Cleaning Up My TBR With a Giveaway (US Only) - Down the TBR Hole #16

This meme was started by Lost in a Story.  Here is how it works:

• Go to your goodreads to-read shelf.
• Order on ascending date added.
• Take the first 5 (or 10 if you’re feeling adventurous) books
• Read the synopses of the books
• Decide: keep it or should it go?

Because I have so many to do, I'm going to try to do this weekly, and do 10 at a time.


1.  Eliza's Freedom Road:  An Underground Railroad Diary by Jerdine Nolan and Shadra Strickland:

It is 1852 in Alexandria, Virginia. Eliza’s mother has been sent away and it is Abbey, the cook, who looks after Eliza, when Eliza isn’t taking care of the Mistress. Eliza has the quilt her mother left her and the memory of the stories she told to keep her close. When her Mistress’s health begins to fail and Eliza overhears the Master talk of Eliza being traded, Eliza takes to the night. She follows the path and the words of the farmhand Old Joe, “ … travel the night … sleep the day. Go East. Your back to the set of the sun until you come to the safe house where the candlelight lights the window.” All the while, Eliza recites the stories her mother taught her along her Freedom Road from Maryland to St. Catherine’s, Canada. 

My thoughts:  
Another subject I used to devour any book on was the Underground Railroad.  However, not sure with this one if I'll get to it.  

Verdict:  Toss


2.  Falling Under by Gwen Hayes:

Theia Alderson has always led a sheltered life in the small California town of Serendipity Falls. But when a devastatingly handsome boy appears in the halls of her school, Theia knows she's seen Haden before- not around town, but in her dreams.

As the Haden of both the night and the day beckons her closer one moment and pushes her away the next, the only thing Theia knows for sure is that the incredible pull she feels towards him is stronger than her fear.

And when she discovers what Haden truly is, Theia's not sure if she wants to resist him, even if the cost is her soul.

My thoughts:
I feel like I have a copy of this on my shelves.  But I'm not sure.  So for now I probably won't keep it.  If I ever get around to going through my books, probably after I move, then I'll know for sure and can re-add it to my list.

Verdict:  Toss


 3.  The Unholy Cause (Supernatural #5) by Joe Schreiber:

A Supernatural novel that reveals a previously unseen adventure for the Winchester brothers, from the hit CW series!

Way back in April 1862, Confederate Captain Jubal Beauchamp leads a charge across a Georgia battleground… Fast forward to 2009 and a civil war re-enactment becomes all too real. When Sam and Dean head down south to investigate they find that history has got somewhat out of hand… 

My thoughts:
Don't know if I own this one, but I know that one day, since the series is ending this year, that day will be soon, I will want to read the stories and get what I can.

Verdict:  Keep


4.  Eureka:  Substitution Method (Eureka #1) by Cris Ramsay:

Welcome to Eureka.
Population: BRILLIANT

It's a town of geniuses-and now it's the smartest series going.

Founded by Albert Einstein and Harry Truman after WWII, Eureka is home to the greatest minds in science and technology. But the creations of these eccentric geniuses threaten to destroy the world as often as they save it. Jack Carter is the everyman sheriff who must use his common sense and unique street smarts to keep a lid on this Pandora's Box of a town.

A secret government think tank that doesn't appear on any maps, Eureka has seen its share of strange problems. But today those problems may be seen by the outside world. People, cars, and buildings are being swapped with people, cars, and buildings from different places. With Eureka's secrets on the line, Carter must find the cause before the town is exposed. And all roads lead to Global Dynamics, the mysterious research facility that everyone seems to work for -- except Jack.

My thoughts:
I loved this TV show.  And I might actually own this book.  However, I know that some day I will want to go back and revisit the quirky town of Eureka.  I also have four other books from this series right after this one on the list:  Brain Box Blues (#2), Road Less Traveled (#3), and Dormant Gene (by a different author - Andrew Crosby)

Verdict:  Keep all of them


5.  Flip by Martyn Bedford:

Alex, 14, goes to bed in December, and wakes in June, in a strange house to a strange family. In the mirror, he sees Flip. Unless Alex finds out what's happened and how to get back to his own life,  he may be trapped forever inside a body that belongs to someone else. What is identity, the will to survive, and what will we sacrifice to survive?

My thoughts:  This isn't even one I remember adding to my list.

Verdit:  Toss


  


6.  The Girl in the Lighthouse (Arrington #1) by Roxanne Tepfer Sandford:

From the time Lillian Arrington was born, she lived an isolated life on a remote lighthouse station with her father Garrett and her young mother Amelia. But Lillian has wishes and dreams far beyond her years.

When her father is transferred to a new station, Lillian is anxious to meet the assistant keepers and their two sons, Heath and Ayden. She had never met children her own age, had playmates, or made a friend.

Heath, the handsome teenage boy who desires to become a doctor someday, welcomes Lillian. However, his younger brother, Ayden, doesn't like her and she struggles to win him over. Before long, a secret bond between the three is forged and to Lillian's delight, they become close friends.

After so many years, Lillian's childhood is beginning to resemble that of a normal girl. No longer is she lonely and isolated from the rest of the world by over-protective parents. Instead, she experiences new adventures, attends school, and falls in love for the first time.

However, her glorious days on Jasper Island are short-lived as her beautiful young mother begins a tragic descent into insanity and passes away. Lillian is left in the care of her sinister grandmother Eugenia Arrington, who, since the end of the Civil War, continues to steadfastly hold onto the once glorious Georgia plantation known as Sutton Hall. It is there that the immoral secrets of Lillian's parents are revealed, and she is left to pick up the pieces of her scandalous past, and somehow, find her long way home.   

My thoughts:  
Hmm, sounds pretty good.  But I don't know, will I ever get around to it?  I also have the sequel to this on my TBR, will do the same with both.

Verdict:  Toss


7.  Hollowland (The Hollows #1) by Amanda Hocking:

"This is the way the world ends - not with a bang or a whimper, but with zombies breaking down the back door."

Nineteen-year-old Remy King is on a mission to get across the wasteland left of America, and nothing will stand in her way - not violent marauders, a spoiled rock star, or an army of flesh-eating zombies.

My thoughts: 
So I fell in love with this author when I began reading her Trylle series while sitting in line all day waiting for one of the Harry Potter movie premieres.  This is an earlier title of hers, and I don't want to forget it.  Actually, we have a graphic novel in my library that I've begun reading on days when I'm sitting and "gurading" the back exit so kids don't decide they can sneak out that way.  

Verdict:  Keep




8.  My Fair Godmother by Janette Rallison:

Finding your one true love can be a Grimm experience!

After her boyfriend dumps her for her older sister, sophomore Savannah Delano wishes she could find a true prince to take her to the prom. Enter Chrissy (Chrysanthemum) Everstar: Savannah’s gum-chewing, cell phone–carrying, high heel-wearing Fair Godmother. Showing why she’s only Fair—because she’s not a very good fairy student—Chrissy mistakenly sends Savannah back in time to the Middle Ages, first as Cinderella, then as Snow White. Finally she sends Tristan, a boy in Savannah’s class, back instead to turn him into her prom-worthy prince. When Savannah returns to the Middle Ages to save Tristan, they must team up to defeat a troll, a dragon, and the mysterious and undeniably sexy Black Knight. Laughs abound in this clever fairy tale twist from a master of romantic comedy.

My thoughts:
If you know me, I love a good fairy tale retelling.  But i this case, I think maybe I'll skip.

Verdict:  Toss


 9.  Kings of the Dead by Tony Faville:

When the H1N1 "Swine Flu" virus mutates it begins to not only kill those who have received the vaccination, but also bring on the unthinkable: the dead reanimate. Cole Helman and his friends are not only survival experts, they've spent hours discussing and preparing for just this event and quickly head to the hills before the cities become clogged with looting and riots. But the group knows all too well that the living dead are just the beginning of their problems, and they'll eventually have to deal with the worst qualities of the living-desperation, greed, selfishness, and cruelty-in this new post-apocalyptic world. And a chance encounter at a secret military installation may reveal a conspiracy bigger than any of them had imagined... Straight out of the apocalypse comes the chronicle of one small group and their experiences with life and death, survival and loss. In a world of the living dead, is one man capable of maintaining not only his community, but his own sanity?

My thoughts:
I might be kind of over zombie books too.  Not sure I've ever heard much more about this one either.

Verdict:  Toss


 10.  Hemlock by Kathleen Peacock:

MACKENZIE AND AMY WERE BEST FRIENDS.

UNTIL AMY WAS BRUTALLY MURDERED.

Since then, Mac's life has been turned upside down. She is being haunted by Amy in her dreams, and an extremist group called the Trackers has come to Mac's hometown of Hemlock to hunt down Amy's killer:

A white werewolf.

Lupine syndrome - also known as the werewolf vius - is on the rise across the country. Many of the infected try to hide their symptoms, but bloodlust is not easy to control.

Wanting desperately to put an end to her nightmares, Mac decides to investigate Amy's murder herself. She discovers secrets lurking in the shadows of Hemlock, secrets about Amy's boyfriend, Jason, her good pal Kyle, and especially her late best friend. Mac is thrown into a maelstrom of violence and betrayal that puts her life at risk.

Kathleen Peacock's thrilling novel is the first in the Hemlock trilogy, a spellbinding urban fantasy series filles with provocative questions about prejudice, trust, lies, and love.

My thoughts:
I think this is one that is well enough known that if I ever decide I want to read it, I'll be able to find again.

Verdict:  Toss


Final Thoughts:
So, while I'm tossing 8 this week, since I have several kind of combined in the Eureka series, I am keeping 6 .  Have you read any of these?  Would you suggest I keep any I'm tossing?  And if you're inspired to do this on your blog, please feel free to join in and share a link in the comments, since it's not really catching on, I'm not going to waste time with the link up this week.  It will also get you an extra entry into my giveaway at the bottom of this post.    

Giveaway:
Once again this is a US only giveaway, unless you are International and see a book here you really want and would be willing to pay for the difference in the shipping through Paypal or some other way.  This week I'm upping the prize, you get to pick any two books from the pictures below, as long as they don't get traded away, or picked by last week's winner, and I will pick a surprise book from the piles to add to your choice.  Here are your choices:      

Above are my 2018 ARCs

My 2017 ARCs 

Above are my 2014-2016 ARCs.

Once again I'm going to let you pick two, along with me throwing in a surprise third book!  Just enter the Rafflecopter below.

  a Rafflecopter giveaway

Revew and Blog Tour: Supervision by Alison Stine (Giveaway)

First I have to say thanks to XPresso Book Tours for allowing me to read an egalley of this and be a part of the tour, you can check out the tour schedule HERE.  It took me a minute or two to get into the book. But once I got into it I needed to know where it was going, and so it kept me turning pages, or actually swiping the screen of my Nook to get to the next page.  First, here is the information about the book and author.

Book and Author details:

Supervision by Alison Stine
Published by: HarperVoyager
Publication date: April 9th 2015
Genres: Paranormal, Young Adult

Synopsis:
Something is wrong with Esmé.

Kicked out of school in New York, she’s sent to live with her grandmother in a small Appalachian town. But something is wrong with the grandmother Ez hasn’t seen for years; she leaves at midnight, carrying a big black bag. Something is wrong with her grandmother’s house, a decrepit mansion full of stray cats, stairs that lead to nowhere, beds that unmake themselves. Something is wrong in the town where a kid disappears every year, where a whistle sounds at night but no train arrives.

And something is wrong with the cute and friendly neighbor Ez’s age with black curls and ice-blue eyes: He’s dead.

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23945188-supervision?ac=1

Purchase:
--Amazon
--Barnes and Noble

AUTHOR BIO

ALISON STINE’s first novel SUPERVISION will be released by Harper Voyager UK in 2015.

Also the author of three books of poetry: WAIT (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), OHIO VIOLENCE (University of North Texas Press, 2009), and LOT OF MY SISTER (Kent State University Press, 2001), she has worked as an actor, an artist’s model, a high school teacher, and a professor. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Ohio University, and is an avid urban explorer.

Author links:
http://www.alisonstine.com/
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/683318.Alison_Stine
https://www.facebook.com/alisonstineauthor?ref=hl&ref_type=bookmark
https://twitter.com/AlisonStine

My Review:
It starts with the main character, Esme, who is not happy living with her older sister in NYC.  Their parents have passed away, and her sister, who she calls "The Firecracker" after an old news story about her dancing, threatens her with going to live with their grandmother whenever Esme causes problems.  Well, when Esme can't find her boyfriend, and sees a message from him in the subway, she goes looking for him and gets trapped in a subway tunnel.  The police offer not to press charges when her sister says she will be sending her away.  At her grandmother's house she is being treated as if she is invisible, in fact everyone in town seems to treat her as if she doesn't exist. And that's not the only weird thing, she is seeing ghosts.  Some of these ghosts, Tom and Clara, seem to think that the reason no one can see Esme is that she is dead like them. But she's not, at least she's pretty  sure she's not because she can still bleed. And unlike her new ghost friends, her wounds don't just fade away.  So now she has to figure out why she seems to be invisible to everyone, and why all of a sudden she can see ghosts.  She does figure out that maybe she can help ghosts pass on, like it seems maybe her grandmother does.  But trying to do that may get her in trouble, even hurt, by the not so friendly ghosts that are still around the house and town.  Especially when she learns about all the area children that have gone missing or died over the past years.  And she might find love, with a ghost.  And she might get a chance to work on the relationship with her sister, who really is there for her throughout the whole time, sometimes the only living person that seems to still know she is around.

I have to say not knowing why she was invisible, but still alive, was a huge thing as I read.  And we don't really get close to knowing till the last fourth of the book.  I guess that was a good way to keep us hooked though.  And in the end I like the way it was solved, mostly. Although if it was a bit quick maybe?  But in the end, if that's what it took to solve the bad situation, then it would be pretty quick.  Definitely a pretty good read.  There were a lot of typos, but as this is an egalley, I would assume all that will be fixed for the final story.  There was a link to Esme's family and the house when it was built, but we didn't really get it till the very end, and I think some of that, along with the parts about her mother, could have been interspersed a bit more.  Still, had some definitely creepy ghost parts, as well as some interesting ghosts.  It pulled in the Underground Railroad, as well as the Orphan Trains, both historical things that I find very interesting to learn about.

Now while you're here, make sure that you enter into the tour giveaway below!

Tour-wide giveaway (INTL)
--3x ebook copies of SUPERVISION and 2x original graffiti art prints based on SUPERVISION

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

Review: The Revelation of Louisa May by Michaela MacColl

First, thanks to Chronicle Books and Edelweiss for allowing me to read an e-galley of this.  Now, I have to admit that I've never read Little Women, or seen the movie, or read anything by Louisa May Alcott.  But, I'd never read Jane Eyre until I read the book The Eyre Affair.  While this was an okay story, not sure that it makes me need to read any of her books.  I was intrigued though, as I always am, by any book that takes a look at an author's life, especially fictional books because they can add in some fun details. 

This story is about Louisa May Alcott's life when she was about 15 and her mother had to go work in another city to bring the family money.  I guess I didn't realize that the author lived in a community with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  I really liked that bit of history that was woven into the story.  Louisa's family was also very much into the abolitionist movement,  to the point of being part of the Underground Railroad.  In the story, when Louisa's mother goes to the job she leaves Louisa in charge of the household, which includes not only doing the housework, cooking and cleaning for her father, but also watching her younger sister Beth, while her mother took the youngest, May, with her.  The household management included a "package", the runaway slave George, who showed up right as Louisa's mother, Marmee, was leaving. 

For Louisa's first time being in charge, things didn't go that smoothly, because at the same time she had a slave to protect, a slave catcher showed up in town looking for him.  And the slave catcher happened to know Henry, as well as another woman that wasn't trusted, Miss Whittaker.  One somewhat happy thing that seemed to occur was that Louisa's cousin Fred showed up.  While they used to be the best of friends, Fred had changed.  He'd grown up into a very handsome young man, and seemed to be interested in Louisa as more than a friend/cousin as well. 

When one of the players in the story turns up dead towards the end, the trials of the story soon turn into a murder mystery, one that Louisa feels she must solve, even if it means that someone she loves and respects, or feels sympathy for, is a murderer. 

I have to say the mystery was a good one, there was lots of story with actual factual bits sprinkled throughout as well.  While it gave me a bit of a history legend on some authors I didn't know that much about, as I said before, I will personally not be adding any of their books to my TBR at this time.  I think that the writing is probably done a lot like Alcott does in her books, at least it reminded me of how I think that the books were written, from what little I know of them. 

If you like the author Alcott's books, I'm guessing you'll enjoy this.  If you enjoy a good murder mystery, with some historical fiction thrown in, you'll also probably enjoy this.  I will definitely be adding it to my list of books to possibly order into the high school library where I work because of all the historical bits and the link to the authors' real lives.  I like that at the end there is even a few pages telling what everything was based on, and where truth and fiction intersected.

The Hazards of Working at a Bookstore Vol. 1.9 Part 1

I have so many books from working this past Wednesday, and then last night, I am going to split this blog into two parts to save myself some time. So check back, hopefully later tonight for the rest.

First is going to be Eliza's Freedom Road by Jerdine Nolen. Now this is really a young readers book, not teen level. But I am a sucker for any Civil War story. And this one really hits close to my childhood. Why? Because at the private school I went to from 1st-8th grade, for handwriting, at one point we had to just copy from books. And the book I copied from most of the time was a book about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. And this story is about a young slave named Eliza who has her mother sent away, and soon the owner is talking of selling the slaves, especially a young girl like Eliza who will be a very big moneymaker. Eliza decides to run away using the stories her mother taught her about the Freedom Road.

Next is Balefire by Cate Tiernan. I guess this is actually an omnibus of a whole series all in one book. There are two girls who look almost identical, one of them has just moved to New Orleans where the other one already lives. And it isn't just a separated at birth kind of thing, it's much darker. Don't know much more than that, but it sounds great.

Third is Born at Midnight by C.C. Hunter. The main character is Kylie whose life seems to be going downhill, parents getting a divorce, boyfriend dumping her, grandmother dies, and now she has a stalker. Her counselor decides to send her to a school supposedly for troubled teens. Turns out the school is actually home to vampires, werewolves, fairies, witches, and shapeshifters, and supposedly Kylie is one of them.

Falling Under by Gwen Hayes is about a girl named Theia who lives a pretty sheltered life, but she dreams about a boy with haunting eyes all the time. Then one day he shows up at her school, and of course she's pulled to him, even though he seems hot and cold to her. She soon learns what he really is, and still thinks she wants to be with him.

And the last one I'll talk about now, and then I'll just do a part two with the other books, is Subject Seven by James A. Moore. Another teen book. In a way the storyline of this somewhat reminds me of I Am Number Four. There were several children genetically modified and raised in the Janus Project. These children are sent away after the original Alpha kills the the head scientist and his guards and escapes. In the future, they begin to feel a call, and feel like their bodies are being taken over by something that they can't control. It is compared somewhat to a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story. They are gathered back together by Subject Seven and find out they were supposed to be killed instead of adopted out, and must band together to save themselves.