Blog Archives
Love As A Matter of Survival
Lucky Storm follows a successful woman in her 50s whose life is shaken by a calculated fraud scheme, forcing her to confront her past to reclaim her identity and dignity. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Lucky Storm is the origin story for a trilogy about a mature couple who have moved beyond the naivete of young adult love. Before meeting each other, Stormé and Maurice had already loved and lost, experiencing some incredible heartbreaks and setbacks. Stormé has closed herself off from love as a matter of survival. Maurice leads a solitary life filled with grief. I wanted to tell the beginning of their love story from a fresh perspective, exploring all the nuances and passions standing in the way of them coming together after having already lived a lifetime of experiences. Lucky Storm explores the messiness of love between this older couple, shattering the clichés that we often believe about older means wiser and smarter. I wanted to share a story where this may appear true on the surface until you dig deeper and get to know them. It’s then that you realize that love can be messy, no matter the age.
Stormé’s relationships carry both desire and danger. How do you balance those elements without losing emotional authenticity?
By remaining true to the core essence of the story: love. Yes, betrayal, revenge, desire, and danger exist. As the story unfolds, we often see the dark side of human nature. Stormé’s vulnerability with love and her trusting nature humanize the story. We want a happy ending for Stormé. After all she’s been through, she deserves it. The road leading to this happiness takes a few wild twists and passionate turns. In the end, romance’s core truth shines: love always wins.
The book explores how intimacy can become a vulnerability. Why was that theme important to you?
Some people mistake intimacy for love. This pattern appears throughout Stormé’s past. And it almost takes her down again in her present. Stormé believes she’ll never find love again, something anyone can relate to following profound heartbreak and betrayal. I wanted to break through this myth for her.
Where does the story go in the next book, and where do you see it going in the future?
Storme may not know this yet, but she is the heroine of her own love story. As her story arc unfolds across the trilogy, I want her to find peace within herself, in love and intimacy. She deserves someone who loves and respects her. Despite her past. No judgments. A true love that comes with one condition: for her to love back with no regrets or fears while staying true to herself. In Book 2, codenamed “Project Tempest,” we’re going to uncover some truths about Maurice, leaving Storme to question if what she has with him is genuine love. Is Maurice the soulmate she believes him to be? Or has Storme fallen into a trap where she is pursuing her idea of love for all the wrong reasons?
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Amidst fraud and betrayal, Stormé works to solve the mystery of whodunit and clear her name to reclaim what is hers. Along the way, Stormé meets a charming detective who turns everything this middle-aged beauty thought she knew about love upside down.
Will Stormé be able to reclaim her future? Or will her trusting nature cost her everything in the end?
Dragon Island: Football Season
Dragon Island: Football Season by Lisa Jacovsky is a creative and action-filled children’s picture book that combines two exciting worlds: dragons and football. The story takes place on Dragon Island, where six football teams, each with six dragon players, compete in a unique and energetic season. One especially fun detail is that the dragons can change their colors to match their team uniforms, adding imagination and visual excitement to the story.
One of the dragons I liked, both visually and in the story, was Blayze, a creative dragon. Ember, who is a deaf dragon, has the ability to create clever plays. Her character adds meaningful representation to the book while showing young readers that everyone has valuable strengths to contribute.
The highlight of the story is the thrilling football game between Team Firestorm and Team Thunder. The match is full of teamwork, clever problem-solving, and exciting twists that keep readers interested until the end. The dragons all bring their own talents to the game, which gives the story plenty of intrigue and helps show how cooperation can lead to success.
Dragon Island: Football Season is a fun and original picture book for young children. It promotes healthy competition, teamwork, diversity, inclusion, friendship, and problem-solving in a way that feels entertaining and engaging. With football-playing dragons, strong friendships, and an exciting game at its center, this children’s book makes a great bedtime story and the perfect read for families.
Pages: 24 | ASIN : B0GS5HKP82
Venera LTD.
Venera LTD. by Stuart Nosler is a sprawling near-future science fiction novel about Hendrick Campbell, a nuclear researcher whose life is pulled from academic disappointment into the hazardous machinery of global crisis, private enterprise, and interplanetary ambition. Beginning with the fallout from a radioactive naval disaster, the story widens into a decades-long account of Venera, a space-and-energy company built on algae fuel, patents, risk, compromise, and moral corrosion. By the end, Hendrick has become both visionary and cautionary figure: a man credited with changing the world, yet haunted by what his company demanded from others, and from him.
What I found most absorbing was the novel’s patience with systems. Nosler is interested in how catastrophe becomes research, how research becomes leverage, how leverage becomes capital, and how capital eventually grows teeth. The book has the density of a corporate dossier and the sweep of a family chronicle, but its best moments are not only in boardrooms or launch sequences. They come when Hendrick’s public ambition rubs against private fatigue: his strained marriage, his attempts at fatherhood, his envy, his humiliation, his belief that reason can keep the world from burning. That belief is noble, but the novel keeps showing how easily nobility can be repackaged as policy, branding, or silence.
I also appreciated the book’s refusal to make Hendrick simple. He’s not a clean hero, nor is he a theatrical villain. He’s more troubling than that: competent, wounded, vain, idealistic, and increasingly acclimated to ethical weather he once would have called poisonous. The prose can be procedural and expository, but that texture often suits the material; the novel wants the reader to feel the weight of contracts, committees, capital structures, reactors, lawsuits, and launch windows. At times, I wanted more compression, but I was rarely indifferent. The book’s long arc gives its moral consequences room to calcify.
I think the audience for Venera LTD. is readers who enjoy hard science fiction, corporate thriller, climate fiction, speculative political drama, and near-future space exploration with an ethical edge. Fans of Kim Stanley Robinson’s systems-minded futurism or Andy Weir’s technical problem-solving may find familiar pleasures here, though Nosler’s book is darker, more corporate, and more suspicious of success. This is science fiction for readers who like their rockets built from debt, grief, and compromise. A grand novel about the price of saving the world when the invoice is written in human lives.
Pages: 771 | ASIN: B0GNJL57SQ
Deadworld
The Child Guardian: Deadworld follows George, an ordinary boy whose life tilts into the impossible when a mysterious globe and mirror connect him to a dying realm called the Deadworld. With his brave best friend Arianwen beside him, George discovers hidden family ties, strange powers, and a conflict much larger than himself, all while trying to hold on to the simple comforts of home, school, cricket, and his father.
I really liked how the book lets George be frightened, uncertain, and still courageous. As a parent, that mattered to me. He isn’t some glossy chosen-one hero who instantly knows what to do. He worries. He hesitates. He wants to be normal. That made his bravery feel more tender and believable. I also found Arianwen a wonderful counterbalance: sharp, loyal, stubborn in the best way, and never treated as just the sidekick. Their friendship has a lived-in warmth to it, the kind of bond children recognize because it’s built on teasing, trust, and showing up when things get scary.
The writing has an old-fashioned adventure feel, with lots of sensory detail: smells, cold air, glowing objects, strange creatures, and those eerie shifts between the familiar world and the Deadworld. The pace is quick, and there are moments where the mythology is thick, but I appreciated the ambition behind it. The ideas are heartfelt: courage isn’t the absence of fear, power needs kindness behind it, and children often understand loyalty more purely than adults do. I was especially moved by the family thread running underneath the fantasy. George’s longing for connection gives the story its emotional weight.
Deadworld is a rich and imaginative fantasy with a good heart and a darker edge than I expected from the opening chapters. It has danger, loss, wonder, humor, and a sincere belief in friendship as a saving force. I’d recommend it for confident middle-grade readers who enjoy portal fantasies, mysterious objects, hidden worlds, and stories where a sensitive child has to grow into courage without losing his softness.
Pages: 209 | ASIN : B0GGYR97RX
Whip the Dogs: An Addiction Thriller
Robin C. Rickards’ Whip the Dogs is a cold, brutal medical thriller about Dr. Michael Andross, an anesthetist whose own opioid addiction is bound to the grotesque research of Wilfred Tait, a disgraced geneticist obsessed with turning addiction into a weapon. The story moves from operating rooms and lecture halls to South Africa and the Arctic, where medical science, military ambition, trauma, and survival knot together in increasingly dangerous ways.
A specific scene I liked was the early lecture scene where Dr. Michael Andross explains addiction to the medical students while visibly unraveling himself. On the surface, he’s giving a clinical talk about dopamine, dependence, tolerance, and the “hedonic” pathway, but underneath the lecture his own body is betraying him: sweating, shaking, craving, and trying to maintain professional authority while addiction is already in the room with him. What makes the scene work is the double exposure. He’s both teacher and evidence, expert and casualty. The medical language gives the chapter intellectual weight, but the tension comes from watching Andross describe addiction as a brain disease while fighting the exact disease he’s explaining.
I found the book most compelling when it treated addiction not as a moral failure but as a trap with teeth. Andross isn’t a perfect or easy hero; he’s frightened, compromised, ashamed, and still capable of courage. That friction gives the novel its pulse. Rickards’ medical background shows in the clinical detail, especially in the scenes involving anesthetics, narcotics, withdrawal, and the terrifying thin line between treatment and harm.
The book is often harsh, sometimes lurid, and not shy about cruelty. Its villainy can be operatic, but the extremity suits the story’s frozen landscapes and fevered ethical questions. What I liked most was the title’s emotional echo: the image of a creature driven by need, punished for hunger, and misunderstood by those holding the whip. Beneath the thriller machinery, the novel has a mordant sadness about control, who has it, who loses it, and who profits from another person’s craving.
I would recommend Whip the Dogs to readers who enjoy addiction thrillers, medical thrillers, scientific thrillers, Arctic suspense, conspiracy fiction, and morally dark action novels. Fans of Robin Cook’s medical suspense may recognize the blend of science, danger, and institutional corruption, though Rickards pushes his story into rougher, more visceral terrain.
Pages: 457 | ASIN: B0GJKJKR1S
Altamara’s Gift
Altamara’s Gift follows Lefty Altamara, a damaged but gifted southpaw whose childhood refuge is baseball and whose adulthood is scorched by Vietnam. The novel moves between the diamond, the San Fernando Valley, the Battle of Hue, Delta Company Double-Deuce, and the lives of soldiers like Doc Hood and Tran Binh Trong, building a war story that is also about memory, loyalty, shame, tenderness, and the brutal search for redemption.
I was struck by how physical this book feels. Baseballs are not just baseballs; they have seams, age, smell, and a kind of private liturgy. War is not abstract either; it’s noise, rot, sweat, panic, gallows humor, and the terrible discipline of doing what must be done when the soul is trying to flee the body. The prose can be blunt and profane, but it also has surprising pockets of lyricism, especially when it turns toward gardens, rivers, music, or the clean geometry of a thrown ball.
I liked the novel’s refusal to make bravery simple. Lefty is heroic, but not polished; Hood is gentle, but not weak; even enemy soldiers are allowed fear, poetry, and longing. The book is capacious, sometimes sprawling, and that sprawl gives it the feeling of an oral history told by someone who cannot separate the jokes from the corpses or the love stories from the firefights. I found that messy abundance moving because trauma rarely arrives in neat chapters.
One other thing I liked was the book’s sense of texture. The way it lets ordinary objects carry emotional weight. A baseball glove, a scarred weapon, a garden, a Vespa, a letter from home, even the smell of gun oil or tomato plants can suddenly become charged with memory. That attention to tactile detail makes the story feel authentic, and it gives the violent scenes a stronger contrast because the world outside the war still feels vivid, specific, and worth saving.
This book is best suited for readers of Vietnam War historical fiction, military fiction, baseball fiction, literary war fiction, and stories about brotherhood, PTSD, and redemption. Fans of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried may appreciate the way this novel blends battlefield horror with memory, absurdity, and aching human detail, while readers of W.P. Kinsella may recognize the almost sacramental treatment of baseball. Altamara’s Gift is a bruising, big-hearted novel about the men who come home from war carrying more than anyone can see.
Pages: 305 | ASIN : B0DYLJSZ8P
The Secret of the Magic eyePad: Novel Study, Activities, 7 STEM Projects, Bonus Audiobook Guide
This book is a hands-on, activity-packed companion to the novel The Secret of the Magic eyePad, designed to bring STEM concepts to life through fun, challenging experiments and problem-solving tasks. It’s not a storybook in the traditional sense but a full-blown interactive workbook, complete with guided science experiments, engineering design challenges, and math integration, all inspired by the characters and events in the original fiction. Readers explore everything from volcano-building and rapid prototyping to room design and physics tricks, with each section laid out in an engaging and accessible way.
I was really impressed by how approachable the writing is. Marsha Tufft clearly knows her stuff. Her engineering background shows, but she doesn’t talk down to the reader. She brings a friendly, encouraging tone that makes even more complex ideas feel doable. What really stuck out to me was how she built in failure as a natural part of the process. It didn’t feel like school. It felt like playing and building and figuring things out. That balance between structure and freedom is tough to hit, but she nails it. I found myself wanting to try some of the challenges myself, and I’m well past the target age group.
There were a few moments that felt a little too structured or worksheet-heavy, like the design evaluation charts or standards alignment bits. They’re useful though, especially for teachers or homeschoolers. Still, the overall energy of the book was high. It sparks curiosity and encourages kids to think like inventors. You don’t need fancy supplies either, just stuff around the house, some curiosity, and a bit of patience. That makes it feel empowering and realistic, which I loved.
This is a great resource for curious kids, especially those between 9 and 13, and for the adults who teach, parent, or coach them. If you’re a teacher looking to bring STEM alive or a parent trying to get your child off screens and into the world of building, this book delivers. I’d especially recommend it for girls interested in science. It subtly works to build confidence and independence without making a big deal about it. Highly recommended for anyone ready to tinker, explore, and learn by doing.
Pages: 226 | ISBN: 195825133X
A Reckoning in Mercy
A Reckoning in Mercy by T. E. MacArthur is a classic Western ghost story set in 1888 northwestern New Mexico, where Eli Mercer, a haunted drifter with an unwanted connection to the dead, rides into the town of Bendición during a violent storm and finds himself pulled into a fight involving corrupt lawmen, racial tension, old land claims, a condemned Hispano man named Don Santiago de Álvarez, and a determined woman doctor, Eleanor. What begins as a desperate search for shelter turns into a supernatural reckoning, with ghosts, guilt, and human cruelty all pressing in from every side.
MacArthur doesn’t treat the setting like painted scenery. The desert, the river, the storm, and the town all feel alive, and often hostile. I could feel the grit, the damp heat, the pressure in the air before something bad happened. The book leans into the Western side of its genre, with horses, guns, gallows, land disputes, and frontier politics, but the ghost story elements are woven in as something more than decoration. The supernatural feels tied to memory and violence, not just jump scares. That worked for me because I felt like it gave the story weight.
Mercer could have been a familiar wandering gunman, but he’s more interesting than that. He’s scared, guilty, proud, and trying very hard not to care until he clearly does. Eleanor is another strong point. She’s brave without feeling polished into perfection, and her presence sharpens the book’s ideas about who gets power, who gets believed, and who is allowed to stand in the way of injustice. The book is candid about prejudice and social hierarchy in the Old West, sometimes bluntly so, and while that can make parts of the story uncomfortable, but I think that discomfort is part of the point.
The prose is big and stormy, matching the story’s mood. Some scenes use heightened, dramatic language, especially during the action and supernatural moments, but that intensity fits the story because this isn’t a quiet little ghost tale. It’s dusty, bloody, strange, and restless. I would recommend A Reckoning in Mercy to readers who enjoy Western fiction with a paranormal edge, especially those who like morally wounded heroes, strong historical atmosphere, and ghost stories that are really about what refuses to stay buried.
Pages: 288
