A Long Way from You by Gwendolyn Heasley is $1.99. This is a contemporary YA about a girl from a small town in Texas who is invited to do a month's worth of art courses at the Parsons school in New York City.
For too long, Kitsy has had to satisfy her dreams of becoming a real artist by giving her friends makeovers before prom.
So when her best friend Corrinne's family offers to sponsor her for a summer art course in New York City, Kitsy bids a temporary good-bye to Texas to say hello to the West Village.
Between navigating the subway and the New Yorkers—namely, the Art Boy who has a nice trick of getting under her skin—Kitsy knows that this summer is going to be about a lot more than figure drawing.
Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Sony | Kobo
A Ride or Die Kind of Love is an eight-in-one anthology for .99c featuring previously published novels from eight different authors, all of which feature motorcycle gangs (a very popular anti-hero style).
Includes EIGHT full length novels that feature men on motorcycles. If you love the wind in your hair, hands in the air and being swept off your feet by a man in leather, this set of novels is just for you.
Chelsea Camaron – One Ride
Selene Chardou – Deadly Seduction
Nicole Jacquelyn – Craving Constellations
Bella Jewel – Hell’s Knights
Kim Jones – Saving Dallas
Kit Rocha – Beyond Shame
Madeline Sheehan – Undeniable
Ashley Suzanne – Mirage
Girl in the Wild by Beth Orsoff is a Kindle Daily Deal at $1.99. This is a contemporary comedy about a woman sent to rural Alaska to produce a documentary about walruses. On one hand, I love contemporary romances with big travel and fish out of water plots, but I tend to twitch at the use of rural Alaska as a place where city folk learn the right way to be..even though I love Alaska and love reading about it. This particular book is set on an island of walruses, which sounds totally intriguing.
In an age of cynicism, is it possible to become an idealist?
When Los Angeles publicist Sydney Green convinces her boss to let her produce a documentary for the Save the Walrus Foundation, the only one Sydney Green is interested in saving is herself. The walruses are merely a means to improving her career and her love life, and not necessarily in that order. Sydney would’ve killed the project the second she learned she’d be the one having to spend a month in rural Alaska if it had been for any other client. But for rising star and sometimes boyfriend Blake McKinley, no sacrifice is ever too great.
Yet a funny thing happens on the way to the Arctic. A gregarious walrus pup, a cantankerous scientist, an Australian sex goddess, a Star Wars obsessed six-year-old, and friends and nemeses both past and present rock Sydney Green’s well-ordered world. Soon Sydney is forced to choose between doing what’s easy and doing what’s right.
The International Bank of Bob is $1.99 as a KDD – and I'm hoping it'll be price matched. I've seen mentions of this book in several places, usually from people who liked it a lot. This is a nonfiction travel memoir about a man who traces his Kiva loans to remote places on the earth to see the effects of his $25 microloans and whether they made a differences.
I've been curious about this book for awhile – and $2 is too tempting for me to pass up – especially because I LOVE Kiva. (If you're curious, use that link, and you should get a $25 credit if you've never joined Kiva before).
Hired by ForbesTraveler.com to review some of the most luxurious accommodations on Earth, and then inspired by a chance encounter in Dubai with the impoverished workers whose backbreaking jobs create such opulence, Bob Harris had an epiphany: He would turn his own good fortune into an effort to make lives like theirs better.
Bob found his way to Kiva.org, the leading portal through which individuals make microloans all over the world: for as little as $25-50, businesses are financed and people are uplifted. Astonishingly, the repayment rate was nearly 99%, so he re-loaned the money to others over and over again.
After making hundreds of microloans online, Bob wanted to see the results first-hand, and in The International Bank of Bob he travels from Peru and Bosnia to Rwanda and Cambodia, introducing us to some of the most inspiring and enterprising people we've ever met, while illuminating day-to-day life-political and emotional-in much of the world that Americans never see.
Told with humor and compassion, The International Bank of Bob brings the world to our doorstep, and makes clear that each of us can, actually, make it better.
RE: The rural Alaska trope. For me, it largely depends on how the message is delivered. Is it the concept of one specific place being so perfect that it’s a bandaid for someone’s psyche? Or is it the concept that someone being exposed to a drastically different way of life can broaden their concepts of their own and challenge them for self improvement? I honestly think a lot of books/movies/whatever TRY for the latter, but wind up conveying it as the former. “LOOK, MAGICAL INUIT FOLK WITH CHARMING FOLKSY WAYS DOING CRAP WITH THEIR HANDS. GET YOUR EMOTIONAL WELLBEING ALL UP INS.”
Yeah. Just… yeah. The whole glamorization/romanticization of rural and small-town America is mind-boggling to me. I’ve lived in small rural towns. They have been universally shitty. Everybody was up in my business, but not in a cute way, just in an irritating invasion of privacy way. There were few jobs, and were are all low-paying, and in many cases, they were essentially closed to women. It was considered okay to use gendered or racial slurs. If I didn’t go to church, I would get condescending, faux-concerned postcards from acquaintances asking if I was sick (because obviously that was the only good reason to not go to church). When I moved to a much larger city about an hour away, all my “friends” stopped talking to me—I became an outsider, one of those “liberal big city folks.” They still occasionally talk to my husband, mostly to ask him when, not if, we are moving back.
I’ve never lived in Alaska, and the pictures look lovely, but I’m going out on a limb here to say that there’s nothing morally superior about living in a frigid wilderness as opposed to a metropolis. There is nothing wrong with being ambitious or wanting a fast-paced career. Sure, it’s not for everyone, but neither is farm life.
This is one of the reasons I avoid a lot of contemporaries. There’s a whole subgenre devoted to heroines who have high-powered, high-earning careers, but they give them up after visiting a nauseatingly sweet, utterly unrealistic small town where they learn that they can only find True Happiness by quitting their jobs and becoming the submissive wives of down-home, aww-shucks, finger-lickin’ good men. Those same men, by the way, are never required to give up anything; the sacrifice is always on the heroine’s part.
Anyway, end rant. This is just something that has been bugging me for a while, and SBSarah’s comment set me off. Sorry. :-/
It seems like Los Angeles is the big city to end big cities. Having only been there once… I can’t say I understand why?. More than any other city in romances (than say New York or DC) herioines (usually heroines) come from Los Angeles completely burnt out and tired of city life. Seriously anybody have ideas why?
Also there’s a ton of places smaller than any of those cities I mentioned that are smaller and very different (Portland Maine, or even some of the “small” towns in America where it’s not quite as big as NYC, Los Angeles, or DC but bigger than they typical romance small town with then a thousand people.
Also said small towns never point out that there’s not a lot of dating oppotunity, employment opportunity, and depending on the people possibly some drinking problems and maybe even crime. (Although I do think that’s why so many murder mysteries take place in small towns. Think you’re safe. It’s one of your friends and neighbors out there killing people. )
I enjoyed Dead Pirate Rachel’s comments and wanted to add my own.
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Sorry for the above comment – sometimes I have problems with my comments getting posted so I wanted to make sure before I ranted.
A-freaking-men to DreadPirateRachel and Emily A. I grew up in a small rural town. None of my immediate family lives there anymore, and there are damn good reasons for that. Yes, lack of employment, drug problems (meth is a HUGE problem in some small communities) and such are big issues. I was fortunate to grow up with two successful, college-educated parents, but what really got to me (and eventually, my parents and siblings) was the closed-mindedness. Gender and racial slurs aplenty. Growing up perceived as a freak because I read for fun and preferred theater to sports (my school was both tiny and hugely into sport). Give me the big city any day (I moved for college and have been here on and off ever since, “on” for almost 8 years now).
So yeah, the fetishizing of small towns bugs the hell out of me.
Did anyone else think the cover for “A Long Way From You” just missed greatness? I like that there are two actual people (with heads!), but it’s a shame that the background is so blurred, especially since it’s a beautiful setting. Not sure why a student at Parsons is so far uptown (most students don’t travel outside of a one or two mile radius during the semester), but the view of the San Remo from the Central Park lake (with weirdly fake looking water) is a lovely one. The problem is that when I see a place I know well like that blurred and made unrealistic looking, I start thinking that the story “blurs” the setting also, and gets details wrong that I know will irritate me. I know the cover has nothing to do with the author, but it’s something art departments might want to take into account: don’t blur very recognizable locations, because people will semi-consciously assume the author didn’t do her homework.
Alaska is extremely beautiful, and I loved my trip there back in 02, but there’s also the fact that Alaska has been dubbed ‘the rape capital of the US’.
https://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130326/what-will-it-take-shine-light-rural-alaskas-sexual-assault-epidemic
So much for magical ruralness.
Addendum @ DreadPirateRachel and maybeimamazed
I have no problem with romanticized small towns. As a native New Yorker, what gets me in many of the contemporaries you mention is the idea that cities have no sense of community. Sure, if you’ve moved/run away from a small town to where nobody knows you it’s possible to be anonymous in a big city….up until you’ve lived in the same place for twenty years, and have seen the kids in your apartment building go from toddlers in the laundry room to trick-or-treating tweens to college students, and not only does the guy you buy coffee from in the mornings know whether you take milk and sugar, he also knows your entire work schedule, and asks where you’re going on vacation, and you know about how his kids are doing in school. The first time I voted the polling volunteer (a neighbor of ours) greeted me with “Oh, your mother was here earlier and when I opened the booklet and saw your name there I said to her I can’t believe she’s eighteen!” I’ve been recognized by my pre-school teacher walking through Grand Central Station. (She sent regards to my parents.)
Of course, this drives some people crazy, so they keep moving around, or opt for anonymity so it doesn’t happen to them. That’s cool, and you’re right, it’s nice that big cities give people that choice. But please for the love of goodness can people stop assuming that people who grew up in cities have never experienced long-term stable friendships and community? I don’t begrudge people the “glamor and glitz” interpretation of cities, but can we please remember that for some of us this is ALSO “down-home” and not assume that all big city dwellers somehow have no “real” family or community ties?
All very good points, Rachel. I actually chose my current neighborhood (where I’ve been since I returned to the city in 2006) BECAUSE of its sense of community. My best friend and my sister both live in the same building, down the street. Another close friend is a block away. These are all people I’ve known for many years (my best friend for 14, my close friend and former roommate for 7, and my sister, well, since she was born!). The staff of the Starbucks on the corner know me and say hello every morning, and I’ve been going to the same yoga studio since 2008. What I like about the city is that I AM allowed more anonymity and freedom than I was in my small town, but I also have good friends and solid networks of people – in fact, my neighborhood’s a lot like a small town, but with more restaurants and less nosiness!
Thanks for writing that lovely comment, Rebecca. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and my parents neighbors still remember me when I visit. I’m in Midtown Manhattan now, and speak to many of the cashiers at my local supermarket. We have some unfriendly creeps in the building, but there is a community here.
I’ve always hated the fact that people believe small towns are idyllic. I hate when a savage murder takes place in a small town and the reporters and residents say “It doesn’t happen to people like us or in towns like this” when the same thing just happened in a different small town the day before! The other thing that makes me crazy about these stories is the failure to show the racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and misogyny that seems to be so natural for some. I’ve been to small towns where white friends have said “I feel so safe here. You can leave the door unlocked at night.” And seeing how the residents are glaring at me (I’m black), I want to tell them that if I left my door unlocked at night, they might not find my body in the morning. I’ll keep NYC, thank you.
As an east coast girl who now lives in Alaska, I can speak to the fact that it does pretty much ruin you for other places. Even Maine seems too full of people to me now, and the thought of living surrounded by buildings makes me twitch. Our winter has been mild this year, and I am ALMOST missing that brilliant week or two of -40 degree days when your breath stops in your throat the moment you step outside. There’s a way of feeling alive here that I have experienced so rarely anywhere else. It’s almost a given among the people I know that when someone leaves, they find themselves moving back within a year or two.
That said, I know it’s not for everyone, and I wouldn’t assign moral judgement to people who prefer other types of places. There are plenty of horrible human beings up here, too, and huge issues for our communities with sexual assault, suicide, and addictions.
One Ride by Chelsea Camaron is a really horrible book. I downloaded it separately a couple of days ago because I’ve been reading a few of the biker romance stories, and it’s very poorly written. It has too many 5 star reviews on amazon to actually fit what people are reading. Some of the biker stories I’ve liked include Joanna Wylde (sp?), Kristen Ashley Chaos (to a degree), and recently read Marianna Zapata (sp?).
Totally down with Dread Pirate Rachel and the rest. There is a reason I don’t read many books set in the rural South. I tried to live there once and ended up packing my kids and the few things I valued most into my car and fleeing in the middle of the night. OTOH, I did enjoy my time in Alaska, northern Maine, and, currently, a town of about 10,000 in northern California. I think part of living rural is picking your place, being willing to try weird local customs, and remembering that whoever you are speaking to is likely related to whoever you are speaking about. That said, I am looking forward to moving to a mid-size city when I retire. I lived in many big cities as a kid and, yes, there was community. And so much bustle. Mid-size seems about right to me.