Excerpt: I've Been Looking For You by Jennifer Dean

I’ve Been Looking for You
by Jennifer Dean
Publication Date: December 1st 2017
Genres: Contemporary, LGBTQ+, Young Adult

Synopsis:

Max: The new girl, the sarcastic asshole, the one who avoids getting attached to anyone.
Emily: The golden girl, the rule-abiding rebel, the one who unknowingly craves something more.
When fate brings the two girls together, life seemed to fall into place. Until their future plans are shattered the moment someone leaves drugs inside Max’s school locker.
While Max inevitably loses hope of escaping her new grim reality, Emily struggles to move on without the one she loves most. Especially when she’s the only one determined to find answers. But the closer Emily gets to discovering the truth, the harder it will be to stop her pursuit, even when it leads to dangerous consequences.

Goodreads / Amazon

Author Bio:

Jennifer was studying History and English at the University of North Texas when she discovered a hidden passion for writing. She has since written two other Young Adult novels, Bound and Blinded. She lives in Seattle Washington.

Website / Goodreads / Facebook / Twitter

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Excerpt:

JUNE 20, 2015

Emily’s slender finger drew invisible letters onto the table, nodding along with my voice but unaware of her distracted mind. I sighed, my words fading with unimportance as I tilted my head and narrowed my eyes with a new focus.

“What’s wrong?”

“What do you mean,” Emily said, slightly confused as her eyes shifted up but her finger continued with the absentminded activity.

I stared back with a knowing look that caused her to shrug.

“I’m not perfect, you know. I’m allowed to have bad days. You’re in prison after all.”

“True,” I said with a nod. “But something tells me there’s a reason for this one.”

“Well,” Emily said, curling her finger into her palm as if it had been beckoned back by her hand to create a frustrated fist. “Since you know so much, maybe you can tell what my problem is.”

Her irritated tone was guarded by impatience, but the only thing that caught my attention was the sadness lingering within her eyes.

“Ems,” I said with a soft plea.

Emily dropped her shoulders in surrender as she closed her eyes for a few brief seconds as if it were a message for the anger to stand down. Once she had blinked them back open, it was clear the space of her former irritation had been replaced with sadness that had now just doubled its territory. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap.” Emily shook her head, speaking with a regretful tone. “Really. It’s nothing.”

My own irritation rose as my need to wrap my arms around her was prevented by the restrictions of the environment surrounding us.

“I know it’s not nothing,” I said, conveying with my stare that I would sit here, waiting for the rest of the visit, if I had to, until she told me what was bothering her.

Emily relented with a heavy sigh, causing me to lift the left side of my mouth into a victoriously crooked smirk.

“My roommate assignment came in the mail this morning.”

Her voice was low and filled with disappointment as her shoulders rose and dropped with another exaggerated sigh. Unable to resist any longer, I quickly looked over my shoulder, happy to see the officer in charge distracted by another inmate interaction, before I took the opportunity and reached across the table to place my hand over Emily’s.

“You knew that was inevitable,” I said while my thumb soothed the back of her hand with gentle strokes.

“I know,” Emily said pausing so that she could turn her hand over and grasp my fingers longingly with her own. “It’s just that the reality of it all is still hitting me in pieces. And seeing that this morning just—” Emily shook her head, looking down at our linked hands as if they could give her the strength she needed while she attempted to hold back the crack seeping into her voice. “It just reminded me of what we had lost.”

“I’m sorry,” I said feeling the uselessness of my words as soon as they left my lips.

I pulled my hand back, ignoring the way my fingers twitched—screaming in protest at the parting from one they were always meant to hold. Emily’s disappointment tightened my chest, leaving me desperate to take away the remainder of her pain, if only for a few minutes.

“What?” Emily said with a confused stare as she took in the false amusement now lifting my cheeks.

“Looks like you’ll be using a bra on the door after all,” I said.

Painting Sky: Blog Tour & Review

Painting Sky by Rita Branches
Publication Date: April 25, 2016
Genres: New Adult, Romance
Find it On: Goodreads / Amazon(ahttp://ritabranches.wordpress.com/ne's 

Follow the full tour here!

Synopsis

Nobody ever said life was easy...

People pleaser Jane Skylar wants nothing more than to earn her art degree, start her life, and bask in the bliss of living with her boyfriend.

But things don't always go as planned...

Struggling with her creative side, Jane finds herself in turmoil, often confiding in her roommate - another, more talented art student, Keith Hale. Keith just so happens to be her boyfriend's older, brooding brother. After a devastating breakup, Jane turns to Keith for comfort. But when the lines blur between roommate and lover, life becomes more complicated than ever before.

When Keith's past comes back to haunt him, their lives all get turned upside down, forcing the truth to surface. Now Jane must fight for what she wants--even if it hurts everyone she loves.

Blog Tour: Whatever It Takes by Lindsey Pogue

Title: Whatever It Takes (Nothing But Trouble #1)

Author: Lindsey Pogue

Publication Date: January 22, 2016
Genres: Contemporary, New Adult

Purchase: Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble

Synopsis:

Four years ago, I thought my life was pretty normal for a teenager. Three years ago, my world was shattered, and now I’m just trying to hold the pieces together.But regret and anger aren’t so easy to ignore. 

I just need to catch my breath … For it all to go away … 
I thought I might finally be ready to move on from that horrible night, but then he decided to come back. 
He can’t come back … he’ll ruin me completely. 
One horror-filled night changes the course of Samantha’s seemingly normal life. She’s ruined everything. Despite her determination to keep the family ranch up and running, her guilt makes it impossible to completely move on or forget. 
Sam takes comfort in her quirky, endearing friends as she tries to balance between the girl she was and the woman she wants to become. Just when she thinks she’s finally making amends with her past, someone she never thought she’d see again returns, and Sam’s life is once again turned upside down. Both her head and her heart want different things, so she’s lost when, once again, she’s forced to make a decision that will inevitably change her life.

Book Blitz: Abandoned by Elisa Dane

Abandoned 
Elisa Dane
Published by: Swoon Romance
Publication date: February 15th 2016
Genres: Contemporary, Romance, Young Adult

Summary:
My name is Tierra Owens, and I like to kiss. A lot. It numbs the hollow ache in my chest and—for a few minutes—makes me forget how truly alone I am. My mother is an alcoholic. She hates me and insists I’m the reason she’s not married to my father, whom I have never met. My best friend, Kaylee, is the only person who knows the real me. Everyone else sees what I want them to: a happy, confident, popular girl who has the world at her feet.

I am a fraud.
Relationships are forbidden. I avoid them at all costs. Sex? Emotions? Those things make a person vulnerable, and vulnerability always leads to heartbreak. When my childhood crush, Mattie shows up at school my world tumbles off its axis. The shell I surround myself with feels more like a pathetic crutch than a protective barrier, and I find myself wanting things. Daydreaming about what it would be like to have a boyfriend, a relationship—love.
The sad fact is: I’ll never have any of those things. I am unworthy—trash. Which is why my mom abandoned me.

Goodreads // Amazon

Author Bio:
ELISA DANE is a self-proclaimed book junkie. A lover of handbags, chocolate, and reality television, she's a proud mother to three All- Star cheerleaders. Writing is her absolute passion, and it's her mission to create stories that will not only take you on a romantic journey that will warm your heart, but help you find a new respect and interest in the sport of All-Star cheerleading.
Elisa is no stranger to the publishing world. She writes steamy paranormal romance under her real name, Lisa Sanchez. Her adult works include the Hanford Park series (Eve Of Samhain, Pleasures Untold, and Faythe Reclaimed), Obsessed (an erotic suspense), and a paranormal novella, Cursing Athena. Elisa lives in Northern California with her husband, three daughters, and a feisty Chihuahua who stubbornly believes she's human.

Website / Goodreads / Facebook / Twitter

Review: On the Verge

On the Verge by Garen Glazier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publication Date: September 16th 2015
Genres: New Adult, Urban Fantasy

Synopsis:

Art, demons, and death. Seattle is On the Verge.

Freya is just a university student worried about grades and tuition until a gorgeous succubus interrupts her post-exam latte with a proposition: come work for her boss, Seattle’s reclusive heiress and antiquities collector Imogen Beldame. Eagerly agreeing despite a nagging feeling in the pit of her stomach, Freya finds herself swept up in a deadly quest at the behest of her psychopathic new employer. Beldame has given her until Halloween to collect three magical pigments that hold the key to crafting mesmerizing portraits that can access the Verge, a borderland on the edge of human reality, and the powerful beings that call it home.

Freya’s reluctant journey takes her to a goblin stronghold in the Cascades for the color blue, to the Seattle Underground to request the color red from Baba Yaga, and to the Fremont home of a beautifully gruesome Cambodian ahp, or spirit of the night, for the color yellow. Working together with Rusty, an enigmatically disfigured man intimately connected with the Verge, and a motley crew of mercurial demons, Freya must come up with a plan to stop Beldame and preserve the fragile balance between fantasy and reality that is at its most vulnerable on Halloween.

Review:

I received a copy of this book from Xpresso Book Tours in exchange for an honest review.

On the Verge is one of the few books I've received for review that makes me sad - sad that such a phenomenal book probably won't get the attention it deserves. Because let me tell you, this book was addicting!

The star of Glazier's novel is Freya, a senior art history major who is lost among so many others like her in the Seattle art scene. Her bland work-school-sleep existence seems to spice up when Ophidia, a representative for a well-known reclusive art dealer, offers her a part time job - but what she doesn't know is that this job throws her head first into The Verge.

"The Verge is a borderland that surrounds your world. It's an undiscovered frontier on the edge of human reality wherein exist all the creatures and beings of myth and legend. We[...]are the dreams and nightmares, gods and devils of the human imagination."

The Verge is essentially a dimension of energy that, when touched by the human imagination, spits out the creatures that mankind has imagined; everything from incubi and sucubi to vampires and werewolves exist because mankind imagined it and The Verge spawned them.

I love this twist that Glazier gave to the creation of legend because what she created for herself was an infinite world of possibilities. Literally any creature or power can exist in this book so long as someone generated it. But what's particularly well thought out is that it's not like Chalk Zone where anything created comes to fruition. In order to be created from The Verge, a certain level of love and passion must go into the creation of the art of fiction. So, to use examples from her book, something like Grimm's Fairytales or a Munch painting would come to life, but a toddler's doodle would not.

The other incredible thing that Glazier set up is that the beings themselves do not fully comprehend or understand the power that is The Verge. Without spoiling too much, there is a race of being who, once deprived of their signature horns, are sent back to The Verge, not as sentient beings, but as theidentity-less forms of energy from which they originated.

The other power that is above their heads the physical manifestation of their creation. In the case of Ophidia and Dakryma, the two main demons, they are bound by portraits, and whomever owns the portraits controls them, which is the issue that becomes the crux of the plot.

For such a rich and fantastical world, Freya is the perfect heroine. She has the traditional hero's journey going as she is thrust into this world of fantasy and forced into a series of tasks that threaten her life. But she has a good balance between skepticism and "how is this honestly my life" comments that make her believable and relatable. Honestly, the best thing that Glazier did was to make her a Seattle art student hipster. She's a stock personality, for sure, but a fun one that you don't see too much in fantasy. Even the side kick she picks up along the way, Rusty, is far from your leading man. To use Freya's words, he is a "truculent mountain man" who stands at 6'2" with a meaty frame and a half-disfigured face. Not exactly the drop dead gorgeous hunk that authors usually spin out these days.

The only - and I do mean only - qualm I have with this novel is the author's propensity to whip out her thesaurus. It's perfectly fine when the characters are making intellectual quips at each other, but sometimes it was just ridiculous in the narration.

"Hers was a more crepuscular circadian rhythm; sunrises just didn't seem as natural as sunsets."
"Her congenital perspicacity."
"He thrived in the disconsolate ambiance of modernity."

Though to be fair, she did give me a brush up on my SAT words.

For this and this alone I'd give this book a 4.5, but for the sake of ratings I'm giving it a 5/5. Great characters and rich world building, plus, as an art history major herself, she really took the sentiment of "write what you know" to heart and created a lush and well-researched landscape of the "On the Verge" Seattle art scene (gettit?). Let's hope this fantastic debut get's some traction!

View all my reviews

Book Blitz: Whatever It Takes by Lindsey Pogue