Welcome to Issue 52 of the SUPERIOR BOOK PRODUCTIONS newsletter!
I am pleased to announce this year’s winner of the Tyler R. Tichelaar Historical Fiction Award, which I sponsor through the Reader Views Literary Awards: Patrick Shannon’s “Tame the Wild Land.” You can read about Shannon’s book below which offers fascinating insight into the histories of Louisiana and Texas when they were occupied by the French and Spanish.
I’m also pleased to announce that a book formerly reviewed in this column, A Dream of Shadows by Diana DeLuca also won twice in the Reader Views Literary Awards, for the Relationships & Spirituality Category and the West Mountain Regional Category. This novel is about end-of-life issues, reincarnation, and much more.
Congratulations to both DeLuca and Shannon. Be sure to check out both of their books. Of course, all the books reviewed in this newsletter are winners in my opinion, and some great new ones are listed below.
Enjoy!
Tyler
New Books
Winner of the Tyler R. Tichelaar Historical Fiction Award, Tame the Wild Land is a book after my own heart. As a descendant of seventeenth and eighteenth century French Canadians, I’ve always been a lover of the period of history when those ancestors lived and have wanted to know more about it, but while most of what I’ve read has been about Quebec and the Great Lakes region, I’ve known little about the other French settlements, especially in Louisiana. This novel filled a huge gap in French-American history for me, and it was also highly entertaining, which is exactly what historical fiction should be.
The author, Patrick Shannon, has chosen for his main protagonist, Louis de St. Denis, a man I’d never heard of, but I should have. Shannon also happens to be a descendant of St. Denis.
To read more, visit Tame the Wild Land.
Officer Sam McClellan and his partner, Lee, have stopped at a convenience store, and Sam has gone inside to buy a bag of Fritos. Meanwhile, a drive-by shooter kills Lee in Sam’s car. But what first appears to be a random act of crime soon reveals itself to be a huge cover-up of dirty secrets, drugs, prostitution, and backstabbing friends in award-winning author Laura Wharton’s new novel, Deceived.
Questions about Lee’s death continue to surface when, immediately following the murder, Sam goes to visit Lee’s wife, Jen, at their beach cottage. Jen is too distraught to notice, but when Sam arrives, he realizes someone has been searching the den in her home. Then Sam returns to his boat, where he lives, to find someone has tossed it while again searching for something, but what exactly, Sam has no idea.
To read more, visit Deceived.
Spirians is the ninth book (eight novels plus a novelette) in the Spirian Saga series by author Rowena Portch, but if you haven’t read the other books, this is a great one to start with because it’s an origin tale. Although set in the eighteenth century in Scotland, it explains how the Spirians came into the world at the beginning of time, sent as Angels by the Spirit to fight Lucifer and the evil ones who became Shadows. Gently playing with biblical history, including a revision of the Tower of Babel story that ties to Atlantis, Portch’s imagination weaves a plausible origin story that feels truthful and realistic for her supernatural fictional characters.
More specifically, Spirians is the tale of Shanuk, who has appeared in previous novels, but whose full story has not been told until now. The novel opens in 1736, with Shanuk as a Spirian on the verge of becoming a warrior.
To read more, visit Spirians.
Darren Pierre’s new book The Invitation to Love is a surprising book offering gentle and heartfelt ways to look at some of the most difficult aspects of being human: our relationships with others and our relationship with ourselves.
While Pierre is himself a gay, black man with a Ph.D., his words will speak to every reader, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, education, class, religion, or any of the other designations we tend to use to separate us. At the end of the day, we are all human, and to be human means to be imperfect. Pierre’s book meets us at that point of imperfection and guides us in how to move beyond it so we can communicate effectively with one another.
To read more, visit The Invitation to Love.
Whether you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a day trader, someone with a 401k, someone who thinks everyone on Wall Street is a crook, or you just plain don’t care about the economy, you need to read Transforming Wall Street because there’s a lot you may not know about capitalism in America today—and there’s reason for hope.
Known as “The Wall Street Coach,” Curtin decided to give free coaching to people on Wall Street, and so, she tells us, “on October 7, 2008, down I went to bring my coaching to those whom I hoped might use it. Within a couple of hours of sitting there on my cement bench on the corner of Broad & Wall Street, there was some static in the air. I could feel the tension. I asked a passerby what was going on and he said, ‘The market is in free fall.’ Then people started to approach me—the sort of executives I didn’t expect would.”
To read more, visit Transforming Wall Street.
Journey with an Angel offers a fascinating look at the topic of angels in general, but with a lot of new information from some surprising sources, and with the biggest shock of all being that angels not only are real but they are living here among us.
In this book, Lisa Ulshafer shares her amazing story of how she found out she is an incarnated angel. Six years following this discovery, she met author David Armstrong, himself a clairvoyant with spirit guides, who confirmed this reality for her. With some assistance from Armstrong, Ulshafer has written this book to share the information she has learned about the roles of angels in our lives and the greater picture of human existence and reincarnation, including sharing the names of some well-known incarnated angels among us.
To read more, visit Journey with an Angel.
