The Reader’s Corner: October 2017

In The Reader’s Corner, I highlight the month’s most exciting releases.

Never Christmas Without You: Just for the Holidays\His Holiday Gift by Nana Malone & Reese Ryan – October 1, 2017 

All you need this Christmas are these sizzling stories full of love and a touch of holiday magic… 

Just for the Holidays by Nana Malone 

Justin Morrison would do anything to make his ailing grandmother happy. Even if that means inventing a fake girlfriend to take home for the holidays. His best friend, Alex Winters, reluctantly agrees, but it’s not easy to keep her long-buried feelings for Justin under wraps when they’re sharing a room…a bed…a kiss. Christmas in Catalina is turning out to be hotter than anyone expected, but is theirs a love for all seasons?

His Holiday Gift by Reese Ryan 

Pleasure Cove’s prodigal son just got the ultimate Christmas surprise—Madison, his five-year-old daughter he knew nothing about. Maddie’s aunt, Mikayla Mitchell, was once one of Dash Williams’s best friends…and his secret admirer. Now, seeing the sexy, ambitious lawyer with his little girl, Mikayla’s more smitten than ever. And Dash is starting to realize Mikayla’s the only one who could make his days merry and bright, and fill his nights with bliss…

Tempted at Twilight (Tropical Destiny) by Jamie Pope – October 1, 2017 

Summer fling or lifetime love affair? 

Nothing fires up Elias Bradley’s adrenaline like the risk of thrilling adventure. But when a serious wrist injury threatens both the Miami trauma surgeon’s career and coveted promotion, he heads down to his family’s island retreat to relax and regroup. At a bar, he meets a woman who awakens extreme emotions that take him by surprise. Even after they part ways following their passionate twilight tryst, Elias longs to connect with Dr. Cricket Warren on a deeper, more intimate level.

Heiress to a billion-dollar tech fortune, Cricket has two PhDs but zero experience when it comes to the opposite sex. So when she spends her vacation back home on Hideaway Island sharing the bed of a sexy stranger, she’s caught off guard by their sizzling attraction. And now she’s having Elias’s baby… He’s ready to step up and do the right thing but they barely know each other. Together, can they turn a moonlit fantasy into a lifetime of romance?

Sizzling Desire (Love on Fire) by Kayla Perrin – October 1, 2017 

A combustible attraction… 

Flirting with a gorgeous stranger at the bar is how Lorraine Mitchell celebrates her longed-for newly single status. One-night stands usually run hot and wild before quickly flaming out, but Lorraine cannot forget her heated encounter with firefighter Hunter Holland. Weeks later, she is beyond surprised to discover that his father—a former patient of hers—has left her a large bequest!

Last time Hunter was in the same room as Lorraine, they were burning up the sheets. Now he’s staring at her from across a lawyer’s office. At first, guilt and grief convince him that the beautiful nurse took advantage of his long-estranged father. Yet despite mutual mistrust, he knows this kind of chemistry only comes around once in a lifetime. And reviving their spark just might ignite a love that’s as deep and true as it is scorching…

The Heat Between Us (Southern Loving) by Cheris Hodges – October 1, 2017 

Love’s sweet refrain? 

Appointed to head Atlanta’s first-ever jazz festival, go-to marketing guru Michael “MJ” Jane sets out to create an annual event to rival New Orleans. Even if that means hiring her irresistible crush Jamal Carver to run security… The former marine with the killer smile and amazing abs also happens to be her best friend’s husband’s confidant. But despite their sizzling attraction, she refuses to become the playboy’s latest conquest.

The driven, desirable bachelorette makes the decorated marine long to hang up his own bachelor status. It’s getting harder for Jamal to keep things strictly business between them—can’t MJ see they’re creating a passionate tune of their own? Just as Jamal starts to earn MJ’s trust, their relationship is threatened by a relentless, still-in-the-picture ex-girlfriend. Will a downbeat melody end their romance before it truly begins? Or can love keep Jamal and MJ in harmony…forever?

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado – October 3, 2017 

A highly anticipated debut by “one of the most ferociously gifted young writers working today” (Michelle Huneven)

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

Soar!: Build Your Vision from the Ground Up by T.D. Jakes – October 10, 2017

You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to think like one and take flight with your dreams.

Too often we remain in jobs that stifle our souls and leave us on the runway of opportunity with the engine of our deepest passion stalled, watching others make their personal vision a reality and build a legacy for their children. But it’s never too late to get your dreams off the ground! If you long to maximize your unique abilities and aptitudes, if you strive to combine personal fulfillment with professional satisfaction, if you dream of creating exceptional goods and offering transformative services, then you are ready to SOAR!

In SOAR! T.D. Jakes reveals how to build the uniquely personal vision within each of us into our special contribution to the world. Blending the practical business acumen of a successful, global CEO with the dynamic inspiration of a life coach, SOAR! provides the tools needed to ignite our imaginations into action and challenges us to embrace our divine purpose as we align our character and creativity with our careers.

Bridging both the corporate and nonprofit worlds, SOAR! is a practical and easy-to-follow flight plan for launching the entrepreneurial drive inside each of us. It provides an inspiring look into the mindset of people who don’t wait to see what will happen but strategically build the wings that will take them to new heights. So buckle your seat belts and prepare for liftoff-you have been cleared to fly beyond your fears, to absolutely SOAR!

We’re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True by Gabrielle Union – October 17, 2017 

In the spirit of Amy Poehler’s Yes Please, Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl, and Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, a powerful collection of essays about gender, sexuality, race, beauty, Hollywood, and what it means to be a modern woman.

One month before the release of the highly anticipated film The Birth of a Nation, actress Gabrielle Union shook the world with a vulnerable and impassioned editorial in which she urged our society to have compassion for victims of sexual violence. In the wake of rape allegations made against director and actor Nate Parker, Union—a forty-four-year-old actress who launched her career with roles in iconic ’90s movies—instantly became the insightful, outspoken actress that Hollywood has been desperately awaiting. With honesty and heartbreaking wisdom, she revealed her own trauma as a victim of sexual assault: “It is for you that I am speaking. This is real. We are real.”

In this moving collection of thought provoking essays infused with her unique wisdom and deep humor, Union uses that same fearlessness to tell astonishingly personal and true stories about power, color, gender, feminism, and fame. Union tackles a range of experiences, including bullying, beauty standards, and competition between women in Hollywood, growing up in white California suburbia and then spending summers with her black relatives in Nebraska, coping with crushes, puberty, and the divorce of her parents. Genuine and perceptive, Union bravely lays herself bare, uncovering a complex and courageous life of self-doubt and self-discovery with incredible poise and brutal honesty. Throughout, she compels us to be ethical and empathetic, and reminds us of the importance of confidence, self-awareness, and the power of sharing truth, laughter, and support.

Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir by Amy Tan – October 17, 2017

In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of AmazementAmy Tan reveals herself in a way she never has before, delving into her childhood, adolescence, family history, beginnings as a writer and professional life to explore the answers to questions of purpose and meaning that we all ask ourselves as we get older.

Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal-writing and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist’s fiction. Interspersed with direct correspondence between the author and her editor, the book will give fans and critics unparalleled insight into the author’s process, her thoughts on the literary enterprise, and her singularly warm, intelligent mind.

Have You Met Nora? by Nicole Blades – October 31, 2017

She’s blossomed from wealthy surgeon’s beautiful daughter to elegant socialite to being the top fashion stylist in the country. And Nora Mackenzie is only days away from marrying into one of New York’s richest, most powerful families. But her fairy tale rise is rooted in an incredible deception—one scandal away from turning her perfect world to ashes . . .

What no one knows is that Nora is the biracial daughter of a Caribbean woman and a long-gone white father. Adopted—and abused—by her mother’s employer, then sent to an exclusive boarding school to buy her silence, Nora found that “passing” as a white woman could give her everything she never had. Every golden opportunity she seized and every deception she worked kept that powerless, forgotten girl forever in the past.

Now, an ex-classmate who Nora betrayed many years ago has returned to her life to even the score. She’s a woman who won’t be bought off, reasoned against, or pleaded with. Her machinations are turning Nora’s privilege into one gilded trap after another. Running out of choices, Nora must decide how far she will go to protect a lie or give up and finally face the truth.

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Natalya

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