Cover Reveal: The Guest Book by Holly Martin

I'm very pleased to be doing another cover reveal today. I love seeing new boo covers, they always make me impatient to get my hands on the book though. This book is released on Valentines day so here's an early valentines gift for you. Feast your eyes on this...

Welcome to Willow Cottage – throw open the shutters, let in the sea breeze and make yourself completely at home. Oh, and please do leave a comment in the Guestbook!

As landlady of Willow Cottage, the young widow Annie Butterworth is always on hand with tea, sympathy or strong Norfolk cider - whatever her colourful array of guests require.  A flick through the messages in the leather-bound cottage guestbook gives a tantalizing glimpse into the lives of everyone who passes through her doors.

This includes Annie herself - especially now celebrity crime writer Oliver Black, is back in town. He might grace the covers of gossip magazines with a different glamorous supermodel draped on his arm every week, but to Annie, he’s always just been Olly, the man who Annie shared her first kiss with.

Through the pages of the Guestbook Annie and Olly, along with all the guests that arrive at the seaside retreat, struggle with love, loss, mystery, joy, happiness, guilt…and the odd spot of naked rambling! 

Forget sending postcards saying 'wish you were here' - one visit to Willow Cottage and you’ll wish you could stay forever.

1000 follower giveaway!

Well I finally got there. Late on Saturday evening I finally reached 1000 followers on twitter, that's including all of your lovely people that follow the blog. I said I would do a giveaway when I reached 100 followers and so here it is. I decided I would giveaway a few of the books that I loved last year. I think one of these books just missed making my top 10 books of 2013 but only by a mere whisker. I'm going to open this giveaway up internationally so anyone can enter.

The books I'm giving away are:

Three books that I loved last year, it's raining men by Milly Johnson, take a look at me now by Miranda Dickinson and This Child of Mine by Sinead Moriarty. I know I've done giveaways of a code of these books before but I know there were a few people who were disappointed not to win those giveaways and they really are all fab books so deserve to be in the celebratory giveaway. 

I'll pop a couple of other bits of bookish swag into the  parcel for you as well just for being such fab followers! 

To win, just leave me a comment below telling me why you follow the blog and/or my tweets and you'll be entered into the draw. The giveaway closes on Sunday so you have a week to enter and I'll announce the winner next week! 

Good luck! 

Guest Post: Jennifer Joyce with A Beginners Guide to Salad

I'm delighted to be part of a blog tour for this fab book which I gave a rave review to a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoyed the book and am so excited to have Jennifer Joyce here on the blog today giving us some more information about her novel, herself and the main character from the novel, Ruth who is a fellow 90s cheese fan (just like me!)

Ruth loves nothing more than curling up in front of the telly with a family-sized bar of chocolate. She doesn’t do diets and she certainly doesn’t do exercise. But all that changes when she’s invited to her school reunion.

Bullied at school for being overweight, Ruth’s first reaction is to rip the invitation into a million pieces. But then Ruth hatches a plan. She’ll lose the weight and arrive at the reunion looking gorgeous and glamorous, leaving her old classmates in awe. Especially her former crush, Zack O’Connell.

With the help of her friends and a new, unbelievably hot colleague, Ruth begins her transformation. With six months until the reunion, losing weight will be a piece of cake, right?

A Beginner’s Guide To Salad is a romantic comedy based around Ruth Lynch. Overweight Ruth was bullied as a child, so when she receives an invitation to her school reunion, she decides to shed the pounds and shock her former classmates.

Ruth is a big fan of cheesy pop. She likes music that is fun and cheerful and dance routines are an added bonus. Early, frizzy-haired Kylie, Steps, S Club 7 – they’re all on her ipod. I’ve compiled a top ten list of Ruth’s favourite songs.

1. Reach-S Club 7

2. Tragedy- Steps

3. Say You'll Be There-Spice Girls

4. Better The Devil You Know-Kylie Minogue

5. Like A Prayer-Madonna

6. C'est La Vie-B*Witched

7. Livin La Vida Loca-Ricky Martin

8. Ooh Aah (just a little bit)-Gina G

9. Love Shack-B52s

10. Girls Just Want To Have Fun-Cyndi Lauper

Jennifer Joyce is a writer of romantic comedies who lives in Manchester with her husband and their two daughters. When she isn’t disappearing into her own fictional worlds, she can be found waffling on her blog and reviewing books forNovelicious’ Alternative Thursday.

You can find out more about Jennifer and her book at

www.jenniferjoycewrites.co.uk

www.facebook.com/jenniferjoycewrites  

www.twitter.com/Writer_Jenn   

Cover Reveal: Hopelessly Devoted To Holden Finn by Tilly Tennant

Excited to be taking part in this cover reveal today. It's always exciting seeing the covers of brand new books and I'm a total judges of a book cover. They make me excited and if I like the cover, I'm gonna buy the book! I like the twist to this one that there's a video that goes with it! So here's the fabulous cover and all the info you need about this book...

'There’s only one man for Bonnie, and that’s Holden Finn.

The problem is that Holden Finn is a twenty-three-year-old pop megastar with his boy band, Every Which Way, and has no idea she exists. Not only that, but half the women in the world want to be Mrs Finn, including Bonnie’s teenage daughter, Paige. The real men in Bonnie’s life do nothing but let her down, but a man you can’t possibly have can never do that… right? She’s safe inside her fantasy bubble.

Then Paige wins a radio competition to meet Holden and the band, and Bonnie’s carefully-constructed world starts to unravel. She is about to find out that you should be very, very careful what you wish for …'

Please check out the cover reveal video...

  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx_P_1dWqbU&feature=youtu.be

About Tilly:

Tilly Tennant was born in Dorset but now lives in Staffordshire with her slightly nutty family.  Tilly is married to Mr Tennant (not that one, though a girl can dream). She likes nothing better than curling up in a quiet corner with a glass of wine watching the world go by, but can more usually be found taxiing her daughters to parties or taking them on emergency shopping trips. After a huge list of dismal and disastrous jobs over the years, including paper plate stacking, shop girl, newspaper promotions and waitressing, she began working as a temporary secretary in a hospital to boost her income whilst doing a degree in English and creative writing. This job lasted nine years. Not terribly temporary. But it does mean that she knows just what it’s like to make monumental admin cock-ups, spend the month’s wages in the hospital coffee shop and fall in love with all the doctors. As she’s a smug married, however, it’s fortunate that the doctors in question don’t usually feel the same way.

Get in touch with Tilly:

Website: http://tillytennant.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TillyTenWriter

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7204286.Tilly_Tennant

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TillyTennant?fref=ts

Competition:

WIN a £10 amazon gift voucher by commenting on Tilly's blog with your funniest celebrity crush encounter. Good luck to all who enter! 

http://tillytennant.com/

Review: Storm and Stone by Joss Stirling

Behind the ivy-clad walls of an exclusive boarding school, lurks a sinister web of corruption, scandal, and conspiracy. American student Raven Stone has noticed something is horribly wrong. First there were the unexplained disappearances. Then there were the teachers' lies. And now the death threats ...Also entangled in the disturbing turn of events is the enigmatic Kieran Storm - a fellow student with a killer intellect and a body to die for. He's heading for trouble and taking her with him. Raven can feel herself falling in love, but can she trust a boy she knows almost nothing about?

Review: this is a very different kind of book for me and so it did take me a while to get into this, if you are used to reading this kind of YA contemporary though you will have no trouble. And no trouble was exactly what I had when I eventually got into this little gem of a novel. I wasn't so hooked on the character of Raven and so it wasn't until the boys (Kieran and Joe) got involved that I felt the story gathered any pace for me. I felt there was someone about Raven, that she was wallowing in something but I wasn't sure what And I wished she would just shut up and get on with it. The boys were new to the the school and I felt like I was in the same boat as them starting out reading the books with them and so I think I identified with these characters more! 

I knew nothing about this storyline but I found it really interesting. It reminded me a little of the St Trinians stories, but most of all of the Demon Headmaster which was a major favourite of mine as a child and so I enjoyed the school setting and the idea of something not quite right going on inside a school. Being a teacher myself I did become worried about risk assessments and the children's progress over the course of the novel but I managed to squash this most of the time. This story had a lot more action than I normally like in a book but I found it quite exciting and wouldn't rule out reading another novel with this level of action if it was a well-written as this one! 

The love story that goes alongside the action in this novel is a classic protective male, slightly clueless female storyline initially, however, things do evolve and in the end, this female is anything it helpless! I really liked the friendship aspect of the story too and was a surprisingly pleasurable sub-plot! I think if you are a fan of Joss Stirling's other writing, you definitely won't be disappointed with her latest novel. If, like me, to are slightly newer to this genre I think this is an excellent way to ease yourself in and there is enough of a love story there for even the most die hard of romance fans! 

Review: At Home by Bill Bryson

In AT HOME, Bill Bryson applies the same irrepressible curiosity, irresistible wit, stylish prose and masterful storytelling that made A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING one of the most lauded books of the last decade, and delivers one of the most entertaining and illuminating books ever written about the history of the way we live. Bill Bryson was struck one day by the thought that we devote a lot more time to studying the battles and wars of history than to considering what history really consists of: centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping and merely endeavouring to get more comfortable. And that most of the key discoveries for humankind can be found in the very fabric of the houses in which we live. This inspired him to start a journey around his own house, an old rectory in Norfolk, wandering from room to room considering how the ordinary things in life came to be. Along the way he did a prodigious amount of research on the history of anything and everything, from architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from the spice trade to the Eiffel Tower, from crinolines to toilets; and on the brilliant, creative and often eccentric minds behind them. And he discovered that, although there may seem to be nothing as unremarkable as our domestic lives, there is a huge amount of history, interest and excitement - and even a little danger - lurking in the corners of every home.

Review: having really enjoyed reading One Summer at the end of last year and then meeting Bill Bryson himself shortly after that's I thought I really must tackle the other massive hardback I have of his still sitting unread on my shelf. This was one of the books I was going to read last summer (and the one before that) but never did. Now I did cheat a little bit because I actually listened to this one on an audiobook which I got from the library because I'd enjoyed listening to this fabulous author reading from his own work so much the last time. I actually bought my dad one of his audiobooks for Christmas so I'm sharing the joy as well.

This book was so much more interesting than I thought it was going to be. I love bill Bryson's writing style, it's so chatty and he adds in facts and anecdotes in a way that a good teacher would do when telling you about some new topic or other... I wasn't sure about the subject matter of this book, however, I thought it might be tough going. Bryson goes off on so many tangents about the history surrounding each room of the house, however that this book was actually incredibly consuming. We listened to it on a couple of long car journeys we've done recently and the time passed so quickly because we were being so entertained by the interesting facts and tit bits about various American presidents and the coining of the term eavesdropping. 

I really liked the structure of the book. Bill Bryson moves from room to room in the house introducing the way that room has developed though the ages in British, American and indeed various other cultures. He suggests interesting facts about things that have happened in that room and explores all the possible other areas of interest that are linked to that room, no matter how tenuous. The style of writing is the usual mix of fact, humour and sarcasm, the humour being so deadpan sometimes, you feel you want to give him a look of contempt, the author/reader relationship feels so real! 

There were definitely a few facts and figures that didn't interest me, and if I were reading the hardback copy that I have of this,in might flick over them, but that's just becaus of my personal interest and other readers may be strongly interested in those small paragraphs that don't really grab my attentions, this has nothing to do with the book itself or the writing within. I would definitely recommend a break from fiction with this super work of non-fiction. If you're a fan or Bill Bryson's travel writing, this will be a good transition to his more factual works for you and the audiobook is fabulous if you are wanting a change of media this Jaunary. This book was really very enjoyable although I expected nothing less from this wonderful author! 

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Things on My Reading Wishlist 21/1/14

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This feature was created because they are particularly fond of lists over there at The Broke and the Bookish. I'd love to share my lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists!

I think this is a really interesting one this week. I know what I like to read about and there are definitely plenty of authors out there who like to write about general things I like and things I'm interested in but if I had to be very specific, here are the things on my reading Wishlist. 

1. Glasgow. I would like to read more chick lit novels which are set in Glasgow. There are plenty set in the Scottish countryside, in London, or Edinburgh but I love Glasgow so I want a heroine who lives in the west end and generally lives and shops in Glasgow. 

2. The London Underground. There are some books which feature this in passing or as a means to an end but there aren't enough books which feature the London Underground more heavily. I'm a massive fan of the tube map and have become much more familiar with using the underground regularly since I have moved closer to it so I would like to read more about it. 

3. Primary school teachers. I've read several books featuring some amazing primary school teachers and I'd love to read some more! 

4. Guinea pigs. I have two guinea pigs as a let even though I definitely fit into the age group of most of my favourite chick lit heroines. I would like to see more chick lit heriones with guinea pigs or hamsters as pets. 

5. Women who drink whisky. I'm a big whisky fan (single malt of course) and there aren't enough women in fiction who go to whisky tastings or receive a lovely single malt for valentines day, I think this should change! 

6. Books. I love reading books about books groups and people who read lots of books but I would like to see more of it, perhaps from an author's perspective or a blogger's...

7. Characters who move more than once. There are plenty of books which feature characters moving to a new home but the reality for most of us isn't that we move just once, it's that we move a handful of times, especially in those post uni years. In the past few years I have moved up and down the country, in and out of parents and boyfriends houses, in and out of flats of my own. I'd like to see more characters doing this. 

8. Shopping malls. The arcade now features a fabulous shopping mall and Milly Johnson often has her character go shopping in meadow hall but we don't really get to see white people do when they shop there. I'd love to see some characters in some of the malls of the world that I have shopped in, I think that would be really fun! 

9. Going to Disneyland. A random one but why not tell me about someone visiting Disney land, perhaps the character is Disney obsessed, maybe she is stalking prince Eric, who kings, could be fun! 

10. Books about people like me. I've stated before that I'm a lazy reader and as you can see from this list, most of my wished for items are things that I'm involved in on a daily basis, but overall that's what I want, to read books about people like me doing things I've done or always wanted to do.

So there you have it. Let me know if I think there are any books that fit the bill for me, or if you agree with any of my choices, and if there are any authors reading this, feel free to write any of these wishes into your novel (only kidding!)