Stacking the Shelves - 11.1.14

Stacking the Shelves
hosted by Tynga's Reviews (details)
Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course ebooks!

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Bought:

Etiquette & Espionage
(Finishing School book 1)
by Gail Carrier
Amazon | Goodreads
-----> for Finishing School Read Along

What I Know For Sure
by Oprah Winfrey
-inspirational, memoir
Amazon | Goodreads
-----> for some positive inspiration and feel good moments

Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
-dystopia
Amazon | Goodreads
-----> the hype and good reviews for this made this irresistible

Doon
by Carey Corp and Lorie Langdon
-fantasy, YA
Amazon | Goodreads
-----> after reading book 2, i just HAD to read this one too ;-)

For Review:

Lies We Tell Ourselves
by Robin Talley
-LGBTQ, YA
courtesy of Media Masters Publicity
Thanks Casey!
Amazon | Goodreads

Hunting in Bruges
(Hunters' Guild #1)
by E.J. Stevens
-paranormal, urban fantasy
courtesy of author
Thanks E.J.!
Amazon | Goodreads

Hit
by Lorie Ann Grover
-YA
courtesy of BookSparks Fall Reading Challenge 2014
Thanks Janay!
Amazon | Goodreads
Library:

Shadow of Night
(All Souls Trilogy #2)
by Deborah Harkness
-demons, vampires, witches
Amazon | Goodreads

Book of Life
(All Souls Trilogy #3)
by Deborah Harkness
-demons, vampires, witches
Amazon | Goodreads
-----> HAD to pick up the rest of this trilogy after experiencing A Discovery of Witches which I really loved, listening to the audio versions

Dreaming about getting soon:

Neil Patrick Harris:
Choose Your Own Autobiography
by Neil Patrick Harris
Amazon | Goodreads
Tired of memoirs that only tell you what really happened?

Sick of deeply personal accounts written in the first person? Seeking an exciting, interactive read that puts the “u” back in “aUtobiography”? Then look no further than Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography! In this revolutionary, Joycean experiment in light celebrity narrative, actor/personality/carbon-based-life-form Neil Patrick Harris lets you, the reader, live his life. You will be born to New Mexico. You will get your big break at an acting camp. You will get into a bizarre confrontation outside a nightclub with actor Scott Caan. Even better, at each critical juncture of your life you will choose how to proceed. You will decide whether to try out for Doogie Howser, M.D. You will decide whether to spend years struggling with your sexuality. You will decide what kind of caviar you want to eat on board Elton John’s yacht.

Choose correctly and you’ll find fame, fortune, and true love. Choose incorrectly and you’ll find misery, heartbreak, and a hideous death by piranhas. All this, plus magic tricks, cocktail recipes, embarrassing pictures from your time as a child actor, and even a closing song. Yes, if you buy one book this year, congratulations on being above the American average, and make that book Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography!

-----> really curious to read this format for an autobiography AND really fell for NHP's character, Barney in How I Met Your Mother tv series

OTHER things on my shelf: kinda book-related

Started listening to another book podcast...

I got turned on to this U.K. duo, Adventure With Words, after listening their Gone Girl episode where Simon from The Readers is a guest.

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* some of these may be offered as giveaways within the next two months

* comment and TELL me what you have acquired for your shelves recently

* per usual, check out the sidebar for my current giveaways offers

Destined for Doon by Laurie Langdon and Carey Corp

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Destined for Doon
by Laurie Langdon and Carey Corp

Find out more about this book and author:
Amazon
Goodreads
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Website
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Just released: September 2, 2014
Publisher: Blink
Genre: Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Romance, YA
Hardback: 352 pages
Rating: 5

Doon series:
Doon
Destined for Doon
Book 3 - 2015
Book 4 - 2016

In this sequel to Doon, Mackenna Reid realizes she made a horrible mistake in choosing to follow her dreams of Broadway instead of staying in the enchanted land of Doon. To make everything worse, she's received her Calling—proof she and Duncan are each other's one true love—and it's pure torment, especially when visions of the very alluring Scottish prince appear right before she goes on stage.

So when Duncan tells her an ancient curse threatens to overtake Doon and the new queen and Kenna’s best friend, Veronica, needs her to return, Kenna doesn't have to think twice. With darkness closing in on all sides, Kenna and Vee must battle a world of nightmares in order to protect the kingdom. But it will take the ultimate test of courage for Kenna to salvage her happily ever after.

Zombie sighting:
Zombies! I'd had an irrational fear of them since Vee and I snuck into an r-rated movie when we were twelve — at my insistence, of course.
-chapter 2, page 29

My two-bits:

Wonderful blend of adventure and romance with a fairy tale like vibe.

I am reading backwards. I have not read book one and now have it on my tbr pile as I really enjoyed falling into this world and want to know more.

I was taken at the start with the character, Duncan and his swoon-inducing Scottish accent.

side note: I have become biased after reading Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series (waaaay back when). I fell in love with Scotland (have yet to visit there) and things related.

Being the second in the series, the story goes into what happens after the happily ever after comes about - as one of the characters from book one is now a Queen and has nabbed her Prince Charming.

What made this story fun to read was that there were two spunky female protagonists to follow along. Both with equally interesting personalities, love interests and story lines.

Loved the banter between both sets of couples and found myself chuckling here and there throughout the read.

About the authors:

Carey Corp lives in the metropolitan Midwest with her loveable yet out-of-control family. Carey wrote her first book at the age of seven, and currently begins each morning consuming copious amounts of coffee while weaving stories that capture her exhaustive imagination.

She harbors a voracious passion (in no consistent order) for mohawks, Italy, musical theater, chocolate, and Jane Austen.

Carey’s debut novel for teens, The Halo Chronicles: The Guardian, earned her national recognition as 2010 Golden Heart finalist for best young adult fiction and was recently featured at the 2012 RT Booklovers Convention in Chicago in YA Alley.
Facebook | Twitter @careycorp | Website | Goodreads

Lorie Langdon has over ten years of experience writing online and print advertising for a Fortune 500 company, and left her thriving corporate career to satisfy the voices in her head.

Now as a full-time author and stay-at-home mom, she spends her summers editing poolside while dodging automatic water-gun fire, and the rest of the year tucked into her cozy office, Havanese puppy by her side, working to translate her effusive imagination into the written word and continue to build the young-adult-focused blog, Honestly YA.
Facebook | Twitter @LorieLangdon | Website | Goodreads

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* review copy courtesy of Fall Reading Challenge 2014. @booksparks #FRC2014

Fall Reading Challenge 2014

Fall Reading Challenge 2014
sponsored by BookSparksPR
details here

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I am really liking the BookSparks reading challenges and will participate in the Fall 2014 challenge.

Below are the ones I plan on reading. (see complete list)

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Course: Guide to Women’s Studies
Required reading: Mating for Life by Marissa Stapley
Department: Women’s Fiction
Course Date: Week of September 8
my review
With honesty and heart-warming humor this course will transport you into four women’s lives. While you watch them navigate their chaotic and unconventional lifestyles, they realize the many modern roles woman play and that some love can really last a lifetime.

Course: Poetry 101
Required reading: Ghosting by Edith Pattou
Department: Young Adult
Course Date: Week of September 22
my review
Have a love for drama and poetry? Then this course is a must for you! Throughout this class you will learn about a group of teenagers’ perspectives on an end-of-the-summer prank gone wrong, written in verse. Alcohol, guns and a dare— within minutes, events collide and a group of teenager’s lives are altered forever.

Course: Theatre Studies 201
Required reading: Destined for Doon by Laurie Langdon and Carey Corp
Department: Young Adult
Course Date: Week of October 6
my review
*Suggested prerequisite for this class (available upon request): Theatre 101 (Doon by Laurie Langdon and Carey Corp)

Anyone with an active imagination should ace this course! This exciting class explores the enchanted land of Doon and what it means to live there. With Broadway, true love and an ancient curse, a group of three friends must battle a world of nightmares in order to save their beloved kingdom.

Course: 90s Music
Required reading: Rock Angel by Jeanne Bogino
Department: New Adult
Course Date: Week of October 20
my review
Calling all 90s rocker chicks (or those who wish they were)! By the end of this course you will have witnessed a young and beautiful guitar goddess rise to stardom and face the challenges inherent with being at the height of 90s rock. With love, drugs, bad boys and rock-n-roll this class will be nothing short of entertaining.

Course: Fairy Tale Remix 102
Required reading: Queen of Hearts Volume 2: The Wonder by Colleen Oakes
Department: Young Adult
Course Date: Week of October 27
my review
*Suggested prerequisite for this class (available upon request): Fairy Tale Remix 101 (Queen of Hearts Volume 1 by Colleen Oakes - my review)

Continue on the adventure of a twisted Wonderland fairytale with FTR 102! In this class you will discover that not all fairytales have a happy ending and sometimes the pretty princess becomes the vile villain. This is an important course for anyone looking forward to Fairy Tale Remix 201 (Queen of Hearts Volume 3: The Fury).

Course: Hot for Teacher
Required reading: Hit by Lorie Ann Grover
Department: Young Adult
Course Date: Week of November 3
my review
This course might be a little unconventional but why not learn how to navigate a flirtation with a teacher. In this course you will explore a student-teacher relationship that has become too flirty and too great a risk. This forbidden relationship is exhilarating and intense until a tragic accident changes everything.

Course: Family Studies
Required reading: Stillwater Rising by Steena Holmes
Department: Women’s Fiction
Course Date: Week of November 17
my review
Throughout this course you will uncover the heart-wrenching story of a town trying to put itself back together after an elementary shooting that traumatized a close-knit community.

Course: Studying Abroad! Semester in Thailand
Required reading: The Unimaginable by Dina Silver
Department: Women’s Fiction
Course Date: Week of December 1
my review
Pack your bags, grab your college sweetheart and get ready for an uber-romantic cruise to Thailand. You’ll learn the fine arts of wining, dining and pirate-invasion-evasion. Wait, what? Yes, this cruise is definitely not everything it seems.

Course: Personality Psychology
Required reading: Both of Me by Jonathan Friesen
Department: Young Adult
Course Date: Week of December 8
my review
Investigate the unexplained condition of dissociative identity disorder in this course through Elias and Cara’s story. Cara meets Elias on a plane and soon discovers that there is not just one Elias but two and Cara quickly finds herself entangled in both of Elias’s lives.

Extra reading: The Body Tourist by Dana Lise Shavin
my review
In this moving and funny memoir that spans the six years following the author's purported recovery from anorexia, Dana Lise Shavin offers a candid and ultimately optimistic window into the mindset and machinations of a mental illness whose tentacles reached deep into her life, long after she was considered "cured."

In 1981, Shavin graduated from college with a BA in Psychology. It had been a difficult venture that included an expulsion, a four-month institutionalization, and a multitude of transfers. By the time it was over, she was convinced she was cured, and that it was time to start curing others. "I’m ready," she told her parents, her therapist, and friends—all of whom shook their heads in horror at her 95-pound, 5’9” frame. Undaunted, she landed a job as a counselor in a halfway house for drug and alcohol addicts. If anyone knew what it took to become a happy, functioning adult, Shavin was convinced she was the one.

As anyone would suspect, the burden of self-contempt, faulty logic, and interpersonal turmoil that are the character traits of depressive disorders and addictions do not miraculously disappear once medication and therapy have taken effect. Where, then, do these dangerous obsessions, such as the wish for obliteration (which often co-exists with the wish for immortality), go once a person sets foot on the road to recovery?

For Shavin, they lived beneath the radar of her supposed new-found health, disguising themselves in the falling-down houses she happily moved into and the dangerous neighborhoods she somehow didn't fear. They announced themselves in the deeply flawed men she professed to adore, the food rituals she thought were normal, the ordinary sex she could not have, and, most profoundly, her inability to acknowledge her father’s illness and encroaching death.

While many writers have written candidly and eloquently about their struggles with depression, addictions, and eating disorders, those stories usually conclude once there is progress toward recovery. Beyond recovery—whether from addiction, illness, the death of a loved one, or divorce—there is another story, one that is about how we re-join the world, and, in the living years that follow the darkness, pursue a life that is creative, engaged, and deeply felt in one's body.

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It is not too late, you can join too - details here.