A PROMISE OF SAFEKEEPING by Lisa Dale

A Promise of Safekeeping

By Lisa Dale

Surprise, I’ve got ANOTHER book for you this week. I thought this might happen - I think there will be many weeks where I'll feature more than one book!

(Please don't forget about yesterday's book, Beautiful Disaster, and make sure to go HERE to enter to win that book as well!)

A Promise of Safekeeping by Lisa Dale is another page-turner, full of suspense and surprises. When Lauren Matthews wrongfully sends an innocent man to prison, the one thing she desperately wants to do when he is released is ask forgiveness. He’s lost nine years of his life because of her error in judgment. How can she give him back that time she’s taken from him?

But in order to get forgiveness from Arlen, the man she’s wrongfully prosecuted, Lauren must get through his best friend, Will. He remembers Lauren from those long ago days and will do anything to protect Arlen from Lauren. 

Lauren prides herself on being able to read people, but when she gets to Virginia to seek forgiveness from Arlen, she’ll discover more than the importance of interpreting body language – she’ll learn about long ago kept secrets, redemption, friendship, forgiveness and love.

Lisa’s website: http://lisadalebooks.com/

Get the book on Amazon: A Promise of Safekeeping

Like Lisa Dale on Facebook

In A Promise of Safekeeping, the book deals with interpreting a person’s body language to tell if that person is telling the truth or lying. Promises are hard to keep, and it’s also hard to tell a lie. Do you sometimes feel like a little white lie is a necessary evil? Tell me how so, and you’ll be entered to win a copy of A Promise of Safekeeping! Or tell me that lying is completely evil and you’ll still be entered to win a copy! Remember to leave an identifying/unique name or email address on your comment entry! 

MaNiC MoMMy is aiming to feature great books each and every week this year, and you’ll have a chance to win it as well! Please stop by often as I’m now posting new books more than once a week! Open to US/Canada residents only, and thanks to all the participating authors and publicists for providing the books. You can check back on this post over the weekend to see if you’ve won the book!

BEAUTIFUL DISASTER by Laura Spinella

Beautiful Disaster

Laura Spinella

This week’s book is one that I’ve started but haven’t finished, and it’s not for lack of trying. Have had a couple of personal issues going on, and sometimes I don’t get a chance to read as much as I’d love too. (Okay, ALL OF THE TIME… If I could do nothing in life but read, write and nap and love my family, I would be one happy lady!)

I’ve got to tell you that this week’s book has one of the most beautiful covers I’ve ever seen, and from what I’ve read so far, I am intrigued and desperately want to know where it’s heading, so that is a sign of great things to come. My heart started racing from the first chapter.

A very good sign. 

I love the premise, not only because it’s a heart-racing stop-what-you’re-doing kind of book, but also because the book that I have out on submission is kind of along the same premise – the ex that the main character can’t stop thinking about comes back. 

But in the case of Laura Spinella’s debut, the ex comes back almost dead from a near-fatal accident.

And he’s in a coma.

Beautiful Disaster is a story about secrets kept and a love hidden, and what happens when that hidden love resurfaces. Can it outlive all that has happened in between? 

Here’s the back-of-the-book blurb:

Mia Wells is poised to finalize the deal that will make her eco-friendly career goals a reality.  The moment is interrupted when an unexpected phone call ushers in a tremulous past.  The man she’s always loved, the one who abandoned her years before, has mysteriously resurfaced.

Set in the Deep South amid magnolia leaves and the innocence of college life, Beautiful Disaster begins with Flynn’s arrival.  He’s a man with a doubtful past, half a name, and no ties to anything earthbound, except Mia.  For a year they have the kind of love affair a man like him inspires.  Mia trusts him with her life.  It’s a precarious leap of faith when she learns that he’s a fugitive on the run. For the next twelve years she keeps his secrets, long after Flynn vanishes, devastating her.  Succumbing to the common sense she once defied, Mia eventually marries. 

Michael Wells is a wonderful man: patient, successful, driven.  She does love him; who wouldn’t?  Never anticipating Flynn’s return, Mia does her best to put the past behind her.  It’s a bittersweet truth as she must admit to a love and a passion that has never died. Yet, the future is grim as a gravely injured Flynn lingers, his dark past hovering like a storm.

When he finally recovers, the puzzle unfolds. Flynn’s recollections are sketchy, piecing together the years and moments leading up to his accident. A smart man for whom honor has been a nemesis, Flynn unravels the truth: one well meaning lie has altered three lives, creating futures that should have never been. As the past and present reconcile, Mia’s what ifs are endless.  Filled with sweetness and suspense, Beautiful Disaster is a powerful tale—a love story that is greater than honor or friendship or the passing of time.

Check out Laura’s website here: www.lauraspinella.net 

Beautiful Disaster on amazon.

Read Chapter One Right Here, Right Now

Exes are certainly a mysterious being – we all wonder about them. Maybe you’ve stalked one, maybe you got back together with one, maybe you are really great friends with one, maybe you got REALLY even with one! Share a quick story about an ex and you’ll be entered to win a copy of Beautiful Disaster!

Remember, MaNiC MoMMy is aiming to feature a great book each and every week this year, and you’ll have a chance to win it as well! Please stop by for your chance every Monday. Open to US/Canada residents only, and thanks to all the participating authors and publicists for providing the books. You can check back on this post over the weekend to see if you’ve won the book! And please tell your friends - good karma can help you to win the books!    : )

THE UNDERSIDE OF JOY by Sere Prince Halverson

 Congrats to 

Dani in Chicago!

You've won The Underside of Joy!

Please email me at stephanieelliot@gmail.com

with your mailing address so you can receive your book!

The Underside of Joy
By Sere Prince Halverson

I knew I would love The Underside of Joy by the title alone. I mean, come on, what IS the The Underside of Joy? This is a book that I read in record time, and for me, finding time to read with three kids does not come easily. I usually only read at night before bed, or in the car while waiting for a kid during a basketball practice. 

With Sere Prince Halverson’s debut, I snuck in reading all the time, neglecting the laundry more than usual, forgetting to feed lunch to kids, and ignoring anything that got in my way.

It’s truly mesmerizing.

The premise is this: A step-mom loses her husband to a drowning, and the birth mother comes back to reclaim her two children. A custody battle ensues. It’s not your basic step-mom fights birth mother story – the writing is so lyrical and fluid, and the setting adds so much to the novel in the fictional Elbow, California, with its Redwood trees, the lush forest, and the flowing river that runs through it.

I fell in love with the characters—Ella, the widowed step-mother, who fights to keep her children, Annie and Zach, after their father dies. She’s the only mother they have ever known. And I even felt sympathy for Paige, the birth mother, who has been gone for three years because she couldn’t deal with motherhood due to a long-ago secret of her own.

This is a story that will tug at your heartstrings; that will have you turning pages so quickly because you can’t wait to find out what will happen next. You’ll love Ella’s extended family – her lost husband’s Italian family, and the heritage they hold close to their hearts, you’ll root for her, and you’ll cry for her losses. You’ll think of Ella, and of Paige even, and definitely of Annie and Zach long after you’ve closed the book, and you’ll wonder about your own Underside of Joy. 

To win a copy of The Underside of Joy, tell me about a particular time in your life or a particular place that is very joyful to you. Don't read other people's comments until you comment first because I don't want their choices to affect your answer. Tell me the first thing that comes to your mind, whether it was a place, being with a person, or a feeling about something or someone that gave you immense joy!

I'll choose a winner later in the week, and also, HOPEFULLY, I'll have ANOTHER book to give away this week too, so please do come back! I've got a TON of books coming up -- it's completely crazy! Which is GREAT FOR YOU!

Please remember, this is for US/Canada contestants only, and I have to thank the author and publicists for making these contests possible! 

Best Part/Worst Part

Our family doesn’t have a lot of family meals. First, many of you know here that I’m not exactly June Cleaver when it comes to all things house-hold. I hate to cook, can’t boil water to save my life, and seriously get heart palpitations when I have to go to the grocery store. 

When I do cook something, my kids are thrilled. I would say on average, we have a sit-down dinner twice a week. Better yet, if I took a calendar and looked at the four weeks in a month, I would say the likelihood of us sitting at the table to a real meal, is about six to seven times a month. Is that sad? Are you all shaking your heads in shame at me?

It’s not to say that we don’t have time for each other, although yeah, we don’t have a lot of time for each other when it comes down to your regular sit-down real family meals: a meat, potato, vegetable, bread and a gallon of milk at the table. But who does this anymore? I personally didn’t grow up that way. Did you? I know actually that my husband did, and I’m thankful that he is very easy-going and never expected that of me, or our marriage wouldn’t have lasted almost 19 years so far.

We DO however try to come together to eat when we can, and I DO provide food and time for us to be together when it’s possible. When he’s not traveling, when one kid isn’t at a practice, or an art class, or out with friends. And every single time we are all together, sitting around our table for five, we have specific rituals that we stick with, and these traditions will follow us through, until the kids go to college, and when the kids return from college, and when the kids get married and come home to visit with their own families. And I absolutely love these family rituals we have created with the five of us.

I don’t know how it started, but Luke, our youngest, must have learned to say Grace when he was attending his Christian pre-school when he was three. He’s ten now. Every time we gather for dinner, we all take each other’s hands and Luke is in charge of saying Grace. Not Dad. I don’t know why this started, maybe because he said it so cute, but he’s been saying it since he could talk, so it’s been a LOT of years. And he’s never gotten it right, and I’m sure he knows it’s wrong now, but this is what he says: “God is good, God is great, let us thank Him for our food.”

THIS is our family prayer, and I absolutely LOVE it. 

The other traditions we have at dinner is our discussion: Best Part/Worst Part, where we go around the table and share the best part of our day, and then the worst part. It’s an expected rule that we CANNOT say that dinner is the best part because we all know that for all of us, being there together at that time having dinner is probably the best part of the day. 

We have to choose another aspect of our day. This is a great time for us because we’re able to share moments throughout our day we couldn’t be with one another and open up about things that may have happened that were less than ideal. It’s our time to connect and reveal what has been going on in our lives.

Life is speeding by for us. I’ve got an eighth grader, a seventh grader and a fourth grader. The older ones go out with their friends on their own; my youngest is not far behind. High school is just around the corner. I need these moments to connect and be a family. We need to remind them that family is the most important thing, THE thing that matters most in the world. We’re all we have. Friends come and go. Family is for life.

This has been another post I’ve gotten to share with you because of my affiliation with Fresh Takes on Family with Subway and I’ve been grateful for the opportunity. It’s made me open my eyes up to how important it is to really take time to be with the family, to create even more traditions and rituals, to keep the conversations open and continuing between my children, my husband and me.

If you’ve got traditions you’d like to share, you’re still able to do so at the Fresh Takes on Family site, and you and your family could be featured!

Thanks for taking the time to peek into my life a little bit, and I’ll be back very soon to share another amazing book about an incredible family. This one is called The Underside of Joy and it’ll have you mesmerized from page one!

My blog is a part of an incentivized online influencer network for Fresh Takes on Family Time Powered by Subway.

Sunday Morning

Sunday morning our family got up and it was a typical winter day in Scottsdale. Absolutely stunningly beautiful. I don’t want to make you guys mad or anything but it was just gorgeous. I said to the kids, “How about we all walk to Starbucks?” There was no complaining from anyone. McK had a friend sleep over and she came along, and then we stopped to pick up another one of her friends. AJ and Luke grabbed their longboards (do you guys know what those are? They’re just like skateboards, but more moveable), and then one of AJ’s friends came too. We had a whole posse with us.

We walked along to Starbucks and on our way we can see the mountains and blue sky and the white clouds. Before we moved to the dessert, I never thought of a place like this having so much beauty and color. I always thought it was going to be brown, brown, brown. Some days I will leave a store and see the mountains in the background and palm trees in the forefront, and think to myself, “Holy Cow, I get to live here?” 

It was just really nice to walk with the fam, and spend some time with them. The weeks are so busy with basketball (two boys who are on three teams – do that math!), art class, car pools, friends, babysitting, Mr. Manic’s work schedule, and other obligations, it seems like we never get family time together. 

Plus, it is really nice to see that finally, FINALLY, we feel at home here. All of our kids have great groups of friends, we feel like if we need to, we have neighbors we can call on if we’re in a bind. It’s certainly not like our old neighborhood, but every day gets better and easier. We’re in a really good place. I could look back a year and a half at some of the posts I wrote when we first lived here, and when the kids first went to school, and how much we all cried and cried, and how much we missed our Chicago home. We’ve come a long way. And we’ve done that because of the strength we have as a family. 

When we got to Starbucks, I said to our group, “You know, I think I could really live anywhere as long as I lived close enough to walk to a Starbucks.” And AJ’s buddy finished my sentence perfectly by saying … “In January!”

Yep, I would have to be able to walk to Starbucks in January. I don’t think I could go back to freezing cold weather. I’m too much of a wimp now. But we all had a good laugh at that. The boys then skated home and we girls sat outside with our drinks and enjoyed the sun on our faces.

It’s nice to be with family and friends, and on the way back, I called my best friend from home, because even though I live here now, I still have my close friends from home, and I’ll never forget them. 

When we got back, McK said we should do that every Sunday. And I liked that idea. I wish we had all the time to do lots more things together. Are there things you and your family do together that have become something of a tradition to you?

I’m sharing this story as part of a FreshTakes on Family Time, and if you’d like to go to their site and share yours, you can win a $50 gift card and a chance to be featured on their site. Some of the stories are really amazing, like the one about this amazing family – the dad is blind yet they find ways to go on family adventures all of the time. It’s truly inspirational.

Thanks for taking the time to read, and I’ll be back later this week with a winner for MWF Seeking BFF, and then next week I’ll have another book for you to win!

My blog is a part of an incentivized online influencer network for Fresh Takes on Family Time Powered by Subway.

MWF Seeking BFF by Rachel Bertsche

Loved hearing about your BFF stories! Congrats to:
BrendaL71
You have won the copy of MWF Seeking BFF!
Please email me at stephanieelliot@gmail.com with your address so I can send you your book!

MWF Seeking BFF My Yearlong Search For A New Best Friend

by Rachel Bertsche

Now this is a memoir I can TOTALLY relate to! I have BEEN that Married White Female seeking the BFF. When we moved from Chicago to Philadelphia, I had to search for best friends. When we moved from Philly BACK to Chicago, even though I still had friends in Chicago, I STILL had to search for new friends. And just a year and a half ago, when we left Chicago to move to Scottsdale, well, I had to do it AGAIN, and I’m STILL DOING IT! It’s HARD to find friends that you can enjoy, trust, and relate to.

And Rachel Bertsche knows this better than anyone!

Rachel and her boyfriend had moved to Chicago, and then soon became husband and wife, which is great, but we married folks know that woman cannot live on man alone! Nope! Rachel needed a friend! She wanted someone to hang with, someone she could go grab a coffee with, she needed someone she could gripe to about her husband. Don’t we all? So what she decided to do was go on a year-long search to find the friend of her dreams, and that meant to put herself out there, to go on 52 friend-dates, to see if she could find a BFF in Chicago!

Rachel has met potential friends through classes, want-ads, through other friends, any way she can, and her hilarious memoir takes you through her friend-dating experience. You just have to put yourself out there if you want to make new friends. I have done the same thing – it’s fun if you are brave enough to do it! I went on a friend-date once that author Jen Lancaster set me up on, and it was a great time. I’ve friend-dated my blog buddies (hi Holly and Terri – we need to go out again!). It’s just a matter of putting yourself out there to see who might be a friend match!

Here is the fun book trailer for MWF …

MWF Seeking BFF Book Trailer

Rachel’s book debuted last week but she was kind enough to answer some questions for me too even though she was busy with TV interviews and traveling and even MAKING new friends!

MANIC: I’ve done the girlfriend search too, and it’s much, much easier when you have little children you can pimp out at The Little Gym or at the park – where do you think is the easiest place for women to meet women who might want to become friends?

RACHEL: I think signing up for classes or groups are a great bet. I joined a book club, a cooking group from MeetUp.com, and took an improv class. These are fantastic for two reasons: 1) You have built-in consistency. If a group meets once a week or once a month, you have a time you are guaranteed to see your potential friend. This takes the work out of always finding a time to get together again. 2) You'll find people with similar interests. If you both love knitting, or reading, or running, that's a great beginning to a relationship.

MANIC: What was your most fun blind girl date?

RACHEL: There were so many! I definitely can't pick just one. But overall, I can say all the most fun dates involved A LOT of laughter. 

MANIC: Did you have a disaster date with anyone?

RACHEL: No, I wouldn't say that I did. There were definitely some that worked out better than others, though. When you meet some 52 new people, you won't click with everyone. When it didn't work out, it sometimes felt like I could hear the movie crickets chirping--there was that much awkward silence--but it wasn't because there was anything wrong with the women, we just weren't a match.

MANIC: Is there anyone you are particularly close to that you met through your girl-dating experience?

RACHEL: So many! I met a ton of women--more than just the 52 I went out with--over the course of 2010, the year I spent friend-dating. I have a number of close friends from the experience. Women in my book club, my cooking club, my dance class, ex-coworkers....

MANIC: How long have you lived in Chicago and would you call Chicago home now?

RACHEL: I've lived in Chicago for four and a half years. We moved in June of 2007. I did my year of friending in 2010. I definitely think of Chicago as home - more now that I have a whole social network there!

MANIC: Are you working on another book?

RACHEL: I'm at the very beginning stages of working on a second book. I have the kernel of an idea.... Hopefully something more concrete will be hammered out soon.

MANIC: Thanks Rachel! Your book is a lot of fun and is a great read! It would make a PERFECT gift for anyone who is moving to a new city, or for anyone’s BFF too!

Readers, you can enter to win it here on MaNiC this week by answering THIS QUESTION:

Have you ever met a close friend in an unusual way? 

I met one of my best girlfriends via the internet. My friend ‘Swishy’ and I became the best of friends when she emailed me saying she was going to a Jen Weiner book signing and asked me if I was attending. I didn’t even know Jen was going to be in my neighborhood. I told Swishy I would go, we met one another and we have been the greatest friends ever since! In fact, she’s coming out to Scottsdale to visit me in a few weeks!

So tell me how you have met one of your closest friends and you’ll be entered to win Rachel’s book! Remember, US and Canada readers only please, and check back later in the week for more blog posts and also for the winner to be announced right here on this post!