Oh, and since it's getting so few hits, I thought I'd point this out to you, my friend Laurie has got a post about women's likes and dislikes. And she's hoping to pick one commenter to whom she'll gift "something shiny"! You may see it here.
She tells me she's going to pick a winner tomorrow.
;) I think my brownie points are safe for the day. I didn't want to be *evil* and keep this to myself, after all!
Too Wicked To Kiss
by Erica Ridley
publisher: Kensington
review copy provided by: the author
Tampa author Erica Ridley debuts with a fine little gothic romance novel, Too Wicked To Kiss, in which she introduces us to Evangeline Pemberton, a young woman so desperate to escape the hands of her lecherous father that she’ll do anything. Even if it means being companion to a woman and her mother who aren’t that far above her father, in terms of their morals. Since rumor has it that Gavin Lioncroft is a man with a reputation that makes him the subject of gossip, far and wide. And it doesn’t make him a man with which Evangeline feels comfortable spending any time, let alone passing time at a party. But as the charge of the greedy Stanton’s, she can do nothing but agree to help in their scheme to entrap Gavin into marriage with their daughter Susan.
With them come a host of assorted characters—from Gavin’s sister and nieces, to his loathsome brother-in-law, an elderly man seeking his assistance in a marriage contract, and his sister’s drunkard brother in law—and Gavin is none-too-happy at the intrusion into his home, spending as little time as he can away from him, even resorting to using the mansions secret passageways to escape the ever growing group. But there’s something about Evangeline that intrigues him, something enticing. The attraction is instantly mutual, and several stolen kisses ensue . . . But Evangeline is keeping a secret from him that has nothing to do with why the Stantons are here, but it is something very strange—and fortuitous—as it just might help him escape the noose, when his brother in law Lord Heatherington is found murdered, and thanks to a row between them, suspicion falls upon Gavin.
Unless of course, Evangeline’s lecherous, hateful father arrives before they can unmask the murderer, and declare their growing passion for one another.
So what happens? Well, you know you just have to read this one to find out!
Erica Ridley’s Too Wicked To Kiss is a fine debut Regency romance novel, and has all the right ingredients: a touch of heat and spice, a surly and dark hero, a determined and likeable heroine, but she also made sure it was replete with despicable villains, hidden corridors and strange happenings, reminiscent of the Gothic romances of old, ala the Brontë sisters—which this reader thought quite a nice touch. I think anyone who is a fan of the classic gothic romances will find much to love here. Do check it out; I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised!
Any Melissa Marr fans, here? She's on tour right now in support of her soon to be released novel Radiant Shadows, you know, from what I hear. I have this list of dates, and thought someone of my readers might find it useful:
DENVER, CO April 22, 2010: Tattered Cover Book Store; 7:00 pm
LEXINGTON, KY April 23, 2010: Joseph-Beth Booksellers; 7:00 pm
ST. LOUIS, MO April 24, 2010: St. Louis County Library; 7:00 pm
BOSTON, MA April 26, 2010: Cambridge Public Library, Cambridge, MA; 7:00 pm
COLUMBUS, OH April 28 – May 2, 2010: Romantic Times Convention
CLEVELAND, OH May 12, 2010: Joseph-Beth Booksellers; 7:00 pm
PHILADELPHIA, PA May 14, 2010: Chester County Book Store, West Chester, PA; 7:00 pm
RICHMOND, VA May 15, 2010: The Fountain Bookstore; 2:00 pm
That's all I know so far. :( Unfortunately, it doesn't look like she'll be coming anywhere close to me, but I hope someone else out there gets to meet her. Have fun!
Well, sorry for the lack of updates this weekend. I wanted to do the 24 hour, I wanted to post some other stuff here, but I had plans away from the computer. Maybe the book-read-a-thon thing will not conflict with those plans next year. However, I did try to do some reading yesterday. I'm about 2/3 of the way through Dark Lover (which has to go back to the library soon), and moving along in Kitty's House of Horrors, though not as far as I would like to be.
Congrats on everyone participating in the read-a-thon, though. I am with y'all in spirit! ;)
Do any of you follow Book Faery's blog? She's doing a "140 follower" contest at her blog, with some nifty titles on the winner pile. :) (and she's got a date with Gena Showalter soon too...) So! Go check it out. http://book-faery.blogspot.com/2010/04/140-follower-giveaway.html
First, let me say thanks to Susan McBride for the wonderful guest post she gave us, and for hanging in there with me through all the stuff that kept sidetracking the posting of said guestblog spot. Susan, thank you, also for being such a sweetheart! I look forward to our conversations. Please keep in touch!
All righty folks, now for the meat of this here post: the contest; yes, we have a winner. Picked by Buzz my Blog Random contest winner generator thingy, the winner of a copy of Susan McBride's The Cougar Club is:
Miranda(AKA Sweet Zephyr)!
*Applause and cue drum roll and trumpets please* Miranda, you should have my email by now, so as I soon as I hear from you, we'll get that ball rolling. :)
Thanks and I do hope y'all enjoyed this week's guest visit as much as I did!
Kitty and the Midnight Hour
by Carrie Vaughn
Publisher: Grand Central (who sent me my review copy).
In Carrie Vaughn’s first novel, Kitty and the Midnight Hour, we meet Kitty Norville, a DJ at a Denver, Colorado radio station, who while bored with her usual midnight shift of AOR fueled music, inadvertently launches a talk show—not just any talk show, mind you. No, this one fast becomes a kind of “vent hour” for Denver’s supernatural community—Vampires, witches, and, (like Kitty herself) other werewolves phone in every night to air their grievances and woes. And lo, Kitty’s show turns out to be such a rousing success, she’s given the go-ahead to continue the format—and syndicated nationwide. So night after night, she sits in her booth with her engineer, chatting about all the psychological problems one never thinks of when thinking of adjusting to the life led by the Supernatural set.
But the job and fame don’t come without a price: Kitty’s pack and their pushy leader Carl do not appreciate Kitty’s newfound fame, at all; more immediate than their complaints and taunts, someone wants Kitty off the air, permanently—alive if necessary; dead, preferably. And they are willing to pay a skilled assassin to have her nightly appearances eternally canceled. And if that weren’t enough trouble for our heroine, the police suddenly show up with a problem of their own: there’ve been a rash of animal attacks. But now that Kitty has outted herself, live on national radio, are they looking at her as the possible murderer? With everyone from the local faction of normal folk terrified by the supernatural half of society, and the local vampire godfather, and the tent revivalists who traipse into town, and even those inside Kitty’s pack, upset with her success (and some would argue, loud mouth) is she truly in danger? Or is she just being set up, and by whom? You’ll have to read to find out!
If there is one downside to the novel, I’d have to say, it ended a little differently than I expected, but that’s not a bad thing really. Read it and you’ll see what I mean. In the end, I found this to be very enjoyable. Is it because of the unique setting, and its refreshingly rural landscape? Maybe. Is it poor Kitty’s trials? Maybe. (And no, I won’t spoil it for you by telling you how all this ties up, but I will say, it doesn’t parallel much in today’s market standard kick butt-take names endings) but it . . . well, rocks, in my humble opinion. :)
In the current saturated market of one New York set Urban Fantasy vampire/vampire hunter/werewolf hunter title after another, the tiny little tome that is *Kitty and the Midnight Hour really stands out. If you have not tried it yet, well, I think you are in for a treat.
You can find it at Amazon, or scoot on over to Ms. Vaughn's site for some other independent locations where this book is sold.
Oh, and my grade for this one:
For more on Carrie Vaughn see her home page or her blog (that has some of the best movie reviews I've ever read! :)
(Yes, I originally published this at the Examiner, but the book's one of my favorites, so I had to repost it here for my readers. :))
And just to continue the theme, Susan McBride graciously participated in my Examiner Q and A series. If you'd like to take a peek at that, you may find it here. Enjoy!
And just to continue the theme, my review of The Cougar Club
Susan McBride's latest novel, The Cougar Club, marks her debut in the Women’s Fiction genre. In it, she introduces us to three friends: Kat, Carla and Elise, who are each living their lives as over-forty-somethings to varying degrees of success. But fate has trouble in store for them. Kat, a successful New York advertising exec, finds herself shown the door, but thankful that she has a loving boyfriend to lean on…
Or so she thought, until she arrives home to find him . . . shall we say, with his pants down.
Poor Kat has a conniption and heads home to St. Louis to sort out her life. Maybe it won’t be so bad. There’s the hope that her family has lost their quirky ways, and if not that, at the very least she’ll be able to reconnect with her old best friends, Carla and Elise—hopefully. Carla, St. Louis’ top news anchorwoman, is having her own troubles, working under the thumb of her snippy ex-husband, who, it seems would like to place the pretty, young new intern, Amber Sue, in Carla’s comfy anchor chair. And Carla’s mad as hell about it and not about to take it. The third in the trio is Elise, who, of the three friends, seems to be doing the best, with a successful dermatology practice, a son doing well in college, and the perfect husband in her adoring Michael—or does she?
Collectively they’re beginning to wonder, what the heck are they, at forty and suddenly facing a new threshold, looking into what seems to be a minefield of upheaval, going to do to straighten out their lives? One thing’s for sure, there are plenty of fish in the sea, even if most of them are under forty—or in some cases, decidedly gay. As the three reconnect, some threads of their lives start to pull back together, as others fray a little more. But with the right attitude, and shoulders to lean on, maybe they’ll decide this being forty thing isn’t so bad after all.
When Ms. McBride and Avon Books offered me this one, I must admit, I didn’t know what to expect. But I was pleasantly surprised by what I found here. Susan McBride’sThe Cougar Club is a cute novel that I think I might compare it to, say, Sex and The City, (but . . . without hanging tooth and nail onto the NYC vibe—a plus, in my opinion!), or like, Kathy Carmichael’s Hot Flash. The novel deals with things I think any 40ish woman might relate to; the characters certainly have spunk and are endearing in all their quirks, their story, at turns, snort-milk-out-your-nose funny and touching. Even if you’re not quite to that age yet, I still think you might enjoy The Cougar Club. I can say for sure, I really did! And I look forward to whatever Ms. McBride releases next, whether it be a new Debutante novel or whatever. I’m sure it’ll be fantastic!
Of course I liked this one so much, I have to give it :
And don't forget Susan's guest post from yesterday, and the little giveaway. :) There's still plenty of time to enter.
(And just a little note: a slightly different version of this is up at over on my Examiner page, if you'd like to, please take a look. :) And I've got this fine novel linked up in my Amazon bar, there, if you're interested in getting it. :)
This blog has been on the back burner for awhile, and I'd like to thank Susan McBride for being such a good sport about all the delays. :) Her new book, I have to say, was probably one of the cutest I've read in a while. (Sure helped get me through jury duty *cough* though I can only imagine what people thought seeing me read it, hehe.)
We hashed out a nice post and contest for my readers. And I've really enjoyed speaking with Susan, the last few (thanks, Susan!). And so...now, without further ado, I'm turning the mike over, so...please welcome, Susan McBride!
***
You Can’t Judge a Cougar by Her Stripes
by Susan McBride
Yes, I know: real cougars don’t have stripes or spots (not the animal kind anyway). They’ve got gold fur and big paws and think Ashton Kutcher would be mighty tasty for breakfast. But I digress. What I want to talk about are the misconceptions about THE COUGAR CLUB, my debut in women’s fiction that came out on February 1. For the first time in my career—after five humorous mysteries and two young adult novels—I saw ugly comments online about a book I wrote even before it came out, stuff like, “Do I really have to assign a book called THE COUGAR CLUB?” (Girl Scout’s honor, that’s a real Tweet from the fiction editor of a venerable publishing trade magazine, which didn’t end up reviewing COUGAR as promised.) And there were remarks along the lines of, “How dare this woman write such filth! How demeaning to her sex! This belongs in the DUMP.” (I’m paraphrasing, but the writer of one of those nasty pre-pub comments on my local newspaper’s site did capitalize “dump,” and I did envision her screaming while she typed it.)
I started to wonder if anyone truly believed the old maxim that you can’t judge a book by its cover anymore, because people were judging THE COUGAR CLUB before it even made its way onto bookshelves. Honestly, I never imagined that a word like “Cougar” could stir up such negative emotions. I’m a 45 year old woman married to a 36 year old guy, so I’ve been called a Cougar since our first date five years ago. Maybe I’m weird, but I found it funny, not insulting. I never hung out at watering holes in my leopard print hot-pants, on the prowl for a nubile frat boy. I’m more of an “accidental Cougar,” I guess, since meeting Ed happened purely by chance.
I think that’s what makes writing so much fun for me. I love busting stereotypes, in real-life and on the pages of a book. The women in THE COUGAR CLUB aren’t certified, card-carrying Cougars any more than I am (well, except maybe for Carla, who’s as much a Diva as a Cougar). Creating the characters in THE COUGAR CLUB—Kat, Carla, and Elise—gave me the opportunity to show the world how viable and amazing three 45-year-old women can be, even when their respective mid-life crises try to trip them up. I wanted these lifelong friends to reconnect at a time when they need each other most. As the book begins, Kat’s a successful ad agency exec, Carla’s a beloved anchorwoman, and Elise is a dermatologist with a thriving practice. Then Kat gets down-sized, Carla realizes the station’s GM is about to replace her with a newer model, and empty-nester Elise believes her plastic surgeon husband has lost interest.
The story is driven by their relationship to one another and the support they lend each other, through thick and thin. They live by the motto that you’re never too old to follow your heart while struggling with being middle-aged in a society that doesn’t treat middle-age kindly. Like so many of us, they’re seeking passion, in their careers and in love; and each of them, in different ways, finds it.
As a woman who found true love after forty and whose career came into full bloom after forty, too, it’s my great hope that readers of THE COUGAR CLUB will look past the C-word in the title (if it offends them!) and discover the humor and warmth that form the gooey caramel goodness at the center of the book. COUGAR isn’t so much about, well, Cougars as it is about celebrating life at any age. As Kat Maguire puts it:
Aging gracefully isn’t about aging gratefully. It’s about living life with your engine on overdrive, making love with all the lights on, trashing your diet books, and diving into the chocolate cake.
To that, I say “Amen!”
***
Me too! So, for a couple more things here; the contest: To enter, please leave a comment, and your email address so I can contact you if you're chosen (your name-at-host.com is fine;and, US and Canada snail mail addresses only, please). And if you have not, please Follow Café Pearl with the google follow button to the right there. After all that's done, I'll pick the winner on Wednesday morning. :) Good luck!
All righty, a few more things. You have seen her book cover, right?
And how about Susan's cute videos?
on The Cougar Club:
and an interview with Susan McBride conducted by LipstickNLaundry
:) Cute huh? Well, go check out her new novel (links are in the Amazon banner to the right, or ...wherever you usually buy books. And...Thanks again to Susan McBride for the great post (and lastly to Jessica Rabbit for introducing us!). :)And thank you for reading. I hope you've enjoyed this guest spot!
So. I found some goodies in my mailbox this week.:) (meme by Story Siren) It's easier to just list them, so:
Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb
Dragon Haven by Robin Hobb
Both from Harper Collins.
I also received a PDF of some stuff for the other site ;) I'll list them there.
Thanks to all the publicists and site owners for all their help in procuring these titles, and they shall be reviewed (you know me--that is, they shall be reviewed if I'm not absolutely bored by them), asap.
Don't think I mentioned this at all (my apologies) but Cherry Mischievous is running a giveaway for a copy of Maria V. Snyder's Poison Study. I hear this series is fantastic, so....go here. She's also giving away the entire series, here. And good luck to all who try for it!
