Monday, October 28, 2024

Shrimping West Texas ~ Lone Star Book Blog Tours Spotlight!

 
Shrimping West Texas:
The Rise and Fall of the
Permian Sea Shrimp Company
By Bart Reid

Nonfiction / Texana / Science / Aquaculture
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Pages: 256
Publication Date: May 21, 2024

SYNOPSIS
When you think of a marine environment, what do you picture? Wetlands, possibly; coastal shores, perhaps. When you think of a shrimp farm, what do you picture? Some folks who know a thing or two about aquaculture m ight say any marine or freshwater environment will do. Bart Reid, one of the founders of the Permian Sea Shrimp company, is here to tell you otherwise. 

Shrimping West Texas is the story of that business and the history of the harebrained notion that farming shrimp is possible in the West Texas desert.

Spanning twenty years of successes and failures, Reid captures the quintessential West Texas entrepreneurial spirit, tallies the unique environmental factors that made this possible, and depicts the motley crew of business folks, scientists, and schemers who were part of the tale.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bart Reid is a marine biologist with a master's degree from Texas A&M University. He has been in the aquaculture (fish farming) business for over thirty years. After many years of farming shrimp in West Texas. he now farms algae for Omega 3 supplements and bioplastics. He also owns Bart’s Bay Armor, a fishing apparel and wading boot company based out of Port Mansfield, Texas, where he fishes on the Laguna Madre.




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Friday, October 25, 2024

Tough Trail Home ~ Lone Star Book Blog Tours Audiobook Review & Giveaway!

TOUGH TRAIL HOME
By Marie W. Watts

Small Town Texas / Rural Fiction / Women’s Fiction
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Pages: 253
Audiobook: 9 hours, 28 minutes
Publication Date: March 27, 2024

SCROLL DOWN FOR THE GIVEAWAY!

SYNOPSIS
*spoiler alert*
Tough Trail Home is a delightful read about a family coming to terms with each other and their new lives.” –Pamela Stockwell, author of A Boundless Place

The Dunwhitty family is flying high until their carefully choreographed life falls apart during the 2008 Great Recession. Lisa's firm goes belly-up while Michael's shuts down after selling faulty heart valves. Desperate, Lisa insists they regroup by seeking refuge in rural Central Texas on land she inherits from a distant relative she barely knows.

It's not the ranch Lisa remembers, but a ramshackle money pit. Michael and their teenage son, Andrew, despise the place. Only their young daughter, Jessica, is happy. After a bitter argument, Michael moves to the city. As his job search drags on, Lisa begins to plant roots; friendships develop for her and the children. With the help of Michael's parents, her neighbor, and the remains of her savings, she begins to return the ranch to its former glory. The couple continues to drift further apart, Michael turning his attention to another woman.

A call from the sheriff's department that their son is in custody jolts the couple to the core. Can they repair their relationship for the sake of their son? Or is it too late?

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REVIEW


HALL WAYS AUDIOBOOK REVIEW: First thing's first -- I felt the need to put a *spoiler alert* on the synopsis above because there are events that I would have rather discovered by reading. Either way, Tough Trail Home is a great choice for readers who enjoy character-driven stories of resilience, determination, and healing.

What I enjoyed the most about Tough Trail Home is that it places readers in small-town Texas and highlights both the perks and challenges of living there. However, everything is intensified because of how our main character, Lisa Dunwhitty, and her two children are thrown into living on a derelict ranch outside La Grange, Texas. It's a riches to rags story, but much like in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, our characters learn that riches come in a lot of different forms.

"To top it off, the store here only sells Folgers coffee."

The family is accustomed to a life of luxury before the (million dollar Persian) rug is suddenly and unceremoniously pulled out from under them. Watching them in turn cling to and let go of the finer things in life is sometimes painful, sometimes refreshing, and sometimes humorous. But being along for the ride as each of them realizes what's valuable is the payoff in the aptly named Tough Trail Home

Readers must suspend their disbelief a bit, and they'll also have to restrain themselves from wanting to punch the page when it comes to some of the characters' behaviors and thought processes (I'm mostly talking to you, Michael). But any of their shortcomings are offset by the most wonderful and intriguing character, neighbor Carl, who is a saint and a savior to the Dunwhitty family. If only we all had a Carl in our life.

The bones of Tough Trail Home are solid, and Watts is clearly an excellent storyteller. I didn't love Lisa's obsessing over her ten-year-old daughter's weight or the ubiquitous but incorrect, "Everyone in Texas has firearms," statement from friend Dorothy. But the other side of that is that Watts evoked reactions, and that's the mark of a great writer. From a technical standpoint, there are a few typos, some inconsistencies with diction, and some unnecessary scenes and details. And the ending is so abrupt that I thought pages were missing. Additional editing and a few more details to reasonably wrap up the story would have taken this novel to the next level for me. 

ABOUT THE NARRATION: I listened to Tough Trail Home at 1.2x instead of regular speed, and narrator Danielle Mors did an admirable job with the Texas accent and distinguishing between character voices. Her pacing was consistent, but there were enough peculiar or incorrect pronunciations and odd inflections that it was taking me out of the story, so I stopped reading with my ears and switched to reading with my eyes. I am un unusually nitpicky reader, so I imagine many of the things that caught my ear would pass by others, and when the narration was good, it was very good. 

Tough Trail Home shows how hard it is to find strength when the hits keep coming. It's also a reminder that turning to friends and family and the healing balm of nature will often provide the grounding and stability to put priorities in perspective. The ending leaves readers to create the next chapters for the Dunwhitty family, but it also leaves Marie Watts an opportunity for a sequel. Fingers crossed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An award-winning author, Marie W. Watts is living her dream of being a writer. Her novel, Tough Trail Home, has received acclaim as a winner of the 2024 PenCraft Seasonal Book Award Summer Competition for Fiction - Women’s Genre; Winner in the 2024 Storytrade Book Awards “Regional Fiction ‐ USA Southwest” category; 2024 Speak Up Talk Radio International Firebird Book Award Winner, and The Outstanding Creator Award for Best Fiction Book of Summer 2024 (2nd place). She and her husband live on a ranch in central Texas. In her spare time, she supports a historic house and hangs out with her grandsons.


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Three winners each receive an autographed copy
of Tough Trail Home
(US only; ends midnight, CST, 11/3/24)
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Thursday, October 17, 2024

The Art of Farming ~ Lone Star Book Blog Tours Book Review!

THE ART OF FARMING
Sketches of Life in the Country
by T.D. Motley

Fiction / Agriculture / Nature / Stewardship
Publisher: Stoney Creek Publishing
Pages: 144
Publication Date: August 26, 2024

SYNOPSIS

Sam Bartlett’s formidable antagonist has four legs. Sol, a miniature donkey, schemes daily to outwit his kindly caretaker. This delightful rural drama regales a symbiosis of plants, humans, dogs, and livestock, with wild creatures observing from secluded, weedy perimeters.  

Retired from teaching, artist Sam farms thirty acres. His popular paintings of vast prairies at sunset are selling well. He plans to market organic herbs and produce, hiring local after-school teens. Begrudgingly raised on a farm, he once swore that when he grew up, he’d never go back. Time and age break promises. 

Elysia boasts a pretty town square, complete with a handsome county courthouse. Sam’s girlfriend, Annie, is a food writer who travels a lot. Bartlett Farm is her sanctuary. 

The Art of Farming is a hopeful tale about stewardship of the land, the animals, and of each other. It honors the integrity of agriculture, as expressed in ancient literature and art. 


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REVIEW


Hall Ways Review: If you want some wonderful armchair travel to get a taste of country life, THE ART OF FARMING is the book you want to read. The world of Sam Bartlett is a mostly peaceful place, where his thoughts on life, people, flora, and fauna flow from page to page.

Readers journey along with Sam and his thoughts, almost in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way, though there are titled chapters that group topics together.  As a retired art professor, Sam frames his musings through an artist’s lens, so the descriptions of everything from a Texas sunset to the shenanigans of a Sicilian miniature donkey are richly detailed, layered, and nuanced.

Readers are treated to great pieces of Texana and a plethora of other tidbits as Sam often segues from the topic at hand to a related one – or meanders around with only the loosest connection to where he starts. Sam is very much a stop-and-smell-the-roses kind of fellow, and it’s refreshing to live in the moments with him in his rural life and learn a thing or two in the process.

While it’s clear that the author has a way with words and writes passages with punch and panache, the book needs thorough editing.  I found the repetitive phrases, typos, and grammatical inconsistencies a huge distraction. Many readers won’t notice or care if they do, but it’s disappointing for me. And I feel the book suffers with a bit of an identity crisis as being categorized as fiction.

Reading the author’s bio and seeing his illustrations scattered throughout the book, THE ART OF FARMING feels like a memoir. It would have been more satisfying for me to know I was reading author T.D. Motley’s reflections about the life he’s lived and his observations of the life he’s living. Instead, I was constantly looking for the standard plot elements I expect in a work of fiction, and there really aren’t any. There’s no big turning point and no grand resolution. The characters are merely sketches and not fully fleshed-out people that I’ll remember long after the book is shelved.

Perhaps I won’t recall the humans, but truth be told, I’ll remember the wonderful critters of THE ART OF FARMING. Motley’s care and compassion for animals shine when he writes about them, and those are what give me ALL the feels. Those passages are why I will remember Sam Bartlett, and I’ll think about him and his menagerie living on in the fictitious Elysia, Texas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

T.D. Motley writes about art and organic farming. Born in Beaumont, Texas, he has been drawing since the age of three. His family has farmed in Texas since the mid-19th century. For many years, he and his wife, artist Rebecca, marketed their organic, heirloom herbs and produce to North Texas chefs and farmers' market customers.

Motley is Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History at Dallas College. His drawings and paintings have been exhibited nationally and are included in numerous collections across the U.S. and Texas. He has lectured at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum in Austin, the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. He is a contributing author for Eutopia and ArtSpiel and has written about mid-century modern Texas artists for DB/Zumbeispiel and the Grace Museum in Abilene. Motley has received Fulbright grants to Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

Motley is the past president of the board of Artist Boat, a Galveston-based nonprofit that teaches students about coastal nature through art and science. He served for several years as chair of the North Texas Fulbright Teacher Exchange Peer Review Committee. Previously, he worked as a printer in the U.S. Air Force, an illustrator for Ling-Temco-Vought Corporation, and a cartoonist for the infamous Dallas Notes from the Underground newspaper. His artworks can be seen at J. Peeler Howell Fine Art in Fort Worth.


Or direct tour links to participating blogs, here:

10/08/24

The Plain-Spoken Pen

Review

10/08/24

LSBBT Blog

Bonus Stop

10/09/24

Chapter Break Book Blog

Spotlight

10/10/24

The Page Unbound

Spotlight

10/11/24

It's Not All Gravy

Review

10/12/24

Boys' Mom Reads

Review

10/13/24

The Clueless Gent

Review

10/14/24

Ames for the Stars

Review

10/14/24

StoreyBook Reviews

Spotlight

10/15/24

Librariel Book Adventures

Review

10/16/24

Guatemala Paula Loves to Read

Spotlight

10/16/24

Rox Burkey Blog

Review

10/17/24

Book Fidelity

Review

10/17/24

Hall Ways Blog

Review

10/17/24KayBee's Book ShelfReview



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Tuesday, October 15, 2024

The Border Between Us ~ Lone Star Book Blog Tours Book Blitz!


THE BORDER BETWEEN US
By Rudy Ruiz


Literary Fiction
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Pages: 256
Publication Date: August 27, 2024

SYNOPSIS

The Border Between Us is a poignant coming-of-age novel from one of the most exciting voices in fiction.

Ramón López was born along the US–Mexico border but is determined to get out and embrace the American dream—and he’s not sure whether his complicated family is a help or a hindrance. As the son of immigrants, as Ramón grows, his admiration for his entrepreneurial father sours as he watches his dad’s dreams of success wither on the vine. Ramón’s mother is constantly preoccupied with his younger brother, who struggles with intellectual disabilities. And the outside world is rife with danger and temptations threatening to distract Ramón from his dreams of making it to New York and succeeding as an artist.

As dreams clash with reality and values conflict with desires, Ramón finds the American dream within his reach—but will it demand too big a sacrifice?

Award-winning author Rudy Ruiz brilliantly captures the beauty and the danger of border life as Ramón struggles to understand his home and his place in the world. The Border Between Us is a stunning, compassionate story about a son’s fraught relationship with his father, the challenges of pursuing a creative life when you come from humble beginnings, and the power of embracing the whole of who you are.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rudy Ruiz is the author of The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez and Valley of Shadows. He is a winner of the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, and multiple International Latino Book Awards. A bilingual native of the US–Mexico border, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Harvard University. Rudy lives and writes in Texas and New England with his wife and children. Visit his website at RudyRuiz.com.

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Thursday, October 10, 2024

In Praise of Mystery ~ Children's Book Review

 

IN PRAISE OF MYSTERY
By Ada Limón
Illustrated by Peter Sís

Poetry / Children's Picture Book / Science & Environment
Norton Young Readers
35 Pages
Published October 1, 2024


ABOUT THE BOOK: As part of her tenure as U.S. poet laureate, Ada Limón has written “In Praise of Mystery,” which will be engraved on the Europa Clipper spacecraft that launches to Jupiter and its moons in October 2024. Published here as Limón’s debut picture book, this luminous poem is illustrated by celebrated and internationally renowned artist Peter Sís.

In Praise of Mystery celebrates humankind’s endless curiosity, asks us what it means to explore beyond our known world, and shows how the unknown can reflect us back to ourselves.


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*
HALL WAYS REVIEW: IN PRAISE OF MYSTERY is tough to review as a children's book. BUT, it is absolutely worth having on your shelf, whether you're five or fifty-five or ninety-five, simply for the reason it exists in the first place: the poem is engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft which will launch any day now (Hurricane Milton delayed it) and journey to Jupiter's second moon, Europa. How glorious and unique is that? 

The poem, written by 2023 US Poet Laureate Ada Limón, is beautiful and evocative, and as a stand-alone poem, I'd give it 5 STARS. The illustrations, created by multiple-award-winner Peter Sís, are a visual delight -- dreamy, engaging, and also evocative -- and they are also worthy of a 5 STARS rating.

Unfortunately, the execution of putting the two elements together is where the book suffers. So as a children's book, I'd rate it 4 STARS. The poem is a bit advanced for younger readers to process, but when the words of the poem are separated from each other and scattered across pages, comprehension is even more difficult and the poem loses its cadence and flow. At times, the text blends too much with the artwork, and the font is lovely, but not really young-reader friendly.

Even so, IN PRAISE OF MYSTERY would make a good read-along title where younger readers can wallow in the beauty of the art and older readers can wallow in the beauty of the words. And I could even visualize the book being used in the classroom with high schoolers as a springboard for a multitude of activities across the curriculum.

Thankfully, the poem is included in full at the end of the book, as is the Author's Notes section that gives the explanation of why the poem was written and where the otherworldly journey it will take. VERY cool. 

I received a digital ARC from the publisher as part of School Library Journal's Day of Dialogue. I will definitely be purchasing the hardcover edition for my personal collection.