes feel harsh and claustrophobic, while the overland journey brings in new threats from both the creatures and desperate people. Lee’s storyline adds a strong moral pressure to the book because his choices are often wrong, but they come from a recognizable place: fear for a sick little sister and the old burden of family obligation. That makes the conflict feel less like good people versus bad people and more like people being squeezed until their worst and best instincts come out.
Keep Close is a fast-paced and emotional survival story about how people hold on to each other when the world stops being safe. It has action, creature horror, family drama, and a touch of romance, but its strongest moments come from the smaller acts of care: sharing food, tying ropes, carrying children, forgiving old wounds, and choosing not to let fear decide everything. By the end, the book feels like the first part of a larger story, but it also gives Ren and her family a satisfying emotional arc. It’s the kind of apocalypse novel that’s most interested in what people reach for when everything else falls away.
Pages: 395 | ASIN : B0DV9G8JXG
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
Adventures of Sher: Surviving the Tributaries of South America
Adventures of Sher: Surviving the Tributaries of South America, by Sherana Barakat, is a childhood memoir told with the wonder, alertness, and emotional honesty of a young girl discovering the shape of her world. Barakat looks back on a nomadic period of her life, moving from Georgetown to Dredge Creek, then into Venezuela’s Amacuro River region, and finally back toward Guyana. The book reads like a memory preserved in color: family, rivers, boats, food, animals, folklore, and danger all sit close together. It’s not just a travel story. It’s a personal record of what it felt like to grow up inside movement, uncertainty, and deep attachment to place.
One of the most appealing parts of the book is the narrator’s sense of freedom. Sher’s childhood isn’t presented as simple or easy, but it’s full of curiosity and confidence. She climbs trees, helps with fishing, watches waterways change color, and learns the rhythms of rural life by being right in the middle of it. When she says, “This was my first taste of living freely,” the line captures the spirit of the book beautifully. The natural world isn’t background scenery here. It’s a living presence, full of mango trees, caimans, piranhas, dolphins, mangroves, muddy waves, and night sounds that stay with her.
Barakat also gives the story a strong family center. Sher’s father stands out as the adventurous force of the book, a skilled navigator who can read the land, water, sun, and stars. Her mother brings steadiness, care, and resilience, especially during the family’s difficult moves. The memoir also honors storytelling itself, from bedtime reading to her grandfather’s folklore about turn tigers and giant creatures. Those stories blend naturally with Sher’s real experiences, especially during the frightening night at Shell Beach when the family believes a jaguar may be outside the door.
The illustrations add a lot to the reading experience. They have a hand-drawn softness that fits the memoir’s tone, and the colored-pencil texture makes the pages feel intimate, almost like entries from a remembered childhood sketchbook. The images of fruit, boats, mangrove roots, waterways, birds, and the child sitting near the river help make the setting feel tangible. Some pictures are especially effective because they don’t just decorate the text. They extend it, giving visual weight to the rivers, trees, and animals that shaped Sher’s memories.
Adventures of Sher is a warm and reflective memoir about a childhood shaped by migration, family courage, and the pull of wild places. Barakat’s voice feels sincere and personal, especially when she writes of the Amacuro River, “This peace and quiet was the perfect harmony for one’s soul.” That feeling runs through the book. It’s a story about looking back with gratitude, not because everything was comfortable, but because those experiences made life feel vivid. Readers who enjoy memoirs about childhood, nature, family history, and life in Guyana and Venezuela will find this a heartfelt and visually rich read.
Pages: 39 | ASIN : B0H2NBCYWK
First Steps From Africa
Andrew Colman’s First Steps From Africa: Sunda & Sahul Book One is a prehistoric adventure built around two twelve-season-old twins, Sahul and Sunda, as their tribe moves through a harsh, changing world in search of food, water, and safety. Set roughly 85,000 years ago, the book mixes survival story, family drama, and early human history in a way that feels aimed at curious young readers. The danger is immediate, with jackals, crocodiles, cave lions, hunger, cold, and drought pressing in on the tribe, but the heart of the story is the twins learning what kind of people they’re becoming.
Sahul is one of the book’s strongest parts because she’s observant, practical, and always thinking a few steps ahead. Her line, “No rain, no grass; no grass, no game,” sums up the book’s whole world in a simple, memorable way. Sunda, meanwhile, is eager to prove himself as a hunter, and his bravery often comes from instinct and action. Together, the twins give the story a good balance: Sahul plans, Sunda acts, and both of them grow through real pressure.
The book is also a story about community. The tribe survives because people share knowledge, watch over children, carry food, learn from strangers, and pass stories from one generation to the next. Waru and Azetta’s arrival adds warmth and variety, especially as their skills and language slowly become part of the tribe’s life. Colman does a nice job showing that survival isn’t just about strength. It’s also about listening, adapting, and accepting help.
What makes the book stand out is how it treats prehistoric life as both dangerous and thoughtful. The characters don’t feel like museum figures. They worry about age, family, fairness, weather, and whether they’ll be ready for adulthood. The book’s educational side is clear, especially in the details about tools, food, hunting, climate, and migration, but it’s usually carried through action rather than lecture. By the end, the line “It is important for us to know that our ancestors survived all this” feels like the book’s quiet message.
First Steps From Africa is a sincere and accessible adventure about young people facing a world that keeps changing around them. It gives readers a sense of how much courage and imagination early humans may have needed just to keep going. For readers who like survival stories with history woven through them, this book offers a grounded and thoughtful start.
Pages: 140 | ASIN : B0GTNB1YRQ
Sanctuary (The Dark Days Series Book 2)
Sanctuary: The Dark Days Series Book Two continues Sonny’s journey after the collapse chronicled in Outbreak, carrying him and his found family toward Fort Gold Rush, a fortified city that seems to offer the protection they have been bleeding toward for so long. But safety is not simple here. Sonny is drawn into a new life of rules, military programs, surrogate family bonds, painful mistaken identity, and fresh violence beyond the walls, making this sequel less a story of escape than a story of uneasy arrival.
I liked how this book changes the pressure without softening the danger. Outbreak was about flight, immediate loss, and the shock of seeing the world die in real time; Sanctuary asks what happens after survivors finally reach a place that claims to be secure. The walls of Fort Gold Rush create a different kind of suspense. Zombies remain a threat, but bureaucracy, grief, loyalty, training, and moral compromise become just as sharp. The sequel understands that a sanctuary can protect the body while still unsettling the soul.
Sonny remains the emotional center, but he feels older here in a way that is both impressive and sad. His relationships with Ashley, Carrie, Will, Kayley, River, Ellen, Clara, Jonathan, Grim, and the others give the book its layered and unique feel, especially when the story explores what family means after biology, geography, and normal life have all been shattered. I was especially drawn to the tension between Sonny’s loyalty to the people who survived with him and the new roles others try to place on him. I had a great time with the battles as well as the quiet recognitions that healing can feel like betrayal, that belonging can be messy, and that a child can become dangerous without becoming cruel.
Sanctuary will appeal to readers drawn to post-apocalyptic survival fiction, zombie horror, young adult dystopian adventure, military science fiction, and found-family drama. While fans of The Walking Dead may come for the undead and the fortified settlements, the book’s emotional compass points closer to the wounded resilience found in The Last of Us. Sanctuary shows that survival is not the same as being saved, and that the hardest walls to rebuild are the ones inside the heart.
Pages: 390 | ASIN : B0G4F9854Y
Outbreak (The Dark Days Series Book 1)
Outbreak: The Dark Days Book One follows Sonny, a young boy whose ordinary summer collapses into terror when a mysterious infection spreads across the world. What begins with family breakfasts, mall trips, and nervous rumors soon becomes a brutal fight for survival through quarantine zones, military violence, zombies, refugee camps, and fractured communities. The story is less about the outbreak itself than about what it steals: childhood, certainty, safety, and the simple belief that adults know how to fix things.
I was most affected by the novel’s insistence on filtering catastrophe through Sonny’s young perspective. His voice gives the horror a raw immediacy; he notices the strange details children notice, from favorite cartoons to birthday memories, even as the world around him is turning feral. That contrast gives the book its sting. The violence is often harsh, but the emotional damage lingers longer than the bloodshed. Sonny’s grief, fear, guilt, and stubborn loyalty become the real pulse of the story.
What really affected me, though, was the book’s bleak but persistent attention to human connection. Families are broken apart, friends are lost, and safe places keep proving temporary, yet the characters keep reaching for one another. The novel is at its strongest when it pauses amid chaos to let people comfort, argue, protect, or mourn. Some scenes are rough-edged and direct, but that bluntness suits the world author Christopher Cole is building: a place where tenderness has to fight for oxygen.
I think this book is best suited for readers who enjoy young adult dystopian fiction, zombie apocalypse horror, survival thriller, post-apocalyptic adventure, pandemic fiction, and coming-of-age horror. Fans of The Walking Dead will recognize the same grim question underneath the carnage: when civilization dies, what kind of person survives in its place? Outbreak is a fierce and grief-marked survival story about a boy forced to grow up while the world burns around him.
Pages: 245 | ASIN : B0G4GQ9J5N
Evolving From the Storm
Dr. Iris Wright’s Evolving From the Storm is a personal reflection on injustice, survival, faith, and the slow, deliberate work of healing. Beginning with the author’s experience as an eighteen-year-old mother accused of harming her daughter, the book traces the long aftermath of that rupture: the loss of custody, the collapse of trust, the years spent functioning rather than truly living, and the eventual awakening that led Wright toward forgiveness, self-love, purpose, and advocacy through the Injustice Movement. Part memoir, part devotional guide, and part reflective workbook, it asks readers to examine the wounds they may have closed but never fully healed.
What moved me most was the emotional honesty of Wright’s central idea: that survival can look deceptively like healing. Her distinction between a closed wound and a healed wound gives the book its strongest thread, and it’s one I found both plainspoken and powerful. When she writes about building walls after betrayal, or about realizing that those same walls kept her trapped inside her own pain, the book feels intimate. I also appreciated the tenderness with which she handles anger. She doesn’t condemn it, but she doesn’t romanticize it either. Her “mirror moment,” where she begins to take responsibility for her healing without taking blame for what happened to her, is one of the book’s most resonant passages.
The writing is direct, rhythmic, and prayerful, often shaped by repetition and short lines that give the prose the feeling of testimony spoken aloud. At times, that simplicity is its strength; the book doesn’t hide behind ornament or theory. It speaks plainly to women who are tired, guarded, grieving, or quietly carrying more than anyone knows. I was especially struck by the chapter on restored love, where Wright admits that she once told her now husband she never wanted marriage, then later found herself proposing from a place of peace rather than fear. That moment gives the book warmth and vulnerability. I occasionally wished for more scene-level detail and narrative texture, especially around the legal ordeal and the long years of rebuilding. The ideas are heartfelt and accessible, but the most compelling sections are the ones where Wright lets the lived moment breathe.
I found Evolving From the Storm sincere, faith-filled, and emotionally generous. It’s a healing companion written by someone who wants her pain to become useful in the lives of others. Its greatest value lies in its invitation to stop mistaking endurance for wholeness, and to believe that peace can be practiced, protected, and chosen. I would recommend this book to readers, especially women of faith, who are working through betrayal, injustice, family separation, emotional guardedness, or the difficult passage from survival into purpose.
Pages: 92 | ASIN : B0GXXBL4CS
Library in the Clouds: Children of the Blue Knight
Library in the Clouds: Children of the Blue Knight, by Hal Olsoe, is a fantasy adventure about Gwen and Landon, two children forced onto the road after their home is burned, their father is killed, and their mother is taken. What begins as a desperate journey to find her slowly opens into something larger, involving old powers, hidden knowledge, political betrayal, and a legendary library that feels half myth and half warning. At its heart, though, this is a story about siblings trying to survive when the world has asked far too much of them.
What I appreciated most was how grounded the book feels, even with its gods, kingdoms, sacred places, and ancient books. Olsoe does not rush the children from one grand fantasy set piece to the next. Instead, the story spends real time on hunger, sore horses, bad inns, dirty clothes, fear, and the small choices that keep people alive. It gives the fantasy genre some dirt under its fingernails. Gwen, especially, carries much of that weight. She’s brave, but not in an easy way. Her courage is practical, tired, and sometimes harsh. Landon brings a softer counterpoint, and I found their bond to be the emotional center of the book. They argue. They misunderstand each other. They keep going anyway.
The author’s worldbuilding is ambitious, and I could feel how much thought went into the gods, temples, social order, and history of the realm. The appendices reinforce that sense of a wider world beyond the immediate plot. The story leans on travel and explanation, and some sections move more slowly than readers expecting constant action might prefer. But that slower pace also allows the book to breathe. The danger feels earned because the quiet moments matter, too. I was especially drawn to the way the book treats knowledge. The library isn’t just a magical idea. It becomes a question: who gets answers, who controls them, and what happens when wisdom turns into a weapon? That stayed with me.
I would recommend Library in the Clouds to readers who enjoy character-driven fantasy adventure with medieval settings, sibling stories, and a sense of myth woven through everyday hardship. It will appeal most to readers who enjoy quests that are as much emotional as physical. This is not a light romp through a magical kingdom. It’s more like a long road taking you to beautiful places, frightening places, and worth following if you like fantasy that takes both its world and its young characters seriously.
Pages: 220 | ASIN : B0GZP9FP8Q
