Book Reviews and Bargain reads for the Amazon Kindle, nook, Kobo, Sony and other ereaders, Kindle Fire, nookColor, Kobo Vox, and other tablets, along with some games, music, technology and computers tossed in now and then.
For Easter, get a free Audible download of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter, narrated by Pauline Brailsford. It's short, but should be a nice listen with kids.Book Description
Mother rabbit cautions her children against entering a vegetable garden grown by Mr. McGregor. Her three daughters obey, but Peter, the naughty rabbit, helps himself to the crops from Mr. MacGregor's garden, to the dismay of all.
Today's Kindle Daily Deal is Deadly Farce ($1.99), by Jennifer McAndrews [Thomas & Mercer].Book Description
When Hollywood heavyweight Shepard Brown fears someone is trying to kill him, he asks newly licensed private investigator Lorraine Keys to keep him safe. Friends with Shepard since elementary school, Lorraine knows he can be more than a little melodramatic. Though she agrees to meet him on location in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to review the situation, the last thing she expects is to find truth in his claims. After all, a poisoned pizza? But after getting caught in the center of yet another attempt on Shepard's life, Lorraine is forced to admit he's right about the danger - and determined to find a way to protect him while searching for the culprit. With her meddling friend Barb along for the ride and her boss anxiously tracking her every move, Lorraine must juggle the chaos of a film set, the lure of the casinos, the mutual attraction of a hunky co-star, and a minefield of Shepard's ex-girlfriends all while keeping Shepard safe and uncovering the identity of the killer … before she becomes the next target.
Today's Kindle Romance Daily Deal is The Lady Is a Vamp: An Argeneau Novel ($0.99), by Lynsay Sands [HarperCollins].Book Description
The Argeneau’s are hungry for love—and Lynsay Sands’s bestselling paranormal romance series starring the enormously popular vampire family is hotter than ever! In this New York Times and USA Today bestselling author’s spicy-sweet sixteenth Argeneau novel, the lady is a gorgeous vampire enchantress who finds herself kidnapped by one desperate—and devastatingly handsome—man. The Lady is a Vamp is Lynsay at her best—and fans of the hit HBO series True Blood, as well as the Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse novels it’s based on, will eagerly drink in every tasty drop of this sexy, suspenseful paranormal winner.
Today's Kindle SciFi/Fantasy Daily Deal is The Marching Morons ($0.99), by C. M. Kornbluth [RosettaBooks]. This is a part of the Galaxy Project, which is bringing back into publication some of the best stories from Galaxy magazine; others titles in the series are only $2.99 apiece.Book Description
About the Story: Published more than 60 years ago, this dark and prescient story of a future devolved to idiocy remains one of the most frightening visions to have emerged from the science fiction of that decade. Envisioning a future United States overwhelmed by a citizenry of low IQ (a consequence of the overbreeding of the stupid) Kornbluth was in fact writing of an observed present. The steady, inexorable descent of human intelligence obsessed Kornbluth, was one of his major themes and reached its truest statement in this novelette. The secret masters of Kornbluth’s future are a small population of the intelligent who in subterranean fashion run the country but the “marching morons” overwhelm them and they summon a cynical entrepreneur from the past to help them deal with the dilemma. Weak on technology (a time machine is employed scoop the entrepreneur into their present) the novelette is deadly accurate in its portrait of a society sunk in stupid television, ornate, worthless automobiles and catchphrases which substitute for thought. The denouement is absolutely uncompromising and its utter bleakness is refractory not of a speculative future (which it may well be) but a present which Kornbluth found omnipresent and unbearable. In terms of social statement and extrapolation THE MARCHING MORONS stands with Orwell’s 1984 or Forster’s THE MACHINE STOPS as shattering anatomization of an inevitable future.
About the Author:
Cyril Kornbluth (1924-1958) was the youngest and perhaps the most brilliant of that great group of satirists (Frederik Pohl, Robert Sheckley, Damon Knight, William Tenn) whom Horace Gold drafted to become the characteristic voice of his magazine. Kornbluth was a child prodigy (writing at 16 stories which became classics of the field) and auto-didact, first-generation fan and newspaperman (a Chicago-based wire service) whose heart and health were wrecked by active combat duty at the Battle of the Bulge and other venues; after the war he became a fully committed science fiction writer who moved from journalism in Chicago to a career in the New York area. In collaboration with Frederik Pohl he wrote THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1952) for GALAXY which became the classic satirical novel of advertising and GLADIATOR-AT-LAW which brought the same satirical force to the housing industry. There were several other novels, science fiction and mainstream, written with Pohl, two with Judith Merril and several (TAKEOFF, NOT THIS AUGUST) written alone. He struggled for years with health, economic and familial obligations (he was married to a sculptress and had two young sons) and died suddenly on a train platform, sprinting for a New York bound train in March 1958. A recent (2009) biography by Mark Rich gives much detail about his painful life and brilliant career.
The Chronicles of Narnia series by CS Lewis for £0.99 each (75% off). In the US, only the first title, The Magician's Nephew, is currently on sale ($1.99), but the The Chronicles of Narnia Complete 7-Book Collection with Bonus Book: Boxen for $12 gets you the series at a bargain price (pre-order for Nov 5).
Falling to Pieces: A Quilt Shop Murder ($1.99 Kindle, B&N), the first novel in Vannetta Chapman's Shipshewana Amish series [HarperCollins], is the Nook Daily Find, price matched on Kindle.Book Description
In this first book of a three-book series, author Vannetta Chapman brings a fresh twist to the popular Amish fiction genre. She blends the familiar components consumers love in Amish books---faith, community, simplicity, family---with an innovative who-done-it plot that keeps readers guessing right up to the last stitch in the quilt. When two women---one Amish, one English---each with different motives, join forces to organize a successful on-line quilt auction, neither expects nor wants a friendship. As different as night and day, Deborah and Callie are uneasy partners who simply want to make the best of a temporary situation. But a murder, a surprising prime suspect, a stubborn detective, and the town's reaction throw the two women together, and they form an unlikely alliance to solve a mystery and catch a killer. Set in the well-known Amish community of Shipshewana, Falling to Pieces will attract both devoted fans of the rapidly-growing Amish fiction genre, as well as those who are captivated by the Amish way of life.
Today's Kindle Kids Daily Deal is three Chitty Chitty Bang Bang books for $1.99 each [Candlewick]. The first is, of course, the classic written by Ian Fleming that many of us grew up reading, along with two new additions to the series, recently commissioned by Fleming's heirs (who hold the copyright). Age Range: 9 and up Ian Fleming’s beloved original text — newly illustrated by Joe Berger! "Crackpot" is what everybody calls the Pott family. So when they go to buy a new car and come back with a wreck, nobody is surprised. Except for the Potts themselves. First, the car has a name. And she tells them what it is. Then they find out that she can fly. And swim. . . . Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a car on a mission to stop a criminal gang in its tracks — and she is taking the Potts with her! Jump into the world’s most loved magical car for her first adventure.Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Joe Berger (illustrator)
Buckle your seatbelt for the first-ever follow up to Ian Fleming's only children's story. When the Tooting family finds an old engine and fits it to their camper van, they have no idea what kind of adventure lies ahead. The engine used to belong to an extraordinary car . . . and it wants its bodywork back! But as the Tootings hurtle across the world rebuilding the original Chitty, a sinister baddie is on their trail - one who will stop at nothing to get the magnificent car for himself. Fueled by wry humor , this much-anticipated sequel to the children's classic by Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond - featuring a contemporary family and a camper van with a mind of its own - is driven by best-selling, award-winning author Frank Cottrell Boyce and revved up by Joe Berger's black-and-white illustrations.Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Race Against Time by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Joe Berger (illustrator)
Everyone’s favorite flying car shifts into another dimension as the intrepid Tooting family zooms back and forth through time. When the Tootings return to Zobrowski Terrace at the end of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again, they find that "home" is looking a lot like Jurassic Park. But this is no theme park — a very real and very hungry T. rex is charging them! Thanks to Dad’s inadvertent yanking of Chitty’s "Chronojuster" lever, the spirited car has ushered them back to prehistoric times, where the family (and especially Baby Harry) make a narrow escape. But Chitty has a mind of her own, and the Tootings will get an unexpected tour of exciting times and places from Prohibition-era New York (where Chitty wants to compete in the famous Prix d’Esmerelda’s Birthday Cake race) to the lost city of El Dorado and back again, with misadventures and surprise stowaways along the way. Get ready for a hilarious high-flying adventure, with celebrated author Frank Cottrell Boyce behind the wheel.
This offer is set up via AmazonLocal and anyone (in the US) can participate.Kids love to read -- it's good for their growing vocabularies and developing imaginations, and with today's deal in the Amazon Kindle Store, you can own great titles like The Last Day of Kindergarten, A Field Guide to Aliens, and many more at a substantial discount.
- Free voucher to purchase select Kindle Kids' books for $2 each
- Wonderful variety of subjects including The 2nd International Cookbook for Kids and My Name is Not Easy, a marvelous story about a rivalry between Native American students
- A great opportunity to build a junior library
Today's Kindle Romance Daily Deal is Charm! ($1.99), by Kendall Hart [Hyperion].Book Description
Avery Wilkins is in her prime. She's 30 years old, living in Manhattan, beautiful, smart, and the head of her own cosmetics company, Flair. But her enviable exterior hides deep heartache and painful secrets. Determined to launch a successful perfume, and hopeful that her relationship with handsome and supportive Marcus is getting serious, Avery is chasing her dreams--and running from her traumatic past.
Just when things seem to be on an even keel, Avery is hit with a succession of shocking setbacks, surprises, and betrayals: A drug-addicted colleague who threatens the future of Flair, one boyfriend who is incapable of fidelity, another who may have committed a terrible crime, a long-lost sister who isn't quite who she seems, and most disturbing of all, the sudden appearance of a woman claiming to be Avery's birth mother.
Avery is forced to question the loyalty of friends, lovers, and colleagues, and even her own beliefs about where she came from and who she is. Through it all, she draws on her ambition, grit, and cunning to outsmart her enemies, keep her company afloat, and protect herself from emotional meltdown. But when her archenemy resorts to kidnapping, has Avery finally met her match
Dramatic, sexy, and fun, Charm! is a wickedly entertaining roman a clef by All My Children favorite Kendall Hart. Brimming with scandal, romance, backstabbing, and unpredictable twists, it is every bit as shocking and captivating as the character who wrote it.
Today's Kindle Daily Deal is save on six popular novels by best-selling Twilight author Stephenie Meyer for $2.99 or less [Hachette]; all are also are Whispersync for Voice-ready.
Today's Kindle SciFi/Fantasy Daily Deal is Player Piano ($1.99), by Kurt Vonnegut [RosettaBooks].Book Description
Player Piano (1952), Vonnegut’s first novel, embeds and foreshadows themes which are to be parsed and dramatized by academians for centuries to come. His future society--a marginal extrapolation, Vonnegut wrote, of the situation he observed as an employee of General Electric in which machines were replacing people increasingly and without any regard for their fate--is mechanistic and cruel, indifferent to human consequence, almost in a state of merriment as human wreckage accumulates. Paul Proteus, the novel’s protagonist, is an engineer at Ilium Works and first observes with horror and then struggles to reverse the displacement of human labor by machines.
Ilium Works and Paul’s struggles are a deliberately cartoon version of labor’s historic and escalating struggle to give dignity and purpose to workers. The novel embodies all of Vonenegut’s concerns and what he takes to be the great dilemma of the technologically overpowered century: the spiritual needs of the population in no way serve the economies of technology and post-technology. Vonnegut overlies this grotesque comedy over tragedy, disguising his novel in the trappings of goofiness.
Not published--at Vonnegut’s insistence--as science fiction, the novel was nonetheless recognized and praised by the science fiction community which understood it far better than a more general readership, a dilemma which Vonnegut resentfully faced throughout his career. Bernard Wolfe’s dystopian Limbo and Player Pianowere published in the same year to roughly similar receptions; two “outsiders” had apotheosized technophobia as forcefully as any writer within the field. Throughout his career, Vonnegut was forced to struggle with his ambivalence about science fiction and his own equivocal relationship with its readers.
The Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK is three titles for up to £1.19 each (>70% off).On a mild winter's evening in 1850, Isabella Robinson set out for a party. Her carriage bumped across the wide cobbled streets of Edinburgh's Georgian New Town and drew up at 8 Royal Circus, a grand sandstone terrace lit by gas lamps.The guests were gathered in the high, airy drawing rooms on the first floor, the ladies in glinting silk and satin pulled tight over boned corsets; the gentlemen in tailcoats, waistcoats and neckties. When Mrs Robinson joined the throng she was at once enchanted by a Mr Edward Lane, a handsome medical student ten years her junior. He was 'fascinating', she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man's charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, which she was to find hard to shake...The White Tiger (Main/ £0.99 UK), by Aravind Adiga (US edition $9.99), winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008
Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables. But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. The city is a revelation. As he drives his master to shopping malls and call centres, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that world. As Balram broods over his situation, he realizes that there is only one way he can become part of this glamorous new India - by murdering his master.The Distant Hours (Main/ £0.99 UK), by Kate Morton (US edition $9.61)
The White Tiger presents a raw and unromanticised India, both thrilling and shocking - from the desperate, almost lawless villages along the Ganges, to the booming Wild South of Bangalore and its technology and outsourcing centres. The first-person confession of a murderer, The White Tiger is as compelling for its subject matter as for the voice of its narrator - amoral, cynical, unrepentant, yet deeply endearing.
Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long lost letter arrives with the return address of Millderhurst Castle, Kent, printed on its envelope, Edie begins to suspect that her mother's emotional distance masks an old secret. Evacuated from London as a thirteen year old girl, Edie’s mother is chosen by the mysterious Juniper Blythe, and taken to live at Millderhurst Castle with the Blythe family. Fifty years later, Edie too is drawn to Millderhurst and the eccentric Sisters Blythe. Old ladies now, the three still live together, the twins nursing Juniper, whose abandonment by her fiancé in 1941 plunged her into madness. Inside the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother’s past. But there are other secrets hidden in the stones of Millderhurst Castle, and Edie is about to learn more than she expected. The truth of what happened in the distant hours has been waiting a long time for someone to find it . . .
Soul's Gate ($2.99 Kindle, B&N), by James L. Rubart, is the Nook Daily Find, price matched on Kindle.Book Description
What if you could travel inside another person’s soul? To battle for them. To be part of Jesus healing their deepest wounds. To help set them free to step boldly into their divinely designed future.
Thirty years ago that’s exactly what Reece Roth did. Until tragedy shattered his life and ripped away his future.
Now God has drawn Reece out of the shadows to fulfill a prophecy spoken over him three decades ago. A prophecy about four warriors with the potential to change the world . . . if Reece will face his deepest regret and teach them what he has learned.
They gather at a secluded and mysterious ranch deep in the mountains of Colorado, where they will learn to see the spiritual world around them with stunning clarity—and how to step into the supernatural.
Their training is only the beginning. The four have a destiny to pursue a freedom even Reece doesn’t fully fathom. But they have an enemy hell-bent on destroying them and he’ll stop at nothing to keep them from their quest for true freedom and the coming battle of souls.
Today's Kindle Kids Daily Deal is Wings: A Fairy Tale ($1.99), by E. D. Baker [Bloomsbury USA Childrens].Book Description
Tamisin has always been a little weird. Her freckles actually look more like sparkles and occasionally, she likes to dance under the full moon. Then one day, wings sprout from her back, and Tamisin learns that her parents adopted her from fairyland. Inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, this fairy tale will delight fans of The Tales of the Frog Princess and new readers alike.
Grades: 6-9
SO LONG – AND THANKS FOR ALL THE WISH
BeWrite Books was born with the new millennium at midnight on December 31/January 1, 2000. It dies on March 31, 2013 when this website will be taken down.
It was all about a wish: A wish shared by us, our authors and our readers.
We worked incredibly hard with a dedicated and passionate professional in-house team and some of the most gifted writers imaginable. We were ahead of the game for so long, surviving on tireless labour, wits, cooperation, friendship, love of the art ... and hope. But recent market forces beyond our control force us to call a halt and – sadly and most reluctantly – wind down to a spring closure.
More than 250 wonderful new works in many genres, created by BB authors over the course of that thirteen-year period, were honed to perfection by a painstaking professional team with nothing more in mind than to expose the greatest books in their best form to the widest possible readership in print and – from the very start – digital editions.
Our job now is to find effective and prestigious new publishers for BB-published titles and to assist those BB authors who choose to take the self-publishing route. We’re working flat-out on that and are succeeding in keeping works alive. But it’s dispiriting and often heart-breaking to now count our every loss as a success.
We thank our authors and our team for their commitment.
We thank our loyal readers for their support.
Titles in our bookstore will become increasingly unavailable through BeWrite Books and its many third-party retail outlets over the wind-down period but can still be discovered and bought with a quick internet search of title or author. Others will remain available in our store and elsewhere until the end of March.
Infinitum nihil ... so it goes.
Luck and best wishes to all.
Neil Marr, Tony Szmuk, Hugh McCracken and Sam Smith