Four Weddings and a Fiasco: The Wedding Day by Sharon Kleve

Blurb:

Cora Henley doesn’t believe in love at first sight. In her personal experience love never lasts. Her parents’ nasty divorce and her ex-boyfriend’s betrayal have her convinced long-term relationships don’t work.

Kane Price is finally ready to settle down, get married and have a family. When he falls head-over-heels for Cora, she makes it clear she’s not interested in a serious relationship. He’s come up against difficult obstacles before and never gives up until he gets what he wants. And he wants Cora.

If Cora can just trust her heart to Kane they both might find their happily-ever-after.

About the Author:

Sharon Kleve was born and raised in Washington and currently lives on the Olympic Peninsula with her husband.

Sharon is a multi-published author of contemporary romance. She loves romance. She loves reading romance, living romance, and especially loves writing about romance. She gets no greater feeling than watching her characters come alive in each other’s arms. Most of all, she loves giving her characters the happily ever after they deserve—with a few bumps and bruises along the way.

One of her favorite things to do is pick up a new book and sink into the story, immersing herself in the emotions between the characters. She hopes to inspire her readers the same way her favorite authors have inspired her.

When not writing, she can usually be found either curled up in her recliner with her cat and a good book, or in the kitchen baking sourdough bread or bagels.

Review:

Cora Henley is a wedding planner who doesn’t believe in love. Still, being detail-oriented and extremely organized, she’s beyond good at her job. Her clients don’t need to know she doesn’t believe their marriages will last. They just need to know their special days will run smoothly, and with Cora at the helm, they most certainly will. Until Kane Price shows up.

Kane disturbs Cora in ways she refuses to acknowledge, and he refuses to go away. He’s a distraction she certainly does not need. To make matters worse, he wants to get married and have a family. After her parents’ divorce, marriage and family are the last things on Cora’s mind.

“Four Weddings and a Fiasco: The Wedding Day” was a fun romp. It’s a novella one can read easily in one sitting, but unfortunately, it was marred by a lack of editing. I like Ms. Kleve. I would love to be able to give her book five roses instead of four, but she really needs to spend a few dollars on a good editor. If you’re not a grammar stickler like me, you’ll love it. If you are, you’ll be a bit bugged, but you’ll still like it.

Author Amazon Page:  http://www.amazon.com/Sharon-Kleve/e/B006JAH14S

Heat Rating:  PG-13

Length:  96 Pages

Digital Price:  $1.99

Buy Link:  https://www.amazon.com/Four-Weddings-Fiasco-Wedding-Novella-ebook/dp/B01F4H68O0

Thanks for visiting.

Still Yellowblown™ Away! Rhyolite Drifts: Yellowblown™, Book Two by J. Hughey

Blurb:

Abandoned by Hotness.

Held hostage by the Yellowstone eruption, I’m stuck at home instead of loving life at college.

Sanity is restored when my college roommate arrives, but I’m still trapped in my hometown with a bunch of people just trying to survive. Some of them are surprisingly interesting, like the HAM radio opera singer lady. Or the pop star who crushes on me while waiting for an air filter for his tour bus.

Unfortunately there’s also my roommate’s gangster little brother who pushes Grandma to her conservative edge, and the local entrepreneurs determined to capitalize on hard times. They tick me off.

Despite all this I’m determined to find a path to the fabled land of Adulthood even if my heart is broken and all the roads are ash covered.

And where the heck did that Nebraskan cattle rancher go, anyway?

Review by Rochelle Weber:

Violet Perch is bereft with the loss of Boone Ramer, aka Hotness, when her college roommate, Mia Carbone straggles up in the drive with her kid brother, Tony. Mia and her grandmother hoped that by getting Tony out of Camden, New Jersey, they could get him away from the punks and hoodlums with whom he was running, but I could have told them from sad experience that a geographic change is not a cure. Tony refuses to help around the house and soon finds his own kind of “friends” to hang with in town. Mia tries to control him, but the damage was done long before she came home from college.

One would think Violet would perk up when a rock star asks her to accompany him back to Miami where the sun still shines, fruit still grows, and people still laze on a beach that is not yet ash-covered, but she just can’t quite accept. His kisses don’t quite make her spine tingle. He’s hot, but he’s not Hotness. Not that she’s heard from “The Nebraskan” since he left or even ever expects to.

Meanwhile, she survives. She helps her family survive. She puts one foot in front of the other, delivering the rural mail via bicycle, shooting and skinning squirrels and rabbits, trying to learn to shoot deer, trying to help her family fend off entrepreneurs who want to turn the family’s free spring water into a business, even if it means evicting them from land they’ve lived on for almost two centuries, showing a heck of a lot more courage and guts than I fear I’d have in similar circumstances.

Even though Rhyolite Drifts picks up exactly where Eruption left off, each book stands well on its own. Again, I had real problems putting the book down, and the only reason it took a couple of days to read it is that I was trying to finish the Marketing for Romance Writers Newsletter, and get caught up with some editing before helping a friend move downstate from the Chicago area. As it was, I read until 4 a.m. one night when I had an 8 a.m. appointment that morning.

The Yellowblown™ books tend to stay with me. Ms. Hughey knows whereof she speaks, as the Yellowstone caldera is a good ten thousand years overdue to blow. I was telling a friend about these books. He said while he was up there last year part of the park was closed, because the ground was so hot the asphalt was melting on the roads. Furthermore, Ms. Hughey is a literate writer. Her dialog could be a smidge looser, but I do love an author who learned grammar and spelling somewhere along the way and uses it in her writing. Brava, Ms. Hughey. I can’t wait for Coldera, but I suspect I shall be bereft knowing the series is finished.

Length:  321 Pages

Digital Price:  $0.99

Buy Link:  http://www.amazon.com/Rhyolite-Drifts-YellowblownTM-Book-2-ebook/dp/B00VGOQ9VS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1430757416&sr=8-1&keywords=rhyolite+drifts+hughey

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

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