A Captivating Guide to the Ancient Crossroads of Civilizations, Enduring Traditions, and Resilient Spirit Through the Ages (European Countries)
Discover the untold legacy of a nation forged through struggle, courage, and unbreakable spirit.
This book gives you the full story of Ukraine — its struggles, triumphs, and the powerful forces that shaped its destiny. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of today’s headlines through the lens of centuries of conflict, culture, and resilience. Whether you’re a history buff, a concerned global citizen, or just curious about the truth behind the news, this book delivers the clarity, context, and connection you’ve been missing.
Here’s just a glimpse of what you’ll uncover inside:
The ancient tribes that first settled the land.
How the powerful Kievan Rus’ laid the foundation for Eastern Europe.
The brutal Mongol invasions and how Ukraine endured.
The rise of the Cossacks: fearless warriors of freedom.
Life under imperial rule and the constant struggle for autonomy.
Ukraine’s pivotal role in both World Wars.
The harsh reality behind the Iron Curtain.
How Ukrainians found independence in 1991.
What really led to the war with Russia — and why it still matters.
And much, much more!
This isn’t just another history book — it’s your key to understanding one of the most pivotal countries of our time.
I’m a Mom, a Grandmom, and a Veteran. Nothing scares me! That’s the saying on my favorite T Shirt. I’m enjoying life too much to let the little things slow me down. If you can’t tell from my Avatar, I live in Florida where I enjoy the sunshine and endure the hurricanes with good grace. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good!
81 posts
3 followers
Follow BookReviews
My Profile
Paste my profile into the search field of your favorite open social app or platform.
Your Profile
Or, if you know your own profile, we can start things that way! Why do I need to enter my profile?
This site is part of the ⁂ open social web, a network of interconnected social platforms (like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, and others). Unlike centralized social media, your account lives on a platform of your choice, and you can interact with people across different platforms.
By entering your profile, we can send you to your account where you can complete this action.
The Celestial War
shattered the Heavens; after millennia, the battle still rages.
On the most important day of Zahra’s career at the Gallery of Time Museum,
everything unravels. A mysterious package arrives from her estranged father,
and the Atar’zul, a relic that could secure her promotion goes missing. While
betrayal festers within the museum, a long lost love returns, throwing Zahra’s
world into chaos.
Kyden, a warrior angel and demon slayer, has guarded the spiritual realm for
centuries. When a famous archaeologist and forbidden artifact vanish, Kyden is
forced to protect a human, a job he vowed long ago to never do again.
Together, Zahra and Kyden must face rising demon threats and the cursed magic
of the Atar’zul. As darkness closes in, they join forces to defend both realms
and find that ending the battle beans trusting each other. Sacrifices must be
made—the cost of which might be their very souls.
Welcome to the battle for humanity’s
future—a story of loyalty, temptation, and the fragile line between light and
shadow.
Cassie Sanchez is the award-winning author behind
the Darkness trilogy—a whirlwind of fast-paced fantasy romance
where danger dances with desire and magic always has a price. Based in the
enchanting Southwest, she lives with her husband and two crazy labs named
Bullet and Scout. When she’s not writing happily-ever-afters, she can be found
wielding a Pickleball paddle or cuddling with her nogs for an afternoon nap.
At the heart of Cassie’s stories are characters who
stumble, fall, and rise again—wrestling with forgiveness and searching for
redemption. Step into her world, where every story casts a spell and love
conquers all, even the shadows.
I’m a Mom, a Grandmom, and a Veteran. Nothing scares me! That’s the saying on my favorite T Shirt. I’m enjoying life too much to let the little things slow me down. If you can’t tell from my Avatar, I live in Florida where I enjoy the sunshine and endure the hurricanes with good grace. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good!
81 posts
3 followers
Follow BookReviews
My Profile
Paste my profile into the search field of your favorite open social app or platform.
Your Profile
Or, if you know your own profile, we can start things that way! Why do I need to enter my profile?
This site is part of the ⁂ open social web, a network of interconnected social platforms (like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, and others). Unlike centralized social media, your account lives on a platform of your choice, and you can interact with people across different platforms.
By entering your profile, we can send you to your account where you can complete this action.
(A Camper & Criminals Cozy Mystery Series Book 23)
SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY WITH A SMIDGEN OF HOMICIDE
USA Today Bestselling author Tonya Kappes brings you southern and quirky characters in her mystery series. Her stories are charged with humor, friendship, family and life in small southern towns.
Around here we say BLESS HER HEART and sometimes it’s just not in a good way. Take Neva Hudson for instance, bless her heart, she’s the town gossip, not to mention someone who likes to toot her own horn.
Two toots too many ’cause bless her heart, someone has strangled Neva and left her for dead in of all places…the church’s Christmas play.
Trust me when I say there’s no shortage of suspects since her tongue lashed a few too many lies about people.
More importantly, my dear friend Dottie Swaggert has been on the tall tale end of Neva’s lies and she’s got the most motive. Thank goodness me, Mae West, and our group of friends, the Laundry Club Ladies have traded our Christmas play elf hats into sleuthing caps because Santa’s bringing Dottie a big ole present of FREEDOM when we find the real killer.
’Tis the season for murder in the small town of Normal, Kentucky. When the town gossip is found strangled to death in a church, there’s no shortage of suspects.
I’m a Mom, a Grandmom, and a Veteran. Nothing scares me! That’s the saying on my favorite T Shirt. I’m enjoying life too much to let the little things slow me down. If you can’t tell from my Avatar, I live in Florida where I enjoy the sunshine and endure the hurricanes with good grace. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good!
81 posts
3 followers
Follow BookReviews
My Profile
Paste my profile into the search field of your favorite open social app or platform.
Your Profile
Or, if you know your own profile, we can start things that way! Why do I need to enter my profile?
This site is part of the ⁂ open social web, a network of interconnected social platforms (like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, and others). Unlike centralized social media, your account lives on a platform of your choice, and you can interact with people across different platforms.
By entering your profile, we can send you to your account where you can complete this action.
When your mind makes you the enemy, either your mind must
die, or you will.
Unless yours is the mind they can’t break.
Adverse Reactions
by Deborah J. Lightfoot
Genre: Dystopian Paranormal Suspense
Purity demands a
bullet. Devin brings a reckoning.
Since she was six years old, Devin Perridin has been locked behind the walls of
the family home to keep her hidden from those who would kill her. But at
sixteen, she is exposed as a “Syke,” one of an outlawed minority who
possess extraordinary powers of mind over matter. Snatched from hiding, she
escapes the firing squad, but only to be imprisoned in a house of horrors: the
Peaceful Hills Sanatorium and Rehabilitation Center for the Treatment of
Persistent Mental Disorders. After an unknown time of torture and
“behavior modification,” brutally designed to destroy her
psychokinetic reflexes, she emerges from the asylum severely damaged in mind
and spirit. Her salvation may lie in the series of crimes triggered by her
release: first kidnapping, then attempted murder, and then a mustering of
forbidden forces to assault the remote pseudo-psychiatric facility where she
had been tortured into near-mindlessness.
Drawing upon a strength she had always known was hers but had never before been
able to consciously control, Devin defies the authoritarian society with its
unjust laws that demand her death. She pushes through pain, isolation, and
moral quandaries to seek justice for not only herself, but all members of a
maligned and cruelly persecuted minority. A post-apocalyptic, paranormal
allegory for the times in which we live.
When your mind makes you the enemy,
either your mind must die, or you will. Unless yours is the mind they can’t
break.
“This novel is
immediately immersive, with an opening scene that sucks readers in with vivid
sensory detail and a great sense of suspense.” —The Black List
“What a story!
I was picked up from the first page and you never let me go thereafter. The
premise is original … compelling … convincing.” —ARC Reader
“A very
enjoyable read. Excellent pacing. Immersive language. Polished, effortless
writing. I’d love to see a prequel (or three)!” —ARC Reader
“Relevant to
the current situation in the world. Ostracizing others who are different out of
fear and ignorance. Cruelty and inhumanity.” —ARC Reader
“Believable and
relatable.” —The Black List
“Thematically
rich, as Devin faces constant self-doubt but eventually comes to find
empowerment in the unique abilities that have made her an outcast.” —The
Black List
VAPORS BILLOWED INTO the chamber in thick masses of orange. Devin choked
on the sickly sweet odor.
“Don’t
fight it, child,” came the voice—equally cloying—from the darkness beyond the
floodlit, glass-walled chamber. “Give yourself up to it.”
The gas
surged into Devin’s face, blinding, gagging her. She made it go away. By force
of will, a moment’s mental reflex, she flung it back.
Fresh
air flooded her nostrils and drove out the syrupy stink. She sucked in a cool,
clean breath.
“No!”
snapped the voice, crackling with amplified static. “You must not.”
The
therapist dropped her with two thousand volts. Devin collapsed to the chamber’s
floor, her body jerking, her nerves on fire. The pain was beyond enduring. A
pain this intense must be lethal. But she did not die. As she convulsed, her
muscles knotted in spasms, she could not scream. No part of her, not even her
voice, was under her voluntary control.
“Try it
again, child.” Smooth and saccharine once more, her unseen therapist spoke from
the concealing shadows as the shock ended and Devin’s pain faded. “Stand up,”
the torturer ordered. “And this time, do not fight it. Or your
punishment will be the same: swift, sure, and severe.”
Devin
struggled upright. She had to brace against the curved glass wall of the gas
chamber to keep on her feet. Her muscles had melted from knots into jelly.
An
orange cloud flooded the chamber and filled her nose with the stink of rotting
fruit.
“Breathe
it,” her therapist instructed. “You must.”
But
again, Devin reacted by instinct alone. No conscious thought interposed between
stimulus and response. The cloud approached; she pushed it away. Pure reflex,
action of mind: act of self-preservation. The gas held back, suspended in
midair, blocked by the power of her impulse.
On the
instant, thousands of volts knocked her to the floor. Pain engulfed Devin, such
a pain as must be lethal but wouldn’t do her the service of killing her. She
writhed, silent and barely conscious.
Her
therapist withdrew the punishment. Devin remained on the floor of the isolation
chamber, curled in the fetal position, her long brown hair covering her face.
Her body was hers to command once more, but her muscles had no strength to
obey.
“You
give new meaning to the word persistent, don’t you, girl?” muttered the
disembodied voice. Then, more forcefully: “The first step toward healing is to
admit you are diseased, Miss Perridin. You have an illness. A mental disorder.
I am offering you the cure—in a pleasant aerosol spray that you need only
breathe. Once inhaled, the drug acts quickly, and its effects are lasting. But
you must take the first step and acknowledge that you want to be cured.”
The
voice grew soft, sugary. “Child, for as long as you hold to the notion—the
mistaken notion—that your disorder is in some way a strength or a benefit to
you, you will continue to fail. And you will suffer the consequences of that
failure. We can’t have that, can we?”
Devin
gathered the remnants of her strength and rolled onto her back. To stand was
impossible; she could barely shape a word.
“No,”
she whispered.
She
wasn’t speaking to her tormentor.
But:
“That’s the spirit!” the therapist responded, sounding genuinely enthused. “Now
we try again. Take your medicine like a good girl.”
The
orange stink flowed in at the top of the chamber. Devin, lying face up, watched
through the curtain of her hair as the cloud descended. She had time to ward it
off, to make it go away. But in the soul of her being, nothing sparked. Her
reflexes, her instincts, failed to respond. What had been a spontaneous force
of mind over matter could offer no resistance.
Devin’s
mouth filled with the sickening taste of defeat. The orange cloud enveloped
her, a sticky weight, and she choked down lungfuls.
“Wonderful!”
her therapist exclaimed. “My dear, I couldn’t be more pleased. This is the
tipping point. Your recovery will be much easier from now on, I promise.”
Devin
breathed the sickly sweet drug and felt the core of her mind go dead.
Then came
the retching. Her body contorted in gut-shredding paroxysms as the drug made
her vomit—or attempt to vomit. Her keepers had starved her for so long, her
stomach had nothing to bring up. The dry heaves racked her with such violence
that she could not breathe. After long moments, unconsciousness brought relief.
Castles in the cornfield provided the setting for Deborah J.
Lightfoot’s earliest flights of fancy. On her father’s farm in Texas, she grew
up reading tales of adventure and reenacting them behind ramparts of
sun-drenched grain. She left the farm to earn a degree in journalism and write
award-winning books of history and biography. High on her bucket list was the
desire to try her hand at the genre she most admired. The result is Waterspell,
a multi-layered fantasy series about a girl and the wizard who suspects her of
being so dangerous to his world, he believes he’ll have to kill her … which
troubles him, since he’s fallen in love with her.
I’m a Mom, a Grandmom, and a Veteran. Nothing scares me! That’s the saying on my favorite T Shirt. I’m enjoying life too much to let the little things slow me down. If you can’t tell from my Avatar, I live in Florida where I enjoy the sunshine and endure the hurricanes with good grace. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good!
81 posts
3 followers
Follow BookReviews
My Profile
Paste my profile into the search field of your favorite open social app or platform.
Your Profile
Or, if you know your own profile, we can start things that way! Why do I need to enter my profile?
This site is part of the ⁂ open social web, a network of interconnected social platforms (like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, and others). Unlike centralized social media, your account lives on a platform of your choice, and you can interact with people across different platforms.
By entering your profile, we can send you to your account where you can complete this action.
A Tiny Little Favor Peyton Banks Publication date: April 17th 2026 Genres: Adult, Comedy, Contemporary, Romance
From USA Today bestselling author, Peyton Banks, comes a steamy rom com about second chances, accidental families, and the most unexpected proposal of all.
He was supposed to be a one-night stand… Now she’s asking him for baby number two.
Five years ago, Tachina Winston made one impulsive decision—a one-night stand with her former client, Vic Maxwell. The result? The world’s cutest little boy and an unconventional but surprisingly seamless co-parenting setup. No drama, no strings, no regrets.
But Tachina has a tiny little problem…
She wants another baby.
Dating apps? Disasters. Blind dates? Even worse. There’s only one man she trusts enough to do this with again: Vic.
Vic isn’t looking for love after a messy breakup. But when Tachina proposes her plan, he can’t deny it—he’s tempted.
And if he agrees, it will come with one condition: he wants to experience everything he missed before.
Easy, right?
Wrong.
Because soon, things get complicated. They’re having adult spend-the-night dates, sharing kisses that last too long, and stirring up feelings neither of them expected.
Then Vic’s ex returns wanting him back, they are forced to decide: was this just a favor with benefits… or the beginning of something real?
“A mood?” Tachina looked up from the menu at her longtime friend. There goes that nose of Addison’s. She had figured out that Tachina was keeping a secret.
“A mood. An energy. An aura. Something is going on in that big, beautiful head of yours.” Addison folded her arms across her chest and stared at Tachina.
“My head is not big,” Tachina muttered. She shrugged. “I’m just hungry.”
“Nope. That’s not it. You’ve got that look on your face. It’s the ‘I’ve been thinking too much about something’ expression.”
“Do I really have a ‘I’ve been thinking too much about something’ look?” Well, that was news to her. Tachina reached up and tucked her thick hair behind her ear.
“Yes, ma’am. Your forehead gets all serious. A long line appears across it.” Addison drew a line across her own forehead.
Tachina grimaced and waved her off. “Stop trying to read my face.”
“Just spill it already.”
Monica, one of their favorites waitresses, arrived at the table. She wore bright-pink lipstick, short pixie blonde hair, and had a personality big enough to fill the café. She pulled out her notepad and flashed them a grin.
“What can I start you with, darlin’? Tea? Coffee? Wine? A little Jack?” She chuckled and motioned to Addison and Tachina. “You two are over here whispering fierce, and by the looks of it, you should order the Jack.”
“It’s her.” Addison pointed to Tachina. “She’s the problem.”
“Woooow…” Tachina shook her head. How was she the problem?
“She sure threw you under the bus. Bless her heart. What’s wrong, babe?” Monica turned her kind eyes on Tachina. She had been working at The Iron Kettle for as long as Tachina and Addison had been coming there. She always tried to help and offer motherly advice. She was in her early sixties and didn’t bite her tongue when it came to nonsense.
“Nothing is wrong,” Tachina said quickly.
Two sets of eyebrows lifted at her.
Liars were rarely safe around women who made it their business to be in other’s people’s business. A best friend and a waitress were two of the most dangerous species to try to get away with something. They would figure it out.
“It’s no big deal,” Tachina stressed, but it seemed neither of them believed her.
“Well, I see she doesn’t want to talk in front of me. Let me take your order so she can spill her guts to you, Addy.” Monica turned to Addison who promptly gave her order.
Tachina glanced back down at the menu. Mind made up, she waited her turn.
“And Miss Tachina, what will you be having?”
“I’ll take the Reuben with extra cheese, extra mustard on the side, make sure they give me the biggest slice of pickle they have, and no chips, I’ll have the house fries instead, please.” She placed her menu back down on the table and again found two sets of eyes on her. She shrugged, unapologetic. “I said I was hungry. Oh, and for a drink, I’ll have a Diet Coke.”
“Really? A diet?” Addison muttered.
“Shut your face.” Tachina blew a kiss at her bestie who rolled her eyes at her.
“I don’t judge. I’ll get your order in and I’ll be back with your drink, babe.” Monica offered her a wink as she collected their menus. She spun on her heel and beelined it through the busy establishment.
“Okay. Now spill it.” Addison was not going to let up on her.
Tachina blew out a deep breath.
It was now or never.
Author Bio:
USA Today best selling author, Peyton Banks, is the alter ego of a city girl who is a romantic at heart. Her mornings consist of coffee and daydreaming up the next steamy romance book ideas. She loves spinning romantic tales of hot alpha males and the women they love. She currently resides with her husband and children in Cleveland, Ohio.
I’m a Mom, a Grandmom, and a Veteran. Nothing scares me! That’s the saying on my favorite T Shirt. I’m enjoying life too much to let the little things slow me down. If you can’t tell from my Avatar, I live in Florida where I enjoy the sunshine and endure the hurricanes with good grace. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good!
81 posts
3 followers
Follow BookReviews
My Profile
Paste my profile into the search field of your favorite open social app or platform.
Your Profile
Or, if you know your own profile, we can start things that way! Why do I need to enter my profile?
This site is part of the ⁂ open social web, a network of interconnected social platforms (like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, and others). Unlike centralized social media, your account lives on a platform of your choice, and you can interact with people across different platforms.
By entering your profile, we can send you to your account where you can complete this action.
