Welcome to Issue 97 of the SUPERIOR BOOK PRODUCTIONS newsletter!
Happy Spring!
It took forever for spring to come to Upper Michigan this year, but it finally came with Easter.
And with it came this year’s winner of the Tyler R. Tichelaar Historical Fiction Award. That and several other wonderful books are featured in this month’s newsletter.
Enjoy!
This Month’s Great Book Quote:
“Wicked people never have time for reading. It’s one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
— Lemony Snicket
This year’s winner of the Tyler R. Tichelaar Historical Fiction Award in the Reader Views Annual Literary Awards goes to Out Front the Following Sea by Leah Angstman.
Being descended from numerous New England Puritans and an enthusiast for this time in history, I was pleasantly surprised by the novel’s setting and time period—New England during King William’s War—a time little known in American history today, but it was a pivotal moment for New England. The Salem Witch Trials took place during it, and there was a fear of invasion by the French. The story takes place in 1689 before the Salem Witch Trials resulted in people no longer believing in spectral evidence. Consequently, a belief in witchcraft was still very strong in the colony and often cited as the cause of anything that went wrong.
Angstman’s heroine, Ruth Miner, is the victim of the prejudices that reign in the colony largely as a result of the war, plus because of the Puritan mindset of the time. She lives outside of town with her dying grandmother. Those in the village believe she is a witch and blame her for everything bad that has recently happened.
For more information, visit Out Front the Following Sea.
Jane Passaglia’s The Dozen Deadly Words That Poison Love: A Simple Little Exercise That’s Really Hard to Do is a book absolutely everyone needs to read. No matter who you are, we all tend to have conflict with loved ones every now and then, and that conflict often results from the words we choose or default to using that trigger anger in our loved ones. In this short but powerful book, Jane identifies twelve words that often cause problems in relationships. She explains why they are problems and how to reword our sentences so we can get across what we really want to say rather than just being hurtful or accusatory. She even ends the book with a silly sentence made up of all the deadly words to help us remember not to use them.
One important word of caution Jane presents upfront is not to try to get around the problem by using cheating words—words that mean the same thing as the deadly word but are used to avoid the deadly word. She gives examples of cheating words also.
Of course, switching to using more positive or clear phrases over the deadly words is not easy. It will take lots of practice to remove the deadly words from our vocabulary.
To read more, visit The Dozen Deadly Words That Poison Love.
Sarah Ayers’ new book The Making of Mia: Searching for Belonging in Daycare, Learning to Live a Less-Scripted Life is a mix of memoir, personal development, and child education philosophy. Sarah has worked in five daycares, including her own, which she has operated since 2010. She writes honestly and insightfully about her experiences, including what she learned from caring for children, and what she learned about herself. Daycare workers and anyone involved in childcare or early education will be able to relate to many of her experiences. However, this book is not a how-to book about how to run a daycare. It’s about the bonds Sarah developed with children, parents, and coworkers. It’s about the needs she saw that went beyond just providing a safe place for the children to stay during the day. It’s about how being a daycare worker changed who she is. It is also a love story about loving children, receiving love and support from friends, and finally finding the one to love for life.
The Making of Mia is divided into chapters that mostly focus on the stories of individual children Sarah has worked with. Mia is just one of the children Sarah knew, but she stands out because she had a confidence beyond most of the other children.
To read more, visit The Making of Mia.
Truly Winning in Real Estate: A Roadmap for Achieving Balance & Success in Your Real Estate Career is an inspiring and practical look at how to build a real estate career while still maintaining balance in your personal life. The authors, Lorraine Jordan and Donna Beach, have more than fifty years of combined experience in real estate. Between them, they have sold thousands of homes and they both own investment properties, so they understand the various sides of the business. Now they wish to share their secrets and hard-earned knowledge with others, from seasoned real estate professionals to those just starting out in the business.
Donna and Lorraine begin with some fundamental questions that they admit they failed to answer fully for themselves when they started out in their real estate careers. Knowing the answers to these questions constitutes the critical planning needed to create a solid foundation for your career.
To read more, visit Truly Winning in Real Estate and Life.
Linda Bakken’s new historical novel On the Backs of Women: A Story About Family and Generations offers a look into the lives of five generations of women in the United States between the American Revolution and the Great Depression. Bakken based the novel on her own female ancestors, tracing her maternal lineage from mother to daughter back to her great-great-great-great-grandmother, who was born just before the American Revolution, and carrying the story on through the early years of her grandmother’s life.
The story begins in New Jersey in 1789 when Maggie is a servant in the Corlis house. Bakken depicts a family living just after the American Revolution who did not feel so strongly against the British that they would quit drinking tea. Nor does Bakken shy away from hard truths about American life at the time, including that the Corlises own a slave. Maggie finds Mrs. Corlis a less than pleasant mistress. After one of her friends and fellow servants dies, Maggie is grief-stricken, and the Corlis’ son takes advantage of her grief by getting her alone. When Maggie soon after learns she is pregnant, Mrs. Corlis refuses to believe her perfect son could be the father and tosses Maggie out of the house. The Corlises’ relatives are not so cruel, however, and soon Maggie finds herself marrying the cousin of her future child’s father.
To read more, visit On the Backs of Women.
Down the Rabbit Hole and Back: Stop Believing the Lies and Live Your Own Truth is a refreshing look at how to undo all the roles and expectations that have been placed on you so you can find your true self. Elisabeth Caetano, an author, speaker, professor, and licensed therapist, uses the metaphor of falling down rabbit holes to illustrate the times when our lives go wrong, and then she shows us how to climb back out of them. Each chapter uses examples from Alice in Wonderland to illustrate the various problems we are all faced with when we fall down our rabbit holes. Using Alice’s journey as a metaphor for our own lives, Caetano shows us how we can, like Alice, grow and come to terms with who we really are, despite the world around us, so we can feel empowered to be our true selves.
Caetano is down-to-earth and straightforward in her methods. She begins with a bold truth: “You were lied to. Sorry, we were all lied to. It wasn’t anyone’s fault; it was just that you learned what your parents learned, and they learned from their parents and so on and so forth from time immemorial.”
To read more, visit Down the Rabbit Hole and Back.
Patti Smith, author, professional keynote speaker, entrepreneur, and life success coach, offers the solutions so many of us seek when life doesn’t go the way we want in her new book What Am I to Do Now? Simple Strategies to Navigate the Unknown and IGNITE What’s Next in Your Life. Patti knows we all want meaningful work, a sense of fulfillment, and a chance to make a difference in the world, but many of us don’t know where to start or we feel we don’t have the knowledge to make a better, more satisfying life possible. In this book, Patti offers the tools people need to evolve from where they are, what she calls your what’s next evolution.
Patti begins by reminding us of what positive children we probably were; back then, we believed anything was possible and we let our imaginations have full rein. But then we were told it was time to grow up, to “get real,” so we came to believe real life did not include fulfilling your dreams. Patti knows nothing is further from the truth. The problem is we become trained to look to others for our validation when all along what we need is inside us. We just need to learn to tap into it, cultivate it, and then take inspired action to get our show started as we step into the spotlight on our own Life’s Stage.
To read more, visit What Am I to Do Now?
