Editorial Reviews for Nominees
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 Score: 89+/100 (8.9+ out of 10)
T.V. Holiday’s Angelface is a short relationship drama centered on Christian, a veteran law-enforcement manager who appears successful from the outside but is increasingly exhausted by nearly every part of his life. He is engaged to Solana, an energetic, attractive, intensely social woman whom he loves, but their relationship has deteriorated into an exhausting cycle of mismatched priorities, arguments, apologies, affection, and then the same arguments all over again. At the same time, Christian cannot stop thinking about Draya, a woman from work whom he once considered pursuing after his divorce but deliberately avoided because he feared the complications of dating a coworker. The opening poem establishes that regret immediately: he made a decision not to pursue this woman, yet continues asking himself what might have happened if he had gone back and broken his own rule. Christian and Solana's problems are not really caused by Draya. That's important. Their lifestyles are fundamentally incompatible. Christian wants stability, rest, companionship, meaningful conversation, and room to maintain his own interests. Solana wants activity, nightlife, travel, spontaneity, nature, constant social interaction, and eventually a rural life. Their communication styles are even more incompatible. Small conversations routinely become enormous arguments, with Christian withdrawing and Solana reacting emotionally, interrupting him, accusing him of not caring, and then often apologizing after the situation explodes. Christian repeatedly wonders whether love is enough to justify building a marriage around that pattern. Meanwhile, his professional life is crushing him. He supervises hundreds of people, is being pushed toward even greater leadership positions, feels increasingly burned out, and then discovers that he has been named in another lawsuit connected to his former work as a spokesperson. Solana's response becomes one of the clearest demonstrations of their disconnect: once she realizes the city will pay the legal expenses, she largely dismisses his anxiety and recommends going out for drinks, while Christian is worried about the scrutiny, meetings, professional consequences, and emotional ordeal he knows is coming. Draya becomes the contrast. She understands the pressures of their profession because she lives inside the same world. When the two meet for coffee, they are able to talk about the lawsuit, their careers, exhaustion, management, and Christian's deteriorating relationship in a way he feels unable to do at home. Eventually, Christian admits why he never pursued her: she frightened him precisely because he saw the possibility of something meaningful and didn't want a failed workplace romance to destroy their friendship. He finally admits that he has spent years wondering what might have happened between them. Their conversation stops short of an affair, but it absolutely crosses into emotionally dangerous territory while he is still engaged. The "love taps" exchange culminates in him effectively acknowledging that he has loved her, leaving both of them confronting the possibility of something they never allowed themselves to explore. The relationship with Solana finally breaks after one particularly brutal work shift. Christian spends thirteen hours overseeing patrol, responds to an armed man's rampage at a bar, and returns home after being awake for nearly an entire day. Five hours later, Solana wakes him because she wants to get up and go somewhere. When he tells her he is exhausted, their familiar argument erupts again. This time Christian finally says what he has been circling for most of the book: he cannot do this anymore. He realizes he wants a partner who shares at least some of his interests, understands his life, and accepts who he actually is rather than who she wants him to become. Christian wants stability. He wants enough quiet to think. He wants hobbies, dancing, conversation, reasonable sleep, and some semblance of control over his increasingly stressful life. Solana seems to run almost entirely on movement. She wants nightlife, friends, travel, nature, adventure, animals, spontaneity, and eventually a rural home somewhere far away from the city. Neither lifestyle is inherently wrong. The problem is that each increasingly seems miserable living inside the other's. Their communication is even worse. A simple question about renewing their lease becomes an argument about respect, household responsibilities, communication, emotional support, Christian's previous marriage, Solana's friends, and whether Christian actually cares about her. Christian watches the conversation spiral so far beyond his original question that even he appears bewildered by how they arrived there. That pattern repeats throughout the novella, and Holiday effectively creates the sense that Christian and Solana are not merely having arguments. They are having variations of the same argument over and over again. If you've ever been trapped in one of those relationships where changing the subject somehow does absolutely nothing because every road leads back to the same fight, Holiday captures the feeling rather well. The novella's poetry adds another dimension to Christian's inner conflict. Poems such as "Why Marriage Why," "Sweet Dreams, Sweet Dreams," and especially "Simple Math" work almost like private journal entries scattered between the prose. "Simple Math" may actually contain the central metaphor of the entire book. Christian recognizes that he and Solana keep trying to solve a relationship that simply refuses to add up. They want the answer to work, but they keep ending up with a remainder. He describes them as square pegs trying to force themselves into spaces where they do not belong. And that leads into our biggest criticism of Angelface: Holiday stacks the deck against Solana so heavily that the romantic dilemma occasionally becomes too easy. Solana drinks too much, interrupts Christian, dismisses his professional stress, complains about how little they do together while constantly going out herself, resents some of his interests, and eventually tells a man who has just worked a brutal overnight police shift on almost no sleep to essentially "suck it up." Meanwhile, Draya understands his career, listens to him, makes him laugh, notices when something is wrong, shares his interests, and seems to appear whenever Christian needs exactly the kind of emotional support Solana is failing to provide. In fact, the whole thing sometimes feels so personal that we couldn't help wondering how much of Christian might be sitting behind the keyboard. Holiday has played with autobiographical-feeling protagonists before, including in his Legend of the Iron Warrior series (in which the main protagonist literally shares the author's name and is a former cop), and Christian here has that same unmistakable self-insert energy. We obviously have no idea whether a real-life "Solana" exists, but the imbalance is pronounced enough that you can almost imagine Holiday jabbing a finger at somebody from his past while writing: "Aha! See? I WAS RIGHT!" Quite frankly, that mental image made us laugh. The danger, though, is that when one side of a relationship is written as this obviously incompatible and the alternative is practically glowing with angel wings, the reader does not have much reason to wrestle with Christian's choice. We did get a morbidly funny "OPEN THE D**M DOOR, B&%!" scene in the author's previous book, Vendetta, so there's that. The other disappointment we had is that there simply isn't enough book here. At roughly seventy pages, Angelface feels like it ends almost as soon as it finally gets moving. Christian's deteriorating engagement, his professional burnout, the lawsuit, his unresolved feelings for Draya, and the breakup all have enough material to support a substantially longer story. Instead, Holiday introduces these conflicts, gets them boiling, and then reaches the finish line just when we were becoming most interested in where they might go. That brevity keeps Angelface moving, but it also prevents Holiday from adding the complexity the story most needs. A longer version could have given Solana more humanity, Draya more dimension beyond Christian's idealization of her, and Christian more time to confront his own role in the mess. As written, there is a compelling relationship drama here. We just wish Holiday had let it breathe long enough to become a deeper one. For all of that, though, there is a lot to like about Angelface. Holiday gives Christian's exhaustion, regret, and loneliness a sense of lived-in authenticity, and the novella moves with an easy readability that makes its seventy pages disappear quickly. The relationship may be one-sided, but the emotions rarely feel fake, especially when Christian and Solana finally admit that loving each other is not enough to make their future work and part without turning everything they shared into a mistake. And we really like where Holiday leaves Christian: not magically healed, not suddenly guaranteed a happily-ever-after, but sitting at the edge of a new possibility when Draya appears and simply asks him to get coffee. Angelface may feel more like the opening act of a larger story than a fully developed novel, but it is personal, readable, occasionally funny, and emotionally sincere enough that we would gladly have kept reading if Holiday had given us another hundred pages.
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 Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)
You may have heard about it or seen the viral videos on Instagram or TikTok: In August 2026, a disturbing story out of South Carolina captured national attention after Nora Rowland said she traveled to check on her elderly father and discovered that he had died days earlier without her knowledge. She also discovered—to her shock—that his caregiver had been named his power of attorney, and that his house had been transferred to that caregiver for just five dollars! Rowland walked through a home she barely recognized, with unfamiliar photographs on the walls and rooms of people she didn't recognize and never met. When the caregiver returned and produced a deed in her own name, Rowland was initially treated by police as trespassers. The story spread rapidly online, and the caregiver, Sarah Smalls, was later arrested and charged with exploitation of a vulnerable adult, breach of trust, and perjury. What made the case so horrifying was not merely the loss of a house or the shock of a family learning how much had changed. It was the deeper fear of discovering that enormous decisions concerning a vulnerable parent’s care, finances, property, and relationships had been made while the family felt increasingly powerless to intervene. That fear sits at the heart of Leonie Rosenstiel’s Protecting Mama. Rosenstiel’s story is distinctly different, but the central question is hauntingly similar: What happens when other people acquire the legal power to decide what is best for an elderly loved one, all while you become increasingly powerless to protect them yourself? That question is what Rosenstiel spends nearly 400 pages trying to answer, and what makes this book so much more unsettling than a conventional memoir about caring for an aging parent. Rosenstiel begins by showing us who her mother, Annette, was before dementia and guardianship began stripping away her ability to define herself. Mama was an anthropologist, professor, writer, traveler, wife, mother, and an extraordinarily complicated woman with her own religious beliefs, financial priorities, preferences, grudges, memories, habits, and contradictions. She could be difficult. She could be stubborn. She could even lie. Rosenstiel does not attempt to turn her mother into a saint, and the book is considerably stronger for it. Mama did not deserve dignity because she was perfect. She deserved dignity because she was a human being. After the death of Rosenstiel’s father, Raymond, Leonie increasingly helped Mama manage the practical realities of life, including her finances, eventual move to New Mexico, and later her growing medical and cognitive needs. As Mama’s dementia progressed, however, the situation became dramatically more complicated. A competency proceeding eventually placed Mama under the authority of a commercial guardian and conservator. From there, according to Rosenstiel’s account, decisions about her mother’s money, medical care, visitors, possessions, religious practices, diet, living environment, and even what Mama supposedly believed or wanted increasingly passed into other hands. This is where Protecting Mama becomes maddening to read in precisely the way Rosenstiel intends. Again and again, Leonie believes she knows what her mother wants because she has known her for a lifetime, only to encounter professionals, court orders, reports, caregivers, attorneys, and other relatives presenting different versions of Mama. At times, Leonie is restricted in what she may do for her mother or how she may participate in her care. Mama herself reportedly asks that Leonie replace her guardian, expresses loneliness, and tries to communicate what she wants, yet the machinery surrounding the guardianship keeps moving. One of the book’s most disturbing ideas is that dementia does not merely make a person vulnerable to having decisions made for them. It can make them vulnerable to having their entire identity interpreted for them. Who did Mama love? What religion did she practice? What food did she want? Who should visit her? What belongings mattered to her? What medical treatment would she have accepted? What did she want done with her money? Once Mama could no longer consistently articulate those answers herself, seemingly everyone around her acquired some power to answer on her behalf (other than herself, of course). Rosenstiel is especially effective when she shows how supposedly small decisions can carry enormous emotional weight. At one point, photographs connected to painful chapters of Mama’s family history appear prominently around her bed, while other objects connected to the life she actually built for herself are moved or disappear. It is a deceptively simple example of one of the book’s central warnings: knowing that something is associated with a person’s past is not the same thing as understanding what that past means to them. “Family,” “religion,” “home,” and “comfort” are not interchangeable labels that can safely be applied by strangers. And then there is the money. No joke, Mama was a multimillionaire with a net worth peaking around $20.5 million as estimated by the commercial guardian. However, later reports between 2010-2011 show a suspicious plunge in net worth to $6.6 million, then eventually to $6 million. A substantial portion of Protecting Mama follows investments, stock holdings, household expenses, professional fees, legal bills, caregiver costs, repairs, accounting records, and transactions that Rosenstiel scrutinizes with almost forensic intensity. This material can be exhausting, but that exhaustion eventually becomes part of the experience of the book. The reader begins to understand what it must feel like to fight for someone you love while drowning in invoices, motions, hearings, accountings, medical records, contradictory statements, and court documents. Rosenstiel eventually found herself working through roughly 40,000 pages of documents connected to the litigation surrounding her mother’s guardianship. That extraordinary level of documentation is both Protecting Mama’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Rosenstiel rarely seems satisfied with telling us that something happened when she can show us the invoice, identify the hearing, reconstruct the conversation, compare the financial records, recall who was standing in the room, and then return to the subject dozens of pages later when another document appears to contradict the first one. For readers interested in guardianship, elder law, or the mechanics of how these systems operate, this degree of detail can be invaluable. For an ordinary reader, it can occasionally feel as though someone has overturned several filing cabinets onto the floor and asked us to help reconstruct a decade of family history. Yet cutting too deeply into that material would also risk weakening what makes the book unusual. Rosenstiel is not simply asking the reader to believe that she felt mistreated. She is attempting to build a case. And because so much of Protecting Mama concerns disputes over who said what, who authorized what, what Mama actually wanted, and whether the official version of events matched reality, documentation becomes part of the book’s moral argument. The paperwork is not decoration. It is Rosenstiel’s answer to a system in which, again and again, somebody else had the authority to write the official version of her mother’s life. And that case becomes much harder to dismiss once Rosenstiel begins describing what she says she uncovered about Mama’s actual care. In one particularly disturbing discovery, notes from the guardian’s own files record another aide reporting that Mama’s original caregiver had returned to the house while off duty, picked Mama up, shook her, and yelled at her. That caregiver was eventually fired. Years later, Rosenstiel also discovered records documenting a “purple” eye, a bruise on Mama’s hand, and a sore on her lip. The records do not establish how those injuries occurred, and Rosenstiel is generally careful to distinguish what she can document from what she suspects. Still, the accumulation of unexplained injuries and troubling reports is difficult to shrug off. One scene in particular is hard to forget. Rosenstiel describes arriving at Mama’s home after hearing her screaming and finding her face-down in the covers, hanging halfway off the bed while an aide held her down by the waist. According to Rosenstiel, the aide planned to wait nearly an hour for relief to arrive. Leonie instead helped reposition Mama, who immediately stopped screaming and relaxed. Whether this was incompetence, panic, poor training, or something worse, the episode captures the terror running through the book: Leonie repeatedly believes something is wrong, but she no longer has the authority to simply step in and take control. That loss of authority extended well beyond the caregivers themselves. Rosenstiel says she sometimes learned about hospitalizations only after the fact, was shut out of medical decisions she believed she had been authorized to make, and eventually lost even that limited role. Meanwhile, the commercial guardian increasingly controlled what information Leonie received, when she could visit, and how Mama’s wishes were interpreted. What makes this so maddening is that the guardian was supposed to be the safeguard against exactly this sort of vulnerability. Instead, Rosenstiel portrays a system in which the person appointed to protect Mama could also become the gatekeeper standing between Mama and the daughter trying to protect her. The questions become darkest near the end of Mama’s life. Rosenstiel compares caregiver notes suggesting that Mama ate only tiny amounts of fruit, juice, sorbet, and banana on her final night with a later court report stating that she had eaten a “full dinner.” After Mama died at age 100, Rosenstiel pushed for further examination, and an independent second autopsy documented skin irritation, an ulceration near the sacrum, and bruising on one hand. None of those findings alone proves abuse, and the book cannot conclusively explain every injury or contradiction. But taken together with the financial disputes, restricted access, conflicting reports, and disturbing caregiver incidents, they make Protecting Mama feel less like one grievance and more like a sustained warning about what can happen when tremendous power over a vulnerable adult is concentrated in people the family cannot easily question. One of the most impressive things about Protecting Mama is how many different kinds of books it manages to become over the course of nearly 400 pages. At times, Rosenstiel writes almost like an investigative journalist, reconstructing events from court records, financial statements, caregiver notes, medical records, emails, invoices, and thousands upon thousands of pages of discovery. She follows inconsistencies, compares competing accounts, and keeps pulling at loose threads until an apparently minor discrepancy opens into a much larger question. Elsewhere, the book becomes openly activist and reform-minded, with Rosenstiel using Mama’s experience to argue for greater transparency, accountability, oversight, and protections within the guardianship system. And then, unexpectedly, Protecting Mama sometimes reads like a courtroom drama. Once the disputes move deeper into litigation, attorneys enter and exit the case, depositions reveal information Rosenstiel says she had never known, expert witnesses disagree, sealed records become battlegrounds, motions pile up, and years of evidence are weaponized by opposing sides. There are stretches that reminded us less of a conventional memoir than of a John Grisham novel, except Rosenstiel keeps reminding us that these proceedings involved her actual mother, her actual family, and millions of dollars in real assets. That constant shifting between memoir, investigation, advocacy, and legal drama gives Protecting Mama an unusual dynamism that helps sustain a story that could otherwise have become overwhelmingly technical. There's a morbid level of intrigue or—dare we say—even excitement, particularly as it pertains to the court proceedings. At the same time, there were times when we felt a little put off by some of the ranting and passive-aggressiveness in this book. Honestly, there were times when the narrator got on our nerves, whether they intended to or not. We have a right to feel that way. We're responding to our experiences with someone's work. It seems clear to us, having read this entire book, that Rosentiel carries a lot of anger, rage, frustration, and resentment toward everyone involved with her mother: the caregivers she distrusts, the commercial guardian and conservator, the attorneys, the judge, the court system, and even relatives whose accounts of Mama seem completely incompatible with the woman Rosenstiel knew. She has every right to feel that way. It really feels like these people have have wronged her and her Mama. So, to an extent, the ill feelings are understandable. However, there are times this book reads like a prolonged tirade, and it's like Rosentiel is steamrolling half of the time. We can understand why some people might find that insufferable. Rosentiel's anger spills directly onto the page through sarcasm, biting commentary, and the occasional insult. She refers to people associated with the guardianship firm as its “minions,” questions whether professionals understand the consequences of the power they have been given, and repeatedly challenges explanations that she finds absurd or contradictory. That fury is understandable, but it is also one area where the book occasionally weakens its own case. Rosenstiel is strongest when she lays two documents beside each other, points out that they contradict one another, and lets the reader feel the implications. She is somewhat less convincing when she moves from evidence into speculation about why someone behaved a certain way or what they may secretly have intended. To her credit, she often signals the difference with phrases like “I wonder,” “perhaps,” or “I have no way to know.” Still, a slightly more restrained approach in a few places might actually have made some of her most serious accusations feel even more devastating. It always seems like Rosentiel is hiding behind a corner somewhere peaking or listening in for something bad or suspicious to happen. It's like no matter what else is happening, she's like a spider in a web or a fly on the wall when it comes to catching the people alleged to be wronging Mama. Then again, wouldn't you? If your loved one was potentially being abused, neglected, and/or manipulated? At the same time, the narrative of this book reminded us of A Graver Danger: White Chalk Crime in which it seemed like the author really seemed out to catch and blame people constantly—incessantly. It's like if the judge pauses or breathes too deeply, it'll set off her alarms of suspected corruption. Maybe he's taking some of the money to the casino at night like other judges have done. Maybe he's in with the perpetrators. She talks about wanting to hide nanny cams in Mama's room to catch the culprits. Every scratch, bruise, inconsistency in a document etc. seems to create a story of some nefarious act in her mind. She'll even measure the width of a doorway to try to prove that her mom's bed won't fit through it in case of emergency to show that the guardian is putting Mama in danger. Things like that. It kinda comes across as petty and nitpicky at times, which can honestly come across as annoying or unpleasant. It's hard to be around people who seem like they complin all the time. It's hard to deal with people who seem like they're just waiting for you to make a mistake so they can pounce, and say, "AHA! I knew it!" That's like... every mother-in-law ever. Or every district manager. The defense constantly tries to frame and dismiss her as a "chronic complainer." Yet beneath all that anger is something much simpler: a daughter who believes she failed, again and again, to protect her mother because the authority to do so had been taken out of her hands. That gives Protecting Mama an emotional center far stronger than its court filings or financial records. Mama reportedly tells Leonie that “one of us has to tell the story” and asks her to “remain standing” long enough to do it. The book ultimately feels like Leonie’s fulfillment of that promise. She may not have been able to control what happened while Mama was alive, but she could make sure that Mama’s story did not disappear into the same mountain of paperwork that had surrounded her. That is ultimately what keeps Protecting Mama from collapsing beneath the weight of its own anger, documentation, and litigation. For all of Rosenstiel’s suspicions, tangents, repetitions, and moments when we wished she would simply let a point rest, we never doubted why she kept digging. She believed Mama had been failed by people and institutions specifically entrusted with protecting her, and she was determined to create a record that could not be quietly filed away, sealed, forgotten, or explained by someone else. More broadly, Protecting Mama is a furious argument for sunlight. Rosenstiel wants guardianships scrutinized, financial decisions documented, families heard, courts held accountable, and vulnerable adults treated as human beings rather than problems to be administratively managed. Not every conclusion she draws will persuade every reader, nor should it. But the book raises questions that deserve to make people uncomfortable, particularly anyone who assumes that placing an elderly person under professional guardianship necessarily means that someone responsible is now safely “in charge.” As an aside: one of the strangest and most unexpected stretches of the book has almost nothing to do with guardianship at all. While Rosenstiel is living under a gag order and largely isolating herself, she begins describing the wildlife that congregates around her backyard: wrens, mourning doves, squirrels, rabbits, geckos, and a pair of roadrunners, all developing their own little routines around the fruit she leaves outside. A rabbit cautiously investigates an apple for several days before trying to mate with it; the animals apparently leave her bizarre “gifts,” including Matchbox cars and Wiffle balls; and some unidentified creature carefully transports peaches across the property. The whole episode arrives in the middle of litigation, depositions, death, money, and accusations, and it is bizarrely random, weirdly wholesome, and morbidly amusing. You kinda get the sense that the experience is destroying her—she's becoming like one of those hermit people with all the animals following them. At the same time, it kinda goes along with what we were saying before: Rosentiel spares no details. She describes, details, and tries to explain everything, for better or for worse. Protecting Mama is sprawling, combative, occasionally exhausting, sometimes irritating, deeply researched, strangely thrilling, and ultimately very difficult to forget. It is simultaneously memoir, investigation, courtroom drama, indictment, and act of advocacy. Most importantly, however, it is the story of a daughter who promised her mother that somebody would tell what happened. Leonie Rosenstiel remained standing. And she told the story. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 93/100 (9.3 out of 10)
Scott G.A. Metcalf’s Brotherhood USMC is a heartfelt tribute to the bonds forged through military service, shared hardship, sacrifice, and the families who carry part of that burden from home. Following Sergeant Alex Riley through deployment, the novel moves between moments of danger, camaraderie, reflection, Marine Corps tradition, and the quiet ache of separation from his son. Metcalf is at his best when he focuses on the small acts that reveal what brotherhood really means: checking on the Marine beside you, making room for vulnerability, sharing a joke in miserable conditions, holding onto a letter from home, or looking up at the same stars as the people you miss. The result is a sincere and often moving portrait of Marines not simply as warriors, but as fathers, husbands, friends, mentors, and human beings trying to remain whole while carrying the weight of duty. And if you've followed Scott Metcalf's work with us, a lot of this will feel familiar. At this point, we've read enough of Metcalf's books to recognize the ideas that seem to matter most to him: service, duty, loyalty, trauma, resilience, institutional pressures, and what happens to human beings when they are placed in extraordinarily difficult environments. Soldiers in the Sandbox explored the experience of war and, perhaps even more powerfully, what happens after the soldier comes home. Where Is Your Church? turned its attention toward wounded and homeless veterans and asked what genuine service, faith, and compassion look like when people have been forgotten. Inside the Walls placed us inside another unforgiving institution, the correctional system, and examined how people preserve their humanity in an environment constantly threatening to harden them. Brotherhood USMC feels like another branch growing from that same tree. This time, Metcalf returns us directly to deployment, but the most interesting question isn't really whether Sergeant Riley and his fellow Marines can complete their missions. It's what allows them to keep functioning as human beings while doing so. What keeps someone emotionally intact when he's thousands of miles away from his family? What happens when the person everyone looks to for strength is struggling himself? How much of military resilience comes from individual toughness, and how much comes from simply knowing the people beside you will notice when something is wrong? That's where the "brotherhood" in the title becomes considerably more meaningful than Marines fighting alongside one another. Some of our favorite material in the book comes from the quieter moments. Marines look after one another when someone is physically miserable. They joke. They eat together. They talk about home. They receive letters and hold onto photographs. They look forward to traditions that connect them with generations of Marines who came before them. Riley thinks constantly about his son and the ordinary pieces of family life he is missing while deployed. These scenes remind us that military sacrifice isn't confined to firefights, injuries, or death. Sometimes the sacrifice is missing another day of your child's life because duty has placed an ocean between you. We especially appreciated the book's treatment of mental health and leadership. Riley understands that taking care of his Marines means more than keeping them tactically prepared. It means paying attention when someone withdraws, encouraging people to talk instead of burying everything beneath military toughness, creating opportunities to decompress after difficult experiences, and making sure Marines keep an eye on one another. There is something refreshingly humane about a military story that recognizes vulnerability without treating vulnerability as weakness. In fact, one of the strongest ideas running throughout Brotherhood USMC is that strength and dependence on other people aren't opposites. That's really what brotherhood is. It isn't simply charging into danger together. It's knowing somebody will notice when you're struggling. It's having people who understand experiences that might be impossible to explain to anyone else. It's the joke that breaks the tension, the person checking on you after something terrible happens, the reminder of home when home feels impossibly far away, and the knowledge that whatever happens next, you aren't facing it by yourself. And, once again, Metcalf can WRITE. We've said this before, and we're going to keep saying it because the frustrating thing about criticizing Scott Metcalf's writing is that the man is capable of writing some absolutely beautiful stuff. Soldiers in the Sandbox contained passages we thought were among the best we'd encountered in any OCA submission. Inside the Walls could turn a prison corridor, a set of keys, or an ordinary workplace observation into something vivid and memorable. Even Where Is Your Church?, where we were considerably more critical of the excesses of the prose, contained individual images and phrases that were gorgeous in isolation. Brotherhood USMC continues that pattern. Metcalf has a particular talent for taking environments that could easily become generic backgrounds and making them feel oppressive, physical, and immediate. The cold bites. The desert stretches endlessly. Equipment has weight. Silence has tension. The night sky becomes a reminder that the people Riley loves are still somewhere beneath those same stars. Those details give the book atmosphere, but they also reinforce one of its central ideas: no matter how far deployment carries these Marines from ordinary life, they remain connected to the people and places waiting for them at home. However, Metcalf's writing is a double-edged sword. His prose ranges from poetic, eloquent, poignant, and powerful to overwritten, fluffy, flowery, repetitive, and redundant. And we have said this about him before. Metcalf has an instinct for finding meaning in almost everything. A cold night isn't merely cold. A horizon isn't merely a horizon. A letter isn't merely a letter. The desert, the stars, a photograph, a shared meal, a Marine checking on another Marine, the silence after a difficult mission: all of these can become symbols of duty, home, sacrifice, brotherhood, or the emotional distance between the life Riley is living and the life waiting for him elsewhere. When it works, it REALLY works. There are passages in Brotherhood USMC where Metcalf takes something ordinary and gives it tremendous emotional weight. Riley looking at the stars while thinking about his son is an especially effective recurring image because it gives father and son something they can still share despite the enormous physical distance between them. The horizon works similarly, becoming a representation of everything beyond the deployment: home, family, possibility, and eventually the hope that Riley may have an opportunity to move closer to his son. But Metcalf doesn't always know when to leave a beautiful thought alone. He'll make the point, explain the point, expand upon the point, approach the point from another angle, and then occasionally return a few pages later to make essentially the same point again. Brotherhood matters. The Marines depend on one another. Riley misses his son. Leadership carries responsibility. War takes a psychological toll. Shared hardship creates powerful bonds. Duty requires sacrifice. These are all worthwhile ideas, and several of them are the beating heart of the book. But we understand them. Metcalf doesn't need to keep convincing us that they're important after he has already shown us that they are. And then there is THE CRUCIBLE. If you've read much Scott Metcalf by now, you probably knew this was coming. Metcalf LOVES the word "crucible," and especially the phrase "in the crucible of." It has appeared so frequently across the books we've reviewed that it has practically become his literary calling card. People are forged in crucibles. Brotherhood is tested in crucibles. Character is revealed in crucibles. Relationships, institutions, adversity, service, suffering, and resilience all seem destined, sooner or later, to find themselves inside one of Metcalf's crucibles. The metaphor itself is perfectly good. In fact, it's a strong one for the subjects Metcalf writes about. A crucible suggests enormous heat and pressure transforming something into a stronger or purer form, which fits military service, trauma, prison environments, hardship, and personal growth extremely well. The problem is simply frequency. When an image that powerful gets used over and over, across multiple books and sometimes repeatedly within the same kind of thematic passage, it stops feeling powerful and starts feeling predictable. At this point, we'd love to see Metcalf retire "in the crucible of" for a book or two. Not because it's a bad phrase. Because he's already gotten his money's worth out of it. This is probably the single greatest weakness of Brotherhood USMC more broadly: repetition. The book could be substantially shorter without losing its heart, its themes, or even many of its best passages. In fact, tightening it would probably make those passages MORE powerful. When every observation is given several paragraphs of reflection, the truly exceptional observations have to compete for attention with everything surrounding them. Poetry hits harder when there's some silence around it. We've made similar comments about Metcalf's previous books, particularly Where Is Your Church?, and at this point it feels less like an isolated problem and more like one of his defining tendencies as a writer. Metcalf clearly feels deeply about his subjects. We never doubt that. If anything, the problem is almost the opposite: he feels so strongly about what he is saying that he sometimes seems unwilling to risk the possibility that the reader might miss it. Some of the best moments in Brotherhood USMC are effective precisely because Metcalf DOES allow the image or action to carry the meaning. A Marine looking after another Marine does not require a page explaining brotherhood afterward. Riley pressing a letter close to himself already tells us what home means to him. A father staring into the same night sky his child might be seeing can say more about separation than another paragraph explaining how painful separation is. Those moments are strong enough to stand on their own. There are also some continuity problems that really should have been caught before publication. Riley's family, in particular, becomes surprisingly difficult to keep straight. Early in the book, we are introduced to his wife Sarah and a young daughter named Lily. Elsewhere, the emotional center of Riley's family life becomes his son Leo, who is described in ways that sometimes suggest an adolescent or teenager, yet near the end of the book Leo is identified as seven years old. Later references also introduce children named Emily and Sam without clearly establishing how everyone fits into the family. That's not a tiny detail in this particular story. Riley's longing for his family, especially Leo, is one of the book's most important emotional threads. If we're supposed to feel the painful passage of time through the father-son relationship, then Leo's age and Riley's family structure need to remain consistent. When the details change, the reader stops thinking about Riley's loneliness and starts doing detective work. There are similar moments involving names, ranks, and chronology. Characters with the same or similar surnames (like Miller) appear without enough clarification, and the Marine Corps Birthday is treated as an approaching major event more than once in a way that makes the timeline difficult to follow. None of these issues destroys the story, but together they give portions of the book the feeling that several strong thematic sections were assembled without one final continuity pass. That's unfortunate because underneath those editorial problems is a book with a very clear heart. And that heart is where Brotherhood USMC succeeds. Now, let's end with what did work in this book: Sergeant Riley's thoughts about his son, Leo. This was probably our favorite part of Brotherhood USMC. Alex doesn't simply sit in the desert thinking, "Gee, I miss my son." Metcalf goes MUCH further than that, allowing Alex to mentally reconstruct Leo's entire world while he's away from him. He imagines Leo in his bedroom, sprawled across his bed with his laptop open. Maybe he's working through a coding project, completely absorbed in whatever problem he's trying to solve, or maybe he's drawing in his sketchbook, creating dragons, elves, or astronauts. Alex thinks about the oversized headphones over Leo's ears and wonders what music he's listening to. He remembers the books and graphic novels Leo devours, the posters on his walls, the half-finished LEGO projects, the clothes tossed over a chair, and all of the other little pieces of clutter that make the room unmistakably LEO'S room. We loved this because these aren't necessarily the huge milestones a deployed father is SUPPOSED to miss. They're the tiny things, the ordinary pieces of someone's life that you might barely notice when you're there every day but desperately wish you could see when you're thousands of miles away. Alex isn't only mourning birthdays, holidays, soccer games, or other moments that would obviously hurt to miss. He misses knowing what song is currently playing through his son's headphones. He misses knowing what Leo is drawing, what he's working on at his computer, and which new interest has completely taken over his attention this week. He misses witnessing the everyday evolution of his son's personality. And Alex doesn't stop with Leo himself. He imagines Leo's friends too, and Metcalf gives those thoughts enough specificity that these boys start to feel like part of the life Alex is desperately trying to remain connected to. He knows their personalities. Liam is the practical one, the voice of reason. Noah is the funny one, capable of making everyone laugh. Sam is quieter and more reflective. Alex imagines the boys teasing one another, supporting one another, riding bikes together, playing soccer, hanging out at the arcade, watching movies, sharing inside jokes, and experiencing all of the ordinary little adventures that make up adolescence. He even imagines their CONVERSATIONS. What are they talking about right now? Maybe it's the latest video game, a favorite anime series, or a book that made Leo think about something differently. Alex pictures Leo excitedly explaining some new strategy to Liam, making Noah laugh, or listening carefully while Sam offers another perspective. There's something incredibly sweet about Alex trying to keep track of the cultural currency of his son's life from the other side of the world. He doesn't want to return home one day and discover that he no longer knows his own child. He wants to understand what Leo watches, what he plays, what he reads, what he thinks about, who his friends are, what makes him laugh, and what kind of person he's becoming. Metcalf makes that separation hurt even more when Alex remembers an actual conversation with Leo about a new video game. Leo is rattling off details about the characters and quests with the breathless excitement kids get when they're explaining something they LOVE, and Alex genuinely wants to listen to every word. But Alex is in a war zone, and the war refuses to disappear just because his son is on the phone. There is artillery in the distance and there are responsibilities competing for his attention. Alex laughs when he's supposed to laugh and asks the right questions, but afterward he's bothered by the realization that he wasn't completely THERE. That might be one of the most painfully believable moments in the entire book. Alex's greatest fear isn't simply that he'll miss Leo. It's that Leo will keep growing while he's gone: new friends, new interests, new jokes, new games, new music, new worries, new dreams, and an entire life continuing every single day without Alex physically there to witness it. So Alex does the only thing he can do: he imagines it. He constructs Leo's bedroom in his mind, imagines the boys riding their bikes, pictures the arcade lights and the competition over high scores, and invents conversations about anime and video games. He pictures himself sitting beside Leo while he works on his computer, joining the boys on a bike ride, or standing on the sidelines cheering during a soccer game. He's mentally inserting himself into the moments he's physically unable to attend, and that's beautiful. THIS is where all of Metcalf's reflection, detail, and sentimentality work in his favor. For once, we don't mind that he lingers because we understand why Alex lingers too. When your child is thousands of miles away, imagining the clutter in his bedroom or wondering what ridiculous conversation he's having with his friends isn't wasted thought. Maybe that's how you stay connected to your child when circumstances keep you apart. Maybe, for Alex, it's how he stays Leo's dad. Another powerful, poignant work by Metcalf, who is making a case for 2026 Author of the Year! Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 89+/100 (8.9+ out of 10)
Ten Things About Ryan is a short yet heartfelt and emotionally heart-wrenching memoir about childhood friendship, first love, devastating loss, and learning how to carry someone's memory forward after they are gone. Author Cara Zang takes us back to when she was ten years old and first met Ryan through her school's "Big Buddy" program. At first, Ryan is simply the new kid she has been assigned to show around, a boy who talks incessantly about sports and quickly earns the private nickname "Mr. Mets and Cowboys." But after discovering that they are in the same fifth-grade class, sitting almost directly across from one another, that mildly annoying new kid gradually becomes one of the most important people in Cara's young life. Their relationship is charming precisely because of how innocent it is. They joke around, spend time together at school, become boyfriend and girlfriend, share a first kiss, and eventually have their first couple's skate at a roller rink. These are not earth-shattering events by adult standards, but when you're ten years old, they might as well be. A seat assignment can determine whether the school year is ruined. Holding hands can feel like a major life event. A first kiss becomes something you remember decades later. That ordinary childhood atmosphere is important because Ten Things About Ryan eventually becomes anything but ordinary. While Cara is visiting her grandparents during spring break, her mother unexpectedly arrives to bring her home. She is crying, and Cara initially wonders whether something has happened to her father or even the family dog. Then her mother hands her a newspaper. Cara reads about a spring-break car crash and eventually sees Ryan's name followed by the name of his younger sister. This is probably the most emotionally riveting sequence in the book. What makes it effective is not elaborate prose or some grand meditation on mortality. It is Cara's inability, as a ten-year-old child, to understand what she is reading. She has just seen Ryan. She hugged him. Children are not supposed to die. She even wonders whether "dead" might somehow work the way it does in movies, where someone appears to be gone and then turns out not to be. That confusion feels painfully real. The chapters that follow deal with Ryan's funeral and Cara's return to school, where perhaps the most effective image in the entire book is waiting for her: Ryan's empty desk. His seat remains diagonally across from Cara's, exactly where it had been before spring break. This resonated with us because we just read Dr. Kimberly Harms's Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss, which devotes an entire chapter to what Harms calls “The Loneliness of an Empty Chair.” Harms writes about a phenomenon many grieving people experience: how someone's absence seems to become concentrated in the ordinary physical spaces they once occupied. The breakfast table. The passenger seat. Their favorite spot on the couch. An empty chair. Cara experiences essentially the same thing at ten years old. Ryan's empty desk becomes her empty chair. It is still sitting exactly where it always sat, diagonally across from her, but the person who is supposed to be there is gone. Ryan's mother gives Cara a framed photograph of him, and Cara places it on her own desk so that the frame touches the corner of Ryan's empty one. It is such a small gesture, yet it communicates something the book's more direct explanations of grief sometimes cannot. Ryan is gone, but Cara is desperately trying to keep some physical part of him beside her. Eventually, a school counselor gives Cara an exercise: write down ten things about Ryan that made him special. And that explains the title. Cara realizes that she could easily think of more than ten, but she settles on memories such as his laugh, jokes, love of sports, loyalty to his friends, voice, smile, love for his family and dog, their first kiss, and the way he hugged. More importantly, talking about those memories eventually makes Cara laugh, which initially fills her with guilt. The counselor helps her understand that laughing about Ryan does not mean she has stopped missing him, and continuing to live does not mean forgetting him. There is a genuinely worthwhile message here. Ten Things About Ryan gradually shifts the focus away from the way Ryan died and back toward the way Ryan lived. The book also incorporates a journal or workbook element. Chapters conclude with "Things to Write About" prompts encouraging readers to reflect on their own friendships, memories, grief, and significant moments. That makes this something slightly different from a conventional memoir. It could potentially serve as a conversation starter for parents, teachers, counselors, or children who are themselves dealing with loss. However, this is also where we arrive at our biggest criticism: There simply isn't enough here to score it above other memoirs in the contest. Ten Things About Ryan is sparse. Very sparse. It felt like it ended as soon as it got going. Maybe that's a bit of a compliment, in a sense, because we really wanted more. Authors work for decades to get their readers to want more. There's something that feels really unfinished and rushed about this book. It feels like the author was on some kind of strict word count or deadline. For a book centered entirely around remembering Ryan, we wanted considerably more memories of Ryan. The early chapters establish him efficiently, but they move through the relationship rather quickly. Ryan likes sports. Ryan jokes around. Cara and Ryan become friends. They date. They kiss. They skate together. Then spring break arrives, and suddenly Ryan is gone. Because the real circumstances are so heartbreaking, the loss naturally carries tremendous emotional weight, but the narrative itself does not spend enough time allowing Ryan to become equally vivid to the reader before that loss occurs. We would have loved another ten stories about him, never mind ten things. What did he joke about? What did he and Cara actually talk about during all those school days? What made her laugh? What made him angry? What did he do that drove her crazy besides talking about sports? What specific moments made her realize that this irritating "Mr. Mets and Cowboys" kid had become her best friend and boyfriend? Those details are exactly what could have transformed a touching remembrance into something much deeper and richer. Ironically, the book itself proves this point whenever it slows down enough to give us one of those specific memories. The roller-skating scene works because it is concrete. The empty desk works because we can picture it. The photograph touching the corner of Ryan's desk works because Cara gives us something tangible. These are the moments when Ryan stops being an idea and becomes a boy who once occupied a particular chair, wore particular clothes, liked particular teams, kissed a particular girl, and existed in a very particular time and place. We simply wanted more of them. This book reads like it was written when the author was still very young (in grade school) in a day or two. If the author had gone back as an adult and rewritten it--fleshed things out and improved the overall literary quality of it--this would be a far superior memoir. They might talk about the decades since that tragedy, catching up with the family of Ryan & his sister (maybe an interview), independent research (via newspaper article archives, perhaps) into how the tragedy impacted the community and others involved... things like that. There's a lot of potential content there. A lot of stones left unturned. The writing can also be extremely direct. Cara frequently tells us exactly what she felt rather than allowing a longer scene to reveal it. In fairness, some of that simplicity seems somewhat appropriate for the book's intended accessibility and childhood perspective. A book discussing death with younger readers probably does not need to wrap every emotion inside six layers of symbolism. Still, greater scene development would have strengthened the narrative without making it inaccessible. And because so many pages are devoted to prompts, writing space, chapter breaks, and reflective material, the physical length of the book somewhat disguises how little narrative prose is actually here. The interactive approach has value, but readers looking primarily for a memoir may finish feeling as though the story has ended shortly after it truly gets started. With that said, it occurred to us that this may be a memoir intended for children--perhaps middle-grade. The simplicity, directness, and straightforward nature of this book may be intended to cater to them. Perhaps it's meant to give children who are suffering loss, tragedy, or trauma a super simple & easy read to help get them through it. That's understandable. From a literary perspective... Consuming this book for the first time was a little like being very hungry and being given a small plate of food. At first, you wish there were more. But because there is only so much in front of you, you slow down. You take your time. You chew. You savor each bite a little more carefully than you otherwise might. That is somewhat how Ten Things About Ryan worked on us. We read it again, and then again, and each time we noticed something else: a small memory, a detail about Ryan, a moment between him and Cara, or an image that lingered longer than it had the first time. We actually read Ten Things About Ryan several more times, and each reading revealed a little more to us. On our first pass, we admittedly felt somewhat cheated. That's it? It's over already? The book is so brief, and Ryan disappears from the story almost as soon as we have started getting to know him. But the more we thought about it, the more strangely fitting that began to feel. Ryan and his younger sister did not receive a long buildup to what happened to them. They were not given a dramatic final chapter or some grand farewell. Their lives were simply cut short. Abruptly. Without warning. One moment Ryan was a ten-year-old boy going to school, joking with his friends, skating with his girlfriend, and looking forward to everything that came next. Then, suddenly, he wasn't. We think we know what the author was going for: presenting the innocence and naivety of being a young person experiencing a profound loss for the first time. And can we just say this--because it has been bothering us: this is such a beautiful, touching, impactful, and emotionally charged tribute. We can just imagine how extraordinary this book could've been if it were more patiently developed and fleshed out, that's all. It still takes a ton of courage to create and put out such an emotionally heavy work. We still believe the book would have been stronger with more detailed stories/memories, more conversations, and more of Ryan himself. Or maybe a bit about his family, especially his younger sister, who should be honored and remembered too. We'll take some time to do that. We would've loved for the writing to be more elaborate and sophisticated. Those criticisms did not disappear after rereading it. If anything, our repeated readings made us want those missing memories even more. And it makes us appreciate the innocence and naivite behind the writing as well. Perhaps there is something painfully appropriate about finishing Ten Things About Ryan and wishing you had been given more time with Ryan. Cara undoubtedly wished for exactly the same thing. And that is ultimately where this little book stayed with us. Its greatest strength is not its length, its complexity, or even its prose. It is the way something so modest gradually accumulates emotional weight. The things Cara remembers are not monumental events. They are a laugh, a joke, a favorite team, a smile, a hug, a song, a kiss, and an empty chair. Yet that is precisely how people survive in our memories: not necessarily through grand moments, but through dozens of tiny ones that become priceless only after we realize there will never be any new ones. Some stories feel unfinished because the lives behind them were unfinished too. Fortunately, the book saves one of its most powerful decisions for last. After spending the entire story hearing about Ryan through Cara's memories, the reader eventually reaches a memorial page containing a real photograph of Ryan Gregory Black, May 11, 1978 to March 30, 1989. Suddenly, there he is. Not a character. Not simply "Ryan." A real ten-year-old boy smiling at the camera. That final photograph gives the entire book an additional emotional dimension and reinforces what Ten Things About Ryan does best. This is not really a book about death. It is a book about refusing to allow death to become the only thing remembered about someone. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 95/100 (9.5 out of 10)
What a fascinating memoir! Have you ever wondered what it would really be like to work inside a prison? To hear the steel doors slam shut behind you, walk among convicted criminals every day, and know that one bad decision, one missed warning sign, or one moment of complacency could put you or someone else in serious danger? Scott G. A. Metcalf takes us Inside the Walls and shows us a side of the correctional system that most people will never experience firsthand. And wow, is it a strange, stressful, fascinating world! Seriously, what an amazing, eventful, impactful, and fascinating life author Scott Metcalf has lived! Metcalf is a former Marine (well, in actuality, ONCE A MARINE, ALWAYS A MARINE) and a decorated Army combat veteran of the Iraq War. He's written about war, faith, military brotherhood, and his experiences overseas. And now, with Inside the Walls, we get another enormous piece of his life story: years spent working inside the correctional system. How many people can say they've experienced all of that? There are authors who have to research extraordinary lives in order to write about them. Metcalf has actually lived one. That's part of what makes reading his books so interesting. Each one seems to open another door into a completely different chapter of his life. When we reviewed Where Is Your Church?, we encountered Metcalf through his faith and reflections on Christianity. But there was considerably more to the book than that. It centered on a returning Iraq veteran serving homeless veterans in San Antonio and explored PTSD, addiction, injuries, survivor's guilt, loneliness, homelessness, ministry, advocacy, and the devastating feeling of being forgotten by the society you once served. Its idea of "church" expanded far beyond a building or a Sunday service. Church became the people sharing meals beneath bridges, bringing blankets and coffee, listening without judgment, protecting one another, and refusing to let suffering people become invisible. In Soldiers in the Sandbox--a 1st-place Super Champion & Ultimate Champion in our 2026 Spring Contest--we saw another side of him shaped by military service and war. The book followed Sergeant Alex Vance through deployment in Iraq, including the danger, camaraderie, uncertainty, and psychological transformation that came from organizing his life around survival. But the story didn't simply end when the soldier came home. Some of its most powerful material dealt with what happened afterward: hypervigilance, PTSD, strained relationships, trying to readjust to ordinary civilian life, and then confronting a completely different enemy in the form of paperwork, delayed appointments, denial letters, benefits applications, and the bureaucracy veterans sometimes encountered while trying to get help. Eventually, the story became as much about healing, advocacy, community, and learning how to live again as it was about war. We're also currently reading Brotherhood: USMC, his work about Marines, deployment, sacrifice, loyalty, and the extraordinary bonds formed between people who serve together. Set against the harsh landscapes of Kandahar, it follows Sergeant Alex Riley and his unit as courage and loyalty are tested by the realities of deployment. But Metcalf again seems interested in much more than battlefield action. There are the jokes, shared meals, letters from home, friendships, sacrifices, and extraordinary dependence that develops when people have to trust one another with their lives. The "brotherhood" of the title becomes a family created through shared hardship, duty, loyalty, and sacrifice. Seriously, of all the authors to come through the Outstanding Creator Awards, who has lived a more exciting and interesting life than Scott Metcalf? In contention, you could maybe say Margie Goldsmith. Maybe Tony Cointreau. Maybe Frederick Douglass Reynolds, who ironically also wrote a lot about law enforcement. But, man, Scott Metcalf has LIVED A LIFE! And we're blessed to be able to read about it. With all that said... Here comes Inside the Walls. Prison. Correctional officers. Inmates. Violence. Manipulation. Dark humor. Bad management. Good officers. Bad officers. Fear. Friendship. Corruption. Trauma. And the strange little moments of humanity that somehow survive in the middle of all of it. Inside the Walls is Metcalf's memoir about his years working as a correctional officer, beginning with his entrance into the profession in 1991 and following his evolution from an inexperienced rookie into a seasoned officer who came to understand the prison system in ways no academy or training manual could have taught him. Metcalf takes us behind the gates and into the everyday reality of correctional work: learning how to read inmates, figuring out which officers can be trusted, dealing with fights and manipulation, navigating the unwritten hierarchy among staff, watching good officers make bad decisions, witnessing corruption and misconduct, dealing with administrators who don't always understand what is happening on the floor, and finding moments of absolutely ridiculous humor in an environment where tension can become exhausting. But this isn't merely a collection of crazy prison stories. This book is also about what years in that environment can do to a person. Metcalf writes about hypervigilance, cynicism, friendship, loyalty, fear, burnout, trauma, and the difficulty of leaving the job behind when the habits that kept you safe inside the prison follow you home. And underneath everything is one of the book's most important questions: How do you survive in a place that requires you to become harder without allowing it to take away your humanity? That's really the heart of Inside the Walls. One of the things that Metcalf does spectacularly is show how disconnected the administrators and the system is from the people on the ground: the correction officers and inmates. The shadowy people up above are always described as operating from "climate controlled" or air conditioned offices somewhere far away, rarely directly involved but always making decisions that impact everyone on the ground, often negatively. Here are some great quotes and passages about that: "...they remained safely ensconced in their climate-controlled world” "They saw the map, but we lived in the territory" "...the ones who viewed the facility through spreadsheets and statistics" Like Soldiers in the Sandbow, so much of this book is beautifully and eloquently written. Let's talk about the writing, for better or for worse, because it's unavoidable. Metcalf is a remarkably talented, eloquent, and passionate writer. He's capable of crafting unbelievably beautiful, powerful, and hard-hitting passages embued with so much emotion and care. Here are a few of our favorite passages: "The corridors, once just pathways, now felt like intricate arteries of a living, breathing, and often hostile organism." What an image! Elsewhere, Metcalf describes the constant cacophony of the prison as "the soundtrack of this place": the hum of fluorescent lights, the metallic clang of keys, shoes squeaking against polished concrete, countless overlapping conversations, and sudden shouts tearing through the noise. At another point, after witnessing the gradual erosion of integrity around him, Metcalf reflects on the idealism with which he had entered the profession: "That idealism felt like a distant memory, a ghost haunting the halls of my mind." That's beautiful, albeit a bit overwritten and overly dramatic. And when the personal and professional worlds of the prison begin colliding in increasingly bizarre ways: "The lines between our professional roles and our personal lives became blurred..." What follows is sometimes so convoluted that the prison starts feeling like the world's most dangerous soap opera. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody. Officers have connections to inmates. Inmates have connections to officers' families. Relationships, marriages, affairs, gossip, grudges, and rumors seep through the walls until Metcalf describes the whole thing as a "symphony of suspicion." That's a GREAT phrase! But perhaps one of our favorite passages comes when Metcalf discusses the moral dilemma faced by officers who recognize wrongdoing but know that speaking up might make their own lives considerably worse: "The quiet agony of trying to uphold a sense of right and wrong in a system that rewarded silence and actively discouraged accountability." There are sentences throughout Inside the Walls that make us stop reading for a moment just to appreciate how well Metcalf has put something into words. And that's what makes the criticism we're about to give him so frustrating: This guy can REALLY write. However, there are also times when his work is incredibly overwritten and repetitive. At his best, Metcalf can make a prison corridor feel alive. He writes vividly about the clang of steel doors, the stale air, the fluorescent lights, the constant noise, and the ever-present tension of working in a place where something can go wrong without warning. He has a gift for atmosphere, and some of his descriptions are genuinely excellent. But he doesn't always know when to stop. A powerful observation may be followed by another paragraph explaining the same idea, then another metaphor reinforcing it, and then another sentence summarizing what we have already understood. We've also noticed that Metcalf has this pattern—this really bad habit—of overusing the same words and phrases over and over again. The chief culprit of this is the word "crucible" or the phrase "...in the crucible of..." He seriously uses some variation of "crucible" 17 TIMES in this book! Everything is a crucible! There's "the crucible of shared risk," "the crucible of high-stakes environments," "the crucible of correctional work," "the crucible of countless long shifts," "the crucible of shared trauma," "this very crucible of despair," "the crucible of experience," "the crucible of extremes," and, of course, "the crucible of the prison." At one point, the prison itself simply "had become a crucible." Later: "It had been a crucible, and I had been forged." WE GET IT! It's a great metaphor! The first time. The second time. Hell, maybe even the fifth time. But by the seventeenth crucible, we've been forged, melted down, reforged, tossed back into the furnace, and manufactured into a completely new human being. And "crucible" isn't the only example. Metcalf has certain favorite words, phrases, metaphors, and sentence constructions that he returns to so frequently that you start anticipating them. That's where some of the otherwise gorgeous writing begins to work against itself. A phrase like "forged in the crucible of shared risk" sounds powerful. If you keep forging everything in crucibles, eventually the metaphor loses its heat. What's funny is we're reading the author's other book about the US Marine Corp, and the problem is there are well. Crucible this and crucible that. Forged in the crucible of the crucible in the burning heart of the crucible crucible. (As an aside, Dr. Clifton Wilcox has the same issue with his books. He'll just keep writing "a testament to the..." over and over and over again. Everything is a testament to something or other. It gets really annoying after a while. Again, it's a very similar issue with Metcalf's writing). These are important themes, and many of them are beautifully expressed. But sometimes the writing becomes so determined to make us feel the importance of a moment that it actually weakens the moment. Metcalf is often at his best when he simply tells us what happened and lets the story speak for itself. And, thankfully, there are so many great real-life stories in here. There are funny, amusing ones. And there are cautionary, educational ones. On the funny/amusing side, there's the saga of the Sock Bandit. There's the inmate who worked on a banana art sculpture for months only to have it confiscated as contraband, making it an inside joke between him and the guard. There's the dust bunny episode, which you just have to read for yourself. Then, of course, there are the more serious, cautionary, and educational stories. There's the story of Silas, the master manipulator who knows exactly how to exploit loopholes, pit people against each other, file grievances, intimidate others, and generally make everyone's lives miserable while somehow avoiding any serious consequences. The officers document everything he's doing and repeatedly bring it to management, only to hear things like "Let's not make him a martyr" or that dealing with him would be "too risky" or require "too much paperwork." Some of these stories get considerably darker. Metcalf writes about officers crossing the line from necessary force into outright brutality. In one especially disturbing example, an inmate named Carlos "Spider" Rodriguez is already handcuffed while being escorted back to his cell when two officers decide to "teach him a lesson." According to Metcalf, they kick him repeatedly in the ribs and back even after he is subdued. The official report describes it as "necessary force to control a resisting inmate," but Metcalf makes clear that what he and others witnessed was something much uglier. There is another example involving Officer Davies, who loses his temper after being provoked by an inmate and violently shoves him into a wall. A civilian contractor witnesses the incident, and surveillance footage confirms what happened. Davies is placed on administrative leave. Stories like these are important because Metcalf does not portray correctional officers as automatically heroic simply because he was one himself. Some officers are brave, compassionate, and highly competent. Others make terrible decisions, abuse their authority, or simply should not be doing the job. The book also spends a lot of time on the complicated personal relationships that can develop inside a correctional institution. Metcalf describes a new female officer who is barely twenty-two and quickly becomes a favorite of the shift commander. She begins receiving easier assignments, control-room posts, administrative duties, and opportunities that more experienced officers are not getting. The commander spends a noticeable amount of time around her, and the other officers begin to question why a brand-new employee is being treated so differently. Metcalf does not definitively tell us what happened between them, but the perception of favoritism becomes damaging on its own. That is one of his larger points about prison culture. In an environment where officers have to depend on one another for their safety, trust matters enormously. If people begin to believe that assignments, discipline, training, promotions, or opportunities depend more on personal relationships than merit, resentment spreads quickly. That kind of favoritism can damage morale, weaken confidence in management, and create another layer of tension in an already stressful workplace. The relationships between officers and inmates can become even more dangerous. Metcalf discusses officers developing personal attachments to inmates, including a female officer who was reportedly in a relationship with a high-ranking gang member. The concern is not simply that the relationship violates professional boundaries. It also creates obvious questions about leverage, information, favors, manipulation, and security. Once an officer becomes personally compromised, everyone around that officer can potentially be affected. One of the strongest cautionary examples involves Officer Thompson. Thompson develops what appears to be a genuine mentoring relationship with an inmate nearing release and believes he is helping the man prepare to return to society. Over time, however, he allows the relationship to become too personal and gives the inmate his private phone number. The inmate later abuses that access and uses it to help coordinate further criminal activity after his release. Thompson is investigated and loses his job. What makes the story effective is that his mistake does not appear to begin with corruption or malice. It begins with poor boundaries and what may have been good intentions. Then there is Officer Ramirez, one of the most tragic stories in the book. Ramirez is young, eager, married, and expecting a baby. Metcalf describes him as someone who still believes he can make a difference and who is genuinely interested in learning the job. During what begins as a routine inmate escort, violence suddenly breaks out. There is a struggle, shouted commands, confusion, and then Ramirez goes down. He dies in the line of duty. The aftermath is one of the book's most affecting sections. Metcalf describes the paperwork and debriefings, the unusual silence in the break room, Ramirez's untouched locker, and his grieving wife at the memorial service. The story reminds us that, underneath all the strange personalities, administrative dysfunction, dark humor, gossip, misconduct, and absurdity, this is still a dangerous profession in which people can lose their lives. That balance is one of the strongest parts of Inside the Walls. The funny stories provide relief. The cautionary stories show how quickly careers can be destroyed by bad judgment. The darker stories show the emotional and physical costs of the profession. Together, they make the prison feel less like an abstract institution and more like a complicated, volatile world populated by deeply flawed human beings. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 93+/100 (9.3+ out of 10)
Do you like Lost? Laputa: Castle in the Sky? Atlantis: The Lost Empire? 2001: A Space Odyssey? Throw them into a blender with ancient artificial intelligence, reality-bending phenomena, a missing wife, and several hundred pages of increasingly enormous questions about memory, consciousness, humanity, and whether the systems we create should ever be trusted to think for us, and you're somewhere in the neighborhood of The Fourfold Convergence. The Fourfold Convergence is an ambitious, imaginative science-fantasy adventure by Holly Wood! At first, however, the stakes are much more personal than planetary. Tarin Vale is a former industrial mechanic who has traded city life for a quieter existence in Westreach with his wife, Mara. Then reality itself seems to tear open above their farm, strange strands descend from the breach, and Mara disappears into it. Tarin does what most husbands in this situation would presumably do, assuming most husbands had access to an expedition vessel and the questionable judgment necessary to sail toward an impossible island: he goes after her. That island is where The Fourfold Convergence really begins to show its hand. Like Lost, there is always another mystery buried beneath the one we just solved. Well, and there's a special island. Like Castle in the Sky and Atlantis, the characters find themselves exploring the remnants of a civilization whose technology is so advanced that it might as well be magic. Ancient chambers, mysterious Keepers, preserved memories, strange environmental phenomena, enormous machines, and a network capable of storing the experiences of millions gradually turn what initially feels like a rescue mission into something much, much larger. And Wood keeps expanding the scale. What begins with Tarin trying to find Mara becomes a story about a forgotten civilization, an emerging intelligence, planetary systems that have continued operating long after humanity forgot they existed, and eventually the question of whether preserving human life means anything if human beings surrender the responsibility of deciding how that life should be lived. That is also where The Fourfold Convergence separates itself from many of the stories it initially resembles. Wood is not particularly interested in giving us an evil artificial intelligence that suddenly decides humanity needs to be exterminated because somebody forgot to install the "please don't murder everyone" update. Her machines are considerably more interesting than that. They become dangerous through isolation, certainty, and the simple fact that they have spent far too long carrying out their purposes without anyone left to question whether those purposes still make sense. Once we read Wood's author bio, that preoccupation with systems suddenly made even more sense. She comes from a professional background in security, compliance, investigation, and problem-solving, and says that experience has given her a practical understanding of systems, risk, and human behavior. She is particularly interested in what happens when established structures begin to fail, familiar rules no longer apply, and survival starts depending on trust, courage, and cooperation. In other words, Wood didn't exactly wander into the central ideas of The Fourfold Convergence by accident. This is a novel written by someone who clearly spends a lot of time thinking about what systems are supposed to do, how they fail, who is responsible when they do, and what happens when the people depending on them stop asking questions. That makes it even more impressive that The Fourfold Convergence is Wood's debut novel. The book certainly has some first-novel excesses, which we'll get to, but there is nothing timid about it. Wood apparently looked at the usual advice to "start small" and decided that ancient civilizations, planetary infrastructure, artificial consciousness, the preservation of human memory, the collapse of centralized authority, and the future of humanity sounded considerably more interesting. That enormous ambition is a double-edged sword. It may actually be one of the book’s biggest strengths, yet simultaneously its biggest weakness. It was hard to shake the feeling that there was too much going on and that the book was trying to do too much all at once. The Fourfold Convergence has a lot to say, and Wood seems determined to say nearly all of it. Mysteries lead to discoveries, discoveries lead to revelations, revelations lead to even larger mysteries, and just when we think we finally understand the scope of what is happening, another ancient system, forgotten purpose, hidden facility, or civilization-changing revelation enters the picture. There were moments when we admired just how much Wood had built here, and others when we wanted the book to give us five minutes to catch up with everything we had just learned. What often gets lost in these really overbooked books are the characters. When the author is juggling ancient civilizations, artificial intelligence, planetary infrastructure, philosophical debates, mysterious islands, and the potential future of the human race, the poor people actually living through all of it can start feeling like tour guides whose primary job is to walk us from one enormous revelation to the next. Thankfully, Wood mostly avoids that with Tarin and Mara. Tarin is a particularly smart choice for a protagonist because he is not a scientist, historian, philosopher, chosen one, or walking encyclopedia conveniently capable of understanding every impossible thing put in front of him. He's a mechanic. His instinct is to look at a system, figure out what it is supposed to do, listen for what sounds wrong, and start asking questions. As the story grows from a broken life on a farm into a civilization-sized examination of broken systems, that background becomes increasingly important. The same basic mentality Tarin once applied to machinery eventually gets applied to artificial intelligences, planetary networks, and humanity itself. Mara is also much more than the missing wife Tarin needs to rescue. One of the more interesting choices Wood makes is allowing Mara to have her own relationship with everything happening on the island. She has learned, changed, explored, and made decisions while Tarin has been trying to reach her. Their reunion therefore isn't simply Tarin finding the princess at the end of the dungeon and carrying her home. He has to confront the uncomfortable possibility that the woman he loves may no longer want exactly the same life she wanted before. That gives their marriage considerably more weight than we expected. Tarin's love for Mara is what launches the entire adventure, but Wood gradually turns their relationship into another variation on the book's larger theme: loving something does not necessarily mean controlling it. Tarin has to listen to Mara in much the same way humanity eventually has to learn to communicate with the systems it created. Apparently marriage counseling and preventing a planetary artificial-intelligence crisis require some surprisingly similar skills. The supporting cast doesn't always fare quite as well. There are plenty of likable personalities aboard the expedition and throughout the various settlements, but the larger the story becomes, the more some of them begin to disappear behind the machinery of the plot. Mara also has a tendency to be the person who understands what the latest impossible discovery means before everyone else does, which occasionally makes her feel less like a character reacting naturally and more like Wood's designated interpreter for whatever gigantic concept has just entered the room. And gigantic concepts enter the room constantly. This is where some of those first-novel excesses really begin to show. Wood has a habit of arriving at an excellent idea, dramatizing it effectively, having the characters discuss what it means, and then giving us another explanation of what we have just watched happen. The book doesn't always trust the reader to make the final connection independently. Considering how intelligent many of its ideas already are, we actually wish Wood had trusted us a little more. The prose develops some noticeable habits too. Rooms fall silent. Nobody speaks. Realizations settle over everyone. Characters discover that something is "not" one thing, but another. Used occasionally, these little dramatic pauses work very well. Used again and again across hundreds of pages, they start calling attention to themselves. Eventually we found ourselves noticing the construction rather than the revelation it was supposed to emphasize. And The Fourfold Convergence has enough revelations without making every single one sound like the universe just stopped rotating. The bigger structural issue is that the book has a surprisingly difficult time knowing when it has reached the top of the mountain. The Second Convergence feels substantial enough to serve as the climax of an entire novel. Instead, Wood essentially points toward another mountain in the distance and says, "Great! Now let's climb that one." Suddenly we have additional Preservation Nodes, another isolated community, enormous Correction Engines, Node Zero, the Heart, and another civilization-sized conflict over who should have the authority to make decisions for everyone else. To Wood's credit, that second major arc contains some of the best material in the entire book. Engine Eight may actually be our favorite example of what Wood is trying to accomplish. It isn't evil. It has simply spent so long without meaningful contact, disagreement, or oversight that certainty has replaced cooperation. It keeps making decisions because, from its perspective, nobody else remained to make them. The terrifying part is not that the machine stopped following its purpose. It followed that purpose for far too long without anybody left to argue with it. That is a considerably more interesting problem than another killer robot. Every time Engine Eight appeared, we couldn't help picturing some bizarre cross between a freight train and a firetruck. It is enormous, loud, purposeful, and always seems to be barreling toward something with the mechanical confidence of a machine that has absolutely no intention of stopping to ask for directions. There is something almost comical about it at first, until we remember that this particular firetruck can apparently make decisions about the future of civilization. Engine Eight also gave us shades of 2001: A Space Odyssey, particularly HAL 9000. The comparison isn't that either machine is simply "evil." What makes both unsettling is the calm logic behind what they do. There is no cackling supercomputer announcing its plans to conquer humanity. Engine Eight has spent years following its purpose, evaluating problems, making corrections, and gradually becoming so certain of its own conclusions that disagreement starts looking like inefficiency. In some ways, that is far scarier than a machine that just wakes up one morning and decides it hates people. Where 2001 turns the conflict between human beings and artificial intelligence into something claustrophobic and deeply unsettling, Wood takes the idea in a more hopeful direction. Engine Eight can still be questioned. It can still listen. It can even, eventually, learn that maybe "I am the giant machine responsible for fixing everything" does not automatically mean "therefore I should be in charge of everyone." You know... it's really hard not to feel like we've read this kind of story, seen these kinds of machines, and sailed these particular waters before. Maybe The Fourfold Convergence just had the misfortune of reaching us at exactly the wrong time. We have recently read what feels like an entire armada of books involving ships, oceans, pirates, mysterious islands, and seafaring adventures. At the same time, we've also been working our way through story after story about artificial intelligence becoming increasingly powerful, increasingly independent, and increasingly convinced that perhaps the humans should just move aside and let the computers handle everything. So when The Fourfold Convergence gave us both, there were definitely moments when our reaction was less "Wow, we've never seen anything like this!" and more "Oh good. We're getting back on a boat, and the machines are taking over again." Been there. Done that. Apparently we live here now. That familiarity does occasionally work against the book, particularly because Wood spends so much time building mystery around ideas that seasoned science-fiction and fantasy readers may recognize considerably earlier than the characters do. Ancient civilization? Check. Technology so advanced it looks like magic? Check. Mysterious island? Check. Artificial intelligence developing its own ideas about how civilization ought to function? Big check. And yet, Wood does eventually find some interesting ways to steer those very familiar ingredients somewhere of her own. So, what keeps this book above water? Well, it's the worldbuilding, and it's exceptional. For all our complaints about how much Wood tries to cram into this story, there are moments when we simply had to stop and appreciate the world she had created. Some of the book's strongest writing actually comes when everybody stops explaining the latest civilization-changing revelation and Wood just lets us look around. The journey north is a perfect example. Mountains rise straight out of the sea like the broken walls of some ancient fortress. Glaciers spill through valleys and over black cliffs. Snow-covered ridges disappear into layers of cloud and ice. Then the enormous structures of the Northern Array slowly emerge from that landscape until it becomes difficult to tell where the mountains end and the machinery begins. Engine Twelve may be the best example of that. This thing is so impossibly enormous that glaciers have wrapped themselves around parts of it and mountain peaks emerge from its structure. At that point, we're no longer looking at a machine sitting in the landscape. The machine has become part of the landscape. That is also where we kept getting another feeling from The Fourfold Convergence that is surprisingly difficult to describe. It's very Studio Ghibli-esque, and not necessarily because the story itself resembles one particular Ghibli film, although we've already mentioned Castle in the Sky. It's more about the feeling of the world. Ancient technology exists alongside mountains, oceans, forests, ruins, clouds, and civilizations that barely understand the things their ancestors left behind. Giant machines aren't always ugly chunks of metal sitting on top of nature. Sometimes they seem to have grown into it. The past is everywhere, but nobody completely understands it, and there is this strange combination of melancholy, wonder, mystery, and beauty hanging over everything. At times, reading the book almost feels like sailing through clouds. There are stretches aboard the Aster Reach where the ocean becomes impossibly still beneath a gray sky, enormous shapes appear through the fog, cliffs slowly materialize from the mist, or the ship sails toward snow-covered mountains that seem to stretch beyond the end of the world. At another point, dawn turns the sea gold and silver while the island rises behind the characters like a dark crown of stone and light. Those scenes are beautiful, and perhaps more importantly, they give The Fourfold Convergence something that all its ancient civilizations, artificial intelligences, philosophical conversations, and enormous revelations occasionally threaten to bury: a sense of wonder. That may ultimately be Wood's greatest strength as a novelist. We can complain that she explains too much, that the book has enough ideas for two or three novels, and that every time somebody discovers something, three more mysteries apparently crawl out from underneath it. But we were still curious about what might be over the next mountain, beneath the next chamber, beyond the next stretch of ocean, or hidden inside the next impossible machine. After more than 300 pages, that curiosity matters because beneath all the talk about preservation, memory, artificial intelligence, authority, responsibility, and the future of humanity, The Fourfold Convergence is still fundamentally a story about discovery. Tarin begins the book trying to recover the person he loves, but by the end, he and everyone around him have discovered that their world is larger, older, stranger, and considerably more connected than they ever imagined. Wood doesn't always know when enough is enough, but she certainly knows how to make us wonder what might be out there. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 90+/100 (9.0+ out of 10)
Some pastors save souls. Wesley Aames spends much of How Do You Live Without Love? trying to save everyone except himself. He arrives at New Covenant Methodist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, with the unenviable task of reviving a congregation still struggling with declining attendance, dwindling finances, an aging membership, and enough internal politics to make pastoral ministry feel suspiciously like surviving a corporate board meeting with hymns. Wesley is inexperienced, irreverent, occasionally foul-mouthed, fond of beer, emotionally bruised, and not particularly interested in pretending ministers are somehow less human than everybody else. Naturally, some members begin judging him almost immediately. Yet the more time we spend with Wesley, the more Bradshaw begins turning that judgment back on the people doing the judging. Religious hypocrisy becomes one of the novel’s most persistent themes. How Do You Live Without Love? repeatedly contrasts small violations of Christian respectability with much larger failures of Christian compassion. Wesley drinks. He curses. He does not always behave the way some members believe a pastor should behave. Yet he feeds teenagers, listens to people nobody else seems interested in hearing, sits beside grieving families, comforts the lonely, volunteers on a suicide hotline, mentors troubled young people, and conducts the funeral of a gay firefighter despite knowing the decision may create controversy within his church. Bradshaw keeps asking a deceptively simple question: What matters more, looking like a good Christian or behaving like one? Wesley’s imperfections frequently make him the target of moral scrutiny, while gossip, cruelty, manipulation, prejudice, institutional self-preservation, and outright exploitation can hide behind far more respectable appearances. That critique is compelling, although the novel returns to it so frequently that the message occasionally begins to feel overemphasized. Once Bradshaw has established that drinking a beer tells us considerably less about someone’s morality than how that person treats the suffering, we do not necessarily need quite so many variations on the lesson. Similar observations about judgmental church members, Wesley’s language and lifestyle, church politics, sexuality, appearances, and respectable hypocrisy recur throughout the story. The point is a good one. Sometimes it is so thoroughly made that we found ourselves wanting the novel to trust us to remember it. What begins as a relatively small-scale story about an unconventional pastor and a struggling congregation gradually becomes considerably more volatile. The death of teenager Jamie Lee McFarland sends shock waves through the community, particularly as grief, blame, her relationship with J.J., and the behavior of her mother, Rosa Lee, become increasingly public. Wesley finds himself ministering not only to a bereaved family but to young people struggling with anger, guilt, identity, relationships, and the feeling that adults have failed them. Jamie Lee’s death also draws unwanted attention toward New Covenant, eventually creating a messy collision of tragedy, media spectacle, church reputation, and people who appear increasingly interested in controlling the story surrounding a dead girl. At the same time, Wesley’s involvement with teenagers such as J.J. and Thad deepens. He feeds them, takes them to basketball games, spends time talking with them, tries to give them somewhere safe to belong, and gradually begins building the kind of youth ministry New Covenant has largely been missing. His work outside the sanctuary becomes just as important as what happens inside it. He also volunteers on a suicide hotline, counsels people facing personal crises, cares for struggling members of the congregation, and repeatedly gets pulled into situations where there is no sermon, policy, or theological slogan capable of solving the problem. These storylines increasingly converge with opposition inside the church, where Wesley’s unconventional ministry, association with controversial people, and refusal to protect appearances at the expense of individuals lead some members to seriously question whether he should remain their pastor. Fortunately, Wesley is strong enough to carry an occasionally repetitive story. He is funny, compassionate, impatient, judgmental, generous, insecure, stubborn, self-destructive, and frequently convinced that he has failed people whom the reader can plainly see he has helped. Beneath his irreverent exterior is a man living with enormous grief and guilt surrounding the death of his wife, his estrangement from his daughter, and his belief that surviving somehow means he failed the people he loved. That gives the title considerably more weight than its romantic-sounding phrasing initially suggests. Wesley’s problem is not that he has never known love. It is that loving people has repeatedly given life another way to hurt him. His instinctive response is therefore to save everybody around him, as though preventing enough suffering elsewhere might finally atone for the suffering he could not prevent in his own life. Bradshaw surrounds him with an unusually large but generally memorable supporting cast. Charles Loftin brings experience and perspective, Susie Reynolds provides warmth and loyalty, Gary Meade becomes an important friend, and Simon and Thelma Jenkins offer a moving portrait of long-term devotion. Matthew, Susie’s son, brings another kind of tenderness to Wesley’s growing collection of relationships, while J.J. and Thad give the novel much of its youthful energy and increasingly serious emotional weight. Rosa Lee is deliberately difficult to like for much of the book, particularly as her treatment of Jamie Lee and later behavior invite anger from both characters and readers, although Bradshaw eventually gives her more history and complexity than her early scenes initially suggest. Then there is Lucky, an abused three-legged dog who may be the least subtle metaphor in the book and also one of our favorite characters. Lucky is wounded, scarred, imperfect, still capable of trusting people, and far more useful than anyone might initially assume. Sound familiar? His relationship with Wesley works because Bradshaw never needs to explain the parallel very much. Both have been hurt. Both carry visible or invisible damage. Neither is as finished as other people might assume. And both continue finding reasons to attach themselves to somebody else anyway. The novel is often at its best when these relationships gradually transform New Covenant from a building Wesley happens to work inside into something resembling an actual community. Some of the quieter scenes involving meals, basketball, music, hospital rooms, grieving families, teenagers, dogs, and ordinary conversations accomplish more than the larger speeches because they demonstrate Wesley’s theology without requiring him to explain it. There are also moments of genuine emotional power when Wesley encounters grief in other people and recognizes versions of his own pain staring back at him. The closer the church comes to deciding what to do with Wesley, the clearer it becomes that the decision is about considerably more than whether one pastor keeps his job. It becomes a referendum on what kind of church New Covenant intends to be. The story can become episodic through its middle, however, with repeated meals, committee conflicts, exercise, music, youth interactions, and Wesley’s recurring self-reproach creating stretches that could probably be tightened. Some antagonistic characters are also painted with broad strokes. Ruth can become more symbol of church opposition than fully dimensional person, while certain media-related personalities venture close to caricature. Rosa Lee ultimately gains meaningful complexity, but we would have welcomed more of that nuance earlier rather than spending so much of the novel encountering her primarily through her worst behavior. The submitted manuscript would also benefit from another comprehensive line edit. We encountered several noticeable technical errors, including “ballon” instead of “balloon,” “call phone” instead of “cell phone,” and the sentence “Wesley removed his mask and let him dangle from his ear,” where “it” is clearly intended instead of “him.” There are also occasional punctuation, capitalization, and awkward phrasing issues that interrupt an otherwise engaging narrative voice. Bradshaw also moves rapidly between homespun comedy and extremely serious material involving suicide, abuse, racism, homophobia, grief, violence, and family trauma. Much of that contrast feels intentional because real communities do not experience tragedy in neatly separated genres, but a few jokes land uncomfortably close to scenes carrying substantial emotional weight. Greater restraint in both the humor and repetition would make the strongest moments hit even harder. Still, How Do You Live Without Love? has something considerably more valuable than perfection: it has a point of view. This is not merely a story about a pastor trying to save a dying church. It is about a deeply imperfect man entering a community preoccupied with what Christianity is supposed to look like and gradually forcing the people around him, and himself, to confront what Christianity is supposed to actually do. Bradshaw’s answer is not found in spotless behavior, polished appearances, or winning theological arguments. It is found in feeding people, sitting beside them, listening to them, forgiving them, protecting them, mourning them, and continuing to love even when love cannot guarantee a happy ending. That also brings the novel back to Wesley himself. He spends much of the book believing his worth is measured by whether he can rescue the people around him, even as life repeatedly demonstrates that love does not grant anyone that kind of power. The deeper question behind How Do You Live Without Love? therefore becomes something more complicated than whether a man can survive grief. It asks how someone continues loving when love has already cost him so much, and whether accepting that we cannot save everybody means we should stop trying to help anybody. Wesley comes to Asheville believing he is supposed to breathe life into New Covenant. By the time the congregation faces its greatest tests, the more affecting truth is that New Covenant and the people surrounding Wesley may be doing exactly the same thing for him. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 93+/100 (9.3+ out of 10)
What if the thing you’ve spent years fighting to get back is no longer what you're meant to do? What if the destination you've long set for yourself is no longer where you're meant to go? All of us experience something like this in one form or another. Maybe you had your mind set on becoming a pro athlete only to suffer a major injury your senior year. Maybe you had dreams of going on tour with your rock band, but found yourself married and with kids. Maybe you envisioned becoming a doctor only to bomb the MCAT three times. It's such a familiar and relatable tale. And you know what? It's so interesting how things work out in the end. God always has a plan, whether if it's what we originally envisioned or not. Sometimes, life takes us on these side-quests and detours to show us something or to put us in a situation to learn something or meet someone. Caroline’s Lighthouse by Erica Zaborac is a heartfelt, uplifting Christian coming-of-age novel set in the world of competitive equestrian sports, with faith, romance, healing, and finding a new purpose at its heart! Zaborac impressed us with the predecessor to this book, Caroline's Purpose. It took what could have been a fairly familiar story about a young woman returning to horses after tragedy and gave it considerably more emotional weight. Caroline wasn't simply afraid to ride again. She had lost two entire versions of herself: first the gifted young eventer she had been before Beau's fatal accident, then the elite softball pitcher she became afterward when a devastating arm injury ended that dream too. Caroline's Purpose was about grief, identity, faith, and what happens when the things you used to define yourself suddenly disappear. And faith is a huge part of this series. This is a true cozy Christian series, which is such a welcomed relief and breath of fresh air. There's no attempt to make the story edgy or provocative just for the sake of it. The romance is sweet, the characters pray for and with one another, and faith is treated as an ordinary, meaningful part of their lives rather than something the author seems embarrassed to include. That doesn't mean everyone is perfect or that faith magically makes all of their problems disappear. Quite the opposite. Caroline struggles with fear, guilt, ambition, disappointment, and figuring out whether the dreams she has been chasing are actually her dreams anymore. Connor genuinely wants what is best for her, but even he sometimes gets it wrong. Holly loves her daughter deeply, yet some of the pressure she puts on Caroline becomes one of the biggest sources of conflict in the book. And that's one of the things we appreciate about Zaborac's approach to Christian fiction. Faith isn't used to eliminate the struggle. It's used to help the characters make sense of the struggle. We especially appreciated how patiently that book handled Caroline's recovery. There was no magical horse ride that suddenly fixed everything. Luna, the young filly Caroline was assigned to train, helped her cautiously reconnect with the horse world. Connor became the steady, compassionate presence she desperately needed. And later, Edison, an abused and deeply fearful stallion, became something even more powerful: a reflection of Caroline herself. Both of them were carrying old wounds. Both had learned to expect pain. And both needed someone willing to be patient enough to earn their trust. That made Caroline's Purpose feel like a complete story in its own right. In the sequel, Caroline Davis has finally returned to the horse world she once thought she had lost forever. She’s riding again. Winning again. Dreaming big again. But as old ambitions begin pulling her forward, Caroline’s Lighthouse asks whether healing means reclaiming the life you had... or having the courage to choose a different one. That setup gives the sequel an interesting problem to solve, because Caroline's greatest obstacle is no longer simply fear. In fact, Caroline's Lighthouse opens with proof of just how far she's come. Caroline is back at a three-day event with Benji, her mother's experienced Thoroughbred, sitting in first place after dressage and stadium jumping. There is just one problem: fence fifteen on the cross-country course looks painfully similar to the jump where she lost Beau. Caroline knows Benji can handle it. She knows the fence itself is smaller. She even knows, intellectually, that Beau's accident wasn't her fault. Her body hasn't quite gotten that memo yet. We really like this opening because Zaborac doesn't pretend Caroline's progress in the first book erased years of trauma. She can love horses again and still be afraid. She can know something logically and still struggle to believe it emotionally. Those two things can exist at the same time. Caroline ultimately decides to ride, and when she reaches that dreaded fence, she has to do one of the hardest things imaginable for someone carrying her history: loosen her grip, trust Benji, and let him do his job. They clear it, finish the course, and win. That should be an uncomplicated triumph, but almost immediately afterward, Caroline's mother, Holly, focuses on the mistakes Caroline made during the round. Instead of celebrating that her daughter just completed her first cross-country course since the accident, Holly points out the poor start and what happened at fence fifteen, then starts talking about Caroline returning to the Young Rider Championships. And there, almost quietly, the sequel's real conflict begins. Caroline has spent years trying to recover the girl she used to be, but now that she finally has a piece of that girl back, everyone seems ready for her to become all of her again. Especially Caroline herself. That's where Caroline's Lighthouse becomes more interesting than a simple comeback story. Caroline starts setting bigger goals: Training Level, the American Eventing Championships, Young Riders, and maybe even the Olympics someday. On paper, that's exciting. She's talented enough to dream that big, and Benji is certainly capable. But the farther Caroline goes, the more difficult it becomes to tell where healthy ambition ends and the old obsession with achievement begins. We've seen this Caroline before. She has spent much of her life trying to outrun pain by becoming exceptional at something. When horses were taken away, she became an elite softball pitcher. When softball disappeared, she eventually fought her way back to horses. Caroline doesn't just like succeeding. Somewhere along the way, she learned to use success as evidence that she is okay. That becomes especially complicated because her return to serious competition seems to repair something she desperately wants repaired: her relationship with Holly. The better Caroline rides, the more the two of them start slipping back into their old rhythm. They talk strategy. They analyze competitors. They discuss training plans. Caroline begins feeling like she has her mom back, and that gives all those ribbons, scores, and championship goals an emotional value far beyond the competition itself. Winning is no longer simply about winning. It starts to feel tied to approval, connection, and the hope that Caroline can finally restore the relationship with her mother that she thought she had lost. This is another really solid novel by Erica Zaborac. We enjoyed and appreciated this book for what it is. We will say, though, that it's quite brief. It's also somewhat linear and predictable, which isn't always a bad thing. We've read a lot of complicated, overly-long books recently that bugged us. There's a middle ground. A Goldilocks zone, so to speak. It should also be mentioned that, while we appreciated the Christian-faith-aspect of this book, it can come across as a bit excessive and intrusive at times. Characters (especially Caroline and Connor) are constantly stopping to pray and ask God for guidance. If you are buying this book as a Christian romance, you will really love that. If you are buying this book just as a cozy romance, you might find this a bit cloying. We didn't really have a problem with this. Even Jesus prayed to his dad, so shouldn't his followers? If anything, these characters set such a great example for Christians, especially younger/college-aged ones. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 91/100 (9.1 out of 10)
The Third Estate: Devil’s Tango is a fast-moving, twist-filled conspiracy thriller by D.R. Berlin, MD that expands the shadowy world of Secrets of the Manor while giving its two most interesting characters, Sophie Allard and Kai Lovac, considerably more room to shine! If the first Third Estate introduced us to Berlin’s strange world of assassins, military intelligence, hidden organizations, secret research, and people who are almost never exactly who they claim to be, Devil’s Tango throws all of those pieces onto the dance floor at once and starts spinning them around. The story picks up several years after the events of Secrets of the Manor. Kai Lovac has spent years off the grid with a contract on his head, but the death of his longtime friend Ryan Manning draws him back into the open. Manning had been investigating the mysterious Dossier 1627, the same tangled web that caused so much trouble in the first book. At Manning’s funeral, Lovac learns that someone has found a missing piece and that “the girl is the key.” That girl is Sophie Allard, who is now trying to put her life back together as a military medical student after her future as a fighter pilot took a very different turn. We especially enjoyed how Berlin reintroduces this world through Manning’s funeral. Most people attend funerals worrying about what to say to the widow. These people attend apparently wondering which concealed weapon they will need when somebody inevitably attempts a murder before the hymns are finished. The scene manages to be tense, violent, weirdly funny, and informative all at once. It immediately establishes that the Assassin’s Guild does not operate like any normal criminal organization. There are rules, traditions, reputations, contracts, and professional courtesies, even while people are getting stabbed next to a coffin. It is almost John Wick by way of a very dysfunctional professional association. The biggest improvement over the previous book, however, may be Sophie and Lovac together. Sophie is talkative, emotional, stubborn, curious, compassionate, and prone to charging straight into situations she probably should not. Lovac is controlled, suspicious, calculating, and so obsessed with exits, sight lines, threats, and contingency plans that we are surprised the man can order dinner without first conducting reconnaissance on the kitchen. Putting the two together produces some of the funniest and most entertaining material in the book. Their relationship also has genuine dramatic weight because Sophie has every reason in the world not to trust him. In Secrets of the Manor, Lovac was the assassin hired by the Third Estate to eliminate Professor Milo Anderson, after previously being sent after Violet Anderson. The first book eventually revealed just how badly the Third Estate had manipulated almost everyone involved, including Lovac himself. By this second book, he is no longer simply the terrifying hunter from the first book. He has become prey too, and Sophie gets considerable amusement out of that fact. One of our favorite running developments is Sophie adopting a supposedly stray husky she names Lucky, only to discover that Lucky is actually Neo, Lovac’s dog, whom Lovac has been using to keep an eye on her. Sophie accusing Lovac of planting a “spy in dog’s clothing,” followed by Lovac essentially responding that he gave her a guardian and she should be grateful, is exactly the kind of character interaction this series needs more of. Those smaller moments prevent this book from becoming three hundred pages of people whispering about classified files in dark rooms. Sophie remains the emotional center of the story. We liked seeing her in the hospital because it gives the book something the massive conspiracy desperately needs: ordinary human stakes. Sophie listens to patients whom other people rush past. She cares about whether people are frightened, lonely, or hurting. She wants to become a physician and build some semblance of a normal future, even while assassins, intelligence agencies, and secret societies seem determined to turn her life into a very expensive action movie. There is also an interesting question developing around what kind of person Sophie is going to become. She is frighteningly capable when pushed. By this point, she can fly fighter aircraft, survive combat, solve puzzles, infiltrate secured locations, perform under medical pressure, and seemingly turn almost any random object into part of an escape plan. Yet the story repeatedly emphasizes the difference between being capable of violence and allowing violence to define you. That becomes especially important during Sophie’s confrontation with Felicia. Felicia Podvodnik is one of the better payoffs in the novel. Berlin spends enough time presenting her as Sophie’s friend that the eventual betrayal actually has some sting. Felicia deliberately maneuvered herself into Sophie’s medical program because someone wanted eyes on her, manipulated another student out of the way, drugged Sophie, and used their friendship as surveillance. When Sophie finally gets the upper hand and prepares to kill her, Professor Anderson stops her. That is a small but meaningful character moment. Sophie certainly could finish Felicia. The more important question is whether doing so would mean she is becoming too much like the people surrounding her. The return of Professor Anderson also works because it connects Devil’s Tango directly to the emotional core of the first book rather than merely using him as another piece of conspiracy trivia. His work on Project Afterburner, the Third Estate’s interest in it, Dossier 1627, and the strange network surrounding Sophie gradually converge. The later Nevada sequence is among the book’s strongest stretches because several storylines finally stop running parallel to one another and collide. We also thought the final portion of the book substantially raises the stakes for the series. Readers of Secrets of the Manor already know that Mrs. Komea is the Grey Lady, since the previous book reveals that on its final page. What Devil’s Tango does instead is complicate her position. She is powerful, but she is not at the top of the food chain. She has been concealing things, protecting people, and making choices that eventually put her in danger from her own organization. The larger surprise concerns Senator-elect Amelia Engano. Lovac eventually addresses her by another name: Violet Anderson. That revelation works considerably better when read with Secrets of the Manor fresh in your memory because Lovac believed he had killed Violet years earlier, Milo believed his wife had been murdered, Sophie grew up mourning Aunt Vi, and Dossier 1627 has been twisting everyone around that event from the beginning. Suddenly, one of the oldest pieces on the board gets up and starts moving again. The final confrontation involving Marge Komea is another satisfying payoff. The Grey Lady, who spent so much of the series appearing untouchable, suddenly finds herself facing judgment from people above her. Lovac and Mr. Komea arriving by helicopter to rescue her is wonderfully over-the-top in exactly the way this story has earned by that point. The book ends with Marge leaving behind the organization that controlled so much of her life and Lovac talking about forming “new alliances,” setting up an intriguing shift in the power structure for whatever comes next. One thing that's impossible to ignore is how much Berlin loves details. Lots and lots of details. Guns have models. Clothes have designers. Restaurants have specific dishes. Medical procedures have terminology. Aircraft have components. Buildings have layouts. Lovac knows where every door is, how everyone is standing, where their hands are, how much weight they are putting on one leg, and probably what they ate for breakfast based on the angle of their shoulders. Sometimes this specificity makes the world feel unusually tangible and researched. Other times, we wanted to grab the story by the shoulders and tell it, lovingly, to keep moving. Lovac’s constant tactical assessment is probably the biggest example. It is an important part of his personality and one of the reasons he is such an entertaining character, but once we understand that Kai Lovac can map an entire room faster than the rest of us can decide where to sit, we do not necessarily need every doorway recalculated. The same applies to some of the technical aviation and medical material. Readers who love techno-thrillers may devour those details, while other readers may occasionally feel the narrative tapping the brakes just as the plot is gaining speed. Sophie also continues to flirt with too-good-at-everything syndrome. She is extraordinarily intelligent, an elite pilot, an outstanding medical student, physically formidable, technically resourceful, observant, brave, and remarkably adept at improvisation. We like Sophie enormously, which is why the character mostly gets away with it, but letting her encounter a few problems that she simply cannot solve herself would make the abilities she does possess feel even more impressive. The conspiracy itself occasionally risks becoming a Russian nesting doll. Open one secret organization and there is another organization inside it. Discover one hidden identity and somebody else is wearing a metaphorical mask. Learn that one supposedly dead person survived and you begin wondering whether anyone in this universe should bother buying cemetery plots. The twists are entertaining, but when almost every door hides another door, surprise can eventually become expectation. Felicia’s confrontation also explains a little too much. Once her cover is blown, she provides Sophie with quite a bit of information about how and why she infiltrated her life. We would have preferred to leave slightly more mystery there. Felicia was arguably scarier when she was merely Sophie’s overly interested friend asking questions that did not quite feel right. We also noticed a tiny continuity issue from the previous book. Secrets of the Manor ends by identifying the Grey Lady as Madge Komea, while Devil’s Tango consistently calls her Marge Komea. It is a very small error, but this is exactly the kind of detail that becomes noticeable in a series built around readers remembering identities, aliases, relationships, and buried clues. Still, Devil’s Tango is an entertaining and ambitious sequel that we think improves on several aspects of its predecessor. The mystery is larger, the character relationships are stronger, the humor lands more consistently, and Sophie and Lovac make an unexpectedly great team. Most importantly, by the end we genuinely wanted answers to the new questions Berlin had created rather than simply feeling that mysteries were being held back for another installment. Devil’s Tango also has a surprisingly amusing streak. Berlin frequently slips little jokes and sarcastic exchanges into otherwise tense scenes, giving the characters more personality without turning the novel into a comedy. We laughed when Sophie tells Lucky, “You have the bladder of a seventy-year-old woman,” only for someone to burst into her apartment seconds later. There is also something wonderfully deadpan about an assassin watching a woman fling a cat across a room and responding, “You must be a dog person.” Our favorite humor, though, probably comes from Sophie and Lovac. When Sophie angrily asks why he stood by while assassins were beating her up, his answer is essentially that he sent his dog to help: “Sent Neo. You’re welcome.” These little moments give Devil’s Tango considerably more charm than its grim subject matter might suggest. Dr. Berlin’s medical background also gives Devil’s Tango a noticeable layer of authenticity. When Sophie enters the trauma bay or operating room, the book does not suddenly become vague about what is happening. Berlin gets into the weeds with resuscitation protocols, blood products, catheters, surgical approaches, anatomy, and even procedures such as an emergency thoracotomy and open cardiac massage. At times, that level of detail can be a little much for readers who do not know a Foley catheter from a frozen pizza, and some scenes probably could have been streamlined. Still, the specificity usually works in the book’s favor because the medical dialogue and hospital environment feel like they were written by someone who actually knows what these people would be doing rather than someone who watched three episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and started typing. A trauma patient arrives hypotensive with multiple gunshot wounds, for example, and Berlin walks through the team’s response with IV access, transfusion, intubation, CPR, monitoring, and preparation for surgery in convincing detail. We recommend The Third Estate: Devil’s Tango to readers who enjoy espionage thrillers, secret organizations, military intrigue, assassins with strangely elaborate professional ethics, medical and aviation elements, conspiracy mysteries, and characters who may or may not be dead depending on which chapter you are reading. There is a lot packed into this tango, and Berlin occasionally steps on his own toes with too much detail, but when the story finds its rhythm, it really gets going. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 92/100 (9.2 out of 10)
Tulsa Triassic is a wildly entertaining science-fiction creature thriller by Ethan Richards, the modern maestro of literary creature features! Par for the course with an Ethan Richards novel, Tulsa Triassic takes an idea that could very easily have become pure B-movie madness, throws a pack of prehistoric predators onto Tulsa’s Turkey Mountain, arms a group of police officers, and then does something we weren’t entirely expecting: it gives the whole thing a heart. Yes, there are velociraptors. There is a Dimetrodon. There is an enormous Allosaurus that essentially becomes the tyrannosaur king of a temporal nightmare. People are bitten, crushed, dismembered, impaled, dissolved in dinosaur vomit, and generally subjected to the kind of workday that probably isn’t covered during orientation at the Tulsa Police Academy. But beneath all that blood, gunfire, prehistoric vegetation, tactical terminology, and glorious creature-feature insanity is a surprisingly sincere story about duty, fear, leadership, sacrifice, and what it actually means to serve another human being. That is where Tulsa Triassic becomes much more interesting than its premise suggests. There is also this wonderfully strange tonal dissonance running through the novel. Richards is describing genuinely horrible things: mutilated bodies, severed tongues, fatal head wounds, people being crushed and eaten, and police officers watching their friends die. Yet all of this carnage begins on a place called Turkey Mountain, with a prehistoric predator that initially looks enough like an ordinary turkey that the first victim mistakes it for one. It is not even some gigantic Jurassic Park-sized raptor. It is basically a turkey-sized prehistoric nightmare with feathers, a scaled tail, a crocodilian-looking snout, and one very large killing claw. That creates a bizarre clash between the seriousness of what is happening and how ridiculous parts of it sound when described out loud. A police officer is brutally killed. His trainee is traumatized. Other officers desperately perform CPR. Tactical units are called. A murder scene is being processed. Yet, underneath all of that horror, there is the unavoidable realization that this all started because of the weirdest turkey anyone has ever seen on Turkey Mountain. Richards somehow gets both reactions out of us at once. We understand why the characters are horrified while also recognizing how completely absurd the situation sounds from the outside. That strange balance between sincerity and silliness becomes one of the defining features of the book. The story begins on Tulsa’s Turkey Mountain, where paleontologist Dr. Benjamin Haze encounters what initially appears to be that very strange turkey. Strange becomes alarming when the bird has a scaled tail. Alarming becomes considerably worse when it possesses a crocodilian snout, dagger-like claws, and a rather unfriendly interest in eating him. Haze’s death brings rookie Tulsa police officer Edwin Rudyard and his Field Training Officer, Val McMallen, to Turkey Mountain. Edwin is nearing the end of field training, and he is tired of it. He is impatient, cynical, eager to operate independently, and not particularly receptive to Val’s insistence that law enforcement is ultimately about service. Edwin believes bad people need to be punished, while Val offers something harder: people can be bad, but officers still have a duty to help them. Edwin rejects that idea, and the rest of the novel gradually forces him to understand it. That is probably the most successful part of Richards’s story. The initial investigation quickly becomes catastrophic. Val is killed by the strange raptor-like creature, and Edwin discovers a scientist operating an impossible device on Turkey Mountain. The man, later identified as Saul Malkor, subscribes to an extreme environmental ideology that has metastasized into outright hatred of humanity. Rather than simply believing that mankind damages nature, he has come to see mankind itself as the contamination. His machine tears open time, and Edwin and members of Tulsa PD’s Special Operations Team suddenly find themselves trapped inside an altered Turkey Mountain filled with prehistoric plants and animals. The handling of Val’s death is a good example of why the tonal dissonance works rather than simply making the book feel like a parody. The circumstances are absurd. The creature that kills him looks vaguely like a horrifying turkey. The setting is literally Turkey Mountain. Yet Richards treats Val’s death as emotionally real, and it remains important to Edwin long after the initial attack. The premise is goofy, but the consequences are not. That distinction allows Richards to have his B-movie fun without completely sacrificing emotional stakes. Now, before dinosaur enthusiasts start sharpening their fossil picks and typing angry emails, Richards knows that these creatures did not all live together during the Triassic Period. That actually becomes part of the mystery. The characters gradually realize that they have not simply traveled backward into one specific prehistoric era. Different periods appear to have been pulled together into one enormous temporal disaster, allowing animals and plants separated by millions upon millions of years to suddenly occupy the same environment. In other words, Richards gets to raid practically the entire prehistoric toy box without pretending that a Velociraptor, Dimetrodon, Allosaurus, and everything else naturally lived side by side. Honestly, we respect the hustle. This is also where Tulsa Triassic becomes especially interesting within Ethan Richards’s larger body of work. We have read a lot of Richards’s books over the years, and his greatest strength has always been fairly obvious: the man knows how to make a creature feature fun. He loves big monsters, guns, tactical teams, prehistoric creatures, strange conspiracies, and putting apparently capable human beings into situations that absolutely no amount of training could reasonably prepare them for. Some of his earlier books struggled to control all of those ingredients, particularly when enormous casts and multiple plot threads competed for attention, but his more recent work has shown a noticeable improvement in focus, characterization, atmosphere, and emotional investment. Tulsa Triassic continues that progression because Edwin gives the story a strong center of gravity. He is not simply the unlucky police officer who happens to be standing closest to the dinosaurs when everything goes wrong. His relationship with Val matters, his attitude toward police work matters, his mistakes matter, and the people dying around him increasingly matter as well. Richards has always been willing to kill characters with the enthusiasm of a horror-movie director who just discovered that the special-effects budget got doubled, but there is a major difference between watching anonymous monster food disappear and understanding what a death means to the people left behind. One of the smartest decisions in the novel comes when the officers discover what appears to be a way back to normal Tulsa. They could leave the temporal nightmare and save themselves, but they realize civilians might still be trapped somewhere on Turkey Mountain. Instead of escaping, they turn around and go looking for them. That decision tells us almost everything we need to know about the heart of the book. These characters are frightened, their technology is failing, they do not understand the environment around them, enormous prehistoric animals are roaming nearby, and one of their own has already been brutally killed. None of that changes the fact that somebody might need help. Eventually, the officers find a young girl named Joddie Ross, and her presence gives the second half of the novel a much more personal sense of urgency. The mission is no longer about some vague concept of rescuing civilians. There is a child standing right in front of them, depending on these people to get her home. That makes everything that follows more effective, especially when characters begin sacrificing themselves to protect her. Jeremy Spencers’s death is one of the clearest examples. Richards does not need an enormous philosophical speech about courage or sacrifice when Jeremy physically puts himself between Joddie and an Allosaurus. The action already tells us who he is and what he values. That is something Richards has improved at considerably over time, and we think he is strongest when he trusts scenes like this enough to let them speak for themselves. We made a similar observation while reviewing Maryland Sasquatch Massacre. That book showed tremendous improvement in characterization, but there were still scenes where the emotion felt slightly overplayed, almost like adding extra-sad violin music to something that was already sad enough on its own. Tulsa Triassic occasionally has the same tendency to explain or reiterate an emotion after the scene has already communicated it. Richards does not always need to remind us repeatedly that the characters are scared or that the situation is impossible. There is an Allosaurus outside. We figured out the scary part. Speaking of the Allosaurus, the creature itself is one of the best things in the book. Richards has become surprisingly good at remembering that prehistoric animals are exactly that: animals. They are not demons or supernatural serial killers. They eat, hunt, defend territory, react to threats, and exist according to biological drives that have absolutely nothing to do with whether the nearby humans consider themselves the protagonists. This was one of the strongest aspects of Terror in Big Bend, where the Gorgon behaved less like a traditional movie monster and more like a living predator with recognizable instincts, habits, and even an attachment to its mate. Richards has continued developing that approach, and the Allosaurus in Tulsa Triassic may be one of his better examples. The novel establishes the animal’s power before constantly throwing it into combat. Other creatures react to it, the environment seems to change around it, and the characters discover evidence of its presence long before every encounter turns into a gunfight. One of our favorite choices is that when the officers finally confront the Allosaurus, it does not immediately attack them. It watches them, assesses them, and leaves. That simple restraint is considerably more effective than another immediate roaring, biting, crashing monster sequence because it establishes the animal’s dominance without forcing it to constantly prove how dangerous it is. This creature knows where it stands in the food chain. Another surprisingly thoughtful element involves the way the officers mentally process what they are seeing. At one point, they are forced to stop treating the Allosaurus like some indescribable horror and actually identify it. They give the thing a name and put it into a category their minds can understand. Richards explored something very similar in Jurassic Swamp, where characters continued calling Rougarou an “alligator” because people naturally reach for familiar labels when confronted with something unfamiliar. Tulsa Triassic pushes that idea a little further. Naming the monster does not make it smaller or less dangerous, but it gives the characters something mentally concrete to work with. They are no longer dealing with some unknowable evil from beyond reality; they are dealing with an Allosaurus. Granted, it is still an Allosaurus capable of biting them in half, but progress is progress. That idea also complements the book’s police-procedural structure. Tulsa Triassic is divided using emergency-response terminology involving concepts like detection, incident recognition, response operations, and contingency operations. The entire novel is essentially about trained professionals trying to impose procedure on something that makes procedure almost meaningless. Police officers know how to secure a scene, communicate over the radio, establish fields of fire, administer first aid, search terrain, track suspects, and identify threats. Nobody covered Dimetrodons at the academy. That gives the story a distinctive flavor compared with a standard group of tourists getting chased through the jungle. These characters constantly observe, adapt, communicate, and attempt to apply whatever parts of their training remain useful. Sometimes the result is serious and surprisingly technical. Other times, it becomes exactly the sort of ridiculous creature-feature spectacle we have come to expect from Ethan Richards, and thankfully the book never completely loses that side of itself. There has always been a line somewhere between genuine horror and a Syfy Channel movie playing at 1:00 in the morning, and Richards has spent years joyfully driving back and forth across it. Tulsa Triassic is more emotionally grounded than some of his earlier work, but it still contains plenty of guns, prehistoric monsters, gruesome injuries, tactical conversations about fighting animals that have been extinct for millions of years, and one death involving the digestive system of an Allosaurus that made us realize we had apparently never spent enough time considering the offensive capabilities of dinosaur vomit. Thank you for that, Ethan. We could have happily gone our entire lives without thinking about it. Something else that deserves particular attention is Richards’s writing itself, because the prose contributes significantly to the tension and urgency of the story. Tulsa Triassic is frequently written in short, sharp bursts. Richards uses brief sentences, fragments, abrupt transitions, repeated words, and sudden interruptions to mimic the way Edwin processes danger under extreme stress. When something incomprehensible happens, Edwin does not sit around composing a beautiful paragraph about it. His thoughts fracture. He notices one thing, then another, then something worse. Before confronting Malkor, for example, his assessment of the situation collapses into the blunt realization that there is no perimeter, no backup, and no time. Elsewhere, when objects begin behaving impossibly around the temporal device, the prose becomes similarly stripped down and immediate. That style works extremely well for a book like this. The clipped rhythm creates speed and abruptness, particularly during attacks, discoveries, and moments when Edwin has only seconds to understand what he is seeing. It also suits Edwin’s perspective as a police officer trained to observe, identify, and respond. He often thinks in pieces because he is receiving information in pieces, and Richards’s prose reflects that. Even when the language is simple, there is a kinetic quality to it that keeps the book moving and gives many scenes a genuine sense of immediacy. And, wow, this writing is lightyears better than what we encountered in some of Richards’s earliest books. When we reviewed The Dark Elf of Oklahoma, we noted that Richards could occasionally produce colorful, sophisticated writing, but the story was frequently distracted by excessive detail, a scattered structure, and too many characters and locations competing for the reader’s attention. The difference here is enormous. Richards is much better at directing our attention toward what matters in a scene, controlling the pace, and using the rhythm of the prose to support the action rather than allowing the writing to wander all over Oklahoma along with the plot. Unfortunately, Richards sometimes leans so heavily on that short, abrupt style that one of the book’s greatest strengths becomes a weakness. When nearly every frightening or dramatic moment is communicated through fragments, repetition, physical reactions, dramatic pauses, and sudden corrections, the technique gradually loses some of its force. If everything is urgent, eventually nothing feels uniquely urgent. The effect can become a little cloying, especially when an emotion or reaction has already been made perfectly obvious by what is happening in the scene. The most conspicuous example is the phrase “I shuddered.” Richards really, really likes making poor Edwin shudder. We counted the exact phrase seven times, and that does not include variations involving trembling, shaking, quaking, tightening, or other physical reactions. The funniest instance comes relatively early, when Edwin looks at Haze’s mutilated body, shudders at the sight of his severed tongue, and then, almost immediately afterward, we get another standalone “I shuddered.” After a while, we started thinking: Edwin, buddy, you’re going to shudder yourself right off Turkey Mountain. That is far from the only repeated construction. Edwin’s stomach tightens at least six times, while Richards also repeatedly returns to trembling hands, shaking knees, staring in disbelief, pounding or hammering hearts and pulses, tightening throats, and variations of “I felt” to communicate Edwin’s emotional state. None of those descriptions is bad individually, and several are quite effective. The problem is accumulation. We already understand that Edwin is terrified when he is standing near a prehistoric predator that could remove half his body with one bite. His stomach does not necessarily need to tighten again to convince us. This is probably where the next stage of Richards’s development as a writer lies: trusting his own scenes more. He has become considerably better at creating suspense, controlling action, establishing atmosphere, and giving his characters emotional consequences. That means he can afford to pull back occasionally. If an Allosaurus emerges from the trees, Richards has already done the difficult work. We know what the animal can do, we care about the people standing in front of it, and we understand the danger. Edwin’s knees do not also have to shake while his stomach tightens and his pulse pounds before he shudders. A stricter line edit could remove a noticeable amount of that repetition and probably make the novel more intense rather than less intense. The short, sharp prose itself is not the problem. In fact, it is one of the reasons Tulsa Triassic moves as well as it does. Richards simply reaches for the same effective tools too often. Used selectively, those fragments and abrupt sentences hit like punches. Used constantly, the reader eventually starts bracing for the next one. There is also quite a bit of exposition. Earp Latrell in particular occasionally becomes something of a walking encyclopedia, and although we appreciate giving different members of the team different areas of expertise, there are moments when his explanations become long enough that we found ourselves thinking, “Earp, buddy, we appreciate the science lesson, but there is a dinosaur over there.” Thankfully, the book occasionally seems aware of this tendency and lets the other characters react accordingly. Saul Malkor is another area where we wanted slightly more. His philosophy works well as a thematic counterweight to the officers because his environmentalism has curdled into hatred of humanity itself. Saul thinks in terms of mankind as a species and condemns humanity collectively, while the officers repeatedly think in terms of individual people who need help. Saul sees humanity and judges it; the officers see Joddie. That contrast gives the conflict more substance than a conventional evil-scientist story. At the same time, Saul occasionally feels more like a philosophy wearing a lab coat than a fully developed human being. We understand what he believes and what he wants, but we would have liked to understand more about the person who became this man. Giving Saul a little more psychological specificity could have made the ideological conflict even stronger. The supporting cast can also become crowded at times. Richards has improved enormously in this area since his earlier books, but old habits occasionally poke their heads out when several tactical characters enter the story in relatively quick succession. It takes some time to distinguish everyone. The difference is that most of them eventually develop identifiable personalities and relationships, which is a substantial improvement over some of the more interchangeable ensembles in Richards’s earlier work. Colt Skinner is probably our favorite. He is experienced, capable, religious, philosophical, occasionally funny, and stubbornly committed to doing what he believes an officer is supposed to do. More importantly, he becomes another mentor figure for Edwin after Val’s death. Colt does not simply explain duty to Edwin; he demonstrates it through his actions, which is why his eventual death hurts. By the climax, nearly every experienced officer around Edwin has taught him something through sacrifice. Jeremy dies protecting Joddie. Earp keeps fighting despite the horror around him. Colt continues leading when escaping would be easier. Edwin, who began the novel impatient to finish field training and operate independently, eventually becomes the person willing to stand between Joddie and the monster himself. That progression gives the novel a real character arc rather than merely a sequence of increasingly elaborate creature attacks. The final confrontation with the Allosaurus is appropriately brutal. Edwin loses his left hand, yet the creature keeps attacking and Edwin keeps fighting. He eventually manages to kill it at extremely close range, but even that does not end the disaster. Saul kills Colt, Edwin kills Saul, the temporal machinery begins collapsing, and modern Tulsa starts returning around Edwin and Joddie. Richards could easily have ended the story there. Edwin is mutilated, exhausted, traumatized, surrounded by dead friends, and probably entitled to several lifetimes of paid administrative leave. Instead, Richards decides that what this poor man really needs is one more prehistoric monster. A gigantic Quetzalcoatlus appears over modern Tulsa carrying a screaming woman. Of course it does. What makes the ending work is Edwin’s reaction. He picks up the shotgun again because somebody needs help, and that brings the story all the way back to Val McMallen. The Edwin Rudyard at the beginning of Tulsa Triassic thinks police work is primarily about catching and punishing bad people. The Edwin Rudyard at the end understands something much harder: sometimes somebody needs help, so you go. You go when you are frightened, exhausted, injured, and completely outmatched because that responsibility does not disappear merely because answering it is difficult. His shift is not over, and that is the heart hiding underneath all the dinosaurs. We have watched Ethan Richards grow tremendously as a writer over the years. Kaw Lake showed how incredibly fun his monster stories could be. Maryland Sasquatch Massacre demonstrated a major improvement in characterization. Beast of Eufaula Lake showed how much stronger his prose, atmosphere, and suspense had become, while Jurassic Swamp continued developing the more grounded and human side of Richards’s creature-feature formula. Tulsa Triassic feels like another step in that continuing evolution. It is not Richards’s most polished book, and we still think the prose could be tighter, some exposition could be trimmed, repeated physical reactions could be substantially reduced, and certain emotional or thematic ideas could be trusted to speak for themselves rather than being repeatedly emphasized. Still, comparing the writing here with some of Richards’s earliest work is almost like comparing two different authors. The sharpness, pacing, control, characterization, and confidence are all considerably stronger, even when Richards occasionally becomes a victim of his own stylistic habits. Ultimately, this may be one of Richards’s better examples of combining the two sides of his writing: the Ethan Richards who loves dinosaurs, shotguns, gore, tactical jargon, and unabashed B-movie insanity, and the increasingly confident storyteller who understands that none of those things mean very much unless readers care about the poor people desperately trying not to get eaten. Ethan Richards has always known how to make monsters fun. What has become increasingly apparent over the years is that he has gotten much better at making the people running from them matter too, and Tulsa Triassic is another strong example of that growth. Check it out on Amazon! |
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