Monday, July 14, 2025

Book of the Week: The Good Queen by J.P. Reedman #HistoricalFiction #WomenInHistory #RecommendedReading



The Good Queen: Matilda of Scotland

Medieval Babes

by J.P. Reedman


Daughter of a Scottish king and an Anglo-Saxon princess, Edith is sent to her Aunt Cristina, the Abbess of Romsey, for her education. Cristina is harsh and unkind and tries to force Edith to wear a nun's veil, first as a disguise and then permanently, but Edith is enraged and tramples it on the ground.

She begs her parents to move her from Romsey to the grand Abbey of Wilton and for a while Edith's life is calm and fulfilling--but then the suitors begin to come.

Most fearsome of all is the King, William Rufus, with his fierce mismatched eyes, florid face...and evil reputation.

More intriguing, though, is his younger brother Henry, and when Rufus dies in the New Forest, struck by an arrow on the hunt, Edith of Scotland's world is about to change.

A new life...a new name...a destiny as England's Good Queen, uniting both Saxon and Norman.

Number 11 in the MEDIEVAL BABES SERIES about lesser-known medieval Queen and noblewomen.


Praise for The Good Queen:

"Enjoyed reading the story of Matilda. She overcame a lot of hurdles in her life an was a very good person, she helped lots of people including ones no one else cared about."
~ Amazon Reviewer, 5*

"Thoroughly enjoyed this book and was very descriptive of the times. The character were vividly brought to life.
Would definitely recommend this book and will look forward to reading more by the same author.
"
~ Amazon Reviewer, 5*



Universal Buy Link


This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.





Sunday, July 13, 2025

Blog Tour: Ciao, Amore, Ciao by Sandro Martini



Join The Coffee Pot Book Club on tour with…


Ciao, Amore, Ciao

Alex Lago, Book #1

by Sandro Martini


Mondays, August 4th - 25th, 2025

Publication Date: March 26th, 2025
Series: Alex Lago Series, Book #1
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Pages: 426
Genre: Historical Fiction


An enthralling dual-timeline WWII family mystery, based on the heartbreaking true story of the massacre in a small town in Italy in July of 1945, from award-winning, bestselling novelist Sandro Martini.

In the winter of 1942, an Italian army of young men vanishes in the icefields of the Eastern Front. In the summer of 1945, a massacre in Schio, northeastern Italy, where families grieve the dead, makes international headlines.

In present-day Veneto, an ordinary man is about to stumble onto a horrifying secret.

Alex Lago is a jaded journalist whose career is fading as fast as his marriage. When he discovers an aged World War II photo in his dying father’s home, and innocently posts it to a Facebook group, he gets an urgent message: Take it down. NOW.

Alex finds himself digging into a past that needs to stay hidden. What he's about to uncover is a secret that can topple a political dynasty buried under seventy years of rubble. Suddenly entangled in a deadly legacy, he encounters the one person who can offer him redemption, for an unimaginable price.

Told from three alternating points of view, Martini’s World War II tale of intrigue, war, and heartbreak pulls the Iron Curtain back to reveal a country nursing its wounds after horrific defeat, an army of boys forever frozen at the gates of Stalingrad, British spies scheming to reshape Italy’s future, and the stinging unsolved murder of a partisan hero.

Ciao, Amore, Ciao is a gripping story of the most heroic, untold battle of the Second World War, and a brilliantly woven novel that brings the deceits of the past and the reckoning of the present together.


Praise for Ciao, Amore, Ciao:

A gripping saga that roots excruciating betrayals in a nation’s tragic history.
~ Kirkus Reviews

Balances action, suspense, and emotional depth to deliver a truly immersive, thought-provoking read with an unflinching look at the sins of the past and the lengths to which the powerful will go to keep them buried.
~ Sublime Book Review


Buy Link:


This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.



Sandro Martini


Sandro Martini has worked as a word monkey on three continents. 

He's the author of Tracks: Racing the Sun, an award-winning historical novel. He grew up in Africa to immigrant parents, studied law in Italy, chased literary dreams in London, hustled American dollars in New York City, and is now hiding out in Switzerland, where he moonlights as a Comms guy and tries hard not to speak German. 

You can find him either uber-driving his daughter, chasing faster cars on the autobahn, or swimming in Lake Zurich with a cockapoo named Tintin.

His latest historical suspense novel, Ciao, Amore, Ciao, is now available.

Author Links:




Tour Schedule

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Saturday, July 12, 2025

Blog Tour: The Winding Dirt Road by Jiu Da



Join The Coffee Pot Book Club on tour with…


The Winding Dirt Road

by Jiu Da




August 4th - 8th, 2025

Publication Date: May 27th, 2025
Publisher: Historium Press
Pages: 391
Genre: Chinese Historical Fiction / Political Fiction


Written as an antithesis to all first-hand and second-hand propaganda written by both Chinese and foreign writers for China in the good part of the 20th century in a fictional form, this collection, through different times and lands, gives insights into how human docile nature and characteristics are manipulated and brought about cultural and social corrosion over the century. The outcome thus sees "a monumental loss breathtakingly massive than any period that preceded it." Subsequently, it foreshadows a system that "would bring out not the best but the worst in people, against people, any people." (Event Horizon)

 

The first story is written as an introduction in addition to the prologue. From there, the collection proceeds with interrelated subjects or topics, building up causes and factors. At every turn, it gathers momentum and convenes halfway through the book to form the major components of critical perspectives at a juncture.

 

Hoarded in the depth of memories of the past decades, this has been a work long overdue.



Buy Link:




Jiu Da


For years, Jiu Da has been intrigued by the question of whether the environment makes us who we are or whether we are the ones that shape our environment.

For the good parts of early years, he stubbornly believed that motivation, talent, and effort could change the outcomes. It did not.

It was not until the virus hit while finding himself perching at home that he came to accept that the environment is indeed the hand that shapes human behavior.

It was during this time that he began his first work, drawing from his love in literature, history and a lifetime of seemingly useless yet fascinating knowledge hoarded in the depth of his mind.

Author Links:





Tour Schedule

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Friday, July 11, 2025

Join us as author Jann Alexander introduces Ruby Lee Becker, the young determined heroine in Unspoken #HistoricalFiction #DustBowl #RecommendedReading



Unspoken

The Dust Series, Book #1

by Jann Alexander



A farm devastated. A dream destroyed. A family scattered.


And one Texas girl determined to salvage the wreckage.


Ruby Lee Becker can't breathe. It's 1935 in the heart of the Dust Bowl, and the Becker family has clung to its Texas Panhandle farm through six years of drought, dying crops, and dust storms. On Black Sunday, the biggest blackest storm of them all threatens ten-year-old Ruby with deadly dust pneumonia and requires a drastic choice —one her mother, Willa Mae, will forever regret.


To survive, Ruby is forced to leave the only place she's ever known. Far from home in Waco, and worried her mother has abandoned her, she's determined to get back.


Even after twelve years, Willa Mae still clings to memories of her daughter. Unable to reunite with Ruby, she's broken by their separation.


Through rollicking adventures and harrowing setbacks, the tenacious Ruby Lee embarks on her perilous quest for home —and faces her one unspoken fear.


Heart-wrenching and inspiring, the tale of Ruby Lee's dogged perseverance and Willa Mae's endless love for her daughter shines a light on women driven apart by disaster who bravely lean on one another, find comfort in remade families, and redefine what home means.



Trailer for Unspoken:



Praise for Unspoken:

"Reminds me, in tone, of Texas classics like The Time it Never Rained and Giant. I loved it. Alexander is a great new talent in the genre of Texana."
~ W.F. Strong, author, Stories From Texas




Traveling the Heroine’s Journey in Hard Times

In many ways, Ruby Lee Becker, the main character in Unspoken, is a heroine on the classic hero’s journey — with modifications for her gender. To follow the Heroine’s Journey in the United States circa 1930s, she’ll need to establish her own agency, confront her own internal obstacles, and push back on society’s limitations on women.

The historical novel opens in 1935 when the massive Black Sunday dust storm strikes the small Texas Panhandle town that’s home to Ruby Lee Becker and her farming family, and it spans the next 15 years through hard times, including the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War II, as she tries to recover what’s she’s lost, both emotionally and financially.


As a ten-year-old at Unspoken’s start, Ruby is desperate to make sense of an upside-down world where you can’t reliably breathe clean air — which is especially deadly for the young, the elderly, and the sickly. They’d contract dust pneumonia, as it was known to doctors. To Ruby Lee, it was a plague. “This brown plague was different,” she thinks. “Nobody knew how you could fix air that wasn’t fit to breathe.

This is the world she’s inherited, has known since she was able to walk, and now its conditions threaten to claim her. She, too, is prone to coughing up dirt. To survive, she’s sent east where the air isn’t dust-filled. It’s an agonizing decision her mother, Willa Mae, will forever regret. But Ruby doesn’t understand that. She rebels at her circumstances, and she grows up longing for the one thing she cannot have: the home she knew with her momma’s love and her family. Despite how miserly their Depression-era home was, it was still home. Except their home came with air too toxic for her to survive.

We know now, with the hindsight of history, how and when the drought and blowing dust storms finally came to an end, and when those who lived there could breathe freely again. But nobody living in those times could know that. So Ruby can’t return, and has to make the most of the new home she’s landed in. It’s not the home she wants. But often, she feels it’s the home she deserves, as she (mistakenly) blames herself for what got her sent there: “From somewheres deep a shameful feeling stirred. I pushed it back in place, buried where it could not be exhumed.

This is her wound, one she’ll carry deep, no matter her considerable successes and achievements as an adult.


Even as she grows up, Ruby is certain her mother abandoned her, and she’s certain she knows why. In her child’s mind, she’s sure a profound power she possesses caused deaths she didn’t intend, and she’ll hide it to shield herself from discovery.

While Ruby doesn’t lack for shelter, clothing, and food during the six years she spends in her newfound home, she does lack for emotional connections with the adults who supervise her. Ironically, she’s exposed to so much more there — different kinds of people, kids from circumstances like hers and not, better education, varying situations to navigate — than she’d ever have experienced back home. As she develops a hard shell to prevent more hurt, she’s quick to learn and picks up crafty survival skills many adults would envy.

In 1939, when Ruby’s 13 going on 14 and trapped at the State Home for Neglected and Dependent Children, she sets out for home on her own:

Minus my twenty dollars, I had only one way home. I pulled on my overalls, jammed on a cap I’d found near the boys’ dormitory—my hair newly cut and short enough to stay under it—and lifted my sack. 
It was early on Sunday in March, and the campus was still quiet. The only activity beyond the gate was a messenger boy on a bicycle. He pedaled onto the campus to the administration building and hopped off his bike. He was a half-pint, maybe eight or nine, his Western Union cap sunk low enough to cover half his ears. His baggy uniform was belted tight and patched in a few spots.

“Who ya looking for?” I asked. “Main office is closed.”

He read the superintendent’s name from his Western Union envelope.

“Then you want the auditorium, there, go to the office backstage. He sets up early for church service.” I pointed out the route through the trees. “Easier to run over.”

“Thanks. I’m in a hurry—first day on the job.” 
When the double doors of the auditorium swallowed him up, I pedaled his bicycle lickety-split to the highway.


Some readers have found Ruby to be “a little Oliver Twist-y,” since she tackles and surmounts obstacles left and right, on her journey back home across Texas.

As Ruby Lee matures, and endures, she’s surrounded by found family, if only she could accept them. But that hard shell does not crack easily, which robs her of connections she’ll eventually realize she craves. Until then, as she says of herself, “I put myself up high, on a shelf, in a dusty corner, where nobody looked. Where nuthin could touch me.

Over the course of her time away, longing for a home she’s conjured into a magical near-castle, Ruby develops the tenacity, the quick-witted thinking, and the street savvy to make her way back. She’s determined to stake her claim there, no matter the desolate conditions she finds. As a resourceful adult who has long dreamed of a home and family that can’t ever be, she will inevitably recognize what’s she longed for can’t exist.

By then, she’ll be ready to face what’s gone unspoken, and fashion something new.









Jann Alexander


Jann Alexander writes characters who face down their fears. Her novels are as close-to-true as fiction can get.

Jann is the author of the historical novel, Unspoken, set in the Texas Panhandle during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression eras, and her first book in The Dust Series. 

Jann writes on all things creative in her weekly blog, Pairings. She's a 20-year resident of central Texas and creator of the Vanishing Austin photography series. As a former art director for ad agencies and magazines in the D.C. area, and a painter, photographer, and art gallery owner, creativity is her practice and passion.

Jann's  lifelong storytelling habit and her more recent zeal for Texas history merged to become the historical Dust Series. When she is not reading, writing, or creating, she bikes, hikes, skis, and kayaks. She lives in central Texas with her own personal Texan (and biggest fan), Karl, and their Texas mutt, Ruby.

Jann always brakes for historical markers.


Author Links:

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