For many people in the United States, this is a three-day weekend. November 11 is Veterans Day, the day we celebrate the service of all U.S. military veterans. It also coincides with holidays around the world such as Armistice Day and Remembrance Day that mark the anniversary of the end of World War I.
Veterans Day is not one of those holidays that gets moved around to the nearest convenient Monday. The date of November 11 has historical significance (see above, end of WWI). This year 11/11 just happens to be on a Monday.
And now on to our regularly scheduled linkification of bloggy events from this week and next week…
$10 Gift Card from the Fall Into Winter Romance Giveaway Hop — Perava P. Work in Progress by Christina Esdon (ebook) — BN100 Take Me Cowboy by Jane Porter (ebook) — Jo J. Getting Rowdy by Lori Foster (paperback) — Lily B.
Format read: ebook provided by Edelweiss Formats available: Paperback, ebook, audiobook Genre: Contemporary Romance, New Adult Romance Series: Ivy Chronicles #1 Length: 305 pages Publisher: William Morrow Date Released: November 5, 2013 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository
Pepper has been hopelessly in love with her best friend’s brother, Hunter, for like ever. He’s the key to everything she’s always craved: security, stability, family. But she needs Hunter to notice her as more than just a friend. Even though she’s kissed exactly one guy, she has just the plan to go from novice to rock star in the bedroom—take a few pointers from someone who knows what he’s doing.
Her college roommates have the perfect teacher in mind. But bartender Reece is nothing like the player Pepper expects. Yes, he’s beyond gorgeous, but he’s also dangerous, deep—with a troubled past. Soon what started as lessons in attraction are turning both their worlds around, and showing just what can happen when you go past foreplay and get to what’s real…
My Review:
The “lessons in love” trope is a classic for good reason. Exploring the depths of passion, particularly for the first time, makes it all to easy for someone to be swept away by emotion. And teaching someone to find their passion makes for a very powerful bond. Or more simply, it is difficult to make love without feeling at least a little love.
In Sophie Jordan’s Foreplay, the two people learning that lesson are Pepper and Reece. Although this is a New Adult romance, the situation is a bit unusual because while Pepper is 19 and in college, Reece is 23 and managing his family’s bar.
Part of the “new adult” romance flavor is that the protagonists, while older than in young adult books, are at the point in their lives where they are making the kind of decisions that will affect their whole lives.
Also that they’re on their own and having sex. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
Reece is almost outside the trope. He’s been forced to take on the full set of adult responsibilities at a very young age. His mother died when he was young, his father was abusive and then became handicapped as the result of an auto accident, and Reece raised his younger brother. Now he manages the bar full-time. His ability to make mistakes and do things over is pretty limited. He’s already supporting his family.
The one thing he does that puts him in the frame for this story is agree to help Pepper learn how to snare the young man she thinks she’s always loved. Reece agrees to be the experienced man who will give her lessons in how to flirt and participate in romantic foreplay, because she’s totally clueless.
He already wants her for himself, and can’t figure out how any guy could have overlooked her for as many years as she says the guy she is pining for has. But he decides to take what he can get, even if actual sex isn’t part of the picture.
Part of what Pepper is eventually planning to give the guy of her dreams is her virginity.
About those dreams of Pepper’s. Well, she and Reece are a pair, because her childhood had even less security in it than his did, and that’s what this is all about. Her dream of marrying Hunter Montgomery isn’t about the guy so much as it is about the package deal. She wants to be part of a secure family, because she never had one of her own.
Her addict mother dropped her off at her grandmother senior apartment facility when she was 11 because mom couldn’t protect her from the low-life scum she used in order to buy her next fix any longer.
Hunter, his sister Lila and their parents lived next door. They seemed like the perfect family. Pepper fell for that and she’s been dreaming about it ever since. When Hunter breaks up with his girlfriend, Pepper sees her chance, but doesn’t know how to go about it. That’s where Reece comes in.
So to speak.
But the sweetness in their relationship is that as soon as Pepper and Reece start dancing around each other, it is a real relationship. Even though Pepper is upfront that it’s practice for someone else, and Reece says he accepts that, she can’t resist the pull of a man who really sees her and is there for her, just as she is.
She’s pretty but also shy and serious and bookish. She’s gotten a ton of student loans in order to go to college, and she works at least two jobs. She’s careful and worries about a lot of things, and she has nightmares about the past. She’s afraid of being abandoned because it happened. Reece sees the real Pepper.
And once Hunter sees that another guy is interested in Pepper, Hunter sees her too. Now Reece has to figure out what, and who, she really wants.
Escape Rating B+: I adore the “lessons in love” type story, and it was particularly well done in Foreplay. Pepper’s social awkwardness makes sense for her character, and I could understand why she felt the way she did about wanting to be smoother and more practiced with guys.
It was obvious from the story that Pepper wasn’t really in love with Hunter. It took her an incredible amount of time to figure it out for herself, but it was pretty clear from the beginning. She fell for Reece a bit quickly, but she wasn’t really ever in love with Hunter. She wanted the security he represented, and that made complete sense.
The love scenes between Pepper and Reece were more than hot. They also did a fantastic job of conveying how she got swept away by what she was feeling, and that it was the first time she felt those incredible sensations. It was all too easy for the reader to get swept right along with her!
Pepper’s roommates were terrific friends and wingwomen! I hope that we get their stories in later books in The Ivy Chronicles.
This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
Format read: ebook provided by Edelweiss Formats available: ebook, paperback, audiobook Genre: New Adult romance, Contemporary romance Series: Losing It #3 Length: 323 pages Publisher: William Morrow & Company Date Released: October 15, 2013 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository
Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find where you truly belong…
Most girls would kill to spend months traveling around Europe after college graduation with no responsibility, no parents, and no-limit credit cards. Kelsey Summers is no exception. She’s having the time of her life . . . or that’s what she keeps telling herself.
It’s a lonely business trying to find out who you are, especially when you’re afraid you won’t like what you discover. No amount of drinking or dancing can chase away Kelsey’s loneliness, but maybe Jackson Hunt can. After a few chance meetings, he convinces her to take a journey of adventure instead of alcohol. With each new city and experience, Kelsey’s mind becomes a little clearer and her heart a little less hers. Jackson helps her unravel her own dreams and desires. But the more she learns about herself, the more Kelsey realizes how little she knows about Jackson.
My Review:
Finding It felt a bit loosely connected to the first two books in this series, Losing It and Faking It (reviewed here and here).
That seems kind of right, because at the beginning of the story, Kelsey Summers is only loosely connected to pretty much everything; reality, sobriety, safety, her own sense of identity and self-worth.
The ruin bar in Budapest where the story really begins is a metaphor for Kelsey’s life. She feels ruined and she’s working hard towards making the outside match the inside, even if that isn’t what she thinks she’s doing.
She thinks she’s collecting adventures by spending her way across Europe using her Daddy’s platinum American Express card. What she’s really doing is anesthetizing herself so that she doesn’t feel any pain.
Until Jackson Hunt swoops in and helps her stumble away from the Euro-trash flavor-of-the-night, but doesn’t take her anywhere except back to the hostel where she’s deliberately slumming it.
His departure, after taking care of her but not taking care of what they obviously both want, leaves her unsettled enough to want to see him again. Both fortunately and unfortunately for Kelsey, Jackson turns up just when she needs another rescue.
But this time he decides to stick around, since she seems to be making a habit of requiring his services. Except he’s not providing the services she definitely wants, the kind that make her forgot herself in a stranger’s arms and body for a night at a time.
Kelsey feels broken, and Jackson tries to help her pull herself together, without adding the sexual relationship they both want into the mix. It’s better if Kelsey finds a piece of herself before she tries to give any more of herself away to anyone else.
Even the man who might come to love her.
Because Jackson Hunt has already been where Kelsey is, even if he doesn’t know exactly what brought her there. He knows exactly what he’s protecting her from.
Particularly since her father paid him to be her bodyguard. Becoming her lover has totally screwed everything up. Especially Kelsey.
Escape Rating B+: On the one hand, the love story between Jackson and Kelsey is both very moving and very hot. You not only follow their adventure across Europe, you follow the push-pull of their intense attraction and his resistance and you want them to figure out a way to make things work.
On that other hand, Jackson’s secret in particular is screamingly obvious. While it becomes apparent through the story that Kelsey’s parents’ reasons for hiring a bodyguard may not have been totally pure, there’s no question in the reader’s mind that she needed some kind of safety net. She had totally stopped even minimally minding her own safety. She’d stopped caring about her future, any future. Jackson stepped in not just to keep her from drinking herself to death, but to keep her from getting beaten, raped, drugged or a whole lot of other bad things.
Kelsey was deliberately looking for friends in the lowest places she could find.
At first, it does seem like Kelsey is a whiny and bitchy little rich girl, pissing and moaning about the safe country-club lifestyle she doesn’t want to go back to, but also refusing to let go of daddy’s Amex. It’s only as Kelsey starts to reveal herself to Jackson that we figure out just what is going on. Or went on.
It’s not difficult to guess what Kelsey’s trauma is. The only questions are who the perpetrator was and what happened afterwards. Kelsey’s pain resides much more in the aftermath than the original event. And that totally makes sense.
Kelsey, like Bliss in Losing It and Cade in Faking It, trained as an actor. She uses her training to cover up whatever she really feels, to the point where the mask has become the only face she shows the world. Jackson forces her to really feel her own emotions, and then she discovers that everything they had was a lie.
But Kelsey has finally found either her courage, or her true self.
Jackson doesn’t save Kelsey after all. But he helped her build enough tools that she was able to save herself.
This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
We’re in Reno right now, and part of this is funny. It’s the setting for Lisa Kessler’s Hunter’s Moon, which I’m reviewing tomorrow. I can see the mountains from our room, at least during the day. At night there’s just this pink neon glow.
The drawback to staying at a casino hotel? This is the first public place I’ve been to in years that allows smoking. I’d forgotten what that’s like, and it’s not a memory I wanted to revive.
Format read: print book provided by the publisher Formats available: Paperback, ebook, audiobooks Genre: New Adult Romance Series: Losing It #2 Length: 304 pages Publisher: William Morrow & Company Date Released: June 4, 2013 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository
Mackenzie “Max” Miller has a problem. Her parents have arrived in town for a surprise visit, and if they see her dyed hair, tattoos, and piercings, they just might disown her. Even worse, they’re expecting to meet a nice, wholesome boyfriend, not a guy named Mace who has a neck tattoo and plays in a band. All her lies are about to come crashing down around her, but then she meets Cade.
Cade moved to Philadelphia to act and to leave his problems behind in Texas. So far though, he’s kept the problems and had very little opportunity to take the stage. When Max approaches him in a coffee shop with a crazy request to pretend to be her boyfriend, he agrees to play the part. But when Cade plays the role a little too well, they’re forced to keep the ruse going. And the more they fake the relationship, the more real it begins to feel.
My Review:
This is a marvelous story about how being oh so wrong can turn into being oh so right.
What makes both Cade and Max interesting is that they are both faking it in the beginning of the story. Max is totally faking who she is, and Cade is faking what he feels. so even though they don’t look like they fit, they actually do fit, in a weird way. Because they both really need to learn to stop. Sort of.
Cade Winston is an actor, so he needs to at least learn when he’s faking. After all, faking is his job. He has to be good at it. But he has to stop pretending to himself. All that’s doing is making him depressed.
He has to get past losing Bliss. And is there ever a metaphor in there. Because the Bliss that Cade lost was a person and not a state of being and absolutely not his to lose. (That story is in Losing It, reviewed here) Bliss Edwards has moved on, and Cade has to, too.
Max Miller keeps pretending to her parents that she isn’t a musician in New York City. When she visits home, she covers up her tattoos and her piercings and acts like the pretentious upper-crust society woman they think they know, instead of the musician and songwriter she really is. They think that marriage and membership in the country club is the only proper future. That is the opposite of Max, but they don’t see it.
They can’t see that Max believes that she should have been the one who died in the accident that killed her sister Alex. That Max feels unworthy and that every time they belittle or disregard her choices, they make her feel less worthy.
Only her music makes her feel alive. Until she needs a fake boyfriend who does not look or act like the tattooed drummer currently sponging off her that passes for her real boyfriend.
Cade has just said goodbye to Bliss and her boyfriend, the man who will ask Bliss to marry him. Cade’s dreams are over. Max, finding herself in the middle of a surprise visit by her parents, sucks him into her need for a fake boyfriend, and he acts the part. Cade’s an actor, he does it well.
Her parents love him. And he feels like Max is the sparkliest thing in his universe. For a few minutes, he totally forgets Bliss.
Max has herself a fake boyfriend for as long as she needs one to convince her parents that she has not sold herself to Satan. Because she hasn’t. She isn’t doing anything wrong except choosing music over convention.
Cade needs Max to knock his overly conventional universe off its axis for a while. And Max needs Cade not just to look conventional, but to provide her with just the tiniest bit of stability in her otherwise chaotic life.
And to be her fake boyfriend. Until neither of them is faking anything.
Escape Rating A-: Faking It has more depth than Losing It, and it felt like a more involving story. I also found the characters more believable than in the first story. Unlike Garrett in Losing It, Cade does not have the patience of a saint and gets angry at Max when he should. He also loses heart when things go against him. Garrett was too good to ring true. Cade may look too perfect but thankfully he doesn’t act that way.
It’s the story of Max putting on her “big girl panties” and dealing with a whole lot of awfully bad stuff. She doesn’t want to hurt or disappoint her parents, but at the same time, she’s past the point where she can live with herself if she lets them decide her life for her. It takes a lot of courage to chose an unexpected path.
There are no villains here. Max’s parents aren’t bad parents. They are just scared. They lost one daughter to tragedy, so they try to protect the other by keeping to paths they believe are safe. Their choices are misguided but not evil.
On the other hand, sister-in-law Bethany may just be the spawn of Satan that Max says she is.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
This is another one of those Sundays when it is just too pretty to be inside. But here I am. My home office has a lovely tree-lined view on the other side of the street–appropriately for this Halloween month, those trees shade the very nicely landscaped cemetery across the road. Hopefully the neighbors will be quiet at the end of the month!
The winner of the ebook copy of Treacherous Temptations by Victoria Vane is Julie B. The winner of the ebook copy of Heavy Metal Heart by Nico Rosso is Jo J.
We found a new way of putting together the “rogue’s gallery” of new books. It’s the gallery function of WordPress. And YAY! Hopefully it looks awesome, because it’s way easier than playing with GIMP. Which wasn’t half bad but occasionally had its own special moments.
The gallery is randomized, so it should be differently cool every time you refresh the page.
For many people in the United States, this is a three-day weekend. November 11 is Veterans Day, the day we celebrate the service of all U.S. military veterans. It also coincides with holidays around the world such as Armistice Day and Remembrance Day that mark the anniversary of the end of World War I.
Blog Recap:
I’ll Be Home for Christmas by Jessica Scott (review)
