IWSG Day, Boating 2/3, Mini Book Reviews, and NaNo Begins!

oats!

As the Gaffer says in chapter 1 of The Lord of the Rings, “‘There isn’t no call to go talking of pushing and pulling. Boats are quite tricky enough for those that sit still without looking further for the cause of trouble.’”

I hadn't known that the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings is available online!

The thing about loving to mess about in boats is that you also need to be a good swimmer! I can float and swim but I'm not very confident and can't dive. I wonder if it's too late to take lessons?

Boat photos below!

On the other hand, I've got enough going on at the moment because NaNoWriMo has begun! I'm trying a little experiment with my writing this time around; we'll see if it pans out.


Today is Insecure Writer's Support Group Day!

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!
Posting: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting!
Be sure to link to this page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.
Every month, we announce a question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say.
You ready?
Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!

I confess that I'm scheduling this post in advance, so I'll have to answer the monthly question in the comments.


I've got some mini reviews today!

These are all books I received ARCs or free copies of in the past few months:


First up, three by Kait Nolan

Wrapped Up With A Ranger

Can a grumpy former Ranger find lasting happiness in a marriage of convenience with a sunny single mom?
After losing his leg, former Army Ranger Holt Steele is building a new life and a new business with his friends. Sure, he never expected to put small-town baker on his resume, but he finds he likes the quiet, simple life. If only he didn't like the sunny single mom who works across the street--or her adorable kid--quite so much.
After escaping a controlling husband, event planner Cayla Black has one focus--growing her business and maintaining a safe, happy home for her daughter. She has no time or interest in a man. Not even one who charms her child with Disney songs and keeps turning up like a mind-reader to help without being asked.
But when her ex's conviction is overturned on a technicality, and he shows up to reclaim his wife and child, Holt intervenes with an outrageous lie. The only way to fix it is to make his falsehood the truth. As they struggle to convince everyone that their marriage of protection is real, these two reluctant hearts fall deeper, until the lines between the fiction and the dream begin to blur, and they have to risk it all to protect the family they didn't know they wanted.

Stirred Up by A SEAL

Can a SEAL without a mission and a widowed baker help each other learn to live again?
Jonah Ferguson never wanted to be anything but a Navy SEAL. But after an injury sidelines his military career, he finds himself back home in small-town Tennessee. Opening a bakery with his best friends and daring to re-imagine his life is a whole new mission, but his biggest challenge yet is sticking to the friend zone with the woman who helped give him new purpose.
Two years after losing her husband to a traumatic brain injury, baker Rachel McCleary needs a change. With the proceeds from the sale of her business, she's exploring what a new life would look like. For the short-term, it means helping one of her former students make his fledgling business thrive. And hopefully adding some benefits to the friendship that helped bring her back to life.
All Rachel wants is temporary, and that's the one thing Jonah can give her. But when the trouble that's stalked his business from the start lands her in its crosshairs--and the hospital--he can't deny that there's nothing short-term about his feelings. Determined to protect her at all costs, he enters into a dangerous race to neutralize the threat before it torpedoes everything he holds dear.

Hung Up on the Hacker

Can a white hat hacker and a wild child tattoo artist turn their oops into forever?
Former Army Intelligence officer Cash Grantham is a whiz with computers and data. An expert in cyber security, he prides himself on being prepared for anything. That doesn't include his best friend's little sister. The one who's all grown up.
Tattoo artist Hadley Steele always had a thing for Cash when she was young. But the man who swaggers into her shop is a far cry from the moody teen she remembers. One look and that childhood crush ignites into a simmering lust that neither of them can deny.
Feeling guilty about his clandestine involvement with Hadley, Cash puts their relationship on hold and hauls himself to Tennessee to square things with her brother. Turns out Hadley has the same idea. And she's got a surprise he didn't see coming. Now they've both got to find a way to break the news their connection as family just got a whole lot more permanent.

These can all be read as standalones but also work well as a series as there's a central mystery running throughout, that only gets solved in Stirred Up by a SEAL. Hung Up on the Hacker is a novella that comes after, and provides a great romance and some extra tit bits of the lives of all the other characters. There's also an exciting set up for a future book that's going to be a second chance romance set during Christmas. I can't wait!

Please Join Us by Catherine Mckenzie

At thirty-nine, Nicole Muller’s life is on the rocks. Her once brilliant law career is falling apart. Her friends are all having babies before they turn forty, while she remains childless. She and her husband are soon to be forced out of the apartment they love. But after a warning from her firm’s senior partners, she receives an invitation from an exclusive women’s networking group, Panthera Leo. Membership is anonymous, but every woman is a successful professional. And despite worries this group might be a cult, Nicole signs up for their retreat in Colorado. Once there, she meets the other women who will make up her Pride. A CEO, an actress, a finance whiz, a congresswoman: Nicole can’t believe her luck. The founders of Panthera Leo are equally as impressive. They explain the group’s core philosophy: they’re a girl’s club in a boy’s club world. Nicole is all in. And when she gets back home, she soon sees dividends. Her new network quickly provides her with clients that help her relaunch her career, and a great new apartment too. The favors she has to provide in return seem benign. But then she’s called to the congresswoman’s apartment late at night where she’s pressed into helping her cover up a crime. And suddenly concerns that something more sinister is at play seem all too relevant.

Ooh, this one had me up late reading! Tension-filled and with intriguing characters. I kept wondering what I would do if I were faced with the same situation!

An Unlikely Match by Laura Bradbury

Could the man I hate be the perfect match I need?
I’m Jules Kelly, a certified bohemian boss babe, whose hip tech company just won subsidized office space in the coolest co-working space in town. From a distance I seem poised to take over the world (or at least the travel industry), and I would be if it weren’t for two big complications:
1. A rare and seriously inconvenient disease is tanking my health by the day, and my only hope for a cure—a transplant—is moving further from my grasp.
2. A soulless database company is sharing my new office space, and its coldly gorgeous, judgmental, CEO is on a path to world dominance (at least in his mind).
Tom Davenport represents the very worst of bro culture in the start-up world. Naturally, we despise each other.
The thing is, as much as Tom's antagonism annoys me, he has an uncanny ability to conjure up my fighting spirit and vitality at a time when my illness is robbing me of both. I'm drawn to him in ways I can't (or would really rather not) understand.
A mysterious angel investor forces our companies to compete for a life-changing amount of money just when my relationship with Tom becomes infinitely more complicated. To make matters worse, things get cutthroat just as my health and time start to run out.
In order to survive, I must decide if I can truly trust my most unlikely ally of all.

This was fun and touching and heartwarming! And very accurate about all aspects of the process of needing a transplant and waiting for one (including when it's unclear whether a matching donor will be found).

All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay

On a dark night, along a lonely stretch of coast, a small merchant ship sends two people ashore: their purpose is assassination. They have been hired by two of the most dangerous men alive to alter the balance of power in the world. The consequences of that act will affect the destinies of empires as well as lives both great and small.
One of those arriving on that stony strand is a young woman who had been abducted by corsairs as a child and sold into years of servitude far from her home. Having escaped, she is trying to chart her own course—and is bent upon revenge. The man who will bring the others out from the city on his ship—if they survive their mission—still remembers being exiled as a boy with his family, for their faith; it is a moment that never leaves him. In what follows, through a story both intimate and epic, unforgettable characters are immersed in the fierce and deadly struggles that define their time.
All the Seas of the World is a stand-alone page-turning drama that also offers moving reflections on memory, fate, and the random events that can shape our lives—in the past, and today. 

 

I'm still reading this one. I have to confess that it's been difficult to get into. One of those instances where I would find it a lot easier to read as a paperback or hardcover, rather than through my Kindle app.

The Reservoir by David Duchovny (yes, it's Mulder!)

I want to read all these other books now!

The Reservoir follows an unexceptional man in an exceptional time. We see our present-day pandemic world and New York City through the eyes of a former Wall Street veteran, Ridley, as he looks back upon his life in his enforced quarantine solitude, wondering what it all means and who he really is.
Sitting and brooding night after night, gazing out his huge picture window high above the Central Park Reservoir, Ridley spots a flashing light in an apartment across the park as if a lonely quarantined person is signaling him in Morse code. His determination to find out who this mystery woman is leads him on an epic quest that will ultimately tempt him with either delusional madness or the fulfillment of his own mythic fate.
Is he a dying man going mad or an everyman metamorphosing into a hero? Or both? We accompany Ridley as he leaves the safety of his apartment window to save the Fifth Avenue femme fatale and descends into a dangerous, increasingly surreal world of global conspiracies, madness, and sickness of this viral time. As Ridley’s actions grow more and more uncharacteristic, he realizes the key to all the mysteries of now, and even all of history, seem to lie deep beneath the freezing waters of the reservoir.

I had no idea what to expect from this book when I got it from Akashic Books, but I really enjoyed it, if that's the right word to use for a story that was mysterious and thoughtful.

The Prospect by Kevin Brennan

When seasoned baseball scout, Bud Esterhaus, recruits phenom pitcher, Joe Carpenter, for the El Centro Sand Cats, he thinks he might be able to wind down his career with a patina of quality. But as Joe climbs through the minor league ranks and attracts the attention of the L.A. Dodgers, Bud is stunned to discover that the budding star is actually a girl—a she-nom—and the whole plan will come crashing down if he can’t cook up a way to keep her identity hidden from the testosterone-steeped world of professional baseball. Joe Carpenter is really Jo Carpenter, and Bud thinks she’s good enough to be the first woman to make The Show.
In The Prospect, Kevin Brennan (author of Parts Unknown—William Morrow/HarperCollins) shows us one way—with a little Shakespearean gender bending—a woman could find herself playing in Major League Baseball. The Natural meets Bull Durham meets A League of Their Own in this warm girl-powered story.

I've reviewed Kevin Brennan's books before and he's been a guest poster on the blog!

This book was very well written and, how shall I put this, calmly exciting. I knew they would be found out, but I didn't know how or when or what might happen... You don't need to know anything about baseball (I know very little) to appreciate the characters, their relationship, and the twists and turns of the story!

Bride Price by Barbara Nadel

When jeweller Fahrettin Muftugolu is found dead in his apartment in the Istanbul district of Vefa, it looks like suicide. Searching the jeweller's home, Inspector Mehmet Suleyman and his team come across a hoard of extraordinary artefacts including solid gold religious relics and a mummified human head. But are they real and, if so, who owns these priceless possessions?
As his colleagues begin their investigation, Suleyman is distracted by troubles of his own. His wedding to Gonca Serekoglu is days away, but when Gonca receives her bridal bedcover from a Roma haberdasher and discovers that it is covered in blood, she sees this as a curse on their marriage. Suleyman asks his old friend Cetin Ikmen to help him uncover the truth, but the task is not that simple...
Meanwhile, as the stories swirling around Muftugolu become increasingly sinister, the dead man's wife appears, laying claim to his valuables, and Suleyman is drawn into a dark and dangerous world of smuggling and savagery...

Ooh, it was fun to dive back into Ikmen's world! I love the characters and their intertwined relationships. Reading the story made me long to visit Istanbul (this is the longest I've ever been away!).

A Secret in the Family by Leah Mercer

Rachel sat at the kitchen table, trying to take it all in. Clutching a faded photograph and an unknown necklace in her hands, she realises that everything she thought she knew about her family has been destroyed in an instant. What had her father done?
As her frail mother sleeps soundly upstairs, Rachel thinks back to the home that was once her sanctuary. With a devoted husband and young children herself, Rachel has always wanted to provide a loving home for her own family. It’s what she always thought she had. Until now.
But then she remembers. Her father’s absences from home on long work trips. Her mother, often tight-lipped and the accident which cost her father his life and drove a wedge between Rachel and her mother for years.
As she looks at the unknown girl in the photo, Rachel believes that she holds the key to who her father really was. But as she delves into a lifetime of secrets, Rachel knows that what she is about to discover has the potential to destroy her family forever. Will she risk everything to find out who she really is?

This one was dark! I wasn't expecting that, I must admit. I had to stay up late reading just to find out all the answers and what Rachel was going to do about it all. I don't want to give away anything, but I really felt for Sam!

And now, a trip to Yvoire, across Lake Geneva! Including lunch, dessert, lighting candles, and a visit to an antique shop and the Garden of Five Senses...

 

What good books have you read lately?