Friday Finds | New NetGalley Finds

TITLE: Candidate

AUTHOR: Tracy Ewens

PUBLISHER: Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), Members’ Titles

RELEASE DATE: June 23, 2015

GENRE: Women’s Fiction, Romance

BUY LINKS: AMAZON

If only life were as simple was choosing between Toaster Strudel and Fruit Loops.

Katherine Galloway is two years divorced and still living out of boxes. Between her brothers (cops that work with her ex) and her mother’s constant reminders that her clock is ticking, Kate is trying to hold it all together. When it comes to public relations, there’s nothing she can’t handle . . . or at least that’s what she thinks.

Grady Malendar, the only son of United States Senator Patrick Malendar, has a reputation as a playboy who likes to have a little too much fun. The senator is running for re-election and needs Grady’s help with the youth vote, so they hire a PR firm. Grady is willing to participate in the dog-and-pony show to help his father win, but there are some things about his life he wants to keep hidden. Especially from his snoopy new PR “babysitter,” Kate Galloway.

Somewhere between campaign stops and fundraisers, Kate and Grady discover that neither of them are what they appear to be. Tensions between them grow until there is no denying they are falling in love behind the scenes of a façade they both need to keep in place. Will scandal, old wounds, and secrets tear them apart, or will Kate and Grady realize that they are both candidates for love?

TITLE: Another Place

AUTHOR: Tina Shyver-Plank

PUBLISHER: Two Harbors Press

RELEASE DATE: October 20, 2015

GENRE: Women’s Fiction, General Fiction

BUY LINKS: AMAZON | B&N

Traversing realms on the path to hope

Hope felt too weak to go on. After years of suffering physical and emotional abuse at the hands of The Man, she was left a fragile shadow of a woman, bone thin and locked in anxiety and depression. She wanted peace. She yearned for freedom. But in order to survive, she had to shed the shackles of victimhood and patriarchy—without destroying herself.

With only a flimsy foothold in her real world of horrors, Hope constructs from the shattered pieces of her frail life another existence. In Another Place, her mental realm, she coexists with her alter ego, Sarah St. Vincent, who equips her with the emotional tools to battle The Man. Yet as Hope becomes addicted to the catharsis of escape, her altered reality threatens to imprison her and trap her from her true existence. Only through self-discovery and her own personal evolution can she bring Sarah’s inner strength to the real world.

A dark and ambitious fiction debut, Another Place experiments with imagery, poetry, and realms of existence to explore the internal landscape of mental illness and the process of recovery and self-actualization.

This story, set in New England, centers on a young, reclusive female who must reclaim the task of reshaping her fragile reality in the modern world of patriarchy. The psychologically intense experiences of the protagonist, a creative and deeply sensitive soul, upon which multi-dimensional states of being persist, compel a mind-bending, emotional catharsis. The protagonist, Hope, a symbol and persona for the trials and tribulations in the self-discovery process, seeks a place apart where inner peace is possible and victimization ends. When the antagonist, The Man, a complex blend of faces, who is the lifelong catalyst for suffering, encounters the alter ego, Sarah St. Vincent, a stronger, more integrated sense of self gradually arises in Hope to replace former ego fragmentation. This book focuses on the imbalance in relationships that cuts deep into the wells of the unconscious.

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