Soccer to the Max MG by Bibi Belford

 

Soccer to the Max
Bibi Belford
 
Ten16 Press, September, 2026
Middle Grade, 195 pp

About the Book

Sandburg has big summer plans. Win the 3v3 Tournament trophy, then escape for a long-awaited vacay on his grandparents’ ranch. But when he’s left behind at soccer camp while his family visits his sister’s doctor, everything unravels. He really wants to follow his dad’s advice, “Do better to be better,” but as disappointments pile up, it seems like me-first is a better option. That decision sets in motion a disastrous chain of events that even Zander, his amazing superhero-loving roommate, can’t prevent.

My Review

Suprises are usually excellent or not-so-great; it turns out many of the surprises in almost-fifth grader Sanburg Zaproski’s summer are of the not-so-great variety.

Soccer camp would have been the coolest thing for Sandy, if it hadn’t meant missing the family annual vacation to Grandpa’s Texas ranch. Meeting new kids and working on soccer skills would have been completely awesome if Sandy hadn’t drawn the fearsomest opponent in soccerdom, the one who strikes fear in every kid’s heart because of his height and abilities. A head taller than every kid his age, Sandy, who’s tasked by his father to see with empathy eyes, starts to look deeper at the people around him. Lessons at camp come as another unwelcome surprise when he realizes he’s not as good of a player as he thought he was. Sandy has a lot of growing up to do, and once he realizes that other kids have similar quirks and fears, he’s slowly learning to be more forgiving.

Until it comes to his younger cousin, Max. When Sandy gets home from camp, squirrely squirt Max seems to get all the attention and praise and treats that Sandy used to get. When Max turns out to be the surprise last-ditch choice to play in a very special soccer tournament Sandy and his friends Zoya and Cole have entered, it’s up to Sandy to find Max’s superpower and decide whether to use it to help the team.

Belford’s wonderful young characters beautifully take the story and run with it. Sandy frequently addresses the reader, drawing us deep into his opinionated actions, sometimes blaming us and sometimes calling out excuses for his behavior. We’re learning and growing social skills right alongside him. When Sandy gets upset at the unfairness of life, he lets us know with a sentence like, “Steam that could roast corn escapes from the top of my head.” When his family tries to surprise him, he says, “I try to remember how to smile. Lift the corners of my lips…stretch them out towards my ears like a guard dog’s muzzle before it bites an intruder.”

Filled with many wonderful quotable quotes, like “chuck in the bucket and move on,” and “an ant has no quarrel with a boot,” as well as wonderful vocabulary words Sandy teaches his audience, like “intimidation,” Soccer to the Max is a delightful story for both the entertainment and character lessons. Highly recommended for any age.

About the Author

Bibi Belford is the author of books for middle grade readers: CANNED AND CRUSHED, THE GIFT,
CROSSING THE LINE, and ANOTHER D FOR DEEDEE. Bibi starting writing books because her students told her they couldn’t find books they liked. She wants her books to challenge kids to make a difference in their world and be everyday heroes. She lives in a high rise building in Chicago, Illinois and when it’s nice writes on her balcony. She enjoys reading, gardening, beach-bumming, and making her grandchildren laugh. Bibi works part time substituting at Bennett Academy and as an educational consultant and trainer. She also volunteers two days a week at a CPS public school. Some of her credentials include:  B.A. English, K-8 Illinois teaching certificate, Reading endorsement, ESL endorsement, and a Masters of Bilingual Literacy. She is a member of CWA – Chicago Writers Association, SCBWI-Illinois, and has served as a panelist and speaker at the UW-Madison Writers’ Institute.

Jane Schmidt and rural life anecdotes Not a Perfect Fit

Not a Perfect Fit

Jane Schmidt

She Writes Press

April, 2017

Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-206-2

328 pp

Print $16.95

E-book

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Not a Perfect Fit: Laugh-out-loud funny one minute and thought-provoking the next, Not a Perfect Fit includes stories detailing everything from Jane Schmidt’s experience living off-grid as the only English woman in an Amish neighborhood to family trips that are remarkably similar to National Lampoon’s Vacation. Through it all, Schmidt manages to rise above the many challenges she faces, inspiring and entertaining her audience along the way.

When fitness instructor Jane Schmidt moved from the city to rural Wisconsin, stories of her “single-girl-gone-country” adventures helped her become an award-winning columnist for the Crawford County Independent and Kickapoo Scout—and now she’s taking readers on a candid, insightful, and hilarious trip into her world with her new book release, Not a Perfect Fit: Stories From Jane’s World featuring some of her most beloved escapades as well as over 30 never-before-seen stories.

My Review

I’m always happy to read fellow Wisconsin authors. When asked to look at Schmidt’s compilation of personal stories from her local newspaper columns, I was intrigued and occasionally giggling to see familiar roads and small communities through her eyes. As the author introduces her work, she shares her stories for her family and also for the rest of us who can say, been there, said that. We’re not alone, we aren’t the only ones surprised by life.

From the gradual refitting of her “cabin” with modern conveniences to the outfitting of her domestic zoo, readers are drawn into Schmidt’s exploits with language, snow, fitting rooms, and hiking in the rain. Her stories of neighbors, love of pets, surprise and joy of the beautiful natural surroundings of southwestern Wisconsin and quirky lifestyle will touch readers. Those who enjoy humorous and thoughtful real life vignettes will be in for a fun getaway of a read. Schmidt’s style is reminiscent of the old-time personal columns, such as Pearl Swiggum’s the Barn Came First, and neighborhood news. All seasons, recent timeline and occasional childhood memories populate the book. Poignant stories of pets are included—readers who are sensitive to the life cycle of dear ones will want a hanky. All brief tales old in down to earth occasionally self-deprecating but with genuine, earnest narrative.

About the Author

Jane A Schmidt is a columnist and the owner of two businesses, Fitness Choices and Turtle Adventures. When not teaching her fitness classes or encouraging women to get outside, she spends her time backpacking in places like the Grand Canyon, Superior Hiking Trail, and Isle Royale National Park; biking across Wisconsin; hiking and kayaking in the Kickapoo Valley Reserve; or just hanging out with her animal family in rural Viola, Wisconsin.

An Interview with Jane A. Schmidt

When did you make the move from the city to rural Wisconsin? Why?

I moved to the Driftless area of Wisconsin after the hype of the millennium in 2000. I spent a lot of time driving in the country when my daughter was small. I'd see an old cabin or a house that was falling apart and I'd think, if only I could buy that place. My dreams were of land, out-buildings, animals, and a quiet country life. I longed to get out of the city and live closer to the land, where I felt I’d have more room for living.

How did moving to rural Wisconsin impact your life?

The impact was huge. I had to start all over. I had no friends here, no job, and after a couple of months I was living off-grid. The learning curve was not only steep but sometimes dangerous. I cooked with a head-lamp on in order to see. The “hot plate” was connected to a propane tank under my cabin. I lived in fear every time I lit a match. I thought I'd blow myself and the cabin up. Every day I learn something new. Like don't use the John Deere mower to blaze a hiking trail through your Amish neighbor’s hay field. Before moving here I spent all my free time getting away. I'd drive to the parks, small country towns, lakes, and rivers. I was camping out every chance I had. Now I live in the kind of areas I was always running too. I can finally slow down and walk!

What is your favorite part about living in the country? Is there anything you miss about city life?

I lived in apartments before moving to this area. I love the freedom of living alone, surrounded by trees and my animal family. Coming from apartment city living to my own home in the country is liberating. I feel I can live-out-loud better here. I miss ethnic restaurants, my family, and the many lakes I lived near when in the Milwaukee area.

How does your passion for fitness and wellness influence your stories?

My passion for a life lived outside has influenced my interest in fitness and wellness. I knew from the get-go that I needed to stay fit and healthy to live the life I wanted to. My stories revolve around my life. My passion for fitness and wellness is reflected in them.

Why do you think readers connect with your stories?

My stories are real. I talk about everyday happenings that some people would never admit to. Reading about walking through an airport with toilet paper hanging off my rear end or mixing up the words circumcise and circumnavigate allows people to relax and find the humor in their own lives. In the end, we're all just people trying to do the best that we can. Not a Perfect Fit reeks of humanness.

Rex Owens, Contemporary Irish Fiction

               

Murphy’s Troubles

Rex Owens

ISBN: 978-0615895048

eBook: $2.99

Print: $14.99

Buy on Amazon

Ian Padraic Murphy harbors a scandalous secret. To avenge the death of his best friend in a Belfast raid, Ian joins the Provisional IRA which he conceals for 30 years. He meets investigative reporter Eileen Donohue and friendship blossoms into a love affair. Eileen inadvertently discovers the man she thought was a reclusive novelist is actually the brain trust for the IRA. Eileen betrays her lover by disclosing his secret in Ireland's leading newspaper. Driven by guilt and remorse, Ian atones for his years in the IRA by working with Sinn Fein to negotiate the 1998 Peace Accord which ended The Troubles in Ireland. After deserting the IRA Ian's own troubles are far from over when they order his assassination. The assignment is given to his friend, IRA Commander, Kieran Fitzpatrick. Will Ian pay the supreme price for disloyalty to the IRA?

My review:

Owens has a passionate voice for the historical extremist movement in contemporary Ireland. Told mostly through alternating viewpoints, the reader is carried along with Ian Murphy, who as a young university student, is recruited and serves the next thirty years in the Irish Republican Army.

With loving exacted scenery and dialect, the author transports his readers to the Ireland of the sixties, to the underlying despair of prejudice, anger, and inequality due not to outward characteristics, but to devotion and heritage according to faith. Allegiance to a culture of religion causes sides to be taken and lines to be drawn. Owens’ fictional account of the inner workings of what it might have been like for principal players in the movement, unable to trust anyone, not even the people you grew up with, called brother, or confessed to or shared a bed with, provides a rich and satisfying read.

Out of Darkness, book 2

Rex Owens

eBook

Print

ISBN: 978-0983298489

Buy on Amazon

Author Ian Murphy battles lifelong alcoholism and chronic depression. Desperate to cleanse his soul, Ian dedicates himself to finding redemption. To confront his demons, he spends a summer hiking on Dingle Peninsula. He meets Mairin McCarthy, and finds unconditional love but still succumbs to the shadows within.

In the fall of 1998 the British government is determined to build walls in Belfast to separate Catholics and Protestants. The only peace citizens of the city can have requires walls. Murphy dedicates himself to stopping more walls from being built. He's convinced the challenge is his path to redemption.

While living in Belfast Ian learns that distrust and hatred divide the city's residents as much as the walls do. Both Catholics and Protestants accept the walls as the price of peace. The walls will be built. How will Ian Murphy find redemption and crawl out of the darkness?

My review:

Owens slips into first person for this second book of his trilogy about contemporary Ireland and the violence of religious extremism. We left Ian Murphy at the end of book one still alive after his friend is ordered to execute him. Realizing his entire life was one of self-imposed seclusion and layers of lies, Murphy tries to reach out and grasp a spark of life before he has nothing left but darkness. In the first book, Murphy wants to end it all; in this book, he’s coming out to meet the life he’s missed.

Told in on-the-spot scenery and dialog, Owens transports readers into a vicarious visit in Ireland of today, with all the nuances, smells, and sights that hide the brewing troubles. The authors has a fine voice with a message of hope that any reader in any era can grasp.

About the Author:

In 1997 novelist Rex Owens attended the first of many UW Madison Writers Institutes. The featured speaker was author was Robert Moss who talked about conscious dreaming as a way to explore the writing life. The die was cast to be a writer. In 1999 he joined a critique group led by Dr. Laurel Yourke where he learned craft the old fashioned way – by writing. 

His son brought him newspapers from Ireland. He read a story of children injured in the Peace Zone in Belfast in 1998 which became the inspiration for MURPHY’S TROUBLES. By 2003 Dr. Yourke suggested he had enough material to consider writing a novel. 

WWII Novel review: Night of Flames by Douglas Jacobson

Night of Flames A novel or World War II by Douglas W Jacobson

 

 

Paperback: 384 pages

Publisher: McBooks Press (October 1, 2008)

ISBN-13: 978-1590131664 

List print: $16.95

List electronic $9.95

From the Publisher:

Painting a vivid and terrifying picture of war-torn Europe during World War II, this tale chronicles the lives of Anna, a Krakow University professor, and her husband Jan, a Polish cavalryman. After they are separated and forced to flee occupied Poland, Anna soon finds herself caught up in the Belgian Resistance, while Jan becomes embedded in British Intelligence efforts to contact the Resistance in Poland. He soon realizes that he must seize this opportunity to search for his lost wife, Anna.

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My review:

Major Jan Kopernik of the Polish Cavalry Brigade, the 29^th Uhlans, says it best: “The German blitzkrieg was not just a military strategy – it was an all-out campaign of terror intent on the total destruction of his homeland.”

 

Night of Flames is a well-detailed fictionalized account of the Nazi campaign in Poland, and the eventual resistance. Anna Kopernik, an associate university history professor in Krakow, her husband Jan, a major in the army, and Anna’s father, Thaddeus Piekarski, give their first-hand account of life during this terrible time. From being front and center when Warsaw is bombed, to watching the Luftwaffe bomb farmers on the roads and rural villages, to the occupation of Krakow, to joining the resistance, each of them deal with the tragedy.

 

Thaddeus decides to be patient at home, believing the Allies will rescue the city soon. Jan leads his brigade into battle trying to defend a poorly prepared country that still depended on civilian telephone lines and beasts of burden to move equipment on their poor roads; Anna and her Jewish friends return to Krakow from a visit to Warsaw where the Nazi occupation edicts put them all in danger.

 

Anna and Jan do the best they can to live long enough, fighting for their homeland, to find each other again. Anna gets involved in the resistance when she escapes to friends in Belgium just before Jan comes to Krakow on business for the exiled government because of his ability to speak German. She's captured later, and Jan uses his connections, even his military orders, to try to find her.

 

Jacobson’s attention to detail shows his respect for the era, for the events, equipment, geography and technology of the time, even weather patterns and clothing and food. While perhaps circumstances seem aligned in perfect favor for the characters, the account is fiction, and fiction asks for the ability to take a leap of faith upon occasion.

 

Realistic to the point that I occasionally buzzed through detailed battle accounts, Jacobson’s Night of Flames will offer readers who enjoy well-documented World War II history a great few hours back in time. Some brutality, on graphic rape.

 

About the author:

 

Douglas W. Jacobson is an engineer, business owner and World War Two history enthusiast. Doug has travelled extensively in Europe researching the courage of common people caught up in the most catastrophic event of the twentieth century. His debut novel, NIGHT OF FLAMES: A Novel of World War Two was published in 2007 and released in paperback and Kindle in 2008. NIGHT OF FLAMES won the "2007 Outstanding Achievement Award" from the Wisconsin Library Association. He is the author of THE KATYN ORDER, 2011. Doug has also published numerous articles on underground resistance actions in Europe and is currently working on his third historical novel set in Europe during World War Two. Doug and his wife Janie live in Elm Grove, Wisconsin.

Book Review: Fabulous in Flats by Mary T Wagner

Fabulous in Flats

By Mary T Wagner

iUniverse

c. May 2011

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1531-3 (pbk) 14.95

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1532-0 (ebk) 6.00

Mary’s right, there’s nothing like the sound of heels clicking down a polished floor; not even flip-flops across campus , but I honestly fell in love with Mary’s take on life…I wanted to be Mary, or at least go to the Renaissance faire with her and join the sisterhood of selective memory after reading this book. But probably not use power tools with her, though.

Fabulous in Flats, I believe, is Mary’s third collection of essays that began as web site posts. May’s been through a lot of living that includes myriads of work experiences from journalism to waitress to wife and mom to a legal practice to divorce and re-entry to the relationship game and writing.

The essays in Fabulous in Flats flutter around the clean-up after divorce and are liberally themed on cleaning out her garage. “(This was) a good time to sit in the shade, sip a glass of lemonade over ice, and watch the goldfinches alight at the thistle feeders. Instead, I was dismantling pieces of my past on a beastly hot day in an effort to make more sense and order of my present. In other words, I was cleaning out the garage.”

Memories surface as she rediscovers pieces of her life and reinvents herself as an accomplished saw artist, tiger mother, pet owner, gardener, and dessert maker after my own heart. Going through Mary’s garage with her was like ripping off bandages that had lost the ability to hurt. Reading this book was a delightful evening relaxing in somebody else’s angst for a change. I knew she was a sister at heart when I got to “I’ve quit trying to plan anything out in life anymore, opting for the ‘carpe diem’ school of thought on a day-to-day basis.”

After I’d long passed the point of being able to review, I continued to read this entire collection and highly recommend Fabulous in Flats to every empty-nest mom. All women of a certain age will get a kick out of the YouTube dancing queen who poignantly observes that, “at this age, maybe we don’t have to do everything the hard way.”

Available on pring Amazon, eBook and Barnes and Noble and the iUniverse store

Reviewed by Lisa Lickel, LisaLickel.com

The author provided a reader copy for review.

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Wisconsin Author Review is a new site dedicated to readers and writers. With the distinct flavor of Wisconsin, we will feature both Wisconsin-based authors who write about nearly anything, as well as books that are set in Wisconsin. We'll showcase books and authors, have occasional interviews and interactions, and share book club information as well. Let us know what kind of information you're looking for.