hey everyone! For my second post of the day, I have a book blitz for At First Blush by Beth Ellyn Summer which is an exciting new book that's out today! All the info will be below along with the buy links, so I hope you check it out! At First Blush by Beth Ellyn Summer Genre: YA Contemporary Release Date: April 4th 2017 Bloomsbury Spark Summary: Who would have thought that a teenager could have a successful career creating makeup tutorial videos on YouTube? For Lacey Robbins, this dream has been her reality. An up-and-coming YouTuber, she has thousands of fans and can't wait for the day when her subscriber count reaches the one million mark. And when she is offered a high school internship at On Trend Magazine, she figures that this could be the make it or break it moment. But sometimes your dream job isn't all that it seems. Her editor is only interested in promoting junk products, and her boss in the Hair and Makeup department introduces her to the larger world of makeup artistry, making her wonder if making tutorials online is all she is meant to do. To top it all off, when the magazine's feature subject, musician Tyler Lance, turns his broodingly handsome smile her way, falling for him could mean losing her fans, forcing her to make a decision: her YouTube life or her real life? Fans of Zoella's GIRL ONLINE will fall right into the world of this YA DEVIL WEARS PRADA and stay hooked from the first blush to the last glossy kiss. Add to Goodreads Buy Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple | Kobo | Google Play | Bloomsbury On April 3rd, the Author will be having a FB Book Launch Party from 6-10PM EST! There will be fun, games, and giveaways! About the Author Beth Ellyn Summer writes contemporary young adult fiction that somehow always includes the following elements: fame, makeup, and television. She graduated from Long Island University with a degree in Print and Electronic Journalism. Interning for Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Fallon was the highlight of her college years. When she's not writing, Beth can be found swatching eyeshadows, solving Wheel of Fortune puzzles, and playing with her adorable cat, Penny Belle. Beth lives on Long Island in a cookie cutter town that, in an ironic twist of fate, doesn't have a single decent bakery. Author Links: Website│Goodreads│Twitter│Facebook│Pinterest│Instagram That's it for this post! If you haven't already, go over and check out my other post for today, which is a Top Ten Tuesday post, on a wednesday and as always, Leave me all your thoughts in the comments below or find me on social media, @BrookeEvans2001 on Twitter and @thecozylittlebooknook on Instagram. I will be back tomorrow with another post!
~Brooke
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Hey everyone and welcome back to my blog for day 5 of my April’s A post A Day challenge. I actually have 2 posts for you today, first of which is this Top Ten (Not Really) Tuesday post. I had originally intended on posting this yesterday, when it was actually Tuesday but the review was required to be posted yesterday, and I just thought, might as well post it on wednesday.
Gosh, it’s been awhile since I last did one of these posts, but it should be fun. This week’s topic is FANDOMS and I’m going to be covering some of the most prominent fandoms in both the bookish world as well as the pop culture world. Also if you didn’t know, this meme is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.
I’m not really in any fandoms, but the one that I might actually be in is The Selection and Famous in Love. I recently read Famous in Love, and was more than excited to find out that they are creating the book into a tv series on Freeform. I can totally get on board with the series. I don’t know much about it yet, but I want to know more!! Anyways, this post is super short, but I have another post later today for you guys so keep an eye out for that. Let me know what your favorite fandoms are and what other ones I should check out. Leave me all your thoughts in the comments below or find me on social media, @BrookeEvans2001 on Twitter and @thecozylittlebooknook on Instagram. I will see you later! ~Brooke Other Breakable Things by Kelley York & Rowan Altwood Genre: YA Contemporary Romance Publication Date: April 4, 2017 Format: I received a copy of the book in advance from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. You can purchase a copy of the book here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LM0F3NA/ref=x_gr_w_bb_sout?ie=UTF8&tag=x_gr_w_bb_sout-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B01LM0F3NA&SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2 Summary: According to Japanese legend, folding a thousand paper cranes will grant you healing. Evelyn Abel will fold two thousand if it will bring Luc back to her. Luc Argent has always been intimately acquainted with death. After a car crash got him a second chance at life—via someone else’s transplanted heart—he tried to embrace it. He truly did. But he always knew death could be right around the corner again. And now it is. Sick of hospitals and tired of transplants, Luc is ready to let his failing heart give out, ready to give up. A road trip to Oregon—where death with dignity is legal—is his answer. But along for the ride is his best friend, Evelyn. And she’s not giving up so easily. A thousand miles, a handful of roadside attractions, and one life-altering kiss later, Evelyn’s fallen, and Luc’s heart is full. But is it enough to save him? Evelyn’s betting her heart, her life, that it can be. Right down to the thousandth paper crane. My Thoughts: After reading the prologue of the book, my immediate and raw reaction. Oh shit, something bad is gonna happen in this book. Boy was I not wrong. I felt like I was reading the book at an arm's length. I was a bit scared to see what would happen next, but couldn’t put it down. You know? Like when you see something that you know you shouldn’t be seeing so you look at it from a distance, but can’t look away? That’s how I felt with this book. I couldn’t get into the book as much as I thought I would. I couldn’t really connect with the characters as much as I would have liked. I liked the raw emotions that were present, and the ending was very heartbreaking to read. So many emotions were happening, and ahhh, overload on my brain. I’m not sure that I can do it justice in words so I’m not even going to try, just read the book lol :) I loved the plot of the book, and the characters were all very good characters, but I think the biggest problem I had was just the writing style wasn’t something that I liked. I think it was more of what the characters were doing, and their decisions that made me not like them as much, as I can never envision myself in their situation. All of their decisions were split second decisions that if it were me, I would have spent at least 2-3 weeks contemplating. But I guess they really took the meaning of you only live once, and that you just have to go for it. The ending. Oh the ending was so many things. It was slightly haunting with all the things that happened so quickly. There was so many ways that this book could have ended, and while the thing that ended up happening wasn’t what I had originally predicted, it was still...not epic, but surprising. (Not in a bad way of course). The book seened like it would take a while to read, given the length of the book, and how the beginning wasn’t as appealing as I had thought, and moved a bit slowly at the beginning, but by the middle, I just wanted The entire time I was just sort of like, when is the events gonna start happening, without realizing that it had started when they ran away. Like that was the main attraction of the book, and was a bit idiotic, but touching at the same time. A lot of the book was just sitting on edge, not knowing what was going to happen next. I liked how there was a sort of a parallel in the book from the beginning to close to the end, where the events were similar but in totally different context. I absolutely love the cover of the book; it reminded me a lot of the cover of Love and Gelato, with the primarily white/cream (I read it as a ebook so the color didn’t show up very well on my phone) with a center colored icon. I love the minimalistic design, which also reflected the tone of the book a little. The title also reflected the events of the book, Other Breakable Things, with the entire health situation, and how close to the verge to ending it all was. I’m going to leave it vague here in order to save myself from letting out any spoilers. Overall, I give the book a 8/10 (4/5 stars). This wasn’t an instant absolutely love book but in the end, even though I didn’t love it as much as I had hoped (I always go into a book with some level of greatness, and I think mine for this book was just too high so that’s why i was disappointed), it was a great book, and definitely worth a read. It wasn’t that long and was pretty great and i recommend that you go and check it out. Just maybe have some tissues on hand for the ending? (i wasn’t gonna tell you this but I may have cried a bit at the end). That’s it for today’s review, and just know that this book is out today so everyone, go over to twitter and wish the author’s a happy book birthday as this is quite a fabulous piece of work. As always, what did you think about the review? Will you go and pick it up? Leave me all your thoughts in the comments below or find me on social media, @BrookeEvans2001 on Twitter and @thecozylittlebooknook on Instagram. Don’t forget to come back tomorrow for TWO (yes you read that right, I have 2 posts for you guys tomorrow) posts which are both pretty epic. And if you missed it, I also have the 2 posts already up this month that you should go check out! I will see you all soon! ~Brooke Hey everyone! it's the third day of Camp Nanowrimo and also the third day of my blog challenge: A Post A Day. And I have a special treat for you! it's a guest post by the author of Any Boy But You, Julie Hammerle! Keep reading to find out how she created the world of North Pole, the fictional city the book takes place in. Also, you can check out my review for the book here: Any Boy But You Populating the world of North Pole A little bit of trivia about the North Pole, Minnesota series: The first book in this series is the third one I wrote. I actually wrote a draft of what will be the second book first—about seven years ago—but the third book in the series is the first one I wrote that was set in North Pole. Book two, then three, then one. Got it? I’m confusing even myself. When I signed on with Entangled to write the North Pole, Minnesota series, we decided to do kind of a “year in the life” sort of thing. Book one would be set in January/February, book two would take place in the summer, and book three would take place during the December holidays. I’d already written the December book (sort of). I was able to take an old manuscript and retcon it to fit into the North Pole world for book two, but I had to come up with book one from scratch. By the time I started writing Any Boy but You, I’d already played around in this universe. I knew which characters I wanted to highlight in books two and three because I’d already written them. I knew I could use those characters, their families, and friends to fill out the world. But who would my main characters be? I started brainstorming—maybe the girl could be the babysitter of someone’s little sibling, or the boy could be the babysitter, or maybe the boy could babysit the girl because she’s a mess and her parents don’t trust her at home alone. Basically, my first thoughts had a lot to do with people babysitting. No, I don’t remember why. I got rid of those ideas pretty fast, and I started to focus on the town itself. What if there were two stores of the same kind on Main Street—kind of like where I used to vacation as a kid and there were, like, three craft stores that sold the same wares. What if the families were feuding? What if the kids wound up in a You’ve Got Mail-type situation where they fell in love without knowing it? The story filled itself out from there—I could highlight as many townies as I wanted as they dashed around town playing the game Oliver created. I could bring in people I already knew from book three for comic relief. I could stealthily set up book two in the epilogue. I started to think of North Pole as Springfield. In the early seasons of The Simpsons, there are a lot of random one-off characters who show up for one scene or one line, never to be seen again. But as the show progressed, those roles started to be filled by characters we’d already come to know. Why have a random nobody running the bake sale, when Chief Wiggum is right there? It creates a sort of shorthand, bringing in the same characters, using their archetypes and idiosyncrasies to enrich the scene. That’s why Craig (one of my favorite North Pole residents) tends to pop up for comic relief every so often in all three books. He’s everyone’s foil. He’s the bee in North Pole’s collective bonnet. The seasons and the main characters change in each story, but the townsfolk are the threads who tie the books together. That's it for this guest post! I hope you enjoyed learning about Julie's writing technique for her book Any Boy But You, and let me know what you think about it. Have you read it yet? Will you be picking up the next book when it comes out?
Again, if you haven't read my review for the book, You can read it here: Any Boy But You Leave me all your thoughts in the comments below or find me on social media, @BrookeEvans2001 on Twitter and @thecozylittlebooknook on Instagram. I will be back tomorrow with another post! Want to know what it is? Check out this post: April's A Post A Day Schedule ~Brooke Hey everyone! It’s the second day of April, and today’s post for y’all is something that I haven’t done in a really long time: a more discussion, life update post. I think the last time that I really had one of these that were a bit more in depth was last year, in like December.
Anyways, the first thing that’s a huge announcement, that if you follow me on twitter, then you already know is that I’m participating in Camp Nanowrimo this month, which is something that I haven’t done before. I did Nanowrimo back in November last year for the first time, and it was an experience that I really enjoyed, but was also a bit stressful at the same time. I like how Camp Nanowrimo allows you to set your own word goal, or if you don’t want to measure your accomplishments in words, you can also chart how many hours, pages, lines, etc… you wrote which is definitely really cool. For now however, I’m going to stick to counting words, but for next year, I’m definitely thinking about setting a goal of a certain amount of hours. Another thing that I really like is that Camp nano sorts you into a cabin, if you would like, and you can choose to be sorted into a cabin with people of your similar age (which is what I did) or goal or genre (I think). Now of course, you probably want to know what the heck I’m writing about, and my goals. Well hold your horses and I’ll tell you right now :) Before even knowing about Camp being in April, (which my timing could not be worse because I’m writing a novel and 30 blog posts in April, on top of homework is probably not the most ideal situation), I had read The Distance from A to Z, which I really liked the idea of going to a summer intensive program, and I had a couple books on my TBR list that featured music, as the lifeline of the main characters. I fell in love with both of these ideas, and one day in class, i started thinking of how I could incorporate both into a book, that I would write for Nanowrimo in November. Well my opportunity to write it came now, so, well...I’m doing it now. The summary of the book is that the main character, Joyce goes of to a summer intensive music camp for singing that is one of the most prestigious programs available for high school students that attracts from all over the world. It is set in New York, and Joyce is from a small Oregon town which is quite a different change in scenery. She meets Cameron, someone else who is in the program and while they have an undeniable attraction, they know they are at competition for a scholarship to another program in the fall, so they stay as enemies. Something happens, and eventually they work over it, and are together by the end. I absolutely love the YA contemporary genre, and while I feel like the book is going to be a bit cliche, I’m hoping to be able to add a bit more depth to the characters and the overall plot of the book. If you have any ideas on what i could add, please let me know because even though it’s only the second day of writing, I’m already out of ideas. A little update on my personal life. Quite a lot has changed since I last update you on my life, and the biggest one is I started a new sport. I don’t really want to say what it is yet, I want to see how it goes first before i actually say anything, but I will say that I absolutely love it, and hopefully it will be something that I do for the rest of my life. It takes up about 7 hours a week of my life, which is a minor setback as that means i have less time for blogging and writing and reading, and for homework as well as practicing piano. So the main reason that I haven’t been able to blog as much is because this is taking up more time that I originally thought. Some of you may know that I utilized my planner like it was a life or death situation before...but i’m afraid to say that i’ve let that slip a bit since the beginning of the year. So this month, I’m also starting a bullet journal, which hopefully will allow me to keep everything together and somewhat organized. I have a post near the end of the month that will detail my experience with bullet journalling. Let me know if you want to see it :) April’s really the month of change, challenges, and trying new things and a bunch of other crazy stuff that i know i’m kind of dumb for trying all this month. But you know, go big or go home so I’m going to take everything and hopefully at least some of the things i do this month work out to be successes. As always, Leave me all your thoughts in the comments below or find me on social media, @BrookeEvans2001 on Twitter and @thecozylittlebooknook on Instagram. Don’t forget to check out yesterday’s post where I have all schedule of all the posts I will have in April, and come back tomorrow for a guest post by the author of Any Boy But You. I will see you tomorrow! ~Brooke Hi Everyone! It’s the first of April, which of course is April’s fools, and I have a feeling that many of y’all are probably thinking that the whole A Post A Day challenge that I have been talking about was just a whole April Fool’s pranks...well it’s not! Today’s post however, isn’t as interesting as the rest of them, not by far, but it does give you all the details about what posts you can look forward to this month.
Of course, this is a list that I made a little while ago, and by the time that it actually comes to posting them, they may have shifted in ideas, or been totally changed. Some of the dates might get changed around as the month goes on, all depending on which ones I have done by when. I have some of the posts scheduled already and a couple others that I am in the middle of writing, so those will be scheduled. As much as I am hoping (and in a perfect world, this would happen) to have all my posts written and scheduled at least a week or more ahead of time, I know for sure that this simply just won’t happen. Anyways, here’s the schedule for this month: April 1: April Challenge Schedule April 2: Life Update: What have I been up to? April 3: Any Boy But You Guest Post by Author April 4: Other Breakable Things Review April 5: Top Ten (Not really Tuesday) Fandom Freebie--Most Popular Fandoms April 6: Operation Prom Date Review April 7: Fanning the Flames Guest Post by Author April 8: Gold Rush Review April 9: Excerpt from my Camp Nanowrimo piece April 10: Don’t Kiss the Messenger Review April 11: Garden of Thorns Guest Post by Author April 12: Incriminating Dating Review April 13: Loot Crate Dream Crate April 14: Other Breakable Things guest post by Author April 15: Halfway through Camp Nano reflection April 16: Excerpt from my Camp Nanowrimo piece April 17: Seeking Mansfield Review April 18: Top Ten Things That Will Make Me Instantly Want To Read A Book April 19: Don't Kiss the Messenger Guest Post by Author April 20: 7 Days of you Review April 21: Intermission Review April 22: Sweet Tea and Summer Love Review April 23: NANO excerpt April 24: Geekeralla Review April 25: True North Guest Post by Author April 26: My experience creating a Graphic Novel as a class project April 27: How Willa Got her Groove back Review April 28: Why I write/journal + Starting a Bullet Journal April 29: Crazy Stupid Fauxmance Review April 30: Recap all posts w/links Hope there’s at least something that you wanted to see on this list, and while I do have this schedule, I want to hear about what else you would like to see. As always, leave me all your thoughts in the comments below or find me on social media, @BrookeEvans2001 on Twitter and @thecozylittlebooknook on Instagram. I will be back tomorrow with another post! ~Brooke |
About me!Brooke's a high schooler who loves to read all sorts of books. She's happy to be able to share all the books she's reading with all of y'all. Archives
June 2020
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