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#BookReview: Marriage to Measure by Talli Roland #ChickLit

Reviewer: Samantha I received a review copy Summary: When Serenity Holland proposes to her long-time boyfriend Jeremy, she’s certain ‘forever’ is a perfect fit. As…

#BookGiveaway: Married by Midnight by Talli Roland

Christmas is coming . . . and so is the biggest day of Kate’s life. While choosing a vintage dress for her Christmas Eve wedding,…

#BookReview: Married by Midnight by Talli Roland #ChickLit

Reviewer: Samantha I received a review copy Summary: Christmas is coming . . . and so is the biggest day of Kate’s life. While choosing…

Book Review: The No-Kids Club by Talli Roland

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Summary:
At almost forty, Clare Donoghue is living child-free and loving it.
Then her boyfriend says he wants kids, breaking off their promising relationship. And it’s not just boyfriends: one by one, her formerly carefree friends are swallowed up in a nonstop cycle of play dates and baby groups. So Clare decides it’s time for people who don’t have children to band together. And so the No-Kids Club is born.
As the group comes together—Anna, who’s seeking something to jumpstart a stale marriage, and Poppy, desperate for a family but unable to conceive—Clare’s hoping to make the most of the childless life with her new friends.
Will the No-Kids Club be Clare’s route to happiness, or will the single life lose its sparkle?
Review:
Talli Roland is a favorite author of mine, and her books never disappoint! The No-Kids Club is a fast-paced read filled with dynamic characters and interesting storylines. Clare, Anna and Poppy are similar in they are all child-less, but each has a different reasoning for that. It’s easy to identify with each woman and get invested in their lives. It is a little bit on the predictable side but still a cute chick lit book that I really enjoyed. You must read Talli Roland if you are a chick lit fan!
4 stars

In My Mailbox: Week of May 19

Title: The Curvy Girls Club
Author: Michele Gorman
Received: Notting Hill Press
Synopsis: A funny, heart-warming story about overcoming the prejudices we hold, no matter where we tip the scales.

When the pounds start falling off Katie, founder and president of London’s most popular social club for the calorie-challenged, it seems like a dream come true. But as the overweight stigma recedes and her life starts to change, she faces losing more than the inches around her waist. Everything that’s important to her – her closest friends, boyfriend, and acceptance into the club itself – are at stake in a world where thin is the new fat.

Title: The No-Kid Club
Author: Talli Roland
Received: Talli Roland
Synopsis: At almost forty, Clare Donoghue is living child-free and loving it.
Then her boyfriend says he wants kids, breaking off their promising relationship. And it’s not just boyfriends: one by one, her formerly carefree friends are swallowed up in a nonstop cycle of play dates and baby groups. So Clare declares enough is enough and decides it’s time for people who don’t have children to band together. And so the No-Kids Club is born.
As the group comes together—Anna, who’s seeking something to jumpstart a stale marriage, and Poppy, desperate for a family but unable to conceive—Clare’s hoping to make the most of the childless life with her new friends. But is living child-free all it’s cracked up to be?
Title: Right Click
Author: Lisa Becker
Received: Lisa Becker
Synopsis: Love. Marriage. Infidelity. Parenthood. Crises of identity. Death. Cupcakes. The themes in Right Click, the third and final installment in the Click series, couldn’t be more pressing for this group of friends as they navigate through their 30’s. Another six months have passed since we last eavesdropped on the hilarious, poignant and often times inappropriate email adventures of Renee and friends. As the light-hearted, slice of life story continues to unfold, relationships are tested and some need to be set “right” before everyone can find their “happily ever after.”

Title: The Breakup Doctor
Author: Phoebe Fox
Received: Phoebe Fox
Synopsis: A broken leg requires an orthopedist. A broken car requires a mechanic. And a broken heart requires a specialist too. The Breakup Doctor is now in.
Call Brook Ogden a matchmaker-in-reverse. Let others bring people together; Brook, licensed mental health counselor, picks up the pieces after things come apart. When her own therapy practice collapses, she maintains perfect control: landing on her feet with a weekly advice-to-the-lovelorn column and a successful consulting service as the Breakup Doctor: on call to help you shape up after you breakup.
But when her own relationship suddenly crumbles, Brook finds herself engaging in almost every bad-breakup behavior she preaches against. And worse, she starts a rebound relationship with the most inappropriate of men: a dangerously sexy bartender with anger-management issues—who also happens to be a former patient.
As her increasingly out-of-control behavior lands her at rock-bottom, Brook realizes you can’t always handle a messy breakup neatly—and that sometimes you can’t pull yourself together until you let yourself fall apart.
Title: I Like You Just the Way I Am
Author: Jenny Mollen
Received: St. Martins Press
Synopsis: By the actress, writer, and one of the funniest women on Twitter, an outrageous, hysterical memoir of acting on impulse, plotting elaborate hoaxes, and refusing to acknowledge boundaries in any form
Jenny Mollen is an actress and writer living in Los Angeles. She is also a wife, married to a famous guy (which is annoying only because he gets free shit and she doesn’t). She doesn’t want much from life. Just to be loved—by everybody: her parents, her dogs, her ex-boyfriends, her ex-boyfriends’ dogs, her husband, her husband’s ex-girlfriends, her husband’s ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriends, etc. Some people might call that impulse crazy, but isn’t “crazy” really just a word boring people use to describe fun people? (And Jenny is really, really fun, you guys!)
In these pages, you’ll find stories of Jenny at her most genuine, whether it’s stalking her therapist (because he knows everything about her so shouldn’t she get to know everything about him?); throwing a bachelorette party so bad that one of the guests is suspected dead; or answering the eternal question, Would your best friend blow your husband on a car ride to dinner if she didn’t know you were hiding in the backseat?
I Like You Just the Way I Am is about not doing the right thing—about indulging your inner crazy-person. It is Jenny when she’s not trying to impress anyone or come across as a responsible, level-headed member of society. With any luck it will make you better acquainted with who you really are and what you really want. Which, let’s be honest, is most likely someone else’s email password.

Book Review: Last Christmas by Talli Roland

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Summary:
For Lucy, the best Christmas present is forgetting the past.

Eager to banish the ghost of Christmas past – when her boyfriend dumped her on the streets of Paris – Lucy is determined to make this the best Christmas ever. She rallies friends and family for an epic celebration that just happens to fall on the same day as her ex’s festive wedding. Furious at how she’s been treated, Lucy can’t help relishing the party v wedding smackdown.

But when the wedding is threatened and only Lucy can help, can she find the spirit inside to save the day, or will this Christmas be even more disastrous than the last?
Review:
Talli Roland is one of my favorite chick lit authors, so even though I’m not crazy for novellas, I really wanted to read another offering from her! Last Christmas is quick, cute, and packs a lot of personality for such a short read. I thought Roland did a great job making sure the main characters were developed, which can lack in novellas from time to time. The storyline had great qualities, from love lost to moving on to even showing forgiveness in a big way, and of course – plenty of romance. If you need a sweet treat for the holiday season, pick up your copy of Last Christmas!
4 stars

In My Mailbox: Week of November 10

Title: Vegas to Varanasi
Author: Shelly Hickman
Received: CLP Blog Tours
Synopsis: Anna has never been the beautiful one; she’s always been the nice one. So when the gorgeous man sitting across the table at a wedding reception remembers her from high school—and quite fondly at that—she’s taken off guard. Formerly overweight and unpopular, Kiran has never forgotten Anna, the one person who was kind to him when no one else could be bothered, and Anna’s a bit flustered as she slowly comes to grips with his intense attraction for her. In what feels like a romantic dream come true, all-grown-up, hunky Kiran invites Anna on a trip to Varanasi. But her troubled, whack-a-do ex-boyfriend starts interfering, creating drama at every turn, which begs the question, “Can nice girls really finish first?”

Title: Last Christmas
Author: Talli Roland
Review: Talli Roland
Synopsis: For Lucy, the best Christmas present is forgetting the past.

Eager to banish the ghost of Christmas past – when her boyfriend dumped her on the streets of Paris – Lucy is determined to make this the best Christmas ever. She rallies friends and family for an epic celebration that just happens to fall on the same day as her ex’s festive wedding. Furious at how she’s been treated, Lucy can’t help relishing the party v wedding smackdown.

But when the wedding is threatened and only Lucy can help, can she find the spirit inside to save the day, or will this Christmas be even more disastrous than the last?

Title: Doubting Abbey
Author: Samantha Tonge
Received: Samantha Tonge
Synopsis: Swapping downstairs for upstairs… How hard can it be!? Look up the phrase ordinary girl and you’ll see a picture of me, Gemma Goodwin – I only look half-decent after applying the entire contents of my make-up bag, and my dating track-record includes a man who treated me to dinner…at a kebab shop. No joke! The only extraordinary thing about me is that I look EXACTLY like my BFF, Abbey Croxley. Oh, and that for reasons I can’t explain, I’ve agreed to swap identities and pretend be her to star in the TV show about her aristocratic family’s country estate, Million Dollar Mansion. So now it’s not just my tan I’m faking – it’s Kate Middleton style demure hemlines and lady-like manners too. And amongst the hundreds of fusty etiquette rules I’m trying to cram into my head, there are two I really must remember; 1) No-one can ever find out that I’m just Gemma, who’d be more at home in the servants quarters. And 2) There can be absolutely no flirting with Abbey’s dishy but buttoned-up cousin, Lord Edward. Aaargh, this is going to be harder than I thought…

Title: It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister’s Boyfriend (Wouldn’t It?)
Author: Sophie Ranald
Received: Sophie Ranald
Synopsis: You live together, laugh together, borrow her shoes and eyeliner – is there anything you can’t share with your sister?

Ellie’s younger sister Rose has it all. She’s beautiful, stylish and dates gorgeous, glamorous millionaires, while Ellie is quite happy watching TV on the sofa with her old mate Ben. But when Rose brings her new boyfriend home, it’s lust at first sight for Ellie. And although she knows it’s wrong, everything changes: she’ll do whatever it takes to get Oliver, even if it means abandoning her principles and turning a deaf ear to her friends. After all, would it be so wrong to take up running, put some highlights in her hair and make herself look a tiny, little bit more like Rose? But as Ellie follows in her sister’s stiletto-heeled footsteps, she realises that finding love could mean losing the most important thing in the world.

It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister’s Boyfriend… is a warm, witty whirlwind romance. If you’re a fan of Tracy Bloom, Pippa Wright and Mhairi McFarlane, you’ll love Sophie Ranald.

Title: The End
Author: Denise Moncrief
Received: Denise Moncried
Synopsis: Sometimes the end is only the beginning.

Almost a year after her husband dies, Ellie Marston opens the file for Tab’s last manuscript, a thriller so compelling it reads like a true story. His manuscript needs an ending, so Ellie writes the obvious conclusion. The same morning she types The End, her career as an assistant district attorney falls apart. Accused of throwing the high profile Patterson case, she resigns in disgrace. The only friend she has left in the criminal justice system is Det. Paul Santiago, a man she has worked closely with on numerous cases. While she was married to Tab, she squashed her growing feelings for Paul, determined to make her deteriorating marriage work, but circumstances after Tab’s death bring Ellie and Paul together.

Ellie’s paranoia increases as she becomes convinced Patterson is harassing her, certain that someone is searching her belongings for any hidden evidence she might have that would reopen his case. It becomes clear there was a conspiracy to release Patterson. She seeks help from her former co-worker, Presley Sinclair, but soon discovers Presley is deeply involved in the subsequent cover up. Worse yet, Tab’s affair with Presley drew him into the twisted conspiracy as well.

Together Paul and Ellie attempt to uncover the conspiracy in the District Attorney’s office, the set up that forced her to resign. The key to the mystery is hidden in the pages of Tab’s manuscript. Once Paul and Ellie come to the correct conclusion—Tab’s manuscript is a true story and Ellie’s added ending is the only logical outcome—Ellie attempts to reveal Patterson’s hidden partner in the District Attorney’s office, but the co-conspirator she uncovers is not whom she suspects. Danger swirls around her as she steps further and further into the conspirator’s trap.

Title: Wish Upon a Star
Author: Trisha Ashley
Received: LightBrigade PR
Synopsis: Cookery columnist and author Cally’s world is turned upside down when her baby daughter is born with serious heart problems. Her ex disappeared when she was pregnant, and Cally has spent much of the early years of daughter Stella’s life at the hospital. When Stella’s only hope is hugely expensive life-saving surgery in the States, Cally moves in with her mother in the rural village of Sticklepond, to save money for the operation.

The village rallies round and begins fund raising with a vengeance, including the laid back and rather handsome baker Jago, who is still trying to escape the clutches of his controlling ex-fiance. With everything that is going on, the last thing Cally wants to do is fall in love, but she is also tired of going it alone. In the run up to Christmas, the true spirit of the festive season begins to show.

A warmly told tale that takes Trisha Ashley fans back to Sticklepond, with colourful characters old and new.

United Authors of Chick Lit

What a fun and clever idea United Authors of Chick Lit is! The event was happening all this week and ends today, and I’ve been following…

Book Review: The Pollyanna Plan by Talli Roland

I received a copy of The Pollyanna Plan by Talli Roland in exchange for an honest review.
Ah, Talli Roland. Her books are always a treat to read, and she never fails to win me over with her sassy writing and loveable characters. Our heroine this time around is thirty-something Emma Beckett, who embodies a non-optimist life. She firmly believes in being realistic and not getting wrapped up in fantasy or hope. Her fiancé is a safe man, she works in insurance (everyone always needs that!) and she doesn’t trouble herself with silly time-wasters such as decorating her apartment. But when she gets fired and loses her fiancé back-to-back, Emma is shaken to say the least. When a friend challenges her to think like Pollyanna: glass half full, always seeing the upside, Emma takes it on. But will her decision turn out positively…or will Emma realize her old way of thinking was the best?
Emma literally cracked me up throughout this book. I was always laughing over her meticulous thought plans, her carefully constructed life. This book whizzed by for me, filled with snappy dialogue, a crew of some pretty fun characters, and a fab story-teller at the helm. I adored the skiddy romance between Emma and Will, and enjoyed the sub-plots that Rolland built in for her characters. The ending was right-on, and this is another chick lit book you must add on your to-read list!
[Rating: 4.5]