Rachel Thompson

Jack Canon's American Destiny

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Orangeberry Book Of The Day - Beyond Escape - Deborah Jensen

 

After separating from her husband of twenty years, Kim is in desperate need of an escape. Retreating to her parents’ home in Texas for a month, Kim encounters ample distractions, the best being Camilo, an alluring Latino man seventeen years her junior. However, when returning to Texas unearths memories of a long-ago lover, Kim discovers her unintentional involvement in a series of dangerous escapades, bringing her deeper into her past than she ever cared to venture. Beyond Escape follows Kim as she pursues a trail of drugs, murder, and secret love affairs that were meant to stay buried.

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Genre – Women’s Contemporary Fiction / Romance

Rating – PG13

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Website http://www.deborahkjensen.com/

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Orangeberry Book Of The Day - Sex and Death in the America Novel - Sarah Martinez

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Free March 19th - 21st.

Vivianna Post is the family anomaly. Daughter of a Pulitzer Prize winner and an academic, she has never quite fit her parents’ expectations as a free-spirited erotica writer. When Vivianna encounters the award-winning author Jasper Caldwell at a nightclub, all she wants is to blame him for blowing off her brother at a writers’ conference the year before and possibly causing his suicide. But as the night—and then the weeks—wear on, Vivianna finds herself drawn to Jasper in ways she cannot understand. When their differences—literary and sexual—threaten to pull Vivianna and Jasper apart, Jasper rediscovers Alejandro, an old friend who just might have the power to complete them both in every way. Using quotes and references to classic erotic and literary icons, Sex and Death in the American Novel is on one level an unconventional romance and on another a discussion of the merits of erotic literature.

Using quotes and references to classic erotic and literary icons, Sex and Death in the American Novel is on one level an unconventional romance and on another a discussion of the merits of erotic literature.

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Genre – Literary Erotica

Rating – X

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Website http://www.mywildskies.com/

Author Interviews http://site.mywildskies.com/Appearances.html

 

Excerpt (First pages):

We all know the first line is the most important: it sets the tone, tells you what this story will be about. Call me Vivianna. Would Melville approve? How about copying straight from Heller: It was love at first sight. We all remember Lolita; how would Nabokov do it?

What if I just come out and say it. This book is the answer to the notion that women ought to fear asking for what they want the most. Whether it’s time alone to write, demanding for and getting respect, or a patient hand under which to soften up and eventually get off. You know what’s even worse: we know we won’t get it anyway. Fuck Virtue. This document serves as my rejection of the notion that I am doomed—by virtue of my gender—to a life of boredom, inanity, and servitude.

An old man in Arizona has over seventy wives. If a woman ever said that one man wasn’t enough for her, you know what they would say about her? I could spend at least ten minutes on the list. Making up lists is a great writing exercise by the way. I learned that from my father. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his novel Taking Ivy Down. Dear old Dad.

Let’s start with two men—just for argument’s sake. What would that look like? Feel like? Smell like? Taste like?

            Two men…two sets of lips, two pairs of eyes moving over my face, my breasts, my hips, resting further down. Two sets of hands, warm and strong, only me, naked and trembling with anticipation between them. Two rustling, soft heads of hair, two minds, two hearts...spirits, two of everything. The energy between them flows through me. Associations come freely when I am in this state; rain, dark swirling skies, and rich red blood flowing from both their hammered faces, they fought…for me. Now we are all together, and they’ve forgiven each other, their bruised lips crush against mine, against my face, against every part of me until finally they come together. As I tip my head back, taking in the scents of their bodies, metallic and musky, sweaty and raw, they reach for each other. The one who lost the battle—the blonde with red rimmed blue eyes—faces me, his arms around mine, his hands reaching further to the one behind me who, underneath the scents of exertion, smells like leather and tangy soap. Their faces come together over my shoulder, first testing, pulling back, then together again. They kiss, more roughly than they would kiss me, with hands moving up to run through each other’s hair, pulling on it, and both pairs of hands move over my arms and shoulders. Sounds of stubble across skin, scraping, hands over tingling flesh, mine, a wince, low voices, soft wispy sounds echo in the silence of this old warehouse...no wait, make that a boxing ring, we’re on the dirty white mat in the center of the ring.

The one behind me—the winner—leans forward, grazing the skin behind my ear with his teeth, the sticky wet skin of his torso connecting all the way along my back. He pushes me down, working himself deeper in me, opening me wide, his hands wrap around both sides of my hips. He groans and the sound sends a thrill though me. The one in front works his way in from below. I am sandwiched between the two of them, and take the loser’s face in my hands, stroking the area near his swollen eye, running the tip of my nose over his lips, his cheek; I gently kiss his forehead, pulling back and tasting coppery blood.

My mother’s words intruded, “Vivianna, are you paying attention?”

 

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Orangeberry Book Of The Day - Alice in Deadland Trilogy - Mainak Dhar

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Genre – Horror / SciFi

Rating – PG

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Alice in Deadland
Civilization as we know it ended more than fifteen years ago, leaving as it's legacy barren wastelands called the Deadland and a new terror for the humans who survived- hordes of undead Biters.
Fifteen year-old Alice has spent her entire life in the Deadland, her education consisting of how best to use guns and knives in the ongoing war for survival against the Biters. One day, Alice spots a Biter disappearing into a hole in the ground and follows it, in search of fabled underground Biter bases.
What Alice discovers there propels her into an action-packed adventure that changes her life and that of all humans in the Deadland forever. An adventure where she learns the terrible conspiracy behind the ruin of humanity, the truth behind the origin of the Biters, and the prophecy the mysterious Biter Queen believes Alice is destined to fulfill.
A prophecy based on the charred remains of the last book in the Deadland- a book called Alice in Wonderland.
Through The Looking Glass: Alice in Deadland Book II
More than two years have passed since Alice followed a Biter with bunny ears down a hole, triggering events that forever changed her life and that of everyone in the Deadland. The Red Guards have been fought to a standstill; Alice has restored some measure of peace between humans and Biters; and under Alice, humans have laid the foundations of the first large, organized community since The Rising- a city called Wonderland.
That peace is shattered in a series of vicious Biter attacks and Alice finds herself shunned by the very people she helped liberate. Now she must re-enter the Deadland to unravel this new conspiracy that threatens Wonderland. Doing so will mean coming face to face with her most deadly adversary ever- the Red Queen.
Off With Their Heads: The Prequel to Alice in Deadland
A few months before Alice was born and fifteen years before the dramatic events depicted in Alice in Deadland, there was The Rising. A few days that destroyed human civilization as we know it, reducing much of the world to a radioactive wasteland teeming with hordes of undead Biters and controlled by a shadowy Central Committee.
Off With Their Heads brings to life the final harrowing days of The Rising through four shorts, each depicting events through the eyes of one pivotal character in the Alice in Deadland series. See how Dr. Protima became the Queen of the Biters; feel the pain of a young man's sacrifice as he becomes the bunny-eared Biter whom Alice later follows down a hole; follow the rise of Chen from a conflicted young Chinese Army officer to a General in the Red Guards; and finally share in the dramatic escape of Alice's parents from a city overrun by Biters.

Friday, March 15, 2013

Orangeberry Book of the Day - Crosswalk - Cara St. Louis

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"I grew up a girl, and I thought an unwanted one, at that, in the 40s and 50s in a forgotten farming and ranching town right at the Four Corners. We were surrounded by reservations, more of the unwanted, just like me. My ticket out was music and so on the old Baldwin my Mom bought me, I practiced until my fingers bled and I got a college scholarship and I was out. That was part one. The part with the family, which I didn’t even think was so great. My Dad took off and my mom had to work as a nurse forty-five minutes’ drive east. In 1945, that might as well have been the moon. So my grandmother kept me like an extra broom, kind of useless and in the way. Or so I thought. Part two was working for the government. That really took me places. All over the world, working for scientists, seeing their secrets, even when I didn’t understand what they were on about. When I did, the whole thing scared the hell out of me. Then , it all came true. Suddenly. Then, I died. I’ve left my daughter behind to tell the story. Maybe it’ll help."
It would be a tragedy, in anyone’s book, if on a beautiful summer Sunday morning a little old lady set out on foot for church and just as she had almost reached the other side of Main Street in a little seaside village, she was brutally run down and killed. What if this seemingly random and incoherent event …the slightest blip on anyone’s radar…had, in fact, happened to a woman who had been granted so long ago a very high military security clearance; a woman who is never named in the novel nor is the town in which she died?
Crosswalk is a thriller, a story whose dramatic arc runs razor-close to current events. The woman’s daughter, Christina, falls down a truly black and greasy rabbit hole in the wake of her mother’s death that leads through bio-engineering, weather manipulation, Naval Research, Naval Weapons, Atmospheric research connected to DARPA and through London, Virginia and Hawaii. The birthplace of her mother’s murder, when she finds it, lies within the circle of Operation Paperclip scientists still working in London in the 80s and 90s. Christina and those she joins with along the way struggle on to find answers despite being chased by Blackhawks, run off roads, betrayed by allies...her comrades include a Canadian civil rights activist who styles himself ‘Amistad,’ an old Brazilian psychic emigrated to Australia, and a chemist-turned-activist also on the trail of these psychotics; half a dozen ancient men who form a sinister cabal. The Gatekeepers are scientists, liaisons with the Joint Chiefs, a global industrialist of unmatched power and wealth, a US Secretary of Agriculture.
While Christina is on her own mission to flush out those who murdered her mother, Tim Verzet, firebomber and ex-military pilot infiltrates the very nerve-center of the global poisoning operation trying to make it implode from the inside. One very well-placed traitor just about brings the whole effort down but in the end, the Achilles heel of the entire campaign, a campaign which has actually been in place for decades, is a very small group, led by one pilot on the inside.

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Genre – Thriller

Rating – PG

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Orangeberry Book of the Day - After The Ending - Lindsey Fairleigh & Lindsey Pogue

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The Virus spread. Billions died. The Ending began. We may have survived the apocalypse, but the Virus changed us.
When people started getting sick, “they” thought it was just the flu. My roommate, my boyfriend, my family…they’re all gone now. I got sick too. I should have died with them—with the rest of the world—but I didn’t. I thought witnessing the human population almost disappear off the face of the earth was the craziest thing I’d ever experience. I was so wrong. My name is Dani O’Connor, I’m twenty-six-years-old, and I survived The Ending.
The Virus changed everything. The world I knew is gone, and life is backwards. We’ve all had to start over. I’ve been stripped of my home, my dreams…all that is me. I’m someone else now—broken and changed. Other survivors’ memories and emotions haunt me. They invade my mind until I can no longer separate them from my own. I won’t let them consume me. I can’t. My name is Zoe Cartwright, I’m twenty-six-years-old, and I survived The Ending.
We’ve been inseparable for most of our lives, and now our friendship is all we have left. The aftermath of the Virus has stranded us on opposite sides of the United States. Trusting strangers, making sacrifices, killing—we’ll do anything to reach one another. Fear and pain may be unavoidable, but we’re strong…we’re survivors. But to continue surviving in this unfamiliar world plagued by Crazies and strange new abilities, we have to adapt. We have to evolve.
And more than anything, we have to find each other.

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Genre – Science Fiction

Rating – R

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Orangeberry Book of the Day – The Key to Love by Meg Mims

Artist Jennette Jacobson clashes with a handsome visitor at a gallery show. He claims that artwork is just “more junk to dust.” Ouch. When she finds a small metal object on the floor, she uses it later in a new collage.

Her world soon crumbles with family problems and a friend’s betrayal. And wouldn’t you know that the same hunky guy claims he lost an important key the night of the show! When Steve Harmon offers to buy Jenn’s work, she refuses to sell. He’ll just trash it to free his precious key.

Or is it possible that key will unlock her future happiness?

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Genre – Contemporary Romance

Rating – PG

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Website http://www.megmims.com/

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Book Blast - Starseed - Liz Gruder

 
Starseed
Author: Liz Gruder
ISBN: 978-1937178291
Publisher: WiDo Publishing
Published: February 2013

SUMMARY

Kaila Guidry has always known she is different. When she meets Jordyn Stryker at school, she finds out just how different.

Jordyn was born and raised far from Earth, a starseed, one of six new students sent to Louisiana's Bush High to learn human ways. But Jordyn didn't count on meeting someone like Kaila.

When Kaila is pushed to her limit by high school bullying and cruelty, Jordyn awakens her to a new reality—and to love. But to prove herself, Kaila must look the other way as the real purposes of the starseeds unfold.

As the horrific plan behind the starseed visit to Earth moves inexorably forward, Kaila and Jordan, caught in an impossible love, must determine where their true loyalties lie.


Praise

"You know from the opening paragraph that something very strange is going on… We see Kaila try to live the life of a normal teen, and we see her "otherness" pull her back into an increasingly tangled web of questions, deceit, and hidden intentions. Liz really shines as a writer, lining the closets and drawers of everyday life with spine-chilling suspense that springs out at you when you least expect it. Starseed is an entertaining read. I highly recommend."
--Patricia B. Smith. Author “What the Animals Tell Me” and “Fifty Shades of Santa” (clean romance fiction)

"Liz Gruder’s characters come alive through youthful, spunky narrative, and her headstrong heroine, Kaila Guidry, elicits a reader’s encouragement from the first page. Fans of Amanda Hocking will find themselves similarly transported into Gruder’s exploration of the dark sides of faith, love, higher dimensions, and, of course, high school." --Jadie Jones, young-adult fantasy author


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Author Liz Gruder

As a youth, Liz Gruder saw a series of UFOs with her best friend while riding bikes. Ever since, she’s held a fascination for the stars. An avid reader, she used to hide under her covers and read with a flashlight. She has degrees in English and Psychology from Tulane University, a nursing license and a yoga certification. After going through Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Liz realized how short life is and is now slowly fulfilling her bucket list: she’s been to the Egyptian pyramids (totally awesome and thought provoking) and is now teaching yoga and writing speculative fiction. Starseed is her debut novel.









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Book Blast Giveaway
$50 Amazon Gift Card or Paypal Cash
Ends 4/7/13

Open only to those who can legally enter, receive and use an Amazon.com Gift Code or Paypal Cash. Winning Entry will be verified prior to prize being awarded. No purchase necessary. You must be 18 or older to enter or have your parent enter for you. The winner will be chosen by rafflecopter and announced here as well as emailed and will have 48 hours to respond or a new winner will be chosen. This giveaway is in no way associated with Facebook, Twitter, Rafflecopter or any other entity unless otherwise specified. The number of eligible entries received determines the odds of winning. Giveaway was organized by Kathy from I Am A Reader, Not A Writer http://iamareader.com and sponsored by the authors. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW.



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