Dolly Parton said, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” That message is sprinkled throughout The Little Girl with Big Dreams by Sissel Waage. This picture book follows a young girl as she imagines herself all grown up with endless possibilities. As...

The Wishkeeper’s Daughter by Michele Ashman Bell starts with a loss. Twelve-year-old Pippa Rowe loses her mother and finds herself alone in the world. It is then that the mirror in her bedroom begins to glow and speak her name, pulling her into Wishmoor Academy,...

No Climb Too High by Angela Haas starts with a woman running out of second chances. Roxanne Denning was struck by lightning in the Colorado mountains two years ago. It left her physically intact with some scars as a souvenir, but emotionally fractured. The accident...

David Boito’s Fatal Castle opens with the Kohinoor’s arrival at Queen Victoria’s palace in 1850 before moving to the Tower of London in 2023, where the diamond’s colonial history lingers in the Crown Jewels. Ashley Bellamy, a UCLA history student and lifelong diamond obsessive, has...

Double by Gerry Burke introduces a wild ride where international spy games collide head-on with American underworld politics. The story sets off in the quiet English countryside village of Omelette, where a local murder case blows open a major standoff between MI5 and a hidden...

Jeff Beamish’s Sneaker Wave centers on Brady Joseph, a Deception Pass teenager whose life has been affected by his father’s death from the bridge above the strait. At seventeen, Brady is drawn into Sarah Roberts’s wealthy circle, even as his closest friends, Sam Sullivan and...

Digger: Dig or Die! by Deborah Cholette is a page-turning dystopian middle-grade novel. On an average sunny day, Nick and his younger sister Lily learn that a catastrophe is unfolding. There's a large crack in Earth's magnetosphere that causes its atmosphere to leak out into space....

The Gospels of Extinction is a collection of twenty-one short stories written over more than two decades by talented author Seth Augenstein. The stories transport us to different times, places, and events. We will walk down memory lane and sneak a peek into the future;...

The little girl starring in Maggie Keefe’s picture book, 5 Different Boo-Boos, has a rough week. On Monday, she scratches her knee while tree climbing. On Tuesday, she falls off her scooter. For five days, it’s one minor injury after another. But the child in...

The Dangerous Shipment is the first book of The Cogs and Gears of the Cosmos series by Simon Drayton. In the near future, humanity has reached the far trenches of the Nebula. Godwin Dirteon is a seventeen-year-old prodigy among the Gearsmen of the Nebula-Class Ship,...

C.F. Yetmen’s The Pretense of Memory follows Oskar Gruenewald, a law student in 1958 Wiesbaden whose life begins to tilt after Professor Brehmer accuses him of plagiarism. Oskar survived the war as a child and was raised afterward by Anna and Henry Cooper, yet his...

In Rob Kaufman’s Death Sentence, Ethan Winslow leaves a funeral unable to forget the way people finally speak honestly once death is on the table. Instead of waiting for his own ending, he invents acute kidney failure and begins telling the people around him that...

Concussion recovery is not always a straightforward process. Colette Struthers is a clinician and Reiki practitioner. She has played soccer for over 40 years, accumulating several head injuries over that period. She had to undergo HEVMT treatment for her recovery, which includes visual, vestibular, and...

Muriel Finch and The Missing Key by Deborah Erdmann introduces us to Muriel, a sharp-eyed retiree who notices absolutely everything and has zero filters. Her peaceful retirement in Seaglass Cove takes a bizarre turn when a stranger (Norman) wakes up in her flowerbeds smelling like...

In Baseball, Birthday, and Ten-Cent Beer by Gregg Sapp, Solomon Zuch loves baseball, and his favorite team is the Cleveland Indians. The Indians' management runs a lottery for home games to pick birthday boys to serve as honorary ballboys. Plans were made for the entire...

Eric Bush’s The Meaning of Androsia is an epic odyssey that follows Ilya Erynovich Koskayin, also known throughout his two-thousand-year-old life by thirty different names. He wakes up in a train station with no memory, yet his instinct brings back skills and knowledge that can...

In Richard J. Reese's Thutmose, Soldier Pharaoh, born into the royal court of ancient Egypt, Prince Thutmose grows up under the watch of Queen Hatshepsut while receiving military training beside secret lessons in hypnosis, religion, and politics from High Priest Ptahmose. As he prepares for...

Are you ready for a compelling deep dive into Scottish history? In Forbes: A Story of Scotland, B.R. Forbes chronicles the fortunes of the Forbes clan as it navigates the fallout of a turbulent relationship with neighboring England's rulers and its evolving religious structures. Claiming...

Daughter of Ash and Bone by S. Ramsey follows Alice Reed, a foster-care survivor who works at a lab. The law firm of Franklin, Maier, and Ziegler hands her a golden pendant from her shadowy ancestor, Campbell Graves, and it pulls her into a war...

Battle of Jericho 2038 by J. F. Elferdink is the best science fiction novel I have read this year. The story is set in a near-future in which Candyland, a consortium owned by Roman Starke, monopolizes a space elevator. Starke’s off-planet warehouses have the capacity...