Life is full of new beginnings. A mother bird tells her young bird it’s time to leave the nest in The Bird Song by Willie Beesley. The news makes him feel very nervous. The world feels so big, but his mom offers some encouraging advice....

Reading can be so much fun, and it helps you learn a lot. In Terrie Sizemore’s Look at Me! I Can Read!, a little girl explores the wonderful possibilities found in books. First, she enjoys pictures that inspire her to learn more. Then she learns...

Daniel Royer’s Aben Almighty follows Aben, an Astroknight returning from the Rift war, as his squad is sent to Planet Taggert to secure an alliance with a people who judge outsiders through ordeal. To pass among them, Aben and his team accept mutations that turn...

Denise Thompson-Slaughter’s memoir Since You Weren’t There & Other Memories charts her personal path through the social landscape of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. She recounts explicit moments such as her teenage uncles shooting rats from a Kenilworth dining-room window, buying Little Golden Books at...

Rejection is Murder by Carol E. Ayer is the first book in the Cat and Mowse Mysteries. Catherine Lynley is a cozy mystery writer, writing under the pen name of Cat Summers. Her stories are always neatly tied up – her life, not so much....

Love Her Blind and Other Poems, an anthology by David Somerfleck, has deep philosophical themes and is rich in symbolism. Several poems see the unattainable fair woman take center stage, ever eluding the author, in which life can often be unforgiving and somber, but for...

What Will I Be Today? This question activates Sailor’s superpower every day. Sailor is a young girl who lives a pretty normal life. She goes to school, watches TV, reads books, picks her nose, and plays with her toys. But when she is in her...

Blood of the Founding by B.A. Chapman is a paranormal romance with a bite to it. Dr. Elena Vance, PhD, works at the Jeffersonian researching obsolete Eastern European cultures, but something strange is happening to her. She thinks she might be turning into a wolf....

In Benjamin Abravenel’s The Past, Again, Judah Cohen is a Santa Barbara boy whose childhood changes after he finds Holocaust photographs in his father Brian’s study and begins answering to James instead of his given name. As James grows older, he sets his sights on...

Brenda Murphy’s Kindling of a Firebrand is set in Boston, where Fran Sweeney grows from a Charlestown dockworker’s daughter into a Catholic woman drawn toward labor politics during the Depression. After illness damages her heart, her parents send her to Mount St. Joseph Academy, where...

I Am Me by Felicia L. Kenny is a lovely children's picture book. Jared is a young boy who shares the joy of being cool in his own way. He comes from a loving family of two parents of different backgrounds. Jared sees the world...

So You Want To Be An Activist by Linda Soules is part of her larger career-exploration series for young readers. This entry tackles a subject most career guides skip entirely: the work of refusing to accept things as they are. The book walks young readers...

The Character Route Tree is a self-help memoir with author Marc R Schneider’s account of growing up in a household shaped by his mother Kiki’s anger, his father’s silence, and the fear rituals Schneider used to feel safe. His memoir traces the effect of that...

God Ain't Done With Me Yet is Min Diamond Golson's memoir about the struggles and mistakes she's made along the way and her search for where she belongs. Having a father who was absent most of her childhood led Golson to seek love and acceptance...

Trouble always seems to find Bethany Jarviss. Though she’s a fairly average woman working for her father in the Jarviss Family Foundation, Bethany somehow has two murder cases under her belt. But now is not the time for work or investigations as she tries to...

Russ Colson’s Minding Earth is a fascinating anthology that pulls readers right into a series of thought-provoking scenarios where science meets human nature. In one standout piece, a skeptical geologist named Nate decides to investigate a time-travel company, convinced their dinosaur tours are a corporate...

Sun Kissed & Salted by Angela Blair follows Alika Jones’s decades-long freefall through acts of self-destruction and survival. In 1988, she had a near-death bike accident in Los Angeles when she experienced an out-of-body episode. She abandons the stability of her life for a volatile...

Mark Binder’s The Worst centers on an ordinary eighth-grader who navigates the awkward world of a small New England middle school along with his tight-knit group of friends. Calling themselves Team Bomb Shelter, these clever middle schoolers use an ironic scale to rank their daily...

“At what point does the desire to succeed become indistinguishable from the willingness to harm?” For Tanner Barrett, the protagonist of Aaron Ryan's short novel The Darkness Within, that question is answered in a horrific manner. Tanner is an indie author caught in a slump...

Living with Strangers a memoir by author Robin Rosenbluth, describing moves between the life that formed her in New York and the year that tests her in Songa, a remote Kenyan settlement where Friends World College places her as an unpaid teacher. After her mother...