Reunion by Therese Fowler

Reunion by Therese Fowler

Published by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

About the book:

Celebrity talk show host Blue Reynolds is the queen of daytime television—she is smart, funny, and as down-to-earth as her adoring fans. In the eyes of the world, she has it all. But no one knows about the secret she has harbored for the last twenty years—a secret that could destroy her image, her reputation, and her career. Twenty years ago, she gave birth to a son and put him up for adoption through illegal channels. And every day since, she’s been filled with regret. Now Blue has hired a private investigator to find her son, knowing full well the consequences.

A week in Key West to do her show on location brings Blue a much-needed change of pace—and an unexpected reunion with an old flame, Mitch Forrester. Helping him launch a television series may help her recapture the kind of genuine romance and affection long missing from her life. But it also means having to deal with Mitch’s disapproving son, Julian, who is only nine years younger than Blue. Emotionally battered from his years as a war photographer in the world’s most dangerous hotspots, Julian struggles to get close to his father while making his disdain for Blue crystal clear—which makes his desire for her all the more shocking.

My review:

Reunion is a definitely a quick and light read. That is not to say that there is no depth to the plot or characters, but rather there is an ease about the writing that kept me reading. Blue's difficult decision to put her son up for adoption many years ago still haunts her and parts of the book focus on her struggle and coming to terms with that choice. That aspect of the plot is what drew me in to the book and kept me intrigued. In my opinion, the romantic elements felt secondary to the real plot and and the development and conclusion of the love triangle seemed too unrealistic, given its unique nature.

When it comes to depicting the book's settings, Therese Fowler does an excellent job. In particular, the descriptions of the luxurious Key West were very well-written and automatically triggered memories from a trip I took there years ago.

The book's ending presents some unanswered questions, which can either pave the way for a sequel or leave readers to their own imaginations. I enjoyed reading this book and though some of the plot development seemed unrealistic, it makes for a wonderful beach read, as the cover implies!

About the author:

Therese Fowler is the author of Souvenir. She holds an MFA in creative writing. She grew up in Illinois and now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband and two sons.

BIG THANKS to Random House for my review copy and Dorothy for organizing this great Pump Up Your Book Promotion tour!

Guest Post: Katherine Center, author of "Everyone is Beautiful"

I am pleased and honored to welcome Katherine Center to Bookopolis! As you can tell by my review of "Everyone is Beautiful", I really enjoyed the book and I can't wait to read Katherine's next novel! Given the delicious-looking cupcake on the cover of "Everyone is Beautiful", it's only fitting for Katherine to discuss "The Truth About Cupcakes". Enjoy!

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The Truth About Cupcakes
© Katherine Center 2009


The truth about cupcakes is that most of them look a lot better than they taste.

I know this from experience.

For the Mom 2.0 Summit in Houston this year, I decided to bring cupcakes with me to the speakers’ dinner. I had this idea of making toppers for them with quotes from Everyone Is Beautiful, and the notion completely swept me up.

There were 50 speakers. And making 50 handmade cupcake toppers turned out to be a heck of a task. I spent hours leafing through the book, marking passages with post-its. Then more hours typing the quotes up and laying them out. Then the pasting and assembling. It wound up taking several days to get it done.

And meanwhile, every day, my kids and I were tasting cupcakes all over town. Because I wanted to find cupcakes that looked just like the cupcakes I remembered from my childhood. And I wanted them to taste as good as those had, too. I wanted to find that old thrill.

I’d pick up the kids after school and say, “Guess where we’re going?”
And they’d say, “Where?”
And I’d say, “On a cupcake hunt!”
And they’d all shout, “Yay!”

The first place we tried had cupcakes with magazine-quality icing. But the “cake” part tasted like a corn muffin. We licked all the icing off and left lumps of cake.

The second place’s cupcakes were sleek and modern. And no fluffy dollup of icing on top--the icing on these was flat and perfectly round. And they weren’t sweet enough. Or maybe they were too sweet. We mostly drank our milk.

We tried red velvet cupcakes, cream cheese cupcakes, regular and jumbo-size cupcakes. We went to grocery stores, bakeries, and cupcake shops—both in town and outside it.

After a week and a half, I‘d pick up my kids and say, “Guess what we’re doing?”
And they’d shout, “No more cupcakes!”

In the end, I never found the cupcakes I was looking for. I finally chose standard-issue grocery store cupcakes with a buttercream icing that tasted pretty good.

But I never found any that tasted as good as the ones I remembered from childhood. I never could get the taste of the cupcake to match the idea of the cupcake. Maybe if you look too hard for something it’s more difficult to find. Maybe nothing from childhood is ever as good as you remember. Or maybe time and the filter of memory just always make everything a little bit sweeter.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Katherine Center’s second novel, Everyone Is Beautiful, is featured in the March issue of Redbook. Kirkus Reviews likens it to the 1950s motherhood classic Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and says, “Center’s breezy style invites the reader to commiserate, laughing all the way.” Booklist calls it “a superbly written novel filled with unique and resonant characters.” Katherine’s first novel, The Bright Side of Disaster, was featured in People Magazine, USA Today, Vanity Fair, the Houston Chronicle, and the Dallas Morning News, among others. BookPage named Katherine one of seven new writers to watch, and the paperback of Bright Side was a Breakout Title at Target. Katherine recently published an essay in Real Simple Family and has another forthcoming in Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers on the Mother-Daughter Bond this April. She has just turned in her third novel, Get Lucky, and is starting on a fourth. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and two young children.

You can visit her website at http://www.katherinecenter.com/

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Lanie Coates’s life is spinning out of control. She’s piled everything she owns into a U-Haul and driven with her husband, Peter, and their three little boys from their cozy Texas home to a multiflight walkup in the Northeast. She’s left behind family, friends, and a comfortable life–all so her husband can realize his dream of becoming a professional musician. But somewhere in the eye of her personal hurricane, it hits Lanie that she once had dreams too. If only she could remember what they were.

These days, Lanie always seems to rank herself dead last–and when another mom accidentally criticizes her appearance, it’s the final straw. Fifteen years, three babies, and more pounds than she’s willing to count since the day she said “I do,” Lanie longs desperately to feel like her old self again. It’s time to rise up, fish her moxie out of the diaper pail, and find the woman she was before motherhood capsized her entire existence.
Lanie sets change in motion–joining a gym, signing up for photography classes, and finding a new best friend. But she also creates waves that come to threaten her whole life. In the end, Lanie must figure out once and for all how to find herself without losing everything else in the process.

Katherine Center’s Everyone Is Beautiful is a hugely entertaining, poignant, and charming new novel about what happens after happily ever after: how a woman learns to fall in love with her husband–and her entire life–all over again.

BIG THANKS to Katherine for her wonderful guest post and Dorothy for organizing this great tour!

Everyone is Beautiful by Katherine Center

"Everyone is Beautiful" by Katherine Center

Published by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc.


About the book:

Lanie Coates’ life is spinning out of control. She’s piled everything she owns into a U-Haul and driven with her husband, Peter, and their three little boys from their cozy Texas home to a multiflight walkup in the Northeast. She’s left behind family, friends, and a comfortable life–all so her husband can realize his dream of becoming a professional musician. But somewhere in the eye of her personal hurricane, it hits Lanie that she once had dreams too. If only she could remember what they were.

These days, Lanie always seems to rank herself dead last–and when another mom accidentally criticizes her appearance, it’s the final straw. Fifteen years, three babies, and more pounds than she’s willing to count since the day she said “I do,” Lanie longs desperately to feel like her old self again. It’s time to rise up, fish her moxie out of the diaper pail, and find the woman she was before motherhood capsized her entire existence.

Lanie sets change in motion–joining a gym, signing up for photography classes, and finding a new best friend. But she also creates waves that come to threaten her whole life. In the end, Lanie must figure out once and for all how to find herself without losing everything else in the process.

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My review:

"Everyone is Beautiful" is a charming story with a lot of heart (plus, don't you just love the cover - it totally fits). The characters are really likeable, even when they find themselves in some awkward situations! Katherine Center's writing is very engaging and down-to-earth, making me feel like I was reading about real people and not just characters in a story. There are themes of love, relationships, family and certainly parenting that complicate and simultaneously enhance Lanie's life.

This book has a great message about respecting yourself and learning to feel beautiful, particularly for mothers who don't take any time for themselves. Once Lanie started working out and taking photography classes, she became a happier and more productive person and an even better role model and parent for her children. I absolutely loved the conclusion Lanie reaches at the end, that like the title of the book, everyone truly is beautiful.

This is a quick read and a light book, but definitely one with important lessons and more depth than your average chick-lit book. I look forward to reading Katherine's next book "Get Lucky".









About the author:
Katherine Center’s first novel, The Bright Side of Disaster, has been featured in People Magazine, USA Today, Vanity Fair, the Houston Chronicle, and theDallas Morning News, among others. BookPage named Katherine one of seven new writers to watch, and the paperback of Bright Side was a Breakout Title on special display at Target last spring. Katherine recently published an essay in Real Simple Family and has another essay forthcoming in the anthology Because I Love Her: 34 Top Women Writers on the Mother-Daughter Bond. Katherine’s second novel, Everyone Is Beautiful, will come out both in hardcover and as an audiobook in February of 2009. She has just turned in her third novel, Get Lucky, and is starting on a fourth. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and two young children.

For more of Katherine Center, check out her wonderful guest post!

BIG THANKS to Random House for my review copy and Dorothy for organizing this great Pump Up Your Book Promotion tour!

Kissing Games of the World by Sandi Kahn Shelton

"Kissing Games of the World" by Sandi Kahn Shelton

Published by Shaye Areheart, a division of Random House

About the book:

Jamie McClintock, an artist who already has a precarious life caring for her asthmatic little son and struggling to pay the bills, doesn’t have time for love or romance. She and her son live in an old farmhouse with an elderly widower who is raising his grandson—but when her beloved elderly landlord dies of a sudden heart attack, her life is thrown into chaos.

When the late landlord’s estranged son Nate arrives in town to settle his father’s affairs and claim his son, Jamie discovers that the spirited old gentleman devoted to raising his young grandson was actually a philandering, deadbeat dad in his day. At least, according to Nate, a widower whose late wife’s accident left him bereft and entirely incapable of caring for the boy.

Jamie and Nate can’t stand each other from the beginning. He’s a self-absorbed, charismatic, world-traveling salesman who thinks being a dad means just letting his five-year-old son come along with him on his many business trips until he can convince his business partner girlfriend to marry him. He’s sure Jamie is just the latest of his dad’s girlfriends, and he’s only too happy to kick her and her son out of the house so he can sell it and get back to his life.

But then he discovers that being an instant dad isn’t so easy after all, especially when he’s blindsided by feelings of grief over the death of his father whose transgressions he never forgave. And even while he and Jamie are fighting over everything from children’s nicknames to Jamie’s odd-ball fashion choices to Nate’s home renovation methods, they discover that they have two little boys looking to them to ease their grief and loss. It’s not long before Jamie’s defensive self-preservation and Nate’s blustery bravado crumble under the laws of attraction.

In a story that is as much a humorous, poignant contemporary romance as it is the tale of a man coming to terms with his father’s desertion, readers will discover new twists to the modern-day mating dance. Sometimes, Jamie and Nate discover, the person you can’t stand is also person you also can’t stand to live without.

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"Kissing Games of the World" is an incredibly enjoyable book with wonderful dialogue and endearing characters. It isn't every day that I read a book that makes me feel connected to each one of the main characters, which is the primary reason why this book is such a gem. It would have been impossible for me not to have cared about Jamie, Nate, Christopher (Nate's son) and Arley (Jamie's son) because they were so real to me, in the way they spoke and interacted, I felt like I knew them. While the plot does seem somewhat unrealistic, (which usually really bothers me), I was so drawn into the story and involved with the characters that I never needed to question whether the storyline was believable or not.

The chapters' narration alternates from Jamie's point of view to Nate's point of view, allowing for the complete range of inner thoughts and emotions from both main characters. Oftentimes they would both be analyzing the same events and it was so interesting to see how vastly different people can perceive the same circumstances.

This book is an excellent addition to the "women's fiction" genre, as it has all the perfect elements of romance, love and family. What I loved most about "Kissing Games of the World" is how intertwined the children's stories were with the adults' lives, and how accurately their feelings and thoughts were relayed. Many books place the children as secondary characters but Christopher and Arley were always considered and were central to the story's development. Plus, they were just so adorable and proved the saying, 'kids say the darndest things', to be true!

Sandi Kahn Shelton is a very talented writer and clearly has a knack for evoking just the right emotion through her writing. There were many times that I found myself laughing out loud and other times when I started to tear up. This is the first book of hers that I've read and I look forward to reading her first two novels!

Author Bio:

Sandi Kahn Shelton is the author of three novels, all contemporary novels about relationships and family, including What Comes After Crazy, A Piece of Normal, and the latest, Kissing Games of the World. She’s also the author of three nonfiction humor books about parenting, and is a feature reporter for the New Haven Register. For years she wrote the “Wit’s End” column for Working Mother magazine, and she has been a contributor to Redbook, Salon, Reader’s Digest, and Woman’s Day.

She’s been a writer for longer than she can actually remember—but she does remember her first sale. When she was 6 years old, her mother wouldn’t give her money for the ice cream truck, so she ran home and wrote a story and sold it to the neighbors for 20 cents. It was called “The King Who Slept For Three Hours and Forty-five Seconds” and she saw this as the beginning of a promising career path that would keep her in frozen desserts for the rest of her life.

You can visit her website at http://www.sandishelton.com/,and her blog at www.sandishelton.com/blog

BIG THANKS to Sandi for sending me her book to review and Jaime for organizing this great Pump Up Your Book Promotion tour!

Perfect on Paper by Maria Murnane

"Perfect on Paper: The (Mis)adventures of Waverly Bryson" by Maria Murnane

Published by Wink's Ink


About the book:

Anything can look perfect…on paper

When her fiancé calls off their wedding at the last minute, Waverly Bryson wonders if her life will ever turn out the way she thought it would…or should. Her high-powered job in sports PR? Not so perfect. Her relationship with her dad? Far from it. Her perfect marriage? Enough said.

Perfect on Paper is a humorous tale of Waverly’s efforts to cobble the pieces of a broken yesterday into a brand new tomorrow. What does the future have in store for her? Will she finally find what she’s looking for?

Her dates? Cringe-inducing at times, definitely entertaining

Her friends? Often amused, definitely supportive

Her new crush? Possibly intrigued, definitely a catch

The results? Hardly perfect, definitely just right

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First of all, let me start of by saying how surprised I am that this book is self-published. It just goes to show how much talent and creativity publishing houses can miss out on sometimes! Maria Murnane's humor and wit are apparent in this adorable story that kept a smile on my face until the very end. Waverly is such a likeable character, not in spite of her flaws but because of them. She isn't exactly the most suave or sophisticated, but she's got a great sense of humor and learns to laugh at herself and make the best of things. Some of my favorite parts of the book are the Honey notes at the beginning of each chapter. I love how they are incorporated into the storyline and wind up teaching Waverly a lot about herself and her capabilities.

This is chick-lit at its best. There are the friendships, the dating, the hilarious 'misadventures' and the predictable, yet always satisfying, happily ever after. Though some parts of the plot are really unrealistic, they end up making the book more fun and enjoyable.

I think it's pretty clear just how much I enjoyed reading Perfect on Paper and I wasn't the only member of my family. In fact, both my mom and my aunt snatched the book up even before I could start reading it and told me that I was in for a treat. Because of that (along with all the other huge Perfect on Paper fans), I had really high expectations for the book and I'm happy to say I was not disappointed. Anyone who hasn't picked up a copy of this book yet is certainly missing out!!

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Bio:

Maria is currently an independent business writer and works mostly with technology and financial services companies, but like the main character in her book, she did spend a few years in sports PR. One day she quit her job and ended up in Argentina for a year, where she played semi-pro soccer and also wrote the first draft of what would eventually become Perfect on Paper. She has dedicated the book to any woman who has ever been on a really bad date or realized halfway through the workday that her skirt is on backwards.

Maria graduated with high honors in English and Spanish from UC Berkeley and received a master’s degree in integrated marketing communications from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She lives in San Francisco and can be reached at maria@mariamurnane.com. To learn more about her business writing services, click here.

BIG THANKS to Maria for sending me her book to review and Tracee for organizing this great Pump Up Your Book Promotion tour!

When Life Stinks, It's Time to Wash the Gym Clothes by Kelly Epperson

“When Life Stinks, It’s Time to Wash the Gym Clothes” by Kelly Epperson

Published by RWG Press

Kelly Epperson’s first book is a compilation of articles that she has written since 2001 for her a weekly newspaper column. There are a wide range of topics covered, from reality television to IQ tests to New Year’s resolutions.

I enjoyed reading the laugh-out-loud columns. Each chapter makes for some nice light reading that can be picked up and read over and over again. The writing style is very personal and straight forward, Ms. Epperson tells it like it is! My favorite article by far is called “Becoming Bilingual In France, But Not In French”, which discusses the intricacies of the English language and how ‘British’ English has such a different vocabulary. As Kelly writes, “I’m not daft, I can figure out the lingo. So now I’ll get off my bum, grab my rucksack and go queue at the post. Cheerio.” This is a fun book that most anyone can relate to in some way because the articles are about real life. Even the most mundane events and facts seem funny when Kelly is the one describing them!

Here are some fun facts about Kelly from her website:

Former IRS agent
Taught English as a Second Language
Never could do a cartwheel
Been married a LONG time (to the same guy)
Have 2 teenage sons who I still adore (most of the time)
No longer drive a minivan
Recently lived one year in the south of France!
Mon francais - c'est mauvais!
Loved loved loved Europe!

As part of Kelly Epperson's Pump Up Your Book Promotion tour, I will be interviewing her in the near future. Stay tuned!!

BIG THANKS to Kelly for sending me her book to review and Dorothy for organizing this great tour!