Books
New Book Recounts Brother’s 6,000-Mile Ride Across America for Nephew with Down Syndrome
Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk
Br. Chris Sweeney, SC, published "Ride for Reid: 6,000 Miles for Love, Faith, and Family," documenting a cross-country cycling expedition undertaken to raise awareness and support for his nephew Reid, who has Down syndrome. The book is out now through Covenant Books.
Sweeney, a member of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart for 34 years, rode from Florida’s coast to California’s redwood forests, a route the book describes as roughly six thousand miles. According to the publisher’s description, the trip included searing heat, freezing cold, mechanical breakdowns, saddle sores and a crash just miles from the finish.
Before the ride, Sweeney spent decades teaching in Catholic high schools across Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, followed by twelve years as a missionary in Mozambique, where he worked on farming projects, grant writing and feeding boarding students at his school. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physical education from the University of New Orleans and a master’s degree in Catholic School Leadership from the University of San Francisco.
The publisher describes the book as combining travelogue, memoir, and spiritual reflection with candid observations on faith and encounters with strangers during the journey. "Every mile reminded me that we are never truly alone, and that love is the most powerful fuel on any journey," Sweeney said, according to the announcement.
"Ride for Reid" is available through Covenant Books and major retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play and the Apple iTunes Store.
Studio CarryOnHarry sees this as part of a familiar but durable genre, the faith-driven endurance memoir, and one where the specificity of Sweeney’s own background, missionary work, decades of teaching, a family motive, gives it more grounding than most.
Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.
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Richard Blum has published "I Do Not Like Escargot," a rhyming picture book that began as a sixth-grade English assignment and, decades later, made it into print through Page Publishing.
The original assignment, according to Blum, asked students to write a book in the style of Dr. Seuss’s "Green Eggs and Ham" about something they didn’t like. Blum chose escargot, despite never having tried it, on the strength of a sixth grader’s confidence that he wouldn’t. The book, released in September 2025, keeps that premise intact and runs with it in verse and illustration.
Blum brought his artistic background to every page, having trained in art while maintaining employment elsewhere. He has roots in Arizona and Missouri, both of which he says shaped the voice in his writing. The finished book, aimed at young readers, follows a child’s insistence on disliking a food he’s never tasted — a setup borrowed directly from the Seuss book it imitates, where a character’s refusal to try green eggs and ham eventually gives way.
This one doesn’t flip the formula. Blum has said that when he finally tried escargot as an adult, he didn’t need to walk anything back. He’s described the experience in blunt terms, comparing the taste to eating rubber soaked in dirt, and says the title stands as written.
The book is listed for sale through major retail outlets including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play, as well as through Page Publishing directly.
Studio CarryOnHarry’s take: there’s something genuinely funny about an author spending twenty-some years validating a sixth grader’s snap judgment about snails, and that’s the hook here, not the publishing deal behind it.
Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.
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The publisher notes that Bridgett’s solitary moment of resistance expands into a wider movement that reaches multiple regions as others begin pausing before obeying directives and choosing prayer over compliance. The publisher describes the novel as building toward a central question: whether a system built for total control can withstand the force of individual conscience, and whether real freedom is found in total allegiance to a higher authority rather than in autonomy itself.
Kennedy’s background is in property management and education, fields that put her in regular contact with institutional systems and the people who move through them. The announcement credits that experience with shaping the novel’s depiction of bureaucracy and constraint, grounding a speculative premise in something closer to observed behavior than invention.
"I wanted to write a story that honors the sovereignty of Christ while confronting the very real tensions between faith and the systems that surround us," Kennedy said in the announcement. "The Ledger is about discovering that true freedom begins where our loyalty to Jesus becomes unshakeable, regardless of what the world demands."
The novel joins a steady stream of faith-driven speculative fiction aimed at readers looking for genre storytelling built around explicitly Christian themes, a corner of publishing that has kept finding an audience even as mainstream dystopian fiction trends toward secular surveillance-state anxieties. "The Ledger" is available in bookstores and through Apple iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and Barnes & Noble.
Studio CarryOnHarry will be watching whether Kennedy’s dual background as educator and property manager gives this entry in the genre a sharper eye for institutional detail than most faith-based dystopias manage.
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