Phenomenal: Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman

Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman by J. B. Lynn
ARC from Edelwiess
Published January 2012 by Avon Impulse
ISBN 9780062134662
Read December 2011
Goodreads, IndieBound, Amazon

Over the summer I was introduced to a new author when I read The First Victim. I truly enjoyed this fantastic thriller and sought out the author, J. B. Lynn. She was kind enough to write a guest post for my blog. Since then we have kept up on Twitter (@JB_Lynn_author). So when she emailed me at the beginning of December about her upcoming novel, Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman, I did a little happy dance. And, oh my, how happy I was to have this book to read over my Christmas holidays. It was exactly the type of escapism you need on a vacation. It took me a day and a half to finish it (it would have only taken a day had I been able to stay up later, but alas I had family obligations).

I was only about a third of the way through the story when I shed my first tears. And I don't mean my eyes misted. I had big crocodile tears trickling past my nose. But those tears turned into giggles a few pages later. (I think the traffic stop may be my favorite scene. It was just perfect). I'm so glad I live alone so I don't have to stifle my laughs, but can freely laugh out loud. And just as I had more tears, I had many more laughs. It was a great combination of humor and heartbreak. I don't remember there being as much humor in The First Victim so it was great to see an additional talent.

I really liked the main character, Maggie. In a lot of ways I felt that I could emotionally relate to her. I think one of the reason why this was such a great escape/vacation read was the surrealism that the character of Godzilla (who likes to be called God) added to the story. When I started the story I wasn't sure if this was just some dream or fantasy or if it was suppose to be real, but it really helped me to forget the real world for a while and just enjoy the story. I expect that to happen when I read fantasy or fluffy romance, but not something that usually happens for me with suspense and thrillers. And there are definitely suspenseful moments. If you follow me on Goodreads you'll see about the last fifth of the book had me on the edge of my seat. At 86% I had an uneasy feeling - things tended to not work out quite right for Maggie and the deal she made could had been her costliest. At 88% my only thought was OH, NO! J. B. happened to be on Twitter when that came through and she told me I was killing her. I thought it was an apropos statement.

I really enjoyed her debut novel The First Victim and was even more impressed with Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman. While I only gave The First Victim 4 STARS because of a little plot issue I had with it (you can read my review here to see what it was), I had no qualms about assigning 5 STARS to Confessions as it was a phenomenal read. You might be wondering why I have waited so long to tell you about it (though if you follow me on Twitter you've seen me talking about it). It's not available, yet. However, you only have to wait a few more weeks. You can get your copy of Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman by J. B. Lynn on January 24. Since you don't want to miss out on what will be one of the best reads of 2012, you can pre-order it at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

So your assignment is to pre-order Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman, read The First Victim
to pass the time, and then come back here January 27 when J. B. Lynn will be sharing a bit more insight in a guest post.

Related articles

• Review: Confessions of a Neurotic Hitwoman by JB Lynn (bookdout.wordpress.com)
• J. B. Lynn: Bits of Real Life (a guest post) (girl-who-reads.com)
• So Funny: Further Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman (girl-who-reads.com)

Goodbye 2011

It's New Year's Eve! 2011 was a great year in reading. I've discovered so many great books and new favorite authors. As it is the end of the year and I didn't do any Best of lists, I thought I would do a wrap up to highlight the most viewed posts, authors who visited, and events on Girl Who Reads this year.

Top 10 Viewed Posts:

Holiday Buying Guide
A Work in Progress - A. C. Dillon
Mocked by Destiny - Inside the Characters with Michele Richard
Sensitive Subject Handled Well: Lies Inside
Christmas Books - Nancy Adams
A Sweet Short Story - The Gift of Joy
Avid Bookshop Grand Opening
I Came Late to the Harry Potter Party
In my July Mailbox (video)
Guilty as Charged - Douglas Kennedy

Guest Authors: I want to thank each author who appeared on my blog this year. I feel honored that you chose my blog and took the time out of your busy schedule to share with my readers.

Susan Fraser King (Queen Hereafter)
Nancy Adams (Saint Nick and the Fir Tree)
Douglas Kennedy (The Moment)
Abbi Glines (Breathe)
A. C. Dillon (Change of Season)
Schledia Benefield (Plain Jane)
J. B. Lynn (The First Victim)
Aine Greaney (Dance Lessons)
Michele Richard (Mocked by Destiny)

Events:

ArmchairBEA
Avid Bookshop Grand Opening
Tayari Jones (Book Reading Silver Sparrow)
Once Upon A Read-a-thon

Well there's a little recap of 2011. I'm so looking forward to 2012 and the books, authors and events I'll be sharing with you. I already have a few authors lined up to visit. My first review of the new year will be up next week: Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman by J. B. Lynn. It is absolutely wonderful and is available for pre-order now (It'll be released January 24). It's a don't miss title of 2012.

I wish you a healthy and happy 2012 filled with great reads!

Girl Who Reads

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness (promo)

Today, A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness is available in paperback. Warner Brothers has secured the rights for this title as well as its sequels (Shadow of Night is due out next summer). If you are like me you like to read the books before seeing the movie. And this book looks great (that saying something as I'm picky about my fantasy).

From Goodreads.com: A richly inventive novel about a centuries-old vampire, a spellbound witch, and the mysterious manuscript that draws them together.

Deep in the stacks of Oxford's Bodleian Library, young scholar Diana Bishop unwittingly calls up a bewitched alchemical manuscript in the course of her research. Descended from an old and distinguished line of witches, Diana wants nothing to do with sorcery; so after a furtive glance and a few notes, she banishes the book to the stacks. But her discovery sets a fantastical underworld stirring, and a horde of daemons, witches, and vampires soon descends upon the library. Diana has stumbled upon a coveted treasure lost for centuries-and she is the only creature who can break its spell.

Debut novelist Deborah Harkness has crafted a mesmerizing and addictive read, equal parts history and magic, romance and suspense. Diana is a bold heroine who meets her equal in vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont, and gradually warms up to him as their alliance deepens into an intimacy that violates age-old taboos. This smart, sophisticated story harks back to the novels of Anne Rice, but it is as contemporary and sensual as the Twilight series-with an extra serving of historical realism.

Intrigued? I know I was and thrilled that Penguin Books offered me a copy for review. I haven't had a chance to read it, yet, with the holidays, but my fellow blogger Tami reviewed it over the summer. You can read her review at Bookish Temptations. In addition to offering me a free copy, Penguin will also send one of my readers a copy! All you need to do is leave a comment with a way to contact you should you be the winner. You have until midnight EST on Friday December 30. Then I will pick a winner using Random.org.

Want a little more background on A Discovery of Witches? Check out this excellent video:

You can find out more about A Discovery of Witches and Deborah Harkness at her website and on Facebook.

Buy at Amazon
Buy Powell's Books

Related articles

• A Discovery of Witches Paperback Release & Giveaway! (roofbeamreader.net)
• A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES Adaptation Being Prepped By Warner Bros. (geektyrant.com)
• A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness (All Souls Trilogy #1) (arcanereader.wordpress.com)
• 'A Discovery of Witches' Headed to a Theatre Near You! (mrsaubergine.wordpress.com)

Brilliant, Beautiful: In the King's Arms

In the King's Arms: A Novel by Sonia Taitz
paperback, 230 pages
Published October 2011 by McWitty Press
ISBN13: 9780975561867
Source: Lucinda Literary
Read December 2011
Goodreads, IndieBound, Amazon


Have you ever read a book so beautifully written that you had to wonder if it was truly prose and not poetry? A story so brilliantly crafted you knew no words of your own could adequately capture it? That is how I feel after reading In the King's Arms by Sonia Taitz.

I had read great things about the book on Twitter and when Lucinda of Lucinda Literary offered to have a copy sent to me, I jumped at the chance. I've read numerous books about World World II, especially when historical fiction was the top of my reading choices. However, those following my blog know that I've been enjoying stories that are set shortly after the war ended or focused on other players during the era. In the King's Arms fit into this new area I've been exploring. The story is about a young woman who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. I can't imagine how such an event could shape the lives of the next generation. 


When I first started reading In the King's Arms, I was reminded of A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I loved that story when I was in high school, read the sequel, and even used it for a term paper topic. I've been trying to figure out why I wanted to compare them. I think it was because both are "coming of age" stories, but there is more than just that. Maybe it had something to do with how it was written. I'm not sure, but something about the story touched me.

I feel so completely inadequate to review this book. It is beautiful and I can totally see why The Sunday Book Review choose it for inclusion.

A free book was obtained from the source mentioned above in order to provide an honest and free review. Girl Who Reads is an advertising affiliate with Amazon and IndieBound; a small fee is earned when purchases are made using the above links.

Related articles

• In the King's Arms: Holocaust Novel Finds Hope in Love and Compassion (alternet.org)
• A Separate Peace, by John Knowles : a Book Review (willsmath.wordpress.com)

Susan Fraser King: Margaret of Scotland (a guest post)

I am happy to introduce to you Susan Fraser King author of Queen Hereafter, which was just released in paperback. If you want to view the book trailer or read the summary, I've posted them here. Today, Susan was kind enough to stop by Girl Who Reads to give us a closer look at her main character - Margaret. I don't know about you, but I don't remember much about medieval history from my school lessons. And I'm positive it never sounded as exciting as Susan has made it. So without further ado...


The holidays are upon us, and as that season blooms green and red and angel-sparkly in our home, I’m pleased to introduce Margaret of Scotland, refugee, queen and saint, in my novel, Queen Hereafter: A Novel of Margaret of Scotland – newly released in trade paperback from Random House and Broadway Books.

Writing a novel about a medieval saint is not the easiest thing to do, as I discovered once I began researching and writing the book. I had written about a medieval queen in my novel, Lady Macbeth; and I had certainly plenty of historical romances (as Susan King and Sarah Gabriel). But a saint? That was a new challenge: all that devoutness and devotion, all that goodness and virtue. As any writer can tell you, a truly well-behaved character can be a lot harder to write than the feisty ones.

Then I got to know Margaret: she had a nicely feisty side, had been shipwrecked, was a needlework artist, a mother, and a tough enough young woman to stand up to the brutish king of Scotland, her own havoc-wreaking husband, and remake him into a more civilized king. A Hungarian-born Saxon princess, Margaret fled the Norman invasion with her siblings and was wrecked on a Scottish shore. The warrior king Malcolm Canmore gave the royal English family sanctuary, and soon offered for Margaret’s hand. A savvy political move, though medieval chroniclers noted that the king fell in love with the beautiful foreign princess, though she resisted the marriage (she wanted to be a nun), but finally relented—and what amounts to a natural fairy
tale romance began.

Margaret has been called by historians one of the most fascinating and complex women of the 11th century and indeed the whole medieval era. She and Malcolm were complete opposites—the young educated cosmopolitan princess accustomed to charitable deeds and luxury surroundings, and the brutish, undereducated warlord raised in a savage warrior culture. Her personal confessor and friend left a rare medieval document in his biography of her, in which he describes her piety, her prayerful devotion, her perfection and compassion—and he mentions her temper, her sense of mischief, her pride, affection for friends, and strict demands of herself.

Despite his idealism, Margaret’s monk, Turgot, provides glimpses of a vital, unique young woman. She respected her tough husband, taught him to read, chided him for his table manners; he adored her, had her favorite book rebound, translated Gaelic for her when she hotly debated with his priests; she fed orphans from her own spoon, stole gold from her husband’s treasury to buy food for the poor, and released his ransomed prisoners; he called her his little thief, boasted of their sons, and begged her to stop fasting.

The fairy tale aspects of her true story are so genuinely the stuff of romance that I could not resist, and had to write about her—a beautiful exiled princess, a shipwreck, a brawny king and love at first sight; a tempestuous but adoring husband, eight healthy, well-behaved children, a deepening mutual love and the growing affection of the Scottish people. Yet as loving, fortunate and intelligent as she was, Margaret worked herself to exhaustion on behalf of the needy, and fasted with such severity that even the priests told her to eat something.

My challenge was to take the various historical facts and many medieval myths about Margaret and spin them into fiction. I wanted to unravel what was known and piece together a new puzzle to make Margaret a real young woman for the modern reader, vulnerable and accessible, rather than just saintly and perfect.

Aside from their political, social and historical significance, the remarkable Queen Margaret and her King Malcolm prove that love blooms in the most unexpected unions, and that not all royal marriages were simply convenient. The story of Margaret and Malcolm is one of a beauty and her beast, two people who changed the course of Scottish, and medieval, history. I hope their romantic story (and that gorgeous cover!) will find a place on your bookshelf, and in your heart, this holiday season.

Thank you, Susan, for sharing with my readers!

If you would like to learn more about Susan Fraser King and her writing, find her on the web:
www.susanfraserking.com

www.wordwenches.com

Buy Queen Hereafter at Amazon

Nancy Adams: Christmas Books (a guest post)

I have the great pleasure of introducing to you Nancy Adams. Today's guest blog is part of her tour promoting her Christmas short story Saint Nick and the Fir Tree, which has just come out in both ebook and print formats (http://nancyadamsfiction.com). It looks like it would make an excellent gift exchange party gift for those looking for that last minute item.

Christmas Books

My earliest Christmas book memories center on The Animals' Merry Christmas written by Kathryn Jackson and illustrated by Richard Scarry. It's been years since I've read the book or even thought about it, and I can't recall any specifics about the stories. But just looking at the pictures that came up when I searched for it on the Internet preparing for this post gave me a warm fuzzy feeling. I see that the publisher's reissued it, and I think I'm going to reissue it, too, and give it to myself for Christmas this year. My sister has the copy we grew up with because she's the one with a kid, my wonderful nephew Sam. I'm glad The Animals' Merry Christmas is being passed down to the younger generation.

When I grew a little older, I loved looking through the Christmas issues of the Ideal magazines our mother collected. I don't know whether the magazine is still published, but she had a whole stack of them. The issue I liked best had several pages devoted to the celebrations of Christmas in different lands. It included information on feast days that seemed wonderfully exotic to a girl growing up in the white-bread, Protestant suburban Midwest. There was December 6, St. Nicholas Day, and December 13, when Scandinavians celebrated the Feast of St. Lucia. The accompanying picture showed a young woman wearing a circlet of lit candles on her head, something that stuck in my memory. Today my first thought is to wonder whether any of the candle wearers ever set her hair on fire. The notion never entered my head back then. Ah me, how our mindset changes once we've grown up!

photo of St. Lucia procession, courtesy of ✽^ Li Chin ^✽'s photostream, Flickr Creative Commons

Around the age of thirteen or fourteen I became a huge Charles Dickens fan. I'm sure it began with his A Christmas Carol, which I acquired through a children's classic book club that sent nice little hardbound editions of classics once a month or so. It included his other Christmas stories, but A Christmas Carol is deservedly the most famous. I think reading it was the beginning of my fascination with language. It was the first book where I was conscious of enjoying the language, enjoying the way Dickens played with it, reveled in it, as much as I enjoyed the story he told. I'm still a huge Dickens fan.

Last year I added a new book to my Christmas pantheon with Ken Harmon's The Fat Man: a tale of North Pole Noir. I won it in a blog giveaway, started reading, and couldn't stop laughing. I wound up giving it to everybody I knew. If you like the noir classics of Raymond Chandler and like a good pun, you'll love the comic "noir" tone of the first-person narrator: an elf on the outs named Gumdrop Coal.

This year I'm curious about two. The Man in the Cinder Clouds by Rick Daley, described as "an origins-of-Santa story" and Tim Greaton's The Santa Shop, described as "a homeless man's journey from despair back to life and Christmas"--both discovered via Twitter.

And finally, my own modest contribution to the genre: "Saint Nick and the Fir Tree : a short story of the day after Christmas." I should first say that it's not a children's story, but aimed more at adults. The idea came to me one summer's day when I'd gone out to prune a yew bush in our yard that the previous owner had shaped like a little fir tree. With the new summer growth, the yew looked like a Christmas tree gone punk--little light-green spikes sticking out all over the place.

Once I'd taken care of those, I stepped back to examine the overall shape. Instead of a nice, smooth cone, the middle had become rather bulgy, as if the "tree" had grown a little beer belly. Instantly my imagination kicked into gear. How would a tree indulge? I thought of the Ent draft that Tolkien's Treebeard had given the young hobbits. I thought of the yew's Christmas-tree shape. What if old Saint Nick had come to town and given the tree a flask of Ent draft? What would it be like if he took his new Tree buddy out on the town, to a Jimmy-Stewart kind of tavern? Et voila, "Saint Nick and the Fir Tree" was born.

About Nancy Adams: A freelance editor and theological librarian, Nancy writes mysteries and fantasy. Her short story "The Secret of the Red Mullet" is published in FISH TALES: the Guppy Anthology. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. In her spare time, Nancy reads, sleeps, and whacks the occasional dust bunny. For more about Nancy and her works visit http://nancyadamsfiction.com.

Nancy has been so kind to offer 2 of my readers a copy of "Saint Nick and the Fir Tree". For US & Canada readers you can win a print copy and for my international readers you can win a ebook. While I would love for you to follow my blog, sign up for my newsletter, or join me on Twitter, none of that is required. All I need you to do to enter is leave a comment, a way to contact you should you win, and your country. I'll do 2 different drawings using Random.org on 8 pm EST Tuesday Dec. 20 to choose the winners.

Like Nancy, I love Christmas books. One I treasure greatly was given to me by my sister - Norman Rockwell's Christmas Book: Carol and stories, poems, recollections. What are you favorite Christmas books?