Month: September 2016

Get BREAKAWAY for a Steal!

Hi there! I’m so excited to share a review and giveaway for a contemporary M/M sports romance from Avon Gale. As you know I adored her hockey playing hunks in SAVE OF THE GAME and POWER PLAY so I went and picked up the first book in the series, BREAKAWAY. The fourth book, EMPTY NET, just released yesterday, and I’m nearly finished with it, as well. So, so good! I’m not even a hockey fan, and I adore these stories!

Breakaway (Scoring Chances, #1)About the book:
Drafted to play for the Jacksonville Sea Storm, an NHL affiliate, twenty-year-old Lane Courtnall’s future looks bright, apart from the awkwardness he feels as a gay man playing on a minor league hockey team. He’s put his foot in his mouth a few times and alienated his teammates. Then, during a rivalry game, Lane throws off his gloves against Jared Shore, enforcer for the Savannah Renegades. It’s a strange way to begin a relationship.

Jared’s been playing minor league hockey for most of his career. He’s bisexual and doesn’t care if anyone knows. But he’s determined to avoid another love affair after the last one left him devastated. Out of nowhere a one-nighter with rookie Lane Courtnall gives him second thoughts. Lane reminds Jared why he loves the game and why love might be worth the risk. In turn, Jared hopes to show Lane how to be comfortable with himself on and off the ice. But they’re at different points in their careers, and both men will have to decide what they value most.

My Review:
Lane is a young closeted gay man who’s on his own for the first time in his live. He’s moved from Canada to Jacksonville, Florida to play for the Sea Storm, a minor league hockey team in a place where people hardly understand the concept of ice. It’s a total culture shock, but Lane’s generally flummoxed. He’s got no filter, and is awkward to the point of /facepalm + Oh man!. He can’t help pissing off everyone in his vicinity with his unconscious lack of tact. In a last ditch attempt to win some favor, Lane, a superlative forward and primo scorer takes on the goon for a rival team, Jared Shore.

Jared isn’t sure what to make of young, virile, talented Lane. But he doesn’t kick the man out of bed. To be the only man that Lane’s ever been with? Seems like an empty net opportunity, but he’s also got to learn to tune out Lane’s odd chatter, at times. Lane’s ashamed of being gay, afraid that his parents will disown him–something he really struggles with even though he’s supporting himself now. Jared helps him to see that being an adult means coming clean with his fears and insecurities, and that helps Lane grow as a man and a player. It’s all good preparation for Lane when he gets The Call bringing him up to the big time, a few games in the NHL. Jared’s an amazing support and together they are able to deal with Lanes parents. I have to admit that was so much sweeter than I had expected. Poor Lane, he tortured himself for so long, and for no reason! I loved Lane, even when I wanted to smack him. He did crack me up with his completely outrageous conversations.

This is a very tender read, considering the guys are grown adult hockey players. I loved how the romance built a little at a time, as Lane and Jared are players on different teams and have lots of forced separations due to schedules. It made their brief trysts so much sweeter, and that was really fun to experience. Also fun? Lane and his new sexual experiences! I do love me a virgin, from time to time. I’m not a hockey fan at all, but this one put me in a smiling frame-of-mind and gave me warm feels despite all that ice.

Interested? You can find BREAKAWAY on Goodreads, and for a single DOLLAR on Dreamspinner Press through 9/4. Regularly priced on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and AllRomance.

SaveoftheGameFSPowerPlayfsSAVE OF THE GAME (Scoring Chances #2) is also on sale. Catch my review here, and pick it up for $2 on Dreamspinner Press.

POWER PLAY (Scoring Chances #3) is ALSO on sale. Catch my review here, and pick it up for $3 on Dreamspinner Press.

About the author:
Avon Gale was once the mayor on Foursquare of Jazzercise and Lollicup, which should tell you all you need to know about her as a person. She likes road trips, rock concerts, drinking Kentucky bourbon and yelling at hockey. She’s a displaced southerner living in a liberal midwestern college town, and when she’s not writing you can find her at the salon, making her clients look and feel fabulous. She never gets tired of people and their stories — either real or the ones she makes up in her head.

You can find Avon on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest or sign up for her newsletter.

Thanks for popping in, and keep reading my friends!

Finding Love While LOOKING FOR GROUP–A Review

Hi there! Today I’m sharing a review for a contemporary M/M romance from Alexis Hall. I really liked WAITING FOR THE FLOOD and FOR REAL, so I jumped at the chance to read LOOKING FOR GROUP. It’s a New Adult romance between two gamers who meet in cyberspace.

Looking for GroupAbout the book:

So, yeah, I play Heroes of Legend, y’know, the MMO. I’m not like obsessed or addicted or anything. It’s just a game. Anyway, there was this girl in my guild who I really liked because she was funny and nerdy and a great healer. Of course, my mates thought it was hilarious I was into someone I’d met online. And they thought it was even more hilarious when she turned out to be a boy IRL. But the joke’s on them because I still really like him.

And now that we’re together, it’s going pretty well. Except sometimes I think Kit—that’s his name, sorry I didn’t mention that—spends way too much time in HoL. I know he has friends in the guild, but he has me now, and my friends, and everyone knows people you meet online aren’t real. I mean. Not Kit. Kit’s real. Obviously.

Oh, I’m Drew, by the way. This is sort of my story. About how I messed up some stuff and figured out some stuff. And fell in love and stuff.

My Review:

Drew is a 19 y/o student in video game design in Leicester. He’s a gamer, but not obsessed. Well, he’s good at Heroes of Legend and is super pissed when his Guild doesn’t value him, or his skills, so he ragequits them. He searches for a new Guild and joins one that’s specifically less intense than the one he’d been with the past three years. These folks are far more engaged in game for game’s sake playing, and take time to study the game, and the lore of it, for funa dn enjoyment, not simply moving forward to rack up points and prestige. It’s different, but oddly welcome, and Drew finds himself really enjoying the game in a way he hasn’t in a long time.

He’s also intrigued by the main Healer, Solace, whose winged Elf avatar is strangely compelling. Drew spends more time in HoL than ever, messaging with Solace thinking that she might-could be a gamer girl. It’s been more than a year since Drew’s dated, and he’s a bit smitten. Then he learns that Solace is really Christopher, call him Kit, and a physics student at Uni of Leicester. It’s frustrating and confusing, because he’d built a bit of a rapport, and now thinks it was all a hoax. But, it wasn’t, and Kit is just a shy gay man who’s never ever dated. His friends are all virtual, though he’s met many in person over the years.

Drew wants to meet Kit in person, and there’s a lot of angst around this, but the do eventually, and they hit it off. Drew never imagined being with a man, but he’s clearly attracted to sweet, shy and stunning Kit. And, he wants more IRL (in real life) time than Kit is quite comfortable with giving, at first.

This was a sweet book that is very low steam, lots of self-investigation, and tons of gaming. Like, so much gaming I might have felt I was IN THE GAME with the avatars of our characters. That was not entirely awesome, for me, as I really prefer being in the character’s heads and so much happened in the game space I was often left behind. It took me a while to catch on to the gaming lingo and syntax, and I found out–way too late–that there was a Glossary just waiting for me at the end of the book…and, it’s a British read, so the Brit slang plus game slang was challenging, for me.

About the romance, it was low-key, but high stakes. Drew’s a straight man, falling for a man he’s only virtually known. Their immediate connection in real life is as scary as it is thrilling. Drew’s friends are less-than-charmed with all his gaming time spent in HoL with Kit, however, and this becomes a problem, because Drew’s sensitive to Kit’s lack of life experience and fears he has a gaming addiction Drew hopes to fix. Kit’s never had a real boyfriend, and finding Drew, who also knows HoL, seems like a dream come true…yet, it isn’t.

I liked the sweetness, but I’ll admit to wishing there was more steam and less Steam (that’s a gaming joke; Steam is where you go buy/play games…). The big conflict left a rift that Drew made right in the only, and best, way possible. I loved how his grand plans were so intricate and really relied on his gaming skill. It was charming. The book is sure to appeal to readers who also have a more-than-casual interest in gaming-slash-gaming romance. The M/M aspect was limited to kissing and exhilaration, with no other descriptions on the page. Still, first love/new love is always fun to absorb.

Interested? You can find LOOKING FOR GROUP on Goodreads, Riptide Publishing, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and AllRomance. I received a review copy via NetGalley.

About the Author:

Alexis Hall was born in the early 1980s and still thinks the 21st century is the future. To this day, he feels cheated that he lived through a fin de siècle but inexplicably failed to drink a single glass of absinthe, dance with a single courtesan, or stay in a single garret. He did the Oxbridge thing sometime in the 2000s and failed to learn anything of substance. He has had many jobs, including ice cream maker, fortune teller, lab technician, and professional gambler. He was fired from most of them.

He can neither cook nor sing, but he can handle a 17th century smallsword, punts from the proper end, and knows how to hotwire a car. He lives in southeast England, with no cats and no children, and fully intends to keep it that way.

Catch up with him on his website, twitter and Facebook.

Thanks for popping in and keep reading my friends!

Their Love is HEARTBORN–Review and Giveaway!

Heart Born Blog Tour Banner
Hi there! Today I’m sharing a review for a contemporary YA supernatural romance-ish novel from Terry Maggert. HEARTBORN is a book where angels not only exist, they’re ready to rule. And humans they save may return the favor.

Be sure to drop below and enter to win a $25 GC in the giveaway.

Book Cover - HeartbornAbout the book:
Her guardian angel was pushed.

Keiron was never meant to be anything other than a hero. Born high above in a place of war and deception, he is Heartborn, a being of purity and goodness in a place where there violence and deceit are just around every corner.

His disappearance will spark a war he cannot see, for Keiron has pierced the light of days to save a girl he has never met, for reasons he cannot understand. Livvy Foster is seventeen, brave, and broken. With half a heart, she bears the scars of a lifetime of pain and little hope of survival.

Until Keiron arrives.

In the middle of a brewing war and Livvy’s failing heart, Keiron will risk everything for Livvy, because a Heartborn’s life can only end in one way: Sacrifice.

Fall with Livvy and Keiron as they seek the truth about her heart, and his power, and what it means to love someone who will give their very life to save you.

My Review:
Livvy is a seventeen year old girl with a congenital heart defect that keeps her just healthy enough to not be hospitalized. She works in a library, inexplicably, despite the seemingly intense struggle to simply walk to and from her post at the information desk.

Keiron is an angel on Earth. Literally. His mission is to find and save Livvy. Because reasons. He does find her, and pretends he’s human to befriend this nearly-friendless human girl. They even share a few chaste kisses that pretty much leave Livvy swooning, or maybe that dizziness was simply her heart being overtaxed. Meanwhile, Keiron’s family is preparing for battle. His elder brother has been accused of Keiron’s murder, and his parents are standing trial in what’s little more than a thinly-disguised power grab by an ancient angelic council. Battle looms and Livvy’s heart is growing weaker. Good thing Keiron is there to save the day….

I really felt like this was a tale of two books. It’s a supernatural romance, of sorts, with angels and humans. Many of the chapters relate the angelic host and the fight to come once Keiron falls to Earth on his quest to save Livvy. The parts with Livvy on Earth are pedestrian and tired. I had about a million questions regarding Livvy and her job, and why? What’s up with her heart condition? Why is she working? What are Heartborn, and what is their purpose?  Where are her parents? Why so many convenient mean people? And, who are these weirdos in the library?

The pacing of the story is slowed with flamboyant descriptions of setting and backstory and characters that set a very grand stage, yet the resolution comes far too quickly. And, it’s a confusing resolution. Livvy is a girl that lots of stuff happens to, and her passivity as a character made it hard for me to relate. Keiron seems like a great guy, and I’m pretty unhappy how things turned out for him. I’m also not clear on a good bit of what happened. At some point all the library people seemed to turn into her medical team, so was the library an illusion? Or, was she constantly monitored by some mystical watch team. I don’t know. I’m not really sure. Too many questions, too few answers, and that’s kind of frustrating. Ultimately, my problem was with the slow reveal of motivation and plot, and when information was finally given, the picture still felt incomplete, to me.

In short, it’s a winding fantasy with a lot of stuff that happens, but no clear reason for much of it. Lots and lots of coincidence, or perhaps just plain illusions that felt mostly contrived and stereotypical. I liked the scenes in “Heaven” best, but understood them the least. Go figure. I expect there’s another book, because Livvy ascends to the Heavens to help fight the angelic war, powered by the love and sacrifice of Keiron. Readers who like metaphysical books will enjoy HEARTBORN more than I did.

Interested? You can find HEARTBORN on Goodreads and Amazon.

****GIVEAWAY****

Click on this Rafflecopter giveaway link for your chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card.
Good luck and keep reading my friends!

About Author Terry Maggert:
I discovered fishing shortly after walking, a boon, considering I lived in South Florida. After a brief move to Kentucky, my family trekked back to the Sunshine State. I had the good fortune to attend high school in idyllic upstate New York, where I learned about a mythical substance known as “Seasons”. After two or three failed attempts at college, I bought a bar. That was fun because I love beer, but, then, I eventually met someone smarter than me (a common event), and, in this case, she married me and convinced me to go back to school–which I did, with enthusiasm. I earned a Master’s Degree in History and rediscovered my love for writing. My novels explore dark fantasy, immortality, and the nature of love as we know it. I live near Nashville, Tennessee, with the aforementioned wife, son, and herd, and, when I’m not writing, I teach history, grow wildly enthusiastic tomato plants, and restore my 1967 Mustang.

You can catch up with Terry on his website, Facebook, twitter, Goodreads and YouTube.

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