Sneak Peek Week: Million Little Mistakes by Heather McElhatton

Author Heather McElhatton introduced the “Do-Over Novel” with her wonderfully imaginative bestseller Pretty Little Mistakes. With her follow-up, Million Little Mistakes, she takes readers on a wild and addictive ride that can alternately lead to happiness, riches, love, loss, death, and many more endings...the choice is totally yours!

Congratulations—You just won $22 million in the Lottery! So what happens next?

In Heather McElhatton's second do-over novel, Million Little Mistakes, you win $22 million in the lottery. Given the chance to live like a millionaire, you could realize all your dreams or learn that money only causes more problems. It all depends on the choices you make . . .

Should you keep your day job? Stay in your relationship? Save an endangered species? Have a debauched weekend on Sex Island? Buy an aristocrat's life on eBay or pay off all your family's debt? Should you climb Mount Everest, trek the remote jungles of China, book passage on a luxury cruise, or become an infamous Voodoo priestess? Is your destiny to become a philanthropist, a pharmaceutical tycoon, a happy homemaker, or a burlesque stripper? Be careful. Your fortune could be lost in a Ponzi scheme; your wildest fantasy may bring you total bliss or lead you to a run-in with extortionists who try to kill you.

There are hundreds of possible adventures sown inside Million Little Mistakes. Some lives end fabulously while others in utter disaster, so choose wisely. You can buy a lot with $22 million, but can you buy a happy ending?

Jackie says:
"I've had a blast playing with both this book and Pretty Little Mistakes. They are the grownup version of the 'choose your own adventure' books I read as a child, and reading them gives me that same sort of innocent delight. Be careful, though, you can lose hours trying for a different fate!"

Sneak Peek Week: The Black Prism by Brent Weeks

Gavin Guile is the Prism, the most powerful man in the world. He is high priest and emperor, a man whose power, wit, and charm are all that preserves a tenuous peace. But Prisms never last, and Guile knows exactly how long he has left to live: Five years to achieve five impossible goals.

But when Guile discovers he has a son, born in a far kingdom after the war that put him in power, he must decide how much he's willing to pay to protect a secret that could tear his world apart.

Coming out August 25, 2010. Preorder your copy here.

Hank's review:
I stayed up later than I wanted to last night, finishing the bound manuscript. It seemed a shame to stop in the middle of the eventful homestretch. Weeks has created a new fantasy world from the one in his Night Angel debut trilogy, one of color-based magic. He's given a lot of thought to the differing properties of the various spectral ranges, which gives the magic a verisimilitude sometimes lacking in stories where it's all spells and voodoo and you're just supposed to accept
it. More than anything, this is a story of ambiguity: multifacted characters, complicated situations, rock-and-a-hard-place decisions, and the lasting consequences of those choices. Without any spoilers, I'll say that Weeks manages to twist a couple fantasy conventions in
ways that I enjoyed finding myself surprised by.

This would be an excellent book to recommend to people who've read their way through Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth books and are wondering what to pick up next.

Brent will be signing this book at our Colfax store on August 31 at 7:30 PM!!!

If you can't wait until the release date, check out Brent's website to read the first 3 chapters for free!

Sneak Peek Week: The Eternal Ones by Kirsten Miller

Coming out August 10, 2010:

Haven Moore cannot control her visions of a past with a boy called Ethan and a life in New York that ended in fiery tragedy. In our present, she designs beautiful dresses for her classmates with her best friend Beau. Dressmaking keeps her sane, since she lives with her widowed and heartbroken mother in her tyrannical grandmother's house in Snope City, a tiny town in Tennessee. Then an impossible group of coincidences conspire to force her to flee to New York, to discover who she is, and who she was.

In New York, Haven meets Iain Morrow and is swept into an epic love affair that feels both deeply fated and terribly dangerous. Iain is suspected of murdering a rock star and Haven wonders, could he have murdered her in a past life? She visits the Ouroboros Society and discovers a murky world of reincarnation that stretches across millennia. Haven must discover the secrets hidden in her past lives, and loves, before all is lost and the cycle begins again.

Preorder your copy here.

Our teenage guest reviewer Molly says:

"Haven Moore's life is twisting one way or another at any given time. Many mysteries are present around her and she is the only one who is dedicated enough to solve them. Through the whole whole book I was on my toes, eager to know what would come next in her ever twisting life. Tragedies crowd her, love blinds her, and the devil himself seems to be working to ruin her life. This book was a thrill for me to read, and I enjoyed following Haven as she tried to figure out her life, and the lives that she may have lived before."

Sneak Peek Week: The Lady Matador's Hotel by Cristina Garcia

TC staff are already loving this book that comes out in September:

National Book Award finalist Cristina García delivers a powerful and gorgeous novel about the intertwining lives of the denizens of a luxurious hotel in an unnamed Central American capital in the midst of political turmoil. The lives of six men and women converge over the course of one week. There is a Japanese-Mexican-American matadora in town for a bull-fighting competition; an ex-guerrilla now working as a waitress in the hotel coffee shop; a Korean manufacturer with an underage mistress ensconced in the honeymoon suite; aninternational adoption lawyer of German descent; a colonel who committed atrocities during his country’s long civil war; and a Cuban poet who has come with his American wife to adopt a local infant. With each day, their lives become further entangled, resulting in the unexpected—the clash of histories and the pull of revenge and desire.Cristina García’s magnificent orchestration of politics, the intimacies of daily life, and the frailty of human nature unfolds in a moving, ambitious, often comic, and unforgettable tale.

Preorder your copy here.




Joe's review:
This is the first book I've read by Cristina Garcia, and it won't be the last! I completely enjoyed this slim novel. The book revolves around the Hotel Miraflor in some unnammed Central American capital. There are six interconnected stories, with hints of magical realism and the lushness of life that reminds me of Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa. Each of the characters were fully-realized, sympathetic and real, which is not an easy feat! I am looking forward to sharing this book with readers looking for a richly-imagined feast for the senses.

Pete's review:
The Lady Matador's Hotel tells the story of one week in an unnamed Central American
Capital at the upscale Hotel Miraflor. A series of bullfights and political elections fill the city with excitement and tension, while a fickle hurricane dances across the Caribbean waters. Anything can happen in such a charged climate. Anything to anyone.

The Lady Matador, Suki Palacios, is a study of otherworldly poise and beauty, single-minded and distant as she enters the ring and faces down the most ferocious of bulls. Nothing can touch Suki, the master of the ring, until something does.

I consider 'The Lady Matador's Hotel' a cousin to the bullfighting chapters in Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises.' But whereas his characters were fun and raucosand little out of control, Cristina Garcia's characters are more simmering and introspective, fighting the ghosts of the past (sometimes literally) as they challenge a murky present. They are right-wing military officers, leftist revolutionaries, shady adoption lawyers, a poet dreamer and a suicidal industrialist. All are helpless,spiraling into one another, creating an intolerable mix and a horrific confrontation.

Ms. Garcia's descriptiveness is unparalleled. The reader feels the sticky, stifling heat of equatorial America, the sudden, refreshing cloudbursts. She describes the intoxicating floral smell on one hand, but then the stench of poverty, garbage and putrefaction on the
other.

All of this wondrous novel, its sensuality and magical thinking, all of it and more, fall under the spell of the enchanting, inscrutable Lady Matador. Will Suki finally defeat the menacing bull, but who really wins if she does?