Book Review: Ancestor Trouble

Maud Newton’s ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Maud’s father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, was an educated man who extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the “purity” of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War. He tried in vain to control Maud’s mother, a whirlwind of charisma and passion given to feverish projects: thirty rescue cats, and a church in the family’s living room where she performed exorcisms.

Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.

Book Review: Secret Identity

It’s 1975 and the comic book industry is struggling, but Carmen Valdez doesn’t care. She’s an assistant at Triumph Comics, which doesn’t have the creative zeal of Marvel nor the buttoned-up efficiency of DC, but it doesn’t matter. Carmen is tantalizingly close to fulfilling her dream of writing a superhero book.

That dream is nearly a reality when one of the Triumph writers enlists her help to create a new character, which they call “The Lethal Lynx,” Triumph's first female hero. But her colleague is acting strangely and asking to keep her involvement a secret. And then he’s found dead, with all of their scripts turned into the publisher without her name. Carmen is desperate to piece together what happened to him, to hang on to her piece of the Lynx, which turns out to be a runaway hit. But that’s complicated by a surprise visitor from her home in Miami, a tenacious cop who is piecing everything together too quickly for Carmen, and the tangled web of secrets and resentments among the passionate eccentrics who write comics for a living.

Book Review: In A Garden Burning Gold

Rhea and her twin brother, Lexos, have spent an eternity using cunning and magic to help rule their small, unstable country. Rhea controls the seasons to show favor to their most loyal stewards with bountiful harvests and short winters, while Lexos keeps the tides strong and impassable to maintain the country’s borders. Reigning over them both is their father, who holds dominion over death, using his most powerful weapon—fear—to keep the people, and his children, in line.

For a hundred years, Rhea and Lexos have been each other’s only ally, defending themselves and their younger siblings against their father’s increasingly unpredictable anger while also trying to keep up the appearance of unity and prosperity within their borders.

Now, with an independence movement gaining ground, other nations jockeying for power, and their father’s iron grip weakening, the twins must take matters into their own hands to keep the world from crashing down around them. But as Rhea and Lexos travel beyond the security of their home to try to save their family, they begin to draw very different conclusions about their father’s style of rule. And if the siblings aren’t careful, they’ll end up facing each other on the battlefield.

Book Review: A Touch Of Light

The dead shall not be mourned or remembered, for death is the enemy and will only drive the Seraph away. The Domain is the bastion of life. The Seraph blesses her faithful with endless years, and they keep death away in hope for Her return, but The Domain nations are not the only ones in Avarin. They have managed only a tenuous peace with the clans to the south, who believe life must be returned to the Earth to keep it whole. But the world of Avarin is changing.

In the clanlands, parts of the Earth seem to be withering away, while in the Domain, a deadly frenzy spreads among the people. It brings darkness to the minds of men and bloodlust to their hearts. This sickness threatens more than just the peace in the realm. It imperils its very heart. Now the people of Avarin must fight to save it. Before death comes for them all.

Book Review: Shadow Avengers

Earth is on course for a devastating invasion from the Dark Dimension, forcing the world’s mightiest heroes into unthinkable alliances, in this heart-stopping new novel in the Marvel: Crisis Protocol series.

Doctor Strange created the Shadow Avengers to save the world from Dormammu, but instead they’re on the verge of dissolution. When sudden weather anomalies across the world correspond with Asgardian heroes emerging from portals ripe with Dormammu’s magical signature, the Shadow Avengers realize the “Master” is making his move. Loki, Venom, and Green Goblin are behind a ceremony plotting to open a portal big enough to encompass Dormammu’s presence. From the Sanctum Sanctorum to the streets of NYC to beautiful Wakanda, the Shadow Avengers must stop Dormammu at any cost – but the Master, in all his cunning wisdom, has something greater in store that will doom the world once and for all.

Book Review: Anvils, Mallets and Dynamite - The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes

"Looney Tunes cartoons", writes celebrated television critic Jaime Weinman, "are the high-water mark of American filmed comedy." Surreal, irreverent, philosophical, and riotously funny, they have maintained their power over audiences for generations and inspired such giants of the cinema as Mel Brooks, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas.

Here, finally, Weinman gives Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety, Sylvester, and the whole cast of animated icons their long-awaited due. With meticulous research, he takes us inside the Warner Bros. studios to unlock the mystery of how an unlikely band of directors and artists working in the shadow of Walt Disney created a wild, visually stunning and oh-so-violent brand of comedy that has never been matched for sheer volume of laughs. The result is an unexpected and fascinating story that matches the Looney Tunes themselves for energy, humor, and ingenuity.

Book Review: Secrets of a River Swimmer

Coming to book-sellers everywhere on February 8th of 2022 is an interesting debut novel by SS Turner, from the Story Plant publishing.

As Freddy gazes at the majestic river gushing past him in the depths of a Scottish winter, he's ready to jump in and end his life. But what happens next is not what Freddy expects. From the moment he enters the river, Freddy starts a journey which is more beautiful, funny, and mysterious than he could have imagined. And through this journey Freddy's story becomes interweaved with a cast of unforgettable characters who are equally lost and in search of answers. Eventually they all unite in their quest for an answer to the biggest question of them all: will the river take them where they want to go?