A Christmas Promise (Timeless Regency Collection) by Joanna Barker, Annette Lyon, and Jennifer Moore : Christmas Book Review

Product Details

• Title: A Christmas Promise (Timeless Regency Collection)
  
• Authors: Joanna Barker, Annette Lyon, and Jennifer Moore  
• Format-Kindle: $3.99 (purchase HERE:https://amzn.to/3miNwCC )
  
• File size : 2414 KB
• Publication date : November 17, 2020
• Word Wise : Enabled
• Print length : 306 pages
• Publisher : Mirror Press (November 17, 2020)
• ***I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy from the publisher. All opinions are my own***  

 

Book Summary 

Coming this Christmas: Three Regency Romances by Joanna Barker, Annette Lyon, and Jennifer Moore

THE TWO BELLS OF CHRISTMAS by Joanna Barker
Roland Hastings made a promise to his father: to marry and carry on the family line. But after a year of searching, he has given up hope of finding the right woman. Anticipating a quiet Christmas with his mother, Roland is frustrated to learn she has organized an entire house party to help him find a bride. Cassandra Bell arrives for the house party with her twin sister Vivian, who has set her heart on winning a proposal from the eligible Mr. Hastings. But when Vivian grows ill, she begs Cassie to switch places with her and keep the other conniving ladies away from Mr. Hastings. Cassie reluctantly takes on the role of her poised and proper twin, but things become much more complicated when Roland begins to take an interest in the spunky and unconventional Cassie...

PROMISE ME AGAIN by Annette Lyon
Secret wedding plans. A powerful brother who will go to any lengths to stop them. Can love truly conquer all? Miriam and Jacob have loved each other for as long as they can remember. They want to wed, but Jacob's older brother Norman forbids it. Deciding to do so secretly without his blessing, Miriam and Jacob make plans to marry on Christmas Eve at a church several hours’ journey away. Despite their efforts, Norman’s long reach finds them. Miriam’s love is tested to the very limit when she is forced into a devil’s bargain with him. She agrees only to spare Jacob pain, but can their hearts find their way back to each other no matter what—or who—stands in their way?

A CHRISTMAS JOURNEY by Jennifer Moore
The war is over, but Lucy Breckenridge’s plans for a perfect Christmas are ruined when Captain James Stewart brings news that her father will not return in time for the holiday. Determined to not miss yet another Christmas with her father, Lucy starts on a journey for London with her trusty maid and manservant. Learning they have gone, James follows, hoping to stop her before she discovers the true reason for Colonel Breckenridge’s absence. Along the way, the two join in local holiday celebrations and learn that families have flaws, friendship requires trust, and Christmas traditions can be created in the most unexpected places.

My Review

This is my favorite time of year when I get to read all of the new Christmas books. The new Christmas Timeless Regency Collection has three very different stories. Each has some type of Christmas Promise interwoven into its plot. One story is full of humorous incidences and surprises, the next is sad and full of tragedy but a miracle happens at the end, and the last is a good mixture of the first two. The good news is, they all end in such a beautiful way. The three authors who wrote these stories know what they are doing when it comes to writing romance. You can be assured when you pick up this anthology you will have fabulous stories in your hands. I enjoyed this collection and you'll feel the spirit of Christmas as you become lost in its pages.

Meet the Authors

Annette Lyon

Annette Lyon is a Whitney Award-winning author and a three-time recipient of Utah’s Best of State medal for fiction. She has received many publication awards from the League of Utah Writers, including the Silver Quill for PAIGE, one of her books in the co-written Newport Ladies Book Club series. She is the author of over a dozen novels, at least as many novellas, a cookbook, a grammar guide, plus some 120 hundred articles.

Website | Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon

Jennifer Moore

Jennifer Moore is a passionate reader and writer of all things romance due to the need to balance the rest of her world that includes a perpetually traveling husband and four active sons, who create heaps of laundry that is anything but romantic. Jennifer has a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Utah. She lives in northern Utah with her family, but most of the time wishes she was aboard a British frigate during the age of sail. She writes Regency, Historical, and Contemporary Romance.

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon

Joanna Barker

Joanna Barker discovered her love for historical fiction after visiting England as an eleven-year-old, and subsequently read every Jane Austen book she could get her hands on. After graduating Brigham Young University with a degree in English, she worked as an acquisitions editor before devoting herself full-time to writing. She enjoys music, chocolate, and reading everything from romance to science fiction. She lives in Utah and is just a little crazy about her husband and two wild-but-loveable boys.

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon

Christmas Day in the Morning Awakening The Joy of Christmas by Pearl S. Buck Newly Adapted by David T. Warner

 

 

Christmas Day in the Morning

Awakening The Joy of Christmas

by Pearl S. Buck

Newly Adapted by David T. Warner

Publication Date: 10/6/20

Hardcover

ISBN: 9781629727967

Retail Price: $14.99

Page Count: 48

Fiction / Holiday

Book Design: © Shadow Mountain

Art Direction: Richard Erickson

Design: Sheryl Dickert Smith

Book Synopsis:

 

The true joy of Christmas is to love and to awaken love.

 

In this adaptation of “Christmas Day in the Morning,” Rob looks back on his boyhood and remembers giving an unusual gift of self—a gift that filled him with Christmas joy. Now, fifty years later, Rob realizes he can still give a gift from his heart.

 

The original Pearl S. Buck story, published in Collier’s magazine in 1955, concludes with the older Rob writing a letter of gratitude and love to his wife. As he does, Christmas joy is awakened in him once again.

 

The final pages of this book provide a place for you to write your own letter of gratitude and love—a letter that will naturally be included when you give this book to a family member, neighbor, or friend. As you do, you may experience what Rob learned as a boy, and then again as a man: the gifts most likely to rekindle Christmas joy are not just the presents we give with our hands, but the gratitude we express from our hearts

 

My Review:  

I loved this short little Christmas Book, Christmas Day in the Morning Awakening The Joy of Christmas. Once I started reading, I was absolutely thrilled! The story told in this book is one of my favorite Christmas stories. It tells of a boy named Rob who learns the gift of giving selfless service to his father one Christmas morning. He experiences the great joy that comes from serving someone else. This particular story is so touching to me because of Rob doing something so special for his father. I loved my father dearly and wished he was still here. It's been almost ten years since his passing, and I miss him so. I think back to my own experiences of doing acts of service for my father and mother. There is no more important lesson to teach our children and grandchildren than to think of others first by doing loving acts of service and letting go of being overly concerned about ourselves.
 
I highly recommend getting this book as a gift for your children and grandchildren. Buy a copy for yourself and read it on Christmas Eve and make it a new tradition in your family. I can't wait to share this story with my family again in this new format with such lovely pictures and the addition of the song and the final pages where we as a family can write down things we are grateful for.

About the Author:

Richard Thomas, Emmy award-winning actor of stage, television, and motion pictures, first presented this story in the annual live Christmas concert of The Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square. As a young man, Mr. Thomas came to international acclaim portraying the eldest son in The Waltons, a television series about a large family struggling to support itself on a farm during the Great Depression.

 

The Walton family was much like the family in “Christmas Day in the Morning,” and the character played by young Mr. Thomas was not unlike the boy Rob himself. As Mr. Thomas joined the Choir and Orchestra on stage, he entered a re-created farmhouse kitchen. In that setting, his warm, familiar presence reminded many of their past family Christmases. Audience members young and old were also reminded of their own childlike desires to be good, and to find their hearts bursting with Christmas joy.

 

 

PEARL SYDENSTRICKER BUCK was born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, to parents who were Christian missionaries. She grew up primarily in Zhenjiang, China, spending most of her life there from the time she was five months old until her early forties. She was raised speaking both English and Chinese and considered herself American by birth and ancestry but shaped by Chinese culture in how she wrote and told stories.

 

In addition to teaching university-level English literature courses, Buck was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, children’s books, and nonfiction. She published over seventy books in a career spanning four decades, and she was widely recognized as a voice bridging the East and the West. She first made her mark in the literary world with the publication of her novel The Good Earth, which was a best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.”

 

In her later years, Buck devoted much of her time to humanitarian efforts. Through her writing, she spread awareness about issues that were important to her, including racism, sexism, immigration, missionary work, war, refugees, and violence. She was known for being an advocate for women and a champion of minority rights, particularly invested in making adoption services available for Asian and mixed-race children.

 

In 1955, Buck published “Christmas Day in the Morning” in Collier’s magazine.

 

Purchase Link:

Buy your own copy of this Christmas book HERE: at AMAZON

Time Management For Creative People By Deirdra Eden: Official Book Tour and Giveaway

Chances are you’ve tried and failed with spreadsheets, agendas, day planners, and other mathematical and finite ways of measuring time. Applying the strict regimes of industrial systems to a creative mind can kill creativity, damper the enjoyment of your work, and knock you off balance.

In this workbook you will learn to balance, organize, and prioritize all you need to get done by living your life in creative cycles and seasons while maximizing your high and low energy times the way you were meant to.

Your creativity is a powerful force that can be harnessed, focused, controlled, commanded, and become a powerful ability as you masterfully channel your desire to create into the powerful motivating force it is meant to be.

  

~ Amazon ~ 

  

Deirdra has spent the last decade captivating audiences of all ages with her novels and fairy tales. Her specialty is paranormal theology that delves into documented historical phenomenon and natural disasters of biblical proportions. 

 ~ Amazon ~ Website ~

 ~ Facebook ~ 

  

Snippet #1

  

To view our blog schedule and follow along with this tour visit our 
Official Event Page 

  

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Second Survivor By Leah Moyes: Official Book Blitz and Giveaway

Leah Moyes is from Arizona but experienced many parts of the world in thanks to a career in the airlines. Now most of her time, aside from writing, is spent with her family, reading Historical Fiction novels or studying ancient cultures as a student of Archaeology.

She always believed she was born in the wrong time period, but since she doesn’t have access to a time machine she must write and read intriguing stories of the past. 

~ Twitter ~ Goodreads ~

~ Amazon ~  

Her secret sank with the ship.

Isabel Fontaine’s lavish lifestyle came to a crashing halt the night the General Chanzy sank. At 18, she had everything—fine luxuries, a prominent family, and an extravagant estate in Marseille. The one thing she didn’t have was her freedom. As the sole heir to the Fontaine fortune, her future was forged with a betrothal to a stranger from a foreign country, but when her family perishes at sea, Isabel sees this as a chance to hide her identity and change her fate.

Taken in by poor, elderly farmers on the Spanish island of Menorca, Isabel is torn between the growing affection for a neighbor and the guilt of living a lie. The simplicity and genuine goodness of this life takes her on a journey she never believed was possible, yet, as time passes and the threat of her untruths face exposure, Isabel must make an agonizing choice.

When that choice is taken from her prematurely and danger cultivates from an implausible guise, will Isabel accept the outcome, or fight to save those she loves?

Second Survivor is a heart-wrenching historical fiction novel set in both Algiers, Algeria during French occupation and Menorca, Spain. Told in the perspective of four characters, Second Survivor is a twist on the tragic shipwreck . . . the General Chanzy in the Mediterranean Sea. 156 people aboard the barge lost their lives on the morning of 10 February 1910. There was only one survivor. This story shares the fate of a Second Survivor.

  

~ Amazon ~  

  

Snippet:

Second Survivor is told in the perspective of 4 different people- Isabel, Miguel, Thomas, and Francisco.

(Thomas)

He sat down and waved one hand my direction. “Please, be seated.” He retrieved a cigar from an ornately crafted humidor on the table nearby. After clipping the tip, he handed it to me. “Elaborate, Monsieur.”

I accepted his gift and waited for him to ignite the smoke with a silver lighter fashioned after a dragon. I admired his taste. Sitting back, I drew a decent inhale before I spoke. “I have a rather delicate conundrum involving a woman.”

His head rolled back, and a loud laugh erupted. “Don’t we all.”

I eased at his humor and set the cigar on a cast iron tray before I retrieved the two ripped pieces of Isabel’s photograph from my pocket. Placing them on table next to his chair, I pointed. “This woman.”

He pushed them together to make a complete image. “She’s beautiful.”

“She perished in the Chanzy shipwreck.”

He tilted his head. “and you want me to bring her back?” His chuckle began in his stomach but by the time it reached his throat it was noisy and grating. “I am very good at what I do, but I cannot raise the dead.”

 

  

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Dragonwatch: Champion of the Titan Games (Book #4) By Brandon Mull: Book Review & Launch Party Video

                                                                   

Product Details

Publication Date: 10/13/20 Hardcover

ISBN: 9781629727882

Retail Price: $19.99 Page Count: 544

Juvenile Fiction / Fantasy & Magic

Book Design: © Shadow Mountain

Cover photo: Brandon Dorman
Illustrated by: Brandon Dorman

Art Direction: Richard Erickson

Design: Sheryl Dickert Smith

 

***I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy from the publisher. All opinions are my own***

Book Summary 

Who will win the battle between Dragons and Giants?

As the war with the dragons intensifies, all eyes are turning to Titan Valley for help. A dragon sanctuary unlike any of the others, this one is home to enslaved dragons ruled by the powerful Giant Queen, one of the five monarchs of the magical world. In addition, it houses the arena for the Titan Games, a series of gladiator-style battles presided over by none other than Humbuggle, the demon who stole Seth’s memories!

 

Seth is seeking for his memories. Kendra is seeking for Seth. And everyone is seeking to stop the dragons from taking over the world—everyone but Ronodin, the dark unicorn, who has his own devious agenda. In the monstrous battle between giants and dragons, who wins? In the race to retrieve a magical talisman that could help win the war, can Kendra trust Seth? Will they find the answers they desperately need in a realm of trolls and titans? Or are more betrayals imminent?

 

Book Trailer 

 

 

 My Review 

Dragonwatch: Champion of the Titan Games (Book #4) picks up right where book three ended. This installment in the Dragonwatch series revolves a lot around the character of Seth and his journey to retrieve his memories. Of course, he finds himself in many hard and scary situations that somehow, he finds his way out of with the help of his friends or people/creatures he meets. Overall Seth has the greatest transformation in his journey to find his true self.

 

Kendra is back again with her fairy-gifts that help in her quest to help the giants.  They need to maintain the hold of the last standing sanctuary against the horde of Dragons led by Celebrant. I only wish that there had been more about Bracken in this book. I hope there is more about the fairy Kingdom and I won’t say more without giving spoilers.

 

Of course, with all of the Fablehaven and Dragonwatch books there is a lot of action, magic, and complex details that keep the storyline moving at a screamin’ pace. This was especially true in the last quarter of the book. I loved everything that took place in the Dragon Temple. 

 

The next book will be the fifth and last book in the series. I can’t wait to see how Seth, Kendra, their cousins, Tanu, Warren, Raxtus, and Merrick work together to bring peace back to the world by finally defeating the Dragon King Celebrant. At least I hope that’s what will happen! Don’t miss out on reading Dragonwatch: Champion of the Titan Games, but make sure that you’ve read books 1-3 in the Dragonwatch series first.

Meet Author Brandon Mull

BRANDON MULL is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Fablehaven, Beyonders, and Five Kingdoms series. A kinetic thinker, Brandon enjoys bouncy balls, squeezable stress toys, and popping bubble wrap. He lives in Utah in a happy little valley near the mouth of a canyon with his wife, Erlyn, their eleven children, and a dog named Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Brandon loves meeting his readers and hearing about their experiences with his books.

Learn more about Brandon and all of his books HERE:http://brandonmull.com

Author photo by Busath Photography

 

For author interview requests, please contact Callie Hansen at chansen@shadowmountain.com

 

 

**Watch The Launch Party for Dragonwatch Book 4**

 

Advanced Praise:

 

Series reviews:

"Fans of Mull's popular Fablehaven books will be delighted with this rousing opener to a new sequel series, which builds upon familiar characters and plot points from the original fantasy series...The excitement of the adventure will sweep up existing fans and undoubtedly create new ones."

-Booklist

 

"That mixture of the familiar and the unknown will intrigue young readers with a fondness for Tolkien's Middle-earth."

-Foreword Reviews

 

" Fans of the series will welcome a new story arc stocked with familiar characters, settings, and adventures."

-Kirkus

 

"Seth and Kendra have many exciting and dangerous confrontations with fantastic beasts, but they are resourceful and brave, and there is never a doubt that the heroes will triumph. Sure to please loyal Fablehaven readers."

-School Library Journal

Purchase Link: 

https://amzn.to/3pPYWzT