Open Books Newsletter
Spring 2026
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Reading Adventures for 2026!
Robert Klose teaches at the University of Maine and is the single father of sons adopted from Russia and Ukraine. He is a regular contributor of essays to The Christian Science Monitor. His work has also appeared in Newsweek, The Boston Globe, and various literary magazines. His books include the memoirs, Adopting Alyosha — A Single Man Finds a Son in Russia and Adopting Anton — A Single Man Seeks a Son in Ukraine; the essay collections Small Worlds — Adopted Sons, Pet Piranhas and Other Mortal Concerns and The Three-Legged Woman & Other Excursions in Teaching; and the novels, Long Live Grover Cleveland, which won a 2016 Ben Franklin Literary Award and a USA BookNews Award, and Life on Mars, which was a Finalist for a 2019 Best Book Award sponsored by American Book Fest and was also a Finalist in the International Book Awards and American Fiction Awards.
He is also a four-time winner of a Maine Press Association award for Opinion writing.
Dr. Eileen Ryan has taught in a variety of educational environments from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana to the urban and suburban schools of Chicago.
Developing resource programs at three private high schools motivated Dr. Ryan to pursue a PhD in special education from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Throughout her career she also taught graduate and undergraduate level courses and provided professional development in special education to a variety of schools.
Dr. Ryan’s quick wit and wisdom are greatly admired by colleagues, friends and family, and her husband, children, and grandchildren will testify under oath that she makes the best Chritmas fudge anywhere.
Lobster Dreams is a wonderfully original and unexpectedly profound novel, written with both scientific authority and literary flair by esteemed oceanographer Stephen Spotte. At its heart is Sonny, a young man who undergoes a surreal metamorphosis into a lobster—a transformation that becomes the gateway to an immersive deep-sea world. The novel is rich with fascinating detail about lobster biology and behavior, from larvahood and molting to eating, mating, and fighting, all presented with humor and insight.
What truly elevates the book is its blend of sharp wit, philosophical depth, and a uniquely imagined underwater setting. The dialogue—especially between Sonny and his fellow metamorphosed lobsters, most notably the wise and quirky Professor—is consistently clever and engaging. Lobster Dreams is a smart, funny, and esoteric meditation on identity, transformation, and what it means to be human—or lobster!
Stephen Spotte, a marine scientist, was born and raised in West Virginia. He has published 19 books, including three volumes of fiction, a memoir, and a work of cultural theory. He is a Certified Wildlife Biologist of The Wildlife Society and also holds a U.S. Merchant Marine officer's license.
Dr. Spotte now lives and writes from his home in Longboat Key, Florida.
While Fred is sure his learning disability is the reason he can never find his shoes, he mostly believes his LD is the reason he will never feel normal.
Fred and his best friend Henry, who has ADHD, attend Mrs. Hogan’s resource class where she teaches them what LD and ADHD mean, and more importantly, what role the disorders will play in their lives.
As Fred navigates four years of high school—confronting bullies, struggling with homework and tests, losing his shoes, and trying to answer the question, Who are you, Fred?—readers will gain an understanding about the complexities of
learning disabilities.
Why can't Fred find his shoes?
3 Novels Examining Campus Life
Happily ensconced as a tenured Professor of Biology at the small Skowhegan College in the wilds of Maine, Tymoteusz Tarnaszewski—who goes by the moniker "T"—suddenly finds himself in unknown territory when an incident in a colleague's classroom motivates the college administration to issue a blanket policy requiring the installation of "trigger warnings" in all syllabi.
T, believing that this would constrain his teaching, refuses to comply, even after one of his own students lodges a complaint about something T said during the course of a genetics lecture. The administration's judgment is swift: T will be terminated at semester's end for insubordination.
What recourse, if any, does T have to save his position? And what will he do when he learns the higher-ups knew, early on, that the student who lodged the complaint against him is actually a threat to the school?
A Story of Hope and Redemption by AJ Wyman
Ambition. Idealism. Corruption. Blood.
An epic historical novel of the French Revolution, Children of Saturn vividly chronicles the dramatic conflict of social unrest that haunts France—and the world—to this day. Rooted in deep research and told through the fates of three real-life historical figures—the English American political activist Thomas Paine; the French Revolution’s leading radical journalist Camille Desmoulins; and the Machiavellian politician Joseph Fouché—Children of Saturn continues the literary tradition advanced by Hilary Mantel, promising readers a thrilling ride and an all-encompassing understanding of one of the most important watershed events in world history.
John Neeleman's second novel, Children of Saturn, is a revisionist historical novel of the French Revolution rooted in deep research, which dramatizes the past in order to speak to the present.
John's first novel, Logos, dramatizing Christianity’s origin, approached first century Palestine and Europe with a revisionist eye. Logos won both the 2016 Utah Book Award for fiction and the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal for Religious Fiction.
In the print edition of Kirkus Reviews, Logos was described as
“a staggeringly impressive feat: a rigorously researched historical novel that carries its scholarliness lightly and grips the reader with personal drama.”
THE ONE BOOK TO READ ABOUT PREPARING FOR THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Surviving the coming world of the warming will pose significant challenges for the world’s eight billion people. And, despite America’s status as the world's richest, most technologically advanced country, Americans will fare no better than others.
Elevated temperatures, rising ocean levels, and more numerous damaging storms will, within several decades, render large portions of the United States inhospitable to human habitation and bring with it economic and social chaos.
The author maintains that the heat of the warming will crack, blister and peel away what has always been the thin veneer of civilization—leading over time to the demise of civil society and the collapse of major institutions.
While continued efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are laudable, they are too little, too late. As he demonstrates, we are already long past the tipping point after which the worst of the warming cannot be avoided. It has become baked in—irreversible. Instead, we need to increase our focus on how to adapt and survive the developing long-term climate calamity.
Surviving the Warming explores coming changes in housing, the economy, family finances, food, water, employment, energy, healthcare, safety and security and suggests ways in which families can prepare for them—starting now!
Richard Leviton is an aging romantic, twice divorced, with visions of literary grandeur. Beginning in the 1980s, a golden age of magazine journalism and a period of unmatched freedom in Los Angeles, and continuing through the convulsions of the 2010s, Leviton grows through a harrowing crucible of circumstances—romantic chaos, alcoholism, home loss, professional obscurity, and cultural transition—all while attempting to anchor his son Philip's precarious security. Meanwhile Philip, coming of age, intermittently homeless, and yearning to retrofit his existence into a generation he believes had it all, begs to experience his father’s LA, the essence of which he’s convinced lives embodied in Leviton’s eternally youthful long-time editor Bailey Kavanagh—perhaps the only woman to ever truly love Richard Leviton.
With eloquent, almost intoxicating prose, the nine linked episodes comprise one bittersweet, sometimes funny, deliciously messy journey through the ache of generational drift, the cultural rapids of the 21st century, and the timelessness of young dreams.
Middle East 101: Navigating Culture, Traditions, Psychology and Business Practices
by Igor Ostapenko
For a large number of people, the Middle East has become more than just a place for shopping and ascending the Burj Khalifa. Expats are coming to live and work here. Yet all these people encounter a new culture and sometimes find themselves at a loss.
Cultural competence allows us to understand other people on the level of motives, values, and conventions. Most importantly, it helps us expand our own horizons. If we all had a slightly better understanding of other nations and cultures, the world would see fewer wars.
Middle East 101 provides a comprehensive guide to successfully navigate culture, traditions, psychology, and business practices within this diverse region. Because the more you know about Islam and the Middle East, the less likely you will fall into the traps of conspiratorial thinking, become a victim of cognitive biases, and explain what is happening around you using cliches. Success in the region can only be achieved with emotional intelligence and cultural competence. Gaining trust in the Middle East is possible only if you communicate with complete sincerity, showing respect for the local religion, culture, and interlocutor.
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence!
Outcasts of Essex, Prisoner of Wallabout Bay & Spanktown Papers
by Jane Hulse
A comprehensive guide to successfully navigating culture, traditions, psychology, and business practices
within a diverse region
Stephen Spotte
It’s little wonder that Jane Hulse has a passion for writing about the American Revolution. Growing up in Keene, New Hampshire, she was surrounded by history. Her family’s Colonial-era home was built across the street from the tavern where 29 Minutemen rallied in 1775 before marching off to fight the British at Lexington. Her house, the town’s first post office, featured a fireplace in almost every room, a view of Main Street from almost every window, and the wide, plank floors characteristic of the period.
With her father, Hulse explored caves nearby that served as hiding places for loyalists who had been hounded out of town during the American Revolution. Those excursions triggered her fascination with writing about the often-overlooked colonists who were against the war. Estimates vary, but at least 20 percent of colonists were opposed to the struggle that eventually united them.
Hulse went on to graduate from Syracuse University with a degree in journalism. She worked for small newspapers in Colorado and then for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, one of the city’s two major papers at the time, where she reported on major criminal trials and other breaking news.
She covered the 1981 shooting of President Reagan by John Hinckley Jr., a young man who lived in the Denver area. She also filed hundreds of stories about killers, kidnappers, and others accused in highly publicized crimes.
After moving with her husband to California, she did freelance reporting for the Los Angeles Times, writing about everything from the giraffe with a crooked neck at the Santa Barbara Zoo to the whimsical “tall-small” house, a four-story jewel built on a tiny lot the size of a garage.
She was city editor at the Santa Barbara News-Press when the newspaper underwent a huge upheaval over the editorial practices of the owner. Hulse and seven other editors and a columnist abruptly quit. The nine, along with the entire editorial staff, received the University of Oregon’s Arcil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism, an annual honor for journalists who “report with integrity despite personal, political, or economic pressure.”
Most recently, she was editor of Central Coast Farm & Ranch, a Southern California agricultural magazine.
Jane Hulse
In her first work of fiction, Janet L. Finn brings decades of storytelling and social justice scholarship to life in a sweeping novel about struggle, solidarity, and unexpected connection.
Pie in The Sky follows the intersecting journeys of two young women—one from Butte, Montana, the other from Santiago—whose lives collide amidst the political upheaval of 1970s Chile. Against the backdrop of labor movements, mining life, and the rising hope of social change, their friendship sparks a story of courage, loss, and transformation that crosses borders and generations.
Grounded in rich historical detail and emotional depth, this is a novel about finding common ground in uncommon places—and the power of human connection to shape the future.
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence! Order Now!
A powerful reflection on the often-overlooked weight of caregiving, this is a story of survival—not just of a child, but of a father learning how to live again in the aftermath of crisis.
Coming of age doesn't only happen to the young.
When a former close friend and rival is murdered, world-weary but still aspiring optimist Jeffrey goes back to the beginning, to those fraught college years at Yale University during the 1980s and to her, to make sense of what happened—only to discover that what needs most making sense of is himself.
By turns smart, funny, and heart-wrenching, Bright College Years tracks Jeff and an ensemble cast as they navigate the shortest, gladdest, most complex years of life.
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
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Don't be late to class!
Three Favorites from 2025!
Pack your bags and Order Now!
Essex, New Hampshire, April 1775.
Fifteen-year-old Sarah Barrett hates the mess of childbirth, yet she’s the unwilling apprentice to the town’s only midwife—her mother. She longs to be a writer like her father who publishes the weekly Essex Journal.
As the American Revolution heats up, his pro-British views turn the town against the family. Troubles deepen when a smallpox epidemic hits the town, and her mother pushes a crude, controversial vaccination.
Sarah finds herself questioning everything: the fight for independence, her father’s judgment, her own failings, and more to the point, why it’s considered unthinkable for a young woman to write for a newspaper.
When she learns the redcoats and the patriots will soon clash over a stockpile of munitions in Essex, she comes up with a risky plan to thwart the bloodbath.
A prison ship. A buried truth. A daring rescue.
Sarah Barrett has only two choices …
She can bow to her mother’s nagging and marry a handsome young lawyer who is well-connected to the British military occupying New York. Or she can stick to her inky grind as a lowly apprentice at a newspaper where her foul-mouthed, ill-tempered boss keeps assigning her stories on ladies’ hair trends instead of the Revolutionary War intrigue she so wants to cover.
Sarah’s relentless digging uncovers a story that nobody wants to even talk about, no less print. The British have set up decaying prison ships in the waters off New York. Risking everything, Sarah fights to expose rampant cruelty and wretched conditions, and in the process just happens to find love.
Open Books Featured Title 2026!
Open Books Featured Title 2026!
3 Outstanding New Titles for 2026!
Tent City
by Amy L. Bernstein
Does the end of prosperity start at home?
A striving family. A collapsing economy. A tragic death. In Tent City, everyone must confront their demons in the struggle to survive.
Tent City is a contemporary dystopian family saga that places ordinary citizens in extraordinary circumstances, precipitated by dire economic disruption. As the American town of Willing crumbles under a collapsing economy, hundreds seek refuge in the dense "city" of tents that spring up in the Kings' big backyard, setting the once-thriving King family on a collision course with disillusionment, disaster, and for some, a new and hopeful beginning. This family saga revolves around trust and betrayal, love and loyalty, and the will to survive the breakdown of the American Dream.
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
The Artfulness of Women
by Naomi Weiss
Between blues and bloodlines, she found her own song.
The Artfulness of Women is an emotionally rich novel that explores the complexities of womanhood, ambition, and generational trauma through the unforgettable character of Bayla Szabo.
Set against the backdrop of Depression-era New York and mid-century America, the novel explores the inner lives of women—their longings, contradictions, and resilience—while weaving in Jewish immigrant culture, blues music, and feminist themes with remarkable grace.
This is a profoundly human story about the cost of dreams and the artfulness required to survive, love, and endure.
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
From The Cyclops Cave: A Braided Memoir
by Don Schofield
From the Cyclops Cave intertwines past and present, weaving a turbulent childhood in 1950s California with an adult life shaped by solitude on the Cycladic islands of Greece. Abandoned by his father and raised by strangers, the author grows up yearning for connection; decades later, in a primitive hut he names the Cyclops Cave, he finds both refuge and reckoning. Through braided chapters moving between memory and the immediacy of Greek island life, this poignant memoir explores resilience, identity, and the lifelong journey to belong.
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
Open Books Featured Title 2026!
Open Books Featured Title 2026!
Open Books Featured Title 2026!
Janet L. Finn is an author, educator, and lifelong advocate for social justice whose work explores the human stories behind systems of power, inequality, and transformation. Raised in Butte, Montana, she grew up surrounded by the grit, resilience, and layered histories of a mining town—experiences that shaped her lifelong curiosity about the lives we inherit, the communities we build, and the forces that shape them.
Today, Janet brings that curiosity and commitment to everything she does—from teaching social work and writing books, to amplifying voices that too often go unheard. Her work spans genres and geographies, but always returns to one central truth: stories matter. They reveal what is broken, celebrate what is beautiful, and offer a path toward justice.
A murder. A false accusation. A deadly truth..
When a dashing coffeehouse proprietor is murdered, Sarah Barrett dives into the mystery and becomes entangled in a scandal that rocked Philadelphia during the American Revolution.
Twenty Quaker pacifists were rounded up, jailed, and banished to the wilds of Virginia for eight months. Their crime? Refusing to back the war for independence.
Were the pious men secretly funneling military secrets to the British? The Spanktown Papers are the key. But even these curious papers are steeped in mystery.
Sarah, a fearless journalist in a man's world, tangles with spies and lies to solve both mysteries, while finding love during dark and dangerous times.
Outcasts of Essex, Prisoner of Wallabout Bay & Spanktown Papers
Janet L. Finn
