Twice in a Blue Moon by Jess Lourey

Published by Amazon Original Stories on June 30, 2026

Originally published in 2014 as The Catalain Book of Secrets, Jess Lourey’s gothic thriller was revised and republished as The Blackthorn Women in 2026. The novel imagines several generations of witches who wield magic in the form of potions and curses and the like. “Twice in a Blue Moon” is a short story in the Blackthorn Women series. I’m not generally a fan of witches (or of stories about them) and I haven’t read The Blackthorn Women, but I enjoyed Lourey's short story.

The story touches upon issues that are primarily of concern to women, including mastectomies and being devalued by society because of gender. It also addresses issues that affect people of any gender, including low self-esteem, unfaithful spouses, and jealousy.

Helena Blackthorne makes homemade candy, at least some of which comes with a dose of witchcraft. Her twin sister Xenia makes and tailors clothing. They operate Seven Daughters Candy and Clothes from a storefront in Faith Falls, Minnesota. They remodeled the store with the help of Audish Buckley. Helena had a crush on Audish until he seemed to take up with her mother, Velda.

To buy the store, Xenia and another sister, Ursula, put up their Queen Anne as collateral. The city has decided to acquire the house through eminent domain to build a park and Helena expects to lose the store once their collateral is gone. The eminent domain scheme was orchestrated by Dagmar Baum as revenge for her husband’s sexual dalliance with Ursula.

Helena has developed a “puckered, poisonous scaling that circled the left areola like a storm cloud,” letting her know that she has breast cancer. A woman named Claudette consults with Ursula about skin problems of her own. When she touches someone, tattoos develop on her skin that signal the deepest fears of the person who touched her.

Will witchcraft overcome Dagmar’s scheme? Or Claudette’s tattoos? Perhaps. Or perhaps exquisite chocolate will be enough to do the job. In any event, the story offers life lessons that may be even more valuable than witchcraft. Sharing your problems is a step toward curing them. A boob funeral is a fitting response to a mastectomy. Scarring might be reimagined as “delicate pink leaves” that create a garden of the flesh. A life spent in anger is a wasted life. It’s never too late to decide what you want from life and go for it. You need to set your troubles aside as a prelude to causing real trouble in the world — the kind of trouble that sparks joy.

The story is clever, amusing, and sweet without becoming mawkish. Fans of witches will undoubtedly enjoy it, but the story holds value even for readers who usually shy away from tales of witchcraft.

RECOMMENDED

Winter Breakage by David Levithan

Published by Amazon Original Stories on June 23, 2026

“Winter Breakage” is one of six entries in the “Edge of Everything” series of Amazon Original Stories that focus on coming-of-age themes. Teenage insecurity seems to be a common theme in these stories. When Eric tells his friend Noah “I’m scared that nobody wants me here,” he’s echoing Isabel in “Safe Harbor” and Julia in “Julia at the Drive-In.”

The story takes place in early 1991, during the fifth week of Eric’s winter break. He is in his first year of college and has been invited to join four friends from his dorm who are getting together in New York City. They neglected to make a plan so they look in shop windows, consider visiting bookstores, and finally see a Woody Allen movie before heading to Chinatown.

Eric complains about the start of his freshman year: “I don’t feel like I chose my friends; it’s more like whoever made the dorm assignments chose my friends.” Maybe Eric doesn’t bother to attend classes or hang out at the student union, the typical ways in which students meet other students outside of their dorm.

Eric has a mildly obsessive interest in his friend Noah, the only other male who will be joining the outing. “It’s just that somewhere in my head, I’m aware that I’m lonely, and something in my brain is constantly telling me that he might be a person who’d make me feel less lonely.” Eric is a bit needy.

Eric has called Noah four times during the break but Noah hasn’t called him back. He left answering machine messages three times and hung up before the machine could answer the fourth call. He knew Noah was going to Florida for part of the break but still takes it personally that Noah didn’t return his calls after he returned.

When they meet in the city, Eric is snippy. Eric and Noah eventually speak to each other as if they are therapists and work out their lack of communication. It turns out (spoiler alert) they are equally insecure. End of story.

The three female characters serve no purpose at all. David Levithan managed to make New York City dull, but he did the same with Eric and Noah. Why Eric’s desire to open his heart to a guy who snubbed him should be of any interest to a reader is beyond me. I suppose Eric’s insecure loneliness is common to college freshmen who are putting high school behind them and haven’t yet made college connections, but Levithan does more telling than showing and Eric’s eventual confrontation with Noah struck me as artificial.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Price of Admission by Dustin Thao

Published by Amazon Original Stories on June 23, 2026

“The Price of Admission” is one of six entries in the “Edge of Everything” series of Amazon Original Stories that focus on coming-of-age themes. The protagonist is Evan Dao, a gay teen of Vietnamese ancestry whose mother worked as a hotel maid in New Jersey until she was promoted to the position of housekeeping manager.

Evan hung out at the hotel where his mother worked. The hotel owner’s family lived in a penthouse suite. Evan saw but didn’t interact with the owner’s son, Dalton Claremont.

Evan’s mother dies when he is fifteen and Evan begins to live with his aunt. Moved by Evan’s circumstances, a “loyal guest” of the hotel that employed his mother improbably arranges for Evan to attend a nearby but prestigious private school with a tuition waiver. Dalton is a student at that school.

Evan needs to take a job at a café to make ends meet. Dalton is at the café with rich friends when he notices Evan and realizes he’s a fellow student. Dalton’s snooty friends disparage Evan for working, but Dalton and Evan begin to hang out. Their friendship leads to kissing. Whether it leads to anything else, Dustin Thao leaves to the reader’s imagination.

Evan is exceptionally bright and excels in school. Evan and Dalton are both admitted to Princeton, although Evan is admitted before Dalton. In his first year, Evan writes a compelling essay and wins a scholarship that allows him to join an “eating club” with Dalton and other children of wealthy families.

Dalton begins to snub Evan. Some of Dalton’s friends are vicious in their condemnation of Evan as a charity case who must have relied on affirmative action to earn admission to Princeton. Evan eventually calls out the rich snobs by pointing to the moral deficiencies of their wealthy families.

“The Price of Admission” covers well-trodden ground in its exploration of class divisions and wealth disparities in America. Upward mobility is increasingly a myth, as is the notion that Ivy League educational institutions operate as a meritocracy. Even as the children of wealthy families condemn affirmative action, they enjoy the benefit of legacy admissions. Evan’s breakout moment, his calling out of privilege, rings true.

Evan comes of age by realizing that he wasted time trying to make friends with people who will never accept him as an equal. Even if meritocracy as envisioned by members of the upper class is more a talking point than a reality, Evan has the intelligence and drive to succeed. He comes to realize that social status is less important than friendships rooted in honesty and shared values.

This is a story that older readers will have encountered before. Everything comes a bit too easily to Evan, a reflection of the story’s lack of depth. I imagine younger readers who don’t have outstanding SAT scores might have difficulty relating to him. The story is nevertheless a timely reminder that attacks on affirmative action are driven by people who resist surrendering power or sharing it with those who are not part of their elite social class. Younger readers, in particular, might benefit from the lessons taught in this modern version of a Horatio Alger story.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel

First published in Spain in 2023; published in translation by Bloomsbury Publishing on April 29, 2025

Guadalupe Nettel is a Mexican writer best known for the novel Still Born. This is her third collection of short fiction. Most of the stories are set in Spanish-speaking countries. Characters are generally living with discontent or fear as they struggle to cope with the uncontrollable events that shape their lives and the secrets that burden their families.

My favorite entry is “Imprinting,” if only because it packs the surprise of an O. Henry story, albeit with a dark ending.  Antonia skips her college classes to accompany a friend who is visiting her sick mother in the hospital. As Antonia walks through the halls, she notices her uncle’s name on one of the doors. She has no clear memory of her uncle but knows that other family members refuse to talk about him. She drops into the room and, while growing close to him, begins to visit every day. The shocking ending allows the reader to deduce the reason why the family wants nothing to do with Frank.

A surprising revelation about family is also at the heart of “Playing with Fire.” The narrator asks herself “if I really knew these two boys who I had given birth to and raised so carefully for years.” When she goes on a camping trip with her disgruntled sons and angry husband, she learns that she doesn’t know any of them as well as she thought she did.

Another story that relies on surprise is “The Fellowship of Orphans.” An adult woman recalls her days in an orphanage, including the warnings the orphans were given about the risk of disappearing in Mexico City if they were to wander off. Walking through a park, she sees a poster with a photo of a missing man. After she spots the man, she calls the number on the poster and learns from the man’s mother that the man she saw is indeed the woman’s son. The woman says she will come to see him, but what happens next is not what the narrator expected. The story doesn’t pack the emotional punch that Nettel likely intended, but it sends a message about familial love — or the consequences of its absence.

“Life Elsewhere,” my second favorite in the collection, tells the story of a man who, after drama school, abandoned his hope for a theatrical career and settled into marriage. He disagreed with his wife about their choice of apartment — she preferred the one with better light, he liked the one in a more interesting building. His choice is rented before they can decide. He later finds that the apartment he wanted is inhabited by an actor he knew in school. Drawn to the apartment more than to his acquaintance, over the course of time and to his wife’s dismay he “began turning into just another member of the family.”

“The Pink Door” is a “be careful what you wish for” story. As is true of most such stories, it relies on something akin to magic to deliver its lesson. An aging man with a controlling wife enters what he believes to be a house of prostitution that suddenly appeared in his neighborhood. The business instead sells him sweets that change his life, making him realize that wished-for changes come with unanticipated consequences.

Three other stories are less appealing. A thousand-year-old monkey puzzle tree in a family’s yard was a source of pride until it became infected by a parasite and lost its leaves and branches. The father believed that the tree held the family together and despaired of the family’s future. “The Forest Under Earth” is built upon predictable comparisons of root systems to family connectedness, but the story goes nowhere.

“The Accidentals” compares the albatross to migrants who flee dictatorships but yearn to return home, an “accidental” being the name given to an albatross that strays from its usual migration route and ends up in an unfamiliar place, mating with an albatross it wouldn’t otherwise desire simply because it is the only available choice. Like “The Forest Under the Earth,” the author’s chosen metaphor is a bit too obvious.

“The Torpor” imagines a permanent pandemic. A couple fled from urban enforcement of social isolation restrictions to join a commune in the woods, then decided they needed the relative comfort of urban living when the woman became pregnant. The story has some imaginative touches of world building in a lasting pandemic but the woman’s vacillation between staying or leaving after returning to the city lacks an emotional punch.

Five of eight successful stories is a decent batting average for a collection. While the volume lacks a home run, it doesn’t have any strikeouts. Her sharp prose alone makes Nettel a writer worth reading.

RECOMMENDED

"Eleven Numbers" by Lee Child

Published by Amazon Original Stories on February 1, 2025

Reacher novels have become predictable. Some seem like parodies of the first novels in the series. I was happy to see Lee Child write something that wasn’t about a tough guy whose violent adventures are narrated in clipped sentences.

The premise of “Eleven Numbers” is simple. Nathan Tyler is a math professor. Tyler is among a handful of respected academics who have given intense thought to Kindansky numbers, a special subset of prime numbers that Child appears to have conjured from his imagination. At least, a quick Google search returned only this story and some references to Wassily Kindansky, a Russian artist whose abstract drawings were based on geometric patterns. My apologies to Kindansky and to Child if Kindansky numbers are real.

Tyler is invited to attend a math conference in Moscow at a time when Americans are being urged not to travel to Russia. He accepts the invitation at the urging of the president, who — with the help of a more renowned mathematician — explains that certain nine-digit Kindansky numbers were used by Russian mathematician Arkady Suslov when he designed a computer security algorithm. Enter the wrong password — a nine-digit Kindansky number — and the system will lock out the user and trigger a password reset. The algorithm is protecting Russia’s nuclear arsenal. America would love to get inside and monkey around with it.

The problem is that Suslov is the only person who knows which of the eleven potential numbers is the correct password. The president wants Tyler to travel to Russia, meet with Suslov, and get a sense of which number he used.

Things go south for Tyler when he rents a car at the airport in Moscow, drives toward his hotel, and gets T-boned by a police car. He’s arrested and tossed into jail, making his mission look like a failure. In fact, his mission has only started.

The story is simple but interesting and at least modestly suspenseful. I liked it because Tyler isn’t a tough guy. He relies on his intelligence to perform his mission and on his instincts to smell a double-cross that the American government has probably planned for him.

I also liked Child’s resort to a conventional writing style. The short sentences and “Maybe this. Maybe that.” style of the Reacher novels has become iconic, but it doesn’t work well outside of the Reacher universe. It’s nice to know that Child can tell an engaging story that doesn’t rely on fistfights, shootouts, and two-word sentences that have grown a bit tired in the Reacher series.

RECOMMENDED