Thursday, August 30, 2012

Review Coveted by Shawntelle Madison

Coveted by Shawntelle Madison
Released: April 24, 2012
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Age Group: Adult
Pages: 304 pages
Format: Paperback
Source: Bought
Rating: 4/5
Author Site: Shawntelle Madison
For werewolf Natalya Stravinsky, the supernatural is nothing extraordinary. What does seem strange is that she's stuck in her hometown of South Toms River, New Jersey, the outcast of her pack, selling antiques to finicky magical creatures.
I immediately took a liking to Nat. I felt so bad for her being an outcast and getting treated so badly even by her own family just because she wouldn't succomb to the life that was intended for her as a werewolf and because of her hoarding condition for collecting an exorbant amount of holiday ornaments. It's so bad that she has let them totally take over her life and her house by the boxfuls and is ashamed when anybody comes to visit. I can identify a bit of myself over the hoarding because I have to have "ALL" the books! I'm just saying.....LOL

On top of all this she is still very much infatuated with her old flame Thorn but because he leads the pack and she is a shunned member he can barely offer her his friendship much less the love and protection she needs when other clans begin to invade the turf who want her dead.

I am very interested to see what happens in the next book because Nat is in training to try to reclaim a spot in the clan. I can't wait to see if she will rekindle an old flame or start one up with Nick (a wizard) whom I also took a liking to! I am sooo pro Nick at this point because I just felt Thorn could have stood up more for Nat if he had such strong feelings for her?

At any rate this was an awesome debut and totally is going on my keeper shelf!

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Guest Post/Book Feature/Giveaway - What Binds Us by Larry Benjamin


Thomas-Edward is only a teenager when he escapes his working-class neighborhood. He's ready for anything—except the arrival of Donovan Whyte in his life. Sophisticated and dazzlingly handsome, Dondi quickly becomes the center of Thomas-Edward's universe, introducing him to a world full of drama, passion and feuding families.

When their relationship fizzles, they remain uneasy friends until Dondi invites Thomas-Edward to his family's summer house. Thomas-Edward is immediately attracted to Dondi's mysterious brother, Matthew—and finds himself hopelessly drawn to both men.

As time passes, Thomas-Edward develops a unique bond with both brothers as they orbit around each other, although he knows only one of them can be his lifelong love. Will the three of them be able to find a way to hold on to each other? Or will love, its loss and the threat of death destroy their connection once and for all?

Writing to Me is ... by Larry Benjamin

Writing is a privilege because I am allowed to make things up, to tell stories. A voice whispers words in the open shell of my ear, words which fall like tears or snow, piling up, forming sentences which rise up and tell a story.

As a writer I have a responsibility to make my characters engaging and tell their truths. I also have a responsibility to readers. Buying a book is a leap of faith. Readers, on the strength of your brand or book blurb, trust you, plunk down their hard-earned cash because they think you will entertain them, will pull them out of themselves, their lives and into another alternate reality—at least for a little while. That makes me want to write the best story I can.

Writing is my salvation, giving me an outlet to express anger, disappointment, grief, joy. My first book, What Binds Us, captures the headiness of youth and first love and sums up the sense of loss and grief that colored so much of the 80s. My next book, Damaged Angels (being released by Bold Strokes Books in October 2012) is my Adele 21. Adele may have set fire to the rain around her faithless, feckless boyfriends, but I had to content myself with setting fire to mine on the page, burning each in an effigy of words. In truth, writing Damaged Angels was more like capturing each one in amber, preserving a moment in time, an experience, capturing a personality, a way of being, so I did not forget.
And finally writing for me is work. There’s more to writing a novel or even a short story than simply creating characters and a story line and dialogue. There’s research that needs to be done to make sure your story is plausible, your characters realistic. Then there’s the business of writing: querying publishers, working with an editor, reviewing a cover to see if it captures the essence of your book, connecting with readers, biting your tongue and holding back tears when you get a bad review.

Yet, writing is something I won’t stop doing. I write because if I don’t, I’m miserable. The words, they come, whether I write them down or not, piling up in my head, making it hard to think of other things, making it impossible to sleep, until I can do nothing but write. I’ve always imagined that the way I feel when I don’t write is the way an asthmatic feels during an attack: gasping for air, unable to think beyond the next elusive breath, waiting for this agony, this impossible feeling of not being able to breathe, to pass.

I would still write, even if no one read a single word I wrote. In What Binds Us Thomas tells the love of his life, Matthew, “I would love you in the dark if I had to.” I would write in the dark if I had to.

I scratch on the wall of my prison, daily, nightly, for I am a writer. Nothing less, nothing more am I. These scratchings, they tell a story if only you will listen, and like all prisoners, words set me, set us, free.


Buy Now @ Amazon Kindle
Genre - GLBT Fiction
Rating - PG15
Connect with Larry Benjamin on Facebook & Twitter

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Sunday, August 26, 2012

Review - Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz

Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz
Released: April 25, 2006
Publisher: Hyperion
Age Group: Young Adult
Pages: 320 pages
Format: Paperback
Source: Bought
Rating: 2/5
Author Site: Melissa de la Cruz
The Blue Bloods vowed that their immortal status would remain a closely guarded secret. And they kept that secret for centuries. But now, in New York City, the secret is seeping out. Schuyler Van Alen is a sophomore at a prestigious private school. She prefers baggy, vintage clothes instead of the Prada and pearls worn by her classmates, and she lives with her reclusive grandmother in a dilapated mansion. Schuyler is a loner...and happy that way. Suddenly, when she turns fifteen, there is a visible mosaic of blue veins on her arm. She starts to crave raw food and she is having flashbacks to ancient times.

I almost put this book down several times because usually if I'm not into a book within at least the first 100 pages then I never will be but I have heard such great things about this series that I stayed with it and Blue Bloods redeemed itself in the last few chapters somewhat. I gave it two stars sadly just for laying the groundwork to hopefully a more meaningful adventure in the second book.

The characters never came to life for me and were just drab and boring. The only one with any finess at all was the evil minded Mimi who basically single-handedly kept the story alive with her jealousy and bad attitude. I kept waiting on Jack to break out of his shell and show me something but even though he had a few spurts of life and interest in Schuyler he always let his father and twin (Mimi) rule his world.

Bliss and Dylan was a relationship that I saw potential in and just when I was becoming involved (FINALLY) in the story, chaos and mystery break out and the book ends.

Schuyler who I would think should be a main character is just flat and at first I was hoping her and Jack would become a team/couple but Jack acts as though he has no mind of his own so then their is Oliver but one minute he is acting like a child and the next he is all knowing so I just easily got disgusted with the characters.

Another thing that just bugged me to no end was it was almost midways before any mention of vampires and angels ever came into play. The first half was merely high school kids on their day to day crisis

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Book Feature/Giveaway - Blood & Whiskey by Clark Hays & Kathleen McFall


The worst things in life always begin with a phone call.

When a young homeless woman is snatched from the streets of Portland, Oregon, she has time to make one terrified call to her uncle Lenny in tiny LonePine, Wyoming. A way-off-the-grid survivalist and paranoid conspiracy theorist, Lenny turns to his best friend Tucker for help. But Tucker's got his own problems, including a vampire girlfriend.

A perpetually broke, down-on-his-luck cowboy, Tucker has fallen hard for Lizzie, a whip smart, big city girl and hotshot reporter. To everyone's surprise in LonePine (all 438 of them), she's fallen hard for him too.

Their unlikely love is central to The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Mystery when Lizzie finds out the awful truth about her heritage. Tucker, with a little help from his Dad, Lenny and an overly-sensitive cow dog named Rex, take on Lizzie's maniacal vampire father and his beautiful consort Elita. It's a blood-spattered undead apocalypse of terror and tumbleweeds.

In Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, Tucker, Lizzie and the rest of the gang are back with a vengeance. Lizzie is pregnant, with a growing, unquenchable thirst for human blood and trouble on the horizon. The most powerful vampires from the ruling clans are headed to LonePine to test her new powers. If they find her lacking, Lizzie, her growing baby, and all of LonePine will be destroyed -- not that it would take very long.

It's an inconvenient time for Tucker to take a road trip, but sometimes friendship trumps common sense. With a duffle bag of improvised weapons, he sets out for Portland with Lenny to find the kidnapped girl. They end up in remote Plush, Oregon, where -- smack dab in the middle of the sagebrush desert -- they uncover a human blood farm run by a fearsome cowboy enemy resurrected from the Old West. His name is Henry Plummer and his sights are set on Lizzie.

As the truth about what they have uncovered dawns on Tucker and Lenny, they rush back to LonePine. The Vampire illuminati have already arrived, including Rurik, a handsome Russian vampire angling to take Tucker's place next to Lizzie.

How far will Lizzie and Tucker go to protect their unlikely love? Can a cowboy and a vampire ever hope to find happiness?

Blood and Whiskey is a story of love, loyalty, loss and sacrifice in the modern American West. With meditations on the nature of good and evil, a new cosmology for vampires -- including a meta-consciousness where vampire (and human) minds reside between deaths -- and a cast of gritty, quirky, realistic western characters, Blood and Whiskey tangles the vampire and cowboy myths into a groundbreaking new "modern gothic western" genre.

Buy Now @ Amazon Kindle
Genre - Western / Gothic Horror
Rating - (PG13)
Connect with Clark Hays & Kathleen McFall on Facebook & Twitter

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Review - The Restorer by Amanda Stevens

The Restorer by Amanda Stevens
Released: April 19, 2011
Publisher: Mira
Age Group: Adult
Pages: 384 pages
Format: Paperback
Source: Bought
Rating: 4/5
Author Site: Amanda Stevens
Amelia Gray has always been aware of ghosts, and now she travels all over the South cleaning up forgotten or abandoned graveyards. When an enigmatic yet haunted police detective asks for her help to trap a serial killer, their growing attraction constitutes the very gravest of threats.

The Restorer was way better than I thought it was going to be. I don't know why I felt so intimidated by this book or held back from reading it for so long because it was really really good! I actually bought the trilogy on a whim for the simple fact it was a story based in my state (SC) and of the paranormal genre.

Amelia can see and feel ghosts but has been warned by her father, who can also see and feel them, since childhood to never acknowledge them or else be haunted forever and up until now she has always followed the rules he gave her but while restoring an old cemetery she finds herself wrapped up in a murder mystery and has to help a haunted detective find a killer as the body count rises.

I could not put it down! It was a fresh spin on what I have always been told about dealing with ghosts which is to face them and demand to know what they want. I was guessing until the end on who the culprit was. I had an idea but every time I thought I had things figured out something new would arise or a new angle would be presented and the ending left me wanting to find out more of her father and what he is hiding so yes, I will totally be reading the next book in this series!