“Summer of 1984” by Leslie Rider is now available at Amazon.com! It’s great summer reading. Click here for the paperback version; click here for the Amazon Kindle version.
“It's the summer of 1984, and Frances Gomez and her family are going on vacation to Eden, USA, the home of the Kingdom of God Channel. Frances struggles with a dysfunctional family and speaking up for herself. But when she meets a friend who teaches Frances she can do more than she realizes, she sees she's more powerful than she thought.”
In paperback form, this book has 252 pages, and it is appropriate for readers age 16 and up.
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“The Things We Don’t Talk About” by Leslie Rider is now available at Amazon.com. Click here for the paperback version.
Written in a modern epistolary style, which includes emails, texts and other messaging formats, The Things We Don't Talk About explores the ways humans communicate things they would rather not discuss and how challenging it is for autistic people to understand these kinds of messages.
“There are things in the life of Laura Ryan that don’t make sense to her. For example, she can’t understand why her family would have a wake and funeral for her grandfather, a man who abused her mother for years. It’s not like no one knew. And it was obvious that it ruined her mother’s life. Yet Laura’s father not only insisted that she go to the wake, but doubted the abuse even happened. Why didn’t he believe her mother? Laura’s son, Felix, has an almost obsessive interest in Thomas the Tank Engine and struggles with social rules. Don’t all kids fall in love with some children’s program or other? Aren’t social interactions challenging for all kids? Laura had these same quirks growing up, too. But their doctor thinks there’s a bigger issue. And what’s with that website that provides peer critiques for artists and their work? The other users seem one dimensional and odd. One minute they’re friendly and welcoming. The next they behave irrationally, and their messages are unreadable. Are they even real people?”
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Nat1 published Leslie’s story, “Dot and Loop,” along with 16 other short science fiction stories in an anthology called “Star-Crossed and Other Tales of Intergalactic Love.”
That book is available for purchase in the U.S. here: https://amzn.to/4nKW8lr. For other parts of the world, see https://nat1publishing.com/anthology/starcrossed/. For Leslie’s profile on Nat1, see https://nat1publishing.com/authors/leslie-rider/.
