Blog tour: Interview & giveaway with Diane Alberts

Today I am happy to welcome Diane Alberts to the blog, as part of her blog tour for new book, Divinely Ruined.
Author bio: Diane Alberts has always been a dreamer with a vivid imagination, but it wasn’t until 2011 that she put her pen where her brain was, and became a published author.  Since receiving her first contract offer, she has yet to stop writing. Though she lives in the mountains, she really wishes she was surrounded by a hot, sunny beach with crystal clear water. She lives in Northeast Pennsylvania with her four kids, a husband, and a Senegal parrot. In the rare moments when she’s not writing, she can usually be found hunched over one knitting project or another.
She is a multi-published, bestselling author with Entangled Publishing and Decadent Publishing. She is repped by her fabulous agent, Lauren Hammond of ADA Management. She has, as of this date, two books with Entangled Publishing, and five books with Decadent Publishing. Her February release with Entangled Publishing, ON ONE CONDITION, hit #18 on the Barnes and Noble Bestseller List. She has a lot of projects currently being shopped around by her fabulous agent, and her goal is to write so many fantastic books that even a non-romance book fan will know her name.

Let's find out a little more about the book!

She finally meets a decent man–after she’s oath-bound never to touch men again!
Rebecca’s life sucked before she became an angel. Crappy apartment, awful jobs, abusive boyfriends–it was no wonder she jumped at the chance to escape it all and become a real live angel. The problem is Rebecca’s not very angelic, and she’ll have to do more to earn her wings than end her love affair with the word f–er, frick.
Especially when she’s assigned to save single father Tony Weis, whose less-than-pure thoughts wreak hell on a telepathic angel’s nerves. It’s all Rebecca can do to keep her hands off him…but when she loses her memory injuring herself to save Tony’s daughter, now it’s Tony’s turn to be her angel and care for her. But will Tony’s devotion tempt her from her angelic path, even if it means being human again?

I had the chance to ask Diane a few questions for the blog.
Ailsa: First of all, 'Divinely Ruined' deals with the idea of guardian angels, but your angels were originally human. Rebecca is still very influenced by who she was in her human life - is she different in this, or do others have problems with adapting to 'angel behavior', too?

Diane: I think she, in particular, has a hard time adjusting to the new life she is in. She had such a dark, unhappy life as a human, so she thinks she is ready to give it all up for the glory of the life of an angel. She doesn’t want love and a family anymore…or, she thinks she doesn’t. But Tony helps her see past her fears, and helps her move on from them.
If not for her past life as a human, I think she wouldn’t have been so tempted by Tony, since he represents everything she wanted when she was human, but could never find.

Ailsa: Aww! So what's your favourite thing about Rebecca? How about Tony?

Diane: I love that Rebecca, despite her attempts at being a hard-hearted, perfect, non-swearing  angel, finds everything she didn’t know she wanted in Tony and Miranda. She is stubborn and tries to ignore the signs, like any red-headed angel would, but not too hard-headed to admit it.
And my favorite thing about Tony is the way he acts around those he loves. He tries to hide behind a hard shell and act like he doesn’t care about anything or anyone, but around Miranda and Rebecca, the real Tony shines through.

Ailsa:  Tony's daughter is adorable! Did you always plan for her to be an equally important main character? I love how much she is tied in to the plot, not just someone there to lighten things up and look cute.

Diane: Yes! To me, she is a central character because she drives Tony to be a better person. She makes him want to be an amazing father and a good human…despite his skepticism toward life. She needed to shine through as the adorable, amazing little girl she is. And, I’ll tell you a little secret. She’s based off my own daughter.

Ailsa: That's so nice to be able to base a character on your daughter! A lot of our readers are also aspiring writers - how would you describe your writing process for the story? Did it come to you fully formed, or did it take a while to come together? Is that typical for you?

Diane: Well, the first thing that came to me was the fact that I wanted to write an angel story that is different from all the other ones. In other angel books, they are ethereal beings that have great, sunny dispositions and never lose their temper. I thought it would be a fun change of pace to switch it up and have them be more human. And Rebecca? Well, she came with a foul temper and bright red hair.
Tony quickly followed, and with him came Miranda. A single father, down on his luck and miserable—in desperate need of saving. Saving that Rebecca could give, and only her. The rest of the story just flowed along after the characters formed, and after lots of re-writing and revising, I subbed it to Entangled!

Ailsa: Hurray! Finally, what would you say to people who still aren't convinced to try the book - what do you think makes Divinely Ruined different?

Diane: It is such a refreshing take on angels, and I tried to blend in the realistic world with the fantasy world. I tried to make you believe that angels like Rebecca really do exist—and maybe you know one. But more importantly, this is not like any angel book you’ve ever read. Trust me…I know! Pick up a copy today!

---
Thanks Diane! If you want to know more, you can read the first chapter online, Entangled Publishing or follow these links to buy: Books on Board,  Amazon,  or Barnes and Noble.


Find Diane on the web:
Website: www.dianealberts.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/DianeAlberts
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Diane-Alberts/121705201245084
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5081315.Diane_Alberts


Finally, Entangled Publishing are offering a giveaway copy of 'Divinely Ruined'! Just leave a comment  to enter, open to midnight June 7th. Winner will be chosen at random and announced as close to June 8th as I can manage.

Review: Divinely Ruined, by Diane Alberts

Title: Divinely Ruined
Author: Diane Alberts
Publisher: Entangled Publishing
Release date: April 2012
Genre: Romance
Source: review copy from publisher

Description: She finally meets a decent man - after she's oath-bound never to touch men again!
Rebecca's life sucked before she became an angel. Crappy apartment, awful jobs, abusive boyfriends - it was no wonder she jumped at the chance to escape it all and become a real live angel. The problem is Rebecca's not very angelic, and she'll have to do more to earn her wings than end her love affair with the word f-er, frick.
Especially when she's assigned to save single father Tony Weis, whose less-than-pure thoughts wreak hell on a telepathic angel's nerves. It's all Rebecca can do to keep her hands off him... but when she loses her memory injuring herself to save Tony's daughter, now it's Tony's turn to be her angel and care for her. But will Tony's devotion tempt her from her angelic path, even if it means being human again?

My thoughts: Divinely Ruined is a sweet story about a woman who's been given the chance at a new life as an angel. Her first task is to save Tony, and that is immediately problematic. First, there's the challenge of making Tony let her in to help. Being an angel makes her telepathic which helps, but it also leaves her susceptible to the mental images Tony comes up with of them being very friendly together. Not on purpose (most of the time) - he just didn't expect an angel to be pretty and favour low cut tops. Each chapter starts with an Angel Rule, and Rule Number 2 is "never fall for your subject". Rebecca is so determined to do a good job and earn her wings, but Tony is very distracting, especially with his adorable daughter, Miranda.

I liked watching Tony and Rebecca start to trust and become familiar with each other, and then to properly care about each other. Rebecca connects with Miranda almost straight away and is an important part in bringing them together. The story is fairly short (less than 200 pages) but has a lot of character development packed in. There was one big thing Rebecca did that I got a bit annoyed with, near the end of the book - she reacts very badly to something Tony does, and I really don't think it was fair of her.

This is a sweet romance story with just a hint of angels involved, and was a pleasant read for an evening. It wasn't particularly 'deep' or needing lots of thought, but it was nice to have something light for a little while. I'll give this a 6 overall.

~Ailsa

A little disruption

Hi guys!
On Friday evening I start a slow trip to New Jersey for my 3rd summer working as a camp counsellor there. I can't wait to be back, but it means posts might be a little slower. For the next couple of weeks, I should be able to keep up with lots of posts, but once camp kicks off near the end of June, I'm not sure how it's going to go. My plan is to get at least two reviews up a week, plus the Letterbox Love posts on Sundays. Maybe I'll be able to do more than that (I hope so) but we'll see how it goes. I'm going to try and set up some auto-posts for the days I can't get to the computer.

I read every single comment, and appreciate them all, so if I'm a little slow reply, it's because I'm trying to stop a group of children burning down the pinelands!

Check back on the blog tomorrow for a review of 'Divinely Ruined' by Diane Alberts, and an interview & giveaway with the author!

Do any of you have fun summer plans?

~Ailsa

Review: Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire

Title: Discount Armageddon
Author: Seanan McGuire
Publisher: Daw (US)
Release date: March 2012
Genre: Urban fantasy
Source: Bought at my local indie fantasy book store (Transreal Fiction, Edinburgh)

Description from back cover: Cryptid, noun: Any creature whose existence has not yet been proven by science. See also "monster".
Cryptozoologist, noun: Any person who thinks hunting for cryptids is a good idea. See also "idiot".


Ghoulies. Ghosties. Long-legged beasties. Things that go bump in the night... and that's just the beginning. The Price family has spent generations studying the monsters of the world, working to protect them from humanity - and to protect humanity from them. Enter Verity Price. Despite being trained from birth as a cryptozoologist, she'd rather dance a tango than tangle with a demon, and is spending a year in Manhattan while she pursues her career in professional ballroom dance.
Sounds pretty simple, right? It would be, if it weren't for the talking mice, the telepathic mathematicians, the asbestos supermodels, and the trained monster-hunter sent by the Price family's old enemies, the Covenant of St George. To complicate matters further, local cryptids are disappearing, strange lizard-men are appearing in the sewers, and someone's spreading rumours about a dragon sleeping underneath the city... 
A lifetime of training isn't enough to prepare Verity for what's ahead - especially not for Dominic De Luca, the Covenant's newest operative. When a Price girl meets a Covenant boy, high stakes, high heels, and a lot of collateral damage are almost guaranteed. 

My thoughts: I was introduced to Seanan McGuire's writing shortly after her first book, Rosemary and Rue, was published, and I've looked forward to each new book ever since. I've yet to be let down by one of her books, so I was really excited for her new series, which starts with Discount Armageddon.

Verity's family has a long history working as cryptozoologists, mainly trying to protect supernatural creatures from humans, and from the Covenant of St George, who think the only good cryptid is a dead one. Verity is taking a gap year of sorts, to live in a city (*gasps from her family*) and pursue a career ballroom dancing. Previously, she entered a So-You-Think-You-Can-Dance type show and did very well, but because her family are hiding from the Covenant, she had to do so under a false name, which she now uses for dance auditions in New York. To make ends meet, she works in a bar owned by a cryptid, Dave, and lives in a tiny apartment with creatures called 'Aeslin Mice'. The mice are rather adorable - just like normal mice, but they talk, and have festivals and religious celebrations for everything. Verity first meets Dominic De Luca as she's free-running home from work over the rooftops of New York and ends up hanging upside down from a trap he'd set. From there, it starts getting harder for Verity to keep her two lives of dancing and cryptozoology separate, getting pulled into problems about dragons that she would rather stay away from. While she and Dominic try to keep from killing each other, they must hunt around and under the city to find the truth of the rumours and find out what's happening to the disappearing locals.

Discount Armageddon is a really fun read. I was very quickly pulled into Verity's world, and I loved each new cryptid she met. I can't wait to see more of the world in the following books.  I like how Dominic and Verity both have a lot of prejudices about each other which they gradually manage to overcome, and I hope later books will show a little more of their fledgling friendship.

The second book, Midnight Blue Light, is scheduled for March 2013, and if you can't wait that long, there are some short stories about Verity's predecessors available on Seanan McGuire's website, here, as well as field guide to some of the cryptids.

I'm giving this 9 out of 10, and I'm really looking forward to book two in the InCryptid series.

~Ailsa

Letterbox Love #2

Letterbox Love is a new feature hosted by Lynsey at Narratively Speaking, intended as a way of sharing the books we've received with a slightly more British feel to it.

I've been away for a couple of weeks, trying (hopefully) to pass my exams, and sort out things for the summer and the coming year - I'm off to study abroad, so it's taken a bit of stress & organising with visas and pesky things things like that.

I've got a couple of books in the last week or so. First, I finally got the 4th Parasol Protectorate book, by Gail Carriger:

I'm about half way through this one, and I love it, it's so much fun to be back in this world again. (Click here for description on Goodreads.)

I also got a couple of ebooks from NetGalley for review:

Brook Street: Rogues, by Ava March - I've finished this one, and will be doing a mini-review of it soon. It's quite short, but it was fun. (Goodreads description.) 

And one that I read the description for somewhere online, and thought it sounded great, so I checked online and lo and behold, there it was! It's called 'The 500' by Matthew Quirk. I'm saving this one for when I have time to just sit & read with no distractions - I think it's going to be the sort of book that needs it. It's published by Hatchette Books & comes out on 5th June. (Goodreads description.)

So that's me for now - what did you all get through the post this week?

~Ailsa

Review: Nightfire by Lisa Marie Rice

Title: Nightfire
Author: Lisa Marie Rice
Publisher: Avon Red
Release Date: Feb 7 2012
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Notes: Book 3 in a series, but stands alone pretty well
Source: review copy from publisher via edelweiss

Description from publisher: Chloe Mason can't remember much about her childhood, except for being in and out of hospitals. Now healthy and all grown up, she's determined to fill the gaping hole that was her past.. When she finds her long lost brother, Harry, she discovers family and something else that was missing from her life. Love.


As a child, Mike Keillor helplessly watched as his parents were massacred. Vowing to never again be vulnerable, he joined the Marines and became a Recon sniper, SWAT officer, and an expert in martial arts, before establishing his own successful security company. When his friend and partner Harry reconnects with his long lost sister, Chloe, the hard-as-nails Mike is felled by the one thing he can't fight. Love.


But their future is jeopardized when Chloe accidently steps into the path of the Russian mob. Though his adversary is way bigger than he is, nothing can stop Mike from saving the woman who has captured his heart. He lost his family, and he will not lose Chloe. Failure is not an option.

My thoughts: It's taken me a while to start writing this review because there were bits that really bothered me in the book. There were other bits that I quite liked. At first, we meet Chloe as she's in the waiting room of a mysterious company, waiting very nervously to speak to someone. She's had a hard childhood, and been a victim of abuse, which is clear early on. She reveals through a tearful conversation that Harry is her brother. Aaannd here it started losing me with the lack of realism. The family that are there at the office immediately welcome her as a sister, and they go home (where the three families involved in the series have apartments almost nextdoor to each other) and have a big family lunch. They've literally just met each other, and they go to have this cosy meal. Mike helps Chloe collect her stuff from the hotel she was staying in, because of course the family want her to stay with them, and while in the hotel room, the insta-lust between them bubbles over. Abused, virginal Chloe makes out with him against a wall, and lets him touch her intimately. It just seemed so unbelievable to me that a woman who's been through what Chloe has, and is still a virgin, would suddenly be so happy with physical contact when she's shied away from it with anyone so far in the book, and then would suddenly let herself be intimate with a man she's just met.

Moving on from that, there were bits that were very well written and I hoped it would turn out ok. There were a couple of other things along the lines of Chloe's intimacy issues that bothered me, but mostly it was the torture and the treatment of the prostitutes that also are tied in to the story. Perhaps stronger-stomached readers would have faired better, but I just didn't feel comfortable reading it. Readers here how secure Mike has made his apartment, and then someone finds a way to get in anyway - I really found it hard to accept that he would have thought of all these other ways to stop things and miss this one rather obvious one.

There is good writing in there, but I just didn't feel like it was very believable in a lot of places, and I was very uncomfortable with some scenes. I think this book has to get 4 out of 10 from me. I might read something else by this author if it had good recommendations, but it's something I'll be quite wary of.

~Ailsa

Review: Royal Street, by Suzanne Johnson

Title: Royal Street
Author: Suzanne Johnson
Publisher: Tor/Forge
Released: April 10th, 2012
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Source: review copy via NetGalley

Description: As the junior wizard sentinel for New Orleans, Drusilla Jaco's job involves a lot more potion-mixing and pixie-retrieval than sniffing out supernatural bad guys like rogue vampires and lethal were-creatures. DJ's boss and mentor, Gerald St. Simon, is the wizard tasked with protecting the city from anyone or anything that might slip over from the preternatural beyond.

Then Hurricane Katrina hammers New Orleans' fragile levees, unleashing more than just dangerous flood waters.

While winds howled and Lake Pontchartrain surged, the borders between the modern city and the Otherworld crumbled. Now, the undead and the restless are roaming the Big Easy, and a serial killer with ties to voodoo is murdering the soldiers sent to help the city recover.

To make it worse, Gerry has gone missing, the wizards' Elders have assigned a grenade-toting assassin as DJ's new partner, and undead pirate Jean Lafitte wants to make her walk his plank. The search for Gerry and for the serial killer turns personal when DJ learns the hard way that loyalty requires sacrifice, allies come from the unlikeliest places, and duty mixed with love creates one bitter gumbo.

My Thoughts: I really like this book. Now that we've got that out the way, let me tell you a bit more about it. We meet the heroine, DJ, as she's meeting the ghost of a lascivious pirate, who she soon banishes. She then catches up with her mentor Gerry, and they dismiss the coming storm, Katrina, as something that probably won't do any more harm than any other storm, and think that people should stop scaremongering. Of course, every reader knows how it's really going to turn out, and I was biting my nails waiting to see if these people would get themselves somewhere safe, and then what would happen in the aftermath. At first it seems like they're going to be ok, but then a few days after the storm has passed, Gerry goes missing, and it's up to DJ to sort out the supernatural beasties that are sneaking in to the city, while she tries to clear his name. Enter Alex, the "grenade-toting assassin". Both Alex & his cousin Jake sound very hot, and I found it very interesting to read about the interaction DJ had with each of them. For a little while, I really couldn't guess which way things were going to go.

I like the way the relationships develop between all the characters, and the way that DJ changes over the book as she finds out some things about her childhood. In her quest to clear Gerry's name, she does come across some things that point the finger strongly against him, and I thought the way she reacted and changed because of that was very believable. Each character has a strong, realistic personality of their own, and the interactions between them were often very funny - I really like DJ's inner voice.

I visited New Orleans last September, and I think it's beautifully brought to life in the book - it made me very nostalgic for my trip. The way that the supernatural element is brought into the world is very interesting, I think - they seem to exist in a parallel, slightly in the past, world, and try to break through to our world/time - it's DJ's job to stop this sort of thing. I can't wait to read more about her adventures, and see what happens with her changing powers as she learns more about what she can do. I'm also very interested to see the after affects of the events at the end of this book.

I'll give this one 9 out of 10 - check it out if you like books by Kalayna Price, Ilona Andrews, or Jocelynn Drake.

~Ailsa