Alicia J. Chumney's Blog

Disclaimer - This is a lengthy read.  There is a TL;DR version near the bottom.



For a good chunk of the month of May I have been diligently - and at times not so diligently watching the #cockygate drama unfolding on Twitter.

I've probably neglected a few things in as this battle began and continued to unfold.

What is #cockygate?

An author - who shall not be named - decided to trademark a

This post is pulling double duty today.



First up, An Inconvenient Princess.  The youngest and seventh child - Penny - meets Rapunzel.   



Only,  unexpectedly, Penny has no magic - unlike her siblings.  It's expected that the seventh sibling have some sort of abilities, but Penny doesn't, and it disappoints everybody who encounters her.



When Penny goes searching for her twin,

A few weeks ago I read, and reviewed, another Joanne Macgregor story. 

Hushed is... WOW.   I had trouble putting it down.  Once again I found myself reading at the gym (a given when I'm on the treadmill or elliptical) and not paying a bit of attention on the time or distance just so I could finish a chapter. 

I thought about it while doing my stretches/cool down.  While grocery shopping -

I am nearing the end of this Special Edition blog post series.

A Little Mermaid (Aya Ling) is the fifth and second to the last book in the Entwined Tales series.  (The last comes out today.)

Whereas the other tales focused on the female members of the Woodcutter family, this tale features a mermaid named Clio and a Prince named Lukas.

Wait... you dear puzzled reader might be asking. 

One of the things I like about the Entwined Tales series is that I'm getting a novella length trial run of authors that have been on my to-read pile or Amazon keeps recommending.

Kenley Davidson is one of those authors.  Her The Andari Chronicles keeps appearing in my recommendations. 

Her contribution handles another lesser known tale, The Frog Princess, with deftness.

Wait? Don't you mean

Here's another YA cover featuring shoes.  Not my first review/recommendation and probably not the last with a couple shot of shoes.

Wait... why am I rambling about cover shots of shoes?  It caught my attention, didn't it?

Joanne Macgregor's The Law of Tall Girls is simple.    Tall guys should date tall girls and not short girls.  After all, short girls can date average sized guys but it

A Bear's Bride is Book Three in the Entwined Tales series features Sophie.  Any readers of the previous two books can deduce that she's a handful.

We start off with her sneaking off to visit her friend, Peter.  The very friend she's been forbidden from seeing.  Peter then proposes and they make plans to run away together.

Until her father interrupts and informs Sophie he's accepted somebody

Sometimes, just sometimes, I stumble on a book that catches my attention from an author I've never heard of before.

All I did was click on Kindle Unlimited in the Kindle Book Store and then checked out the recommended for you section.

After scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through the romances and retold fairy tales my results started getting interesting.

I don't know if it was the

Okay, Brittany Fichter has been in my to-read-eventually list for ages.  What a better time to be introduce to her writing than with this Entwined Fairy Tales series?

An Unnatural Beanstalk is the second tale in the series and is based off of Jack and the Beanstalk.  Obviously.

While one of the lesser known tales, Jack and the Beanstalk has one major plot line despite the many variations.

 

The funny thing about reading something from somebody you sorta-kinda know (I went to high school with Megan O'Russell's husband, but I have not met this fearless author, yet.) is that there are tiny moments in books where you catch reality sneaking into fiction.

And it is amazing!  Like Chapters 11 through   where I can see details and dialogue inspired by real life adventures (and possibly