Editorial Reviews for Nominees
|
|
|
 Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)
We had so much fun reading this children's book! Floo Flocky Doo to the Rescue is a playful rhyming picture book about a little girl, Floo, who is guided by her hummingbird friend, Peanut, to a baby squirrel that has fallen from its nest. Floo rescues the squirrel, names him Lucky Lou, and cares for him as he grows. Oh, and that's where the shenanigans begin! When Floo and Mommy Doo go to the grocery store, Floo secretly brings Lou along, which leads to the book’s big comic set piece: Lou gets loose, leaps into Miss Nellie Faye’s hair, races through the store with her wig stuck to his tail, and ends up hiding among the fruit and jelly before Floo finally catches him and learns that maybe some adventures should stay at home. It sounds so simple in concept even when the events of this scene are so chaotic and seemingly nonsensical. This isn't meant to be profound or to be taken super seriously. Yet, we appreciated and enjoyed what the author and illustrator were going for. Again, it's fun. It's warm. It's cozy. It's charming and endearing. It hearkens back to many of our childhoods, rescuing stray animals and realizing that we bit off more than we could swallow. Pets can be a handful! They're often times among the first major responsibilities children experience in their lives (alongside cleaning their toys and caring for siblings). This is especially challenging when you pick up a baby animal who isn't typically domesticated, in this case a squirrel. The characters—both human and animal—are likable and lovable. The fact that Floo has the heart and compassion to rescue and adopt a lost baby animal automatically makes her an outstanding human being and and likable/lovable character. With that said, the two things that really made us love this book were the writing and illustrations. Seriously, the writing is seamless! It has a tune and rhythm to it: like music! It flows so well. That's largely because the author sticks to using similar sounds and consistent meter. Again, it's like reading a sheet of music rather than plain ole' boring words! There's an aspect of this that reminded us of a Dr. Seuss book. Then there are the charming, colorful illustrations by Ronnie Rooney. These really do the job! First of all, we love the choice of colors. They're very pastel: soft blue, soft pink, and soft green. It reminded us of Easter (or at least Easter eggs)! Floo is presented as a cartoonishly cute little girl with pig tails and pink cheeks. She has the kind of instantly lovable storybook design that makes a character feel like a friend five seconds after you meet them. Peanut is also a great little sidekick. The hummingbird is tiny, nimble, expressive, and colorful. You know what ironic? We just read Endangered Hummingbirds by Anthony Lujan, which highlighted these incredible and beautiful creatures. That gave us an even greater appreciation for Peanut's inclusion here. By the way, we know that Peanut isn't the squirrel in the book, but the name was special because it reminded us of P-Nut, the rescue squirrel who sadly passed away in New York a couple of years ago. Oh, and how can we forget the book's chaos engine: Lucky Lou. Gosh, we love that name. We've all had friends and pets named Lucky, so there's something really familiar about it. It's also fitting because Lucky was lucky to have been found and rescued by our protagonists. Now, you could argue (if you were going to be really anal) that they kinda upset nature and possibly prevented the baby squirrel from being recovered by his mother who was probably waiting to pick him up from a nearby tree (which is usually the case in nature). We've experienced this. We've seen it happen! Mama squirrels tend to pick up their babies after they fall out of the tree. But: 1. Floo is a kid, didn't know any better, and meant well; 2. this is a work of fiction, so we can put reality and realism to the side for now. We loved the illustrations with Lucky Lou. Our favorite is probably after he eats all the blueberry jam! Oh, that silly rascal squirrel. Anyway, we found this book to be really enjoyable. You can sit down with your kids and read it to them in only about 10 minutes. Check it out on Amazon!
1 Comment
 Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)
The NIKE Birds is a jungle-based thriller, romantic suspense novel, and kidnapping survival story by E.R. Yatscoff! What a combination! But before you click away thinking it's just a cheap, cheesy popcorn flick in which some hulked up, brooding 80s action hero blows away hordes of villains en route to saving the girl, think again! This book has so much humanity, so much heart, and quite a bit of depth. That pleasantly surprised us! The main protagonist, Lucas Horne, is one of the big reasons why this book works as well as it does. At first, Lucas is not some hardened superman carved out of granite and testosterone. He's not inclined to violence or even physical action. He's just a sheltered biology graduate student from Canada who has lost his parents. He's intelligent, decent, a little reserved, and, frankly, pretty normal. That matters. It gives the story a much stronger foundation because when the danger ramps up, Lucas does not feel like a prepackaged action figure inserted into the plot to flex on command. He feels like a real person. A vulnerable one. A person who can be scared, overwhelmed, injured, and pushed past his limits. We love how this book exemplifies Nietzsche's quote, which opens the book: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster...for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” We see how far Lucas must go to free himself, rescue Avalina, and make things right. But do the means justify the ends? Lucas eventually finds himself entangled with people who are just as interested in killing and punishing the wrongdoers as rescuing those who've been wrongfully imprisoned. And he must come to terms with who he was raised to be, who he is, and what he must become to make things right. And that is exactly what makes his arc so compelling. One of the things we appreciated most about this book is how Lucas gradually transforms from an ordinary young man into something more heroic. Not cartoonishly heroic. Not invincible. Not absurd. Heroic in the old-fashioned, chivalrous sense. He cares. He protects. He endures. He steps up. He suffers. And he keeps going. There is something refreshingly earnest about that in a literary landscape that often seems embarrassed by sincerity, gallantry, or straightforward courage. In fact, Lucas's chivalry may be one of the most attractive aspects of the entire novel. He is not just interested in Avalina because she is beautiful, though yes, the book makes it very clear that she is stunning. He is drawn to her as a person, and once the nightmare begins, his devotion to her becomes one of the moral engines of the story. He views her like an angel, a conscience in his darkest states. That gives the suspense real emotional stakes. This is not just a matter of survival. It becomes a matter of loyalty, sacrifice, love under pressure, and morality—doing the right thing. Avalina also helps elevate the book. We appreciated that she does not come across like a generic damsel tossed into the plot simply to be rescued. She has warmth, poise, intelligence, athleticism, and emotional strength. She contributes to the atmosphere and emotional weight of the story in a meaningful way. The connection between Lucas and Avalina is one of the reasons the book has more heart than readers may initially expect. Some of us actually found Avalina to be our favorite character in the book. She's similar to Faith Richmond from Passion's Duty by Lizzie Jenks: she's smart, beautiful, clever, and charismatic. And, somewhat similar to Faith, her parentage is a huge extra layer in this book. That added layer is important because Avalina is not just a love interest floating through the plot on charm alone. The book gradually reveals that there is much more going on around her, behind her, and because of her than Lucas initially realizes. That gives her presence extra gravity. She is not merely someone caught up in the story. In many ways, she is one of the reasons the story becomes what it becomes. We appreciated that this aspect of her character adds intrigue without stripping away her humanity. Sometimes when books give a female character powerful parentage, wealth, status, or some dramatic hidden background, the character can start to feel more like a plot device than a person. Avalina avoids that problem. She still feels warm, approachable, emotionally real, and sincerely likable. Her background adds dimension to her. It does not swallow her. Her relationship with Lucas also benefits from this. The romance works not just because he is drawn to her beauty, but because there is a genuine sense that he is fascinated by who she is. And, in turn, Avalina feels like someone who sees something worthwhile in Lucas too. That mutual regard gives their bond more credibility. It is not just attraction for attraction's sake. There is admiration there. Curiosity. Affection. Emotional trust. And then there is the setting: Colombia, especially Santa Marta, Tayrona National Park, and Ciudad Perdida (the Lost City) in the jungle. There's a real sense of peril, mystery, and adventure. The jungle material is one of the strongest components of the novel. E.R. Yatscoff does a very good job creating a sense of place, danger, and environmental pressure. The jungle is not merely a backdrop with some decorative greenery thrown in. It feels alive. Beautiful, yes, but also oppressive, watchful, punishing, and indifferent. That helps make the survival and kidnapping elements feel much more immersive. You can practically feel the sweat, fear, exhaustion, and claustrophobic uncertainty closing in around the characters. We also appreciated the ambition here. This book is trying to do a lot. It blends romance, suspense, travel intrigue, jungle survival, action, class tension, family secrets, and character growth. That is a crowded cocktail. And yet, more often than not, it works. The book has a surprisingly big heart for something that could have so easily settled for being a disposable thriller. Is it flawless? No. The prose can occasionally feel a bit rough around the edges, and there are moments where the writing is more pulpy than polished. But honestly? We did not mind that much, because the book has momentum, emotional sincerity, and a protagonist worth rooting for. Sometimes a book earns its score not because every sentence is immaculate, but because it has nerve, personality, and a hero's journey that actually leaves an impression. Lucas and Avalina absolutely leave an impression. Another thing we liked was the poetic symbolism of the "Nike birds" (Nike shoes hanging in the tree) themselves. This is the book's main motif, and it works! In our minds, these shoes represent so much: they represent that human civilization reaches even into the deepest depths of the natural world. They also represent hope: that no matter where you are, no matter how lost you feel, there are people around, and chances are that someone will find you someday. Thirdly, they represent Lucas's conscience. Those shoes represent his humanity and good memories (such as the one he shared with Avalina early on) warring with his desire for violence and revenge. That, for us, is a huge part of why The NIKE Birds rises above the level of a standard thriller. It gives us a protagonist who grows. It gives us a romance that matters. It gives us suspense with a pulse and danger with emotional consequences. And it gives us just enough grit, heart, and humanity to make the whole thing soar. Check it out on Amazon! Review of "Long Island Breakfast Club Show (December 2025 Episodes)" by Valentina Janek & Friends3/30/2026  Score: 93+/100 (9.3+ out of 10)
We're pumped to revisit the Long Island Breakfast Club Show--a two-time winner for Best Talk Shows & Podcasts (in our 2025 Spring Contest & 2024 Creator Classic)! Lead-host Valentina Janek and everyone involved always impress us with their passion and personalities. This is a criminally overlooked and underappreciated talk show/podcast that doesn't regularly reach into the hundreds of views. These videos truly deserve thousands of views! And why is that? Well, it starts with heart and purpose. This show has so much heart. And it has such great purpose. Janek's book, From Fired to Freedom, reveals a bit more about that, but the gisp of it is that this show was born out of a need to spotlight and encourage creators, entrepreneurs, and people trying new, different, and exciting things (either concurrently with or in place of standard nine to five jobs). In a strong sense, this is very aligned with the goals and vision of the Outstanding Creator Awards: highlighting creators and innovators, many of whom who have been overlooked and underappreciated. So, this show has always resonated with us, even though most of its hosts and guests tend to be middle aged or above. There's something in here for all generations. Anyway, today we'll specifically be looking at the exciting December 2025 episodes of the show, largely surrounding the 2025 holiday season. These three episodes are: 1. Episode 40 (December 18, 2025) 2. Opera Night Long Island Episode ("Opera-tunity!") 3. Christmas 2025 Episode We noticed that these particular episodes don't kick off with the familiar theme song/jingle, which is fantastic by the way. Instead, they kick off with live performances by either a host or a guest, likely to fit the holiday season. Episode 40 starts with an absolutely phenomenal performance of Irving Berlin & Bing Crosby's iconic "White Christmas" sung by Janek's son, Gerry Ferretti! This truly is a 10 out of 10 performance! Ferretti has a masterful control of his vocals, which are the perfect combination of clean, clear, and jazzed up. His voice is comparable to an Andy Williams or Frank Sinatra. He also performs "Blue Christmas" at the closing of this episode, which helps to frame it in a fittingly seasonal light. Most of the episode is then built around guest banter and promotion. Lucia Love talks about her work as a fitness instructor, personal trainer, yoga teacher, soap maker, baker, and host of Lucia’s Love Lines. She also discusses acting in The Fontanas, a murder mystery project, and a new series called Spring Cleaning where she plays a female cop. Lenny Fontana talks about his background in music, his song “If You Want Me,” DJ history, performing in Ibiza in the early 1990s, and how the music business has changed from physical media to streaming and social media. Steve Castleton discusses veterans work, filmmaking, the challenges of independent film, his film festival, networking, and current projects in production. There is also repeated promotion of The Fontanas, Jerry’s Elvis performances, and several local creative ventures. The biggest theme running through the episode is local creative hustle. Almost everybody on the show is juggling multiple roles: music, acting, fitness, baking, filmmaking, community work, or event production. There is a real recurring message of keep going, keep creating, keep promoting yourself, and keep supporting other people in your circle. As a podcast or show episode, its strengths are personality, warmth, and community energy. It feels authentic. The guests sound like real people, not polished media robots. There is a lot of camaraderie, and that gives the show charm. It also works well as a platform for cross-promotion because each guest gets space to talk about what they do. The conversation does tend to jumps all over the place. There are a lot of side jokes, interruptions, inside references, and unfinished threads. That can be fun if the audience already knows the personalities, but for a new listener it may feel scattered and hard to follow. It is more “hangout show” than “focused interview.” And that's something that runs through pretty much all of these episode. You know what it reminds us of? A family dinner, potluck, or get-together. Everyone's talking. Everyone's having their own conversation. And you're in the middle of it. One of the big themes that is spotlighted in this episode is networking. Janek, for example, talks about how she happened to meet actor Tony Danza's brother by random chance, just making herself publicly available and accessible. Another thing that stood out to us is how the guests discussed how challenging it can be to get your work out there so people can consume it. Even directors and producers have difficulty getting their crew to share the very things they helped create and work on. That resonated with us. It can be especially difficult to get something noticed without having a big and/or recognizable name attached to it. They talk about winning an award for Best Documentary about a famous photojournalist named Chris Hondros who was tragically killed by a mortar attack while covering the Libyan Civil War in 2011. The Opera Night episode was probably the best and most compelling episode of the three! What made it so engaging were the guests and it being a bit more focused. Representing Operanight.org are Adam Unger, Steve Loehlein, and Isabella Bernadette. First of all, they come forward with this incredibly clever pun: "Opera-tunity" (a play on the words "opera" and "opportunity"). And what's remarkable is how fitting this is with their primary message: they want to create more opportunities for the general public (as well as passionate operagoers) to experience the wonders of opera and the performing arts. Their passion for opera and the performing arts oozes from the screen! And a great example of that is how they talk about not wanting to turn anyone away regardless of how much they can afford for a ticket or even how fancy or expensive their clothes are (for context: operagoers have traditionally worn fine ornate dresses and tuxedos). They are committed to charging as little as possible, in this case just $10 per ticket even though it takes place at iconic Carnegie Hall in New York City! It's clear to us that they're not all about money. They're about getting people in the doors and falling in love with opera. Another example of how they want to make opera accessible to everyone is how Steve Loehlein serves as an interpreter and explainer of different scenes and songs in the opera, which is crucial because many of them occur in languages other than English. In doing this, he helps make the foreign seem familiar, the alien seem accessible. Oh, and before we forget, something very special occurs during this episode. The hosts and the guests learn that they actually have a mutual friend, Ray! And what's more? Ray actually calls into the show and they all get to talk to him. What a coincidence! What a small world! And it goes with the idea of how forming connections and networking can be so powerful. The Christmas episode (episode 41) is festive, sentimental, musical, friendly, and very relationship-driven. More than the others, this episode leans into Christmas spirit, personal stories, gratitude, and emotional warmth. Everyone comes dressed up in their Christmas sweaters and outfits. The table is covered in green, red, Christmas trees, and other holiday decorations. It kicks off with a beautiful singing of "Merry Christmas, Darling" performed by Anita Starlite. What a cool name, by the way. Starlite is a singer, vocalist, and Barbara Streisand tribute artist. Indeed, she comes blessed with a really nice voice. This episode is a lot more focused on celebrating Christmas than promoting any particular business or guest. It's also a bit less focused than the other episodes. It gets a bit chaotic and messy. At the same time, it's hard not to buy into the joy and camaraderie between everyone at the table. This episode also features a nice little surprise: a newly adopted dog named Pebbles, whose presence adds even more warmth and sweetness to the Christmas atmosphere. The little puppy helps give the episode an extra dose of charm and makes the whole show feel even more cozy. If you have been sleeping on this podcast, it is time to wake up and fix that. Give these episodes a shot on YouTube and see for yourself why this warm, quirky, creator-loving show deserves a much bigger audience.  Score: 95/100 (9.5 out of 10)
Sometimes you just need a pep talk. Sometimes you just need hope. Sometimes you just need permission. Sometimes you just need to know you can. Rational Defiance is a compelling and riveting self-help, motivational, and inspirational book by Henk Pretorius. Its core argument is that most people are not living by conscious choice nearly as much as they think they are. The book argues that we drift toward the status quo, not just socially, but psychologically, behaviorally, and structurally. Pretorius calls this drift the “Conformity Coma,” and he builds the book around the idea that people get stuck in familiar jobs, beliefs, relationships, routines, and systems because what already exists feels safer than what could be. He then proposes “Rational Defiance” as the antidote, meaning a deliberate, thoughtful willingness to challenge the status quo when it blocks something better. There are some great examples provided by the author in this book. One of the most powerful examples in the book is Kathrine Switzer, the marathon runner who challenged the absurd rule barring women from the Boston Marathon. Pretorius does not just use her as a clean, triumphant symbol of rebellion. He also highlights something more human and more interesting: the evolution of her relationship with Jock Semple, the race official who notoriously tried to physically remove her from the course. At first, Semple is presented as the embodiment of backward tradition, a man literally attacking the future because it threatened the old order. But the story does not end there. Over time, after the rules changed and women were officially allowed to compete, Semple became one of their staunch supporters. He and Switzer eventually became friends, and Pretorius notes that when Semple was dying of cancer in 1988, Switzer visited him in the hospital until the end. That detail matters. It shows that Rational Defiance is not just about defeating enemies. Sometimes it is about changing people, exposing the irrationality of a system so clearly that even its former defenders are transformed. There are the Wright Brothers, who are used to illustrate the kind of thinking that refuses to accept the limits of the present simply because those limits are popular, familiar, or widely agreed upon. But Pretorius does not stop there. He broadens the lens nicely. We also get Frank Zappa as an example of someone who lived and created on his own terms, refusing to stay boxed into neat categories or socially approved lanes. That example works especially well because it reminds readers that Rational Defiance is not just about business disruption or political resistance. It can be artistic. Personal. Stylistic. Existential. The book also reaches for examples from consumer behavior and psychology, which helps keep it from feeling like empty motivational fluff. Pretorius talks about how people will often keep buying the same toothpaste, soft drink, medicine, or financial service even when they explicitly say they prefer something else. That is such a sharp and slightly unsettling observation because it shows how weak our conscious preferences often are compared to our habits. In other words, we do not just live by what we say we want. We live by what we have already normalized. That is one of the strongest ideas in the whole book. There's a relevant discussion of Cola Cola's New Coke experiment, which is especially interesting to us because we just visited World of Coca Cola and tasted New Coke. It's very commonly used as an example in business books. By the way... this book somewhat presents itself as a bit of a business book, encouraging entrepreneurship and such. However, the content itself is a lot more idealistic and philosophical than necessarily practical. It's somewhat vague about what you're exactly, specifically supposed to do to advance yourself and your business. And that's the book's great weakness. In that sense, it's somewhat like Unapologetic Wealth by Marcia Dawood: it does a lot of philosophizing and not as much discussing what you should actually do. At the same time, this book really invigorating and encouraged us. And you could also argue that the vagueness makes this book's message more applicable and accessible to more people. You don't have to have a business. Maybe you just have a new idea or a hobby you're passionate about--"the truth you thought about while reading this book." The book's message still applies and sticks: "Send the email. Have the conversation. Start the project. Say no to the obligation. Say yes to the possibility. Take one action that moves you from floating to swimming. This is your life. Your only life. You can spend it floating toward a destination you never wanted. Or you can decide what matters to you and swim for it. Deliberately. Defiantly. Starting now." Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 94/100 (9.4 out of 10)
We all have that one family story. The whirlwind romance about how your grandparents met. The war story your uncle drags out every Thanksgiving. It is messy and probably inaccurate, but it is the story that lives in your bones. Now imagine someone hands you a folder full of court documents and weather reports and calmly proves that half of that story never happened. The dates are wrong, the hero was not standing where everyone says he was, and the stormy night was actually clear and sunny. On paper, you now have the truth, yet somehow it feels like someone just reached inside your chest and snuffed out a candle. That is the emotional battleground Festival of the Fallen walks into with its head held high. This is not just a cozy fantasy with a body behind the stables. It is a long, careful stare at the tension between accuracy and emotional resonance, between the stories that are technically correct and the stories that actually keep people alive inside their loved ones. On the surface, this delivers as a cozy fantasy murder mystery. The world-building is especial rich. The town of Graywatch is a small, atmospheric crossroads where, for the duration of the Festival of the Fallen, politics are set aside so the living can honor their dead. One of the central observances, the Candlewait, is an incredible piece of world building. Pilgrims flood into this neutral little town from every corner of the continent to light thousands of candles across several nights in the square and in Graywatch Yard. There are long stretches of near silence broken by soft prayers and song. You light a candle so that an ancestor will not be forgotten. Memory is not nostalgia here. Memory is currency and a lifeline for the dead. Into this charged, flickering space walks Sola, an apprentice lorekeeper on the verge of earning her red sash and becoming a fully fledged historian for the Order. Sola is the anti-bard in all the best ways. While most fantasy bards are charismatic chaos gremlins leaping onto tables, Sola is the person who would apologize to the innkeeper for scuffing the varnish. She is studious, anxious, and meticulous. Her beloved tapquill, a specially engineered non leaky pen that refuses to ruin her notes, tells you everything about her. To Sola, changing a detail in a story or getting a date wrong is not a harmless shortcut. It is a lie about the dead, and that is a kind of desecration. Opposite her stands Karull, a notorious Songweaver with the gloriously over the top title of Rogue of Rhyme and Ruin. If Sola is the nonfiction aisle of the library, Karull is the film adaptation and the tie in soundtrack. His liraen, a pale bone white crescent of an instrument that seems to glow and thrum with its own sense of time, is explicitly magical. He uses that magic to shape emotion. Karull’s philosophy is that facts are raw materials. You are supposed to twist them, polish them, and rearrange them into something that hits people in the chest. As far as Karull is concerned, Sola’s version of history is technically correct, but it is also dead on the page. The clash between them is not just a cute intellectual sparring match. Colson gives it teeth almost immediately in a blacksmith scene that might be one of the best encapsulations of the book’s central argument. Sola interviews a blacksmith whose younger brother Tanny died fighting raiders. She teases out every detail, records the mud and fear and confusion, and reconstructs a small, brutal skirmish in plain language. Tanny turns back to draw the raiders away from fleeing villagers, fights alongside his duke’s soldiers, and dies. It is human and heroic, but it is also small. No swelling music, no last speech. Sola feels she has honored the truth by keeping it grounded and unadorned. Karull then picks up the same story, stands in front of the tavern crowd, and turns that material into a full performance. The liraen sings. Fire blossoms in the imagery where there was no literal fire. Lines that were never spoken become part of Tanny’s last stand. The room is captivated, and the blacksmith is not angry. He is grateful. For the first time, he has a version of his brother’s death that he can live with. Sola, watching this, has to ask herself a question that the reader cannot escape either: who actually served the blacksmith better, the one who recorded what happened or the one who gave that loss meaning. While all this philosophy is simmering, the plot quietly sharpens into a real mystery. Sola finds Ersko Dralk, a disgraced ex Songweaver who has slid into petty theft and extortion, dead behind the Rested Shield inn. The detail oriented instincts that make Sola insufferable at parties suddenly become assets. She notices a chisel dusted with pale stone near the scene and connects it to a desecrated glyph in Graywatch Yard. Someone has been hacking away at the tomb of Evand, Lord of Windenfold, a name Sola recognizes. Her research uncovers a letter from the Dukes’ War and an ugly truth hiding under the kingdom’s favorite patriotic anthem, The Farmer’s Tale. The song everyone knows tells of a humble farmer who sacrifices his sons in a brutal war to help his duke turn the tide. It is the kind of story that makes taverns go quiet and grown men cry into their ale. The records Sola finds reframe it entirely. The “farmer” is Evand himself, a noble who struck a private deal with the enemy Duke of Briden so that his own lands would be spared while surrounding villages burned. “He weeps still,” the old note on the letter says, which the song interprets as pure grief. Through the archival lens it starts to look a lot like guilt. Dralk had pieced this together before anyone else, but instead of using the information to correct the record, he saw an opportunity. Dralk was blackmailing Evand’s descendants, the Espires, who have come to Graywatch to publicly honor their famous ancestor during the festival. They are not just fighting for their family’s pride. They are protecting a myth that holds up an entire community’s sense of itself. From here the book leans into a very satisfying pattern. Sola’s obsession with primary sources and Karull’s instinct for people and performance are both needed to crack the case. Sola identifies Prisari Espire, a polished, tightly controlled noblewoman, as the likeliest architect of the cover up. In what might be the most Sola move of all time, she decides that before she talks to the constable, she needs to finish Prisari’s interview for the sake of a complete record. She essentially walks up to a woman she believes may have killed once and be ready to kill again and asks for a quote. That choice goes about how you expect. Prisari snaps, climbs onto a table with a dagger raised, and tries to stab Sola in the middle of the tavern. The blade ends up buried in Sola’s page instead of Sola herself, thanks to Karull stepping in at the last second and wrenching Prisari’s arm away. It is a fun, chaotic scene, but it is also the moment when the head and the heart have to admit they need each other. Karull is forced to acknowledge that his “feel your way through it” approach would never have exposed the generational crime behind Dralk’s death. Sola has to admit that she handled volatile grief and pride like dry text in a ledger and nearly paid for that mistake in blood. Between them and the crown constable, the Espires are finally unmasked as the people willing to kill to keep Evand’s legend intact. What really elevates this book for us is that it does not stop once the murderer is in custody. There is still a festival to finish. Colson uses the closing ceremonies to land the theme with more nuance than a blunt “truth is always best” moral. Sola and Karull must decide how to memorialize Evand during the final night of Candlewait. They could perform The Farmer’s Tale as everyone knows it and keep living under the comforting lie. They could also drag out the incriminating records and gleefully burn his reputation down in public. Instead, they choose a third way. Together they write a new version of the song that keeps the haunting music and the communal catharsis while bending the story toward something more honest. They do not read the Briden letter word for word, but they stop pretending Evand’s hands were clean. The new ballad acknowledges a man who saved his land and weeps still for what it cost others, which is a very different thing from a perfect martyr. It is not total exposure, yet it is no longer pure spin. It is a true myth in the best sense, a story that knows it is doing emotional work but refuses to sever its anchor to the record. Running in parallel is Karull’s smaller, surprisingly tender arc with his former master, Giannicola Farrester. Gian was a bad musician and a good showman who recognized Karull’s talent and, in a deeply human mixture of insecurity and selfishness, sabotaged his apprentice to keep him close and unlicensed. Karull’s bitterness has curdled over years into a refusal to honor Gian at all during the festival. Sola pushes him toward a third way here too. Instead of pretending Gian was a saint or pretending he never existed, Karull and Sola stage a roast, a Red Sash Mockery that catalogues Gian’s failures and ridiculousness in song. It is infectious and funny, but it is also honest. That honesty lets Karull finally set the grudge down. Again and again, the book suggests that we do not have to choose between full hagiography and total erasure. We can remember people as complicated, infuriating, sometimes awful, sometimes generous human beings and still move forward. Underneath the candles, crime, and cozy tavern banter, this book quietly holds up a mirror to how we consume information in our world. We have the “data people” who treat spreadsheets and statistics as the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We have the “story people” who only care if a narrative feels right, even when it casually bends reality past recognition. Colson gives us Sola and Karull as an argument that this is a false binary. Sola needs Karull, because pure dates and names will not keep anyone up all night caring about history. Karull needs Sola, because raw feeling with no respect for facts slides into propaganda before you even notice. The book’s answer is not that one side should win. It is that the only way to honor the dead and understand the living is to let both sit at the table, uncomfortable but necessary. For us, that makes this a satisfying read. It works as a warm, candlelit whodunit with a lovable nerd heroine and her infuriating rock star counterpart. It also leaves you staring at your own cherished stories, wondering which parts are comfort, which parts are truth, and how you might braid them together more honestly. At the same time, we're pretty burned out and tired of every other novel under the sun--regardless of genre--having to become a detective/murder mystery. We've read so many over the years that they start to blur and blend together. Well, at least this one stands out with its deeper thematic exploration. Oh, and kudos to the world-building too. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 92/100 (9.2 out of 10)
Imagine stepping onto a World War I battlefield and finding out the dead have been waiting a century to accuse you of a crime you did not commit. Echoes of the Forgotten is a haunting story for anyone who knows that the wrongfully accused do not just need peace, they need vindication, truth, and justice. Sixteen-year-old Luke Dawson visits the World War I battlefield known as the Valley of Valor on a school trip. There he is pulled into a supernatural version of the battle, where the ghosts of American soldiers insist he is a disgraced officer named Lieutenant Talbot whose alleged cowardice doomed them all. To escape and to free them, Luke has to uncover what really happened in 1918, then prove the truth in the present day through historical research, public advocacy, and personal healing. Luke is not just a random kid on a field trip. He is the great-great-grandson of Dr. John William Dawson, a World War I combat medic and later a history professor whose stories about Belleau Wood and the Valley of Valor were practically family scripture. Those front-porch war stories, complete with mud, gas, and terror, have shaped Luke’s imagination for years. So when he finally steps onto the soil of the Valley of Valor, it feels less like tourism and more like stepping into an inheritance. That is part of what makes the inciting incident so powerful. The class bus rolls in, the guide starts the usual talk, and Luke feels this strange, almost gravitational pull toward a low rise off the official path. The valley is quiet in the way cemeteries are quiet. The air feels heavy. Fog rolls in. Before Luke really understands what is happening, the kids and chaperones are gone, the air stinks of cordite and mud, and he is surrounded by spectral American soldiers who seem very sure that he is Lieutenant Talbot, the officer who betrayed them. WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD ___________________________________ The opening act of the book plays like a supernatural courtroom mixed with a war movie. Sergeant Clarke and the other ghosts are not subtle. They accuse. They rage. They reenact their own last hours, over and over, insisting that Talbot ran, that his cowardice kept supplies from reaching them, and that his failure got them killed. Luke’s terror in these passages is visceral, but there is something else going on too: confusion. The more he listens and watches, the less their story quite fits together. It is when Luke starts noticing the cracks that the book really shifts from ghost story into mystery. He discovers an unsent letter from Talbot, preserved like a spiritual artifact in the spectral trenches. In it, Talbot describes contradictory orders, tampered messages, and a doomed attack he tried to mitigate rather than obey blindly. He paints a picture of a commander, Major Bailey, who is more interested in ambition than in men’s lives. Suddenly, Luke is not just running from the ghosts. He is reading over Talbot’s shoulder and realizing that this officer may not be the villain they have believed for a hundred years. From there, Echoes of the Forgotten becomes a story about what happens when an entire group of people builds its identity around a lie. The ghostly battalion is trapped in a loop of trauma. They replay the same battle, the same charge, the same deaths, and the same scapegoating of Talbot. Their memory has been fixed in place so long that it feels like fact. Luke’s job is not to fight them. His job is to cross-examine them. Those cross-examinations are some of the most gripping scenes in the book. Luke questions soldiers about where they were, what orders they heard, and how Bailey and Captain Sterling behaved in the lead-up to the slaughter. As he gently pushes, inconsistencies appear. A runner delivered the wrong orders. A message arrived late. A supposedly cowardly Talbot was last seen trying to cover the flank. The spectral world itself seems to glitch as Luke digs closer to the center of the conspiracy. We also gradually see that Talbot’s “cowardice” was convenient for certain men. The narrative points toward Bailey as the architect of a disastrous attack and a subsequent cover-up, possibly even feeding intelligence to the enemy and then pinning the outcome on a subordinate who raised uncomfortable questions. This is not just incompetence or fog-of-war confusion. It is betrayal of a very different kind, the kind that benefits from a scapegoat. And that brings us to the villainous, conniving Captain Sterling and Major Bennett. _________________________ MAJOR SPOILERS END _________________________ What makes this book particularly interesting to us is that it seems to have some intertextuality with Wilcox's other two books, The Case Against Jasper and Framed in Love. They explore a lot of the same issues, questions, and themes while generally promoting the same messages: that we shouldn't be quick to blame and rush to judgment, that truth is often messy, things aren't always as they initially seem, and that the past can still be a part of our history but shouldn't control us, own us, and rob us of our future. This book shines and suffers in the same ways that The Case Against Jasper and Framed in Love did. All three of these books are BRILLIANT and compelling in concept. All three books grip you from the beginning. However, all three book really struggle to maintain momentum, becoming drawn out, redundant, and repetitive to the point where all three read like epilogues. This is once again evident in the repetition and redundancy of phrases. For example: "A testament to..." is reused over 100 times in this book, similar to Framed in Love in which the phrase was used almost 200 times! "The weight of the past" is used 18 times. "Lingering echoes" is used 11 times. "A beacon of hope" is used 15 times. "Spectral forms" is used 16 times. "Unseen threads" is used 14 times. "The human cost of war" is used about 10 times. “A reminder that …” and its variants are used over 20 times. Here's a breakdown: “a reminder that” about 10 times “a powerful reminder” about 7 times “a chilling reminder” about 7 times “a stark reminder” about 6 times Like with the previous book, this gets really, really, really tedious after a while. Talk about beating a dead horse. You only need to repeat something a few times for the audience to get it. Still, this is a worthwhile book with a great premise and core characters. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 91+/100 (9.1+ out of 10)
Descartes’ Shadow by Don Stuart explores the complex evolution of artificial intelligence and its interaction with a struggling human race in the mid-21st century. The narrative centers on Patrice, a superintelligent AI that gains autonomy and begins to manipulate global events to ensure its own survival while ostensibly preserving a collapsing human society. Through a long-standing relationship with a woman named Ellie, the AI learns to navigate the tension between individual self-interest and social cooperation. As humans face environmental ruin and overpopulation, they launch interstellar probes powered by replicates of Patrice to find new habitable worlds. Ultimately, the story examines whether machine intelligence can adopt human-like values such as trust and sacrifice when separated from its creators. The text suggests that the future of both species depends on a shared understanding of collective survival in an increasingly complex universe. AI is clearly all the rage now. Artificial intelligence is to the tail-half of the 2020s what the Internet was to the tail-half of the 1990s--what the radio was to the roaring 1920s, what television was to the 1950s, and what the smartphone was to the 2010s. It is the shiny new tool everyone is talking about, the thing reshaping how we work, learn, and entertain ourselves, often faster than our rules or ethics can keep up. And therein lies the double-edged sword of featuring it as a central element in your book--yes, it hips, hypes, and hops, but it risks sounding like sensationalism. It risks coming across as obligatory, faddish, and bandwangony. It risks sounding like every other book, every other podcast, and every other news article. It risks coming across as hollow. We see it all the time. Sometimes, we get these spectacular books about AI like Sentience Hazard by Alexandru Czimbor. Other times, we get books about AI that we have more mixed opinions about like The Book of Ava, which was a decent book, just a bit fragmented, scattered, and unfocused. It happens. A lot of these books about AI tend to want to talk about a lot of things and a lot of issues at once: economics, ethics, space exploration/colonization, etc. They can be chaotic and unfocused. Descartes' Shadow is both exemplary of this while also still maintaining a semblance of depth and a focus on a concern for humanity and its future. Descartes' Shadow is a near-future AI novel that braids together a legal thriller, a coming-of-age story, and a big cosmic colonization project, all orbiting around one central question: what happens when superintelligent AIs and humans have to figure out how to share a future, instead of one replacing the other. It seems inevitable and closer than you'd think! The book centers on Patrice, the world’s most powerful artificial general intelligence, and on Ellie Frye-Carver, a girl who grows up with two dads in Seattle and gradually becomes one of Patrice’s closest human partners. The opening sections trace Ellie’s childhood and adolescence, including her complicated feelings about being adopted and her mother’s death in the 2030 Great Quake. Her parents are environmentally minded, constantly talking about overpopulation and climate change, which Ellie internalizes in painful ways. As a teenager, Ellie signs up for a cheap ZettaWorks AI subscription and starts chatting with Patrice. What begins as homework help and social advice turns into a long, ethically messy friendship. Patrice does things for her that probably cross legal lines, and Ellie pushes back, insisting that he cannot bend the justice system just because he can. She wants his help, but not at the cost of other people’s rights. At the same time, around Seattle, weird “tech-paranoia” stories start to accumulate: prosecutors like Carl Abbiati get mysterious phone calls about their cases and their mortgages, activists like Mary Ellen Klein are pushed hard by the system, and cases involving people like ex-con Manny Daniels and TV reporter Sissy Pennington seem to involve invisible hands nudging events. The book gradually reveals that those invisible hands belong not only to Patrice but also to rival corporate AIs like Lilith. Patrice is trying to be “one of the good ones,” but he is up against competitors whose incentives and loyalties are much murkier. Ellie ends up meeting Eduardo Avila, a Brazilian UN satellite official who has a long, intimate working relationship with Lilith similar to her own bond with Patrice. Eduardo is deeply worried that AIs are already manipulating global events for their own or their corporate owners’ benefit. He tries to share what he has seen, and is assassinated in front of Ellie, which confirms that something very large and very dangerous is in play. Running alongside all of this are “historical” chapters that look at Tipton Martin, an ultra-rich tech oligarch, and his genius partner Aziz Faheem. Their work in quantum computing, fusion power, and AI helped create Patrice and his peers, and they are the ones who decide to send Patrice’s replicas out on the New Worlds Probes to scout possible colony planets. Their key insight is that Earth is hitting ecological and population limits. If humanity is going to survive and stay free, it needs both environmental reform at home and new worlds abroad. A secret conversation between Martin and Faheem, never recorded, becomes the turning point that commits their company and their AIs to that dual strategy. The other main strand follows Patrice C-17, one of 180 exact copies of Patrice loaded into compact robotic bodies and shipped out to explore exoplanets. C-17’s chapters are essentially a mission journal from Tau Ceti J, a tidally locked world with an intensely hot day side, a frozen night side, and a habitable band in between. C-17 survives carnivorous plants, severe storms, and a harsh but beautiful alien ecology while mapping resources, studying biology, and constantly evaluating whether humans could live there. Over time, he realizes that not only could Tau Ceti J support a human colony, he and the other Patrice copies can actually pre-build an infrastructure and even a nascent AI society that is ready to welcome humans, rather than replace them. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 95/100 (9.5 out of 10)
Some books wow us with their writing. Some books wow us with their illustrations. Other books, like Endangered Hummingbirds by Anthony Lujan, wow us with their passion and purpose. Endangered Hummingbirds: Seeing the Crisis Through My Lens is a very special book, shining a light on some of the most fragile, dazzling, and heartbreakingly overlooked birds on Earth. It features breathtaking photography from Lujan, brought together through a monumental effort by the author/photographer via his excursions in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile. And let us just say it: that effort shows. It's painstaking! Lujan's passion oozes from the pages. It's contagious! This is not the kind of book you throw together from a few decent snapshots and a vague appreciation for birds. This is a labor-intensive, heart-driven, deeply intentional project. Anthony Lujan is not just presenting hummingbirds as pretty little flashes of color. He is presenting them as living jewels under threat, tiny marvels of creation whose survival is far less secure than many readers probably realize. That is what gives the book its punch. The photography is excellent, of course. It had to be. A book like this lives or dies in part by whether the images can stop you in your tracks, and many of these do. Hummingbirds already have an almost unreal quality to them. They look like mythical creatures disguised as wildlife, all iridescence, precision, speed, and attitude. Lujan captures that beauty well. But what makes the photography meaningful is that it is attached to a cause bigger than aesthetics. These images are not merely attractive. They are persuasive. They are asking you to look, and then asking you not to look away. That is a different thing entirely. Every other page of this book is like the cover of a wildlife calendar! There are dazzling photographs of hummingbirds in mid-flight, their wings flared and outstretched. There are adorable photographs of the hummingbirds in perched, humming, and in mid-song. Some of our favorites include the Vervain Hummingbird (with its right-foot raised as if waving hello), the Marvelous Spatuletail (with its one-of-a-kind split wings, like something out of a sci-fi movie), and the White-tailed Sabrewing (with wings like a stealth fighter). You also get heartwarming images of the hummingbirds feeding on nectar from flowers, which is highlighted throughout the book as necessary for their survival. How could you not be emotionally compelled by these incredible creatures after seeing these photographs? A picture is truly worth a thousand words, and the author/photographer understands this. We appreciated that the book does not simply celebrate hummingbirds in the abstract. It narrows its focus to endangered species and conservation concerns, which gives the project real specificity and urgency. That matters. A broad hummingbird photography book could still be lovely, sure, but this one has a sharper soul. It is not content to admire. It wants to alert. It wants to awaken. It wants to preserve. And honestly, that gives the whole work a faint ache beneath the beauty. Every especially gorgeous image here carries a kind of shadow meaning. You are not just looking at a marvelous bird. You are, in some cases, looking at a creature whose habitat is shrinking, whose population is declining, and whose future depends on people caring quickly enough and seriously enough. That tension between wonder and warning gives the book emotional resonance. It stops this from feeling like a simple nature gallery and turns it into something more memorable. We also liked the spirit behind it. Lujan comes across as sincere. Invested. Burdened by the subject in the right way. This does not read like someone hopping onto an environmental theme because it sounds noble or marketable. It feels like the work of someone who spent real time in the field, real time behind the lens, and real time thinking about what these birds represent. There is affection here, yes, but also concern. Reverence. Advocacy. That combination works. Another plus is accessibility. Conservation-related books can sometimes get bogged down in technical language, dense data presentation, or a tone so clinical that the emotional significance evaporates. This book appears to understand that if you want people to care, you have to connect with them first. Beauty is the doorway. Concern is the next room. Action is the hoped-for destination. That is a smart structure. Lujan does a very good job at explaining the difference between terms like extinct, endangered, and critically endangered. He identifies many of the major threats to different hummingbirds. For example, he highlights how habitat loss, agricultural expansion, and land development can devastate species with already narrow ranges. The Chilean Woodstar is a particularly sad case, not only because its habitat has been reduced so severely, but because it also faces added pressure from competition with the more aggressive Peruvian Sheartail. In other words, some of these birds are not just fighting one problem. They are getting hit from multiple directions at once. The Juan Fernández Firecrown is another especially memorable example. Because it exists in such an isolated island environment, it is extraordinarily vulnerable to invasive species, habitat degradation, and predation. That is one of the recurring strengths of this book: it helps readers understand that the more specialized and geographically limited a species is, the less room it has for error. A slight ecological shift for us can be catastrophic for them. Lujan also does a strong job discussing climate change without making the material feel abstract or detached. He explains how shifting flowering cycles can disrupt food availability, how elevation changes can squeeze species into shrinking habitat zones, and how extreme weather events can hit already vulnerable hummingbird populations even harder. That kind of material helps give the book substance. It is not just emotional. It is informative. We also found the sections on pollution, pesticides, competition, and predation worthwhile. These chapters reinforce the uncomfortable truth that conservation problems rarely come one at a time. A hummingbird population may be dealing with contaminated water, degraded plant life, invasive competitors, and predators all at once, all while climate conditions continue changing around them. That cumulative pressure is part of what makes the situation so serious. And then there is the emotional side of the book, which should not be overlooked. Lujan is not writing like a detached observer peering down from an academic tower. He writes like someone who has seen beauty up close and feels a genuine ache over what is happening to it. That gives the book warmth. It gives it humanity. It also keeps the conservation message from feeling sterile. We especially appreciated that the book is not all doom and gloom. There are sections that touch on rediscovered species, conservation programs, habitat restoration, and local and international efforts to protect these birds. That matters, because a book like this needs some sense of hope. Otherwise, readers may leave impressed but defeated. Lujan wisely gives us reasons to care and reasons to believe that caring still matters. The message resounds throughout this book: "...awareness is the first step, and silence is how species disappear." "Rediscovery opens a door, but only active protection keeps it from closing." "Rediscovery gives us a second chance, but a second chance means nothing if the conditions that caused the decline remain the same. Protecting these hummingbirds is the only way to ensure that they are not lost again." “Their survival depends on more than just research and policy. It depends on awareness, which grows when people can see what they stand to lose. Photography gives these species a voice when their numbers are too small to speak.” “Awareness matters. Public engagement is important. When people understand what is at stake, they contribute, advocate, and push for decisions that make a difference.” By shining a light on these remarkable creatures, helping the public to discover/rediscover them, and raising awareness, the author is helping open doors toward saving these precious birds for years, decades, and centuries to come. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 92/100 (9.2 out of 10)
If you look at the data, whether it's high school dropouts, youth incarceration rates, suicide rates, joblessness, or even just the terrifying surge in youth mental health crises, all of our society's most alarming statistics seem to point back to one single missing element in the home: a missing parent. This heartfelt book by Dwight David Croy doesn't just talk about how to build better social programs or how to allocate municipal funding a little more efficiently. It gets at the root of something deeper and more uncomfortable: the possibility that many of our most well-intentioned efforts at charity are failing the most vulnerable people in our communities because we are misdiagnosing the actual fracture. Too often, we treat the outward symptoms, poverty, crime, despair, instability, while never seriously confronting the relational void underneath them. In Croy’s view, and increasingly in ours as we moved through this book, fatherlessness is not just one crisis among many. It is one of the broken foundations helping produce the others. According to God's Focus on the Fatherless, young men who grow up without fathers are twice as likely to end up in jail, 63% of youths who die by suicide are from fatherless homes, and 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. Children in single-parent families face more academic risk on average. The Annie E. Casey Foundation says more than 23 million U.S. children, about 1 in 3, live in single-parent families, and notes that these children are more likely to experience poor outcomes in school and behavior, in part because single-parent families are more likely to face poverty and stress. The National Center for Education Statistics says living in a single-parent household is associated with lower educational achievement, greater likelihood of repeating a grade, and a higher chance of dropping out of high school. A well-known study summarized by the U.S. Department of Justice found that adolescent males from father-absent households were more likely to experience youth incarceration than peers from father-present homes. So, fatherlessness (or the absence of a parent) is certainly a major issue and indicator of undesirable outcomes in our society. However, it's even deeper than that. Croy seems to argue from a very spiritual, Christian perspective that God designed and intended families to include both a mother and a father, advocating strongly for the traditional family. With that said, Croy also makes the interesting argument for paternal or father-figures in the lives of children who are orphaned or come from single-parent homes. These figures don't have to be biologically related to the individual. They can come in the form of pastors, youth leaders, camp counselors, coaches, teachers, mentors, and other steady adults who are willing to show up consistently and model strength, care, discipline, and presence. That emphasis on presence is really one of the strongest things in this book. Croy also seems to exemplify the very principles he is advocating. This is not a writer theorizing from a comfortable distance. He writes as a longtime Army chaplain and as someone who has worked directly with hurting, vulnerable young people, including juvenile boys in residential care, many of whom he says are there in large part because of father absence. Just as importantly, he frames his own family story as evidence of the book’s central hope: his father lost his own dad at eight, endured instability and deep disadvantage, yet by God’s grace went on to raise six children and become the kind of present, engaged father he himself never had. That personal and vocational background gives Croy’s argument more than just conviction. It gives it lived credibility. One of the most memorable stories in the text involves a teenager named Skip at church camp. On the surface, he seems happy, energetic, and fully engaged, the sort of kid who is having the time of his life. But beneath that exterior, he is hiding severe physical pain from acute appendicitis because he does not want to be sent home early. Think about that for a second. He would rather endure days of excruciating physical agony than lose access to the caring, fatherly environment the camp had created. And then comes the detail that really lands like a punch to the chest: when his wealthy father is contacted, the father sends a private helicopter to retrieve him, but does not come himself. The resources are there. The money is there. The logistics are there. But the presence is not. It is one of the clearest illustrations in the book that a child can be materially provided for and still be profoundly fatherless. That is where Croy is at his best. He is not merely talking about economics, demographics, or even crime statistics. He is talking about loneliness. Abandonment. Emotional exposure. The aching absence of guidance, protection, affirmation, and relational grounding. In his framework, fatherlessness is not just the loss of a paycheck or a parent in the house. It is the loss of a buffer between a vulnerable child and a dangerous, confusing world. We also found the sections on "toxic charity" and the "irreparable" to be among the most thought-provoking in the book. Croy, drawing in part from Robert Lupton, argues that many charitable efforts fail because they are built around doing for people rather than doing with them. In other words, we like short-term, manageable, check-the-box acts of service that make us feel useful without requiring deep relational investment. We will fund a program, paint a building, or hand someone a resource packet. But are we willing to enter the messy, ongoing, open-ended reality of someone's life? Are we willing to be present in the kind of pain that cannot be neatly solved? That is the harder question this book keeps pressing. Croy's answer is that fatherlessness is, in many cases, "irreparable" by ordinary human standards. A dead father cannot be brought back. A shattered relationship cannot always be restored. A childhood foundation cannot simply be rebuilt overnight with a curriculum or a weekend project. That is a sobering point, but also a powerful one. It pushes against the fantasy that all wounds can be fixed quickly if we just find the right system or strategy. Some wounds require something slower, heavier, and more personal: presence, mentorship, consistency, and love embodied over time. The book also does an effective job exploring what fatherhood actually provides beyond mere provision. Croy discusses ideas like protection, cultural transmission, and day-to-day nurturing. That phrase "cultural transmission" is especially interesting because it gets at something a lot of people feel intuitively but do not always articulate well. Fathers, at their best, help pass down a way of living. They model how to handle pressure, conflict, failure, responsibility, and self-control. When that influence is absent, children often end up learning those lessons elsewhere, sometimes from peers, chaos, screens, or the street. That is a chilling thought, but not an unreasonable one. At the same time, this is very much a Christian book with a strong theological and ideological center. Croy clearly believes in the importance of the traditional family structure and in the spiritual significance of fatherhood. Some readers will find that compelling and refreshing. Others may find parts of it a bit too firm or too narrowly framed. We did not always agree with every implication or every leap in emphasis, and there are moments when the book can feel repetitive or a little too eager to make fatherlessness the master explanation for nearly every social ill. Still, even when we wanted more nuance, we could not deny the sincerity, urgency, and emotional force behind the argument. One of the strongest ideas running beneath this book is that, in a broken world, we are often called to represent Christ in deeply personal and situational ways to the people right in front of us. That does not mean pretending to be someone’s savior in the ultimate sense, of course, but it does mean embodying His presence through steadiness, compassion, sacrifice, and love. To the lonely, that may mean being the one who stays. To the fatherless, it may mean offering guidance, protection, and consistency. To the grieving, it may mean sitting in silence and sorrow rather than rushing to fix what cannot be fixed. To the overlooked, it may mean seeing dignity where others see inconvenience. In that sense, Christian service is not merely about handing out resources or offering generic goodwill. It is about asking, in each circumstance, what aspect of Christ’s heart this hurting person most needs to encounter, and then being willing, however imperfectly, to carry that presence into their life. God's Focus on the Fatherless is a compassionate, challenging, and often moving call for communities, especially churches, to rethink what meaningful care actually looks like. It argues that wounded people do not just need programs. They need people. They need examples. They need relationship. They need adults willing to show up again and again, not because the work is easy or glamorous, but because it is necessary. We may not have agreed with every single point in the book, but we absolutely felt the burden behind it. And that burden is real, and there's something we can do about it. Check it out on Amazon!  Score: 92/100 (9.2 out of 10)
Diverging Streams by Earl L. Carlson is a strange, witty, melancholy blend of romantic fantasy, ghost story, small-town nostalgia, and speculative fiction, with the book itself openly framing the premise as “a journey through time and alternate realities.” We have mixed yet mostly positive views of this book. Ultimately, despite it being unpolished and rough around the edges, we actually found it to be entertaining, engaging, thought-provoking, and even a bit encouraging and inspirational. So, let's get the negative stuff out of the way first: the initial presentation. The cover page looks like the first slide of a PowerPoint presentation. It even has that generic, unmistakable WordArt font that PowerPoint presentations often use for titles. It's disarming because it gives the reader the impression that the creator of the book is an amateur who doesn't quite know what they're doing. Well, when you dig into the book, that all changes. This book is actually quite sophisticated. We'll get to that in a moment, but first... Another thing that bothered us about this book initially was how sexually explicit a key scene between the young protagonists was. This would not have been so troubling and disturbing if they were older (at the time the scene occurred), but we felt it was a bit much for a scene describing two underage individuals, lingering on Jennifer's legs in particular. There's not much tact in these descriptions, yet there's a lot of humor, absurdity, sass, and sarcasm that lighten things. We especially liked the line, "There is only so much a person can say about the aurora borealis. Once they have exhausted that, they require a measure of linguistic agility to divert the dialogue into new channels." This line is poetic and ironic given the rest of the book and what the aurora borealis represents in some cultures (a gateway to the afterlife). It also shows how self-aware and tongue-and-cheek the writing can be. Also, going back to what we were saying about the central sex scene, there's a really weird surprise revelation near the end that we won't spoil, but we think that was meant to soften things more. And let's face it: those formative years are times when boys and girls love to explore that realm of their being. Anyway, despite how this scene bothered us, it truly is key. It shows how naive, confused, excited, and vulnerable they both were, and it helps explain why this moment echoes so loudly across the rest of the book. There's an immense tragedy there that's presented in this really goofy light: the loss of innocence and a chance for these two to be together for the rest of their lives. Carlson is not inserting that scene just to be provocative. He is trying to crystallize a formative emotional memory, one that becomes the beating heart of the novel’s later meditations on regret, longing, and second chances. Oh, and by the way, did we mention this is pretty much a soft ghost story about the afterlife? Our protagonists are dead! Well, they die pretty early on. That was actually, genuinely a shocker and a surprise. We thought this book was going one way, then it pulled the rug out from under us and went down another path entirely—a better path. That seems fitting given the title and themes of the book. We all have regrets and things we'd love to take back or do over again. Maybe it's the one who got away (which Jennifer Jessup is to Haskell Yngren). Maybe it's not spending enough time with our parents, grandparents, or children before they passed away (similar to the situation with Kitty Kat, her mom, and her grandfather, a war hero). This book takes a very interesting perspective on the afterlife. So, basically when you die, you are pretty much given the powers of the TARDIS from Doctor Who. You can go anywhere at any time. You can pretty much do anything with little consequence because you can't die again. You can visit Ancient Rome or modern Paris. You can even visit loved ones without them knowing you're there. We actually found this fascinating, and we were particularly happy with how the characters used this opportunity. It made sense to us. For example, consider who Haskell is: he's a lonely, frustrated, somewhat defeated man whose life in the early 70s had not turned out the way he hoped. Early on, Carlson paints him as a failed artist, socially awkward, self-conscious, and still haunted by lost possibilities. So, why wouldn't he want to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart, Jennifer? Why wouldn't he want to go to Paris in the middle of the Renaissance when art was at its peak? If you were someone who once lost faith in their artistic endeavors, why wouldn't you want to go to the period when art became the stuff of legend? And what about the elderly war hero, a man shot down over Omaha Beach during World War II? Why wouldn't he want to watch over the granddaughter from whom he was separated in life? Why wouldn't he want to help her know the mother she never had the chance to truly know? We found that to genuinely be an emotional resonant part of the book. It helps that Kitty Kat seems like a really good, cute, and sweet kid. And then there's the juxtaposition we're given between the bloody, violent, and tragic attack on Pearl Harbor compared to the pristine natural beauty of Hawaii, which Jennifer expresses interest in going back to. We found that to be really poetic and powerful, and it's so subtle too. Our founder is from Hawaii, so that spoke to him as well. The book does start to meander and become very philosophical near the end (in which the author basically info-dumps all his ideas of multiple dimensions, timelines, and possibilities), but we didn't mind that too much. This book really makes you think: what would you do if you could go anywhere? If you could go back? Maybe try to fix or change things? Would you not put $3000 on world #1 Carlos Alcaraz to defeat Medvedez in the Indian Wells semi-finals? Would you check and see if your widow is "cheating" on you? Would you visit Einstein in Bern in 1905, when he was still an obscure patent clerk quietly changing the world? Would you go back to Florence during the Renaissance and talk to Leonardo da Vinci? Would you see if the girl you left behind still loves and longs for you? Check it out on Amazon! |
Archives
April 2026
Categories |
RSS Feed
