by Jonathan Chalstrey Rating: *** Heart  follows the adventures of Hernando Bustamante, a sixteenth-century surgeon. Apprenticed at sixteen to the renowned Doctor Bartolo in Seville, he is forced to flee to Italy by the Spanish Inquisition, where he becomes a professor of medicine at Bologna University. But when Hernando falls in love with Euphemia, a nun, he is expelled from Bologna and takes up a position as an assistant surgeon in Padua. Yet fate conspires again, and Busta

by Nino Gugunishvili Rating: **** There Was a Garden Once  is a concise collection of twenty-four autobiographical musings and essays, some just a couple of pages long. Interwoven with humorous reflections on everyday life are deeper meditations on grief and aging. Gugunishvili’s latest compilation * is a little book of delights, leaving the reader smiling despite the plaintive tone of several narratives. Gugunishvili writes with a natural, chatty intimacy that never feels f

by John A. Heldt Rating: ***** The Winding Road  continues the Maclean Brothers' time-traveling saga from the first installment, The Patriots * . Despite the entreaties of his fiancée, Abigail Ward, Noah rides out to enlist in the Continental Army, ready for war in the late eighteenth century, yet armed with a secret cache of modern weaponry. Jake stays behind with the Wards, helping however he can while growing inseparable from their younger daughter, Rachel, Abby’s sister.

by Jennifer Wizbowski Rating: ***** Set in early eighteenth-century Venice, Poinsettia Girl unfolds the story of Agata della Pietà, who, at age ten, was placed by her dying Nonna , Guilelma, at the Ospedale de la Pietà , an orphanage that placed emphasis on nurturing musical talent and housed its own prestigious and mysterious conservatoire, the Figlie del Coro , for whom Vivaldi was a teacher and composer. Agata is supremely gifted, not only as a soprano but also as a copyi

by Jim Bates Rating: **** Science fiction/dystopian mash-up The Defectives  is set in the 27 th  century. Cockroach-esque creatures, the Tracliodytes conquered Earth in the 22 nd  Century, and humans were driven underground to live in cities deep beneath the Earth’s surface. Over the next five hundred years, they segregated into the “ Rich and Powerful ” and the “ Defectives ”, and life for the latter is brutal under the diktats of the Supreme Commander, Reginald Botta. When

by Robert Wilson Rating: **** Told in four parts over the course of the 1970s, The Love You Take  is a late coming-of-age novel focusing primarily on Andy Watson, from small-town Strasburg in Virginia as he matures from college student to married father. Surrounded by a select group of eclectic friends, all of whom have their vulnerabilities and moments of self-reckoning, Andy navigates the decade of Nixon, Vietnam, and socio-political unrest while wrestling with the responsi

by Lagnard Benz Rating: **** Don’t Study at University is a self-help book with a difference, offering much more than the title suggests, covering extensive, often esoteric ground. Benz essentially lays out a manifesto, backed by personal experience and thorough research, that scrutinizes traditional educational methods and, consequently, expected career/life trajectories. He rigorously questions and, in many cases, debunks prescribed belief systems, urging the reader to do l

by Adam Cosco Rating: **** Twelve-year-old Leslie Adams feels something is wrong with her, inside, but her dad insists she’s just sleepwalking. But she isn’t sleepwalking when Leslie slashes Tommy Spence to death at his own birthday party, although she cannot remember the attack. Six years later, Leslie tries to make a new beginning, enrolling at college to study investigative journalism, although Tommy’s murder haunts her.  When she starts to experience disturbing incidents

by E. Denise Billups Rating: ***** When Evangeline “Eva” Beauford was sent away at the age of ten by her mother without explanation from the family's olive plantation in Alabama, Beauford Grove, to live with her cousin in Boston, she felt abandoned and confused. Eighteen years later, Eva is a successful hematologist, studying the vagaries of human blood, and her own is yielding more questions than science can answer. When she receives a mysterious posthumous letter from her s

by Julio Fernandez Rating: **** Beginning in 2012 but rapidly taking the reader up to the present day, PopeLeo.ai and The God You Trained  delivers an uncomfortable sermon on the rise of AI, chiefly through the lens of Gabriel Menas, an AI engineer who had studied to become a priest but left the seminary shortly before ordination. The novel is also inspired by the cautionary remarks concerning artificial intelligence made by Pope Leo XIV, which were included in a Vatican pres