Flower Friday - Gold Medal

  'Gold Medal' roses

This week's featured flowers are ''Gold Medal" roses!  These hardy Grandiflora roses have warm yellow petals with light pink edges.  In our fairly mild climate, this disease-resistant rose blooms in clusters throughout the summer and into early fall.  The flowers have a light, spicy scent and the foliage is a lovely dark green.   To learn more about about 'Gold Medal' roses, check out the 'Gold Medal' page at Dave's Garden, the 'Gold Medal' page at Rose-Roses, or the 'Gold Medal' page at HelpMeFind.

  

A few book & blogoshpere notes:

1.  Hush, Hush and Crescendo author Becca Fitzpatrick will be chatting with the Mundie Moms on November 30th at 8 pm CST.  Stop by their blog to join the chat.

2.  Want to read Bree Despain's The Dark Divine before The Lost Saint arrives in stores on December 28th?  For a limited time, you can purchase The Dark Divine eBook for under $2.50 on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

3.  If you enjoyed Cindy Pon's Silver Phoenix and are looking forward to reading Fury of the Phoenix when it arrives in stores next April, then you will want to enter the Fury of the Phoenix ARC contest on Cindy's blog (ends 12/1).

Flower Friday - Nicole

 'Nicole' roses

This week's featured flowers are 'Nicole' roses!  These floribunda roses have beautiful white petals with dark pink edges.  The foliage is dark green and glossy.  Rose season is coming to an end as the weather grows colder and wetter, and none of the roses in our yard will bloom again until next spring.  But a few rose varieties continue to bloom through the end of October, so we took a walk through the rose garden at our favorite local park to snap a few photos of the final roses of the season & we'll feature them as the next few Flower Fridays.  To learn more about about 'Nicole' roses, which are sometimes called 'KORicole', 'Raspberry Ice' or 'Tabris' roses and are often confused with 'Hannah Gordon' roses, check out the 'Nicole' page at Dave's Garden, the 'Nicole' page at HelpMeFind, the 'Nicole' page at Ozarks Gardens, or Martha Stewart's  'Nicole' page.

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A few book & blogosphere notes:

1.  Can't make it to any of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's Beautiful Darkness tour stops?  Visit the Caster Chronicles' Blog TV channel to check out videos of their Austin tour appearance.  Kaleb Nation also shared the first in a series of video interviews with Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl this week, you can check that out here. 

2.  Pure Imagination is hosting an international Pre-Holiday Pre-Order Giveaway featuring pre-ordered copies of Stephanie Perkins' Anna and the French Kiss and Bree Despain's The Lost Saint.  You can check that out here ( ends 10/29).

3.  Reading Angel is hosting a fun Ghost-apalooza Giveaway featuring all sorts of goodies, including signed copies of Jeri Smith-Ready's Shade and Lee Nichols' Deception.  You can check that out here (ends 10/23).

Book Review: The Dark Divine by Bree Despain

Title:  The Dark Divine

Author:  Bree Despain

Publisher:  Egmont USA

Genre: YA (paranormal)

Hardback: 372 pages

ISBN:  1606840576 

Summary:

A prodigal son... A dangerous love... A deadly secret...

I stood back and watched his movements. Daniel had that way about him that could shut me down in an instant. . . . I kicked the gravel a couple of times and worked up my courage again. “Tell me . . . I mean . . . why did you come back? Why now, after all this time?”

Grace Divine, daughter of the local pastor, always knew something terrible happened the night Daniel Kalbi disappeared—the night she found her brother Jude collapsed on the porch, covered in blood. But she has no idea what a truly monstrous secret that night really held. And when Daniel returns three years later, Grace can no longer deny her attraction to him, despite promising Jude she’ll stay away.

As Grace gets closer to Daniel, her actions stir the ancient evil Daniel unleashed that horrific night. Grace must discover the truth behind Jude and Daniel's dark secret . . . and the cure that can save the ones she loves. But she may have to lay down the ultimate sacrifice to do it—her soul.

Overall rating: 7/10 flowers

To buy this book:  IndieBound | Powell's | The Book Depository | Amazon

Add this book to your:  Goodreads | Shelfari | LibraryThing | Visual Bookshelf

Grace's childhood crush sweeps back into town after having disappeared under mysterious circumstances years earlier. Why has he come back? What does he want from her? And is she willing to give him her heart even if it means ignoring her family's wishes or betraying her brother? Bree Despain's The Dark Divine is a romantic, paranormal YA novel inspired by the parable of the Prodigal Son.

What I Liked:
-      Grace's close-knit family is unusual in the sea of YA paranormal novels. That gave her a unique and memorable perspective. Parents are notoriously absent/neglectful/evil in YA novels, so the fact that this book features activities like family dinners, looking after younger siblings, and being expected to contribute to their church charity work made Grace's family dynamic stand out as something different from the average YA heroine's family dynamic.
-      I often have a soft spot for 'bad-boy' heroes, so I expected to like Daniel for his mysterious, 'bad-boy' qualities. Instead, I ended up liking him for the childhood crush he shared with Grace and for his nice-boy-with-a-secret-and-a-rough-past qualities.
-      I enjoyed Don's character. He remains a bit of a loose cannon throughout the story, so you are not quite sure what to expect from him, and that kept his roll interesting. He reminded me of Lennie in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Boo Radley in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
-      I liked Grace's fixation with the walnut tree, and nearly all of my favorite scenes involved that tree.
-      The details of Daniel's childhood were revealed in a way that was consistent with the rest of the story and got the point across without halting the rest of the story or becoming disturbingly graphic in the description of the abuse he endured.
-      The romance, while somewhat predictable, is sweet and compelling. I liked Daniel more than I liked Grace, who occasionally seemed a bit too selfless and 'perfect' to me, but I still wanted them to find a way to be together. I look forward to seeing what obstacles they will face in the next couple of books in this series.
-      The paranormal elements in this story have their own unique mythology and tie into the Divine family's religious beliefs quite convincingly. Daniel's story strongly parallels the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-32), and I am curious to see if the upcoming books in this series will have elements of other parables.
-      This book did veer a little too close to preachy territory a couple of times, but I enjoyed the way the ideas of forgiveness, love, and sacrifice were woven into the fabric of the paranormal mythology.

What I Wished:

-     I strongly wished there were not time and location headers every few pages throughout this book.  Since the time and place were already obvious within the text, the headers seemed unnecessary, distracting, and redundant.  They were also strangely inconsistent.  Here are a few examples of these headers with my notes in parentheses:  "Downtown" (a location),  "Later, before school" (a time), "In the house, about twenty minutes later" (a time and a location), and "Avoidance" (not a time or a location).  Perhaps this was just my personal pet peeve and won't bother other readers, but I found the headers consistently unnecessary. 

-     The paranormal twist to this story is hinted at way too heavily to feel like much of a surprise once it is finally officially revealed, so I found myself wishing it would come out into the open much sooner than it actually did.

-     Jude annoyed me from start to finish, and although tried to understand Grace's desire to respect his wishes and honor his requests, I simply could not.  I understood that his irritating behavior was critical to the roll he played within the story of the Prodigal Son as well as the roll he played within the paranormal aspect of the story, but it succeeded in making me annoyed with Grace as well as Jude each time she chose to take his side.

The Dark Divine will appeal to fans of paranormal romances with fairly innocent heroines, like Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, Maggie Steifvater's Shiver, and Shelena Shorts' The Pace.  If you would like to learn more about The Dark Divine or author Bree Despain, please visit her website | blog | facebook | twitter.  I am looking forward to checking out the sequel to The Dark Divine, The Lost Saint, which is scheduled to be released on December 28th.

My awesome friend Debbie from Cranberry Fries created this lovely trailer for The Dark Divine:

Teaser Tuesday: The Dark Divine by Bree Despain

My teaser:

But the thought of rich coffee made me ill.  And that stony look on Jude's face as I climbed into the truck made me want to find a hole to bury my head in.

        -  page 48 of  The Dark Divine by Bree Despain

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.  Anyone can play along!  Just do the following:

• Grab your current read.
• Share two 'teaser' sentences from somewhere on that page.
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn't give too much away!  You don't want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title and author, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teaser!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Currently Reading:

The Dark Divine by Bree Despain &  I Heart You, You Haunt Me by Lisa Schroeder

 Up Next in my TBR (to-be-read) pile:

Chasing Brooklyn by Lisa Schroeder

What are you reading today?  What's up next in your TBR pile?

This fun meme is hosted by Sheila at One Person's Journey Through a World of Books.