Winner of Cage of Stars...

is Amber @ A Little Pink in the Cornfields!!!! Congrats Amber!!

email me at pinkflipflops44 at gmail dot com with your address and I will get it out in the mail later this week!

If you are bummed you didn't win and still want to read it you can:

Buy it from Amazon here

Buy it from B&N here

Buy it from Vintage Books here

Watch out for another Summer Giveaway coming soon!!

Thanks for reading my blog!

2nd Random Summer Giveaway!

My first random summer giveaway was Isabel Allende's Portrait in Sepia that Lisa won!

The second one is Twenty Stories by Kristin Fouquet. I received this book as a goodreads.com giveaway and reviewed it here back in February. This book would be great for beach as it is a collection of flash fiction. You can read a story and hop in the water. Come back and read another! If you are fascinated with New Orleans or enjoy short stories this would be great for you.

Oh and my favorite part? The book cover!!!! I LOVE IT.

To enter you must be a follower..

Leave a comment telling me what is your favorite collection of short stories.

Follow me on twitter for an additional entry...

and tweet about this on twitter for an additional comment.. (one tweet per day... just leave a comment letting me know)

Giveaway will be up until Tuesday June, 29th and the winner will be announced Wednesday, June 30th! Thank you for reading and commenting!

Don't forget to vote for the July Group Read. Poll is up on the side!

Winner of Portrait in Sepia!

is.....

Lisa from Lisa's Yarns!

Lisa I will email you.. I think I may still have your address. ;)

In blogger book club news.. I was able to get a copy of House Rules! I just popped into the library and they had like 8 copies just sitting there! So much for that 110 wait list! I am on page 60 something now.. Pretty good!

Headed down to the Tiger's game tonight..Pretty pumped! ;)

1st Random Summer Giveaway

Throughout the summer I am going to randomly giveaway some cool stuff around these parts! First off is a read once, but in excellent condition, copy of Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende.


Description from goodreads.com: Isabel Allende has established herself as one of the most consummate of all modern storytellers, a reputation that is confirmed in her novel Portrait in Sepia. Allende offers a compelling saga of the turbulent history, lives and loves of late 19th-century Chile, drawing on characters from her earlier novels, The House of Spirits and Daughter of Fortune.

The book's heroine is Aurora del Valle, who "came into the world one Tuesday in the autumn of 1880, in San Francisco". As Aurora sets out to retell her own history and that of her family, she admits "there are so many secrets in my family that I may never have time to unveil them all: truth is short-lived, watered down by torrents of rain". In typical Allende fashion, Portrait in Sepia is crammed with love, desire, tragedy and dark family secrets, all played out against the dramatic backdrop of revolutionary Chile. Aurora's mother is a Chilean-Chinese beauty, whilst her father is a dissolute scion of the wealthy and powerful del Valle family. At the heart of Aurora's slow, painful recreation of her childhood towers one of Allende's greatest fictional creations, the heroine's grandmother, Paulina del Valle. An "astute, bewigged Amazon with a gluttonous appetite", Paulina holds both the del Valle family and Allende's novel together, as she presides over Aurora's adolescence in a haze of pastries, taffeta and overweening love.

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is Allende's decision to turn her heroine into a photographer, bringing together the written word and the photograph as a way of holding onto the past: "through photography and the written word I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evanesce, to untangle the confusion of my past". There is little confusion in Allende's elegantly crafted and hugely enjoyable novel. --Jerry Brotton




Allende came to visit my college when I was an undergrad and she is SOOO fascinating. I seriously left the talk to go buy this book. It is wonderful and she is an excellent storyteller. She writes in Spanish and it is translated afterwards.





To enter: be a follower and leave a comment of who your favorite storyteller is!





This is open until Tuesday, June 15th. Winner will be announced next Wednesday the 16th!

You Pick 2010...

*Note the poll is up for January's Group Read!! ** voting goes until 1/1/10 and I will announce the winner that day..

Taking a page from Stacy's Books , albiet a much SMALLER page, I am going to have my lovely readers pick 10 of my 2010 reads. The last two years I have made a push to read the books on my shelf. While, I have done a pretty darn good job, I also have obtained more and bought more and then not read some. Last week, I went through my house room by room, book shelf by book shelf and collected books that I need to read. Now this isn't even the complete list because I have more young teen / young adult books that I have collected over the years that are not on my list to read but I have collected them from people who know I am a teacher. I unfortunately took the picture before I added in my Christmas stash of books but I took a photo of those and after I took that I did add it into my large pile, which is still NOTHING compared to her large stash of books. I am amazed by hers, which you can view here.

Here is how this will work. You will pick 1-5 titles from the stack that you think I should read in 2010. Leave comments about why you think I should read that particular book or you can just leave a list. I will leave the voting open until January 3rd. On January 4th, I will post the 10 books that my readers have chosen for me to read during 2010. If there is a tie, I will pick the one I will read out of it.

Now, you may ask, why should you help me pick a book out? Because, after everyone has added in their 2 cents and I am tallying the votes, I will use random.org to pick a winner and that winner will recieve Bananagrams Gram - Bunches of fun! If by chance the winner already owns this game, I am willing to send a gift certificate to uncommongoods as it is one of my favorite places to shop and browse!

Now help me out !!! :)

THANKS!!

Reminder..

If you want one of the books that I am giving away, let me know which book you want and leave your email. The first person to tell me which book they want and leaves their email addy will get it. :)

Clicky

Tis the Season and All...

I am taking a page from stacybuckeye and in the honor of the season I am giving away 5 books to the first 5 people who respond. They are all slightly used and some have writing in them, but everyone loves a good used book, right?

Here are the 5 lucky books looking for a new home. If you want one of the books, just leave a comment and an email that I can get ahold of you at to get your address.

1. The Last Juror - John Grisham - Fairy Footprints

2. Kiss the Girls - James Patterson

3. Ceremony - Leslie Marmon Silko Lisa

4. Babyville - Jane Green - amber tidd murphy

5. Dancing Girls - Margaret Atwood - amanda18228

Winner of The Bookshelf Giveaway!!

Lisa from Lisa's Yarns!!

Send me your email and I will send you the copy of Hot & Bothered!!

Emptying out the Bookshelf Giveaway!

Hot and Bothered is a novel by Annie Downey that I devoured in a day this June. It was hilarious and quite the page turner. My review of it is here . A nice light read to get you through the blah days that are ahead!

From Booklist: The chirpy heroine in Downey's debut is surprised to find herself
at a crossroads when, at age 39, her husband ("Ex-Rat") leaves her with two
children and an identity crisis, presumably to join Sex Addicts Anonymous and
gallivant around with a new girlfriend. Saddled with a sassy best friend, a
flaky mother, and a gigantic crush on a charming professor ("Perfect Guy"), she
thinks that it's a miracle when she finds time for herself. She tries
meditation, she tries a part-time job, she even tries shopping for sexy
lingerie, all while parenting and hosting holiday dinners. Told in flashes,
Bridget Jones-style, the short, page-length snippets, with titles like "A Manic
Moment" and "Cheese Danish," give the sense that the author, like her main
character, is always on the run. Still, Downey pulls off the fast pace, and
readers will root for this single mom to find her prince, however unconventional
the pursuit may be. Will she end up with Perfect Guy? Ex-Rat? Rugged Alaskan
Man? Now that she is thriving, who cares? Delightful. Emily CookCopyright ©
American Library Association. All rights reserved

To win:

Leave a comment about a crossroads in your life
Be a follower
Post about the giveaway on your blog

Giveaway is open until October 28th and 7pm EST. :)

100 giveaway winner!!!!!!!!

Thanks for all your entries and for reading my blog!

And the winner of At First Sight by Nicholas Sparks is Kelly from She Wears a Red Sox Cap!!

Congratulations and send me your email and I will get a hold of you to send you the book!!

100th post and giveaway!

I have hit the way too hyped 100th blog post. It’s almost a certain bust because this is where I talk about how awesome it is to blog, how many wonderful blogs I’ve found and how I’ve grown as a writer and yada, yada, just get to where you are giving something away is what most people will be thinking about this point. So as to not disappoint and to not say anything ridiculous and pointless I am giving a book away.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be, since I started this blog as a place to write my book reviews and has hosted other random thoughts that invade my ever busy mind.

So what book have I picked? Well, as my first (hopefully more to come) giveaway, I am giving away a slightly used copy of At First Sight by Nicholas Sparks. I read this last summer and I bawled. But I don’t know of a Sparks novel, where I have not bawled like a little baby by the end.

At First Sight is about Jeremy Marsh who is very certain he will not do specific things in life and then proceeds to do all of them. (My kind of guy!) He somehow ends up in small town North Carolina engaged to the love of his life. Of course they have some issues, normal drama occurs and most stressful, they are expecting a baby. One of those things he swore he’d never do. Throughout the novel, Jeremy grows up, realizes what’s most important and as with any other Sparks novel, experiences extreme heartbreak, yet somehow comes out stronger than before. It’s definitely a couple Kleenex read. J

So how can you win this lovely book? Here is how…
1.) Leave a comment!
2.) Become a follower
3. Blog about the giveaway and link to my post..

So you can pretty much enter 3 times, and if you’ve noticed like nobody reads my blog, so odds are you have a chance to win!! And if you are one of the many people who come and read and never comment, here is your shot to come out of the woodwork because I do see where you are coming from and when you stop by, so you might as well leave a comment!! ;)

So enter away and hopefully I will have more giveaways with the next 100 posts… Oh and maybe I will figure out how to make my pictures upload how I want.. :P

Contest is open until September 28th at 7:00 p.m. eastern standard time.