Mari’s Light Burning Bright
Kaitlyn Marquart’s Mari’s Light Burning Bright is a young adult contemporary fiction novel about Mari, a teenage girl trying to live with memories of childhood abuse, self-harm, a family move, and the fear that she may never feel whole again. As the sequel to Amber Luna My Bright Light, the book follows Mari after Camp Evergreen as she enters Northstar Wellness Center, meets other young people carrying their own pain, and slowly begins to understand that healing is not a straight path. It is messy. It is brave. And sometimes it starts with simply letting someone sit beside you.
Mari’s voice is raw without feeling forced, and Marquart gives her room to be angry, funny, scared, judgmental, tender, and wrong. I appreciated that. Teenagers are not tidy people, especially teenagers in crisis, and the book does not try to polish Mari into someone instantly inspirational. Her thoughts loop, flare, retreat, and return. That rhythm felt honest to me. The scenes at Northstar could have easily become heavy in a flat way, but the author balances them with small flashes of humor and human detail, like Scrabble games, awkward meals, and characters who are much more than the reasons they are there.
I also found myself thinking a lot about the author’s choices around faith, family, and recovery. Mari’s Mormon background is not treated as a simple answer or a simple problem, which makes the story more interesting. Her family loves her, but they often miss what she is trying to say. That hurt to read because it felt real. People can care and still fail to understand. The book is candid about pain, but it is careful with it. It doesn’t turn Mari’s suffering into a spectacle. Instead, it keeps asking a quieter question: what does it take for someone to believe she is worth saving when shame has been speaking louder than everyone else? The answer comes slowly, through therapy, friendship, memory, music, and the fragile courage to try again.
I would recommend Mari’s Light Burning Bright to readers who appreciate reflective young adult fiction with emotional depth, especially stories about mental health, trauma recovery, friendship, and finding a voice after silence. It’s not a light read, and readers sensitive to self-harm or childhood abuse should approach it with care. But for those who value hopeful, character-driven fiction that understands healing as a long walk rather than a sudden rescue, this book has a steady glow.
Pages: 153 | ASIN : B0H56ZX1V8
The Best of Young Athletes
The Sweet Season centers around a group of overlooked girls who are shaped into a softball team led by an aging coach with a stubborn belief in effort. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
As a high school football player who had the great fortune to play on a very successful team, the book began as an ode to all the coaches who spend countless hours coaxing the best out of young athletes. However, early on I realized that while Coach’s character was a critical component, the story needed to be told from the point of view of the players and I elected to go with teenage girls since they often must confront life’s many challenges, both on and off the field, much earlier than teenage boys. Similarly, I decided to build the story around a softball team, not only because girls are more commonly engaged in this sport but also because it’s a very strategic game that requires its players to make many critical decisions on an inning-by-inning, game-by-game, basis. So, I crafted a disparate group of overlooked girls who, with the aid of their aged coach, find not only themselves and each other but also something none of them ever expected—they become a team, an entity separate and apart from their individual selves, an entity that accomplishes more than any of them ever dreamed possible.
How does sports fiction allow you to explore character in ways that other genres might not?
When you show up for a team sport, you’re immediately confronted with issues and problems that can often be ignored in everyday life. Suddenly, your effort and dedication matter. If you don’t give it your best, then it’s not just you that suffers—all of your teammates will suffer as well. Each member of any team needs to put in considerable time and effort, not only to improve their own skills but also to find the best way to help their teammates improve their skills. In the Sweet Season, I explore this dynamic through characters like Jessee, an exceptional athlete who learns that helping her teammates is far more productive than criticizing them; and Fee, an exceptional student who learns that despite her lack of athleticism, there are ways she can help the team succeed; and Bebe, a dedicated member of a very conservative church who learns that leading by example is far more productive than imploring others to see the world through the same religious lens that she does.
Cat becomes the emotional center of the story. When did you realize how important she would be to the novel?
I live in a town with a large immigrant community from Somalia and I once attended a lecture from a member of that community who described his incredible overland march from his burned-out village to a refugee camp and ultimately to America. Although I had initially conceived the Cat character as an outsider, casting her as an immigrant who practices a religion utterly foreign to most girls who have grown up in a small midwestern town allowed me to delve even deeper into prejudices built around race, religion and culture, all of which evaporate when the evil you don’t know becomes the person you do know. Cat’s courageous ability to overcome the crippling adversities that her family endured, as well as her own fears, becomes the lodestar that ultimately unites her teammates.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
My first book, Morocco, A Remembrance of Childhood, Colonialism and the Cold War, is a memoir covering my early childhood years growing up as the son of a U.S. Navy officer and airplane pilot in a very foreign country, while The Sweet Season is centered on adolescence. Logically, my next book should focus on my adult years working as a corporate lawyer. However, I’m not John Grisham and I apparently lack the creativity to extract an interesting story from that time of my life. Instead, I’m currently crafting a novel centered on a widowed writer living alone in a small town in Northern Michigan who bumps into a middle-aged woman who shows far more interest in him than would appear warranted. Following this chance encounter, their budding relationship is disrupted by a murder that jeopardizes both of their futures. On the way to its surprising conclusion, the book will delve deeply into the small town’s historical past and the many ways in which this past has colored the lives of the man and woman at the narrative’s center. Just your average historical novel, mystery story, and court room drama, focused on an unlikely relationship that may or may not blossom. My target date for publishing is sometime during the summer of 2027.
Author Links: Amazon | Website
A chance meeting between a crabby old man, rehabbing a dilapidated Victorian mansion in an impoverished midwestern town, and five disparate teen girls pessimistically seeking contributions to support the summer softball team they have, for various reasons, been “sentenced” to join, ultimately alters the course of all their lives.
More than a sports story, more than a coming-of-age story, The Sweet Season is an inspirational exploration of the journey we all take from childhood to adulthood; as well as a thought-provoking exploration of the critical pathways we either choose or reject along the way.
Listening to Spravato
Listening to Spravato, by Justin Page, is a personal and practical meditation on how music shapes the experience of Spravato treatment for depression. Part memoir, part guide, and part argument for more intentional clinical care, the book follows the author’s journey from years of severe depression and suicide attempts into the fragile, complicated hope offered by esketamine sessions. Page explores the Spravato chair as more than a medical setting, showing how light, blankets, headphones, silence, clinicians, playlists, and even the soft crunch of recorded snow can become part of the treatment environment. At its center is a clear and quietly radical idea: when the mind is most vulnerable, sound isn’t background. It’s structure, shelter, and sometimes a lifeline.
What moved me most was the book’s tenderness toward suffering without ever turning it into spectacle. Page writes about depression with an intimacy that feels earned, especially in the personal note where he remembers being sixteen and feeling that the word “depression” was far too small for the storm it named. That passage gives the rest of the book its emotional gravity. The later chapters on playlists, clinic rooms, and session phases could have felt purely technical, but they don’t, because they’re rooted in the lived knowledge of someone who has needed these tools to survive. I found the “one bad trip” chapter especially striking. The absurd interruption of a Spotify ad, followed by the terrifying intrusion of a screaming solo flute and a rumbling Beethoven passage, makes the book’s central argument suddenly visceral. Page doesn’t merely tell us that sound matters under Spravato. He lets us feel how quickly music can become a menace when the self is unmoored.
The writing is strongest when it trusts its own lyric intelligence. Page has a gift for turning sensory experience into language that feels both precise and haunted: ambient music becomes architecture, a soft piano feels like a hand on the shoulder, public soundscapes offer “the comfort of a crowd without the threat of contact.” I admired the way he balances poetic reflection with practical restraint. He’s skeptical of mystical claims about 432 Hz and “healing frequencies,” yet he’s generous enough to admit that symbolism can matter when the nervous system is open and afraid. Its ideas are persuasive because they are humble. Page isn’t selling music as magic. He’s arguing that care is often found in the smallest, adjustable details.
I came away from Listening to Spravato with a renewed respect for the unseen textures of healing, for the chair, the headphones, the nurse outside the door, and the final grounding track that helps a person return to themselves. This is a compassionate, idiosyncratic, and quietly necessary book, one that makes a convincing case that treatment environments should be designed with more imagination and more mercy. I’d recommend it to Spravato patients, clinicians, clinic owners, music therapists, and anyone interested in how sound can help hold a person steady when language has gone temporarily out of reach.
Pages: 116 | ASIN : B0GQHXYRRV
Inspired the Same Love of Reading
Journey to Nirisia follows a quiet fourteen-year-old girl whose summer job quickly turns into a journey to a magical world. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
My passion and drive comes from the desire to place compelling books in the hands of an Upper Middle-Grade audience. I write stories that challenge and engage young readers while honoring their intelligence and curiosity. My aim is to inspire the same love of reading that shaped my own childhood.
Many readers will recognize Emma’s anxiety and uncertainty. How did you approach writing those aspects of her character?
Everyone experiences anxiety and uncertainty at some point in life, especially during the teenage years. My stories feature characters who are imperfect—and who are not expected to be anything else. Through their journeys, I hope readers recognize just how awkward, challenging, and complicated life can be. More importantly, I want them to understand that it is perfectly fine to be different, to have fears, and to experience emotions that take time and courage to navigate.
Were there scenes or characters that surprised you while writing the book?
Great question. Truthfully, my answer is no. I knew exactly who I wanted each character to be from the start. Emma, the introvert, is wonderfully flawed, and I wanted her journey to begin that way—filled with doubt, insecurity, and moments of indecision. After all, regardless of age, we all experience these feelings from time to time.
If my writing can make readers think, ‘that’s exactly how I feel,’ then I’ve accomplished my goal. My hope is that my audience sees themselves in these characters and realize they are not alone in their struggles, fears, or uncertainties.
Can you give us a glimpse inside the next installment of this series? Where will it take readers?
I would love to tell you about The Library Between Worlds: The House That Lies. If you love mysteries, this one is for you.
The story summary is: Dunhallow is cursed. Its residents are vanishing without a trace, and though all believe that Ashford House is the cause, none have lived to prove it.
But when Emma, Faylen, and Cedar find themselves in this spooky town, they set out to be the first ones to return with answers. And when someone close to them goes missing, waiting is no longer an option. They must uncover the dark secret hiding behind Ashford House’s walls—or sealed away in its basement.
Can the trio solve the mystery that an entire town cannot, before Ashford House claims them too?
Author Links: Amazon | Website
5 Star review / Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Reader’s Favorite*
Emma has always preferred the company of books over people. She believed in the magic within their pages, never suspecting the worlds they held truly existed. Now she is about to discover just how real those worlds are.
A dark force known as Eraser is ravaging countless realms, destroying their stories one by one. With each tale he consumes, he moves closer to unraveling reality itself.
To stop him, Emma must find the Wizard’s Crystal, a magical prison powerful enough to contain him. If she fails, every world ever written could vanish, leaving no stories left to save.
So You Want To Be An Ice Cream Flavor Inventor
Linda Soules’ So You Want To Be An Ice Cream Flavor Inventor is a fun, fascinating, and surprisingly eye-opening children’s book that turns a dream job into a real-world career young readers can understand. At first, inventing ice cream flavors may sound like a job that is all about eating delicious scoops, but this book quickly shows that there is much more happening behind the scenes. Through clear explanations and engaging examples, Soules introduces readers to the chemistry, creativity, patience, and problem-solving involved in developing a successful new flavor.
One of the strongest parts of the book is the way it explains the science of taste in a kid-friendly but respectful way. Readers learn why cold temperatures can hide sweetness, why the nose does much of the work when we taste food, and how color can change the way the brain experiences flavor. These details make the book both educational and memorable. The fun facts are especially enjoyable, from the real ice cream graveyard in Vermont to the professional taster whose tongue was insured for a million dollars. These are the kinds of facts young readers will want to share with everyone.
Beyond the trivia, the book does an excellent job connecting curiosity to real careers. Soules shows how food science, flavor chemistry, sensory science, and the culinary arts all come together in the work of an ice cream flavor inventor. The book invites kids to think like scientists and creators. The hands-on activities and kitchen experiments make the subject feel accessible, encouraging readers to start testing their own ideas at home.
With colorful illustrations, approachable writing, and a wonderfully creative subject, So You Want To Be An Ice Cream Flavor Inventor is a delightful blend of science, imagination, and career exploration. It’s perfect for curious kids, future chefs, STEM lovers, and anyone who has ever wondered how their favorite frozen treat came to be. This is an engaging and educational book that makes food science exciting and shows young readers that even a scoop of ice cream can lead to endless discovery.
Pages: 38 | ASIN : B0GX2ZW3M1
Brighter Than The Sun
Brighter Than the Sun by Kit Erikson is a steamy, big-hearted MM romance about Blake Larsen, a performer with a lifelong dream of being seen as more than a body, and Ethan, a business student and diner server who’s still figuring out how to trust his own wants. Blake’s childhood declaration, “I’m going to be a star!” sets the emotional tone for the book. This is a story about ambition, sex work, queer community, and the messy process of building something real with someone who scares you in all the right ways.
Blake is the book’s brightest presence, but he’s written with enough insecurity and weariness to keep him from feeling untouchable. He dances, cams, takes adult work seriously, sews costumes, cares for his friends, and dreams of opening a club where performance can be art, celebration, and livelihood all at once. His dyslexia is also woven into the story with care, especially in how it shapes his relationship with reading, texting, and business ownership without making it his whole personality.
Ethan brings a different kind of tension to the romance. He’s drawn to Blake from the start, but his comfort zone is much smaller than Blake’s world. Watching him move from curiosity to desire to fear to something steadier gives the relationship a satisfying push and pull. The book doesn’t rush past the discomfort that comes from shame, family expectations, and assumptions about sex work. Instead, it lets Ethan stumble, learn, and choose Blake with more honesty each time.
The club storyline gives the romance a strong backbone. The transformation from The Firehouse into Siren makes the book feel like it’s about a whole community, not just one couple. Friends, dancers, performers, bartenders, and chosen family all help create the sense that Blake’s dream is bigger than one spotlight. By the time the group cheers “Siren!” together, the word feels earned, like a promise they’ve all decided to keep.
This is an explicit, affectionate romance with plenty of heat, humor, and backstage chaos, but what lingers most is its belief in being seen clearly. Blake wants applause for his talent, Ethan wants a life that actually fits him, and together they build a space where desire and dignity can exist in the same room. Brighter Than the Sun is tender and full of people trying their best to become braver than they were yesterday.
Pages: 402 | ASIN: B0GXYNK3C7
The Ballad of Screech and Friday
The Ballad of Screech and Friday, by Joann Keder, is a rowdy Piney Falls mystery in which Lanie Anders-Hill finds herself pulled into a strange tangle of karaoke-club deaths, cult residue, family secrets, and one very suspicious chain of Moonbeam-branded operations. At the center is Pepper Friday, a woman with a bruised past and a complicated connection to November “Vem” Bean, while Sybil Screech storms through the story like a human car alarm in expensive shoes. What begins as small-town mayhem around a disastrous stage performance widens into something sharper: manipulation, poison, undercover work, and the long afterlife of childhood control.
I enjoyed how the book refuses to behave like a tidy little mystery. It has the bones of a cozy whodunit, but the flesh is pure Piney Falls: eccentric, noisy, emotionally dented, and funny in a way that sometimes arrives sideways. Lanie’s narration gives the story its ballast. She’s observant without being chilly, exasperated without turning cruel, and her devotion to Vem gives the more outrageous scenes a real human pulse. The humor is deliberately extravagant, names, clubs, cult slogans, moaning sessions, villainous moles, but beneath the confetti is a serious concern with how people survive being used.
Pepper was the character who lingered with me most. Her arc is not a simple redemption tour; it’s thornier than that. She has jealousy, anger, shame, and a dangerous hunger to be seen, but the novel lets those feelings sit beside courage and moral awakening. That mixture gives the book texture. I also appreciated the way the mystery keeps changing shape. Just when I thought I understood the danger, the story widened from personal revenge to institutional exploitation, from karaoke absurdity to something almost gothic in its pattern of control. The tonal jumps are bold, and while the plot can, at times, feel gloriously overstuffed, the emotional throughline keeps it from becoming mere carnival noise.
This book is best for readers who like cozy mysteries, small-town mysteries, amateur sleuth fiction, quirky mysteries, cult suspense, and character-driven mysteries with a satirical bite. Fans of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books may enjoy the same collision of comic chaos, danger, and oddball community, though Joann Keder gives the absurdity a more homespun and wounded heart. The Ballad of Screech and Friday proves that even the loudest, strangest towns can become places where damaged people learn to breathe again.
Pages: 292 | ASIN : B0GKR41SH2
A Beautiful Sunrise
A Beautiful Sunrise by Bernadette Gage is a historical coming-of-age novel about Abi, a girl from Ipole whose hunger for education pushes against a culture that expects girls to marry, bear children, and stay quiet. The story follows her from childhood through schooling, marriage, motherhood, teaching, and later study abroad, tracing how one girl’s chance at education becomes a wider argument for dignity, independence, and opportunity for women.
I found the book most moving when it stayed close to the everyday texture of Abi’s world: the farms, schoolrooms, family compounds, village meetings, boarding school routines, food, chores, and the constant weighing of duty against desire. Gage writes with a steady, patient style. She isn’t in a hurry. Sometimes that makes the novel feel almost oral in its pacing, like someone is sitting beside you and telling a family history piece by piece. At times, I wanted a little more sharpness or compression, because some scenes explain what the reader already understands. But there is also something generous about that fullness. The book wants us to see the whole village, not just Abi.
What stayed with me most was the author’s choice to make education feel both personal and political. Abi’s story isn’t only about school certificates or ambition. It’s about permission. Who gets it. Who withholds it. Who has to fight twice as hard for it. I appreciated that the novel doesn’t make Abi perfect. She is stubborn, sometimes impatient, and often forced to carry more than she should. That made her feel real to me. The strongest idea in the book is simple but powerful: when a girl is given room to grow, the effect does not stop with her. It moves through her children, her students, and her community.
As a work of historical fiction and inspirational women’s fiction, A Beautiful Sunrise will appeal most to readers who like character-driven stories about resilience, family, education, and social change. I would especially recommend it to readers who enjoy reflective, culturally grounded novels with a hopeful arc. The story is like a slow sunrise, fittingly, and its warmth builds over time.
Pages: 178 | ASIN: B0GWB2ZL8Z
