A good story puts its main character into ever-increasing conflict, and the fantasy novel Persona: Stratus the Reborn wastes no time doing exactly that.

In the opening pages, teenager Raj (a.k.a. Stratus) investigates his parents’ death at the hands of gang members and confronts the gang’s leader. A few pages later, beings from another planet […]

This intriguing novel relates the hardships and joys in the life of Diamond Pearl Hope, a biracial reporter living in Florida. Born to a white father and African-American mother, Diamond moves to her grandmother’s home after her mother’s death. Her aunts and cousins, also living with her, frequently torment her over her light skin and […]

The nameless hero of Gary Sutton’s melodramatic novel is a striving outcast everyone in the little town of Oskaloosa, Iowa (a real place, by the way, southeast of Des Moines) just calls “Moon.” The bastard offspring of a round-heeled peroxide blonde and an Irish-Catholic handyman, he’s also cursed with a caved-in head shaped like a […]

Clearly a labor of love and family pride, Alme’s novel about her great-grandparents, immigrants who settled in Minnesota during the mid-1800s, captures many of the historical events and the social culture of the times.

Courageous and accustomed to hard work, both the German Mergels, her paternal ancestors, and the English-Irish Baileys, her maternal side, endured […]

Set in Australia and powered by aboriginal mythology, Anne Ravenoak’s novel is a deeply spiritual yet thematically inefficacious story that follows Annie, a free spirit idyllically existing in the Dreamtime — a timeless place between death and rebirth — who is called by the Master Dreamer time and again to return to the world to […]

In The Amplified Light, English teacher, marriage counselor, and devout Christian Alice Brooks has created a daily devotional drawn exclusively from the Amplified Bible. Completed in 1965, the Amplified Bible sought to show the depth and texture of the language of scripture by “using synonyms and definitions [that] both explain and expand the meaning of […]

We’re all connected to history, but we’re not all as connected to the evolution of the iron and steel industry — and the most infamous location where that occurred — as is Richard A. Gregory. Descended from ironworkers, Gregory has used his ancestors as the main characters in his book, in order to depict this […]

During his 33 years of federal service as an expert in meteorology, Harold “Hal” A. Corzine traveled far and wide sharing his deep knowledge on observing and forecasting the weather. Yet because of his busy schedule, his three children grew up knowing little about his own childhood, work and life experiences. This autobiography fills that […]

Sasha White is back in control of her life. The protagonist of K. Hunter’s novel My Blue Heaven has walked out of an abusive relationship. She’s moving up fast in the law firm where she works. She’s hitting the gym, dropping weight, and showing off her toned body in stylish clothes. So the new man […]

Racial barriers and poverty versus wealth set the stage for this book of Christian fiction, which opens in 1927 in Clearwater, Miss. George Simmons and his wife, Chassity, run a successful plantation and cotton gin while employing generations of black domestic help, which are treated like dear family, much to the chagrin of many other […]