Category: book introduction

The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry

The world building elements in Patti Callahan Henry’s The Secret Book of Flora Lea are as varied and finely wrought as brush strokes on canvas. In the enchanting story’s two timeframes, the reader is taken into a quaint hamlet outside Oxford; pastoral fields beside the river Thames; a stone cottage with flourishing gardens; the fairy tale setting of Whisperwood; an antiquated bookstore in London’s town center; and, at the heart of the unfolding mystery, a secret between sisters evacuated from WWII London that haunts Hazel Linden well into 1960.

Excited to be taking an upwardly mobile position at Sotheby’s, on her last day of employment at Hogan’s Rare Book Shoppe in Bloomsbury, 25-year-old Hazel receives a shocking delivery from America of a recently published book titled, Whisperwood that dredges up the central wound of her past. The associated guilt Hazel harbors is never far from mind. “The dread. The panic. The jealousy of other people having small children at their side . . . Some days, she’d turn to that loss and acknowledge it, and sometimes, for blessed hours, she would forget, but then the shadow would fall long and fast onto her soul and she’d remember this: She lost her sister.”

Examining the book in hand, Hazel’s thoughts turn to 1940s London and “Operation Pied Piper, “a nursery rhyme name for a horror of an idea” that swept 14-year-old Hazel and her five-year-old sister, Flora, to the countryside during an uncelebrated part of England’s history that saw the children of WWII’s London relocated from harm’s way. “Now in the backroom of the small Rare Book Shoppe, the past overcame her. She’d been searching for her sister for twenty years now, ever since she’d disappeared when she was six years old from the hamlet of Binsey, and now Hazel had a clue, something to grasp on to and she was not letting go.”

Hazel’s devotion to discovering the truth behind the disappearance of her sister drives the story, and at its center is a 1940s fairy tale Hazel made up, intending to distract young Flora from the war-torn reality around them. The story grows in magical increments and begins each time, “Not very long ago and not very far away, there was and still is an invisible place right here with us. And if you are born knowing, you will find your way through the woodlands to the simmering doors that lead to the land made just and exactly for you.” The details of the imagined kingdom Hazel named Whisperwood were kept secret between the displaced sisters. When the book with that title falls into Hazel’s hands, so begins an expertly crafted suspenseful mystery.

The two timeframes in The Secret Book of Flora Lea create high stakes motivation as Hazel endeavors to discover what happened to Flora, while securing her own future. By 1960, Hazel has made a neat life for herself, despite her family’s unhealed backstory. Engaged to a young man from a prominent family and on course as a purveyor of rare books, when the past comes to haunt, questions of life’s priorities come to the fore, tipping the scale to the importance of family.

The supporting characters oscillate with fluid strategy throughout the story, as Hazel Linden, against all odds, refuses to accept the final judgement on her sister’s disappearance. Callahan Henry keeps the reader in character invested suspense. When all characters are brought into surprising alignment, Hazel asks herself, “Is this where hope met despair? Where the past rushed to the present? Where joy replaced the agony of the lost?”

Patti Callahan Henry delivers, yet again, an historically layered, dreamy tale that keeps the anglophile fires burning, on the heels of her acclaimed 2021 release, Once Upon a Wardrobe. Her descriptive detail is cinematic. Fourteen-year-old Hazel Linden, newly re-homed at the Aberdeen’s countryside cottage, gazes out the kitchen window in the hamlet of Binsey: “What a place this was, Hazel thought. All the wide green space to run; the rippling of the sky that touched the horizon of trees unobstructed by a cathedral or tall building. It was as if by taking a simple train ride the world had unfolded, presenting itself in long stretches of rolling hills and heather fields.”

A charming story that weaves fairy tale, mystery, and historical importance with a good dose of romance, The Secret Book of Flora Lea will appeal to all ages, as the author unfurls a fantastic story about “an invisible place right here with us.”

Book Review: Artist: Awakening to the Spirit Within by Jocelyn Jones

In Artist: Awakening to the Spirit Within, revered acting coach to the stars Jocelyn Jones combines her personal story, the techniques she’s used for legions of students in her thirty years as an acting teacher, and her tried and true spiritual insights. In her book’s introduction, Jones says, “This book is a humble attempt to wake up the artist in everyone—to connect you to your own source of inspiration and the solutions that live in the ether waiting for you to tune in and listen.”

Artist is a combined memoir and tutorial on the mechanics of acting that lay bare the line between art and artist while making a strong case in suggesting that the well of inspiration an actor draws from is the same source for creating an abundant life. The author shares, “Using the same techniques I give actors, I believe anyone can discover and connect to their own depth of joy… It is the structure you create in life that lays the groundwork for an exciting existence.” Continuing with the idea of structure, Jones says, “The more confident you are in the structural choices you make for your life, the more freedom you’ll feel living in the moment. The more freedom you feel living moment to moment, the more joy you invite into your life.”

The daughter of Tony-award winning, character actor, Henry Jones, Jocelyn Jones grew up in the midst of theatrical royalty and intuited that “Acting is about creating a life where there once was none. It’s about manifesting,” and “We are what we believe. We need to wake up and take responsibility for our thinking.” Equating skills for three-dimensional acting with life-skills, Jones suggests that “thoughts and feelings (inner life) color how the actor does the behavior; after they connect to all that, the words come.”

A bi-coastal youth, due to her parents’ divorce, Jones divided her time between New York City and a beachside community in Los Angeles. Preferring to live as a student of life, as opposed to pursuing scholastic achievement, Jones found divine inspiration in nature, learned to trust synchronicities in affirming her life’s path, and realized that the core of an artist is not so much talent as an acute sensitivity.

The author has much to say on the idea of being present in one’s own life and suggests that time speeds by because most are not actually in it, and that to slow down time, there is merit in being “in the moment” to fully experience “what is.” The author places emphasis on appreciating life’s day to day variables. “Oddly, it is the mundane details of life that bring the truth to both acting and living… When you fall in love with the mundane details of moment-to-moment living, you fall in love with the miracle that is life.”

Interspersed throughout the book are exercises the author uses to teach actors that are equally important techniques to use in life: Meditation, objective observation, and communing with nature to name but a few, and each exercise is designed to help us make decisions about what we want in life, while focusing a keen eye on what we choose to do. Jones recommends asking questions. She recommends finding fulfillment in discovery, and says, “Art is the expression of that which you have personally discovered…It’s the joy of discovery that permeates the expression.”

Artist: Awakening to the Spirit Within is an insightful, accessibly written book that hits all the high notes of art and creativity with an aim toward helping us lead an inspired life. For the actor and the layman, it’s an uplifting, life-affirming book sure to inspire all readers to create and discover the art in their own lives.

For the last 15 years Ms. Jones has served as a confidential “Creative Consultant” on some of Hollywood’s highest-grossing pictures. Known as a secret weapon to industry insiders, she has advised clients on everything from acting, to which projects to choose; to doctoring scripts; to developing their future projects. Her consulting work has been considered an invaluable asset by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

An in-demand Acting Coach for over 25 years, Jocelyn has shepherded hundreds of actors from novice to starring careers at The Jocelyn Jones Acting Studio, where she works with a handpicked group of actors, directors and writers.

She began her teaching career at The Beverly Hills Playhouse, where she taught for Milton Katselas for over 17 years. She has her own studio (The Jocelyn Jones Acting Studio) in West Los Angeles.

Hear Jocelyn Jones Interviewed by the inimitable Grace Sammon of Storytellers Podcast here:

THE STORYTELLERS! Jocelyn Jones remarkable woman, storyteller, acting coach of the stars, author of ARTIST!

Listen https://youtu.be/qc-PQDIJlpo

#ar…

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#bookreview: Be an Angel by Roma Downey

As it appears in the New York Journal of Books:

A beautiful, timeless, and timely collection of inspirational passages to use as a daily touchstone, Roma Downey’s Be an Angel: Devotions to Inspire and Encourage Love and Light Along the Way makes good on its title. It’s lovely in its optimism, succinct in its knowledge, efficient in its compact arrangement, and wonderfully structured for the reader’s convenience.

That actress, producer, and author, Roma Downey is a household name due to her starring role as an angel in the nine-year run of the fantasy/drama television show, Touched by an Angel, which justifies her hand in writing this book; it is her humility to which we’re attracted. In the book’s introduction, the author states her impetus in writing the book: “Over the years, because of my role on TV, people often mistook me for an actual angel.” Realizing the responsibility of her high-profile position, she explains how she rose to the challenge: “Della taught me that if we’re going to be used by God, we need to let go of our expectations and get out of the way.”

The 52 chapters of Be an Angel encourage the book’s use as a daily devotional to ponder in an incremental manner that, once coalesced, will impress as an overall way of being in the world, “bringing light into darkness.”

The chapters are neat and accessible, each beginning with a recognizable, inspirational quote followed compatibly by a short example of Downey’s personal experience to illustrate her point. Her manner is intimate and confessional. Her concerns are universal. Her tales range from anecdotes to transparent first-person narratives. Her settings range from home and hearth to her presence on social media.: “I recently posted this verse to my social media story one morning just after dawn . . . with the rest of the world, I had been watching a terrible international conflict evolve thousands of miles away.”

There are interesting stories in this well-arranged book, and the reader is given a look behind the curtain of a person leading a fascinating life. Downey shares her acquaintances and accomplishments with awe-struck wonder. She roams out into the world to India and returns to us with a message: “In India I encountered a profound oneness with humanity. We all love and lose. We have families and dreams . . . I

learned that we can understand one another’s pain if we open ourselves to it.”

Covering such subjects as hope, faith, gratitude, forgiveness, and grace, Downey suggests with a light hand that the beginning of enduring change might all start with you: “I started looking at what irks me considering what I’d want changed then doing for someone else what I’d want done.” Downey arrives at a conclusion: “We can’t change everything, but we can work toward peace when we change ourselves . . . if we don’t tend to what’s inside, we simply don’t have the bandwidth to be the change on a grander scale.”

Though anchored in Christian doctrine, Be an Angel transcends principle to embrace a larger concept of God. “It’s so essential in our frenetic world to step aside and be with God in stillness.” The author finds God in nature, “Often, I use the shift between activities to experience His presence in nature . . . I return to being not merely doing one more thing.”

The arrangement of this book is user friendly. Be an Angel is both an owner’s manual and a guide.  Beneath each of the 14 general categories, there are three companion stories illustrating Downey’s subject in exemplary form. At the end of each essay is a prompt for the reader’s consideration written as a reflection, and the reader is invited to put what they’ve read into practice.

For dreamers and students, thinkers and searchers, Roma Downey’s Be an Angel is a collection of spellbinding essays that reads like a devotional. Its tone is enlightening and encouraging. It’s a beautiful book you’ll want to keep at your bedside and give to your family and friends.  

Claire Fullerton is a staff reviewer at New York Journal of Books.

Roma Burnett OBE is an actress from Derry, Northern Ireland. For nine seasons she played Monica the angel in the CBS television series Touched by an Angel. She produced the mini-series The Bible for the History Channel and also appeared in it as Mary, mother of Jesus. She has performed on stage with the Abbey Theatre, The National Theatre of Ireland, and has appeared both on and off Broadway. She played the leading role of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the Emmy award-winning miniseries A Woman Named Jackie for NBC.

Book Review! New Release!

My Last Innocent Year by debut author Daisy Alpert Florin, is an intimate, insightful novel; a 21-year-old’s first-person account depicting her last semester at small town Wilder College in 1998 New Hampshire. The coming-of-age story concerns a fish-out-of-water New Yorker named Isabel Rosen, who’s finding her footing in an elite liberal arts environment where she hopes to become a writer.

As an only child, four years after her unconventional mother’s death, Isabel remains devoted to her hard-working father who owns and operates Rosen’s Appetizing Store in the Jewish neighborhood in which she was raised. Her childhood’s insular world was comprised of, “Orchard Street, Essex Street, Rivington, Delancey, streets, where Jewish immigrants had settled at the turn of the century, dragging their history and sadness behind them.”

As she navigates the road to adulthood on the grounds of Wilder College, Isabel is haunted by the memory of her parents’ tenuous marriage. They’d met when the 25-year-old Vivian walked into Rosen’s Appetizing, when Abe Rosen was 40. Their marriage seemed to be a union of opposites. “My parents’ marriage had always been a mystery to me,” Isabel says. In contemplating her deceased mother, she explains, “My mother was an artist, and her art always came first. . . . She seemed to be searching for something in her work, a life beyond Rosen’s Appetizing and the Lower East Side. Escape. She wouldn’t have been the first artist looking for that.”

The story begins with an ambiguous, sexual experience between Isabel and Zev Neman, an Israeli student at Wilder who might have been too forceful—Isabel lacks the experience to discern. When she recounts the episode to one of her roommates, Debra Moskowitz—a budding, subversive activist—events are set in motion by Debra to get Zev Neman back, no matter the questionable tactics. Isabel is tolerant of Debra when she discovers Debra suffers from episodic depression. Isabel realizes, “I’d seen Debra at her worst, and I’ve found that is often what binds women together. Men admire each other when they are at their best, but women enjoy meeting each other in pits of despair.”

Joanna Maxwell has a troubled marriage. A professor of English studies, she’s married to unstable professor Tom Fisher, with whom she shares a young child named Igraine. Due to their upending divorce proceedings, Joanna forfeits teaching the creative writing class Isabel is scheduled to take to last minute substitute, Professor Conneely. Isabel later reflects, “Connelly was older, married, my professor—there were rules about these things. Later, I would understand there were not rules about these things and would run from inconvenient attraction to a colleagues’ or a friend’s boyfriend, as quickly as possible.”

Professor Connelly was once a celebrated poet. Now in his early 40s, he writes a column in a small-town newspaper and never discusses his failed attempt at writing a novel. Good looking in an unselfconscious way, Isabel attends his writing class and says in hindsight, “I’d had crushes before and I would have them again, but there was something different about this.” “There is something that passed between two people when there was a mutual attraction, a frisson.”

When the taboo attraction between Isabel and Professor Connelly transcends the classroom, parallel lines are drawn with the public scandal between Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton, occurring in the same timeframe, and unsettling Isabel with fear of an unequal power balance. Professor Connelly encourages Isabel to be clear about what she wants, so “there are no misunderstandings.” In hindsight, Isabel says, “I understood well enough what had happened, understood too why he had asked me, back at the beginning of things . . . He had seen the end embedded in the beginning in a way I hadn’t. It was how adults behaved, I knew now, and I would never again not see the world in the same way.”

My Last Innocent Year is written with confessional intimacy verging on stream-of-consciousness storytelling. It’s softly delivered coming-of-age themes pertain to such questions as individuality versus conformity; desire versus boundaries; and passion versus practicality along the road of growing into one’s own. A tale to please YA readers and well beyond, it’s a poignant story that doesn’t shy from sharp edges, universal, timeless, and timely.

Claire Fullerton’s most recent novels are Little Tea and multiple award winner, Mourning Dove. Honors include the Independent Book Publishers Book Award Silver Medal for Regional Fiction, the Reader’s Favorite for Southern Fiction Bronze Medal and various other literary awards.

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Book Review: Reef Road by Deborah Goodrich Royce

My Book Review, as it appears in the New York Journal of Books:

Author Deborah Goodrich Royce’s psychological thriller Reef Road hits the high notes of suspense with breathtaking sleight of hand, building as it unfolds in alternating chapters written in two tenses like puzzle pieces that keep the reader on their toes.

The story is one-part true crime detective novel that reads like creative nonfiction concerning a decades’ old unsolved murder, and one-part literary thriller involving a woman enmeshed in a self-created chain of events now careening out of hand. Reef Road seamlessly weaves two storylines while suspensefully delaying their linkage, oscillating with a slow burn between what is perceived at face value and what really happened.

The story opens in media res, under the prologue’s heading The Wife. It is May 2020, in the advent of Covid-19’s lockdown, when two boys find a disembodied hand washed up on Palm Beach, Florida’s sand. When the boys alert the authorities, so begins Reef Road’s harrowing backstory that leads to that severed hand.

An unspecified voice under the heading A Writer’s Thoughts narrates intermittingly throughout Reef Road. The writer researches the 1948 Pittsburg death of 12-year-old Noelle Huber, whose murder to date remains unsolved. Now living abjectly alone in Palm Beach with an aged dog named Cordie, the decidedly peculiar writer has personal interest in the case and reports, “I grew up under the shadow of a dead girl—a girl I had never met, whose family had not heard of me, a family I would not know if I passed them on the street, nor would they, in turn, know me.” The weight of the dead girl’s shadow is due to the writer’s neurotic mother, once a close, childhood friend of Noelle Huber’s, who remained indelibly scarred by her murder in such a way that made her exceedingly nervous and cast a pall on the writer’s childhood.

Investigating decades’ old evidence, the writer’s feelings are complicated by residual resentment associated with the case. In speaking of the damage incurred from growing up with her paranoid mother in a small town on the outskirts of Pittsburg, the writer says, “My mother’s imprint of her friend’s murder was that of the twelve-year-old child she’d been at the time. A large part of her was frozen in 1948.”

In addressing what it was like to grow up with a damaged mother, the writer says, “I didn’t want to have that kind of mother. I did not want to be that kid. I did not want to come from the family I did, with some string attaching us all to a dead girl.” In explaining what clearly becomes an unhealthy obsession with Noelle Huber’s murder, the writer says, “A single act of violence does not end. Noelle Grace Huber was murdered seventy-two years ago this year, but, for me—for others like me—it never ends.”

Linda Alonzo does not speak Spanish. Married to a prosperous Argentinian named Miguel Alonzo, she is the mother of two young children who grew up in Pittsburgh and now lives in the tony section of Palm Beach’s Reef Road. The marriage is difficult, and with regard to Miguel, “Linda increasingly chafed under the yoke of his control.” Yet the perks of the marriage outweigh the obvious. “Linda and Miguel were walking the edge, all right. The edge of what, precisely, she did not know.”

Diego Alonzo is presumed dead. The elder brother of Miguel, his last known whereabouts was in the mountains of Bolivia decades prior, after he fled another fight with his mother, before all lines of communication went dead. In the dark of night, the mysterious Diego manifests at the Alonzo’s Reef Road front door, and ushers in familial upheaval complicated by the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic, making his visit protracted, adding chaos to Linda and Miguel’s fragile marriage, and leading to an inciting incident in the tumultuous story: “At eleven a.m. on a Sunday morning, Linda picked up the phone to call the police and report her family missing. Why she had not called the cops, the day it had actually happened was an act of omission that would come back to haunt her.”  

The exciting, page-turning intelligence of Reef Road cannot be overstated. The clever story will please lovers of mystery, crime, and thriller genres. Author Deborah Goodrich Royce handles the balance of Reef Road’s off-kilter story with a magnificent, firm grip. The novel is rife with uncanny connections and flawed main characters with hidden agendas. It’s tense with secondary characters, whose impacts are stunning, as events ricochet in a series of strange chain-reactions sprung from perfectly timed twists you’ll never see coming.  

Meet the Author: Deborah Goodrich Royce

Deborah Goodrich Royce’s literary thrillers examine puzzles of identity. Finding Mrs. Ford and Ruby Falls will be joined by Reef Road in January 2023.

Deborah began her career as an actress, starring as Silver Kane, sister of the legendary Erica Kane (played by Susan Lucci) on the ABC soap, All My Children. She went on to star in feature films such as April Fool’s Day and Just One of the Guys, TV movies such as Return to Peyton Place and The Deliberate Stranger, and series such as Beverly Hills 90210 and 21 Jump Street.

After the birth of her daughters, she moved with her family to Paris and worked as a reader for le Studio Canal Plus. In the 1990’s, Deborah was the story editor at Miramax Films in New York. There, she oversaw readers, manuscript acquisitions, and script development, editing such notable screenplays as Emma by Doug McGrath, and early versions of Chicago and A Wrinkle in Time.

With writing partner, Mitch Giannunzio, Deborah won a grant from the Massachusetts Arts Council in 2002 to develop and workshop their original screenplay, Susan Taft Has Run Amok.

With her husband, noted small-cap investor, Chuck Royce, Deborah restored the 1939 Avon Theatre in Stamford, CT. Under her leadership, the Avon hosts an ongoing series of film luminaries, most recently, Mira Nair, Richard Gere and Chloe Sevigny. The late Gene Wilder, a longstanding advisory board member of the Avon, was an early advocate for Deborah’s writing.

Deborah and Chuck have restored several hotels (Ocean House, Deer Mountain Inn, Weekapaug Inn, and The Margin Street Inn), a bookstore (The Savoy in Westerly, RI), and numerous other Main Street buildings in Westerly, RI and Tannersville, NY.

Deborah serves on the governing boards of the New York Botanical Garden, the Greenwich Historical Society, and the PRASAD Project and the advisory boards of the American Film Institute, the Greenwich International Film Festival, the Preservation Society of Newport County, and the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach. She is a former trustee of the YWCA of Greenwich and the Garden Conservancy.

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Bryson City Recipes by Renea Winchester is Here!

It’s here! The recipe book that acts as a companion to Renea Winchester’s celebrated novel, Outbound Train, and first published in France is now available in the US! Bryson City Recipes was inspired by the authentic characters in the Appalachian set Outbound Train, and the classic, Southern recipes are amazingly easy to follow! From Appalachian Spiced Tea to Macaroni and Cheese with Tomatoes, you’ll delight in this recipe book!

In 1976, memories from a night near the railroad tracks sixteen years earlier haunt Barbara Parker. She wrestles with past demons every night, then wakes to the train’s five-thirty whistle. Exhausted and dreading the day, she keeps her hands busy working in Bryson City’s textile plant, known as the “blue jean plant,” all the while worrying about her teenage daughter, Carole Anne. The whistle of the train, the hum of those machines, and the struggle to survive drives Barbara. When an unexpected layoff creates a financial emergency, the desperate pressure of poverty is overwhelming.
Unbeknownst to Barbara, Carole Anne sneaks out at night to walk the tracks so she can work at Hubert’s Bar. She’s hoarding money with plans to drive her mother’s rusty, unused Oldsmobile out of Bryson City, and never return. She only needs one opportunity … if she can just find it.
When Carole Anne goes missing, Barbara finds herself at a crossroad—she must put aside old memories and past hurts to rely on a classmate for help finding her daughter. But this is the same man she blames for the incident years ago. Is she strong enough—or desperate enough—to do anything to keep her daughter safe?
In Outbound Train, the Parker women struggle to make frayed ends meet in a town where they never quite do … at least, not without expert weaving and a bit of brute force.

Renea Winchester

Renea was born and raised in Bryson City, North Carolina. She began her writing career in Georgia where she penned several non-fiction works including Farming, Friends & Fried Bologna Sandwiches (Mercer University Press) which was nominated for the prestigious SIBA award, earned Renea a nomination for Georgia Author of the Year, and received the endorsement from The Pulpwood Queens, the largest book club in the country. After winning the Wilma Dykeman Award for Essay and the Appalachian Writer’s Award, Renea focused on transitioning to fiction.

Renea has served on the Atlanta Writers Board, Georgia Writers Association, and judges multiple literary awards. In April 2020, Firefly Southern Fiction released Outbound Train. Set in her hometown of Bryson City, North Carolina, in 1976, Outbound Train is a triumphant story of perseverance and hope despite the harshness of poverty.

Renea is passionate about literacy, Appalachian Heritage, preserving rare seeds, cultivating endangered plants and meeting new friends.

Book Release: Scare Your Soul by Scott Simon

Most books are meant to be read.
This one is meant to be lived.

It’s not easy to be courageous. Feelings of fear and uncertainty often stop us dead in our tracks. But what if you had the courage to take action anyway? What changes would you make to transform your current reality into the life of your dreams?

Here’s the good news — like a muscle, courage grows stronger the more you exercise it. And Scare Your Soul will not only teach you how to exercise courage but will guide you in taking small, boundary-pushing actions to expand your comfort zone (so that you feel less fear and more confidence with each action).

By combining research on positive psychology with real-life stories of Scare Your Soul participants, international thought leader and happiness entrepreneur Scott Simon challenges you to confront your limiting beliefs. With writing prompts, activities, and real-world challenges, Scare Your Soul is an interactive roadmap to building bravery.

Scare Your Soul teaches you that the greatest antidote to much of what ails you in your life isn’t achievement, it’s action. So if you crave an extraordinary life but feel like you don’t know how to take “extra” ordinary action, this book is for you.

It’s time to Scare Your Soul.


Editorial Reviews

Review

“This is an empowering and inspiring book! If you want to lead the life you’re meant to lead, this is the compass you ought to take along.”―Tal Ben-Shahar, author of international bestsellers Happier and Being Happy

“In a world that feels so dark and full of fear, this book is a lantern for the courageous way forward.”―Jennifer Pastiloff, best-selling author of On Being Human

“I used to think being fearless was enough, until I read this book. It’s a game-changer.”―Turney Duff, author of the New York Times bestseller The Buy Side

“For any wallflowers desiring to encompass boldness—this is for you.”―Janne Robinson, author and poet –This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About the Author

Scott Simon is a happiness entrepreneur and founder of Scare Your Soul. He is dedicated to creating, curating, and leading opportunities for people around the world to be happier and more courageous. Scott founded the Scare Your Soul organization in 2015, organically growing it from one Facebook post to a global movement with sixty volunteer ambassadors worldwide. He has presented to groups around the world, appeared widely on TV and podcasts, given a TEDx Talk, and brought his passion for courage to retreats, a life coaching practice, and mindfulness meditations in person and online.

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Foster by Claire Keegan

In emotionally evocative, simplistic language, author Claire Keegan tells the story of a young girl sent to live with rural Irish relatives, while her over-burdened mother is due to have yet another baby. First-time experiences and awkward adjustments give the tentative girl her first taste of self-worth and belonging to a childless couple now aching to share their heart. A story profound in tacit nuance and cultural identity, the poignant ending resonates with an appropriateness both heart-rending and satisfying.

      Claire Keegan is an Irish writer known for her award-winning short stories. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, and The Paris Review; and translated into 20 languages.

An international bestseller and one of The Times’ “Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century,” Claire Keegan’s piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US

Book Review: The Presence of Absence by Simon Van Booy

The Presence of Absence

Image of The Presence of Absence

Author: Simon Van Booy

Buy on Amazon

Reviewed by: 

Claire Fullerton for The New York Journal of Books

Max Little is dying and wants to leave behind something of his life. A young writer of novels, novellas, and short stories, Max grew up in Wales, is of Pakistani descent, and now reclines in a New York hospital bed, in full acceptance of his terminal illness.

Not wanting to beg the reader’s pity, Max does what he does best by writing, and begins his straightforward narrative by marveling at the magic between reader and writer: “You do realize that by turning the page you’ve decided to follow a complete stranger down a possibly meaningless path?” he says. “Stories lead us behind the curtain of somebody else’s life into the deepest chambers of our own.” Max considers that by the time the reader puts eyes to his words, he, himself, might be absent. “None of that matters,” he assures, “because our lives are braided here and now by this sentence.” Seemingly delighted to embellish his point, Max continues, “For instance, I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us. I might even be dead. Yet here I am.”

In Simon Van Booy’s extraordinary novel, The Presence of Absence, each well-wrought sentence builds upon the next, taking us deeper into Max Little’s life with staggering lucidity. The first part of the story is constructed in descending numerical chapters that decline with a sense of fatalism as the narrator reconstructs his life’s highpoints interspersed with uncanny, existential observations on the business of life, death, and dying. Max confesses his mind’s innerworkings with adroit ease. “Do people ever walk around their homes, wondering which room they will die in? Whether it will be a Wednesday night or Saturday morning at the table with toast and coffee?”  And “What would happen to things like knives and forks once I was gone. Would my wife keep them?”

At the center of Max Little’s concern is his wife, Hadley, and the reader is taken to their first meeting even as Max shares his ruminations on how to best tell Hadley he is dying. Pondering his plight alone on a beach, he arrives at a profound spiritual truth, when he comes to consider himself in the third person. Max posits, “When you nurture the ability to witness your life in the third person, in extremis, or through prayer or meditation, there is an unavoidable shift in consciousness as you realize that who you are is not simply how you feel—but a presence beyond desire of any sort.”

Jeremy Abrams’s mother is dying. He comes into Max’s life through the coincidence of their shared New York therapist. The men bond over the similarities in their life circumstances, and as their friendship grows, it is Jeremy who suggests that Max begin keeping the journal the reader now holds in their hands. Max writes, “You might wonder what dying people look forward to. Being visited, yes, but also being left alone—though that takes a lot of practice, managing thoughts . . . I also look forward to reassuring people it’s okay this is happening.”

In The Presence of Absence, Part Two is theatrically introduced as a quick, black scene change. The section brilliantly holds the subheading, Sotto Voce. The third person story moves forward eight years in time, and fittingly alternates between breathtaking poetry, poignant one-liners, and what miraculously transpires from the connections formed in Max Little’s absence. An insight comes at the hands of one such connection, who stands at a sink washing cups in a basin and thinks, “Like the cups draining on a tea towel, absence has a practical value in how it shapes presence.”

A mind-bending, affecting story that breaks the heart open with startling clarity, this book makes the reader want to take pen in hand to underline The Presence of Absences’ passages. That author Simon Van Booy has taken a universal subject most prefer to shy away from and creatively crafted an accessible work of high art is an unparalleled literary feat. The deft use of language in this tour de force fulfills its own mission when Van Booy summarizes, “Language is a map leading to a place not on the map.”   

Simon Van Booy

Simon Van Booy is the award-winning and best-selling author of nine books of fiction, and three anthologies of philosophy.

He has written for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the New York Post, NPR, Poets & Writers, and the BBC. His books have been translated into many languages and optioned for film. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter. In 2013, he founded Writers for Children, a project which helps young people build confidence in their storytelling abilities through annual awards.

Beasts Of The Earth by James Wade

Beasts of the Earth

Image of Beasts of the Earth

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Reviewed by: 

Claire Fullerton for The New York Journal of Books

We know from the start LeBlanc is wounded, that his limping spirit is tantamount to the spare, prison-like furnishings of the low-ceilinged duplex he’s rented on the shanty side of town for the past 20 years, that his economic speech has little to do with still waters running deep, that it’s born of a wariness from what he’s hiding.

It is the economic downturn of 1987 in Coral County, Texas, where thirty-something Harlan LeBlanc works alongside the small crew of Carter Hills High School’s Grounds and Maintenance Department, and partakes of a cursory friendship with a troubled, young co-worker named Gene Thomas. A man of habit gripping to a rote, daily schedule, LeBlanc tends the high school’s football field with each step carefully taken, in a manner telling of his mind frame. “LeBlanc reveled in such undertakings—the opportunity to create boundaries, to ensure the proper area for the rules to be applied. There was an element of control, an upholding of justice, that brought peace

to his mind.”  

It is 1965 in the bayou of Assumption Parrish, Louisiana, and 13-year-old Michael Fischer’s hardscrabble world grows harder when his regionally shunned, depraved criminal father is released from prison. “A boy should be happy when his father returns, but Michael was not happy. He had memories of Munday—memories distorted by time and hearsay—and though there existed still a longing for the comfort and protection of a father, dread guided the boy.” Used to being the man of the house for his morbidly obese mother and younger sister, Michael is in fear when his hard-drinking father is home, and only breathes easy when he habitually disappears.

After home circumstances take an unspeakable, dark turn at the hands of his father, Michael flees to the woods, where he’s met with more danger still, until he’s found by a dying recluse of a poet named Remus, who takes the injured Michael to his cabin, and begins the long road to repairing the traumatized, now displaced, youth.

Over time, the strangers warm to an alliance, and Michael “played at having a father, and Remus played at being one. But the past is not a thing to sit still, and there are no new beginnings. The world itself was begun only once. And since that beginning its every rotation has depended on the one before—each circumstance born from the last.”

Cassie Harper has broken Gene Thomas’s heart. A student at Carter Hills High, there is

more to her than meets the eye. When Cassie is found murdered on school grounds, it rocks the entire community. When circumstantial evidence comes to include Gene Thomas, it strikes LeBlanc too close to home, casting aspersions on his character, and giving rise to his secret, haunted past.  

Author James Wade treads a tight wire between Beasts of the Earth’s dual storylines. He deftly keeps the reader guessing about common ground throughout the tumult of the three-part story. The tone is shadowy and off-kilter, with elements of gothic-tinged realism vested upon an innocent heart, and a mind in peril of becoming unhinged.

There is much to keep the reader invested. Wade’s pitch-perfect, personality-driven dialogue sings in the voice of life, and his ability to meld existential thought, situational metaphor, and cinematic setting is a full-bodied experience: As Harlan LeBlanc sets out to right a wrong from the past, “He walked along the river in the morning light and watched it widen and grow as it approached Port Neches and then on to the Gulf of Mexico, and he wondered if the river might hold itself or some piece of itself out there in all that ocean—might cling at some molecular level to whatever made it a river in the first place, salt or no salt. But he knew the answer and knew the difficulty in fighting back against an ever-growing tide.”

Beasts of the Earth satisfies the discerning reader. Its balanced, oscillating chapters are played out in riveting complete scenes that take you deeper into the gritty backstory of Harlan LeBlanc, a man you care about, and somehow understand from what he’s not saying, while the town around him holds him in suspicion and his moral compass covertly guides him to truth and justice sought at a personal cost.

A soul-deep exploration of a wounded man in crisis, James Wade’s Beasts of the Earth follows his two widely acclaimed novels, All Things Left Wild, and River, Sing Out, and secures his position as an author of extraordinary merit.  

Author James Wade

James Wade lives and writes in the Texas Hill Country with his wife and daughter. He is the author of River, Sing Out and All Things Left Wild, a winner of the prestigious MPIBA Reading the West Award for Debut Fiction, and a recipient of the Spur Award for Best Historical Novel from the Western Writers of America. His third novel, Beasts of the Earth, is now available from Blackstone Publishing.