Dear Friends and Followers,

Welcome to My Book Buffet, a monthly newsletter featuring updates on my publishing adventure, including my novels When Things Go Missing and This Sea Within. I also share reviews of books I’m currently reading and more on the literary and Indie publishing world in general.

Here’s what’s on the menu this month:

• Update on my new novel, This Sea Within
• Creativity Has No Expiration Date: Library Author Talk, March 22
• When Things Go Missing Reviews by Beth Kennedy and Darren McGowan
• My reviews: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConoghy and Sally Cronin’s What’s in a Name
• The Librarians: A new kind of super-hero movie

Update on This Sea Within

I’m still waiting eagerly (and somewhat impatiently) for some rough drafts of the cover from my designer, and hope to have a cover reveal by this time next month. In the meantime three gracious early readers of my new novel have given me blurbs that I can use on the front and/or back covers. I won’t reveal their names until the cover reveal, but I will share what they have written:

“An epic, page-turning tale filled with passion and beauty, political intrigue and revolution.”

“A passionate affair, thrilling dangers, masterful writing–what else could a reader want? This is a book you will feel and long remember.”

“A captivating love story about freedom, rebellion, and willingness to die for one’s principles. It kept me turning pages late into the night.”

In the meantime, I’ve been formatting the book using Atticus software. There was a fairly long learning curve at the beginning, but now it’s moving along and looking quite lovely. I’ve added several back pages. “On the Making of a Novel” tells how our travels in Central America inspired me. The day we sailed into Panama Bay when U.S. gunboats were firing on the city in their attempt to kidnap President Noriega was especially memorable. With the recent kidnapping of Venezuea’s president, it illustrates how history repeats itself, a major theme in my novel. I’ll write more about that in another post.

Author Talk – Creativity Has No Expiration Date

I was thrilled when friends from Santa Barbara County Action Network where I served as director for so many years offered to sponsor an author talk for me at the public library in Santa Maria, where I lived before I retired. We booked a room for March 22 and then The Friends of the Santa Maria Public Library offered to co-sponsor. I’ve been working with both of them to create a flyer and press release about the event. If you are in the neighborhood, please stop by. It’s free.

Creativity Has No Expiration Date

Local author Deborah Brasket on publishing late in life

2PM-4 PM, Sunday, March 22, 2026
Santa Maria Public Library, Shepard Hall, 421 S. McClelland St., Santa Maria, CA

Have you ever wondered if it’s too late to write that novel, become an artist, or play the piano? Join local author Deborah Brasket and SBCAN Co-Executive Director Jeanne Sparks for a candid conversation about how Brasket came to publish her debut novel When Things Go Missing late in life. She’ll share her journey, read from her book, and be on hand to answer questions and sign copies.

Reviews of When Things Go Missing

Thank you, Beth Kennedy, for this lovely, introspective review.

Deborah J. Brasket’s moving novel When Things Go Missing, may cause you to reflect on your life in ways that you didn’t expect, as you follow her characters in this very human tale of a family. 

Throughout the book, each family member will be challenged to take stock of their own lives in response to an unexpected change in their family dynamic when their always reliable mother chooses to disappear. While they all love each other, they do have very real issues, and there are times when it’s best to let people resolve things on their own, yet only the people involved can make that decision. 

As a parent, a sibling, a child, a friend, perhaps we’ve all had those moments when we’ve felt the push/pull of wanting to take a break from it all, but how many of us would do it, and what would happen to those we would have to leave behind, even though we love them dearly, while also loving ourselves? Are we helping, are we hurting, by staying or leaving? What happens next?

This book tells this family’s story with compassion, love, humor, and caring, and shows you how people can find a way to find a way, with love and a strong will. I highly recommend it. 

I was delighted to see this recommendation of my book on Substack. Much appreciated, Darrell!

Poet Darrell McGowan praised my novel in a Substack note. “Like many of you, one of my great pleasures is sitting down with a good book and being carried off by a compelling story. It’s been a while, though, since I found a story that tugged at my heartstrings like @Deborah Brasket’s When Things Go Missing. Her characters have quickly come to feel like members of my extended family. Deborah weaves her story with depth, realism, and compassion. I feel truly privileged to spend time immersed in her beautiful novel. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, I highly recommend When Things Go Missing!”

MY BOOK REVIEWS

I just finished McConaghy’s newest novel (our book club’s pick for March). And I have to say I agree with all the occolades it’s getting. I’m not surprised. I loved her Once There Were Wolves, a novel about rewilding wolves in the Scottish highlands, full of fascinating details about wolves, the backlash from the local farmers, a troubled sister who may or may not be a ghost, and a budding love affair between two wounded souls. Wild Dark Shore is a close cousin to all of this.

BACK COVER DESCRIPTION

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.

But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears.

MY REVIEW

Wild Dark Shore is a deep, moody, sometimes brooding, and atmospheric novel, much like the island setting with its wild beauty, rugged landscape, turbulent seas, and crumbling cliffs that threaten the sealions and penguins that call it home.

At its heart, it’s a love story: Of a troubled father for his three strange, bewildering, and beautiful children; for his dead wife who haunts him with whispers and touches; and for this mysterious woman who has washed up on his shore, who has befriended his children, and whose very presence now threatens them.

It’s also full of mysteries: Why does teen daughter Fen go to live among the sealions, and why does her father let her? Why is son Raff so full of rage he must release it by punching a boxing bag until his fists are bloody? Why is the youngest child Orley so obsessed with saving the seeds that will replenish a dying earth, and why is he haunted by the ghosts of the dead? Why did Rowan come to this island, and why does her presence there threaten the family?

The answers to all these question trickle out slowly. Too slowly for this impatient reader. During the first third of this novel I took long breaks, weary of the intrigue, the not-knowing, the slo-mo reveal.

But halfway through I was so in love with these quirky, kind, complex, and angst-ridden characters that I could not put the book down. Then when the relationship between the woman and the father grew from attraction to a wild hunger for each other, I was completely hooked. The way McConoghy writes about fierce love–between man and woman, father and children, humans and wildlife is deep and tender and frightening. And heartbreakingly real.

Wild Dark Shore is an intense read with intense themes, intense loves, intense consequences for people trying to survive a crumbling and threatening habitat caused by an eco catastrophe. Highly recommended.

While reading the dark, mysterious, slow-reveal of McConoghy’s novel, I found the perfect companion read in Sally Cronin’s What’s in a Name. Many of you know Sally as a champion of Indie authors and books. She is also a prolific, talented author in her own right. I learned that when she shared the short story “Peter” from her book What’s in a Name. I was so charmed by this romantic sweet-sad story of an RAF pilot who was so convinced he would not survive the war that he refused to follow his heart when smitten by a red-headed woman he met on leave. I immediately bought the book, hoping to find more stories like it, and indeed I did.

BACK COVER DESCRIPTION

Our legacy is not always about money or fame, but rather in the way that people remember our name after we have gone. In these sixteen short stories we discover the reasons why special men and women will stay in the hearts and minds of those who have met them. Romance, revenge and sacrifice all play their part in the lives of these characters.

Kenneth watches the love of his life dance on New Year’s Eve while Lily plants very special flowers every spring for her father. Martha helps out a work colleague as Norman steps back out into the world to make a difference. Owen brings light into a house and Patrick risks his life in the skies over Britain and holds back from telling a beautiful redhead that he loves her.

Meet Queenie and Rosemary who have both lost their husbands and must face a very different future. One that will take courage and the use of new technology.

Sonia is an entitled princess whose father has reached the end of his tether and Theresa has to deal with a bully in the checkout. Usher is an arrogant narcissist with a docile wife and is used to getting his own way and Vanessa worries about the future of her relationship with her teenage son.

Walter is a loner and is happy with just his dog for company, Xenia is the long awaited first baby of a young couple. Yves is a dashing romeo who has the tables turned on him unexpectedly and Zoe… Well she can see into the future.

In one way or another all these characters will be remembered by those whose lives they have touched.

MY REVIEW

What’s in a Name is full of very human, touching, sometimes hilarious, and often surprising stories that dip lightly into the lives of quite a cast of characters: loners and match-makers, scoundrels and lovers, widows and retired soldiers, heart-breakers and the heartbroken.

Two of my favorite stories, besides “Patrick”, were “Norman,” and “Xenia.” Norman, a retired WWII vet, was forced to downgrade into an apartment complex overrun by gang warfare. When he sees how the children have been driven away from their playground by gangs of teenagers, he dons his old uniform and fights back. Xenia is about a young woman who wants to name her unborn child after a beloved grandmother and conjures up all the old lovely memories of this gentle and radiant woman.

We do not get to know these characters as well as we do Rowan and Fen, Raff and Orley, but the brief glimpses we do get of them (well, most, anyway) make you proud to be part of the human race. And for the few who are awful scoundrels and cheats–well they (mostly) get their just desserts in the end. And those who escape scot-free? Well, that too is the way the world turns, and Cronin handles it in such a humorous way we smile as we shake our heads and sigh.

If you are looking for fun and heartwarming stories to lighten your heavier reads, I highly recommend turning to What’s in a Name.

A Different Kind of Super-Hero Movie

Many thanks to Valorie Hallinan’s recent post about this. A must-watch if you care about books, librarians, and freedom of speech. Read more about it at the link below.

Coming for the librarians (and the books)

Thank you so much for reading and responding to this newsletter! You are the ones who inspire me and keep me writing.