Chapter Reveal & Giveaway: Weak At The Knees by Jo Kessel

Title: Weak at the Knees
Genre: New Adult Contemporary Romance
Author: Jo Kessel
Publisher: CreateSpace
Pages: 292
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1490397604
ISBN-13: 978-1490397603

Purchase at AMAZON (US) & AMAZON (UK)

“We got so busy living life that we forgot to live our dreams.”

Danni Lewis has been playing it safe for twenty-six years, but her sheltered existence is making her feel old ahead of time. When a sudden death plunges her into a spiral of grief, she throws caution to the wind and runs away to France in search of a new beginning.

The moment ski instructor Olivier du Pape enters her shattered world she falls hard, in more ways than one.

Their mutual desire is as powerful and seductive as the mountains around them. His dark gypsy looks and piercing blue eyes are irresistible.

Only she must resist, because he has a wife - and she’d made a pact to never get involved with a married man.

But how do you choose between keeping your word and being true to your soul?

Weak at the Knees is Jo’s debut novel in the new adult, contemporary romance genre – a story of love and loss set between London and the heart of the French Alps.

Chapter Reveal

First Chapter: I don’t like being English. I never have. It’s always felt like such an un-sexy nationality. Let’s face it, if any foreigner were asked to conjure up a vision of the typical male Brit, most likely they’d be thinking of someone slightly overweight, over-boozed and over sunburned. Most other Europeans fare better. The Italians are all considered hot-blooded Romeos whilst the Scandinavians are a blonde bunch of Adonis’s. As for the French, granted they have a reputation for being curt and unfaithful, but deep down the rest of the world respects their infidelity, crediting the lot with being expert lovers even though most of them probably aren’t. The most flattering of British descriptions is that of an English Rose, but that wouldn’t fit someone like me. Far from being a sinewy blonde with a porcelain complexion, I’m more a pint-sized pre-Raphaelite – short, with waist-length brown curly hair and far too many curves. Not that being an English rose is a particularly flattering description anyway. Yes, it might be a beauteous flower, but it’s also got prickly stems which snare. No, in my opinion, whichever way you look at it, on a global, sexual scale, being English isn’t often an asset. Hugo’s English. He’s as stiff upper lip Hooray Henry as they come. He’s tall and good-looking in that pretty, public schoolboy, foppish kind of way and he’s a charmer to boot. Think Hugh Grant and you’re not far off the mark - although if it was a toss up between Hugh (particularly the Four Weddings Hugh) and Hugo, there’d be no competition. It would be Grant all the way. I’ve always had a bit of a crush on him. Ironically, many women from all over the world would probably jump at the chance to jump on my Hugo because he’s English. Not because he’s the typical Brit though, but because he’s got the Hugh Grant factor and foreign females fall for that kind of thing. It’s the look, the manners and the self-deprecation. For me, however, nothing beats your language being spoken by somebody who’s not from your country. It’s undeniably sexy. It’s why I like foreigners. Hugo is what you’d call a catch. My mother definitely thinks so. I’m sure she’s secretly hoping we’ll end up together. Son-in-law material doesn’t come any better. She could show him off and brag away till the cows came home. “My Danni’s Hugo” she’d boast to all her friends, with an air of smug superiority, “He’s a Barrister. He’s ever so clever.” Indeed he is. Apparently you need to be fluent in Ancient Greek and Latin to get a first in Classics at Oxford like Hugo. Now, that might seem a useless skill to the less educated of us – after all there are no more ancient Greeks or Romans with whom to converse – but you’ve still got to be bloody brilliant to master it. You try making head or tail of a page of Homer’s Iliad! You’d soon understand why they coined the phrase ‘It’s all Greek to me’. We met when I was fifteen. He was a couple of years older. “Danni Lewis” he’d remarked, at the end of our first proper conversation at some run-of-the mill teen party we’d gone to. “I think you’re great. You’re so original. You’re so enigmatic.” “Well, thanks very much,” I’d replied. “You’re pretty nice too.” What I’d really wanted to ask was ‘what the hell does ‘enigmatic’ mean?’ I didn’t dare though because I didn’t want to come across as intellectually inferior. He’d clearly assumed that I was as clever as he was, which meant knowing a word like enigmatic even at the age of fifteen. These days I work hard at not making assumptions, although most of the time I fail dismally. I suspect we all do. Anyway, as soon as I got back home I’d fired up my computer and checked the meaning of the word ‘enigmatic’ on an on-line dictionary. ‘Deliberately mysterious’ or ‘puzzling’ were the definitions I got. I’d liked that. It conjured up a vision of someone beautiful but unobtainable, a woman over whom you could obsess but not possess; a woman about whom one could never assume. It took us ages to get together. We indulged in hours of what we called phone sex. In truth there was nothing remotely sexual about it. A typical late night, tucked up in bed conversation would go as follows: HUGO: “Watch you doin?” ME: “Mmmmmm, I’m just lying here, thinking about you lying there. Where are you, watch YOU doin?” HUGO: “I’m just lying here on my bed, thinking about you lying there.” ME: “U ON your bed or IN your bed?” HUGO: “I’m on it.” ME: “Well, why don’t you get in it?” HUGO: “Why?” And so the scintillating dialogue would continue – although you’d have thought that a bloke who was destined to get a first from Oxford might be able to make slightly more dynamic conversation. I think the reason it took me six months to secure a date was because I kept being too enigmatic. The deliberately mysterious and puzzling me was quite clearly sending out the wrong signals. Hugo assumed I wasn’t interested. Eventually one day, we were both sitting on my box room bed at my parents’ house in Hendon, north London, playing this stupid truth yes or no game when he came clean and I came clean and it was all very sweet and a date was put in the diary. --------------------------------------------------------------- I was ten years old and having lunch with my grandmother. I think I’d just dared to ask (even though she was eighty-two) if she was still having sex with my grandfather. She never answered the question, but decided it was time to offer some useful advice. She must have got this from a Mills and Boon novel, because she sure as hell didn’t get it from her marriage. She was a Polish immigrant and married the first man she’d met on British soil. She spent the rest of her life trying to make the best of it. The conversation was remarkably one-sided and as usual, she kept getting her V’s and W’s mixed up. It’s a common Eastern-European linguistic affliction apparently. Anyway, the mentor-like chat went a bit like this. “Danni darling.” “Yes grandma?” “Now I vant to tell you something and I vant you to try to remember it ven you get older.” “Ok Grandma”. “If a man ewwer makes you wery dizzy ven you kiss him, make sure you newwer let him go. You vant to make sure you marry him.” “Why? Does Grandpa make you wery dizzy?” “Eat your lunch Danni”. I was on the brink of repeating my original ‘are you and grandpa still having sex’ question, but thought against it, gagging myself with a forkful of lamb and mushy peas. With hindsight, I wish I hadn’t held back. I mean, do most octogenarians still have sex? If so, what are the chances of cardiac arrest mid-orgasm? ------------------------------------------- Anyway, Hugo didn’t make me wery dizzy when he kissed me, but it was still very nice and he did make me happy. Phone sex progressed to pillow talk and we had a really good, solid relationship. He knew me inside out and always had an uncanny knack of knowing exactly what I was thinking, which often got me in a lot of trouble. I loved his company. He made me laugh and he stimulated me intellectually. I mean, how many other seventeen-year olds do you know who are nicknamed Ariadne? That’s what he’s always called me. It took a while for me to pluck up the courage to ask who Ariadne actually was. It turned out she was this Princess from Greek mythology who fell in love with a bloke called Theseus who was due to be offered as a sacrificial victim to the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster. But in order to save her loved one from his horrible fate she’d stuffed a ball of thread into his pocket as he was led into this prison of a labyrinth, meant to be impossible to escape from. But thanks to her (and the thread) he did escape and was never sacrificed and they lived happily ever after. Hugo said he hoped an imaginary trail of string would always lead him to me, which is why he’d called me Ariadne. I think he was secretly hoping that I’d embrace this story with a bit more enthusiasm by calling him Theseus. But I couldn’t. It all felt a bit too un-cool. I preferred calling him Achilles, which really pissed him off because it didn’t demonstrate the same level of love and commitment. He hated the thought that he might be my Achilles heel. “Lighten up”, I’d said. “Don’t take everything so bloody literally.” I’ve got to hand it to him though. He’s the only person who’s ever got me into a bath under the auspices of scientific experimentation. One day he’d told me to bring my bikini with when I went round. I’d hoped that meant we were going to his parents’ posh health club, and was frankly a bit miffed when I got there and he said we were staying put. “Why did I bring my bikini then?” I’d protested. “My fault” he apologised. “You probably don’t need it. But we are doing something with water.” He led me into his parents’ bathroom. The tub had been filled to the brim. Curiously there were a whole load of plastic measuring jugs strewn across the floor. He explained that he’d been learning all about this Greek mathematician, Archimedes, the first person to work out that the volume of an object placed in a fluid was equal to the volume of the amount of fluid displaced by that object when submerged. For some bizarre reason, Hugo wanted to work out my body mass Archimedes style. He’d drilled a small hole just above the water line. The plan was that when I got in the bath, my body mass would trickle out the hole and Hugo would be waiting to collect it in the measuring jugs. “I don’t give a toss what my body mass is Hugo. I don’t even understand what you’re going on about.” “Don’t be such a killjoy Danni. It’ll take five minutes.” So off I went to put on my swimsuit and came back to stand hovering by the bath. “Are you sure this is going to work?” I was no scientist, but felt pretty certain all would not go according to plan. “Of course it will” snapped Hugo. I stepped gingerly into the tub. A little bit of water trickled into a jug Hugo was holding up to the hole. “OK, you can sit down now Danni. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do it so slowly, it’s all under control.” So I plonked myself down and Hugo looked on in horror as the volume of my body mass cascaded over the edge of the bath onto his parents’ cream shag pile, bypassing his too small hole entirely. “Achilles, I think you should stick to the Arts,” I laughed. “Oh shut up Ariadne. You never wanted it to work in the first place!” See, told you he always knew exactly what I was thinking. Anyway, never one to miss out on a golden opportunity, and seeing as I was already in the bath, he told me to shove up and let some of the water out. He took off his clothes and sloshed himself beside me. Secretly I think the whole thing had been about getting me half-naked in the bath with him. Christ knows why he hadn’t just suggested that in the first place. --------------------------- Even by the age of eighteen Hugo and I had spoken loads of times about marriage. “Do you think we’ll end up together” he’d ask. I’d pondered and then joked about a possible scenario. “I don’t know. If you ever asked me I’m sure I should say yes, but probably wouldn’t. I reckon I’ll be more intent on screwing up my life. Maybe I’ll come crying to you when I’m mid-thirties and divorced, by which time you’ll probably be blissfully married to somebody else and I’ll have to live with the fact that I had the chance of happiness but turned it down. I don’t know what it is about Hugo. Many people would dream of having what we have. It’s just sometimes I find myself in the kitchen of our Highgate flat (technically his flat, but we both live in it) sticking lemon sole under the grill when I should be out being wild and reckless.

Terms & Conditions:

By entering the giveaway, you are confirming you are at least 18 years old.

One winner will be chosen via Rafflecopter to receive one $100 Amazon Gift Card and one winner will be chosen to win the gift basket.

This giveaway begins October 7 and ends January 18.

Winners will be contacted via email on Monday, January 20, 2014.

Winner has 48 hours to reply.

Good luck everyone!

ENTER TO WIN!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Guest Post & Giveaway: Weak At The Knees by Jo Kessel

I'm really happy to welcome Jo Kessel, author of Weak At The Knees, who will  be guest posting for me today!  Don't forget to enter the awesome giveaway at the bottom of this post!

AS AN AUTHOR WHAT SCARES ME THE MOST - IS IT WRITING ABOUT SEX?

The scariest thing about being an author is that people will judge me. This is no different for any creative, be it an artist, an actor, or a movie director etc. We’re all putting our work out there in the public domain, hoping that people will enjoy it, but knowing that they will all have an opinion, be it good or bad.

But in addition to worrying about what the public will think about my work, I’m also concerned about what my friends and acquaintances think – especially other mothers in the school playground. My books are quite sexy and what I don't want is for people to look at me in a different way. I wonder if E L James has suffered from that at all?! I would love to ask her that question. But if I'm worrying about this, imagine how an actor might feel if they take their parent to see a film in which they star naked and engaging in torrid sex scenes! I think I would want the floor to open up and swallow me whole.

On a different note, but still relevant to being judged, I once wrote an article for a British newspaper on schools. It was a personal piece about choices I had made for my own children’s education. To protect my children’s identity I wrote under a pseudonym and thank goodness I did. There was a HUGE reaction to my article. Readers (in their hundreds) were leaving posts on the newspaper’s websites that were epic in length and mostly nasty in tone, with the odd supportive one in between. Even though logically I knew that these people didn’t know me or the full story (there’s a limit to what you can say in a thousand words) I took it all as a very personal attack.


This was a very important lesson for me. I learned that in future (and now as an author) I need to develop a much thicker skin and to not take anything too personally. In fact, I will concentrate on broadening my shoulders and standing ESPECIALLY proud, not DESPITE my sex scenes, but BECAUSE of them!

About The Author:

Jo Kessel is a journalist in the UK, working for the BBC and reporting and presenting for ITV on holiday, consumer and current affairs programs. She writes for several national newspapers including the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Guardian and the Express and was the anonymous author of the Independent’s hit column: Diary of a Primary School Mum.

When Jo was ten years old she wrote a short story about losing a loved one. Her mother and big sister were so moved by the tale that it made them cry. Having reduced them to tears she vowed that the next time she wrote a story it would make them smile instead. Happily she succeeded and with this success grew an addiction for wanting to reach out and touch people with words.

P.S Jo’s pretty certain one of her daughters has inherited this gene.

Other books by Jo Kessel include Lover in Law.

Her latest book is the new adult contemporary romance novel, Weak at the Knees.

Visit her website at www.jokessel.com.

Connect & Socialize with Jo!

TWITTER | FACEBOOK | GOODREADS

Terms & Conditions:

By entering the giveaway, you are confirming you are at least 18 years old.

One winner will be chosen via Rafflecopter to receive one $100 Amazon Gift Card and one winner will be chosen to win the gift basket.

This giveaway begins October 7 and ends January 18.

Winners will be contacted via email on Monday, January 20, 2014.

Winner has 48 hours to reply.

Good luck everyone!

ENTER TO WIN!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Title: Weak at the Knees
Genre: New Adult Contemporary Romance
Author: Jo Kessel
Publisher: CreateSpace
Pages: 292
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1490397604
ISBN-13: 978-1490397603

Purchase at AMAZON (US) & AMAZON (UK)

“We got so busy living life that we forgot to live our dreams.”

Danni Lewis has been playing it safe for twenty-six years, but her sheltered existence is making her feel old ahead of time. When a sudden death plunges her into a spiral of grief, she throws caution to the wind and runs away to France in search of a new beginning.

The moment ski instructor Olivier du Pape enters her shattered world she falls hard, in more ways than one.

Their mutual desire is as powerful and seductive as the mountains around them. His dark gypsy looks and piercing blue eyes are irresistible.

Only she must resist, because he has a wife - and she’d made a pact to never get involved with a married man.

But how do you choose between keeping your word and being true to your soul?

Weak at the Knees is Jo’s debut novel in the new adult, contemporary romance genre – a story of love and loss set between London and the heart of the French Alps.

Truth or Dare

Truth or Dare is a feature created by Jenna at Jenna {does} Books.
Click here for her original post.

Today's truth or dare challenges:

I chose Truth this time.

I have a lot of hobbies and skills.  Honestly, I think I'm too creative for my own good.  There are SO many things I'm interested in and want to do that there's no way I would be able to do it all. I'm interested in the following: writing, nail polish (and making my own polish), crafts, baking, cake decorating, cooking, photography, horror movies, shoes and lotssss more.

Review: Hunted by P.C. & Kristin Cast

Cover Source: GoodReads.com

Title: Hunted

Author: P.C. & Kristin Cast

Series: House of Night #5

Version Reviewed: Finished, Hardback

Website: www.houseofnightseries.com

GoodReads Summary:

What if the hottest guy in the world was hiding a nameless evil, and all he wanted was you?
At the start of this heart-pounding new installment of the bestselling House of Night series, Zoey’s friends have her back again and Stevie Rae and the red fledglings aren’t Neferet’s secrets any longer. But an unexpected danger has emerged. Neferet guards her powerful new consort, Kalona, and no one at the House of Night seems to understand the threat he poses. Kalona looks gorgeous, and he has the House of Night under his spell. A past life holds the key to breaking his rapidly spreading influence, but what if this past life shows Zoey secrets she doesn’t want to hear and truths she can’t face?
On the run and holed up in Tulsa’s Prohibition-era tunnels, Zoey and her gang must discover a way to deal with something that might bring them all down. Meanwhile, Zoey has a few other little problems. The red fledglings have cleaned up well – they’ve even managed to make the dark, creepy tunnels feel more like home – but are they really as friendly as they seem? On the boyfriend front, Zoey has a chance to make things right with super-hot ex-, Erik, but she can’t stop thinking about Stark, the archer who died in her arms after one unforgettable night, and she is driven to try to save him from Neferet’s sinister influence at all costs. Will anyone believe the power evil has to hide among us?

Honestly, I was eager to begin Hunted. With the end of the last installment in the series, things were left rocky, horrible, and confusing. So I couldn't wait to delve deeper into the next novel to find out exactly how Zoey and all the other fledglings would manage to get themselves out of this mess.

I won't lie, the first couple of chapters were a little boring to me, but I was still hooked and could not quit reading chapter after chapter. I was very curious to see how all these fledglings would handle themselves, minus the aid of adult vampyres. It was very interesting to find that they had seemed to create their own little town, their own world beneath and there were honestly a couple parts that had my pulse racing a little faster and my brain begging to know what was going to happen next. I found myself really not wanting anything bad to happen to any of these characters.

I do have to say though, that some of the situations Zoey is put it are getting a little exhausting. We're stuck getting aggravated at her and multiple male characters again as Zoey's boy trouble continue to be a problem in the world of the House of Night. I found myself begging her to just put some of these characters out of their misery and just (freaking) move on (already).

Another thing I wasn't very happy about is the backtrack to previous novels. In Untamed, novel number four, it seems like most of the "immature" language and childish ways of speaking were mostly gone. Every now and then we caught a glimpse of Zoey's kiddish words, but it wasn't overly annoying. In this novel,Hunted, we're thrown right back into it. With words like "bullpoopie", it seems Zoey's refusal to use cuss words is thrown back into third grade. Even the characters in the novel constantly bring it up and terrorize her over it. (How many times do we need to read one character telling her it's okay to cuss sometimes?). The continuity of this gets a little tiresome.

I also noticed that around the middle of the novel, there seemed to be quite a bit of typos and mistakes. Numerous times Darius' name was used when the character's were referring to Damien and Darius was nowhere near them. And there were a few punctuation errors too. Quotation marks that were put in the middle of paragraphs where characters had clearly not stopped speaking. I do not hold this against anyone though because I am the queen of the backspace button (I hit it four times in this sentence already). People make mistakes and sometimes there are just ridiculous typos that no one seems to notice until it's already too late. I go back numerous times after I have published a post to fix something that I never noticed until I threw it out there for the world to see.

All in all, there was some repetition in Hunted that I did not enjoy as much, but the novel itself was really good. I enjoyed it and would read it again. I have to repeat what I said about the last novel; the further you read into this series, the better the books get.

And I absolutely loved the ending to this novel. I found it very touching and even went back and re-read parts of it. 

Memorable Quotes:

"Remember how you said if you'd been Rose you would really never have let him go? Okay, well, let's do a little reenactment. I'm the gay-looking DiCaprio and you're Rose. You have to keep your eyes open and on my face, or you'll have let me go and I'll turn into a huge gay Popsicle."

"I'm seventeen! I can't save the world - I can't even parallel park!"

Favorite Character:
Rating: 3 Stars.

*This book was borrowed from a friend.

Spotlight & Excerpt: Red Threads by Stacey J. Mitchell

Title: Red Threads 

Author: Stacey J. Mitchell 

Release date: 2013 

Genre: Urban Fantasy 

Tour: Irresistible Reads Book Tours 

Book Description: 

Twenty-six-year-old Lily Robinson has her dream job in a museum, a great boyfriend, and is happy with her life – until the day she starts seeing red threads growing out of the chests of those around her. That same day Lily meets a stranger who seems to know her and understand what she is seeing. Lily doesn't believe him when he says she has a special ability, and it's only when he saves her life that she accepts something very strange is happening to her. Lily's life is rapidly turned upside-down when she gets thrown into the world of fate and meets the beings who influence it. Can she learn to control her ability to help herself and those around her who need it most? Will she actually want to when she finds out what she has to do? 

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18194046-red-threads?ac=1 

About the Author: 

I am a tea drinker and history geek who lives in south Wales. I love reading, being outdoors, cooking, and stand-up comedy—but I don't like bananas and insects.  I have been writing stories ever since I could hold a pen. I have a degree in Egyptology, and I love writing so much that I even enjoyed my university coursework.  

Official Website: http://www.staceyjmitchell.com 

Twitter: @_staceymitchell 

Excerpt

Lily and her father went into the station building to check that her train was on time and find out its platform number. After they had made their way out on to platform two, Lily turned to her father.
“Dad, are you all right? You and Mum, I mean.”
The expression on his face was unreadable, and he casually looked around at some of the other passengers waiting nearby. “Why do you ask, love?”
Lily noticed that he hadn’t tried to reassure her instantly. “I just feel like all I see you two do lately is argue. I don’t know, maybe I’m overreacting.”
“Oh, you know, people argue,” he said, starting to fiddle with the collar of his polo shirt. “It’s not the end of the world, just a rough patch. We all have them.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that if you want to convince me.”
People were beginning to gather in clusters here and there, signalling the train’s imminent arrival. There was a youngish couple nearby standing very close together, arms locked around each other, whispering. They started kissing, and Lily looked away. Usually public displays of affection turned her stomach, but today it just made her think of Nick. She couldn’t wait to get back to him and back to normality.
Lily’s father stuck his hands in his pockets and looked both ways down the platform, but his face was still unreadable. Lily saw him open his mouth to reply to her, but she didn’t have a clue what he said. An excruciating pain flashed across her forehead and her vision failed for a few seconds.
When she could bear to open her eyes again, the pain was gone and every single person on the platform was attached to a woven red rope. It seemed to grow out of their chests, just as the hair grows on a person’s head, and then disappeared off into the distance or into the chest of a person nearby.
She looked around with a queasy feeling of muted horror sitting in a lump in her chest. The ropes passed through buildings and people, never tripping anyone up or getting in the way. The people around her didn’t even seem aware of their tethers.
Looking around, Lily saw that everyone had one of the ropes growing out of their chests, including her father. But when she looked down at her own chest, there was nothing there.

Click here to check out the rest of the tour!

Brought to you by:

Shadows by Jennifer L. Armentrout

Cover Source: GoodReads.com

Title: Shadows

Author: Jennifer L. Armentrout

Series: Lux 0.5

Version Reviewed: Finished, eBook.

Website: www.jenniferarmentrout.com

GoodReads Summary:

The last thing Dawson Black expected was Bethany Williams. As a Luxen, an alien life form on Earth, human girls are…well, fun. But since the Luxen have to keep their true identities a secret, falling for one would be insane.
Dangerous. Tempting. Undeniable.
Bethany can’t deny the immediate connection between her and Dawson. And even though boys aren’t a complication she wants, she can’t stay away from him. Still, whenever they lock eyes, she’s drawn in.
Captivated. Lured. Loved.
Dawson is keeping a secret that will change her existence...and put her life in jeopardy. But even he can’t stop risking everything for one human girl. Or from a fate that is as unavoidable as love itself.

Okay, let me start off by saying that I have not read Obsidian and that this is also the very first book I have ever read by Jennifer L. Armentrout.  Therefore... Oh my God!  The ending of this killed me. I understand that it had to happen the way it happened for reasons that I will learn later but that doesn't make it any less horrible. (Horrible in that it made me sad, not in the way it was written).

I admit that at first, Shadows had quite a lot of parts that made me think of Twilight but after I got passed those parts the story became completely it's own and I was engrossed in it 100%. So far, I can understand what all the fuss is about.  It's well written, the characters are great and I haven't seen too many alien books out there. I can easily say that this is the very first alien book that I have ever read. Actually, that's a lie.  It's the second, The Host being number one.

I'm falling in love with the Lux series and I can't wait to continue with the rest of the books!


Memorable Quotes:

"But he was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs." -Kindle Location 765.

Favorite Character: Dawson & Daemon.
Rating: 4 Stars.

*I bought this book with my own money.

Review: Stir Me Up by Sabrina Elkins

Cover Source: GoodReads.com

Title: Stir Me Up

Author: Sabrina Elkins

Series:

Version Reviewed: eBook, ARC

Website: www.sabrinaelkins.com

GoodReads Summary:

Cami Broussard has her future all figured out. She'll finish her senior year of high school, then go to work full-time as an apprentice chef in her father's French restaurant, alongside her boyfriend, Luke. But then twenty-year-old ex-Marine Julian Wyatt comes to live with Cami's family while recovering from serious injuries. And suddenly Cami finds herself questioning everything she thought she wanted.
Julian's all attitude, challenges and intense green-brown eyes. But beneath that abrasive exterior is a man who just might be as lost as Cami's starting to feel. And Cami can't stop thinking about him. Talking to him. Wanting to kiss him. He's got her seriously stirred up. Her senior year has just gotten a lot more complicated….

Let me mention, first of all, this cover.  Gosh, he is yummy. I get excited any time I see a cover with him on it.

I was excited to read this book.  It sounded really great and definitely like something I would enjoy.  I got into the book easily and story really caught my attention.

I won't lie, however.  Just a few chapters in, the book didn't hold on to me as much.  I'm not sure exactly why, but I wasn't a huge fan of the writing.  I have to admit also that this is one of those books where the main character really gets on my nerves.  I think i I knew Cami in real life, I wouldn't be able to be friends with her.

Don't get me wrong, the book had it's moments but I can't say that I would openly recommend it.



Favorite Character: Julian
Rating: 2 Stars.

*This book was provided for free by the author for review.

Excerpt, Guest Post & Giveaway: Beneath The Skin by Amy Lee Burgess

I'm happy to welcome author Amy Lee Burgess today!  

The Inspiration Behind Beneath The Skin

At the time of Hurricane Katrina, I lived in New Orleans. I evacuated with my (now ex) husband, four cats and two computer towers. We never went back. I’d written since I was about ten years old, but I’d gone into a long hiatus during the New Orleans years. Stranded in Houston, a city very different than New Orleans, I went into what I now suspect was a bout with depression spiced with PTSD.

After we made the decision not to go back to New Orleans, I couldn’t seem to bond with my new city. I started writing again. About vampires. Time that had dragged and seemed soaked with futility now rushed past at blinding, glorious speed. By the time I looked up, almost a year had passed and I had eight novels. (None of them remotely publishable!)

My heroine, Anabel, was my touchstone and my lifeline in an increasingly changing world. My marriage broke up and I found myself alone for the first time since I left my childhood home. I was down to two cats by this point and I wanted Anabel’s story to keep going and going and going.

Friends convinced me to post the novels by installment on my LiveJournal. I started getting feedback and decided to rewrite starting from the second novel on. More time passed with me plunged into Anabel’s life.

I’d never seriously thought about publishing. The task seemed Herculean and my fragile sense of self and ego was so afraid of being crushed by rejection. I had an editor friend who invited me to submit something to her but not my vampire novel because she’d read some of it and knew the series was too long, too tangled, too free form. Okay, she didn’t tell me all that except for the too long part but after publishing the Wolf Within series I can look back and see for myself that Anabel was never destined to be published.

The shortest of Anabel’s novels, the first one, clocked in at over two hundred thousand words. And they just kept getting bigger and longer every novel.

Another friend, a writer, issued a challenge around this time – participate in NaNoWriMo. Thirty days to write fifty thousand word didn’t seem like much of a feat to me. Ha. But writing a fully articulated novel with a beginning, middle, and most importantly, an ending did seem like something I needed to do. I set my goal to write an entire novel in less than one hundred thousand words over the thirty days of November. And I would submit it for publication and see what happened.

I had to set Anabel aside for the first time in five years. Five years! Where had the time gone?

I didn’t know what I was going to write about, but I knew what I wasn’t going to write about. Vampires.

I’d been reading some Patricia Briggs novels at that point and a couple of other shifter novels. I’d always loved wolves and so I decided my NaNoWriMo novel would feature wolf shifters. Beyond that I had no idea.

First person POV? Third? I fretted for days before November 1st. The Anabel novels were written in third person with shifting POVs among the main characters yet my first love was always to write in first person. So a few days before November I decided that’s what I would do. I would write about a wolf shifter from the first person POV. But who was she? What did she look like? What was her name?

Halloween night I went to bed after setting my alarm so I could get up at 5 a.m. and start my shifter novel. I still had no idea who my heroine was. I fell asleep.

November 1st, around four-thirty in the morning I woke ahead of my alarm with a name circling around in my brain. Stanzie. What the hell kind of name was that? I knew my heroine’s name was Stanzie but, damn it, she had to have an actual real name. Stanzie had to be a nickname. But from what name would you get Stanzie?

Anastasia? Yeah, but Stanzie came from New England. Wait. What? She does? It seemed I had dreamed of her but I couldn’t recall anything but her name and now that she came from New England. (That made sense since I come from New England I can write about that region because I know it.)

Anastasia sounded like a foreign woman’s name and Stanzie needed something less haughty, something more Puritan. Like Hope or Faith or Charity or…Constance! You could get to Stanzie from Constance!

I leaped out of bed – much to the dismay of my cats – and ran to my keyboard. Stanzie was a real person to me now, albeit one I didn’t know yet.

So I sat down behind my computer and I could see Stanzie sleeping in a small single bed in a Paris hotel room. She was dreaming..about her wolf finding one of her bond mates. Dead.

Run. Run, run, run. Scared. Littles hide, no scrape legs, no make noise. Wind no push things. Fur stick up. Me scared. Me follow scent. Her. Me love Her. See big hard thing. Pushed in. Black water drip, drip, drip. Blood. Smell blood. Drip, drip, drip. Scared. See Her. See Her in big hard thing. Her two legs now. Her eyes no see Me. Look up to Big Shiny and little shinies. No see. Smell blood. Smell Her. No hear beat thing. No hear blood move under skin. Her no move no more. Her gone. Me look up see Big Shiny. Me cry loud.

From that dream Stanzie’s past was born. She was in Paris to attend a Gathering of wolf packs so she could find a new bond mate. Hers Grey and Elena, were killed in a car crash and she’d been driving. Everyone in her old pack blamed her – said she’d been drinking. But Stanzie didn’t remember the accident that way. Had it been her fault ll or maybe there was some other more sinister cause?

I finished the novel, Beneath the Skin, in eleven days.

If you could shift into a wolf, what would you discover about yourself?
Two years after the deaths of her bond mates, Constance Newcastle is ready to start over. The problem? The rest of the Great Pack, gathered in Paris to shift into wolves together, is not so sure she deserves the chance. Although the Great Council ruled the car crash an accident, even Constance blames herself. She was driving, after all.
Treated like a pariah by those she longs to rejoin, Constance reunites with an old lover. Everything looks promising until he mysteriously dies. Accused of his murder and desperate to clear her name, Constance joins forces with handsome, confident Liam Murphy, a former Alpha pack leader with a past as tragic and troubled as her own. Guided by the mysterious Councilor Jason Allerton, Constance and Liam discover they are not alone– throughout the Great Pack, people are dying. Can all the deaths be accidents, or is something more sinister going on?
CONTENT WARNING: Vulgar language, some sexual situations

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Excerpt

Run. Run, run, run. Scared. Littles hide, no scrape legs, no make noise. Wind no push things. Fur stick up. Me scared. Me follow scent. Her. Me love Her. See big hard thing. Pushed in. Black water drip, drip, drip. Blood. Smell blood. Drip, drip, drip. Scared. See Her. See Her in big hard thing. Her two legs now. Her eyes no see Me. Look up to Big Shiny and little shinies. No see. Smell blood. Smell Her. No hear beat thing. No hear blood move under skin. Her no move no more. Her gone. Me look up see Big Shiny. Me cry loud. * * * * When I jerked awake, a smothered scream on my lips, the digital clock on the nightstand read five thirty-two in the morning. I rolled over and reached out instinctively for the reassuring warmth of Grey’s body, but of course he wasn’t there. He never would be there again. Two years, I told myself as I threw back the covers of the single bed in a small, unfamiliar Paris hotel room and staggered for the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. The dregs of the dream slipped away under my fingertips as I massaged my cheeks and forehead, blond hair spilling over my shoulders into the wet stream of the water. My hair was getting long. Two years, I told myself again, bitterness twisting my face. I scowled into the mirror and saw my own reflection–as familiar to me as anything in the world. I thought of the wind, the trees at night, the scent of the pine needles embedded in the soft earth of the forest. Everything conspired to create a wall between me and the rest of the world. I hadn’t connected with anything or anyone for so long I barely remembered what it felt like not to be alone. My thirty-second birthday had come and gone three months earlier. Once upon a time there would have been a celebration. Grey and Elena would have been there with me. Presents. Cake. Instead I’d sat in a dark theater and watched a horror movie while secretly envying all the couples who sat around me. When I saw people in love, a strange, isolating ache gripped my whole body. Two years, I told my reflection in the mirror. Grey used to tell me I was beautiful. He loved to trace the contours of my face with his fingers–my high cheekbones, my full mouth, my eyelids and forehead. Even my nose, which I thought was too big but he pronounced elegant. Ha. He was the elegant one with his sensitive mouth and long, thin fingers. A poet’s face. Hollow cheeks, dreamy eyes. Elena had been the beauty in my opinion. Blond, like me, only hers was so fair it was nearly white. The milky translucence of her skin made me think of women in castles in the medieval days, women who stayed behind the castle walls and never saw the sun because of the feuds and fights their men waged for them. Grey and Elena–my bond mates, my lovers, my friends. There had also been Jonathan, Nora, Callie, Vaughn and Peter. Grandfather Tobias. My pack. Two years ago, that is. When everything stopped.

About The Author

Amy Lee Burgess is a transplanted New Englander living in Houston, Texas with two dogs and lots of DVDs. In an attempt to bond with the city after being forced out of New Orleans post-Katrina, she turned to her writing. Determined to finally finish that novel she’d been hacking away at since high school, Amy managed to come up with a wolf shifter character named Stanzie Newcastle. She and Stanzie have been BFFs ever since.

In addition to Stanzie, Amy has also forged a relationship with several vampires, a witch or two, and other assorted supernatural creatures she hopes will entertain her readers. But she will always have room for coffee and butterscotch squares with Stanzie.

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Cover Reveal & Giveaway: Ruined by Jus Accardo

Ruined by Jus Accardo 

Hell is looking for a way to break loose… 

Jax lost the genetic lottery. Descended from Cain, the world's first murderer, he's plagued by a curse that demands violence in exchange for his happiness. He left everything behind, including the girl he loved, but thriving on the pain of others is lonely… And it's killing him. 

  

After a series of heartbreaking losses, Samantha put rubber to pavement and headed for college as fast as her clunker could carry her. But she can't outrun her problems. When an attack at school drives her back home, she's thrown into the path of a past—and a guy—she's been trying to forget. 

 

Sam strains Jax's control over his darkness, but running isn't an option this time. Someone—or, something—followed her home from school: a ruthless monster with a twisted plan centuries in the making. Forced together to survive, and fighting an attraction that could destroy them both, Jax and Sam must stop a killer bent on revenge. 

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18545084-ruined 

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Ruined-Entangled-Embrace-ebook/dp/B00FILC2FM/ 

Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ruined-jus-accardo/1117003674?ean=9781622661848 

About Jus Accardo 

JUS ACCARDO spent her childhood reading and learning to cook. Determined to follow in her grandfather’s footsteps as a chef, she applied and was accepted to the Culinary Institute of America. At the last minute, she realized her path lay with fiction, not food, and passed on the spot to pursue writing. Jus is the bestselling author the popular Denazen series from Entangled publishing and is currently working on the first book in a new adult series due out summer 2013. A native New Yorker, she lives in the middle of nowhere with her husband, three dogs, and sometimes guard bear, Oswald. 

Website: http://www.jusaccardo.com 

Blog: http://www.jusaccardo.com/category/blog/ 

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/JusAccardo 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorJusAccardo 

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