Tag: concert

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#BlogTour: The Royal Daughter by Soraya Lane

For this blog tour, we’re looking at . For this blog tour, we’re looking at The Riyal Daughter by Soraya Lane.

Here’s what I had to say on the review sites (Goodreads, Hardcover.app, TheStoryGraph, BookHype):

Strong Dual Timeline Emotional Rollercoaster. This is a book about finding yourself and doing your own thing – even when everything and everyone is against you. It is about finding family you never knew you had. It is about unravelling decades old family secrets… that you didn’t even know were secrets. It is about falling in love, a few times over – at least once in each timeline, + falling in love with a new land.

As Lane has done throughout this series, she yet again shows remarkable skill in bringing together the two halves of her former writing – the romance + the historical fiction – in a genuinely compelling, but only very loosely coupled, series. Indeed, while other *groups* of authors have, over the last several years in particular, come together with similar loosely coupled “series” where each can be read as standalone, all tied together by some theme or some macguffin… with this series, Lane manages to create a much more cohesive single author version of the gimmick that still maintains the “can be read as standalone” allure of this gimmick. In doing so, in many ways she changes it from a marketing gimmick to her own (so far unique, at least in my own reading) almost genre, really. Because this tale, and this series, isn’t *just* romance, though it fills every (mostly “clean” / “sweet” / “behind closed doors”) requirement for the romance genre that I’m aware of, even by its more strict interpretations. This book isn’t *just* historical fiction, though again, it fills every requirement I’m aware of for the genre (which are much looser generally than romance). And while Lane truly excels in both spaces – and I think I’ve said this next bit before in other reviews of this series – she truly comes to her full ultimate power in combining them so effectively and beautifully.

And speaking of effective and beautiful… be forewarned here: there are sections near the end where the room gets extremely dusty all of a sudden. To the point that some readers may cry out for an Audible version of the tale, as it may genuinely become impossible to read the words on the page with your eyeballs due to the amount of dust in the room. (To be clear… men don’t cry. But sometimes, sometimes rooms get extremely dusty – and it may *look* like we’re crying or even bawling as we try to keep the dust out of our eyes. 😉 )

Very much recommended.

After the jump, an excerpt from the book followed by the “publisher details” – book description, author bio, and social media and buy links.
Continue reading “#BlogTour: The Royal Daughter by Soraya Lane”

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#BookReview: Stability by Emily Alter

Perfectly Titled. This is a solid adult FF romance featuring two established-yet-still-young ladies who know themselves and yet still find themselves growing… together. I titled this review as I did because the book really is perfectly titled, as the major conflicts between these women truly do center around the issue of stability and what that can mean for different people in different situations. Some, such as Zaira, more grounded and family oriented may need one form of “standard” stability. Others, such as former child prodigy Paige, may find a more gyroscopic sense of stability in the chaos. Merging the two worlds… well, Alter does a great job of showing the realistic headaches and heartaches that such an attempt can bring about. Excellent story set in an existing world, but within its own corner of it and with prior characters featuring heavily. For those who are less concerned about details of prior books being revealed before the reader actually reads those books, this is absolutely a book you can enter this world in and go back and read the details of the other relationships discussed in the other books. For those who are more concerned about such things… you’re going to want to read those other books first. Based on this book – the only one I’ve read from the author so far – I can tell you that you’re most likely going to want to read those books anyway, and when you read them you’re going to want to have this one on hand anyway if you didn’t read it first. Truly an excellent and seemingly realistic-ish story. Very much recommended.

This review of Stability by Emily Alter was originally written on June 7, 2021.

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#BookReview: The Sound Between The Notes by Barbara Linn Probst

Solid Story, Could Have Used Better Structure. This was a solid story of a woman trying to find herself after putting her career on pause to raise her kid and give him a life she had never had. For me, though, the structure of the storytelling itself would have dramatically benefited from a slight variation of the technique here. Here, we get a mostly dual timeline story, a bit scattered at times (date stamps alone would have been useful in that regard, even if just “x years ago”) but workable. What *really* could have elevated this story though would have been to take a page from another tale of another professional struggling to find his way and looking back on his life – Billy Chapel in the *movie* version of For Love Of The Game. (We shall not speak of the book – one of very few cases where the movie is by far the superior story.) There, the story is told in the same dual timeline approach that we get here – but with *both* timelines happening before the seminal event (in that case, the last game Billy Chapel will ever pitch as a professional baseball player, in this case an important concert), then some follow-up after the event itself. Ultimately just a tweak, though a significant one, that would have made the story flow so much better for at least this reader. Still, truly a worthy read and very much recommended.

This review of The Sound Between The Notes by Barbara Linn Probst was originally written on February 25, 2021.