Amid the crazy going on in Downtown Los Angeles since Friday, June 6, 2025, and subsequent federal deployment of National Guard troops and active-duty marines, I received good news from Dawn Fanshawe, a blogging friend in the United Kingdom, on Tuesday, June 10th. She sent me the link to her review of my novel, The Twisted Circle, on Goodreads.

A Five Star review! Oh, what joy! It’s such a blessing when a reader not only enjoys my storytelling but also takes the time to recommend it to others. Thank you, Dawn, for brightening my day during these uncertain times in an alternate reality not of my making.

Goodreads Five Star Review by Dawn Fanshawe

Rosaliene’s story took me into a world very unfamiliar to me, but she made me feel very much at home. The spoken dialects, culture and landscape took me on a real adventure.
This was entertaining, intriguing, moving and the characters were entirely relatable. I knew each one! I loved Barbara and grew to love every one of the characters, with their gifts and failings; their habits, their struggles, pain and their baggage.
It is a story of how to grapple with the complicated nature of relationships and broken humanity, and of the difficult decisions we sometimes need to make if we can be honest with our hearts.
I loved this story.

Dawn Fanshawe is the author of Lost Down Memory Lane: Caring for Alzheimer’s, A Personal Journey.

In keeping with Dr. Gerald Stein’s recommendation in his blog post “Don’t Hesitate to Summon Joy,” published on June 8th, I hold on to this unexpected moment of joy. Dawn’s appreciation for my novel The Twisted Circle is a reminder that the stories we tell can connect us across geographical and societal divides. As Dawn concludes in her comments, we humans all “grapple with the complicated nature of relationships and broken humanity.”

My novel The Twisted Circle is set against the political background of Guyana’s 1979-1980 civil rebellion/resistance, led by the popular opposition leader Walter Rodney (1942-1980), against the authoritarian regime. Last Friday marked the 45th anniversary of Rodney’s assassination on June 13, 1980, by an explosive communication device in his car. He was thirty-eight years old. He left behind his wife and three young children.

Strange coincidence: June 13, 1980, also fell on a Friday.