In keeping with the change of name for my Romance & Women’s Fiction Twitter chat [@SatBookChat previously known as @ChocLitSaturday] – I am announcing a change of features here on Jorie Loves A Story. Since January, 2014 I carved out a niche of focus which I named #ChocLitSaturdays as I have felt the best time to read romantic and dramatic stories are the weekends. This spun into a Twitter chat featuring the authors of ChocLit whilst I supplied weekly topics which would appeal to readers, writers and book bloggers alike. We grew into our own Saturday tribe of chatters – then, somewhere round the time of my father’s stroke in late [2016] and the forthcoming year of [2017] I started to feel less inspired to host the chat.
I had new plans to re-invent the chat in its new incantation as @SatBookChat but I also wanted to re-invent the complimentary showcases on my blog which would reflect the diversity of stories, authors and publishers I would be featuring on the chat itself. As at the root and heart of #ChocLitSaturday the chat were the stories I was reading which complimented the conversations.
After a difficult year for [personal health & wellness] this 2018, I am beginning anew this Autumn – selecting the stories to resume where I left off featuring the Romance & Women’s Fiction authors I am discovering to read whilst highlighting a story by the author I am chatting with during #SatBookChat. Every Saturday will feature a different author who writes either Romance or Women’s Fiction – for the remaining weeks of October and most of November, I will be featuring special guest authors during #SatBookChat whose stories I have either read, are reading or hope to read in the future if their newer releases. The reviews on Saturdays might inspire the topics in the forthcoming chats or they might be directly connected to the current guest author.
Our holiday break for the month of December will find us resuming #SatBookChat the week after New Year’s, 2019 where new guests and new stories will lay down the foundation of inspiring the topics, the conversations and the bookish recommendations towards promoting Romance & Women’s Fiction.
Acquired Book By: One thing I love about being active in the bookish side of the twitterverse is being able to interact with authors. Not only do I get to readily engage with authors I am just discovering ‘now’ but I have the chance to re-connect to the authors I’ve known in the past – Sally Malcolm is one of those authors! I first learnt of her style for Romance within her debut novel for ChocLitUK – in fact, it was featured during my original Saturday’s event called #ChocLitSaturdays. The novel was about pirates and life on the high seas – in essence, my affinity for Captain Jack Sparrow and my interest in these kinds of epics at sea is what led me to become curiously curious about “The Legend of the Gypsy Hawk”. I was oft curious if there would be a next chapter after this debut and due to life evolving forward, simply had forgotten to chase up the recent goings on in Ms Malcolm’s literary career.
Until I caught sight of her tweets giving a s/o about a m/m Romance re-telling of a Jane Austen novel I personally found quite arduous to get into and opted not to read it for a long while now! I was re-inspired to see ‘Persuasion’ from Ms Malcolm’s perspective and see how this would work through a re-telling and re-spun as an m/m romance duology. The first in the sequence is ‘Perfect Day’ and it is followed closely by ‘Between the Lines’.
Thus, I agreed to accept a complimentary copy of “Perfect Day” by the author Sally Malcolm in exchange for an honest review. I did not receive compensation for my opinions or thoughts shared herein.
Why I originally was keen on the writing styling of Ms Malcolm:
Malcolm has found a way to ignite your imagination inside a pirate tale by the smallest of details, tricking your mind into believing exactly what your heart is willing to acknowledge – she’s found clever ways of tucking in certain descriptive details that level themselves believable for the era but also, for the setting of a pirate’s locale! I loved the little touches she granted the opening of her trilogy – to root you where you were taken and to give an assurance that you could settle inside this pirate’s tale with the atmospheric touches you’d expect to find! It was in the manner of speech inasmuch as the necessity for firelight illuminating great niches of space where the pirates resided whilst eluding to the expanse of their reign over the region they controlled.
Even the manner of how the salt air mingled with long hair, and how bare feet graced Amelia’s feet as she causally walked about both ship and land – it gave you a proper glimpse of where the Gypsy Hawk had taken anchour! I could nearly have smelt it for myself, as Malcolm kept encouraging your imagination whilst building the back-stories of Captain Hazard and Amelia (a Captain in her own right of her father’s fleet) to where each would intersect and collide paths into one another. Fitting really, as they each had such a spark of defiance intermixed with a challenging will to seek adventure at all costs.
I liked Malcolm’s ease of manner in telling her tale – she purports you so completely inside the story, it’s nearly not known if you stepped through a portal or were simply ‘elsewhere’ the moment you picked up her story – this feeling I had whilst I was reading about the Gypsy Hawk was most welcome indeed – as it was a lovely reprieve and a quicker read than most historicals will grant you! I liked how right from the turning of the beginning chapters, your so settled inside the thickening plot as to beg the pages to turn faster to learn more of how any of the growing tension and conflict can resolve! I like a well-told story but what is keen is to have a quicker read told equally as well – sometimes it’s nice to take-on lighter faire in historicals – reads where you can let your mind play a bit round the edges of a story and not lie heavily on plots that tug at your heart or still your soul due to the dramatic revelations.
Malcolm has written a delicious historical for readers who want to take an adventure on the high seas and combine their love of pirates from motion pictures with their love of story-tellers who can capture their heart on the written pages of a novels!
-quoted from my review of The Legend of the Gypsy Hawk
I read about the Gypsy Hawk two years ago and now have had the lovely chance of reading Ms Malcolm’s newly revealled styling where she exchanged m/f romances for m/m romances! I am not a stranger to the m/m or f/m romance or fiction genres as I’m an open-minded reader who believes in #EqualityInLit. Something I’ve tried to promote via my feeds on Twitter inasmuch as my diverse selections on Jorie Loves A Story where I opt to either read to review, listen to review or showcase stories across all spectrum’s of literature including LGBTQ+ inclusive story-lines.
A few of the stand-outs for me was the discovery of the Edith Lewis and Willa Cather mysteries by Sue Hallgarth wherein we’re entreated to a purview of their lives on the road as they visit different locations important to them whilst they were alive and solve a bit of crime on the side! They are intuitive novels writ in the Cosier side of the ledger for mysteries but crafted with a sophisticated eloquence you don’t wish to put down at all!
One of my favourite champions of f/f Women’s Fiction which ties in a lovely relationship novel centred around non-traditional families, foster care and adoption is the delightfully poignant The Language of Hoofbeats by Catherine Ryan Hyde. This story echoes a realistic impression about at-risk youth, emotional anguish and angst of growing up without a foundation of ‘home’ and the people who risk their heart to nurture the children who have felt they were abandoned or forgotten. If you loved the relationship between Steff and Lena on The Fosters, the two characters within this novel will warm your heart!
In a new entry of cross-genre interest for Steampunk and altered time shifting stories, I happily discovered Tara Sim’s Timekeeper novel in audiobook! It was a wondrous world full of dramatic emotions and an intriguing plot set in a universe you truly want to re-visit and get to know even better than your first visitation! She also included a unique m/m romance between two very unique characters and I felt she honoured her cross-genre approach and the relationship very well. One of these days I need to listen to the next stories in sequence as this was only the beginning!
Being a Janeite, as much as the author herself, I was keen on seeing how she approached the original canon (even though technically I have not read Persuasion) and re-imagined it in a very modern and contemporary world setting. I wasn’t sure if I would pick up on the usual nuances re-tellings have within them due to my lack of knowledge of the original story however, as it was one story of Austen’s I never felt I could warm too I was excited about the prospect of finding a re-telling which might give me the aesthetic of Austen without it being of Austen.
Perfect Day
by Ms Sally Malcolm
Source: Direct from Author
When Joshua Newton, prodigal son of New Milton’s elite, fell in love with ambitious young actor Finn Callaghan, his world finally made sense.
With every stolen moment, soft touch and breathless kiss, they fell deeper in love. Finn was his future…until he wasn’t.
Eight years later, Finn has returned to the seaside town where it all began. He’s on the brink of stardom, a far cry from the poor mechanic who spent one gorgeous summer falling in love on the beach, and the last thing he wants is a second chance with the man who broke his heart. Finn has spent a long time forgetting Joshua Newton—he certainly doesn’t plan to forgive him.
But as Finn and Joshua circle each other, drawn together yet kept apart by their painful history, old feelings begin to stir. Is it possible for love to bloom again in hearts so scarred by regret, resentment, and hurt?
Places to find the book:
ISBN: 978148803187
Published by Carina Press
on 13th August, 2018
Format: Portable (Pocket) Paperback Edition
Pages: 266
Published by: Carina Press (@CarinaPress)
an imprint of Harlequin Books
I’ve been adding flames to those stories of Romance which have extra heat inside them and are more intensively written than others. This one definitely qualifies as there is a certain flashback sequence between Finn and Joshua which explores how they fused their passion together and re-defined their own sense of sexuality amongst themselves.
This is a Digital First release and will be released into more formats.
Uniquely I do have a paperback copy of this novel – similar to the title I recently reviewed by Tule Publishing “A Small Town Christmas”, I cannot find a listing for the print copy I reviewed. I listed the ISBN for the print copy I have but used the publication date for the ebook as I couldn’t trace when the print copy dropped. What I love most about the book itself is how charmingly ‘portable’ this copy is – it reminds me of the vintage hardbacks my grandfather gave me – uniquely small, compact & brilliantly able to be taken with you as you travel!
Sally Malcolm’s re-telling of Persuasion duology:
Perfect Day (part one)
Between the Lines (part two) | Synopsis
Converse via: #ContemporaryRomance, #LGBT and/or #LGBTRomance
and #Persuasion OR retell of #JaneAusten
About Ms Sally Malcolm
Sally Malcolm was bitten by the male/male romance bug in 2016 and hasn’t looked back.
Perfect Day is her first published male/male romance, with the follow-up (Between the Lines) out later in 2018 and a dozen other ideas bubbling away on the back burner. Her stories are emotional, sweetly angsty, and always have happy endings.
Sally also writes tie-in novels for the hit TV shows Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. To date she’s penned nine novels and novellas, and four audio dramas.
She lives in South West London with her American husband, two lovely children, and two lazy cats.
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