Interview/Review/Giveaway - Stitch by Samantha Durante

Welcome to my stop on the Stitch book tour. Today is the last day of the tour and it comes to an end after six weeks of touring!! At my stop today, you can read a summary of the book, my review and learn a little more about the author Samantha Durante in the interview. There is also a giveaway for THREE copies of Stitch, so please enter!!

Title: Stitch
Author: Samantha Durante
Series: Stitch Trilogy #1
Published by: Samantha Durante
Published Date: August 1st 2012

Book Description

Her heart races, her muscles coil, and every impulse in Alessa's body screams at her to run... but yet she's powerless to move.

Still struggling to find her footing after the sudden death of her parents, the last thing college freshman Alessa has the strength to deal with is the inexplicable visceral pull drawing her to a handsome ghostly presence. In between grappling with exams and sorority soirees - and disturbing recurring dreams of being captive in a futuristic prison hell - Alessa is determined to unravel the mystery of the apparition who leaves her breathless. But the terrifying secret she uncovers will find her groping desperately through her nightmares for answers.

Because what Alessa hasn't figured out yet is that she's not really a student, the object of her obsession is no ghost, and her sneaking suspicions that something sinister is lurking behind the walls of her university's idyllic campus are only just scratching the surface...

The opening instalment in a twist-laden trilogy, Stitch spans the genres of paranormal romance and dystopian sci-fi to explore the challenges of a society in transition, where morality, vision, and pragmatism collide leaving the average citizen to suffer the results.



My Review

When I began reading this book, I expected it just to be a simple ghost story, where the characters discover each other and find love. Boy was I wrong!! It is way more than that!! Samantha Durante has written a fascinating story where all is not what it seems and it will keep you wanting more!

Alessa is a college freshman and has glided through her last year of high school after the deaths of her parents. Her grades slipped as a result and she didn’t get into one of the big colleges that she wanted to attend. Instead, she was accepted to Eastern State University as they overlooked her personal issues. She has settled into the Uni life, as a normal young adult, attending classes and the occasional party. She only has one close friend, Janie, who is her constant support person.

In various places around her dorm, Alessa keeps seeing a ghost. He pops up out of nowhere and he unsettles Alessa as she feels very emotional about him. She decides to learn more about him and does research about the original occupants of the house. This is how we learn about Isaac more personally as she is able to discover so much about him at the college library.

I like Alessa, she is portrayed as the normal, smart college chick who is doing her best at school. She has no family left and has had to regroup and set her own goals. She is a determined person and once she has her heart set on something it is hard to change her mind. So when she decides to try and help the ghost not even Janie can change her mind.

After reading about half of the book I was thinking, now this is a nice book, we may be seeing soul mates trying to get back together. We have the ghost and the girl from the future trying to connect through time, aww how sweet. But then BANG!! This massive twist is thrown in that I didn’t see coming and the plot takes an abrupt change. Samantha was able to keep me glued to the pages, waiting to see what would happen to Alessa next! With all the twists that come into it I have been left wanting more!


Purchase Links

Amazon (print $9.99 & Kindle $2.99): http://www.amazon.com/Stitch-Trilogy-Book-1/dp/0985804602/
Smashwords (multiple e-book formats $2.99): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/208278
Coming soon to B&N Nook and iTunes


Interview with Samantha Durante

Hi Samantha! Thank you for taking the opportunity to chat with me today!!

I have a few questions, nothing too stressful.... here we go!!


How long did it take to write Stitch? Did you have to wait long for it to be published?

S: Start to finish, Stitch actually only took around 8 months.  I wrote the first draft over the course of about three months last winter, and then I spent the spring and beginning of the summer revising it and getting it ready for publication (and all of this mainly on weekends since I work as a freelance business writer during the week).  I’m self-published, and actually one of the main reasons I decided to self-publish is because I was impatient to get Stitch into the hands of readers and I didn’t want to wait the months it would take to find an agent and publisher!  So as soon as the book was ready to go in August, I published it through Amazon and Smashwords and started the blog tour.  :-)

Did you do a lot of research to write this book? Alessa does research about wormholes and such, did you research as well or is it all fictional?

S: Believe it or not, all that wormhole stuff is science!  All of the crazy physics in the book comes directly from Stephen Hawking books or scientific articles online – I’d read some for fun in the past so I knew a little bit about it (what I could wrap my head around at least! 11 dimensions, really??), but then I did the research online just like Alessa would have and basically just recorded my findings.  I may have taken small liberties here and there for the sake of explaining things more clearly, but everything from the spacetime physics to the possible ghost explanations to the details of how a virus wiped out the world’s population (more about this coming in the next book) is very much based on fact, or at least the conjecture of qualified scientific experts.  There are plenty of crazy twists in the book, so I felt it was important to balance them out by making it as believable and based-in-reality as possible!

When you began writing Stitch, did you always plan the massive twist that occurs halfway through the book or did it come to you?

S: It was planned from the start.  I initially set out with the idea of a ghost romance, but I wasn’t totally happy with that because the only way I could think to get the main characters together was time travel.  And I’ve never been satisfied with time travel books because, well – as you saw from the physics that Alessa researches in the book – time travel just doesn’t make scientific sense.  And as a reader, I’m willing to suspend belief for the sake of enjoying a good book, but it’s just not where I wanted to go with the very first book I wrote – I wanted the idea to be something I was really excited about.  So I started thinking of other ways I could resolve this issue of Alessa and Isaac not being in the same time, and that’s when the idea for the twist occurred to me.  I knew it was the right one because I was SUPER excited about it!

You touched on the romance between Alessa and Isaac in Stitch, will we see more of how their relationship developed in the future?

S: Absolutely!  It was difficult to get too much romance in the first one because for the first half of the book, the characters don’t even know who they really are.  And I love that it’s romantic in that they still feel this deep bond for each other even though they don’t recognize each other, but since they don’t actually physically reunite until the climax, there’s wasn’t really much time for things to get steamy.  I tried to bring in more romance through the flashbacks, but it’s still only a glimpse of where these characters have been together.  But the good news is that Isaac and Alessa are together for much of the next book, and there’s a lot of explaining to do about the history of their world (and of course, their part in that history), so there will plenty of opportunity for romance to come!

How much of yourself or from personal experience have you put into the characters?

S: I would say that much of these characters are based on my personal experiences (and those of people I know well).  Since Stitch is my first book, I just figured that it’d be easier to think about how I would react in a certain situation instead of trying to guess what someone else might do, and I wanted my characters to be realistic and nuanced, so I thought, what better way to achieve that than to base them on real people?  Fortunately, though, neither I nor any of my loved ones has been through anything nearly as traumatic as what the characters in Stitch go through, so a lot of the emotional torment is based on stuff I’ve read about real tragedy survivors, that sort of thing.

Will we expect more action in the next books? I’m a bit of an action girl, and it appears to me we will see more of it, will we?

S: Oh yes!  Now that the characters know what they have to do, expect a LOT more action than in the first book.  It’s a big, dangerous world that Alessa and Isaac are trying to navigate on their own, and things aren’t exactly tranquil for the other characters back on the compound, either.  The second book will also allow you to get to know the antagonists a lot better, and they have some seriously nasty surprises in store...

Ok, so here are some fun questions...

Do you have any favourite authors that you read today?

S: I have a lot of favorite authors!  The most recent ones I’ve added to my list are Veronica Roth and Lauren Oliver – amazing!

If you could travel in a time machine into a book, what book would it be and why?

S: Oh wow, this is a tough one – there are so many places I’d love to go.  Probably any elven land: Lothlórien in Lord of the Rings, Ellesméra from Eragon, etc.  They always seem to be so peaceful and calm and whimsical, just beautiful places full of magic.  It’s like a spa on steroids.

Do you have a favourite book boyfriend?

S: You can never go wrong with a classic – it’s gotta be Darcy from Pride and Prejudice.

If you could travel anywhere in the world with a book, where would you go and what book would you take??

S: I would stay right in my house curled up with an immersive sci-fi/fantasy series a la Harry Potter or Hunger Games and go wherever the book takes me.  :-)

You are now at the end of the Stitch Book Tour. How do you feel now it’s all done?

S: The tour has been AMAZING.  I can’t even express how exciting it’s been to share Stitch with so many people and hear all the reader reactions and get to meet so many awesome bloggers.  So I’m sad for it to end, but I guess at the same time also a little relieved (it’s been A LOT of work and a very busy time for me between the tour, getting married, and buying/renovating my first home!).  So I’m super happy to have had such a fun and successful tour, but I’m really looking forward to settling in and finally having the time to start on book 2!

Thank you so much on allowing me to participate in the tour and for chatting with me today!

S: Thanks so much for hosting the final day of the Stitch Blog Tour today, Naomi!  It’s been my pleasure.  :-)

Author Bio


Samantha Durante lives in New York City with her fiancé, Sudeep, and her cat, Gio. Formerly an engineer at Microsoft, Samantha left the world of software in 2010 to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams and a lifelong love of writing. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology, Samantha is currently working full time for her company Medley Media Associates as a freelance business writer and communications consultant. Stitch is her first novel. Learn more about Samantha at www.samanthadurante.com.

Social Media Links





Giveaway

There are 3 eBooks up for grabs in the giveaway!! Just fill out the Rafflecopter below. Goodluck!!


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Waiting On Wednesday # 12 - With All My Soul By Rachel Vincent


Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill of Breaking the Spine where I have the chance to spotlight an upcoming release that I’m eagerly anticipating.

With All My Soul
By Rachel Vincent
Soul Screamers #7

I can’t wait for the final book in the series!! I can’t find a blurb to share with you!! I can’t wait until March 19th 2013. I am going to read the whole series through.... I hope my blog will handle it!


What are you waiting for? Please leave it in a comment below or leave me your WoW link so I can check out yours too!!


Have a great Wednesday!!
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Promo/Review/Giveaway - Hidden Salem by Kiki Howell

Welcome to my stop on the Hidden Salem book tour which has been brought to you by Bewitching Book Tours. Here you can read a summary of the book, my review and learn a little more about the author Kiki Howell. There is a tour wide giveaway and there are 4 beautiful pieces of jewellrey up for grabs!! Don't forget to visit the other blogs on this tour for more information about this book and the author.

Title: Hidden Salem
Author: Kiki Howell
Publisher: Mitchell Morris Publishing
Published: October 15th 2012

Blurb

Intuition alone brought Makayla to Salem, MA in search of a story, but her research has her confronting more than she bargained for. With her empathic gifts stronger in Witch City, she physcially suffers, landing her literally unconscious in the arms of both Noah Ayers, local cop and Dylan Baines, local history teacher. Yet, it is Lauri, a witch who owns a local shop, who teaches Makayla about who she is and what she can do.

Unfortunately for all of them, Makayla also stumbles upon a coven in the woods practicing a dark magic ritual. Now they are after her, threatening her life and the lives of those she has quickly come to care about. Immersed in things she never expected, like an old legend and necromancy due to residual hauntings, the race is on to stay safe from the coven and protect her heart from a certain sexy cop.

But, is Lauri correct in thinking Makayla might just have encountered the only real witch in Salem from 1692? And, do they share the same bloodline?



My Review

I’m a sucker for a great Witch story and this one has just jumped to the top of my list! Makayla has travelled to Salem to pursue her writing career and to develop her empath abilities. Once she arrived in Salem, her abilities triggered immediately and she sees a vision from the past. After the vision fades she falls into the arms of a very handsome cop.... mmm, who wouldn’t be happy with a man in uniform!

I found that I really liked Makayla. She tries to be independent, but she is willing to ask for support when needed. Her empath abilities are quite draining and super handsome cop, Noah, is always there to catch her, literally. They have a connection from the beginning, but they both take their time about taking it further.

Noah is what most girls dream of- super hot, masculine, tough and a great protector. He is worried about Makayla’s safety from when they first meet and can’t help but find her to make sure she is ok. He is usually focused solely on his job but Makayla seems to be his undoing. She finds trouble everywhere she turns and he happens to be there to save her each time. But he is a typical man! He can’t understand his feelings – could this be love? He just can’t grasp that he may be falling for Makayla.

I loved watching Makayla and Noah’s relationship develop. Makayla keeps some secrets from him that may tear them apart. But they have amazing chemistry and a strong connection. Noah sees things as black or white and Makayla is definitely in the grey area!!

But while Makayla is trying to discover more about her visions, she stumbles upon something else entirely. There is some dark magic being practiced around Salem and she is being pulled toward it. The covern involved then play a dangerous game with Makayla’s life and the few friends that she has made since being in Salem.

I was hooked by Kiki Howell’s writing from the very first chapter. She took us on Makayla’s journey immediately, straight into visions and cops. I seem to enjoy books more that have action all the way through and I found Hidden Salem kept me turning the pages to see what was going to happen next. It has a great plot that I was addicted to and there are some romance scenes, but nothing too graphic. It was a fantastic paranormal/romance that I want more of!
  


Buy Links



About the Author

Ever since she was young, Kiki Howell has loved to listen to a well-woven tale with real characters, inspired plots, and delightful resolutions. Kiki could spend hours lost in a book, and soon she knew that creating lives, loves, and losses with just words had to be the greatest thing that she could do. To that end, she pursued her study of literature and writing, earning a bachelor’s degree in English. She then followed in a Master’s program in Creative Writing.
 
She has now had over thirty stories published between eleven different publishers.  She could not be more thrilled or grateful to see her creations polished and out in the real world. In May, 2011, Kiki was chosen as an Ohioana Book Festival author for her novel, Torn Asunder.

You can find Kiki online at:



Hidden Salem Bewitching Book Tour Giveaway

Kiki has four pieces of jewelry purchased from The Official Witch Shoppe in Salem, MA which was still open when she visited Salem in August 2010. Each week, throughout the month tour, a winner will be chosen from one of the tour stops.

All who enter will also be put into a final drawing for a $25.00 Gift Card from the winner’s choice of several retailers from Barnes & Noble to Starbucks (list will be provided to winner).

Open to US Shipping



To find out more about the jewellrey visit The Official Witch Shoppe


a Rafflecopter giveaway





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Tour/Promo/Excerpt - Pure and Sinful by Killan McRae

Welcome to my stop on Pure and Sinful book tour which has been brought to you by Bewitching Book Tours. Here you can read a summary of the book, an excerpt and learn a little more about the authors Killan McRae. Don't forget to visit the other blogs on this tour for more information about this book and the authors.

Title: Pure and Sinful
Author: Killan McRae
Series: Pure Souls #1
Publisher: Tulipe Noire Press
Published: September 20th 2012

Book Description:

Statistician Riona Dade knows all about probabilities. Still, even she'd tell you the chances of discovering you’re a witch, being appointed to the demon-slaying trio known as the Pure Souls, and finding yourself sinfully attracted to a catholic priest who uses amen and other four-lettered words with equal enthusiasm are pretty slim. Also learning your ex was once Hell’s first-round draft pick, and realizing you're a prize catch for Satan’s soul-damning quota leaves a girl feeling like she just won the lottery while being struck by lightning while riding a unicorn across Atlantis.

Trying to keep her mind off role playing the Thornbirds with Father Angeletti, Riona leads the Pure Souls against a maniacal menagerie of Mephistopheles’s minions plaguing greater Boston. Giving in to lust is a direct flight to damnation for both her and the priest, leading Riona to distract herself by striking up a romance with her new, foxy neighbor, Lucy. But she can't shake her attraction to Marcello, and as the tension between them grows thicker than a lumberjack’s beard, temptation may become too difficult to resist.

How long can they deny the pull growing between them, knowing there will be Hell to pay? 



Excerpt
 A demon horde was no laughing matter. Riona was an equal-opportunity vanquisher of scum, and each of these minions’ numbers would be called soon enough. The VIP floating somewhere in the crowd was her target, however. Her gaze scanned the room and found his Mediterranean blue peepers fixed in her direction, joined farther down his face by an irksome grin, one corner of his devilish mouth curled.

“Didn’t know it was ladies’ night,” he grumbled.

Riona flexed her hand, cracking her knuckles like a string of firecrackers. “If there’s one thing I’ve never been accused of, it’s being a lady.”

Even without his bronzed-skinned and brawny-shouldered glamour, Riona recognized Jerry from twenty paces. He wore smugness like a well-tailored shirt, and, oh, how she wanted to rip that from him and toss it to the floor. This green-skinned, yellow-freckled, damned-soul-incarnate sipping a pint of Bavarian brew was the reason she was here, after all, and the sooner she toasted his ass and sent his soul “disembodied” back to Hell and into the unloving embrace of Papa Satan, the better.

Demonstrating that he had a bit of backbone left, Jerry didn’t make a run for it. He gave her one pulse-spiking wink, and turned back to the bar. A demon who drank lager with one raised pinky off the stein would have gotten his ass kicked if he’d been any other evil minion. Not Jerry. As one of Lucifer’s top agents earthside, she’d recently come to learn, Mr. Romani had been spreading evil since before the calendar flipped to A.D. The almost unheard of longevity and ability to outmaneuver demon slayers made him a bit of a legend in these circles. The reverence gave him airs. Jerry thought himself a demon of decorum and class. Riona had always said his eccentricities made him look like a friend of Dorothy in public.

But damn it all, if he hadn’t disproven that association to her time and time again in fervent, pulsating, speak-in-tongues and curl-your-toes demonstrations of lust and pleasure against her burning flesh.

But that was before. In his magically-engineered facade, he appeared to her as a black-haired, blue-eyed, Italian-American underwear model, sleek, shiny and sinfully lustable. The glamour, and their ensuing hot and heavy relationship, all amounted to an ingenious scam. Jerry was on a mission, and it wasn’t to win her heart. Lucifer had somehow gotten a heads up that Riona was next up on the roster to be vested as the Keystone Witch of the Pure Souls, she figured.  Hell dispatched Jerry to assess her corruptibility, and feel her out (feeling her up was just a bonus). At some point, the need for the game evaporated and it nearly cost Riona her life. No one could have predicted that it would be at that particular moment that her powers would manifest, allowing her to walk through a solid wall and escape. It had to be a one in a million chance, right?

Riona actually knew. The chances stood at 3,456,783 to 1. She had been the power ball winner in the supernatural lottery.

Jerry chuckled from across the silent, tension-locked room. “Of all the bars in all the netherworlds, she has to come walking into mine.”

Riona put up a false front of confidence in her best attempts at a bluff. “Why, hello handsome. Fancy seeing you here.”

He took another swig of his beer before gently placing the bottle on the counter and pushing himself off his barstool. With a swagger that still melted her internally, despite the less than desirable exterior she now beheld, she still remembered the delectable ways in which those hips could swing. He made each step golden as he crossed the room. When they stood face to face, that unique mixture of anticipation and disgust only he could instill took up residency among the butterflies in her stomach. Despite the fact that his demon physiognomy was now clear as day, those azure discs that undid her so often during their short-term fling excited her in ways that weren’t proper for a Sunday.

“I take it you’re not here for a drink, so I can only assume this is that long overdue booty call you know you’ve been hankering for.”

Her breath went jagged as his scaly hand reached up and stroked the flushed alabaster of her cheek. She closed her eyes and tried to regain the locus of control. She would not, could not, let him get the better of her.

 “What can I say?” she bantered back, opening her eyes, now brimming with code orange vigilance. “Once you go demon, it’s them that you’re needin’.”

“Cute. We should print that up on t-shirts."

About the Author
 Killian McRae would tell you that she is a rather boring lass, an authoress whose characters’ lives are so much more exciting than her own. She would be right. Sadly, this sarcastic lexophile leads a rather mundane existence in the San Francisco Bay Area. She once dreamed of being the female Indiana Jones, and to that end she earned a degree in Middle Eastern History from the University of Michigan. However, when she learned that real archaeologist spend more time lovingly removing dust with toothbrushes from shards of pottery than outrunning intriguing villains with exotic accents, she decided to become a writer instead. She writes across many genres, including science fiction, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction.

facebook fan page: 

Goodreads: 

twitter: @killianmcrae





  
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Teaser Tuesday #13 - Dead Embers by T.G. Ayer



Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This weeks teaser is from the second book in the Valkyrie series by T.G. Ayer. I really loved the first book, Dead Reckoning, so I am looking forward to this one!!


Dead Embers by T.G. Ayer
Valkyrie #2
Published August 31st 2012

Glaring at the view meant turning my back on Fen.

Big mistake.

I'd assumed he still stood beside me, lost in his funk, entranced by the silvery-white valley. But when my back suddenly warmed, as some large object shielded my body from the icy fingers of the gusting wind, every muscle in my body tensed. I glanced over my shoulder, my heart tripping.

Too late. Too late to turn and defend myself.

Too late to stop him.

For a shadow of a second, I stared into his eyes, shocked, horrified he'd do such a thing to me. A thousand fears filtered through my frigid brain. Was he in cahoots with Loki? Or was he Freya's dog all along?

It took an eternity for him to blink. Even longer for me to blink.

Then Fenrir pushed me, and I fell off the cliff into pure white oblivion.


Kindle Loc 450


Oooh!! Fenrir!! You are nasty right there.... What have you done??
I wonder why he did that... What are your thoughts??


PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks for stopping by!!
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