Tag Archives: The Bell in the Fog

New Releases: June 4, 2024

Middle Grade

Asking for a Friend by Ronnie Riley

Why go through the stress of making friends when you can just pretend? It works for Eden and their social anxiety… until their mom announces she’s throwing them a birthday party and all their friends are invited.

Eden’s “friends,” Duke, Ramona, and Tabitha, are all real kids from school… but Eden’s never actually spoken to them before. Now Eden will do whatever it takes to convince them to be their friends–at least until the party is over.

When things start to go better than Eden expects, and the group starts to bond, Eden finds themselves trapped in a lie that gets worse the longer they keep it up. What happens if their now sort-of-real friends discover that Eden hasn’t been honest with them from the very beginning?

Author Ronnie Riley creates a world full of queer joy and all the ups and downs of true friendship.

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon

Continue reading New Releases: June 4, 2024

Most Anticipated Adult Fiction: July-December 2023

The Beasts of Paris by Stef Penney (July 4th)

A diverse group of memorable characters find themselves in Paris during the build up to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Dreamer Anne is half-Haitian, possessed of incredible gifts, but with a past she tries to bury; Laurence is desperate to spread his wings, develop his talents as a photographer, and escape the restrictions of his Canadian upbringing; Ellis, an American army surgeon, has lived through the trauma of the American Civil War and will do anything to avoid further violence. We join these characters and others as they live through, and are buffeted by, momentous historical events that will change them forever.

The Franco-Prussian War ends in a devastating defeat for the French after the Siege of Paris, in which countless Parisians die of starvation and cold during a bitter winter. This terrible time is quickly followed by yet more horror: the socialist revolution of the Paris Commune that seizes the government, briefly, until it is brutally crushed by the French Army.

Against this backdrop our characters meet, struggle, grow, fight their demons, lose their hearts, find love. The reader witnesses the ebb and flow of history as the characters confront a changing world around them. And although set in the nineteenth century, the novel explores questions that are uniquely contemporary: issues of gender, sexuality, inequality, and race.

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon

Continue reading Most Anticipated Adult Fiction: July-December 2023