FTC: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. I received no other compensation and the opinions expressed in this review are one hundred percent true and my own.
Borderline Insanity by Jeff Miller turned out to be a great book, but it was a slow starter for me. This type of book is one that I always enjoy, but I had a hard time getting into the story for some reason. I am sure part of the reason was that of what happened in the prolog of the book. It just really bothered me that someone would make a mother leave one of her babies behind and take her and the other back to Mexico. I am sure it is something that happens, but I don’t think that it is right. It left me feeling sorry for the mother and the children. After I was a few chapters into the book, I started to enjoy the story more. Once I was into the book, I read it pretty quickly because I wanted to know how it all worked out in the end. If you love reading mysteries than I am sure you will enjoy this book as much as I did at the end of it.
About The Book
Special Agent Dagny Gray is a member of a small FBI team with unprecedented independence. To maintain their autonomy, the team must continue to solve big cases. To stay on the team, Dagny must keep her personal demons under control.
When Father Diego Vega tells her that undocumented workers are vanishing from a small town gripped by immigration politics, Dagny thinks she’s found her next case. But without bodies or proof of foul play, her boss won’t let her take it. Defying his orders, Dagny risks her career to investigate with Father Vega.
The families of the victims don’t trust her. The local police won’t help her, and the sheriff wants to stop her. Deep down, she worries that she’s not going to find the missing men alive. But what she uncovers is more horrifying than anything she could have imagined.…
Jeff Miller grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio, where Jerry Springer attended his temple and Pete Rose broke his heart. He’s rafted down the Rio Grande with folksinger Butch Hancock, co-created an award-winning mockumentary about table tennis, and performed and written for a public access sketch comedy series. Like many lawyers, the only thing he ever really wanted to do was write. The Bubble Gum Thief is his first book. He lives with his incredible wife, Kate, and their two young sons.
FTC: I received a free copy of this book from iRead Book Tours in exchange for my honest review. I received no other compensation and the opinions expressed in this review are one hundred percent true and my own.
There’s Been A Change Of Plans by Amy Koko was a fun book to read. I did find myself smiling through most of the book. Even though I am younger than the author is in this book I understood what she was going through and how hard it can be dealing with the things that she had to deal with. I loved this book because she shared the humor she saw in such a bad situation. It also reminded me that even if life is hard, I need to take the time to find the humor in the situation because that is the best way I have found cope with things that are causing me so much stress. If you or someone you know has gone through a divorce later in life, I know you will enjoy and understand this book even more than I did.
About The Book
Blogger Amy Koko bears her soul in her witty, bittersweet memoir, There’s Been A Change of Plans: Divorce, Dating & Delinquents in Mid-life. Expecting a trip to Italy, Koko is blind-sided by her husband’s confession that he’s been putting his shoes under a much younger and prettier woman’s bed. After twenty-seven years of marriage and four children, she faces the unimaginable: her life as she knows it is unraveling around her and her family’s future is anything but certain.
In the literary tradition of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Koko’s memoir details her journey from hearing the news that her husband is in love with a blonde, thirty-something Swiss pastry chef to trying everything from thong underwear to a mini-facelift to save her marriage, only to see it die in the parking lot of gas station.
With incredible honesty and humor, Koko takes the reader on a wild ride through the tough, emotional times of starting over through divorce, mid-life, finding a job, and Internet dating, all the while trying to keep her four teenagers out of jail.
There’s been a change of plans, and that’s just the beginning.
About The Author
After 27 years of marriage, Amy Koko went into divorce, kicking, screaming, stalking and drunk texting but lived to tell about it. She is the creator of the popular blog Exwifenewlife and a contributor to Huffington Post Divorce as well as Huffington Post Women. Amy lives in St. Petersburg, Florida where she begins each day with a freshly ground cup of good coffee and ends it with a good glass of pinot noir. Or chardonnay. Or a dirty martini. Whatever’s handy.
I liked this quote because I feel like this a lot. Once I feel like I have a hand on what is going on in my life something crazy happens, and I have to start over. The thing that is constant in my life is change, so it is something that I am trying to learn to deal with and not to let it cause me so much stress.
What do you think of this week’s quote by Hugh Prather?
FTC: I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest review. I received no other compensation and the opinions expressed in this review are one hundred percent true and my own.
Secret Crush by Victoria Pinder was an okay book. I had a hard time getting into this book. At times it felt like the author was rushing things and then at others times I was left wondering why some parts were left in the book. I enjoyed the plot and the characters but like most books I was able to figure out what was going on by the end of the book. I did like the characters and the story line of this book. Like I said before I had a hard time getting into the book, so I was glad that it was a shorter book than some of the others I have read lately. If you love chick lit books, I am sure you will like this book.
About The Book
Billionaire’s second son John Morgan comes home to his father’s funeral. He joined the FBI to prove his father caused his sister’s death, but now he needs to find out who he is and what’s left of his family that he can trust.
Alice Collins grew up on a farm, but she was best friends with Victoria Morgan before she died. She decides to go to the Morgan family’s funeral to pay her respects.
Surprises ensue as they usually do for the Morgans at the funeral. Alice gets caught in the crossfire of family drama and intrigue, and it’s John’s duty to protect her. While they reconnect, feelings surface. But can a farm girl truly ever capture the heart of a billionaire? Could their love be real? Or is this all just a fantasy while she’s involved with one Morgan plot after another?
About The Author
Victoria Pinder grew up in Irish Catholic Boston before moving to the Miami sun. She’s worked in engineering, after passing many tests proving how easy Math came to her. Then hating her life at the age of twenty-four, she decided to go to law school. Four years later, after passing the bar and practicing very little, she realized that she hates the practice of law. She refused to one day turn 50 and realized she had nothing but her career and hours at a desk. After realizing she needed change, she became a high school teacher. Teaching is rewarding, but writing is a passion.
During all this time, she always wrote stories to entertain herself or calm down. Her parents are practical minded people demanding a job, and Victoria spent too many years living other people’s dreams, but when she sat down to see what skill she had that matched what she enjoyed doing, writing became so obvious. The middle school year book when someone wrote in it that one day she’d be a writer made sense when she turned thirty.
Besides her full-time job of teaching, in 2013 and 2014, she sold her sold books to three different publishers. The Zoastra Affair, Chaperoning Paris, Borrowing the Doctor, and Electing Love will be published by Soulmate Publishing. Anything the Throne will be published with Double Dragon Ebooks. Favorite Coffee, Favorite Crush will be published with Jupiter Press.
Now she is represented by Dawn Dowdle of Blue Ridge Literary Agency, and she hopes to continue selling her novels that she writes. Moving up to the next level from hard work and determination is rewarding, and partnerships bring new opportunities.
Also, she’s the Vice President of Programs for the Florida Romance Writers. She’s gone to multiple conferences and intends to continue. She learns and meets so many people at conferences. Her website is here, http://www.victoriapinder.com, and she’ll continue to grow my web presence. She is working hard on other projects and found the time to plan her wedding this year.
Before writing, her father had taken her to many star trek conventions and on her own, she grew up as the only girl in the 90s at the comic book store. Science Fiction was her first love, but contemporary romance was her second. She’s sticking with contemporaries for the near future.
Member of Florida Romance Writers, Contemporary Romance, Fantasy, Futuristic, and Paranormal chapter of RWA, Celtic Hearts and Savvy Authors.
FTC: I received a free copy of this book from Online Book Club in exchange for my honest review. I received no other compensation and the opinions expressed in this review are one hundred percent true and my own.
Motions & Moments: More Essays on Tokyo by Michael Pronko this was such an impressive set of essay’s to read. I enjoyed this because I felt like got a very good idea of what it is like in Japan. It is somewhere that I would love to visit, but I don’t know if I ever would be able to visit there. This left me wanting to go because I was able to get a look at what it is like there. At times I did get confused, but I know that if I was in Japan trying to figure everything out I would be just as confused by everything that was going on around me. I was confused, but I wasn’t left worried or scared because it was just an essay and I knew that I would be able to figure stuff out later. He did have a glossary at the end of the book that explained what things were, but I didn’t even look at it until the end because I wanted to try and figure it out like I would have to do if I ever traveled there on my own. All in all, I enjoyed this book and I know I will go back and read parts of it again because I loved feeling like I was there and being able to figure everything out as I was reading the different essays.
About The Book
Motions and Moments is the third book by Michael Pronko on the fluid feel and vibrant confusions of Tokyo life. These 42 new essays burrow into the unique intensities that suffuse the city and ponder what they mean to its millions of inhabitants.
Based on Pronko’s 18 years living, teaching and writing in Tokyo, these essays on how Tokyoites work, dress, commute, eat and sleep are steeped in insights into the city’s odd structures, intricate pleasures and engaging undertow.
Included are essays on living to size and loving the crowd, on Tokyo’s dizzying uncertainties and daily satisfactions, and on the 2011 earthquake. As in his first two books, this collection captures the ceaseless flow and passing flashes of life in biggest city in the world with gentle humor and rich detail.
My new collection of essays, Motions and Moments: More Essays on Tokyo, just out in December 2015, covers different ground from the first two collections. I look at the structures inside Tokyo’s cultural life, but also at the flow of life here, the pleasures, which always seem entangled with aggravations, and the odd instances and situations the city drags me into.
From what I can tell from past reviewers, and from old friends on Facebook, picking up your life and setting it down in Tokyo is kind of a strange thing for a boy from Kansas to do! I have lived, taught and written in Tokyo for eighteen years now. I work as a professor at Meiji Gakuin University teaching American literature, culture, film, music, and art.
Living here all seems so natural to me, though, but not always. My essays spring from that precarious balance of familiar and unfamiliar, from life lived in an intense place. I love having a day job that’s engaging, where students ask questions about literature, art, music, film and life. Going from the classroom out to Tokyo I get even more questions. The city asks me as many questions as the students do.
In that sense, I’m definitely with Thoreau, even though I can’t think of anyplace more different from Tokyo than Walden Pond. Thoreau captured it right when he said: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Tokyo life teaches me a lot of essentials, too.
Over the years, I have written for many publications in Japan: The Japan Times for a dozen years, the once-great Tokyo Q, a learner-oriented weekly ST Shukan, Winds magazine, Jazznin, and Jazz Colo[u]rs (in Italian!). These days, I write about Japanese art for Artscape Japan. That gets me out to galleries, museums and odd cultural spots. My other writing is for my own website Jazz in Japan (jazzinjapan.com). I go out to jazz clubs as often as I can, which isn’t as often as I want.
The new book forms a trilogy of sorts with the first two, Beauty and Chaos and Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens. The essays in those two collections were mostly culled from my regular column in Newsweek Japan in Japanese. Many of the new essays come from that Newsweek Japan column, but many are completely new.
FTC: I received a free copy of this book from BookLook in exchange for my honest review. I received no other compensation and the opinions expressed in this review are one hundred percent true and my own.
An Amish Harvest by Beth Wiseman, Kathleen Fuller, Amy Clipston, and Vannetta Chapman was a great book. I am a huge fan of books like this because I love that the stories are short, and you can read just one and come back weeks later and read another one if you want to. I love books like this because I can read one story and get through the whole so thing, so I am not left wondering what is going to happen. I can’t pick just one story that I liked the most out of this book because I enjoyed reading them all. If you are new to Amish fiction than I would say that this would be a good book to start out with because the stories are shorter, and it gives you an excellent introduction to Amish fiction. If you love Amish fiction than I know, you will love this book as much as I did.
About The Book’s
Faith, hope, and love remain forever in season in this collection of four richly absorbing novellas set amidst the wonder of an Amish autumn.
Under the Harvest Moon, by Beth Wiseman
When Naomi Dienner is suddenly widowed, she never expects to find love again . . . until she meets Brock Mulligan, an English family friend hired at harvest time. As a sinister presence begins to threaten Naomi, Brock seeks to prove himself trustworthy while struggling with growing feelings for Naomi and her children. Will God open Naomi’s heart—and give Brock his own second chance at love?
Love and Buggy Rides, by Amy Clipston
Janie Lantz is a cashier at Lancaster Souvenirs and Buggy Rides, where Jonathan Stoltfuz is a buggy driver. A frightening accident brings Janie and Jonathan together in a blossoming friendship, yet daunting obstacles stand between them and something deeper. Can love kindle into flames that burn away fear and regret—and lead them to a life together?
Mischief in the Autumn Air, by Vannetta Chapman When items start going above market value at his auction house, Eli Wittmer is first thrilled, and then puzzled. But when the house is broken into, Eli and his new bookkeeper, Martha Beiler track down a trail of clues. Will they solve the mystery before the fall festival ends—and discover an unexpected new love?
A Quiet Love, by Kathleen Fuller Dinah Hochstetler, quiet and bookish, longs for marriage but hides in her shyness. Amos Mullett, a simple farmer, knows he’s different but aches for a loving wife. As Dinah and Amos navigate a budding romance, will the power of love—and the blessing of God—be enough to overcome their doubters?
About The Author’s
Beth Wiseman
“I wish I had the time to review books and chat with you here, but my writing deadlines just don’t allow it. Please like my Fans of Beth Wiseman Page on Facebook where I try to post any news and interact with readers.”
Beth is the best-selling and award winning author of the Daughters of the Promise series – Plain Perfect, Plain Pursuit, Plain Promise, Plain Paradise, and Plain Proposal. She is contracted with HarperCollins Christian Publishing. Her other series–the Land of Canaan Novels–begins with Seek Me With All Your Heart, then The Wonder of Your Love and now, His Love Endures Forever. Seek Me With All Your Heart is the first Amish fiction book selected as a Women of Faith novel in 2011. Beth has also written three contemporary Christian fiction novels, Need You Now published in 2012 and The House That Love Built in 2013. In The Promise, (2014) Beth jumps way outside the box. This story takes readers far away from Amish Country and small Texas towns to a dangerous place on the other side of the world. Inspired by a true story, Beth believes this is the book she’s been working toward for a long time. 2015 brings Beth back to the Pennsylvania Amish with her new series, Amish Secrets. She is currently working on book #2 following much success with book #1, Her Brother’s Keeper.
You can also follow Beth on Twitter: @BethWiseman
Kathleen Fuller
Kathleen is the best-selling author of over thirty books, including the Hearts of Middlefield Series and the A Middlefield Family Series. She lives with her husband and three children in Northeast Ohio. Kathleen loves to hear from readers.
Amy Clipston
Hi, I’m Amy Clipston. I am an author of Amish and Christian fiction with HarperCollins Christian Publishing. Most of my books focus on the Amish community, faith, and love. I also write romance novels and young adult inspirational stories.
Vannetta Chapman
Vannetta Chapman writes inspirational fiction full of grace. She is the author of many novels, including the Pebble Creek Amish series, Shipshewana Amish Mystery Series, and Plain and Simple Miracle series. Vannetta is a Carol award winner and also received more than two dozen awards from Romance Writers of America chapter groups. She currently writes Christian suspense, Amish romance, and Amish mystery. She was a teacher for 15 years and currently resides in the Texas hill country. For more information, visit her at http://www.VannettaChapman.com.
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