Biographies and Memoirs

Mommy's Boy: How My Doggie Soulmate's Love Rescued Me

Jennifer Huston Schaeffer | Biographies and Memoirs

Jennifer Huston Schaeffer's memoir, Mommy's Boy, is a unique story of a bond between a woman and her canine son, a story of the transformative decade she spent with Benny, a rescued Westie-Maltese mix who became her “doggie soulmate.” Following heartbreaks and realizing traditional motherhood might not be her future, Jennifer adopts Benny in 2014, finding unconditional love that heals her loneliness. The narrative follows their journey from Chicago to Indianapolis, where Benny helps Jennifer pursue a romance with Brad. Together, they face Benny’s complex health battles, including pancreatitis and gallbladder surgery, treating him as their child. For how long can they keep Benny with them?...

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Most Recent Reviews

Tyranny of the Mind: Self-Rule and the Common American Uprising

Julie A. Fragoules (Xaos Publishing)

| Reviewed by Cristina Prescott

Julie A. Fragoules’s Tyranny of the Mind: Self-Rule & The Common American Uprising is a sweeping, heavily documented treatise arguing that the United States is surrendering its founding ethos of individual liberty to a new, secular authoritarianism. Interweaving her immigrant family’s story with millennia of Western history, Fragoules traces how religious and state tyrannies—from the Roman Inquisition to feudal Europe—were rejected by the Enlightenment and America’s founders, who built a constitutional republic on liberty of conscience and...

Trolling for Murder (A Vashon Island Mystery)

Charlotte Stuart (Colvos Publishing)

| Reviewed by James Farlow

In Charlotte Stuart's Trolling for Murder, workplace investigator Lavender “Lew” Lewis discovers the body of Quin Armstrong at the base of Vashon Island's iconic Bird King Troll sculpture, a note declaring him “no friend of nature” taped to the wooden giant's pointing finger. When high school teacher Audrey Young becomes the prime suspect due to volatile confrontations about bullying, Lew digs into the victim's extensive list of enemies—from feuding neighbors to scorned developers—only to uncover that the killing resulted from decades of suppre...

The Matriarch Mission

Maxime Trencavel (Tail of the Bird Books)

| Reviewed by Mariela M. Olsen

Maxime Trencavel’s The Matriarch Mission opens in 1913 Crimea, where thirteen-year-old Oksana Mangupli, a bookish Krymchak girl, follows her dying grandmother into a mystical cavern and encounters Asherah, an ancient divine feminine force. This meeting launches Oksana into a decades-spanning saga weaving through the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik terror, and World War II, as she follows her destiny as a woman of the “bump”—a genetic marker linking her to a matriarchal lineage tasked with finding the legendary “black object” and the blue light of...

The Long Run to Love

Florenz Dombey (Self Published)

| Reviewed by Louise Garten

Florenz Dombey’s The Long Run to Love is the sixth installment of The Willow Chronicles, an expansive historical romance spanning 1963 to 1969, set against the turbulent backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and Seattle’s maritime culture. The novel follows Willow “Billie” Benton, a tall, fiercely independent shipping magnate who built the container empire Pinctada Holdings, and Sidai “Sid” Ackroyd, a brilliant six-foot-tall Maasai economist appointed to an endowed chair at the University of Washington. Their chance meeting at the Olympic Hotel...

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