Sunday, November 8, 2009

In My Mailbox!

In my mailbox is a weekly meme created by The Story Siren.

For Review:
How far would you go to protect your family?

Ann Brooks never thought she’d have to answer that question. Then she found her limits tested by a crisis no one could prevent. Now, as her neighborhood descends into panic, she must make tough choices to protect everyone she loves from a threat she cannot even see. In this chillingly urgent novel, Carla Buckley confronts us with the terrifying decisions we are forced to make when ordinary life changes overnight.

A year ago, Ann and Peter Brooks were just another unhappily married couple trying–and failing–to keep their relationship together while they raised two young daughters. Now the world around them is about to be shaken as Peter, a university researcher, comes to a startling realization: A virulent pandemic has made the terrible leap across the ocean to America’s heartland.

And it is killing fifty out of every hundred people it touches.

As their town goes into lockdown, Peter is forced to return home–with his beautiful graduate assistant. But the Brookses’ safe suburban world is no longer the refuge it once was. Food grows scarce, and neighbor turns against neighbor in grocery stores and at gas pumps. And then a winter storm strikes, and the community is left huddling in the dark.

Trapped inside the house she once called home, Ann Brooks must make life-or-death decisions in an environment where opening a door to a neighbor could threaten all the things she holds dear.

Carla Buckley’s poignant debut raises important questions to which there are no easy answers, in an emotionally riveting tale of one family facing unimaginable stress.

Bought: 

There were no surprises in Gatlin County.
We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere.
At least, that's what I thought.
Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong.
There was a curse.
There was a girl.
And in the end, there was a grave.

Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she's struggling to conceal her power and a curse that has haunted her family for generations. But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever.

Ethan Wate, who has been counting the months until he can escape from Gatlin, is haunted by dreams of a beautiful girl he has never met. When Lena moves into the town's oldest and most infamous plantation, Ethan is inexplicably drawn to her and determined to uncover the connection between them.

In a town with no surprises, one secret could change everything.




I already had this edition of Twilight but I let my little cousin borrow it and....So I had to but another copy along with New Moon!

From Paperbackswap.com


The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades -- with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal counter moves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. But then neither is Teddy Daniels.







Sixth in the Anthony Award-winning Southern Vampire series.
Spiked with a frothy fusion of romance, mystery, and fantasy, this bestselling series sends the supernaturally gifted cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse to New Orleans, where she has to deal with the legacy of one of her own family and a host of potentially dangerous characters.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Reviewers Roundup!(2)

This is a weekly feature on Pure Imagination inspired by The Story Siren's YAC but I'm going to do something a little different and just post the reviews of the books I loved or reviews that made me want to read a book, made me laugh or maybe sometimes made me shake my head in disagreement. Here are the reviews for the week of November 2, 2009.
 
Book Whisperer reviewed Girl in the Area by Lise Haines
"Girl in the Arena is an astounding alternate reality where violence and fame determines the status quo. Lyn may be the daughter of seven gladiators, but the glamour and glitz have lost their shine, her primary goal is to find a way out. While reading I found my emotions to be on a roller coaster, although one emotions tended to prevail from the beginning to the end; that is being flabbergasted at the acceptance of this lifestyle...."

Edge of Seventeen reviews Salt by Maurice Gee
"Salt has a strange setting; I can't describe it. It is dystopian--ruined and dying. Company rules with an iron fist. Although, when they came from over the sea their flags showed open hands, as if in greeting and peace. The rich live lavish lives and the poor die of starvation or illness. Many are hauled away every day to work in the various mines and other manual labour jobs where not much of you is left at the end of the day. The worst place to be is the salt mines, and to be assigned to Deep Salt is a death sentence. A slow and painful death sentence...."

Aimee at My Fluttering Heart reviewed Ice by  Sarah Beth Durst
"Durst has been an entirely clever seamstress in writing this novel. Known modern science and the mysteries of a timeless magic are patterned beside one another as if they have always existed as a pair. In order for a reader to suspend disbelief, the author is usually required to shift the characters into an alternate universe for the magic to occur. But by choosing the widely unexperienced but very real arctic territory as the story's environment, Durst maintains the mysterious beauty of an ice-covered fantasy world as well as injecting science into the storyline to ground the tale in reality...."

Tricia at My Reading Addiction reviewed On the Edge by Ilona Andrews
"I didn’t know what to expect from On the Edge, I love Andrews’ Kate Daniels series but this one is set in a slightly different world than Kate’s but once I started reading I was blown away by the complex world building and how easy it was to follow. The Edge is a place that lies between the Weird with it’s magic users and the Broken with it’s non magic folk. Those who live in the Edge have some magic and the luxury of being able to cross the lines into the other worlds for work and such, but people from the broken can’t see the Edge and those from the weird suffer great pain and death from crossing the lines...."


Sara at The Hiding Spot reviewed Before Midnight by Cameron Dokey
"Dokey's version of Cinderella is completely different than the Disney version that many are accustomed to. It was odd at first - I kept expecting certain events to occur, but Dokey successfully revamped this old tale. I was pleasantly surprised to find that in this version, Cinderella doesn't have an evil stepmother! Instead, there is a whole new villain, and, this time, readers get to see a bit of the person behind the villain...."

Book Blather reviewed Little Black Lies by Tish Cohen
"I thought the story line for Little Black Lies was very believable. I never found myself thinking that her lies or the storyline were too out there. In fact, the only part that made me go really? was the whole petting couch thing. (Think a puppy pile of teens with wandering hands on a couch) But the more I think about it, the more I remember things we could get away with in high school, so it’s really not that far fetched. In fact, everything else was so dead on that I could easily see this story happening in almost any high school across the nation. Kudos to Cohen for that!"




Guest Post: Justine from A Bookful of Thoughts' Twilight Experience

I'm happy to welcome Justine from A Bookful of Thoughts to share her experience seeing the Twilight stars up close, even if it wasn't so fun at times. Justine is a true Twi Hard to have gone through this!


Long story short, my friend and I saw Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Nikki Reed and Rachelle Lefevre at Much Music. We got our wristbands a few days before the actual live show. That was a weekday and we knew we had to be there early. And to our surprise, we were granted permission from our parents to take a day off school and to line up to get our wristbands. It took a whole day of waiting...but when we received them, we were full of excitement and relief.

Now to the long part of the story...
The day of the show was brutal. And it just had to rain. We got there around 8 in the morning (the show was at 5 pm), which was already considered late since the others actually camped out. Yes, we planned on camping out. I wanted to camp out. But we had transportation, safety problems and what not. So it was alright...because 30 minutes later, they opened the gates of hell (er...literally). It was a stampede. Everyone rushed to the front with their huge bags but that didn't affect my friend and I. We got a good spot, about 2 rows of people from the front, but a black fence sort of barrier was in front of us, which was behind a block that held a tree, so we couldn't move forward...That became a problem later.

We had to wait several hours in that crowd. It was drizzling, but that was only a nuisance since we got parkas from the staff who threw them everywhere. Imagine putting it on in a crowd where you can't even move a muscle. Yeah, it's quite difficult. And eating? Even more difficult. I barely ate because (1) I couldn't get the food into my mouth and (2) you wouldn't want to go to the washroom and try going back to your spot. If you do, you might as well wave goodbye from the back.

When we neared the time they would come, everyone was tense and feeling impatient. It was as if they were about to explode. And they did. As soon as the Twilight Stars came out, deafening yells and squeals surrounded us. I thought it was a great idea to go on the fence and take pictures, so I did just that. Unlucky for me, my camera stopped working because of the rain. My friend gave me her camera to take pictures with because it was hard for her to raise her hand in the crowd since she was gradually moving to the left, where the fence ended (she was trying to move herself back to where she was). Plus, she was short. So, problem solved.

Halfway through the show was when the tables turned for us. There was this girl and her siblings who came from out of nowhere. Before we knew it, they made it beside us behind the fence as well. Of course, there were remarks made...The girl ignored them and kept on going forward, but her siblings stayed not too far behind her. Then, quickly, she went on the fence and raised her camera to take pictures and such...my friend and I noticed that she didn't have a wristband! I heard a few others on the other side of this girl say that too. As you would expect, annoyance oozed out of our pores.

The problem with the girl was that she screamed. A lot. And loud. What's funny is that she didn't scream any of the Twilight stars' names. She screamed Tim Deegan's name. She also jumped up and down, which HELLO, is kind of a problem in a tight crowd. Anyway, she still kept going forwards....but clearly there was a fence thing right in front of her. And if she kept doing that, it might slip and we might fall and crack our skulls. I was panicking and so was my friend. She actually tried to keep it still, to hold it straight, but it was hard since it was cold and wet. In the end, though, nothing bad happened (thank goodness). Then, she gradually started to push me aside, but I wasn't going to let that happen. I was about to do something about it (no, no, I wasn't going to cause a riot) when the Twilight stars came out again and the girl just had a spazz attack which involved: jumping up and down, squealing (screeching actually), raising her camera and waving frantically. In just a quick movement, I was off the fence and was now beside it. Bummer.

Still, I realized it was a decent view. I could see the Twilight stars sideways! So I took pictures happily while my friend raised her arm that held a soaked paper and a pen. It's funny because you couldn't see her head, only her arm in the air. Ooh! And I saw my hand in a glove on TV and my friend's camera, too! That counts for something :). Sadly, we didn't get an autograph from any of the Twilight stars. But that kind of experience - actually seeing them - is good enough for me. At least my friend and I will have something to relate to when it comes to Twilight and its Twihards that come along with it.

I love Twilight, I really, really do. But if there was another event like this at Much Music, which there probably will be for the promotion of New Moon, I don't think I would go. It might be too dangerous for me to handle.

- Justine

Thanks Justine!!

Thursday, November 5, 2009

New Moon Scenes

I thought it would be fun to go over all the scenes we are all looking forward to seeing in New Moon. Well not all of them because that would be a very boring post. It would say The whole movie. So we will go over the ones you are most looking forward to.

The birthday scene, of course. Its the turning point in Bella and Edward's relationship. It's also the most seen scene out there right now. I still think it will be great! Jasper trying to attack Bella looks just how I imagined it.

I have to say it...and I know we are not really looking forward to it but its important and we just have to suck it up and take it....The Breakup Scene. Are you going to cry? I probably will. I know this scene is already out there but I refuse to watch it until Nov 20!

Bella at the movies with Jake and Mike. This is one of the semi unimportant scenes but I'm really looking forward to it. Have you saw the picture with Jake and Mike's hands on the armrest. Too funny! Poor Bella! Plus the night after the movie is when everything changes for Jacob....

The Meadow scene with Laurent. This looks like its going to great and just like I imagined it. It's the first time we get to see The Wolves!

Meeting the Wolf pack. Do I even need to explain this one...all those shirtless guys!

Cliff Diving! We have saw Bella in the water and after with Jacob but not the actual diving. I can't wait to see it. The special effect with Edward in the water is amazing!

The almost kiss. Ahh...I read New Moon first so even though I'm team Edward I always want them to kiss in the kitchen! I can't wait to see it!

Alice and Bella. In the book when Bella sees Alice again you think FINALLY! So I'm looking forward to that feeling. And the realization that Edward still loves Bella(like we ever doubted).


The Italy scenes. OMG! How can you not be excited about these! It looks beautiful and Edward is going to be back! Not to mention the Volturi. The fight scene looks great even if it wasn't in the book. I also think Dakota Fanning makes a great Jane!

The end. *Sigh* I wonder if they will use The line that Edward says to Bella:
"Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars--points of light and reason...And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn't see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything." I hope so. I'm also looking forward to the scene in the woods with Edward and Jacob. It's going to set up for Eclipse nicely.


What scenes are looking forward to?

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Midnight Sun Video Series


I came across these on the web and they are great! It's a series of videos based on Midnight Sun. The creator, Darksoulvamp is very talented! Here's the first episode:



It makes me fall in love with Edward all over again! You can watch the rest of the series Here. Go watch them!!!

Giveaway and Giveaway and Giveaways...

Since I have so many giveaways going on and I have come accross so many great ones on other blogs I thought I would put them all in one spot. Here's my giveaways:
Fallen by Lauren Kate(international)
Hold Still by Nina LaCour
Twilight Goodies!


Here is some other great ones!
Tynga's Urban Fantasy Reviews is giving away a Twilight charm Bracelet!! They are nice! go enter!
The authors of Beautiful Creatures are giving away Books and Swag. There will me 4 winners!
The Book Pixie is having a awesometastic birthday giveaway 13 books 4 winners!
Yan at Books By Their Cover is haveing a HUGE contest!
Wine The Maze Runner at The Edge of Seventeen!

Go enter!!!

And the winner is.....


The winner of Wings, Going Bovine and Night Runner is......


Wendy!

Check your inbox. I have already sent you an e-mail. Congrats!
And to everyone that didn't win I will be posting another contest later today! It's one I'm really excited about! Stay tuned!!
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