Catherine Stine's IDEA CITY

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Friday, September 7, 2018

Viviana MacKade's Fall Book Fair Hop, Sept 3-7


Viv's Fall Book Fair Hop starts September with a bang!

This amazing Fall Book Fair hop brings me back to my own blog, after a long hiatus to write (I finished two novels and a novella - phew!) and to raise and train my beagle pup to the one-year mark, where he is  more mature and independent. Say hi, Benny.

I hope you enjoy this hop, as it has a genre for just about everyone - contemporary, suspense, historical, paranormal fantasy, young adult and new adult. The link to the entire listing is here, at Viviana MacKade's blog.

Friday is YA and NA day. Heart in a Box, my YA is on Friday's list, Below is the full Friday lineup of great reads!

Victoria Adams
Contemporary romance. First book in Circles Trilogy
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Barb Caffrey
Allen and Elaine are graduate students in Nebraska, and love each other very much. Their life should be idyllic, but Elaine's past includes rape, neglect, and abuse from those who should've loved her—but didn't, because from childhood, Elaine identified as transgender.

When Elaine tells Allen right before Christmas, he doesn't know what to do. He loves Elaine, loves her soul, has heard about transgender people before, but didn't think Elaine was one of them—she looks and acts like anyone else. Now, she wants to become a man and is going to leave.

He prays for divine intervention, and says he'll do anything, just please don't separate him from Elaine...and gets it. Now, he's in Elaine's body. And she's in his. They'll get a second chance at love.


Why? Because once you find your soulmate, the universe will do almost anything to keep you together—even change your faces.
Amazon
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Mara Gan

Duty and prophecy get in the way of everything.

All I ever wanted to do was read my books, play my sports, and help people. Life and prophecy had other things in mind. Helping people is what I do; as an empath and semi-frequent telepath, I can easily sense and understand people's needs and emotions. Sometimes even before they do. Being able to read everyone’s thoughts and feelings all the time can drive me crazy with anxiety, but that moment when I can finally make someone’s life better makes everything worth it.

Unfortunately, I’m also the next in line to rule the galaxy, I’m the only diplomat most planets will listen to, assassins try to kill me on an annoyingly regular basis, and a much-vaunted Prophecy has decreed that I’m going to die. Oh, and someone blew up my home planet. Kind of a lot to deal with, right?

Too bad I just got another problem: a big, irritating, overbearing bodyguard with serious anger management issues. And I think I’m falling for him.
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Julie Gardner
17-year-old Lily Anderson is ready to wrap herself in a big red bow and give Zach Hewitt the greatest gift in the history of Christmas: Her. But when she pulls a pair of booties from her stocking and learns her forty-year-old mother is pregnant, Lily finds herself adrift, unsure of Zach’s commitment.

Lily hopes Zach will anchor her with promises of love. Unfortunately, his chaotic home-life makes him afraid of those three little words; and Maddie Franklin-in her Amazing Technicolor Dream Thong–makes sure Zach can have her whenever he wants. With the help of her best friend Sarah, Lily plots to secure her place in Zach’s heart. But after a series of awkward rejections, Lily loses faith in her dream boyfriend, in herself, even in Sarah.

That’s when Lily turns to Adam Connolly, a transfer student whose lash-y eyes and comfortable silences make her question who it is she wants and what she needs. But Adam’s support can’t help her the day Lily discovers her parents’ game-changing secret. Faced with the truth, Lily must decide how to deal with her family’s past, take hold of her own future, and accept that there are many names for love. Don’t bother making wishes; what you get is more than enough. 
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Scarlett Kol
A girl looking for a way out.
Being the daughter of New America’s leader, Mercury Masters has everything a girl could want. A glamorous life full of beautiful people, and the power to have anything she wants, except for one thing—to escape. Because Mercury’s perfect life comes with secrets to keep. Dangerous secrets that if made public would destroy her, her family, and her father’s reign. Then she meets Hawk. A boy looking to be a hero.

Hawk, a handsome prep school dropout turned vigilante, has his own family secrets. Deadly secrets that have haunted him since he was fifteen. But instead of fighting the ghosts of his past, Hawk has assembled a group of misfit hackers and thieves to save the future from the corrupt government of New America and the mysterious virus that is killing off its citizens. But trying to do the right thing is tough when the person you really want to save is your enemy’s daughter.

A love that could kill them both. 
Powerful forces keep them apart, but coming together could be the key to saving New America from destruction—even though it may cost both their lives.
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Adam Mann

Two very short stories about a boy meeting a girl, or girls.
The first is at college, where it is not the number of girls but one very special girl who is as inexperienced as the boy. Hopefully she will take the lessons she has learned into her married life.
The second is a young man meeting a series of young ladies, but not always at work, although sometimes work related.
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Brooke Moss
Posey Briggs has a chip on her shoulder the size of Whidbey, the island off of the Washington Coast where she’s stuck with her annoying foster family, and their band of mismatched, screw up kids. The last thing she needs while she rides out these last few months until she’s eighteen and finally free from the system, is to be saddled with some bogus tutoring assignment given by an English teacher with a God complex.

Drew Baxter has the world in the palm of his hands. Best athlete in school, coolest guy on campus, nailing the hottest girl in school whenever he wants. What more could he ask for? Except for his dad to stop making his life a terrorizing game of whose face will get pounded tonight? He’d rather do just about anything other than sitting around listening to the school loser lecture him about Shakespeare every day.

Sometimes the universe has a way of thrusting two people together, even though they’d rather drink poison than sit across a library table from one another. And in this case, the universe knew something Drew and Posey never saw coming: they would become the single most important person in each other’s lives, and save each other from completely unraveling.

Will the explosion, save them or destroy them?
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Connie Smith
Lila and Austin have known each other since she befriended his younger brother when she was a toddler. In fact, since her parents moved from her hometown, Lila's lived with Austin's family. The two are friends, though more of the teasing, taunting breed than the BFF variety.
But all it takes is one moment for everything to change...
For Austin, that moment comes when Lila performs a rumba in the school's auditorium to qualify for the state dance competition, the young woman on stage so far-removed from the little girl in his memories.
For Lila, the moment is a reflected image of Austin preparing for prom, the guy standing in front of his mirror hardly resembling the child that spent so much of his youth pestering her.
Will they find a way to admit to themselves and their families that their feelings are deeper than friendship? And can Lila focus on this building relationship – and deal with her unstable ex – and still win the dance contest?

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Catherine Stine
Each heartbeat leads Joss closer to a shocking truth that will change everything.

Joss Olstad wins the fight to switch from her private school to a public high to “find her pieces” she lost when the artist father she never knew died. There, Joss struggles with a slutty friend, who flirts with her new love, Will; girls who press her on her embarrassing past, as well as her stoner mother’s lies back at home. Armed only with her handmade heart boxes that hold private messages, Joss’s search for identity leads her to a scary industrial section of Queens, and a shocking family secret that changes everything. This novel has been on Amazon’s top 100 in Teen and Alternative Family for over two years.
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Lisa Voisin
A fallen angel seeking redemption. A demon seeking revenge. The teenage girl caught between them.

Mia Crawford is being hunted. When a horrible creature appears out of thin air and attacks her, she knows Michael Fontaine is involved, though he claims to know nothing about it. Secretive and aloof, Michael evokes feelings in Mia that she doesn't understand. Images of another time and place haunt her. She recognizes them--but not from this lifetime.

In search of the truth, Mia discovers a past life of forbidden love, jealousy and revenge that tore an angel from Heaven and sent her to an early grave. Now that her soul has returned, does she have a chance at loving that angel again? Or will an age-old nemesis destroy them both? Ancient history is only the beginning.

Winner of the Chanticleer Grand Prize for supernatural fiction, The Watcher is the fast-paced, achingly romantic start to The Watcher Saga, a Young Adult urban fantasy series.

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Lee Ann Ward
No nightmares about my dad’s car crashing or my sister’s tiny face vanishing in a window of red. No, not anymore. Now when I sleep I fall into an expanse of frozen wilderness, the other life I’ve lived…

The one I’ve lived with him.

Anna experiences vivid dreams from a past-life she lived in the 1800s with her husband Robert and their children in the wilderness of the Michigan Territory. Much like her own mother grieving the man and child she lost, Anna can’t simply let go of the memories that haunt her.

But when she runs into Robert in this lifetime, a whirlwind of their past lives—and deaths—rocks her modern world to the core. What will she be willing to risk to spend every lifetime with Robert? 

In the twists and turns of “repeating” their lives over and over through time, Anna must sacrifice everything for a glimpse of immortal love.
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