Friday, September 30, 2016

Blog Tour Review ft Excerpt & Giveaway- THE BOOKSHOP ON THE CORNER by Jenny Colgan



William Morrow Paperbacks
September 20, 2016
ISBN: 9780062467256; $14.99
E-ISBN 9780062467263; $9.99


About the Book

Nina Redmond is a literary matchmaker. Pairing a reader with that perfect book is her passion… and also her job. Or at least it was. Until yesterday, she was a librarian in the hectic city. But now the job she loved is no more.

Determined to make a new life for herself, Nina moves to a sleepy village many miles away. There she buys a van and transforms it into a bookmobile—a mobile bookshop that she drives from neighborhood to neighborhood, changing one life after another with the power of storytelling.

From helping her grumpy landlord deliver a lamb, to sharing picnics with a charming train conductor who serenades her with poetry, Nina discovers there’s plenty of adventure, magic, and soul in a place that’s beginning to feel like home… a place where she just might be able to write her own happy ending.


Review:
I believe this was a story written straight to my booklover heart. The author showed us what and why reading is so important to those of us who live and breathe words. It's not just reading about made up stuff, it's about feeling. Laughing, crying, and empathizing with another human being - even if that human being is one through a book. It reminds us that life can be beautiful in many different ways; but we're showed just how beautiful through a story. 

Nina is a librarian who has a knack for finding the perfect book for a reader. Then she receives terrible knees that her job at the library is closing down. Which means Nina is jobless and terrified of what the future may bring. One day while looking in the paper she sees an ad for a van and then she gets the greatest idea. Maybe she could turn that van into a mobile bookshop!

But of course, she's never been one to take risks so she it's just an idea. It didn't take long for her to change her mind when she lost out on another job opportunity. Nina then moves to Scotland! It's there that she becomes part of a quirky little town in desperate need of books! And Nina is just the person to give it to them. 

There is some romance in the book that surprised me. I totally wasn't expecting love! I thought this was going to be a book strictly about books. And it is, but the story is much more than that. I loved the message of the story. To me, it meant that I could do anything if I just set my mind to it. Books are an amazing tool that can be educational, fun, comforting, and a great way for escaping.

*Thank you to the publisher for providing a copy for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Purchase Here:

About the Author
Jenny Colgan is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous novels, includingLittle Beach Street Bakery, Christmas at Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop, and Christmas at the Cupcake Café, all international bestsellers. Jenny is married with three children and lives in London and Scotland.

Connect with Jenny Colgan


Praise for Jenny Colgan and THE BOOKSHOP ON THE CORNER:

“Losing myself in Jenny Colgan’s beautiful pages is the most delicious, comforting, satisfying treat I have had in ages.”
   — Jane Green, New York Times bestselling author of Summer Secrets

“With a keen eye for the cinematic, Colgan (Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery, 2016, etc.) is a deft mistress of romantic comedy; Nina's story is laced with clever dialogue and scenes set like jewels, just begging to be filmed. A charming, bracingly fresh happily-ever-after tale…”
Kirkus

 “This is a lovely novel with amazing characters who are hooked on books… at least some of them. The plot is believable and is a joy to read. The main female character, Nina, is the librarian who always figures out the best choice for a patron without fail. Jenny Colgan thinks outside the box and creates a memorable book.”
RT Book Reviews

“This charming tale celebrates the many ways books bring people together”
Booklist

“This light, fresh romantic comedy is the perfect escape for bibliophiles. Enjoy it with a cup of tea on a crisp day.”
Real Simple

“[A] love story about reading and the joys books can bring to people’s lives.”
All About Romance


Excerpt from THE BOOKSHOP ON THE CORNER:

The problem with good things that happen is that very often they disguise themselves as awful things. It would be lovely, wouldn’t it, whenever you’re going through something difficult, if someone could just tap you on the shoulder and say, “Don’t worry, it’s completely worth it. It seems like absolutely horrible crap now, but I promise it will all come good in the end,” and you could say, “Thank you, Fairy Godmother.” You might also say, “Will I also lose that seven pounds?” and they would say, “But of course, my child!”
            That would be useful, but it isn’t how it is, which is why we sometimes plow on too long with things that aren’t making us happy, or give up too quickly on something that might yet work itself out, and it is often difficult to tell precisely which is which.
            A life lived forward can be a really irritating thing. So Nina thought, at any rate. Nina Redmond, twenty-nine, was telling herself not to cry in public. If you have ever tried giving yourself a good talking-to, you’ll know it doesn’t work terribly well. She was at work, for goodness’ sake. You weren’t meant to cry at work.
            She wondered if anyone else ever did. Then she wondered if maybe everyone did, even Cathy Neeson, with her stiff too-blond hair, and her thin mouth and her spreadsheets, who was right at this moment standing in a corner, watching the room with folded arms and a grim expression, after delivering to the small team Nina was a member of a speech filled with jargon about how there were cutbacks all over, and Birmingham couldn’t afford to maintain all its libraries, and how austerity was something they just had to get used to.
            Nina reckoned probably not. Some people just didn’t have a tear in them.
            (What Nina didn’t know was that Cathy Neeson cried on the way to work, on the way home from work—after eight o’clock most nights—every time she laid someone off, every time she was asked to shave another few percent off an already skeleton budget, every time she was ordered to produce some new quality relevant paperwork, and every time her boss dumped a load of administrative work on her at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon on his way to a skiing vacation, of which he took many. Eventually she ditched the entire thing and went and worked in a National Trust gift shop for a fifth of the salary and half the hours and none of the tears. But this story is not about Cathy Neeson.)
            It was just, Nina thought, trying to squash down the lump in her throat . . . it was just that they had been such a little library.
            Children’s story time Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Early closing Wednesday afternoon. A shabby old-fashioned building with tatty linoleum floors. A little musty sometimes, it was true. The big dripping radiators could take a while to get going of a morning and then would become instantly too warm, with a bit of a fug, particularly off old Charlie Evans, who came in to keep warm and read the Morning Star cover to cover, very slowly. She wondered where the Charlie Evanses of the world would go now.
            Cathy Neeson had explained that they were going to compress the library services into the center of town, where they would become a “hub,” with a “multimedia experience zone” and a coffee shop and an “intersensory experience,” whatever that was, even though town was at least two bus trips too far for most of their elderly or strollered-up clientele.
            Their lovely, tatty, old pitched-roof premises were being sold off to become executive apartments that would be well beyond the reach of a librarian’s salary. And Nina Redmond, twenty-nine, bookworm, with her long tangle of auburn hair, her pale skin with freckles dotted here and there, and a shyness that made her blush—or want to burst into tears—at the most inopportune moments, was, she got the feeling, going to be thrown out into the cold winds of a world that was getting a lot of unemployed librarians on the market at the same time.
            “So,” Cathy Neeson had concluded, “you can pretty much get started on packing up the ‘books’ right away.”
            She said “books” like it was a word she found distasteful in her shiny new vision of Mediatech Services. All those grubby, awkward books.


Nina dragged herself into the back room with a heavy heart and a slight redness around her eyes. Fortunately, everyone else looked more or less the same way. Old Rita O’Leary, who should probably have retired about a decade ago but was so kind to their clientele that everyone overlooked the fact that she couldn’t see the numbers on the Dewey Decimal System anymore and filed more or less at random, had burst into floods, and Nina had been able to cover up her own sadness comforting her.
            “You know who else did this?” hissed her colleague Griffin through his straggly beard as she made her way through. Griffin was casting a wary look at Cathy Neeson, still out in the main area as he spoke. “The Nazis. They packed up all the books and threw them onto bonfires.”
            “They’re not throwing them onto bonfires!” said Nina. “They’re not actually Nazis.”
            “That’s what everyone thinks. Then before you know it, you’ve got Nazis.”
With breathtaking speed, there’d been a sale, of sorts, with most of their clientele leafing through old familiar favorites in the ten pence box and leaving the shinier, newer stock behind.
            Now, as the days went on, they were meant to be packing up the rest of the books to ship them to the central library, but Griffin’s normally sullen face was looking even darker than usual. He had a long, unpleasantly scrawny beard, and a scornful attitude toward people who didn’t read the books he liked. As the only books he liked were obscure 1950s out-of-print stories about frustrated young men who drank too much in Fitzrovia, that gave him a lot of time to hone his attitude. He was still talking about book burners.
            “They won’t get burned! They’ll go to the big place in town.”
            Nina couldn’t bring herself to even say Mediatech.
            Griffin snorted. “Have you seen the plans? Coffee, computers, DVDs, plants, admin offices, and people doing cost–benefit analysis and harassing the unemployed—sorry, running ‘mindfulness workshops.’ There isn’t room for a book in the whole damn place.” He gestured at the dozens of boxes. “This will be landfill. They’ll use it to make roads.”
            “They won’t!”
            “They will! That’s what they do with dead books, didn’t you know? Turn them into underlay for roads. So great big cars can roll over the top of centuries of thought and ideas and scholarship, metaphorically stamping a love of learning into the dust with their stupid big tires and blustering Top Gear idiots killing
the planet.” 
            “You’re not in the best of moods this morning, are you, Griffin?”
            “Could you two hurry it along a bit over there?” said Cathy Neeson, bustling in, sounding anxious. They only had the budget for the collection trucks for one afternoon; if they didn’t manage to load everything up in time, she’d be in serious trouble. 
            “Yes, Commandant Über-Führer,” said Griffin under his breath as she bustled out again, her blond bob still rigid. “God, that woman is so evil it’s unbelievable.”
            But Nina wasn’t listening. She was looking instead in despair at the thousands of volumes around her, so hopeful with their beautiful covers and optimistic blurbs. To condemn any of them to waste disposal seemed heartbreaking: these were books! To Nina it was like closing down an animal shelter. And there was no way they were going to get it all done today, no matter what Cathy Neeson thought.
            Which was how, six hours later, when Nina’s Mini Metro pulled up in front of the front door of her tiny shared house, it was completely and utterly stuffed with volumes.

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Review- SPARKING THE FIRE by Kate Meader



SPARKING THE FIRE
BOOK 3
A HOT IN CHICAGO NOVEL
KATE MEADER
Pocket Books
September 27, 2016
ISBN 9781476785936
$7.99

Praise for Sparking the Fire, Book 3:
“The tale of hot firefighters and the women—and one man—who love them has come to an end. Meader ends this series with role playing, fierce family loyalty and multiple orgasms. The male protagonist goes through a transformation that showcases his vulnerability, insecurities, possessiveness and protectiveness. The many instances of a family sticking together through it all are more than enough to tug on the heart strings, but the steamy sex and sentimental pillow talk make this book a must-read.”
RT Book Reviews Four Star Review, Scorcher

“Can a firefighter and a movie star really make it work? Meader (Rekindle the Flame, 2015) immerses you in Wyatt’s tight-knit family of foster siblings that she’s built throughout the Hot in Chicago series, and readers will feel like part of the family in no time. Her descriptions of Chicago will leave fans wanting to travel to the Windy City and fall in love with their own firefighters.”
—Booklist

About Sparking the Fire, Book 3:
Heating up reading lists this Fall will be Kate Meader’s highly anticipated Sparking the Fire, the “sexy and sassy” (#1 New York Times bestselling author Jude Deveraux) steamy third novel in the Hot in Chicago series, where former lovers unexpectedly reunite for a sizzling affair that will have the director yelling, “Quiet on the set!”

AN OLD FLAME STILL SIMMERS…
Wyatt Fox, resident daredevil at Engine Company 6, needs a low key job to keep him busy while he recovers from his latest rescue stunt. Consulting on a local movie shoot should add just enough spark to his day. But then in struts Molly Cade: the woman who worked his heart over good, and then left him in the Windy City dust.

BUT WILL A NEW SHOT AT LOVE LEAVE HER BURNED?
Actor Molly Cade, America’s fallen sweetheart, finally has her shot at a Hollywood comeback with a dramatic new role as a tough-as-nails firefighter that promises to propel her back into the big time. And she’s not going to let anything stand in her way—even a certain brooding, blue-eyed firefighter she’s never quite been able to forget…Their story is straight out of a script: irrepressible, spunky heroine meets taciturn, smoldering hero. But these two refuse to be typecast, and when the embers of an old love are stoked, someone is bound to get burned…

REVIEW:
So, even though I didn't love this as much as Playing with Fire, I was still entertained for the most part. Wyatt is the strong silent, broody type; one of my favorites. And Molly is the good girl next door and was Americas sweetheart before she went ahead and dethroned herself. Now she's ready to get back in the game and get back into Americas good graces. By doing so, she wants to consult with Engine 6 for her firefighter movie she's making in Chicago. 

Who better to help consult but Wyatt! 

The way the two met was H-O-T. I could tell you all about it in great detail but I want you to be able to experience the sexiness yourself. Of course, I believe the book could just combust into a huge ball of fire with the way the two looked and acted around each other. Anyways, Wyatt and Molly must work together. Even though years and years have passed since the two spent intimate times together, they pick up where they left off. 

What kind of book would it be though without the yummy drama and secondary characters. Both of which I absolutely loved! Firefighters. Hollywood. Hot men. Did I mention "hot" firefighters? Great characters. You don't want to miss out on the 'Hot In Chicago' books. If you're a reader who loves romance, sexy men, and strong heroines, these books will not let you down! Kate Meader knows how to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

*Thank you to the publisher for providing a copy for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.



About the Author:
Kate Meader was raised on romance. An Irish girl, she started with Catherine Cookson and Jilly Cooper novels, and spiced it up with some Mills & Boon. Now based in Chicago, she writes romances of her own, where sexy contemporary alpha heroes and strong heroines match each other quip for quip. When not immersed in tales of brooding mill owners, oversexed equestrians, and men who can rock an apron or a fire hose, Kate lives on the web at katemeader.com.

Fire Giveaway:
We are excited to do a Fire Giveaway to celebrate the third in Kate Meader’s Hot in Chicago series, Sparking the Fire. This giveaway will include Flirting with Fire (Book 1) and Playing with Fire (Book 2). You can visit all sites on the blog tour to enter the Fire Giveaways – but keep in mind you can only win once! U.S. only.

Blog Tour:
September 14:
RT Book Reviews – Exclusive Excerpt only

September 20:
Heroes and Heartbreakers – Exclusive Excerpt + Giveaway

September 23:
USA Today’s Happy Ever After – Exclusive Excerpt only

September 26:
Harlequin Junkie – Spotlight + Giveaway
Under the Covers – Interview

September 27:

September 28:

September 29:

September 30:

October 3:

October 4:

October 5:

October 6:
The Librarian – Blog Talk Radio Author’s on the Air - Interview Only - Listen Live at 7:30 pm ET!

October 7:

Sparking the Fire buy links:
S&S  
B&N   
BAM   
IBOOKSTORE (ebook)  
KINDLE (ebook)   
NOOK (ebook)   
GOOGLE PLAY (ebook)   

HOT TIP: Kate is also offering a $25 Amazon gift card during the Sparking the Fire release tour. It will run Monday September 26 to Friday October 7. Enter here.

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