In Carla Beene’s The Twin Within, our seventh-grade protagonist, Cassie Cortez, has a tough time navigating school in Santa Fe while dealing with cruel school bullies and the physical limitations of mild cerebral palsy. Although her parents provide her with a loving home, Cassie has...

In Herb Guggenheim’s The Goldbach Conjecture, Soleri College enters 2023 as an experimental public liberal arts school where students shape much of their education through pass/fail academic contracts. Its progressive culture has long welcomed students who see themselves as different, but Governor Randall Delago wants...

The Ashes of Us by Ashley Baker is a compelling novel. Very early one morning, Dr. David McCall, a clinical and anatomical pathologist, receives a strange phone call. He is informed that his nineteen-year-old daughter, Addison McCall, is in the hospital. She was assaulted. He...

The Picture Business: Stories About the People Who Make the Movies is an insider’s look at Hollywood. In it, best-selling author Elaine Kagan, who is also a film and television actress, uses her firsthand experience in show business as the template for her fictional (though...

In Jared Morrison’s The Crossing, a struggling marketing executive, Ben Regan, looks back on the final year of his best friend, Taylor Thorne, a struggling screenwriter whose luck changes when a woman named Natalie Pierce shows up briefly at the corner of Sunset and Marmont,...

A. M. Linden’s novel, The Sheriff: The Druid Chronicles, Book Three, is a mix of intriguing historical fiction and fantasy, set in early medieval Britain in the eighth century. The story is set in two neighboring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Atheldom and Derthwald. The central character is...

In To Die For by Audrey Steidl, Dei Fields immediately decides that Mika St. John is the boy she must have when he walks into class at McKinley High School. Mika is already dating someone, but that hardly matters to Dei. Mika has grown up...

The Catalysts 2: Silent Night by Joseph Guzzo is a delightful adventure tale featuring talking cats. Vic, his wife Claudia, and their son Luca are still celebrating the unexpected return of their previously terminally ill talking cat, Fatty. Alongside their other talking cat, Red, Fatty...

It has been more than a decade since the war began on Solara, a world of sprawling lands and isles. It was sparked after the Nightshade Empire, the government that rules most of Solara, launched a persecution campaign against Arcanists, people who can draw on...

Ronnie Sacco’s The Resonance Crossing is set in the authoritarian surveillance state of Dominia, and it follows a low-tier reclamation worker named Luca Ashbourne. In a world where people are forbidden to feel and where emotion is medicated, scored, and suppressed by the National Dominia...