Review: Under the Jeweled Sky - Alison McQueen

London 1957. In a bid to erase her past and build the family she yearns for, Sophie Schofield accepts a wedding proposal from ambitious British diplomat, Lucien Grainger. When he is posted to New Delhi, into the glittering circle of ex-pat high society, old wounds begin to break open as she is confronted with the memory of her first, forbidden love and its devastating consequences. 

The suffocating conformity of diplomatic life soon closes in on her. This is not the India she fell in love with ten years before when her father was a maharaja’s physician, the India of tigers and scorpions and palaces afloat on shimmering lakes; the India that ripped out her heart as Partition tore the country in two, separating her from her one true love. The past haunts her still, the guilt of her actions, the destruction it wreaked upon her fragile parents, and the boy with the tourmaline eyes. 

Sophie had never meant to come back, yet the moment she stepped onto India’s burning soil as a newlywed wife, she realised her return was inevitable. And so begins the unravelling of an ill-fated marriage, setting in motion a devastating chain of events that will bring her face to face with a past she tried so desperately to forget, and a future she must fight for. 

My thoughts:

This book takes place in 1947 and 1957. Sophie first comes with her mother and father to India as her father becomes a doctor for a maharajah. It's a small world, her mother suffocates her, but she finds a friend and her life is changed. India becomes a country and fast forward to 1957. This time Sophie comes to India with her new husband, it's a different country from what she remembers. Still again she feels suffocated. 

What to say about this book, what will I remember from it. Well, it made me cry. I can't even remember when a book last made me cry, maybe it happens once a year. It's a good thing, this book truly made me feel. And It's a bad thing, omg it made me cry, it was sad! Why!? It broke my heart.

But before that happened a lot of other things happened. Sophie was kind of quiet, first she followed her parents and then her husband. First in the end she followed herself. This was her journey and I am glad she found courage in the end. True courage. 

Some things happen that I wont get into too, spoilers. But now (-57) and then (-47) comes together.

Just as it is Sophie's story it is also a story about India. We see how India is formed, and broken apart. Hindu and Muslim countries, there is kidnappings, rape, murder, families torn apart. It was not a pretty break.

Conclusion: 

An interesting story.

Cover

eh

Paperback, 408 pages
Published January 21st 2014 by Sourcebooks Landmark (first published April 25th 2013)
Fiction
for review

Author Interview and giveaway: Carolyn Brown

Today I interview Carolyn Brown and there is a giveaway of 3 of her books :D

Welcome!

Welcome back to my blog Carolyn. Anything fun happened since I saw you around the last time?

Carolyn: I love propping up my feet and visiting with all y’all here at Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell. We always have so much fun! Oh, my goodness, so many fun things have happened since I last visited here. Family continues to expand and there’s more books to be written and cowboys are coming out of the woodwork wanting me to tell their stories...which I do not mind one bit. I love it when those sexy boys knock on my door, their boots all polished and their hats in their hands.

Tell me about your new book, The Cowboy's mail order bride...

Carolyn: Fulfilling a promise to her grandfather in his last days of life, Emily has brought a box of letters to Clarice, her grandfather’s first and lost love. Her intentions were to leave the letters and be on her way but things didn’t work that way. Clarice begged her to stay and tell her more about Marvin Cooper’s life. Her grandson, Greg, isn’t convinced that Emily is really who she says she is but he’s willing to play along…for a little while anyway. Magic is in the air…but then there is a certain magic in the fading art of real letters, isn’t there?

Is this the last in the Cowboy's and Brides series or will there be more?

Carolyn: There is one more in the Cowboy’s and Brides series: How to Marry a Cowboy is scheduled for July, 2014 and tells Mason’s story about what happened when he found a woman in a tattered bridal gown on his front porch. And then in October The Burnt Boot Series will kick off with Cowboy Boots for Christmas (Cowboy Not Included). Also, in August, another cowboy series debuts with Long Hot Texas Summer. So there are lots more cowboys in the next few months.

What was the inspiration behind this book?

Carolyn: That’s a long story but to make it short, I am a mail order bride. Husband and I wrote letters back and forth for two years (he was in Germany with the Army and I was in Oklahoma finishing high school). He proposed by mail and I got my engagement ring by mail. Even though it was all done in the era before Skype, texting and cell phones and all the technological things of this day and time, it inspired me to write the story. What if my proposal and my ring had been lost in the mail? What if since I didn’t respond, he thought my answer was no?

As you have written about so many couples, is there any couple that is your favorite?

Carolyn: My favorite couple? Hmmmm, that tends to be the couple I’m working with at the time but I have to admit that Emily and Greg sure have a special place in my heart. RT Reviews says that the book has an old world feel to it. I like that because I wanted it to blend the old with the new in a new and different way.

And what are you working on right now?

Carolyn: I’m working on The Cowboy Clash, the second book in the Burnt Boot series that will hopefully be on the bookshelves the first of 2015. Sawyer O’Donnell (Cowboy Seeks Bride) is coming back to tell us about his life in Burnt Boot when he gets thrown in the middle of a century old family feud.

Thanks!

Giveaway

A set of the 3 books in the Cowboys & Brides Series (Billion Dollar Cowboy, The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby and The Cowboy’s Mail Order Bride), along with a cute cowboy charm gift from Carolyn herself!

1. Open to US and Canada.

2. Ends Feb 8

3. Just enter :D

Ask questions if you want to too :)

THE COWBOY’S MAIL ORDER BRIDE BY CAROLYN BROWN – IN STORES FEBRUARY 2014

She's Got Sass...

Emily Cooper promised her dying grandfather that she'd deliver a long-lost letter to a woman he once planned to wed. Little does adventurous Emily know that this simple task will propel her to places she never could have imagined...with a cowboy who's straight out of her dreams...

He's Got Mail...

When sexy rancher Greg Adams discovers his grandmother Clarice has installed Emily on their ranch as her assistant, he decides to humor the two ladies. He figures Emily will move on soon enough. In the meantime, he intends to keep a close eye on her—he doesn't quite buy her story of his grandmother as a mail-order bride.

A lost letter meant a lost love for Clarice, but two generations later, maybe it's not too late for that letter to work its magic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carolyn Brown is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author with more than sixty books published. She writes bestselling single title cowboy and country music mass market romances as well as women’s fiction. Born in Texas and raised in southern Oklahoma, Carolyn and her husband now make their home in the town of Davis, Oklahoma. For more information, please visit www.CarolynLBrown.com.

To purchase The Cowboy’s Mail Order Bride:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Books-a-Million

iBookstore

IndieBound

Sourcebooks

Discover a New Love

Author Interview and Giveaway: Alison McQueen

Welcome to today's interview with Alison McQueen.

1. Tell me about yourself.

I was born in London during the swinging sixties when mixed marriages were still a rarity. My mother was born in Assam in 1928. She came to England thirty years later, never meaning to stay, and met my father, a strapping great Viking of a man. He was a wonderful jazz musician.

I knew that I had a grandfather and that he had a farm in Africa, but I never met him. He existed only as a single photograph in my mother’s album. My father was an effectively an orphan, having been dumped on the steps of a Barnardo’s home at the age of five. With so little information about who I was and where my family came from, it’s little wonder I became a writer.

2. And what your new book, Under a Jeweled sky is about?

Under The Jewelled Sky is a tragic tale of love and loss set in the dying embers of the British Raj. The story unravels the fragile construct of a severely dysfunctional British family and watches its slow disintegration in the wake of World War II, the subsequent partition of India, and a scandal with terrible consequences. 

The tangle of politics and diplomacy during both periods seemed like a fitting backdrop to the disordered lives of the characters, with layers of deceit and half-truths and nothing being quite what it seems.

Under the Jeweled Sky explores the inevitability of lost innocence, the urgent connection in our stars, and how far we'll go to pursue our destiny.

3. What was the inspiration behind this book?

Under The Jewelled Sky was inspired by memories of my mother’s friends; the women I would eavesdrop on, the hushed voices and grave expressions passed over teacups. My mother’s friends had grown up (many of them in India) in the days before such things were openly spoken of, but it was all there: domestic violence, unwanted pregnancies, addiction, ruin, and occasional salvation. 

Bad marriages were commonplace, but divorce was unthinkable, and the brittle veneers of fake harmony were part of the everyday landscape. Morals and ethics were knotted up with religious doctrine and stiff upper lip. Respectable people did not wash their laundry in public, nor did they question what went on behind the closed doors of their neighbours’ houses.

Part of the story is set in a maharaja’s palace. Although the fictional palace and its location are anonymous, I did have an inside track into life inside an Indian palace. In her twenties, my mother was hired as the private nurse to the Maharaja of Indore’s mother-in-law. She arrived there from Bombay and was shown to her quarters, an enormous suite in a grand building set across the grounds from the main palace.

A car was sent for her every morning, but she said that she preferred to walk. So off she would go, strolling through the grounds while the car followed along a few yards behind, driving at snail’s pace in case she should change her mind. Her breakfast would be served to her on a solid silver service, with a footman standing by should she want for anything.

From what she has told me, I am not sure that she handled it particularly well. She said that she didn’t want any fuss, which was quite the wrong way to go about things in a palace. There was also an incident when she was caught preparing her own boiled egg, which didn’t go down at all well. The cook was quite overcome with grief, and my mother never ventured to lift a finger again. I have to say, I rather like the thought of that.

4.  What are you working on right now?

I am currently working on another novel set partially in India and touching upon a subject that remains one of the last taboos. The draft is still at an early stage which means that my house is awash with scraps of paper and cryptic messages that I will have no hope of understanding when they eventually surface. Creating a first draft is utter torture.

5. What are some of your own personal favorite books?

There are so many wonderful books out there and if I lived to be a hundred years old there still wouldn’t be enough time to even scratch the surface. I have a habit of returning to the classics; Daphne’s du Maurier’s wonderful Rebecca, The tragic Great Gatsby, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales. When I read I really want to feel something. There is nothing to beat a great story beautifully written.

Thanks!

Giveaway

1 copy of Under a Jeweled Sky

1. US only

2. Ends Feb 8

3. Just enter

PS.1  new rules: If your profile leads to google+ you have to put your email or twitter name in the comments (cos I will not spend hours tracking someone down on google+. Also please do check that your profile doesn't lead to an empty page. How would I ever find you? it has happened)

PS.2. I will have the review up on Tuesday and as Alison said, it was a tragic tale, and I sure enjoyed it too. So you all will have to wait for that.

Where to find Alison:

Website & blog:

www.alisonmcqueen.com

Twitter:

@Alison_McQueen

Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Alison-McQueen/265035533524734

Instagram:

http://instagram.com/alisonmcqueen

Pinterest:

http://pinterest.com/alisonmcqueen/pins

Mishel Reviews: Deeper - Robin York

Mishel reviews

Series or Stand Alone: Caroline and West, book one

Release Date:  January 2014 

Publisher: Bantam

Pages:  400

Author Site:   http://www.robinyork.com/

My Rating: 4.75/5 

Source: NetGalley

Cover: The cover model is pretty but that’s really the only thing…I like that it’s simple and it goes well with book two’s (HARDER) cover!!

In this New Adult debut by Robin York, a college student is attacked online and must restore her name—and stay clear of a guy who’s wrong for her, but feels so right.

When Caroline Piasecki’s ex-boyfriend posts their sex pictures on the Internet, it destroys her reputation as a nice college girl. Suddenly her once-promising future doesn’t look so bright. Caroline tries to make the pictures disappear, hoping time will bury her shame. Then a guy she barely knows rises to her defense and punches her ex to the ground.

West Leavitt is the last person Caroline needs in her life. Everyone knows he’s shady. Still, Caroline is drawn to his confidence and swagger—even after promising her dad she’ll keep her distance. On late, sleepless nights, Caroline starts wandering into the bakery where West works.

They hang out, they talk, they listen. Though Caroline and West tell each other they’re “just friends,” their feelings intensify until it becomes impossible to pretend. The more complicated her relationship with West gets, the harder Caroline has to struggle to discover what she wants for herself—and the easier it becomes to find the courage she needs to fight back against the people who would judge her.

When all seems lost, sometimes the only place to go is deeper.

Review:

While I get the idea of the new emerging genre of New Adult I really don’t feel it’s all that necessary. I like to read any kind of book that sounds good whether it be fantasy, romance, horror, suspense, etc. Differentiating between adult, young adult, and now, new adult feels like a waste of time. But I get the need to micro-manage and to sub-genre genres. I get that. I have my weird quirks too. So I’ll go along with it and read what I like in whatever genre, sub-genre, or categorical scheme to get me to buy more books =D So with that said  Deeper is my first dip in the New Adult pool. I’m amazed by how much I liked it. There was sexy times a plenty, a super hot bad boy who is secretly a pretty charming and caring man, a smart and very likeable heroine, a lot of different issues to contemplate and discuss…basically Deeper is a keeper on my bookshelf.

Law school bound Caroline recently breaks up with her longtime boyfriend, Nick, of three years. Soon after the breakup she discovers a set of sexually explicit photos posted all over the internet. Hmm I wonder whodunit? Now before I could even start to contemplate blaming Caroline for her part in the picture taking she surprised me by accepting her responsibility. I was kind of half-expecting her to be all “woe is me” and “I can’t believe this happened!! *sob sob*”… but yeah I didn’t get any of that. She knew she shouldn’t have let Nick take those pictures. But she never dreamed they’d be blasted over the web or ever used against her. No one ever dreams of that, well not anyone I know at least. 

Despite having a big “SLUT” sticker on her forehead Caroline doesn’t roll over and die or go crawl in a hole to disappear. Like I said, she really surprised me by taking control and trying to do what she thought was best to remedy the situation. I honestly would have been a very “woe is me” kind of heroine in a very dramatic fashion. The repercussions can truly be devastating and just imagining myself in Caroline’s situation makes me shudder. And while I respect the hell out of Caroline for putting her brave face on, I must say she did create some unnecessary drama for herself. Bullying sucks no matter what age you are but fighting back can really do wonders. I wish she would have stood up for herself a little more and asked for help rather than trying to bury it under the rug and wish it all away. Ain’t gonna happen honey! Sometimes you can’t let what others think get in the way of your life. Especially when Caroline didn’t do anything wrong but take sexy pictures for her boyfriend. 

Now I read the blurb before I requested the book on Netgalley, okay okay maybe I skimmed it. (oh and by the way, this book was formatted just fine! Thank goodness, Thank Netgalley!) But I had no idea that the story was going to take off into this passionate affair with my new fictional boyfriend. I mean really, I didn’t prepare myself!  To Caroline, West is like this tempting, beautiful to look at but don’t even think about touching (or talking to) creature. Even before Caroline’s picture scandal and her breakup with Nick, West was someone that very much interested her. His allure was almost tangible but Caroline was too afraid to be anything but the good girl she’s always been. But when West steps further into her life by beating Nick up, she has no choice but to acknowledge her growing attraction to someone she’s hardly spoken to. 

One of my favorite parts of the story is West’s point of view and his story. I absolutely loved the fact that the author chose to tell the story in alternating perspectives. Without West’s thoughts I don’t think the book would have had such an impact on me. West is not a true bad boy. He grew up struggling to get by with his younger sister and mother. And his mother has had a very devastating and consuming love affair with West’s father all his life. West has had to step in as a brother, son, and father-figure all at young ages. He’s had to grow up fast and use whatever was in reach to get by, including his own body.  I did become attached to Caroline and the fact that she came out of her shell with West. She learns how to survive, how to grow, and how to let go of what’s safe all the while teaching West about what it means to be truly cared for and loved. The two of them are explosive when they come together. Which brings me to my next favorite part of the story – the sexy times!! HOT, steamy, and extremely well written - I loved the sexy times shared between Caroline and West. Even with blunt and abrasive language I still found the scenes to be some of the best sex scenes I’ve ever read!

I am sort of just blown away at how much this story has to offer: amazing sex scenes, nicely written secondary characters, and a number of issues that will resonate with many different readers. And I actually felt pretty content with the ending. I would have definitely wanted another book if the author didn’t already have Harder (July,2014) coming out. However the ending was enough for me. I cried, my heart was aching, but I was content with using my imagination to put the pieces together for myself. But I’m not complaining with the fact that there will be another book. I’d like to fast forward time so I can read it now! But to me the ending wasn’t a cliffhanger. Anywho, I really liked Deeper! I liked it so much I pre-ordered a paperback copy of it and the next book so they’ll have permanent homes on my bookshelf. So would I buy it? Heck yes, I already did =P I’m actually looking forward to reading the author’s other books under her real name (Ruthie Knox).