Late Night With Andres Blog Tour - Review, Playlist and Giveaway!!!

Release date: October 29th 2013

Purchase: Amazon

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18469063-late-night-with-andres

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Rising-star blogger Milla Kierce knows she's arrived when she sees the swag basket in her dressing room on the night of her late-night television debut. But before she can bite into the muffin that symbolizes her success, gunfire echoes through the TV studio. She's just hidden herself (mostly in plain sight) when the door flings open. Instead of a gunman, there stands one of the world's most popular rock stars, Gage Daxson, looking for his own way out of danger.

Thrown together, they'll battle a venomous man seeking revenge and his own sexual pleasure, but they may never leave the building again. Distracted by fear, fame, and infamy, can these two somehow find their way to each other?

Equal parts horrifying and hilarious, Debra Anastasia's Late Night With Andres offers more than a few twists and turns—and, of course, enough heat to keep things interesting.

My Thoughts

     Definitely an interesting read!  Milla Kierce is a blogger who has suddenly become famous in the media for her wit and advice with her online persona.  Now she's waiting to be interviewed by late night talk show host, Andres.  Things don't happen the way she expects however when a crazed gunman comes to the studio, throwing together her and rock star Gage Daxson, into a mutual fight for survival.  Now all they have to do is stay alive until the police are able to get them out of there,  Will they find they have something more in common than they ever thought?  I was already a fan of Debra when I read this novella, having read her book Poughkeepsie and absolutely adored it.  So I went into this one expecting something mainly hardcore and intense in it's rendering.  What I got instead was something slightly hardcore, with a very big sense of humor!

     Gage and Milla are both bad-asses but the gunman himself is a caricature most of the time, making me laugh while making me cringe and fear for their lives.  Probably the biggest caricature in this book is Andres himself, the talk show host who is basically a complete asshole and uses the entire situation to break back out into on the scene reporting.  He has hidden cameras in the dressing rooms, tries to obstruct justice by denying the police access to anything and everything - oh and he'd like nothing more than for someone to die and make his story all that much more exciting!  Probably my biggest disappointment was that the novella length didn't really allow for any serious character development and the romance felt very, very rushed and superficial.  The thing with the toes (I won't go into detail, so as not to spoil it) was funny and weird, but overall I just didn't feel like they could really say they loved each other based on the interactions they had.  Overall, it kept me entertained and was a fast, fun read.  I would recommend it, and I hope Debra decides to maybe expand it into a novel someday!

VERDICT:  3.5/5  Stars

*I received an ARC from the author.  No money or favors were exchanged for this review.  This book was published October 29th, 2013.*

Playlists

Gage:  I felt like Gage would probably be a really big fan of ballady, 70s and 80s rock bands.  Gage probably listens to a lot of Journey and Foreigner on his downtime, with some AC/DC mixed in for good measure, just to make sure people know he's a bad-ass!  For newer stuff, I see him as being a fan of Seether, Blink-182 and maybe some Imagine Dragons.

1.  For Those About to Rock - AC/DC
2.  Faithfully - Journey
3.  Cold As Ice - Foreigner
4.  Fake It - Seether
5.  What's My Age Again? - Blink 182
6.  Amsterdam - Imagine Dragons

Milla:  She's not a fan of Gage's music, which leads me to believe that she might be more into stuff that doesn't neccessarily hit the mainstream.  Here are five songs that I think Milla would probably like (the last is kind of what I think her preconceived notions of Gage match up with):

1.  The Beekeeper - Aoife O'Donovan

2.  Open-Ended Life - The Avett Brothers

3.  Tell Your Heart - Schuyler Fisk

4.  Helplessness Blues - The Fleet Foxes

5.  Talkin' Smooth - Kate Voegele

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Debra Anastasia grew up in New York and got a bachelor's degree in political science at SUNY New Paltz. At the start of her marriage, she moved to southern Maryland with her husband. She still doesn't trust crabs and all their legs, though everyone else in her family thinks they're delicious. Her favorite hobbies include knitting, painting furniture and wall murals, and slapping clowns.

Her writing started a decent handful of years ago when along with the dogs, cat, kids, and husband, the voices of characters started whispering stories in Debra's ear. Insomnia was the gateway for the plots that wouldn't give up, wouldn't let go. In the shower, a twist would take hold and--dripping and frenzied--she'd find somewhere, anywhere to write it down.

www.debraanastasia.com | twitter.com/Debra_Anastasia

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Burning Down the House

Published:  May 16th, 2013
Firecracker
By: David Iserson
Razorbill
ISBN-13:  9781595143709

Being Astrid Krieger is absolutely all it's cracked up to be.

She lives in a rocket ship in the backyard of her parents' estate.

She was kicked out of the elite Bristol Academy and she's intent on her own special kind of revenge to whomever betrayed her.

She only loves her grandfather, an incredibly rich politician who makes his money building nuclear warheads.

It's all good until...

"We think you should go to the public school," Dad said.
This was just a horrible, mean thing to say. Just hearing the words "public school" out loud made my mouth taste like urine (which, not coincidentally, is exactly how the public school smells).

Will Astrid finally meet her match in the form of public school? Will she find out who betrayed her and got her expelled from Bristol? Is Noah, the sweet and awkward boy she just met, hiding something?

Review

 

     From all of the reviews that I've read about this book, it seems to be one that you either REALLY like/love or one that you straight-up hate!  I am more in the truly like camp of feelings for this particular book.  Astrid Krieger is a truly messed up individual.  She comes from a very rich family, where everyone except for her crazy Grandfather pretty much ignores her and she's been taught that power is everything, that to need anyone else is the worst kind of weakness imaginable.  So when Astrid is betrayed by one of her minions and kicked out of her boarding school, she is determined to find out why exactly they got her kicked out and how they managed it.  In the meantime, she's stuck in public school with the unwashed masses but a boy named Noah might just make things more bearable until Astrid can regain her rightful place at Bristol Academy.  When all Hell breaks loose and her life becomes more of a mess than even she ever imagined, can Astrid pick up the pieces and learn to let someone else into her world finally? 

     I liked the premise of this book and there were a lot of extremely interesting characters.  This whole book centers around Astrid learning that she can't keep everything and everyone distanced from herself forever.  She is a complete and total asshole to everyone around her, the only person being an exception to that is her Grandfather.  Astrid has never truly had friends, only co-conspirators.  She can't stand anyone in her immediate family and refuses to call the exchange student who's obsessed with her by his actual name, instead calling him Pierre.  But when she meets Noah he starts to break through her shield of sarcasm and rudeness.  I loved that she lived in a rocket ship on the property instead of in the house with her family.  I loved the therapy sessions with her former headmaster and thought that his assignment for her was pretty genius.  The way she tries to enact a change in her life, while still being an aggressive, truth-telling bomb of human being was heartbreaking at times and absolutely hilarious at others. 

      I think that my favorite character was a toss up between her Grandfather and Lucy, her hair-chewing friend that she accepts into her life reluctantly.  Both had a certain vulnerability (Lucy's was more obvious) that made Astrid actually stop and think about her actions at times.  Yes Astrid does horrible things to people with practically zero reason: trying to sell the local police station to China, robbing convenience stores, the way she treats Pierre, smashing a Twinkie into a bitchy girl's hair at school.  But she also does good things like giving away burgers at the Dairy Queen, going to Lucy's birthday party and roller-skating when no one shows up, saving her sister's wedding by getting the groom to the church when it looks like he's gonna run for it.  By the end of the novel she is still herself, but has learned that to be an awesome person she doesn't have to alienate everyone.  My main complaint would be the meandering plot that seems to go in a million directions and gets slightly ADD as it moves along.  It takes way too long for Astrid to figure out the mystery behind being kicked out of boarding school, especially who was really behind it.  I had figured out by the halfway point at the latest.  And Astrid's self-monologues did get somewhat repetitive at times.  Overall, it was a seriously amusing and funny book that had memorable characters and a decent plot.  I would recommend it to fans of the more recent run of crazy comedies like Pineapple Express and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, who enjoy an edge reminiscent of that T.V. show New Girl, for which the author is a writer.

 

VERDICT:  4/5  Stars

 

*I received an Advanced Reading E-book Copy from the publisher, via NetGalley. No money or favors were exchanged for this review. This book was published May 16th, 2013.*