Swish by Tom Carter is a paranormal romance (PNR) for young adult readers. Adopted by her uncle, Abigail Lewis is bullied at high school. With only one friend, Abby suffers mean-spirited pranks at school and physical abuse at home. Her life seems bleak until she meets a new neighborhood boy, […]
Paula Chaffee Scardamalia’s The Tempting Voice is a romance about a hidden Greek mythological world that co-exists with ours. The novel explores the tropes of forbidden love, personal achievement, the positive and negative of family, and monstrous enemies. The novel alternates point-of-view between two main characters – Nik and Marie […]
Grandfather’s Whispers, a novel by Stacy N. Elliott, examines in prose the burden that some of us bear through life. The novel is a magical realism story about Sarah, a seventeen-year-old girl, and her grandfather, Ralph. A group of raucous boys start off Sarah’s day by running her off the […]
C. Rae D’Arc’s Dead and Back Again series chronicles the life of private investigator Aeron Spade, also known as Earl Aeron Fromm, the Haunted, of Margen. He lives in the magical world of Novel where each “land” represents a literary genre. For example, on the map “Fantasy” exists across the […]
I’ve read several H.L. Burke’s novels before, including the excellent Heart of Curiosity, so I looked forward to her steampunk adventure of Nyssa Glass in the House of Mirrors. I had never read any of the other Nyssa Glass offerings and was intrigued by the title. This steampunk novella met […]
Benjamin Stevenson wins the award for most eye-catching title in recent memory for Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone. Admit that pairing this wordy title with a murder mystery has to intrigue mystery bibliophiles everywhere. But what’s in a name, or title? Does this book hold up beyond its […]
Peaflower by Jessica Tanner is one of the novellas in a series of retellings of fairy tales. This time, it’s The Princess and the Pea, or is it? This offering not only retells The Princess and the Pea in a new and refreshing way, but incorporates other fairy tales into […]
Simone St. James’ novel of murdered girls and cheap motels, The Sun Down Motel, is both a crime and a speculative thriller, similar to The Lovely Bones. The book is told from two perspectives across two time periods. In 1982, Vivian Delaney, or Viv, leaves home to make it big […]
The October Society concludes in this trilogy of spooky campfire tales (are there any other kinds of spooky tales?) told by mysterious children. All the books in this series are styled after a television show, complete with commercial interruptions. Each child tells a scary story to the others. In the […]
Stefanie Gilmour’s Cage the Wolf is the second in the Alex Steward series of a young woman dealing with the duality of lycanthropy. In this world, the transformation isn’t automatic or strictly based on a moon phase. The afflicted person has some measure of control, even more with practice. Alex […]