IndieReader Discovery Awards 2024 Entrants
Added as our reviewers read them, find the latest verdicts for the 2024 IndieReader Discovery Award entrants, leading up to the big winner announcement in June!
In J. Luke Bennecke’s CIVIL TERROR: GRIDLOCK the intriguing concept of a futuristic system of fully automated highways designed to save lives becomes a story packed with suspense when cyber-terrorists twist the computer code for their deadly purposes. The mystery behind the events will keep readers on the edge until the very end.
J Mercer’s IN ONE LIFE AND OUT ANOTHER is a tense and compelling YA novel voiced by Marin Greene, a conflicted seventeen-year-old who takes the reader on an emotive and intense parallel journey as she navigates two divergent outcomes that arise from contrasting actions and reactions to the same scenario. Through a clever split-structure narrative, Marin explores these different versions of her complex, and often, toxic relationships while trying to forge an independent future for herself. Powerful, convincing, and immediate, IN ONE LIFE AND OUT ANOTHER is a thought-provoking examination of the consequential impact of the choices we make.
In a conversational style of writing and using scientific data in ways a novice can understand, author John Durbin Husher explains in his hypothesis BEYOND GLOBAL WARMING: that the world has an imminent energy crisis of global proportions. He warns that combined effort is needed from the world’s scientists and problem solvers to overcome the real issue.
John Durbin Husher writes a treatise about man on earth, from the spark of the Big Bang to the latest technological advancements in THE WONDER OF LIFE, taking readers on a journey of challenges that man has faced and survived. Paralleling the discoveries in medical research with the progressions of technology, Husher’s summary succinctly shows the miracle of life and the human brain.
Lust and love are two different things, but in WINTER’S LIST by Jordyn Kross, a young woman (whose boyfriend dumped her) meets a couple of guys who really light her fire. Can love be far behind? This sexually-charged novel reads like a boddice-ripper fantasy but with more of today’s culture and acceptance and is for readers who want explicit romantic fiction for their bedtime read.
THE FINANCIAL MINDSET FIX by Joyce Marter is like having multiple therapy sessions with a licensed counselor, improving the reader’s connection between mental health and financial health. In the program, Marter walks the reader through various therapy methods to overcome mindsets affecting financial health, issues such as fear, doubt and anxiety that prevent prosperity.
In the stunningly accomplished PARIS BLUE, Julie Scolnik unfolds a hauntingly beautiful and irresistible memoir of first love in all its ecstasy and agony. Mainly set in Paris in the late 1970s, Scolnik’s prose is as elegantly sophisticated and enchanting as the city she so wonderfully evokes. When Scolnik’s eyes meet those of Luc’s, a married French lawyer, across the chorus of the Orchestre de Paris so begins a suspenseful and sensual relationship that owes much to the spellbinding qualities of classical music, and will eventually leave an anguished Scolnik with more questions than answers.
With the author’s own graphics and illustrations infused throughout the storyline, THE ENPIRION PROJECT: EXORDIUM (BOOK 1) by L. Bossi is a visual tale of healing and reinvention. Well-written, easy to read chapters lead the plot forward, as a formerly honored soldier finds his raison d’être by revisiting his past and taking hold of the future. This fantasy story touches on issues of mental health, anxiety, depression, inner confidence, and LGBT+ sexual awakening.
Lisa Guillot’s FIND YOUR CLEAR VISION guides readers to identify and ultimately project their own ‘brand’ or identity and teaches how to be authentic and effective in one’s own life. The text is aimed at women who want it all yet have difficulty both defining ‘it all’ and achieving it. The author–writing from her own experiences–is inspiring in her authenticity.
Including many biblical references that proclaim the need to embrace Christianity to achieve world peace, THE STRENGTH OF THE NATION describes author Luisa Mirella Plancher‘s encounter with an angel and the subsequent message delivered to Americans and leaders including Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. It explores many controversial ideas but is nonetheless a great read.
Michael Eon’s THESE THINGS HAPPEN is a heartfelt tale full of inspiration for overcoming one’s inner demons. The dual timelines remarkably portray the struggles and tragedies faced by many of the distinctive main characters throughout this coming of age journey.
STILETTO DIG, Mimi Beck’s debut women’s fiction novel takes place on the Jersey shore, where a group of rich friends (sometimes frenemies) gather for the summer. Ruby Sutton, who grew up on the shore, but married well in Manhattan, is the self-proclaimed social director. At a party for her newest venture, a line of stiletto shoes, the rising fitness/wellness guru Lucy Hall is stabbed seven times with a stiletto heel during a power outage. During the investigation and rising suspicions among the group, nerves fray and each couple involved is pushed to face the realities and fragilities of their relationship. By turns funny and serious, the book delves into the complexities of what character believe they should want versus what they actually do want, and how those tensions create further tensions with their friends facing similar dilemmas, while all pretend everything is fine. Surprising twists in the third act, and the choices and discoveries the characters make about each other and themselves give the book’s core a powerful heart. The lessons the characters learn about love, trust, belonging, and personal truth will resonate in this funny and poignant book.
After decades of experience in the aviation industry, Norman Currey has gathered together a brief but informative treatise in AIRPLANE STORIES AND HISTORIES. Wartime aviation gets a lot of attention, particularly WWII with its iconic Spitfires and Messerschmitts and more, but other periods of military and commercial flight are covered with plenty of photographs.
Patricia Lucia’s PERILOUS AND BEAUTIFUL is the first installment in the Sea Turtle trilogy–a contemporary romance that follows Bear, a gay and free-spirited woman who is trying to find her true self amid repeated heartbreaks. Sweet and likeable characters that avoid clichés.
Reminiscent of the American Girl book series, Rachael Kaufman’s THE ADVENTURES OF SOPHIE AND OLIVIA is the story of rambunctious twins who always manage to find themselves getting into mischief. Readers will find their school’s career day experiences relatable and the lessons they learn regarding consequences, honesty, and integrity to be extremely valuable.
“History” is not only about politics, wars, and dates – it’s about how people actually lived. Born in 1930 in rural Kentucky, author Rachel G. Carrington gives readers a look at THE EARLY YEARS: A MEMOIR of her life during the Great Depression, World War II, and beyond. Well-written and edited, this true recollection provides details of Carrington’s everyday life in the “early years” of the 20th century.
Ronald Gaffney presents THE BATTLE FOR NOVA SCOTIA as “A Trilogy of Tales,” each one focused on a slightly different period in the history of colonial-era Atlantic Canada. For outsiders, this series of stories, most of which are written in the style of soldiers’ journal entries, gives significant perspective to how the English and the French colonists struggled with each other, as well as their fraught relations with the native Mi’kmaq people. It is easy to see why these colonies didn’t declare independence along with the Thirteen Colonies to the south – as the third act takes place in the years of the American Revolution, by which time the colonists of Canada had had too much war in their recent past to continue.
LIFE IN THE HANDS OF JESUS by Sharmila Panirselvam is arresting and totally absorbing from the very beginning. A passionate essay of approximately forty pages, Panirselvam recounts her personal search for the meaning of life from her Hindu childhood to her Christian adulthood, via a predominantly Muslim secondary (high) school. This is the writer’s own reflection and any reader on a similar personal quest or indeed wondering what the fuss over Christianity is all about should read this.