Tuesday, September 30, 2014

What's Left Behind Review

What's Left Behind by Lorrie Thomson
Publication date: August 26, 2014 by Kensington Books
Source: Author/publisher for an honest review
Description:

When the person you’ve built your whole life around is gone, what do you do? It’s not the first time Abby Stone has faced the question. At eighteen, she envisioned a future with her childhood sweetheart, Charlie, only to have him go off to school and leave a pregnant Abby behind. But that pales beside a second loss, when her eighteen-year-old son, Luke, falls to his death from his third-floor dorm.
Abby throws herself into running her thriving B&B on the coast of Maine. With the help of Rob, a local landscape architect, she plans a backyard labyrinth as a memorial to Luke—a place to find peace and solace. Even as Charlie begins hanging around again, looking for a chance to do right by her, Abby resolves to look forward, not back. And then Luke’s girlfriend arrives on Abby’s doorstep—pregnant, as alone as Abby once was—bringing with her the unexpected gift of a new beginning, one that celebrates the past.

Rich in emotion and insight, this beautifully written novel explores the depth of a mother’s bond, resilience after unimaginable loss, and the way love’s memory can fill the gaps in a shattered heart.


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My Take:


What's Left Behind is Lorrie Thomson's second novel, and is a worthy successor to her first novel, Equilibrium.  While the novels are not related in any way, I once again found myself very emotionally invested in the protagonist of the novel. Thomson has proven that she can write about people in a way that really pulls at the reader's heart.

The novel begins with Abby basically still in shock after the death of her son from a fall from his dorm-room window. The devastation is palpable through the words on the page and I had to stop and start the book twice because it  was so painful. I have a college-age son and Abby's pain was all too believable. Once I forced myself to keep reading, I found myself drawn deeply into the lives of Abby, Lilly Beth, Rob, Charlie and Tessa. The three generations of single moms was an interesting aspect to the novel as well.

The reader gradually learns about Abby and how she basically raised Luke on her own, although she did have help from her mother, Lily Beth - also a single mother. Abby's childhood sweetheart, Charlie, ended up not being the guy she thought he was. Abby has a difficult time giving up on the idea of a relationship with Charlie even though it is apparent to everyone that he isn't going to be the stable kind of guy she needs. This relationship was the most troublesome for me - I just wanted to her move on from him. I did enjoy how the history of their relationship was described in depth, gradually, over the course of the book. I could understand the long history they had together and the loyalty still there from their childhood.

I was very intrigued to finally find out more about Lily Beth - she was such an enigma through most of the book. Once more was known about her history, it really altered my view of things.

The third single mom,Tessa, Luke's troubled new girlfriend, is a handful and in need of some emotional support. Her situation is difficult for a number of reasons, not least because her relationship with Luke was still new when he died. She also carries some guilty feelings regarding Luke's death, and is uncertain about what she should do about the baby.

I was really impressed at the way Thomson wove all these situations and more into a wonderful, emotional, thoughtful story that held my attention from start to finish. As usual, I found myself totally immersed in this world and the lives of the characters.

What's Left Behind is definitely high on my suggested books list. I enjoyed the book so much once I got past the heartbreak of the first chapter or two. Thomson is able to write such emotionally stirring, character- and relationship-driven books. I will be recommending it to everyone. If you like an emotionally satisfying novel about people and their relationships, healing and personal growth, then you should love What's Left Behind by Lorrie Thomson.


About the author

I grew up as an only child in the city of Boston and dreamed of living with a big family in an antique white New Englander, on a quiet street with neighbors who stopped for chats at the stonewall. I also dreamed of writing novels for a living. Let’s just say, if I’d known the power of visualization, I would’ve thrown in a mountain view. I’m working on it.
When my youngest child was three, I decided to pursue the writing dream for real, and got down to the hard work of putting words to paper. Three novels, and a mere ten years later, I got “the call” from my wonderful agent, telling me we had an offer for my debut novel and making my author dream come true.
I now live in New Hampshire with my husband and our three children. When I’m not reading, writing, or hunting for collectibles, they let me tag along for camping adventures, day-long paddles, and hikes up 4,000-footers, so I can get a taste of that coveted mountain view.

You can visit Lorrie's website here.











Monday, September 29, 2014

Treasure Coast Excerpt





Treasure Coast by Tom Kakonis
Publication date: September, 2014 by Brash Books

  Treasure Coast is one of the first releases from the new publishing company, Brash Books.      Bestselling authors Lee Goldberg and Joel Goldman created Brash to publish “the best crime novels in existence.”



Description:
Treasure Coast is the wild new thriller from Tom Kakonis, the acclaimed author of Criss Cross and Michigan Roll.

A compulsive gambler goes to his sister's funeral on Florida's Treasure Coast and gets saddled with her loser-son, who is deep in debt to a vicious loan shark who sends a pair of sociopathic thugs to collect on the loan. But things go horribly awry...and soon the gambler finds himself in the center of an outrageous kidnapping plot involving a conman selling mail-order tombstones, a psychic who channels the dead and the erotically super-charged wife of a wealthy businessman. As if that wasn't bad enough, a killer hurricane is looming...

It's "Get Shorty" meets "No Country for Old Men" on a sunny Florida coast teeming with conmen and killers, the vapid and the vain, and where violent death is just a heartbeat away.

~~~~~~~~~


~~~~~~~~~

Praise for Treasure Coast:

TREASURE COAST just got a great review from PW: “A darkly humorous caper novel that…offers strong entertainment.”

A reviewer for Up and Down these Mean Streets says: The bottom line is that Treasure Coast is a page turner, but you don’t just find yourself turning the pages. You savor the language, the mordant, unpleasant insights into human nature, fate, chance…the whole damn ball of wax.”






Now, enjoy an excerpt from Treasure Coast.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Excerpt from
TREASURE COAST
by
Tom Kakonis


LIKE MOST MEN CLOSING IN ON THE BENCHMARK
forty, Jim Merriman made far more promises—to others
mainly, a dwindling few yet to himself—than he knew, heart of
hearts, he ever intended to keep. It was a habit by now so deeply
entrenched, so much a part of him, that he wore it like a second
skin: Generate an earnest pledge today; effortlessly shuck
it off tomorrow. Mostly it was harmless, this habitual shortfall
between oath and execution, deed and good intention. A commonplace
human failing, to his thinking, small and forgivable.

A way of getting by in this sorry world.
But the vow exacted from him by a dying sister—that now
was giving him serious pause. Better make that acute discomfort.
(If he were going to be honest with himself, for a switch,
figuring—trying to figure—how to squirrel out of this one. Very
unsettling.)

From across the continent, he’d been summoned to her bed
of pain, where eventually, floating up out of a narcotized fog, she
found the strength to peel back crusted eyelids, fix him with a
fluttery gaze, and in a voice fainter than a whisper, feebler than a
gasp, murmur, “Jim? That you?”

“None other,” he affirmed, putting some of that fraudulent
deathwatch heartiness into it.
“You came.”
“Said I would.”
“Been here long?”
“Not long,” he lied. In fact he’d been sitting there for the better
part of the afternoon, studying her sleep, marveling at the
relentless progress of this formidable malady, its curious manifestations.
Her face, in sleep, was sunken, sallow with a greenish
tint, the color of mold-infested cheese. The sockets of the eyes,
hollow and dark, looked to be rimmed with a dusting of soot.
A limp hand, its flesh withered and veined as a dry leaf, seemed
to sprout from a forearm grotesquely swollen to Popeye proportions
and out of which coiled an IV vine that leaked some colorless,
powerless anodyne into her blood. Now that hand moved in
an effort at a sweeping gesture. “No, here, I mean. Florida.”
“I got in this morning. Leon picked me up at the airport.”

“Leon?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“Your place. I told him to go back and crash. He looked
pretty wasted.”
“It’s been hard for him,” she said.
“He’ll be OK.”
“You think so?”
“Sure.”
“I wonder.”
“How about you?” he asked. “They treating you right here?”
“They do what they can.”

“Well, you need anything, you just let me know,” he said,
more confidently than he felt—as if he had a direct hotline to the
nerve center of the AMA and could make the quacks jump at his
barked command. Hotline to nowhere was what he had.
She nodded dismally, said nothing.

To put something into the oppressive silence, he launched
a wandering monologue, picking his topics cautiously, from the
security of the distant past mostly, skirting that phantom third
presence in the room, Lord Death, with his constrictive time horizons.
“Remember that time…” he’d begin a tale, lifted from their
shared heartland childhood, and through the malleable prism of
inventive memory, he’d mutate some perfectly ordinary incident
into an adventure antic. Outrageously the tales grew in the telling,
spinning the sunny Leave It to Beaver mythology of a tight,
joyous, loving family life. Pure fabrication of course. All of it. The
sorry truth was that, apart from the accident of birth, they’d never
had much in common, never been particularly close. Nevertheless
he wore on, mouth running tirelessly, until at last the grab bag
of hilarious anecdotes was depleted, the memory-lane tour
exhausted, and again a desolate silence settled over the room.
Thee somber interval lengthened. After a while she filled it.

“Jim?”
“Yeah?”
Eyes tearing over, she said, not as a question, “There’s not
much time left, is there.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. Nurse out there says you’re
holding your own.”
“Will you do something for me?” she asked, ignoring the blatant
falsehood.
“Whatever I can.”
“It’s Leon. He’s all alone now. So helpless. Like a child. Will
you watch out for him?”
“Sure, I’ll give the kid a hand” is what he told her. Another in
that legion of empty pledges. Slippery, purposely vague. The kind
of thing you search for to say. Should have been enough.
Except she couldn’t leave it alone. “Promise?”
“Hey, you can count on me,” he said lightly, conscious of the
sickly smile tacked on his face.
“Need to hear you say it, Jim.”
“Uh, what’s that?” he asked, stalling, averting his eyes from
that pleading, miseried gaze, unblinking now, insistent.
“You promise.”

So, cornered, he heard his voice utter that one too, the “p”
word, figuring, Why not? What’s the damage? Whatever it took
to help her exit gracefully, or as graceful as anyone riddled by
outlaw cells, wildly multiplying even as they spoke, could ever
exit. It was only words. Nothing lost, no one really hurt.

His first mistake. First of many.
Ten minutes later he stood outside the entrance to the Palm
Beach Gardens Medical Center, idly puffing a cigarette. A nurse,
briskly efficient, professionally cheery, her smile as starched as
her uniform, had appeared only a moment after the vow-taking
ceremony (nice timing, those mercy angels) and shooed him out
of the room, chirping something about “Time for meds” and
whatever other ghoulish things they did to keep the croakee
wheezing and earn their pay. OK by him. Welcome break from
the white world of the hospital and its clash of pungent perfumes,
its soiled bedsheets, lemony cleansing solutions, acrid antiseptics,
hothouse flowers, rank festering flesh.

The slanting rays of the sun, still fierce on an immense slate
of bleached sky, steamed the hospital lawn, glued the parking-lot
tar. The dank air resonated with the atonal hum of insect energy.
Symphony of famished worms, he thought ruefully, gathering for
the feast waiting just on the other side of this door.

A sudden mournful ache, hollow and unfocused, overtook
him. But whom did he really mourn? An expiring sister in there,
seldom seen, scarcely known, barely recognizable anymore, soon to
be floating out of herself? No, it was himself he sorrowed for, himself,
a couple of weeks short of a milestone birthday, half a lifetime
squandered, pissed away, and dying just as surely as she, only daily,
increment by increment, puff by puff . Conducting his own requiem
in advance, dirge supplied courtesy of an invisible swarm of bugs.
What they’re doing, these crusading nicotine zealots, by banishing
us from their haloed presence, he further reflected, dourly
now, is creating a breed of solitary, morbid philosophers. Seekers of
occult mystery in wisps of smoke.

His cigarette had grown a tail of ash. He ground it under a
heel, defiantly lit another. And just as he put a flame to it, a most
handsome woman clad in a satiny blouse and designer jeans came
through the door, paused, the shed a pack of Capris from a Gucci
bag slung over her shoulder, and shook one loose. The flame in
his hand still flickered, and so in that wordless bond that links
a renegade fraternity, he offered it to her. She favored him with
a small smile and ever so lightly touched his hand in a steadying
gesture. Fetching gesture, fetching smile. Up close this way,
he could see she wasn’t young but not yet old either, a ripened
thirtyish somewhere; by his best estimate, forty tops. Around a
plume of smoke, she said, “Another second-class citizen?”

“Afraid so.”
“They’re turning us into a bunch of sneaks.”
“Or worse yet, wimps. Where’s Bogie when we need him?”
“Who?” she asked.
“Humphrey Bogart. Remember him? Tough as nails, and he
always had a weed stuck in his face.”
“How about Bette Davis? Nobody crossed her.”
“There you are.”

One thing you had to give your habit—it was an instant icebreaker.
Something to be said for that, particularly when your
commiserator comes equipped with a dizzying cascade of platinum
curls; good bone geometry; skin lacquered to a high sheen;
a generous crimson-glossed mouth; eyes a cool blue but with a
glint of worldly mischief in them; and pliant, slightly plumpish
curves under a fashion-statement outfit. Like this one did. All
of which he assimilated in a sly sidelong glance, as he no longer
pondered his own mortality but rather the enduring quality of
lust, how it occasionally nods but never really sleeps.
“You visiting somebody?” she asked him, turning the talk
elsewhere, extending it. Promising signal.

“A sister,” Jim said.
“Is it serious?”
“It’s cancer.”
“Bad?”
“Terminal variety.”
“That’s a shame.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, well, cancer always wins.”
She took a long, meditative pull on her Capri. the third finger
of the cigarette-bearing hand, he noticed, was bedecked with
a gaudy rock the size of a boulder. Generally—though not absolutely,
in his experience—a bad signal. In a stagy, breathy voice,
she said, “I’m real sorry.”

“No need to be,” he said with mock solemnity. “Doctors
determined it wasn’t your fault.”

For a sliver of an instant, she looked perplexed. Then, as she
got it, her smile widened, displaying an abundance of teeth, dazzling
as neon and much too perfect to be anything but orthodontist
enhanced. Jim gave her back his player smile, oblique,
distant, hint of evasiveness in it. Dueling grins.

Hers departed first, displaced by an earnest expression. “Is
she centered?”
“Centered?”
“Centered,” she repeated, as though the echo explained itself.
“Afraid I don’t follow,” he said, baffled by the corkscrew twist
in the conversation and wondering if maybe this time the joke
wasn’t on him.

“Like, in tune with her spiritual center.”
Evidently no joke. “Well,” he said, “we’ve never been what
you’d call God-fearing people. She taught math, some community
college down here. Numbers are—were—her religion.”
“Got nothing to do with religion,” she declared, a little impatiently.
“No? What then?”

“Energy. Strictly energy. See, I read this book by this Indian
guy—from India, I mean, not your American kind—where he
shows how we’re all a part of this one big spirit. Only he calls
it energy. Cosmic energy. And it’s, like, steady. Never changes,
never dies. What we call ‘dying’ is just trading energies.”

“That’s a comfort.”
“And what you got to do,” she plowed on, voice elevating
urgently, “when your body’s ready to pass, is zero in on it, your
place in this energy field. That’s what centering is. Sort of like
finding your way home.”

“Interesting theory,” Jim allowed, thinking they all have to
come with some wart, physical or otherwise. Even the best of
them, like this dumpling of sex here, with the loopy-energy hair
up her sweet apple ass. Too bad. Terrible waste.
“Changed my life, I can tell you.”
“Bet it did at that.”

“What I do now,” she said, “is try and help people get in
touch with it. Their energy center. That’s why I’m here. My best
girlfriend’s mother—she’s about to pass too.”

Sounded to him like some spiritual fart cutting, with her
being the therapeutic Gas-X. But what he said was, “Sounds sort
of like volunteer work.”

“Guess you could call it that. See, growing up, I wanted to be
a nurse. Never did make it, so this is the next best thing.”

“You? A nurse?”
“I always wanted to help people.”
Yeah, right. “I see,” he said cautiously, radar suddenly alert
for a scam coming on.
“So you think she’s centered yet?”
“Who’s that?”
“Who we’re talking about here…your sis.”
“You got me.”
“If you want, I could speak to her.”

Finally the pitch. Everybody peddling something. Pretty
prosperous clip too, by the looks of that stone weighting her
finger. Unless, of course, it was fake. “Appreciate the offer,” Jim
said, “but I don’t think she’d be very receptive.” Figured that’d
be the end of it. Any good fleecer knows when it’s time to
book.

Figured wrong. “OK,” she said breezily and, in yet another
of those bootleg turns, added, “You’re not from around here, are
you?”
“How could you tell?”
“Wild guess.”
“You guessed right.”
“Whereabouts then?”
“Nevada.”
“Vegas?”
“Reno.”
“Reno, Vegas—they’re like Florida,” she said. “Nobody’s
from there.”
“Right again.”
“So? Originally where?”
“South Dakota.”
“No kidding!” she exclaimed. “Me too. I’m from Bismark.”
“That’s in North Dakota.”
“Same thing.”
“I expect maybe it is. There’s not all that many of us, either
province.”

“Hey, don’t I know? That’s why we got to stick together. What
I always say is, ‘When you’re from Dakota, you got to be good.’ ”
Jim regarded her narrowly. A corner of her wide mouth was
lifted once again in a suggestion of a smile, artful, provocative,
faintly amused. The naughty mischief he’d seen earlier, thought
he’d seen, all but given up on during the energy drone, shimmered
behind her eyes. “By that,” he said, choosing his words
carefully (for if four decades had taught him any lesson at all, it
was that a man never knew when he was going to get lucky), “do
you mean ‘nice good’? Or oh, say, ‘skillful good,’ ‘accomplished’?”
Before she could reply, a sleek silver Porsche swung into the
lot and lurched to an idling stop twenty or so yards from where
they stood. A head—male, jowly, squinty eyed, round, and hairless
as a billiard ball—poked out of the driver’s-side window like
a wary turtle emerging from its shell. She gave it a high-handed
wave, a big theatrical welcoming grin, calling, “Hi, honey. Be
right with you.” To Jim she stage-whispered, “Thee big doolie
arrives.”

“Doolie?”
“The worse half.”
“Oh.”

She lowered the waving hand, abruptly thrust it at him.
“Been real nice talking to you.”
Jim took the offered hand. Grip was surprisingly firm; the
shake snappy, businesslike. “Same here,” he said.
“My name’s Billie. Billie Swett.”
“Swett?”
“You got it. Like in the perspiration, only with an ‘e’ and two
‘t’s. Cute, huh?”
“Well, everybody’s got to be named something.”
“And you are?”
“Jim Merriman.”
“Merriman,” she repeated, the tantalizing shimmer not quite
gone out of her eyes. “You don’t look so merry to me.”
“Inside I’m laughing.”
“Listen, you change your mind—about your sister, I mean—
I’ll be at the hospital here. Next couple days anyway. Ask around.
They know me in there.”
“I’ll be watching.”
The Porsche’s horn bleated. The turtle head squawked,
“C’mon, honey. We’re runnin’ late.”
“I’m coming, hon,” she called back sweetly, but under her
breath, softly, though not so soft as to be inaudible, she muttered,
“Asshole.”

Across lawn and lot, she sauntered, loose easy stride, studied
sway in the shapely hips. Into the Porsche she climbed, pecked
the turtle on the cheek, checked her reflection in the rearview,
patted and primped the cotton candy ringlets. And with that the
two honeys were gone, sped away, leaving Jim to speculate now
on the quirky nature of luck, which, he suspected, like gold, was where you found it.

Excerpted from the book TREASURE COAST by Tom Kakonis.  Copyright © 2014 by Tom Kakonis.  Reprinted with permission of Brash Books.  All rights reserved

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Friday, September 26, 2014

Feature & Follow Friday #1 (Starting over)


Feature & Follow Friday -- I haven't done one of these in so long I may have forgotten how. Just kidding. This is the fun blog hop hosted by Parajunkee & Allison Can Read and each one features a different blog. Be sure to check out their blogs and follow them.


Here are the rules:

    • Put your Blog name & URL in the Linky thing. You can also grab the code if you would like to insert it into your posts. (Links can be found at Parujunkee & Alison Can Read above.)
    • Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say “hi” in your comments and that they are now following you.
    • If you are using WordPress or another CMS that doesn’t have GFC (Google Friends Connect) state in your posts how you would like to be followed
    • Follow Follow Follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don’t just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don’t say “HI”
    • If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the Love…and the followers.

The question for the week:  Book character(s) you’d like to see with their own Twitter page
It may be because I recently read Dark Aemilia, but I think Aemilia would have a very entertaining and ranty-y feed. 



Thursday, September 25, 2014

Color Song Book Blast and Giveaway


02_Color Song 
Publication Date: September 16, 2014 
Skyscape (Amazon Children’s Publishing) 
Formats: eBook, Paperback, Hardcover
Genre: YA Historical



Add to GR Button



By the author of the acclaimed Passion Blue, a Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Book of 2012 and “a rare, rewarding, sumptuous exploration of artistic passion,” comes a fascinating companion novel. Artistically brilliant, Giulia is blessed – or cursed – with a spirit’s gift: she can hear the mysterious singing of the colors she creates in the convent workshop of Maestra HumilitĂ . It’s here that Giulia, forced into the convent against her will, has found unexpected happiness, and rekindled her passion to become a painter – an impossible dream for any woman in 15th century Italy. But when a dying HumilitĂ  bequeaths Giulia her most prized possession – the secret formula for the luminously beautiful paint called Passion blue – Giulia realizes she’s in danger from those who have long coveted the famous color for themselves. Faced with the prospect of lifelong imprisonment in the convent, forever barred from painting as a punishment for keeping Humilita’s secret, Giulia is struck by a desperate idea: What if she disguises herself as a boy? Could she make her way to Venice and find work as an artist’s apprentice? Along with the truth of who she is, Giulia carries more dangerous secrets: the exquisite voices of her paint colors and the formula for HumilitĂ ’s precious blue. And Venice, with its graceful gondolas and twisting canals, its gilded palazzi and masked balls, has secrets of its own. Trapped in her false identity in this dream-like place where reality and reflection are easily confused, where art and ambition, love and deception hover like dense fog, can Giulia find her way? This compelling novel explores timeless themes of love and illusion, gender and identity as it asks the question: what does it mean to risk everything to follow your true passion?

Praise for the Novels of Victoria Strauss

"Fantasy elements and a historical setting rich with sensuous detail are satisfying, but it’s Giulia’s achingly real search for her heart’s desire that resonates most today, when millions of girls still have limited choices. A rare, rewarding, sumptuous exploration of artistic passion." - Kirkus Reviews on PASSION BLUE (Starred Review, a Best Teen Book of 2012) "Compelling…absorbing…An intriguing historical novel inspired by accounts of women artists in the Italian Renaissance." - Booklist on PASSION BLUE "Mysterious dreams, suspense-filled legends, the terror that unfolds as the dig ensues, and the fine characterizations weave together beautifully to make this adventure fantasy a winner." - Booklist on GUARDIAN OF THE HILLS (Starred Review) "A rich story about human nature, this fantasy is a thought-provoking page-turner. The characters are deeply etched, and the plot turns are credible yet arresting…A thoroughly enjoyable read." - Kliatt on THE ARM OF THE STONE "The plot is complex yet convincing, and the abundant, well-chosen details of the settings–as well as the carefully developed characters–make this high fantasy a superior and original novel." - Publishers Weekly on THE GARDEN OF THE STONE (Starred Review)

Buy the Book

Amazon Barnes & Noble
IndieBound


About the Author

03_Victoria StraussVictoria Strauss is the author of nine novels for adults and young adults, including the STONE duology (THE ARM OF THE STONE and THE GARDEN OF THE STONE), and a historical novel for teens, PASSION BLUE. She has written hundreds of book reviews for magazines and ezines, including SF Site, and her articles on writing have appeared in Writer's Digest and elsewhere. In 2006, she served as a judge for the World Fantasy Awards. An active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), she's co-founder, with Ann Crispin, of Writer Beware, a publishing industry watchdog group that tracks and warns about literary fraud. She maintains the popular Writer Beware website, Facebook page, and blog, for which she was a 2012 winner of an Independent Book Blogger Award. She was honored with the SFWA Service Award in 2009. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. For more information please visit Victoria's Strauss's website. You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Goodreads.

Color Song Blog Tour & Book Blast Schedule

Monday, September 16
Book Blast at Passages to the Past
Book Blast at The True Book Addict

Tuesday, September 17
Review at Oh the Books
Book Blast at The Maiden's Court

Wednesday, September 18
Review at Casual Readers
Review at Leeanna.com (Passion Blue)

Thursday, September 19
Review at Leeanna.com

Monday, September 22
Review at Ageless Pages Reviews
Feature at Oh the Books

Tuesday, September 23
Book Blast at Flashlight Commentary

Wednesday, September 24
Review at History from a Woman's Perspective
Interview at Bibliophilia, Please
Book Blast at Reading Lark

Thursday, September 25
Book Blast at A Book Geek

Friday, September 26
Review at Reading Room Book Reviews
Book Blast at Just One More Chapter

Monday, September 29
Review at Tribute Books Mama
Interview at Math, Science & Social Studies...Oh My!

Tuesday, September 30
Review at Book Babe
Book Blast at Historical Fiction Connection

Wednesday, October 1
Review & Interview at Bookish
Book Blast at Historical Tapestry

Thursday, October 2
Review at Brooke Blogs
Review at Oh, for the Hook of a Book

Friday, October 3
Review at A Bibliotaph's Reviews
Book Blast at The Lit Bitch

Saturday, October 4
Book Blast at Susan Heim on Writing

Monday, October 6
Review at WTF Are You Reading?
Book Blast at Let Them Read Books

Tuesday, October 7
Review at A Leisure Moment

Wednesday, October 8
Review at Peeking Between the Pages

Friday, October 10
Review at A Bookish Affair

Giveaways

To enter to win any of the following prizes please complete the form below:
2 Grand Prizes Winners: One Kindle Paperwhite with custom Color Song cover with Color Song and Passion Blue ebooks pre-loaded, plus swag (postcards, bookmarks), and signed paperback editions of Strauss's Stone duology (The Arm of the Stone and The Garden of the Stone) (US only) 2 winners: Signed hardcovers of Color Song and Passion Blue, plus swag (postcards, bookmarks) (US and Canada) 5 winners: Signed paperbacks of Color Song and Passion Blue, plus swag (postcards, bookmarks) (US and Canada)
Giveaway ends at 11:59pm on October 10th. You must be 18 or older to enter. Winner will be chosen via Rafflecopter on October 11th and notified via email. Winner have 48 hours to claim prize or new winner is chosen. a Rafflecopter giveaway  photo b2ed6105-5b7a-44ee-b090-fadd98280323.png

A Man of Honor Blog Tour and Review

  A Man of Honor, or Horatio's Confessions by J.A. Nelson Publication Date: December 9, 2019 Quill Point Press Paperback, eBook & ...