I’m very excited to be participating in the 2015 Read-A-Spark hosted by Olivia from Brewing Up Books, Kathy from The Novelty of Life, and Cassandra from ccbooks66512.
This Read-A-Thon runs from 5/17 – 7/26 and will include discussions, activities, and challenges relating to all eleven of the Nicholas Sparks book-to-movie adaptations that have been released thus far. #ReadaSpark will be used on Instagram and Twitter, so feel free to follow along and tag your own posts.
Here’s the reading schedule:
The Longest Ride – 5/18
The Choice – 5/24
The Best of Me – 5/31
Safe Haven – 6/7
The Lucky One – 6/14
The Last Song – 6/21
Dear John – 6/28
Nights in Rodanthe – 7/5
The Notebook – 7/12
A Walk to Remember – 7/19
Message in a Bottle – 7/26
Anyone can participate in the Read-A-Spark – simply add your name and blog/Goodreads URL to the list on Brewing Up Books and create an introductory post on your blog, linking back to Brewing Up Books. (Source: Brewing Up Books)
“Forty years old, divorced, with two sons on the verge of adolescence and an ex-husband who considers visitation to be optional, Brenda Haversham isn’t having a whole lot of fun. She’s also no longer qualified for the work she loves, so she’s toiling away in a cubicle instead, trying to make ends meet. Brenda is short on money, short on connection with her kids, and short on any kind of social life. The only thing Brenda has in abundance is her anger. And that turns out to be her greatest asset.
When she was a kid, Brenda’s father taught her how to throw a good fastball. That wasn’t of much use to a girl, but it is enough to astound onlookers at a “test your speed” pitching cage before a Cleveland Indians game. The more Brenda pictures her ex-husband’s face on the other end, the harder she throws. And when someone tapes her performance and puts it up online, Brenda becomes an Internet sensation and then more than that.
The Indians come calling and Brenda finds her life taking a turn in a new direction. Soon, she’s standing on the mound as the first woman player in Major League history and dealing with everything that comes with it. The money is great and the endorsement deals are even better. The fury of “traditionalists?” Not so much. And the conflicting emotions of her teammates are even harder to manage. Meanwhile, Brenda’s home life is evolving faster than she can keep up, redefining her role as a mother, a friend, and even a lover. As the season winds down Brenda will find out if she has what it takes to be a winner at both baseball and life.” (Description via NetGalley)
MY THOUGHTS
Susan Petrone has created a masterful story of a dream many girls who play softball or baseball have…a chance to play professionally. With every sentence I was imagining myself in Brenda’s shoes putting on the team jersey, tying up my cleats, and holding that ball in my hand in front of thousands of people.
I’ve never read a book, about baseball, that really touched my heart like this book did. Even in today’s society a woman playing professional baseball is unheard of and I think Petrone gave an accurate interpretation of how people might react. There were those who truly supported Brenda, but there were the “haters” who thought it an abomination having a woman play. Petrone also did an excellent job incorporating the emotions a single mother would have when taking on a job that requires a lot of travel in addition to having to deal with her ex-husband. If there was ever a Brenda to grace Major League baseball, she would change everything and be a part of something historical…something that would pave the way for others afterward.
Throw Like a Woman is about perseverance, courage, and strength. It’s about knowing you’re part of something bigger than yourself and embracing every moment of it.
I absolutely loved this book and would highly recommend it to those who enjoy reading women’s fiction and are baseball fans like myself.
An advance copy was generously provided through NetGalley for an honest review.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“She started to walk toward the grass then sprinted, just because she could. Out of breath, she reached her arms up and out and spun around a few times, looking at the perfect blue sky above. And then she screamed ‘Yeeeeeesss!’ as loudly as she could.”
“For a second, Brenda had an image of her father standing in front of her, holding a beat-up catcher’s mitt, an ancient catcher’s mask on the top of his head. ‘If you can just make the four-seam fastball fly as it wants to fly, you could be…anything,’ he’d said to her.”
Susan Petrone’s short fiction has been published by Glimmer Train, Featherproof Books, Muse, Conclave, and Whiskey Island. She is the author of the novels Throw Like a Woman (2015, The Story Plant) and A Body at Rest (2009, Drinian Press), which won a bronze medal for regional fiction from the Independent Publishers Book Awards (IPPY). Her short story, “Monster Jones Wants to Creep You Out” (Conclave, 2010) was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. On the non-fiction side, Susan’s work has appeared on CoolCleveland.com and ESPN.com, and she co-owns the Cleveland Indians blog, ItsPronouncedLajaway.com, for ESPN.com’s SweetSpot network.She holds a master’s degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Cleveland State University and lives with one husband, one daughter, and far too many dogs in a little house near some medium-sized woods. (About the Author found on Susan’s website)
I’m always curious (for some odd reason) what people prefer to drink while reading a book. Does your choice depend on the book your reading or just your drink preference?
Personally, I love drinking wine while reading. So, just to be a little nosy I created a poll.
The first book in Lia Riley’s Off the Map series is coming out in print! Upside Down is a great book and I would definitely recommend it and the rest of the series to those who enjoy New Adult novels. As part of the Print Release Blitz I had a chance to ask Lia a few questions. I’m really happy I had this opportunity because she’s easily become one of my favorite authors.
ABOUT THE BOOK
TITLE: Upside Down
AUTHOR: Lia Riley
GENRE: New Adult
PUBLICATION DATE: May 12, 2015
PUBLISHER: Forever Yours
“Twenty-one-year-old Natalia Stolfi is saying good-bye to the past-and turning her life upside down with a trip to the land down under. For the next six months, she’ll act like a carefree exchange student, not a girl sinking under the weight of painful memories. Everything is going according to plan until she meets a brooding surfer with hypnotic green eyes and the troubling ability to see straight through her act.
Bran Lockhart is having the worst year on record. After the girl of his dreams turned into a nightmare, he moved back home to Melbourne to piece his life together. Yet no amount of disappointment could blind him to the pretty California girl who gets past all his defenses. He’s never wanted anyone the way he wants Talia. But when Bran gets a stark reminder of why he stopped believing in love, he and Talia must decide if what they have is once in a lifetime . . . or if they were meant to live a world apart.”
Without further ado here are my interview questions with author Lia Riley.
Q: What are you currently working on?
Lots! I’m wrapping up edits on my brand-new contemporary Adult Brightwater series (three sexy cowboy brothers), as well as edits for a stand alone New Adult, WITH EVERY BREATH, that releases in print on December 29th and stars a sexy, broody Scottish mountain climber.
Q: Where did the characters Bran and Talia come from?
They both sort of just waltzed into my brain…but Bran is a clear nod to my love of the Byronic hero…moody, broody, and imperfect with the ability to act heroically. Talia probably draws on my own sense of humor, struggles with mental illness and the fact I did study abroad in Australia at twenty-one.
Q: How has your life changed with the publication of the Off the Map series?
It’s a lot busier! I have actively chosen to make writing a career which means keeping work hours, sitting at the computer even during glorious weather days and basically living in yoga pants J Also…I couldn’t be happier!
Q: Do you have any writing superstitions or rituals?
Hmmm…good question. I often drink tea while writing so litter the house with forgotten cups. Also, I realized that I often fast-draft with my eyes closed or while intently staring in the distance. This is a little awkward in coffee shops.
Q: What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
Don’t wait for the muse, get words on page. There is no magic, only work. Okay, a little magic but you have to be working for it to come.
GIVEAWAY
Enter here for your chance to win a prize pack featuring a $10 Amazon gift card, a signed copy of Upside Down, and Off the Map themed goodies.
After studying at the University of Montana-Missoula, Lia Riley scoured the world armed only with a backpack, overconfidence and a terrible sense of direction. When not torturing heroes (because c’mon, who doesn’t love a good tortured hero?), Lia herds unruly chickens, camps, beach combs, daydreams about as-of-yet unwritten books, wades through a mile-high TBR pile and schemes yet another trip. She and her family live mostly in Northern California.
Check out my reviews of each book in the Off the Map Series:
Now that I have some time to catch up on my blog (i.e. no more wedding planning), I can finally respond to this awesome nomination for The Versatile Blogger Award. I was nominated (back in February) by Emma from The Book Brief. Thank you so much Emma!
Here are the rules:
1. Show the award on your blog
2. Thank the person that has nominated you.
3. Share 7 different facts about yourself.
4. Nominate 15 blogs of your choice
5. Link your nominees and let them know of your nomination.
My 7 facts:
1. I recently got married on April 25, 2015 to an amazing man!
2. I sometimes have an unfortunate case of not wanting to exercise because I’d rather be writing or reading. Can anyone relate?
3. I love buttery Chardonnay wine. Yum!
4. I’m obsessed with taking pictures. They are a way for me to relive great memories.
5. When I download a new song I listen to it over and over again until I get tired of it.
6. I have to read a book all the way through even if I’m hating it.
7. I recently found out that I can sleep on planes if I take a Jet Blue flight because they have a lot more leg room compared to other airlines and (according to my husband) I have giraffe legs that need room to stretch out.
My Nominations:
At this point I will not be nominating anyone as there are too many great blogs to choose from.
It seems like I’ve been gone for so long, but I’m happy to say that I’m finally a married woman now. Our wedding was beautiful even with the surprise California rain that lasted for 5 minutes. We danced. We cried (ok I cried). We laughed. At the end of the day I married the most wonderful man I’ve ever known.
Now to share some pictures provided by our wonderful, amazing, and talented photographer Sean King of Sean King Photography.
Ever since I read Lia Riley’s Off the Map series she instantly became one of my new favorite authors. Not only are her novels great, but she’s also great to her fans. I’ve appreciated that she responds to emails and Facebook comments and interacts with her fans often. She’s also been very generous by providing me with copies of her books as giveaway items on my blog. Lia Riley is an amazing person and (of course) writer. With that said…I jumped at the chance to help promote the release of her new book Carry Me Home…it’s out today!
“Love doesn’t have to be perfect to be true… Years ago, Tanner Green loved Sunny Letman. She was meant to be his first kiss, first love, first everything. Then their world spun upside-down and out of control. Free-spirited Sunny doesn’t do commitment. Sure, guys are great for a night or a week, but shealways leaves first. That is, until professional skateboarder and town golden boy, Tanner Green, unexpectedly walks back into her life.
Despite their broken history, a fragile and undeniably electric connection still holds them together. Now Tanner has to convince Sunny that even though love isn’t always perfect, it’s worth sticking around for.”
GIVEAWAY
Now what would a launch day be without a chance to win the book!
Enter here for your chance to win a digital copy of Carry Me Home by Lia Riley.
After studying at the University of Montana-Missoula, Lia Riley scoured the world armed only with a backpack, overconfidence and a terrible sense of direction. When not torturing heroes (because c’mon, who doesn’t love a good tortured hero?), Lia herds unruly chickens, camps, beach combs, daydreams about as-of-yet unwritten books, wades through a mile-high TBR pile and schemes yet another trip. She and her family live mostly in Northern California.
Congratulations Lia Riley on your new book release!
“This provocative, poignant memoir of a daughter whose mother left her behind by choice begs the question: Are we destined to make the same mistakes as our parents?
One summer, Melissa Cistaro’s mother drove off without explanation Devastated, Melissa and her brothers were left to pick up the pieces, always tormented by the thought: Why did their mother abandon them?
Thirty-five years later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. After decades of hiding her painful memories, she has just days to find out what happened that summer and confront the fear she could do the same to her kids. But Melissa never expects to stumble across a cache of letters her mother wrote to her but never sent, which could hold the answers she seeks.
Haunting yet ultimately uplifting, Pieces of My Mother chronicles one woman’s quest to discover what drives a mother to walk away from the children she loves. Alternating between Melissa’s tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother’s final days, this captivating memoir reveals how our parents’ choices impact our own and how we can survive those to forge our own paths.” (NetGalley Description)
MY THOUGHTS
Memoirs are certainly my favorite genre and it’s because of books like Pieces of My Mother by Melissa Cistaro. It’s such a heartbreaking story and shows just how much people are impacted by their parent’s choices. When a parent makes poor choices their children might follow the same path or spend their lives worrying that they might. That’s exactly what Melissa Cistaro was going through.
The book is formatted in flashbacks. It starts with Melissa as a young child watching her mother leave and then goes to her as an adult flying to be with her dying mother. The story continues on like this and follows Melissa’s childhood along the way.
Growing up, Melissa had an unusual relationship with her mother. Her mother had left, but was never really gone. She’d visit randomly and Melissa would occasionally take trips with her mother. Reading the book, you can really feel that she never understood why her mother left.
This book really hit home for me. Both Melissa and I had a mother that we didn’t really understand. We didn’t understand the decisions they made and why they continued doing what they did seeing how it effected their children. While my mother never left us like Melissa’s did, I feel that she left us mentally. I felt a lot of what she was feeling growing up. She asked why her mother wouldn’t stay while I’ve asked why my mother couldn’t stop taking her pills.
It was clear that Melissa kept her feelings bottled up…just like I tend to do. She had so much anger towards her mother, but didn’t want to tell her, fearing that her mother would run away again. I felt that in this paragraph:
“What good would it do me to unravel the anger inside me? I might hurl this heavy ceramic coffee cup across the table. I might stand up and tell her she sucks at being a mom. But that isn’t me. I’ll need to take her as she is right here, right now – fragrant, strip-searched, and full of mystery.”
There was a line in the book that also reminded me of my siblings. “We line up, three across, and stand over the grate with our legs apart until it gets too hot and the metal edge starts to burn the bottoms of our feet.” I laughed when I read this because that’s exactly what my siblings and I did when we’d get ready for school. We’d fight over it just like Melissa did with her brothers.
Pieces of My Mother is about learning to forgive even when you don’t fully understand the decisions that were made. It’s also about learning to forgive yourself and know that the decisions people make are their own.
I would highly recommend this book for those of you that love a good memoir.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“But memory is never linear. It’s as random as the wildflowers that grew behind our yellow house – a purple lupine here, a patch of California poppies there, a circle of yellow buttercups – and hidden among them, the slivers of broken glass that sliced our feet open. I was searching for the memories that could rescue me.”
“She pretends to be reading something on the page but her mind is somewhere else. I feel like she’s trying to show me that she’s okay, that she can still do the thins she’s always done. She is pretending to read and I am pretending that this does not break my heart.”
Melissa Cistaro’s stories have been published in numerous literary journals, including the New Ohio Review, Anderbo.com, and Brevity as well as the anthologies CHERISHED and LOVE and PROFANITY. She works as a bookseller and event coordinator at Book Passage, the esteemed independent bookstore in Northern California. Melissa graduated with honors from UCLA and followed her literary pursuits through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop in Portland. Between the years of raising her children, writing, bookselling, teaching horseback riding, and curating a business in equestrian antiques – Melissa completed her first memoir. Pieces of My Mother will be released on May 5th 2015. (Bio from Melissa Cistaro’s website, link above)
So sorry I’ve been MIA for the last couple of weeks. It’s been pretty hectic because in 6 days I will be getting married! Now I understand why they say the last few weeks are the most stressful. My fiancé and I have been running around finalizing details and making sure everything is in order. Thursday and Friday are going to be busy days since my dress, wedding favors, and flower girl shoes need to be picked up and I have to get my nails done. Hopefully I still have hair by Saturday and please cross your fingers that it doesn’t rain. It’s supposed to rain Thursday and Friday I guess.
I’ve also been trying to get everything wrapped up at work since I’ll be gone for a few weeks for our honeymoon to St. Thomas. I can’t wait to lay out with my husband enjoying each other’s company, eating food, and drinking cocktails…and of course I’ll be catching up on my reading. Right now I’m reading The Beautiful Daughters by Nichole Baart and will end up finishing the book on a nice beach.
I’ll have a few scheduled posts ready during the honeymoon, but will be pretty much off the grid. I just want to spend my honeymoon thinking only of my husband and the fact that we are newlyweds.
I’m so looking forward to this Saturday when I finally get to marry the man of my dreams. He’s so amazing and I can’t imagine my life without him.
Considering how excited I am, I wanted so share some more engagement photos. (I’ve said this a million times, but our photographer is AMAZING!)
Perfect for fans of Emily Giffin and Jennifer Weiner, this bright, funny debut from a fresh voice in fiction offers a delicious take on love, family, and what it means to build a home of one’s own.
“Sarina Mahler thinks she has her life all nailed down: a growing architecture practice in Austin, Texas, and an any-day-now proposal from her loving boyfriend, Noah. She’s well on her way to having the family she’s hoped for since her mother’s death ten years ago. But with Noah on a temporary assignment abroad and retired Olympic swimmer—and former flame—Eamon Roy back in town asking her to renovate his new fixer-upper, Sarina’s life takes an unexpected turn. Eamon proves to be Sarina’s dream client, someone who instinctively trusts every one of her choices—and Sarina is reminded of all the reasons she was first drawn to him back in the day. Suddenly her carefully planned future with Noah seems a little less than perfect. And when tragedy strikes, Sarina is left reeling. With her world completely upended, she is forced to question what she truly wants in life—and in love.
Full of both humor and heartbreak, The One That Got Away is the story of one woman’s discovery that, sometimes, life is what happens when you leave the blueprints behind.”
MY THOUGHTS
We all have that one person. The person you thought was the one, but ended up disappointing you. The person that’s always in the back of your mind. This person is the one you don’t truly get over. This person is the one that got away.
Sarina Mahler is a strong woman who knows what she wants…at least career wise, but in the relationship department it’s a different story. While she believes that her future with her boyfriend Noah is set, she’s sorely mistaken when a ghost from her past comes back to town. That ghost comes in the form of a tall, handsome, and charming swimmer named Eamon.
If you’ve ever been in a situation where you had to choose between your head and your heart then you will totally relate to the character Sarina. She had to figure out what would ultimately make her happy even though each path would cause pain to someone else, but that’s the risk you take with love. You have to decide what’s best for you in the end and know that you won’t look back with regrets. This is what Sarina was going through while she was spending more time with Eamon and her boyfriend was miles away.
I related to Sarina most when it came to her family. She lost her mother, just like I did, and I felt Sarina’s pain every time she thought of her mom. It’s a pain that never leaves you, but becomes a part of who you are. The smallest reminder could bring you back to the day she left and bring the tears along with it. This is the part of Sarina that I was most fond of while reading.
Chase does an excellent job portraying real world dilemmas when it comes to a woman’s career and finding a man that will understand her dreams and aspirations, but also understands the importance of family. That is the story that Bethany Chase created. She created a character who’s strong willed, family oriented, and full of heart and passion. I think I would get along with Sarina if in some weird universe I was able to jump into the pages myself.
The One That Got Away is about following your heart and not worrying about what others will think of your decisions. It’s about deciding what’s important in your life.
I’m always open to reading books by new authors. I think they give a fresh take within their genre and Bethany Chase’s debut novel is definitely worth reading.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“It’s funny how, when you only get to spend a very finite amount of time with someone you wanted to know better, you find that certain details have cut deeper tracks in your memory than others-something about the way they looked, or one particular comment that made you laugh, out of hundreds of sentences.”
“Instead, it’s like groundwater. Pooling underneath my skin, seeping to the surface here and there, now and then. Endlessly replenished. Easy to forget about, until it startles me wit the depth of it.”
A native of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Bethany Chase headed to Williams College for an English degree and somehow came out the other side an interior designer. When she’s not writing or designing, you can usually find her in a karaoke bar. She lives with her lovely husband and occasionally psychotic cat in Brooklyn, three flights up. This is her first novel.
Stories Unfolded 