Ebook Review Central, Dreamspinner Press, March 2012

When I performed my regular search of the blogosphere for the reviews of the  Dreamspinner Press March titles, I admit that I was really hoping that Amy Lane’s Super Sock Man would get enough reviews to make the featured title list this month.  The title of this coming-of-age story grabbed my attention, but four reviews wasn’t quite enough to put a title over the top this month.

So what did it take? Take a look at the reviews listed for these featured titles and you’ll see.

The number three title this month was A Helping of Love by Andrew Grey, the latest entry in his Taste of Love Stories. Series entries often do well, as fans of the series provide a pre-built audience and jump on the new title as soon as it comes out. This story gives readers not just sensuality and love, but also deals with disability issues and learning to trust after surviving an abusive relationship. One hero is wheelchair bound, and you guessed it, the other hero’s previous lover was was an abuser. This one looks like another hit for Mr. Grey.

From the sweetness of A Helping of Love, we head to something considerably rougher for the second place title. Mine by Mary Calmes features a cover that Tori Benson, in her review over at Heroes and Heartbreakers, just shouted out as, and I quote, “ZOMG!” But besides the cover, the story is about a co-dependent couple who make some seriously risky life-style choices. Choices risky enough to get one of the men kidnapped. The thing is, that kidnapping seems to be on top of some death threats. Not instead, mind you, in addition. It’s pretty clear that getting to an HEA for this pair is going to take some major work, but the reviewers say that it is well worth buckling up for the roller-coaster ride.

Number one is a book that was a  “Recommended Read” at Guilty Pleasures and a “Top Pick” at Night Owl Reviews, as well as highly rated at a host of other sites. Which title am I talking about? Appropriately, it’s Rarer than Rubies by EM Lynley. The main characters in this one are an M/M romance writer on vacation in Bangkok and the spy who falls in love with him. (Reed Acton, the mysterious man who starts following around our hero, Trent Copeland, isn’t exactly a spy, but…it sort of fits.) One reviewer said it was like an M/M version of Romancing the Stone. That apparently worked really, really well for a lot of readers and reviewers. Books that are this much fun are rarer than rubies. Truly.

That’s it for Ebook Review Central for this week. We’ll be back next week for the Samhain March feature. Ta-ta for now!

 

Ebook Review Central, Dreamspinner Press, February 2012

We’re back at Ebook Review Central to take a look at the Dreamspinner Press titles from February 2012. But before we do that, I’d like to give a shout-out to Ariel Tachna from Dreamspinner for her session at the Book Bloggers and Publishers Online Conference on March 7.

Ariel said that one of the big reasons Dreamspinner placed all of their titles on NetGalley was to give librarians a chance to review the entire Dreamspinner catalog every month.

Ebook Review Central was created as a way for librarians to have “one-stop-shopping” for reviews of ebook-only or ebook-predominately titles. Over the last few months, I’ve discovered that a lot of readers, authors and publishers are finding it useful. I’m very happy with that!

Back to the February featured titles…

The first feature is Chase in Shadow by Amy Lane. There was absolutely no question that this would be number one. Every review is near or at the top of the reviewer’s rating scale, and there is a reason. This book isn’t just a story, this one seems to reach out and grab the heartstrings of every person who reads it. Because this one evokes personal stories. This is about one young man who is trying, so hard, to take care of everyone in his life but himself. He’s leading a double life, and pretending he’s not gay. He has a fiancé he loves. His life is a struggle on every level, financially, educationally, with his family. When his two lives collide, he almost doesn’t make it. And the story of his nearly not surviving that collision is what touches all the reviewers.

Ty’s Obsession by SJD Peterson is a story with a decidedly different flavor. This contemporary western BDSM tale is the second featured story of the month. Ty’s story is the third tale in Peterson’s Whispering Pines Ranch series (after Lorcan’s Desire and Quinn’s Need) and the reviewers say that the crew just gets better with each story. Also that the story needs to be read in order, so be prepared to get them all, since Peterson leaves loose ends dangling that lead to the next book. But series fans are more than happy to dangle, eagerly waiting for that next book.

Last, I’m going to give the third featured place to a January book. There weren’t a lot of reviews for this one when the January 2012 ERC for Dreamspinner went to “press” but in between, the word-of-mouth has clearly gone around, and it’s very, very good.

Bonds of Earth by G. N. Chevalier is a book about not just surviving a war, but also about surviving the peace. And about having dreams above your station, and trying to make them come true, and what happens when a war shatters you. And how rebuilding someone else helps you rebuild yourself. The clear message that war is always hell, and that not all wounds are physical, since the war in this story is the first “War to End All Wars”, the one history now labels World War I. And added to all of that the love story of two gay men who fall in love at a time when imprisonment is still a very real possibility.

Bonds of Earth sounds like an absolutely fantastic read, but I agree with a comment that several reviewers mentioned, that the cover doesn’t do it justice.

But that’s it for this week. Please join me again next week at Ebook Review Central. March Madness will continue with the February featured titles from Samhain Publishing.

 

Ebook Review Central, Dreamspinner Press, January 2012

We’re back at Ebook Review Central taking a look at the January 2012 titles from Dreamspinner Press. And it’s a relief to be back to the usual 25-30 titles in the month. I’m glad the Advent Calendar is only once a year!

But let’s talk about the January titles, shall we? After all, Christmas is so, well, last year.

Two of this month’s featured books for Dreamspinner have something in common. Both books have something blue in the title, although it’s definitely not the same kind of blue.

The blue moon in the title of Rowena Sudbury’s novella Blue Moon refers to the phrase “once in a blue moon”, at least according to the author. The story is about two pro wrestlers who are surprised by love in the most unlikely of circumstances. The reviewers were all equally surprised by how quickly the pages of this story flew by, and also by how much they fell in love with the characters. The author gave everyone an intro into the intensity of the wrestling world, and a peek into the heads and hearts of two very intense men. The happy ending is touching, and according to one reviewer, “very, very sweet”.

The blue in Delsyn’s Blues by Lou Sylvre refers to music. As in “the blues”. In this second book in the Vasquez & James series, Sonny James is grieving, and he is listening to a voice singing the blues. The problem is that Sonny is busy revisiting the mistakes of his past, and that voice he’s hearing is coming from beyond the grave. Meanwhile, his partner Luki Vazquez needs him in the here and now. And Sonny really needs to start focusing on the present, because somebody wants him dead.

Delsyn’s Blues is the followup to last year’s Loving Luki Vasquez. Reviewers recommend reading that book first to get the full flavor of the intensity between Sonny and Luki, as well as the backstory on Delsyn. For romantic suspense readers, this series sounds like an excellent read.

And the final title for the month is Galley Proof by Eric Arvin. Reviewers describe this as “an impossible to put down novel that is fun, witty and though-provoking.” The two heroes of Galley Proof are a fiction writer and the editor who shakes up his life. Logan Brandish is an author who needs shaking up. His life seems perfect, small-town, boyfriend, cat–but it’s not. Logan is in a rut and his writing shows it. When a new editor named Brock breezes in and tells him his writing is crap (which it is) Logan runs away, to Italy. But not before Brock has shaken up his entire life.

Because Galley Proof is about writers and editors, this has to be well written or it wouldn’t work. After all, writers and editors are supposed to be able to use words well, otherwise they wouldn’t be writers and editors! All the reviewers love it, and I can understand why. We all love authors. But the reviews are terrific, so if you are looking for a contemporary romance, and you want witty, check this out.

Writing, wrestling and murder. What a week!
We’ll be back next week, with another exciting edition of Ebook Review Central. Next week  it will be time to look at Samhain Publishing for January 2012.

 

Ebook Review Central for Dreamspinner Press for December 2011

Welcome back to Ebook Review Central! This is another accidental Christmas issue, because this week we’re featuring the December 2011 titles from Dreamspinner Press. And in December, Dreamspinner’s biggest event was their 2011 Advent Calendar, I’ll Be Home for Christmas, featuring 32 Holiday themed titles. It made for a huge month at Dreamspinner, with a total of 59 titles published.

Regular readers of Dreamspinner titles must have been overwhelmed by the number of books available, or they were overcome by Christmas cheer. One thing they didn’t do was spend a lot of time slaving away at reviews.

Because there wasn’t a lot of action on the new reviewing front, there are only two featured titles this week.

Twelve Days by Isabelle Rowan is a holiday story. It’s also a sequel to her earlier book, A Note in the Margin. This is not just a story about the holidays, this is a story about the first Christmas that a relatively new couple, John and David, get to spend together. And John owns a bookstore, which is cool all by itself.  But this is a story about love and wanting the one you love to be happy, and also about healing past the broken places. It sounds just tailor-made for the holiday season.

Blue Notes by Shira Anthony is not a holiday story. It’s a life-changing story. Jason Green goes home one night in Philadelphia and finds his fiancee in bed with another man. So what does he do? He takes a two-month sabbatical from work and goes to stay at his sister’s apartment in Paris. In Paris he starts a love affair with jazz, a love affair with a jazz player named Jules, and, of course, a love affair with Paris. But what will happen when the two months are over?

Although there isn’t a third featured book, I’d like to give a special shout out to Serena Yates at Queer Magazine Online for reading and reviewing the entire 2011 Advent Calendar. She’s the only reviewer who managed this particular feat, and I salute her. If I’d had to make my way through that much Christmas cheer, no matter how good it read when I started, by the end I’d have shoved a candy cane down somebody’s throat, possibly my own.

While the new titles didn’t get a lot of reviewing attention, two of Dreamspinners’ October titles stood at the top of just about everyone’s “Best of 2011” list. I’m referring, of course, to Rick Reed’s Caregiver and Roux & Urban’s Divide & Conquer. I’m proud to say that both titled were featured on ERC in the October 2011 Dreamspinner post.

Caregiver has appeared on the Best of 2011 lists at Indie Reviews, Reviews at Jessiewave‘s Guest Reviewers top pics and Top 2 Bottom Reviews. It’s also a nominee for Best Book of the Year at LRC Cafe.

Roux & Urban’s fourth book in their Cut & Run series, Divide & Conquer, is even more popular. It’s on both Helyce’s and Mandi’s Best of 2011 lists at Smexy Books, as well as on Wave’s Best of the Year list at Reviews at Jessewave, Red Hot Books, Top 2 Bottom Reviews, and Fiction Vixen.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see more kudos roll in for these two books. They are both winners!

That’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next week with the Samhain December 2011 titles. And it will still be Christmas.

Ebook Review Central for Dreamspinner Press for November 2011

Happy Boxing Day to those in the UK, Canada, NZ and Australia! For the rest of us, happy Monday. And welcome to the post-Christmas edition of Ebook Review Central, where it’s still November, and it’s time to look at Dreamspinner Press titles for that month.

Dreamspinner fans seem to have started their Turkey Day comas early in November. Every title received at least one review, but there were no overwhelming favorites this month. Just a nice, steady stream of reviews.

Last month’s featured titles continued to receive acclaim. Rick R. Reed’s Caregiver continued to rack up even more reviews this month. Roux and Urban’s Divide & Conquer not only added to its impressive review tally, it made several “best of 2011” lists, including Samantha’s Top Picks for 2011 at Fiction Vixen and Library Journal’s Best Ebook Romances for 2011.

But we’re here to highlight the November titles.

Cop Out by KC Burn is a story “about love, romance, growth, and doing the right thing,” according to one reviewer. This is a clearly both a police story and a love story with multiple twists on the way to its deserved happy ending. When Kurt’s detective partner is killed in the line of duty, Kurt knows that he must visit his partner’s family. It’s what partners do. But when he tries to locate his partner’s family, he has to do some investigation. His partner was deeply in the closet, and kept his life partner, Davy, isolated and alone to the point of abuse. Now Davy has no friends or support network, and is alone with his grief. Kurt and Davy’s journey to friendship, trust and eventually love make the story of Cop Out.

It’s Not Shakespeare by Amy Lane is an “opposites attract” type of story.  James Richards is a college professor on the verge of settling into a rut for the rest of a pretty boring life. Instead, he moves to northern California to escape a bad breakup. One of his students sets him up with a friend of hers, and his life kick-starts its way out of that rut he had started to settle into.  Rafael Ochoa is the “friend”, a younger, handsome, motorcycle mechanic from the other side of the tracks who seems like a wet dream come true for James, but they shouldn’t have anything in common. But they are just what each other needs.  (And all the reviewers say that James’ dog Marlowe is adorable!)

Unshakeable Faith by Lisa Worrall is an amnesia story. Brody Tyler feels obligated to help a young man who suffers a vicious attack and then walks into his bar with amnesia, so he invites him to stay. They fall deeply in love, in spite of the young man’s lack of memory. Brody calls him “Nash”. Six months later, “Nash” is the victim of a hit and run driver, wakes up in the hospital, and remembers his original life, but not his life with Brody. Brody convinces Nash’s family that he is Nash’s bodyguard, so that he can continue to be near him, and find out who is after him. Ms. Worrall doesn’t just make the amnesia story work, she convinces the readers that the life during the amnesia spell is real enough that we mourn the relationships that are lost when it ends. Amnesia stories can be hard to make believeable, but Lisa Worrall carries it off, according to the reviewers.

That’s all for this week. See you on next week (next year!) for Samhain Publishing’s November 2011 titles.

 

Ebook Review Central for Dreamspinner Press for October 2011

It’s time for Ebook Review Central to take a look at the Dreamspinner Press titles from October 2011.

But before we move to the featured titles, let’s take a moment to look back at September. The September list has been updated to reflect additional reviews since the last time we looked at Dreamspinner, and there are a couple of titles that need to be mentioned. Legal Artistry by Andrew Grey, one of last month’s featured titles, received even more praise this month, probably because the sequel, Artistic Appeal, was published in October. Chasing Seth, another ERC featured title, also received even more reviews. It was a late entry in September (Sept. 30), so people may have been still reading it mid-month.

Now on to the October titles! Dreamspinner published 25 titles again this month. There were a lot of titles from continuing series this month, and it was clear from the reviews that reviewers were definitely waiting for those series books, because they generated most, but not all, of the reviewing buzz this month.

The Dreamspinner featured titles are:

Caregiver by Rick R. Reed was the only non-series title to generate a significant number of new reviews this month. From the book blurbs in the reviews, it sounds like a “three-hankie special”, but in a really good way. Every reviewer describes it as a fantastic book that they read with a lump in their throats. This novel is about the AIDS epidemic, and it is set in 1991, at a time when AZT was the only drug available and infection was still considered a death sentence. The reviewers all mention that the way the novel is written is unconventional, and that the author lets the plot drive the story, but that the characters make this a story well worth reading.

Divide & Conquer by Abigail Roux and Madeleine Urban is the fourth book in their Cut & Run series. Not only did it run away with the reviews, but the most of the reviewers were looking for ratings higher than they normally use in order to rate it. Everyone who follows this series, and it seemed like that was everyone, had fantastic things to say. The Cut & Run series is a mystery/suspense series about two FBI agents, Ty Grady and Zane Garrett, who aren’t even sure they can work together at first. Falling for each other isn’t even on the radar, at least at the beginning. But by the point of this fourth book these two men have definitely managed to figure out a working partnership–the personal partnership is still a work in progress. And it’s that work in progress that keeps readers coming back for more, along with the adrenaline of the suspense plot in each new book. (For the release of Divide & Conquer, Dreamspinner made all four titles in this series available to reviewers on NetGalley. A couple of the reviewers listed mentioned that they read the entire series in one gulp because of this. The strategy definitely paid off!)

Talker’s Graduation by Amy Lane is the final featured title. Based on the reviews, this one comes with a caveat. On the one hand, readers clearly loved this book. On the other hand, it apparently only makes sense if you’ve read the other two first. This novella is the “payoff” story to the two previous books in the series, Talker and Talker’s Redemption. It’s very clear that Tate Walker and Brian Cooper, the two characters in this story, have had an extremely difficult life. Graduation is when they finally get their happy ending. They just have to earn it first.

And that wraps up the Dreamspinner titles for this month! Please come back next week when Ebook Review Central will be looking at the Samhain Publishing titles for October 2011.

Ebook Review Central for Dreamspinner Press September 2011

The second issue of Ebook Review Central covers Dreamspinner Press ebooks for the month of September 2011.

In September, Dreamspinner published 25 ebook titles. Because all Dreamspinner ebooks are available to libraries on OverDrive, and because reviews for Dreamspinner titles are hard to find, all Dreamspinner ebooks are listed whether or not there was also a print book.

The basic information listed is for the ebook format, since this is Ebook Review Central! So there’s title, author, date, publisher, series if applicable, suggested categories from the publisher, price and eISBN. And the-ever popular book cover.

Then there’s the review listings. Who, where, a link and a grade or rating if the reviewer gave a rating or ranking. Not everyone who reviews does.

For a complete review of how Ebook Review Central came about, the not necessarily gory details are here. And if you are interested in the particulars of what might be included in ranking or reviewing, the complete explication of ranking and reviewing is in the first issue, along with the featured titles for Carina Press.  The total list of reviews and titles for Carina is at Ebooks Review Central.

The list of reviews was up-to-date as of 10/29/11. I will be cycling through Carina Press, Dreamspinner Press, Samhain Press, and a “player-to-be-named-later” every four weeks, always looking at one month previous, so there’s a chance for the reviews to be posted. I’m still looking for that fourth publisher or publishers, so I’d appreciate any suggestions. I will add updates to the September list when I come back around to Dreamspinner next month.

As I did last week, I want to highlight the titles that had the most buzz, based on the reviews.

Chasing Seth, by J.R. Loveless garnered the most reviews. Based on what the blogosphere is saying, it is a good story because it succeeds on multiple levels. This is a male/male romance that deals with bigotry between whites and Native Americans, and it’s also a paranormal story dealing with shapeshifters, werewolves specifically, and apparently does an excellent job on that front as well.

Legal Artistry by Andrew Grey is the fifth book in the Bottled Up series. Series books in general tend to be highly anticipated, and either they satisfy pent up demand, or occasionally they disappoint. Legal Artistry seems to be just what fans of this series were waiting for, and the extremely positive reviews reflect that. Several reviewers mention that Grey’s books are the ones that started their enjoyment of the M/M genre. Librarians might consider this when looking for books to purchase.

Angel by Laura Lee certainly got talked about a lot. Angel is Dreamspinner’s first title in their new Itineris Press, where they intend to publish faith-based GLBT literature. The book was discussed in some surprising places, both as a story and for it’s faith-based aspects. Read the reviews and see what you think.

That’s a wrap for this week. See you next week for a look at Samhain’s September titles.