Book Tour: Spin the plate by Donna Anastasi

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Today we have an excerpt from Spin the Plate, by Donna Anastasi, currently on tour with Walker Author Tours. Here we see the hero of the story, Francis, reflecting on his first encounter with Jo. Enjoy, and don’t forget to pick up your copy of Spin the Plate!

Francis was distracted. He’d been haunted all day by the woman he’d spoken to on the subway. His face reddened as he remembered once again what he’d said to her, Jesus loves you, you know…He rested his elbows on the desk and pressed hard against his eyebrows with the palms of his hands. Great opening line, Francis. But what choice did he have? When he received ‘a word,’ as he sometimes did, he felt obliged to deliver it, no matter how inconvenient.
His chest rose and fell heavily as his thoughts flooded with the image of her powerful body and exquisite face: he’d stole a long enough look to penetrate her harsh expression and see the features beneath—distinctive cheek bones, long lashes, full lips. She was unlike any other woman he’d ever met—spirited, strong, iron-willed, and absolutely unafraid. He closed his eyes and imagined the scowl melting from her face. She looked serene. And beautiful. She was angry and hurting, but behind the hurt there was something there. He had to speak with her again.

You can also see my review of Spin the plate!

Teaser Tuesday 3/19/13

- Ambrosia Leave a comment

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Little bit late in posting this but better late than never right? Been a busy last couple weeks.

He swept her an over the top bow, “I am at your command”
I hoped he had done it for the thrill of it and not because of any compulsion. pg. 202 Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead

Musing Monday 3/18/13

- Ambrosia 4 Comments

Musing Monday is hosted over at Should Be Reading.

 

Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week…

• Describe one of your reading habits.
• Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).
• Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.
• Do you have a bookish rant? Something about books or reading (or the industry) that gets your ire up? Share it with us!
• Instead of the above questions, maybe you just want to ramble on about something else pertaining to books — let’s hear it, then!

My Musing this week is about one of my current reads I am reading the first book in The Vampire Academy . I gave into curiosity and peer pressure. I am not sure if I like it yet or not. I am 87 pages in and have not really felt a connection with either of the main characters. That said I am digging Dmitri the Russian Guardian.

So my muse is do you keep going with a book that your not sure you will like. I don’t dislike the book but I just feel no connection yet, how long do you stick with a book until you set it aside?

WWW 3/13/13

- Ambrosia Leave a comment

To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What are you reading next?

I finally decided to try the Vampire Academy books so I am currently reading the first one.

I just finished Crossing Over One Woman’s Exodus from Amish life. I will be posting the review soon.

and up next is The house of Special Purpose, unless I decide to go another route which is possible 🙂

Posted in WWW

Book Review: Bound to Be a Bride by Megan Mulry

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Exciting historical erotic novella from acclaimed author Megan Mulry. In 1808 tempestuous Isabella, daughter of the Duke of Feria, unites with rebellious Javi, a highborn aristocrat practiced in the art of hojōjutsu, Japanese rope binding. They meet in the forest of western Spain, where both are on the run from an arranged marriage…to each other.

This book was just okay to me. I am not sure why but I really did not connect with anyone of the characters to well. The writing was okay but the plot was just not what I thought it would be. It was a fast read and not a total bore, I honestly think I may have liked it better if I found the characters more likeable. I won’t go into what I thought of Issabelle’s Father, of course I am sure we are not supposed to like him and for the time period he was not that much of an oddity.

Well it would seem the slump continues.

My Gemstone Rating:

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Book Review: Aura by Rebecca Lynn Talley

- Ambrosia 1 Comment

“I half-turned to her and shrugged, still processing what I’d seen, or at least what I thought I’d seen, in Ms. Neal’s eyes—like they weren’t hers. Obviously, they were her eyes, but it looked like she’d plucked them from someone else’s head. A dead someone else’s head.”

In the fight between good and evil, Light is your only weapon.

Crystal Scott finally feels like a normal teenager. She has a lead in the high school play, a best friend, and a gorgeous boyfriend. With prom only a few days away, Crystal’s ordinary life seems perfect.

Endowed with great Light because of her virtuous choices and her inherent gifts, Crystal’s aura has become visible to those with the ability to see auras. Unfortunately, her power has also attracted the attention of demons intent on destroying all Light.

When Vincent Crandall, the human host for a powerful demon, discovers that Crystal’s Light is strong enough to disrupt the connection between demons and their hosts, he realizes she may be able to sever the connection altogether. Determined to stop her from interfering with his plans to rule the world, he sends operatives to neutralize her Light.

After the operatives fail to disable Crystal, Vincent decides he must harness her power for himself. He kidnaps her parents, and Crystal is thrust into battle against a demon army she didn’t even know existed. With the help of a mysterious young man and his mother, Crystal must learn to use the power within her before Vincent kills her parents and exploits her Light.

I was looking forward to reading Aura by Rebecca Talley and was very happy to take part in the book tour for this book. Overall I did enjoy the book and it was an enjoyable enough read. The structure is very good and I was happy with the writing style. Considering some of the books I have read lately it was nice to have a book that did have a solid foundation with it.

However there was some very dragging points where things just seemed to stall and very slowly roll along. The start of the book was slow and it took a while to fully engage in the story and be able to say okay, I like this. I never disliked it but I really prefer a book that is going go grab me sooner. The end of the book was a bit slow as well, I wonder if maybe there was some conflict on just how to wrap things up with the story.

Even with the slower parts of the story it is an okay book. It did not blow my mind but I liked it. If your looking for a paranormal read this is an enjoyable relatively fast read. The aspect of good vs evil is of course not a new one, but there are some interesting twists within the story as it unfolds. There are some good descriptions and parts that will make you raise an eyebrow. The scene when the main character first starts to notice something off about a teacher is interestingly done.

My Gemstone Rating:

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You can also check out more about the Tour and giveaway:

Tour Schedule

Aura

“I half-turned to her and shrugged, still processing what I’d seen, or at least what I thought I’d seen, in Ms. Neal’s eyes—like they weren’t hers. Obviously, they were her eyes, but it looked like she’d plucked them from someone else’s head. A dead someone else’s head.”

In the fight between good and evil, Light is your only weapon.

Crystal Scott finally feels like a normal teenager. She has a lead in the high school play, a best friend, and a gorgeous boyfriend. With prom only a few days away, Crystal’s ordinary life seems perfect.

Endowed with great Light because of her virtuous choices and her inherent gifts, Crystal’s aura has become visible to those with the ability to see auras. Unfortunately, her power has also attracted the attention of demons intent on destroying all Light.

When Vincent Crandall, the human host for a powerful demon, discovers that Crystal’s Light is strong enough to disrupt the connection between demons and their hosts, he realizes she may be able to sever the connection altogether. Determined to stop her from interfering with his plans to rule the world, he sends operatives to neutralize her Light.

After the operatives fail to disable Crystal, Vincent decides he must harness her power for himself. He kidnaps her parents, and Crystal is thrust into battle against a demon army she didn’t even know existed. With the help of a mysterious young man and his mother, Crystal must learn to use the power within her before Vincent kills her parents and exploits her Light.

Author Rebecca Lynn Talley

Rebecca Lynn Talley grew up in the gorgeous seaside city of Santa Barbara, CA. She met, and married, her husband, Del, while attending Brigham Young University. She graduated from BYU with a degree in Communications. She currently lives in rural Colorado on a small ranch with a dog, too many cats to count, and a herd of goats. She and Del are the proud parents of ten wildly-creative, multi-talented children.

Rebecca is the author of a children’s picture book, Grasshopper Pie (WindRiver 2003), a children’s chapter book, Gabby’s Secret (DuBon Publishing 2011), four novels, Heaven Scent (CFI 2008), Altared Plans (CFI 2009), The Upside of Down (CFI 2011), and Aura (DuBon Publishing 2012). She has also authored numerous children’s stories and articles for both print and online magazines.

When she isn’t writing, Rebecca loves to date her husband, play with her kids, swim in the ocean, and dance to disco music while she cleans the house. She has folded at least one million loads of laundry, baked hundreds of batches of chocolate chip cookies, and eaten 5,478 gallons of ice cream.

Reviews

This YA urban fantasy is fantastic! The story grabbed me from the start and kept me enthralled until the end! I love books that keep me thinking about the characters and events and possibilities even after putting them down…Aura is one of those books! Rebecca Lynn Talley has created characters you care about in a world begging for the special gifts they possess. I love the premise of Aura and imagine I’ll be enjoying many more Light vs. Demon novels in the future….at least I hope there are more to come!
~KindleQueen

I loved the clasic good VS evil in Aura. I loved that Crystal made the conscious choice to be good inspite of feelings and doubts. I also loved the idea of demons posessing somone who had made dark choices, or greedy bargains. The book is clean and well handled inspite of the serious subject matter.Well done.
~C. Michelle Jefferies

This is one of those books that you hope will become widespread enough to make a positive impact in this world. Personally, I think this is a book every teenager should read and I will definitely be passing it along to my own kids. Thank you, Rebecca, for writing a beautiful story with a wonderful message! I hope you keep at it because now I want a sequel!
~Rachael Anderson

Aura sucked me in from the first page. The book is intense and well-written. I loved that Crystal is innocent and makes a conscious choice to stay that way in the face of intense pressure. I would recommend Aura to young adults on up.
~Cami Checketts

Wonderful, wonderful message. Probably the most solid moral message I’ve ever read in contemporary literature, but without being too heavy or feeling like a lecture. You could almost look at it like an allegory, I think, representing real life with fictional symbols. I’m trying to explain without giving anything away, and I think I’m doing a bad job. Anyway, I have four boys, but if I had a girl, I would definitely have her read it. The story is imaginative and creative, Crystal is a strong but believable heroine, caught up in high school cares and not realizing her own potential or the battle that is waged around and for her. I thought at times it was a bit predictable, and that the first half of the book drug a little. It probably could have been told quicker or perhaps made a little more interesting. But all in all, I enjoyed it. The story kept me going and the characters were sweet and compelling.
~May Abbey

Wow! I got this book for free and LOVED it! I can’t wait to read any follow up books! (There WILL be follow up books, right?) In this story Crystal is full of light, thanks to making good choices, and she has to figure out how to keep the light in the midst of high school where temptation runs rampant and where she just wants to be an average girl! I like that things never went too far, and I felt like it was very well-written, with rounded out characters!
~Tamera Westhoff

Blog Tour Giveaway
$25 Amazon Gift Card or Paypal Cash
Ends 3.21.13

Open only to those who can legally enter, receive and use an Amazon.com Gift Code or Paypal Cash. Winning Entry will be verified prior to prize being awarded. No purchase necessary. You must be 18 or older to enter or have your parent enter for you. The winner will be chosen by rafflecopter and announced here as well as emailed and will have 48 hours to respond or a new winner will be chosen. This giveaway is in no way associated with Facebook, Twitter, Rafflecopter or any other entity unless otherwise specified. The number of eligible entries received determines the odds of winning. Giveaway was organized by Kathy from I Am A Reader, Not A Writer http://iamareader.com and sponsored by the author. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Teaser Tuesday 3/12/13

- Ambrosia Leave a comment

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Living together out of wedlock, on the other hand was different. I had committed to Ottie and he to me, and there was only one choice. ~ pg.88 Crossing Over One Woman’s Exodus from Amish Life by Ruth Irene Garrett

Book Review: Alice Hartley’s Happiness by Philippa Gregory

- Ambrosia Leave a comment

When Professor Charles Pringle does not react to his wife`s special birthday dance of the seven veils, Alice decides to leave him and moves in with an unsuspecting student, Michael. His aunt dies and leaves him her house, so the couple move in and convert it into a “growth centre”.

Well thanks to this book I now find myself really locked in a book slump. I hope to break that slump soon.

I have loved Phillipa Gregory’s other works and I mean loved. I was very excited to delve into something that seemed a little different but since it was Gregory would be good. Sadly I was to be disappointed. While the writing is still in the usual reader friendly style that makes the book easy to read and a fast read, the story is just bad. There is not a single likeable character in the whole of the book. I wanted to like Alice at first being dumped by her Husband, a free spirit. That like did not last very long at all.

Once again that seems to be all I can say about this book. I have issues with saying negative things about books, but safe to say I did not enjoy this one much at all.

My Gemstone Rating:

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Musing Monday 3/11/13

- Ambrosia 5 Comments

Musing Monday is hosted over at Should Be Reading.

 

Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week…

• Describe one of your reading habits.
• Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).
• Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.
• Do you have a bookish rant? Something about books or reading (or the industry) that gets your ire up? Share it with us!
• Instead of the above questions, maybe you just want to ramble on about something else pertaining to books — let’s hear it, then!

I am obsessive about my library being clean. It is by far the cleanest room in my house although the cats like to try to change that for me. They dump things over and oh yeah Pasha shredded a whole roll of paper towels recently. I dust often and I am just very fussy if anything is out of place. Is that strange?

Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery by D.T. Max

- Ambrosia Leave a comment

For two hundred years a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. In England, cows attack their owners in the milking parlors, while in the American West, thousands of deer starve to death in fields full of grass.

What these strange conditions–including fatal familial insomnia, kuru, scrapie, and mad cow disease–share is their cause: prions. Prions are ordinary proteins that sometimes go wrong, resulting in neurological illnesses that are always fatal. Even more mysterious and frightening, prions are almost impossible to destroy because they are not alive and have no DNA–and the diseases they bring are now spreading around the world.

In The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, essayist and journalist D. T. Max tells the spellbinding story of the prion’s hidden past and deadly future. Through exclusive interviews and original archival research, Max explains this story’s connection to human greed and ambition–from the Prussian chemist Justus von Liebig, who made cattle meatier by feeding them the flesh of other cows, to New Guinean natives whose custom of eating the brains of the dead nearly wiped them out. The biologists who have investigated these afflictions are just as extraordinary–for example, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a self-described
“pedagogic pedophiliac pediatrician” who cracked kuru and won the Nobel Prize, and another Nobel winner, Stanley Prusiner, a driven, feared self-promoter who identified the key protein that revolutionized prion study.

With remarkable precision, grace, and sympathy, Max–who himself suffers from an inherited neurological illness–explores maladies that have tormented humanity for centuries and gives reason to hope that someday cures will be found. And he eloquently demonstrates that in our relationship to nature and these ailments, we have been our own worst enemy.

This was an interesting book and you can tell that a lot of research went into the work that was done. However overall I found myself fairly bored when reading it. I guess it was not what I expected which was not the books fault (I guess) such interesting information though could have been given in a less dry manner. This is a shorter review than usual because that is all I can really think to say about the book. Give it a shot if you don’t mind a dry presentation the information is interesting at least.

My Gemstone Rating:

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