Cover Reveal! Enchantment (Spellbound #3) by Nikki Jefford

CLICK HERE FOR THE TEASER POST & A SPELLBOUND SWAG GIVEAWAY!

For the ever fabulous blog tour of Nikki's awesome paranormal series "Spellbound", I will be revealing the long awaited cover of the last installment to the series, "Enchantment". Before I get on to the cover reveal, I'd like to say a few things about the cover. 

As the designer, I'm pretty attached to the books I've designed the covers for. And for this series, I'd like to admit that I'm pretty damn attached to them. I hate to say that we've finished with the last cover of the series and we (Me, Nikki, and Nikki's friend Bob) won't be making (Bob & Nikki did the brainstorming and inputs, and I did the making) anymore of the gaga modeled covers. :( *cries* 

*sniff sniff* ANYWAYS! The Enchantment cover was the most challenging of the series for both me and Nikki. We both wanted the series to go out with a BANG that we ended up with 4 versions of the cover. We even made it look Satanic at one point. That didn't turn out well AT ALL! But thanks to our persistance, my patience, photoshop and Bob's input. We have made the finest cover of the series!

And NOW, I present to you... ENCHANTMENT! 

*insert hearts and joy here* :DD

What do you guys think?

Don't forget to join the giveaway! Links can be found on top of this post or below my menu bar. 

About the Author:

Nikki Jefford is a third generation Alaskan who found paradise in the not-so-tropical San Juan Islands where she is, once more, neighbors with Canada. She has a B.A. in journalism from the University of Alaska Anchorage and was a reporter before returning to her first love: fiction.

After a whirlwind romance in France, Nikki married Sébastien in March 2000. They reside with Cosmo the wonder Westie.

Find her at:
http://nikkijefford.com
http://twitter.com/NikkiJefford
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5424286.Nikki_Jefford

Review + Book Feature : Want by Stephanie Lawton

(Click image to go to the Goodreads Page)
Title: Want
Author: Stephanie Lawton
Publisher: Inkspell Publishing
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Contemporary
Format: eBook
Buy: Amazon | Inkspell Publishing

Julianne counts the days until she can pack her bags and leave her old-money, tradition-bound Southern town where appearance is everything and secrecy is a way of life. A piano virtuoso, she dreams of attending a prestigious music school in Boston. Failure is not an option, so she enlists the help of New England Conservatory graduate Isaac Laroche.

Julianne can’t understand why Isaac suddenly gave up Boston’s music scene to return to the South. He doesn’t know her life depends on escaping it before she inherits her mother’s madness. Isaac knows he must resist his attraction to a student ten years his junior, but loneliness and jealousy threaten his resolve.

Their indiscretion at a Mardi Gras ball—the pinnacle event for Mobile’s elite—forces their present wants and needs to collide with sins of the past. 

Will Julianne accept the help she’s offered and get everything she ever wanted, or will she self-destruct and take Isaac down with her?

Want is an unexpected turn into my usual reads. The cover itself is a representation of mixed genres like contemporary, romance, fiction, young adult, and even a small flare of paranormal.

The story itself was dark on a psychological sense. It involves self-inflicted pain, trauma, domestic abuse and the usual heartache. It was also dark in an angsty sense. Romance here was preserved as both bad and good, bad in terms of damaging ones reputation and good in terms of finding the ‘one’.

All the characters are easily distinguished from the other. Juli is our protagonist and she is a brilliant pianist. She’s training her way into this prestigious music school in Boston but her piano teacher, who is old and gray had a stroke and is hospitalized. His replacement is his famous nephew, Isaac. Juli scares me sometimes. Her reactions to everything are unpredictable. She could be throwing things around in this page and shouting in the other. Her self-esteem problem and her constant doubts she has of herself is overwhelmingly annoying, to the point, where I almost stopped reading the book and left it at that. But no, Stephanie Lawton, has written a page-turner. No matter what, you just can’t stop turning those pages.

The only thing I can say about Isaac is that I used to love him but now, I just don’t know what to say about him. The mysterious bad-boy disappointed me and I didn’t see it coming at all.

My favorite character of the book would be Dave. Dave is Isaac’s best friend from Boston and Juli’s newfound best friend. Dave was adorable, sweet and the only good guy in the whole story, the guy who challenged the bad things in Juli’s life with his sweetness and balanced good and evil.

Overall, Want is the type of book that keeps you guessing. The type that makes you believes it’s predictable but its not. It may be from the Young Adult genre, but I’m pretty sure fiction-junkie’s will like this as much as I have. This is a wonderful Debut from a wonderful new author, Stephanie Lawton. I hope there’s a sequel to this. The ending didn’t seem like the end at all.

About the lovely author:

Stephanie Lawton

After collecting a couple English degrees in the Midwest, Stephanie Lawton suddenly awoke in the deepest reaches of the Deep South. Culture shock inspired her to write about Mobile, Alabama, her adopted city, and all the ways Southern culture, history and attitudes seduce the unsuspecting.

A lover of all things gothic, she can often be spotted photographing old cemeteries, historic buildings and, ironically, the beautiful beaches of the Gulf Coast. She also has a tendency to psychoanalyze people, which comes in handy when creating character profiles.

On her thirtieth birthday, she mourned (okay bawled) the fact that in no way could she still be considered a “young adult,” so she rebelled by picking up Twilight and promptly fell in love with Young Adult literature.

She has a love/hate relationship with Mardi Gras –where does all that money come from?–and can sneeze 18 times in a row.

Find Stephanie here:

Blog: http://stephanielawton.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stephanie-Lawton-author/192796874113180
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/Steph_Lawton
Pre-order Want: http://www.inkspellpublishing.com/4/post/2012/02/want-by-stephanie-lawton.html

Review: I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It by Adam Selzer

(Click image to go to the Goodreads Page)Title: I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It
Author: Adam Selzer
Started: 29/05/12
Finished: 31/05/12
Genre: Horror, Paranormal, Young Adult
Format: Paperback
Buy: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | The Book Depository

Algonquin “Ali” Rhodes, the high school newspaper’s music critic, meets an intriguing singer, Doug, while reviewing a gig. He’s a weird-looking guy—goth, but he seems sincere about it, like maybe he was into it back before it was cool. She introduces herself after the set, asking if he lives in Cornersville, and he replies, in his slow, quiet murmur, “Well, I don’t really live there, exactly. . . .”

When Ali and Doug start dating, Ali is falling so hard she doesn’t notice a few odd signs: he never changes clothes, his head is a funny shape, and he says practically nothing out loud. Finally Marie, the school paper’s fashion editor, points out the obvious: Doug isn’t just a really sincere goth. He’s a zombie. Horrified that her feelings could have allowed her to overlook such a flaw, Ali breaks up with Doug, but learns that zombies are awfully hard to get rid of—at the same time she learns that vampires, a group as tightly-knit as the mafia, don’t think much of music critics who make fun of vampires in reviews. . . .

The first thing that came into my mind when I saw the cover and read the title was 'gross'. Why would anyone want to kiss a decaying dead body that probably wants to eat your brains? In this weird but interesting book, we have Alley, who is known for her mean music reviews and her snarky remarks. Her narration alone made me crack up more than once. BUT by mid-book, Alley became a disappointment to me. I did not like her drastic change in character after just 80-pages and all for what? A boy. A zombie boy. But she didn't know that. Okay, I get it, its hard for people in the books scenario to tell the difference between mortals and immortals since everyone basically dresses in goth gear. But how can you not notice his smell, face, clothes and the way he talks! It all screams ZOMBIE!

In the first few pages of the book, Alley Rhodes was cool, stubborn, mature and intelligent but when she changed into a love-dazed, stupid, naive 12-year-old, who did nothing but deny the fact that her boyfriend's a zombie during most of the book, everything I liked about the book just disappear and the storyline just began to drop quickly.

Plot was present, the characters are weak and disconnected from the reader. I just finished the book and I can't remember the names of any of the secondary characters. Sad, I know. As for the ending, all I can say about it, is that it was abrupt and lacking. The author could have written a lot more and made the ending more smooth but sadly, he just stuck to rushed and cut-short.

Despite all the negatives, I still enjoyed the book. It was entertaining and funny, how the writer portrayed  a zombie-human romance and the writing style was amazingly breezy and clean, which allows the reader to go through the book easily. If only the author wrote more differently, added more details, and made Alley less-intolerable, then maybe the book would have been amazing. Other than that, the book is an entertaining light read for the adventurous readers.