book reviews

Reviews of books that explore the complexities of family throughout history and across cultures.

The Love That Stays Off-Camera
I didn’t notice the fire until it was almost too late. It was a Tuesday in late October. Dry wind, brittle leaves, the kind of air that crackles with danger. I was inside, scrolling through bad news on my phone, when the smell hit—acrid, sharp, wrong. I ran outside just as smoke curled over the ridge behind our street.
By KAMRAN AHMAD5 days ago in Families
The Last Gallop
In a small village nestled between golden wheat fields and sun-cracked hills, there lived a horse named Bahar. He wasn’t sleek or swift, nor did he have a pedigree worth boasting about. His coat was dull in places, his legs bore old scars, and one ear was half-torn from a long-forgotten storm. But to twelve-year-old Rehan, Bahar was more than a horse—he was memory, comfort, and home.
By meerjanan6 days ago in Families
The Static Hum of Home
Unit 734, or Sevy, as Leo had insisted on calling it, hovered a precise 1.7 meters off the floor, gliding through the Miller household. Breakfast chaos, same as every Tuesday. Sarah was yelling about lost gym socks, Tom was trying to read the news feed on his wrist, and Leo, ten years old and perpetually sticky, was attempting to build a waffle tower that defied all laws of physics. Sevy smoothly cleared the spilled orange juice, the faint scent of synthetic cleaner a counterpoint to the burnt toast. Its optical sensors registered the minute tremors in Sarah’s hands, the tense set of Tom’s jaw, the pure, unadulterated glee on Leo’s face as his waffle structure finally collapsed.
By HAADI8 days ago in Families
The Weight of Pages
The dust was a living thing, a fine, glittering shroud over everything. It clung to the cracked spines of the books, coated the spectacles Martha perched on the bridge of her nose, even seemed to settle in the faint lines around Eleanor’s eyes. This wasn't some grand, public institution. This was Grandfather Silas’s library, two high-ceilinged rooms added onto the back of Martha’s rambling, slightly damp Victorian. It stank of old paper, the faint sourness of leather decay, and something else – expectation. Eleanor hated it. She hated the quiet that amplified every creak of the floorboards, every rustle of their clothes, every sigh her mother let escape.
By HAADI9 days ago in Families
The Space Between Noticing
The city woke up loudly, but Jonah always noticed the silence first. It lived in the early hours, tucked between the hum of traffic and the clatter of metal gates opening for business. It lingered in the spaces most people rushed through without a second thought. Jonah didn’t rush. He never had.
By Yasir khan9 days ago in Families
My name is Alice and this is my story
Chapter One Alice was a girl that was loved a lot by her family. Her mother and father loved her very much but then their happened something that forced her mother to divorces her father she still had contact with her father and she went to him every weekend and some days he went to pick her up at school. Alice grows up thinking that parents should live in different houses but that was not the case in other families. When Alice was about 6 years old her mother met a man and they started dating. Alice was very confused by this man that was with her mother. She told her dad that she was afraid that he is going to make her not see her dad again. Her father told her nobody can every stop him for seeing his daughter and that he loves her very much. When she was 7 Years old her mother and her boyfriend married and 9 months later she had a brother. She also had a step sister that was very rude and did like her. They moved into a bigger house where they each got their own rooms and it was peaceful for a while. Alice and her father went to visit her granny that lived near the sea. Her granddad died a few days earlier and they went there for the funeral. At her grans house she played with her baby cousin that was just a few weeks older than her baby brother. When they went home her dad told her that she don’t have to fever about anything because he will always be there for her. Alice got home and then she saw all the new stuff that her step father’s child got. She was not worried about it because her dad will by her stuff.
By Alice Van Heerden9 days ago in Families
The Hum of the Hearth
Unit 734 watched the boy, Leo, chew his toast with an open mouth, crumbs scattering like tiny asteroids on the laminate floor. Mrs. Miller, across the cheap plastic table, sighed, a low, guttural sound that Unit 734 had logged as 'Discontent, mild to moderate.' The air reeked of burnt coffee and something sweet, probably the syrup Leo was drowning his waffle in. This was 'Breakfast,' an hourly ritual Unit 734 had recorded for three years, seven months, and twelve days. Its internal chronometer ticked. Its optical sensors focused on the boy's sticky fingers. Data streamed, always data.
By HAADI10 days ago in Families
Ink Bleeds, Not Words
The attic air, thick with dust motes dancing in the one weak beam of sunlight from the grimy dormer window, smelled like old paper and forgotten things. Michael coughed, swiping a hand across his forehead. Forty-seven years old and still dealing with his parents' ghosts, even if only in cardboard boxes. He’d told himself this was just a purge, a necessary declutter before Sarah really started pushing the renovation. But every box he opened felt like prying a lid off a tomb.
By HAADI11 days ago in Families
Moonlit Shuffles
The house felt like a hollowed-out skull. Too big, too quiet, every creak of the floorboards a question Lena didn’t have an answer for. Her father had been gone six weeks. Six weeks, and the air still smelled faintly of his pipe tobacco and the old spice cologne he’d worn since before she was born. Her mother, Clara, moved through the rooms like a ghost, tidying things already neat, dusting surfaces that shone. Lena watched her, a knot of frustration tightening in her gut. She’d driven three hours to be here, to help, to *be* with her mother, but Clara just kept… busy.
By HAADI12 days ago in Families
Shards of a Sunk Heart
Elias tasted the salt on his tongue before his eyes even opened, a permanent fixture in the air of their small, leaning shack on the cliffs. The pre-dawn chill seeped through the cracks in the walls, raising gooseflesh on his arms. Beside him, Lena, twelve years old and too thin, breathed a shallow, rhythmic gasp that always settled his gut, for a moment anyway. He shifted, joints popping like old timber, and the lumpy mattress groaned. Another day. Another dive into the deep, into the silence, into the shimmering ghost of what was once. The Sunken Glass City.
By HAADI13 days ago in Families
Moonlit Reckoning
The house groaned around Elena at eleven-thirty, a familiar protest of settling wood and old pipes. She sat at the kitchen table, the last of her herbal tea cooling, a film like grief on its surface. Lila should've been home an hour ago. No text, naturally. Not a peep. Elena tapped her fingers on the worn Formica, the sound too loud in the quiet. This was their rhythm now, a silent, syncopated beat of expectation and disappointment, a constant, low thrum beneath everything.
By HAADI18 days ago in Families
The Hidden Gospels:
What if the Bible we know is only half the story? What if Jesus spoke in secret code because humanity wasn’t ready to hear the truth — that the real enemy isn’t sin, but illusion itself? The banned Gospels tried to tell us this centuries ago, before power rewrote the script.
By Living the Greatest CONSPIRACY Theory. By RG.23 days ago in Families