The Call of the Bugle

The Call of the Bugle begins with a famous charge, but John Amos is more interested in what the charge leaves behind. He uses the Crimean War as the engine, then follows the human fallout through memory, duty, love, and the strange afterlife of a battle that keeps echoing long after the horses are gone.

That is where the book works best. Amos is careful with the period detail, but he never lets the history sit there like a display case. He gives it motion. Rooms feel lived in. Paper feels handled. Uniforms, lamps, rain, horses, and smoke all carry weight because the prose knows what they mean to the people inside the scene.

Seattle readers who like historical fiction with a strong sense of place should find plenty here. The novel moves cleanly between public event and private consequence. Amos understands that war is not just a line in a history book. It is the thing that rearranges a life, then keeps rearranging it long after the noise stops. Robert’s story makes that clear. He is not only trying to understand a battle. He is trying to make peace with what has changed in him.

The book also has a strong emotional center. The romantic thread is not decorative. It gives the story heat and balance, and it keeps the novel from hardening into a pure military account. Amos lets that relationship stay grounded and human. That choice pays off. The personal stakes never get lost under the historical material.

What I admire most is the control. Amos does not lean on spectacle to carry the novel. He trusts the scenes, the atmosphere, and the pressure of memory. That restraint gives the book its shape. It also keeps the emotional turns from feeling forced. The result is a novel that feels thoughtful without becoming cold.The Call of the Bugle is a war story, but it is also a story about what people carry forward. Amos writes with clarity and purpose, and he gives the reader a book that is steady, detailed, and deeply aware of the cost of survival. It looks back at Balaclava and finds something quieter than glory, and more lasting too.


Grumpy Old Dan: Reflections from the Edge of Fatherhood, Fame, and Frustration

Remmes wrote the book for Grumpy Old Men: The Musical. Grumpy Old Dan reads like a man who spent years refining jokes for a paying audience; someone who knows where a laugh lives in a sentence, who trusts timing, and leans on the crowd-pleasing move when the room goes quiet. The collection runs thirty essays organized around fatherhood, body horror, middle age, and the indignities of medical maladies. Most began as standalone pieces; some were written for this compilation. The seams show, but that's not a liability. Remmes has the essayist's gift: he's honest about himself in ways that are useful rather than therapeutic. The opener, "Practice Child," establishes the book's frequency. Remmes and his wife are trying to conceive. She schedules him for a semen analysis. He keeps the appointment after she becomes pregnant, talked into it on grounds he can't reconstruct. The scene in the collection room—VHS tape, 1976 Playboy with a Jimmy Carter interview, a cup too small a target—works because Remmes doesn't editorialize. He reports, with a thirty-minute countdown and anxiety about being average.

"The Big Bummer" is the collection's anchor. Remmes was struck by a drunk driver near Bryant Park at twenty-six with two brain surgeries, metal bolted to his femur, blind spots, and a stretch of ICU delirium during which he was convinced he was Woody Allen's attorney, kidnapped by Mia Farrow as leverage in a custody suit. He wrote about it soon after. That document appears here unrevised. Thirty years of distance haven't made it easier to touch. The confession that he kept skipping the chapter during editing, and included it unchanged, is more honest than the essay itself, which he wrote with the dissociation of someone who hadn't processed what happened.

"Good-Night Kiss" is the most accomplished piece: a late-night marital standoff that begins with "we haven't had sex in a month" and escalates through an argument about the choir lady named Becky until something real surfaces. The fiction frame, the couple is named Guy and Angela, not Dan and Jennifer, gives Remmes distance to let the uglier feelings through. It reads like O. Henry drafted by someone who'd been in couples therapy.

The "Darndests" trilogy, which are exchanges with his daughters across their childhood, works because Remmes gets out of the way. A daughter who announces, "I need my privacy!" while naked at a Fourth of July party. A handwritten apology: "I am sooo sorry. I was mad and only meant to partly stab her with the soft part, not the lead."

Grumpy Old Dan lands in a market saturated with dad memoirs performing vulnerability. Remmes brings craft that most of them lack. He also carries a story with real stakes, a real body, and a reckoning with the fact that becoming a parent changes the weight of your own near-death. That's not common.

The book is uneven. Read "The Big Bummer." Read "Good-Night Kiss." Read the sperm collection sequence out loud to someone you trust.


Tristan 4 America

Tristan 4 America is fiction with a political pulse. Bruce Overby sets the novel inside the 2024 presidential election and lets the pressure do the work. That choice matters. A book like this lives or dies on how well it turns public noise into private consequence.

Overby starts from a plain fact: politics is not abstract when you are inside it. It gets under the skin. It changes the way people talk, lie, and choose their sides. The novel seems built on that idea. It is less interested in lecturing about the race than in showing what the race does to the people caught in it.

The front matter says enough to place the book. It is from Willow River Press, an imprint of Between the Lines Publishing, and the dedication points to the roots of Overby’s interest in writing and politics. That fits. The novel feels like the work of someone who knows the machinery and wants to expose the parts that usually stay hidden.

What stands out is the control. The book does not need to shout to make its point. It can trust pace, sequence, and pressure. That gives the story a clean edge. The best political fiction keeps the reader alert without drowning the page in explanation. Overby seems to understand that. He keeps the focus on movement and on the choices people make when they think the room is watching.

There is also a steady sense that this is more than campaign theater. Elections are one layer. Below that are habit, fear, ego, and the small bargains people strike to keep moving. That is the better material anyway. It is where fiction gets its force. Overby uses the election as a frame, but the novel’s real interest is human weakness under load.

Readers who like fiction with political tension, a fast pace, and a clear grasp of how public life distorts private motives should be in good shape here. Tristan 4 America feels current without feeling disposable. It knows the season it came from, but it is really after the parts of ambition that never go out of style.


Tristan 4 America

Tristan 4 America is built to move. Bruce Overby sets a political thriller inside the 2024 presidential election and gives it the kind of pressure cooker structure this genre needs. The book is not interested in wandering. It wants conflict, momentum, and the constant sense that every room contains a deal, a trap, or both.

That choice works. A story like this depends on motion, and Overby understands that pace is part of the argument. Elections are public theater, private calculation, and national nerves all at once. The novel leans into that mix. It treats ambition as something messy and risky, not as a clean line from point A to point B. That is where the tension lives.

The writing has a lean, functional edge. It does not stop to admire itself. It gets the scene in place, pushes the pressure higher, and moves on before the moment goes stale. That discipline helps. Political thrillers fail fast when they get clogged with speeches or explanations. Overby keeps the machinery visible without letting it jam.

What gives the book its spark is the sense that the stakes are both public and personal. A presidential race is already a machine built on leverage, image, and fear. Put characters inside that machine, and you get an easy way to expose who they are when the room tightens. Overby seems to understand that the real suspense comes from what people will trade, hide, or sacrifice once the stakes turn real.

The novel also has a clean cinematic quality. The setup is easy to picture, the pace is brisk, and the pressure keeps rising in ways that suit the material. It feels like a book made for readers who want the story to keep advancing, not circling. That is a strength, not a limitation.

Readers who like topical thrillers, campaign drama, and fiction that keeps its foot on the gas will find a lot to like here. Tristan 4 America knows what it is doing. It stays lean, stays alert, and keeps the election heat on the page without losing the plot to its own noise.


Elvener's Legacy

Elvener's Legacy picks up with confidence. Debra Koehler already built the bones of this world in the first book, but this installment moves with more purpose and far better rhythm. At my age, I’ve read enough fantasy to know when a writer is stalling for time. Koehler rarely does that here.

The novel follows Meiri as she straddles two lives: one rooted on Earth and another tangled in Amoran’s political and spiritual conflicts. That split gives the book its pulse. One chapter drops her into grocery-store normalcy; the next throws her into ancient rivalries, Guardians, tournaments, and enough prophecy to keep three kingdoms anxious. Oddly, it works.

I especially liked the relationship between Meiri and Eliasser. Koehler doesn’t smother the reader with endless romantic circling. Their connection develops through action and loyalty instead of breathless speeches. Eliasser has the patience of a man who’s spent centuries watching younger people make poor decisions, and Meiri meets him with enough stubbornness to keep him interesting. Their scenes carried weight because neither character behaved like a teenager trapped in an immortal body.

Ashara also stood out. She’s sharp-tongued, practical, and occasionally funny in the dry way exhausted people become funny. Fantasy novels often crowd the page with interchangeable wise women. When she drags Meiri out of bed before dawn or snaps at someone for wasting time, I could practically hear the coffee deprivation.

The worldbuilding is ambitious without becoming unreadable. Koehler tosses around terms like Reparention, Foreseers, Vortexes, and Twin Lights with complete confidence. Sometimes I had to pause and remember who belonged to which faction, but the emotional stakes stayed clear even when the mythology thickened. That matters more to me than memorizing fictional vocabulary.

The pacing improves noticeably after the opening chapters. Around the tournament sequence, the story grabs hold and stops wandering. Koehler writes action cleanly. Swords swing, people bleed, and scenes end before they wear out their welcome.

I also admired the humor because it arrives sideways. A cashier asking “paper or plastic?” before the story barrels into cosmic conflict made me laugh. So did several Earth-bound scenes where magical beings try to navigate ordinary human behavior. Fantasy works best when characters still have to eat breakfast and argue over logistics.

The book isn’t perfect. A few conversations run long, and secondary characters occasionally blend together during council scenes. There’s also a heavy reliance on lore explanations in the middle section. I caught myself rereading two paragraphs involving the Elveners and the Guardians because my attention drifted.

Still, Koehler delivers something increasingly uncommon: a fantasy novel with heart, momentum, and characters who behave like adults. By the final chapters, I was fully invested in Meiri’s fate and more curious than I expected about where this chronicle is headed next. That’s a good reason to keep reading.


Evening the Score

Olivia Hinckley’s revenge plan in Evening the Score by Lexi LaFleur Brown starts with a mascot costume and ends somewhere far more complicated: her own heart getting in the way of her carefully aimed sabotage. Set against the high-pressure world of professional hockey, the novel leans into enemies-to-lovers tension with sharp precision. Brody Parker is not the villain Olivia expected; instead, he’s a man quietly buckling under legacy, expectation, and emotional isolation. Their chemistry builds through banter and accidental vulnerability until revenge stops feeling satisfying. What makes this romance work is how it lets anger soften into understanding without losing its bite.


Honey in the Wound

A sweeping debut that blends history, magic, and family legacy, Honey in the Wound is an unforgettable novel of survival and reclamation. Spanning generations of Korean women marked by extraordinary gifts, the story centers on Young-Ja, whose ability to infuse food with emotion becomes both burden and power. The novel moves from mountain forests to teahouses of resistance to modern Seoul with lyrical confidence. What lingers most is its emotional intelligence: grief, resilience, and the healing power of intergenerational truth. Richly atmospheric and deeply humane, this is women’s fiction at its most transporting and ambitious.


The Whale's Tale and the Otter's Side of the Story

This is the coolest book ever! This book can be read from front to back and back to front. I like that one way the otter tells the story about why otters are cooler than whales, and the other way, the whale tells why he is better than otters. I really like how each one gets to tell their own story.

This is a very fun storybook. I like the way the illustrations use a few colors: blue, white, and black as the main colors. My favorite is the otter. I think it is really cool that they like to hold hands in the water and use a rock as a tool. I would love to see more books that can be read this way; it is like two stories in one.


The Night King's Court

Velvet-dark and shimmering with enchantment, The Night King’s Court by Elisa A. Bonnin feels like wandering through a dream you’re not sure you’ll wake from. Ida’s journey begins with longing but quickly spirals into something more disquieting, as the court’s beauty reveals its teeth. The romance between Ida and Lenore glows softly at first, then deepens into something urgent and necessary. Bonnin’s lush worldbuilding dazzles, but it’s the creeping unease—the sense that magic always takes something—that gives the story its edge. A haunting, slow-bloom sapphic romance wrapped in glittering danger.


Café Lafitte in Exile

Part cultural history, part love letter, Café Lafitte in Exile by Frank Perez and Jeffrey Palmquist vividly reconstructs the pulse of queer New Orleans through one legendary bar. What makes this book stand out is its sense of continuity—how it threads Indigenous histories, colonial attitudes, and modern LGBTQ+ life into one evolving narrative. The authors balance archival research with lived experience, giving the story both authority and soul. Reading it feels like stepping into a space where laughter, resistance, and memory echo off the walls, reminding us that queer history is inseparable from the places that shelter it.


Baby Kraken

//Baby Kraken// is a story for young readers who need some reassurance when they feel afraid. A young boy goes to the beach with his parents, and while they're having fun swimming and exploring the ocean, the boy decides he might be safer while staying on the sand. This changes quickly when, while exploring, he finds a little octopus on shore, and when he puts it back in the water, he realizes it's not so bad or scary after all!

 //Baby Kraken// is for a younger audience, but the beautiful illustrations are for all readers to enjoy; there are plenty of pictures set underwater, featuring colorful sea creatures and plants that will mesmerize readers. There is a great message for all readers, and most readers of any age will find something to relate to.


Ignore All Previous Instructions

On Callisto, where an AI conglomerate decides what stories are allowed to exist, Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann reads like both warning and love letter to imagination. Kelli Reynolds edits approved narratives for a living, but her real story begins when past and present collide in the form of Rowan, her ex and the human inspiration behind her fictional pirate hero. The romance here is quiet but piercing, built on fractured memory, identity, and survival under systems that sanitize creativity. Hoffmann balances speculative worldbuilding with intimate emotional stakes, creating a story where love itself becomes an act of resistance.


Eat the Ones You Love

There’s something deliciously grimy and hypnotic about Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin. What begins as a story about heartbreak and starting over slowly blooms into full-on botanical nightmare fuel. Shell’s growing attraction to Neve gives the novel a tender emotional core, but Griffin surrounds that tenderness with creeping dread and wonderfully bizarre horror imagery. The sentient orchid lurking behind the flower shop counter feels both absurd and genuinely threatening, like a fever dream rooted in loneliness and codependency. The novel balances grotesque horror with vulnerability so well that even its strangest moments feel emotionally grounded. It’s weird, funny, romantic, and deeply unsettling in the best possible way.


Punk'n Heads

Punk’n Heads by Dave Baker and Nicole Goux reads like a late-night jam session that spirals into something unexpectedly tender. Hannah’s crash landing into a horror-punk band could have been pure chaos, but the story hums with emotional honesty beneath the glitter and fake blood. The art crackles with energy, mirroring the messy entanglements of band life, hookups, and unresolved feelings. What really lands is how the book captures that specific, disorienting moment of reinvention after heartbreak. It’s loud, a little reckless, and surprisingly introspective—a graphic novel that understands that sometimes finding yourself requires turning the volume all the way up.


Two's A Charm

Sibling rivalry has rarely felt as magically chaotic as it does in Two’s A Charm by Heather Spellman. Effie and Bonnie, witches living in the cramped tension of small-town Yellowbrick Grove, are forced into uneasy proximity when dark magic begins distorting everything around them. The story thrives on contrast: Effie’s careful restraint versus Bonnie’s impulsive charm, both unraveling as family history resurfaces in dangerous ways. Spellman leans into cozy fantasy textures while still letting the stakes feel real, especially as sisterhood becomes the only stabilizing force in a world slipping out of control. It’s magical, messy, and warmly human.


Down With The Ship

Down With the Ship by Chloe Jory turns a luxury yacht into a pressure cooker of class tension, forced proximity, and slow-burning attraction. Stella Olsen enters the story already unraveling, suspended from her academic program and trapped among her sister’s wealthy in-laws, where she collides repeatedly with Captain Caleb. Their antagonism is immediate and entertaining, but what makes the novel sing is how it layers vulnerability beneath sarcasm. The ocean setting isolates every interaction, amplifying both conflict and chemistry. As attraction grows, so does Stella’s reckoning with belonging, ambition, and self-worth. It’s sharp, funny, and emotionally satisfying in equal measure.


The Ache in Your Heart Is Holy

Of all the self help books which flood the market, this one deals with the fact that life can be painful and the pain may be residual.  This is an interactive book which asks the reader to perform exercises to understand the genesis of personal pain and grief. The author contends that pain may be a pathway to transformation and a more insightful and spiritual life. This reader has valued the exercises she presents and feels that anyone could benefit through this practice, particularly those with spiritual inclinations.||This is a slim volume, but the pages are filled with exercises which will take some time to work through.  This reader can assure you that there are benefits to be had by acknowledging the pain inherent in living and that attention to one’s attitude and spirit can pay dividends.  The best remedy for emotional upset is to get out of one’s head and into feeling the gratitude which is always a part of living.


Day Hiking Olympic Peninsula

If you are in western Washington and like to hike, this is an invaluable guide. The book lists 136 hikes in seven sections: Southwest Washington and Olympic Peninsula South, East, Northwest, North, West, and Coast. A map shows all the hikes. Most are in and around Olympic National Park, but many are along the coast and in other places. A table gives a quick overview of each hike with round-trip distance, rating, difficulty, whether it’s year-round, if car camping is nearby, whether it is kid- or dog-friendly, if it has exceptional wildflowers or old growth forest, whether it has beach hiking, bird watching, historical significance, and if it’s good for overnight camping. Each hike has a good write-up detailing whom to contact for passes or maps, whether mountain bikes or dogs are allowed, how to get there, what you will find on the trail, and what you might do to extend your trip. There is also a map of each hiking trail and a color photo for each. The writing is conversational and pleasant to read. The size (5”x 7”x1”) is perfect to tuck into a backpack or glovebox. Don’t leave home without it.


THE DOG SITTER

"Darkly funny, emotionally sharp, and impossible to put down, The Dog Sitter delivers the perfect blend of messy midlife reinvention, biting humor, and slow-burn tension. Readers who love complicated women, witty banter, richly flawed characters, and chaotic “what could possibly go wrong?” energy will devour Colleen Fitzroy’s unforgettable spiral into Manhattan luxury, emotional upheaval, and one very judgmental dog. Packed with razor-sharp observations, laugh-out-loud moments, and surprising heart, this novel captures the uncertainty of starting over while proving it’s never too late to reclaim your life." —Leah Tran, Manhattan Book Review


A Broken Russia Inside Me

A Broken Russia Inside Me treats memoir as witness work. A. Molotkov follows the long reach of Soviet history into private life, moving from childhood in communist Russia through the collapse that followed, then into the hard work of building a life in the United States. The book’s interest is not in tidy redemption or a familiar immigrant arc. It keeps returning to what gets carried, what gets broken, and what can still be named after a person crosses borders. That gives it authority. Family, art, memory, language, and national upheaval all press against one another, and Molotkov understands that exile is rarely just a change of address. It is a rearrangement of the mind, a shift in what can be said, and a test of how much honesty a life can hold without cracking open.

What gives the book its force is restraint. Molotkov seems strongest when he stays close to concrete detail and lets the larger emotional weight gather on its own. That keeps the memoir from turning into a sermon or confession. The prose, based on the material available, looks lean and controlled, which suits a story built from rupture. Readers who want a polished success story will probably want something else. Readers who value literary nonfiction with political texture, hard edges, and a clear eye for what survives collapse should find a lot here. The book seems especially strong where it places one person’s survival beside the failures of a state and the uneasy freedom that follows.

Recommended for readers of serious literary memoir and political nonfiction who want memory without decoration.


The Pope Must Die

Donald Anderson's The Pope Must Die reaches for Dan Brown's baroque mythology. It lands somewhere more interesting and more frustrating.

The premise earns its cover. An American-born pope, Nicholas Cassella, turned Sixtus VI, has been installed through a $35 million bribery scheme—thirty cardinals bought at a million each, with five million to the pontiff himself. Behind it: a Kuwaiti billionaire named Khalid Zahir and his Jordanian intermediary, Ahmed Bensaïd, who spotted the teenage Nicholas working at an institution for the disabled and built him into a weapon over three decades. CIA officer Amanda O'Brien and FBI agent Jordan Harrison spend 418 pages trying to stop a uranium bomb from reaching Washington while the conspiracy unravels around them. Anderson covers the distance.

The conspiracy has internal logic. The conclave bribery, the manufactured backstory, the Russian entanglement—the reveals feel earned, not conjured. The best scenes run on institutional friction. A Spanish port administrator stonewalls over a downed network. A Vatican cardinal hides a bill of lading under his bedpost. Amanda bribes a port clerk for a hundred euros when fifty would've done it, then moves on without congratulating herself. These scenes trust the reader. Anderson knows that procedure, followed or obstructed, is where thrillers live or die.

The prose is functional, not alive. Sentences do the job without music. The dialogue tightens things: Oval Office exchanges snap, and Jordan's early scenes in Madrid move. What kills the momentum is that the biography dropped before the characters earn it. Jordan Harrison gets his weight, his college position, his pickup lines, and his answer to whether he's gay before the plot asks anything of him. Four sentences of résumé where one action would do more.
Amanda escapes this. She holds a Navy captain at gunpoint to force a presidential call. She bluffs through a Situation Room standoff with the president, the secretary of defense, and a traitorous general, all on screen. She makes the wrong call twice and the right call once, and the novel doesn't stop to grade her. That restraint is the book's best instinct.

The political texture has bite. A Lutheran president collecting Eisenhower memorabilia. An American pope was sold to the public as a cultural bridge. Anderson understands that power is theater, and his best scenes run that idea hard. The central irony—that faith and democratic legitimacy can be purchased the same way—holds up across 418 pages without the novel having to announce it.

Thirty named characters is ten too many. The Bulgarian terrorists, the Russian counterfeiter, and the tattoo parlor subplot each arrive with their own momentum and drain it from the story. The climax has pressure. It drags loose ends behind it. Anderson knows his architecture. He hasn't learned to trust it.


Baker Vaughan: A Novel

"A gripping, character-driven novel that pulls you deep into the mind of a flawed man on the edge of both redemption and ruin. With sharp prose, emotional depth, and a simmering sense of tension, this story delivers the kind of slow-burning suspense that keeps readers turning pages late into the night. Fans of literary fiction with a psychological edge will be drawn to its raw honesty, moral complexity, and unforgettable voice. Baker Vaughan is the kind of novel that lingers long after the final page, asking how far we’ll go to outrun our past...and whether we ever truly can." —Scott Olsen, Manhattan Book Review


A Soldier in the Family – A Mother Confronts the Invisible Wounds of War

Nancy Ronquillo's son Matt enlisted in the Army three months after 9/11, deployed to Iraq with the 82nd Airborne in February 2003, came home with PTSD, and died in a car crash near Fort Bragg on April 26, 2004. He was twenty years old.

The book opens with a found poem: Matt's letters from Iraq assembled by his brother Andrew. It's raw and funny and devastating in two pages. Soldiers calling their diarrhea "the black ninja." An offhand mention that someone in Alpha Company shot a kid coming down the stairs with an AK-47 — "Pretty fucked up, since the kid was probably just bringing the gun down to give to us." The poem earns the Zora Neale Hurston epigraph. Ronquillo knows how to sequence material.

She refuses the simple arc. The book isn't a portrait of a hero. It's a portrait of a family carrying damage. Matt's father, Tom, a Vietnam Special Forces veteran, was walled off for thirty years by the time Matt enlists, and of how that damage travels forward. Matt doesn't join the Army because he believes in the mission. He joins because he's hungry for his father's approval. Ronquillo figures this out, standing at an ironing board, watching Tom walk downstairs. She doesn't tell him to stop Matt. She doesn't tell Matt. She calls this out, over and over, without excusing herself.

That honesty is the book's subject. Ronquillo is a nonprofit executive, not a writer by trade, and her prose slows under the weight of its earnestness. The ancestry thread in Part VI adds texture but frays the urgency built in the preceding hundred pages.

The close-in scenes hold. Matt was back from Iraq, cramped in the passenger seat in Chicago rush-hour traffic, pressing down on his mother's knee as if he needed the car to move faster, Ronquillo only understanding years later that he was flashing back to Baghdad convoys. The last family dinner, which consisted of egg rolls and buffalo wings for John's twenty-second birthday, that she recognizes in retrospect as the last time they'd all eat together. Matt handing her a dress shirt to iron on his way out to a party, both of them knowing she'll cave.

There's an unresolved tension at the center of the marriage that Ronquillo leaves unresolved. Tom's Vietnam service shadows everything — his silence, Matt's enlistment, her inability to fight back. The book doesn't wrap that into meaning. The lake house bought with Matt's life insurance, the tango dancing: all of it sits alongside the grief. The final sections tip toward the spiritual. Ronquillo listens for Matt's voice in a snowy lakeside wind. These passages are genuine, but they ask for a generosity the book has earned.

A Soldier in the Family belongs on the shelf with accounts of the Iraq War's domestic costs, not the combat literature, but the literature of the houses those soldiers came back to, and didn't.


The Thought Leadership Handbook: How the Experts Elevate Their Big Ideas—and How You Can Too

Bill Sherman, Peter Winick, and Naren Aryal

The term "thought leader" entered the lexicon in 1994. Thirty years later, it's been inflated to meaninglessness, applied with equal enthusiasm to Carol Dweck and whoever just posted a LinkedIn carousel about "owning your narrative." Sherman, Winick, and Aryal know this. Their handbook opens with a foreword that names the problem: volume doesn't equal value, and the field has let its core term drift without standards or accountability. That honesty sets up something better than it delivers.

The book's best argument is structural. Sherman and Winick spent twenty years running Thought Leadership Leverage and conducting over 700 podcast interviews. They've organized their observations into a framework: core idea, content library, market offerings, platform identity. None of these concepts is radical alone, but the authors make a useful case for why all four must work together, and why failure in one corrupts the others. The platform identity section is sharp: the discipline of reducing your body of work to two to four words that travel without you is harder than it sounds.

The case studies carry the book. Eduardo Briceño was delivering a BCG keynote from his driveway at 1:40 a.m., two cars angled to throw headlights onto a folding table while his phone served as a hotspot. Tim Sanders was losing $250,000 on corporate training programs before pivoting to licensing deals with Skillsoft. Jane Hyun built two platform identities over a twenty-year career. These stories give the frameworks a pulse.

The pacing breaks it. Three authors across 305 pages produce redundancy—the Four Elements get introduced, re-explained, walked through avatars, then summarized in checklists. The checklists give the book a self-help texture at odds with its ambitions. Chapter 12, pre-released as a manifesto, reads stronger in isolation than embedded in the full structure. The rhetoric and the workbook mechanics don't coexist.

There's also something closed-circuit about a book on thought leadership that its blurbers describe as the definitive resource on thought leadership. The 30-plus endorsements at the front from Ken Blanchard, Marshall Goldsmith, and Michael Bungay Stanier read less like praise than a social proof installation. The authors are too self-aware not to feel the irony.

The section on the "duty to speak," the obligation to share knowledge rather than keep it behind paywalls, gives the book a moral seriousness most business titles skip. The final chapters on publishing, co-authored by Aryal, make an unromantic case for why books still matter.

The Thought Leadership Handbook isn't the text it wants to be. But it's a field guide, and in a space this loud, that counts.


The Lockup Period

Thompson's debut opens at 3:46 a.m. with a man in Ferragamos dragging a body bag down apartment stairs, banging it against the wall below, checking his Patek Philippe for scratches mid-effort. Silicon Valley's self-regard meets the weight of consequence. The book spends 400 pages earning that setup.

Mario Kennedy, 25, sleeps in the attic above Prospector's Pizza, showers at the Y, drives a Camry with screaming rotors. He let two founders work out of his storage space rent-free. They built MenuAi, a restaurant platform set to IPO at Unicorn status. Mario holds nearly 900,000 shares. He needs to survive 90 days without selling, also known as the lockup period, while venture capitalist Ravi Singh works to ensure he collects nothing.

Thompson knows this world. The Lanvin sneakers at the Stanford Shopping Center, the Sand Hill VC offices with founder-friendly signage, the IPO party in SoMa where bankers drink Dom and hurl a muffin at the TV. He's been here before. That specificity is the book's first pleasure. Mario is likable, which is hard to pull off. He has a bad temper, poor judgment, and a habit of improvising deeper into trouble. He flips a registration table at a Four Seasons investor conference in chapter three. He buys Audi rentals and Lanvin sneakers he can't afford, convinced that looking wealthy is the price of admission. Thompson doesn't judge him. He shows the math.

Jamie Villanueva, the Techsmack reporter, is better company. The scenes where her storyline meets Mario's are the novel's best. Thompson keeps them opaque to each other longer than expected. Ravi Singh is where the novel goes broad. His menace is real early — the condescension, the Einstein quotes, the institutional authority turned on a man with none. As the plot accelerates, he becomes an instrument rather than a character. The money laundering, the mob investors Bonetti and Hernandez, the DOJ sweep of 39 companies and 7 venture firms — it's scaffolding, and it creaks.

The ending is earnest. Mario ends up at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, receiving a federal commendation in front of cameras, old friends, and the reporter he loves. Thompson means it. But the tidiness deflates what had been a story about belonging and what a city charges for admission.

What stays is the class architecture. In Palo Alto, a pizza man sleeping above his shop is a visible category error. The VC who quotes Einstein to dismiss him, the check-in man who calls him "the Pizza Delivery Boy" loud enough for the lobby to hear. Thompson records these moments without comment. That restraint is the book's best quality.

The Lockup Period is a caper with a criticism: the Valley's mythology of meritocracy has always had a velvet rope. For genre fiction with something to say, that's enough.


Living in the Long Shadow: Surviving a Legacy of Mental Illness

The book opens with a fact that does quiet, devastating work: Marilyn Sherman's schizophrenia announced itself the summer night she and her husband attended a stage hypnotist on Pico Boulevard in 1964, and it killed her fifteen years later, by gunshot, on a Sunday afternoon in June. Her daughter Suzanne was nineteen. Her son David opened the bedroom door.

Sherman builds the memoir backward from that death and forward from earliest memory, and the structural risk pays off. She wants to locate, with dated Kodak slides and newspaper clippings and anniversary candles, when the illness came, how long it stayed, and what it looked like from four feet off the ground. This is grief as forensics. The restraint is considerable.

The prose works best at child-height. A birthday party where Marilyn freezes with a knife raised above the cake, staring past it. Her mother is in a newspaper photo with smudged eyeliner and a caption that makes no sense. The recurring nightmare about walking to school on a holiday when no one else is out. Sherman renders the phenomenology of a frightened, watchful child with precision that earns its sentiment. She doesn't editorialize the hard moments. She trusts the images.

She's also tracking the specific terror of genetic inheritance. For years, Sherman monitored herself from what she calls "the watchtower," alert to symptoms, waiting. She has an "echo"—words repeating in her head like ripples after a pebble—and doesn't tell her mother until finally she does, and her mother, flat-eyed, says only: " We can't be late." That scene carries the book's thesis about what illness costs the people standing next to it.

Sherman isn't precious about her own survival instincts. At fourteen, she leaves her mother's house. At nineteen, she tells her grieving brother, on the phone moments after the news, it was inevitable, and he drops the receiver. She doesn't excuse herself. She's interested in how children of the mentally ill become good at a self-preservation that looks, from the outside, like coldness.

The book stumbles when it reaches for structural tidiness. The flash-forwards to the days before Marilyn's death create tension early, but they thin out, and the technique loses its voltage. The epilogue, where Sherman names statistics—sixty million Americans, 14.7 per 100,000—breaks the spell the preceding 180 pages cast. The thinking is sound. The register is wrong.

Living in the Long Shadow lands with the authority of a memoir that wasn't written quickly. Sherman spent decades earning the distance to look at this material, and it shows. The result is less therapy and more testimony. It's specific, composed, and harder to shake than it first appears.


There's a scene midway through this memoir where thirteen-year-old Suzanne Sherman comes home to find her mother sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, playing Led Zeppelin. Her mother looks up with an eerie smile. Do you hear what they're saying? They know. Sherman closes the door and never listens to that song again.

That's how this book works. It doesn't argue its case. It shows you the moment the floor drops.

Sherman grew up in the 1960s and '70s West LA with a mother whose paranoid schizophrenia went undiagnosed for years and untreated for longer. Living in the Long Shadow reconstructs that childhood from the inside, not as a survivor's manifesto, not as a clinical retrospective, but as a close read of specific, dateable memory.

The book is full of scenes that carry more weight than they first appear to. A mother who lets her thirteen-year-old daughter smoke Marlboros, then gets caught stealing cigarettes from her pack. A family dinner where Sherman calls the KFC bucket a "rare treat," and you realize what that detail is doing a sentence later, when the mother announces she's been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Sherman doesn't signal the pivot. She trusts you to feel it.

She's also good on the specific texture of a childhood spent reading adults. When Sherman's mother whispers that they have a telescope trained on their phone number, Sherman's response is to stay calm and practical. She's twelve and already managing the room. The skill is bone-deep by then. She's been practicing since she was four.

What separates this from the crowded shelf of mental illness memoirs is Sherman's refusal to sentimentalize either the mother or herself. Marilyn Sherman was a Wellesley graduate who sang Brahms on Channel 9 and marched in candlelight peace protests with a guitar strapped to her chest. She was also a woman who believed the Mafia stole her earrings. Her daughter holds both of these truths without flinching. The portrait that results is fully dimensional: a person, not a diagnosis.

Sherman is equally unsentimental about the era's failures. Thorazine paralyzed part of Marilyn's face. It killed her concentration. Her psychiatrist kept her on it anyway, then added a second antipsychotic on top. The rage in Sherman's telling of this is the cold kind — more damning for being understated.

The book has one real structural problem: the flash-forwards to the days preceding Marilyn's death lose momentum in the middle stretch. They work as a framing device early, but by the third act, they feel less like counterpoint and more like obligation.

That's a craft issue, not a vision one. The vision here is clear, and the execution is mostly equal to it. Sherman spent decades writing toward this book, and you feel that patience in the prose in the way it refuses shortcuts and the way it earns its grief scene by scene.


Unfolding the Heart: One Woman’s Quest for True Nature

The book opens with a slap. Ten-year-old Rosanne runs home to tell her mother that Jesus spoke to her in class and called her to be a nun. Her mother turns from the stove, wooden spoon dripping with sauce, and catches the girl square across the face. That scene earns a film's first act. It's visceral, efficient, and character-defining. Unfolding the Heart carries that instinct throughout. Annoni structures the book in three parts across 35 chapters, framing nearly fifty years of her life between two anchor points: a four-week solo meditation retreat at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia in 2006, and the finale involving cancer, COVID, and the terminal diagnosis of her best friend. The abbey sequences are the book's strongest material. Annoni writes herself into a cabin on a promontory above Pleasant Bay, covering the bathroom mirror with a red Durga shawl so she won't get distracted by her own reflection. It tells you everything about where she is before she says a word about it.

The real co-lead is Mike. Tall, gay, Irish-eyed, a storyteller who makes you feel like the only person in the room. He's introduced through a Frank Lloyd Wright-embossed journal he pressed into Annoni's hands at Logan Airport, and he never stops being present even after he's gone. Their forty-five-year friendship—soulmates, they agreed after consulting a psychic in 1979—is the spine the narrative wraps itself around. When Mike's diagnosis comes (Stage 4 inoperable lung cancer, metastasized to every bone in his body) and Annoni's own Stage 1 breast cancer follows two weeks later, the book earns its weight. You've sat with these two people long enough that the news lands.

Annoni writes physical experience well. Carrot-peeling became ecstasy during her first Vipassana retreat. The terror of a Canadian December night, feeling alone as a condition rather than a concept. Mike needed a walker to cross his own living room while grousing about his oxygen tank. These are the moments the book lives in.

The pacing wobbles in the middle third. Part II covers decades of therapy, teachers, and spiritual frameworks—the Diamond Approach, Mahamudra, Buddhism, Bodynamics—and reads like a syllabus. A chapter titled "Separation" and another "Running Away" gesture at dramatic ruptures but move through them faster than the reader can feel them.

The ending doesn't close with Mike's death in July 2020. Annoni continues two more years into grief, depression, and a psilocybin journey outside Boston. Other memoirs take their bow at the graveside. This one keeps going. The payoff is a stone on Annoni's desk, a gift from Mike's husband: the word TRUST carved into its surface. She runs her fingers over it each morning.

Unfolding the Heart won't satisfy readers looking for velocity or a villain. It delivers a life examined with honesty—the slaps and the silences, the red teacup placed on the counter before unpacking the clothes. Annoni's prose knows how to hold still. That's harder than it sounds.


The California Pizza Kitchen Story: How Two Federal Prosecutors Changed the Way America Eats Pizza

There's a scene early in this book where Rick Rosenfield, having fired his first chef for theft, finds himself days from opening with no menu, no kitchen lead, and a lease secured with his house. He calls his partner Larry Flax in Europe. Then he pushes forward anyway.
That instinct—stubborn, reckless, and vindicated—is what makes this book work. Rosenfield isn't writing nostalgia. He's reconstructing a startup, and he remembers every dollar and every betrayal.

The villains are villains. Ed LaDou, the chef who double-crossed the founders before they opened, then demanded his name on the marquee, then claimed credit for their empire for two decades, is rendered with bite. PepsiCo's caretakers—who gutted quality, froze growth, and sent an executive to Orange County to tell Rosenfield and Flax "We will bury you"—register as the most satisfying antagonists in a business book since Barbarians at the Gate. The private equity firm that later locked the founders out of their offices and refused to pay them a combined salary equal to the incoming CEO's earnings earns its own chapter of contempt.

The partnership at the center is what lifts the book past genre. Rosenfield and Flax finishing each other's sentences, arguing strategy across a restaurant named over breakfast at Nate'n Al's deli, taking turns convincing each other not to walk away. The book is honest that Rosenfield writes it alone, at Flax's insistence, which makes their disagreements feel real rather than staged.

The opening chapters move fast. Beverly Hills, 1985, 67 seats, a wood-burning oven bought for $2,500 out of a parking lot, Shirley MacLaine ordering a single cup of coffee on opening night before heading upstairs to see her agent, and the Barbecue Chicken Pizza selling by the hundreds within a week. Rosenfield earns his pacing here. He earns it again in the PepsiCo chapters, where the slow suffocation of a brand by a corporation that views it as a rounding error is depicted with patience.

The book bogs down in its middle stretch, during the expansion years: Steve Wynn at the Mirage, Larry naming Treasure Island, celebrity sightings accumulating like a guestbook. The structure with the main CPK story in the front, then a prequel covering Rosenfield's prosecution of mob bosses and aircraft hijackers grafted onto the back, feels like two books stapled together. The mob trials are cinematic, but reading them after the pizza story deflates momentum.

The ending earns itself. Rosenfield and Flax staging a proxy battle to reclaim their board, confronting the CEO who sneered that the two of them weren't worth one of him, and maneuvering CPK through a second IPO and eventual sale to Golden Gate Capital closes the loop. The book is about control. Who has it, who takes it, and what you'll do to get it back.


Desi 2.0: My Family's American Dream and the Cost of Never Being Enough

Sonny Garg’s Desi 2.0: My Family’s American Dream and the Cost of Never Being Enough starts with a question over saganaki in a Chicago restaurant: “What are you chasing, and why?” Garg turns it into something harder and more honest.

The book follows Garg’s life as the son of Indian immigrants, shaped by discipline, silence, and fear of failure. His father arrives from India carrying colonial trauma, poverty, and a belief that worth must come through credentials. Harvard becomes a religion. Achievement replaces affection. Mistakes threaten the structure holding the family together.

That story isn’t new. Garg gives it force through detail. He remembers criticism over water dripping down a glass. He remembers his father threatening violence with a shoe. He remembers being locked in a dark basement “to reflect on how I was a bad person.” The details matter because family systems run on repetition, not speeches.

This memoir works best when Garg stays close to experience instead of drifting into self-help language. He often describes emotional life through tech metaphors: “algorithms,” “operating systems,” “programming.” Sometimes the language fits. Sometimes it sounds corporate. The tension still belongs in the book. Garg spent years in executive culture and learned to hide damage inside polished language.

The strongest sections deal with mental illness and silence. Garg’s sister suffers a breakdown in college. Later, his father spirals into threats of suicide and violence. Nobody speaks openly. Nobody asks for help. The family protects appearances because public success matters more than stability. Garg avoids turning this into a broad statement about South Asian families. He keeps the story inside his own house, fear, and drinking. That restraint gives the memoir weight.

Chicago hangs over the memoir in useful ways. Garg treats the city as a proving ground. Corporate ambition, immigrant striving, class aspiration, and civic belonging collide there. The book understands how upward mobility can sharpen loneliness instead of curing it.

The later chapters push too hard toward redemption. The language around healing grows neat after earlier sections earned power through contradiction and discomfort. Garg still refuses to clear himself. He admits he used family pain at nonprofit fundraisers because the story raised money and raised his status. That honesty gives the memoir credibility.

What lingers isn’t the success story. It’s the inheritance of anxiety. Garg shows how children absorb ambition before they understand love.


The Eleven Primal Spaces: Awakening Next-Level Leadership by Reconnecting to What Makes Us Human

Marc D. Kirshbaum’s The Eleven Primal Spaces argues that people feel disconnected from themselves, each other, and their work. He says leadership begins with awareness, belief, trust, resilience, and conflict before strategy decks and quarterly targets.

That premise could have collapsed into corporate jargon. Kirshbaum avoids that because he writes from experience instead of abstraction. When he writes about rebuilding organizations, negotiating in Japan, or losing an acquisition to office politics, the book feels earned.

The strongest sections stay physical. Kirshbaum returns to posture, movement, ritual, rooms, and bodies. One chapter links human self-awareness to standing upright millions of years ago. Another argues that people lose purpose while staring at screens. His image of “Homo digitus” lands because readers already know the posture. You see it in airports, offices, and coffee shops.

Kirshbaum writes best about community instead of optimization. He understands institutions weaken when people stop believing they matter. The chapters on belief and trust work because they recognize something most leadership books avoid. Employees know when “culture” is a slogan in the break room.

The book also carries emotional honesty. The Steve Madden section works because it examines loyalty as a strength and a weakness. Kirshbaum avoids the language of prosecutors and consultants. He writes like someone trying to understand how ambition, friendship, ego, and identity knot together in work and life.

The book drifts at times. Some ideas repeat with different framing. A few chapters lean too hard on “next-level leadership” language from executive conferences. Some readers will want sharper attention to workplace power instead of personal transformation. Burnout is not always a spiritual crisis. Sometimes management exploits people.

The book’s argument still holds. Kirshbaum insists leadership is relational before it is operational. That matters because public language about work now treats people like software patches waiting for upgrades.

What lasts after the final page is not the leadership vocabulary. The book asks what kinds of spaces people build for each other and what those spaces produce. That question feels real instead of manufactured.


Friday Night at Atonement Café

Jim Currie’s Friday Night at Atonement Café opens like a Columbia Gorge storm. Birds gather over White Salmon. Toxic air drifts east. Then the novel turns strange and haunted.

The book lives in White Salmon and the Columbia Basin with precision. Currie doesn’t flatten the Pacific Northwest into rain, coffee, and melancholy. He writes the Gorge as a corridor shaped by dams, tribal memory, wildfire smoke, migratory birds, nuclear anxiety, and extraction.

Charlie, a widowed reporter, lives near White Salmon with Val, a corgi who serves as ballast, comic relief, and warning system. Currie understands rural loneliness. Grief settles into routines: fixing fences after elk break through, walking cemetery paths, listening to tugboats on the Columbia.

That restraint gives the opening force. A toxic event at Hanford ripples through the region. Birds gather in murmurations over the Gorge. Chinook salmon stop behaving normally. The air smells wrong. Psych patients at Douglas Hospital recover fragments of memory through music. Currie anchors every turn in regional detail: SR-14 traffic, Yakima radio, Bonneville fish ladders, orchard labor politics, Pentecostal churches, treaty violations, and the fight over the Columbia.

Richard Eaglefeather, a Yakima elder, carries the novel’s moral center. Currie avoids stereotype because Richard exists as a hard, observant man instead of a mystical guide. He remembers Hanford contamination, poisoned groundwater, and salmon collapse. When he speaks about malformed animals and fouled rivers, the novel stops sounding speculative and starts sounding historical.

Nature drives the book. Swifts twist above White Salmon like weather instruments. Coyotes loot abandoned Safeway lots after evacuation orders. Geese cross the river while human systems fail beneath them. Currie keeps asking what the nonhuman world notices before people do.

The prose can strain. Currie stacks metaphors until some sentences buckle. Dialogue sometimes sounds polished past speech. A few passages drift into essay. Still, the writing has conviction. Currie wrestles regional questions into story instead of using the Northwest as decoration.

The music scenes carry the most force. Woolly Mammoth, the damaged rock band recovering memory through improvisation, never feels sentimental. Currie treats music as physical memory. Fingers remember before language does.

Romance enters through absence. Charlie’s dead wife, Rosy, shapes every page through memory and habit. Their marriage rests on work, argument, and shared conscience. The grief feels lived-in.

The novel’s strongest achievement is atmosphere. Currie captures the mid-Columbia as beautiful, contaminated, divided, and restless. Disaster always feels one wind change away.


Murder to Movies: The Real Story Behind Hollywood's Darkest Films

Paul Drexler knows his way around a crime scene. The San Francisco historian behind Notorious San Francisco has spent decades reconstructing the city's ugliest chapters for the Examiner. Murder to Movies is his attempt to go wider—15 chapters, 15 cases, 15 films, spanning from 1931 Cagney pictures to Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder to Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. The premise is good: hold a movie up against its source crime and see what Hollywood got wrong, softened, or buried.

When Drexler stays close to that premise, the book delivers. The Zodiac chapter is the best thing here; not the familiar Bay Area material but the Korean case, the 1986 Hwaseong serial murders that Bong adapted more than a decade before Lee Choon-jae's DNA caught him in 2018. The comparison is gripping because Bong made Memories of Murder without a solution, so the film's final shot, where Park Doo-man stares into the camera, turns out to be something weirder and sadder than an artistic choice. Drexler earns that reveal.

The chapter on Killers of the Flower Moon is honest work. He treats the Osage murders with the gravity they deserve and quotes Osage actor Christopher Cote's discomfort with the film's sympathy for Ernest Burkhart without resolving it. The observation that DiCaprio's casting reassigned the story's moral center, away from FBI agent Tom White, away from Mollie Burkhart, toward the man who helped poison her family, is the kind of structural critique the book does best.

Murder to Movies can't decide whether it's a film-criticism project, a true-crime compendium, or a history lecture, and the seams show. Several chapters, including Rasputin, Henri Landru, and the Brabant Killers, run long on historical reconstruction and short on the promised cinematic reckoning. Drexler spends six dense pages on Landru's fraud scheme and two paragraphs on what Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux does with the material. The Sada Abe chapter gets a sharp treatment of its cultural context, then ends abruptly.

The prose is reliable rather than distinctive. Dry, well-paced, funny in a deadpan way, but it rarely stops you cold.

A San Francisco consciousness runs through everything, from the Barbara Graham gas chamber case to the Zodiac letters arriving at the Chronicle. When Drexler writes about the city's geography—Presidio Heights, the Examiner building, the weight of the gas chamber at San Quentin—you feel it. When he writes about Belgium or prewar Japan, the texture thins.

For readers who've never dug into the real cases behind these films, Murder to Movies is a useful primer. For anyone who's read Grann on the Osage or Graysmith on Zodiac, the novelty runs thin by the midpoint. Drexler is a thoughtful tour guide who knows the territory better in some rooms than others, and is honest enough to tell you when the movie lied.


Cadillac Wheels: A country music–inspired thriller

Scott Saxberg's second novel has a compelling premise: a Calgary private equity kingpin, Jack Strong, stumbles upon a homeless busker whose voice sounds like his murdered son's. The book bills itself as Dexter meets Johnny Cash, which is either a pitch-perfect logline or a promise the novel can't keep. It's both.

The structural conceit is clever. Jack steals Tanner Banks's notebooks and reads them in a tent while planning his revenge. The thriller's present tense and Tanner's backstory unspool together, each page of the notebooks a ticking clock. The device should generate dread. It generates moderate dread. Saxberg understands suspense. He cuts chapters at the right moments and plants sirens at the right distances, but the machinery is visible in a way that flattens the effect. The prose varies wildly. When Saxberg is grounded in physical detail (the "2001 Brunello di Montalcino" in Jack's backpack, the squirrel's rat-ta-ta-ta cutting through his reverie), the writing earns its keep. When he reaches for interiority, Jack's grief spiraling back to Aiden, the sentences turn declarative and inert, telling us that Jack's "blood filled with fire" rather than letting the fire catch. Tanner's chapters are warmer and more alive. His disintegration after a car accident kills his girlfriend, Maddy, has texture, especially in the Saskatchewan-town details: the Shaunavon Co-op parking lot, the Roughriders cap he can't bring himself to wear.

The country music architecture is this book's most interesting and most exhausting quality. Saxberg wrote twenty-plus original songs performed by Tanner Banks, printed in full in an appendix and available as recordings, a hybrid-media experiment. Some of the lyrics work ("Bridge City summers are for cowboys / And strong women"). Many read like first drafts. The playlist threading each chapter (Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Steve Earle, Florida Georgia Line) telegraphs the emotional register so hard the prose barely needs to do the work—and sometimes doesn't.

Jack is the more original creation: a sociopath whose grief is real, whose menace is cultivated with discipline, whose code of patience reads as Albertan in its energy-sector precision. The business detail—private equity deals, alibi construction, a fixer named Riley Keller—has the specificity of someone who has lived in those rooms. That specificity is where Saxberg's talent lives.

This isn't a cold-blooded genre machine. It's a grief novel wearing a thriller's hat. The ambition is real. The execution is uneven. The Calgary setting, underused in literary fiction, is a contribution.

A strong editorial pass and trust in the reader would have made this more powerful. Cadillac Wheels is a promising second novel.


Country Club Summer

"Country Club Summer blends affluence, family drama, and female perspective into a novel that understands how much can be hidden inside polished routines. It captures the quiet unraveling of three women’s lives—their loyalties tested, their identities shifting, and the unspoken weight of expectation pressing in until the truth can no longer stay buried. Rachel Cullen keeps the story readable and sharp, giving readers a summer novel with gossip, tension, and a little bite." —Samantha Olsen, Manhattan Book Review


Metal Viper

Metal Viper opens with a twelve-year-old boy folding naan into his father's poems. Under Myanmar's 2021 coup, that's not a metaphor — it's how the poems travel. Soldiers smash the bakery window twenty pages in, drag the baker-poet Dampa to Insein Prison, and shackle his son Vika beside him. The novel earns its premise fast.

Kae Zhang carries the rest of it. She's 4'11½", founder of Article 5, operating out of Geneva on a budget that makes her financial officer Anan grind his teeth. Her father never thought she was enough. She's not fearless (she'll tell you that herself), but she drives eight hours through burnt villages and Tatmadaw checkpoints to pull a twelve-year-old out of the worst prison in Southeast Asia. That's the book's engine: not heroism, but the refusal to stay home.

The people around her are the best thing Lovett and Schultz do. Anan is a Persian Zoroastrian refugee from post-revolution Iran, keeping Article 5 solvent through worry and spreadsheets. Neenie holds down the Geneva office, nonbinary, scarred above the right eye from a beating they don't cover with makeup, coordinating logistics across three time zones. Reinhardt Allen, Kae's mentor, runs his operations from a guesthouse in Mae Sot, where the Singha beer has been on order for years. He calls in a favor from a Thai military lieutenant at 4 a.m. and doesn't explain the relationship. Nobody in this book feels invented. They feel like the actual strange collection of people who do this work.

The politics land without sermonizing. The Tatmadaw burn villages and fire shoulder-launched rockets at civilians. A British teak executive named Martin Hughes offers Kae tea and a toilet while his private security force patrols the perimeter of an illegal logging operation. The novel puts both things on the same road and lets you do the math.

The weak spots are real. The backstory chapters — Kae's UCLA years, her father's disappointment, how she met Reinhardt at a Baskin-Robbins in Torrance — stall the momentum right when the drive into Myanmar should be pulling hardest. The overland journey from Mae Sot to Yangon runs thirty pages too long. The co-authorship shows occasionally: one voice wants interiority, the other wants pacing, and they don't always agree on which scene they're in.

None of that kills the book. This is a novel about people who believe Article 5 of the UN Human Rights resolution still means something — and who cross a military checkpoint to prove it. The premise isn't safe, and the execution isn't clean. It mostly works anyway, which is more than most books manage. Metal Viper is uneven, honest, and built around a protagonist who earns every page. Read it for the ensemble. Forgive the detours.


Metal Viper

There's a moment early in Metal Viper when Kae Zhang, standing at the window of her Geneva office, watches diplomatic traffic roll toward the UN complex and sees only the twelve-year-old boy in Insein Prison. That's the book's moral center, not the geopolitics, not the thriller machinery, but the weight of one specific child in one specific cell.

Lovett and Schultz are doing something structurally restless here. The novel moves between political thriller, character study, and what you might call diaspora fiction: the story of people who belong nowhere fully and have turned that condition into a vocation. Kae is Chinese-American, raised in San Marino, ordained in New Haven, married in Geneva, fighting a coup in Yangon. Her colleague Anan fled Iran as a boy after the Ayatollah's forces imprisoned his banker father. Neenie survived institutional violence in a country the novel doesn't name. Sahir left Turkey, studied Mayan philosophy in the Yucatan, and calls himself a cultural attaché. These aren't diversity credentials. They're the actual biographies of people who end up doing human rights work, people for whom the question of who deserves protection was answered by their own childhoods.

The prose is spare without being cold. Sentences carry weight without straining for it. A burnt village appears as scorched earth glimpsed through a truck window; the authors don't editorialize. A British teak executive named Martin Hughes offers tea and a clean toilet while his private security force patrols the fence line of an illegal logging camp. The scene does more political work than a paragraph of argument could.

The genre blending doesn't always hold. The thriller structure wants momentum, but the character study keeps calling for stillness — Kae praying at a banyan tree at 3 a.m., Anan watching a tracking screen in Geneva, Reinhardt drinking Leo Beer at his regular table in Mae Sot with his back to the wall. These scenes are the best writing in the book. They also slow it. Whether that's a flaw depends on what you came for.

The backstory chapters, such as Kae's father, her UCLA years, the Baskin-Robbins in Torrance where she first met Reinhardt, arrive at the wrong moments. The information matters. The placement doesn't. A tighter edit would have woven it in rather than stopping to deliver it.

The book earns its ending. The resolution isn't triumphant, which is honest. The systems that arrested Dampa and Vika are still standing. What shifts is smaller and, for that reason, more believable. Lovett and Schultz understand that human rights work doesn't end. It just accumulates, like Kae's office wall of talismans from dictators and shamans and everyone in between who handed her something to carry.

Metal Viperis a genre hybrid that earns its ambition more often than not. The diaspora texture is the real achievement.


Metal Viper

The jungle in Metal Viper is not a backdrop. It presses against the story: teak forests stripped to grey mud, villages reduced to scorched earth glimpsed through a truck window, the smell of wet ash threading through bullet-proof glass. Lovett and Schultz write landscape the way Pacific Northwest writers write rain: not as weather but as a moral condition.

The novel is set almost entirely in Myanmar and Thailand, but its ecological conscience will feel familiar to readers here. The illegal teak trade, including Tatmadaw officers running extraction operations under corporate cover, a British company called NaturTeak Ltd. flying a helicopter over a compound guarded by private security, sits alongside the human rights abuses without comment. The book trusts you to draw the line between the two. Old-growth forests and disappeared poets share the same economy of violence. That's the kind of political texture that earns its complexity rather than announcing it.

Kae Zhang, the novel's protagonist, runs Article 5 out of Geneva. She's Chinese-American, raised in southern California, trained at Yale, small enough that people underestimate her and sharp enough to use it. She enters Myanmar through the Thai border town of Mae Sot, crossing the Friendship Bridge over the Moei River at dawn, watching a man in a longtail boat below, and the border crossing is one of the book's best passages. Two countries, one river, the same desperate traffic moving in both directions. The authors have clearly been there.

The overland drive from Mae Sot to Yangon is where the novel's environmental writing peaks. Teak forests give way to clearcut, clearcut gives way to jungle again, and then smoke. The road itself is a kind of character: pockmarked, rerouted, haunted by the wrecked vehicles the Tatmadaw pushed to the shoulder. The authors track Kae's psychological state through what she can see from the window, which is a sound instinct. It keeps the interiority grounded.

The ensemble that surrounds Kae — Anan, the anxious financial officer, Neenie, the nonbinary office coordinator, scarred and unashamed, Reinhardt Allen drinking Leo Beer in Mae Sot with his back to the wall — is drawn with the kind of specificity that suggests the authors know people like this. The character work is better than the plotting. The backstory chapters, which arrive mid-journey to explain how Kae and Reinhardt first met, break the drive's momentum at exactly the wrong moment.

The ending is modest and honest. The systems that crushed Dampa and Vika are intact at the end. What changes is narrow and specific and costs something. Metal Viper is a political thriller that takes its politics from the ground up. It's uneven, and it's serious, and it knows which forests it's talking about.


Metal Viper

Here's the question I keep coming back to with Metal Viper: would I hand it to a friend? Yes. With one caveat: give them the first fifty pages and tell them to stay with it, because the book takes a little while to find its stride.

The story starts with a father and his twelve-year-old son. Dampa bakes bread in Yangon and writes poems, and after Myanmar's 2021 military coup, those poems get him arrested. His son Vika goes with him, shackled, to Insein Prison, one of the worst places on earth. That image of a child folding his father's words into naan, not knowing it'll be the last time he stands in that shop, is the emotional hook the whole novel hangs on. It works.

Kae Zhang flies in to help. She runs Article 5, a human rights organization named after the UN resolution that prohibits torture. She's small and has the kind of relentless energy that makes people around her simultaneously grateful and exhausted. Her husband, Peter, is back in Geneva with their two boys, tracking her location on a monitor David built from secondhand equipment. Her son Albert, nearly thirteen, punches a bully at school and calls her to report it. Her younger son Ishi draws her a T-Rex. The family scenes are brief, but they land. Kae carries that weight, the guilt of the necessary absence, without the book making a production of it.

The team she travels with is the warmest part of the novel. Anan worries about money and watches Kae's back. Reinhardt, her old mentor, meets them at a guesthouse in Thailand, smelling of last night and calling in favors from people he won't explain. These relationships feel lived-in.

Where the book loses some readers is the middle stretch. The drive from the Thai border to Yangon is tense and vividly drawn — burnt villages, military checkpoints, an unexpected detour through an illegal logging camp — but it runs long. A few of those miles could have been cut without losing anything. The backstory chapters, which explain how Kae became Kae, arrive at moments when the plot has built up momentum it can't afford to lose.

The resolution is honest. The book doesn't promise justice. It shows people who show up anyway, which is a different and more believable thing.

If you've ever read a news story about Myanmar and wanted to understand what it looks like on the ground — not in statistics but in one family, one lawyer, one overland drive through a country coming apart — this is the book. It's imperfect, and it matters. Hand it to someone.
This book is a human rights thriller with real heart. The pacing stumbles in the middle, but the family at the center of it, both Vika's and Kae's, makes it worth the whole trip.


From Sea to Summit: Hiking Myself to Healing

Liberty moved back to Orcas Island in 2020 with a resting heart rate of 180 bpm, micro-clots in all ten toes, and a ME/CFS diagnosis her doctor summarized with a shrug: "Don't exercise." She'd been an endurance rider, a freediver, a certified mermaid instructor. The crash was total, and the distance between who she was and what her body could now do was, by any measure, humiliating.

Her recovery plan was a virtual 120-mile hiking challenge on Moran State Park's trails — the kind of goal that sounds modest until you're falling asleep against a tree on the first steep one while your dog waits and the forest does nothing to acknowledge your suffering. She goes home. She comes back the next week.

The Orcas Island material is the strongest thing here, and Liberty is smart enough to let the place do some of the work. She logs 200-plus orca sightings a year as a Salish Sea naturalist, giving behavioral talks while Southern Residents hunt off the bow. Park founder Robert Moran was told he had a year to live in 1911 and died decades later on the same trails she's relearning to walk — a parallel Liberty never underlines, which is exactly why it lands. In a Norwegian fjord, a baby orca drops a fish in front of her and swims a figure-eight. Liberty calls it grace and moves on, which is the right instinct.

The childhood chapters are brutal and load-bearing. Her stepmother bought medicine for Liberty's sick fish, refused to put it in the tank, and watched them die one by one — a detail that tells you everything about the household's relationship to control. Liberty survived by deciding early that every adult diagnosis of her limitations was a lie, and that refusal becomes a theory of self-determination she spends the rest of the book field-testing. It's more interesting than most trauma backstories because the stakes are legible: either she was right to disbelieve them, or she wasn't.

The geography is the book's real problem. Between Orcas Island and Mount Olympus, Liberty takes the reader through Alaska, Mongolia, Ethiopia, Peru, Norway, Malta, and Sicily. Each chapter is competent, but most of them add weight without adding lift, and the cumulative effect is a book that keeps interrupting its own best argument. A tighter edit — cutting half the travel sections — would make this twice the memoir it currently is. Liberty earns the Olympus summit through four years of grinding work on island trails. She doesn't need the frequent-flier miles to prove it.

When the book finally gets to Olympus, it delivers. She trains with a pack stuffed with books, crosses the Blue Glacier before dawn in crampons, and wedges her body between two outcroppings when the handholds run out on the summit pitch. At the top, she meets a stranger who broke his leg on this same climb a year ago, got helicoptered out, and came back. They fist-bump, and it's the clearest image in the book of what Liberty is actually arguing: that returning to the thing that broke you is the whole point, not the summit itself.

At 57,000 words, it needs a harder edit, but the core — a specific woman on specific trails, clawing back a specific life — is honest work, and honest is harder than it looks in this genre.


The Good Neighbor

"A beautifully written and deeply moving novel, The Good Neighbor brings a timeless message to life through unforgettable characters and powerful moments of compassion. From Mireya’s quiet courage and selfless act of kindness on a cold Christmas Eve to Arlen’s life-altering journey that challenges everything he thought he understood about faith, Peter B. Unger crafts a story rich with heart and meaning. The novel’s vivid storytelling and emotional depth shine through scenes of struggle, grace, and unexpected connection, inviting readers to reflect on what it truly means to love one another. Uplifting, thought-provoking, and profoundly inspiring, this is a story that lingers long after the final page." —Jack Davis, Los Angeles Book Review


A Star-Cursed Heart

A Star-Cursed Heart by Annie Mare is a sweeping, emotionally charged fantasy that blends star-crossed romance, family legacy, and supernatural suspense into something unforgettable. The centuries-old curse at the center of the story gives the novel a rich gothic pulse, while the connection between Ashes and Lucy provides its aching heart. Mare crafts two heroines you can’t help but root for, torn between duty and desire, fate and freedom. The Salem-era origins add depth, and the modern storyline moves with urgency and passion. Tender, haunting, and fiercely romantic, this is a beautifully imagined queer fantasy about choosing love over fear.


The LGBTQ Almanac

If queer history were a constellation, The LGBTQ Almanac by Deborah G. Felder would be the night sky—vast, glittering, and full of stories waiting to be traced. This expansive collection introduces readers to hundreds of figures across disciplines, blending biography with cultural insight. What impressed me most is its accessibility; you can dip in anywhere and emerge with a newfound sense of connection. From activists to artists, the book celebrates both household names and overlooked pioneers. It’s not just a reference guide—it’s a vibrant archive that insists queer contributions have always been central, never peripheral.


The Lord of the Wood

E. M. Anderson’s The Lord of the Wood feels like stepping into an enchanted fairytale where the magic has started to rot around the edges. Arthur and Ira’s relationship develops with a quiet sincerity that makes the growing horror hit even harder as the forest tightens its grip around them. The novel’s atmosphere is its greatest strength: eerie birds, cursed landscapes, and the slow transformation overtaking Ira all create a constant sense of unease beneath the cozy fantasy surface. Anderson writes loneliness and yearning with remarkable warmth, making the romance feel earned amid the danger. By the final chapters, the story becomes both heartbreaking and strangely hopeful, like candlelight flickering inside a haunted ruin.


Phases

Brandy’s Phases is a moving and deeply personal memoir that offers far more than celebrity stories. With honesty and grace, Brandy reflects on her rise from singing in Mississippi churches to becoming a global star, while also revealing the emotional cost of fame. Fans will love the behind-the-scenes moments involving iconic music, television, and legends like Whitney Houston, but the heart of the book lies in Brandy’s vulnerability. She writes candidly about pressure, self-doubt, and the long road to healing. Phases is inspiring, heartfelt, and empowering, showing the strength it takes to reclaim your voice and define yourself on your own terms.


America's Founding Myths...And What REALLY Happened

Paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes, life is infinitely stranger – and far more layered – than anything the mind of man could invent.  The familiar stories of America’s founding have long been polished into clean, inspiring legends.  Yet the actual events, with all their human contradictions, messy compromises, and unexpected twists, prove richer, more nuanced, and ultimately more compelling than the simplified myths.

This volume examines fifteen such founding myths in an accessible format suitable for older elementary and middle school readers.  Each double-page spread addresses one legend.  On the flap is the legend.  Lifting the flap reveals the more complex historical record (as currently understood), along with discussions of the myth’s origins and enduring appeal.  The remainder of the spread provides supporting factoids that illuminate the layers beneath the legend.  Thought-provoking questions are interspersed throughout, encouraging readers to evaluate evidence and form their own conclusions.  Select spreads also include true-or-false statements, with historical assessments provided under the flap.

The illustrations are vivid and engaging, enhancing the discussion of each myth’s complexity while adding visual interest.  The interactive flap format further promotes active engagement with the material.

Overall, this is a well-researched and thoughtfully designed book.  As it does require a background in American history, it is recommended for readers from older elementary students through adults.


Owl King

Bex Hogan’s Owl King is a darkly enchanting YA fantasy filled with danger, sisterhood, and folklore-rich magic. Set in the same faery world as Nettle, the novel follows Ilsette as she risks everything to save her sister Lyla from the sinister Owl King, who steals the power of his brides. Hogan creates a vivid, atmospheric world of talismans, rival realms, and perilous bargains, while the emotional bond between the sisters gives the story its beating heart. Fast-paced yet lyrical, Owl King blends adventure with meaningful choices about love and sacrifice, making it a captivating coming-of-age fantasy readers will devour.


Conversion Therapy Dropout

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez,Shauna Niequist

There’s a quiet intensity running through Conversion Therapy Dropout by Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez that makes it impossible to look away. This memoir doesn’t just recount trauma—it interrogates the systems that made that trauma possible. Rodriguez’s years within evangelical megachurch culture are rendered with striking honesty, exposing contradictions between preached love and practiced exclusion. Yet what lingers most is the author’s reclamation of faith on his own terms. The book unfolds as both reckoning and release, offering readers a deeply personal portrait of survival, identity, and the courage it takes to rebuild a life from the ground up.


Hubris

The Parthenon is one of the most recognizable ancient buildings in Athens. It has adorned postcards, pictures, art and one of the main attractions for tourists visiting Athens but the story of how it came to be and how it came to define Athens is the story of this new book by David Stuttard. || This is more than just a straight forward biography of a building and how it changed a community over time, as it was built thousands of years ago the information about how it came to be has become more myth and legend than fact; though often there are facts in the myths of the past. This book weaves a story of how Athens rose in power, how it viewed the mountain the Parthenon and used it in its sacred activities and eventually how the community decided to raise a massive work on top of the mountain, in a way in a fit of hubris pride. || This work is easily accessible for the average reader, the writing and story will keep readers engaged.


Cute FACTopia!

Cute FACTopia! is the latest book in the FACTopia series that features hundreds of facts (some books have over 400, while this one includes 200 "super sweet" facts). This book, along with the others, is a trivia lover's dream, with a variety of unique facts about anything and everything. I especially liked this FACTopia book because it is "cute" and includes many facts about animals, and I particularly liked the ones about cats. The facts are "short and sweet," and the illustrations are complementary to the text, as well as bright, colorful, and pleasing to look at. I think people aged 10 and older would be able to understand this book best and get the most enjoyment from it because it will help to know some general things beforehand (locations of states/places, what some animals are, types of food, etc.).


Decomposition Book

Few debuts capture emotional chaos as sharply as Decomposition Book by Sara Van Os. Savannah’s grief, isolation, and obsession unravel in increasingly surreal ways after she discovers Ava’s body in the woods, and the novel thrives in that blurry space between psychological breakdown and supernatural haunting. Van Os writes with razor-sharp humor one moment and devastating vulnerability the next, creating a narrator who feels painfully real even as reality itself starts slipping away. The connection between Savannah and Ava becomes oddly intimate, unsettling, and tragic all at once. Fans of messy queer horror stories filled with emotional volatility and ghostly ambiguity will absolutely devour this book. It’s unsettling in a way that sneaks under your skin slowly.


//A Fugitive's History of the Known Universe// by Nadia Afifi is the follow-up novel to A Rebel's History of Mars. Like the series' first novel, this book follows a dual timeline. In one, we follow Azad, a lovable but thoroughly neurotic fugitive who, with the help of his sister and the rest of the crew of the Magreb, uncovers the troubling history surrounding the colonization of the planet Nabatea. In the other, we follow Dr. Saadia Hamza, the scientist who discovered the wormhole that made Nabatea's colonization possible and the mother of the planet's founder and first leader, the charismatic yet ruthless Barrett Hamza.

//A Fugitive's History of the Known Universe// has it all. Intriguing world-building, space travel, extraterrestrial colonization, and space pirates. Afifi also delves into the ruthlessness of building a new society in a foreign land. As extensive and engaging as the world-building is, it takes a backseat to her characters, each of whom is richly developed. Even though this is a sequel, Afifi gives enough background that this story can work as a stand-alone novel, but much of the world-building makes more sense when read as book two.  This novel is perfect for fans of character-driven political sci-fi thrillers.


Millie Fleur's Pumpkin Problem

Millie is back with a brand new and super secret friend. This friend helps Millie to teach the people of Garden Glen that spring is not the only time for planting. When Millie's friend splatters pumpkin seeds and magic dirt the turn the town into their very own pumpkin patch. This is great for everyone.

I really like this series and this book. My favorite part is Millie's friend who spills the seeds and dirt. I want to keep this part a secret, so you have to read this book to see who makes a mess with Millie. My favorite part is the town being a pumpkin patch. I hope to try to grow my own pumpkins this year. This is a very fun book, and I can't wait to see more!


This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews is an absolute feast for fantasy readers, clever, thrilling, and wildly entertaining from the first page. The premise of Maggie waking inside her favorite unfinished fantasy series is irresistible, and the story delivers on every promise with sharp humor, high-stakes politics, and nonstop momentum. Maggie is a fantastic heroine, using wit and book knowledge to survive a brutal world of scheming nobles and dangerous magic. Andrews balances sweeping adventure with sparkling character dynamics, especially the slow-burn romantic tension woven throughout. Bold, addictive, and brilliantly fun, this is portal fantasy at its most exhilarating.


Speaking of America

As America approaches a historic milestone birthday, the 250th, many publishers are putting out history books that help the average American connect with history, especially American history and the country’s’ role in the world. This book collects the interviews that David Rubenstein conducted at the Library of Congress as part of the Congressional Dialogue series for the first time. Rubenstein interviews historians, documentarians, journalists and writers who have written, or documented, history over the past several years. Each interview is preceded by a short introduction about the person being interviewed and what work they are being interviewed about. Each interview is a wide ranging discussion about that topic and helps to bring the story further to life. || This might be too niche of a book for some readers, but it is interesting to hear authors in their own words discussing a work they have spent many hours studying on. In a way it is like reading the transcript of a podcast interview when you can’t find the interview anymore. Fans of history will enjoy this book.


Paula Cappa’s Wolf Magick, Secret Mysteries of Draakensky has the feel of a book built from weather, instinct, and old spells that never quite go dormant. It moves through Marc and Charlotte’s world with a steady pull, but the real force here is Draakensky itself, a place that seems to remember everything that has ever been done on it.

Cappa writes with a sure hand for atmosphere. She knows how to load a scene with little signals, a strange silence in the trees, a pendant gone missing, a path that feels ordinary until it doesn’t. The effect is cumulative. You keep turning the pages because the novel keeps hinting that something older, stranger, and harder to control is gathering just out of sight.

What gives the book its charge is the way it folds love, danger, and enchantment into the same weather system. The romance matters, but so does the sense that every choice is happening inside a landscape with its own rules. Wolves, ravines, windmills, woods, and threshold places keep showing up because this story understands that the physical world is never just physical. It’s loaded, and it watches back.

The prose leans toward the lyrical, but it doesn’t float away. Cappa stays close to sensation, to tension in the body, to the uneasy recognition that a home can become a test. That keeps the novel grounded even when it moves into mythic territory. The mystery unfolds like a trail in shifting light, with enough menace and enough wonder to keep both sides alive.

Wolf Magick will not be for readers who want everything explained in neat, practical terms. It wants something older than that. It wants to be felt, not just followed. If you like your fiction steeped in folklore, charged with romance, and shaped by the idea that a place can hold memory like a living thing, this book has the goods.


Defending the Swamp Dragon

//Defending the Swamp Dragon// is the thirty-first book in the //Dragon Masters// series that continues Drake and Worm's adventures with the other dragon masters and allies. In //Swamp Dragon//, they find a dragon master named Kinti, who needs their help to convince the townsfolk that the Swamp Dragon didn't attack her, that it was trying to help her. At the same time, people are getting confused about who the bad guy is - the Swamp Dragon or the mystical creature found nearby.

 Book thirty-one is another exciting adventure, but, in my opinion, not as exciting as previous books, particularly when Maldred was still around. I might be getting a little on the older end for the audience for these books, but I will still stick with each new one that comes out and adjust my expectations based on these books for younger readers and other dragon books geared for older readers.


The Things I Agreed To

"The Things I Agreed To opens like a psychological thriller and turns into a sharp look at what happens when a private book release gets pulled into public scrutiny. Jacob Anthony Rose builds the pressure with care, letting silence, speculation, and professional fallout do the damage before anyone says the quiet part out loud. It’s tense, controlled, and interested in the cost of being read too closely." —Samantha Olsen, San Francisco Book Review


The Hive

Wendy Smolen’s The Hive starts with a small act of rebellion and grows into something larger, messier, and a lot more human. What begins as a college friendship, bad decisions, and the easy rush of being young turns into a long study of loyalty, envy, class, marriage, motherhood, and the strange ways a tight circle can become both shelter and trap.

Smolen writes with confidence about women who know one another too well. The Hive is full of the little signals that make a friendship last, and the little slights that make it wobble. Who gets the first call. Who gets left out. Who gets the attention. Who gets to be easy, funny, successful, admired, or forgiven. The book doesn’t flatten those dynamics into simple good-guys-and-bad-guys territory. It lets them stay jagged.

Smolen understands that long friendships are never just about affection. They’re about memory, competition, obligation, and the specific kind of honesty that only shows up when people have spent years together. The women in this novel are funny, sharp, vain, loyal, hurtful, generous, and wounded, often in the same scene. That mix gives the story its bite.

The novel also has real texture around family life and Jewish identity. Smolen keeps pulling the reader back to the rituals, the jokes, the food, the pressure to perform, and the way every family story becomes part of a larger identity story. Those details matter because they give the book a lived-in feel. This isn’t friendship in the abstract. It’s friendship with genealogy, history, and baggage attached.

The writing is strongest when Smolen lets the social pressure build quietly. A dinner. A wedding. A phone call. A comment that lands a second too late. She knows how quickly an old bond can turn tense, and how hard it is to separate genuine love from old habit. That tension gives the novel its movement. You keep reading because the emotional stakes keep shifting under your feet.

The Hive is less interested in tidy resolution than in the long aftermath of belonging. It knows that some friendships survive because people are kind. Others survive because they are stubborn. The best ones survive because they are both. Smolen has written a smart, bruised novel about what it costs to stay in the same hive for so long.