"Defining Pearl" and "Kiss on Her Wings": Two Five Star Reads You Might Enjoy

“Defining Pearl” is indeed a pearl of great price. This memoir of Pearl Matibe is written by an extraordinary woman who was a

part of the political opposition to a dictator in Zimbabwe and lived to tell about it. In an attempt to define who she is, Pearl chronicles her childhood and education, both of which were very segregated from the world outside the closed curtains of her home. She was taught strict etiquette and proper English from early on and was often mistaken for a white woman over the phone. Her dream was realized as she and her husband settled into raising and family on a farm, something that typically was done by the white landowners. But everything went wrong when her husband became a part of the opposition against the dictatorial rule of Robert Mugabe. The taking of their farm, numerous arrests and threats on her life and the lives of her family finally drove her from Zimbabwe and she eventually found herself in the U.S. where she was forced to learn a new culture and begin to define herself in a different way.

Pearl Matibe has an excellent story to tell in “Defining Pearl.” She doesn’t tell it out of a sense of vanity, but rather to communicate the pride that she has in her family and heritage. She takes an honest look at the double-standards that exist in our world based upon race and culture. Her observations are an accusation toward all of us because we do not truly see who a person is, but rather make an assumption based upon outward appearances, accents or heritage. I felt a slight bite, also, as she described an America that is very different from the one that I grew up in. Yet, I also understood her disenchantment because I have experienced the very same things from my own country as the culture has continually morphed itself into something unrecognizable. Ultimately, however, I found “Defining Pearl” to be honest, tragic and inspiring; a lesson in our failure to really getting to know people.




Kiss on Her Wings
“I’ve only known two men’s souls in my life, one the devil, the other the birds wings which picked me up and carried me back to the freedom of being.” This quote from “Kiss on Her Wings” is a powerful statement of love and trust which Wendy Gibbins illustrates in a profound way in this novella. Simon and Beth have a deep love that is true and lasting. When Simon stumbles across a journal among the books on Beth’s shelf, he begins to read the story of a horrible crime, the person who committed it and the victim. As he continues to read he is filled with numerous changing emotions. Interrupting his reading are mysterious phone calls and the discovery of a bank book with large sums being withdrawn every few months. He wonders if Beth has gotten herself into something. As he continues reading, he begins to put the pieces together. Will his discoveries destroy their love? Will he be able to help Beth escape the problems that she is facing?

The depth of this love story is brought to light in a very subtle, but genuine manner. “Kiss on Her Wings” contrasts the depths of evil with the height of genuine love. Wendy Gibbins has subtly created a masterpiece in this novella, touching both worlds in a very real way. The patience, endurance and honesty of genuine love, even at the risk of losing it all is expertly demonstrated by Simon’s quiet commitment to Beth. Genuine, intriguing and inspiring; “Kiss on Her Wings” will raise your spirits as well and restore your confidence in the existence and power of true love.

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Young Adult, Teen Novella, "Sophia's Dilemma" gets Five Stars

Second Book in The Teen Mayhem Series... Loved the first one and this one is just as good.

Sophia has plenty of struggles to sort through and learns plenty about jumping to conclusions and running off on a whim to help her boyfriend Dane in “Sophia's Dilemma: This Too Shall Pass (The Teen Mayhem Series).” K. T. Bowes has extended the romance, mystery and thrill of the Teen Mayhem Series in this excellent sequel. Having parted ways with her friends Maddie and Heather, Dane is the only person that Sophia has in her life and she intends to take good care of him. When his birth certificate is needed for a scholarship application, Sophia takes it upon herself to go retrieve it from his mother’s house, in spite of the fact that Dane has said that no scholarship was worth the trouble that might come about for him to retrieve the birth certificate. Dane was right. Her actions soon have Dane in the hospital, chained to his bed with a handcuff and facing the possibility of criminal charges for murdering his stepfather. With things in the dumps, everything seems to be crumbling around Sophia when she overhears some gossip that sends her entire life into a tailspin. Nothing seems real to her any more as she pushes forward to clear Dane of the charges, while secretly knowing that it was over between them.



“Sophia's Dilemma: This Too Shall Pass (The Teen Mayhem Series)” is expertly written in a way that draws every possible emotion from the reader. K. T. Bowes has done an excellent job of dragging the reader into the subjective feelings of the main character, while subtly showing that though everything looks bad from Sophia’s perspective, everything is, in fact, getting better. The thrilling suspense of an added mystery following the murder of Dane’s stepfather is an added twist that injects even more intrigue into a story which is already spell-binding. Suspenseful, tragic and revealing; “Sophia's Dilemma: This Too Shall Pass (The Teen Mayhem Series)” will have you quietly whispering to the young heroine words of encouragement and repeating the words, “this too shall pass,” to her over and over again.

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Unlimited Reading for $4.95 per Month

Inkbok Promotional Release

In the fast-paced ever changing landscape of the book industry, one company, Inkbok.com, is planning to shake things up a bit by first breaking all of the rules.

Set to launch March 28th, Inkbok will offer unlimited reading of thousands of books, articles, poetry, short stories and more on Android, iOS and web for $4.95 per month. Romance, mystery, children’s, self-help, business, fitness, science fiction and biography are a just a few of the over 50 genres represented on the site. Inkbok arrives on the heels of similar subscription-based e-reading services launched in the past few months, though at roughly half the cost - other services at $8-$10 per month and Inkbok at $4.95 per month.

The question on everyone’s mind, however, is how could $4.95 unlimited reading possibly be good for publishers and authors?

“The truly unique and innovative aspect of Inkbok is our community model of business,” says 30-year-old entrepreneur, Joey Ebach, founder of Inkbok. “It allows us to meet our three foundational goals: low cost reading, fair royalties, and giving back.” For authors and publishers, this “community model” means sharing in the total gross revenue of the website, meaning every dime of member fees, advertising, email blasts, book promotions and more is shared with authors.

Each month, Inkbok takes the total gross revenue generated from the site and splits it three ways: 60% to authors/publishers based on how many times their work was read, 30% to Inkbok, and 10% to a charity that the community votes on. “As Inkbok grows, it will benefit all of our authors and increase our impact on the outside community. There is nothing like this in the literary industry today,” says Konrad Urbanowicz, Inkbok’s Vice President and head developer. With Inkbok taking only 30% of it’s gross revenue to cover all of it’s expenses to run the site, pay employees, and make a profit, Urbanowicz is certainly correct that there is nothing else like this.

This gross revenue sharing model is a new alternative to the traditional royalty system the publishing industry has used for years, and Inkbok may have struck a chord. In the past three months, they have gained 80 publishing partners and over a thousand authors. “The response thus far has been nothing short of amazing; our collection is growing exponentially,” says Urbanowicz.

When asked why a platform like Inkbok is needed, Todd Ebach, President of Inkbok, stated that people have a natural desire to search and discover, readers included, but they don’t want to pay for the process by buying each book. The team at Inkbok believes that offering readers the freedom to discover through a subscription model will result in more people reading and more exposure and royalties for authors. “We want to recapture that exciting feeling of spending hours in an old used bookstore and never knowing what you might find.”

The word “community” seemed to be the driving force of our conversation. When asked about this, Joey Ebach replied, “Reading is a conversation between the author and the reader. Our desire is to bring this conversation into real time, connecting authors with readers, and readers with other readers.” The team views Inkbok as more than just a business, but a place where stories and ideas are created, discussed and shared. “Early on, we chose not to seek out funding from investors or venture capitalists,” says Ebach. “If we did, they would have never allowed us to give 60% of our gross revenue to authors and 10% to charity; that’s not exactly profit maximization. Rather, we are a group of book lovers working to create the best reader writer community in the world.”

LAUNCHING MARCH 28TH. YOU CAN READ MY BOOKS RIONEGRO AND ZIPAQUIRA ON THIS SITE AS WELL AS FUTURE RELEASES.

HOME FIRES (My Five Star Review)

Though there were some painful parts to this novel, all in all, I enjoyed it.

When things come crashing in on Myra Benning’s idyllic life in “Home Fires,” she has to reach deep inside to find the strength to continue on. Judith Kirscht tells the story of how the awkward girl who grew up on the Minnesota Prairie faces a life and family that has fallen apart. Having discovered her husband’s infidelity, she decides that she will stick it out until her oldest son has gone on to college and her daughter is adjusting better to school. Things take a turn of her own when her husband carries things into deeper issues and she has some difficult decisions to make. While facing down the Benning family’s string of issues that have been passed down from father to sons, she refuses to turn a blind eye to things and faces it head on. Though she takes the hard road, it is the beginning of healing, but will it be enough to get her life back on track again?

Judith Kirscht has brilliantly chronicled the deep emotions and struggles that go along with unfaithfulness and the way it ruins families in “Home Fires.” As she develops the emotions of the characters and unravels the plot, the added touch of her “venting” comic strip provides a unique twist to the telling of the story. I found myself deeply wrapped up in the emotions and struggles and had a tendency to wander off and explore issues from my own experience. Honest, real and profound; “Home Fires” will challenge you on a very deep level and open your heart on another.

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BECOMING A WOMAN OF WORTH (Five Star Review)

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to read this book. It is meant to appeal mostly to women, but the truth is universal for

all of us.


What we become and how we develop is directly related to our self-confidence. In “Becoming a Woman of Worth: Creating a More Confident You”, “Kristen Clark” not only illustrates this point, but shows women how to get over the numerous hurdles that often stand in the way of being self-confident and self assured. This book is meant as a compliment to an online program called 21 Day Journey which meant to help change the patterns of how women view themselves by developing a daily habit of finding their worth through the scriptures. She bases her beginning premise on Psalm 139:17-18 from which she poses a question. How precious are your thoughts about yourself? Kristen then begins a definition of self-esteem and responds to some of the myths about it. She then progresses into some practical ways of building self-esteem. The crowning jewel is the section on making confidence into a spiritual mindset. Using God’s Word as the foundation for each part of her work, Kristen allows Christian women to see that it’s okay, even encouraged by the scriptures to be self-confident and that all of us can find our worth in how God views us and build upon that.

Though I am a man, my experience as a residential treatment counselor for adolescent women drew me to this book. “Becoming a Woman of Worth: Creating a More Confident You” was and is exactly what many of the young ladies that I have worked with needed to have in their hands and in their hearts. Kristen Clark gives true, practical suggestions, many of which we used in our program, but she goes a step further and shows how God blesses rather than frowns upon building our self worth. The truth of what Kristen has written applies not only to women, but to everyone. Much of what was written about placing the needs of others before our own applied directly to me and I gained a great deal personally from many of her practical suggestions. Honest, practical and inspiring; “Becoming a Woman of Worth” ought to be in the hands of every young lady you know; their future will be completely altered by it.

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EXPANDING YOUR HORIZONS

You might not like broccoli, but if you've never tried it, then you don't know if you do or not. It isn't always easy to try new things and expand your horizons, but it is the way that we learn, grow and become better people.

I've driven for at least 34 years. Every day! I started before it was even legal for me to drive and I had driven in any and every kind of weather or situation imaginable by the time I was 25. I've driven everything from a tiny Ford Escort to a diesel truck with a flatbed and a Hay Swather (12 foot to 20 foot wide head for cutting hay), tied down to it. I've driven into the tightest corners in driveways and alleys in the world with large machinery on a truck and gotten along just fine. Needless to say, my driving ability exceeds the average. And then I came to Medellin.

There are no rules in Medellin. People drive however they want and where ever they want. Motorcycles do not stay in their lanes, they zip up between, in front, behind and all around the other cars in traffic. Having observed this chaos from bus and taxi, I believes that it was not something that I wanted to do. So, when a friend asked me to drive their car through Medellin and out into the country to visit a farm, I was more than nervous about it. I really didn't want to. I couldn't really get out of it. I did it. And...

It wasn't bad. I actually never noticed the difference.

There are people out there who have never sat down and enjoyed a fiction novel. There are various reasons why they haven't. Many have to do with High School literature teachers that completely destroyed their desire to read, however, most simply have never developed a taste for it. They have yet to plunge themselves into an imaginary world, in an imaginary place and time, doing the impossible and overcoming the world. Because of this, most of them even lack imagination and creativity. Television, computers, video games, iPods, etc. are ruining the brains and imaginations of people all over the world. I've spoken before of how dangerous it is for people to be this way in previous posts "The Threat of Not Reading."

Join my crusade to get more people reading fiction and literature. There are several ways that you can help:

- First, sign up for my blog and share it with your friends and family. It's extremely easy. Fill in the info below to sign up and click on the share buttons for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ below each of my blogs.

- Second, purchase my books and share them with your friends. Request them at your local library. My books are purposely thin and only about 100 pages. To a new reader, a Tom Clancy thickness novel is completely overwhelming and intimidating. Use my books to help get them started.

- Support my publishing campaign on Indiegogo to print two of my novellas in Spanish. Click on the campaign advertisement in the side column. This will allow me to get these books into the hands of readers in Colombia. Less than 5% of Colombians read fiction and that is simply not an acceptable number for a democratic country.

READING EXPANDS HORIZONS. You can help that happen.

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