Release Day Blitz: Dangerous Love by Casey Clipper #CaseyClipper #DangerousLove #LoveSeries #ReleaseDay #99centsReleaseDaySpecial

Title: Dangerous Love (The Love Series #3)
Author: Casey Clipper
Publisher: Self
Release Date: March 10, 2015
For today only, Dangerous Love will be on sale for $0.99.

Derk Forester is a man who's used to getting what he wants when he wants. He takes, conquers, then saunters away in all aspects of his life - work and play. Years embedded deep in the mob and a sour taste for relationships, he has zero desire to find a permanent partner to make a home with. His carefree lifestyle leaves him with a long list of inconsequential, bed-rocking, no-strings-attached women. A daily life he relishes until he meets...her. The one woman who could alter his world. The one woman he can't get out of his head. The one woman who could bring him to his knees. The one woman who could be used against him.

If it wasn't for bad luck, Mackenzie Hiland would have no luck at all. A cheating husband, shafted by the courts, no money or home, her life is a dismal list of horrible choices and even worse consequences. After acknowledging she needs to change her decision making skills, Mackenzie can't help but to be lured in by the dangerous man, who's taken an interest in her and is blatant in his desire to get her into his bed. Despite the fact she tries to distance herself from Derk, he refuses her rejections. Will Derk become another addition to the long list of regretful decisions she's made? Could Derk possibly be the man that doesn't screw her over? Or will Derk be the one choice that finally takes her to a point of no return?

Warning: Not suitable for under 18 yrs of age. Contains strong language, violence, and sex.


Excerpt

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE

A few minutes after ten, Derk and Smith sauntered into Cards to find it filled with wall to wall drunks.

"Holy sh*t," Derk spat.

Mackenzie was on top of the bar with Kayla and two other bartenders doing some sort of dance, gyrating to the pulse of the music. He could have sworn he felt his blood pressure spike. F*&k this shit. It was bad enough she just recovered from a concussion from dancing on that cesspool of a bar, but to be on display like a pole dancer. Forget it. Not his girl. She needed to find a goddamn secretary job.

Review: Awoken by Sarah Noffke

Title: Awoken (The Lucidites #1)
Author: Sarah Noffke
Publisher: One-Twenty-Six Press
Release Date: November 24, 2014
Acquired Via: Author
Around the world humans are hallucinating after sleepless nights.

In a sterile, underground institute the forecasters keep reporting the same events.

And in the backwoods of Texas, a sixteen-year-old girl is about to be caught up in a fierce, ethereal battle.

Meet Roya Stark. She drowns every night in her dreams, spends her hours reading classic literature to avoid her family’s ridicule, and is prone to premonitions—which are becoming more frequent. And now her dreams are filled with strangers offering to reveal what she has always wanted to know: Who is she? That’s the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out. But will Roya live to regret learning the truth?

My Review

Even though Awoken is a dream traveling book, a lot of it seemed like a time travel book. Especially, since the dream travelers could travel back in time during their dreams. I did think that the combination of dream traveling with other powers such as mind reading or being able to see a few seconds in the future was a unique premise.

March is the Month to #KeepYAWeird - #Giveaway & Upcoming Twitter Chat

Our awesome friends at Penguin Teen have put together the special campaign to "Keep YA Weird" and promote unique, nontraditional books that are aimed at young people. All month long, bloggers will be reviewing "weird" books, there will be loads of giveaways, and coming up next week, a Twitter chat with six fabulous authors. Just follow the #KeepYAWeird hashtag!

About the Twitter Chat

The Keep YA Weird Twitter chat will be on March 17th at 7:00pm EST with some of everyone's favorite weird YA writers:

Andrew Smith (The Alex Crow)
Jon Skovron (Man Made Boy)
April Genevieve Tucholke (Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea)
Kat Rosenfield (Inland, Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone)
Brenna Yovanoff (Paper Valentine)

Just click on the books' titles to find out more about them!

Giveaway

"What's Your Winner's Curse?" - The @MarieRutkoski Blog Tour #TheWinnersCurse #Giveaway

The “Winner’s Curse” is an economics term that means you’ve gotten what you wanted . . . but at too high a price. In honor of Marie Rutkoski’s Winner’s Trilogy, Mac Teen Books asked bloggers talk about their own personal “Winner’s Curse!”

My Winner's Curse

I know a lot of bloggers chose their families as something they would pay too high a price for and other serious choices. I want to be a little lighter.

My "Winner's Curse" would be Diet Coke. I know there are lots of studies about how terrible it is for us, but I have to have it every day. I buy it every day. Have I gotten kidney and urinary tract infections from drinking too many? Yes, before I learned my limit. Do I know about Aspartame Poisoning? Of course I do - my family has staged intervention after intervention. I've even given it up before. However, it is my only vice, and I know there are many worse ones out there.

Many people would say that the supposed side effects of Diet Coke are too high a price to pay to drink the glorious nectar, but it is one that I'm willing to pay. In fact, I think I'll go have one now.

About The Winner's Curse

Spotlight (Interview &Giveaway): Awoken by Sarah Noffke

Title: Awoken (The Lucidites #1)
Author: Sarah Noffke
Publisher: One-Twenty-Six Press
Release Date: November 24, 2014
Around the world humans are hallucinating after sleepless nights.

In a sterile, underground institute the forecasters keep reporting the same events.

And in the backwoods of Texas, a sixteen-year-old girl is about to be caught up in a fierce, ethereal battle.

Meet Roya Stark. She drowns every night in her dreams, spends her hours reading classic literature to avoid her family’s ridicule, and is prone to premonitions—which are becoming more frequent. And now her dreams are filled with strangers offering to reveal what she has always wanted to know: Who is she? That’s the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out. But will Roya live to regret learning the truth?

Interview

Amber: Hi Sarah, thank you so much for stopping by Bibliophilia, Please! What was your inspiration or muse in creating a time/dream travel book?

Sarah Noffke: I’ve always been fascinated by dreams and sleep. Not just sleeping, but dreaming, is vital to our survival. If we don’t dream then the human brain deteriorates. REM sleep deprivation in rats has shown to cause a loss of survival behaviors, decrease of pain threshold and depression. In humans, sleep deprivation causes hallucinations because it is so crucial to brain function. All this kept me thinking about the power stored in dreams and dreaming abilities. I spun these ideas around in my head until I concocted a villain (Zhuang) who stole human’s abilities to achieve REM rendering them hallucinating zombies. And maybe also I was inspired by my own sleep deprivation at the time. My daughter was six months old and not sleeping through the night. I’m fairly certain I shouldn’t have been operating a motor vehicle.

I also had to include time travel in my books. This was a must. Time travel makes the plot really difficult, but for that reason it also adds great complexity. I LOVE Doctor Who for this reason.

Amber: Do you write full-time or do you have a day-job? If you have a day-job, what is it?

Early Review: Sweet by Emmy Laybourne

Title: Sweet
Author: Emmy Laybourne
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends (Macmillan)
Release Date: June 2, 2015
Acquired Via: Around the World ARC Tours
A cruise to die for...

Solu’s luxurious celebrity-filled Cruise to Lose is billed as “the biggest cruise since the Titanic,” and if the new diet sweetener works as promised — dropping five percent of a person’s body weight in just days — it would be the answer to the world’s obesity problem. But Laurel is starting to regret accepting her friend Viv’s invitation. She’s already completely embarrassed herself in front of celebrity host Tom Forelli (otherwise known as the hottest guy ever!), and she’s too seasick to even try the sweetener. And that’s before Viv and all the other passengers start acting really strange.

Tom knows that he should be grateful for this job and the chance to shed his childhood “Baby Tom-Tom” image. His publicists have even set up a “romance” with a sexy reality-TV star. But as things on the ship start to get a bit wild, he finds himself drawn to a different girl. And when his celebrity hosting gig turns into an expose on the shocking side effects of Solu, it’s Laurel that he’s determined to save.

Emmy Laybourne takes readers on a dream vacation that goes first comically, then tragically, then horrifyingly, wrong.

My Review

Sweet is a book that you're going to want to get your hands on when it releases this summer. It's the perfect summertime book because it reads quickly, it's set on a cruise ship, and who isn't worrying about their size in bathing suit season? And the best thing about Sweet? It handles weight loss and body image very tactfully and presents quick fixes as a less than ideal way to go around it.

Blog Tour (Interview & Giveaway): Sweet Muse by Ava Cummings

Title: Sweet Muse
Author: Ava Cummings
Publisher: Merrimack Media
Tour Organizer: Lady Reader's Bookstuff Blog Tours
Release Date: January 22, 2015
Determined to overcome her difficult past, Anna Starr lands a coveted job at the nation's biggest celebrity magazine in the center of the New York City power scene. She learns early on to make it on her own, and through sheer force of will she does. But frustration sets in when the dark side of tabloid journalism starts to poke through, and she gets duped while dating slicker-than-thou city boys.

Amidst a sea of cocktail parties, Anna meets rising art star Damien Wolfe. Their connection is dangerous, intense, and passionate beyond her imagination. He sees her in a way that she has never seen herself, setting her on a journey toward self-discovery—understanding what it means to be truly loved for the first time in her life. But she may lose it all when her blind ambition and his dark past lead to a crisis that changes everything.

Interview

Let us start with the Basics of Ava...

Who are you?

I’m Ava Cummings.

Tell us about yourself.

I spent more than 10 years as a magazine editor at some of the biggest and best-known magazines in the world. She began my career at ELLE, where I fetched coffee, fell in love with fashion, and, eventually, became a full-fledged editor, covering Hollywood and bringing in stories about bold, complicated women that were making a difference in the world.

Soon enough, though, the rise of celebrity culture in the early 2000s lured my to Us Weekly and then In Touch, where I helped create the raging celebrity news category that exists today. I saw a parallel between soap operas and celebrity magazines and built storylines that drew readers back each week to get the next installment in the lives of the stars that they loved and idolized. A knack and a passion for dramatic storytelling had been solidified.

I’ve always been a storyteller, whether weaving celebrity tales together or crafting complex, emotional plotlines for her characters. Inspired by the sweep-you-off-your-feet happy endings of fairy tales, the unbelievable headlines she reads in the news, and the quirky personalities that I’ve encountered in both the real world and on reality TV, I use it all to create fast moving, entertaining, passionate stories. It has been my dream to become a romance novelist since my early days editing love advice columns in women’s magazines.

To balance the frenetic pace of weekly magazines, I found Yoga and became a trained instructor. I’ve always been committed to health and wellness. I still practice daily and revel in its centering and balancing effects, as I juggle a career as a marketing director, raising two children, and my role as a budding romance novelist. I live with my family in the suburbs of Boston. Sweet Muse is my first novel.

A bit about what you have written...

Promo Blitz (Excerpt): Whipped by Kelly Collins

Title: Whipped (Decadent #3)
Author: Kelly Collins
Publisher: Self
Release Date: February 13, 2015
Roxy Somerville grew up with everything. Sports cars and designer clothes were commonplace in her life. Love, affection and autonomy were not. She left her life of luxury, and traded her riches for freedom, a freedom that would lead her back to her first love.

Bobby Anderson had very little in the way of wealth as a child. He had a supportive family and it made him the richest of men. For a time, he had Roxy, then she was gone. Now she’s back in his life, and he will stop at nothing to keep her.

Travel through past mistakes to second chances. Take a journey straight to the heart of love. Whipped is dipped in intrigue and suspense and immersed in sizzling hot passion. Once you find yourself Whipped, there is no turning back.


Excerpt

The drink special tonight is the Painus Anus. It’s a Tequila drink that contains:

1 Part Tequila
1 Slice of jalapeño pepper
Dash of Hot Sauce

Roxy loves this drink. She’s a huge fan of hot and spicy, the hotter the better. This one doesn’t disappoint. Many of the patrons call it the double dipper––hurts going in––hurts coming out.

“Hey, Roxy.” She looks up and sees Trevor and Chris who stand at the end of the bar. She races over to give them a hug. They are hands down her favorite people in the world.