Deluged With Books Cafe

Contemporary Romance Date Published: June 2014 Rating: ♨♨♨♨ (4 cups)  Really entertaining and engaging, a reader tends to get lost with the foibles, musing and all out adventure into Savvy's  foray into managing her uncle's motel, flirting or not with the ex-handyman/childhood friend/one night fling turned bar owner Skip and trying to solve the great mystery of Florida coastline real estate with the help of her all female staff and her not so shabby sleuthing skills. The Gull Motel is a truly delightful read that will keep you turning the page. Book Summary:    Savvy Thorpe needs a vacation. Finally finished with college, she heads to her favorite shabby motel on Florida’s Gulf Coast where her aunt and uncle always save her room twenty-four. She quickly finds out, though, that The Gull Motel is not just her home away from home. It’s hers to manage while her aunt and uncle take an extended trip. Skip McComber, The Gull...

If you want to read a book about the beauty of summer and the struggle of gardening, about something and nothing, then you may pick this up and forget the time. The Solitary Summer  follows her journey in  Elizabeth and her German Garden , where she accounted her time learning gardening and interacting with nature and friends. As also reflected in Elizabeth von Arnim's other book,  Enchanted April , her writing conjures serene images of flowers in bloom and shafts of sunlight, of lying on the grass by the pond, of reading for hours under the shade of a tree and the effects of these languid habits on the soul. In this short book, she related her witty conversations with the Man of Wrath, her exchanges with previously hired gardeners, the way of life of the villagers, funny arguments with her own conscience and best of all, her love of books and traipses at the garden.

Stories doesn't need silence. They need words. Without them, they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you. These words and the rest it entailed remained with me after I finished this rather somber book.  The Thirteenth Tale  is your usual blend of English Gothic mystery about ghosts and haunted manors and dysfunctional old family. Margaret Lea, a some time biographer working on his father's antiquarian shop, travels to Oxfordshire to meet the famous novelist Vida Winter, who once published a book,  Thirteen Tales of Change of Desperation  which strangely only contained twelve stories. Will Vida, who is known not to speak the truth about her origins and for being a recluse, ever reveal the thirteenth tale? This one is a plethora of book quotes, if you ask me. It is like one quarter book musings and three quarters mystery, an aspect that made this an interesting read, perhaps a rather definitive style of Diane Setterfield. I love how she under...

Beautiful Creatures  has been floating around the bookshelves and bestsellers list before I (as is usual) found myself jumping on the last bandwagon. It does take a while to sway me to the currently popular. When the film adaptation hit the theaters, my curiosity got piqued. Seeing the trailer and recognizing half the cast (no kidding!) was the last push that propelled me to finally check it out. This is the first of the Caster Chronicles series, spanning four books, and set in a small place in South Carolina. Lena is the new girl in town while Ethan cannot wait to escape the place. Inevitably, they gravitated to each other. As Ethan puzzles out the dreams of a girl haunting him, Lena struggles to hide her ever growing power, a curse that's been in her family for generations. The South, which seemed a favorite haven of the paranormal, continually draws me in with its sinister history and old worldliness (beginning with Anne Rice). Take an abandoned mansion, let a my...

SEDUCED by Molly O'Keefe Released May 26th, 2014 Historical Romance BOOK SUMMARY:  A gritty and emotional historical western romance by RITA-award winning and Bestselling author Molly O'Keefe. Melody Hurst’s days as a Southern belle are over. Now she’s widowed and alone in the foothills of the Rockies, struggling to make a life in a dangerous world. She’s determined to secure a future by marrying – but love is out of the question. Cole Baywood has turned bounty hunter after serving in the horrors of the Civil War, but the ghosts of the men and women he’s killed still haunt him. He’s drawn to the beautiful widow trying to seduce him, only the darkness in his soul forces him to reject her. Is it possible that Melody’s touch can heal the demons of his past? And how can he convince a woman who has lost so much to risk her heart? Review: Seduced is the first book in Molly O' Keefe's newest series, Into The Wild.  Set in the post civil war, we meet four peop...

In a unique world created by Cassandra Clarke full of magic and pirates and assassins, we meet our feisty heroine named Ananna. As the daughter of the pirate captain of the Tanarau, she's always dreamed of leading her own crew and have her own adventures. However, she finds out that she is to be married to Tarrin of the Tariri, which will destroy all of her plans. Ananna takes the matter in her own hands and fled not just from the marriage, but also from the life she has ever known. The Tariris sends an assassin after her - and with a twist of fate, she saved the assassin from a mysterious assailant and were both binded by a magical curse. Ananna and the assassin Naji, must now travel together in order to find a cure.

So for our book club sunday discussion, we picked Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park, a young adult coming of age romance set in the 1980's.  This book had very good reviews and this made us curious enough to read it.  And after many, many Sundays of being postponed we were able to finally seat down and discuss what we thought about it. Eleanor  is the new girl in town, and with her chaotic family life, her mismatched clothes and unruly red hair, she couldn't stick out more if she tried. Park  is the boy at the back of the bus. Black T-shirts, headphones, head in a book - he thinks he's made himself invisible. But not to Eleanor... never to Eleanor. Slowly, steadily, through late-night conversations and an ever-growing stack of mix tapes, Eleanor and Park fall for each other. They fall in love the way you do the first time, when you're young, and you feel as if you have nothing and everything to lose.