About Featured Book: Visions of Johanna by Peter Sarno

"A beautifully written literary novel . . . Sarno's use of metaphors and lush language draws readers into the story . . . [who] may shed a tear or two before the final page is turned."
—BlueInk, Starred Review

Johanna, an artist, and Matt, a music critic, couldn’t be more different, but by a simple twist of fate, she plucks him from a crowd at a Dylan concert. What follows is a heady and intense relationship buffeted by the usual suspects that gently rocked the ‘80s. Matt’s lessons in art—as well as life—at the hands of Johanna, drive the novel into pockets of feminism and quiet revolution. All of this is tempered by deeply held traumatic secrets that torque their intimacy.

Yet it's Revere—and not Boston—that remains one of the underlying attractions in "Visions of Johanna". This north shore backdrop brings Matt into full focus—a child in a city of recent immigrants, life by the ocean, the bilious flavor of the Mob are just some of the elements rendered in skillful detail. Johanna, a renegade from Wisconsin—freewheeling and hyper-energized—draws Matt out of his comfort zone and into her world.

A meditation on art and unrest, "Visions of Johanna" celebrates life, love, memory and the undying power of the deep connections that sustain us. The novel follows Johanna and Matt as they pursue their dreams to paint and to write. But burdening problems collide with these artistic desires and other forces conspire against them. Ultimately, the two are done in by their inability to share aspects of their past they believe they must hide from.

The novel travels through time and social unrest to the final moment hinted at in the prologue. Within this book's pages, tragedies haunt, acts of moral goodness manifest themselves, and benevolence reigns with a finality that absolves all.

"A beautifully intimate romance that doesn't shy away from challenging topics."
—Publishers Weekly's BookLife

“This would be a perfect book club book. With questions that address the concepts of faith and hope to the efforts put towards the women’s movement, there is a lot that can be talked about…Detailed, wonderfully written, and thought-provoking, 'Visions of Johanna' will have readers thinking long after they put the book down.”
— Kristi Elizabeth, Manhattan Book Review

This Fiction book is available in these Formats: eBook, Print

This book is in Kindle Unlimited!

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About Featured Book: Spring Flowers in the Snow: An Unexpected Blessing by Nancy H. Pressley

One rarely expects to begin a new and exciting chapter when you have walked the earth more years than the average life span.
The following is the story of an exception to the usual. For two septuagenarians, the holiday season of 2016 brought an unexpected blessing.
An intelligent but introverted girl seeks to find her place in the world as she moves in and out of uncomfortable roles until finally discovering a fit, including a soul mate and purpose, in the fourth quarter of life.

This Fiction book is available in these Formats: eBook, Print

This book is in Kindle Unlimited!

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About Featured Book: Zoratama The Muisca Princess by Jaime Bedoya Martinez

The history of pre-Hispanic South America is prolific in narratives of violence perpetuated, in battle and commerce, to an indigenous population. Mostly for the sake of feeding a perverse avarice and yearning for indulgence that was the fashion for Old World society at the time, this conquering force overcame great odds and difficulties to satisfy their greed for material treasure. They consequently took out their frustration and discomfort on these communities. Their occupation exhibited the brutality of a society desperate to pay their debts and build their riches with whatever could be extracted from other people, foreign lands.

Disregarded by history are the stories of the daily life of these indigenous people as they built true humane societies and developed myths to satisfy their curiosities of the workings of their natural world.

What has been lost to history is the spark of wonder when the European encountered the native for the first time, in submission rather than domination. Zoratama is that glimpse, told in the passion of a conquistador for a native beauty. The story is a tragedy of the forbidden, unprecedented and one that passion, eroticism, could not resolve. Love defeated by one of the many sins which motivated Europe to its genocidal tendencies. Ultimately it is not devotion to another being which drove the history, but rather devotion to the unknown.

Jaime Bedoya Martinez’s Zoratama constructs the structure for modern Hispanic society through the unrealistic passion of consorts of divergent worlds. His belief that the legacy of the Muisca has been abandoned is true, for beyond anthropological and archeological studies explaining in detail the life, religion, society of these people, little credit is given to their contributions to current culture.

And the assimilation, whether military or societal, of these cultures is anything but polite; the Spaniards greedy and brutal, the Muisca resolute and tribal.

Mr. Bedoya beautifully builds an alternate storyline which ultimately argues that commitment to passion and transcendence has no boundaries. Zoratama, the Muisca princess, and Lázaro Fonte, the Spanish conquistador, construct a love story for the ages, replete with spiritual integration and an offspring of a new race.

Ultimately, the writer in his true fashion destroys this love, immersed in the tragic myths of both races, in an absurd annihilation of people, family, emotion and sentiment because the ironic metaphor that evolves is the incarnation of a new race, culture and historical footprint.

This Fiction book is available in these Formats: eBook, Print, Audiobook

This book is in Kindle Unlimited!

Buy Book Here.