Book Review: Alma of my Heart by Susanna Lo

Alma of my Heart by Susanna Lo
Irena Montoya and Tatiana Jones come from two entirely different worlds. Irena is a poor, illegal immigrant who sneaks across the Mexican border and walks 46 days to Los Angeles where she hopes to find a new life for herself and her unborn daughter. Tatiana is a wealthy architect who has everything a woman could want – beauty, brains, money and an adoring husband – but she can’t have children. After a year of struggling to raise her daughter as a single mother in the pits of L.A., Irena realizes the best thing she can do for her child, Alma, is to give her up. She leaves Alma at the steps of The Survivors Sojourn, a safe haven for abused women and children founded and built by Tatiana. The minute Tatiana meets Alma, she knows all her dreams will come true and she raises Alma as her own daughter. Seven years later, the tragedy of Alma’s death brings Irena and Tatiana together. Through pain and suffering, these two women find love in a way neither one expected because sometimes hope can come from great despair.

This story was amazing, I was truly touched by this story. I cried, I smiled, I felt the happiness and the sadness that came with the women in this book.

I was drawn into this book, I felt everything that these women went thought, this book was so beautifully written, it kept you there feeling there pain, there happiness, their love.

The sacrifices that were made by the two of these women, it was what made them stronger, it is what made them fight harder and made them into the people they are today. I was thankful for this book and I have heard they are going to make it into a movie which is great. This story needs to be told. I believe that it will give people hope.

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Book Review: I've Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella

I've Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella
I've lost it. The only thing in the world I wasn't supposed to lose. My engagement ring. It's been in Magnus's family for three generations. And now, the very same day his parents are coming, I've lost it. The very same day. Do not hyperventilate, Poppy. Stay positive!!

Poppy Wyatt has never felt luckier. She is about to marry the ideal man, Magnus Tavish, but in one afternoon her 'happy ever after' begins to fall apart. Not only has she lost her engagement ring but in the panic that followed, she has now lost her phone. As she paces shakily round the hotel foyer she spots an abandoned phone in a bin. Finders keepers! Now she can leave a number for the hotel to contact her when they find her ring. Perfect!

Well, perfect except the phone's owner, businessman Sam Roxton doesn't agree. He wants his phone back and doesn't appreciate Poppy reading all his messages and wading into his personal life.

What ensues is a hilarious and unpredictable turn of events as Poppy and Sam increasingly upend each other's lives through emails and text messages. As Poppy juggles wedding preparations, mysterious phone calls and hiding her left hand from Magnus and his parents... she soon realises that she is in for the biggest surprise of her life.

In Sophie Kinsella’s latest standalone novel I’ve Got Your Number the heroine Poppy Wyatt has lost her engagement ring and not just any ring, it is Magnus’ (her fiancé) great grandmother’s emerald engagement ring, a ring so valuable that Magnus had to go into a vault and retrieve the ring before proposing to Poppy. And now Poppy has lost it, on the day she is supposed to see Magnus’ parents for the first time after getting engaged. It would be an understatement to say that Poppy is panicking and of course things get worse after Poppy loses the one way anyone who has found the ring to contact her (her cell phone) so what does she do? She steals a phone or well saves a phone since the item in question was taken from the trash. Who cares if it’s a company phone and that the person calling it (Sam Roxton) demands that she returns it (turns out the phone belonged to his personal assistant), Poppy NEEDS it and she’ll return it as soon as she gets her ring back. In fact she even offers to substitute as Sam’s PA until this whole mess is over. Oh the trouble this girl gets herself into.

In I’ve Got Your Number Poppy Wyatt is a people pleasing physiotherapist about to be married into a family of over achieving geniuses. Sam Roxton is a high level executive who isn’t big on socialising or writing messages that are more than a sentence long and by a series of unexpected events they both get tangled up in each other’s lives. Initially both Poppy and Sam clash as they are both very different personalities and neither can really understand the other but they both also have what the other needs and in the end really help one another to realize their faults and their strengths.

Ever since I read the humorous Can You Keep A Secret a few years ago I have been a fan of Sophie Kinsella's standalone books. They are what you want to read if you need something funny and cute to put you in a good mood, the novel equivalent of a romantic comedy. This book was both a light and quick read and the heroine, like all Sophie Kinsella heroine's, is a likeable character who after getting herself in to a few ridiculous situations realizes how strong, smart and capable she really is. Some people may dismiss books like these as pure fluff but I just desperately want to read the next book this author writes.

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Book Review: Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry

Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry
"I won't tell anyone, Echo. I promise." Noah tucked a curl behind my ear. It had been so long since someone touched me like he did. Why did it have to be Noah Hutchins? His dark brown eyes shifted to my covered arms. "You didn't do that-did you? It was done to you?" No one ever asked that question. They stared. They whispered. They laughed. But they never asked.

So wrong for each other...and yet so right.

No one knows what happened the night Echo Emerson went from popular girl with jock boyfriend to gossiped-about outsider with "freaky" scars on her arms. Even Echo can't remember the whole truth of that horrible night. All she knows is that she wants everything to go back to normal. But when Noah Hutchins, the smoking-hot, girl-using loner in the black leather jacket, explodes into her life with his tough attitude and surprising understanding, Echo's world shifts in ways she could never have imagined. They should have nothing in common. And with the secrets they both keep, being together is pretty much impossible.Yet the crazy attraction between them refuses to go away. And Echo has to ask herself just how far they can push the limits and what she'll risk for the one guy who might teach her how to love again.

I wasn’t too interested in Pushing the Limits, one I don’t read much contemporary fiction and two the cover kind of screams romance but I got the ARC at BEA and so much people who had read advanced copies were giving Pushing the Limits positives reviews, including one of my favourite authors so I decided to give it a shot. This novel is so much more than a romance.

Told from alternating points of view Pushing the Limits is about Echo, who ever since an attack she can’t remember that left her arm permanently scarred is trying not only to remember what happened to her so she can move on but is also trying to deal with the grief of losing her brother Aires who died overseas on deployment. It’s about Noah, who after a fire kills his parents has been shipped from one foster home to another and only wants to be reunited with his little brothers again. It’s about two people struggling with overwhelming issues trying to find hope and happiness.

Pushing the Limits was both a deep and compelling read that had me glued to the pages and desperate to find out how the story ends. Katie McGarry knows how to create realistic characters and she knows how to get me to care about them. Both Noah and Echo are the reasons I did not want to put this book down, not only did I want to find out how their individual stories pan out but I wanted to see their relationship through and to find out what would become of it. Echo is a girl who was betrayed be someone she should have been able to trust above everyone else and because of the aftermath she hides herself from the world and has become a shadow of her former self. Noah is the result of the failings of the Foster Care system, there is barely anyone he will trust and he is both hurt and angry. It took me a while to like Noah; I could sympathize with him sure but because of his reputation for doing drugs and sleeping around with girls it wasn’t until about one hundred pages in that I started liking him as a character but I eventually did and in the end he was the character that had me crying and wanting to comfort.

Pushing the Limits is not a fluffy light read but nor will it bog you down and fill you with angst. Pushing the Limits is both real and hopeful and a stand out début.

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Book Review: Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Anna can't wait for her senior year in Atlanta, where she has a good job, a loyal best friend, and a crush on the verge of becoming more. So she's not too thrilled when her father unexpectedly ships her off to boarding school in Paris - until she meets Étienne St. Clair, the perfect boy. The only problem? He's taken, and Anna might be, too, if anything comes of her crush back home. Will a year of romantic near-misses end in the French kiss Anna awaits?

I added Anna and the French Kiss because almost everyone I knew had loved the book and had given it five stars. I was certainly surprised by this because if you read the title, look at the cover and read the synopsis it comes off as a light chick-lit read. Something to put you in a good mood for a bit but not something that would garner the amount of positive response from readers that it had received, so I picked it up.

It didn’t take me long to finish Anna and the French Kiss, it really was a quick read filled with humour, romance and charm. The main character Anna has been shipped off to boarding school in Paris for her senior year without her consent and at first she’s upset about this because she’s being pulled from the only life she knows and being forced to adapt to a new culture and make friends. However, it doesn’t take very long for Anna to find a group of friends to tag along after and soon after that it takes her even less time to become one of them especially when she instantly clicks with the beautiful Étienne St. Clair.

This novel was very much a romance and I knew that going in but I wasn’t really that much invested in it. I certainly think that both Ann and Étienne have great chemistry, the way their dialogue just flows naturally back and forth between them and the way they both just seem to understand each other but I didn’t really care if they got together and only wanted them to be together so that Anna could stop fawning over Étienne. What I really enjoyed was that the story wasn’t just about the romance; it was about Anna coming to terms with herself. Like any other normal teenage girl Anna makes mistakes and she has flaws and dreams and it was great watching her make mistakes and learn from them and grow. It was also fun to read about her new group of friends in Paris, they were all unique individuals that stood out very fresh in mind and who I wouldn’t have mind learning more about.

So I will be picking up Stephanie Perkins’ next book (Lola and the Boy next Door) which is a companion piece to this novel about a different set of characters, because I did enjoy her story even if I didn’t love it as much as everyone else.

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