Editorial Reviews for Nominees
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 Score: 89+/100 (8.9+ out of 10)
T.V. Holiday’s Angelface is a short relationship drama centered on Christian, a veteran law-enforcement manager who appears successful from the outside but is increasingly exhausted by nearly every part of his life. He is engaged to Solana, an energetic, attractive, intensely social woman whom he loves, but their relationship has deteriorated into an exhausting cycle of mismatched priorities, arguments, apologies, affection, and then the same arguments all over again. At the same time, Christian cannot stop thinking about Draya, a woman from work whom he once considered pursuing after his divorce but deliberately avoided because he feared the complications of dating a coworker. The opening poem establishes that regret immediately: he made a decision not to pursue this woman, yet continues asking himself what might have happened if he had gone back and broken his own rule. Christian and Solana's problems are not really caused by Draya. That's important. Their lifestyles are fundamentally incompatible. Christian wants stability, rest, companionship, meaningful conversation, and room to maintain his own interests. Solana wants activity, nightlife, travel, spontaneity, nature, constant social interaction, and eventually a rural life. Their communication styles are even more incompatible. Small conversations routinely become enormous arguments, with Christian withdrawing and Solana reacting emotionally, interrupting him, accusing him of not caring, and then often apologizing after the situation explodes. Christian repeatedly wonders whether love is enough to justify building a marriage around that pattern. Meanwhile, his professional life is crushing him. He supervises hundreds of people, is being pushed toward even greater leadership positions, feels increasingly burned out, and then discovers that he has been named in another lawsuit connected to his former work as a spokesperson. Solana's response becomes one of the clearest demonstrations of their disconnect: once she realizes the city will pay the legal expenses, she largely dismisses his anxiety and recommends going out for drinks, while Christian is worried about the scrutiny, meetings, professional consequences, and emotional ordeal he knows is coming. Draya becomes the contrast. She understands the pressures of their profession because she lives inside the same world. When the two meet for coffee, they are able to talk about the lawsuit, their careers, exhaustion, management, and Christian's deteriorating relationship in a way he feels unable to do at home. Eventually, Christian admits why he never pursued her: she frightened him precisely because he saw the possibility of something meaningful and didn't want a failed workplace romance to destroy their friendship. He finally admits that he has spent years wondering what might have happened between them. Their conversation stops short of an affair, but it absolutely crosses into emotionally dangerous territory while he is still engaged. The "love taps" exchange culminates in him effectively acknowledging that he has loved her, leaving both of them confronting the possibility of something they never allowed themselves to explore. The relationship with Solana finally breaks after one particularly brutal work shift. Christian spends thirteen hours overseeing patrol, responds to an armed man's rampage at a bar, and returns home after being awake for nearly an entire day. Five hours later, Solana wakes him because she wants to get up and go somewhere. When he tells her he is exhausted, their familiar argument erupts again. This time Christian finally says what he has been circling for most of the book: he cannot do this anymore. He realizes he wants a partner who shares at least some of his interests, understands his life, and accepts who he actually is rather than who she wants him to become. Christian wants stability. He wants enough quiet to think. He wants hobbies, dancing, conversation, reasonable sleep, and some semblance of control over his increasingly stressful life. Solana seems to run almost entirely on movement. She wants nightlife, friends, travel, nature, adventure, animals, spontaneity, and eventually a rural home somewhere far away from the city. Neither lifestyle is inherently wrong. The problem is that each increasingly seems miserable living inside the other's. Their communication is even worse. A simple question about renewing their lease becomes an argument about respect, household responsibilities, communication, emotional support, Christian's previous marriage, Solana's friends, and whether Christian actually cares about her. Christian watches the conversation spiral so far beyond his original question that even he appears bewildered by how they arrived there. That pattern repeats throughout the novella, and Holiday effectively creates the sense that Christian and Solana are not merely having arguments. They are having variations of the same argument over and over again. If you've ever been trapped in one of those relationships where changing the subject somehow does absolutely nothing because every road leads back to the same fight, Holiday captures the feeling rather well. The novella's poetry adds another dimension to Christian's inner conflict. Poems such as "Why Marriage Why," "Sweet Dreams, Sweet Dreams," and especially "Simple Math" work almost like private journal entries scattered between the prose. "Simple Math" may actually contain the central metaphor of the entire book. Christian recognizes that he and Solana keep trying to solve a relationship that simply refuses to add up. They want the answer to work, but they keep ending up with a remainder. He describes them as square pegs trying to force themselves into spaces where they do not belong. And that leads into our biggest criticism of Angelface: Holiday stacks the deck against Solana so heavily that the romantic dilemma occasionally becomes too easy. Solana drinks too much, interrupts Christian, dismisses his professional stress, complains about how little they do together while constantly going out herself, resents some of his interests, and eventually tells a man who has just worked a brutal overnight police shift on almost no sleep to essentially "suck it up." Meanwhile, Draya understands his career, listens to him, makes him laugh, notices when something is wrong, shares his interests, and seems to appear whenever Christian needs exactly the kind of emotional support Solana is failing to provide. In fact, the whole thing sometimes feels so personal that we couldn't help wondering how much of Christian might be sitting behind the keyboard. Holiday has played with autobiographical-feeling protagonists before, including in his Legend of the Iron Warrior series (in which the main protagonist literally shares the author's name and is a former cop), and Christian here has that same unmistakable self-insert energy. We obviously have no idea whether a real-life "Solana" exists, but the imbalance is pronounced enough that you can almost imagine Holiday jabbing a finger at somebody from his past while writing: "Aha! See? I WAS RIGHT!" Quite frankly, that mental image made us laugh. The danger, though, is that when one side of a relationship is written as this obviously incompatible and the alternative is practically glowing with angel wings, the reader does not have much reason to wrestle with Christian's choice. We did get a morbidly funny "OPEN THE D**M DOOR, B&%!" scene in the author's previous book, Vendetta, so there's that. The other disappointment we had is that there simply isn't enough book here. At roughly seventy pages, Angelface feels like it ends almost as soon as it finally gets moving. Christian's deteriorating engagement, his professional burnout, the lawsuit, his unresolved feelings for Draya, and the breakup all have enough material to support a substantially longer story. Instead, Holiday introduces these conflicts, gets them boiling, and then reaches the finish line just when we were becoming most interested in where they might go. That brevity keeps Angelface moving, but it also prevents Holiday from adding the complexity the story most needs. A longer version could have given Solana more humanity, Draya more dimension beyond Christian's idealization of her, and Christian more time to confront his own role in the mess. As written, there is a compelling relationship drama here. We just wish Holiday had let it breathe long enough to become a deeper one. For all of that, though, there is a lot to like about Angelface. Holiday gives Christian's exhaustion, regret, and loneliness a sense of lived-in authenticity, and the novella moves with an easy readability that makes its seventy pages disappear quickly. The relationship may be one-sided, but the emotions rarely feel fake, especially when Christian and Solana finally admit that loving each other is not enough to make their future work and part without turning everything they shared into a mistake. And we really like where Holiday leaves Christian: not magically healed, not suddenly guaranteed a happily-ever-after, but sitting at the edge of a new possibility when Draya appears and simply asks him to get coffee. Angelface may feel more like the opening act of a larger story than a fully developed novel, but it is personal, readable, occasionally funny, and emotionally sincere enough that we would gladly have kept reading if Holiday had given us another hundred pages.
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 Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)
You may have heard about it or seen the viral videos on Instagram or TikTok: In August 2026, a disturbing story out of South Carolina captured national attention after Nora Rowland said she traveled to check on her elderly father and discovered that he had died days earlier without her knowledge. She also discovered—to her shock—that his caregiver had been named his power of attorney, and that his house had been transferred to that caregiver for just five dollars! Rowland walked through a home she barely recognized, with unfamiliar photographs on the walls and rooms of people she didn't recognize and never met. When the caregiver returned and produced a deed in her own name, Rowland was initially treated by police as trespassers. The story spread rapidly online, and the caregiver, Sarah Smalls, was later arrested and charged with exploitation of a vulnerable adult, breach of trust, and perjury. What made the case so horrifying was not merely the loss of a house or the shock of a family learning how much had changed. It was the deeper fear of discovering that enormous decisions concerning a vulnerable parent’s care, finances, property, and relationships had been made while the family felt increasingly powerless to intervene. That fear sits at the heart of Leonie Rosenstiel’s Protecting Mama. Rosenstiel’s story is distinctly different, but the central question is hauntingly similar: What happens when other people acquire the legal power to decide what is best for an elderly loved one, all while you become increasingly powerless to protect them yourself? That question is what Rosenstiel spends nearly 400 pages trying to answer, and what makes this book so much more unsettling than a conventional memoir about caring for an aging parent. Rosenstiel begins by showing us who her mother, Annette, was before dementia and guardianship began stripping away her ability to define herself. Mama was an anthropologist, professor, writer, traveler, wife, mother, and an extraordinarily complicated woman with her own religious beliefs, financial priorities, preferences, grudges, memories, habits, and contradictions. She could be difficult. She could be stubborn. She could even lie. Rosenstiel does not attempt to turn her mother into a saint, and the book is considerably stronger for it. Mama did not deserve dignity because she was perfect. She deserved dignity because she was a human being. After the death of Rosenstiel’s father, Raymond, Leonie increasingly helped Mama manage the practical realities of life, including her finances, eventual move to New Mexico, and later her growing medical and cognitive needs. As Mama’s dementia progressed, however, the situation became dramatically more complicated. A competency proceeding eventually placed Mama under the authority of a commercial guardian and conservator. From there, according to Rosenstiel’s account, decisions about her mother’s money, medical care, visitors, possessions, religious practices, diet, living environment, and even what Mama supposedly believed or wanted increasingly passed into other hands. This is where Protecting Mama becomes maddening to read in precisely the way Rosenstiel intends. Again and again, Leonie believes she knows what her mother wants because she has known her for a lifetime, only to encounter professionals, court orders, reports, caregivers, attorneys, and other relatives presenting different versions of Mama. At times, Leonie is restricted in what she may do for her mother or how she may participate in her care. Mama herself reportedly asks that Leonie replace her guardian, expresses loneliness, and tries to communicate what she wants, yet the machinery surrounding the guardianship keeps moving. One of the book’s most disturbing ideas is that dementia does not merely make a person vulnerable to having decisions made for them. It can make them vulnerable to having their entire identity interpreted for them. Who did Mama love? What religion did she practice? What food did she want? Who should visit her? What belongings mattered to her? What medical treatment would she have accepted? What did she want done with her money? Once Mama could no longer consistently articulate those answers herself, seemingly everyone around her acquired some power to answer on her behalf (other than herself, of course). Rosenstiel is especially effective when she shows how supposedly small decisions can carry enormous emotional weight. At one point, photographs connected to painful chapters of Mama’s family history appear prominently around her bed, while other objects connected to the life she actually built for herself are moved or disappear. It is a deceptively simple example of one of the book’s central warnings: knowing that something is associated with a person’s past is not the same thing as understanding what that past means to them. “Family,” “religion,” “home,” and “comfort” are not interchangeable labels that can safely be applied by strangers. And then there is the money. No joke, Mama was a multimillionaire with a net worth peaking around $20.5 million as estimated by the commercial guardian. However, later reports between 2010-2011 show a suspicious plunge in net worth to $6.6 million, then eventually to $6 million. A substantial portion of Protecting Mama follows investments, stock holdings, household expenses, professional fees, legal bills, caregiver costs, repairs, accounting records, and transactions that Rosenstiel scrutinizes with almost forensic intensity. This material can be exhausting, but that exhaustion eventually becomes part of the experience of the book. The reader begins to understand what it must feel like to fight for someone you love while drowning in invoices, motions, hearings, accountings, medical records, contradictory statements, and court documents. Rosenstiel eventually found herself working through roughly 40,000 pages of documents connected to the litigation surrounding her mother’s guardianship. That extraordinary level of documentation is both Protecting Mama’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Rosenstiel rarely seems satisfied with telling us that something happened when she can show us the invoice, identify the hearing, reconstruct the conversation, compare the financial records, recall who was standing in the room, and then return to the subject dozens of pages later when another document appears to contradict the first one. For readers interested in guardianship, elder law, or the mechanics of how these systems operate, this degree of detail can be invaluable. For an ordinary reader, it can occasionally feel as though someone has overturned several filing cabinets onto the floor and asked us to help reconstruct a decade of family history. Yet cutting too deeply into that material would also risk weakening what makes the book unusual. Rosenstiel is not simply asking the reader to believe that she felt mistreated. She is attempting to build a case. And because so much of Protecting Mama concerns disputes over who said what, who authorized what, what Mama actually wanted, and whether the official version of events matched reality, documentation becomes part of the book’s moral argument. The paperwork is not decoration. It is Rosenstiel’s answer to a system in which, again and again, somebody else had the authority to write the official version of her mother’s life. And that case becomes much harder to dismiss once Rosenstiel begins describing what she says she uncovered about Mama’s actual care. In one particularly disturbing discovery, notes from the guardian’s own files record another aide reporting that Mama’s original caregiver had returned to the house while off duty, picked Mama up, shook her, and yelled at her. That caregiver was eventually fired. Years later, Rosenstiel also discovered records documenting a “purple” eye, a bruise on Mama’s hand, and a sore on her lip. The records do not establish how those injuries occurred, and Rosenstiel is generally careful to distinguish what she can document from what she suspects. Still, the accumulation of unexplained injuries and troubling reports is difficult to shrug off. One scene in particular is hard to forget. Rosenstiel describes arriving at Mama’s home after hearing her screaming and finding her face-down in the covers, hanging halfway off the bed while an aide held her down by the waist. According to Rosenstiel, the aide planned to wait nearly an hour for relief to arrive. Leonie instead helped reposition Mama, who immediately stopped screaming and relaxed. Whether this was incompetence, panic, poor training, or something worse, the episode captures the terror running through the book: Leonie repeatedly believes something is wrong, but she no longer has the authority to simply step in and take control. That loss of authority extended well beyond the caregivers themselves. Rosenstiel says she sometimes learned about hospitalizations only after the fact, was shut out of medical decisions she believed she had been authorized to make, and eventually lost even that limited role. Meanwhile, the commercial guardian increasingly controlled what information Leonie received, when she could visit, and how Mama’s wishes were interpreted. What makes this so maddening is that the guardian was supposed to be the safeguard against exactly this sort of vulnerability. Instead, Rosenstiel portrays a system in which the person appointed to protect Mama could also become the gatekeeper standing between Mama and the daughter trying to protect her. The questions become darkest near the end of Mama’s life. Rosenstiel compares caregiver notes suggesting that Mama ate only tiny amounts of fruit, juice, sorbet, and banana on her final night with a later court report stating that she had eaten a “full dinner.” After Mama died at age 100, Rosenstiel pushed for further examination, and an independent second autopsy documented skin irritation, an ulceration near the sacrum, and bruising on one hand. None of those findings alone proves abuse, and the book cannot conclusively explain every injury or contradiction. But taken together with the financial disputes, restricted access, conflicting reports, and disturbing caregiver incidents, they make Protecting Mama feel less like one grievance and more like a sustained warning about what can happen when tremendous power over a vulnerable adult is concentrated in people the family cannot easily question. One of the most impressive things about Protecting Mama is how many different kinds of books it manages to become over the course of nearly 400 pages. At times, Rosenstiel writes almost like an investigative journalist, reconstructing events from court records, financial statements, caregiver notes, medical records, emails, invoices, and thousands upon thousands of pages of discovery. She follows inconsistencies, compares competing accounts, and keeps pulling at loose threads until an apparently minor discrepancy opens into a much larger question. Elsewhere, the book becomes openly activist and reform-minded, with Rosenstiel using Mama’s experience to argue for greater transparency, accountability, oversight, and protections within the guardianship system. And then, unexpectedly, Protecting Mama sometimes reads like a courtroom drama. Once the disputes move deeper into litigation, attorneys enter and exit the case, depositions reveal information Rosenstiel says she had never known, expert witnesses disagree, sealed records become battlegrounds, motions pile up, and years of evidence are weaponized by opposing sides. There are stretches that reminded us less of a conventional memoir than of a John Grisham novel, except Rosenstiel keeps reminding us that these proceedings involved her actual mother, her actual family, and millions of dollars in real assets. That constant shifting between memoir, investigation, advocacy, and legal drama gives Protecting Mama an unusual dynamism that helps sustain a story that could otherwise have become overwhelmingly technical. There's a morbid level of intrigue or—dare we say—even excitement, particularly as it pertains to the court proceedings. At the same time, there were times when we felt a little put off by some of the ranting and passive-aggressiveness in this book. Honestly, there were times when the narrator got on our nerves, whether they intended to or not. We have a right to feel that way. We're responding to our experiences with someone's work. It seems clear to us, having read this entire book, that Rosentiel carries a lot of anger, rage, frustration, and resentment toward everyone involved with her mother: the caregivers she distrusts, the commercial guardian and conservator, the attorneys, the judge, the court system, and even relatives whose accounts of Mama seem completely incompatible with the woman Rosenstiel knew. She has every right to feel that way. It really feels like these people have have wronged her and her Mama. So, to an extent, the ill feelings are understandable. However, there are times this book reads like a prolonged tirade, and it's like Rosentiel is steamrolling half of the time. We can understand why some people might find that insufferable. Rosentiel's anger spills directly onto the page through sarcasm, biting commentary, and the occasional insult. She refers to people associated with the guardianship firm as its “minions,” questions whether professionals understand the consequences of the power they have been given, and repeatedly challenges explanations that she finds absurd or contradictory. That fury is understandable, but it is also one area where the book occasionally weakens its own case. Rosenstiel is strongest when she lays two documents beside each other, points out that they contradict one another, and lets the reader feel the implications. She is somewhat less convincing when she moves from evidence into speculation about why someone behaved a certain way or what they may secretly have intended. To her credit, she often signals the difference with phrases like “I wonder,” “perhaps,” or “I have no way to know.” Still, a slightly more restrained approach in a few places might actually have made some of her most serious accusations feel even more devastating. It always seems like Rosentiel is hiding behind a corner somewhere peaking or listening in for something bad or suspicious to happen. It's like no matter what else is happening, she's like a spider in a web or a fly on the wall when it comes to catching the people alleged to be wronging Mama. Then again, wouldn't you? If your loved one was potentially being abused, neglected, and/or manipulated? At the same time, the narrative of this book reminded us of A Graver Danger: White Chalk Crime in which it seemed like the author really seemed out to catch and blame people constantly—incessantly. It's like if the judge pauses or breathes too deeply, it'll set off her alarms of suspected corruption. Maybe he's taking some of the money to the casino at night like other judges have done. Maybe he's in with the perpetrators. She talks about wanting to hide nanny cams in Mama's room to catch the culprits. Every scratch, bruise, inconsistency in a document etc. seems to create a story of some nefarious act in her mind. She'll even measure the width of a doorway to try to prove that her mom's bed won't fit through it in case of emergency to show that the guardian is putting Mama in danger. Things like that. It kinda comes across as petty and nitpicky at times, which can honestly come across as annoying or unpleasant. It's hard to be around people who seem like they complin all the time. It's hard to deal with people who seem like they're just waiting for you to make a mistake so they can pounce, and say, "AHA! I knew it!" That's like... every mother-in-law ever. Or every district manager. The defense constantly tries to frame and dismiss her as a "chronic complainer." Yet beneath all that anger is something much simpler: a daughter who believes she failed, again and again, to protect her mother because the authority to do so had been taken out of her hands. That gives Protecting Mama an emotional center far stronger than its court filings or financial records. Mama reportedly tells Leonie that “one of us has to tell the story” and asks her to “remain standing” long enough to do it. The book ultimately feels like Leonie’s fulfillment of that promise. She may not have been able to control what happened while Mama was alive, but she could make sure that Mama’s story did not disappear into the same mountain of paperwork that had surrounded her. That is ultimately what keeps Protecting Mama from collapsing beneath the weight of its own anger, documentation, and litigation. For all of Rosenstiel’s suspicions, tangents, repetitions, and moments when we wished she would simply let a point rest, we never doubted why she kept digging. She believed Mama had been failed by people and institutions specifically entrusted with protecting her, and she was determined to create a record that could not be quietly filed away, sealed, forgotten, or explained by someone else. More broadly, Protecting Mama is a furious argument for sunlight. Rosenstiel wants guardianships scrutinized, financial decisions documented, families heard, courts held accountable, and vulnerable adults treated as human beings rather than problems to be administratively managed. Not every conclusion she draws will persuade every reader, nor should it. But the book raises questions that deserve to make people uncomfortable, particularly anyone who assumes that placing an elderly person under professional guardianship necessarily means that someone responsible is now safely “in charge.” As an aside: one of the strangest and most unexpected stretches of the book has almost nothing to do with guardianship at all. While Rosenstiel is living under a gag order and largely isolating herself, she begins describing the wildlife that congregates around her backyard: wrens, mourning doves, squirrels, rabbits, geckos, and a pair of roadrunners, all developing their own little routines around the fruit she leaves outside. A rabbit cautiously investigates an apple for several days before trying to mate with it; the animals apparently leave her bizarre “gifts,” including Matchbox cars and Wiffle balls; and some unidentified creature carefully transports peaches across the property. The whole episode arrives in the middle of litigation, depositions, death, money, and accusations, and it is bizarrely random, weirdly wholesome, and morbidly amusing. You kinda get the sense that the experience is destroying her—she's becoming like one of those hermit people with all the animals following them. At the same time, it kinda goes along with what we were saying before: Rosentiel spares no details. She describes, details, and tries to explain everything, for better or for worse. Protecting Mama is sprawling, combative, occasionally exhausting, sometimes irritating, deeply researched, strangely thrilling, and ultimately very difficult to forget. It is simultaneously memoir, investigation, courtroom drama, indictment, and act of advocacy. Most importantly, however, it is the story of a daughter who promised her mother that somebody would tell what happened. Leonie Rosenstiel remained standing. And she told the story. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 93/100 (9.3 out of 10)
Scott G.A. Metcalf’s Brotherhood USMC is a heartfelt tribute to the bonds forged through military service, shared hardship, sacrifice, and the families who carry part of that burden from home. Following Sergeant Alex Riley through deployment, the novel moves between moments of danger, camaraderie, reflection, Marine Corps tradition, and the quiet ache of separation from his son. Metcalf is at his best when he focuses on the small acts that reveal what brotherhood really means: checking on the Marine beside you, making room for vulnerability, sharing a joke in miserable conditions, holding onto a letter from home, or looking up at the same stars as the people you miss. The result is a sincere and often moving portrait of Marines not simply as warriors, but as fathers, husbands, friends, mentors, and human beings trying to remain whole while carrying the weight of duty. And if you've followed Scott Metcalf's work with us, a lot of this will feel familiar. At this point, we've read enough of Metcalf's books to recognize the ideas that seem to matter most to him: service, duty, loyalty, trauma, resilience, institutional pressures, and what happens to human beings when they are placed in extraordinarily difficult environments. Soldiers in the Sandbox explored the experience of war and, perhaps even more powerfully, what happens after the soldier comes home. Where Is Your Church? turned its attention toward wounded and homeless veterans and asked what genuine service, faith, and compassion look like when people have been forgotten. Inside the Walls placed us inside another unforgiving institution, the correctional system, and examined how people preserve their humanity in an environment constantly threatening to harden them. Brotherhood USMC feels like another branch growing from that same tree. This time, Metcalf returns us directly to deployment, but the most interesting question isn't really whether Sergeant Riley and his fellow Marines can complete their missions. It's what allows them to keep functioning as human beings while doing so. What keeps someone emotionally intact when he's thousands of miles away from his family? What happens when the person everyone looks to for strength is struggling himself? How much of military resilience comes from individual toughness, and how much comes from simply knowing the people beside you will notice when something is wrong? That's where the "brotherhood" in the title becomes considerably more meaningful than Marines fighting alongside one another. Some of our favorite material in the book comes from the quieter moments. Marines look after one another when someone is physically miserable. They joke. They eat together. They talk about home. They receive letters and hold onto photographs. They look forward to traditions that connect them with generations of Marines who came before them. Riley thinks constantly about his son and the ordinary pieces of family life he is missing while deployed. These scenes remind us that military sacrifice isn't confined to firefights, injuries, or death. Sometimes the sacrifice is missing another day of your child's life because duty has placed an ocean between you. We especially appreciated the book's treatment of mental health and leadership. Riley understands that taking care of his Marines means more than keeping them tactically prepared. It means paying attention when someone withdraws, encouraging people to talk instead of burying everything beneath military toughness, creating opportunities to decompress after difficult experiences, and making sure Marines keep an eye on one another. There is something refreshingly humane about a military story that recognizes vulnerability without treating vulnerability as weakness. In fact, one of the strongest ideas running throughout Brotherhood USMC is that strength and dependence on other people aren't opposites. That's really what brotherhood is. It isn't simply charging into danger together. It's knowing somebody will notice when you're struggling. It's having people who understand experiences that might be impossible to explain to anyone else. It's the joke that breaks the tension, the person checking on you after something terrible happens, the reminder of home when home feels impossibly far away, and the knowledge that whatever happens next, you aren't facing it by yourself. And, once again, Metcalf can WRITE. We've said this before, and we're going to keep saying it because the frustrating thing about criticizing Scott Metcalf's writing is that the man is capable of writing some absolutely beautiful stuff. Soldiers in the Sandbox contained passages we thought were among the best we'd encountered in any OCA submission. Inside the Walls could turn a prison corridor, a set of keys, or an ordinary workplace observation into something vivid and memorable. Even Where Is Your Church?, where we were considerably more critical of the excesses of the prose, contained individual images and phrases that were gorgeous in isolation. Brotherhood USMC continues that pattern. Metcalf has a particular talent for taking environments that could easily become generic backgrounds and making them feel oppressive, physical, and immediate. The cold bites. The desert stretches endlessly. Equipment has weight. Silence has tension. The night sky becomes a reminder that the people Riley loves are still somewhere beneath those same stars. Those details give the book atmosphere, but they also reinforce one of its central ideas: no matter how far deployment carries these Marines from ordinary life, they remain connected to the people and places waiting for them at home. However, Metcalf's writing is a double-edged sword. His prose ranges from poetic, eloquent, poignant, and powerful to overwritten, fluffy, flowery, repetitive, and redundant. And we have said this about him before. Metcalf has an instinct for finding meaning in almost everything. A cold night isn't merely cold. A horizon isn't merely a horizon. A letter isn't merely a letter. The desert, the stars, a photograph, a shared meal, a Marine checking on another Marine, the silence after a difficult mission: all of these can become symbols of duty, home, sacrifice, brotherhood, or the emotional distance between the life Riley is living and the life waiting for him elsewhere. When it works, it REALLY works. There are passages in Brotherhood USMC where Metcalf takes something ordinary and gives it tremendous emotional weight. Riley looking at the stars while thinking about his son is an especially effective recurring image because it gives father and son something they can still share despite the enormous physical distance between them. The horizon works similarly, becoming a representation of everything beyond the deployment: home, family, possibility, and eventually the hope that Riley may have an opportunity to move closer to his son. But Metcalf doesn't always know when to leave a beautiful thought alone. He'll make the point, explain the point, expand upon the point, approach the point from another angle, and then occasionally return a few pages later to make essentially the same point again. Brotherhood matters. The Marines depend on one another. Riley misses his son. Leadership carries responsibility. War takes a psychological toll. Shared hardship creates powerful bonds. Duty requires sacrifice. These are all worthwhile ideas, and several of them are the beating heart of the book. But we understand them. Metcalf doesn't need to keep convincing us that they're important after he has already shown us that they are. And then there is THE CRUCIBLE. If you've read much Scott Metcalf by now, you probably knew this was coming. Metcalf LOVES the word "crucible," and especially the phrase "in the crucible of." It has appeared so frequently across the books we've reviewed that it has practically become his literary calling card. People are forged in crucibles. Brotherhood is tested in crucibles. Character is revealed in crucibles. Relationships, institutions, adversity, service, suffering, and resilience all seem destined, sooner or later, to find themselves inside one of Metcalf's crucibles. The metaphor itself is perfectly good. In fact, it's a strong one for the subjects Metcalf writes about. A crucible suggests enormous heat and pressure transforming something into a stronger or purer form, which fits military service, trauma, prison environments, hardship, and personal growth extremely well. The problem is simply frequency. When an image that powerful gets used over and over, across multiple books and sometimes repeatedly within the same kind of thematic passage, it stops feeling powerful and starts feeling predictable. At this point, we'd love to see Metcalf retire "in the crucible of" for a book or two. Not because it's a bad phrase. Because he's already gotten his money's worth out of it. This is probably the single greatest weakness of Brotherhood USMC more broadly: repetition. The book could be substantially shorter without losing its heart, its themes, or even many of its best passages. In fact, tightening it would probably make those passages MORE powerful. When every observation is given several paragraphs of reflection, the truly exceptional observations have to compete for attention with everything surrounding them. Poetry hits harder when there's some silence around it. We've made similar comments about Metcalf's previous books, particularly Where Is Your Church?, and at this point it feels less like an isolated problem and more like one of his defining tendencies as a writer. Metcalf clearly feels deeply about his subjects. We never doubt that. If anything, the problem is almost the opposite: he feels so strongly about what he is saying that he sometimes seems unwilling to risk the possibility that the reader might miss it. Some of the best moments in Brotherhood USMC are effective precisely because Metcalf DOES allow the image or action to carry the meaning. A Marine looking after another Marine does not require a page explaining brotherhood afterward. Riley pressing a letter close to himself already tells us what home means to him. A father staring into the same night sky his child might be seeing can say more about separation than another paragraph explaining how painful separation is. Those moments are strong enough to stand on their own. There are also some continuity problems that really should have been caught before publication. Riley's family, in particular, becomes surprisingly difficult to keep straight. Early in the book, we are introduced to his wife Sarah and a young daughter named Lily. Elsewhere, the emotional center of Riley's family life becomes his son Leo, who is described in ways that sometimes suggest an adolescent or teenager, yet near the end of the book Leo is identified as seven years old. Later references also introduce children named Emily and Sam without clearly establishing how everyone fits into the family. That's not a tiny detail in this particular story. Riley's longing for his family, especially Leo, is one of the book's most important emotional threads. If we're supposed to feel the painful passage of time through the father-son relationship, then Leo's age and Riley's family structure need to remain consistent. When the details change, the reader stops thinking about Riley's loneliness and starts doing detective work. There are similar moments involving names, ranks, and chronology. Characters with the same or similar surnames (like Miller) appear without enough clarification, and the Marine Corps Birthday is treated as an approaching major event more than once in a way that makes the timeline difficult to follow. None of these issues destroys the story, but together they give portions of the book the feeling that several strong thematic sections were assembled without one final continuity pass. That's unfortunate because underneath those editorial problems is a book with a very clear heart. And that heart is where Brotherhood USMC succeeds. Now, let's end with what did work in this book: Sergeant Riley's thoughts about his son, Leo. This was probably our favorite part of Brotherhood USMC. Alex doesn't simply sit in the desert thinking, "Gee, I miss my son." Metcalf goes MUCH further than that, allowing Alex to mentally reconstruct Leo's entire world while he's away from him. He imagines Leo in his bedroom, sprawled across his bed with his laptop open. Maybe he's working through a coding project, completely absorbed in whatever problem he's trying to solve, or maybe he's drawing in his sketchbook, creating dragons, elves, or astronauts. Alex thinks about the oversized headphones over Leo's ears and wonders what music he's listening to. He remembers the books and graphic novels Leo devours, the posters on his walls, the half-finished LEGO projects, the clothes tossed over a chair, and all of the other little pieces of clutter that make the room unmistakably LEO'S room. We loved this because these aren't necessarily the huge milestones a deployed father is SUPPOSED to miss. They're the tiny things, the ordinary pieces of someone's life that you might barely notice when you're there every day but desperately wish you could see when you're thousands of miles away. Alex isn't only mourning birthdays, holidays, soccer games, or other moments that would obviously hurt to miss. He misses knowing what song is currently playing through his son's headphones. He misses knowing what Leo is drawing, what he's working on at his computer, and which new interest has completely taken over his attention this week. He misses witnessing the everyday evolution of his son's personality. And Alex doesn't stop with Leo himself. He imagines Leo's friends too, and Metcalf gives those thoughts enough specificity that these boys start to feel like part of the life Alex is desperately trying to remain connected to. He knows their personalities. Liam is the practical one, the voice of reason. Noah is the funny one, capable of making everyone laugh. Sam is quieter and more reflective. Alex imagines the boys teasing one another, supporting one another, riding bikes together, playing soccer, hanging out at the arcade, watching movies, sharing inside jokes, and experiencing all of the ordinary little adventures that make up adolescence. He even imagines their CONVERSATIONS. What are they talking about right now? Maybe it's the latest video game, a favorite anime series, or a book that made Leo think about something differently. Alex pictures Leo excitedly explaining some new strategy to Liam, making Noah laugh, or listening carefully while Sam offers another perspective. There's something incredibly sweet about Alex trying to keep track of the cultural currency of his son's life from the other side of the world. He doesn't want to return home one day and discover that he no longer knows his own child. He wants to understand what Leo watches, what he plays, what he reads, what he thinks about, who his friends are, what makes him laugh, and what kind of person he's becoming. Metcalf makes that separation hurt even more when Alex remembers an actual conversation with Leo about a new video game. Leo is rattling off details about the characters and quests with the breathless excitement kids get when they're explaining something they LOVE, and Alex genuinely wants to listen to every word. But Alex is in a war zone, and the war refuses to disappear just because his son is on the phone. There is artillery in the distance and there are responsibilities competing for his attention. Alex laughs when he's supposed to laugh and asks the right questions, but afterward he's bothered by the realization that he wasn't completely THERE. That might be one of the most painfully believable moments in the entire book. Alex's greatest fear isn't simply that he'll miss Leo. It's that Leo will keep growing while he's gone: new friends, new interests, new jokes, new games, new music, new worries, new dreams, and an entire life continuing every single day without Alex physically there to witness it. So Alex does the only thing he can do: he imagines it. He constructs Leo's bedroom in his mind, imagines the boys riding their bikes, pictures the arcade lights and the competition over high scores, and invents conversations about anime and video games. He pictures himself sitting beside Leo while he works on his computer, joining the boys on a bike ride, or standing on the sidelines cheering during a soccer game. He's mentally inserting himself into the moments he's physically unable to attend, and that's beautiful. THIS is where all of Metcalf's reflection, detail, and sentimentality work in his favor. For once, we don't mind that he lingers because we understand why Alex lingers too. When your child is thousands of miles away, imagining the clutter in his bedroom or wondering what ridiculous conversation he's having with his friends isn't wasted thought. Maybe that's how you stay connected to your child when circumstances keep you apart. Maybe, for Alex, it's how he stays Leo's dad. Another powerful, poignant work by Metcalf, who is making a case for 2026 Author of the Year! Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 89+/100 (8.9+ out of 10)
Ten Things About Ryan is a short yet heartfelt and emotionally heart-wrenching memoir about childhood friendship, first love, devastating loss, and learning how to carry someone's memory forward after they are gone. Author Cara Zang takes us back to when she was ten years old and first met Ryan through her school's "Big Buddy" program. At first, Ryan is simply the new kid she has been assigned to show around, a boy who talks incessantly about sports and quickly earns the private nickname "Mr. Mets and Cowboys." But after discovering that they are in the same fifth-grade class, sitting almost directly across from one another, that mildly annoying new kid gradually becomes one of the most important people in Cara's young life. Their relationship is charming precisely because of how innocent it is. They joke around, spend time together at school, become boyfriend and girlfriend, share a first kiss, and eventually have their first couple's skate at a roller rink. These are not earth-shattering events by adult standards, but when you're ten years old, they might as well be. A seat assignment can determine whether the school year is ruined. Holding hands can feel like a major life event. A first kiss becomes something you remember decades later. That ordinary childhood atmosphere is important because Ten Things About Ryan eventually becomes anything but ordinary. While Cara is visiting her grandparents during spring break, her mother unexpectedly arrives to bring her home. She is crying, and Cara initially wonders whether something has happened to her father or even the family dog. Then her mother hands her a newspaper. Cara reads about a spring-break car crash and eventually sees Ryan's name followed by the name of his younger sister. This is probably the most emotionally riveting sequence in the book. What makes it effective is not elaborate prose or some grand meditation on mortality. It is Cara's inability, as a ten-year-old child, to understand what she is reading. She has just seen Ryan. She hugged him. Children are not supposed to die. She even wonders whether "dead" might somehow work the way it does in movies, where someone appears to be gone and then turns out not to be. That confusion feels painfully real. The chapters that follow deal with Ryan's funeral and Cara's return to school, where perhaps the most effective image in the entire book is waiting for her: Ryan's empty desk. His seat remains diagonally across from Cara's, exactly where it had been before spring break. This resonated with us because we just read Dr. Kimberly Harms's Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss, which devotes an entire chapter to what Harms calls “The Loneliness of an Empty Chair.” Harms writes about a phenomenon many grieving people experience: how someone's absence seems to become concentrated in the ordinary physical spaces they once occupied. The breakfast table. The passenger seat. Their favorite spot on the couch. An empty chair. Cara experiences essentially the same thing at ten years old. Ryan's empty desk becomes her empty chair. It is still sitting exactly where it always sat, diagonally across from her, but the person who is supposed to be there is gone. Ryan's mother gives Cara a framed photograph of him, and Cara places it on her own desk so that the frame touches the corner of Ryan's empty one. It is such a small gesture, yet it communicates something the book's more direct explanations of grief sometimes cannot. Ryan is gone, but Cara is desperately trying to keep some physical part of him beside her. Eventually, a school counselor gives Cara an exercise: write down ten things about Ryan that made him special. And that explains the title. Cara realizes that she could easily think of more than ten, but she settles on memories such as his laugh, jokes, love of sports, loyalty to his friends, voice, smile, love for his family and dog, their first kiss, and the way he hugged. More importantly, talking about those memories eventually makes Cara laugh, which initially fills her with guilt. The counselor helps her understand that laughing about Ryan does not mean she has stopped missing him, and continuing to live does not mean forgetting him. There is a genuinely worthwhile message here. Ten Things About Ryan gradually shifts the focus away from the way Ryan died and back toward the way Ryan lived. The book also incorporates a journal or workbook element. Chapters conclude with "Things to Write About" prompts encouraging readers to reflect on their own friendships, memories, grief, and significant moments. That makes this something slightly different from a conventional memoir. It could potentially serve as a conversation starter for parents, teachers, counselors, or children who are themselves dealing with loss. However, this is also where we arrive at our biggest criticism: There simply isn't enough here to score it above other memoirs in the contest. Ten Things About Ryan is sparse. Very sparse. It felt like it ended as soon as it got going. Maybe that's a bit of a compliment, in a sense, because we really wanted more. Authors work for decades to get their readers to want more. There's something that feels really unfinished and rushed about this book. It feels like the author was on some kind of strict word count or deadline. For a book centered entirely around remembering Ryan, we wanted considerably more memories of Ryan. The early chapters establish him efficiently, but they move through the relationship rather quickly. Ryan likes sports. Ryan jokes around. Cara and Ryan become friends. They date. They kiss. They skate together. Then spring break arrives, and suddenly Ryan is gone. Because the real circumstances are so heartbreaking, the loss naturally carries tremendous emotional weight, but the narrative itself does not spend enough time allowing Ryan to become equally vivid to the reader before that loss occurs. We would have loved another ten stories about him, never mind ten things. What did he joke about? What did he and Cara actually talk about during all those school days? What made her laugh? What made him angry? What did he do that drove her crazy besides talking about sports? What specific moments made her realize that this irritating "Mr. Mets and Cowboys" kid had become her best friend and boyfriend? Those details are exactly what could have transformed a touching remembrance into something much deeper and richer. Ironically, the book itself proves this point whenever it slows down enough to give us one of those specific memories. The roller-skating scene works because it is concrete. The empty desk works because we can picture it. The photograph touching the corner of Ryan's desk works because Cara gives us something tangible. These are the moments when Ryan stops being an idea and becomes a boy who once occupied a particular chair, wore particular clothes, liked particular teams, kissed a particular girl, and existed in a very particular time and place. We simply wanted more of them. This book reads like it was written when the author was still very young (in grade school) in a day or two. If the author had gone back as an adult and rewritten it--fleshed things out and improved the overall literary quality of it--this would be a far superior memoir. They might talk about the decades since that tragedy, catching up with the family of Ryan & his sister (maybe an interview), independent research (via newspaper article archives, perhaps) into how the tragedy impacted the community and others involved... things like that. There's a lot of potential content there. A lot of stones left unturned. The writing can also be extremely direct. Cara frequently tells us exactly what she felt rather than allowing a longer scene to reveal it. In fairness, some of that simplicity seems somewhat appropriate for the book's intended accessibility and childhood perspective. A book discussing death with younger readers probably does not need to wrap every emotion inside six layers of symbolism. Still, greater scene development would have strengthened the narrative without making it inaccessible. And because so many pages are devoted to prompts, writing space, chapter breaks, and reflective material, the physical length of the book somewhat disguises how little narrative prose is actually here. The interactive approach has value, but readers looking primarily for a memoir may finish feeling as though the story has ended shortly after it truly gets started. With that said, it occurred to us that this may be a memoir intended for children--perhaps middle-grade. The simplicity, directness, and straightforward nature of this book may be intended to cater to them. Perhaps it's meant to give children who are suffering loss, tragedy, or trauma a super simple & easy read to help get them through it. That's understandable. From a literary perspective... Consuming this book for the first time was a little like being very hungry and being given a small plate of food. At first, you wish there were more. But because there is only so much in front of you, you slow down. You take your time. You chew. You savor each bite a little more carefully than you otherwise might. That is somewhat how Ten Things About Ryan worked on us. We read it again, and then again, and each time we noticed something else: a small memory, a detail about Ryan, a moment between him and Cara, or an image that lingered longer than it had the first time. We actually read Ten Things About Ryan several more times, and each reading revealed a little more to us. On our first pass, we admittedly felt somewhat cheated. That's it? It's over already? The book is so brief, and Ryan disappears from the story almost as soon as we have started getting to know him. But the more we thought about it, the more strangely fitting that began to feel. Ryan and his younger sister did not receive a long buildup to what happened to them. They were not given a dramatic final chapter or some grand farewell. Their lives were simply cut short. Abruptly. Without warning. One moment Ryan was a ten-year-old boy going to school, joking with his friends, skating with his girlfriend, and looking forward to everything that came next. Then, suddenly, he wasn't. We think we know what the author was going for: presenting the innocence and naivety of being a young person experiencing a profound loss for the first time. And can we just say this--because it has been bothering us: this is such a beautiful, touching, impactful, and emotionally charged tribute. We can just imagine how extraordinary this book could've been if it were more patiently developed and fleshed out, that's all. It still takes a ton of courage to create and put out such an emotionally heavy work. We still believe the book would have been stronger with more detailed stories/memories, more conversations, and more of Ryan himself. Or maybe a bit about his family, especially his younger sister, who should be honored and remembered too. We'll take some time to do that. We would've loved for the writing to be more elaborate and sophisticated. Those criticisms did not disappear after rereading it. If anything, our repeated readings made us want those missing memories even more. And it makes us appreciate the innocence and naivite behind the writing as well. Perhaps there is something painfully appropriate about finishing Ten Things About Ryan and wishing you had been given more time with Ryan. Cara undoubtedly wished for exactly the same thing. And that is ultimately where this little book stayed with us. Its greatest strength is not its length, its complexity, or even its prose. It is the way something so modest gradually accumulates emotional weight. The things Cara remembers are not monumental events. They are a laugh, a joke, a favorite team, a smile, a hug, a song, a kiss, and an empty chair. Yet that is precisely how people survive in our memories: not necessarily through grand moments, but through dozens of tiny ones that become priceless only after we realize there will never be any new ones. Some stories feel unfinished because the lives behind them were unfinished too. Fortunately, the book saves one of its most powerful decisions for last. After spending the entire story hearing about Ryan through Cara's memories, the reader eventually reaches a memorial page containing a real photograph of Ryan Gregory Black, May 11, 1978 to March 30, 1989. Suddenly, there he is. Not a character. Not simply "Ryan." A real ten-year-old boy smiling at the camera. That final photograph gives the entire book an additional emotional dimension and reinforces what Ten Things About Ryan does best. This is not really a book about death. It is a book about refusing to allow death to become the only thing remembered about someone. Check it out on Amazon! |
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