Winter Stroll - Review & Giveaway

Review by Darcie Czajkowski

The holidays are a magical time. There’s caroling and decorations, hot toddies and warm apple cider. Family visits from near and afar, and people are just a little bit kinder than the rest of the year.

But life doesn’t stop in December and, often times, the holiday can amplify problems, and everything seems more chaotic. That’s when family can step up and help you through those times. And for the Quinn family, they may need each other more than ever this year.

Picking up where things left off in Hilderbrand’s Winter Street, Winter Street Inn owner Kelley Quinn and his wife Mitzi’s son, Bart, is still missing in Afghanistan. His likely capture by a dangerous extremist group has driven Mitzi to drink. Too much. Too often. And her state of mind isn’t ameliorated by her decision to take up residence with the Inn’s former Santa Claus, George, with whom she used to have a once-a-year affair. But when the Santa suit comes off in Lenox, Massachusetts, everyday isn’t full of Christmas cheer. She misses Kelley, plain and simple, and returns to Nantucket for the baptism of Kelley’s grandchild, the daughter of Kelley’s son with his first wife, Margaret.

Margaret will also be there. Drake, the pediatric surgeon she’s been dating for several years, the one who works too much and wouldn’t take the time off to go to Nantucket for the baptism, surprises Margaret by showing up on Nantucket. He may have another surprise up his sleeve as well.

Kevin Quinn has come a long way since last year. Now he’s happily engaged to Isabelle, the Inn’s manager, and their daughter, Genevieve, is about to be baptized. The entire family will be present for the service and celebration. Everyone except Kevin’s two brothers.

First, there’s Bart. Missing in action. Potentially a P.O.W.

Then there’s Patrick, who is currently serving time in jail for insider trading. His wife, Jennifer, whom Kevin and his siblings see as a sister, is holding down the fort with their three boys. Or is she? The boys aren’t making things easy on her, and she’s found a way of coping, albeit a highly dangerous one.

At least Ava, Kevin’s sister, will be there to see her niece get baptized. Or will she? When her ex-boyfriend, her long-time love who wouldn’t commit, returns to Nantucket, he insists he made a huge mistake and wants her back. But now Ava’s dating sweet Scott, who is the best boyfriend she could ever ask for. Or is he?

When the Quinn family plus George and Drake come together for the baptism, there is laughter, tears, and a whole lot of drama, especially when Kevin’s conniving ex-wife shows up out of the blue and stirs the pot, calling into question whether there will even be a baptism after all.  

Filled with realistic family dynamics and a juicy plot, Winter Stroll is the perfect follow-up to last year’s Winter Street. Hilderbrand excels at escalating drama and chapter-end cliffhangers, which made me want to read the entire book in one sitting. For a rather short story, I applaud the character development that Hilderbrand achieved and appreciated that her characters covered a wide range of personalities. Winter Stroll is a reminder that life doesn’t become perfect around the holidays, but with family to hold us together, we can all be filled with the Christmas spirit.

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About the Author:

Elin Hilderbrand does her best writing on the beaches of Nantucket, as well as on the charming streets of Beacon Hill in Boston. She has three magical children who beg her not to sing along to the radio or dance in public.Winter Stroll is her sixteenth novel.

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Winter Stroll by Elin Hilderbrand

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The Great Christmas Knit Off - Giveaway

The Great Christmas Knit Off
By: Alexandra Brown  

Releasing October 13, 2015

Harper Collins

Blurb

The perfect seasonal tale of how laughter, friends and wacky Christmas sweaters can mend a broken heart.

Heartbroken after being jilted at the altar, Sybil has been saved from despair by her knitting obsession and now her home is filled to bursting with tea cozies, beanies, and sweaters. But, after discovering that she may have perpetrated the screw-up of the century at work, Sybil decides to make a hasty exit and, just weeks before Christmas, runs away to the picturesque village of Tindledale.

There, Sybil discovers Hettie’s House of Haberdashery, an emporium dedicated to the world of knitting and needle craft. But Hettie, the outspoken octogenarian owner, is struggling and now the shop is due for closure. And when Hettie decides that Sybil’s wonderfully wacky Christmas sweaters are just the thing to add a bit of excitement to her window display, something miraculous starts to happen…

Buy Links:   Amazon | B & N | iTunes | Kobo 

Author Info

Alexandra Brown began her writing career as the City Girl columnist for The London Paper - a satirical diary account of her time working in the corporate world of London. Alex wrote the weekly column for two years before giving it up to concentrate on writing novels and is now the author of the Carrington’s books. Set in a department store in the pretty seaside town of Mulberry-On-Sea, the series follows the life, loves and laughs of sales assistant, Georgie Hart. The Great Christmas Knit Off is Alex’s fourth book and is the first in a new series set in the fictional village of Tindledale, following the lives of all the characters there.

Alex lives in a real village near the south coast of England, with her husband, daughter and a very shiny black Labrador.

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The Years of Loving You - Cover Reveal

Blurb:

From the award-winning author of PIECES OF YOU comes this enthralling love story, guaranteed to make you laugh, cry and dream upon a star…

What if your first love was your only love?

When Molly is diagnosed with a life changing illness, it feels like her whole world has come crashing down. She hopes the news will make her marriage to Sam stronger. But why does Molly always call best friend Ed in a crisis?

Ed. The very same Ed that Molly fell in love with at a party when they were teenagers, underneath a star-filled sky. Then life took them in very different directions. They could only ever be friends.

Suddenly Molly starts to question every decision she’s ever made. What if they could turn back the clock? Back to the very beginning. When the only certainty they shared was each other …

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About the Author:

As a shy teenager, Ella Harper found a way to escape by learning foreign languages, and imagined she might eventually get a glamorous job speaking French. After completing a BA in French and Russian Studies, she found herself following in her father’s footsteps into banking instead, seduced by the excitement and glamour of that world. But after climbing her way to Assistant Vice President, Ella started idly mapping out the beginnings of a novel on an old laptop. When she realised her characters were more real to her than dividends and corporate actions ever could be, she left her job to become a writer. Eight years later, and Ella has published four hugely popular novels under the name Sasha Wagstaff.

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Recipe For Disaster - Review & Giveaway

Review by Deb Czajkowski

“Be careful what you wish for.”  Why?  Because you just might get it!  You’ve heard this quote.  Sometimes we wish for something in the moment and then, when it comes to fruition, we realize we really hadn’t thought it through.

                                  

Anneke Stroudt, a successful architect and home builder, often wishes she didn’t have to deal with difficult ─and, using her word, stupid─ people.  And she also wishes she had more time to spend working on the restoration of the beautiful historic property that she had speculatively purchased.  But her job demands many hours of her day, and the rest of her day she gladly shares with her chef fiancé.

Until one fateful day when Anneke both loses her job and her fiancé, and she is forced to move into the gutted house.  Now what?  Anneke no longer has a source of income.  And the century old house will take both many months of intense labor and megabucks to restore before she can put it on the market.  Hence, she is now property rich but cash poor.  What was she thinking?

 Thinking before speaking has never been Anneke’s strong suit.  But doing is ─ beginning with demolishing the basement, which leads to the discovery of a mysterious and very old leather-bound book.  The book belonged to Gemma, the cook for the house’s original owners, and is filled with intriguing and tempting recipes as well as sage commentary and advice.  For someone in desperate need of both, can Gemma provide Anneke with the right ingredients for sustenance and life lessons?

If you value historic homes, or if the thought of renovating one is fascinating or enticing to you, you’ll love Stacey Ballis’ Recipe for Disaster.   It is filled with significant detail on, well, the details involved in the step-by-step renovating process.  As someone whose carpentry skills are pretty much limited to using a hammer to hang a picture on the wall, I’m just going to take her word for its accuracy!  I love the idea of a turn-of-the-century (the twentieth century!) home, of the family that lived there a hundred years ago, what their lives were like, and what foods they ate.  I loved Gemma’s book, her diary; her thoughts and her recipes.  I’m definitely going to try some of them!

Reading Gemma’s words of wisdom and experience often made me think of another familiar quote: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”  Still true today, good recipes and good advice are always in fashion.  

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About the Author:

Stacey Ballis is the author of several novels, incuding Inappropriate Men, Sleeping Over, Room for Improvement, The Spinster Sisters, Good Enough to Eat, Off the Menu and Out to Lunch, and the upcoming Recipe for Disaster currently available for pre-order, being released March 3, 2013. Her first cookbook, Big Delicious Life is out now in a digital edition, and she is at work co-authoring a new cookbook called Cooking for You: Wellness in the Kitchen with Dr. Francis Ardito, which will be released in 2015. She is also a contributing author to the anthologies Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, and Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume, and Living Jewishly. She is currently at work on a new work of full-length fiction called for Berkeley/Penguin, which will be out in 2016.

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Recipe For Disaster by Stacey Ballis

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The Gratitude Diaries - Review

Review by Darcie Czajkowski

When was the last time you stopped to smell a rose?

When was the last time you expressed gratitude to your spouse for taking out the trash or making dinner?

When was the last time you gave thanks for the good things in your life when everything around you was falling apart?

When was the last time you were grateful that you are healthy and can walk or run a mile?

When was the last time you took a minute to think about what you were about to eat instead of devouring three slices of pizza in less than five minutes?

In the Gratitude Diaries, journalist Janice Kaplan spends a year living gratefully. Instead of feeling upset or annoyed when things don’t go her way, she makes a conscious effort to put that incident in perspective. The particulars of the events don’t change, but her attitude does.

Utilizing progressive research from doctors, psychologists, philosophers, and academics, Kaplan uses gratitude to transform her entire life, including her marriage, children, health, finances, career, and fitness. When she focuses on the good things and expressing gratitude for the positive aspects of her life, she finds that she is consistently happier, healthier, no longer plagued by migraines, and feels improvements in her relationships with her husband, children, and friends.

This book was indubitably the best book I’ve read this year. It’s truly a book for everyone. What if bad days could become okay days, and okay days could become good days? What if we got along better with our significant other and felt more connected to him or her just by showing a little appreciation? Would you do it?

Challenge yourself to make today the day that you start living gratefully. Be kind to others. Send a card to a friend who’s going through a hard time. Thank your parents for taking you on adventures when you were a kid. Send an email to a friend overseas. It doesn’t take much to thank others for the impact they make on our lives. You don’t know if today will be your last, so why would you want to spend it being negative or focusing on the things that didn’t go right?

As Kaplan wrote, “I’d learned this year that gratitude didn’t depend on the right events or even the right decisions, but how I processed them. Gratitude gave you back control. I didn’t have to pick the perfect restaurant (or hotel or flight home) to appreciate the vacation and be grateful I was here.”

Life isn’t going to be perfect. It’s wrought with difficult times, bad news, hard choices, and tragic moments. But it’s also filled with love, joy, friendship, and family. Everyone has something to be grateful for, and we all have a minute (or more) each day to reflect on what made that day special. Even on the bad days, look for it, something good is there. It can be as simple as being thankful to be alive, because really, in the end, being alive means that tomorrow is a new day. And that is something to be grateful for.

Purchase the book at:

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About the Author:

Janice Kaplan is widely known for her achievements as a writer, television producer and magazine editor. As the Editor-in-Chief of Parade, the most widely read publication in America, she brought new energy and excitement to the magazine, increasing readership to over 74 million every Sunday. She attracted some of America’s best writers and biggest-name celebrities.

Author and co-author of eleven books, her bestselling novels include The Botox Diaries, Mine Are Spectacular! and The Men I Didn’t Marry. Her popular Lacy Fields mysteries include Looks To Die For and A Job To Kill For, and her books have been translated and published in more than a dozen countries. A former columnist at Seventeen magazine, she was a contributing editor at Vogue and has written hundreds of articles for national magazines.

Janice appears frequently on television shows including Today, Good Morning America, Entertainment Tonight and CBS Early Show, and is a popular speaker around the country. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and won Yale’s Murray Fellowship for writing. Kaplan lives in New York City and Kent, Connecticut with her husband and has two wonderful sons who graduated Yale.

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Night Blindness - Promo & Giveaway

A future as bright as the stars above the Connecticut shore lay before Jensen Reilly and her high school sweetheart, Ryder, until the terrible events of an October night left Jensen running from her family and her first love. Over the years that followed, Jensen buried her painful past, and now, married to a charismatic artist, she has created a new life far away from the unbearable secret of that night.

When Jensen's father, Sterling, is diagnosed with a brain tumor, she returns to her childhood home for the first time in thirteen years, and the memories of her old life come flooding back along with the people she's tried to escape. Torn between her life in Santa Fe with her free-spirited husband, Nic, and the realization that it is time to face her past, Jensen must make a terrifying decision that threatens to change her life again--this time forever.

An emotionally thrilling debut set during a New England summer, Susan Strecker's Night Blindness is a compelling novel about the choices we make, the sanctity of friendship, and the power of love.

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About the Author:

SUSAN STRECKER resides in Essex, Connecticut, with her husband and two children. Her first novel, Night Blindness, was an Indie Next pick.

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Night Blindness by Susan Strecker

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Christmas Chocolat - Review & Giveaway

Review by Marlene Engel

The Christmas season used to mean festive meals and holiday traditions for the Arnaud children.  But when their mother passed, so did those events.  And with that came the distance that their father put between them.  Now, all grown up, they are surprised when they are summoned by their father to gather as a family under one roof.  None desires to return to Philadelphia, but even as adults, and after all the time that’s passed, they still know not to deny their father.

Each sibling is dealing with their own set of issues.  And to call the family dysfunctional is putting it lightly.  But as they come together, they reconnect on events of the past and fill each other in on the happenings of each of their lives.  Emotions will be high during this reunion, but when their father drops a bomb on them, the true reason behind this reunion, this difficult situation gets a million times tougher.  Just at the siblings start to mend their past, will their father’s secret be the final nail in the coffin to push them away for good?

I really enjoyed this book.  With a cast of flawed characters, a story that will move you and delicious recipes, this is the perfect book to get you into the holiday spirit.

Purchase the book at:

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About the author:

Kate Defrise grew up in the United States but spent summers with her family in Belgium, where she learned that great food was a catalyst to a great life. She earned her degree in translation in French and Italian from the Ecole d’Interprètes Internationaux in Mons. She worked as a translator and teacher in Belgium before moving to France, where she did a stint in radio and television. She lives and cooks in San Diego with her husband, two daughters, and a cat.Christmas Chocolat is her first novel.

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Christmas Chocolat by Kate Defrise

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