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 […]

Anita Fiore Welsh was given up for adoption in 1963, through an adoption that wasn’t legal. Her memoir, Waiting For the Bad Thing to Happen, published July 21, 2026, covers the years that followed, including time in foster care, relationships, marriages, all looked back on with a fair amount of hard-earned wisdom. At 202 pages, […]

The cover of In Between Rooms gives you a perfect preview of what you’re in for: a bloodied stuffed elephant sitting alone. It’s a fitting image for Adrian M. Mompoint’s second horror novella, which continues to draw heavily from Stephen King. Where his previous novella, The Performance Review felt more like a King short story […]

Sol Canyon by Michael Wolf is a Los Angeles detective novel that starts out as a light character piece and gradually turns into something quite a bit darker. Released September 2025, it’s the first book in Michael Wolf’s series following James Gardiner, a young private eye who narrates his own life like an old-school hardboiled […]

Ancient Sicily is, in large part, criminally underused in historical fiction. Everyone wants to write about the fall of Troy or Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but Syracuse rarely gets a mention outside academic texts. That gap is exactly what Irish writer Jim Loughran is aiming to fill with Syracuse Will Burn, published in July 2026 […]

Vendetta is the third book in T.V. Holiday’s Legend of The Iron Warrior series. I haven’t read the first two, so I came into it cold, but it turned out to be a gripping and fairly epic read that mostly holds up on its own. Part superhero comic, part dark fantasy, it follows a hero […]

Apocalypse stories are a guilty pleasure of mine, so I was eager to dig into Salvation Reigned. It’s a bit of hard book to categorize, and that’s part of its charm. On the surface it’s a science fiction disaster story, but underneath it’s something closer to a fever dream about the end of the world […]

As the title signposts, I Get Knocked Down is a collection of deeply personal poems that tackle some difficult subjects. Poetry can be tricky to review because it’s such a personal form of writing, and what resonates with one reader may not with another, but I found this to be a genuinely moving collection. Although […]

Black River by Yvonne Osborne, the follow-up to 2024’s Let Evening Come, is a literary rural noir set in the lowlands of Michigan farm country. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Where the Crawdads Sing sat down for a drink with a William Faulkner novel and a touch of Romeo and Juliet, this is roughly the result. […]

The Sizable Problems With an Interspecies Relationship by Belladonna Bryson, originally released in 2024 with a one-year anniversary edition out in March 2025, is a debut fantasy romance that reads like a love letter to the energy of mid-2000s teen fantasy. If you have ever wondered what would happen if Sky High, Zootopia, and a […]

The Hierarchy of Angels by William Whitley, released in May 2026, is a debut novel that drops readers straight into a richly imagined alternate-history world that feels like a lost Jules Verne epic, with strong shades of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines thrown in for good measure. It is a steampunk adventure, but a particularly grounded […]