Sunday, 8 April 2018

Unraveled (Perfected #3) ♥ Review Tour Plus Giveaway ♥


Unraveled (Perfected #3)

by




















Excerpt from Unraveled: 


No one glanced up at us as we left. We were inconsequential, just two kids leaving a pizza place. And that’s exactly what we felt like—kids. Powerless. Weak. Alone.
The bell on the door jingled lightly once more, and we stepped back out into the night. Once again, the sound of jazz music drifted out of the bar next door. I paused, listening to the soulful cry of the saxophone. For a moment, I closed my eyes, focusing on the full, round tone.
And then, just as the last note of the song died away, the bomb went off.
One single note rang in my ears.
High pitched.
Whining.
The saxophone... It had just been playing, wasn’t it? I could remember the low, sweet crooning, but that wasn’t what this sound was.
I shook my head and tried to bring a hand up to my eyes, but something held it clamped down at my side. I tried to wiggle free, but there was something pressing my back, too, making it hard to breathe.
I coughed. My mouth was dry, thick with dust and the taste of metal.
“Penn,” I croaked. “Penn?”
I blinked, trying to turn my head.
In front of me the ground spread out like a battle field.
Red and blue lights blinked behind a cloud of dust. Dark forms moved left and right, up and down. Long limbs waved to one another.
My cheek pressed against something rough.
“Penn!”
“Here’s one,” someone said. They sounded far away, a voice inside a bubble floating somewhere high above my head.
The weight on my back lifted, and a hand slipped beneath me, lifting me from the ground. I choked in a deep gulp of air and balanced on my wobbly legs. Even with the world tipped vertically once more, I couldn’t make sense of it.
“Ella!”
I turned.
The dark outline of Penn stumbled toward me.
Behind him, the building crumbled in on itself. Brick and cement.Wire and steel.Here and there a tipped table, a smashed chair. Broken glass littered the ground, glittering with the orange light of flames that glowed inside the hole where a door had just been. A door. A door. The door that had just jingled shut behind me.




♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ❣


Kindle U.K £6.17 or Kindle US $8.54, 304 pages

Expected publication: April 3rd 2018 by Entangled: Teen







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Saturday, 7 April 2018

From Little Houses to Little Women #Blitz #Tour #Spotlight




From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood

by

Creative Non-Ficion / Memoir / Travel
Date Published: Paperback out this March / eBook November 2014
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

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Nancy McCabe, who grew up in Kansas just a few hours from the Ingalls family’s home in Little House on the Prairie, always felt a deep connection with Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series. McCabe read Little House on the Prairie during her childhood and visited Wilder sites around the Midwest with her aunt when she was thirteen. But then she didn’t read the series again until she decided to revisit in adulthood the books that had so influenced her childhood. It was this decision that ultimately sparked her desire to visit the places that inspired many of her childhood favorites, taking her on a journey that included stops in the Missouri of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Minnesota of Maud Hart Lovelace, the Massachusetts of Louisa May Alcott, and even the Canada of Lucy Maud Montgomery.


From Little Houses to Little Women reveals McCabe’s powerful connection to the characters and authors who inspired many generations of readers. Traveling with McCabe as she rediscovers the books that shaped her and ultimately helped her to forge her own path, readers will enjoy revisiting their own childhood favorites as well.



From the Prologue:
When my daughter was still a toddler and I was overwhelmed by the chores and errands and tasks of a single parent with a full-time job, I found myself reminiscing fondly about the books I’d read when I was young. Having a child made me miss my own childhood—not the miseries of forgotten homework or lost retainers or shifting friendships, but the joys of the uninterrupted hours that I spent reading.
Back then I’d floated across seamless surfaces of prose, absorbed in books without an eye on the clock or an ever-present guilt about neglected duties. Now, my job required heavy reading, but that was work, more like swimming: I had to be aware of each stroke, of the tricky rhythms of breath. I was tired of being tightly scheduled and hyper-organized. I was tired of being too busy to while away at least an occasional afternoon with a book. I just wanted to plop down and read for hours and hours.

About the Author


Nancy McCabe is the author of four memoirs about travel, books, parenting, and adoption as well as the novel Following Disasters. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, and many other magazines and anthologies, including In Fact Books’ Oh Baby! True Stories about Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love and McPherson and Company’s Every Father’s Daughter: Twenty-Four Women Writers Remember their Fathers. Her work has received a Pushcart and been recognized on Notable lists in Best American anthologies six times.


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Friday, 6 April 2018

Dark Desires ♥ Blog Tour! Review





Dark Desires (Pure/ Dark Ones #3) 

by


Paranormal / Fantasy Romance
Date Published: April 5, 2018

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“A human and a vampire. An Assassin and his target. They made an impossibility possible, despite his past, despite their present. They had the future—they had Eternity.”

Ryu Takamura is the Dark Ones’ Assassin. He has never missed his target…until now. Until her.

Ava Monroe is a talented geneticist who holds the key to the vampire race’s future…and perhaps her own as well.

Their attraction is explosive from the first. She would do anything to have him. He would sacrifice all to protect her.

But will their love triumph over seemingly impossible odds as they battle enemies new and old? Especially the demons from Ryu’s past? And deep within his heart?



Excerpt 1

Chapter One
Present day, en route from New York City to Tokyo.

The guy next to her had cheekbones that could cut glass.
That was the first thing Ava noticed when she finally got her above-average-sized assets settled in the luxurious first class seat on Japan Airlines.
Well, okay, the second thing.
The first thing was his smell.
Although the word “smell” connoted foul odors, which was not the case at all. Perhaps scent would work better the way Ava was thinking about it.
Or heck, maybe aroma would be the most appropriate description for the way the volatized chemical compounds he produced from scent glands all over his body, more commonly known as pheromones, made saliva pool in her mouth as if she had just been presented a decadent, dark chocolate fudge wrapped in a crisp white chocolate casing with a graceful swirl of raspberry sauce and an elegant sprinkle of hazelnut on top.
Presented in the haute-couture artistic fashion of three star Michelin restaurant plates of course.
It was Ava’s favorite dessert, guaranteed to make her mouth water.
The raspberry and hazelnut details were her mental attempt to match the impeccable, almost inhuman grace and style of the man sitting in the seat next to her, to the dessert in question.
She’d only had this specific dessert once in an exclusive posh French restaurant when she was attending a conference at the Sorbonne.
And wow. Just wow.
The first bite had been better than sex. The second bite more euphoric than the multiple orgasms she achieved with her best friend the Rabbit Habit. And the third and last bite—she could only make the tiny piece of fudge last so long—had her begging for more.
That was what the man’s smell reminded her of.
Her internal temperature had already risen a couple of degrees by the time she’d noticed his cheekbones.
Ava tried to regroup by keeping her eyeballs strictly focused on the screen in front of her as a flight attendant in person and in video went through the safety instructions.
She was not the most natural when it came to interactions with powerfully attractive men. Irresistibly attractive, rather, if just his smell could make her break out in a heat rash.
With an IQ of over 200 (genius was above 140 and Einstein’s IQ was between 160 and 190, but who was counting), a PhD and MD in molecular genetics, another PhD in regenerative stem cell science and being one of the world’s foremost experts on these topics at the age of thirty, she should be able to handle a simple human interaction with aplomb.
But no, sadly not.
Not when her EQ was well below average and her social quotient was probably not even on the chart—as in, negative.
Thus, Ava tried to avoid embarrassing herself abominably by focusing her attention away from the glorious male sitting beside her before she caught wind of something even more threatening to her libido than his fragrance and his cheekbones.
And it was just his personal scent, she could tell, no artificial cologne on top to distort the perfect combination of molecules that wafted from his skin to her olfactory bulbs. Perhaps just a hint of soap, very light and wintry fresh.
Odor prints were influenced by diet, environment, health and genetics, she knew, and it was as if his smell was made specifically to elicit a force-of-nature response from her.
It would all be extremely fascinating had she not been preoccupied with hiding her now flaming hot cheeks from view.
“What would you like for first meal?”
“What?” Ava blurted, reeling from discovery number three:
His voice might be the most dangerous attraction of all.
The man gestured with a slim, long-fingered hand to the attendant who was bending over Ava with a menu of items.
Ava swiveled around to regard her.
How long had the model-esque stewardess been there? Probably a good while, since her smile seemed frozen in a grimace on her face.
Ava quickly chose the least healthy of all her options for lunch, snack and supper, because her motto was that healthy equaled tasteless, and why go through life eating tasteless food? Thus decided, she refocused on the TV screen.
It was blank.
Blank was good. Perhaps she could channel blankness into her mind.
Fourteen hours! She had to tame her libido for eight hundred and forty minutes! That was a lot of time to be simmering fruitlessly in unrequited lust.
Not for the first time Ava wished she wasn’t so hot-blooded. Maybe it was the Latin heritage. Though genetically speaking, she was one-fourth German, one-fourth Japanese, owing to her Brazilian mother, and one-fourth Scottish, one-fourth Welsh on her father’s side. One hundred percent American, born and raised in the Bronx of New York.
Maybe it was more nurture than nature.
Ever since she was a child she always felt like she didn’t quite fit in. She had the looks on the outside, but on the inside, her brain worked in unusual ways. She viewed the world in mathematical equations, chemical cocktails, symbols rather than words.
But that’s not to say she didn’t feel things. She felt rather too much. She avoided feeling whenever she could because emotions weren’t logical, and she very much preferred logic.
She could be downright volcanic when her emotions and feelings ran high. It wasn’t as if her hormones operated in overdrive 24/7 or even a small fraction of the time. In fact, she rarely had time to notice, let alone indulge, in physical attraction. But when she did feel those powerful bodily urges… well, she indulged.
But she’d never felt this magnitude of attraction.
Keeping her gaze unfocused and her eyeballs pointed forward, Ava dug into the giant hobo bag beneath the seat in front of her, pulled out her iPhone, stuck the buds into her ears and turned up the volume on her favorite playlist.
But no matter how hard she listened, all she heard was that voice.
It was what the ocean would sound like if it were male and awakening from a satisfying slumber after a night of mind-blowing sex.

Review:  ♥ ♥ ♥

Dark Desires is the third book in the Pure/Dark one's series. It can be read as a standalone.

Ava is smart with genius IQ status. She is good with knowledge but lacking in the social skills department. On her travels from New York to Japan, she meets Ryu. He's a vampire and an assassin. He is part of the Dark Ones. There are two vampire races who are on the verge of war. The Pure ones can only get intimate with the true mates. The dark ones are created and the Pure ones are born. Ava is instantly attracted to Ryu and cannot control her inner thoughts. She is like a cat on heat.

Ryu has a mission and he isn't used to having distractions. Ava is in trouble because of her research. She has got involved with the wrong people. Ryu wants to stop the research so it doesn't get into the wrong hands. He try's to keep Ava at arm's length but it's difficult because he cares about her safety.

The second half of this book was better than the first so I'm glad I stuck with it. The author tried to show Ava's intellectual side but it was mixed with the common tongue. I found the sophisticated writing a little out of place in the overall story. There are also Japanese names/ objects. I found the story to be a little full on for bedtime read. The storyline is easy enough to follow but I wasn't too keen on the choice of some words. I don't mind stories that also teach you about culture but in this book the language was a turn-off.

Dark Desires was an okay read.

*There is a glossary in the back of the book to help with the vampire terminology. 
*I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
About the Author


Aja has been writing stories since the age of six, and novels since the age of thirteen. While she'd be the first to admit that those early efforts weren't particularly good, she sure loved putting them down on paper!

The best part of writing, according to Aja, is that it’s completely organic, the way the stories develop. When the inspiration hits, she writes just so she herself can learn where the characters are headed because oftentimes, they take her by surprise! It is her ultimate dream to share her stories with as many readers as she possibly can.

Her other loves include art, cooking, old movies (anything with Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Redford, Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, and all the song and dance numbers because she can’t watch them and not be happy!)

She adores taking long walks with her husband and running after her two rambunctious kids. She has traveled extensively (all seven continents except Antarctica) and has had a multi-cultural upbringing. She speaks two and a half languages and binge watch TV shows when the mood strikes.

Aja has a Bachelor’s of Arts in Comparative Literature and Economics and two Master’s degrees, one of which is in East Asian Studies.


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