Four Exciting Reads to Jump-Start Fall
(NewsUSA)
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The Poisoned Fruit by Julie Colacchio
For centuries, Mages have been imprisoned by America. Now, America Needs Magic.
When Topaz Tenkiller is finally released, the Cold War is escalating, Prince is singing "When Doves Cry," and addiction is destroying her brother. The gifted Mage is assigned to a UN security detail. Topaz flourishes with freedom, food, and friends. She enjoys security work and sends money home to help her brother. Topaz finds a secret lab with mutilated Mage corpses and discovers that scientists are harvesting magic. Will she stay silent and save her brother or expose America's brutality to save her people?
Says author Alison Levy, "Colacchio’s book is a rich, emotional journey...alternately gut-wrenching and empowering. Once you take a step into this story, you’ll feel compelled to finish it in one sitting!” Purchase at https://bit.ly/3VPltiV.
Anela’s Club by D.K. Yamashiro
A coming-of-age story about rising above tragedy and learning to view life through a lens of hope and love.
When Anela Lee's brother, Jake, dies on the football field, her family is shattered. Her parents never wanted her, and without her biggest cheerleader, she withdraws into her pain and insecurities. Even school, once a refuge, means nothing anymore. Only one teacher refuses to give up on her, pushing her to enter an essay contest that gives her a shot at Harvard. Still, self-doubt holds Anela back.
Then a senator teaches her about the many world leaders who have used their childhood trauma to do great things. The hope that Anela can turn her pain into something beautiful gives her back her spark and encourages her to enter the contest. But does she have the confidence to share her essay in front of an audience? Purchase at https://bit.ly/44YATUc.
The Last Tale of Norah Bow by J.P. White
In 1926, during Prohibition, Vital Bow is abducted at gunpoint during dinner at the family cottage in Rye Beach, Ohio. His intrepid fourteen-year-old daughter, Norah Bow, discovers her father’ s involvement in a rum-running gang operating on Lake Erie and determines to sail north to rescue him. En route, Norah rescues Ruby Francoeur, an enigmatic woman of easy virtue who conceals secrets of her own.
With Ruby as crew, Norah enters an island-and-city world of eccentric and monstrous characters who test her resolve, strength, and knowledge as both a young woman and a skipper. Norah Bow is a coming-of-age story told by an elder Norah, a tale filled with characters steeped in betrayal, remorse, and a fierce desire for more lives. Norah Bow is a story about family secrets, self-reliance, and the complicated nature of memory itself. Purchase at https://bit.ly/3VG2SEc.
Midnight Rider by Quinn Miller
Rikki is generally content with his life and the world in which he lives. That is until the day a mysterious big cat emerges from living underground and reveals the hideous truth about Rikki’s society.
While Rikki trains his fire-breathing horse for a community event, the confused teenager must navigate a dark path of twisting and evolving morals. When the previously helpful cat suddenly becomes a violent predator, Rikki must either act in line with his own morals or witness his town succumb to the wrath of the beast.
Midnight Rider is the debut novel from a new YA fantasy writer. The author is an all-around intellectual who loves philosophy, drawing, and playing musical instruments in addition to writing--and hardly has time for the hobbies, there are so many of them! Purchase at https://bit.ly/4exgUAF.
- Have you ever played a game where you see a person, couple, or group and begin to make a story around them? It’s a great way to meet spies, murderers, vagabonds, lovers, and thieves. The running dialogue of this game is best imagined with your date or significant other. What you learn about your accomplice is always surprising as the plot thickens.
Trozzolo writes conversationally as if the reader is accompanying the explorer on the journey. Each vignette is a story the explorer imagines based on the person’s appearance, behavior, and interactions with others. Through these stories, the reader is given a glimpse into the lives of small-town Americans and the daily routines that make up their lives. The stories are engaging, thought-provoking, and often surprising. Each poem is introduced by a short reflection from the explorer, commenting on what they learned from the experience.
- For Donald Denihan, it was supposed to be the fishing trip of a lifetime. Instead, it ended up nearly costing him his life in a hard bargain he made with the sea.
Denihan’s story is documented in riveting detail in his new book HARD BARGAIN (Stillwater River Publications). The book is best described as part gripping true adventure story and part self-reflection on how being on the doorstep of death helped him get a better grasp on what is really important in life.
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When I Stop Fighting by Daryl Dittmer
Peach Tea Smash by Laura Childs
Vermilion Harvest by Reenita M. Hora
500 Ways to Eat Like a Local by Jon Douglas
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Map of My Escape by Cheryl L. Reed
Army Brat by Laura Gutman
Lucianity by John Byer
Childless Mother by Tracy Mayo
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May Day by Jess Lourey
The Bucharest Legacy by William Maz
A Grain of Hope by Melissa Cole
On Being Human by Ghazala Alam
- “After many years working on intelligence and war issues, I now believe we’re about to have a worldwide nuclear war. We and nearly all life will probably soon be incinerated in a superheated radioactive dust that chokes the atmosphere for decades and turns most of the Earth to ice. Billions of us will die instantly, the rest in slow agony from radiation, burns and hunger.”
Bond is a former war journalist, intelligence expert, U.S. Senate candidate, diplomat, investment banker, and international energy company CEO. He is also considered an expert on world crude supply and oil refining.
- It’s stunning to realize that only 10 states make birth records available to American-born adoptees and their biological parents. For adult adoptees born in the 20th century era of closed adoptions, this presents a painful obstacle to discovering their origins and ending the agonizing hunger to know their own identity.
ABANDONED AT BIRTH illuminates the darker side of adoption, and what it takes to heal. “I hope it starts conversations about the rights of those given away, loss and grief in adoption, the biology of belonging and identity, and why love is not always enough to extinguish the pain,” Sherlund says.
- “I don’t know which is worse: disease of the human body or disease of humanity.”
The author has a unique background in medicine. After graduating from medical school, he switched from clinical medicine to health technology assessment, analyzing new medical tests and treatments in a career spanning over 15 years.
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