Oh my heavens! Could a book trailer get any more perfect than this?! So so excited to get this book and be a part of the ARC tour. Brodi and I went to Junior High and High School together and now that we’re all grown up, she just rocks as an author. Not to mention she is awesome sauce. Put this one on your MUST HAVE list…
ds with autism and other cognitive disabilities at church. 
re about The Book (dis)Abilities and the Gospel and to read my review click here. To visit my website, about our adventures with special needs click Parenting Partner here. Hope you can watch!
Fire and Ice is the first stop in the Tristi Pinkston blog tour for:
Bitter Blessings
by Christine Mehring
Paperback, 192 pages
Published July 8th 2011
by Cedar Fort
ISBN 1599555239
Source: publisher
4 stars
Megan has the perfect life, but when her mother dies in an accident, everything spins out of control. With the rest of her family falling apart, Megan must confront her past to uncover the truths that will keep everyone together. Thought-provoking and heartfelt, this book shows that even in times of trial, you can often find blessings.
Megan and her family are holding things together after the death of their father until one day they get a visit from the Tuscon Police and receive news that mom will not be home for dinner. Killed in a car accident, mom leaves her own mother as the primary caregiver to Megan and her two younger sisters. But Grandma hasn’t worked in years and turns to Megan to help support the small family. In a snowball of hard events she must put the pieces back together as to why insurance is refusing to pay out their claim, what their grandmother is hiding from them all and just how they are supposed to make ends meet.
With an awesome cast of supporting character including her best friend Adam and his father, Megan just may be able to survive the challenges that lie ahead. There were a lot of things I really loved about Bitter Blessings. It’s a short read that pulled me in and I finished it in one sitting. It addresses adolescent substance abuse, grief, financial hardship, codependency and religious bigotry in an artful, hopeful manner. I appreciate that so many hard things were covered and often found myself wondering if life could get any worse for Megan. But in the end, the author proves that sometimes things fall into place just they way they are meant to, even if it takes some time and effort. A clean LDS fiction title with an endearing example of friendship and faith.
About the Author: Christine Mehring grew up in a house full of books. As a child she was often in trouble for hiding out — in the school library. She wanted to be an astronaut, an archeologist, a starving artist in Paris (so romantic!), a gypsy traveling the world with a backpack, a teacher, a farmer, an international spy; the world was so huge and full of possibilities tha
t is was impossible to choose just one. Then, one day, she realized that what she really wanted most of all, and what she was looking for in everything else, was stories. Now she makes stories, so some days she’s an astronaut, some days she’s a gypsy, and when she’s not writing she really does farm a small market garden with her husband, the beekeeper, and an assortment of kids and animals in an area of Nevada that might generously be called “the boonies”.
Visit the author’s website or click to purchase Bitter Blessings.
Jolene A- Original Sin
Mary Gravett- Masquerade
Tiffany Drew- Magnolia League
Tracey McCorkle-Darkest Mercy
Evika Pina-Night World #1
Lisa Potts- Graveminder
Tracy Maddox- City of Bones
Valerie Fink- The Jumbee
Brandy Huffman- Thirst #1
Lady Vampire- Night World #2
Tanya Maxemow-Siren Song
I have your mailing addresses so let me know when you receive your book. And thanks to all our new followers. We love to give things away here at Fire and Ice so stay tuned for lots more chances!
Virtuosity
by Jessica Martinez
Hardcover, 304 pages
Published October 18th 2011
by Simon Pulse
ISBN 1442420529
4 stars
Now is not the time for Carmen to fall in love. And Jeremy is hands-down the wrong guy for her to fall for. He is infuriating, arrogant, and the only person who can stand in the way of Carmen getting the one thing she wants most: to win the prestigious Guarneri competition. Carmen’s whole life is violin, and until she met Jeremy, her whole focus was winning. But what if Jeremy isn’t just hot…what if Jeremy is better?
Carmen knows that kissing Jeremy can’t end well, but she just can’t stay away. Nobody else understands her–and riles her up–like he does. Still, she can’t trust him with her biggest secret: She is so desperate to win she takes anti-anxiety drugs to perform, and what started as an easy fix has become a hungry addiction. Carmen is sick of not feeling anything on stage and even more sick of always doing what she’s told, doing what’s expected.
Sometimes, being on top just means you have a long way to fall….
I picked up Virtuosity at the Simon and Schuster blogger event at BEA and it was one of the books I was most excited about reading. The cover threw me off a bit once I got into it because it really doesn’t match the mood or main character of the story. Carmen Bianchi is a 17 year old child prodigy who’s already won a Grammy and is now working toward the most important competition of her career-the Guarneri. If she wins it means a new violin, and touring some of the most prestigious music halls of the world as a soloist. But Carmen has felt her passion and skill slipping away in the grip of performance anxiety and psychological addiction to the drug Inderal. As her mom and violin coach Yuri pour on the pressure, Carmen’s performance continues to deteriorate. She wants to know what she’s up against and finds Jeremy King, who in every way seems to be just like her only he’s British and he looks like he’s a young little boy with curly blond hair and dimples. That is online. When she “bumps”into him in person she’s surprised by what she finds and mortified that he catches her spying. So begins the perfect banter and chemistry between Carmen and Jeremy who both want and need so badly to win.
Virtuosity was a refreshing change of pace for contemporary YA with music as the focal point. I’m not a big fan of prologues that give away future plot points so I kind of wish it would have been left out. I loved that it was clean with only a couple swear words in the entire book and minus sexual content. The characters and the places they visit jumped right off the page for me. I genuinely loved the support Jeremy and Carmen show for each other given that they have every reason to mistrust and even dislike one another. I am a little concerned about the portrayal of an anti anxiety drug as evil because there are many teens who may genuinely battle with anxiety and have to turn to medication for relief. Other than that the only other wish I had is that the ending was more fully fleshed out and not so rushed. I would recommend Virtuosity to readers over 14 as a good clean look into the life of a teen professional musician who is fighting against pressure from a parent. It’s a tale of forbidden love and self-discovery that I genuinely enjoyed!
To enter to win an ARC of Virtuosity courtesy of Fire and Ice and SimonTeen click here and fill out the form.
Congratulations to Michelle Glenn and Maleficent Mcneff who both won ARCs of Eve on our facebook page and Gisele Alv who won the Intrinsical/Indelible bookmarks.
Please email us your US mailing address!
Fire and Ice is honored to be the first stop in the blog tour for 
Horses Never Lie About Love: A True Story
by Jana Harris
Hardcover, 288 pages
Expected publication: November 1st 2011
by Simon & Schuster
ISBN 1451605846
When Jana Harris moved with her husband to Washington State for a teaching job, she realized that she could also fulfill her lifelong dream of having a horse farm. And Harris knew the horse on whom she could build her dreams the minute she saw her on a ranch in the Eastern Mountains where a herd had been corralled to be sold: a beautiful, deep dark red–colored mare known as a blood bay, standing about sixteen hands, with a pretty head with a white star and a narrow stripe that slid down her face to two black nostrils. Something about the way the mare guarded her handsome foal, a black two-month-old 200-pound colt, spoke to Harris. The mare was named True Colors.
But when True Colors was delivered to Harris’s ranch three months later, she was unrecognizable. She had gone feral, run away, and been recaptured. Terrified of people, she was head-shy from the infected sores on her face and her lungs were damaged by smoke-induced pneumonia. She sensed demons hiding in everything from the scent of fabric softener on clothes to a gate in a fence. Her will to escape was enormous. This injured, traumatized horse existed between two worlds—wild and domesticated—and belonged to neither. But there were glimmers of hope: The other horses fell in love with her on sight, just as Harris had. And true to her name and herself, True Colors would never pretend to be something she was not; with her wise, intuitive nature, she would end up changing the lives of everyone she encountered, animal and human.
Horses Never Lie About Love is the story of this remarkable horse and the revelations about life and love that she gave Harris over the course of their decades together. Now thirty-three years old, this complex, magnetic animal retains the outsize personality that transforms everyone around her, both human and equine. True Colors has grown to become the heart of the range and the farm, her quiet wisdom transmitting a strength of character that transcends the thin line between animals and the humans they love. There is a famous horseman’s saying: A horse never lies about its pain. But maybe we should also consider: A horse never lies about love.
About the Author: A poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist, Jana Harris has been a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award winner and a PEN West Center Award finalist. Born in San Francisco and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she worked for six years as director of Writers in Performance at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. She now lives with her husband in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, where they raise horses. She studies the riding discipline of dressage and competes.
Ms. Harris teaches creative writing at the University of Washington. She is editor and founder of Switched-on Gutenberg (http://www.switched-ongutenberg.com/), one of the first electronic poetry journals of the English-speaking world. Her seventh book of poems, The Dust of Everyday Life, an epic concerning the lives of forgotten Northwest pioneers, (Sasquatch) won the 1998 Andres Berger Award, and she has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer (for Manhattan as a Second Language and Oh How Can I Keep On Singing?). In 2001 she won a Pushcart Prize for poetry for her poem “I Drive You From My Heart.” More information at http://www.janaharris.net/
View the full blog tour schedule and more about the book here:
Click here to read an excerpt.
We are giving away one copy of Horses Never Lie about Love courtesy of Simon & Schuster as part of the blog tour. To enter click here and fill out the form. Giveaway ends November 9, 2011. A big thanks to Simon & Schuster for the chance to be a part of their tour!
Saturday was the huge Authoropalooza event at Barnes and Noble which every year is one of my favorites. There are so many great writers all in one place! This year’s authors in attendance included:
G.G. Vandagriff-Foggy With a Chance of Murder
Jessica Day George– Tuesdays At The Castle
Frank L. Cole– Hashbrown Winters
Joy Spraycar– Quicksilver
April Touchette- Parole at Camp Somerset
Caleb Warnock-Forgotten Skills of Self-Sufficiency Used by the Mormon Pioneers
Connie Sokol– Faithful, Fiot and Fabulous
Mandi Slack-The Alias
Ronda Gibb Hinrichsen– The Hidden Kingdom
B.K. Bostick– Huber Hill and The Dead Man’s Treasure
Carla Kelly-Marian’s Christmas Wish
Tristi Pinkston– Hang ‘Em High
Jason Anderson
Kim Justesen- My Brother The Dog
Berin Stephens-Dragon War Relic
Wendy Paul-101 Gourmet Cake Bites
Nancy Miles– In Good Taste
Debbie Hulet-Independence Rock
Mary Muller- The Guardians of Innocence
Nichole Giles-Sharp Edge of A Knife
Russell Estlack- Shattered Lives Shattered Dreams
Taylor Hartley-Sinner’s Advocate
Marilyn Brown-Images of America: Provo
Paul Talbot-Wizard Magic
Cindy M Hogan-Watched
Jewel Adams-Words of Love
J. Kevin Morris-Strangely Normal
Valerie Mechling & Samuel Stubbs-The Tale of Telsharu
Jenni James– Pride and Popularity
Heather Justesen– Blank Slate
and Jennifer Laurens-Heavenly
Jennifer donated an awesome tote bag from her Heavenly Series as well as a huge of pile of swag including a music CD, postcards and bookmarks. Jessica Day George signed some bookplates for our readers and the other authors chipped in signed bookmarks.
To enter to win some Authorpalooza swag comment below. I’ll pick three winners. Giveaway is open internationally! Ends November 17, 2011. View all the photos from the event on Heather Gardner Photography’s Facebook page.
The Language of Flowers
Rating: 5 Stars
The Victorian language of flowers was used to express emotions: honeysuckle for devotion, azaleas for passion, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it has been more useful in communicating feelings like grief, mistrust and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings. Now eighteen, Victoria has nowhere to go, and sleeps in a public park, where she plants a small garden of her own. When her talent is discovered by a local florist, she discovers her gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But it takes meeting a mysterious vendor at the flower market for her to realise what’s been missing in her own life, and as she starts to fall for him, she’s forced to confront a painful secret from her past, and decide whether it’s worth risking everything for a second chance at happiness. “The Language of Flowers” is a heartbreaking and redemptive novel about the meaning of flowers, the meaning of family, and the meaning of love
Slayers
by C.J. Hill
304 pages
Published September 27th 2011
by Feiwel & Friends
ISBN0312614144
Dragons exist. They’re ferocious. And they’re smart: Before they were killed off by slayer-knights, they rendered a select group of eggs dormant, so their offspring would survive. Only a handful of people know about this, let alone believe it – these “Slayers” are descended from the original knights, and are now a diverse group of teens that includes Tori, a smart but spoiled senator’s daughter who didn’t sign up to save the world.
The dragon eggs have fallen into the wrong hands. The Slayers must work together to stop the eggs from hatching. They will fight; they will fall in love. But will they survive?
The Official Slayers Blog Tour Schedule
Monday October 24th- Fire and Ice
Tuesday October 25th- I’m A Reader Not A Writer
Wednesday October 26th- Books Complete Me
Thursday Ocotber 27th-Bookalicio.us
Friday October 28th- Cari’s Book Blog
Saturday October 29th- Rachael Renee Anderson
Sunday October 30th- Tales of a Ravenous Reader
Click here to read an exclusive deleted scene from Slayers.
Visit CJ Hill’s Website /Blog/ Twitter
Buy Slayers
As part of the blog tour Fire and Ice is giving away one advanced reader’s edition of Slayers to our readers. Must be 13 or older to enter. Giveaway is international and ends November 7, 2011. Fill out the form below to enter.
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