For the Love of Books Podcast

Yooper Ale Trails presents Michigan's Upper Peninsula breweries and brewpubs

Mikel B. Classen and Jon C. Stott, award-winning authors of travel books, provide expert guidance for beer aficionados and tourists to visit the 29 unique craft breweries and brewpubs of Michigan's Upper Peninsula in Yooper Ale Trails.

The tours to breweries are organized geographically from the east UP to the west side into eight picturesque ale trails. Each brewery or brewpub has its own story. Classen and Stott have captured the essence of the beer scene in the UP since the mid-1990s. Classen suggests planning six months for an ale trail trip.

"The book itself is a little bit of a roadbook too, you get a good breakdown of beers we found there," Classen said.

Listen to the episode to win a signed hardcover copy of Yooper Ale Trails.

Sponsored by Moravian Sons Distillery and Doc Chavent.

Copyright (c) 2024. Emma Blogs, LLC.

 

Peg Herring pens novel Fake

Author Peg Herring Peg Herring is a former educator who lives in northern Lower Michigan. Her Tudor mysteries starring Princess/Queen Elizabeth garnered nice reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, New York Journal of Books, and Library Journal. The first book of her paranormal series, The Dead Detective Agency, received a Best Mystery of the Year Award from EPIC. In 2014 Peg stole her grandmother’s name and started writing cozy mysteries. Since then, Peg has written women's fiction and suspense while Maggie Pill writes cozies.

 

 

Sponsored by Moravian Sons Distillery and Doc Chavent.

 

Kip Morgan is a fake with worries...and they're multiplying. Kip Morgan is a con artist who urgently needs to elude the authorities. He sees an ad from a firm seeking a private investigator in a new town with a new name. Kip applies, figuring he knows as much about crime as most detectives, though from a different vantage point. Kip gets the job at Waite Investigations because his new bosses, Jocelyn and Maureen Waite, have figured out that clients look for youngish male P.I.s, not two sixty-plus women too easily dismissed as "little old ladies." Though he has plans to acquire a chunk of their fortune, Kip finds there's a lot more to the Waites than he’d imagined. As he tries to adjust to fussy Mo and quiet Jo, a houseful of secrets soon gets out of hand, and Kip the Conman has a lot more to worry about than being exposed as a FAKE.

Listen in for a chance to win a signed copy of FAKE.

U.P. author Nancy Besonen pens Off The Hook 1 & 2

Nancy Besonen's "Off The Hook," published in 2023, is a collection of humor columns she successfully slipped by her editor over a 30-year reporting career for L'Anse Sentinel.

 

However, there were still a few very silly things left unsaid.  Shamelessly borrowing from her original recipe, she unleashed her second and final installment, "Off The Hook Too!," in 2024, rounding out what she likes to call "The Compleat Works of Nancy Besonen."  (take that, William Shakespeare!) 

Sponsored by Doc Chavent and Moravian Sons Distillery

Copyright (c) 2024. Emma Palova. All rights reserved.

Author Sarah Geddes pens Henry the Sneezing Dragon

 Life as a dragon should be amazing. You can soar across the sky and breathe fire. However, when you are a young, clumsy dragon who sneezes fire at all the worst moments, it makes life a little challenging. Desperate to make friends and finally feel accepted, Henry takes off across the savanna, but trouble seems to follow him at every turn.

 

Summary for To the Moon: A Jacob and Trevor Adventure
Jacob and Trevor are brothers and the best of friends. They have avid imaginations and love to play make-believe. Their favorite thing is playing on their saucer swing and pretending to fly to the moon. One day when Jacob loses a tooth, the tooth fairy comes - but she has run out of money and decides to leave fairy dust instead. The boys use the fairy dust to go on an adventure of a lifetime!

 

Bio: Sarah Geddes is a 6th grade Language Arts teacher. She has taught middle school in a virtual setting since 2007 and loves to help students explore the world and their imagination through books. She has two boys (ages 5 and 7) who love to cuddle up and read. Watching their eyes light up when turning the page of a book has inspired her to put her own stories down on paper. 

 

Listen in to win a signed copy of Henry the Sneezing Dragon.

 

 

Sponsored by Moravian Sons Distillery and Doc Chavent.

 

Emma Blogs, LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2024.

Author Summer Porter pens A Mouse Tail on Mackinac Island II

This delightful "Squeak-quel" to A Mouse Tail on Mackinac Island illustrated by Maggie Chambers takes the mouse family on a vacation to the one and only historic Grand Hotel. Listen in for a chance to win a signed copy of the book.

Sponsored by Moravian Sons Distillery and Doc Chavent

Copyright (c) 2024. Emma Blogs, LLC. All rights reserved.

Author Jean Davis pens One Shot at the Sphinx

Let the games begin...

This novella will draw you into the magic of the Narvan series.

The enemy of her enemy might be just the tool Anastassia Kazan needs to remove the Jalvian invaders from the Verian space station she calls home. Working out a treaty between the Jalvians and the Verian people was the highlight of Anastassia Kazan’s military career.

Just when station life seems to be settling into a tolerable accord, a spy from the Jalvian’s enemy shows up to take advantage of her hard work and threatens the precarious peace with his very presence. It’s only fair, as a spy for the Verian army, that she uses him in return.

Listen in for a chance to win The Shot at the Sphinx.

Sponsored by Moravian Sons Distillery and Doc Chavent.

Copyright (c) 2024. Emma Blogs, LLC. All rights reserved.

Author Stefanie Gilmour pens Fear the Wolf

It's going to get GROWLY in author Stefanie Gilmour's first book in the Alex Steward series.

From the moment she shifted into a werewolf, Alex was terrified. First, of the man who attacked her—then of the creature within her.

 

Alex wants to build a life in Hopewell, but she struggles to keep her savage passenger caged. If her inner wolf breaks free again, people could die, and she’ll be the one hunted.

 

For help, she relies on her best friend Emma, a wizard and the only person she trusts with her secret. But Emma has her own secret: Mitch. He’s twisting her into someone unrecognizable…and he may be harming other vulnerable supernatural citizens.

 

To save Emma, Alex must make alliances with wizards and werewolves alike, face the Committee, unravel deadly conspiracies, and confront her own worst fear—herself.

 

Listen in for a chance to win a signed copy of Fear the Wolf.

Sponsored by Moravian Sons Distillery and Doc Chavent

 

Copyright (c) 2024. Emma Palova. All rights reserved.

Author Wade Walker pens Bite of the Wolf

Author Wade Walker’s first book is a mix of horror and espionage inspired by James Bond, and secret agents. The main character secret agent Val West finds himself bitten by a werewolf, and he must unravel the deadly secrets of the werewolf that bit him. Will he stop this mysterious monster’s diabolical plans in time and find a cure? Will the building romance between agent Val West and archaeologist Tanya Nimble live or die?

 

“It’s kind of like WikiLeaks when the files were decrypted,” Walker said in a recent podcast interview on For the Love of Books Podcast show with host author Emma Palova.

Sponsored by Doc Chavent and Moravian Sons Distillery.

Listen for a chance to win a signed copy of Bite of the Wolf.

Copyright (c) 2024. Emma Palova, All rights reserved.

Author Jessica Hartsfield pens debut book The Kingdom of Orion

In part one of The Sisters Three saga, Esme Halle thought she had finally found peace. Creating a life in Avalon on the continent of Mar, she had worked hard to distance herself from her sordid past in the neighboring Kingdom of Orion. So hard in fact that she could barely recall any memories of her previous life, and she preferred it this way. Now all of the secrets she had kept hidden so deeply even from herself, may be the only key to saving everything she holds dear. The sisters three, Esme's name for her mother and aunts, have brought the kingdom of Orion to its knees, information has grown scarce, and her dreams show her the past is the key to all.

Listen in for a chance to win a signed copy of The Kingdom of Orion.

Sponsored by Doc Chavent and Moravian Sons Distillery

Copyright (c) 2024. Emma Palova, All Rights Reserved

Modern History Press publishes U.P. Reader Volume #8

“It's the perfect gift for Father's Day. Don’t give your father, The World’s Greatest Dad mug, or a barbecue apron. He doesn’t care. He needs something else to feed his brain,” Victor Volkman, senior editor at Modern History Press said in the newest episode of For the Love of Books Podcast on Thursday.

Give him U.P Reader Volume #8 instead. The hefty publication with a beautiful cover photo of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore between Munising and Grand Marais is filled with fiction and non-fiction stories, essays, poetry, memoirs, humor, and history.

It’s 181 pages long with historical archive photos and includes six stories from the winners of the annual Dandelion Cottage contest from all of the UP’s participating schools.

“It feels very solid and very significant,” said Volkman. “This is the biggest it’s going to get, ever. We’ve expanded it with the first, second, and third-place winners of the contest. Kids like to write long.”

Listen in for a chance to win a signed copy of U.P. Reader Volume #8

Sponsored by Doc Chavent.

Copyright (c) 2024. Emma Blogs, LLC