Novel Spotlight: Real Chick Lit For Real Chicks by Meredith …
Today’s Novel Spotlight isn’t so much for just one novel, but rather – a collection! I’m so excited for Meredith Schorr that she now has…
Chick Lit Plus
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Release Day: A Questionable Friendship by Samantha March
I’m so thrilled that today is the release day for my third novel A Questionable Friendship – eek! I’m chatting about it on my author blog today,…
Cover Reveal: Pulled Beneath by Marni Mann
I am excited to take part in the cover reveal today for Marni Mann and her new adult novel Pulled Beneath. I am so fortunate to be…
In My Mailbox: Week of February 17
Title: The New Ever After
Author: Julie Farley
Received: CLP Blog Tours
Synopsis:
After becoming a widow with three small children, Heather Meadows is starting a new life. She has a sexy new husband, newborn twins, and a blossoming career as a writer. But with the advent of summer comes an avalanche of worries about doing it all and being enough. In her quirky style that drew readers to Tripped Up Love, Heather works through her new challenges and surprises with the fortitude she found she had when her first husband died. Only this time, her strength is put to the ultimate test as she faces losing not only her best friend but her new happily ever after as well.
Title: Never Google Heartbreak
Author: Emma Garcia
Received: Bookouture
Synopsis: Viv’s ex-fiancé, Rob, proposed to her three months after she slept with him – she thought it was one of those whirlwind romances you read about in magazines. Five years later, after Rob calling off the wedding for the third time, she has finally moved out.
As Viv passes through the three essential stages of grief (denial, vodka, disastrous haircut), she becomes determined that it’s not too late to try and get Rob back. One drunken declaration of love at an extremely inappropriate moment later, and Viv’s scruffy, tequila-swilling best friend Max is there to pick up the pieces.
Just when Viv’s starting to realise that maybe the real thing has been under her nose all along, she makes what might just be the biggest mistake of her life…
Can love sneak up on us unexpected? What’s the answer to heartbreak? And what’s a girl to do when even the Internet doesn’t have the answer?
Title: Social Death
Author: Tatiana Boncompagni
Received: Get Red PR
Synopsis: Money and fame can conceal all manner of deceit, but only for so long. A beautiful socialite is brutally murdered in her exclusive New York City apartment building. A financier’s trophy wife and the night doorman are the last two people to see her alive. There’s no sign of forced entry. No known motive. Just a neighbor’s account of overhearing a heated argument outside the victim’s apartment on the night of the murder. Clyde Shaw has built a career covering brutal crimes for the FirstNews network, but this story may be more than the top news producer can handle. The murder victim, Olivia Kravis, is the daughter of FirstNews’s mogul founder-and Clyde’s best friend since childhood. As a high-stakes network ratings war begins, Clyde’s own privileged yet troubled past comes back to haunt her, and she’s forced to choose between finding her best friend’s killer and losing everything-her job, her reputation, even her life. Long-guarded secrets. Millions at stake. And only Clyde holds the key to unlocking the truth.
Title: Schasm
Author: Shari Ryan
Received: BookTrope
Synopsis: Chloe Valcourt drifts between two worlds: the dark reality of her domineering mother and feeble father and the vivid fantasy of her imagination. With her condition comes the harsh observation of doctors who intend to cure her of it. But a chance encounter with a handsome and vaguely familiar young man in her dream world hints at the possibility of hidden truths—and a life she can’t remember. As her drifts become a greater escape from the cruelty of the real world, Chloe finds herself lost between what is real and what is imagined, questioning her very existence. Can she remain in the lush new imagined landscape to find happiness in a realm of her own invention? Is she doomed to return to the harsh reality of the outside world forever? Or will she become trapped somewhere between the two…unable to return to either?
Title: Tea and Primroses
Author: Tess Thompson
Received: BookTrope
Synopsis: Nothing is as it seemed in calm, quaint Legley Bay.
Famous novelist Constance Mansfield lived a seemingly straightforward – if private – and somewhat predictable life. Friends, beloved daughter Sutton, a beautiful home, and all the success an author could wish for. A perfect life….but was it?
When a hit and run accident suddenly takes her mother’s life, Sutton finds hidden secrets with her heartbreak. Emotional walls she assumed Constance had built to protect her privacy may have been to protect something – or someone – else entirely. Family and friends return home for support, including her own lost-love, Declan. He’s the first thing she craves to help her cope with her loss and the questions she’s left with, but he’s also the last person she wants to see. Will he be able to put down roots at last?
Can the loss of true love be the making of a life, or is it destined to be the undoing of everything? When money, power and love combine across time, anything is possible.
Novel Spotlight and Giveaway: A Fall of Marigolds by Susan …
A beautiful scarf, passed down through the generations, connects two women who learn that the weight of the world is made bearable by the love we give away….
September 1911. On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, nurse Clara Wood cannot face returning to Manhattan, where the man she loved fell to his death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Then, while caring for a fevered immigrant whose own loss mirrors hers, she becomes intrigued by a name embroidered onto the scarf he carries…and finds herself caught in a dilemma that compels her to confront the truth about the assumptions she’s made. Will what she learns devastate her or free her?
September 2011. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, widow Taryn Michaels has convinced herself that she is living fully, working in a charming specialty fabric store and raising her daughter alone. Then a long-lost photograph appears in a national magazine, and she is forced to relive the terrible day her husband died in the collapse of the World Trade Towers…the same day a stranger reached out and saved her. Will a chance reconnection and a century-old scarf open Taryn’s eyes to the larger forces at work in her life?
Novel Spotlight and Giveaway: The Fever Tree by Jennifer McVeigh
Now available in Trade Paperback, THE FEVER TREE by Jennifer McVeigh (Berkley Trade Paperback Reprint; 978-0-425-26491-1; February 4, 2014; $16)! When it was first released…
Novel Spotlight: Weightless by Michele Gorman – Free Book Code and …
I’m a big fan of Michele Gorman and have read all of her books, and I’m excited to read her latest, Weightless. Watch for my review coming…
In My Mailbox: Week of February 10
Title: Paper Phoenix
Author: Michaela Thompson
Received: CLP Blog Tours
Synopsis: First comes divorce, then comes murder…
…or at least sweet thoughts of murder. Maggie Longstreet has plenty of them after slimy, ambitious Richard trades her in for a more recent model. She’s so depressed she can barely get out of bed when Larry Hawkins, a seemingly not-at-all depressed acquaintance, commits suicide out of the blue. Suddenly Maggie goes on high alert, remembering something her evil ex said about Larry—something highly suspicious.
And from there, it’s just a short segué to a bracing new development:
“When some women get divorced they go back to school, I thought. Some do volunteer work at the hospital, or join communes and learn to birth calves. Some have affairs with inappropriate men. My new interest is burglary. Maggie Longstreet, former wife and mother, past president of the Museum Guild, now starting a career as a second-story woman.”
Fortunately, Maggie isn’t alone in her adventure—a very attractive, much younger man proves a lot more fun than Richard ever was. In fact, the real delight of this witty, sly mystery is seeing Maggie come alive again after a suffocating marriage. Set in the’70s, it has a bit of that Mad Men feel of women on the brink of something big. And completely unexpected.
You know Maggie’s going to be okay when she says: “I’d rather have had one of those cute little guns with a mother-of-pearl handle, but this (diamond pin) would have to do. I concealed it in my hand. At least now I was armed—or pinned.”
Title: The Seduction of Miriam Cross
Author: WA Tyson
Received: CLP Blog Tours
Synopsis: Can Delilah Percy Powers figure out who killed Miriam Cross before she becomes the killer’s next target?
Miriam Cross, author, feminist and philanthropist, disappears from her Philadelphia home. A year later, a lonely recluse named Emily Cray is brutally murdered in her bed in a small Pennsylvania town. Miriam and Emily are one and the same. As Delilah and her staff of female detectives – a militant homemaker, an ex-headmistress and a former stripper – delve into Miriam’s life, they become submerged in an underworld of unfathomable cruelty and greed with implications that go far beyond the gruesome death of one woman or the boundaries of one country. Eventually Miriam’s fight for justice becomes Delilah’s own…until Delilah’s obsession with finding the truth may prove just as deadly.
Title: The Brazilian Job
Author: Michelle Vernal
Received: Michelle Vernal
Synopsis: Nobody’s Perfect Are They?
Rebecca Loughton’s bumbled her way through her thirty something years making a few cock-ups along the way. Of course, these wouldn’t be so glaringly obvious if it wasn’t for her golden haired, older sister Jennifer.
In a bid to escape Jennifer’s lengthy shadow and to find her happy ever after Rebecca, high-tails it out of her hometown of Christchurch to the other side of the world landing a legal secretary job in the buzzing city of Dublin. A few drinks later, all she has to show for her new life is an embarrassing one-night stand and a dollop of flirtatious banter with her boss Ciaran who just happens to have a predatory receptionist in hot pursuit of him.
Amidst plans of preventing such a merger, Rebecca receives news that Jennifer’s picture perfect life has a big, fat crack down the middle of it in the form of a philandering husband. Summoned home to look after her sister’s children and cooking school while she works on her marriage, Rebecca finds the reality of looking after two young children along with the bizarre array of guests booked into the cooking school grim. The only bright spot on her horizon are Ciaran’s e-mails but then she meets David Seagar whom she thinks might just be the ending to her happy ever after but will he prove to be far from perfect too?
Title: The Perfect Affair
Author: Claire Dyer
Received: Quercus Publishing
Synopsis: What happens if you fall in love with the wrong person?
Rose knows only too well the exhilaration and devastation of loving a married man. So she watches with a keen eye as Eve – her closest companion, the granddaughter she never had – meets Myles, the new tenant in her downstairs flat.
Quietly and softly and against the backdrop of their own unsatisfactory marriages, Myles and Eve fall in love and, as they try to have the perfect affair like Rose did before them, they come to learn about the pain of lost opportunities, to decide whether it is ever better to follow your head or your heart, to know what it is to be torn between love and duty.
New Book Releases: February 2014
Ah February, the month of groundhogs, Valentines and presidents. I don’t know about your weather, but where I live it’s been very, very chilly. As a consequence, I’ve been indulging in quite a few books and I’m ready for some new material. Here’s a sample of the fun chick lit books that will be published this month.
Twisted Sisters by Jen Lancaster – February 4, 2014. Lancaster is one of the funniest authors I’ve ever read. Her latest fiction book is a humorous and sometimes sarcastic story of Reagan Bishop, a successful psychologist with her own cable show. Despite all her success, Reagan feels as though she never measures up to her younger sister, Geri, who is her parents’ favorite. When her show gets picked up by a network, the pressure of prime time proves to be too much. With the help of a New Age healer, and a Freaky Friday-like plot twist, Reagan finds herself addressing her sibling rivalry issues once and for all.
The Curl Up & Dye by Sharon Sala – February 4, 2014. Once upon a time LilyAnn Bronte was her high school’s Homecoming Queen, with a quarterback boyfriend and a bright future in front for her. Then her boyfriend was killed in Iraq and she spent the next eleven years mourning his loss. During this time, LilyAnn’s childhood friend, TJ, supports her, while harboring his unrequited love for her. When a handsome stranger comes to town, LilyAnn begins to reawaken, which doesn’t go unnoticed by TJ. After she gets a makeover that TJ realizes isn’t for him, he pulls away. Will LilyAnn pursue a new life or realize that she had love all along?
The Dream Dress by Janice Thompson – February 19, 2014. Gabi Delgado is a seamstress at a fancy bridal salon in Texas who dreams of being the next Vera Wang. After she’s fired from her job, in front of a reporter for Texas Bride magazine, she must decide if the time is right to pursue her dreams. The reporter who witnessed her humiliation is surprisingly helpful, and handsome. Gabi may have to take a chance on love, too.
A Questionable Friendship by Samantha March – February 18, 2014. Brynne and Portland have been best friends since college. Now both twenty-five, married and living in Maine, they find their friendship strained. Brynn is happy with her fulfilling marriage and the small café and bookshop she owns. She’s also excited about her plans for motherhood. The problem is Brynne is having trouble getting pregnant. Portland, whose marriage is falling apart, envies her friend’s apparently perfect life. This novel explores what really makes someone a true friend, a support system, a sister.
Evening Stars by Susan Mallery – February 25, 2014. This is another book about sisters. Nina took care of her younger sister Averil, practically raised her, because their mother lived her life so recklessly. Nina sacrificed her dreams, so that Averil could break free from their home on Blackberry Island. When Averil returns with her husband, Nina is none too happy, because that’s not what she envisioned for her sister. Since Nina is also juggling two different admirers and dealing with their mother, Averil’s return leads Nina to wonder if it’s time for her to reach for the stars.
