Book Review: Wedding Girl by Stacey Ballis

About WEDDING GIRL by Stacey Ballis, published May 3, 2016 by Berkley
Genre: romance, contemporary fiction

Top pastry chef Sophie Bernstein and her sommelier fiancé were set to have Chicago’s culinary wedding of the year…until the groom eloped with someone else, leaving Sophie splashed across the tabloids—fifty grand in debt on her dream wedding. The icing on the cake was when she lost her job and her home…
 
Sophie moves in with her grandmother, Bubbles. Sophie gets a part-time job at the old-fashioned neighborhood bakery and finds herself reluctantly giving a wedding cake customer advice on everything from gift bags to guest accommodations. Before she knows it, she’s an online wedding planner. It pays the bills, but Sophie wonders if she’s really moving forward—or starting over from scratch. (publisher)

My comments: 

I enjoyed reading this light romance with the entertaining twists in plot - a successful and well-known chef is left at the altar by her fiance, and she disappears from society by hiding out with her grandmother Bubbles, making ends meet by working at a local bakery. Sophie soon uses her baking skills to improve the bakery's failing business  and meets a woman whom she gives advice to re wedding planning. Sophie soon becomes a wedding advisor online, incognito, and develops a whopping online business, with no one knowing her real identity. Romance comes into the picture later on, and a chance for Sophie to redeem her baking career. 

Add to the plot the amusing personalities of Sophie's grandmother and her bakery boss, and an online confidante whom she might just be interested in romantically.

Romance and foodie readers, this might be a book for you!

Thanks to the publisher for a review copy of Wedding Girl.

First Chapter: If It Fits, I Sits picture book of cats

Bibliophile By the Sea hosts First Chapter, First Paragraph every Tuesday. Share the first paragraph(s) of your current read or book interest, with information for readers

The photo above is the first page of a picture book of cats taken in strange positions and places. Each photo has a one sentence caption. Here is the cover of the hardcover book:

IF It Fits, I Sits: Cats in Awkward Places, published October 8, 2015 by Orion
Genre: picture book

I am not a cat lover in general, but these pictures almost made me change my mind! 

Sunday Salon: Fallen Leaves

Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer.
Also visit Mailbox Monday and It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Date. 

I'm raking up fallen leaves from last autumn, clearing flowerbeds and bushes of old debris, having found a wonderful new tool - a shrub rake with a very long handle that grabs leaves from under bushes and pulls leaves from bushes without leaving damage. Wish I had known about this rake years ago!

On the reading score, I have three new books this week:

A Drop in the Ocean by Jenni Ogden, to be released May 3, 2016, published by She Writes Press. On her 49th birthday, Anna Fergusson, Boston neuroscientist and dedicated introvert, arrives at an unwanted crossroads when the funding for her research lab is cut. On impulse she rents a cabin for a year on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. However Turtle Island, alive with sea birds and nesting Green turtles, is not the retreat she expected. (goodreads)

300 Days of Sun  from the author Deborah Lawrenson, published April 12, 2016 by Harper Paperbacks

Deborah Lawrenson’s mesmerizing novel transports readers to a sunny Portuguese town with a shadowy past—where two women, decades apart, are drawn into a dark game of truth and lies that still haunts the shifting sea marshes. (goodreads)

And this year's Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction I bought for my Kindle:

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, published April 7, 2015 by Grove Press

The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity, politics, and America, wrought in electric prose. The narrator, a Vietnamese army captain, is a man of divided loyalties, a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist sleeper agent in America after the end of the Vietnam War in the mid 1970s. A powerful story of love and friendship, and a gripping espionage novel, The Sympathizer examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today. (goodreads)

In addition, I have a couple of books for book tours coming up in May and June.
What's on your reading list this week?

Book Beginning: Gone with the Witch by Heather Blake

The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice.
Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader.

Gone With the Witch by Heather Blake, to be published May 3, 2016 by NAL
Wishcraft Mystery #6

Book beginning, Chapter One:

Sunlight burst through the front windows of As You Wish, spotlighting the pink streaks in Ivy Teasdale's shoulder-length strawberry blond hair and the vehemence in her blue eyes. 

"The integrity of the event is at stake, Darcy," Ivy said to me, the sound of hammering outside punctuating her words like exclamation points. "Along with its sterling reputation." 

She sat ramrod straight on the velvet sofa cross from me, her hands fisted, her black-tipped fingernails pressing deeply into the fleshy skin of her palms. 

Publisher description:

Wish-granting witch Darcy Merriweather is put to the test at a pet show. . . . 

Darcy and her dog Missy are at the annual Pawsitively Enchanted pet contest. The show’s organizer hires Darcy to keep an eye on things among growing suspicions that someone is sabotaging the event. But her lead suspect is found dead, and someone begins snatching up prize-winning pets from under their owners’ noses. Darcy is determined to protect the pampered participants at whatever cost. 

Page 56:
My hand shook as I said, "How did you do this?"

What are you reading this weekend?

Manga: Oogu, the Inner Chambers Volume I by Fumi Noshinaga

Ooku: The Inner Chambers (Volume I) by Fumi Noshinaga, published in 2009.
Genre: manga, graphic novel
Source: personal copy

Description: In Edo period Japan, a strange new disease called the Red Pox has begun to prey on the country's men. Within eighty years of the first outbreak, the male population has fallen by seventy-five percent. Women have taken on all the roles traditionally granted to men, even that of the Shogun. The men, precious providers of life, are carefully protected. And the most beautiful of the men are sent to serve in the Shogun's Inner Chamber...

Comments:
My first manga... The 203 pages of graphic and sometimes dramatic drawings in this manga pulled me into the fictional world of female shoguns and an Inner Chamber populated mainly by handsome young men.

 The series is a twist on the historical facts, where the shoguns were male and the Inner Chamber populated by females. The book focuses on the new shogun, a young female determined to change the old traditions, reduce the number of men in the Inner Chamber, simplify their lives, and make an impact on society. 

I am very curious about the others in the series, to see where the story leads. There are about 11 or more of the books so far.

First Chapter: Deep South by Paul Theroux

Bibliophile By the Sea hosts First Chapter, First Paragraph every Tuesday. Share the first paragraph(s) of your current read or book interest, with information for readers

Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads by Paul Theroux, published September 3, 2015 by Penguin
Genre: nonfiction, travel
Source: library

First chapter, first paragraphs:

In Tuskaloosa, Alabama, on a hot Sunday morning in early October, I sat in my car in the parking lot of a motel studying a map, trying to locate a certain church. I was not looking for more religion or to be voyeuristically stimulated by travel. I was hoping for music and uplift, sacred steel and celebration, and maybe a friend.

I slapped the map with the back of my hand. I must have looked befuddled.

"You lost, baby?"

Travelling through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, travel writer Paul Theroux writes of the stunning landscapes he discovers - the deserts, the mountains, the Mississippi - and above all, the lives of the people he meets. (publisher)

Based on the opening sentences,  would you continue reading?

Sunday Salon: Leaving Blythe River; and Reader, I Married Him

Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer.
Also visit Mailbox Monday and It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Date. 

Sunny but still cool. There is a yellow tulip and lots of violets in the yard, plus white blossoms on the serviceberry tree. Seems spring has finally arrived.

Only two books to feature this week....

Leaving Blythe River by Catherine Ryan Hyde, to be released May 24, 2016 by Lake Union Publishing.

New York Times bestselling author Catherine Ryan Hyde returns with an unforgettable story of courage.
Seventeen-year-old Ethan Underwood is totally unprepared to search for his father in the Blythe River National Wilderness. Not only is he small, scrawny, and skittish but he’s barely speaking to the man after a traumatic betrayal. Yet when his father vanishes from their remote cabin and rangers abandon the rescue mission, suddenly it’s up to Ethan to keep looking. Angry or not, he’s his father’s only hope.

Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre, edited by Tracy Chevalier
Published March 22, 2016 by William Morrow Paperbacks

This collection of original stories by today’s finest women writers—including Tracy Chevalier, Francine Prose, Elizabeth McCracken, Tessa Hadley, Audrey Niffenegger, and more—takes inspiration from a line in Charlotte Brontë’s most beloved novel, Jane Eyre.

Have a great reading week...