Dad: A Novel by Steven Manchester (Book Review)

Dad by Steven Manchester

Publisher: The Story Plant

Publication Date: Sept 14, 2021

Format: eBook - 1520 KB / 336 pages

               Hardcover - 336 pages

               Nook - 2 MB

ISBN: 978-1611883084
ASIN: B08QDX75TM
BNID: 978-1945839535
Genre: Father & Son Family Relationships / Literary Fiction

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Disclaimer: I received a copy of the book from the author / publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Book Description:

Three generations of dads, playing traditional roles in each other's lives, arrive simultaneously at significant crossroads. The decisions they make and the actions they take will directly - and eternally - affect each other. 

After a life of hard work and raising children, Robert is enjoying his well-deserved retirement when he discovers that he has an illness he might not be able to beat. At 19, Jonah is sprinting across the threshold of adulthood when he learns, stunningly, that he's going to become a father. And Oliver - Robert's son and Jonah's dad - has entered middle age and is paying its demanding price. While reconciling the time and effort it has taken him to reach an unfulfilling career and an even less satisfying marriage, he realizes that it's imperative that he keep it all together for the two men who mean everything to him. 

When different perspectives lead to misunderstandings that remain unspoken - sometimes for years - it takes great strength and even more love to travel beyond the resentment. Dad: A Novel chronicles the sacred legacy of fatherhood.

My Book Review:

Every once in a while an author comes along who writes novels that are so powerfully compelling, poignant, and thought provoking, that they pull at the heartstrings and stir the soul. For me, that author is Steven Manchester and his latest novel, Dad.

Dad is a wonderful story about the complicated dynamics of father/son family relationships that will simply pull at your emotional heartstrings. Author Steven Manchester weaves a richly descriptive tale that follows the emotional journey of the legacy of fatherhood experienced at different stages of life that spans three generations of Earle men: grandfather Robert, son Oliver, and grandson Jonah. The Earles' journey is filled with a multi-layered complexity filled with humor, animosity, unresolved dysfunctional father/son issues, regrets, healing of old wounds, new life experiences, and an emotional second chance to renew the bonds between fathers and sons. 

Grandfather Robert is seventy-two and enjoying the fruits of retirement, until he is diagnosed with a terminal disease. Robert wants to take stock of his life, and find a way to make up for all the lost time he squandered by putting other people before his own son Oliver. 

Son Oliver is struggling through a middle-life crisis, always worrying about his marriage, job, his relationship with his father Robert, and his parenting skills with daughter Layla and son Jonah. His father's terminal prognosis prompts Oliver to find a way to fight for his marriage, change his parental relationship with his kids (especially Jonah), let go of old resentments, and get the father-son relationship that he always wanted with his Dad before he passes away. 

Grandson Jonah is nineteen and living a carefree lifestyle living in his parents' basement, and has grown up addicted to playing video games. He's in his first year of college and is still undecided on a major, he feels lost and doesn't want to study, he unrealistically fantasizes that he can make a career out of competitive video gaming e-sports. All that changes when his girlfriend Marissa tells him that she's pregnant, and suddenly he is faced with a life-changing event: becoming a grownup with upcoming responsibilities. 

The reader will be easily captivated and drawn into the Earles' sentimental and touchingly realistic journey. The author does a wonderful job of intertwining the Earles' father/son relationships in an alternating third person narrative that delves into their complex pasts with the difficulties that they face in their present lives. You can't help but get swept away and experience the full gamut of emotions as the Earles face a crossroad in their lives as they hash out their unresolved dysfunctional family dynamic, while considering the intense and difficult choices of how to deal with their current life issues. Grandfather Robert is the catalyst that brings the Earle men together with his wisdom, tough love, and humor. Funny how father/son relationships ebb and flow as life events can bring family members together with a mending and bonding of relationships with an added touch of heart. 

I would be remiss if I didn't mention how much I really loved that author Steven Manchester provides the reader with a fresh breath of air with his amazing story that delves into the not that often written about dynamic of father/son relationships. Kudos on an beautifully poignant story. 

Dad is an powerful and compelling story written from the heart. It is a must read that will make you ponder your own family dynamic (especially the father/son relationships), stir your soul, and resonate with you for a very long time.

RATING: 5 STARS 

About The Author

Steven Manchester is the author of the #1 bestsellers Twelve Months, The Rockin' Chair, Pressed Pennies and Gooseberry Island; the national bestsellers, Ashes, The Changing Season and Three Shoeboxes; and the multi-award winning novels, Goodnight Brian and The Thursday Night Club. His work has appeared on NBC's Today Show, CBS's The Early Show, CNN's American Morning and BET's Nightly News. Three of Steven's short stories were selected “101 Best” for Chicken Soup for the Soul series. He is a multi-produced playwright, as well as the winner of the 2017 Los Angeles Book Festival and the 2018 New York Book Festival. When not spending time with his beautiful wife, Paula, or their four children, this Massachusetts author is promoting his works or writing.


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The Healing of Howard Brown by Jeb Stewart Harrison (Book Review)

In association with Premier Virtual Author Book Tours, Jersey Girl Book Reviews is pleased to host the virtual book tour event for The Healing of Howard Brown by author Jeb Stewart Harrison!

Book Review

The Healing of Howard Brown by Jeb Stewart Harrison

Publisher: Independent Self Publishing

Publication Date: August 16, 2016

Format: Paperback - 336 pages

               Kindle - 1054 KB

ISBN: 978-1530900282

ASIN: B01KNEJ9SQ
BNID: 978-1530900282
Genre: Contemporary Literary Fiction / Family Saga

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Disclaimer: I received a copy of the book from the author in exchange for my honest review and participation in a virtual book tour event hosted by Premier Virtual Author Book Tours. 

Book Description:

“This is your last chance to do something right, son. Don’t screw it up.”

With these words ringing in his 60-year old ears, Howard Brown, Jr., sets out from Kentfield, California to find his wayward and possibly psychotic sister and return her to their dying father’s bedside. The search leads him to the Brown family’s ancestral home near St. Francisville, Louisiana, where his Southern cousins have apparently conspired with his sister to bilk him out his inherited, potentially oil-rich property. At the same time, he discovers that a long dormant birthmark in his sternum is a portal to the land of the dead. His consciousness is suddenly inundated with terrifying visitations from a rogue’s gallery of twisted ancestors, until he fears that he is just as crazy as his sister and everybody else in their labyrinthine family. Wounded to his core, doped up and strung out, Howard discovers that his salvation is beating loud and clear, within his own weary heart, and that all he has to do is listen.

The Healing of Howard Brown is a capacious and energetic narrative of self-discovery, delivered with an authentic voice that is supple, smart, somber, witty, ironic, self-revealing, self-doubting, and wonderfully lyrical. Themes of family, trust and responsibility to others, the national as well as personal past, and the life of the spirit resound throughout, with a cultural resonance involving class and race, the North and the South, the definition of masculine identity, and, centrally, the nature of mature love in a multitude of relationships-husband-wife, brother-sister, father-son- in the face of a debilitating mental illness that runs like a poison vein through the family tree.


Praise for The Healing of Howard Brown by Jeb Stewart Harrison:

“If you enjoy beautiful prose, complex themes of family and race, and a refreshingly original narrator, this book is for you. Harrison is among the select few contemporary fiction writers who still write for serious readers.” – Jim Heynen, author, best known for The One Room Schoolhouse, The Boys’ House, You Know What is Right, The Man Who Kept Cigars in His Cap and many more.

“This book starts off with a bang and keeps on going. Howard is a character with a specific voice and story. I’m sure you’ll be provoked and entertained.”- Jessica Barksdale Inclan, author of The Believe Trilogy, The Being Trilogy, and many more.

“Jeb Stewart Harrison is an original writer and a multitalented creative person. I enjoy his unique and often innovative narrative structure. His books are thoughtfully written and a pleasure to read and savor. While you turn future pages in your life reread this inspiring story. As time goes by—(when you’re older and hopefully ‘wiser’) you’ll feel new motivation with each visit into Howard’s inimitable life.”- Paul C. Steffy, author, The Good Soldier—based on his Infantry year in Vietnam.

“An ambitious story that navigates themes of family, redemption and even metaphysics, in a thought-provoking, humorous way. Harrison clearly has a deep affection for Howard and the myriad of colorful folk who make up his complex, often crazy life. A book any reader will continue thinking about long after putting it down.”- NW Bookman, Amazon Reviewer


Book Excerpt:

1 Trying To Die

I could tell he was trying to die ­– really trying, as if by the sheer force of his iron will he could command his heart to stop, like he had so often commanded me, my sister, my mother and a great many others to stop, to halt, to shut up, to do this or that. He was in that familiar state of stern, steely concentration, laid out on the rented hospital bed at the foot of great grandmother’s regal plantation four-poster, his knuckly fingers rolled into fists, his jaw clenched, his brow furrowed, and the afternoon sun illuminating his gnarled and knobby toes. What, I wondered, was responsible for their profound disfigurement? Was it the miles of fairways, tees and greens he had trudged across in his 85 years? Or was it the endless hours pacing to and fro in San Francisco courtrooms, trying to command the thoughts of judge and jury?

Whatever it was, I decided then and there it should be avoided. I bent over my massive midriff and studied my own toes in the crusty white shag. Aside from the yellowing, curled nails, they didn’t look unusually bent or knobby, at least not yet, but I feared that like many of the failing factory parts of my six/six, 240-pound frame, they would eventually join in the cacophony of inflamed and screaming joints that had accompanied me into my 60th year.

 My father’s exit had become unreasonably complicated. I could understand why, on a purely emotional level, he felt like dying. So did I, even on that exquisitely lit late summer afternoon. We had, both of us, a rough go of late.

It started with my mother succumbing to the “awful awful” (my father’s term for Alzheimer’s) in a quiet but possibly premature fashion, after which he promptly broke his hip, got pneumonia, and forgot how to swallow. Subsequently, his life quickly became a revolving door of hospitals, rehab centers, surgeries, more hospitals and rehab centers, skilled nursing facilities, and finally home to a house full of caregivers, hospice nurses, pills, purees, and us: me, my ever-patient and long-suffering wife Sandy, my winsome son Tripp, his equally winsome girlfriend Elke and the world’s most prescient, possibly telepathic chocolate lab Mr. Booper. On occasion my mercurial shape-shifting sister, Sisi, might show up, but those visits had become increasingly infrequent.

What made my father’s last days so devilishly complicated was this: my sister had decided she was burned out on care-giving and needed a break, so she informed everybody she was going on a three day backpack trip with her new post-divorce boyfriend, a rotund biker who smelled of Cool Ranch Doritos, with a doo-rag atop his shaved dome – the polar opposite of her hail-fellow-well-met husband of 22 years. Our father was horrified, convinced that this creepy recovering alcoholic was going to rape and murder his daughter, chop her up into bite-sized chunks, pack her up in double-strength trash bag and unload her in a Quincy dumpster. So when she didn’t answer our phone calls at the appointed time on Monday, Hal Brown got a little nervous. Then more than a little nervous. When she wasn’t back by Tuesday morning he was beside himself. Spiked a fever. We all started calling around to see if anyone knew of her whereabouts. By the time I learned from her employer that she had walked off the job in a huff it was too late. The old man’s vision of his daughter as a raccoon midnight snack had sent him into delirium, so he laid down on the rent-a-bed, closed his eyes, and told his broken heart to stop.

There I was, stuck between a father who was so bereaved by his daughter’s apparent abandonment that, like a grief-stricken Dickens character, he could just lay down and die, and a sister that obviously didn’t give a shit.  Where would this leave me, once my father was dead and my sister gone? Would I be a 21st century version of young Rasnolikov, abandoned by humanity, my body in tatters, my mind tortured, twisted and inflamed, and my heart throbbing with a cold, nameless ache; nothing more than a branch broken off the family tree, left to rot on the ground? After thirty years of teaching high school English and coaching basketball, with my remaining years stretched out before me like the last flight of the proverbial stairway to heaven, I felt like I couldn’t take another step.

My Book Review:

In The Healing of Howard Brown, author Jeb Stewart Harrison weaves an intriguing contemporary literary tale that follows sixty year old retired high school English teacher / basketball coach Howard Brown Jr., as he embarks on a personal journey to unravel the intricate dynamics of his dysfunctional family history, and unexpectedly gains a new level of self-discovery.

Set in Kentfield, California and St. Francisville, Louisiana, and told in the first person narrative, the author weaves a fascinating tale that easily engages the reader to follow Howard's journey to find his missing mentally unstable sister Sisi, who disappeared before the the death of their father. Howard takes the reader on a wild ride as his journey into his family's dysfunctional past mixes with the present, leading him from his home in California back to his father's family's old plantation property in Louisiana in search of Sisi, that will unexpectedly lead him on a personal journey of deep soul searching and self-discovery.

The author weaves a well written and fascinating family drama that delves into the complexity of the Brown family dynamic, and the serious issues of alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, Alzheimer's Disease, and emotional abuse that plagued the Brown family throughout the years. Through all the crazy mishaps and trials and tribulations that Howard endures while on his journey, he learns to face his demons, the importance of letting go, and the healing power of redemption.

The author provides a wonderful mixture of drama, humor, and seriousness to the story that easily keeps the reader's interest as Howard's journey unfolds. I would be remiss if I didn't mention how much I really enjoyed the author's rich and vividly descriptive style of writing, especially the wonderful descriptions of the California and Louisiana settings.

The Healing of Howard Brown is a thought-provoking contemporary literary tale that will draw you in, touch your soul, and leave a smile on your face.


RATING: 5 STARS 

About The Author

Jeb Stewart Harrison is a freelance writer, songwriter, musician and painter in Stinson Beach, California. After many years as an ad agency copywriter, writer/producer, creative director, and director of marketing communications, Jeb now writes fiction and creative non-fiction, along with commercial works for hire.

Jeb’s debut novel, Hack, was published by Harper Davis Publishers in August 2012. In 2015 he received his MFA from Pacific Lutheran University at the tender age of 60, and followed up with the publication of The Healing of Howard Brown in August, 2016. He also records and plays electric bass guitar with the popular instrumental combo The Treble Makers, as well as Bay Area favorites Call Me Bwana.

Jeb was born and raised in Kentfield, California, and has lived in Boulder, CO; Missoula, MT; Hollywood, CA; Scottsdale, AZ; Indianapolis, IN and Ridgefield, CT.


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Virtual Book Tour

 The Healing of Howard Brown by Jeb Stewart Harrison ~ Virtual Book Tour Event Page

Tour Schedule:

Teddy Rose Book Reviews Plus Jan 17 Kick Off & Giveaway

Christy’s Cozy Corners Jan 18 Guest Post

Jean Amazon Reviewer Jan 19 Review

Jersey Girl Book Reviews Jan 30 Review & Excerpt

Indie Reviews Behind the Scenes Feb 3 Interview Live 9 pm est

Deal Sharing Aunt Feb 7 Review

Nanja Amazon Reviewer Feb 16 Review

JBronder Book Reviews Feb 17 Review & Excerpt

Teddy Rose Book Reviews Plus Feb 23 Review

The Avid Book Collector Feb 24 Excerpt

Thoughts on This ‘n That Feb 27 Review

Angel Amazon Reviewer Feb 28 Review

Mathew Amazon Reviewer Feb 28 Review

In God We Trust: The Journey of Jack Sampson's $1 and $100 Bills by Heather Hummel (Book Review)

In God We Trust: The Journey of Jack Sampson's $1 and $100 Bills by Heather Hummel

Publisher: Independent Self Publishing

Publication Date: PB - November 17, 2015 / eBook - November 20, 2015

Format: Paperback - 198 pages

               Kindle - 2794 KB

ISBN: 978-1519398727

ASIN: B017I71Z38

Genre: Contemporary Literary Fiction

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Disclaimer: I received a copy of the book from the author in exchange for my honest review.

Book Description:

In the summer of 1976, Sylvia—a young, widowed waitress—receives a $100 tip. That same afternoon, her 10 year old son, Jack, is handed a brand new bicentennial $1 bill as change for candy in the town’s General Store. With piqued curiosity about the statement In God We Trust, Jack leaves his mark by writing his name in bold letters on both his $1 bill and his mother’s $100 bill before they go back into the world. He cannot begin to know the people and scenarios the bills will impact as they pass through the hands of others over time and distance.

Years later, Jack’s past catches up with him. Shaken from his pristine position as CEO of a magazine publishing company in his San Francisco, complete with a corner office view of the Bay, Jack comes to understand the true meaning of loss and found.

The story of IN GOD WE TRUST reveals the journey of each bill and the people who either saved them or spent them. The question is: Whose hand would be the last to hold the $1 and $100 bills?


My Book Review:

Have you ever wrote your name on a dollar bill for a contest giveaway or raffle? Well then come along for the ride as one little boy's name written on a dollar bill and a one hundred dollar bill journeys around the USA for twenty-five years touching the lives of eight people.

In In God We Trust, author Heather Hummel weaves a wonderful contemporary literary tale that follows the inspirational journey of a dollar bill and a one hundred dollar bill from 1976 to 2001 that bears the name of ten year old Jack Sampson.

In a span of twenty five years, one little boy's questioning of what 'In God We Trust' means on the bills leads him to write his name on the bills as his way of letting everyone know that he trusts in God, and unknowingly connects eight people from all walks of life around the country when the bills come into their possession, and ultimately coming full circle for Jack in 2001.

Set in Pontiac, Illinois with stops around the US, and told in the third person narrative, the author weaves a fascinating tale that easily engages the reader to follow the bills' journey around the country as they touch the lives of eight very different people. Each chapter is broken down into an individual snippet of the eight people's lives, and how they are changed when they receive and pay forward the one dollar or one hundred dollar bill. The author does a wonderful job of describing what receiving and using the bills meant to each of the people, their stories are touching and will stay with you for a long time. As the bills make their journey around the country for twenty-five years, the reader is finally brought up-to-date in 2000-2001 with a now thirty-three year old Jack Sampson, and how the memory of writing his name on both the bills back in 1976 now comes full circle with a new understanding of the meaning of loss and found that will ultimately change his life forever.

In God We Trust is an inspirational and feel good contemporary literary tale that will pull at your heartstrings, touch your soul, and leave a smile on your face.


RATING: 5 STARS 

About The Author

Heather Hummel has penned over a dozen books as a ghostwriter. Her clients include corporations, politicians, philanthropists, and public figures. With experience in both traditional and independent publishing, Heather's diverse background and knowledge of the industry appeals to many authors seeking a qualified ghostwriter.

Heather is a featured blogger in the Arts & Culture section of the Huffington Post. Television, print, and radio coverage for her clients’ books include: The Today Show and other regional shows; Publishers Weekly, USA Today and the Washington Post; and in magazines that include: Health, Body & Soul, First, and Spry Living, a combined circulation of nearly 20 million in print alone. A contributing author in Successful eBook Publishing: The Complete How-to Guide for Creating and Launching Your Amazon Kindle eBook by David Wogahn, Heather shares her wisdom in a chapter on ghostwriting.

Heather's second career is as a land and seascape photographer. Her work is represented by Agora Gallery in the Chelsea District of New York City.

A graduate with High Distinction from the University of Virginia, Heather holds a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies degree with concentrations in English and Secondary Education.

Awards: 2009 Mature Media Awards, Merit Award: Gracefully 2009 New York Book Festival, Women's Literature: Whispers from the Heart

Essays: Messages of Hope and Healing (Sunpiper Media, 2006) Blue Ridge Anthology (Cedar Creek, 2007)


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