Open Books Newsletter
Summer 2025
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Reviews, Interviews,
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Featured Books for 2025!
Arthur Kevin Rein is back with the third and final book of the Red Wolf Trilogy.
Witness No More
follows
Rolling in the Deep & A Flame Worth the Candle
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.
Witness No More
by Arthur Kevin Rein
Ten months have passed since Max Cherhasky, his father J. Roman, and step-mother Nadine disappeared from their lakeside mansion in Walnut Creek, Wisconsin. Roman's testimony against the Chicago Mob has placed the family in mortal danger. The Witness Protection Program has changed their names, uprooted their lives, and dragged them to a small town in South Dakota.
Max meets Leah, a beautiful artist who possesses a vision for color beyond his understanding, and falls in love. Beyond her, there is no happiness in his new home. As Max's high school graduation nears, he makes plans to escape his family, the town, and the WPP. But the Cherhaskys are hiding from more than the Mob. Back in Wisconsin, a warrant is issued for the murder of Max's mother, Madeline, dead twelve years.
What happens when a murder suspect is under federal protection? Witness No More, the final volume in the Red Wolf Chronicles trilogy, follows Max as he goes off the grid with a partner he has always disdained. But can he forget Leah so easily? And what about the truth he can never leave behind?
Arthur Kevin Rein grew up on a resort (with five siblings and four cousins) much like the one described in Rolling in the Deep and A Flame Worth the Candle. Since then, Rein has graduated magna cum laude from the University of Wisconsin—Oshkosh, obtained a medical degree from the Medical College of Wisconsin, and practiced Internal Medicine for forty years. He has published short stories and non-fiction works. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife.
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?
Three 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 Favorite from OB Author Khristy Reibel
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
by Jane Hulse
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 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.
Hulse, who has a grown daughter, is married to journalist Steve Chawkins and lives in Ventura, California. She loves running, crossword puzzles, American history, and small white terriers named Sam.
Jane Hulse
“Oh! I am delighted with the novel, and should like to spend the rest of my life in reading it,” exclaims the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Spellbound by The Mysteries of Udolpho, Catherine Morland cannot help projecting the novel’s melodrama onto the walls of her friend’s home. She transforms a visit to Bath into a Gothic misadventure, complete with forbidden chambers, family secrets, and utter mortification when her literary infatuation precipitates an offensive misunderstanding.
We readers, like Catherine, graft our favourite stories onto our quotidian lives. She is the child who, upon finishing the Nancy Drew series, begins to see “mysteries” unfolding in her schoolyard, the teenager whose attempts to channel Elizabeth Bennet’s conversational style result in frequent social faux pas, and the university student who, encouraged by The Secret History, enrolls in Latin 1000 anticipating arcane rituals and secret societies.
As readers, we construct our perceptions of the world through ongoing experimentation with the porous boundary between fiction and reality. Like Catherine, we often err in these trials. Sometimes, however, a literary exemplar aligns with a life experience to create a paradigm shift, and metamorphosis ensues. The Alchemy of Stories is a modern, analytic collection of literary criticisms serving as an ode to those moments — the alchemical convergence of literature and life.
Monika Lee is a full professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada where she teaches English literature. Author of three books, Shelley’s Impact on Rousseau: Figuring the Written Self (1999), gravity loves the body (2008), and If water breathes (2019), she has also written many essays and articles on English Romanticism, an award-winning stage play The Petting Zoo, two poetry chapbooks, short fiction, a libretto for an opera The Maker, and dozens of poems in literary journals and anthologies. She was awarded the Brescia Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Clara Sebben holds an M.A. in English Literature from Western University and a B.A. in English and French Literature from Brescia University College, where she earned the Gold Medal. She is presently a J.D. candidate at Western University's Faculty of Law. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, crochet, and spending time with her family.
Monika Lee
Clara Sebben
Hot title for Summer reading! Pre-order Now!
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence! Order Now!
Celebrating the Transformative Literature of Our Time
Upcoming this Fall Pre-order Now!
Anglophiles and Historical Fiction Lovers Will Love Goldfinch in the Thistle
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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Three Favorites from 2024!
Open Books Welcomes Author AJ Wyman
A fiercely loyal person who believes in lifelong friendships and strong bonds, AJ Wyman remained committed to his family in the face of an almost surreal crisis, and ultimately survived the personal crisis that threatened to cut his life short with the help of those he loved, and those who loved him.
Lessons learned as a young husband and father led him to write about not only the struggles of his baby daughter surviving and recovering from cancer, but also about nearly losing his essential balance to circumstances that seemed too uncontrollable and too painful to bear. Through all the stress, tension and fear that dominated his life at the time of his daughter's struggle for life, AJ came to realize just how kindness, love, and acceptance can help us to be resilient.
AJ's story, The Grace to Carry On, is about his infant daughter's battle with cancer, about his own transformation, and about how he stays committed to making his life, as well as the lives of his family, better every day.
The Grace to Carry On will be published by Open Books in Fall 2025.
AJ Wyman
Pack your bags and Order Now!
