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Destiny of Determination: Faith and Family is Cathy Burnham Martin’s engrossing true account of her ancestors’ escape from the Armenian genocide and the rebuilding of their lives in America. This multigenerational family saga, told mostly via backstories and history, is full of joy, sorrow, and the miraculous, including a startling miracle at the book’s end. The book reads more as a work of non-fiction than a novel, as it is mainly a chronicle of events with fairly straightforward prose, and would be better served by a first-person narrator, but Martin lovingly and emotionally preserves her family’s history, for an engaging […]

The Story of My Life: Childhood Never Lasts by Vaughn J. Samuel is a tumultuous memoir that gives heartwarming insight into how hope and hard work can pay off, despite terrible circumstances. For Samuel, this came through considerable hardships of her childhood, which no child should have to endure, as she worked hard to apply herself and excel, with no support. The style throughout her narrative is simple and unassuming, conveyed with straightforward honesty. Samuel is forthright about her struggles while crediting God for her successes in the economic booms of the eighties and nineties, bringing her story to a […]

Scott Allen Benkie delivers a candid legal thriller in his novel The Lawyer’s Angel. Attorney James Crosson is at his wit’s end with heavy gambling debt and a failing practice, which leads him to take a case involving a CEO despot who is doing everything he can to maintain his throne. Benkie accurately depicts the toxicity of wealth and power through his plutocratic characters, giving the thriller a sense of acerbic social critique. Some dense legal diction slows the novel down at times, and there is an overuse of ethnic stereotypes, but the resolution where characters reimagine their lives […]

With a sublime balance of heartbreak and humor, Judy Haveson shares her life story in Laugh Cry Rewind. Growing up in a loving Jewish family could not protect Haveson’s childhood from unthinkable traumas, including a random act of violence and the death of her adored sister, Celia. Her sister’s calm and wisdom stayed alive in Haveson’s memory as she navigated college, careers, dating, marriage and miscarriages, the deaths of beloved family members, and celebrated the birth of her son. Reading more like an autobiography with its strict chronology, Laugh Cry Rewind is intimate and mesmerizing thanks to Haveson’s conversational […]

In this powerful memoir, I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls, Mary Ellen Gambutti narrates the complicated journey to restoring her identity after adoption. Gambutti describes her upbringing, in turns idyllic and traumatic, through reconstructed memories, speculation, and vignettes, aided throughout by personal knowledge, letters, and other artifacts. While some generalizations dilute the memoir’s pointed focus on adoption, readers will be enlightened by Gambutti’s portrayal of an adoptee’s pervasive feelings of loss, impermanence, and abandonment. Gambutti explains how adoptees must stay hypervigilant, which takes center stage when she devotes herself to the search for her family of […]

In the emotive novel Karma, co-authors T. Kennington and C. Roth unravel an engrossing mystery of two women running from a traumatic past of violence and addiction. After narrowly escaping their own deaths, Micah and Rowan flee to L.A. where they run a nightclub and find solace in unexpected love. The third-person perspective successfully cultivates a cagey tone, drawing readers into this decidedly dark take on romance, which dives into a number of difficult subjects, such as physical and emotional abuse. When the pair meet their matches in Caden and Declan, the savior-complex is somewhat disappointing for such fiercely […]