Month: April 2026

Book Spotlight: Play From Your Heart by Scott Martin and Coryanne Hicks

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Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring authors Scott Martin and Coryanne Hicks for their latest release, Play From Your Heart: A Journey Through Loss, Resilience, and the Beautiful Game.

Book: Play From Your Heart: A Journey Through Loss, Resilience, and the Beautiful Game
Author: Scott Martin and Coryanne Hicks
Publication Date: 9 June 2026
Publisher: Library Tales Publishing
Genre: Soccer Biography
Formats Available: E-book and Paperback

About the Book

When rising college soccer coach Scott Martin was struck down by a rare, flesh-eating infection that took both hands and parts of his feet, doctors told him he was lucky just to survive. But survival wasn’t enough. Overnight, the man who lived for the game had to relearn how to move, teach, and live without the very tools that defined him.

From hospital beds and courtroom battles to the touchline of a dusty youth-league field, Martin’s twenty-year odyssey is one of heartbreak and rebirth. He rebuilt his body, lost—and found—his purpose, married the doctor who saved him, adopted five children from around the world, and, when everything seemed over again, rediscovered his passion by leading a ragtag team of twelve-year-olds to an undefeated state championship.

Told with unflinching honesty and humor, Play From Your Heart is a memoir about endurance, grace, and the power of sport to heal what medicine cannot. For anyone who’s ever faced the unthinkable, and still chosen to stand back up, this is a story that proves the human spirit is undefeated.

Fans of Wild, Crying in H Mart, and Good for a Girl will find themselves cheering, weeping, and ultimately believing again in the beautiful game, and in the resilience of the human heart.

You can find Play From Your Heart here:
Amazon | Website

About The Author

Scott Martin

Scott Martin is an award-winning soccer coach, educator, and advocate for the disability community. Holding an advanced national coaching license, he has spent over 30 years coaching at the select youth, high school, and college levels, earning Coach of the Year honors four times and leading multiple teams to state championships. His expertise has connected him with top coaches in the U.S. and internationally.

Beyond the field, Martin is a dedicated educator in Wisconsin and the host of the Life’s a Road Trip podcast, where he highlights stories of resilience and disability advocacy. After surviving a life-threatening illness that led to the loss of his hands and feet, he became a powerful voice for amputee abilities and prosthetic advancements. His contributions to research at the University of Washington and Johns Hopkins University have helped shape innovations in the field.

Recognized for his advocacy, Martin serves as a Global Advisor for Billion Strong, a worldwide disability organization. His journey has been featured in Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Power of Positive, and he is the author of Play From Your Heart (Library Tales Publishing), a memoir that chronicles his remarkable path of perseverance, reinvention, and the unwavering spirit that has guided him forward.

You can find author Scott here:
Website

If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com

Book Review: Scrap: Salvaging a Family by Luanne Castle

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Book Details:

Author: Luanne Castle
Release Date: 1 January, 2026
Series:
Genre: Memoir
Format: E-book 
Pages: 172 pages
Publisher: ELJ Editions
Blurb:
Luanne Castle’s new hybrid flash memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family (ELJ Editions 2026), is now available to purchase on Amazon and ELJ Editions.

Scrap: Salvaging a Family explores the stain of childhood fear and anxiety on the adult spirit and the experience of reconciling with an aging or dying parent. A daughter has grown up in a household with an angry and abusive father. He keeps the secret of his own biological father’s identity from his daughter for decades. Can this family be salvaged?

Review

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Scrap: Salvaging a Family by Luanne Castle is a fragmented, lyrical, and emotionally precise memoir that sifts through family memory, inherited shame, childhood fear, and the difficult work of understanding a parent without excusing the harm they caused. Written as a “memoir in flash,” the book is built out of short, vivid pieces, named as scraps of childhood, domestic scenes, remembered violence, questions, photographs, family stories, documents, and imagined reconstructions, all stitched together into something devastating and incredibly artful.

At the centre of the memoir is Castle’s father, Rudy, a man carrying the wound of being born “illegitimate,” by the absence of his own father, and by the shame that surrounded his origins. But Castle does not simplify him into villain or victim. He is frightening, volatile, sometimes cruel but he is also resourceful, hardworking, wounded, loving in broken and bewildering ways, and capable of gestures of strange tenderness. This complexity is what gives the memoir its emotional maturity. Author Castle is not writing to settle a score; she is trying to understand the system of hurt that made her father who he was, and how that hurt passed through him into her childhood.

The form of the book is one of its strongest elements. The flash structure mirrors the nature of memory itself as nonlinear, sensory, sharp-edged, and sometimes contradictory. Author Castle’s prose is beautifully controlled, often poetic without becoming ornamental. She has a remarkable ability to locate trauma in objects. The title Scrap is perfect because the memoir is not only about salvage in the literal sense, but about salvaging meaning from what was damaged, hidden, discarded, or misunderstood.

What I admired most is the book’s refusal to offer easy forgiveness. It moves toward compassion, yes, but not sentimental absolution. Scrap is a beautifully crafted and intelligent memoir about trauma, inheritance, girlhood, secrecy, and family wounds. It is painful, yes, but also tender in unexpected ways. It is a memoir that feels intimate, brave, and unforgettable.

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Book Review: A Symbol of Time by John Westley Turnbull 

Categories Alternate History, Dystopian, noir, Science-Fiction, Speculative-Fiction, Surreal FictionLeave a Comment on Book Review: A Symbol of Time by John Westley Turnbull 

Book Details:

Author: John Westley Turnbull
Release Date: 14 November, 2025
Series:
Genre: SScience-Fiction, Dystopian, Alternate History
Format: E-book 
Pages: 243 pages
Publisher: –
Blurb:
Survival requires sacrifice. But what if the price is an entire world?
Their home is cold and dying, choked by the toxins of their own progress. Now, an advanced alien species looks toward the Third Planet—Earth—with hope and fear. They see a fertile paradise, but one that is hostile, hot, and dominated by massive, predatory reptiles.
The choice is stark: die in the heat, or remake this new world in their own image.
As they descend to alter the climate and purge the planet of its prehistoric masters, they set in motion a chain of events that will echo through geological time. A Symbol of Time weaves palaeontology and astronomy into a chilling tale of survival. As the new masters of Earth terraform the planet, the question remains: does high intelligence inevitably carry the seeds of its own destruction?

Review

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

A Symbol of Time by John Westley Turnbull is a haunting speculative fiction that begins with exhaustion, opening on a dying Homeworld, where the last surviving inhabitants of a once-thriving civilisation are forced to abandon their planet and seek refuge on the “Third World,” a beautiful, brutal, water-rich planet teeming with monstrous life. From the very beginning, the novel positions itself as more than a survival story; it is a meditation on ecological ruin, migration, leadership, memory, and the dangerous arrogance of believing that survival justifies everything.

What I found most compelling is the moral tension at the heart of the book. Elthyris begins as a determined leader trying to save her people from extinction, but as the colony reaches the Third World, her decisions grow increasingly severe. The novel does not present colonisation as a clean heroic act. Instead, it asks difficult questions like when does adaptation become domination? When does necessity become cruelty? And how easily does a displaced civilisation carry the seeds of its old destruction into a new world? This gives the book its strongest intellectual weight, especially through the concept of “Worldshaping,” where survival begins to blur into planetary violence.

The world-building is ambitious and often striking. Author Turnbull’s imagined species, their failing Homeworld, the Ark Dawn, the terrifying fauna of the Third World, the underground habitat, and the long generational arc all create a sense of scale that feels genuinely epic. The book is especially effective when it lingers on planetary time and the final movement is one of the most resonant parts of the novel, beautifully tying together the themes of grief, legacy, and the fragile sentient desire to be remembered.

Character-wise, Elthyris, Kithyon, Lyggra, Arrielle, Venryn, and Reuff all serve distinct thematic purposes. Kithyon and Lyggra bring emotional warmth to a narrative otherwise dominated by survival pressure and ethical compromise, while Arrielle becomes a powerful bridge between the founding generation and the long future that follows. Elthyris is perhaps the most interesting figure, not always likeable, not always morally defensible, but consistently compelling because she embodies the terrible burden of leadership under existential threat.

That said, the novel is not without issues. At times, the prose leans heavily into exposition, and some sections read more like historical chronicle than intimate drama. The sweep of the story is impressive, but the emotional immediacy occasionally gets diluted by the sheer amount of world-building, explanation, and long-range plotting. Readers who prefer fast-paced, character-centred sci-fi may find parts of the book dense. But those who enjoy philosophical, ecological, and civilisation-scale speculative fiction will likely appreciate its ambition.

A Symbol of Time is a thoughtful and morally serious science-fiction novel about survival, inheritance, and the repeating patterns of history. It is not merely about reaching a new world; it is about what a species chooses to become once it gets there. Imperfect but extremely ambitious, it leaves the reader with the uneasy sense that memory may be the only true defence against repeating the same old catastrophes. The ending captures this beautifully, reminding us that monuments, like civilizations, are both acts of remembrance and warnings against forgetting.

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Book Spotlight: A Symbol of Time by John Westley Turnbull 

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Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring author John Westley Turnbull for his latest release, A Symbol of Time.

Book: A Symbol of Time
Author: John Westley Turnbull
Publication Date: 14 November 2025
Genre: Science Fiction
Formats Available: E-book on Amazon, including Amazon Unlimited, Paperback and Hardcover.
For Readers Who Enjoyed: Asimov, Harry Harrison, other science fiction well known authors of the 60’s,70’s & 80’s

About the Book

Survival requires sacrifice. But what if the price is an entire world?

Their home is cold and dying, choked by the toxins of their own progress. Now, an advanced alien species looks toward the Third Planet—Earth—with hope and fear. They see a fertile paradise, but one that is hostile, hot, and dominated by massive, predatory reptiles.

The choice is stark: die in the heat, or remake this new world in their own image.

As they descend to alter the climate and purge the planet of its prehistoric masters, they set in motion a chain of events that will echo through geological time. A Symbol of Time weaves palaeontology and astronomy into a chilling tale of survival. As the new masters of Earth terraform the planet, the question remains: does high intelligence inevitably carry the seeds of its own destruction?

You can find A Symbol of Time here:
Amazon | Goodreads

About The Author

John Westley Turnbull

I am an Australian, whose fascination with science fiction began during long nights spent reading Asimov and other giants of the genre. I am a retired lawyer, husband, father and grandfather. I bring a lifetime of observation to my work, blending curiosity with a steady regard for how the world might have unfolded along other possible paths. My interests lean toward alternate histories and the points where timelines could diverge into something stranger. I continue to write with the same sense of wonder that first kept me awake long past bedtime. A Symbol of Time is my first novel.

You can find author Turnbull here:
Website

If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com

ARC Review: The Fabled One (Book One) by D Reign

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Book Details:

Author: D Reign
Release Date: 30 April, 2026
Series: Book 1 of 1: The Fabled one
Genre: Fantasy
Format: E-book 
Pages: 170 pages
Publisher: –
Blurb:
Come on a journey as we follow Gaelin find out who she is. The Fabled One is about a young woman who learns about who she is when her parents (or those she thought were her parents) are tragically killed. Gaelin is wanted by the King and Queen who rule in another realm. Gaelin must leave all that she knows on earth and seek to find her path navigating a fated love with two people who will lay down their lives for her. Gaelin needs to master the powers that she possesses as the Fabled one to bring peace and light to the realms around her. This series is full of intrigue, connecting with the ancestors, finding yourself, and believing in who you are. This a full fiction fantasy book with some steamy scenes so hold onto your hats for this one.

Review

Rating: 4 out of 5.

The Fabled One: Book One by D. Reign does not arrive quietly, it enters through rupture: through death, revelation, prophecy, flight, and the sudden collapse of everything the protagonist thought she understood about herself. From its opening catastrophe, the novel makes its intentions clear. This is a story built on destiny, pursuit, and awakening that leans unapologetically into high emotional stakes and mythic revelation.

At the center of the novel is Gaelin, and she is easily its strongest anchor. What makes her work is not polish but immediacy: she is frightened, angry, mouthy, confused, and often emotionally raw in ways that feel true to her circumstances. The book does not ask her to become composed too quickly. Instead, it lets her remain disoriented by grief and betrayal, even as pieces of her power begin to emerge. That emotional instability gives the novel much of its life. Gaelin’s voice is direct, often impulsive, sometimes funny in spite of herself, and that first-person immediacy carries the reader through some of the book’s denser exposition.

The other narrative engine here is the growing bond between Gaelin, Lahmae, and Chameleon, and this is where the story begins to take on a more distinctive texture. What starts as rescue and protection gradually becomes something more intimate and fated, and the novel clearly wants to explore not just magical destiny but emotional convergence. There is an earnestness to these dynamics that I found compelling, even when the pace of attachment moves very quickly.

The worldbuilding itself is imaginative, if at times impressionistic. We move through Earth, palace realms, hidden portals, the Fallen planet, magical bloodlines, psychic protections, conjuring, and the increasingly important mythology of the Fabled One. The mythology is interesting, and the sense of layered agendas around Gaelin’s existence gives the book a strong forward thrust. The problem is not a lack of ideas; if anything, it is that the novel contains many ideas at once and does not always distribute them with enough control. Information sometimes arrives in bursts rather than through gradual integration, and there are moments when the reader is being told about systems, titles, histories, and motivations so quickly that the emotional throughline has to work harder to hold everything together.

That, I think, is where the novel’s main limitations lie. The prose has energy, sincerity, and momentum, but it also bears the marks of a draft that could have benefited from further refinement. At times the sentences run too long or repeat an emotional beat more than necessary; at others, the punctuation and phrasing flatten scenes that might otherwise have landed with greater force. There is a strong story here, but it occasionally feels as though it is arriving faster than the language can shape it. Similarly, certain transitions, especially around revelation, trust, and romantic escalation, can feel abrupt rather than fully earned on the page. None of this erases the book’s strengths, but it does mean that the reading experience is sometimes uneven.

Still, I want to be fair to what the novel is doing well. The Fabled One is never cynical. It is emotionally open, mythically ambitious, and extremely invested in its heroine’s significance. it is refreshing how sincerely it embraces its own stakes. The antagonistic energy around Meridah, Qu’Rah, Starmall, and Serena gives the story a clear sense of danger, and the ending understands how to close on intensification rather than closure: Gaelin is changing, her power is growing, and the conflict is clearly widening rather than resolving.

The Fabled One: Book One reads as a fantasy series opener with clear emotional conviction and a strong instinct for dramatic momentum. It is imperfect, certainly, even structurally loose in places, and stylistically rough in others, but it also has heart, urgency, and a heroine whose emotional reality remains compelling even when the world around her becomes increasingly fantastical. Readers who enjoy portal fantasy, magical destiny, dangerous courts, and emotionally charged fantasy romance will likely find plenty here to invest in, especially if they enjoy first books that spend as much time igniting future conflict as resolving present one.

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Book Review: Star Evolution Volume 1 by Evanjellen

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Book Details:

Author: Evan jellen
Illustrator: Pineapple lava 
Release Date: 15 March, 2025
Series:
Genre: Sci-Fantasy, Anime-esque,
Format: E-book 
Pages: 431 pages
Publisher: Helena St. George
Blurb:
A Cyber beast known as the Ouroboros, came from a higher dimension and viciously attacked the starverse. The land created by a powerful Demon god.
The great Demon Lord fought the Ouroboros to a standstill. She was unable to fully vanquish the beast, so instead, she tore its body apart, sealing it across the stars.
In her time of need, the great Demon Lord received aid. An interloper, the Magician, helped her create a system that produces candidates that have the potential to defeat the powerful god. After countless failures, five female warriors were born, created to finally defeat the perpetual snake god.

However, time is running out, as the great Demon Lord cannot maintain the seals for much longer. Her perpetual nemesis will soon break free. Their failure slay the snake god will bring about the end of the universe. The future depends on the success of the Divine Star warriors.
This is Star Evolution, a story that fuses together a fictional sci-fantasy setting with non-fictional themes of philosophy, self-growth, and realism for a story that transcends normal writing conventions. Together, the five women chosen by fate will overcome the trials of the gods by cultivating their light that is hidden in the darkness. This is a realistic space opera with a grand mystery to unfold!

Review

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Star Evolution, Volume 1 by Evanjellen is an ambition that announces itself from the first few pages to build an entire cosmology and ask the reader to step into it at full speed. From its blood-soaked prologue, with a crimson-armored warrior battling a monstrous silver-eyed serpent across a ruined cosmic battlefield, the novel makes its intentions clear: this is a science-fantasy universe of gods, ancient war, machine beings, sealed calamities, and unfinished destinies. It is expansive, anime-inflected, and unabashedly maximalist in its imagination.

What I found especially interesting is the book’s dual structure. On one hand, it gives us the large mythic architecture: the Demon Lord, the Ouroboros, the realm gods, the repeated failure of prior “star warriors,” and the long cosmic project of finding the right champions to finally end the cycle. On the other, it narrows into more local, emotional terrain through Nameless and Divine Flash with two sisters from a harsh village in the Under Realm whose lives are shaped by loss, scarcity, violence, and a growing sense that the systems governing their world are neither just nor trustworthy. That contrast is where the novel often feels most alive.

The strongest character work, for me, lies in those sisterly dynamics. Nameless has an appealing volatility to her; she is impulsive, angry, proud, and deeply loyal, while Divine Flash offers a gentler counterweight shaped by fear, tenderness, and protective love. Their bond gives the story an emotional anchor it needs. By contrast, the realm-level material around Divi, Tony, the council of deities, and the missing Earth Goddess is conceptually rich, but it can sometimes feel more interesting as lore than as immediate drama. The ideas are compelling though the delivery occasionally feels like dense blocks of explanation rather than being revealed as fully dramatized tension.

This is, in many ways, the book’s chief strength and chief weakness at once. Author Evanjellen clearly has a vivid imaginative grasp of this world, but because the novel carries so much worldbuilding, mythology, and terminology, the pacing can feel overloaded in places. Characters sometimes speak in exposition-heavy bursts, and the prose, while energetic and sincere, can at times become repetitive or mechanically emphatic when a gentler hand might have heightened the drama. That said, the action scenes do have momentum, and when the narrative leans fully into confrontation, it becomes much sharper and more immediate.

I also think it is worth noting that this first volume reads very much like an opening movement rather than a self-contained arc. It is setting pieces into place as it is the beginning of a longer journey.

Star Evolution, Volume 1, is a debut that may work best for readers who actively enjoy anime and RPG-adjacent storytelling with high-concept lore, dramatic confrontations, cosmic hierarchies, chosen-warrior energy, and characters whose destinies are entangled with the fate of worlds. Readers looking for polished restraint or subtle minimalism may find the novel rough around the edges. But readers willing to meet it on its own wavelength will likely find something earnest, imaginative, and promising here; a first volume with visible imperfections, yes, but also real heart and a strong sense of its own universe.

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Book Spotlight: Spirit of the Plain: The Unnamed (Book #1) by B. Walker 

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Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring author B. Marcus Walker for his latest release, Spirit of the Plain: The Unnamed (Book #1).

Book: Spirit of the Plain: The Unnamed – Book 1
Author(s): B. Marcus Walker
Publication Date:  May 30, 2025
Publisher: Killbot Factory
Page Count: 463
Genres: Dark Fantasy, Coming-of-Age

About the Book

The Forest Plain will not allow men to settle, farm, or cross with armies. Men of the west dream of breaking its curse, but doing so will destroy the way of life of the nomadic people who live there.
In Grayhaven, they say, “Glory to Ahur and to the Plain,” because it has kept them safe for five centuries and has allowed them to grow into the wealthiest nation on the continent.
COLLIER TRUIT is from Grayhaven, but flees after his grandfather’s failed political machinations led to the murder of their family. He is part Yurbo, through his father and seeks out his father’s clan, determined to win their help in retaking his ancestral titles.
While in the plain, Collier faces mounting threats with his Yurbo hosts. One threat is the fearsome wolfmen known as Lyken, themselves refugees from colonized homeland. This includes the drunk and shaggy ARNAK, and his friend, the troubadour MOJAG. They flee for Grayhaven but run into the Yurbo. The greater threat is from the west. There, ASHLYN, an acolyte of the order of mages known as the Bruj, heads into the Forest Plain to complete her prophesized destiny to break the Plain’s curse.

You can find Spirit of the Plain: The Unnamed here:
Amazon (Paperback) | Amazon (ebook) | Apple Books | Barnes & Noble | Books 2 Read

About The Author

B. Walker

Originally from Chicago’s south side, Brian Walker has worked twenty years in numerous industries as a web and eLearning developer, facilitator, and project manager. His true passion has been as a writer of fiction, both genre and literary. You can find his writing on Medium in publications including Thought Thinkers, ILLUMINATION, and Morning Musings, as well as short fiction in the Minetta Review. His first novel, Spirit of the Plain, is available in print and eBook.

You can find author Walker here:
Website | Instagram | Medium

If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com

Book Spotlight: Tesla’s Opera by Mir Seidel

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Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring author Mir Seidel for her latest release, Tesla’s Opera: The real, stranger-than-fiction Nikola Tesla.

Book Cover

Book: Tesla’s Opera: The real, stranger-than-fiction Nikola Tesla
Author: Mir Seidel
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Publisher: Fomite Press
Genres: Non-fiction, Crossovers Opera & Biography
Available in: Paperback
For Readers Who Enjoyed Reading: The Prestige by Christopher Priest, The Current War by Adam Cline, The Three Ghosts of Tesla by Richard Marazano (graphic novel)

About the Book

Tesla’s Opera: The Real, Stranger-Than-Fiction Nikola Tesla brings the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla to life through the opera he inspired, Violet Fire. For its creators, only opera could encompass the extremes and surreal qualities of Tesla’s life and career: the visions he had from childhood, his inventions that helped create our wired and wireless world, even his unrealized ideas. Tesla moved in the heights of New York society, yet he never married, and gave his love to a white pigeon. 
With a score by minimalist composer Jon Gibson, libretto by Mir Seidel, and directed by Terry O’Reilly, Violet Fire had its world premiere in Serbia, Tesla’s homeland, on the 150th anniversary of his birth. Tesla’s Opera includes the full libretto, stunning photos from the performance, and haunting images from the continuous video projections, along with commentary by the opera’s  librettist, director, and conductor, critic Merilyn Jackson, and author/poet Andrei Codrescu. 
This book offers us the Tesla we need now—stranger than fiction, worthy of remembrance, and packed with meaning for our time. 

You can find Tesla’s Opera here:
Amazon | Goodreads | Barnes & Noble | Formite Press

What Others Are Saying

“In Tesla’s Opera, Mir Seidel has crafted an inspired and visually stunning tribute to one of history’s greatest minds. Through music, choreography, and imaginative staging, this colorful book celebrates Nikola Tesla’s life in a way that is both joyful and moving. To quote one of the book’s contributors, “Tesla could make you proud to be human”—and this creative homage does just that. Insightful, festive, and richly layered, Tesla’s Opera brings Tesla’s multifaceted brilliance to life with style, wit, and heart.”

—Marc J. Seifer, author of Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla and Tesla: Wizard at War

“Whatever happens through the centuries about Tesla, misusing his name, copying his work, this will still never overshadow his genius and contribution to mankind.“

—Marina Abramovic, Serbian-American artist

“The book is immersive in tracking the history, mysteries and mystique of Nikola Tesla. This is a fascinating, fun book about the world of science, opera and avian love. Poet Andrei Codrescu even weighs in on the current currency of the Tesla name in his fiery intro to the book about a certain musky billionaire appropriating the Tesla name.”

—Lewis Whittington, Review of Tesla’s Opera in CultureVulture

About The Author

Mir Seidel

Mir Seidel’s latest book, Tesla’s Opera: the real, stranger-than-fiction Nikola Tesla (Fomite Press), considers the pioneering inventor through the opera about Tesla that she wrote the libretto for—a magic-realist retelling of Tesla’s life. The opera, Violet Fire, was performed in Belgrade, New York, and Philadelphia. Her novel, The Speed of Clouds, is out from New Door Books. Her writing has also appeared in places including Art in America, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Calyx, Bourbon Penn, and The New York Review of Science Fiction.

You can find author Seidel here:
Website | BlueSky | Instagram

If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com

Book Spotlight: The Lucky Penny by Stephanie Vaccaro and Louise Allen

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Welcome to the TRB Lounge. Today, we are featuring authors Stephanie Vaccaro & Louise Allen for their latest release, The Lucky Penny.

Book: The Lucky Penny
Author(s): Stephanie Vaccaro and Louise Allen
Publication Date:  April 3, 2024
Publisher: –
Page Count: 402
Genres: Science Fiction, Dystopian, Post-Apocalyptic
Editions Available: Paperback and Ebook (Kindle)
For Readers Who Enjoyed Reading: Hunger Games and Divergent

About the Book

Penny never thought she’d have family. Penny lost family when Penny little. Penny scared when taken away from home. Penny stay quiet. Penny lost, Penny found. Now Penny have new family. Penny brave. Penny tell her story.

Julietta Milard’s life had been rather mundane up until a few years ago when she found herself in the small town of Waterwealt. Though she had intended to move on to bigger and better things, a beautiful museum preserved in time had her sprouting roots rather than traversing the Wastes further.

Having helped the sleepy town with its various mechanical-based problems, Julietta thought found herself in a smooth routine. That was until the universe decided to throw a curveball her way when about two cycles later a small girl shows up at her doorstep, sick, injured, and unable to speak with only a penny necklace as any identification.

Nearly a cycle and a half later, the young girl, whom Julietta named Penny, has recovered but remains mute despite her best efforts. On top of taking care of little Penny, restoring the museum, and trying to find a solution for the now increasingly weakening water pressure in town, Julietta is faced with another issue. A stranger has come to town, a ‘doctor’ named Charles Hawthorne, who seems to think the Arcane is real. Brushing him off, she finds herself questioning what the world is coming to. That is until the world as she knows it to come crashing down around her and vanishes in a cloud of dust.

You can find The Lucky Penny here:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads

About The Author(s)

Louise Allen
Stephanie Vaccaro

David Yarnton

It was the year 2018. Stephanie (USA) had joined a Minecraft server of an online friend. One Sunday morning she was working on her homework when she got a ping on Discord from another server member asking if anyone was around to play. Meanwhile on the other side of the pond, a woman named Louise (England) was bored and wanted to play some Minecraft, pinging the discord server of her friend asking if anyone was around. And thus the dynamic duo of Stephanie and Louise was born!
Having been friends ever since Stephanie and Louise have delved into many creative endeavors, usually combining Stephanie’s programming abilities and story telling with Louise’s writing prowess and digital artistry skills. Which is why it was not strange for them to decide to write a story together at the start of 2023. What was originally supposed to be a way for Stephanie to learn a thing or two from Louise about writing turned into a full blown story filled with what they describe as “Chaos, Shenanigans, and most importantly CCCs”.

You can find authors Stephanie and Louise here:
Stephanie | Louise

If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com

Book Review: Shattered But Not Silenced: A Dystopian Novel by Helena St. George

Categories Dystopian, noir, Speculative-Fiction, Surreal FictionLeave a Comment on Book Review: Shattered But Not Silenced: A Dystopian Novel by Helena St. George

Book Details:

Author: Helena St. George 
Release Date: 15 March, 2025
Series:
Genre: Dystopian, Speculative Fiction, Psychological, Social Commentary
Format: E-book 
Pages: 431 pages
Publisher: Helena St. George
Blurb:
In a world where productivity is the measure of one’s worth, who decides human value?
Set in a near-future America devastated by economic collapse, Shattered But Not Silenced imagines a regime that targets social service recipients, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the homeless for “reform” under the guise of economic recovery.
At the center is Maya, an autistic young woman navigating a country in turmoil while surviving forced rehabilitation inside the New Thought Center. Her sensory sensitivities, coping mechanisms, and layered internal processing are revealed through her sharp, ironic first-person voice. She is complex. She is observant. She is defiant.
The novel asks difficult questions. Who defines human value? What happens to those who do not meet the definition?

ARC Reader Review: “I liked Maya the more I got to know her. The writing is amazing! So many well-crafted sentences and paragraphs. The language used to describe the settings and in dialogue flows. Now that the novel has ended, I’ll miss Maya. Great job tying up loose ends. Well done!”

ARC Reader Review: “Great writing… You had me at the first page wanting more. Four chapters in and I can’t wait to read the next one! Honestly!!! I can’t put this book down. Maya got arrested! Wow! Didn’t expect that!”

ARC Reader Review: “You know it’s a good read if it makes you cry.”

Review

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Shattered but Not Silenced by Helena St. George offers a very unsettling yet profound narrative that examines control, autonomy, and the fragile line between protection and oppression. At its core is Maya, a neurodivergent protagonist wading through a society that increasingly defines human worth through productivity, compliance, and conformity, a premise that feels less like fiction and more like an uncomfortable extension of reality.

What struck me most about this novel is not its dystopian machinery, but its interiority. This is not a plot-driven rebellion story in the conventional sense. Instead, it is a slow, deliberate descent into systems of control, especially economic, institutional, and psychological. The narrative begins almost deceptively grounded, but as the story progresses, the cracks widen, revealing a society tightening its grip through surveillance, propaganda, and systemic erasure.

Maya’s perspective is the novel’s greatest strength. Her sensory processing, looping thoughts, and emotional responses are not treated as narrative devices but as intrinsic ways of being. Author Helena handles this with notable care and authenticity, ensuring that Maya’s neurodivergence is neither romanticized nor reductive. This lends the narrative a rare intimacy where the reader is not simply observing oppression, but feeling its texture through Maya’s experience.

Thematically, the novel is relentless. It interrogates systems that claim to rehabilitate but are built to control. The progression from societal unrest to forced confinement and indoctrination is chilling precisely because it feels incremental. Structurally, the book is expansive. With a timeline that spans over a year and a half, the narrative charts Maya’s transition from a struggling young adult to someone entangled within a system that seeks to redefine her very identity. This progression allows the author to build tension gradually, though, in my opinion, at times it also leads to a sense of narrative diffusion leading to certain stretches that could have benefited from tighter pacing and sharper scene consolidation.

Where the novel wins is in its refusal to offer easy catharsis. The ending, and especially the afterword, makes it clear that this is not a story of triumphant resilience in the conventional sense. Survival here is not heroic; it is uneven and personal. This is a bold narrative choice and that may unsettle readers expecting a more traditional arc, but it ultimately reinforces the book’s thematic integrity. That said, the novel is not without its limitations. The density of its themes occasionally overtakes narrative momentum, and some external characters feel less fully realized compared to Maya’s richly developed interior world. Additionally, readers seeking a faster-paced, plot-heavy dystopian thriller may find the introspective tone demanding.

But perhaps that is precisely the point as Shattered but Not Silenced does not try to entertain in the conventional sense, it simply tries to bear witness. It asks difficult questions about who gets to define value, who is deemed “fit” for society, and what happens to those who exist outside those definitions. And more importantly, it refuses to look away from the answers.

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