Stretching too Thin

It feels like I've stretched myself too thin for the month of June. I have two book tour stops to post today, and they'll make it up later this afternoon. I apologize if that's mildly inconvenient for anyone. I really should have planned better between the Summer Reading Program (3 programs every week for the next 5 weeks) and the book tours. Hopefully I can keep up between both things.

Book Tour: The Reapers by Jacinta Maree

Synopsis:
The day you die is meant to be the end, but for 18 year old Jordon Hastings, his death was only the beginning.

In a dark and twisted world, lost spirits known as Reapers remain behind after death to help collect the spirits from the realm of the living. A new Reaper, Jordon struggles to accept his fate and lingers in the shadows of his mortal life. But when a demon wolf starts to live through his shadow, hunting his family and friends Jordon has no choice but to leave. As soon as he accepts his new role the truth behind the relationship between Reapers and Angelic Hunters is revealed. His loyalty is tested, making him choose between a corrupted God and a single Banished Spirit.

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18513846-the-reapers?ac=1

Purchase:
--B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-reapers-jacinta-maree/1116987955?ean=9780989202749

--Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Reapers-My-Demonic-Ghost-ebook/dp/B00F8LQ1JK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1390489353&sr=1-1&keywords=the+reapers+by+jacinta+maree

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AUTHOR BIO:

Self confessed chocaholic, Jacinta was born and raised in Melbourne Australia with her loving family of five. Even as a child Jacinta had an itch to write. Writing was the one constant hobby she clung to, also trying her hand at piano, flute, tennis, horseback riding and drama.

Jacinta works full time in the family business and spends her afternoons either playing basketball, reading, writing or hanging out with friends. She is always happy to try something new; getting her real estate license, practicing ninjitshu, Zumba and parkour to name a few.

For her future, Jacinta sees herself writing. It is a large part of her identity and something she hopes to continue. Aside from her love of stories she loves Japan and its unique and beautiful culture and history. From their delicious sushi dishes right down to their wooden sandals and kimonos. She is also a huge cat person and loves to snuggle up in front of the fire for a good movie or book. Her favorite genres are paranormal and fantasy but she also loves anything written by thriller writer, Stephen King.

Author Links:

https://www.facebook.com/jacinta.maree.10

https://twitter.com/JacintaMaree6

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6448929.Jacinta_Maree

http://jacintamareeauthor.blogspot.com.au/

Review:

Series: My Demonic Ghost #2

Release Date: 17 September, 2013

Publisher: Staccato Publishing
Genre: fiction/paranormal/young adult

ISBN: B00F8LQ1JK

Edition: Ebook

Rating: ★★★★☆

Review Written: 11 June, 2014

Book Tour: Battle Hymns by Cara Langston

A second war. A second chance.

In December 1941, Charlotte Donahue is engaged to Nick Adler, a handsome, pre-law student at Georgetown University. Despite her studies at a liberal arts college, she expects nothing more than to marry her fiancé and settle into a conventional life as a young American homemaker. But her future is unexpectedly disrupted after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. While Nick trains for the battlefront with the U.S. Army, Charlotte does her part by volunteering as a nurses’ aide with the American Red Cross.

Assigned to a convalescent ward at Walter Reed’s Army Medical Center, Charlotte discovers her passion lies, not in the home, but in tending to the wounds of injured soldiers, all of whom remind her of Nick. Here she is drawn to a mysterious soldier, Lieutenant William Kendrick, whose jet was shot down in the skies over Germany. As Will’s physical and psychological wounds begin to heal, he and Charlotte develop a friendship that will bind them together in ways they never imagined.

Battle Hymns is a poignant story of love, survival, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Second World War.

Buy the Book

Amazon US
Amazon UK
Apple iBooks
Barnes & Noble (Nook)
Smashwords

About the Author

Cara is a novelist of historical fiction. She has two novels in the works. Battle Hymns is a historical romance set in Washington, D.C. from 1941 to 1943. It will be published on June 3, 2014. The Glassmaker’s Wife is a historical romance set in 1925 Chicago and is still very much in progress.

Cara has been an avid reader – especially of historical fiction, classics, and mystery novels – since she was young. She read all of the American Girl books when she was in 5th grade, even though her parents could not afford to buy her a doll. In middle school, she was obsessed with the only two Ann Rinaldi books in the school library. They taught her about the 1770 Boston Massacre and the Salem Witch Trials before her history classes ever did. And that was when Cara’s love of historical fiction was born. She didn’t begin writing, though, until her senior year at the University of Georgia, where she studied Finance and had already committed to a career in the corporate world. One day she will be able to quit working for The Man and focus on her writing. Until then, it pays the bills.

When she’s not writing or working, Cara enjoys drinking red wine, watching bad television, doing genealogical research, obsessing over the Duchess of Cambridge’s every outfit, and finding the best guacamole in Texas. Cara currently lives in Dallas, Texas with her husband and their dog.

For more information please visit Cara Langston's website. You can also connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and Pinterest.


Publication Date: June 3, 2014
eBook; ISBN: 9781311184443

Review:

Series: N/A

Release Date: 3 June, 2014

Publisher: Cara Langston
Genre: fiction/historical

ISBN: 9781311184443

Edition: Paperback

Rating: ★★★★☆

Review Written: 9 June, 2014

Book Tour: The Runaway Highlander by R.L. Syme

Anne de Cheyne has a choice. She can play the dutiful daughter and allow her mother to sell her to a greasy English sheriff, or she can take control of her own life and find her own match. After a frightening run-in with her promised husband reveals a dark secret, she makes a desperate choice. Flight. Aedan Donne needs easy money and no-questions-asked. When Milene de Cheyne offers him enough to pay all debts, requests complete silence, and pays half up front, just for a simple recovery, he can't believe his luck? until he meets his mark. Anne?s beauty and passion ignite something Aedan can?t ignore, even as she leaves him in the dust. Suddenly, he finds himself wanting to capture the runaway Highland lady for himself.

The Highland Renegades Series

Book One: The Outcast Highlander
Book Two: The Runaway Highlander
Book Three: The Pirate Highlander -- Coming Soon!

Buy the Book

Amazon UK Amazon US Barnes & Noble CreateSpace

About the Author

R.L. Syme works at a youth theatre, teaching kids performing arts and musical performance classes/camps when she's not writing. Otherwise, she's putting her Seminary degree to good use writing romance novels. Let not all those systematic theology classes go to waste... For more information please visit R.L. Syme's website and blog. You can also connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Review:

Series: The Highland Renegades

Release Date: 15 April, 2014

Publisher: R L Syme
Genre: fiction/historical/romance

ISBN: 9780996010306

Edition: Paperback

Rating: ★★★★☆

Review Written: 5 June, 2014

Book Tour: Love & Treasure by Ayelet Waldman

A spellbinding new novel of contraband masterpieces, tragic love, and the unexpected legacies of forgotten crimes, Ayelet Waldman?s Love and Treasure weaves a tale around the fascinating, true history of the Hungarian Gold Train in the Second World War.

In 1945 on the outskirts of Salzburg, victorious American soldiers capture a train filled with unspeakable riches: piles of fine gold watches; mountains of fur coats; crates filled with wedding rings, silver picture frames, family heirlooms, and Shabbat candlesticks passed down through generations. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure?a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust. Seventy years later, amid the shadowy world of art dealers who profit off the sins of previous generations, Jack gives a necklace to his granddaughter, Natalie Stein, and charges her with searching for an unknown woman?a woman whose portrait and fate come to haunt Natalie, a woman whose secret may help Natalie to understand the guilt her grandfather will take to his grave and to find a way out of the mess she has made of her own life.

A story of brilliantly drawn characters?a suave and shady art historian, a delusive and infatuated Freudian, a family of singing circus dwarfs fallen into the clutches of Josef Mengele, and desperate lovers facing choices that will tear them apart?Love and Treasure is Ayelet Waldman?s finest novel to date: a sad, funny, richly detailed work that poses hard questions about the value of precious things in a time when life itself has no value, and about the slenderest of chains that can bind us to the griefs and passions of the past.

Buy the Book

Amazon US
Audible.com
Barnes & Noble
Book Depository
IndieBound

Watch the Book Trailer

Praise for Love and Treasure

"Love and Treasure is something of a treasure trove of a novel. Its beautifully integrated parts fit inside one another like the talismanic pendant/ locket at the heart of several love stories. Where the opening chapters evoke the nightmare of Europe in the aftermath of World War II with the hallucinatory vividness of Anselm Kiefer?s disturbing canvases, the concluding chapters, set decades before, in a more seemingly innocent time in the early 20th century, are a bittersweet evocation, in miniature, of thwarted personal destinies that yet yield to something like cultural triumph. Ayelet Waldman is not afraid to create characters for whom we feel an urgency of emotion, and she does not resolve what is unresolvable in this ambitious, absorbing and poignantly moving work of fiction."
-Joyce Carol Oates

"One is quickly caught up in Love and Treasure with its shifting tones and voices?at times a document, a thriller, a love story, a search?telescoping time backwards and forwards to vividly depict a story found in the preludes and then the after-effects of the Holocaust. Waldman gives us remarkable characters in a time of complex and surprising politics."
- Michael Ondaatje

"Love and Treasure is like the treasure train it chases: fast-paced, bound by a fierce mission, full of bright secrets and racingly, relentlessly moving."
- Daniel Handler

"Complex and thoughtful, moving and carefully researched, this is a novel to love and treasure."
- Philippa Gregory

"This lush, multigenerational tale? traces the path of a single pendant?. Inventively told from multiple perspectives, Waldman?s latest is a seductive reflection on just how complicated the idea of ?home? is?and why it is worth more than treasure."
- Publishers Weekly

"A sensitive and heartbreaking portrayal of love, politics, and family secrets . . . Waldman?s appealing novel recalls the film The Red Violin in its following of this all-important object through various periods in history and through many owners. Fans of historical fiction will love the compelling characters and the leaps backward and forward in time."
- Mariel Pachucki, Library Journal

About the Author

Ayelet Waldman is the author of the newly released Love and Treasure (Knopf, January 2014), Red Hook Road and The New York Times bestseller Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace. Her novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits was made into a film starring Natalie Portman. Her personal essays and profiles of such public figures as Hillary Clinton have been published in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her radio commentaries have appeared on "All Things Considered" and "The California Report."

For more information please visit Ayelet's website. Her missives also appear on Facebook and Twitter.

Her books are published throughout the world, in countries as disparate as England and Thailand, the Netherlands and China, Russia and Israel, Korea and Italy.





Review:

Series: N/A

Release Date: 1 April, 2014

Publisher: Knopf Publishing
Genre: fiction/historical/christian

ISBN: 9780385533546

Edition: Hardcover

Rating: ★★★★★

Review Written: 28 May, 2014

World News: Events that Shouldn't be Ignored

While I tend to keep everything here about the reviews and tours I do, every now and then there's some world news that needs to be noted and shared with the community at large. I have a couple of things to share today:

• Dr. Maya Angelou passed away at 8 a.m. EST this morning. Angelou was arguably one of the most influential poets of the 20th century with her most known work being I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first part of her seven part autobiography. Dr. Angelou was a professor at the Wake Forest University. She will be greatly missed.
  
  
• LeVar Burton, known as Geordi le Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Kunta Kinte from roots, and the host of the long running show Reading Rainbow has recently started a new kickstarter. Called Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere, the kickstarter focuses on filling a need that is still prevalent in the United States by bringing Reading Rainbow to the internet, creating specialized webisodes for Schools, and delivering it FOR FREE to schools. Arguably one of the most influential things in my life as a child, I highly recomment checking out the kickstarter page for this good cause. The prizes are fantastic. Now if only I had $600 to give so I could have a face-time call with LeVar Burton.

Book Tour: The Lost Duchess by Jenny Barden

 

       An epic Elizabethan adventure with a thriller pace and a high tension love story that moves from the palaces of England to the savage wilderness of the New World. Emme Fifield has fallen about as far as a gentlewoman can. Once a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, her only hope of surviving the scandal that threatens to engulf her is to escape England for a fresh start in the new America where nobody has ever heard of the Duchess of Somerset. Emme joins Kit Doonan's rag-tag band of idealists, desperados and misfits bound for Virginia. But such a voyage will be far from easy and Emme finds her attraction to the mysterious Doonan inconvenient to say the least. As for Kit, the handsome mariner has spent years imprisoned by the Spanish, and living as an outlaw with a band of escaped slaves; he has his own inner demons to confront, and his own dark secrets to keep... Ever since Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement in Virginia was abandoned in 1587 its fate has remained a mystery; 'The Lost Duchess' explores what might have happened to the ill-starred 'Lost Colony' of Roanoke.

Buy the Book

Amazon (AUS)
Amazon (UK)
Book Depository

About the Author

I've had a love of history and adventure ever since an encounter in infancy with a suit of armour at Tamworth Castle. Training as an artist, followed by a career as a city Jenny (Portrait 2)solicitor, did little to help displace my early dream of becoming a knight. A fascination with the Age of Discovery led to travels in South and Central America, and much of the inspiration for my debut came from retracing the footsteps of Francis Drake in Panama. The sequel centres on the first Elizabethan 'lost colony' of early Virginia. I am currently working on an epic adventure during the threat of invasion by the Spanish Armada. My work has appeared in short story collections and anthologies and I've written for non-fiction publications including the Historical Novels Review.

I am active in many organisations, having run the 'Get Writing' conferences for several years, and undertaken the co-ordination of the Historical Novel Society’s London Conference 2012. I am a member of that organisation as well as the Historical Writers' Association, the Romantic Nevelists' Association and the Society of Authors. I'll be co-ordinating the RNA's annual conference in 2014. I have four children and now live on a farm in Dorset with my long suffering husband and an ever increasing assortment of animals. I love travelling, art, reading and scrambling up hills and mountains (though I'm not so keen on coming down!).

Author Links

Website Facebook Twitter Jenny Barden's Blog English Historical Fiction Authors Blog

Also by Jenny Barden

Publication Date: June 20, 2013
Ebury Press
Formats: Paperback, Ebook

    Mistress Cooksley may be a wealthy merchant's daughter, but she blushes at my words and meets my eyes look for look. Yet I cannot hope to court her without fortune, and a dalliance with a pretty maid will not hinder me from my path. Captain Drake's endeavour might bring me gold, but I, Will Doonan, will have my revenge. The Spaniards captured my brother and have likely tortured and killed him. For God and St George, we'll strike at the dogs and see justice done. I thought I'd left Mistress Cooksley behind to gamble everything and follow Drake, and here she is playing the boy at the ends of the world. She's a fool with a heart as brave as any man's. Yet her presence here could be the ruin of us all...

Review:
Series: N/A
Release Date: 5 June, 2014
Publisher: Ebury Press Paperback
Genre: fiction/historical/romance
ISBN: 9780091949679
Edition: Paperback
Rating: ★★★★★
Review Written: 27 May, 2014