Waiting on Wednesday (+Giveaway!): Caged In Winter

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event hosted by Breaking The Spine and is a fun way to see what books other bloggers just can't wait to get their hands on!

 CAGED IN WINTER

Brighton Walsh

Contemporary New Adult

Releases November 4th from Berkley

In this emotional and sexy New Adult debut from Brighton Walsh, the only thing more frightening than commitment is hope…

Aspiring chef Cade Maxwell is immediately, viscerally attracted to Winter Jacobson. But it’s not her mouthwatering curves he’s drawn to—it’s the strange emptiness in her eyes. When Cade saves her from a drunken customer with grabby hands, he’s shocked at her response…

Winter doesn’t need Cade’s help. After a lifetime of getting by on her own, she’s happy to rely on herself. She’s exactly seventy-six days away from graduating college, and if she can hold it together that long, she’ll finally be able to rise above the crappy hand she was dealt.

But now, every time she turns around, Cade is there, ready to push her, smile at her, distract her from her plans. Winter knows she can’t afford to open up—especially to a man she’s terrified to actually want…

Confession: I cannot cook to save my life. Okay. That's probably an exaggeration. I probably COULD cook if I wanted to, but I so dislike it (it causes me stress!) that I avoid it at all costs. It comes as little surprise then that a favorite trait in a book boyfriend is someone who's good in the kitchen. Well hello there, chef Cade! I also thoroughly enjoy reading about strong, self-sufficient women who have to learn to lean on other people every now and then, so this book seems like an all-around winner to me.

As a special add-on to my Waiting on Wednesday feature, I have an excerpt to share with you!

CADE:

“Okay, now add the flour, but—” It’s too late, a puff of white exploding in Winter’s face before I can get the words out or reach to flip the switch. “You need to turn the mixer to low.”
 

She spins around, her cheeks covered in random white spots, some of the flour dusting her hair. “You couldn’t say that before, ‘Now add the flour’?” Her voice is low, her eyes narrowed, and I take a step back.
 

“Well, yeah, I guess I could’ve, but I just sort of figured you’d know enough not to add loose flour to a wildly spinning mixer.”
 

“Oh, you figured I’d know enough for that, huh? Even after I told you I’ve never made cookies before? Even then?”
 

She’s advancing on me now, and I shouldn’t be retreating like a scared animal. I have more than a foot on her, a hundred-plus pounds, but she looks pissed. And that glint in her eye tells me she’s up to something. I glance down at her hand, seeing a measuring cup half filled with flour, and I realize what she’s going to do a split-second before she does, but not soon enough to dodge it.
 

A cloud of white powder hits me straight in the face, and I cough as I inhale some. Wiping away the dust from my eyes, I say, “I can’t believe you did that.”
 

“Oh, well, I just figured you’d know enough to duck.” She shrugs and offers me a saccharine smile.
 

“I don’t think you want to start this with me, baby.”
 

“In case you missed the flour in your face a second ago, I already started it, baby.”
 

I stare her down, then reach over, grabbing the bowl of melted chocolate—my mom’s secret ingredient in her cookies—and dip my fingers into it. Winter narrows her eyes at me and takes a step back. “Don’t you dare.”

Amazon • B&N • iTunes • Kobo 

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BRIGHTON WALSH

Brighton Walsh spent nearly a decade as a professional photographer before deciding to take her storytelling in a different direction and reconnect with writing. She lives in the Midwest with her husband and two children.

Website • Twitter • Facebook • Goodreads

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GIVEAWAY

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Review + Giveaway: The Farm

THE FARM
The Farm #1
Emily McKay
Young Adult/Dystopian
420 pages
Berkley Trade
Available now
Received from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
Life was different in the Before: before vampires began devouring humans in a swarm across America; before the surviving young people were rounded up and quarantined. These days, we know what those quarantines are—holding pens where human blood is turned into more food for the undead monsters, known as Ticks. Surrounded by electrical fences, most kids try to survive the Farms by turning on each other…

And when trust is a thing of the past, escape is nearly impossible.

Lily and her twin sister Mel have a plan. Though Mel can barely communicate, her autism helps her notice things no one else notices—like the portion of electrical fence that gets turned off every night. Getting across won’t be easy, but as Lily gathers what they need to escape, a familiar face appears out of nowhere, offering to help…

Carter was a schoolmate of Lily’s in the Before. Managing to evade capture until now, he has valuable knowledge of the outside world. But like everyone on the Farm, Carter has his own agenda, and he knows that behind the Ticks is an even more dangerous threat to the human race...

MY THOUGHTS 
Despite a rather bland title, The Farm packs a physical and emotional punch, giving us stunningly flawed characters made all the more appealing by their imperfections and providing us with a stark contrast between human and monster in this dark and gritty tale. Part of the appeal aside from the characters themselves is the world; one we’ve caught just on the cusp of evolving into something new and frightening, but in this first installment it’s still a very recognizable world to us. The initial stages of change have begun, but the explanations for the Ticks and the farms seem plausible despite the paranormal element, and we settle into Lily, Mel and Carter’s lives with an easy familiarity not altogether common in dystopian stories.

Though we alternate between Lily and Mel’s first person points of view and Carter’s third person point of view, majority of our time is spent with Lily, a young woman who is a perfect jumble of strengths and weakness and has us in her corner almost immediately. Her obvious love for her autistic twin sister Mel is one of the highlights of the entire story, her need to protect and guide Mel beautifully offset by our understanding thanks to Mel’s POV that Mel herself is often not the one of the two of them in need of protection and guidance. Over the course of the story we get to see Lily and Mel’s relationship progress from one drastically skewed with Lily believing Mel to be a responsibility (though no doubt one she wouldn’t trade for anything) to a more equal bond between the two, with the realization from Lily that Mel, given her ability to strip the world down to its simplest form and see things without menial clutter getting in the way, is more capable of understanding, communication, and emotional support than she’d ever given her credit for.

The romantic element between Lily and Carter is as emotionally complex as Lily and Mel’s relationship, their brief history in the Before giving them a solid foundation from the very beginning and making it easier for us as readers to become invested in their future as a couple. Lily’s flashbacks to her first meeting with Carter her freshman year pull an unexpected laugh from us given the precarious situation she and her companions are in at present, her inner monologue detailing her massive crush on him sparking our own memories of that first gut reaction to someone we were utterly helpless to control. Their feelings for one another now are a giant knotted mass of insecurity, attraction, and hesitancy we can’t wait to unravel as the series progresses, the complication of a paranormal element making the tension between them that much sweeter.

Overall, The Farm is a hugely successful first installment, giving us a world transitioning from contemporary to dystopian and taking us along for the dark and riveting ride as humanity falters in the face of a seemingly unstoppable predator, but as we read, we find that the extraordinary makes heroes out of the previously ordinary.

Rating: 4/5

GIVEAWAY

Thanks to the wonderful people at Berkley/Penguin, I have one copy of The Farm to give away on the blog today! To enter, please just leave a comment on the review and be sure to include a valid email address so I can contact you if you win. This giveaway is open to US residents only and will run through midnight on Friday, January 11th after which time a winner will be chosen and emailed. Good luck everyone!