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This is Mother Daughter Book Reviews' "Shoutout" to her wonderful "Book Blasters" who posted book blasts with us over the month of December, 2014. Big, big thank you to each and every one of you! You are much appreciated.
* Giveaway Details *
Prize: One winner will receive a $100 Amazon gift card or a PayPal cash prize (winner's choice)
Contest Ends: February 28, 11:59 pm, 2015
Open: Internationally
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Terms and Conditions: NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. The winner will be randomly drawn through the Rafflecopter widget and will be contacted by email within 48 hours after the giveaway ends. The winner will then have 72 hours to respond. If a winner does not respond within 72 hours, a new draw will take place for a new winner. Odds of winning will vary depending on the number of eligible entries received. This contest is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with Facebook. This giveaway is sponsored, hosted and managed by Renee from Mother Daughter Book Reviews. If you have any additional questions - feel free to send and email to Renee(at)MotherDaughterBookReviews(dot)com.
Her whole life, it had just been the two of them. Before her mother’s last breath, she gave Camille the information she had craved her entire life: the identity of her father. Daring to contact him, Camille was welcomed by an entire family she never knew existed. But nothing comes without a price, as she discovers when her family claims a legendary heritage tracing back to a centaur touched by Zeus.
As she learns the secrets of her Centaur bloodline, she is drawn into a forbidden love with Drake. Her life may be the blood debt required to pay for her mother’s transgressions. The same person who once held her mother captive, and forced her into decades of hiding, now controls Camille. Her only chance is to seek a piece of her mother’s past that will win her freedom and the life she desperately wants.
Source: Info in the About Blood Debt was taken from GoodReads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14743629-blood-debt on 31/01/2015.
The Author
About Nancy Straight:
I LOVE Starbucks’ White Mocha Latte and Mountain Dew, (but not together). I have a lead foot so I set cruise control when I drive, even in 25 MPH zones. I almost never win when I play Angry Birds, but have my 9 year old close, so he can clear the hard levels for me. I grew up on a farm and am opposed to eating fresh chicken (not opposed to meat – just opposed to any meat that was alive a few hours before lunch). I am a huge fan of the show, Big Bang Theory, on CBS. I have two fantastic sons, three rotten dogs and a husband that I adore.
Riana “Ria” Ofor is a gifted sculptress whose beautiful creations could draw crowds. But due to the childhood accident that left her facially scarred, she avoids selling her work publicly, instead scraping a living through online sales. However, when a home repossession notice arrives, both her love of sculpting, as well as her home, suddenly come under threat.
Now she is forced to step out of her comfort zone and enter the very public world of gallery showings. When she does land a gallery contract, she then finds herself the target of a rival artist after the very same contract. Using malicious lies about Ria, he intends to make her regret taking what should have been his. Now, Ria must look to find a truth that conquers all lies.
Source: Info in the About Rise was from the press kit from the publicity team.
Buy Link(s):
Excerpt:
Chapter one.
Ria appreciated the beauty of the headless female sculpture standing before her. A sculpture without its head has its own particular beauty. Strong sculpted legs, intricately crafted torso and powerful shoulders – the beauty of creation.
She squatted in front of the sculpture and ran a slender hand over its flanks. The modeling clay she had chosen had done its job; its durability ensuring the legs of the sculpture came out strong and smooth, the hips gently curved. Seven weeks into the making, this piece would be larger than any piece she had previously sculpted, and certainly more challenging.
Here in her art studio, which spanned the basement of her small house in London’s Island Gardens, clay statues of ancient kings and queens graced the long wooden shelves resting against ivory walls. A small sink sat at the far right end against the wall beside a large white storage cupboard, snug beside a two-seater. A small stereo, which she only turned on when sketching, rested on the table beside it.
Time to begin the head, she decided, as she rose gracefully to her feet. Creating the head was her favorite part. If the legs, shoulders, and torso possessed their own particular beauty, then how she created a sculpture’s head showcased its personality – laughing eyes, a slanted mouth, and a molded chin. These will bring out the figure’s humorous manner.
Ria got to her feet. A slim young woman with close-cropped, tightly-curled black hair; she had a dewy, dark chocolate complexion. And with a delicate oval face, even the faded pink burn scars that ran from the apples of her cheekbones down to her collarbone, her classic beauty couldn’t be marred.
She reached for her apron and tied it around her long-sleeved white t-shirt and soft faded blue jeans. Sculpting was arduous and messy work, but one of the perks of being a full-time sculptress was that she went to work in her most comfortable clothes.
She moved to where the armature waited atop the worktable. Shaped like an egg, an armature’s rigid metal framework ensured effective structuring of a sculpture’s head.
Collecting an armful of old newspapers from the storage cupboard in the corner, she rolled the papers into balls then began to fill the armature with them. Once thoroughly packed, she secured the head in place with a small plastic bag. Now for the clay. She took a moment to relish the solid, yet light weight of it in her hand. Then, detail by detail, piece by piece, she began adding more and more clay to the stuffed plastic bag, melding and smoothing it against the bag’s slippery surface. She hummed as she worked, following the measurements she had set out when the idea had first came into her head. Her deft and skilful fingers, armed with her trusted sculpting chisel, manipulated the clay.
The sharp slap of the letter box upstairs stopped her. She stretched her arms high over her head, working out the stiffness in her shoulders caused by bending over the armature. She crossed to the sink and washed her hands, then proceeded to leave the studio, heading up pink carpeted stairs to the ground floor.
She plucked the white envelope lying on the doormat. Early morning sunlight shone through the glass panel in the front door, and the click of women’s heels sounded on the pavement outside as they carried a neighbour to work. Once the morning rush was over as everyone had either left for work or school, she would go for her daily morning walk and then fuel up with a green juice.
She broke the seal of the envelope and pulled out the letter.
Please be informed that payment due on the above-referenced account has not been made. We have made several unsuccessful attempts to contact you. Our records show that your account is in arrears by £11,509.
Please make arrangements to clear the outstanding amount within 28 days, otherwise the case will be escalated to our solicitors, whereupon they may be forced to take legal action resulting in the repossession of the property.
If you have since made arrangements to clear the aforementioned amount, please ignore this letter.
Ria’s stomach dropped somewhere below ground level, and the noose of the repossession notice only tightened further around her neck, almost choking her.
Meet The Author
About D.U. Okonkwo:
D. U. Okonkwo was born and raised in London. An avid reader from childhood, she began writing her own stories at the age of ten. She holds a BSc Hons degree in Business with Spanish, and is currently working on her second novel.
My “day job” is running a school for bright children with serious emotional needs. It is highly rewarding, but when school vacations roll around, I often decompress in Mexico where I have a supportive group of writer friends. I fly out of Houston and in two hours am in Guadalajara, on my way to Lake Chapala, a gorgeous lake in the mountains of Jalisco. Most people have never heard of it, but it is large enough that even a world map shows it as a blue dot in central Mexico. I especially enjoy getting away from the super hot summers in Houston to the mountain coolness, with lots of rain and thunderstorms. Just like Camelot, the rain falls mostly at night.
A string of small Mexican villages line the north side of the lake from the towns of Chapala to Jacotopec, and they are full of American and Canadian expats, some of whom are fulltime residents. Others are snowbirds or sunbirds. It’s only an eight hundred mile trip from Texas to the Jalisco mountains, but I feel sometimes like I’ve been in a time machine that deposited me into slow-moving villages of cobblestones, horses in the street, shops that close at siesta time and bustling open markets. Living or visiting there has been described as attending the best summer camp in the world--- only for adults.
The support of writing friends there has been terrifically important. When I am in Mexico, I am (almost) free of the stresses of my day job, and am able to really concentrate on writing. Two of these friends have published best sellers. We meet for critique sessions and, depending on the time, either retire to a nearby coffee shop or, if it’s later, sip a margarita.
When it’s time to go back home, I feel sad, but refreshed, and ready to begin again.
If you would like to have your pet’s photo posted as one of McCreery’s Friends, send it via the “Perfect Dogs” button at www.almostperfectnovel.com.
Two unlikely friends, an old woman and a boy with special needs, take an aging champion to Westminster Dog Show, and heal their troubled families.
Seventy year-old Bess Rutledge has fantasized about winning the Westminster Dog Show all her life, but now she has decided she is too old to follow her dream. She meets Benny, an angry fourteen year-old with mild autism and ADHD, who has a dream of his own: to impress his self-absorbed mother. He becomes convinced that winning Westminster with McCreery, Bess’ aging champion standard poodle, will finally make his mother proud of him. Getting Bess to go along with his plan, however, is not going to be so easy.
Source: Info in the About Almost Perfect was from the press kit from the publicity team.
Diane Daniels Manning is the co-founder and director of The New School in the Heights, a therapeutic school in Houston, Texas which helps children dealing with social-emotional challenges find success in school and life. She has a Ph.D. in Education and a post-doctoral M.P.H from Harvard and is a practicing child psychoanalyst certified by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Formerly, she was the Director of the Reading and Learning Disabilities Clinic at Tufts University, Lecturer and Research Associate in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Harvard, and Chair of the Department of Education at Tulane University. She learned the inner workings of dog show kennels by writing an authorized oral history of a lifetime President of the Poodle of Club of America. Her writing awards include the Faulkner-Wisdom Novella Prize and the Women in Film and Television Short Script Competition.
When not at The New School, Diane and her writing partners, a Standard Poodle named Misty and a rescue cat named Elvira, convene at the keyboard to share great thoughts and plan the dinner menu.
Prize: Giving away 13 copies of Almost Perfect by Diane Daniels Manning (5 print copies - USA only, 5 ebook copies and 3 audiobooks from Audible - international) and one $25 Amazon Gift Card (open international) Ends Feb 20, 2015
You can also win one $50, $25 or $10 Amazon Gift Card on author’s website. The author will ask a question about the book as an entry.
Only fifty years left before vampires rule the world.
When Dallas police detective Cami Davis joined the city's vampire unit, she planned to use the job as a stepping-stone to a better position in the department.
But she didn't know then what she knows now: there's a silent war raging between humans and vampires, and the vampires are winning.
So with the help of a disaffected vampire and an ex-cop addict, Cami is going undercover, determined to solve a series of recent murders, discover a way to overthrow the local Sanguinary government, and, in the process, help win the war for the human race.
But can she maintain her own humanity in the process? Or will Cami find herself, along with the rest of the world, pulled under a darkness she cannot oppose?
Source: Info in the About Sanguinary was from the press kit from the publicity team.
Buy Link(s):
Meet The Author
About Margo Bond Collins:
Margo Bond Collins lives in Texas with her husband, their daughter, several spoiled cats, and a ridiculous turtle. She teaches college-level English courses online, though writing fiction is her first love. She enjoys reading urban fantasy and paranormal fiction of any genre and spends most of her free time daydreaming about vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, and other monsters. Waking Up Dead is her first published novel. Her second novel, Legally Undead, is an urban fantasy, forthcoming in 2014 from World Weaver Press.
WARNING***
This novella is intended for those 18+ of age and contains strong language, sexual content, and adult situations.
The Kingsmen M.C's saga continues in this newest installment of Tara Oakes' tantalizing new series. In the first three novella's you've come to know and love the characters within the club. Jay and Lil's have had their epic love story play out over the pages of "A Lil' Less Broken", followed by "A Lil' Less Lost" and finally, "A Lil' Less Hopeless". While their fairytale is far from over, the next arc in the series concentrates on some of the other intriguing characters that have been woven throughout Jay and Lil's storyline.
The question on everyone's mind is.... WHO IS CHARLIE? And what is she hiding?
Planting herself deep within the club's inner circle, Charlie came to Chisolm with one goal in mind... to destroy the Kingsmen, M.C., no matter the personal cost. An unknown hatred fuels her mission to take them down. Pairing herself up with one of the club's bad boy's, the M.C.'s enforcer, Clink, seemed like just the ticket to get her in the door.
Once inside the club she had been eyeing from afar, she comes to realizes things are very different from what she had imagined them to be. Villainizing the group as a whole for an injustice that was done to her many years earlier no longer seemed to fit with growing attachments and relationships she was forming.
And then there's Clink. He may very well be the wild card thrown into the mix that derailed Charlie's plans from the get go. Originally, serving as nothing but a way in to the club, and a body to warm her sheets at night, Clink has thrown Charlie for a loop. Determined from an early age to never need a man, Charlie can't help but find herself drawn to him in a carnal and ethereal way. She's tried to fight it, to deny it, but it was in vain. He calls her sugar... but, she's anything but sweet.
A chance twist of luck placed Charlie right in the middle of club politics, where she was able to help free the club's Vice President, Jay, from serving time for murder he did not commit, but willingly confessed to in Book 2. Her risk earned her the hard earned respect and admiration that is hard to come by in the world of the M.C.
Now that she finally has a place of her own in life, a place where she belongs and is wanted... is she willing to give it up? Give Him up? Willing to let it all slip through her fingers? Find out in Book 4 of Tara Oakes' Kingsmen M.C. series, "Bitter Sweet Deception".
If you're looking forward to Bitter Sweet Deception, releasing on FEBRUARY 25TH, make sure you pre-order a copy:Amazon US
Source: Info in the About Bitter Sweet Deception was from the press kit from the publicity team.
Buy Link(s):
Teaser:
Trailer:
Meet The Author
About Tara Oakes:
Tara is a thirty something newbie author from Long Island, New York. She's a voracious reader, a passionate writer and obsessive junk T.V. aficionado. When she's not doing one of those three things she is attempting to garden, hanging with her hubby or partaking in some retail therapy. She enjoys connecting with her readers and is having a blast entering into this new world of publishing.
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