Book Blitz and Giveaway: Blood, Milk, and Chocolate - Part 2 by Cameron Jace

Book Details:
Blood, Milk & Chocolate – Part 2 by Cameron Jace
(The Grimm Diaries, #4)
Publication date: January 4th 2016
Genres: Young Adult, Fantasy, Fairy Tales 

Synopsis:
Carmilla Karnstein’s journey through the Seven Seas, trying to find the Tower of Tales and meet Lady Shallot so she can help her and Angel to escape from Night Von Sorrow’s wrath. Lady Shallot finds them an island on the back of whale. They call it Sorrow and begin a journey of most heart wrenching secrets. What and where Sorrow really is. Who the Lost Seven are. And most of all who Carmilla and her new born daughter really are.

In the fourth installments of this epic tale, nothing is like it seems, some of the favorite character dies, and the thin line between good and evil blurs even more.





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Author Bio:

Cameron Jace is the bestselling author of the Grimm Diaries and Insanity series. A graduate of the college of Architecture, collector of out-of-print books, he is obsessed with the origins of folk tales and the mysterious storytellers who spread them. Three of his books made Amazon's Top 100 Customer Favorites in Kindle 2013 & Amazon's Top 100 kindle list. Cameron lives in California with his girlfriend. When he isn't writing or collecting books, he is playing music.

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Author links:
Blog:  http://cameronjace.blogspot.ca/
Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/camjace
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/cameronjace
Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/995289.Cameron_Jace 

 Excerpt:
Life in the Seven Seas didn’t promise a happily ever after for Angel and me. Sailing in our small boat, I didn’t know what was worse. The nights or the days.
     The days were gloomy. Looms of mist surmounted our boat, and we could hardly see the horizon. Angel liked to call it the sea’s edge, as if there was an imaginary waterfall at the end where all ship’s fell off into oblivion. The apple trader I fell in love with surely had a dark imagination.
     The nights in the Seven Seas were the embodiment of scare. The fear of the unknown. Because we still couldn’t see ahead. The hope of finding the Tale of Towers and meeting Lady Shallot to help us escape Night Von Sorrow were diminishing tide by tide. The Seven Seas were a slow death. Day after day, I began to realize we may have fooled ourselves, thinking we could really escape and find a place we could call our home.
     And there was more.
     By day we sometimes saw other ships looming beyond the mist which draped like curtains before our eyes. The mist blurred our destinations. And the thing we thought we glimpsed behind may have been illusions.
     “Do you see them, Angel.” I said.
     “See what?”
     “The ships looming behind the mist. The silhouettes of sailors. Their red eyes.”
     “I see nothing, Carmilla. You’re imaging things. The sea does that sometimes.”
     I turned back to him. He was standing at the farther side of the boat, trying to catch some fish. He had been like that since I’d sold my soul to fate. Nothing mattered to him but food.
     Angel spend half of the days catching an incredible amount of fish. To me, the fish saved me from starving. But to Angel, the fish he caught meant nothing but blood.
     I had seen him ripg a large fish with his teeth and sucking out the its red guts with insatiable hunger. He had to drink fast before its blood clotted. One after the other. Someday when he couldn’t catch the fish, he jumped into the water, disappeared for hours and then reappeared with a big fish between his teeth.
     “You breath under water?” I remember asking.
     “I guess so,” He didn’t even care that he began acquiring incredible vampire powers. “I can only do it when I am really hungry.”
     We’d sit next to each other. I ate fish. He drank its insides. The rest of the day he’d sleep, tired of hunting for blood. This wasn’t the love stories I had imagined when I first met him.
     But I wasn’t surprised. I, Carmilla Karnstein, was bound for sorrow by Captain Hook, Fate of the Seven Seas. And Angel was risking his full transformation into a vampire like his father.
     One night, I realized we we were two survivors unable to love each other, but couldn’t. Survival took most of our time, and the bond between us thinned with every passing wave rocking our boat of life in the Seven Seas.
     That night was the first time I thought about having a child. Angel and I needed something we both cared about to keep our bond from fraying. And it was a strange thought. Because somehow I knew, deep inside my soul, that I will not only have one child. But two.
     Something told me I will have two girls. Twins.

Blitz-wide giveaway (INTL):

• Books 1-3 of the Grimm Diaries Series

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Review: Insanity by Cameron Jace

Thanks to Xpresso Tours for allowing me to read a part of this as part of a tour.  As I've mentioned many times on here I am really a fan of fairy tale or other classic story retellings.  Honestly though, Alice in Wonderland was never one that I had really read all the way through.  My interest in the story though changed once I read Splintered by AG Howard.  I love her series.  While this book doesn't quite live up to what I loved about that series, it still had a very unique new look at this classic story, as well as the author and his history and other stories.

The main character is a girl named Alice, and she is in an asylum.  She's in an asylum because supposedly she killed  a whole school bus full of her classmates and friends, and all of it because she said there were creatures from Wonderland who had actually been there and caused the bus to crash.  But Alice can't remember most of this.  In large part she can't remember because of all the shock therapy she's been subjected to while in the asylum.  There's another person in the asylum, Professor Caterpillar, who goes by Pillar, who also claims to be from Wonderland.  And he is a serial killer.  And doesn't pretend not to be.  He also has his ways of escaping the asylum with no one being the wiser until they discover he's gone.  What's even weirder about it is that he always returns, and lets them "lock" him up in his cell again.

Outside the asylum there have been murders of young girls.  All the girls have been left with huge "Cheshire Cat" grins on their faces.  Very unnatural grins.  Pillar believes that it is the work of the actual Cheshire Cat, and he believes that Alice is "the" Alice from the stories.  And he thinks she can help catch the cat before he gets whatever he is after. While Pillar doesn't necessarily care about saving the girls, Alice does, especially with the first girl she saves, Constance.  Together Alice will work with Pillar to try to catch the Cheshire Cat and end not only these murders, but also stop him from causing the end to all humankind.

What I liked was all the ways the mythology of the original story was related back to things from Lewis Carroll's life.  The history of Carroll's life and writings, all of that was fascinating, and I wonder how much was real, and how much was embellished.  It makes me want to learn even more about the author.  I also liked the character that was kind of thrown in as a love interest, Jack Diamond.  I hope to see more of him in the next story in the series, and I hope he does turn out to be a real love interest.  I will read on some day in this series I'm sure.

What I didn't like are just a few things.  I feel a lot of time was spent in the story just telling us all the history and other background things.  While they were important to the story, definitely, and yes they were interesting, sometimes it felt like there were too many "info dumps."  I also saw a few grammar and spelling errors, that I don't know if my copy I got was maybe pre-editing, or else hopefully those types of things were looked at closer in the 2nd and 3rd books in the series.  For the most part these errors didn't interfere with the story, and that is really all that matters.

If you are a fan of the Alice in Wonderland stories, or other stories/poems by Lewis Carroll, then I think you could really enjoy this.  Also fans of retellings like I am, or people who enjoy very unique takes on stories and themes, should probably pick this series up and give it a shot.