by Melissa J. Troutman | Nov 21, 2025 | Blogs/Podcasts, Fiction, Friday Fiction: Books From Off the Beaten Track
If I asked you to name a classic work of literature, I’m sure one of the first to come to your mind would be A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Everyone knows about this book, and chances are everyone—or almost everyone—has read at least an excerpt of it...
by Melissa J. Troutman | Aug 29, 2025 | Blogs/Podcasts, Fiction, Friday Fiction: Books From Off the Beaten Track
If you take a handful of Beauty and the Beast and mix it with a scoop of How to Train Your Dragon, and throw in a few sparks from something like Rumpelstiltskin, you’ll have an idea of why I enjoyed Embergold by Rachelle Nelson so much. (Beauty and the Beast is...
by Melissa J. Troutman | Jun 27, 2025 | Blogs/Podcasts, Fiction, Friday Fiction: Books From Off the Beaten Track
Something Else: The Background When I heard about Something Else before its release in January, I didn’t know what to expect. After all, it was the original story, Something I Am Not, that had me sobbing on my bedroom floor after midnight. (No wonder it won the 2020...
by Melissa J. Troutman | Apr 25, 2025 | Blogs/Podcasts, Fiction, Friday Fiction: Books From Off the Beaten Track, Mystery
Introducing Lady Jayne Disappears by Joanna Davidson Politano: Pride and Prejudice meets Little Women, wrapped in a bit of Charles Dickens, and tied with ribbon borrowed from Sherlock Holmes. As a writer and a reader, I appreciate few things more than reading books...
by Melissa J. Troutman | Nov 22, 2024 | Blogs/Podcasts, Fiction, Friday Fiction: Books From Off the Beaten Track
Every writer dreams of visiting her story. But what do you do when the hero is more like a villain, the villain is more like a hero, and your side characters come to life with stories of their own? Oh, and you don’t know the world, and the person you have a crush on...
by Melissa J. Troutman | Aug 30, 2024 | Blogs/Podcasts, Fiction, Friday Fiction: Books From Off the Beaten Track
The question I asked when I first finished Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was, Where has this book been all my life? I can’t believe it took me until my late twenties to read this famous literary classic by Lew Wallace. My earliest exposure to the story was in...
