Book Blitz: All- Star Love by Stephanie J. Scott

All-Star Love by Stephanie J. Scott
(A Six Lakes Tennis Academy Novel)
Publication date: May 24, 2022
Genres: Contemporary, Romance, Sports, Young Adult

An enemies-to-more fake dating romance set in the world of competitive tennis
Maisie Maxwell planned for a senior year of dazzling college scouts by playing her best tennis. Instead, her beloved tennis training academy is thrown into scandal when the academy founder and head coach, who happens to be her uncle, takes off to Tahiti with the school’s tuition money. Her classmates label her a traitor, but she commits to graduate from the school she loves.

Only her aim to lay low is thwarted by the school’s last-ditch hope to stay open, a new partnership with reality show The Academy.

Also not helping her stay-under-the-radar plan? A wayward forehand shot that nails transfer student Shane Wagner in the face on day one. Shane, obnoxiously gorgeous for starters, is the current number one nationally seeded player in junior boys’ tennis. Oops.

Everyone at school sees Shane as an outsider and fame-seeker. He’s just as much an outcast as Maisie. While reality show producers push for chaos, Shane and Maisie band together with their own idea: pretend to be together and control the narrative.

But the savvy head producer has her own agenda, and it’s not collegiate tennis scholarships. Shane and Maisie need to play hard to save the school before they’re outmatched.

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EXCERPT:

I put all my strength into my next forehand. The ball torpedoed over the net, not even bothering to bounce within the court. Nope, that sucker was headed for the fences. If this was baseball, it’d be time to break out the peanuts and Cracker Jack.

Too bad this wasn’t baseball.

“Ahh!”

A figure in the distance went down knees to the court. A crowd of students suddenly appeared, gasping and rushing over.

“You hit him!” someone shrieked.

My breath lodged in my throat. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I jogged over, terrified to breathe until I knew my accidental victim was okay.

Caleb directed a dirty scowl at me. “You really are the worst, Maxwell.”

I angled to see the fallen student. “I’m so sorry!”

“Oh, Maisie,” Nia mumbled, now beside me.

“I’m okay,” the guy on the ground said, attempting to stand despite the crowd. His head emerged, sun-bleached brown hair unkempt and curling over a tanned forehead. That perfectly shaggy hair some guys could get away with. He wasn’t a returning student. The face turning toward me could easily belong on a clothing website, the kind with ninety-dollar T-shirts with holes in them for a distressed look. Basically, he was very attractive.

A swath of blood streaked across that very attractive face.

That part was definitely my fault.

Sorry floated across my tongue, but my lips couldn’t form the word under the pressure of so many glaring classmates. Any hope of being an admired senior this year shriveled and burned like a tissue set aflame.

He accepted a clean towel and pressed it to his nose. “I expected I might not be welcome here, but your forehand really confirmed it.”

“Way to go, Maxwell,” Caleb said with a sneer. “You just nailed Shane Wagner in the face.”

Oh. Wait, what? “You’re … you’re—”

“Shane Wagner,” the bloody-faced model boy said through the towel.

Shane Wagner. The Shane Wagner. I just nailed the face of the number one seeded player in junior boys’ tennis.

Author Bio:

Stephanie J. Scott writes young adult and romance about characters who put their passions first. Her debut ALTERATIONS about a fashion-obsessed loner who reinvents herself was a Romance Writers of America RITA® award finalist. She enjoys dance fitness, everything cats, and has a slight obsession with Instagram. A Midwest girl at heart, she resides outside of Chicago with her tech-of-all-trades husband and fuzzy furbabies.

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Book Blitz: The Love List by Elana Johnson

The Love List by Elana Johnson
Publication date: May 17, 2022
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance

Beatrice Callahan loves lists. Sometimes she even makes a to-do list of things she’s already done, just to go check, check, check and feel accomplished. So it’s easy to understand why, when her divorce is finally final and her ex is all moved out, Bea takes a cool, close look at her life…and makes a list.

It’s not exactly a bucket list.

It’s a love list.

Bea loves the outdoors, so she puts visit 10 National Parks on the list.

She loves animals, and on goes get a puppy.

She loves the beach, and she adds take a dream vacation to the list, and decides to do that one first. After all she’s been through and all she’s lost, she needs time to relax, rest, and reset.

On the first day she arrives in Hilton Head Island, she meets Grant Turner, the man whose house she’s renting for her fabulous beach vacation. He’s just there to make sure she settles in properly and has enough towels.

But when Bea asks for recommendations around the island, Grant quickly becomes her tour guide and then a friend and then…more than friends.

Bea turns to her lists when things get confusing and her love list morphs once again… Can she add fall in love at age 45 to the list and check it off?

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EXCERPT

Grant’s stomach rumbled as the line didn’t seem to dwindle at all. When he glanced at the clock, he dang near fell over. “I have to go,” he said, twisting to look at Cara like she was the boss and could dismiss him.

“No,” a woman said in a near-bark from the other side of the counter. “I need to put in my order.”

He turned and met a pair of dark blue eyes that reminded him of deeper waters off the shores of Hilton Head. The kind he’d fish in when he went out trawling with one of his friends who owed him for letting his mother stay in the best condo on the island for a weekend girls’ trip.

“Excuse me?”

“Did I hear you say I can’t get anything without a banana?” she asked, those eyes flying across the wall behind him. “They’re a really strong flavor profile.”

She wore her hair in a pixie cut, with fashionable bangs that hung in shaggy layers across the very tops of her eyebrows. In any other situation, Grant would classify her as beautiful, and if he held a drink in his hand instead of a blasted blue ballpoint pen, and if the music pumped through a tiki bar instead of wafted along the air conditioning currents in a smoothie shop, he might try to get her number.

“They’re what makes your smoothie smooth,” he said, irritation blipping through him.

“Fine,” the woman said with a sigh. She hitched her rustic, spotted-cow-purse higher on her shoulder. He did smile at that bag, wiping the gesture away quickly when she lifted her eyebrows and asked, “Are you ready to take my order?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said in true Southern-gentleman style.

“I’d like the Beach Sunrise, with half the banana.”

“No more raspberries,” Cara called just as Grant started writing. He froze and looked up at the woman.

“Uh,” he said.

“Let me guess,” she said. “I can’t have the Beach Sunrise.”

“It does have raspberries in it,” he said, and he congratulated himself that he didn’t even have to turn to look at the menu to know that. He’d enjoyed a fair few Beach Sunrises over the years, and he happened to like the raspberry, mango, and banana combination.

She emitted the sigh of the century, and Grant’s phone started buzzing at him. “Oliver,” he called down the line. “I have to go.”

Oliver burst out laughing with a customer down at the register, and Grant rolled his eyes.

“I’ll get him,” Cara said. She stopped making the smoothies and went down to Oliver. She said a couple of things, to which he leaned his head toward her, and then he looked down to Grant.

“I’ll have the Fake Sunset,” the woman with the cute hair and pretty eyes said.

Grant scratched out her order, flung the paper onto the slider, and dropped the pen. “I have to go,” he said to an approaching Oliver. “And I still don’t have my smoothie.”

“Ten minutes,” Oliver said. “I’ve got raspberries in the freezer. Can you do the register while I grab them?”

“The freezer” meant the grocery store half a mile away. Grant wasn’t stupid, nor was this the first time he’d helped Oliver in a pinch.

“How about I run and get the raspberries?” Grant asked. “Then when I get back, Cara will have my smoothie ready, and I can go.” He held his ground with the sandy-haired owner. Just because Oliver could charm scorpions didn’t mean Grant had to do his bidding. In fact, he had half a mind to leave for “the freezer” and never come back to The Mad Mango. It had certainly inspired some anger in him that afternoon—and he was in danger of being seriously late to meet his four o’clock check-in.

His phone hadn’t alerted him to her proximity, however, so he might be okay. Oliver didn’t need to know that, and Grant glared at his friend.

The woman who’d stood a foot or two down the counter listening stepped back toward them. She clearly wasn’t super happy. “Are you telling me I can have the Beach Sunrise?” she asked. “You just have to grab the raspberries out of the freezer?”

“Yes,” Oliver said at the same time Grant said, “No.”

Grant made an executive decision. “I’ll go grab the raspberries,” he said, walking in the wrong direction to get them from the freezer. “I can’t ring these people up.” He didn’t look back as he stepped away.

“If you can get raspberries,” the pixied woman said. “I want the Beach Sunrise.”

“Lady,” Grant said, cutting her a glare out of the corner of her eye. “I don’t work here. Let it go.”

A blender started making a horrible chugging noise, then metal on metal, all within a single second.

“Watch out,” Cara called from down where she’d just scooped frozen peaches into a blender cup.

“Watch out?” Grant swung his attention from the blonde woman with the stormy eyes to the counter that ran along the length of the back wall. The lid blew off the top of the blender in that moment, and all Grant had time to do was throw his hands up in front of his face and pray.

He entered some weird place where noise and feeling didn’t exist. He sensed them happening around him, but for some reason, they didn’t affect him. The weird sensation didn’t last long, and then everything came rushing at him at double-speed.

Cold seeped through his shirt and made his skin ripple with gooseflesh. More than one person shouted, and he could pick out Oliver’s voice saying to get some napkins and then for Cara to kill the power to the blenders.

The soul-wrenching sound of that metal on metal that said the blender bottle wasn’t seated with the motor rotor grated against his nerves, and then it blissfully ended.

“I’m so sorry,” Oliver said, but he wasn’t talking to Grant. He’d somehow gotten on the other side of the counter, and Grant wouldn’t put it past him to have vaulted the stupid thing, because the person he’d just apologized to?

The beautiful blonde…who now had Fake Sunrise dripping down the side of her neck.

Author Bio

USA Today bestseller Elana Johnson writes adult contemporary beach romance. She is the author of over 130 books across two names, and there's nothing better than sun, sand, and swoon-worthy kisses! Unless it's a sweet-and-sexy cowboy - read those under her pen name of Liz Isaacson. Learn more about her sweet beach romances at www.elanajohnson.com. Join her texting group by sending the word SAND to 474747 and get exclusive sales, freebies, and more.

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Mini Review: The Homewreckers by May Kay Andrews

The Homewreckers by Mary Kay Andrews

Published: May 3, 2022

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Rating: 4/5

Synopsis

Hattie Kavanaugh went to work helping clean up restored homes for Kavanaugh & Son Restorations at 18; married the boss’s son at 20; and was only 25 when her husband, Hank, was killed in a motorcycle accident.

Broken-hearted, but determined to continue the business of their dreams, she takes the life insurance money, buys a small house in a gentrifying neighborhood, flips it, then puts the money into her next project. But that house is a disaster and a money-loser, which rocks her confidence for years to come. Then, Hattie gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: star in a beach house renovation reality show called The Homewreckers, cast against a male lead who may be a love interest or maybe the ultimate antagonist. It's a question of who will flip, who will flop and will Hattie ever gets her happily-ever-after.

Filled with Mary Kay Andrews's trademark wit, warmth, junking trips, and house porn, The Homewreckers is a summer beach delight. 

My Thoughts

I really enjoyed this read! As a fan of Mary Kay Andrew’s books, I found this premise refreshing with the addition of a bit of mystery. The main character of Hattie is relatable with her dealing with trying to move on after her husband's death while dealing with her future as far as her romantic life goes.

Hattie’s love is restoring houses, it's the one thing that has helped her deal with her loss however when she is offered a chance to be on a TV show doing exactly that she is hesitant, to say the least. All she wanted to do was her job while the higher-ups want to focus more on pushing a romance between her co-star and herself. However, we see that sparks happen between Hattie and someone else, which I loved! While the romance was good I really felt the relationship between Hattie and her best friend was the real gem here. They have been there for each other through thick and thin and even today they have each other’s back.

While Hattie’s life and work is the main storyline I also enjoyed the second storyline of the mystery surrounding a missing teacher back in the day and how Hattie’s house flip is involved. 

All in all this book was funny and the storyline was a good one. The characters were all relatable and interesting plus the twist of the bit of mystery was a plus. Once again Mary Kay Andrews delivers a solid summer read I would recommend… hands down!