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Sherry Ostroff'sThe Wall at the Sugar Factory “I had no answers for Elta. None that would be truthful, anyway….. I knew that we needed a home. My daughter needed to live in a place where she wouldn’t have to live in constant terror. A home where she wouldn’t have to be fearful that murderers might come for her in the middle of the night. Where people didn’t hate her…..” So thinks Shaindel, a main character in Sherry Ostrioff’s excellent historical novel, The Wall At The Sugar Factory, based on her own family’s history.  Shaindel and her daughter survived a pogrom, a government or military orchestrated violent attack on Jews. Shaindel’s husband and most men in her village were murdered by the Russian and Ukrainian military. Women and girls were raped and murdered, homes looted and burned. Fear was in the air. Shaindel had hoped that a mother and child would not be targets. But she knew better.     Part of my family was from the Ukraine, coming to the US in the 1880’s. None had a good memory to share. Shaindel’s home was destroyed, her husband murdered at the wall at the sugar factory. She and her 3-year old daughter…

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In J.R. Ridgley's 16Wheeler, main character Carrie Marshall recently a widow, recently without a job and recently adrift in what was an orderly and planned life, takes off spontaneously to visit her grandchildren. She doesn’t check the weather and is stranded in a freezing snow storm, hearing her dead husband’s voice berating her judgment, as he so often did in life—her dead cell phone, lack of food and emergency supplies. Trucker John Graham, a widower with grown children, is constantly on the road to escape his life after his beloved wife died of cancer. His life is in his rig, the cab with a microwave, refrigerator, shelves, a bed and internet. His friends are truckers he sees at truck stops and talks to on his CB. His kind heart has him stopping for the car he sees on the side of the road, rescuing Carrie. And turning him from a suspected predator to a hero who saves her life. Like Noah’s Ark, the rig becomes the world for John and Carrie, adrift in the world. I will never look at an 18Wheeler in the same way again! The aroma of baking apples reminds us that fall is around the corner, even if…

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        “Had Anna been allowed to choose, she'd have become a professional time-traveller. No luck there, so instead she became a financial professional with two absorbing interests; history and writing.” (annabelfrage.com) Like his Grandmother Alex before him, Duncan Melville finds himself on a crossroads during a terrible thunderstorm. Instead of falling backwards 300 years as she did, he falls forward in time, from 1716 to 2016, landing like his grandmother, at the feet (well, actually in front of a modern automobile driven by Erin Barnes!) of a person destined to be important in his life. Living in 2 time periods can be enlightening, confusing and, for a reader, so compelling that it is difficult to do anything else until  you read to the novel’s end! The crossroads are symbolic of life choices. For Anna Belfrage, they “…represent a moment in which there are multiple choices and you never know beforehand what will happen if you choose road A or road B. Obviously, my poor time travellers don’t get a choice, they’re just thrown through the nexus to land in an entirely new time. There are days when Alex, the female protagonist of The Graham Saga, still hasn’t…

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