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Small Town Roads

L. B. Johnson

2017 Gold Medal
145 Pages
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Fiction - Religious Theme

2017 Gold Medal
READER'S FAVORITE 2017 GOLD WINNER for Fiction - Religious Theme.
Small Town Roads is a Christian Coming of Age Story in Small Town America from the Amazon #1 Best Selling Author of "Saving Grace - A Story of Adoption" and "The Book of Barkley - Love and Life Through the Eyes of a Labrador Retriever".
 
Let go of the life you wanted to get the one that you were meant for.
 
With a recent college degree in Criminal Justice and big future dreams, rookie Law Enforcement Officer Rachel Raines is looking for a temporary place to hide a heart full of loss and a quieter police patrol than Chicago. The bequest of her late aunt's house out in rural Illinois seems like the perfect opportunity for both if she can survive the gigantic spiders, creaky plumbing, and inevitable challenges of being the rookie on a small town force.  It's a place unlike any she has lived in - a tiny town with no coffee baristas, no night life, and one single restaurant that has a giant cow perched on the roof. It was not the life she had expected.
 
Sometimes God has other plans for us.
 
Down the street, her aunt's best friend, Evelyn Ahlgren, marks the passing of seasons and neighbors, long mired in her loneliness as a widow. When the young woman with scars of her own befriends her, they strike up an unlikely friendship across generations that just might help them both heal with a little help from heaven above.
 
Written in both third person (Evelyn's view of life) and first person (Rachel keeping an online journal to track the events of each new day), words both humorous and breathtakingly lyrical, as these two vastly different generations bond, Small Town Roads is a beautifully told, heartwarming story.  It is not just a story of life in rural America, it is finding the best in people, including ourselves, in the most unlikely of places.

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An Unexpected Afterlife

Dry Bones Society
Dan Sofer

2017 Silver Medal
284 Pages
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Fiction - Religious Theme

2017 Silver Medal
Readers' Favorite 2017 Book Awards Silver Medal winner.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE?

Moshe Karlin wakes up one morning, naked and alone, in the Mount of Olives Cemetery. According to his family and friends, he died two years ago, but Moshe is not about to accept his demise lying down.

Is his new lease on life a freak of nature or the start of the long-awaited Resurrection? Moshe doesn't really care. He vows to beat his "afterlife crisis" and win back his life-and his wife-if it is the last thing he does.

But the road ahead is full of unexpected dangers. Along the way, he gains insight into life, love, and the Jewish State, as well as the suspicion that perhaps his perfect first life was not so perfect after all.

Meanwhile, other changes are afoot in the Holy Land. A reluctant prophet prepares to deliver a message of redemption - and the end of life as we know it - when a freak accident changes the course of history.

An Unexpected Afterlife is a highly original adventure novel-packed with humor, engaging characters, and surprises - in the Jewish lore and legends of the Resurrection, the World to Come, and the End of Days.

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Jesus and Magdalene

Joao Cerqueira

2017 Bronze Medal
324 Pages
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Fiction - Religious Theme

2017 Bronze Medal
Silver medal in the 2017 Global Ebook Awards
Bronze medal in the 2017 Reader's Favorite Awards
Siliver medal in the 2017 Independent Press Awards
Silver Medal in the 2017 New Aple Book Awards
Silver medal in the 2016 Hungry Monster Review
Silver medal in the 2017 Feathered Quill Book Awards
Silver medal in the 2015 Latino Book Award
Finalist in the 2017 Indie Book Awards
Finalist in the 2017 Independent Book Awards
Finalist in the 2017 Chanticleer Book Awards
Book of the year 2016 for Latina Book Club

Jesus returns to earth and meets activist Magdalene who is fighting for a better world. He find an extremist ecological group, which is plotting to destroy a maize plantation it believes to be genetically modified. Then, he observes the rise up against a tourist development that is to be built in a forest reserve. Finally, he witnesses an armed conflict between blacks and gypsies. However, although he limits himself to accompanying Magdalene attempting only to pacify those on bad terms, even then Jesus is unable to escape the fury of mankind. And only a conman will recognize him.
Using humor, Jesus and Magdalene broaches recent phenomena of social and political conflict.

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Stainer

A Novel of the 'Me' Decade
Iolanthe Woulff

2017 Honorable Mention
344 Pages
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Fiction - Religious Theme

2017 Honorable Mention
New York City, 1975: Decent-hearted but spoiled Jewish college kid Ben Steiner is naively possessed by an overwhelming desire to be cool. At a springtime party on the night of his twenty-first birthday, he meets two people: Rebecca Glaser, the longed-for sweet girl of his dreams, and P.T. Deighland, a beguilingly knavish wiseacre from Princeton. Seduced by Deighland's cocksure irreverence while simultaneously succumbing to his own temptations, Ben makes a cascading series of unfortunate choices which not only threaten his budding relationship with Rebecca, but expose him to ruin at the hands of a ravishing but ruthless fashion model named Anthea Montague. 
Against the background of a vanished period in American history, STAINER offers a bittersweet nostalgic trip back to a less complex world, during a time of incautious excesses that, while deceptively fun and carefree, in due course forced many unwary youngsters like Benjamin Steiner to learn some necessary -albeit painful- lessons about growing up.