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Makin’ the Love Monday – Moon by Laurann Dohner

Makin’ the Love Monday! Oh mah gawds! It’s 9pm and I don’t even have the review done yet. I totally fell down on the job. It’s almost Makin’ the Love Tuesday Morning. Not that makin’ the love on Tuesday mornings is wrong–just it’s important to have some follow through on commitments. I’m commited to makin’ my love on Mondays. I’m rigid. And I’m also late. And to be really sticking honest–I have already finished writing the Any Day That Ends in YA which I consider my Tuesday post.

The reason this is a late post is that I really didn’t want to review Moon by Laurann Dohner for today. I wanted to do another book but L-I-F-E beefed my day and this is what I have. I was hoping to reserve a Laurann Dohner review for when True was released. There is really no universal law that says I can’t do more than one review by one author on my blog, even if I feel as if that is some sort of evil nepotism. The world will not collapse if I do this now and True when it comes out. The worse thing that could possibly happen is that I will piddle a little now and then piddle a little later instead of one piddle all alone.

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Weekend Pick Me Up – Selling Scarlett by Ella James

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.

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

I 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.)

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

This 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.

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Morning Tea with the Author – H.L. 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.

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Makin’ the Love Monday – Found by Evangeline Anderson

I have spent the last week under a ton of blankets trying to shake the chills and sleeping off some sneaky poorlies. I wanted to get a good deal of reading and other assorted “life necessities” taken care of before the beginning of October. But alas, the cold hand of illness brought me to my knees and I only read about four books this past week.

My Makin’ the Love Monday selection of this week is one of the Brides of the Kindred novels by Evangeline Anderson, book four, Found. I started reading this series after finding one of the titles on a Listopia lists, Mars Needs Women Trope, which just made me giggle to no end. When I read the first book, Claimed, I was about 70% on board but I had this really horrible problem… I truly HATED the heroine and her sister made me want to eat glass. I really liked the males though, Sylvan who is a main character in the first and the hero of the second–Hunted, is one of my favorites. BUT I hate his HEA too. Then there was Sought… Deep is so yummy–all broken and tortured and his light half and eager to please brother, Lock. But Kat was freaking irritating as all hell. There was this ray of hope… In Sought Lauren is introduced and she is Xairn’s mate for the fourth book, Found, and she is wonderful. How could this possibly go wrong?

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Any Day that Ends in YA – Runes by Ednah Walters

I didn’t think there was any real estate left in my heart for another book boyfriend but I was wrong. It is getting a bit crowded in there but Runes by Ednah Walters has pretty much smacked me upside the noggin’ and left palpitations in my chest upon introduction with Torin St. James. Man, arrogant jackasses. There just aren’t enough of them in YA to appease my hunger.

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Makin the Love Monday – Whose Bed is it Anyway? by Natalie Anderson

What happened to my weekend? It’s one of those blinked and missed it deals. I had a little sleep issue on Thursday night and I was up all night and then I had one of those uber sleeps Friday night and Saturday morning I felt like a superhero. But now I feel like I went through a time fold and the entire two days just disappeared. I had books to read and things to do and I am behind! I’m sort of like one of those horses behind kind of behinds at this point. I need to read like 9 million books by Wednesday. No more StumbleUpon for me!

So this is my first NetGalley book and I received it courtesy of Harlequin via in exchange for an honest review. Not that I would have given a dishonest one anyway.

Whose Bed is it Anyway? is the newest release by New Zealand author Natalie Anderson. I really enjoy Harlequin Kiss books because they have those flirtatious and sassy characters and the situations are always fun and quirky. They have a sort of charisma that so many other of the Harlequin branches lack and that is why I really love these books and I chose this title. Natalie Anderson’s style and hero were perfect for the Kiss story.

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Any Day that Ends in YA – Still Star-Crossed by Melinda Taub

I was so into reading Still Star-Crossed yesterday that I sort of fell asleep reading it and never got my Tuesday YA up. This book is not in anyway a snorer though. It it beautiful and funny–an incredible tribute to Shakespeare and love stories throughout time.

I found this book recommendation in a YA book chat room on a website, I can’t even remember which one, while on a book crawl over the weekend. Part of my bipolar curse is this fried negative feedback loop where I go on these lost hour book hunts looking for more and more and more until I have lists and Goodread TBRs despite all likelyhood of ever being able to read even a small percentage of them. Still Star-Crossed was love at first sight thing and I swore it would be read straight away.

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Makin’ the Love Monday – Night of the Tiger by N.J. Walters

Augh! Monday. It’s like Sunday night’s bastard sister. I am exhausted and it’s the beginning of the week, my list of things to do is just being made and I already want a break. Cry! Cry! How tough is life!

The book I chose for my Makin’ the Love Monday is something that I actually read a few weeks ago but I loved it and it is deservin’ of the kudos–so here is it’s red ribbon reward and all.

I found this book in my Amazon recommendations and I usually get the weirdest recommendations from Amazon so when I read the synopsis and it sounded good I sort of figured that Amazon must have screwed up and sent me someone else’s book suggestion. Night of the Tiger (This book is free for Kindle at this time) by N.J. Walters is the first book I have read by this author, despite finding she has written more books than the phone book has Smiths, and it was A-mazing. If I had to condense a description of what the beginning of this book is like I would say–imagine Dante’s Inferno, a hodgepodge of Bosch art, the TV show Carnivale, and Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunter Series–put them all together, stir them up, shake that upside down, now add a little kitten tail and some mythologically screwed up comics and you get the world as it’s known to Aimee and Roric.