Book Tour Archives - Proud Book Reviews

March 9, 2023March 10, 2023

These Violent Nights – Rebecca Crunden

This book contains:

Extreme class segregation and persecution
“Ownership” of people similar in some ways to slavery
Descriptions of and the aftereffects of genocide
Drugging
Attempted rape
Attempted and completed murder.

Thorn is the primary character we follow for roughly two thirds of the book, however, we also spend about one third following Lucien.

Thorn is a human who’s suffered immense trauma from the Suriia and is hell bent on revenge for the murder of her family while also trying to do her best to protect her “little sister” Thistle. She’s a tough nugget, strong willed, suspicious of all and entirely dedicated to her cause.

Lucien is a Suriia of unknown origins (until the last third of the book) who’s suffered immensely at the hands of humans. Not initially from the same Earth as Thorn is, he’s suffered similar trauma but responds in quite a different way. For him, he’s all about creating a safe space for his family to live out their days without drawing more attention to themselves than they need to.

Thorn and Lucien are battling their own demons while trying to find a better life for themselves and their loved ones. We follow Thorn until she meets Lucien and then go back a bit to get a bit of Lucien’s history until he meets Thorn. And then everything changes, and we learn exactly how intricate everything is, and follow them as they do their best to fix it.

I’ve read and reviewed the entire of The Outlands Pentalogy, and really enjoyed Rebecca’s writing. So when I discovered she’d entered this book into the 2022 Book Bloggers Novel of the Year Award (BBNYA), I thought I knew what I was getting into. But boy was I wrong!

Although I did have mixed feelings about this as I read it. I loved the first third, then was super confused for the entire of the second third and felt betrayed and so conflicted. But then my trust was restored in the final third. If you read this, please give the second third a chance! It will make sense and work out for the best by the end of it!

I promise!

By the very end I was so happy, and while I’d kinda like to know what happens further in the future for all of them, I’m not disappointed in how it ended.

March 2, 2023March 3, 2023

Never Too Late – T.A. Williams

This book contains:

Substance abuse, both recreational and addiction to the point of death
Depiction of a serious stroke.

Steph lives and works in London while making her way within the music industry. While her passion is for classical music on the keyboards, she knows the skill and dedication to make it in classical music is beyond her capabilities. So instead, she tried to make it as a session musician then moved onto a job as a sound technician for a recording studio for stability.

Rob on the other hand has made it big as a classical violinist soloist, and has garnered quite the reputation as a playboy. Living full time in Italy and touring the world his career is going great and he’s enjoying life to its maximum benefit.

Steph and her boss-cum-boyfriend get offered the deal of a lifetime to travel to Italy for a month to record a new-come-back album for a world famous band who’d separated a decade earlier. While the timing isn’t great, it’s too good of an opportunity to turn down, so they pack and jet off to Italy where they find themselves staying with the band.

When they arrive, they discover that recording the album won’t be as simple as they’d thought, and not just because they don’t have a keyboard player anyone.

It’d been a while between reading blurb and agreeing to take part in this tour and me actually reading the book, so I found myself a little confused as to who Steph was meant to end up with for quite a while. Then when it was apparent, I could only see it working out in a couple of ways (I was pretty close to being right) which then had me questioning how it could possibly be wrapped up properly in the short bit left of the book.

The way Steph’s life direction seemed to constantly shift depending on a variety of variable kept you on your toes and reminded me of how I’d plan my chess moves. You could make your choice based on the information available to you, but when guessing what might happen you also needed to consider all the possible ways the cast of characters might behave or actions, they might take to get us to the end goal you know needs to happen.

Partner the shifting sands of possibilities with the beautiful Italian coastline, you can definitely lose yourself in the story and the locations and just soak it in. Such a great story that had me wishing I could be with them out in the sun and relaxing with good food and wine.

Author Bio

I’m a man. And a pretty old man as well. I did languages at university a long time ago and then lived and worked in France and Switzerland before going to Italy for seven years as a teacher of English. My Italian wife and I then came back to the UK with our little daughter (now long-since grown up) where I ran a big English language school for many years. We now live in a sleepy little village in Devonshire. I’ve been writing almost all my life but it was only nine years ago that I finally managed to find a publisher who liked my work enough to offer me my first contract.

The fact that I am now writing escapist romance is something I still find hard to explain. My early books were thrillers and historical novels and I now also write cozy crime, but my first love is romance. Maybe it’s because there are so many horrible things happening in the world today that I feel I need to do my best to provide something to cheer my readers up. My books provide escapism to some gorgeous locations, even if travel to them is currently difficult.

February 13, 2023February 14, 2023

Nobody Puts RomComs in the Corner – Kathryn Freeman

This book contains:

Reference to cheating
Suggested familial financial extortion/violence.

Sally is the romance loving, café owner with a room to let after her younger sister has moved into her boyfriend’s place. Her life is all about romance. Romance movies of all kinds, a café themed on love and creating early love experiences for other couples and wanting to find her own perfect match.

Harry on the other hand is a total love cynic. He’s a builder by trade whose parent’s marriage has been falling apart more and more since his dad retired. While he never had a loving home growing up, what he’s experiencing as their marriage deteriorates solidifies his belief that love doesn’t exist.

Thanks to Sally’s sister moving out and the debt she needs to repay, she’s forcing to let her sister’s old room out. A friend of a friend puts Harry in touch with Sally because he’s in desperate need of renting a room on a short-term basis.

As they live together, they learn more about each other, most prominently, their difference of opinion about love. One night after a few drinks, they re-create the famous lift scene from Dirty Dancing, and overnight become a Tik Tok sensation.

As the name suggests, this fun love story is basically a rom com the whole way through. While I don’t think I’ve seen EVERY movie they recreated or referenced, I’ve seen most and I loved reading about their adaptations.

I had such a fun time reading this. I think pretty much every time I picked this up, I found myself giggling and laughing at what they were up to.

And in amongst all those funny moments, Harry is beating the gender stereotypes in his industry as a builder. I won’t say how, because that might spoil the surprise, but it was so nice for this to be popped into the story in such a natural way.

Overall, a hugely fun book that is quite inclusive in such a natural way that I kinda wish more authors could do.

Continue to find out about the author.

Author Bio

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to write a book. It may have had something to do with my obsession with reading romance. Real life interfered and I headed off in a different direction – into the world of science, becoming a pharmacist before joining the pharmaceutical industry. I did end up writing, but it was about disease and medicines. Decades later, I’m finally doing what I always wanted to do.

With a husband who asks every Valentine’s Day whether he has to buy a card (yes, he does), all the romance in my life is in my head. Then again, his unstinting support of my career change proves love isn’t always about hearts and flowers – and heroes come in many disguises.

February 6, 2023February 6, 2023

An Island in the Sun – Kate Frost

This book contains:

Discussion of miscarriage and the lasting emotional impacts
References to drug use and addiction
Depiction of and discussion around absentee parents, being a mother and having a career and the impacts this has on individuals’ mental health and their relationships with others
Lost pet.

Tabitha is a songwriter who also pet sits around the world constantly travelling from place to place to take on pet sits. Since leaving a difficult relationship after suffering a miscarriage, she’s moved from place to place hoping to heal.

Raff is the son of a wealthy couple and up until recently, lived in London. Thanks to a difficult relationship with his parents, he comes to Madeira while his parents are meant to be travelling hoping to get a couple of weeks respite before needing to figure out his next move in life.

Tabitha arrives in Madeira to begin her latest pet sit for a wealthy couple heading off on holidays for a couple of weeks. On her first night after they’ve left, she’s woken up to the sound of someone in the house. Unsure of what she might find the last thing she expects is Raff claiming to be the son of the homeowners. The son they never so much as mentioned once in the time Tabitha spent with them.

Tabitha has only a couple of weeks to sort out what to do with Raff, what to tell the homeowners, and whether she’s going to try and reconnect with an old friend while she’s on the island.

While I didn’t enjoy every moment of this books, I believe that was done purposely as you’re not meant to like Raff all that much when he first arrives. He’s impulsive, drinks and appears to be a bad influence on others to the detriment of everyone around him and them. Those moments that I didn’t like were the exact moments that were created to portray him in that manner and it’s expertly executed.

Once you piece together all the little pieces however, there’s moments of profound sadness, happiness, hurt and longing. All emotions that I’m sure all of us can relate to. The way each and every character is relatable either to ourselves or someone we know is amazing and a skill not many writers have.

Continue to find out more about the author.

Author Bio

Kate Frost is the author of several bestselling romantic escape novels including The Greek Heart, and The Love Island Bookshop. She lives in Bristol and is the Director of Storytale Festival, a book festival for children and teens she co-founded in 2019.

January 16, 2023January 16, 2023

Someone to Kiss – Jamie Anderson

This book contains:

Mental health issues (anxiety, depression, addiction, narcissism and probably a few more)
Toxic workplace depicted as a manipulative and abusive boss
Casual sexual encounters, including affairs
Sexual assault to various degrees from making someone uncomfortable through to rape (the rape is discussed, including some of what happened).

The primary character we follow throughout the book is Kate, a 43-year-old single woman desperate to share her life with someone. While she tries to come across as a confident woman who knows her self-worth and who she is, in reality, she’s highly insecure and easily triggered into self-destructive behaviours.

We also get the occasional chapter from the perspective of Julie (Kate’s best friend) and Ben (Julie’s older brother) to help us get more depth to what Kate’s going through and what’s happening around her.

We start the story with Kate drunk at a New Years Eve wedding deciding that she’s going to find someone to kiss by the following NYE. Over the course of the following 12 months, we follow Kate as she enters the realm of online dating trying to find herself a boyfriend.

Over that time there are many other challenges that pop up, and she needs to navigate each of these as best she can.

When Rachel sent this out she labelled it as a romantic comedy, so my expectations of what I’d be getting out of this book was more along the lines of something from Rich Amooi (who’s books are hilarious by the way!) or Camilla Isley. What I ended up reading was quite different to my expectations.

That’s not to say that it wasn’t amusing, or that it was bad!

It’s just something I’d label as more of a fiction and romance book. A bit of equal parts. The reason I would take the comedy part out is that the expectation people place on a comedy is to spend most of the time laughing, and this is much to serious for that.

With heavy themes discussed (just check out the trigger warning section above) I don’t think it’s appropriate or correct to label this as a comedy.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It’s great to see more mature aged women as the lead character in a romance, while also depicting the struggles of online dating, especially as an older woman. But I also enjoyed reading about how subtle people’s reactions and responses can be to those who don’t know what happened to them. And of course, the way each character placed blame on themselves for things outside of their control and how they navigated through to acceptance that they’re not to blame for what happened to them.

Author Bio

Jamie Anderson is based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. A proud Canadian and Saskatchewanian, she wanted to set her first two novels in the place she was born and raised.

She works in content marketing, has a certificate in professional writing and has done a smattering of freelance writing, character development and copyediting over the past several years.

She’s been writing for as long as she can remember, and has been reading for longer than that. She lives happily with her mountain of books, her TV and her two plants. Sign-up to Jamie’s newsletter for news on her followup romance novel Love, Julie. You’ll also receive exclusive deals, special offers and a FREE copy of Jamie’s sweet, uplifting novella Running from Christmas as a welcome gift!

January 9, 2023January 2, 2023

A Laird in London – Catherine Tinley

This book contains:

Racism towards non-English people
Forced marriage.

Isabella is the youngest child and only girl in the Burtenshaw family and because of that, she’s wild, confident and knows what she would like from her life. The problem is, as a woman in regency times, her rights and options are limited and generally controlled by her eldest brother, the head of the Burtenshaw family.

Angus is the head of his family, and desperate to get adjoining lands back to improve the quality of his people’s lives. While he’s a confident and take-charge leader in Scotland, he’s a different man when he gets to London. While still confident and proud of his heritage, he’s also restrained and cautious to ensure the success of his trip to London.

Angus must travel to London to try and meet with the Lord who owns the neighbouring lands in order to try and purchase them. His sole aim is to procure the lands and return to Scotland as quickly as possible. At the same time, Isabella is forced to attend the London season in order to find a husband.

From an accidental meeting, Isabella and Angus are drawn to each other in ways they can’t explain, and they need to navigate it and their own individual goals for the season.

This was such a fun read and gave me a few Outlander vibes with the descriptions of the handsome Scottish Laird. His brave actions, consistent persistence to achieve his goal but also the way he navigated his feelings for Isabella was so enjoyable to read.

Isabella on the other hand had very modern thoughts for a woman, which given Catherine Tinley’s style isn’t surprising, and it made me wonder what else she might include in the book. One of those thoughts actually had me wondering and REALLY hoping she’d do it, but she didn’t.

For a book I practically binged in my last few days of work before Christmas, this definitely rated up there for me!

Continue to read further down to find out about the author and any extra giveaways available.

Author Bio

Catherine Tinley is a multi-award winning author of witty, heartwarming historical romance. Her first novel, Waltzing with the Earl, won the Rita® Award for Best Historical Romance in 2018, while Rags-to-Riches Wife won the RoNA Award for Best Historical Romance 2021 as well as the HOLT Medallion, and A Waltz with the Outspoken Governess won the RoNA Award for Best Historical Romance 2022.

She has loved reading and writing since childhood, and has a particular fondness for love, romance, and happy endings. After a career encompassing speech & language therapy, Sure Start, maternity campaigning and being President of a charity, she now manages a maternity hospital. She lives in Ireland with her husband, children, cats, and dog and can be reached at her website and on her socials.

Giveaway – Win a signed copy of A Laird in London (open internationally)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

*Terms and Conditions –Worldwide entries welcome. Please enter using the Rafflecopter box below. The winner will be selected at random via Rafflecopter from all valid entries and will be notified by Twitter and/or email. If no response is received within 7 days then Rachel’s Random Resources reserves the right to select an alternative winner. Open to all entrants aged 18 or over. Any personal data given as part of the competition entry is used for this purpose only and will not be shared with third parties, with the exception of the winners’ information. This will passed to the giveaway organiser and used only for fulfilment of the prize, after which time Rachel’s Random Resources will delete the data. I am not responsible for despatch or delivery of the prize.

December 15, 2022December 7, 2022

Lineage – C. Vonzale Lewis

This year, the Book Bloggers’ Novel of the Year Award (BBNYA) is celebrating the 50 books that made it into Round Two with a mini spotlight blitz tour for each title. BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors, ending with 10 finalists and one overall winner.

If you want some more information about BBNYA, check out the BBNYA Website or take a peek over on Twitter. BBNYA is brought to you in association with the @Foliosociety (if you love beautiful books, you NEED to check out their website!) and the book blogger support group @The_WriteReads.

Blurb

Smart-mouthed Nicole Fontane has a way of getting herself into trouble.

She’s been fired from every job she’s had but still refuses to work in her father’s apothecary shop because of his practice of Earth Magick.

On Tulare Island where Nicole grew up, Magick has always been a way of life—one she’s determined to avoid at all costs. With less than two hundred dollars in the bank and rent due, Nicole is forced to take a job at Tribec Insurance as a last resort. Little does she realize, the moment she sets foot inside the building, she becomes a pawn.

Tribec’s proprietors, the Stewart family, are curiously preoccupied with the Naqada, the mysterious pre-dynastic Egyptian society. It seems creepy but harmless at first, until the eerie atmosphere, disappearing Magick wards, and the smell of blood inside Tribec bring Nicole to a startling conclusion. The Stewarts are practicing Blood Magick—the deadliest of the Five Principles.

By the time Nicole uncovers the truth, people near and dear to her are going missing, and all signs point to the Stewarts and an archaic blood ritual to an Old One. To prevent catastrophe, Nicole must confront a hidden past and unlock the Magick buried within. But can she set aside her deep-rooted fears to work with a team of vigilante Mages? Or will the clock run out on Nicole and those she loves?

Author Bio

My name is Carla Vonzale Lewis and I like my martinis shaken… never stirred.

Carla was born in Georgia, but please don’t mistake her for a Georgia peach. She’s more like a prickly pear. Speaking of being born, someone asked her recently if she remembered her birth. And she had to say, “Yes, I do remember that handsy doctor pulling me out into the cold. Right Bastard!!!”

Despite being born in the South, she grew up in California. Every once in a great while she gets to experience all four seasons. But mostly, it’s just heat.

When not writing, Carla enjoys reading, binge watching shows on Netflix, and trying to convince her husband that getting a dog is a wonderful idea.

And one day, she will discover how many licks it actually takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

December 8, 2022December 7, 2022

Fear and Fury – Jamie Jackson

Blurb

Meet Megaera, Meg for short. She’s like Deadpool, except for funner.

For a girl with the power of fear the recruitment attempts from both sides are never-ending. A self-described not-a-hero, villain-leaning humanoid, Meg just wants to live her life, work her dead-end job and have everyone else (especially the heroes) leave her alone. But when a bigger fish who can turn superpowers back on their users enters the picture and threatens the person Meg loves the most (herself), she must turn to the last group of people she would admit she needs help from.

Forced to team up with the heroes she despises (but won’t murder, because let’s face it, orange is not the new black), Meg will have to face the choices from her past that she won’t get therapy for. Self-centered, snarky, sarcastic and a little bit dramatic, she’s going to have to save the world, even if that wasn’t her intention. And try not to get shot in the process. Because that shit hurts.

Author Bio

Jamie lives in Charlotte, NC with her husband, three feral children and two badly behaved dogs.

She has BAs in English and Theatre, her favorite part of which was working backstage on traveling Broadway productions.

You can find her on Twitter, TikTok and Instagram under @VillainLeaning or follow her Facebook page, Adventures of a Villain-Leaning Humanoid.

December 4, 2022December 4, 2022

Elle’s A to Z of Love – Claire Huston

Blurb

Haileybrook, a beautiful village in the peaceful Cotswolds countryside, is most people’s idea of heaven on earth.

Born and raised in this small slice of paradise, Elle Bea can’t wait to leave.

It should be easy, but every time she packs her bags for exotic adventures, old loves and loyalties pull her back.

Will Elle be forced to forget her dreams of far-flung places and epic romance, or can she grab one last chance to have it all?

An uplifting, romantic story about friends, family and the relationships that make a place a home.

Author Bio

Claire Huston lives in Warwickshire, UK. She writes uplifting modern love stories about characters who are meant for each other but sometimes need help figuring that out. A keen amateur baker, she enjoys making cakes, cookies and brownies almost as much as eating them. You can find over 150 recipes on her website. This is also where she talks about and reviews books. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram (get the links at Claire’s Linktree).