Weekly Update #41

Welcome!

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimberly @ Caffeinated Reviewer. 

It’s a chance to share News. A post to recap the past week, showcase books and share news about what is coming up for the week on our blog.

Now that's explained, it's on to my weekly recap!

Christmas week is over! I hope you all had a wonderful time with your families.
My mum stays with us at Christmas but all the other family that was here for the wedding left on Christmas eve. We had a lovely chilled Christmas day, with a huge meal, and spend the next couple of days - in proper Christmas tradition! - hibernating in the house and eating leftovers.
After that, the cabin fever struck so we had to get out!

We went down to Dorchester to their Tutankhamun museum and spent several hours exploring much to the little dude's delight as he's been listening to Rick Riordan's Kane Chronicles over Christmas break (and is already on book 3) and therefore he was very interested in all things Ancient Egyptian / Egyptian Gods!
We've also spent time at the local parks, wandering around pokemon hunting and bowling too.

Now we're in the New Years countdown.
 New Year is a quiet thing here. I haven't done a big blow out New Years since leaving Edinburgh where I lived on one of the closes of the Royal Mile and therefore was right in the middle of party central and basically had no option but to get on the Hogmanay train or go insane... Nowaday's, it's food, family, and cheesy party games like Just Dance!

I always feel both excited and optimistic and deflated at New Year. Excited for what is to come but miserable that all the fun is over and I'm back to work on Thursday!

I can't complain at the year I've had though... This year, we welcomed a new kitty, bought our first house, bought a new car, I got promoted at work and we got married!
Next year is going to be so tame in comparison.

However you welcome the bells, have a happy new year!

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I loved this book!

My thoughts on Your Sound.

⭐⭐

Ugh, I picked this up via Kindle Unlimited after seeing it on another blog. I thought a nice holiday-themed novella would be a perfect quick read but I was wrong. Yes, it was a quick read but it was painful! The story was so rushed, even for a novella!
And it was all tell, tell , tell! There was no show.
The characters were annoying, everything was so over the top and the amount of drama in an 80 page book was just unnecessary!
The only thing I got right was that it was a quick read otherwise I wouldn't have bothered finishing it.

Kindle Unlimited

I clicked it, read it and didn't like it!

Kindle Unlimited

1-clicked this one after seeing book 2 recommended on another blog. I do love me some UF and the lead character being blind with a werewolf 'guide dog' sounds interesting!

Lots of Best of 2018 lists flying around!
Too many to link but I've been enjoying seeing what people have loved most this year.

In the evenings, my mum and I have been watching the odd thing on catch-up TV and it's been all the types of shows I'd never normally watch  - because I don't really watch 'normal' TV! My mum does though so there's been Mrs Brown's Boys, Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special, a Torvill and Dean Biopic and some random Take That at 30 special... Plus we watched The Midnight Gang adaptation with the little dude because he loved the book and he quite enjoyed the TV movie.

Book Blogger Hop: Books For Christmas?
Cover Reveal: Magnolia Road by J. Lynn Bailey
Review: Your Sound by Katia Rose
Merry Christmas!
Movies: A Netflix Christmas

I'm trying to blog ahead! So far, for this week, I have my best books of 2018 and what books I'm looking forward to in 2019.

Have a great week all!

Book Blogger Hop: Do you get any books for Christmas? If so, name the titles.

About The Meme

The Book Blogger Hop was originally created by Jennifer from Crazy-For-Books in March 2010 and ended on December 31, 2012. With Jennifer's permission, it was relaunched by The Coffee Addicted Writer on February 15, 2013.

Each week the hop will start on a Friday and end on Thursday. 

There will be a weekly prompt featuring a book related question. The hop's purpose is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, befriend other bloggers, and receive new followers to your own blog. 

Did you get any books for Christmas? If so, name the titles.

Can you call yourself a bookworm if you didn't get any books for Christmas?
What kind of madness would that be?
Well actually... I didn't get any books for Christmas.
To be fair, I rarely do as I'm primarily an ebooker. You can't really wrap those and pop them under the tree. I did get a fabulous bookmark though, from my mum. It's for those rare occasions I have a print book in my hands...

What I did get for Christmas are Amazon gift cards. These feed my book buying demon for months!
Seriously, last years Christmas gift cards got me through to June! To be fair, I was being very restrained due to a bulging TBR, my KU subscription and penny pinching to buy my house but still... 6 months on Christmas gift cards.
It was awesome.

This year, I reckon I'm aiming to reach June again as I still have my KU subscription and I have soooo so many books on the backlist that I'm committed to whittling down.

🌻

Did you get any books for Christmas this year? What were they?

🌻

To view the linky list of this weeks Hop participants, please visit The Coffee Addicted Writer.

Cover Reveal: Magnolia Road by J. Lynn Bailey

One of my New Years blog resolutions is to cut down on the amount of promo stuff I sign up for as I went a bit overboard the latter half of this year and it got a bit draining. 

However, I read the blurb of this and had to share! It sounds so good... So, behold! 

The cover, blurb and a sneaky peak of J. Lynn Bailey's up-coming book, Magnolia Road!

There's a giveaway at the bottom too...

Releases January 29th!

On the outside, Bryce Hayes is satisfied with the structure of her life, her demanding career, and a series of no-strings-attached relationships, but her brother bounces in and out of rehab, her mother thinks she can beat her son’s addiction, and her father is simply doing what he can to keep a semblance of “normal”. When Bryce’s father, Congressman Hayes, orders her to Granite Harbor, Maine, due to a string of threats to their family coming from an unidentifiable source, she doesn’t expect Ethan Casey, the sexy soldier who slept with her, then walked out, without so much as a goodbye, to be her landlord.

Ethan’s past is riddled with chaos, bullets, and loud noise. After returning to his small town after the war, he’s determined to get back to his roots. Peace, quiet, and working as a game warden for the Maine Warden Service sounds right as rain. But with Bryce in Granite Harbor, staying in his house on Magnolia Road, Ethan can’t stop thinking about his future—and that includes Bryce. But to make things right with the love of his life, he’ll have to open old wounds…and risk losing her forever.

If silence had a name in this moment, it would be fear. Fear and darkness go together like smothered love—stifling, overbearing, and hard to overcome. But, right now, all I know is that I’d rather feel these things because I’m with Ethan. And I’ll do it the way he wants. If that means as friends or lovers because living without him doesn’t seem like a viable option. It’s not something I think I can do. The strong, willful, never-need-a-man woman that I am has somehow changed, turned. Flipped.

This situation could have been avoided. Maybe, if I had ignored Ethan that day in Los Angeles, ignored his long legs and his dark brown eyes and long eyelashes, the vein that runs the course of his left arm, his big hands, maybe this moment wouldn’t hurt so much, knowing it was the beginning of the end. Knowing I made a choice that would shatter my heart because what we did today wasn’t love. We didn’t make love. We didn’t share our deepest secrets.

We put bandages on our wounds.

I lick my lips before I put my mouth to his chest for a kiss. “I know this is the end, Ethan.”

Add it to your Goodreads!

J. Lynn Bailey has loved to write since she learned to read, around the second grade. When she isn't running after her children, watching COPS, or on the hunt for her next Laffy Taffy joke, you can probably find her holed up in her writing room feverishly working on her next book. She lives in Northern California with her family.

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Review: Your Sound by Katia Rose

Molly Myers is just your average groupie next door.
Literally.

The rock star whose posters cover her bedroom wall is banging her roommate right on the other side of it. Even for Molly, the reigning queen of embarrassing moments, the situation is epically awkward. Every thump of the headboard is just one more reminder that the lead singers of famous bands don’t date bumbling shy girls too anxious to leave their own rooms.

JP Bouchard-Guindon wasn’t looking for Molly’s room when he accidentally burst through the door, but the wild-haired girl lying there in her underwear was certainly worth the detour.

As the keyboardist for Montreal’s latest indie rock sensation, JP has met his fair share of fangirls. He’s always ready to throw up some finger guns for a photo. What he’s not ready for is the way skittish, wide-eyed Molly Myers gets stuck inside his head.

A practical joker and a social recluse are the last people anyone expects a connection between. She’s silence aching for a voice, and he’s sound with a craving for quiet. Their differences will either pull them together, or fracture their worlds when they push them apart.

*ARC provided in exchange on an honest review*

ebook

Full length novel

Alternating, first person.

No.

No.
Even though this is book 3 in the Sherbrooke Station series, each can be read as a standalone.

No

No

No

No

No

OMG, guys! This book! This book... This book stole my heart!
From beginning to end it made me smile, it made me feel happy. I laughed, I cringed, my stomach swooped and my heart fluttered and I full on fell in love with JP and Molly.
They were two perfect for each other little peas in a pod.

Molly is a painfully awkward fan-girl living with the horror that the frontman of the band she idolizes is her roommate's boyfriend. She's sweet, she's loyal and an unbelievably talented artist but it's all buried under layers of self-consciousness, doubt and social anxiety. Molly is being smothered by her own fears and the expectation of her mother. I swear, I just wanted to hug the poor girl. She was so awkward it was painful at times but then she begins to bloom! She begins to realise what she is capable of. She comes out of her shell, finds her voice, stops being so afraid and goes after everything she wants.

JP is a mad-hatter. He's constantly on the go and totally random. He reminds me pretty strongly of Mal from Kylie Scott's Stage Dive series. However, he's so much more than the random goof who exists to provide the comic value. JP has hang-ups and wounds that are as real as anyone's and he too has to go on a journey to heal and move on.

I adored how, on paper, JP and Molly shouldn't have worked but they are exactly what the other needed. I loved how they were friends first and slowly built to being more... To being everything. Each was the catalyst of the other's change but the story wasn't a "and then they fell in love and everything was better" story. They help each other, make the other see themselves more clearly, but there is no magic cure all here: The changes come from within.

It's a journey of self-discovery and, in the process, falling in love. It's not a heavy-hearted read, it's low angst and fun but serious when needed. I seriously loved it!

For those who love a rockstar romance with heart, you've got to read it. In fact, you've got to read the series. It's awesome.

Meh. It fits with the other covers and it's refreshing in that it doesn't have a shirtless dude on it. Don't get me wrong, I love a ripped shirtless dude as much as the next gal but it's nice to have a change!