Martha Engber's Blog

Hello everyone!

I’d like to announce I have a new website! Please join me there to read my blog, learn about my upcoming books and register for events and workshops.

by Ann S. Epstein

Ann S. Epstein’s newest historical novel, The Great Stork Derby , due out Oct. 19, is a gut-wrenching story built upon one of the craziest true events that ever occurred in modern human history: a baby-making contest.

The story begins in 1976 with the humiliating image of a curmudgeon who’s fallen on the floor of his decrepit Toronto house and can’t get up. When help finally arrives, the social worker assigned to Emm Benbow gives him two stark choices, either live in a rundown old folks’ home, the only one he can afford, or stay with one of his children.

It turns out he has a bunch of them. In 1926, when he was a young, newly married man of salesman disposition and competitive spirit, he talked his sweet, meek wife into entering the high-stakes Great Stork Derby: the Toronto couple that had the most babies within 10 years would win what amounts to a million dollars in today’s currency.
The contest was real and the brainchild of Charles Vance Millar, a wealthy man infamous for practical jokes that exploited the greedy. Eleven families took part in this particular “joke.” Of those, four mothers with nine children each took home $110,000 to their respective families.

The author does a fabulous job of turning what appears to be a funny sitcom set-up into a familial tragedy through her depiction of Emm as a man more interested in the competition than in actually fathering his children. When his wife died young, he left the rearing of his brood to his mother, a hard-hearted disciplinarian.

While the story has wonderful moments of humor, the reader feels the dark reality Emm learns as he moves from living with one of his kids to another: he was a lousy, selfish father who can either die alone, embittered by what he feels his children owe him for housing and clothing them in their youth. Or he can admit his emotional abandonment and build relationships with them.

That premise could easily lead to an overly-sweet sentimental movie feel. Instead, the author’s deft treatment of the characters and the complex dynamics between them treats the reader to a truly literary feast in which the heartbreaking exists beside the hope of a man determined to change in the last days of his life.

You can also find this review on Goodreads.

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Bliss Road on It’s Way!

Just a quick note today to say that Vine Leaves Press has decided to add to my stack of published books by publishing my memoir, Bliss Road, in June of 2023. A huge thanks to VLP and to all of you friends and readers who’ve been so supportive!

Below you’ll find a description. And please sign up for my monthly newsletter for updates and giveaways!

Book Description

Through this hybrid of poetry and essays, Martha Engber provides insight into what it’s like to be the child of an undiagnosed high-functioning autistic parent. Sometimes funny, often devastating, this memoir will illuminate a neurological condition that affects over 40 million people worldwide, and in the process encourage others to chase down the source of their family angst to reach a more blissful future.

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Now available via Amazon and all other online booksellers.

If you love Mary, review her story on Goodreads, Amazon and BookBub.

Listen on Spotify

When my daughter was in grade school, one of her best buddies was Rachel Kellum. Even then it was apparent Rachel’s vast imagination and independence of mind kept her from worrying about what others thought. She followed her interests and made friends with those who interested her.

That mindset has led her to collaborate with friends on a sci-fi podcast venture called Second Star to the Left, a 10-episode series you can listen to on Spotify. If you’d rather read the story — or study how to write a podcast script — a transcript is included with every episode.

Here’s the summary:

“Scout-explorer Gwen Hartley has five years to explore and prepare her planet for settlement. With no aid but her robots and the anxious voice of her long-distance scout-minder, Bell Summers, she’s hoping to be ready for anything.”

Created by Aysha Farah and E. Jade Lomax and directed by Rachel, the voice actors are Ishani Kanetkar and Jorin Baas.

If you’d like to learn how to write and produce a fiction podcast, The Podcast Host (a fantastic website!) explains how in How to Make a Fiction Podcast: The Ultimate Guide.

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Now available via Amazon and all other online booksellers.

If you love Mary, review her story on Goodreads, Amazon and BookBub.

For a full list of reading and workshops, visit my website.

In her newest novel, Small Forgotten Moments due out Aug. 31, 2021, Annalisa Crawford has brilliantly reimagined the age-old ghost story to create a brand new genre, that of the psychological poltergeist.

The narrator, Jo, is a Londoner who suffers from amnesia severe enough she can’t remember life previous to her last three years. Though unable to envision even her mother’s face, the barista for pay and artist by soul can’t escape the obsession of her paintings, Zenna, the winsome, omnipresent spirit who haunts Jo’s psyche. Though Jo tells herself the sometimes playful, but increasing spiteful spirit is no more than a figment of the imagination, the phantom rapidly threatens to overtake the artist’s mind.

When Jo can no longer tolerate the intrusion, nor accurately tell what’s real, she finds her way back to her mother and childhood home on the Cornish coast. There to discover how she can throw off the weight of Zenna’s increasing power, Jo finds the shocking answers that force her to take the only action possible to save herself.

The author does a fabulous job of conveying Jo’s frustration, disorientation and growing terror at the hands of a soul demon born during her stormy childhood. The wild, windy Cornish coast serves as the ideal backdrop to the narrator’s psychological nightmare, while also serving as the catalyst that may, or may not, set her free.

Wonderfully imaginative and eerie!

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Now available via Amazon and all other online booksellers.

If you love Mary, review her story on Goodreads, Amazon and BookBub.

For a full list of reading and workshops, visit my website.

This is the best deconstructed love story I’ve ever read!

In Careless Love, author Steve Zettler gives us a spectacular love story steeped in rich Hawaiian sunsets and the stark reality of how fleeting moments of love and passion can be.

Though neither the narrator’s name nor gender are mentioned, I pictured him as a man in his 40s. Only a few weeks before his mother dies, she shocks him by saying the man she divorced is not actually the narrator’s father. Instead, his real dad was a man Grace met in 1979 when she traveled to Hawaii, where she planned to vacation, then kill herself as a final exclamation point to her doomed marriage to a famous Hollywood director.

Understandably intrigued by such a dramatic story hidden for so long, the narrator interviewed everyone who played even a small role in that seminal week on Oahu. Then he pours forth what he learned, relaying details so sensory-rich as to vividly portray those brilliant moments of transformation.

The moment we see the spirited, independent Grace meet Lee Corbet, a man haunted by his Vietnam War past, the two are so obviously made for one another that the speed with which their hearts turn away from thoughts of death and toward love proves completely believable.

Most tantalizing — and agonizing — is the question that begins on page one: what happened to Lee? Every sight, sound, gesture and word spoken inches us ever closer until we experience the catastrophic moment that forever changes the lives of three people’s lives.

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Now available via Amazon and all other online booksellers.

If you love Mary, review her story on Goodreads, Amazon and BookBub.

I don’t often read dystopian novels because of the claustrophobic doom that often hovers over them. But I’m glad I received an advance reader copy of Jessica Bell’s newest novel, How Icasia Bloom Touched Happiness, because the end is so bright.

You’ll find my review below and on Goodreads.

Jessica Bell’s newest novel, How Icasia Bloom Touched Happiness is a philosophical tour-de-force dressed as a dystopian journey that brandishes elements of classics such as “The Hand Maid’s Tale” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Twenty-year-old Icasia Bloom lives in a world overtaken by one ruler, the enigmatic Governor Jacobson. He’s instituted rules that force people to find purpose and happiness in their employment. If they don’t do so by a certain age, they’re terminated with no hope of having their souls joined together with those of loved ones in a technologically-based afterlife. More disturbing, to keep the population stable, girls are artificially impregnated by the age of 15 and then sterilized, including 20-year-old Icasia, who has a 5-year-old son.

Icasia lives on the edge of this rigid society by being a Tatter, or someone who earns a living bartering favors for food and other goods, as in tit-for-tat. Rather than marry either her son’s sperm donor or another man of her choice, she forges her own path with her parents’ support. She doesn’t believe she possesses a passion for any kind of profession, until one day when she meets Selma, the owner of a newly-opened bakery.

Icasia is swiftly drawn into the drama surrounding Selma’s husband, who receives a letter stating he faces imminent annihilation without salvation because he hasn’t found the happiness and fulfillment the government requires.

Ever resourceful, Icasia plunges in with one strategy after another in her attempts to help Selma save her husband. Each effort drives Selma further down a philosophical path of what it means to be human until she finds the source of her own happiness, an epiphany that saves her and those she now loves.

Wrapped in the guise of a gritty world where the government ties a pretty bow around death and pressures people to the point of breaking, Icasia’s story inspires intense thought about human existence and the incredible power we possess to create our own happiness.

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Now available via Amazon and all other online booksellers.

If you love Mary, review her story on Goodreads, Amazon and BookBub.

For a full list of reading and workshops, visit my website.

Buy now!

Thanks, everyone, for your support over the past 6 months in making Winter Light a 2021 Gold Medal IPPY Winner in Young Adult Fiction! Mary Donahue loves you all, even if she’s too cool to show it.

In thanks, I’m offering 1 FREE Kindle copy to any book club that chooses the book for discussion. As always, I’ll be happy to join your book club discussion if that’s something your members would enjoy.

Thanks to Virginia Andrade McPherson, Kelly Spring and others who’ve already chosen my book!

And thanks to Amy Huynh-Chaplick for buying 10 copies to gift to friends.

I appreciate all of you!



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Now available via Amazon and all other online booksellers.

If you love Mary, review her story on Goodreads, Amazon and BookBub.

For a full list of reading and workshops, visit my website.



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Buy now!

I just learned Winter Light won a Gold Medal in Young Adult Fiction in the 2021 Independent Publishers Book Awards (IPPY). A virtual awards ceremony will take place June 30.

I’d like to congratulate the other winners in this 25th awards event. I’d also like to give a huge thanks to Vine Leaves Press and all of you friends and readers!

By Connie Biewald

Preorder now, publication date of May 25, 2021

I fell in love with Nadine Antoine on the first page of Connie Biewald’s Truth Like Oil, a sentiment that only grew stronger the deeper I sank into the story of an immigrant mother’s plight to keep her two young adult sons on the straight-and-narrow in a foreign culture.

Just watching the exhausted Nadine climb the stairs of her apartment building in Cambridge, MA, after her long shift as a nurse’s aide, I knew immediately she’s a woman who will do anything for her two sons, one a senior in high school and the other a freshman in college. Moreover, Nadine does so without the warmth and loving support of the family and friends she left behind in Haiti, which she fled in her teens due to the actions of a lascivious uncle.

Though Nadine is better off financially in the US, she’s emotionally and spiritually isolated and feels she has no one to consult when her youngest son, Chance, edges toward the life of a street criminal. And though her older son, Henry, is the vision of young man on his way to an upwardly-mobile life, he struggles in isolation similar to that of his mother, caused by being one of the few black students in the elite Midwestern university that offered him a scholarship.

Nadine’s Haitian roots, and sons’ escalating angst, eventually demand she take them to visit her native country. Nadine looks forward to being once again enfolded by family. Yet she worries the trip may force dark family secrets — the identities of her sons’ fathers and what caused her to flee Haiti — into the glare of a Caribbean sun.

The author’s ability to interweave conflicting cultures; portray a mother’s willingness to do anything to save her kids; and build two unlikely friendships that arise when Nadine cares for a white woman recovering from a stroke: all make this a story one to savor like the “bannann peze,” or fried plantains, Nadine makes for her sons.



View all my reviews

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Now available via Amazon and all other online booksellers.

If you love Mary, review her story on Goodreads, Amazon and BookBub.

For a full list of reading and workshops, visit my website.