Winner of Heart of Iron

Sorry I forgot to handle this on Saturday.

Congratulations to the Winner

of 

Giveaway Ended June 7, 2013
ARC Giveaway: Heart of Iron


Winner: Vicki W

Vicki please fill in the Winner's Acceptance Form or email me at mesreads AT gmail.com to confirm the win and I'll get the book mailed.  Please reply within 72 hours!   

Thank you to all who entered.

Book #Review and #Giveaway: It Had to Be You by Jill Shalvis

This is a fast, fun, enjoyable read.

It Had to Be You

by Jill Shalvis

• Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (May 28, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1455521124
• ISBN-13: 978-1455521128

Genre: Contemporary Romance
My Rating: 4.5 of 5.0

Book Description

Release date: May 28, 2013 | Series: Lucky Harbor

Ali Winters is not having a good day. Her boyfriend left her, everyone in town thinks she's a thief, and now she's about to be kicked out of her home. Her only shot at keeping a roof over her head and clearing her name is to beg for help from a police detective who's as sexy as he is stern....

After a high-profile case goes wrong, Luke Hanover returns to his hometown for some peace and quiet. Instead he finds a bombshell brunette in a heap of trouble. As he helps Ali put her world back together, the pieces of Luke's own life finally seem to fall into place. Is this the start of a sizzling fling? Or are Luke and Ali on the brink of something big in a little town called Lucky Harbor?

Review:
Ali is a very vibrant, upbeat person. She comes from a household where her mother went from boyfriend to boyfriend but she always protected her two daughters and tried to look on the bright side of things. Ali had become the responsible one, helping with finances.  She moved to Lucky Harbor with the hope of building a new life for herself.  She loves working as the clerical and floral assistant in the town’s florist and she has lots of great ideas if only her boss would let her use them.

Ali was dating, then living with the charismatic town manager. He had been working long hours and it had been several months since they shared a bedroom but she still considered him her boyfriend until she discovered him ‘partying’ with another girl in his office after an important town event. She returns home to find he has vacated and she gets a text from him that the lease has expired and she has to move out that day.

Ali is in the kitchen in her under garments when she is surprised by an intruder. It turns out to be Luke who is the owner/landlord. He has come home expecting an empty house and seeking refuge and escape from a high profile murder case.  Instead he is faced with a vibrant, package of determined young lady. Ali assures him she will be out in a few days and in the meantime she will protect him from the intruding calls and visits from reporters.

Before Ali can find other lodgings she becomes the primary suspect in the theft of a suitcase of fifty thousand dollars of town money. Luke doesn’t want to become involved but his protective instincts have already kicked into gear.

I loved these two characters! Ali is so upbeat and positive that she buoys those around her, including the tired and brooding Luke. Luke is all protective cop and ‘hero’ material. It is fun to read their fun dialogue and their attempts to resist the irresistible zing between them! Ali teaches crafts to the senior set, including Luke’s estranged step-grandfather. These folks and some other crazy characters add to the emotional trauma as Luke and Ali try to solve the mystery which is clearly some type of frame-up. Some of the prior characters of other Lucky Harbor books are mentioned although they aren’t a big part.

The characters are sweet and loveable, the plot is fun and the writing is easy. Jill Shalvis does a lovely job of keeping the reading upbeat and fun.

I received this title, for an honest review, from Grand Central/Hachette.

Thanks to the fine folks at Grand Central, Hachette, for offering a copy for Giveaway!
TO ENTER THIS GIVEAWAY for a Print Copies

ENTRY FORM HERE

For 3 Extra Bonus entries Visit the author's website and tell me something you find of interest.

ONE Winner-

* This contest is only open to those with US address.

* No P.O. Boxes Please - for shipping reasons.

* Limit one win per household.

* This contest will close 10 PM (Central) on June 21, 2013.
The winner will be randomly selected from all entries.
WINNERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED on June 22, 2013.
Winners will have 72 hours to respond by email or the winners form linked in the announcement.

Book Review: Who Wants to Marry a Cowboy by Abigail Sharpe

This is a fun read that works perfect for summer!
Who Wants to Marry a Cowboy 
by Abigail Sharpe

• File Size: 518 KB
• Print Length: 352 pages
• Publisher: Forever Yours (May 7, 2013)
• Sold by: Hachette Book Group
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00AG0VO8G

Genre: Contemporary Romance
My Rating: 4.25 of 5.0

Book Description
Publication Date: May 7, 2013"Charming and witty. Abigail Sharpe will delight you."-- New York Times bestselling author Christie Craig"A rich and rustic tale of family, friendship, and love guaranteed to lasso your heart." -- Jessica Lemmon, author of TEMPTING THE BILLIONAIRE
In the bestselling tradition of Lori Wilde...
SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMEONE NEW . . .
There's nothing florist Ainsley Fairfax won't do to help her sister get the love of her life-even if it means taking her place on a bachelorette weekend at a Wyoming ranch so Cecelia can sail off with the man of her dreams. Ainsley is determined to spend the time keeping her head down and her heart safely tucked away-until an encounter with the ranch's hunky owner gets her heart-and steamy desires-to bloom . . .
Riley Pommer doesn't want to be lassoed into any relationship. But with the family ranch in dire straits, Riley knows his sisters' crazy plan to turn the ranch into the setting for a dating competition-and using Riley as the bait-is the only thing standing between them and foreclosure. But the rules of the game change the instant Riley lays eyes on the spirited Ainsley. Now, as others try to stampede over their love, can Riley prove to Ainsley that true love is a prize worth fighting for?

Review:
Ainsley is stressed by her high society mother trying to foist her onto the starched but ‘oh-so-proper’ Edward. Edward has totally bought into the position of teaming with Ainsley as his practical society wife. He believes that he can manage a life with her and won’t have to worry about the pain that he associates with a passionate love. The thing is--Ainsley doesn’t love Edward and dreams of freedom to pursue expanding her florist shop. On the other hand, her rebellious and free spirit sister, Cecelia, has had a crush on Edward for years. Cecelia has decided to escape their mother by spending a summer week on a Wyoming ‘dude’ ranch as a bachelorette candidate for the handsome cowboy owner.  The girls decide to trade places when their mother books Ainsley on a romantic cruise with Edward.

Riley is the reluctant bachelor who has to entertain a group of bachelorettes. The scheme was his sisters’ idea to increase the income of the ranch and use a dating competition to test the ranch for women to come to a dude ranch destination.

Riley has always played the field and has no intention of settling down just to please his siblings who are struggling with the recent loss of their dad. Ainsley has no plans to fall for a cowboy. She plans to use the time investigating the ranch family green house.

Riley isn’t pleased to have to take several days to entertain eight overly eager women. However, he is quickly intrigued by the one woman who isn’t fawning over him. Ainsley isn’t interested in competing for attention but she has a hard time ignoring the sparks when she gets close to Riley. The other jealous women make nasty innuendos and start suspicious rumors to interfere with the growing relationship between Ainsley and Riley. Edward showing up to claim Ainsley as his fiancee only complicates matters.

This turned out to be a fun story and you sort of get a “two-fer” as you get Ainsley’s romance and Cecelia’s struggles to win over Edward.  The other female candidates make some good characters to dislike as they create conflict.  The writing style is easy and the plot is fun and engaging. Riley has commitment issues while Ainsley has fear of confrontation issues to overcome. Riley’s siblings, a teenage boy and his sisters, are clearly characters who may develop for further stories. This is a good summer read for those who enjoy bachelorette antics and conflicted romance stories.

I received this title from Forever Yours/Hachette for an honest review.

Author Interview plus Giveaway: Barbara Bretton, author of The Crosse Harbor Time Travel Trilogy

Please help me welcome Barbara Bretton and enjoy the insightful answers provided in this Interview.

About the Author:
Barbara Bretton is the USA Today bestselling, award-winning author of more than 40 books. She currently has over ten million copies in print around the world. Her works have been translated into twelve languages in over twenty countries.

Barbara has been featured in articles in The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Romantic Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Herald News, Home News, Somerset Gazette, among others, and has been interviewed by Independent Network News Television, appeared on the Susan Stamberg Show on NPR, and been featured in an interview with Charles Osgood of WCBS, among others.

Her awards include both Reviewer's Choice and Career Achievement Awards from Romantic Times; Gold and Silver certificates from Affaire de Coeur; the RWA Region 1 Golden Leaf; and several sales awards from Bookrak. Ms. Bretton was included in a recent edition of Contemporary Authors.

Barbara loves to spend as much time as possible in Maine with her husband, walking the rocky beaches and dreaming up plots for upcoming books.
WEB: www.barbarabretton.com
FACEBOOK:  www.facebook.com/barbarabretton
TWITTER:  www.twitter.com/barbarabretton
GOODREADS:  www.goodreads.com/Barbara_Bretton
RAVELRY:  www.ravelry.com/wickedsplitty

 Learn more from Barbara's answers below:

Q1.  I have read some of your contemporary fiction and really enjoyed the easy flow. Now I am excited to read the time travels. Is there a big transition in your writing style from one genre to another?

BB:
Hi, Martha! Thanks so much for hosting me today. I love Q&A interviews.

Thanks, also, for the kind words about my contemporaries. Good question about writing style. I think my style is essentially the same from genre to genre with a few minor differences. (Word choice in historicals comes to mind.) I tend to write in a conversational style which (I hope) lends itself to easy, effortless reading. I don't want to get between the reader and the story.

Q2.  I love series and I am always curious: When you do a series do you have each book plotted out before you start the first one or do the subsequent books flow from the first book?

BB:
I'm taking a deep breath here before I plunge ahead with the answer. The truth? I don't plot. I was a great plotter with my first ten books and then something happened (A comet? A meteor?) and suddenly I didn't want any part of plotting. I went from plotter to what they currently call "pantser" in the blink of an eye. There was something very comforting about having an outline to follow but that same sense of comfort also deadened the excitement. At least it did for me. I love not knowing what's going to happen when I hit the keyboard.

And here's another dark truth: I never once planned to write a series. In each instance I had a single, clear idea and a passion to write it that I guess transmitted itself to my publishers who (to my delight) subsequently asked for me to continue the storylines.

Q3.  What most inspires your plots?

BB:
So many things! The Time Travel trilogy came to life when a hot-air balloon landed in the parking lot of my parents' condo. My Sugar Maple series sprang to life in my dentist's waiting room. I was leafing through a brochure on dental implants (fun reading, right?) and found myself wondering what happens to a vampire with tooth troubles. Sometimes it's a whisper of conversation overheard in a diner or a photograph in a magazine that lingers long after I've turned the page.

Q4.  If you could jump into a book, and live in that world, which would it be?

BB:
Right now I'm re-reading Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels so I'd probably like to be transported to his fictional Boston and be Susan Silverman for a day. And I'm almost (but not quite) embarrassed to admit that it would be fun to be the heroine of one of Victoria Holt's wonderful classic Gothic novels. Maybe I could be the Bride of Pendorric or Mistress of Mellyn. I cut my romance-reading teeth on those books when I was a teenager and I still love them.

Q5.  Have you had to do any unique research or what was one of the most surprising things you learned in researching for any of your books?

BB:
Some years ago I was lucky enough to be chosen to participate in Harlequin American's Century of American Romance project, a series of romances each set in a different decade of the 20th century. It was an ambitious project and we were all over-the-moon excited about it. I was given the privilege of writing about the 1940s and 1950s which meant some of the best research opportunities of my life. I had always loved my parents' stories about World War II and this gave me the chance to sit down and really listen. Not as a daughter but as a writer.

Be careful what you wish for! My dad's stories were mostly about being a Sea Bee in New Guinea, but my mom's were filled with Manhattan in the 1940s, of whirlwind romances and being a real life Rosie the Riveter and dancing the night away at the Stork Club  and Copacabana. I'd heard the stories a thousand times before but this time I listened differently and the past became as real to me as the world I was living in.

And then came the Big Surprise. My mom had been engaged twice before she met and fell in love with my father and one of those men died in Europe during the War. The funny thing is, it wasn't my mother who told me. It was my dad. She was furious that he'd blurted out her "secret" and distraught that I might think less of her.

Think less of her?! It only made me want to hear every single story she had to tell.

My parents both died in 2001 (within four months of each other) and I'm so grateful I had the chance to sit down and really listen to the stories of their lives when I had the chance.

Q6.  How do you handle it when some element of what you're writing decides that it just doesn't want to work the way you want it to?

BB:
Like any professional writer: first I cry, then I reach for the chocolate.

Once I emerge from my chocolate coma, I sit down and take a hard look at the material and nine times out of ten I discover that I made a wrong turn somewhere along the line and I have to take a scalpel to the manuscript and slice my way back down to the bones of the story.

Q7.  You have been writing for many years. Is there anything you see that is different in style or writing technique or tools from when you first became published?

BB:
Where do I start?? I've been re-reading some of my older books recently (think early to mid 1980s) and the difference in style and technique is astonishing. Technology has changed so dramatically in the last 30 years that most plot twists could be eliminated with a cell phone call or a minute with Google. But beyond that I'd say the long-winded descriptions of clothing and food have been stripped to the bone . . . and in a good way. Female characters are stronger, more independent. Male characters, even our beloved Alpha males, have been forced to adapt to the changing social landscape.

Storytelling is faster-paced, leaner, more dialogue-heavy than narrative-rich. I've often wondered if that's partially a result of creating on a computer. I wrote my first books by hand then typed (yes, typed!) them at the kitchen table on an old IBM Selectric. This was back in the days when you had to make sloppy, annoying carbon copies and sit there painstakingly daubing Liquid Paper over your typos. While I wouldn't want to go back to the pre-computer days, I have to admit there was something very satisfying about watching that stack of pages mount up.

Research meant a trip to the library and maybe a long wait for special order volumes to be delivered. Communication with publishers was snail mail. Writers haunted their mailboxes for acceptance checks or the dreaded rejection letters. A writer's life revolved around the post office: sending off our work, waiting to find out what The Powers That Be thought of it.

And everything took a veeeerrryyy loooonnnnggggg time.

Q8.  Which character did you have the most fun with in the Time Travel trilogy, and why do you choose that character?

BB:
My smart-mouth psychic librarian Dakota Wylie, hands down. She popped up early in TOMORROW & ALWAYS and I was a goner. There's something about secondary characters that seems to free a writer and make them much easier to write than the primary characters. Dakota is funny, painfully honest, curious about this world and what may lie beyond, unlucky in love, addicted to donuts, and willing to grab hold of adventure when it comes her way. What's not to like? Dakota didn't come with the romantic baggage Emilie and Shannon brought with them and that was part of what made her such a delight. She was as close to a clean slate as I was ever going to find. So it was pretty much of a no-brainer when she got her own book and her own hero, DESTINY'S CHILD, Crosse Harbor #3.

Q9.  What three words would you use to describe yourself and your personality?

BB:
Happy. Spontaneous. Creative.

Q10.  If you could have readers finish a sentence what would it be?

BB:
I wish I could . . .

Thank you so much for taking time to share (both your writing and this interview) with readers.

BB:
It was my pleasure entirely. This was fun! Besides, we Marthas have to stick together.
--Barbara Martha Anne Bretton

Isn't that cool she shares my name too!
Visit all the tour stops linked at Bewitching Book Tour.

Somewhere in Time is currently free for download from iTunes, Amazon, Smashwords. It can be downloaded in all formats from this Smashwords link.

ENTER THIS GIVEAWAY for an AUDIO VERSION OF SOMEWHERE IN TIME - Digital Format:

ENTRY FORM HERE

Don't forget to fill in the form for entry! 

I have noticed a few commentors who forgot to enter through the Form. 

For 3 Extra Bonus entries COMMENT ON THE INTERVIEW above or Complete the sentence started by Barbara (BB) at Q10.
For 2 Extra Bonus entries COMMENT ON THE REVIEW.

* This contest is open to anyone who can download digital audio.
* This contest will close 10 PM (Central) on June 21, 2012.
The winner will be randomly selected from all entries.
WINNERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED on June 22, 2012.
Winners will have 72 hours to respond by email or the winners form linked in the announcement.

Book Review: Somewhere in Time, Book 1 of The Crosse Harbor Time Travel Trilogy, by Brabara Bretton

I enjoyed the American Revolutionary history in this time travel romance.

Somewhere in Time (The Crosse Harbor Time Travel Trilogy) 

by Barbara Bretton

• File Size: 497 KB
• Print Length: 352 pages
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Barbara Bretton (June 24, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B008ELA6VK

Genre: Time Travel Romance
My Rating: 4.25 of 5.0

Book Description

Publication Date: June 24, 2012

The CROSSE HARBOR TIME TRAVEL TRILOGY

Book 1 - SOMEWHERE IN TIME

Book 2 - TOMORROW & ALWAYS

Book 3 - DESTINY'S CHILD

Reviewers Choice Award - Best Historical Time Travel

--Romantic Times

Historian Emilie Crosse dreamed of a love that would last forever

Who knew she'd have to sail across two centuries to find it?

When her ex-husband Zane Grey Rutledge showed up at her door with a Revolutionary War uniform that was part of his grandmother's estate, neither one suspected that their lives were about to change in ways they couldn't possibly imagine.

Swept back in time to 1776 where a nation is struggling to be born, Emilie finds herself torn between two men: Zane, her ex who still holds the key to her heart, and Andrew McVie, the Patriot hero of her long-ago dreams . . . .

Review:
Emilie is a historian and although independent and strong minded she seeks security and safety in life and love. There was great passion with her ex-husband, Zane, but he was too impulsive and mercurial for her to believe he could be a “forever” love.

Zane loves his rich toys, fast-paced and jet-travel lifestyle. He loved Emilie and impulsively married her but their divergent goals caused her to walk out on the marriage. When his grandmother dies he is left with the Rutledge mansion as an unwanted responsibility. He decides to donate it for a museum but before he walks out the museum director makes sure that he takes ‘the package’ that his grandmother insisted he have. Inside the package is a Captain’s uniform supposedly passed down in the family since the American Revolution.

Before he leaves for Tahiti, Zane takes the uniform to Emilie for an expert opinion regarding it’s authenticity. The chemistry between them is as combustible as ever and Zane thinks he can convince her to go traveling with him. But the next morning she sneaks out to take a balloon ride to the town festival. The event includes celebrating the brave actions of Andrew McVie who saved George Washington from an assassination attempt in 1776. Zane commandeers the balloon and a freak wind dumps them out in 1776.

Imagine yourself sent back over two hundred years with none of the technology, or even household facilities-bathrooms, refrigerators-that you are accustomed to! Emilie is rather thrilled but Zane is convinced they will return to their own time. Things become emotionally confused and complicated when they meet Emilie’s patriotic hero, Andrew McVie. Would Emilie prefer steady, strong, family oriented Andrew over the passion and joy she has with Zane?

I really liked Emilie’s character and Zane and Andrew are good contrasting, likeable, strong, men. I love the time travel elements and enjoyed reading and thinking about the difficulties Emilie and Zane face in the past, trying to fit in not only with action but in speech too. The way the author weaves in changes in the hearts and dreams of Emilie and Zane is very engaging. The combination of emotional conflict and historical interest makes for a very satisfying romance read.

I received this title, for an honest review, from the author through Bewitching Book Tours.

Somewhere in Time is currently free for download from iTunes, Amazon, Smashwords. It can be downloaded in all formats from this Smashwords link.

Please see the next post for an interesting Author Interview and Giveaway to win an audio copy of Somewhere in Time.