Some men, when their girlfriends leave them, take up running or drinking. Taylor Canyon goes looking for whale vomit. That’s the premise of The Ambergris Trail, Dax Cornwell’s new novel. Canyon is a 27-year-old hotel linen porter in the fading Norfolk resort of Torc-next-the-Sea, kind of drifting through life. He’s convinced that a single lump […]

The first novel in the Hidden Gods series by R.K. Varden, The Wolf Who Held the Sky is a dark, mythic fantasy romance that sets out to tell the “true” story behind a lesser-known piece of Norse mythology: Sköll, the wolf who chases the sun across the sky. The book takes place a thousand years […]

Published by Pony Express Publications on March 2, 2019, Limerick Comics is a slim, 32-page collection that sits somewhere between children’s poetry and graphic novel. The premise is simple and instantly appealing: take the humble limerick, break it into comic panels, and use it as a doorway into real knowledge. It’s a book that definitely […]

The second book in the Looked Down Upon series, A Masked Wickedness is the latest coming-of-age novel from indie author Jordan Lopez. Published on March 30, 2025, it picks up two years after the events of The Exiled Kin and runs to 370 pages. Where the first book was built around a search for justice […]

Clocking in at roughly 150 pages and coming out November 10th, Embracing the Local is an upcoming civic memoir that chronicles Glen Cantrell in his first year as president of the Twain Harte Area Chamber of Commerce. Pitched somewhere between a memoir and an essay collection, it arrives with a somewhat unusual origin story. The […]

The follow-up to The Children of the Children (reviewed here), The Catchings Press is a literary coming-of-age novel set in 1967-68, in the fictional small town of Catchings, Texas. It’s McMillion’s second novel, and it shares its interest in institutional power and control with that book, though in a considerably different way: here the setting […]

What do you do when the person you love is still there, but the person you knew is already gone? Woman of Valor is a memoir by Jeanne Simonoff, published September 2, 2026 by Redhawk Publications that explores this topic. It’s a slim book at 150 pages, and the second installment in a planned memoir […]

The first book in a duology, Looked Down Upon: The Exiled Kin is an imaginative coming-of-age thriller from indie author Jordan Lopez. Published on August 12, 2023, with the sequel coming out last year, it clocks in at 316 pages and feels like a personal project in more ways than one. Reading it, I kept […]

Memoirs live or die on one simple test: is this ordinary life, as lived, actually worth someone else’s time to read? Despite It All, I Made It Through: Volume I, published May 22, 2026, is the first of a planned trilogy and is billed as a novel “inspired by a true story,” though it reads […]

If you enjoy Depression-era historical fiction, Cutie Pies by the Slice will definitely be one to add to your reading list this autumn. Set in the twenties to thirties, the novel is Kimberly Nixon’s latest work of family-inspired historical fiction. Following her earlier novel, Rock Bottom, Tennessee, this book is reportedly inspired by her mother’s […]

So You Want To Be A Professional Athlete is another entry in the “So You Want To Be A…” series by Linda Soules, the illustrated career-exploration line for young readers that has grown to nearly 200 titles, covering everything from astronauts to zookeepers. I’m reviewing it alongside another entry in the series, So You Want […]

So You Want To Be A Scientist is the latest entry in the “So You Want To Be A…” series by Linda Soules, an illustrated career-exploration line for young readers that now spans nearly 200 titles, covering everything from astronauts to zookeepers. I’m reviewing this book alongside another entry in the series, So You Want […]