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Review of "Inside the Walls" by Scott G. A. Metcalf

9/30/2026

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!

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Review of "The Fourfold Convergence" by Holly Wood

9/29/2026

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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!

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Review of "How Do You Live Without Love?" by Anthony Bradshaw

9/28/2026

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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.

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Review of "Caroline's Lighthouse" by Erica Zaborac

9/27/2026

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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.

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Review of "The Third Estate: Devil’s Tango" by D.R. Berlin, MD

9/26/2026

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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.

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Review of "Tulsa Triassic" by Ethan Richards

9/24/2026

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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.

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Review of "La Flor Del Mar" by Jamilette Cintron

9/23/2026

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Score: 92/100 (9.2 out of 10)

La Flor Del Mar is a dark historical fantasy romance and swashbuckling pirate adventure steeped in Puerto Rican history, indiginous Taino mythology, Caribbean folklore, and historical colonial conflict by Jamilette Cintron!

Set primarily in 1687 Puerto Rico (fitting with the author's heritage), the story follows Lily, a young woman with little memory of where she came from and an inexplicable connection to the sea. She has spent much of her life under the control of Madam, growing up around a brothel while fiercely resisting the idea that anyone has ownership over her body or her future. Lily knows there is something unusual about her, but she doesn't yet understand why the ocean seems to respond to her emotions or why fragments of her forgotten childhood seem connected to forces far older than herself.

Her life takes a dramatic turn when she crosses paths with Captain Stone, a feared pirate whose black sails and reputation suggest a monster, but whose actions reveal a considerably more complicated man. Stone and his crew live by a strict code: women are never to be harmed, the poor are never to be robbed, everyone eats before anyone eats, nobody dies alone, and, above all, "La confianza es sagrada." Trust is sacred.

So, right off the bat, one of the book's core themes and central ideas comes into focus: oftentimes, the people labeled as monsters are less monstrous than those who labeled them as such. Sometimes, the monsters are not the pirates, sea creatures, or supernatural beings lurking beneath the waves. Sometimes, they are the people hiding behind authority, respectability, wealth, and power.

Cintron repeatedly plays with that reversal throughout the book. Captain Stone may be a feared pirate, but he operates according to a moral code that forbids harming women, stealing from the poor, abandoning the dying, or allowing one person to eat while others go hungry. Meanwhile, supposedly "civilized" institutions and authority figures are responsible for conquest, exploitation, violence, betrayal, and the pursuit of power at virtually any cost.

Even the book's enormous kraken, which initially appears to be exactly the kind of nightmarish monster sailors would tell stories about, turns out to be far more complicated than expected. When Rosa encounters the creature beneath the sea, she discovers something ancient and intimidating, but also strangely gentle and protective.

This makes La Flor Del Mar less interested in asking "Who looks like the monster?" and much more interested in asking "Who actually behaves like one?"

Lily is drawn aboard Stone's ship and into a dangerous mystery involving the Spanish Crown, a long-hidden cave, an old shoemaker, ancient legends, and a mysterious treasure known as La Flor Del Mar.

What begins as a pirate adventure gradually becomes something much larger, intertwining Lily's forgotten past with Puerto Rico's history, supernatural forces beneath the sea, and questions about identity, ancestry, freedom, loyalty, and who gets to decide what, or who, belongs to whom.

One thing we repeatedly had to wrestle with when reading this book is how much it reminded us of other similar books. It almost feels like once you've read one pirate-themed romantasy, you've read them all. They tend to follow the same tropes, archetypes, and beats.

The books usually involve some super-secretly-special girl who starts out the book as a lowly brothel worker only to meet a noble handsome pirate captain who's somewhat vicious but surprisingly kinda nice, but more importantly is super hot and owns his own place/ship, so that's cool.

For example, The Pirate's Conquest by Charlene Centracchio also centered on a feared pirate captain who, despite being violent and unquestionably rough around the edges, often proved more honorable than the supposedly respectable men around him. Then came The Devil's Conquest by K.M. Taylor, which pushed the idea even further with Captain Eduard Thane, another dangerous pirate who turns out to be far more chivalrous and morally grounded than many of the people representing polite society.

And The Devil's Conquest also featured a young woman whose life was closely connected to a brothel, a comparatively noble pirate captain, romance aboard a pirate ship, hidden supernatural forces, Caribbean adventure, mysterious treasure, and a heroine whose connection to the sea becomes much more important than it initially appears.

In all of these books, there's always this scene (or series of scenes) of: Oh, he's so mean because he ties me up and keeps me here, but I actually kinda like it, and he's actually kinda nice because he doesn't kill me or sexually take advantage of me. I can fix him!

That all gets kinda cliche and cloying after a while. It definitely got some eye rolls from us.

That does take a little bit of the specialness out of La Flor Del Mar. There is a certain been-there, done-that quality to some of the basic setup: the feared-but-secretly-noble pirate captain, the strong-willed woman who refuses to be controlled, the corrupt establishment that turns out to be worse than the outlaws, the romance developing aboard a dangerous ship, the mysterious treasure, and the supernatural connection to the sea. None of these things are bad, and they're popular tropes for a reason, but when you've reviewed multiple books that use many of the same ingredients, it becomes harder for the newest one to surprise you simply by putting pirates, romance, magic, and a treasure hunt together.

Thankfully, this is also where La Flor Del Mar begins to separate itself. While some of the story architecture feels familiar, the cultural identity of the book does not. Cintron isn't merely dropping a generic pirate romance into a vaguely tropical Caribbean setting. Puerto Rico is deeply embedded in the story itself, and the author's connection to the island gives the book a much more personal foundation.

The story draws from Taino mythology, Indigenous history, Spanish colonization, African ancestry, Caribbean folklore, ancestral memory, and the cultural identity of Boriken. These elements aren't just decorations around the edges of the plot. They help shape the mythology, the conflict, Lily's mysterious past, the history the characters are uncovering, and the meaning behind what everyone is searching for.

That makes a major difference because a pirate ship can sail through almost any historical fantasy, a noble pirate captain can appear in almost any romantasy, and a mysterious treasure can be buried on almost any island. But the particular history being remembered here belongs to Puerto Rico, and that is where Cintron gives the book something much more distinctly her own.

There is also a deeper emotional connection to that material than we usually see in pirate fantasy. Cintron dedicates the book to her ancestors and speaks directly about African, Spanish, and Indigenous descent, the stories that have been lost, and the importance of remembering the people who survived. That gives the novel's interest in history and ancestry a sincerity that helps counterbalance some of its more familiar genre conventions.

So, yes, we may have seen the noble pirate captain, the mysterious woman with a connection to the sea, the corrupt empire, and the hidden treasure before. But we have not quite seen this particular mixture of Puerto Rican identity, Taino mythology, ancestral memory, piracy, romance, and supernatural folklore brought together in this way. That cultural specificity is probably the biggest reason this book ultimately feels more distinctive than its familiar premise initially suggests.

The book does carry another double-edged sword: it's surprisingly short, especially considering just how much Cintron is trying to cram into it. On one hand, that makes La Flor Del Mar a fast, easy read. It doesn't spend 600 pages wandering around the Caribbean waiting for somebody to finally find the cave. The story moves, the chapters generally have a purpose, and there is almost always another mystery, confrontation, supernatural event, revelation, or bit of pirate chaos waiting around the corner.

On the other hand, we actually think this book could have benefited from being longer. There is a lot going on here: Lily's mysterious childhood, Stone's family history, Rosa and Tato, General Alejandro Vargas, the Spanish Crown, the search for La Flor Del Mar, Taino mythology, colonial history, the kraken, multiple romantic relationships, betrayals, hidden family connections, supernatural powers, and a whole bunch of revelations that we are deliberately not going to spoil. That's a lot of material for a relatively compact novel.

This also creates some issues with pacing and flow. It often seems like everything and everyone is literally flying or teleporting from one place, scene, or revelation to the next, sometimes leaving the story feeling a little unmoored. Well, Stone is called the Ghost Pirate, after all, but still...

As a result, some of the book's biggest emotional moments happen so quickly that we barely have time to process one revelation before Cintron is already firing the next cannonball at us. The final portion of the book, in particular, feels like somebody yelled "EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE!" and the story took that as a challenge. There are several moments near the end that should be enormous for Lily, Stone, Rosa, Tato, and even Vargas. Secrets from the past come to light, long-standing assumptions are overturned, characters discover connections they never knew existed, loyalties are tested, and relationships suddenly take on completely new meanings. Then, before everyone has had much time to sit with any of that, we are racing into the climax.

We don't necessarily want fewer revelations. We want more room around them. A few additional chapters would have helped certain discoveries land harder emotionally, particularly those involving Lily's past and Stone's family history. Cintron has some genuinely good ideas here, but sometimes the book seems almost impatient to get to the next one.

The same thing applies to the romance. We like Lily and Stone together. Their personalities bounce off each other well, and there is something naturally entertaining about a stubborn woman who has spent her life refusing to be controlled getting stuck with a pirate captain who is very accustomed to people doing what he says. That's a recipe for trouble and flirting, usually both. But the relationship eventually reaches a level of emotional devotion that feels a little fast considering how comparatively little time the two have actually had together. We would have loved a few more quieter scenes in which Lily and Stone simply talked, learned about each other, argued about something that wasn't immediately life-or-death, or had time to develop the trust that the book places so much emphasis on.

The supporting characters could have benefited from that extra breathing room too, especially Rosa and Tato. Those two are fun. Rosa is brave, loyal, impulsive, and occasionally seems to possess the self-preservation instincts of someone who looks at a giant sea monster and thinks, Yeah, I can probably work with this. Tato, meanwhile, is one of the book's most entertaining characters: intimidating, stylish, sarcastic, fiercely loyal to Stone, and capable of switching from gentleman to nightmare with relatively little warning. Their developing relationship provides some welcome humor and warmth, and we honestly wouldn't have minded spending considerably more time with them.

In fact, one of the strengths of La Flor Del Mar is that the supporting cast doesn't feel completely disposable. Rosa is not merely "Lily's friend." Tato is not merely "the captain's henchman." Vargas is not merely "the evil Spanish guy." Each of them carries personal history, loyalties, regrets, or relationships that eventually become important to the larger story.

General Alejandro Vargas is probably the best example of this. Without spoiling exactly how he fits into everything, Vargas initially appears positioned to become the sort of straightforward establishment villain we were just talking about. Instead, Cintron spends significant time showing us his past and the circumstances that shaped his decisions. He has done terrible things, but the book gives him recognizable human motivations rather than reducing him to some cackling representative of colonial evil. That doesn't excuse what he does; it just makes him more interesting.

His storyline also becomes one of the book's strongest explorations of its repeated phrase, "La confianza es sagrada." Trust is sacred. Trust in this story is not simply about whether Lily can trust Stone or whether Stone can trust Lily. It stretches across friendships, families, enemies, betrayals, debts, and decisions made decades before the main story even begins. People inherit the consequences of promises they never personally made, and several characters spend the novel living in the shadow of somebody else's choices.

That helps give La Flor Del Mar more depth than its pirate-romance packaging initially suggests, and it also makes us wish Cintron had given herself another fifty pages or so to really let all of it breathe.

Ultimately, La Flor Del Mar is at its best when it stops feeling like another pirate romantasy and starts feeling unmistakably like a Jamilette Cintron story. The noble outlaw, brothel-adjacent heroine, forbidden attraction, mysterious treasure, and supernatural connection to the sea are familiar enough that, yes, they occasionally had us rolling our eyes. But the Puerto Rican identity, Taíno mythology, ancestral memory, morally complicated characters like Vargas, the genuinely fun pairing of Rosa and Tato, and the repeated idea that "La confianza es sagrada" give the book a personality that those familiar ingredients alone could never provide.

Check it out HERE!

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Review of "Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss" by Dr. Kimberly Harms

9/22/2026

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Score: 95(+)/100 (9.5(+) out of 10)

Some books just hit harder.
Some books just reach into your chest and pull out your heart.

Have you recently experienced a devastating loss? Have you lost a spouse, a partner, a child, or someone whose absence has completely changed the shape of your life? Have you ever looked at an empty chair, an untouched closet, or the other side of the bed and wondered, What am I supposed to do now? How am I supposed to keep going? Will I ever feel like myself again?

Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss is a deeply moving, compassionate Christian grief devotional by Dr. Kimberly Harms!

At its core, Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss is a 52-week devotional designed primarily for widows, though many of its lessons about grief, faith, identity, purpose, and healing will resonate with anyone who has lost someone they deeply loved.

But calling it merely a devotional does not quite capture what Harms has created. This is part devotional, part grief workbook, part memoir, part spiritual companion, and even part support-group guide. Each week blends Scripture with Harms's own experiences of loss, reflection questions, a short prayer, and a practical "Flourish Forward Challenge" designed to help readers take one small step through grief instead of simply reading about it. Harms even includes a suggested format for small widow groups, making the book something readers can work through alone or alongside others who understand what this kind of loss feels like.

The entire book is organized around the seasons of grief. Winter is survival. Spring is renewal. Summer is growth. Autumn is reflection, wisdom, and legacy.

Rather than treating grief as something that progresses neatly from Point A to Point B, Harms uses the changing seasons to show how loss can transform over time. The coldest part of grief may eventually give way to hope, purpose, peace, and even joy, but that does not mean the person who died has been forgotten or that sorrow has somehow disappeared.

That idea becomes one of the most beautiful themes in the entire book:

“Joy and sorrow are not enemies. They are companions who inhabit the same soul without canceling one another.”

And that may be the best way to understand what Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss is really trying to do.

It is not teaching readers how to stop grieving.

It is teaching them how to live while grieving, heal while remembering, and eventually discover that love, sorrow, faith, purpose, and joy can all continue to exist together.

Harms is not writing about any of this from a comfortable distance. She has lived it. In fact, she has experienced enough loss and upheaval for several lifetimes. Her mother struggled with severe mental illness and ultimately died by suicide. Years later, Harms endured the nightmare no parent ever wants to experience when her son, Eric, also died by suicide. Her husband, Jim, survived that unimaginable loss alongside her, but years later Harms lost him too. In Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss, she openly wrestles with the almost impossible question of how someone finds meaning after the suicide deaths of both a mother and a son, followed by the death of the husband with whom she had expected to spend her retirement years.

And death was not the only loss that forced Harms to reinvent herself. Harms spent approximately 30 years practicing clinical dentistry, building not only a career but a significant professional identity. She served as the first woman President of the Minnesota Dental Association and spent 21 years as a National Spokesperson for the American Dental Association. Then nerve damage in what she calls her "drilling fingers" took away her ability to continue practicing dentistry.

That loss dramatically altered the retirement Harms and Jim had envisioned. They had poured their resources into a home on Lake Wabana in Minnesota and planned to ease gradually into retirement while Harms continued practicing dentistry in the area. When the nerve damage ended that plan, Harms and Jim adjusted and created another version of the dream with less money and more time together. Then Jim's health declined. Then he died. Eventually, Harms found herself selling the cabin that had once represented the future they expected to share.

That history gives this book tremendous credibility because Harms knows firsthand that grief does not take only a person. Sometimes it takes the life you thought you were going to have with them. It can take careers, routines, identities, financial plans, relationships, expectations, and entire imagined futures.

Yet Harms's biography is also a remarkable example of the philosophy she teaches throughout this book. When dentistry was taken from her, she found another direction. When grief devastated her family, she studied grief. When tragedy gave her painful knowledge she never asked for, she began using that knowledge to help other people. Harms eventually became a grief counselor, death doula, civil mediator, life coach, author, and international speaker focusing on grief, conflict, and legacy. Her son Eric's memory has also lived forward through the Eric Harms Memorial Libraries in Rwanda, transforming one of the greatest tragedies of her life into an opportunity to educate and serve others.

And perhaps that is why the phrase "flourish forward" feels so genuine coming from Harms. She is not arguing that terrible things happen for a reason. She is showing that even after terrible things happen, there can still be a reason to keep going.

What a message! And what an incredible human being who is able to deliver that message!

This is actually not Dr. Harms's first rodeo with the Outstanding Creator Awards. Her previous book, Are You Ready?, was a 1st-Place Super Champion in both our 2024 Summer Contest & 2024 Clash of Champions contest! In addition, Are You Ready? was ranked #14 in our Top 25 Non-Fiction Books of 2024 list! Those are some monumental accomplishments!

And it creates some pretty big shoes to fill--some hefty expectations.

How does Harms's latest entry fair? Spectacularly!

This book is touching, heartfelt, inspirational, relatable, uplifting, and remarkably well-written. We can't emphasize this enough: the writing is phenomenal. The way that Harms is able to craft beautiful, eloquent, impactful, and gripping passages is almost incomparable. She is a remarkably gifted writer!

It's like these words and passages are sewn together in a beautiful ornate quilt or tapestry.

Here are a few passages, just about the topic of joy. Now, for context, joy is something that many widows (and those experiencing loss) feel guilty about. They ask themselves, "How can I be happy after something so bad? Isn't it disrespectful to the deceased? Isn't it like forgetting?" Well, Harms confronts this with such beautiful passages:

"Joy is patient, but it is also persistent. It stands quietly at the door of your heart, waiting to slip
in through the cracks when grief grows tired."

“Joy does not replace. It restores.”

“If grief is love in its wounded form, joy is love in its healed form.”

“Joy is not betrayal. Joy is survival.”

And that's just the topic of joy.

Harms repeatedly takes ideas that could easily become generic inspirational advice and turns them into something vivid, memorable, and emotionally tangible. Sometimes she does it with elaborate imagery. Other times, she absolutely nails an enormously complicated emotion in just a handful of words.

She does something similar with acceptance. Acceptance can sound like defeat, like throwing your hands up and admitting that grief won. Harms turns that idea completely around:

“Acceptance is not surrender, it’s serenity.”

Again, so few words, yet so much meaning. Acceptance is not agreeing that what happened was fair. It is not forgetting. It is not deciding that you no longer care. It is releasing the exhausting battle against a reality that cannot be changed so that you can begin learning how to live within the life that remains.

Harms does not merely tell grieving readers that they are allowed to imagine a future again either. She writes, “Dreaming again is not moving on. It is moving forward.” She follows that with another wonderful line: “Grief rearranges your dreams, yes. But it does not eliminate them.”

That distinction is enormous. Harms understands that telling somebody who has lost the person they planned their future with to simply “move on” can feel almost insulting. Instead, she reframes healing as movement that carries the deceased forward with you rather than leaving them behind. The old dream may be gone. That does not mean dreaming itself has to die.

Her writing about hope is equally beautiful. Harms explains that grief and hope do not have to fight for ownership of the same heart: “Hope does not compete with grief; it sits beside it, offering companionship on the journey forward.” Elsewhere, she reminds readers that they can simultaneously long for what was lost and reach for what could be, cherish old memories while creating new meaning, and carry sorrow while still imagining a future.

We especially love the way Harms uses imagery throughout the book. Grief becomes winter. Healing becomes spring. Hope becomes a seed. The Holy Spirit becomes a gardener. Memories become roots. Pain becomes soil. Renewal becomes light slowly entering a darkened room. These metaphors are not simply decorative; they make complicated emotional experiences easier to understand and, perhaps more importantly, easier to feel.

And sometimes that writing becomes almost painfully raw. Not every powerful passage is a polished metaphor about flowers, gardens, or sunlight. Harms also brings readers directly into moments when grief simply overwhelms her. One particularly heartbreaking memory finds her crying out for Eric, desperately asking, “Where is Eric? Where is my son?” That desperation matters because it reminds us that all of the wisdom in this book came after moments when there was no wisdom, serenity, or beautiful lesson to be found. There was simply a mother wanting her son back.

Consider, too, the way Harms describes healing after prolonged darkness: “Light doesn't rush you. Dawn comes at its own pace; and so does healing.” A few paragraphs later, she describes life gradually regaining color after grief, not suddenly or completely, but “in brave little patches.” She compares the experience to somebody slowly turning the saturation back up on a life that had gone gray.

That's gorgeous, and it is also incredibly accessible. You do not need a psychology degree, a theology degree, or years of grief counseling to understand exactly what she means. Anyone who has spent months or years feeling as though the color has disappeared from life can recognize the significance of finally noticing one little patch of it again.

Some of Harms's best writing comes when she combines several of the book's recurring metaphors. While discussing personal transformation after loss, she writes that God is calling readers to “carry your memories as roots instead of weights.” Later, those almost imperceptible moments of improvement, noticing sunlight, laughing without immediately feeling guilty, realizing that a painful day did not consume the entire day, become “stitches of grace” in a larger tapestry.

What fantastic imagery!

A memory can be a weight. It can drag you backward, hold you down, and make every step harder. But a root? A root also connects you to the past, except instead of preventing growth, it supports it. It feeds what continues growing above the ground.

That concept eventually develops into another beautiful declaration about purpose and legacy: “the love you lost becomes part of the legacy you leave.” We especially love that line considering how important the subject of legacy was in Harms's previous book, Are You Ready? Love does not simply disappear when someone dies. Throughout Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss, Harms treats it as something stubbornly alive, something that refuses to stay buried with the person who died. As she writes elsewhere, “Love after loss is not smaller. It is deeper. It is slower. It is wiser.”

That is the kind of writing Harms produces again and again.

Even when discussing the uncertainty of beginning again, she finds fresh ways to describe it. Hope is not presented as some giant triumphant breakthrough. Sometimes it is simply a tiny spark. Sometimes it is a seed buried where nobody can see it. Sometimes it is the first faint strip of morning light entering a room that has been dark for a very long time. Harms understands that healing rarely arrives with fireworks. More often, it sneaks in quietly enough that you may not recognize it until it has already begun.

And perhaps one of the most powerful examples comes when she describes planting hope after loss. Harms essentially turns sorrow into soil. The tears that seem pointless or wasted can become nourishment for whatever eventually grows next. Rather than treating tears as evidence that a grieving person is failing to heal, she describes them as part of the healing itself. The pain becomes soil. The tears water it. Something new, however fragile, can eventually take root.

Harms eventually imagines a grieving person looking back at the garden that has grown from that suffering and realizing that something beautiful emerged not despite the tears, but because of them.

That is the magic of Harms's writing in this book. She takes grief, something abstract, chaotic, invisible, and nearly impossible to explain, and gives it seasons, soil, roots, weather, light, color, gardens, and something that can eventually bloom.

What's interesting about all that is this book has a double-edged sword on its hands: its presentation.

On one hand, the illustrations and backgrounds are bright, vibrant, and beautiful. This really help to facilitate the envigorating, positive, uplifting tone and atmosphere of this book. On the other hand, they can also be a bit distracting or even overwhelming.

The writing by Harms is so good that a part of us kinda just wished it was on a plain white page with a blank white background. It really didn't need all these graphical enhancements, even as pretty as they are. All the pretty doves and flowers draw attention away from the amazing text. This problem is made worse by the choice of font size (the font is a bit small) and the lack of indentations. Gosh, fixing these issues (which are probably tacked on in post-production anyway) would've made this book a 9.6.

All in all, Harms is such an extraordinary human being with an extraordinary message to share with everyone--especially those in the midst of tragedy, sorrow, grief, and despair--those who need it most.

Harms is such a remarkable, incredible example of what to do with the pain and sorrow of loss. She endured all of these profound losses and her career ending to become a phenomenal award-winning and best-selling author who is now able to touch the lives of countless people through her work.

Check it out on Amazon!

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Review of "The Ark of the Covenant in Its Egyptian Context: An Illustrated Journey" by David A. Falk, PhD

9/21/2026

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Score: 96/100 (9.6 out of 10)

We're constantly finding reasons to be impressed with Dr. David A. Falk's works—from his thought-provoking science-fiction novels, including Reliquary of the Dead, All the Stars as Angels, and the sprawling War of the Gods series, to Egg Hunter, the delightfully unexpected video game he created with Kiara Falk and Lagomorph Rampant Studios. What was always apparent in reviewing Falk's work is that he is a really fascinating, intelligent, and inquisitive person with a keen interest in archaeology, ancient history, mysteries, discovery, and hidden secrets! He's like a real-life Indiana Jones!

In all of Falk's works, there's always been something deeper beneath the surface, something waiting to be discovered, uncovered, and better understood. And that brings us to his ultimate work, his masterpiece, his magnum opus: The Ark of the Covenant in Its Egyptian Context: An Illustrated Journey!

Quite frankly, this might be the strongest book in our 2026 Clash of Champions contest so far. The amount of research that must've gone into this is mind-boggling! The thought and effort behind it is mindblowing! And it's so well put together: text, citations, diagrams, illustrations, and all!

Coincidentally, it's neck and neck with another archaeological masterpiece in Chariot Kings: Recovering the Lost Kingdom of Mitanni by R Jay Driskill. Both works are phenomenal glimpses into the past--piecing these histories together using the fragmented remnants we have available to us today. That's no small task!

Now, before you click away because you see the words "Ark of the Covenant" and think, Gosh, this is gonna be another one of those books using pseudoscience or pseudohistory to prove/disprove Christianity or Abrahamic religions, think again! This book takes a very unbiased, evidenced-based approach--impressively so!

Falk is not seeking to prove anything. He's not trying to argue a point--for or against the existence of the Ark of the Covenant (though he does draw evidence-based conclusions). That's a relief. Because it always seems like everyone else has an agenda. Even those who argue for the existence of the Ark, or who even claim to have it or know where it is, always seem to do so with ulterior motives. For example, in Ethiopian religious and historical tradition, the Ark is an enormous source of national pride. For the Christian apologists, Ron Wyatt's claims of the Ark being below Jerusalem and having come in contact with dripping the blood of Jesus can definitely add a spark to a person's faith.

But this book isn't specifically about faith. It's not about a predetermined conclusion. It's about being unbiased and open-minded to where the evidence leads.

That open-mindedness shows up again and again throughout the book. Falk is perfectly willing to challenge ideas that are popular among religious readers when he believes the evidence points elsewhere. For example, he rejects the commonly promoted early date for the Exodus and instead argues for a later, Ramesside-era setting, drawing on the existence of places such as Ramesses, Pithom, and Migdol, the Merneptah Stela, Egyptian chronology, and other archaeological evidence. He even notes that some defenders of the early date have tried to explain away the name "Ramesses" through later editing, but Falk finds those attempts unconvincing.

At the same time, he doesn't swing to the opposite extreme and use Egypt to "debunk" the Bible either. Quite the contrary. Falk argues that the Ark makes more sense when understood within the Egyptian world from which the Israelites emerged. Chests, shrines, barques, palanquins, winged protective figures, and portable sacred spaces all provide context for understanding the Ark's design. But rather than reducing the Ark to a cheap copy of Egyptian religion, Falk shows how those familiar visual ideas could have been adapted and transformed into something distinctly Israelite. By the end, he describes the Ark as something that simultaneously resembles a shrine, coffin, reliquary, throne, and processional object, while still being its own thing.

And then there is the question everyone wants answered: Where is the Ark now? Falk could have milked that mystery for all it was worth. He could have pointed toward Ethiopia, a secret chamber beneath the Temple Mount, some hidden cave, or another sensational theory. Instead, his conclusion is almost aggressively unromantic. It's scientific.

Dr. Falk is a real-life, genuine Egyptologist! A consumate professional.

That professionalism matters because this is exactly the kind of subject that practically begs to be sensationalized. Instead, Falk repeatedly chooses the less flashy answer when he believes it is the better-supported one. He notes that the Ark is still mentioned during the reign of King Josiah, which works against the idea that it had already disappeared centuries earlier into Ethiopia or elsewhere. And when he finally tackles the question of what happened to it, he does not give us a secret chamber, a hidden monastery, or an archaeological treasure hunt. His conclusion is that the Ark was most likely destroyed in connection with the Babylonian conquest, its wooden structure burned and its gold recovered, melted down, and reused.

That conclusion is almost hilariously anticlimactic compared with the legends surrounding the Ark. But that's exactly why we respect it. Falk doesn't seem interested in making the answer exciting. He seems interested in making it make sense. And that same mentality drives the entire book.

Rather than pursuing answers like "Does the Ark actually link humanity with God (or a god)?" or "Does the Ark grant the owner magical powers, good fortune, prosperity, or political authority?," Dr. Falk is more interested in helping readers to gain context behind the Ark from a purely educational standpoint.

Why is the Ark described the way that it is? Why was it made from acacia wood and overlaid with gold? Why did it have carrying poles? Why were cherubim placed on top? Why was the sacred space associated not with the inside of the chest, but with the area above it, between the cherubim? And why does this strange piece of furniture seem to share characteristics with so many other ancient objects while never quite matching any one of them exactly?

Those are the kinds of questions Falk wants us asking. To answer them, he basically teaches us how to read an ancient visual language that most modern readers no longer understand. Egyptian religion communicated meaning not only through words, but through furniture, architecture, symbols, placement, materials, and ritual space. Chests could carry one kind of meaning. Shrines another. Barques another. Palanquins, thrones, veils, winged figures, and layered sacred spaces all communicated ideas that people living in that world would have recognized almost instinctively.

That is where this book becomes so fascinating. Falk does not argue that the Ark was simply copied from one Egyptian object. Quite the opposite. He shows how it seems to draw from several different forms of Egyptian ritual furniture at once. It is chest-like, shrine-like, throne-like, reliquary-like, and processional. By the end, Falk describes the Ark as a kind of miniature portable temple, carrying sacred space with it wherever it went.

One of the best analogies in the entire book compares this concept to space travel. An astronaut cannot simply step onto the moon and survive in its natural environment. He has to bring a little piece of Earth's environment with him: oxygen, pressure, temperature control, protection. Falk argues that Egyptian shrines and sacred barques worked in a somewhat similar religious way. They created a protected capsule of sacred space that allowed a divine image to move through the ordinary, profane world without leaving the conditions considered necessary for holiness.

That's such a clever way of explaining an ancient religious concept that could otherwise sound hopelessly abstract. And then Falk shows us the major difference: there is no idol in the Ark. That may be one of the most important observations in the entire book. Egyptian sacred furniture was often designed to house, protect, enthrone, or transport a physical representation of a god. But the Ark contains no statue of Yahweh. There is no little divine figure sitting inside waiting to be fed, dressed, awakened, moved, or cared for by priests. Instead, the holy space is associated with the area above the Ark, between the wings of the cherubim.

In other words, the Ark appears to use a visual language familiar to the ancient world while simultaneously changing the message. The form communicates divine presence, but the absence of an idol communicates something different: this God cannot be contained inside an image. Falk argues that this was a radical departure from the surrounding idolatrous model. The Ark and tabernacle used recognizable conventions of sacred and profane space, but Yahweh's presence was not bound to a statue. The God of Israel remained voluntarily rather than being symbolically captured or maintained through an idol.

And that is where The Ark of the Covenant in Its Egyptian Context becomes much more than a book about an old golden box. It becomes a book about communication. Falk is showing us how ancient people could communicate enormously complicated ideas about holiness, authority, divinity, protection, covenant, and presence through physical design. The Ark was not important simply because of what it was made from. It was important because of what it meant. And Falk spends this entire book teaching us how to see that meaning again.

Check it out on Amazon!

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Review of "Scrubby's Engagement" by Mike J. Kizman

9/20/2026

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Score: 92+/100 (9.2+ out of 10)

Some things just belong together.

That's how we began our previous review of the first book in Mike J. Kizman's series, Scrubby's PBnJ.

Bread and butter. Milk and cookies. Macaroni and cheese. Peanut butter and jam. And, of course, Brynn "Scrubby" Green and Dewey "Huck" Huckleberry. Well, apparently some things don't just belong together. Sometimes they stay together.

Scrubby's Engagement picks up shortly after the ending of Scrubby's PBnJ, following Brynn and Dewey through the months after their engagement. The first book asked whether Brynn could open herself up to a man who genuinely saw her, appreciated her, respected her, and loved her. This book asks a surprisingly different question: Can Brynn actually believe him? Can she trust that this wonderful man really wants her, exactly as she is? Can she let him see the parts of her past she is ashamed of? Can she become part of his family without feeling like she has to earn her place? Can she allow other people to help run the restaurant she built from the ground up? Can she stop trying to control, perfect, fix, cook, organize, manage, and worry about absolutely everything? And perhaps most importantly, can Brynn stop seeing herself through the eyes of the teenage girls who once called her "Scrubby" and start seeing herself through the eyes of the people who love her?

That's the real story here, and it's a good one.

Another major reason Scrubby's Engagement works is simply that Scrubby is an extremely likable protagonist. You want this woman to succeed. A bit like Venus in Kizman's larger universe, Brynn has that hard-working, entrepreneurial mentality that makes it difficult not to get behind her. She isn't waiting around for somebody else to create the life she wants. She built Scrubby's PBnJ herself, survived the difficult early years, developed its menu and identity, earned a loyal customer base, hired and trained people she trusts, and turned what sounds like an almost ridiculous business concept into something genuinely successful.

Brynn is also a complete workaholic, and she knows exactly how much of herself she has poured into the restaurant. Scrubby's PBnJ would not be what it is without Scrubby. That's not arrogance. It's simply true. She took the financial risk. She worked through the years when the business was barely making money. She developed the recipes, established the standards, built the reputation, and made sure customers kept coming back. Even now that the restaurant is successful enough to support employees such as Lynx and Paris, Brynn still thinks like the person who remembers when every dollar mattered. Her business isn't merely her job. It is one of the greatest accomplishments of her life, and that makes her entrepreneurial drive genuinely inspiring.

Brynn is constantly thinking about costs, quality, expansion, marketing, staffing, customer satisfaction, and how to improve what she has already built. She takes pride in doing things correctly, sometimes to an almost comical degree. Tell Scrubby that store-bought bread is "good enough" and you may as well insult one of her relatives. Call her homemade jam "jelly" at your own risk. But that same quality also becomes one of her weaknesses. Brynn has spent so long believing the restaurant depends on her that she struggles to accept the idea that it can function without her physically being there. She has every reason to be proud of what she built, but eventually she has to recognize that creating a successful business also means creating something capable of surviving when the owner takes a day off.

That's why her growing trust in Lynx matters so much. Brynn isn't just delegating a few shifts. She is handing someone else responsibility for something she considers an extension of herself. For a workaholic entrepreneur, that might be more frightening than the wedding planning itself. And because we genuinely like Scrubby, we want her to figure it out. We want the restaurant to succeed. We want her relationship with Dewey to succeed. We want her to keep growing without losing that relentless drive that helped make her who she is. Scrubby's determination makes you root for her, while her imperfections make you care about her.

In our previous review, we said that the romantic engine of Scrubby's PBnJ was recognition. Dewey recognized Brynn's value before Brynn fully recognized it herself. He didn't just see a nearly six-foot-tall woman with giant black glasses, an unconventional figure, and a restaurant based around what many people would consider children's food. He saw the chef, entrepreneur, musician, Christian, friend, daughter, dreamer, and extraordinarily hardworking woman underneath all of that.

Scrubby's Engagement takes that idea to its natural next step. Dewey already sees Brynn. Now Brynn has to learn to see Brynn. That isn't easy. Her old insecurities are still very much alive. She worries about how she looks, questions whether Dewey could really find her attractive, and continues carrying some of the emotional baggage associated with the "Scrubby" nickname she reclaimed years ago. Love doesn't magically erase fifteen years of insecurity.

Dewey can tell her she's beautiful 100 times. He can kiss her. He can propose to her. He can plan a life with her. He can demonstrate over and over again that he is attracted to her. And there is still a little voice inside Brynn asking, "Yeah, but... are you sure?" That's frustrating, funny, sad, and human.

Fortunately, Dewey continues to be one of the most refreshingly decent romance leads we've encountered. As we said in our review of Scrubby's PBnJ, he isn't some smoldering bad boy with abs, trauma, six motorcycles, seventeen tattoos, and a pathological fear of commitment. He's just a good guy. But this book wisely gives him more depth than that. Dewey has a past too. He has regrets, heartbreak, grief, and experiences that help us understand him as more than the endlessly supportive guy standing beside Scrubby.

One of the stronger elements of Scrubby's Engagement is the way Brynn and Dewey gradually become more vulnerable with one another. Brynn's history with her ex, Lucas Pratt, becomes an especially important part of that. Kizman doesn't rush the issue. It hangs over parts of the novel, slowly building as Brynn wrestles with what happened, what it did to her self-image, and how much of herself she is comfortable revealing to Dewey. The storyline reinforces one of the book's most important ideas: loving someone isn't only about admiring the best parts of them. It's also about knowing what hurt them, what they regret, what they fear, and what they still struggle to believe about themselves.

That reciprocity is important. The first book could occasionally be summarized as Dewey sees how wonderful Brynn is while Brynn struggles to understand why. The sequel develops into two imperfect people revealing increasingly vulnerable parts of themselves and deciding they still want to build a life together. That's stronger.

And Kizman understands that building a life together doesn't only happen during tearful confessions and romantic speeches. Sometimes it happens through house keys. Early in the novel, Dewey gives Brynn keys to his house. Brynn initially misunderstands what he means, which creates a funny little exchange, before realizing that the gesture is really about making the home theirs rather than his.

We loved that. The engagement ring at the end of Scrubby's PBnJ showed that Dewey understood Brynn's life. He deliberately chose something practical enough for a chef to wear while working. The keys continue the same idea. The ring says, "I want to marry you." The keys say, "I want to build a home with you." That distinction matters, and the fact that the keys are just ordinary pieces of metal somehow makes the moment better.

This is part of what Mike J. Kizman consistently does well. We've previously praised him for taking ordinary people and ordinary experiences and making them interesting. 14 Hours of Saturn proved that a rainy Saturday, some coffee, arts and crafts, sibling rivalry, and a stray cat can carry an entire story when the characters are compelling enough. Scrubby's Engagement might be his most extreme experiment with that philosophy yet because there is A LOT of ordinary life in this book. People grocery shop. People cook. People discuss salaries. People pick out furniture. People go to church. People make restaurant schedules. People plan catering. People talk about rent. People drive long distances. People discuss employee compensation. People learn to sew. People eat leftovers. People play games. People debate honeymoon destinations.

Brynn can apparently survive an emotional crisis, legal trouble, restaurant destruction, wedding stress, family drama, and probably the apocalypse itself and still stop long enough to evaluate whether somebody seasoned the food properly. That's Scrubby. And once again, Kizman somehow makes much of this mundane material interesting because these little details accumulate into a life.

Brynn doesn't dream of ruling a kingdom. She doesn't discover magical powers. She isn't prophesied to save humanity. She doesn't even seem especially interested in turning Scrubby's PBnJ into some giant restaurant empire. She wants a successful little restaurant. She wants good employees. She wants family. She wants church. She wants music. She wants children someday. She wants Dewey. She wants people to enjoy her food. And maybe she'd like everybody to stop calling it jelly. It's jam. Never forget that.

Kizman's shared universe also becomes increasingly rewarding here, and honestly, it's just fun and cool to see. The more of his books we read, the more it becomes apparent that these stories aren't isolated little bubbles. His characters occupy the same larger world, know some of the same people, hear about one another, cross paths, and occasionally wander straight into somebody else's story. It gives the books a wonderful feeling that life continues even after the final page of any individual novel.

Saturn O Syres, protagonist of 14 Hours of Saturn and 5 Weeks of Saturn, again crosses into Brynn's world, but this isn't merely a cameo where readers are expected to clap because they recognize the name. Saturn is working in advertising, which matters because we already watched her fascination with advertisements develop in 14 Hours of Saturn. Something that helped define Saturn in her own story has grown into a career that can now materially affect another protagonist's life.

And Saturn isn't the only connection. Rebecca from Afternoon Rebecca, Sabrina, and Venus are all part of or referenced within this expanding web of characters. For readers who have followed Kizman's other books, those names carry additional history. Rebecca isn't simply Rebecca. Saturn isn't simply some quirky advertising agent. Venus isn't simply another name dropped into conversation. Sabrina isn't just a funny friend floating around the edges of somebody else's story. We already know some of these people, their relationships, their personalities, their careers, their struggles, and where they've come from.

That's what makes the interconnectedness work so well. The characters don't merely cameo. Their lives overlap. Rebecca can appear in Saturn's story. Saturn can become part of Brynn's. Sabrina can move away, build another life, and still remain connected to this group. Venus can exist somewhere beyond the immediate events of this novel while still remaining part of the social fabric connecting these characters.

There's something really satisfying about that. It makes Kizman's books feel almost like visiting the same community through different front doors. One novel might invite us into Rebecca's life. Another follows Saturn. Another takes us inside Scrubby's PBnJ with Brynn. Every time the camera shifts, the previous characters haven't vanished. They're apparently still out there working, dating, marrying, arguing with their siblings, running businesses, going to church, making questionable decisions, and occasionally bumping into the protagonist of another Mike J. Kizman novel.

Kizman isn't really constructing an epic fantasy-style "world" filled with maps, kingdoms, histories, and mythology. He's constructing a community, and that's arguably even more appropriate for the kinds of stories he tells. Businesses, families, churches, friends, coworkers, musicians, first responders, old acquaintances, and local professionals repeatedly cross one another's paths. Scrubby's Engagement makes that interconnected world feel larger while simultaneously making it feel more intimate, and longtime readers get the extra pleasure of recognizing familiar faces along the way.

The restaurant itself is probably the best example of that sense of community. In Scrubby's PBnJ, the restaurant was primarily Brynn's dream. In Scrubby's Engagement, Brynn discovers something she may not completely understand at first: Her dream has become other people's home too. Lynx, Paris, Alsi, Janet, Staci, the customers, musicians, friends, and others have become invested in the place and, more importantly, invested in Brynn.

This becomes especially obvious after one of the strangest and most unexpectedly chaotic sequences in the novel. A private event involving a boys' basketball team turns into a full-scale brawl. Alcohol has been smuggled in. Food starts flying. Milk follows. Tables and chairs are damaged. A window is shattered. The restaurant looks like a war zone. Suddenly this mellow Christian romance about wedding planning and gourmet peanut butter sandwiches has turned into... well... we're not entirely sure. The Fast and the Furious: PBnJ Drift?

Whatever it is, the incident works because of what happens afterward. Brynn is devastated, but she isn't alone. Her people show up. They clean, repair, reorganize, and help her recover. The emotional importance of the incident has very little to do with damaged furniture or money. Brynn built Scrubby's PBnJ. Then Scrubby's PBnJ built a community around Brynn.

That realization feeds directly into another major theme of the novel: Brynn has to learn that being capable does not mean doing everything herself. Lynx becomes especially important here. We already knew Brynn trusted Lynx professionally, but this novel expands that relationship tremendously. Lynx isn't just another employee anymore. She is someone Brynn can leave in charge.

That sounds like a small thing, but for Brynn, it isn't. Brynn has fused so much of her identity with the restaurant that trusting another person to manage it means accepting the possibility that Scrubby's PBnJ can function without Scrubby standing inside it every waking hour. That is healthy. Probably terrifying. But healthy.

One of our favorite stretches of the novel comes when Brynn finally spends an extended period away from the restaurant and spends more time with Dewey's family. This is where Nova Huckleberry becomes one of the book's best characters. Nova doesn't simply welcome Brynn because she is Dewey's fiancée. She gradually teaches Brynn another lesson she desperately needs to hear: she doesn't have to earn her place in the family by constantly doing things for everyone.

That idea could summarize Brynn's entire emotional problem. She seems to believe usefulness is the price of belonging. Cook something. Fix something. Manage something. Help someone. Work harder. Be better. Make yourself indispensable. Then maybe people will have a reason to keep you around. Nova rejects that idea.

And wonderfully, she does much of this while teaching Brynn how to sew. Brynn initially struggles with sewing because, of course, Brynn cannot tolerate being bad at something for five minutes. Nova reminds her that skills take time and points out that the successful restaurateur sitting beside her didn't create a profitable business overnight either. Brynn even manages to correct "jelly" to "jam" in the middle of being taught a life lesson, because apparently some principles are too sacred to surrender under any circumstances.

But the best moment comes from a tiny imperfect seam. Brynn looks at her work and says, "It's not perfect." Nova replies, "No. But it holds."

That may be the most important line in the entire book because what is marriage? What is family? What is friendship? What is a business? What is a human life? None of them are perfect, but they can hold. Brynn doesn't need to become the perfect wife. She doesn't need the perfect body. She doesn't need the perfect restaurant. She doesn't need perfect employees. She doesn't need to make every meal from scratch. Okay, admittedly, Brynn herself may strongly disagree with that last one. But she needs to learn that something can be imperfect and still be worthy, useful, beautiful, and capable of holding together.

That lesson gives Scrubby's Engagement considerably more thematic depth than its premise initially suggests.

We also have to mention one of the funniest parts of the entire book without completely ruining it: the drunken bouquet toss. We won't tell you exactly who does what, who ends up where, or what happens afterward, but suffice it to say that what should be one of the most predictable wedding traditions imaginable somehow becomes absolute chaos. It's arguably the highlight of the book.

Seriously, we've seen a lot of bouquet tosses in books and movies. We can't remember many that escalate quite like this one. What begins as a harmless wedding tradition quickly becomes one of those scenes where you keep thinking, "Surely this cannot get any worse," and then Mike J. Kizman politely informs you that, yes, yes it absolutely can. It is ridiculous, unexpectedly physical, genuinely hilarious, and a great payoff after so much relatively restrained wedding planning and interpersonal tension. We won't say another word about what happens because discovering the madness for yourself is half the fun.

Our biggest criticism of Scrubby's Engagement is that the book loses a considerable amount of momentum near the middle. Kizman's slice-of-life storytelling is normally one of his strengths, and we have praised it repeatedly in his previous books. He has a knack for making everyday conversations, meals, jobs, errands, family interactions, and small personal dilemmas feel meaningful. That remains true here. However, there is a stretch in Scrubby's Engagement where the balance tips a little too far toward ordinary activity without enough forward movement to keep the story progressing at the pace established earlier.

There is a lot happening in theory. Brynn and Dewey are planning their wedding, Brynn is managing the restaurant, relationships among the supporting characters continue developing, and the issue involving Brynn's past and Lucas gradually hangs over the story. The Lucas situation is particularly interesting because Kizman doesn't rush it. Brynn's history, her discomfort discussing it, and her fear about how Dewey might react linger beneath the surface before becoming increasingly important. We actually like that slow build. It gives the issue emotional weight instead of treating Brynn's past like a plot twist that appears out of nowhere.

The problem is that several slow-moving elements accumulate at the same time. Wedding planning stretches on. Restaurant life continues in great detail. There are conversations about schedules, meals, family, business decisions, and preparations. Meanwhile, the Lucas dilemma develops so gradually that it sometimes feels as though the book is circling the conflict rather than moving toward it. Individually, many of these scenes are pleasant and often entertaining. Collectively, though, they make the middle portion feel much slower than the opening and later portions of the novel.

That's an important distinction because we would not want Kizman to eliminate the slice-of-life quality that makes his books distinctive. This book shouldn't suddenly become an action thriller just because we're asking for more momentum. The ordinary moments are part of the charm. We simply think some of them could have been condensed or combined so that the wedding, Brynn's personal growth, her relationship with Dewey, the restaurant, and the unresolved tension surrounding Lucas continued moving forward together.

The book does regain its momentum as the various emotional and interpersonal threads begin moving toward their payoffs, but there is definitely a point near the middle where this book starts to drag. A tighter middle section would make the later developments feel stronger because there would be less distance between the setup and payoff.

This is also why we wouldn't simply argue that the book needs to be dramatically shorter. Mike J. Kizman's fascination with ordinary life is part of what makes his writing his writing. We enjoy that Scrubby worries about ingredients, employee schedules, restaurant finances, furniture, food preparation, wedding details, and things most other novels would skip over entirely. The problem isn't that these scenes exist. The problem is that too many of them arrive in succession without enough narrative acceleration between them. In other words, this book doesn't need to stop being slice-of-life fiction. It just needs the slice in the middle to be a little thinner.

There is also another significant issue that is difficult to ignore: this book needs another serious editing pass. This isn't merely a case of a few misplaced commas or occasional awkward sentences. There are duplicated or overlapping passages, abrupt transitions, tense inconsistencies, apparent remnants of alternate drafts, continuity problems, and places where scenes seem to have been stitched together without the seams being completely hidden. However, the biggest issue with this book is that there are no indentations! This books consists of paragraph blocks intermingled with dialogue, and that's a pretty serious formatting issue. We checked the sample of the Kindle version as well and found the same problem. Originally, we were going to deduct a decimal point fromt he score (9.2+ to 9.1+), however, we did some digging around regarding the publisher's BBB complaints and more information. We think there's enough controversy surrounding them that we can shift some of the blame away from the author in this case.

Yet underneath those problems, there is a very good sequel here. Scrubby's PBnJ was about Brynn finding somebody who sees her. Scrubby's Engagement expands that idea by showing Brynn beginning to understand just how many people value her, professionally and personally. An entire community has formed around this awkward, anxious, talented, deeply sincere woman who once turned an insulting high-school nickname into the name of a restaurant.

Gradually, Brynn starts to understand something: maybe she doesn't have to prove everyone wrong anymore. Maybe she doesn't have to earn every bit of love she receives. Maybe the people around her actually know exactly who she is. Maybe the girl everybody called Scrubby grew up into somebody worth being proud of.

Not perfect. But neither is the seam. And it holds.

That's what makes Scrubby's Engagement work. It's sweet, funny, wholesome, occasionally absurd, surprisingly emotional, excessively detailed, imperfectly edited, and unmistakably Mike J. Kizman. Most of all, it's unmistakably Scrubby, and we're glad we got to spend another book in her wonderfully peculiar world.

Check it out on Amazon!

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Editorial Reviews for Nominees
(May Contain Spoilers and Affiliate Links)

Review of "Inside the Walls" by Scott G. A. Metcalf

Review of "The Fourfold Convergence" by Holly Wood

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Review of "The Third Estate: Devil’s Tango" by D.R. Berlin, MD

Review of "Tulsa Triassic" by Ethan Richards

Review of "La Flor Del Mar" by Jamilette Cintron

Review of "Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss" by Dr. Kimberly Harms

Review of "The Ark of the Covenant in Its Egyptian Context: An Illustrated Journey" by David A. Falk, PhD

Review of "Scrubby's Engagement" by Mike J. Kizman

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