Browse Month by October 2013
Uncategorized

Weekend Pick Me Up – Selling Scarlett by Ella James

photo (1) Yesterday was my 40th Birthday. I have reached my 4th decade. If this was my wedding anniversary it would be my ruby year. Since it is only my birthday year I will be open to accepting sapphires. No need to be greedy.

For my big year I woke up with a killer headache on a day that just so happened to be one where I was going to see my neurologist about my migraines. Received a birthday gift of a shot of Toradol to kick it’s ass and then bought myself a Thai massage before coming home and spending the day with my husband watching Netflix and playing World of Warcraft. We had actually had bigger plans but crappy weather in SoCal is unusual and when it happens it sort of stops things in their tracks. It rained all yesterday and we nested.

This weekend we are having a “brown out” where we aren’t using any electronic equipment and are spending the weekend doing things together. We have paperback copies of The Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card to read when we aren’t out of the house going to the zoo and having my birthday dinner. We haven’t really had a weekend like this since we were in college. This all being the case… I have to do my Weekend Pick Me Up early since David is taking tomorrow off to start our our vacation early. I’ll whip this out now so you can start yours early too!

This weeks recommendation is a romantic suspense by Ella James called Selling Scarlett. I found this book on Amazon on a search for free Amazon books. It is the first in her new Love Inc. series about a seedy underworld pleasure brothel in the Nevada desert that caters to the affluently jaded and infamously bored.

Continue Reading

Uncategorized

Any Day That Ends in YA – The Spirit Keeper by K.B. Laugheed

photoI had a case of reader’s peckishness over the later part of last week and I tried to read Tijan’s Carter Reed and I wasn’t feeling it. Opened up and got to chapter eight on Flight, the First book of the Crescent Chronicles. I got to 40% of Love in the Time of Global Warming. Barely made it into Endless by Amanda Gray, which is one I’m supposed to review for NetGalley–not sure what I’m going to do there. And I bought but didn’t even tap into the Bayou Heat books by Alexandra Ivy & Laura Wright. I was sort of having my own version of my baby sister’s attention span on book boyfriends.

Finally yesterday, with the blood vessels in my head trying to evict either my brain matter or protesting the housing of my skull… somehow I managed to get two books read. I don’t know what it says about me that I can do more reading with a migraine than I can without one.

The Spirit Keeper by K.B. Laugheed was really an incredibly great book. I hate making statements like that because I can hear my Photography Instructor from college saying in the back of my mind that that is not the correct way to give valuable criticism. But this book really is a great book. (Nancy, I am going to qualify it now! I swear.)

Continue Reading

Uncategorized

Tongue Wagger – The Last Alive by H.L. Wampler

IMG_7969This is my first Empowering Lemon Bundt Wednesday and the reference will probably be lost on most but it is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer quote from when Willow goes to join the Wicca circle at UC Sunnydale. Inspite of the tongue and cheek meaning to the comment it is meant to infer that the members have a mean amount of girl power. My Wednesday blog posts will be for books with heroines who kick serious boot-ay!

The first urban warrior to be featured is Emma Taylor, the zombie slaying survivor of an apocalypse started when her sister becomes patient zero after a mysterious bite on a family camping trip. The Last Alive is a very fast paced novel. From the first page it takes off and there are no lulls or pauses. Tension is created by an alternating look between the fortified Pittsburgh she lives in present time with flashbacks to the initial outbreak and it leaves the reader caught precariously between the panic of then and desperation of now.

Continue Reading

Uncategorized

Morning Tea with the Author – H.L. Wampler

Wampler
Today is an auspicious day because it is the beginning of a new addition to my blog, Morning Tea with the Author, which is a Q&A with authors about books, writing, reading and everything in the kitchen sink.

My first author is H.L. Wampler, creator of the novel The Last Alive, a horror story about a zombipocalypse that begins when her twin sister is bitten in the woods while camping and then things get really hairy.

Continue Reading