Book Review, Excerpt, and Blog Blitz: The New One by Evie Green

I’m thrilled to be on Berkley’s blog blitz for The New One by Evie Green!

  • Title: The New One
  • Author: Evie Green
  • Where to buy: Amazon (affiliate link)
  • Genre: Sci-Fi, Horror, Thriller
  • Would I recommend: If you like a near-future sci-fi with things that *could* happen, some nail-biting tension, and a satisfying resolution, you need to read this!

Synopsis:

A suspenseful, cutting-edge novel about two parents who finally get the daughter they’ve always wanted–it’s too bad she isn’t real. From the author of We Hear Voices.

For Tamsyn and Ed, life is tough. They both work long hours for very little money and come home to their moody, rebellious daughter, Scarlett.

After a tragic accident leaves Scarlett comatose and with little chance of recovery, Tamsyn and Ed are out of options until a lifeline emerges in the form of an unusual medical trial. In exchange for the very best treatment for Scarlett, a fully furnished apartment, and a limitless spending account, the family must agree to move to Switzerland and welcome an artificial copy of their daughter into their home.

Suddenly their life is transformed. Tamsyn and Ed want for nothing, and the AI replacement, Sophie, makes it feel just like having their daughter back–except without all the bad parts. Sophie is engaged, happy, and actually wants to spend time with her parents.

But things take a turn for the worse when Scarlett makes a very real recovery and the family discovers that the forces behind their new life are darker than they ever could have imagined.

My review:

Parents, how many of us have found ourselves almost wishing, in our children’s difficult moments, that they could just be as sweet and loving as they were when they were small? How many of us have thought, if they could just lose this or that undesirable quality, they would be wonderful. If we’re honest, all of us, probably, in some moment of deep exasperation.

That’s where Ed and Tamsyn find themselves. They work multiple jobs trying to keep afloat in their ratty trailer. Their marriage is struggling. Their teenage daughter Scarlett is causing them no end of grief. And they don’t have the bandwidth to deal with her bad behavior.

One night they try to stop her from sneaking out in the middle of the night. Things go horribly wrong, and Scarlett is hit by a car, seriously injured, perhaps never to recover. When a lifeline is extended, literally, Ed and Tamsyn feel like they have no choice but to take it.

VitaNova invites Ed and Tamsyn into what seems like the perfect solution: they’ll create a clone of Scarlett and transfer her consciousness into the new body. The new version will be like Scarlett, only better. New home, new daughter, all the luxuries they could want, and they even find renewed interest in each other. Perfection, right?

Sophie (the new version of Scarlett) really does seem like the perfect daughter at first. She’s so good at so many things. And she’s so well behaved! Ed and Tamsyn, while the idea squicked them out a bit at first (especially Tamsyn), soon appreciate how much better they have it now. So there are cameras all over their new plush apartment. So Sophie has cameras in her eyes. So the VitaNova folks keep tabs on them. That’s okay, right?

And then Scarlett wakes up, and things really get twisty.

Evie Green does a good job of making the reader think. How far would we go to keep a loved one (or a simulacrum of them) in our lives? How much would we be willing to sacrifice? And could we ever trust that someone offering all of this to us really had our best interests at heart?

The characters are well drawn. Sophie seems so realistic, so much like a normal, loving daughter, that you don’t realize how much of her personality is programmed. Might that cause problems with Scarlett, her “origin source,” back in the picture? Ed and Tamsyn struggle with whether they should accept this new reality, and even when they do, we still see that internal conflict remains. We see Scarlett wrestling with feeling like her parents have replaced her with a “better” version. I can’t imagine that – waking up from a coma to find out you now have a twin who’s good at everything. How do you not feel like second best in that scenario?! My heart hurt for Scarlett the most.

Green throws a nice twist in about 2/3 of the way through. I wasn’t really expecting it, and it changed my perception. It also confirmed some things about VitaNova. I’m not telling what the twist it. Read the book yourself and find out!

Five stars for making me read past my bedtime more than once! Highly recommended for fans of near-future sci-fi with shades of horror and thriller that explores what hasn’t happened yet, but maybe could.

Read on for an excerpt!

THE NEW ONE by Evie Green
Berkley Trade Paperback Original | On sale March 28, 2023
Excerpt

PROLOGUE

I listen for a long time before any of the words make sense. When they do, I can grab only a word here or there. Soleil. Le weekend.

I try to hold on to the other words but I can’t reach them. Everything comes and goes. I am floating.


After a while I realize I am not floating. I have a body.

I am in a body.

I am a body.

My eyes are closed, and after a long time I think that since I am back in my body, I might try to open them. After some more time, I try. It doesn’t work.

I know there is noise, but I can’t make sense of it. My sense of smell seems as if someone switched it on, and it is unbearable. The smells crowd into my head and I want them to go away. It smells like medicine, clean things, chemicals. Not home.

Things hurt. People do things to me. They poke me and move me, and sometimes it hurts and sometimes I don’t feel anything. I sense light outside my eyelids. It goes away and comes back. It gets darker and then lighter. I drift back to my dark place, and I come up again.

One day the sounds start to form shapes and I find that I know a word. I know that it is the word for the person I need, the person who will pull me out of here.

I try to make my mouth say it: “Mum.”

Chapter 1

Five months before

November

She had been daydreaming. The water had evaporated and the cauliflower was sticking to the bottom of the pan and the potatoes were burning, because she’d forgotten all of it. It was salvageable, but she didn’t want it.

“Oh, shut up,” she told it nonsensically, and turned off the gas ring. Everything annoyed her.

She tried to focus on the television. It was a reality show, one that usually distracted her just enough. Tonight, though, it wasn’t working.

Scarlett wasn’t missing. She was out. If she hadn’t overdone the cover story by throwing in Leanne, it wouldn’t have been worrying yet. It was still all right.

She messaged her. Please just send a text. Nothing happened. She messaged again and called her phone and she didn’t answer.

She turned the TV off and messaged Ed, hating the fact that she was admitting defeat again. He replied at ten forty-five.

Fuck’s sake honey! Again?!????
Yeah, I’ll find her.

At least he replied to her when it was about Scarlett. Since he worked late nights and she worked early mornings, they hardly saw each other. That was why they were still together.

She looked at the photo on the wall. They had been happy once.

It was a picture of the three of them taken when Scarlett was about four. They had been on the beach at Perranporth, standing in front of the Atlantic Ocean, the beach wide and sandy around them. Their hair was blowing around and they were laughing. Scarlett stood between them, holding their hands.

They had been happy because Scarlett had been a dreamy child. They had been happy because their relationship was newer, and they weren’t ground down by life. Scarlett had been an adorable little girl, always asking questions about everything. They had kept her supplied with books from the library, had tried to find the answers she needed, had done everything they could to help her have a better life than they did.

She had learned to read before she went to school, and together they had all learned a bit of French from an app. Her parents agreed (as all parents probably did) that their daughter was exceptionally bright and brilliant, and as the years went by, they encouraged her to do her homework, to be top of the class, to excel at everything and keep her options wide open.

She was exactly average-sized for her age, which seemed like a good thing: she could never be teased for being too big or too small. She had curly dark hair and intense brown eyes, and she would climb into bed with them at night, cuddling up and whispering, “I love you so much, Mummy.” She used to ask for a baby brother. Her favorite color was blue. She wanted to see snow. She wanted to have snowball fights, to climb mountains, to see the pyramids. She wanted to do everything.

She had been the best child ever. And then, a few weeks before she turned thirteen, Scarlett had changed.

Excerpted from The New One by Evie Green Copyright © 2023 by Evie Green. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved.

Posted in Berkley, Blog Tours, Book Reviews, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Book Review, Excerpt, and Blog Tour: The Perfumist of Paris (The Jaipur Trilogy #3) by Alka Joshi

Welcome to my stop on the HTP blog tour for The Perfumist of Paris!

THE PERFUMIST OF PARIS

Author: Alka Joshi

Publication Date: March 28, 2023

Publisher: MIRA Books

BUY LINKS:

Harlequin 
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Amazon
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BOOK SUMMARY: 

“A stunning portrait of a woman blossoming into her full power…this is Alka Joshi’s best book yet!” —Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye

From the author of Reese’s Book Club Pick The Henna Artist, the final chapter in Alka Joshi’s New York Times bestselling Jaipur trilogy takes readers to 1970s Paris, where Radha’s budding career as a perfumer must compete with the demands of her family and the secrets of her past.

Paris, 1974. Radha is now living in Paris with her husband, Pierre, and their two daughters. She still grieves for the baby boy she gave up years ago, when she was only a child herself, but she loves being a mother to her daughters, and she’s finally found her passion—the treasure trove of scents.

She has an exciting and challenging position working for a master perfumer, helping to design completely new fragrances for clients and building her career one scent at a time. She only wishes Pierre could understand her need to work. She feels his frustration, but she can’t give up this thing that drives her.

Tasked with her first major project, Radha travels to India, where she enlists the help of her sister, Lakshmi, and the courtesans of Agra—women who use the power of fragrance to seduce, tease and entice. She’s on the cusp of a breakthrough when she finds out the son she never told her husband about is heading to Paris to find her—upending her carefully managed world and threatening to destroy a vulnerable marriage.

My review:

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I’m jumping in on this, the third book in the trilogy. I didn’t have any real difficulty reading this as a stand-alone work, but I think there’s a lot of good story in the first two books that I should go discover. If you haven’t read any of the three, start at the beginning with The Henna Artist.

Radha and Pierre are married, living and working in Paris, raising their two daughters. Radha loves her work at the House of Yves with master perfumer Delphine, and hopes to one day become a master perfumer herself. Pierre struggles with his wife’s career. It’s the 1970s. Women working isn’t a given, and he doesn’t understand why she can’t be content just staying home to be a wife and mother. His mother, Florence, is also a bit of a thorn in Radha’s side. She worries that Florence wants to make her girls completely French, to take their Indian heritage away from them.

Radha receives an important assignment at work – her first solo project! Work on the project has her returning to India, where her sister Lakshmi gets her in to visit the courtesans of Agra, to learn their secrets of using scent to seduce and entice. Lakshmi also tells Radha that Niki, the baby Radha gave up for adoption when she was just thirteen years old, knows she is connected to him somehow and is heading for Paris to learn why.

Alka Joshi paints wonderful word pictures of her characters and the settings. And her descriptions of different scents almost made the book like smell-0-vision. I could easily imagine the scents Radha discovered on her trip back to India.

The characters are wonderful and sometimes infuriating. Sometimes my heart just ached for Radha and the burden she carried, the secret she kept from Pierre, and sometimes I wanted to shout, “But how much of this could have been avoided if y’all would just TALK to each other?!” That being said, I’ve never given a child up for adoption. It’s easy for me to say but of course I’d tell my husband about it. But honestly, would I? I don’t know.

It took me a minute to really get sucked in to the story, but the more I read, the more I liked. There were some surprises that I didn’t expect, and they turned out to be marvelous. This is the kind of book where I felt like I was saying good-bye to friends when I finished. And as an adoptee who’s found my own birth family, I could totally relate to Niki. The biggest difference is that I always knew I was adopted, and it was never a big secret. I can’t imagine finding out like Niki did.

Betrayal by a trusted friend, women’s rights, the sacrifices we make to balance work and life, lost love and family found, this book has it all. It’s a five-star read for me.

Read on for an excerpt, and see if you might love it, too.

Excerpt

Paris

September 2, 1974

I pick up on the first ring; I know it’s going to be her. She always calls on his birthday. Not to remind me of the day he came into this world but to let me know I’m not alone in my remembrance.

“Jiji?” I keep my voice low. I don’t want to wake Pierre and the girls.

“Kaisa ho, choti behen?” my sister says. I hear the smile in her voice, and I respond with my own. It’s lovely to hear Lakshmi’s gentle Hindi here in my Paris apartment four thousand miles away. I’d always called her Jiji—big sister—but she hadn’t always called me choti behen. It was Malik who addressed me as little sister when I first met him in Jaipur eighteen years ago, and he wasn’t even related to Jiji and me by blood. He was simply her apprentice. My sister started calling me choti behen later, after everything in Jaipur turned topsy-turvy, forcing us to make a new home in Shimla.

Today, my sister will talk about everything except the reason she’s calling. It’s the only way she’s found to make sure I get out of bed on this particular date, to prevent me from spiraling into darkness every year on the second of September, the day my son, Niki, was born.

She started the tradition the first year I was separated from him, in 1957. I was just fourteen. Jiji arrived at my boarding school with a picnic, having arranged for the headmistress to excuse me from classes. We had recently moved from Jaipur to Shimla, and I was still getting used to our new home. I think Malik was the only one of us who adjusted easily to the cooler temperatures and thinner air of the Himalayan mountains, but I saw less of him now that he was busy with activities at his own school, Bishop Cotton.

I was in history class when Jiji appeared at the door and beckoned me with a smile. As I stepped outside the room, she said, “It’s such a beautiful day, Radha. Shall we take a hike?” I looked down at my wool blazer and skirt, my stiff patent leather shoes, and wondered what had gotten into her. She laughed and told me I could change into the clothes I wore for nature camp, the one our athletics teacher scheduled every month. I’d woken with a heaviness in my chest, and I wanted to say no, but one look at her eager face told me I couldn’t deny her. She’d cooked my favorite foods for the picnic. Makki ki roti dripping with ghee. Palak paneer so creamy I always had to take a second helping. Vegetable korma. And chole, the garbanzo bean curry with plenty of fresh cilantro.

That day, we hiked Jakhu Hill. I told her how I hated math but loved my sweet old teacher. How my roommate, Mathilde, whistled in her sleep. Jiji told me that Madho Singh, Malik’s talking parakeet, was starting to learn Punjabi words. She’d begun taking him to the Community Clinic to amuse the patients while they waited to be seen by her and Dr. Jay. “The hill people have been teaching him the words they use to herd their sheep, and he’s using those same words now to corral patients in the waiting area!” She laughed, and it made me feel lighter. I’ve always loved her laugh; it’s like the temple bells that worshippers ring to receive blessings from Bhagwan.

When we reached the temple at the top of the trail, we stopped to eat and watched the monkeys frolicking in the trees. A few of the bolder macaques eyed our lunch from just a few feet away. As I started to tell her a story about the Shakespeare play we were rehearsing after school, I stopped abruptly, remembering the plays Ravi and I used to rehearse together, the prelude to our lovemaking. When I froze, she knew it was time to steer the conversation into less dangerous territory, and she smoothly transitioned to how many times she’d beat Dr. Jay at backgammon.

“I let Jay think he’s winning until he realizes he isn’t,” Lakshmi grinned.

I liked Dr. Kumar (Dr. Jay to Malik and me), the doctor who looked after me when I was pregnant with Niki—here in Shimla. I’d been the first to notice that he couldn’t take his eyes off Lakshmi, but she’d dismissed it; she merely considered the two of them to be good friends. And here he and my sister have been married now for ten years! He’s been good for her—better than her ex-husband was. He taught her to ride horses. In the beginning, she was scared to be high off the ground (secretly, I think she was afraid of losing control), but now she can’t imagine her life without her favorite gelding, Chandra.

So lost am I in memories of the sharp scents of Shimla’s pines, the fresh hay Chandra enjoys, the fragrance of lime aftershave and antiseptic coming off Dr. Jay’s coat, that I don’t hear Lakshmi’s question. She asks again. My sister knows how to exercise infinite patience—she had to do it often enough with those society ladies in Jaipur whose bodies she spent hours decorating with henna paste.

I look at the clock on my living room wall. “Well, in another hour, I’ll get the girls up and make their breakfast.” I move to the balcony windows to draw back the drapes. It’s overcast today, but a little warmer than yesterday. Down below, a moped winds its way among parked cars on our street. An older gentleman, keys jingling in his palm, unlocks his shop door a few feet from the entrance to our apartment building. “The girls and I may walk a ways before we get on the Métro.”

“Won’t the nanny be taking them to school?”

Turning from the window, I explain to Jiji that we had to let our nanny go quite suddenly and the task of taking my daughters to the International School has fallen to me.

“What happened?”

It’s a good thing Jiji can’t see the color rise in my cheeks. It’s embarrassing to admit that Shanti, my nine-year-old daughter, struck her nanny on the arm, and Yasmin did what she would have done to one of her children back in Algeria: she slapped Shanti. Even as I say it, I feel pinpricks of guilt stab the tender skin just under my belly button. What kind of mother raises a child who attacks others? Have I not taught her right from wrong? Is it because I’m neglecting her, preferring the comfort of work to raising a girl who is presenting challenges I’m not sure I can handle? Isn’t that what Pierre has been insinuating? I can almost hear him say, “This is what happens when a mother puts her work before family.” I put a hand on my forehead. Oh, why did he fire Yasmin before talking to me? I didn’t even have a chance to understand what transpired, and now my husband expects me to find a replacement. Why am I the one who must find the solution to a problem I didn’t cause?

My sister asks how my work is going. This is safer ground. My discomfort gives way to excitement. “I’ve been working on a formula for Delphine that she thinks is going to be next season’s favorite fragrance. I’m on round three of the iteration. The way she just knows how to pull back on one ingredient and add barely a drop of another to make the fragrance a success is remarkable, Jiji.”

I can talk forever about fragrances. When I’m mixing a formula, hours can pass before I stop to look around, stretch my neck or step outside the lab for a glass of water and a chat with Celeste, Delphine’s secretary. It’s Celeste who often reminds me that it’s time for me to pick up the girls from school when I’m between nannies. And when I do have someone to look after the girls, Celeste casually asks what I’m serving for dinner, reminding me that I need to stop work and get home in time to feed them. On the days Pierre cooks, I’m only too happy to stay an extra hour before finishing work for the day. It’s peaceful in the lab. And quiet. And the scents—honey and clove and vetiver and jasmine and cedar and myrrh and gardenia and musk—are such comforting companions. They ask nothing of me except the freedom to envelop another world with their essence. My sister understands. She told me once that when she skated a reed dipped in henna paste across the palm, thigh or belly of a client to draw a Turkish fig or a boteh leaf or a sleeping baby, everything fell away—time, responsibilities, worries.

My daughter Asha’s birthday is coming up. She’s turning seven, but I know Jiji won’t bring it up. Today, my sister will refrain from any mention of birthdays, babies or pregnancies because she knows these subjects will inflame my bruised memories. Lakshmi knows how hard I’ve worked to block out the existence of my firstborn, the baby I had to give up for adoption. I’d barely finished grade eight when Jiji told me why my breasts were tender, why I felt vaguely nauseous. I wanted to share the good news with Ravi: we were going to have a baby! I’d been so sure he would marry me when he found out he was going to be a father. But before I could tell him, his parents whisked him away to England to finish high school. I haven’t laid eyes on him since. Did he know we’d had a son? Or that our baby’s name is Nikhil?

I wanted so much to keep my baby, but Jiji said I needed to finish school. At thirteen, I was too young to be a mother. What a relief it was when my sister’s closest friends, Kanta and Manu, agreed to raise the baby as their own and then offered to keep me as his nanny, his ayah. They had the means, the desire and an empty nursery. I could be with Niki all day, rock him, sing him to sleep, kiss his peppercorn toes, pretend he was all mine. It took me only four months to realize that I was doing more harm than good, hurting Kanta and Manu by wanting Niki to love only me.

When I was first separated from my son, I thought about him every hour of every day. The curl on one side of his head that refused to settle down. The way his belly button stuck out. How eagerly his fat fingers grasped the milk bottle I wasn’t supposed to give him. Having lost her own baby, Kanta was happy to feed Niki from her own breast. And that made me jealous—and furious. Why did she get to nurse my baby and pretend he was hers? I knew it was better for him to accept her as his new mother, but still. I hated her for it.

I knew that as long as I stayed in Kanta’s house, I would keep Niki from loving the woman who wanted to nurture him and was capable of caring for him in the long run. Lakshmi saw it, too. But she left the decision to me. So I made the only choice I could. I left him. And I tried my best to pretend he never existed. If I could convince myself that the hours Ravi Singh and I spent rehearsing Shakespeare—coiling our bodies around each other as Othello and Desdemona, devouring each other into exhaustion—had been a dream, surely I could convince myself our baby had been a dream, too.

And it worked. On every day but the second of September.

Ever since I left Jaipur, Kanta has been sending envelopes so thick I know what they contain without opening them: photos of Niki the baby, the toddler, the boy. I return each one, unopened, safe in the knowledge that the past can’t touch me, can’t splice my heart, can’t leave me bleeding.

The last time I saw Jiji in Shimla, she showed me a similar envelope addressed to her. I recognized the blue paper, Kanta’s elegant handwriting—letters like g and y looping gracefully—and shook my head. “When you’re ready, we can look at the photos together,” Jiji said.

But I knew I never would.

Today, I’ll make it through Niki’s seventeenth birthday in a haze, as I always do. I know tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow, I’ll be able to do what I couldn’t today. I’ll seal that memory of my firstborn as tightly as if I were securing the lid of a steel tiffin for my lunch, making sure that not a drop of the masala dal can escape.

Excerpted from The Perfumist of Paris by Alka Joshi © 2023 by Alka Joshi, used with permission from HarperCollins/MIRA Books.

About the author:

Born in India and raised in the U.S. since she was nine, Alka Joshi has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of Arts. Joshi’s debut novel, The Henna Artist,  immediately became a NYT bestseller, a Reese Witherspoon Bookclub pick, was Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, & is in development as a TV series. Her second novel, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur (2021), is followed by The Perfumist of Paris (2023). Find her online at www.alkajoshi.com.

SOCIAL:

Author Website: www.alkajoshi.com
TWITTER: @alkajoshi
FB: @alkajoshi2019
Insta: @thealkajoshi
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18257842.Alka_Joshi

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Book Review: Muskets & Masquerades by Lindsey Fera

  • Title: Muskets & Masquerades
  • Author: Lindsey Fera
  • Where to buy: Amazon (affiliate link)
  • Genre: Historical Fiction
  • Expected publication date: April 18, 2023
  • Would I recommend: If you enjoy well-researched historical fiction with romance, tension, and family drama, you’ll want to read this!

Synopsis:

Jack and Annalisa are married only five months when, enroute to France, a shipwreck separates them. On different shores, each believes the other dead. But when Annalisa learns Jack is alive, she returns to America and discovers much has changed. After a betrayal, she flees town as her alter ego, Benjamin Cavendish, and joins the Continental Army,

Unbeknownst to Annalisa, Jack has also joined the Continentals, harboring shameful secrets from his days in mourning. Against the backdrop of war with Britain, façades mount between Jack and Annalisa, and the merry minuet of their adolescence dissolves into a masquerade of deceit, one which threatens to part them forever.

My review:

Muskets & Masquerades is the second book of a planned trilogy. I haven’t yet read the first, but after reading this one, I’ll go back and catch up!

As the story opens, Jack, newly married to Annalisa, is summoned to France by the Committee of Secret Correspondence. He tries to persuade Annalisa to stay home, but she’ll have none of that. They both set sail for France, but they’re separated when the ship capsizes.

Annalisa awakes with no memory of the events that brought her to the luxurious residence where she finds herself. She is nursed back to health and starts to build a life there, with no idea whether her memories will ever return. Jack is captured by the British and held on the same ship where his brother, who fights for the British, is serving. You’d think his brother might have some compassion on him, but no. Oliver is rather a jerk to Jack.

Through trials and travails, Annalisa and Jack both make their way back to America. Each thought the other dead, and Jack has allowed himself to be persuaded into a position that threatens his marriage to Annalisa. She assumes her alter ego, Benjamin Cavendish, and joins the Continental Army.

Lindsey Fera writes a mighty good story! I loved Annalisa from the start. She is an unconventional woman, not allowing herself to be strictly limited by the expectations of her time period. She faces danger and difficulty with the emotions you’d expect, but she doesn’t let challenges derail her. She perseveres.

And Jack. My heart just hurt for him and the choices he made. As the reader, I had the advantage of figuring out before he did just how much those choices would come back to bite him. He tries to do the right thing in his situation, he just doesn’t have all the information that would let him know for sure what the right thing is.

I’ve seen a review or two mention the difficulty they had believing that the people who know Annalisa wouldn’t recognize her even in men’s clothing. I thought about that. I think we see what we expect to see a lot of the time, and no one in the Continental Army would have expected to see her in the thick of battle. (And she didn’t fool everyone entirely!)

Ms. Fera has clearly done her research. The language her characters use is fitting of the time in which the story is set, and the events are depicted very well. The glossary of terms that she includes is very helpful, too, if there’s a word the reader can’t interpret from context.

If you enjoy an engaging, well-researched story that lets you imagine events as if you were there, with characters you may want to hug or shake (or maybe kick in the shins, depending), I highly recommend Muskets & Masquerades. Just start with the first story, Muskets & Minuets, and keep reading!

My thanks to the author for a review copy. All opinions here are mine, and I don’t say nice things about books I don’t actually like.

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Word of the Week: March 27, 2023

Word of the Week: a bookish meme hosted here on Mondays in which we share a word that we find entertaining, enlightening, edifying, or just plain fun to say! Share your own word on your blog, then help me grow the meme and come share it here on mine!

This word is just fun to say! With election season fast approaching and who knows who trying to curry political favor, you might find a use for it in the near future.

Okay, if you think about it literally, the image is kind of gross. But what a perfect description of a person who will spare no effort in their attempts to gain favor with someone.

What’s your Word of the Week? No linky, because my linky creator has been giving me fits. Bu do leave your word in a comment!

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Book Beginnings on Fridays and Book Blogger Hop: March 24, 2023

Book Beginnings on Fridays is hosted each week by Rose City Reader. It’s a chance to share the first sentence or so of the book you are reading this week. You can check out others’ book beginnings here. I’m also going to link up with Carrie at Reading Is My Superpower for First Line Friday.

This week’s book beginning:

Synopsis:

The final chapter in Alka Joshi’s New York Times bestselling Jaipur trilogy takes readers to 1970s Paris, where Radha’s budding career as a perfumer must compete with the demands of her family and the secrets of her past.

Paris, 1974. Radha is now thirty-two and living in Paris with her husband, Pierre, and their two daughters. She still grieves for the baby boy she gave up years ago, when she was only a child herself, but she loves being a mother to her daughters, and she’s finally found her passion—the treasure trove of scents.

When her friend’s grandfather offered her a job at his parfumerie, she quickly discovered she had a talent—she could find the perfect fragrance for any customer who walked in the door. Now, ten years later, she’s working for a master perfumer, helping to design completely new fragrances for clients and building her career one scent at a time. She only wishes Pierre could understand her need to work. She feels his frustration, but she can’t give up this thing that drives her.

Tasked with her first major project, Radha travels to India, where she enlists the help of her sister, Lakshmi, and the courtesans of Agra—women who use the power of fragrance to seduce, tease and entice. She’s on the cusp of a breakthrough when she finds out the son she never told her husband about is heading to Paris to find her—upending her carefully managed world and threatening to destroy a vulnerable marriage.

“Imagine running amid a field of lavender bushes with your friends. Playing hide-and-seek between rows of jasmine vines.” Antoine closed his eyes.

This is the third in Alka Joshi’s Jaipur Trilogy. Would you read it?

Book Blogger Hop

Book Blogger Hop is hosted by Coffee Addicted Writer. It starts each Friday and runs through the following Thursday. Each week, there’s a new prompt featuring a book-related question. It’s designed to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, make new blogging friends, and gain followers. See what others have to say on this topic and link up your own post here.

24th – 30th – Are books a must-have in your home? 
(submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer)

Have we just met?! Of course they are! A home isn’t complete without books. We have several bookshelves, and they’re all full. Where other folks have knickknacks, we have books.

What about you? Do you keep books in your home?

Posted in Book Beginnings on Fridays, Book Blogger Hop, Book Memes | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Book Review and Blog Tour: Hidden (Vampires of Marchwood #1) by Shalini Boland

I am ridiculously excited about Bookouture’s new sci-fi and fantasy imprint, Second Sky. This is my first blog tour with them, and I’m sure it won’t be my last! Welcome to my tour stop for Hidden, the first in Shalini Boland’s Vampires of Marchwood series.

Author:    Shalini Boland 


Book:     HIDDEN (plus TAKEN and HUNTED – my review is only for Hidden, but the other two are also available now!) 

Publication Day:  March 21st 2023

Buy Link(s):

Hidden: https://geni.us/B0BTJ9PJ3Jsocial
Taken: https://geni.us/B0BVNYQFDPsocial
Hunted: https://geni.us/B0BVNZ3DPCsocial

Book description:

Falling in love has never been so dangerous…

From USA Today bestselling author Shalini Boland comes the addictive Vampires of Marchwood series. Perfect for fans of K.F. Breene, Sarah J. Maas and Tracy Wolff.

My name is Madison Greene. On my seventeenth birthday, I inherited an old mansion and wealth beyond my wildest dreams. I thought it was a joke, but as I step through the creaking door of the sprawling building, I realise my life in foster care is in the past. I’ve been chosen and my world has changed forever.

But I wasn’t told that Marchwood House hides a secret.

As I explore every inch of the crumbling property, I stumble upon a set of large, dusty boxes in the basement. When I pull back the lid and look down, I find myself staring at the most handsome face I’ve ever seen. High cheekbones, porcelain skin…

And when he wakes up and locks eyes with me, I realise my heart already belongs to him, even though my head is screaming at me to get as far away from Marchwood as possible. Because I know what he really is.

I never planned to fall in love – but it’s too late now. Alexandre has a dark and dangerous past. He needs me and I have to help him. But can a human really save a vampire?

My review:

The story unfolds in two times: 1881, where we see Alexandre Chevalier and his family on an archaeological dig in Turkey, searching for a lost underground city of legend, and the present day, where Madison Greene and her brother Ben, children in the foster care system whose parents are dead, inherit a great country estate and a pile of cash from a long-dead relative. This newfound wealth changes Maddy and Ben’s lives, and they have no idea how much their lives will change when they move to Marchwood.

The 1881 timeline was fascinating. I loved the details of the archaeological dig, the chase to find the myths on which the story of the lost city was based, the tension as they explored the location they ultimately found. The horror of the party’s encounter with ancient vampires was deliciously spine-tingling, and the aftermath of that encounter heartbreaking. I felt a little bit bad for Alexandre. Were it not for his foolish choice at a party, his entire family wouldn’t have been in Turkey. Definitely a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Modern day lost a little something by comparison, but the story still kept me engaged. Maddy is a teenager, and a lot of the time, she jolly well acts like one. She’s prone to serve attitude, make impetuous decisions, and then regret her life choices. (Wait. Alexandre was a teenager, too….) I can’t really fault her for serving attitude to her foster parents, though. They make it clear that they see her and Ben as more of a meal ticket than children to love and raise and care for. Ben is a likeable young man, and Travis really deserves better than what he gets from Maddy. But Boland’s writing style just sucks you along into the story, regardless of the itch to smack a character upside the head because she rushes into situations headlong.

Vampires are portrayed quite differently here than they are in many stories, and Alexandre is a lovely character. (Although I’m unaccustomed to vampires that have serious self-restraint when they need to feed. It took a little getting used to.) His relationship with Maddy is, for the most part, sweet, especially when you remember that he was only a teenager when he became a vampire. So he’s really a century or more older chronologically, but emotionally, they’re pretty close in age.

I’ve seen this book compared to Twilight. I can see the resemblance, but this was a lot more fun to read than Twilight. Bella was a weak-willed, wishy-washy, almost emotionless heroine. Maddy has spunk. She may do stupid stuff, but no one will ever accuse her of being passive!

Four stars for a delightful bit of brain candy that leaves me wanting to know what happens next! Gotta read books two and three.

Is this a book you’ll pick up? Leave me a comment!

About the author:

Shalini lives in Dorset, England with her husband, two children and Jess, their cheeky terrier cross. Before kids, she was signed to Universal Music Publishing as a singer songwriter, but now she spends her days writing suspense thrillers (in between school runs and hanging out endless baskets of laundry).

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

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Book Review and Excerpt: How I’ll Kill You by Ren DeStefano

  • Title: How I’ll Kill You
  • Author: Ren DeStefano
  • Genre: Thriller
  • Publisher: Berkley
  • Buy link: Amazon (affiliate link)

Synopsis:

Your next stay-up-all-night thriller, about identical triplets who have a nasty habit of killing their boyfriends, and what happens when the youngest commits their worst crime yet: falling in love with her mark.

Make him want you.
Make him love you.
Make him dead.

Sissy has an…interesting family. Always the careful one, always the cautious one, she has handled the cleanup while her serial killer sisters have carved a path of carnage across the U.S. Now, as they arrive in the Arizona heat, Sissy must step up and embrace the family pastime of making a man fall in love and then murdering him. Her first target? A young widower named Edison–and their mutual attraction is instant. While their relationship progresses, and most couples would be thinking about picking out china patterns and moving in together, Sissy’s family is reminding her to think about picking out burial sites and moving on.

But then something happens that Sissy never anticipated: She begins to feel protective of Edison, and then, before she can help it, she’s fallen in love. But the clock is ticking, and her sisters are growing restless. It becomes clear that the gravesite she chooses will hide a body no matter what happens; but if she betrays her family, will it be hers?

My review:

How I’ll Kill You has an interesting premise: triplet sisters, abandoned at birth, raised in the foster care system. After a childhood full of disappointment, betrayal, and hurt, they learn that they can only rely on each other. When Iris, the oldest, snaps and kills her much older lover, Sissy, the youngest by just minutes, handles the cleanup and makes sure Iris won’t be found out. They decide then that they’ll never let men hurt them again; rather, they’ll take lovers, win them over, and then kill them.

As Iris and Moody leave a growing number of corpses across the country, Sissy ensures no trace is left of her sisters’ crimes. She’s the one who keeps them off of law enforcement’s radar. She’s always been the steady one. The sensible one.

Until now.

It’s time for Sissy’s first kill. She sees him in a diner in Rainwood, Arizona, and she just knows. He’s her mark. As her assumed identity of “Jade,” she’ll have six months to win him over and make him love her before she bids him the final farewell. None of them counted, though, on Sissy falling in love with him.

This story goes some dark places. It’s a pretty scathing indictment of the foster care system, where the girls were either cared for but couldn’t stay, treated with indifference, or actively harmed. However they were treated, they came out of the system damaged. The book is also stark in its descriptions of how Sissy handles a cleanup job, so if you’re squeamish, be prepared.

But the book has its beautiful parts, too. Love of family is central to the tale, even if that love has been twisted and misguided along the way. Sissy and her sisters love each other and have each other’s backs. The relationship between Edison and Sissy is genuine, and Sissy’s internal struggle when facing a choice between her sisters and a man she didn’t expect to love made me want to hug her. Sissy also finds an unexpected friend in their neighbor Dara, her first real friend outside of her family.

My prosecutor brain couldn’t help but think what a nightmare this would be for law enforcement. Three identical siblings – how could you ever prove which one actually committed the crime? Of course, they’d have to get caught first….

How I’ll Kill You is a solid four-star read for me. Read on for an excerpt – see if it might be your cup of tea!

Thanks to Berkley and Netgalley for a review copy. All opinions here are mine, and I don’t say nice things about books I don’t actually like.

Excerpt:

If not for my sisters and the tragic circumstances of our upbringing, I would be living an empty life and bound for heartbreak.

It started when we were nineteen.

Iris called me, frantic, in the middle of the night. She had her own apartment above a laundromat in downtown Clovis. She was so proud of that place—all five hundred square feet of it. She kept it tidy and burned incense at all hours to hide the smell from the dumpster in the alley outside her bedroom window. At night, there was the persistent throb of the bar across the street, the music loud enough to rattle the porcelain angel figurines on the shelves. They’d come with the place, and Iris had decided they made her living room look homey—a word she’d never used before, because we’d never had a home.

“Just come,” she’d sobbed and then hung up. All of my calls went straight to voicemail. I sped the whole way over there, sure that someone had just climbed up the fire escape to murder her. But what I found was a different sort of violence.

Blood, deep and dark, pooled on her oriental rug, and splattered across the angel figurines.

She’d been sleeping with her old high school guidance counselor—a fifty-one-year-old married father of two. He strung her along for months, promising to leave his wife. He broke her heart a hundred times, and then Iris plunged a kebab skewer through his.

“You watch all of those crime shows,” Moody said, emerging from the kitchen with a bottle of bleach she’d found under the sink. “Help us make this go away.”

 We moved with a practical calm, the three of us, and when it was through, Iris’s ill-fated lover was resting in six garbage bags, wound tightly with duct tape. If it were only one of us, or even two, I’m sure we would have been caught. We would have missed a detail. But we were a perfect team, the three of us.

 After a lifetime of being torn apart, we were finally together, finally able to help one another in all the ways we never could when we were being jostled helplessly by the foster system. All those years of loneliness, of wanting, of being kept apart, had brought us to this desperate moment. Knee-deep in the water of the San Joaquin river in the velvet black night, we weighed the pieces of the man with rocks, and a promise started to form. In the coming days, it slowly became obvious what we needed to do.

We wouldn’t deprive ourselves of love, but our hearts would be weapons. We would love the men we found completely and without inhibition, put a lifetime into our brief time together. Live out every fantasy we desired. And then we would kill them.

There would never be another lover to break one of us. We would break all of them first.

“Excerpted from HOW I’LL KILL YOU by Ren DeStefano published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Ren DeStefano”

Posted in Berkley, Book Reviews, Thriller | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Can’t-Wait Wednesday: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme that highlights books soon to be released, the ones we’re excited about but haven’t read yet. It’s hosted by Wishful Endings, and was formerly hosted by Breaking the Spine. Y’all can check out all of this week’s Can’t-Wait Wednesday posts here.

Title: Thornhedge

Author: T. Kingfisher

Genre: Fantasy, Fairy Tale Retelling

Publication Date: August 15, 2023

Publisher: Tor

Synopsis:

From USA Today bestselling author T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge is the tale of a kind-hearted, toad-shaped heroine, a gentle knight, and a mission gone completely sideways.

There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This isn’t her story.

Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right?

But nothing with fairies is ever simple.

Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He’s heard there’s a curse here that needs breaking, but it’s a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold…

My thoughts:

I adore a good fairy tale retelling! I’ve never read any of T. Kingfisher’s books, but I’ve heard such good things about them that I expect this to rock my socks off. Come on, August!

What are you eagerly awaiting this week? Let me know in a comment!

Posted in Book Memes, Can't-Wait Wednesday | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday: Books on my TBR That I Predict Will Be 5-Star Reads

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish and is now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. Check out upcoming Top Ten themes on Jana’s blog and go here to see what others have on their Top Ten Tuesday lists!

This week’s topic is a TTT Rewind. I went back through the last thirteen years of TTT topics and selected one I haven’t done before.

Today I’m talking about books on my TBR that I expect I will big puffy heart love.

The Magic of Lemon Drop Pie by Rachel Linden – Magical realism and the ability to relive past days and pie?! Yes, please.

At the Coffee Shop of Curiosities by Heather Webber – I’ve loved everything I’ve read by her. This is another full of magical realism, set in a Southern small town. I have no doubt it will be fantastic.

The Cybernetic Tea Shop by Meredith Katz – A fully autonomous robot whose creator has died and a drifting human who doesn’t realize that a robot might need her help. Sounds like a sci-fi I’m going to love.

Drinks and Sinkholes by S. Usher Evans – Cozy fantasy by one of my most favorite authors? What’s not to love?!

The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan – Historical fiction that explores the conflict of young love across class divides and the conflict many felt over the harnessing of Niagara Falls for power generation. It sounds like a good read!

The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok – This sounds like a memoir of love and loss and the connections that stay between mother and daughter. I expect it might make me cry.

Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill – A dystopian future, humankind is gone, and one AI is resisting the mainframe brain that now controls the world. I’m in!

The Night-Bird’s Feather by Jenna Katerin Moran – Slavic-inspired fantasy is something I haven’t read much of. A young woman dreams the future and the past, and in her dreams, she finds hope that she may yet defeat the lord of death when their battle comes.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin – I’ve heard so many good things about this one, I don’t see how I can help but love it.

Murder at the Menger by Kathleen Kaska – A historical mystery, set in Texas, with hints of the paranormal? How can that not be a five-star read? I can’t wait!

What books on your TBR do you think will be five-star reads for you? Are any of these on your list? Have you read any of these and loved them? Share in a comment!

Posted in Book Memes, Top Ten Tuesday | Tagged , | 14 Comments

Blog Tour, Author Guest Post, and Giveaway: A Flicker of a Doubt by Daryl Wood Gerber

Welcome to my stop on the Great Escapes Book Tour for A Flicker of a Doubt by Daryl Wood Gerber! Read on for a guest post from the author and for my review.

A Flicker of a Doubt (Fairy Garden Mystery #4)
Publication Date: March 28, 2023
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Publisher: Kensington
Preorder on Amazon (affiliate link)

Fairies are trending hard, especially when it comes to fairy garden décor in Walmart and Target and on Amazon. The latest installment in the nationally bestselling Daryl Wood Gerber’s Fairy Garden mysteries is a perfect read for Laura Childs readers and all fans of whimsy and charm.

With a theater foundation tea and an art show planned at Violet Vickers’s estate, Courtney is hired to create charming fairy gardens for the event. It’s not so charming, however, when her best friend Meaghan’s ex-boyfriend turns out to be Violet’s latest artistic protégé. Even worse, not long after Meaghan locks horns with him, his body is found in her yard, bludgeoned with an objet d’murder.

There’s a gallery of suspects, from an unstable former flame to an arts and crafts teacher with a sketchy past. But when the cops focus on Meaghan’s business partner, who’s like a protective older brother to her, and discover he also has a secret financial motive, Courtney decides to draw her own conclusions. Fearing they’re missing the forest for the trees, and with some help from Fiona the sleuthing fairy, she hopes to make them see the light . . .

Author guest post:

I had no idea when I started writing mysteries that I’d also have to be a cook. Lucky for me, I was a cook already. I sold pies around the neighborhood when I was ten; I catered parties while in college; I worked in a number of restaurants as I started to build my career as an actress.

But now, because I write culinary mysteries, I have to come up with recipes that I can include in my books. May I tell you how hard it is to come up with new recipes? Everything under the sun has been done. So here’s what I do to keep it fresh. For the Cookbook Nook Mysteries, I often focus on the event that is going on in town, like a festival, a competition, or a play. For example, in the upcoming Poaching is Puzzling (April 2023), the theme is a crossword puzzle event. There is a kickoff party featuring lots of appetizers, so I decided to share appetizer recipes with my readers.  Crispy salmon appetizers, mini quiches, mini potpies, and of course, dessert comes after appetizers, so I include a few desserts. The pumpkin cardamom pie is to die for. For the Fairy Garden Mysteries, because Courtney serves tea at her fairy garden shop, Open Your Imagination, on the weekends, I come up with recipes that could be served for tea. Cookies, tea cakes, scones, and my favorites, brownies. In addition, Courtney’s boyfriend owns a popular café, so in A Flicker of a Doubt, I put his savory recipes on display.

Now, perhaps you didn’t know this, but the ingredients in a recipe are not copyrightable. Why not? Because ingredients are essentially a formula. Granted, when I land on a recipe, I often tweak the ingredients, adding spices or items that I believe might zip up a recipe. But how many variations of ingredients could there be when, say, making sugar cookies? What is copyrightable is the language used to concoct the recipe [i.e., the directions]. Putting the instructions in one’s own words can be a challenge. Think about it. Verbs like stir, mix, and whip all crop up in a recipe. I’m not going to change those to blend, beat, and whisk just to make the directions different, although, come to think of it, that might be easier to do.
Hmmm. . .

In addition, if a recipe calls for a six-quart pot, I’m not going to change it to an eight-quart pot just to alter the words. So how do I make it my own? I use my own voice. Oh, sure, I could copy someone else’s recipe (and possibly get sued), but it wouldn’t be written in my voice, and that’s important to me. To make it my own, I use words that I typically use, terms I say to myself when I cook. A recipe might call for chopped vegetables, but I call them veggies, and I prefer the term diced to chopped. I call the refrigerator the fridge, and so on . . .

Does that sound silly? Sure, but as a writer, every day I come up with expressions that are specific to me or to my characters. Therefore, each time I create a new recipe to include in a book, I fine-tune those directions. It’s a way for me to bring you into my kitchen . . . and into my world.

Savor the mystery!

 

My review:

This was the first of Daryl Wood Gerber’s Fairy Garden Mysteries that I’ve read, but I was able to follow along without too much difficulty. And now I want to read them all!

Courtney Kelly runs a shop called Open Your Imagination, where she sells fairy gardens and fairy doors and the supplies to make them. She’s also filling an order for several large fairy gardens that Violet Vickers wants to decorate for her theater foundation tea and art show.

Nicolas, her friend Meaghan’s ex-boyfriend, is back in town. He’s one of the featured artists at Violet’s show, and he manages to get into confrontations with several people in short order. The tension ramps up when Nicolas’s brother shows up demanding to know where Nicolas is and threatening to collect on the sizable debt he claims Nicolas owes him. Shortly thereafter, Ziggy, Meaghan’s business partner and friend, finds Nicolas dead outside Meaghan’s house. Courtney can’t sit idly by and not try to help. And the more she digs, the more unsavory things she learns about Nicolas and his family. 

Carmel-by-the-Sea is a delightful setting for this story. It feels like the kind of place where one might find fairies. With all of the creative energy, it also sounds like a place I’d love to visit!

Courtney is a likable character. She has a jewel of a helper in her shop in Joss, and Joss’s assistance lets Courtney be there when she needs to be for her friends. Violet is a treat, too. I love that she pokes fun at herself about her excessive use of the word “lovely.” 

The more Courtney tries to figure out whodunnit, the more suspects she comes up with. Was it Nicolas’s brother? Any one of the several women who apparently had a thing going with him? Suspects are considered and ruled out, and then we’re back to square one. Gerber did a good job keeping me guessing as to who the real killer was.

I love the fairies! Gerber includes a lot of lore and information about different fairy types and classifications, and the fairies we meet are charming. Fiona, Courtney’s fairy, cracked me up with her efforts to figure out which humans could see her and which couldn’t. And the ending of the book left me wondering if we’ll see Fiona in the next book in the series. I hope so! (Spoiler: No, Fiona isn’t dead. Now go read the book and see what happened.)

If you like a clean cozy mystery with interesting characters, a beautiful setting, and a mystery that keeps you guessing, you need to pick up A Flicker of a Doubt. Heck, start at the beginning of the series. I give this five stars, and now I’m off to catch up on the first three!

About Daryl Wood Gerber

Agatha Award-winning author Daryl Wood Gerber is best known for her nationally bestselling Fairy Garden Mysteries, Cookbook Nook Mysteries, and French Bistro Mysteries. As Avery Aames, she penned the popular Cheese Shop Mysteries. In addition, Daryl writes the Aspen Adams Novels of Suspense as well as stand-alone suspense. Daryl loves to cook, fairy garden, and read. She has a frisky Goldendoodle who keeps her in line. And she has been known to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and hitch-hike around Ireland alone. You can learn more on her website: httsp://darylwoodgerber.com

Author Links

WEBSITE FACEBOOK BOOKBUB YOUTUBE INSTAGRAM PINTEREST GOODREADS AMAZON NEWSLETTER

Purchase Links – AmazonB&NKoboBookshop

TOUR PARTICIPANTS

March 21 – Christy’s Cozy Corners – REVIEW, CHARACTER GUEST POST

March 21 – Maureen’s Musings – SPOTLIGHT

March 21 – The Plain-Spoken Pen – REVIEW, AUTHOR GUEST POST

March 22 – The Book Decoder – REVIEW

March 22 – Angel’s Guilty Pleasures – SPOTLIGHT

March 22 – I’m Into Books – SPOTLIGHT

March 22 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – REVIEW

March 23 – Celticlady’s Reviews – SPOTLIGHT

March 23 – The Avid Reader – REVIEW, RECIPE

March 23 – Diane Reviews Books – REVIEW

March 24 – Books to the Ceiling – SPOTLIGHT & PODCAST

March 24 – MJB Reviewers – SPOTLIGHT

March 24 – View from the Birdhouse – REVIEW

March 24 – Baroness Book Trove – REVIEW

March 24 – Hearts & Scribbles – SPOTLIGHT

March 25 – FUONLYKNEW – SPOTLIGHT

March 25 – StoreyBook Reviews – AUTHOR GUEST POST

March 25 – Ruff Drafts – SPOTLIGHT

March 25 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – SPOTLIGHT

March 26 – Cozy Up With Kathy – REVIEW

March 26 – Jane Reads – AUTHOR INTERVIEW

March 26 – Lisa Ks Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT

March 27 – Melina’s Book Blog – REVIEW

March 27 – Literary Gold – AUTHOR INTERVIEW

March 27 – #BRVL Book Review Virginia Lee – SPOTLIGHT

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Posted in Blog Tours, Book Reviews, Contemporary Fiction, Cozy Mystery, Great Escapes Book Tour, Magic, Mystery | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments