New Novel Vietnam, Port Townsend Bay Traces a Dying Man’s Journey Home

NY Weekly Staff on July 17, 2026

Seattle, WA — Author Calmar Austin McCune has released Vietnam, Port Townsend Bay, a novel that follows the wealthiest man in Vietnam on a final, unforgettable flight back to the small Washington town where he grew up.

The story opens at a Hanoi airport, where a Vietnamese-American surgeon named Dr. Thu is unexpectedly recruited to serve as an in-flight physician aboard a private Boeing 747. Her patient is Dexter Rowell, an elderly, ailing businessman who owns the plane, and who has just been given two weeks to live. Rather than spend his final days in comfort at home, Rowell has decided to fly across the Pacific to Port Townsend, the small waterfront town on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula where he was born and raised, and where his parents are buried.

Over the course of the flight, Rowell tells Dr. Thu the story of his life: a difficult childhood, an unlikely stint as a high school quarterback, and his enlistment in the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1966 as a demolitions specialist. There, he became one of the “tunnel rats” who crawled through the Viet Cong’s underground tunnel networks near Cu Chi, narrow, booby-trapped passages filled with venomous snakes, scorpions, and near-total darkness. Captured and held by North Vietnamese soldiers and villagers, Rowell endured months as a prisoner before a forced march to Hanoi and, eventually, release at the war’s end.

Decades later, haunted by memories of the woman who helped care for him during his captivity, Rowell returned to Vietnam, married her, and built an unlikely fortune there, turning a wartime observation about rice paper into an international business empire. Now, with his health failing, he is drawn back to Port Townsend for one last look at the schools, streets, and shoreline of his youth.

Dr. Thu, his in-flight physician, becomes an unexpected confidante on this journey. A gifted facial reconstruction surgeon trained at Harvard and the Royal London Institute of Surgery, she has her own quiet story of leaving Vietnam behind, and the long flight across the Pacific becomes a conversation between two people separated by generation and circumstance but bound by the same distant homeland.

McCune weaves together two vividly rendered worlds, the claustrophobic terror of Vietnam’s wartime tunnels and the quiet, salt-air familiarity of a small Pacific Northwest town, into a meditation on memory, homecoming, and the pull of the place where a life began. Readers familiar with Port Townsend will recognize real landmarks along the way, including Fort Worden, the Hood Canal Bridge, Water Street, and the beach where the story reaches its close.

The novel closes with an unexpected final gesture from Rowell, one that reaches beyond Port Townsend and back across the Pacific to the country and the people who shaped his life, bringing the story full circle.

Though presented as fiction, the novel draws on extensive research into the tunnel warfare of the Vietnam War era and on McCune’s own long familiarity with Port Townsend, where he lived and worked for three decades. The result is a story that moves fluidly between two very different settings, always circling back to the same questions of home, identity, and what it means to return to a place after a lifetime away.

Vietnam – Port Townsend Bay is available now in hardcover, softcover, and eBook editions through Xlibris and major booksellers.

About the Author

Calmar Austin McCune grew up in Seattle, Washington, and went on to practice law in Port Townsend, Washington, for many years. He now lives back in Seattle, where he continues to write. McCune is 87 years old, and Vietnam, Port Townsend Bay draws on his deep familiarity with the Olympic Peninsula town he called home for decades, as well as his lifelong interest in the history and legacy of the Vietnam War.

Every Generation Believes It Is Preserving Its History, But Every Generation Also Loses Part Of It

NY Weekly Staff on July 16, 2026

Modern life has become an endless exercise in storage. Photographs rest inside cloud servers, birthdays appear as automated reminders, and family milestones are documented before anyone has the chance to experience them. We have accumulated more records than any civilization before us, yet many families struggle to answer surprisingly ordinary questions: Who first owned this home? Why did our grandparents make the choices they did? Which stories shaped the people we became?

Memory, it turns out, has never been measured by volume. It survives because someone decides that a story is worth telling. That tension lies quietly beneath Rebecca McDonald’s My Grandmother’s Treasures. A novel that treats family history not as nostalgia but as an active conversation between generations. Rather than relying on sweeping historical spectacle, the narrative begins with something remarkably familiar. A grandmother opens her jewelry box for her fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Each object becomes less an ornament than an invitation, carrying fragments of lives that might otherwise disappear.

Objects That Outlive Their Owners

For centuries, families entrusted heirlooms with responsibilities now assigned to digital archives. A ring commemorated a sacrifice. A watch recorded the migration. A faded brooch carried the memory of someone whose name might never appear in a history textbook.

These possessions mattered because they demanded interpretation. Unlike a smartphone gallery containing thousands of nearly identical images, an heirloom arrives without explanation. Someone must supply the missing narrative.

Rebecca’s novel recognizes this distinction. The jewelry itself possesses little importance without Cassie McAllister’s willingness to explain why each piece exists and what emotional weight accompanies it. The exchange between grandmother and granddaughter becomes an act of preservation, reminding readers that heritage is transferred conversationally long before it becomes historical documentation.

The quiet ritual feels increasingly uncommon. Families often inherit possessions after funerals, when the storytellers capable of explaining them are already gone.

Silence Between Mothers And Daughters

My Grandmother’s Treasures refuses to romanticize family relationships. Running alongside its recollections is an unresolved conflict between Cassie and her daughter, Vivian, whose disagreements remain deliberately obscured from young Tessa.

This emotional architecture reflects an uncomfortable truth about family memory. Every household maintains competing versions of the past.

  • Parents remember responsibility.
  • Children remember absence.
  • Grandparents remember sacrifice.
  • No account is entirely complete.

The novel acknowledges that inheritance extends beyond cherished keepsakes. Families also pass along misunderstandings, unanswered questions, protective silences, and unresolved disappointments. These intangible legacies often prove more durable than physical possessions.

The resulting friction feels authentic precisely because it refuses convenient reconciliation. Families rarely argue only about the present. More often, they revisit decades-old decisions using contemporary language.

History Lives Best In Ordinary Rooms

Rebecca McDonald spent more than two decades teaching history and English before turning to fiction, an experience reflected in her attention to overlooked lives rather than celebrated figures. The perspective challenges a widespread assumption that history belongs primarily to nations, wars, presidents, and revolutions.

Instead, history appears around kitchen tables.

  • Inside family photographs.
  • Within recipes whose origins no one fully remembers.
  • In conversations postponed until summer afternoons.

These intimate settings rarely receive institutional recognition, yet they shape identity far more consistently than public monuments. The stories shared inside households influence values, loyalties, fears, and ambitions long before formal education begins.

Perhaps this explains why novels centered on family memory continue attracting readers despite an era obsessed with acceleration. They offer something increasingly scarce: continuity. Not certainty, because every family contains contradictions.

Not perfection, because every inheritance arrives with imperfections. Continuity.

Takeaway

My Grandmother’s Treasures suggests that remembering is less about preserving flawless versions of the past than accepting that every generation edits history before passing it onward. The greatest inheritance may not be jewelry, photographs, or carefully stored documents. It is the willingness to remain curious enough to ask older relatives difficult questions while there is still time to hear the answers. The stories waiting inside those answers may become the only archives future generations truly trust.

The Silent Crisis in Christian Leadership and Why Good Leaders Are Quitting and How to Survive the Call

NY Weekly Staff on July 16, 2026

Something is happening in the church that many people may not be talking about openly. Behind the scenes of vibrant ministries and growing congregations, a quiet crisis can unfold. Good leaders, faithful men and women who answered the call of God, sometimes walk away. They may not be walking away because they lost their faith. They may be walking away because the weight of leadership became too much to carry.

If you are a leader, you may know what this feels like. There may have been moments when you looked at the responsibility on your shoulders and thought, “I do not know if I can keep doing this.” That thought does not make you a failure. It can make you honest. And honesty can become the first step toward survival.

The modern church often celebrates the platform. It celebrates influence, authority, and the visible results of leadership. But what the church does not always address is the internal collapse that can happen when a leader carries too much for too long. The quiet moments of pressure, the sleepless nights, and the weight of decisions that affect real lives are often unseen. Because they are unseen, leaders can suffer in silence. They smile on Sunday and fall apart on Monday. This is the silent crisis, and for many leaders, it can feel real.

One damaging lie leaders may believe is that strong leaders do not struggle. This myth can harm ministries more than many external challenges. The truth is that many leaders in the Bible faced moments of deep struggle.

Consider Moses. God called him to lead an entire nation out of slavery. That sounds powerful, but what did it actually feel like for Moses? He faced constant pressure, endless complaints, and the burden of people who depended on him for everything. At one point, Moses cried out to God and said, “I cannot carry all these people by myself. The burden is too heavy for me.” That is a leader talking. That is real. Moses was not weak. He was honest. He admitted that the weight was too heavy for human shoulders.

Consider Elijah. After one of the major victories of his life, he collapsed. He ran into the wilderness, sat under a tree, and asked God to take his life. He was exhausted, discouraged, and empty. This was not simply a moment of spiritual weakness. It was also a moment of human exhaustion. God did not rebuke Elijah for his honesty. Instead, God let him sleep, gave him food, and restored his strength.

If the prophet Elijah could hit a breaking point, leaders today can as well. The idea that leaders must always be strong can be dangerous. It can keep leaders from seeking help, and it can keep them from finding rest.

One difficult part of leadership is loneliness. A leader can be surrounded by people and still feel alone. This is not just a feeling. It can be a reality of leadership.

Leaders often carry a vision that others do not fully understand. They make decisions when others do not see the full picture. They carry burdens that no one else can fully carry for them. Slowly, their circle can become smaller. They may stop sharing their struggles because they do not want to worry people. They may stop being honest because they feel they must appear strong.

This isolation can become dangerous. It may lead to emotional shutdown, spiritual dryness, and poor decisions. Leaders were not meant to lead alone.

The pain of betrayal adds another layer to the weight. There is a unique kind of hurt that can come when people a leader trusted turn against them. They invested in them. They prayed for them. They stood by them. And then, for reasons they may never fully understand, those people walk away or turn on them.

This is not just painful. It can be confusing. A leader may replay every conversation, searching for what went wrong. But sometimes, they did nothing wrong.

David experienced this. He wrote about the pain of a close friend betraying him. Jesus experienced this as well. Judas walked with Jesus, learned from Jesus, ate with Jesus, and still betrayed him. If it happened to Jesus, Christian leaders should not be surprised when betrayal becomes part of their own journey.

But betrayal does not have to harden the heart. Leaders may need to guard their hearts without closing them off completely. Forgiveness is not easy, but Brantley presents it as necessary. Without forgiveness, bitterness can grow, and leadership can suffer.

So where is the hope? Where is the solution to this silent crisis? Evangelist Michael Brantley’s book, Leadership as a Christian HELP!, points overwhelmed leaders back to dependence on God.

The book speaks directly to leaders who feel worn down by responsibility. It does not present quick fixes. It offers a faith-centered message. One of the freeing ideas in the book is that leaders are not supposed to be enough on their own. Brantley argues that God did not design leadership for people to have all the answers, handle everything perfectly, or carry everything alone. He designed it so that leaders would need Him.

The moment a leader says, “God, I cannot carry this without You,” can become the moment they begin leading differently.

Evangelist Michael Brantley understands this struggle because he has lived through parts of it. His writing is not only theory. It is shaped by ministry experience and the quiet battles many leaders do not see.

He writes with compassion and conviction, calling leaders to stop pretending and start depending. He reminds readers that strong leaders are not the ones who never struggle. They are the ones who depend on God.

The weight of leadership does not always disappear when a leader releases it to God. But, in Brantley’s message, it can be transformed. Instead of pressure alone, it can become purpose. Instead of stress alone, it can become a shared responsibility with the God who called them.

Many leaders live under the pressure to be perfect. They feel they cannot afford to make a mistake. They feel they must hold everything together. This pressure can be crushing. It can lead to burnout, fear, and loss of joy.

Brantley’s message is that God did not call leaders to perfection. He called them to faithfulness. Faithfulness means showing up, doing the work, and trusting God with the results. It means being honest when they fall short and allowing God’s grace to cover their weaknesses.

Perfectionism can damage a leader. Faithfulness can help sustain one.

The silent crisis in Christian leadership may be real, but it does not have to define every leader’s story. Leaders do not have to quit. They do not have to fade away. They can survive the call, but Brantley argues that they cannot do it while carrying the weight alone.

They need to stay connected to God. They need trusted people who can speak truth into their lives. They need rest when rest is needed. They need forgiveness when they have been hurt. And above all, they need to remember that their identity is not in their role. Their identity is in Christ.

Leadership is an assignment, but it is not the whole of who a person is.

Evangelist Michael Brantley writes in Leadership as a Christian HELP! that finishing well is not about how fast a person goes. It is about staying connected to the source. A leader can have a visible ministry and still lose themselves if they are not careful.

The road can be hard, but Brantley points readers back to the One who called them. In his view, God can carry leaders through each season when they allow Him to do so.

For leaders who feel tired, overwhelmed, or alone, Leadership as a Christian HELP! offers a faith-based reflection on the cost of ministry, the need for dependence on God, and the importance of continuing with humility, honesty, and faithfulness.

Photo Courtesy: Michael Brantley

The Scientist Who Looked Up and Found a New Kind of Love

NY Weekly Staff on July 16, 2026

In My Friend Greg, Joaquim Procopio begins with a modest instrument pointed at the stars and then does something rare in contemporary speculative fiction: he lets wonder arrive slowly.

The narrator, Jota, is not a superhero, not a chosen savior in the usual cinematic sense, and not a young man chasing adventure. He is a Brazilian scientist and retired medical doctor whose curiosity is disciplined, tender, and sometimes comic.

At an amateur astronomy gathering in rural São Paulo, he meets Greg, a strange blond visitor with a magnificent telescope, dark glasses, uncertain explanations, and a relationship to the sky that feels, from the first pages, both intimate and suspicious.

The book’s own synopsis calls the story “a love story between two scientists,” one terrestrial and one extraterrestrial, but that description only begins to suggest the odd emotional temperature of Procopio’s novel.

What follows is science fiction with the patience of a diary and the temperament of a scientist who cannot stop noticing things. A telescope mount, a rural gate, a cool geodesic dome hidden among eucalyptus trees, a mysterious camera, a chessboard, a basement, a farm that is not exactly a farm: Procopio builds his world through instruments, procedures, habits, and small discontinuities. The reader is not pushed through revelation. The reader is invited to observe.

That observational quality is the novel’s signature pleasure. Procopio’s own background gives the novel an unusual texture. Writing under the pen name Joaquim Procopio, the author is Joaquim Procopio de Araujo Filho, a Brazilian MD and PhD from Universidade de São Paulo, with postdoctoral work at Cornell University Medical College in membrane biophysics. He has published more than 60 scientific papers across fields, including membrane biophysics, artificial membranes, bioelectricity, theoretical biophysics, diabetes, fatty acids, and physiology teaching. That résumé matters, not because fiction needs credentials, but because this book’s imagination is inseparable from scientific habit. It does not merely decorate itself with science. It thinks scientifically, sometimes obsessively, sometimes beautifully.

The love story at the center of the book is stranger than the familiar romance between human and alien. Antonina, the extraterrestrial scientist who becomes Jota’s mentor and object of fascination, is not written as a fantasy of softness or conquest. She is brilliant, commanding, vulnerable, and, in Jota’s eyes, almost unbearable to contemplate. The manuscript frames their relationship around a provocative idea: domination not through violence or power, but through “a sort of love.” That theme gives the novel its charge. It asks whether love can remain love when intelligence, dependence, awe, and influence become dangerously unequal.

There is a philosophical boldness here that recalls older speculative traditions, when science fiction was willing to pause for lectures, theories, arguments, and metaphysical unease. Yet My Friend Greg is also intimate, even domestic. Its alienness often appears over coffee, bread, homemade liquor, chess, car washing, improvised hospitality, and the smell of eucalyptus. Procopio understands that the uncanny becomes more powerful when it sits at the lunch table.

The result is a sprawling, eccentric, deeply earnest novel about contact, not only between species, but between forms of knowing. Jota looks at the night sky and sees beauty, distance, and time. Greg’s group looks at Earth and sees crisis, potential, and mystery. Antonina looks at Jota and seems to see something he does not yet understand about himself. That triangular tension, between science, love, and destiny, gives the book its emotional architecture.

Readers looking for clipped minimalism will not find it here. My Friend Greg is expansive, digressive, and unapologetically idea-driven. It belongs to the tradition of novels that want to contain a universe, not simply tell a story. Its ambitions are large: ecology, intelligence, medicine, memory, extraterrestrial civilization, the fragility of Earth, the limits of human perception, and the bewildering force of affection. The book’s table of contents alone suggests its range, moving from astronomy and the hidden farm to questions of intelligence, planetary organization, medical transformation, artificial gravity, and other speculative frontiers.

But beneath the scale, what lingers is the voice of a man trying to describe the moment his ordinary categories failed him. “I report them with no expectation that someone believes they actually took place,” Jota says at the beginning, framing the narrative as a record made against ridicule. That sentence gives the novel its human key. This is not merely a book about extraterrestrials. It is a book about credibility, wonder, humiliation, longing, and the loneliness of experiences too large to share easily.

My Friend Greg may be marketed as science fiction, but its deeper subject is surrender: to evidence, to beauty, to intelligence greater than one’s own, and to a love that arrives disguised as an experiment. For readers willing to follow its patient accumulation of detail, Procopio’s novel offers a rare pleasure: the feeling that the universe is not only bigger than we imagined, but more intimate, more demanding, and more emotionally dangerous.

My Friend Greg is available online for readers drawn to Joaquim Procopio’s strange, searching, and deeply imaginative universe. Those willing to sit with its questions will find a science-fiction love story that follows a few of the genre’s usual patterns.

Decide Now and Mean It, Julia Young Sandrock’s Guide to Abundance Is the Permission Slip You Didn’t Know You Needed

NY Weekly Staff on July 16, 2026

By: Julia Allen

Julia Young Sandrock’s Decide, Now: A Guide to Mastering Abundance and Fulfillment offers an introspective exploration of personal transformation, inviting readers to reconsider abundance not as an external achievement but as an internal state cultivated through conscious choice. Rather than positioning fulfillment as the product of circumstance or acquisition, Sandrock argues that it emerges through intentional living, self-awareness, and a willingness to challenge long-held assumptions about success. This reframing encourages readers to shift their focus inward, examining the beliefs and habits that shape their daily experiences.

Organized around the author’s proprietary Fulfillment Framework, the book guides readers through three interconnected stages of self-exploration designed to examine limiting beliefs, reconnect with one’s authentic essence, and align everyday decisions with personal values and purpose. Each stage builds upon the previous one, creating a cohesive journey that feels both structured and flexible. The framework provides a clear roadmap while still allowing space for individual interpretation, making the material accessible without sacrificing philosophical depth or nuance.

Sandrock’s writing favors contemplation over prescription. Rather than relying on dramatic promises of overnight transformation, she encourages readers to engage in an ongoing process of awareness and intentional practice. This approach lends the book a grounded and realistic tone, emphasizing that meaningful change unfolds gradually. The result is a work that feels less like a motivational manifesto and more like a reflective companion for those navigating periods of transition, uncertainty, or personal growth.

Recurring themes of intuition, energetic alignment, mindfulness, and conscious decision-making are woven throughout the narrative with consistency. Readers familiar with contemporary spiritual and personal development literature will recognize many of these concepts, but Sandrock distinguishes her work by emphasizing practical integration over abstract theory. Reflection prompts and thoughtful exercises encourage readers to pause between chapters, transforming the reading experience into an active dialogue rather than passive consumption. These moments of engagement deepen the reader’s connection to the material and reinforce its applicability to everyday life.

One of the book’s notable strengths lies in its tone. Sandrock writes with warmth and measured confidence, avoiding dogmatism in favor of gentle encouragement. Her voice consistently affirms the reader’s capacity for change without diminishing the complexity of personal transformation. This balance allows the book to remain accessible to newcomers while still offering moments of insight for readers already immersed in mindfulness or self-development practices. The language is clear and inviting, making complex ideas feel approachable without oversimplifying them.

The author’s central premise, that abundance is a condition of being rather than a reward earned through external accomplishment, serves as the book’s philosophical anchor. Throughout, she challenges achievement-driven narratives that equate worth with productivity or material success, instead advocating for a more integrated understanding of fulfillment rooted in authenticity, presence, and purposeful action. While these ideas have become increasingly familiar within modern personal growth literature, Sandrock presents them with sincerity and cohesion, reinforcing them through a structured progression rather than isolated inspiration.

The pacing encourages deliberate reading. Chapters build naturally upon one another, inviting readers to revisit previous insights as their understanding deepens. Those seeking highly tactical strategies or business-oriented productivity systems may find the book intentionally reflective, but readers open to contemplative exploration will likely appreciate its measured cadence and emphasis on internal transformation. The book rewards patience and introspection, offering value that unfolds over time.

Ultimately, Decide, Now succeeds as an invitation rather than an instruction manual. It asks readers to become active participants in their own evolution, recognizing that meaningful change begins with a series of intentional decisions made in the present moment. Sandrock presents fulfillment not as a distant destination but as a practice of aligning thought, energy, and action with one’s deepest values.

If you have been chasing a version of abundance that keeps moving further away the closer you get to it, and you are ready to discover that fulfillment was never something to be earned but something to be chosen, Decide, Now by Julia Young Sandrock is the reflective and genuinely transformative companion you have been looking for. Grab your copy on Amazon today and begin the most important series of decisions you will ever make, the ones that align everything you do with everything you actually are.

Jennifer Hashmi and the Floating Islands of Pongoland

NY Weekly Staff on July 15, 2026

By: Jaxon Lee

Some authors chase trends. Jennifer Hashmi does the opposite. She writes from a place most modern children’s fiction has forgotten, a place where kindness is a kind of power, and where a hidden archipelago in the sky still has lessons to teach a noisy world below.

Hashmi is the author behind the Sonny, Gogo, and Tobo series, including the most recent installment, The Adventures of Sonny Gogo and Tobo: An Epilogue, and the companion fantasy The Ruby Ring and the Black Knight. Her stories drop readers into Pongoland, Maridoland, Beldeena, and the other floating islands of an archipelago that her young hero, Sonny, first stumbles into at age seven. By the time readers meet a grown-up Sonny in the Epilogue, the world has grown with him.

A Writer Shaped By Two Countries

To understand the books, it helps to understand the woman who wrote them. Born in Bradford in 1938, Hashmi trained as a speech therapist, studied theology, and then, in 1964, boarded a ship to India. She lived in Delhi for forty-one years, married Professor Salman Hashmi of the University of Delhi, raised a son and daughter, and only returned to Britain in 2005. Today she writes from London, surrounded by her grandchildren.

That long arc, England, India, and back again, quietly runs through every island she invents.

Why Pongoland Exists in Her Own Words

Asked what pulled her toward this particular world, Hashmi speaks plainly.

“I wanted to build a place where children could think,” she explains. “Not a place without trouble, trouble is half the fun, but a place where the trouble is solved by being clever, being fair, and being kind. That isn’t old-fashioned to me. That feels urgent.”

She is direct about the contrast she draws between Earth and the islands. In the new Epilogue, her hero Sonny reflects on a world “recklessly destroying its eco-system” and choosing luxury for the few over the work of the many. Hashmi does not pretend the parallel is accidental.

“I wrote those passages because I believe them,” she says. “Children notice everything. They notice when the world around them doesn’t add up. I wanted to give them a world that does add up, bartering instead of buying, clean air instead of factories, leaders who actually listen. Not as a fantasy escape, but as a question. Why couldn’t ours look more like this?”

Choice, Not Magic, at the Heart of the Series

Readers expecting wand-waving will find something else. Hashmi’s magic is gentler. Owls carry travelers between islands. A wise woman, Mother Fulati, heals with herbs and intuition. A young hero learns that growing up means making harder choices, not flashier ones.

“Magic in these books is wisdom,” Hashmi says. “It is patience and the ability to see what other people miss. Mother Fulati is the heart of everything I believe about how the world should work. She listens. She tells the truth gently. She trusts people to grow.”

The Epilogue takes Sonny into adult territory, duty, partnership, finding the right person, and learning what real responsibility costs. Hashmi handles all of it without lecturing.

Why She Keeps Writing

At 87, Hashmi shows no sign of stopping. Alongside the Sonny books, she has produced poetry, a spiritual diary, and a translation of Le Grand Meaulnes from the French.

“Writing keeps me curious,” she says. “Every story asks me a question I haven’t answered yet. The islands are still teaching me things. I think that is why readers stay. They can feel that I’m still learning too.”

For families looking for fiction that respects a child’s intelligence and adults quietly hoping a book might restore something, Hashmi’s archipelago is waiting. Readers can find her full catalog, including the new Epilogue, on Jennifer Hashmi’s official author website.

Some authors chase trends. Jennifer Hashmi built a world that waits, patiently, for readers to find their way to it.

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Rising From the Setting Sun and How Teodorie and Geordie Ravara Turn Grief Into Light

NY Weekly Staff on July 15, 2026

By: Revamz LLC

When a story is born from pain, it can carry the ability to support reflection, not just for its creators, but for readers who connect with it. The Enlightened Series: Setting Sun is that kind of story. It springs from the intertwined lives of a mother and child, Teodorie and Geordie Ravara, whose personal trials became the spark for a fictional world where loss, identity, and courage meet the will to move forward.

From the first page, the novel plunges readers into a nightmare that feels painfully real, a child reliving the crash that shattered her family. “Nightmares occur because your body is trying to tell you something is wrong,” it opens. That single line reflects what both authors said in their interview: pain, when understood, can become part of purpose.

Teodorie Ravara, “the first American born on both sides” of her Filipino family, grew up feeling like the “first” and the “only,” an outsider even among relatives. That tension between belonging and isolation echoes through the book’s central character, Rianne, a young girl caught between what once was and what must now be. Teodorie described herself as an “adventure seeker,” confident yet marked by teasing that she was “adopted.” That duality, courage mixed with hidden hurt, became an emotional cornerstone of Setting Sun. In Rianne’s world, survival means living with questions that have no answers. The crash that took her sisters’ lives leaves her wondering why she was spared. “I don’t feel blessed,” Rianne admits. “I feel… empty.”

While Teodorie’s storytelling is grounded in resilience and cultural identity, her co-author and child, Geordie Ravara, brings a younger lens filled with empathy and imagination. Growing up surrounded by creativity, from professional acting to devouring books by age four, Geordie developed an early love for stories. “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” they said, recalling journals begun at six. That dream became more than fiction. It became a bridge between generations. The blend of youthful wonder and a mother’s hard-won wisdom gives Setting Sun its emotional pulse.

Geordie recalled calling 911 at four years old to save their mother during an allergic reaction, a moment revealing an instinct for courage under pressure. That same bravery appears in Rianne’s determination to live after tragedy. For Teodorie, writing became a form of therapy. After suffering a stroke three years before the interview, she explained that while her speech sometimes faltered, her spirit did not. Each page reflects that truth. The book’s emotional realism, its slow, tender portrayal of healing, comes from a woman who rebuilt her strength word by word.

Their shared Filipino heritage also anchors the story’s emotional depth. Teodorie remembered being “the only American cousin among a hundred,” both celebrated and teased for it. That push and pull between inclusion and distance infuses the novel’s meditation on belonging. It is not only about grief. It is about identity, faith, and the way culture shapes how people survive. In one haunting line, Rianne reflects that her sisters were “meant to accept the body of Christ for the first time. Instead, they met Christ.” Faith, irony, and love coexist there, reflecting the Ravara family’s grace amid sorrow.

The strength of Setting Sun lies in how honestly it portrays grief through a young girl’s eyes. Rianne’s pain feels real because the authors do not look away from difficult emotions. When she clutches her sisters’ bracelets before walking out the door and whispers, “The pain in my chest doesn’t get any worse, so I nod and walk out,” it becomes a quiet act of courage, the kind that can define healing.

In the interview, Geordie described themself as “a very independent person” and “a listener before a talker.” That patience shows in the pacing of the story. Scenes linger, emotions breathe, and readers are invited to feel, not just observe. The collaboration between mother and child is closely connected, their writing flowing like two hearts beating together, each understanding what the other cannot say aloud.

The series title itself, The Enlightened Series, reveals something deeper. For both authors, enlightenment is not sudden revelation but slow rediscovery. “The ache in my chest has not changed since I woke up in that hospital bed,” Rianne says. “They told me it’s all in my head. How could it be?” Her disbelief mirrors the numb shock of anyone who has lost deeply. Through her, Teodorie and Geordie offer a message: the human heart can be fragile yet enduring. Even in darkness, there can be glimmers of light, a child’s laughter, a parent’s promise, the rising sun after the longest night.

The book’s structure mirrors that journey, from the nightmare of “Full Moon” to the rebirth in “Morning Prayers.” Each chapter becomes a step toward acceptance. The dedication captures their purpose: “To all the young humans who were pushed to do something before they were ready. Don’t let anyone change who you are, even if those people are ones you love.” It is a call to self-trust and quiet defiance.

By the end, one theme becomes clear: Setting Sun is not only about death. It is about life after it. It is about the bond between mother and child, faith and reason, the person we were and the one we must become. Through honesty and vulnerability, Teodorie and Geordie Ravara have turned pain into art that may stay with readers.

When asked what keeps them moving forward, Teodorie smiled through her pauses. She did not need to finish the sentence. The answer was already there. The act of creating The Enlightened Series was both prayer and promise. It suggests that even when the sun sets, it can rise again.

From a California Laboratory to Ancient Rome, Robin E. Levin’s The Death of Carthage Reaches Readers

NY Weekly Staff on July 14, 2026

By: Alexander Sebastian

Robin E. Levin’s The Death of Carthage offers something different from the typical Roman epic. It is not a sweeping panorama of generals and senators told from above. It is a ground-level account of one of history’s longest and most consequential conflicts, narrated by three ordinary people whose lives are shaped by it. Levin draws on Livy and Polybius for the historical bones, then fills in the human texture that ancient historians left out: the boredom of camp life, the awkwardness of homecoming, the moral weight of survival.

The author is not a career novelist. Levin was born in Baltimore in 1949, moved to California in 1957, and has spent most of her adult life in San Francisco. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971 with a degree in anthropology and zoology, and worked as a clinical laboratory scientist specializing in lipids at Quest Diagnostics until retiring in 2012.

The Death of Carthage is her first published novel, the product of a lifelong interest in ancient history that began in junior high school and was encouraged by a mother who watched I, Claudius on Masterpiece Theatre and read every Colleen McCullough novel about Rome. Levin has said the book grew directly out of her reading of Livy’s account of the Second Punic War, which struck her as a story that practically demanded novelization.

Three Voices, One Long War

The novel is built in three sections, and each section is told by a different first-person narrator. The first is Lucius Tullius Varro, a young Roman eques drafted into the cavalry at the start of the Second Punic War. He serves under Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus from the early campaigns in Hispania through the final defeat of Hannibal at Zama. The second narrator is his cousin Enneus, captured at the Battle of Lake Trasimene and sold into slavery on a Greek estate, where he remains for more than two decades. The third is Enneus’s son Hector, who comes of age in Rome and eventually witnesses the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C.

This structure gives the book something that single-protagonist Roman novels often lack. By moving the point of view across three generations and three positions in Roman society, Levin presents the same long conflict from inside the cavalry, inside slavery, and inside the literate Greek-Roman expatriate world that produced figures like Polybius.

Drawn from the Ancient Sources

Levin’s research foundation is solid. The novel draws primarily on Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, Polybius’s Histories, Appian of Alexandria, with additional material from Plutarch and Silius Italicus. Quoted passages from these classical authors appear as chapter epigraphs and are carefully footnoted at the back of the book. The major military and political events follow the sequence preserved in the ancient record. Readers familiar with the period will recognize Cannae, Baecula, Ilipa, Zama, the trial of the Scipios, and the long final siege under Scipio Aemilianus, all rendered with attention to what the surviving sources actually say.

The Human Cost of Empire

One of the most distinctive choices in The Death of Carthage is Levin’s willingness to dwell on slavery. Section Two of the novel is given over entirely to Enneus, who spends twenty-one years as a shepherd on a Greek estate before Titus Quinctius Flamininus negotiates the release of Roman captives. The account is unromantic. Enneus is flogged. He is starved. He survives by reading aloud from memory and by quietly accepting that, as he puts it, his loyalty is to his back, which does not want to be flogged.

When he returns to Rome, his mother is dead, and his brother was killed at Cannae. His old property has been taken over by squatters who do not believe his claim. The novel handles this without melodrama. It treats homecoming after captivity as a slow, awkward process that involves favors, family debts, and the practical need to find work.

Politics, Personalities, and Cato

Readers who enjoy political intrigue will find plenty of it. The rivalry between Scipio Africanus and Marcus Porcius Cato runs through the entire book and is presented with both sides given their best argument. Cato’s case for the destruction of Carthage is laid out at length. So is Scipio Nasica Corculum’s case that Carthage should be preserved as a rival to keep Rome alert. The eventual fall of Africanus, hounded out of public life over alleged financial malfeasance, is shown as a kind of political assassination by procedure, and the novel makes its sympathies clear without sermonizing.

Filling a Genre Gap

Levin has noted that while ancient Rome is a crowded subject in historical fiction, novels focused specifically on the Punic Wars are rare. The Death of Carthage was written in part to address this. Readers who came of age on Colleen McCullough’s First Man in Rome sequence, or on the I, Claudius adaptations, will find familiar terrain handled in a fresh way. The book is not a battle-by-battle military history in fictional dress. It is a study of how a hundred-year war reshaped private lives.

A Three-Generation Saga of Rome and Carthage

The Death of Carthage is available on Amazon for readers interested in historical fiction set during the Second and Third Punic Wars. The novel covers roughly a hundred years of Mediterranean history through the eyes of three connected narrators.

Levin shares historical insights, behind-the-scenes notes, and news about upcoming releases on Instagram and Facebook.

Cooper Neitzel’s Promised Lands Explores the Sacred Journey Across Seven Faith Traditions

NY Weekly Staff on July 10, 2026

The first volume in The Covenant Pulse Series invites readers into a powerful study of call, wilderness, arrival, grace, effort, and the human longing for divine promise.

Photo Courtesy: Cooper Neitzel

In an era when religious difference is often treated as division, Cooper Neitzel’s Promised Lands: Pathways of Call, Wilderness, and Arrival Across Seven Faiths offers a timely and thoughtful invitation: listen more deeply, compare more reverently, and rediscover the sacred journey that has shaped human faith across centuries.

Promised Lands is the first volume in The Covenant Pulse Series, a spiritually rich and intellectually engaging body of work built around the guiding rhythm of Listening • Learning • Living. The book, now presented in its Second Edition, 2026, following its first edition in 2024, positions itself as both a work of comparative theology and a formational guide for readers seeking to understand how divine promise, human struggle, and spiritual arrival appear across the world’s great faith traditions.

At the heart of the book is a question both ancient and urgent: What does it mean to be called away from the familiar, tested in a wilderness, and brought toward a promised land?

For Neitzel, that promised land is not limited to geography. It may be Canaan, the New Jerusalem, Jannah, Mokṣa, Nirvāṇa, Sach Khand, Zion, or the continuing covenant path of the Latter-day Saint Restoration. Each tradition names the destination differently. Each carries its own theology, sacred language, and historical memory. Yet beneath the differences, Neitzel identifies a recurring structure: Call, Wilderness, and Arrival.

This structure gives Promised Lands its distinctive shape.

The book first enters the Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Judaism, the promised land is bound to covenant, peoplehood, Torah, and the enduring hope of the Messianic Age. In Christianity, it becomes the renewed creation and the New Jerusalem, where heaven and earth are brought together in divine fulfillment. In Islam, it is Jannah, understood not merely as paradise but as the soul’s return to the nearness of God.

The second movement turns to the Dharmic traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Here, the promised land becomes less about physical territory and more about transformation. Hinduism’s Mokṣa speaks of liberation and the soul’s long homecoming. Buddhism’s Nirvāṇa offers the cessation of craving and the release from suffering. Sikhism’s Sach Khand presents the Realm of Truth, where the soul is fulfilled in the presence of Waheguru.

The third movement brings readers into Latter-day Saint promised-land narratives, exploring covenantal journeys through scripture and history. These accounts are not presented as isolated stories, but as part of a larger sacred pattern: God calls, humanity responds, the wilderness refines, and arrival becomes both gift and responsibility.

What unites the book is Neitzel’s central framework: the Covenant Pulse.

The Covenant Pulse is the living rhythm between divine action and human faithfulness. It asks how grace and effort move together. It refuses the extremes of grace without response or effort without gift. Instead, it observes that every tradition examined in the book must answer the same spiritual question in its own language: What does God give, and what is humanity asked to become?

This idea gives Promised Lands its emotional and theological force. The book does not reduce religious traditions to similarities, nor does it rank them against one another. Instead, Neitzel practices what he calls Holy Envy, a posture of reverent admiration for the beauty, discipline, courage, and spiritual insight found in traditions beyond one’s own.

That posture is especially important because Neitzel writes from a Latter-day Saint perspective. Rather than hiding that location, he names it. The book is clear that it is written from within the Restoration, with respect for Latter-day Saint scripture, covenants, temple theology, and living prophetic witness. Yet that confessional grounding does not narrow the book’s vision. It strengthens it. Neitzel’s argument is that faith can be deepened, not diminished, when it listens honestly to the best of other traditions.

In this sense, Promised Lands is not simply a book about religion. It is a book about spiritual formation. It asks readers to think about their own call, their own wilderness, and their own promised land. It asks whether arrival is only a destination or also a transformation. It asks whether Zion is a place to be reached, a people to be formed, or a covenant practice to be lived.

The result is a work that feels both scholarly and devotional, both historically aware and deeply personal.

For readers interested in theology, comparative religion, Latter-day Saint thought, interfaith dialogue, sacred history, or personal spiritual growth, Promised Lands offers a meaningful and timely contribution.

It is a book for readers who believe the journey matters.

It is a book for those who have felt called, tested, stretched, or transformed.

And it is a book for anyone still searching for the place, state, or practice where the deepest longing of the soul finally meets divine promise.

Across seven faiths, Cooper Neitzel shows that the promised land has many names. The journey has many paths. The wilderness takes many forms.

But the Pulse continues.

About the Book

Promised Lands: Pathways of Call, Wilderness, and Arrival Across Seven Faiths is Volume I of The Covenant Pulse Series. Written by Cooper Neitzel and published by Hemingway Publishers, the book examines promised-land narratives across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and the Latter-day Saint Restoration.

The book is organized around the three-stage sacred journey of Call, Wilderness, and Arrival. It explores how different faith traditions understand divine invitation, human struggle, spiritual refinement, and ultimate fulfillment.

At the center of the work is the Covenant Pulse, Neitzel’s framework for understanding the relationship between divine grace and human faithfulness. Rather than erasing theological differences, the book honors them while identifying meaningful resonances across traditions.

About the Author

Cooper Neitzel is the author of Promised Lands and the creator of The Covenant Pulse Series. Writing from a Latter-day Saint confessional perspective, Neitzel approaches comparative theology with reverence, scholarly care, and a commitment to interfaith listening.

His work emphasizes the importance of honoring religious difference while learning from the spiritual beauty, discipline, and wisdom found across traditions. In Promised Lands, Neitzel invites readers to see the sacred journey not only as a historical or theological pattern, but as a living reality that continues to shape personal faith, covenant life, and spiritual transformation.

Through this publication, Hemingway Publishers presents a work that contributes to conversations in theology, comparative religion, Latter-day Saint studies, spiritual formation, and interfaith understanding.

Availability

Promised Lands: Pathways of Call, Wilderness, and Arrival Across Seven Faiths by Cooper Neitzel is published by Hemingway Publishers as part of The Covenant Pulse Series.

Media Contact

Hemingway Publishers
Website:https://www.hemingwaypublishers.com/

When Freedom Comes at a Cost

NY Weekly Staff on July 10, 2026

A True Story of Survival, Faith, and Courage Behind the Iron Curtain

For many readers in America, freedom is so deeply woven into daily life that it can feel almost invisible. It is there in the right to speak openly, to worship without fear, to question authority, to travel, to choose a future. But for Corinna Montgomery, freedom was never something to take for granted. It was something dangerous to desire, costly to pursue, and life-changing to finally reach. In The Wings of Freedom: A True Story of Survival, Faith and Freedom, Montgomery shares a deeply personal memoir of growing up in East Germany under Communist rule, enduring fear, arrest, imprisonment, and separation from family, and ultimately discovering not only physical freedom, but spiritual strength as well.

What makes this book especially powerful is that it does not read like distant history. It reads like a warning, a testimony, and a reminder all at once. Corinna does not present freedom as a slogan. She presents it as something she had to live without long enough to understand its true value. Her story begins in East Germany, where she was born in 1962 and raised in an environment defined by surveillance, political pressure, and silence. From an early age, she learned what it meant to live in a society where the government controlled education, work, movement, speech, and even belief. People stood in long lines for food, feared the Stasi, and understood that asking the wrong question could bring consequences no family wanted to face.

Life Inside a World Built on Fear

One of the strongest aspects of The Wings of Freedom is its plainspoken honesty about everyday life in the DDR. Corinna describes a system in which obedience was not simply encouraged; it was expected. Schools taught approved ideology. Young people were pushed toward political organizations. Creative freedom was restricted. Religion had to be kept quiet. People could not openly trust their neighbors, and sometimes not even their relatives, because the state relied on informants and on fear to maintain control.

These details make the memoir more than a personal recollection. They turn it into a vivid portrait of what happens when a government demands conformity at the expense of human dignity.

And yet, this is not a story written only in the language of oppression. It is also a story about awakening. Corinna’s stepfather plays a central role in that transformation. Unlike many around her, he encouraged her to think, to ask questions, and to understand that being told what to believe was not the same as truth. That influence changed everything. It gave her a private inner life even while she lived in a public culture of fear.

As a teenager, she began to understand that silence might keep a person safe for a while, but it could also slowly erase who they really were.

That tension sits at the heart of this memoir and gives it real emotional force…

The Moment Survival Became the Only Option

As the pressure mounted, Corinna’s family made the decision that many people only dream about, and very few dare attempt. They planned to escape. The way she recounts those preparations is one of the most gripping parts of the book. There are secret conversations, carefully managed letters, coded meetings, trusted contacts in West Germany, and the terrifying understanding that one mistake could destroy everything. This is not the stuff of fiction. It is the reality of a family trying to outthink a system designed to crush exactly this kind of hope.

One especially unforgettable episode involves Corinna carrying a letter during a covert attempt at a meeting. When the police appeared, she destroyed the letter and swallowed the torn pieces in a bathroom stall rather than risk discovery. It is the kind of detail no reader forgets because it captures both the terror of the moment and the courage demanded of someone still so young.

Montgomery’s memoir is filled with moments like this…

They show how survival is often built not on grand speeches, but on split-second choices made under pressure…

Then comes the arrest. Corinna and her family are swept into the machinery of the East German state, where questioning, intimidation, and imprisonment become brutal realities. The book does not sensationalize these experiences. Instead, it presents them with a directness that makes them hit even harder. She shows how quickly an ordinary day can turn into a nightmare, how families can be separated instantly, and how a government can trap even legal requests. Her account of being branded a traitor for seeking freedom highlights what authoritarian systems fear most: people who believe they have the right to choose their lives.

Why Faith Matters in a Story Like This

The subtitle promises survival, faith, and freedom, and the book truly earns all three. Faith is not presented here as an abstract theme pasted onto a hard story. It emerges gradually through suffering, endurance, and the search for meaning after trauma. Corinna’s journey eventually takes her beyond imprisonment and into a new life in West Germany, then later into the United States. But escape alone is not the whole destination.

What gives the memoir depth is its recognition that leaving oppression does not automatically heal the spirit!

Real freedom also involves rebuilding identity, learning trust, and discovering purpose…

The later sections of the manuscript reflect that spiritual evolution, including chapters centered on new beginnings, the Lord’s guidance, the Holy Spirit, and ministry.

That makes The Wings of Freedom more than a historical memoir.

It becomes a testimony of restoration. Corinna survives Communism, survives imprisonment, survives dislocation, and still refuses to let bitterness define her future. Instead, she turns memory into witness. She writes not only to recount what happened but also to remind readers that freedom can disappear when people stop valuing it. As her story makes clear, “We have to learn from history, or history will repeat itself.” Her faith also becomes the very thing that helps her endure what should have broken her.

Why This Story Matters Now

There is a reason books like this continue to matter. They remind readers that tyranny rarely arrives with a dramatic announcement. It grows through fear, compliance, censorship, and the steady normalization of control. Corinna Montgomery’s story is deeply rooted in East Germany, but its emotional and moral questions are universal.

· What happens when people are trained not to question?
· What does courage look like when danger is ordinary?
· How does a young woman hold onto her identity when the world around her keeps demanding surrender?

These are the questions that make The Wings of Freedom resonate far beyond its historical setting. It speaks to readers who love memoirs of resilience, stories of survival under authoritarian rule, Christian testimonies of endurance, and true accounts of women who refused to let fear have the final word. It is a book about family, sacrifice, conscience, and the difficult beauty of starting over. Above all, it is a book that understands freedom not as an entitlement, but as a gift worth protecting.

Corinna Montgomery has lived through Communism, arrest, separation, refugee life, and reinvention. She eventually built a new life in the United States, but she writes with the clarity of someone who never forgot what it felt like to live without basic liberties.

That perspective gives this memoir its weight and its urgency…

It also gives readers something rare: A true story that is both sobering and hopeful.

To learn more about this remarkable journey of endurance, conviction, and renewal, read The Wings of Freedom: A True Story of Survival, Faith, and Freedom by Corinna Montgomery.

Read the book today to deepen your appreciation for freedom, boost your courage, and stay with you long after the final page!

Author Name: Corinna Montgomery
Book Title: The Wings of Freedom: A True Story of Survival, Faith and Freedom
Book Published by: Global Author Publishing

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