3 Fantastically Awesome Books BJ Thinks You Need to Read: July 2025

The Disappearance of Sloane Sullivan by Gia Cribbs  Did you know that witness protection was started in Rhode Island because of all the organized crime we have here? Years ago I watched a show on the USA network called In Plain Sight, which was about US Marshalls who were working with people who were put into the witness protection program. What a fascinating concept! You just leave your life and assume another one so that you won’t be in danger because maybe you were in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw the wrong thing. This book is about a teenage girl who is hiding out with her own Marshall. She has changed her identity 19 times. She is alone in the world, taken from the life she knew when we was 12 because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw the wrong thing.  She’s learned to always be aware of her surroundings, to defend herself, and to never say too much about who she is or where she’s from. She knows her parents are dead, she has no siblings. Then she moves to a new town with her Marshall when on the first day of school she meets her childhood best friend who she had to leave behind when they were 12. And the last thing she wants to do is to tell her Marshall, but she can’t have any links to her past or else “they” will find out where she is. An awesome book with one hell of a twist.

 

Wavewalker by Suzanne Heywood This is a memoir by a woman whose family moved aboard a sailboat when she was 6, and they lived aboard and sailed the southern Pacific for over a decade. The adventure started in 1976 when the dad decided they’d follow Captain Cook’s 3^rd voyage to commemorate the 200^th anniversary of it, because “if he didn’t commemorate it then who would?” Ultimately the trip ended up being kind of a nightmare for her. Literally. They got caught in a massive storm between Africa and Australia and she suffered a head injury, which she had nightmares about for the remainder of her childhood. She wanted to live a “normal life” on land where she’d go to school and make friends. But the parents wanted to take on paying passengers and sail all over the south Pacific.  When she was a teenager the parents left her and her brother in a cottage in New Zealand where it was her job to care for her brother and make sure he went to school, all while she was only allowed to do her schooling via correspondence. The parents didn’t seem to really care about what her interests were as she got older, and she was repeatedly called selfish for wanting to study. Very interesting story.
 

The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan  I absolutely loved this one. Cate Kay is an author and she released a massive best seller, but she is keeping her true identity a secret. She’s keeping it a secret because when she was a teenager her best friend was in an accident and she fled the scene and left her friend. So over the whole story she’s in hiding to overcome the grief and the guilt. She never really knows what came of her friend, but she knows she can’t go back there and cannot live a life in public. Such a great premise and amazingly done.