Letters to Daniel by Amy Leigh McCorkle

 

Blurb:

Through a series of open letters to her favorite actor, Daniel Craig, the author details her struggles with abuse, mental illness, and her ultimate triumph over both.

About the Author:

Amy McCorkle was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky.

She has lived in New Mexico and Texas as well, but she currently makes her home in Shepherdsville, Kentucky.

An award-winning blogger, she is also a successful author in both the sci-fi erotic romance genre with No Ordinary Love and a dark romantic suspense tale, Another Way To Die. She’s also written the first two books of a Mad Max meets Gladiator series set to be a trilogy. She has placed second in the 2011 Preditors & Editors Readers Choice Poll for Best Short Romance Story and semi-finaled with Another Way to Die in the 2012 Moondance International Film Festival.

From Hydra Publications, she has released Set Fire to the Rain as well as her first print novel, Bounty Hunter. She is co-authoring the Gunpowder & Lead series with Melissa Goodman.

Her work is flavored by her childhood heroes, pop culture, music, and the cinema, as well as the writers she still enjoys reading today.

Review:

Letters to Daniel was an excellent book that I couldn’t finish reading. Let me explain. It’s a series of open letters to Daniel Craig. Yes, the actor—the one who played James Bond. These letters detail Ms. McCorkle’s struggles with child abuse, bi-polar disorder, and food addiction.

To quote Meatloaf, “Two out of three ain’t bad.” Well, actually, in this case they are. Okay, you can almost make that three out of three. While Ms. McCorkle suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her cop father, I suffered emotional abuse at the hands of my adoptive mother. A friend recently told me about something going around on Facebook, I think, that said something like, “The compulsion to apologize is a sign of emotional abuse, so don’t be a jerk when you encounter someone who does that.”

To which I replied, “Thank you. I’m sorry.”

But I digress. I’m also bi-polar and a food addict. And I read Letters to Daniel the week I buried two human family members and one canine one. I wanted to eat everything in the kitchen, including the cabinets.

Did I mention I also spent a holiday weekend with my ex and his bride? He divorced me because of my mood swings. Don’t get me wrong, I really like his new wife. She’s a sweetie. But I felt overwhelmingly lonely the whole weekend. And guilty. There was my daughter’s father-in-law who’d just lost his wife of fifty-plus years, and there I was having a pity-party because my ex of thirty-plus years had remarried—again. Yeah, I know: feelings are neither right nor wrong; they just are.

So, I pick up Letters to Daniel, and except for the sexual abuse and the fact that Ms. McCorkle hasn’t yet married, I’m reading my life story. Oh, and Ms. McCorkle is much farther along in her career than I was at her age.

Then I started thinking about when my funk began, and I realized it was before the death-watch, before the funerals, before the ex and his bride came to town, before his mom took me aside and gave me the “Shelley Dear, I was so proud when you lost weight. What happened?” speech. (I’m still “Shelley” to a few family members.) That’s when I realized at least one of my meds has quit working. I’m seeing my psychiatrist tomorrow as I write this, and that’s at the top of my agenda.

I was seventy-two percent of the way through the book when I put it down and just cried. I guess I needed that. I’m told the end is very inspirational. Somehow, through the funk, and the self-pity, and the tears, I found the whole book inspirational. I highly recommend Letters to Daniel. I just don’t recommend reading it in the midst of a bi-polar/ food addict breakdown. Hopefully I’ll start new meds tomorrow and be able to finish it eventually.

Author Website:  http://www.amazon.com/Amy-Leigh-McCorkle/e/B006T5AAA0/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1

Heat Rating:  R

Length:  253 Pages

Prices:

Print:  $14.95

Digital:  $3.99

Buy Link:  http://www.amazon.com/Letters-Daniel-Amy-Leigh-McCorkle-ebook/dp/B01A1V35IQ

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Defective by Susan Sofayov

Blurb:

University of Pittsburgh law student, Maggie Hovis, battles an enemy she cannot escape—her own brain. Her family calls her a drama queen. Her fiancé, Sam, moves out after she throws a shoe at his head. Maggie knows there is only one way to get him back—control her moods. So she takes the step most of her family is against: therapy. After a diagnosis of Bipolar II Disorder, Maggie begins to investigate her family tree—which is plagued by mental illness and hidden relatives—and develops empathy for her deceased Great Aunt Ella, who lived her life in a mental institution. But Maggie’s journey leads her into fear and insecurity, afraid she’ll end up like Ella and never get Sam back. But what about Nick, her super-sexy old flame, who wants to reignite their passion? And does it even matter, anyway? Won’t mental illness stop any man from loving her?

Review by Rochelle Weber:

Being bi-polar and having gone through a couple of medicinal cocktails as well as several rounds on locked wards, I thought I knew a lot about my disease. But Ms. Sofayov has apparently done a lot more research than I have. In Defective I learned the meaning of a word I’d just drifted across and to which I had not paid much attention—hypomanic.

Like me, Maggie Hovis is a Bi-Polar 2 with Hypomania. Her disease does not manifest itself in long periods of great elation and creativity followed by long periods of deep depression bordering on catatonia. It shows up more as temper tantrums followed by abject apologies and then sleeping it off like an alcohol binge, and walking around like a zombie the rest of the time, sometimes taking to one’s bed, sometimes just wallowing on the couch with the TV on, sometimes managing to put one foot in front of the other when absolutely required to survive, but with one’s very own cloud surrounding one. Bi-polar 2’s have brief flashes of the happy, creative kind of mania during which they may go somewhere fun or start a project, but they rarely finish these things. Maggie’s boyfriend, Sam, referred to those times as “Beautiful Maggie.”

[My first “book” was actually a collection of first chapters. I had about 300 pages of the beginnings of books, most of which I threw away. Goodness, I wish I’d kept them, but when one is sofa-surfing homeless, one can only carry so much luggage. You can’t be a hoarder on your friends’ couches.]

Maggie also has voices in her head telling her people will find out what a fraud she is when she does something right, or chiding her when she doesn’t quite do something perfectly, just like mine. I just never realized they were part of my disease.

[“A 3.25 grade point average. Couldn’t make cum laude, could you? You’re a failure.” “Yeah, but to be fair, I did that one semester working full time while going to school in a wheel chair with my leg in a cast, and the CTA not-so-Special Services kept leaving me sitting in that cold corridor and caused me to miss three classes because they went to the wrong building in my office complex. If they’d missed me one more time, it would’ve been an automatic fail.” “Lame excuse for getting two Bs that semester if you ask us.” [My voices, not Maggie’s. I call them The Committee.)]

The information about the disease is woven into a search for Maggie’s family history, a manic obsession with getting her boyfriend back, and the reappearance of an old flame, all tempered with the words of her cousin. “Face it, Mags. We’re defective. No one’s ever going to love us.”

Well, I loved Maggie Hovis. She and her family were fascinating, well-drawn, three dimensional characters—even Aunt Ella who died before Maggie was born. The villain in Defective was one with whom I am all too familiar and Ms. Sofayof definitely did her homework to bring it to life in dazzling HD-3D. I could not put this book down, except when it took me into my own head and I stopped to ruminate about my own struggles with B-P 2 and hypomania.

Yes, Maggie, I loved you. Enough to give you five [Yes, 5! Ignore the Committee and just say “Thank you.”] Roses. Whether you’re bi-polar, living with someone who is, not related to but curious about the disease, or just looking for a good romance with real demons, Defective is a great read.

Length: 308 Pages

Prices:

Print: $11.53

Digital: $2.99

Buy Link: http://www.amazon.com/Defective-Susan-Sofayov/dp/1626941254/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1415256962&sr=8-1&keywords=Defective+%2B+Susan+Sofayov

Thanks for visiting. Rose, Julie, Donna, & Rochelle