The Trajectory of Today’s Topics

• Hot off the press, the current most popular books of the year.

• High Fantasy books you won’t be able to put down.

• How about a free Ebook?

• Random facts and trivia about the Father of Modern Fantasy

Hot Off The Press

Are Any of These on Your Wish List?

Who doesn’t love a great list? Who doesn’t love a great book? Like a mad scientist, these two things have been chemically combined without blowing up the lab! According to the behemoth Goodreads, these books are the hottest and newest books of the year. Again, romance and romantasy are the reigning heavyweights, so if your heart has an itch you can’t scratch, maybe you’ll find the cure here:

10.  Fearless by Lauren Roberts: Genre–Romantasy. 196k readers have this book saved. This is the finale of the Powerless trilogy, as it seems that political tensions are rising, betrayals are coming from all angles, and the fate of the kingdom hangs in the balance. 

9.  Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall: Genre–Romance. 386k readers are looking forward to this one. Beth’s new, quiet life is flipped upside down when her first love shows up in her small town. This love brings along secrets and opens up fresh wounds over her lost son. Now she must choose between her current, comfortable life and the one from her past.

8.  Say You’ll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez: Genre–Romance. 461k readers want to dive into this book. A perfect first date followed by family obligations leaves Xavier and Samantha attempting to give a long-distance relationship a go. It’s a heartfelt book full of sacrifice and memory that has it resting at #1 on the NYT Bestseller list. 

7.  Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney: Genre–Psychological thriller. 464k readers looking for thrills and chills. An author’s wife mysteriously vanishes. With no clues and no idea what’s going on, Grady retreats to a small Scottish island only to see a woman who looks exactly like his wife. Buried secrets threaten his sanity as he digs deeper. Not gonna lie, this one holds my interest!

6.  Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid: 470k saves. Genre–Romance. Set in the 1980s in NASA’s Space Shuttle program, we follow six astronauts training to go into space for the first time, including the first woman to enter space, and her secret romance that causes her to question her role.  

5.  Deep End by Ali Hazelwood: 512k readers want to dive into the Deep End. Genre–Romance. A diver recovering from an injury and a world-class swimmer enter training for the Olympics. They also try out a no-strings-attached relationship. Who knows how that’s going to turn out? 

4.  The Crash by Freida McFadden: 531k McFadden fans want this one. Genre–Thriller. Tegan is eight months pregnant, gets rescued from a blizzard, and now is questioning the couple who rescued her. Staying in the remote cabin with them, she finds some very dark secrets. 

3.  Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry: 769k readers can’t wait to read this book. Genre–Slow-burn romance. A pair of journalists are competing for an exclusive, career-altering biography of a reclusive heiress. A budding romance starts to unfold as they both work to secure this prestigious project.

2.  Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins: 1 million readers can’t wait to travel back to Panem. Genre–Dystopian YA. Prequel to The Hunger Games, featuring the curmudgeonly Haymitch Abernathy and the events that transformed him into the snarky District 12 mentor. A great read, check out my review here. 

1.  Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros: 2 million people are ready to enter this storm. Genre–Romantasy. If you haven’t heard of this book or Fourth Wing, where have you been? This book has become the fastest-selling adult novel of the past 20 years! It’s number 3 in the series, and fans can’t seem to get enough of it. 

The TBR Files

Peak High Fantasy and Characters You Will Think About Years Later

Hooked me from the first sentence. The first book in this series, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, was released in 1984, and it was part of a trilogy called the War of the Lance. I fell in love with dragons when I discovered Jane Yolen and Hearts Blood, but these books transported me into a lush, wonderful fantasy world that I still visit on occasion.

Fantasy books were harder to find back then. This was before I discovered Dungeons and Dragons, before I fell into Middle Earth and The Lord of the Rings, so this was my big introduction to epic fantasy. I collected these books like professional athletes collect supermodels. There are now between 150 and 200 books related to this world. I’ve read dozens of these books, but few compare to the original three. 

What a deal! When I saw this hardback collection of all three books (they were only released as paperbacks originally) I had to get it. (Right now, the Dragonlance Chronicles are only $20! And it’s a gorgeous hardback! Don’t miss out on this deal!) In my pre and early teens, these books were the only kind I would read. I devoured them every chance I got, and still to this day, they are fantastic books. 

Straight up Peak Fantasy. They tell of a land where dragons once ruled, but have been gone for centuries. Elves, dwarves, humans, and other races live in a tenuous peace, but then rumors of leathery wings in the sky, followed by annihilation, are creeping across the land. Dragons have returned, and evil forces are threatening to take over. 

I could write a whole newsletter on these books. There is so much going on in these three books that it’s impossible to condense them to a few short paragraphs. If you love dragons, fantasy races, political intrigue, superb characters all with individual flaws, and crazy action, you’ll love these books. If you enjoy high fantasy, I implore you to check these books out. They were all ☕☕☕☕☕ for me. They kept me up at night, and I ended up thinking about them all day. They aren’t as rich and as deep as Tolkien, but you also don’t have to read them with a thousand-page journal of notes to keep up with everyone and everything that’s happening. 

Randomness

Wish Granted… You Get a Free Ebook, and YOU Get a Free Ebook, and you get a free…

Some exciting news is happening on the home front. I’m nearly finished with the edits on Night of the Familiar! My sequel to the YA urban fantasy, action-adventure book Plight of the Familiar, will be released soon!! I’ve been working on this one for over a year now. Previously, I had the VERY rough draft hammered out, so these past 16 months have entailed completely rewriting it, editing, proofreading, and editing some more. It has been a process for sure, but I’m trying to make sure it’s as polished as I can get it. And more importantly, I’m trying to make sure it’s a rousing, can’t put down, emotional, firecracker of a book.

Here’s where you come in. If you’ve read Plight of the Familiar, and you want to see what’s happening next, you could be an ARC reader! ARC stands for Advanced Reader Copy. Your mission, should you choose to accept, is to read Night of the Familiar and then leave a review. Early reviews help readers decide if they want to take a chance on a newly published book, and they are essential for indie authors like myself. 

Reviews are an author’s lifeblood. Without huge marketing budgets, design teams, publicists, and big book labels, reviews are the best thing to get the word out and convince people to read independently published books. They are worth more than gold to some of us! I wouldn’t mind a few suitcases of gold bars, but since that won’t happen, I’ll settle for a couple dozen reviews. 😁

If you are interested, I will send you a free Night of the Familiar Ebook. All you have to do is read it within a decent time (hopefully within a month to 6 weeks) and then pop onto Amazon and/or Goodreads and leave me an honest review. There’s no binding, legal contract, only a “handshake” agreement that you will read the book and then leave a review. I won’t send burly thugs out to bounce a baseball bat off your kneecaps if you don’t. If I knew someone who would do that, I’m sure I’d have more than 5 reviews on Plight of the Familar… just sayin’ 🤣 (Kidding!)

Contact me below. So, if you’re reading this newsletter, and you would like to get an early, exclusive, pre-release Ebook of Night of the Familiar—Part two of the Familiar series—and you’ve already read Plight of the Familiar (this is a requirement because you have to know what’s happening to really follow the story) please, PLEASE hit me up! I will love you forever and sing your praises in a horribly off-tune redneck dialect! 

Just email me at [email protected] Put “ARC reader” in the subject line, and I’ll send you the information. 

One more note of interest. If you have not downloaded the short story Squeak in the Night, about Patrick, Doofus, and a possessed squeaky toy, click on that title. No strings attached, nothing nefarious aside from a creepy old man who sold the haunted artifact. It’s a fun, humorous, light-hearted, not scary story, in the style of Plight of the Familiar. It’s a freebie and a thank you for reading these newsletters.