Unwrap Your Candy
Jesse Miller
Eluding narrative structure conventions, Jesse Miller’s cinematic Unwrap Your Candy is a novel about being madly in love with — and consequently, blissfully intoxicated by — language. If you had planted James Joyce’s wayward, disjointed, but actually very loving son in contemporary America, he might have written this book.
Unwrap Your Candy is the story of Thom Evans and a day/night he spends after he leaves his miserable job at a condom factory for a night on the town with his compellingly attractive, but seriously wounded lover, Samantha. Over the course of the evening, in much the same way that Leopold Bloom and his surrogate son, Stephen Dedalus, bumbled through Joyce’s Dublin, Thom and his memories of his father drunkenly bumble through a modern American city in all its glitter and crassness.
Set in the mid-2000s, this new edition of Unwrap Your Candy from LJMcD Communications features a stunning new cover and a foreword by Lachlan J McDougall.
Horse Tales of the Revolution: The untold story of the American Revolution from the animals’ perspective
Peg Casey
Meet the animals that witnessed and participated in the events of the American Revolution for Independence. Join Paul Revere’s horse Brown Beauty, William Dawes’ horse Murray, Samuel Prescott’s horse Lady, and their animal friends as they tell their tales of the American Patriots’ fight for Freedom.
First There Was Bird
Magnolia’s daddy won the beloved cockatiel Third Bird at a carnival, just before he died in a car accident. Magnolia promised to always take good care of Third Bird . . . but then she loses him, when she accidentally allows the bird to fly from his cage at her mama’s beauty salon. Magnolia’s grief, for her father and for her lost bird, opens up a whole new world of friends as they search not only for Third Bird, but for acceptance and healing. Helping her mama to see that physical beauty is not important (even in a family that comes from “a long line of beauty queens”), Magnolia becomes the star of her small Southern town as she finds hope and light in the healing of her grief and learns that sometimes when you go looking for one thing, you find what you really need.
“…young readers are likely to enjoy the quick pace and quirky personalities. A heartfelt, ambitious, and often charming story with a significant emotional punch.” –Kirkus
Maddy’s Towers
Inbal Alon
Maddy’s heart feels like a tower of blocks that has crashed down when her best friend Mei shares a secret that wasn’t hers to tell.
With her mom’s guidance, Maddy learns that trust, like a tower, is something people build together one kind choice at a time.
Soon, Maddy is given a chance to knock down Mei’s tower, too. She must decide: Will she let it fall… or start building again?
Maddy’s Towers is a story about friendship, forgiveness, and the small choices that help trust grow.
Plowman: Harvest of Grain and Innocence
Charles Bruckerhoff
At twelve, Stella Young and Hana Sanada discovered the wartime journals of their two great-grandfathers, who fought in WWII, as well as a wartime journal of Stella’s grandfather, who served in Vietnam. Now, many years after the wars ended, they started turning these journals into a book-length manuscript. However, their views on the book’s themes suddenly changed. Stella’s father was an infantry captain serving in Afghanistan. One evening, army officers came to her home to tell Olivia, her mother, and Stella that their beloved husband and father had been killed in action. This devastating news shattered their entire family. Plowman exposes the suffering and loss by patriotic soldiers, families, and communities from America’s wrong wars.
Triage
Elisa Speranza
When the ghosts of war won’t stay buried, a former Army nurse must find a way to heal-or risk losing everything. In 1951 New Orleans, Laura Marino works as a nurse at Charity Hospital. She’s been home from World War II for six years, but peacetime has brought its own challenges. She’s frustrated at work, and her childless marriage to Nicholas, a surgeon she met in the Army, is strained.
Laura is devastated when news arrives that Frances, her best friend from the front, has taken her own life. Turning to the wartime journal she has kept hidden away, Laura is plunged back into memories of the bonds forged amid chaos on the front lines of North Africa, during the siege of Anzio, and at a refugee camp in Italy.
Triage is an intimate portrait of a woman’s hard-won journey through love, loss, and a quest for redemption.
Into the Kryvolis Forest
L. Kharkiv
An illustrated Middle Grade novel in verse set in the world of Ukrainian folklore. For fans of Edward Gorey, Slavic fairy tales, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
After their settlement is invaded by monsters, Solomiya and Bronas must cross a dangerous forest to get to a safe village. They have thirteen days, before the forest claims them forever, turning the children into one of its beasts. The deeper they step into the woods, the closer the branches draw together, enveloping them in darkness. The magical beasts circle them, the fear cripples their steps, but with an axe in hand and an antlered chickadee as their guide, they put one foot in front of the other and make their way forward.
A novel in verse rooted in Ukrainian folklore and filled with immersive hand drawn illustrations.
FOUNDING CRIMES How Smuggling, Fraud, and Treason Built the United States
David Tolly
Before there was a Constitution, there were criminals.
The men history canonized as Founders were also smugglers, tax cheats, currency manipulators, and treasonous debtors — and their crimes didn’t just precede the American experiment, they funded it. In Founding Crimes, CFO and forensic turnaround specialist David H. Tolly tears open the original books and finds a ledger the history textbooks buried: a nation bootstrapped on fraud, launched on contraband, and governed by men who wrote the laws specifically to cover their tracks.
Structured as a case file — twenty-seven exhibits, each a fresh indictment — this is narrative history with an accountant’s eye and a prosecutor’s nerve. The Revolution wasn’t a righteous uprising. It was the largest wealth-protection scheme of the eighteenth century.
Everything you were taught about 1776 was the winning side’s audit.
Read the real one.
