Quilts and Books

I remember reading a number of positive reviews of this book when it came out almost exactly two years ago. I'm sure I purchased it on the strength of those reviews, but like too many of the books I buy, it got pushed to the back burner. I was scrolling through my Kindle titles recently and realized that this would be an excellent choice for this month's TBR Challenge.
The blurb: Compared to love, politics is easy Union organizer Millie Frank's world isn't filled with cocktails and nightclubs…until she's turned into an unwitting minor celebrity. As if being part of a hostage situation wasn't traumatizing enough, now her face is splashed across the news. But Millie's got fresher wounds to nurse—like being shot down by the arrogant bad boy she stupidly hit on. Parker Beckett will do whatever it takes to close a deal for the senate majority leader, including selling out union labor. Charming and smart on the surface, he's also cynical and uncommitted—an asse…

I sort of stumbled across this book when it was a March Kindle First* offering. As near as I can tell, Ann Howard Creel (no website found) is primarily a YA author. This is her second "adult" novel. I can't tell if it's being marketed as a romance or not, but it definitely meets the definition, HEA and all.
While You Were Mine uses the iconic photo of a sailor kissing a nurse on V-J Day as it's jumping off point.  The blurb:
Everything she loved could so easily be lost. The end of WWII should have brought joy to Gwen Mullen. But on V-J Day, her worst fear is realized. As celebrating crowds gather in Times Square, a soldier appears on her doorstep to claim Mary, the baby abandoned to Gwen one year earlier. Suddenly Gwen is on the verge of losing the child she has nurtured and loves dearly. With no legal claim to Mary, Gwen begins to teach Lieutenant John McKee how to care for his child, knowing that he will ultimately take Mary away. What starts as a contentious rela…

Last spring I decided to re-read Nalini Singh's entire Psy-Changeling Series when I discovered my public library owned it in downloadable audio format. Yesterday I finished Shards of Hope, the latest book in the series. All together it took me about 9 months to listen to 14 books (I did not attempt to re-read any of the novellas). It was an interesting experience. Last July, when I was part-way the series through I blogged this:
First, I'm extremely glad I decided to do this re-read. It's been almost nine years since the 1st book, Slave to Sensation, was published and over the years I've forgotten as much as I've remembered. Some books have been more compelling, and thus more memorable than others. Some, like Blaze of Memory have not been so memorable. Case in point, with BoM-- as I listened I knew I'd read it before, but honestly couldn't remember any of it until near the end. And this is kind of important because Singh has carefully built the Psy-Changelin…

It's series catch-up month for the TBR Challenge and this month it was a pretty easy choice. I have several books from this series that I've been wanting to read, so it was time to get back to them.

Badlands by Jill Sorenson is the 3rd book in her romantic suspense series named after the first book, Aftershock. I loved Aftershock and I also enjoyed the first book in her MC series, Riding Dirty. This book picks up with two of the characters from Aftershock and uses some of the same settings in Riding Dirty, around the Salton Sea of southern California.

Penny and Owen were trapped with several others in the earthquake described in Aftershock. In Badlands it's now five years later. Thanks to his heroics in the aftermath of the earthquake, Owen, an ex-con, is now working as a bodyguard for Penny's father, a presidential candidate. For years the two of them have kept their feelings for one another to themselves. Penny is a single mother devoted to raising her son, Cruz, and…

To those of you who offered me your condolences on the passing of my sister, I want to say thank you again for your kind words. It meant so much to me. It has really helped to finally talk about it.

So now I want to brag on my sister just a little bit. She really was exceptionally creative with her quilting; she put a lot of thought into the quilting of the quilt. Rather than try to tell you about it in my words, I'll just let these pictures of her quilts speak about it.

First up this is a little baby quilt. If you click to enlarge you'll see the pattern of flowers, leaves, and stems quilted in red and green.

Here's the quilt she did for the QBFF paint chip challenge back in 2011.

I currently have this one hanging in my kitchen nook. I love looking at it.
The small sections quilted with the rainbow variegated thread are a great touch.
The center section is quilted with metallic thread. This is not easy to do. It requires the right needle in your machine and adjustments to …

57 years.
3 months.
15 days.

That's how old my sister was when she died on December 30, 2015.

Char spent four and a half years in a tug of war with cancer. For a while there she seemed to be in total control. But that insidious disease came back and this time would not let up. Here's the kicker. She had uterine cancer, just like me. Only hers was Stage 4 when they found it. Mine barely qualified as Stage 1. Life is often unfair, but that seemed the cruelest irony of all. As I wept that she was dying, she wept because I was not.

It's taken me a long time to process this and to be willing to talk openly about it. Some of you reading this have been very open with your own struggles with health, grief, death, and dying. I've wanted to be, but I think I needed for the worst of it to be over first. Every time I tried to write about it, I'd sit paralyzed at the keyboard. I just wasn't ready I guess.

Char decided to suspend further treatment last August. It was making …

This book by Farrah Rochon has one of the best opening pages I've ever read. Seriously. You can go read it here at Amazon. It totally made me laugh. As did a few other parts of Deliver Me. I needed something that wasn't too serious and I lucked out.

Here's the blurb:

After being dumped by her boyfriend and passed over for yet another promotion, Monica Gardner moves to New Orleans, determined to make a name for herself as the new attending ER physician at Methodist Memorial Hospital. As for men--she's through with them. But when given the chance to chair the hospital's annual charity banquet, Monica must elicit the help of gorgeous Ob-gyn Elijah Holmes. 

Eli will do anything to thwart his matchmaking Mama's plan to reunite him with his high school girlfriend. So, when the sexy new ER doc asks for his help in planning this year's charity banquet, Eli devises the perfect scheme: He'll help put on the best banquet the hospital has ever seen, if Monica poses …