#BeachTown – Rosepoint Publishing

The rabbits and deer have won the fairy garden. It’s official. I’ve given up on live plants and planted plastic instead. Animals 1 – farmer 0. It’s a tie on the veggie bed with chicken wire and mesh around my tender plants. They did manage to penetrate to a vigorous bean plant and that plant won’t be going anywhere now. Love the animals, but…

Punkin the Pom is carefully beginning to enjoy her walks.* The CE, having a closer bond, is trusting her more and she’s taking advantage. Otherwise, still accepting few treats, no toys, no offers of companionship, and housetraining is a throw of the dice.

June was a struggle, once again, with the CE’s attention divided and my spending more time in the kitchen. It didn’t help that I decided my next personal challenge was to make a sourdough starter and produce a loaf of sourdough bread. I’m currently on the third try which is not looking good right now at Day 4 of a 6-7 day cycle of starter. Of course, it’s also that time of the year when the gardens and outdoor activities take precedence.

I’m thinking, if not a sabbatical, then a greatly reduced schedule through July and probably August. Most of my reading now includes audiobooks as time for reading has been greatly reduced. Of the twelve books, half were audiobooks!

As always, links on titles are to our reviews that include purchase or source information.

The Curse of King Midas by Colleen M Story (CE review)
Lockdown by Sara Driscoll
The Cyanide Canary by Robert Dugoni and Joseph Hilldorfer (audiobook)
The Wild Road Home by Melissa Payne
If Something Happens to Me by Alex Finlay (audiobook)
The 6:20 Man by David Baldacci (audiobook)
The Woman in Me by Britney Spears (audiobook)
Best House on the Block by T R Ragan
The Husbands by Holly Gramazio (audiobook)
Prevailing Wind by Thomas Dolby (CE review)
Breach by Holly S Roberts (blog tour)
Beach Town by Mary Kay Andrews (audiobook)

Favorite Book of the Month

I really loved The Wild Road Home—it was addictive, kept me reading, and I was thoroughly invested in the well-developed characters. It fell just one-half star short of five, however, and the CE easily gave his book, Prevailing Wind, five stars even with a rather slow start. It’s a toss up, but I’ll have to give the nod to his book.

Favorite for June – Prevailing Wind by Thomas Dolby

My Reading Challenges page…Reading Challenges page—well, you know the score. Life is scattered and chaotic right now. The Goodreads Challenge is now six books behind schedule at 68 of 150. I make no promises.

Welcome as always to my new subscribers! My blog hopping time has seriously suffered having apparently landed somewhere underneath getting a review out. I apologize for the slow response to your great posts, but I’m trying. Honest.

Loggin' off

*Apologize for the poor GIF, apparently I’m not allowed to upload an MP4 even when I get it down to 11 MGs.

Beach Town #1

Book Blurb:

Greer Hennessy needs palm trees.

As a movie location scout, picture-perfect is the name of the game. But her last project literally went up in flames, and her career is on the verge of flaming out. Greer has been given one more chance, if she can find the perfect undiscovered beach hideaway for a big-budget movie. She zeroes in on a sleepy Florida town called Cypress Key.

But Eben Thibadeaux, the town’s mayor, objects to Greer’s plan. A lifelong resident of Cypress Key, Eben wants the town to be revitalized, not commercialized. Greer has a way of making things happen, regardless of obstacles. And Greer and Eb are way too attracted to one another for either of them to see reason.

Between an ambitious director and his entourage―including a spoiled “It Boy” lead actor―who parachute into town, a conniving local ex-socialite, and a cast of local fangirls and opportunists who catch the movie bug, nothing is going to be the same in Cypress Key. Now Greer is forced to make some hard choices: about the people and the town she’s come to care about, and about her own life. True love is only for the movies, right? Can Greer find a way to be the heroine in her own life story? Told with inimitable heart and humor, Mary Kay Andrews’ Beach Town is the perfect summer destination.

My Review:

Ah, the ole hate-to-love trope apparently working well a decade ago and a favorite of the romance genre. Yes, it must be getting mighty cold down below if I’m reading a romance novel.

I like the unique concept of a movie location scout for a big picture production searching for the perfect location of a small sea coastal town setting. In this case, the MC stumbles upon Cypress Key, a seedy little town past its heyday in the Florida Keys.

Greer Hennessy discovers the romance of Florida comes with heat, humidity, and bugs—the giant, flying-at-you palmettos who look like monster cockroaches. Nasty things. They have little barbs on their feet so when they land on you, they can latch on. Yeah, been there, done that.

But the location turns out to supply just about everything on their must-have list, including an old building to blow up for the climax. The problem, of course, is Eben Thibadeaux, the town mayor and engineer who doesn’t want anything blown up. He wants to fix up. The owner has other ideas.

I loved the cast and crew, CJ is a hoot, and the enthusiastic director is so authentic you can see him yelling directions through a megaphone. The main character is a damaged soul, childhood and all that, and Eben (since I was listening to the audiobook) sounded like Ed every time it was his dialogue or referred to and, again, did not wholly engage with him.

It’s a fun little book, getting into the nitty gritty of what it takes to be a location manager, the constant calls of problems, not the least of which is the spoiled and entitled young male star, full of himself.

I thought it was engaging, entertaining, and I enjoyed the sense of humor, but just couldn’t buy into the conclusion and resolution. Fanciful, it went overboard into disbelief. Other than that, I’d recommend the audiobook ably narrated by Kathleen McInerney.

I downloaded a copy of this audiobook from my local well-stocked library. These are my honest thoughts.

Rosepoint Publishing: Four Stars

Book Details:

Genre: Small Town & Rural Fiction, Women’s Fiction
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
ASIN: B00UM2PW3Q
Listening Length: 14 hrs 8 mins
Narrator: Kathleen McInerney
Publication Date: May 19, 2015
Source: Local Library (Audiobook Selections)
Title Link: Beach Town [Amazon]

The Author: MARY KAY ANDREWS is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 novels (including Bright Lights, Big Christmas; The Homewreckers; The Santa Suit; The Newcomer; Hello, Summer; Sunset Beach; The High Tide Club; The Weekenders; Beach Town; Save the Date; Christmas Bliss; Ladies’ Night; Spring Fever; and Summer Rental, all from St. Martin’s Press, as well as The Fixer Upper; Deep Dish; Savannah Breeze; Blue Christmas; Hissy Fit; Little Bitty Lies; and Savannah Blues, all Harper Collins), and one cookbook, The Beach House Cookbook.

A native of St. Petersburg, Florida, she earned a B.A. in journalism from The University of Georgia (go Dawgs!). After a 14-year career working as a reporter at newspapers including The Savannah Morning News, The Marietta Journal, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she spent the final ten years of her career, she left journalism in 1991 to write fiction.

Her first novel, Every Crooked Nanny, was published in 1992 by HarperCollins. She went on to write ten critically acclaimed mysteries, including the Callahan Garrity mystery series, under her real name, Kathy Hogan Trocheck. In 2002, she assumed the pen name Mary Kay Andrews with the publication of Savannah Blues. In 2006, Hissy Fit became her first New York Times bestseller, followed by dozens more New York Times, USA Today and Publisher’s Weekly bestsellers. To date, her novels have been published in German, Italian, Polish, Slovenian, Hungarian, Dutch, Czech and Japanese.

She and her family divide their time between Atlanta and Tybee Island, GA, where they cook up new recipes in their restored beach homes, The Breeze Inn and Ebbtide—both named after fictional places in Mary Kay’s novels, and both available to rent through Tybee Vacation Rentals. In between cooking, spoiling her grandkids, and plotting her next novel, Mary Kay is an intrepid treasure hunter whose favorite pastime is junking and fixing up old houses.

#ThrowbackThursday