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Lead Story

Lead stories from SPR’s ever-growing independent book portal

Review: Banged-Up Heart: Dancing with Love and Loss by Shirley Melis

★★★★½ Banged-Up Heart: Dancing with Love and Los

Business and travel writer Shirley Melis experiences love and devotion for two amazing men in her life and suffers the loss of both in her poignant memoir Banged-Up Heart: Dancing with Love and Loss.

Honesty is the hallmark of this memoir, a paean to the best of relationships beset by the inevitability of death. Two years after the sudden loss of Joe, a fellow writer, political activist, and her husband of thirty years, Melis arranges to meet an old acquaintance and recent widower for a possible new start. She is urged on by a coterie of old friends. […]

2019-01-22T11:33:30+02:00June 7th, 2017|Categories: Book Reviews, Lead Story|Tags: , |
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Review: Nannion by Andreas Androutsellis-Theotokis

 Nannion

Everyone loves a cat story, and Nannion by Andreas Androutsellis-Theotokis  features the eponymous off-white street cat in a surprising science fiction tale of earth sciences and Greek history. Although not a story for children (Nannion, the cat’s namesake, was in fact a prostitute in Ancient Greece) there is a childlike quality to the narration that makes the cat’s relationship with Claire, a lonely and dying marine biologist working in the Aegean Sea around Athens and the island of Dioptra, cozy reading.

As the book goes on, other characters working in marine sciences come into the story. The team learns about […]

2019-02-11T08:52:05+02:00June 6th, 2017|Categories: Book Reviews, Lead Story|Tags: , |
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Review: Something Olde (The Divel Series Book One) by Denis Jay Klein

Something Olde

When heiress Sandy Waters decides she’s getting married in Bermuda, she wants to wear Something Olde – the cursed family heirloom, The Divel Necklace, once lost overboard from the ship Sea Venture in 1609, into the Atlantic ocean’s churning seas surrounding the island in a hurricane so awful that it inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest – and worn ever since its recovery at Waters’ family weddings.

The only problem is, it’s locked in a vault, and the only man that can open it, Clark Dearborne, is having second thoughts about turning up with it. He’s got a choice – deliver the […]

2019-04-29T12:16:45+02:00May 30th, 2017|Categories: Lead Story|Tags: , |
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Review: Bless the Skies by Julie Elise Landry

★★★★½ Bless the Skies

Bless the Skies by Julie Elise Landry is a riveting and provocative work of dark fantasy, which follows the lives of three girls, Laeli, Sophia, and Elaina, who must navigate a bleak and desperate world. When Elaina is kidnapped and enslaved by the twisted High Lord Lawrence Anderton, Laeli and Sophia risk their lives to save her, through a dangerous and unforgiving landscape.

Although the journey narrative of the novel might suggest Lord of the Rings fare, Landry takes her characters to much darker depths than Tolkien, or even Game of Thrones. So much of fantasy fiction […]

2017-05-10T08:25:22+02:00May 4th, 2017|Categories: Book Reviews, Lead Story|Tags: |
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Review: Ravenwood Risen by W.C. Maher

★★★★ Ravenwood Risen by W.C. Maher

Being wrenched from a life of pastoral normalcy and forced into a destiny fraught with sacrifice and struggle is a common foundation for many fantasy novels, but in Ravenwood Risen, author W. C. Maher takes a new angle on this classic theme. Although the rumors swirl and dangers appear to be creeping in at the edges of Aman, the small region of Colore seems relatively untouched. Ephraim and Jules Ravenwood unwittingly go about their daily lives, ignorant – but not unprepared – for what the world will soon demand of them.

In the same vein as the Shannara […]

2017-05-11T03:32:05+02:00May 2nd, 2017|Categories: Book Reviews, Lead Story|Tags: , , |
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Review: Stories of Yesteryear: Horse & Buggy Days by Harry H. Brown

Stories of Yesteryear

Stories of Yesteryear: Horse & Buggy Days by Harry H. Brown is a charming reprint of Harry Brown’s tales of Halifax, Massachusetts and New England at the turn of the century and earlier. Harkening back to days before cars, or even electricity, these vignettes are in turns amusing and moving, as it tells an important story about a bygone era. Much of what Brown writes about is lost to history, which makes this reprint by his family and important and worthy enterprise.

At only a page or so apiece, these stories are easy to read and ingest, and have a […]

2019-02-11T09:18:32+02:00May 1st, 2017|Categories: Book Reviews, Lead Story|Tags: , |
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Review: Traveller – Inceptio by Rob Shackleford

★★★★ Traveller - Inceptio by Rob Shackleford

Author Rob Shackleford goes beyond the nitty-gritty physics and paradoxes implicit in time travel in his new book Traveller – Inceptio, an impressive new addition to the time-travel niche and an exciting start to a new series.

The story begins simply enough: a group of Australian graduate students researching security technology stumble onto the potential for a time-travel device and the world immediately takes notice. Governments begin clamoring for the technology, but a more methodical approach is required for such world-changing technology. A destination is chosen – Saxon England, about 1,000 years in the past – and […]

2019-01-22T05:49:44+02:00April 28th, 2017|Categories: Book Reviews, Lead Story|Tags: , , |
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Review: In Search of A Little Piece of Sunshine by Carlos Jimenez

★★★★★ In Search of A Little Piece of Sunshine by Carlos Jimenez

In Search of A Little Piece of Sunshine by Nicaraguan writer Carlos Jimenez is a beautiful and original middle grade novel for readers who enjoy fantasy and nature. Jimenez is a new talent ready to burst onto the US market with this, his first English language release.

As a band of brave children search for “a little piece of sunshine” to save the freezing cities in North America, namely NYC, they must travel into the forests and face many strange and mythical creatures in their environmental quest. An allegory set in the time of Obama, this book is really […]

2019-01-22T11:03:39+02:00April 27th, 2017|Categories: Book Reviews, Lead Story|Tags: |
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