#BookReview: Mermaid Tears by Susan L Read

Synopsis: There's no such thing as normal. 

Sarah has always been a hard-working student, even if she has felt her grades don't reflect her efforts. She is a good friend, a kind daughter, and she loves being creative. But lately she is struggling with school and friendships, and nothing brings her much joy. Her family doesn't seem to understand what's happening, and neither does Sarah. Everyone keeps telling her to do better, and Sarah is trying her hardest, but when her first year of middle school begins, what was supposed to be a fresh start turns into a disaster that quickly spirals out of control. Sarah, who can't understand why she is feeling this way, begins to seriously wonder if the world would be better off if she was no longer alive. Sarah has always felt a connection with mermaids, and she now wishes she was a mermaid herself, so she could just slip under the ocean and swim away, disappearing from everyone's lives forever.

Finally, Sarah reaches her breaking point, and in desperation, seeks help from a trusted teacher. Everyone in Sarah's life reaches in to pull her from her own drowning emotions, and with the help of her family, friends, teachers, and mental health professionals, Sarah learns there is a name for what she is feeling. She develops tools, not only for coping, but for thriving. In learning about her condition and gaining the support she needs for managing it, she begins the long journey back to her life.

Rewarding, memorable, and deeply evocative, this gorgeously written story about a girl who learns to navigate the choppy and scary waters of her mental health, is nothing short of remarkable.

#BookTour: Babe in the Woods by Yvonne Wakefield @rabtbooktours #Giveaway

Biography and Memoir, Adventure

Date Published: October 26, 2021

Publisher: Pepin Enterprises

At age eighteen, Yvonne set out to build a home from trees on 80 acres she bought on an Oregon mountainside. In 1975, log by log she creates a cabin and heals from an orphaned past, finding a new family in the forest, and with people in a valley named John Day.

Babe in the Woods: Self Portrait is the second in a three-book series. It chronicles a span in Yvonne's four decades long relationship with her log cabin and the people she meets in the valley. The book continues Yvonne's story of learning to live in the wilderness within and outside of herself. It is also a story of rogue bears, building a bear-proof log studio, a young artist's development, and the trials and triumph of finding oneself, alone in the backwoods.

#BookReview: The Sorting Room by Michael Rose

Synopsis: In Prohibition-era New York City, Eunice Ritter, an indomitable ten-year-old girl, finds work in a sweat shop—an industrial laundry—after impairing her older brother with a blow to the head in a sibling tussle. When the diminutive girl first enters the sorting room, she encounters a giant, the largest human being she has ever seen. 

Gussie, a powerful, hard-working Black woman, soon becomes her mentor and sole friend. Eunice is entrapped in the laundry’s sorting room by the Great Depression, sentenced to bring her low wages home to her alcoholic parents as penance for her childhood mistake. Then, on her sixteenth birthday, Eunice becomes pregnant and her drunken father demands the culprit marry his daughter, trapping her anew—this time in a loveless marriage, along with a child she never wanted. Within a couple of years, Eunice makes a grave error and settles into a lonely life of drudgery that she views as her own doing. Decades pass in virtual solitude before her secret history is revealed to those from whom she has withheld her love.

An epic family saga, The Sorting Room is a captivating tale of a woman’s struggle and perseverance in faint hopes of reconciliation, if not redemption. 

#BookReview: The Passing Storm by Christine Nolfi

Synopsis: A gripping, openhearted novel about family, reconciliation, and bringing closure to the secrets of the past.

Early into the tempestuous decade of her thirties, Rae Langdon struggles to work through a grief she never anticipated. With her father, Connor, she tends to their Ohio farm, a forty-acre spread that itself has enjoyed better days. As memories sweep through her, some too precious to bear, Rae gives shelter from a brutal winter to a teenager named Quinn Galecki.

Quinn has been thrown out by his parents, a couple too troubled to help steer the misunderstood boy through his own losses. Now Quinn has found a temporary home with the Langdons—and an unexpected kinship, because Rae, Quinn, and Connor share a past and understand one another’s pain. But its depths—and all its revelations and secrets—have yet to come to light. To finally move forward, Rae must confront them and also fight for Quinn, whose parents have other plans in mind for their son.

With forgiveness, love, and the spring thaw, there might be hope for a new season—a second chance Rae believed in her heart was gone forever. 

#BookReview: Empty Threat (The Black Pages #1) by Danny Bell

Synopsis: Book one of The Black Pages

Elana Black has the power to make herself fictional. But when she decides to start saving all the people in books and TV shows who die just for the sake of advancing the plot, she quickly learns that she's not the only one with her powers.

All Elana wants to do is save people. But these others don't want the stories to change, and they'll do everything they can to stop her. 

If you had the power to change fate... to create a happy ending where there wasn't one before... would you do it if it meant risking your own?

#BookReview: OtherLife by Lynette DeVries

Synopsis: When 16-year-old Lucy McGowen goes under sedation for a routine dental procedure, she hopes to come out of it free of pain. Instead, she wakes up in an alternate version of her life―a reality in which her secret hobby is out in the open, her own parents feel like strangers, and her boyfriend doesn’t even know her name. Navigating her new world is hard enough, but then Lucy begins getting cryptic messages from a mysterious sender with unfinished business. She has also acquired a new habit―sleepwalking―and with each episode, she finds herself in increasingly bizarre situations. She doesn’t know if luck has landed her in this revamped version of reality―or if she was somehow chosen―but one thing is clear: she must uncover the truth about how it’s all connected before she loses herself completely. Will Lucy find a way back to her other life . . . or will she create a new world that she can truly call her own?

#BookReview: Blood Crescent (Divine #1) by Stevie McCoy

Synopsis: A missing mother. A magical birthright. Can she uncover the secrets of her family legacy before the bloodline runs dry?  

My name is Chrystal Dylan, and I was born with the worst super power ever, a lightning rod for supernatural energy that attracts vampires like cat nip to feed from. Nothing like being an all you can eat buffet, until one decided to “save” me from that fate by triggering my transition into the very thing killing me.

Considering that was the least of my problems, I have a council looking to eliminate all anomalies threatening to expose them to the human world, it just so happens that I’m one of them, and so is my best friend Victor. I won’t go down without some answers, including what they did with my mom.

Blood Crescent is the first novel in the exhilarating Divine Series of YA paranormal fantasies. If you like hidden magical realms, fresh new takes on vampire lore, and heartfelt journeys of self-discovery, then you’ll love Stevie McCoy’s spellbinding coming-of-age tale.