[Blog Tour] Fall For Me by K. A. Last (Review + Giveaway)

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Fall For Me by K.A. Last  

The Tate Chronicles #1
Publication date: January 17th 2013 

YA Paranormal/Fantasy

Premise:

“Angels aren’t supposed to fall in love, especially with each other. But for the record, you were worth it.”

Grace Tate is a Protection Angel and Vampire Hunter, and she has always followed the rules. But some rules are made to be broken…

Until now the fight against evil has been simple, and falling in love was never part of the plan. So what happens when it’s beyond Grace’s control, and when she least expects it she falls for the wrong person?

All hell breaks loose, that’s what.

At Hopetown Valley High, not everything is as it seems, and the one person Grace thought was her enemy becomes her most important ally.

Blood will be shed, lives will be lost and friendships will be tested. It all comes down to one decision, and when Grace tries to save all those dear to her, she realises not everyone can be—or wants to be—saved.

  

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Also, check out the prequel!

Sacrifice - A Fall For Me Prequel by K.A. Last 

The Tate Chronicles #0.5
Publication date: May 2013

YA Paranormal/Fantasy

Premise:

Sacrifice is a 23,000 word prequel to Fall For Me. It tells the story of Grace and Seth, and what happened in that castle. It is meant to be read after Fall For Me, although it can be read first...

Seth’s heart is breaking. He knows his decision will hurt the one person he keeps breathing for, but he can’t take it anymore. He can’t be near Grace knowing she will always be just out of reach.

Grace is oblivious to Seth’s turmoil. She loves him unconditionally, but not in the way he wants. They both know that in Heaven physical love is forbidden, and to break the rules is to defy everything they’ve ever been taught.

When Grace and Seth are sent on a mission to save a young mother and her unborn child, Grace must face the fact that Seth won’t be returning home. She doesn’t understand Seth’s decision and hates him for it. But what neither of them realise is how big a part that single decision will play in shaping their entire future.

What would you sacrifice for the one you love?

Review

My thoughts:

Fall For Me is the entertaining and fast-paced first installment in The Tate Chronicles series. I had a lot of fun reading it and I was able to finish it in one sitting.

First, we have a confusing prologue about winged-beings and what seems to be a painful separation. It doesn't make much sense when you first read it but then as the story progress you'll understand it all.

In the chapters we get two point of views. The first one is Grace's. She's a seventeen-year-old Guardian Angel whose purpose is to protect the Tate family who has being hunting vampires for a long while, so she's re-born in every generation to act as their protector. This time, she is Archer Tate's twin sister. They both hunt vampires and live on their own since all their relatives have passed away.

Grace has special powers as an angel such as traveling through some sort of light, healing and she's able to read minds but as an angel she also has some limitations: she's forbidden to fall in love and she's forced to follow the Council's order and if she doesn't follow the rules she risk falling and becoming a Dark Angel. Archer has his own set of gifts related to his Hunter status, such as speed, strenght and overdeveloped hearing.  Other than that, they both attend to a normal school like ordinary teenagers.

The second point of view we get is Josh's. He's also seventeen and it's a border at Hopetown Valley High School (the same school as the twins). His mom died 7 years ago so he only has his father. He's dating Abby  - the queen b, popular, beautiful- at the beginning of the book but he's sick of her being so shallow and dumps her. 

Somehow, both Josh and Grace had have a crush on each other for a long time but since Grace has never acted on it (because it's forbidden for her) and Josh was with Abby, they've never confessed their feelings until now.

The whole relationship is a bit cheesy for my taste. I have a problem believeng that she doesn't know Josh has a crush on her since she can read minds and she's been interested in him forever... And then boom! suddenly and just for the show she realizes that he has feelings for her. Also, Josh has been dating Abby for three years and like two minutes after dumping her, he's all "I love Grace, she's my reason for existing, she's THE ONE". I mean... seriously? A little too dramatic for me, I think.

To add a little more spice to the whole thing, there's a new girl in town: Charlotte. She's a vampire who has a white soul. An exception to all the dark souled vampires out there. So the twins can't quite kill her because she isn't precisely evil. The thing is that the other vampires (the bad ones) are looking for her because they want her blood to make themselves stronger and she's trying to get the twins to protect her. The problem is that even when everything inside Grace is telling her not to kill this girl, protecting her could result in horrible consequences for Grace and the ones she loves the most.



On the other side (quite literally) we have Seth,  Grace's ex-BFF who is now a Dark Angel because she fell and now is her enemy (kind of...). Obviously they have history together, but the real meaning of all that won't be revealed until almost the end of the book (yep... you have to read the book to find out what's his part in all of this).

And what I just told you is just a peek at what's happening in the story, because this is just the initial mess which will get far more complicated as you turn the pages.

Through the story we meet a lot of secondary characters and it's a bit confusing at first because it's hard to keep up with the names and everything, but when you get to know a little bit about each of them, everything starts to make sense. I really liked Ryan (Josh's best friend) I found him just adorable. 

I think the plot is pretty complicated because there's a lot going on, but I liked the book because of that same reason. It didn't fail to keep me entertained and wanting to know what was going to happen next, so I can say this one is a real page-turner. The writting was pretty good, without too many descriptions and really fast-paced.

Overall, I think Fall For Me is a good book on this topic (angel-related) and even when I had some issues with the main romantic relationship, I'm still looking forward to Fight For Me, the next book in the series.

Rating:

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About the author

K. A. Last was born in Subiaco, Western Australia, and moved to Sydney with her parents and older brother when she was eight. Artistic and creative by nature, she studied Graphic Design and graduated with an Advanced Diploma. After marrying her high school sweetheart, she concentrated on her career before settling into family life. Blessed with a vivid imagination, she began writing to let off creative steam, and fell in love with it. She now resides in a peaceful leafy suburb north of Sydney with her husband, their two children and a rabbit named Twitch.

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[Book Blitz] Eversea by Natasha Boyd (Teaser + Giveaway)

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Eversea by Natasha Boyd 

New Adult Contemporary Romance 
Publication date: June 10th 2013

Premise:

• An orphaned small-town southern girl, burdened by responsibility and stuck in time.

• A Hollywood A-list mega-star, on the run from his latest scandal and with everything to lose.

• A chance encounter that leads to an unlikely arrangement and epic love affair that will change them both forever.

When his co-star and real-life girlfriend is caught cheating on him with her married and much older director, A-list hottie, Jack Eversea, finds himself in sleepy Butler Cove, South Carolina. Jack hopes the sultry southern heat in this tiny coastal Lowcountry town will hide him not only from the tabloids and his cheating girlfriend, but his increasingly vapid life and the people who run it.  He doesn’t count on meeting Keri Ann Butler. 

Keri Ann has relied on herself so long, dealing with her family’s death and the responsibilities of keeping up her family’s historic mansion, that boys and certainly the meager offering of eligible boys in Butler Cove, have never figured into her equation.  But fate has other plans.  Suddenly face to face with the man who played the movie role of her favorite fictional character, Jack has Keri Ann yearning for everything she has previously avoided ... and Jack must decide whether this funny, sassy girl is worth changing his life for, before his mistakes catch up to him.

Eversea is a FINALIST in the Winter Rose Unpublished Contest for 2013.

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Teaser

Jack stepped toward me. If it was possible, he suddenly looked predatory.

Pressing my back further against the cool wall at his approach, I held my breath as he planted his palms flat against the wall behind me, his body hovering a scant inch from mine and his head ducking straight down to my neck.

“I’m glad we have our reasons laid out, Keri Ann,” he said quietly, breathing his words into my ear in a torrent of snapping electricity. “But that doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen.”

My stomach flipped over, and my breath whooshed out into a deep and embarrassing pant. Placing my hands against his hard chest, I pushed him away to arms length. “Wow, did anyone ever tell you how arrogant you are?”

“Not arrogant. Confident. There’s a difference.”

About the author

Natasha Boyd is a writer with a background in marketing and public relations. She lives in the coastal Carolina Lowcountry, complete with Spanish moss, alligators and mosquitoes the size of tiny birds.  She has a husband, two sons and a cat named Tuna.  Eversea is her first full-length novel. 

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[Blog Tour] Hidden by M. Lathan (Review + Giveaway)

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Hidden by M. Lathan
Hidden #1
Published November, 2012
Young Adult Paranormal

Premise:

Sixteen-year-old Leah Grant has given up on being normal. She’d settle for stopping the voices in her head, intrusive visions of the future, and better odds of making it to her seventeenth birthday.

That’s the thing about pretending to be human in a world where magic used to exist – at any moment, her cover could be blown and she’ll be burned to death like the rest of the witches.

Everything changes when she loses control of her powers and flees the orphanage she grew up in. She desperately wants to be invisible but finds her face plastered on every news channel as humans panic over the possible resurgence of her kind. And now the hunters won’t give up until they find her.

Making friends for the first time in her life and falling in love with one of them drives her to discover why she is unlike any being she’s ever met – human or otherwise. The dangerous powers inside of her that would repel Nathan, her new, handsome reason for living, are priceless to some. The locked up forever kind of priceless. And to others, they are too dangerous to allow her to live.

Let’s hope she can stay hidden.

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(Hidde is currently free on B&N, iTunes, Smashwords and Kobo)

Review

My thoughts:

Okay… this review is going to be a tough one. It’s SO hard to explain this book without spoilers that I don’t even know if I’ll be able to tell you much of anything… I’ve been trying and trying to write and rewrite this thing for over an hour, so here it goes my best attempt.

Hidden is the story of a sixteen-year-old girl living at St. Catalina Orphanage since her parents died on a terrible war. She’s always felt different and the kids she lives with had made clear that she is, so Leah is depressed, lonely and angry. Sound sad but pretty normal, right?

Now… enter the most amazing superpowers ever, a whole new group of people who understand our main character, a lot of magic and paranormal stuff (including shape-shifters, witches, hunters, copies, etc), huge revelations and betrayal. There you go! That’s more like it!

The story is told in first person from Leah/Christine (yeah, two names, it’s kinda complicated, you should read the book…) POV and there was like a LOT going on. It was a little hard to keep up, especially at the beginning of the book, because we are thrown in this sort of dystopian world (after a huge war between humans and supernatural beings occurred) and we have to figure it out to understand what is happening to our protagonist. There’s a lot of information to take in and try to wrap your mind around. So the beginning is a little slow and kind of depressing because our main character is clearly depressed and it shows –which I think is good because she’s entirely believable. The slow pace normally would be a problem for me, but strangely this time it didn’t bother me that much… I was so intrigued by the prologue, captivated by the writing style and just trying to figure out what the hell was going on that I didn’t mind the beginning being slow because I wanted answers and I was getting them a one at a time.

But, the slow pace didn’t last much longer than a few chapters… Because then, everything starts to get out of control. Leah has been rescued from the orphanage by a witch named Sophia and she meets a bunch of “people” who are like her (kind of. Seriously… read the book). Between that crowd is Nate, a cute shape-shifter who quickly becomes Leah’s best friend since they both have a lot in common. This guy is the one that helps Leah out of her shell. He shows her that she’s not the monster she believed and makes her understand that she’s worth loving. And in the middle of that, they fell for each other.

And here’s where I had some issues… The romance was developed way too fast for my taste. And about two thirds into the story turns out that adorable, good Nate wasn’t that good after all and he’s pretty harsh and mean to Leah who he’s supposed to love… So, things don’t make much sense in this aspect of the story.

The thing I really liked about this book was that it had the most unexpected plot twists ever. I mean, seriously… I’m really good at predicting outcomes in books but I swear that I didn’t see most of the big twist in this story coming my way, so my mind was blown away multiple times through the story and that was fantastic!

Overall, I think Hidden is a great addition to the Paranormal genre. The author did a great job at creating an original and captivating story that would keep you at the edge of your seat trying to guess what’s coming next and rooting for a really well written main character. I’m definitely looking forward to read Lost, the next book in this series.

Rating:

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About the author

M. Lathan lives in San Antonio with her husband and mini-schnauzer. She enjoys writing and has a B.S. in Psych and a Masters in Counseling. Her passion is a blend of her two interests – creating new worlds and stocking them with crazy people. She enjoys reading anything with interesting characters and writing in front of a window while asking rhetorical questions … like her idol Carrie Bradshaw.

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Giveaway

One (1) copy of Lost (Hidden #2) by M. Lathan.

Must be at least 13 years old to enter the giveaway.

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