Cruise with an Adorable Fat Girl

by Bernice Bloom

Goodreads

Amazon US / UK

Mary Brown – our full-figured heroine – is off on a cruise. It’s the trip of a lifetime…featuring eat-all-you-can buffets and a trek through Europe with a 96-year-old widower called Frank and a flamboyant Spanish dancer called Juan Pedro in attendance. Then there’s the desperately handsome captain, the appearance of an ex-boyfriend on the ship, the time she’s mistaken for a Hollywood film star in Lisbon and tonnes of clothes shopping all over Europe.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

If I was surprised to see Simon, then he was a million more times surprised to see me … for the simple fact that four years ago I’d told him that I had six months to live. I know, I know, it’s appalling behaviour but I’m rubbish at finishing relationships and I just came out with it.

“You look like that actress… what’s her name?” said one of the guys. “You know – the blonde one?” “Grace Kelly?” I said. That was certainly the look I’d been going for. “No, no – Rebel Wilson,” he said. “You look very like her.” “Thanks,” I said. “I was hoping I was channelling Grace Kelly.”

I don’t know a great deal about politics: only that Theresa May wears great shoes and Donald Trump is a giant, orange loon-bucket and no one knows how he was elected.

I wanted fries as well, but Juan said that was tacky. Coming from a man in tight leather trousers that finished halfway up his calf, I wasn’t sure whether that was a compliment or an insult.

My Review:

The last thing on earth I need is another addiction, but I fear I have acquired a new one for the cunningly amusing author Bernice Bloom and her wily Adorable Fat Girl series.   Mary Brown is an adorable yet outrageous Queen-Sized trouble-magnet and party animal who manages to embroil herself in the oddest of quandaries. While generally well intended, the fallout of her exploits was uproariously comical and kept a smirk on my face throughout, as Mary was nearly unstoppable once she got an idea and a full head of steam, or had been into the gin.

During this adventure, Mary took her hijinx to the high seas and across Europe when offered a free cruise to accompany her travel blogging friend who was to chronicle their trip, and being an indiscriminate lover of food, Mary was wildly excited about the free all you can eat buffets. When her friend bailed at the last minute, she made Mary promise to secretly provide the blog entries to ensure more free trips. Free cruises for blogging? Where do I sign up?

Mary made fast friends on the ship and became particularly fascinated and obsessed with the tale unfolding from her ninety-year-old dinner table-mate, Frank, and eagerly listened to fragments of his tale until his nurse/companion whisked him away each night.   Frank was making the voyage for a specific purpose, for which Mary just had to insert herself. Once they reached Sicily, Mary sprang into action and assembled a rag-tag crew for their expedition to locate a cottage and make amends for Frank’s seventy-year-old regret. I adored the various storylines, loved the quirky and captivating characters, and was beguiled by Ms. Bloom’s colorful and highly amusing writing style. I am hopelessly addicted.   More Fat Girl, please!

Author Bio –

Hello, my name is Bernice Bloom and I am a writer (I write light-hearted rom-com style novels and also work as a magazine journalist and advertising copywriter) and jewelry designer. My recent series of novels is called ‘Adorable Fat Girl’ and it features a heavily overweight woman called Mary Brown. She is bright, funny, friendly and bonkers. She’s also fat. The books blend the comedy of her efforts to lose weight with a more serious backstory about what happened to her in the past that had led to the issues that make her prone to over-eating. I’m fascinated that there are so few overweight heroines in literature. Women can be manipulative, evil, even murderers in fiction, but not fat! Certainly not fat and beautiful with loads of friends! Then along came Mary and she’s developed quite a fan base of people who love the fact that the heroine is large. She gets lots of letters and I have ended up taking her on lots of adventures!

Social Media Links –

https://www.facebook.com/BerniceBloombooks/

https://twitter.com/Bernice1Bloom

https://www.instagram.com/bernicebloomwriter/?hl=en

Giveaway 

Win a Daisy Bracelet and Earring set created by Bernice Bloom

(Open Internationally)

*Terms and Conditions –Worldwide entries welcome.  Please enter using the Rafflecopter box below.  The winner will be selected at random via Rafflecopter from all valid entries and will be notified by Twitter and/or email. If no response is received within 7 days then I reserve the right to select an alternative winner. Open to all entrants aged 18 or over.  Any personal data given as part of the competition entry is used for this purpose only and will not be shared with third parties, with the exception of the winners’ information. This will be passed to the giveaway organizer and used only for the fulfillment of the prize, after which time I will delete the data.  I am not responsible for despatch or delivery of the prize.

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Diary of an Adorable Fat Girl

 The Complete, Full-length Novel

by Bernice Bloom

Goodreads

 Amazon US /  UK 

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Mary Brown is funny, gorgeous and bonkers. She’s also about six stone overweight. When she realizes she can’t cross her legs, has trouble bending over to tie her shoelaces without wheezing like an elderly chain-smoker, and discovers that even her hands and feet look fat, it’s time to take action. But what action? She’s tried every diet under the sun.

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This is the hysterical story of what happens when Mary joins ‘Fat Club’ where she meets a cast of funny characters and one particular man who catches her eye.

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The story is laugh-out-loud funny and will resonate with anyone who has dieted, tried to keep up with any sort of exercise programme or spent 10 minutes in a changing room trying to extricate herself from a way-too-small garment that she ambitiously tried on and is now completely stuck in.

Bernice Bloom is the big, new name in comedy writing…this is the first full-length novel after her series of laugh-out-loud mini books.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Sorry, it might sound like a horrible thing to say, but when I was sweet and pretty and slim, men opened doors. Now they take one look at me bulldozing my way down the street and think ‘well that one can clearly open the door herself – blimey she might take the whole thing off its hinges’… The day you can’t squeeze into your size 16 jeans is the day you learn to open doors for yourself.

I wanted the fish and chips like I’ve never wanted anything in my life before, but I reined myself in. I could easily nick some of Ted’s chips instead, everyone knows that the calories don’t count if they are contained in food nicked from someone else’s plate.

“This is the stupidest thing ever to happen to me in my whole, entire life.” I just shrugged. It wasn’t the stupidest thing to have happened to me that week, so I wasn’t in a position to comment.

Most beauticians think they’re scientists… And I was absolutely sure that every time they covered my face in something like mashed up beetle’s’ legs, sea moss and elephant’s semen that I’d emerge looking like Cameron Diaz. That was the thing about going to the beauticians – it was all about the hope.

Honestly, bringing out weighing scales at a Fat Club was like bringing out a hand grenade or a venomous snake. I noticed that Janice had physically recoiled from the sight of it.

My Review:

Originally written as three separate novella type installments for a six-part series, I giggle-snorted my way through this delightfully amusing yet insightfully written tale of a dramatic, Queen-Sized, Calamity Jane type named Mary. Mary was a trouble-magnet of the most unusual variety, yet she meant well, most of the time. Mary had acquired a weight problem following a vaguely referenced traumatic event in her teens, and while she had attempted and failed many diets, she was frustrated with herself and driven to join her first group-oriented approach, a group she called “Fat Club.” She made new friends with a few of the members and a special friend indeed with Ted, a sweet man whose kind heart was as large as his appetite. I enjoyed the premise, adored the quirky characters, and was highly entertained and charmed by Ms. Bloom’s observantly insightful, colorfully descriptive, and humorous writing style. Much to my merriment, Mary repeatedly found herself in the most unusual and comical of predicaments. The ending of this book felt rather abrupt until I realized the story had not concluded but had reached a satisfactory for-now stopping point in the middle of the series, as  three more installments remained. And between giggles, I fell upon a new addition for my Brit vocabulary list with “cack-handed” – which according to Urban Dictionary means “an awkward or inept way of doing something; originally meaning left-handed, stemming from cultures that use their right hand to eat and their left hand to wipe their behind.” I am eagerly looking forward to more cack-handed adventures as I already have Cruise with an Adorable Fat Girl waiting for me on my Kindle.   And, my apologies to any southpaws who may accidentally stumble upon this silly little review.

Author Bio –

Hello, my name is Bernice Bloom and I am a writer (I write light-hearted rom-com style novels and also work as a magazine journalist and advertising copywriter) and jewelry designer. My recent series of novels is called ‘Adorable Fat Girl’ and it features a heavily overweight woman called Mary Brown. She is bright, funny, friendly and bonkers. She’s also fat. The books blend the comedy of her efforts to lose weight with a more serious backstory about what happened to her in the past that had led to the issues that make her prone to over-eating. I’m fascinated that there are so few overweight heroines in literature. Women can be manipulative, evil, even murderers in fiction, but not fat! Certainly not fat and beautiful with loads of friends! Then along came Mary and she’s developed quite a fan base of people who love the fact that the heroine is large. She gets lots of letters and I have ended up taking her on lots of adventures!

Social Media Links –

https://www.facebook.com/BerniceBloombooks/

https://twitter.com/Bernice1Bloom

https://www.instagram.com/bernicebloomwriter/?hl=en

Giveaway 

Win a Daisy Bracelet and Earring set created by Bernice Bloom (Open Internationally).

*Terms and Conditions –Worldwide entries welcome.  Please enter using the Rafflecopter box below.  The winner will be selected at random via Rafflecopter from all valid entries and will be notified by Twitter and/or email. If no response is received within 7 days then I reserve the right to select an alternative winner. Open to all entrants aged 18 or over.  Any personal data given as part of the competition entry is used for this purpose only and will not be shared with third parties, with the exception of the winners’ information. This will be passed to the giveaway organiser and used only for the fulfillment of the prize, after which time I will delete the data.  I am not responsible for despatch or delivery of the prize.

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Author: Lindsay Detwiler

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Release Date: March 10, 2018

Publisher: Hot Tree Publishing

Cover Designer: Claire Smith

 

An undeniable chemistry simmers between the unlikely pair. The beach babe and the sexy cowboy soon find themselves asking: Can they tame their wild hearts and commit to the blossoming romance between them?

 

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

No, I don’t want to come into your honky-tonk bachelor pad and eat weird casseroles from the other neighbors who are apparently deaf because if I brought you a casserole right now, it’d probably be poisoned. Just saying.

 

She pinkie swore it was, so clearly that must mean it’s true. Oh, to be twenty-two again.

 

Oh my God, if he did that to you with a kiss, imagine what’s going to happen when you knock boots… What? I’ve always wanted to use that expression, and now it fits.

 

I don’t know if I’m in the writing mood. I think I’ve just seen too much twerking tonight to write effective horror.

 

Jodie doesn’t take handouts. Well, unless they’re in the form of free drinks. Then I lower my principles a notch. I’m not foolish, after all.

 

My Review:

Although a stand-alone story, Wild Hearts picked up where Inked Hearts left off, and was written from the first person POV of Jodie, a waitress and indie author wannabe of the horror genre. Her sexy new neighbor sported western attire, a limp, and a noisy parrot name Johnny Cash who enjoyed the loud country music of his namesake, at all hours of the day.   Jodie wasn’t a fan. I wasn’t an immediate fan of Jodie in this story as she was a rather abrupt and rude drama llama and mean girl to the tall glass of water named Levi. Oh, Levi, swoon – cue the fluttering hand-fan. But Levi’s obvious charms were too hard to resist and they soon decided on a “no-strings-attached” association of “just fun.” Of course, with a sweet and adorable couple with magnetic chemistry, it couldn’t stay at that level for long and I grew to appreciate Jodie almost as much as Levi had, although she continued to be prone to rash and dramatic overreactions. I enjoy this quirky, amusing, diverse cast of characters and look forward to more lively and entertaining stories from this clever wordsmith.

Nook: http://bit.ly/2DzhZsT

 

 

Lines in the Sand, Book 1

Inked Hearts

ONLY 99c

books2read.com/inkedhearts

 

Facebook I Twitter I Website

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A high school English teacher, an author, and a fan of anything pink and/or glittery, Lindsay’s the English teacher cliché; she loves cats, reading, Shakespeare, and Poe.

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She currently lives in her hometown with her husband, Chad (her junior high sweetheart); their cats, Arya, Amelia, Alice, and Bob; and their Mastiff, Henry.

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Lindsay’s goal with her writing is to show the power of love and the beauty of life while also instilling a true sense of realism in her work. Some reviewers have noted that her books are not the “typical romance.” With her novels coming from a place of honesty, Lindsay examines the difficult questions, looks at the tough emotions, and paints the pictures that are sometimes difficult to look at. She wants her fiction to resonate with readers as realistic, poetic, and powerful. Lindsay wants women readers to be able to say, “I see myself in that novel.” She wants to speak to the modern woman’s experience while also bringing a twist of something new and exciting. Her aim is for readers to say, “That could happen,” or “I feel like the characters are real.” That’s how she knows she’s done her job.

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Lindsay’s hope is that by becoming a published author, she can inspire some of her students and other aspiring writers to pursue their own passions. She wants them to see that any dream can be attained and publishing a novel isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

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