TBR Challenge

Starting Line for Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer’s “Take Control of Your TBR Challenge”

March 3, 2013 by Barbara at Basia's Bookshelf 12 Comments

Do I need this one? Oh boy, yes. Will it make me cry? Most likely. Why? Because I have to limit my reading to books published before March 1st which means no brand spanking new releases unless they’re ARCs or something I have to do for tours or something. *sniffle* For anyone who hasn’t joined in on the fun yet – and you know you do because you have a giant TBR pile, there’s a nice prize at the end and it’s just fun to see how many reviews you can push out when you have a motivator – here are the deets:

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Rules

Link-up! This is open to everyone. If you do not have a blog then link your Facebook or Goodreads account.

Beginning March 1st, 2013 and ending March 31, 2013 at midnight read books from your TBR pile ALL books must have been published before March 2013.

Post a review to Goodreads, your blog or Facebook then link it to the Rafflecopter for an entry. (for those of you who post a month or more out on your blog like me, just link up your Goodreads rating and quick review.)

Rafflecopter will close on April 2, 2013 at midnight and a winner will be chosen. Open internationally as long as Book Depository or Barnes and Noble ship to you. Prize: New 2013 release. I will do pre-orders as well.

Need Extra Incentive or Can only commit for a weekend
Join the Take Control Read-A-Thon
March 15-18
Fun, Challenges, Friendship
Sign up for read-a-thon HERE

I have 17 days of reviews spoken for and a couple of days for other things, leaving 14 days free to attack my TBR pile. I have a couple of challenges I’m falling behind on that I know I can hit and a few unusual books I’ve purchased recently that I’d love to review. So hopefully, I’ll be able to stay on track and have a good month!

Filed Under: TBR Challenge Tagged With: Kimba The Caffeinate Book Reviewer

TBR Pile Review: Call Me Irresistible (Wynette, Texas #6)

August 24, 2012 by Barbara at Basia's Bookshelf 8 Comments

By Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Publisher: William Morrow
Publication Date: January 18, 2011
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Source: Purchased

R.S.V.P. to the most riotous wedding of the year . . .

Lucy Jorik is the daughter of a former president of the United States.

Meg Koranda is the offspring of legends.

One of them is about to marry Mr. Irresistible—Ted Beaudine—the favorite son of Wynette, Texas. The other is not happy about it and is determined to save her friend from a mess of heartache.

But even though Meg knows that breaking up her best friend’s wedding is the right thing to do, no one else seems to agree. Faster than Lucy can say “I don’t,” Meg becomes the most hated woman in town—a town she’s stuck in with a dead car, an empty wallet, and a very angry bridegroom. Broke, stranded, and without her famous parents at her back, Meg is sure she can survive on her own wits. What’s the worst that can happen? Lose her heart to the one and only Mr. Irresistible? Not likely. Not likely at all.

Goodreads Summary

I’m not sure where I got the idea (Cait), but I think reading Susan Elizabeth Phillips is some sort of rite of passage in Romancelandia. Like Jennifer Crusie, Nora Roberts and Lisa Kleypas, she’s a member of that group of authors that you have to try, just once, just because. So I crossed another item off of my bucket list this week and read not one but two of SEP’s books.

I can’t consider myself an expert on what SEP usually writes, so I’m just going by my general observations from Glitter Baby and Call Me Irresistible. At least with these two books, the plot followed an uncomfortably similar arc. Rich girl with self-awareness issues, hot guy everyone wants with self-awareness issues, wacko mothers/cast, trouble from jealous something or other, drama, drama.

Meg is the daughter of Fleur and Jake from Glitter Baby. She’s the square peg that’s been running away from the round hole for years and her family finally cuts her off financially, inconveniently while she’s in the middle of nowhere at her best friend’s wedding. The groom is the town’s golden child; to meet Ted Beaudine is to love him and he doesn’t even have to work at it. He’s absolutely perfect in every way. He’s also completely wrong for her best friend, and when Lucy leaves Ted at the altar after a heart to heart with Meg, the entire town is up in arms. Nobody would choose to leave Mr. Irresistible so it had to have been Meg’s doing. The wedding party long gone, her family not taking her calls and her credit cards cut off, she’s stuck in a very unfriendly Wynette until she can earn enough money to leave.

If there’s ever a kind of character that can only exist in books, it would have to be someone like Meg. It isn’t that she’s tall, striking and of course thinks she’s plain; that’s not uncommon. She has to be one of the most stubborn creatures invented. At first she has to stay in Wynette because her options are to work off her hotel bill or go to jail. After that? She stays because she’s going to prove to her parents that she can be responsible. But she’s being “responsible” in a town full of people who hate her, essentially squatting in someone’s empty house and taking baths in a creek. That’s crazy. The only thing that really redeemed her character for me was that she had the smartest mouth on her. Her arguments with Ted and the little skirmishes she got into with the residents of the town were funny, snarky and sparkling.

I loved the weird, gossipy people of Wynette. They were rude, snooty and outright hostile but in a way that made it seem like the smackdown had been delivered at a semi-formal garden luncheon that Meg crashed in a pair of Daisy Dukes and a tube top. It could have come across as just mean, but Meg gave as good as she got and generally just annoyed them with her presence. It all was the best part of the book for me – the initial fury over the jilting, the scapegoating and the slow realization that Meg was as odd as they were.

Against the vivid people in the town and Meg’s general ridiculousness, Ted just got lost for me. He didn’t annoy me but I didn’t care much about him outside of his sparring with Meg either. He was all about getting funding for a golf course that would save the town and he was a genius environmentalist, but I wasn’t drawn into either storyline. Maybe if I were more familiar with the town and what the problems were, I’d have gone for the investor plot a little more, but I wasn’t and I didn’t. I had a couple of problems with Meg and Ted’s relationship too. Since I already said I thought Meg was crazy and Ted was boring, their romance was equally bi-polar. When they were fighting it was kind of fun and snappy but the softer moments didn’t do anything for me. They both were faking and avoiding things, making the ending way over the top dramatic.

My Summary: You can pretty much take the above review, change out townspeople for parents, triple the drama and deduct the humor and you’d have my review for Glitter Baby. I can’t say this is something SEP is known for and I’m not someone who’ll argue about using a formula that works – I’ve been addicted to Lisa Marie Rice’s books for ages and she writes the same story over and over, just with different terrorists. Neither Glitter Baby nor Call Me Irresistible worked for me as well as I hoped, mostly because I didn’t enjoy the romance and I thought the heroines were frustrating. I won’t rule out any more SEP because I have a feeling Cait will let me know if a good one comes along, but I won’t be seeking any out.

My Rating: B-

Filed Under: *B Rating, Contemporary/Romance, Reviews, TBR Challenge Tagged With: Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Wanted by Her Lost Love (Pregnancy & Passion #2)

May 22, 2012 by Barbara at Basia's Bookshelf Leave a Comment

By Maya Banks

Publisher: Harlequin
Publication Date: November 1, 2011
Genre: Category Contemporary Romance
Source: Purchased

Despite his fiancee’s chilling betrayal, developer Ryan Beardsley provided for Kelly Christian when he sent her packing. So he’s livid to find her working in a dingy Houston diner, desperate and pregnant. Regardless of whether the baby is his–or his brother’s–Ryan demands that Kelly return to New York with him. Now. For the baby’s sake. Or maybe because the woman’s as irresistible as ever…

Goodreads Summary

I know this seems like an odd choice for the blog, right? I was scrolling through my Kindle looking for some books for my TBR Challenge for books from 2011, came across this one and realized I’d never read it.

Six months ago, Ryan Beardsley threw his fiancée Kelly Christian out of his life when his brother confessed they’d slept together. Ryan doesn’t just despise her, but he’s working hard to keep hating her. He gave her a substantial check to make sure she had the means to stay gone but she’s never cashed it so he hired a private investigator to track her down and find out why.

Kelly hasn’t found another guy, gone back to college or done any of the things Ryan thought she would. The investigator finds her working in a crappy diner halfway across the country and when Ryan shows up to confront her, he sees she’s at least six months pregnant. Kelly is furious he tracked her down and since she’s carrying a baby he thinks could be his or his brother’s, he won’t leave her alone.

She agrees to go back to New York with Ryan only when it turns out her health and financial situation makes it necessary. They decide to try and let the past go which is Harlequin-speak for Ryan to continue to believe that Kelly wronged him while he generously offers to forgive her because they still love each other. When the same old problems resurface in the city, Ryan takes Kelly to an island resort so they can have some time alone to work things out.

There are just some basics about these pregnancy-betrayed lover stories that are the same no matter who the author is or even what year they’re written and just about every cliché you’d expect makes an appearance in this one. Ryan and his family are very old money and his mother hated Kelly from the start since she had the bad taste to be poor. Kelly’s mother is remarried, slightly skeevy and doesn’t really talk to her anymore. The obligatory island resort is a little vague but nicely plush – somewhere you’d love to go if you could ever figure out where it was.

Banks is very good at writing damaged people – it’s one of the things that make her books so dramatic and emotional. I didn’t always like Ryan because he went on too long about being the abused, betrayed party. He loved Kelly but painted himself in one hell of a corner with six months of convincing himself and his friends that she was a tramp and not to be trusted. I liked that Kelly was willing to give Ryan a second chance for herself and the baby and that she kept opening her heart to him after he’d screw up. There was a tiny mouse sitting next to me that would yell at her to kick him in the shins when Ryan would make some boneheaded remark bringing up the past though.

There’s always at least a handful of big dramatic chapters at the end of these and Banks is a master of climactic endings anyway so there was actually a double whammy with a lot of storming out and crying and danger. I was disappointed in the last chapter though. It was a big letdown after all the buildup, like an, “I’m sorry,” with a shrug when a ten page grovel is called for. The book also clearly called for an epilogue and there wasn’t one so I was just left feeling dissatisfied.

My Summary: Banks is a favorite author of mine and an auto-buy for her regular titles. I probably wouldn’t have bought this if it hadn’t had her name on it just because I’ve read at least a dozen of these already and they’re all generally the same. She did do it better so she’d be at the top of the curve with this, but just improving on a tried and true mediocre theme doesn’t make a great book. If you’re looking for a recommendation for category romances that have lots of drama and solid HEAs, Banks’ series fit the bill though.

My Rating: B-