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Young love and history mingle together in Innocence Derailed by Jane Catherine Rozek. Kate is a freshman in high school when she meets Mark, a junior, at a football game, and they fall for each other instantly. The two grow up together in the 1960s and 1970s, a turbulent backdrop to their tender romance, with the Vietnam war raging on and American culture seemingly changing by the minute, when young love has its own joys and sorrows. The book’s basis on a true story gives the narrative a true feeling of authenticity, unfolding like a rich work of fiction, rather […]

Ivy Gilbert’s Protectors of the Light is a classic fantasy tale with a supernatural twist – charged with protecting positive timelines from corruption and evil, Hannah must deal with foes beyond her comprehension to protect a powerful force for good. While the premise of an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances is a familiar one, Gilbert adds an intriguing element of the bond between twins, leaning towards esoteric spirituality in its focus on our fundamental interconnectedness. The pace of the novel is quick, and while the concepts can be surprisingly deep, they’re delivered with a light touch, making for an […]

A well-written and fast-paced work of young adult fiction, Bully Boy by Tom Wade is a coming-of-age story about a boy who struggles against bullies in a school that tries to sweep incidents of cruelty under the rug. Henry Wilton is being attacked by a group of boys who are unopposed by the students and the teachers; as the situation gets worse and his cries for help go ignored, Henry will need to decide whether to find a way to protect himself or take the fight back to those who mean him harm. The book does an exemplary job of […]

In the Americana-heavy memoir following the author’s rare and debilitating spinal disorder, The Villains Who Snapped My Spine, author A.H. Nazzareno traces back through his life for a thread of bad luck that may have led him to his current condition. Something like the off-kilter writing of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Nog, or Bukowski’s Ham on Rye, the “villains” of the story are laid out between accounts of the hospital procedures and thoughts on American history and experiences from the deserts of Arizona to the old Civil War fields of ghosts and deer. A memoir full of bitter humor, […]

A consistently hard-hitting collection of poetry, Franco Cardiello’s Love is a Mental Illness strikes with precision again and again, drawing from the poet’s own experiences and laying them bare. Cardiello’s style is notably idiosyncratic and may take a poem or two to get used to his enigmatic flow of words, but the reader is soon drawn into the collection’s heart-wrenchingly realistic world of love, hope, trauma, pain, vulnerability, and honesty. A revolutionary work in its creativity and execution, this cross-genre collection works equally well as a work of lyric poetry and a form of self-help for those who see themselves […]