Tag: reading

A sneak peek at Hard Lemonade with Darlene DeLuca

~ Jacquie Bosma ~ Leave a comment

Joining me at the blog today is author Darlene DeLuca. Darlene writes contemporary romance that feels real and women’s fiction that explores relationships – what brings people together or keeps them apart. Her intent is to bring to life interesting characters that readers can relate to in real-life situations that combine a little fun, plenty of drama, and big helpings of friendship, love, and self-discovery, and will leave readers either cheering or sighing with a satisfied smile as they turn the final page. The Kansas City author enjoys getting lost in a good story with a glass of tea, a bit of dark chocolate and a warm, sunny beach.

“It’s not really letting go of the past that is the problem. It is coming to terms with letting go of a possible future that will never be. That is the struggle. To let go of the past you must let go of the future and live in the present.” – Anonymous

Letting go of a dream, watching a dream die, knowing a dream is out of your control… What’s the answer? How do you know when to keep trying, when to change your goals? When to give up?

I explore these questions in my new women’s fiction novel, Hard Lemonade, releasing Oct. 1. Emily Sherridan and her new husband leave friends and family behind in Chicago to pursue their dreams in sunny Los Angeles. Eric writes screenplays and dreams of making blockbuster movies. Emily supports his dream and plans to finish her college education at prestigious USC then launch her career in marketing and consumer studies. 

They work hard. Emily throws all of her energy into school and work. Eric joins writing groups, networks within the industry, submits proposal after proposal to agents and studios. He’s building on the regional success he had in college. He won awards. The university theater department produced his plays. He and Emily arrive in L.A. full of hope and confidence.

But life happens—and it doesn’t follow their roadmap.

How they each respond to the changes and disappointments sets them on a bumpy course pitting hopes against reality.

Her husband fails. Her marriage fails. Does that make Emily Sherridan a failure?

With high hopes and rose-colored shades, Emily Sherridan leaves her family and friends to build a new life with her screenwriter husband in sunny Los Angeles. There, she learns that love conquers all…until the rent is overdue, the rejections pile up, or the test is positive.

As months, then years, go by and Eric’s career fails to launch, Emily is determined to hold everything together. But when he brings danger into their lives, it’s over. When the cops arrive at her doorstep, anguish mixes with anger. She wonders how low they can go—until one of the officers hands her the number to a women’s shelter.

Broke and broken, her dreams are dashed and her confidence is shaken. With Eric’s taunt about running home pounding in her ears, Emily pushes forward though she’s unsure of her direction. She cannot give up. Her daughter deserves more.

From rosy dreams to real-life roadblocks, Hard Lemonade is a compelling story of friends, family, and fierce sheroes.

Go here to get your own copy of Hard Lemonade ahead of its release on October 1st! Be sure to connect with Darlene on Instagram, Facebook, and her website.

Keep reading for an exclusive excerpt from this compelling novel before it comes out!

Continue reading “A sneak peek at Hard Lemonade with Darlene DeLuca” →

Ode to the Fancy Book Club

~ Jacquie Bosma ~ Leave a comment

This story begins the way any good story should begin: with a castle.

It’s a fiberglass castle, actually. Hurricane resistant, too, if you can believe it. And I wasn’t even dressed for a castle that day. I was wearing a t-shirt and an athleisure skort. Showing up any better dressed than that, and folks might mistake me for one of the residents. Not that that would be such a bad thing, actually…

Fine. Disney. I was at Disney.

During a midday break in our family’s one-day-only trip to Magic Kingdom, I saw a text from a friend of mine. She invited me to take part in a start-up book club, one with an emphasis on (a) actually reading the book and (b) being as fancy as possible with our monthly book club discussion gatherings. This is… surprisingly groundbreaking for a lot book clubs nowadays. There are lots of “book clubs” out there that are thinly veiled excuses to binge drink with a bunch of people and/or chat so much that no one actually discusses a book (or, in the worst case scenarios, they don’t actually ever read the book.)

It sounded good to me. I was then added to the Fancy Book Club group chat on WhatsApp, and… I missed the first three meetings.

By May, I finally came to my first meeting. May’s book was The Secret Life of Sunflowers by Marta Molnar, a dual-timeline historical novel telling the stories of the lives of people who knew Vincent Van Gogh well. Our cake was decorated to look like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. We discussed the book for over an hour (and this was after dinner and chitchat). It was the best first taste of Fancy Book Club—a monthly gathering that I’ve come to love for so many reasons. Here are just a few.

We take turns. One of our members had the good idea to create a shared spreadsheet to schedule out the year. Members take turns hosting in pairs. We’ve been to one another’s houses, but we’ve also had meetings in an old tannery warehouse, an RV, and a distillery. Someone once brought up that she’d talked to someone who had run a book club for decades, and she always, always, always plays host. She has to buy the food. She has to mix drinks. She has to clean house. What a nightmare. I’m grateful that we share the hosting responsibilities among our members—less pressure, less stress, and more fun to see how everyone chooses to decorate/theme/host. Best of all: we have a fabulous December meeting each year, where instead of a book discussion, we gather at our local rooftop bar and participate in a blind-date-with-a-book style book exchange.

We all get to vote on book selections. Every month, the hosts will come up with a shortlist of books for the club to choose from, usually centered around a theme (romance, historical, literary, even—gasp!—nonfiction). We’ll read descriptions and vote on our favorites. The choice with the most votes is the book we’ll read that month. It’s more fun when we can have some options—and, more often than not, even the ones that don’t win the poll will be ones I’ll add to my TBR. This ensures we have a wide range of books to discover from lots of folks with differing reading preferences. (We also may or may not have an annual tradition where one month is “Petty Book Club” and the hosts will select a book that didn’t make the cut earlier that year. It was only once, but it should be an annual tradition. Without the temporary switchover to Petty Book Club, I would have never been introduced to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and that would have been a darn shame.

We read outside of our comfort zones. We’re not a one-genre book club. Because we have diverse interests, Fancy Book Club has read contemporary literary fiction, romcoms, historical dramas, fantasy, among many other sub-genres. October’s book club pick was Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. I have never voluntarily picked up anything even horror-adjacent in my life (real life is already scary; why would I want anything even more frightening?!), but this was one of my favorite books of the year. I have read books that I would have never chosen on my own. In turn, I have learned so much more about the various experiences, perspectives, and people that make up our world.

We’re an amazing bunch. Fancy Book Club includes some familiar friends as well as some new-to-me-since-book-club-started friends. Some of these women are actual Pinterest Boards of hosting ideas, many are astonishingly skilled at crafting a gorgeous meal. Mixologists, teachers, party planners, parents, leaders—it’s like our very own Barbie World full of bookworms. Icons everywhere.

We’re different readers. We have different perspectives on life. Some are introverts; some are extroverts. We’ve got different strengths. But we do have a profound shared love of books and getting out the fancy serveware once a month Just Because.

If you find yourselves blessed with a book club that feels like a warm, welcoming, decadent party, one where life’s crazy anecdotes meets thought-provoking literary discussion, then you are blessed indeed.

I know I am.

Most—not quite all—of the bestest book club ever.

“Nobody reads anymore.”

~ Jacquie Bosma ~ Leave a comment

I’m a creative human. Even if you’ve only so much as passed by me at the grocery store, you can probably catch that vibe. As much as I want to claim being a well-rounded individual, there’s an under-nurtured area of my personality that doesn’t see a lot of action: Analytical stuff. Statistics. The precise predictability of numbers.

My husband loves that stuff, so we balance each other out pretty well. But I noticed a study recently conducted by the Pew Research Center that made my ears perk up: reading trends among U.S. adults.

Which, yay, statistics! News I can use! But the results are… a little icky.

“How can you read this? There’s no pictures!”

Of the U.S. adults surveyed, less than half of them (38%) have read at least one book in the past year. Very few of them enjoy reading in any kind of book club community (only 5% of men and 10% of women). And one quarter of them—that’s 25% for those of you who are even more number-averse than I am—read zero books at all this past year.

There’s still a small percentage of surveyed adults (about 14%) that have read more than 20 books in a year, but the big numbers are revealing that many adults read, at most, one book a year and, at worst, no books.

Take a look at another survey from August, where we see a steep decline in adults who read for enjoyment over the past decade or two.

These surveys don’t really dive into the “why” too much. It’s likely a bundle of unique circumstances—the overwhelming busyness of day-to-day life, socioeconomic disadvantages, mental fatigue, as well as learning disabilities that make reading less enjoyable for some people—but I’m more concerned with those who aren’t reading not because they can’t, but because they just don’t want to.

So if that’s you, and you’ve somehow wandered onto a blog that’s written by someone who is part of that weird 14% who reads 20+ books a year, but also someone who writes them… pull up a chair. Let’s have something tasty to sip on. And let’s chat about the Why.

I was a child during the height of the “Read” poster campaign and yes, that is a flex.

“Reading feels like homework.” No actually, it really does. Sometimes. I love my book club, but some months are easier than others when it comes to powering through a book that isn’t something I normally read. But if you’re an adult that’s out of school, here’s something great to know: You can listen to your favorite music in the car. You can eat cereal for dinner if you want. You can have a birthday cake when it isn’t your birthday. And you don’t have to read any books you don’t want to read. Sometimes that means I re-read books I loved as a kid (Goosebumps, Baby-Sitter’s Club, the OG American Girls historical fiction books, Animorphs, even The Stinky Cheese Man). Nostalgia is a heck of a drug.

Really. Nobody’s making you complete a required reading list. How freeing is that! Get a book, any book, and dive in. Once you start reading things you actually want to read, you might start to branch out and read things outside of your interest level. You might even learn something by accident but it won’t even feel like school when you do.

“I don’t like books.” I can reassure you on the homework thing, but I’m gonna have to put my foot down here. Yes you do. This is a point in history where anyone can publish a book about anything. An. Ee. Thing. If you like it, there is a book about it.

Maybe you thought books weren’t your thing because you’re not into romantasy like all the Booktok girlies are right now (spoiler: me neither, actually). Or you think life is too hard to actually enjoy a thriller or horror book, so maybe you could try a low-stakes cozy read. It might be that fiction isn’t something you enjoy at all. Awesome! Do you have any idea how many insanely compelling non-fiction books there are out there?! Your reading preferences won’t be the same as mine, to which I say, “Amazing. You do you, boo.”

“Books are expensive.” Undeniably. I won’t argue that point. Everything is getting prohibitively expensive, and seeing hardcover books go for upwards of forty dollars is—sorry, fellow authors—stupid. And that’s if you don’t go for sprayed edges or Super Duper Special Editions or whatever else they’re trying to upsell you on. Even paperbacks are running about twenty bucks. E-reader copies are sometimes affordable, but even those run you about six dollars on a normal day.

If I can challenge you to venture outside of your Barnes & Noble, or your preferred big box store, or That One River Running Through Most Of South America (you know the one), though, you might find some alternatives. Many independent bookstores offer used books—many of which are recent used books that are in demand right now and not just the dusty dog-eared copies of your grandma’s old bodice-ripper paperback but hey listen there’s a place for that sometimes—and many places will even pay you (or offer store credit) for books you read and want to unload. Or, next time you’re thrifting for a mythical pull on a hanger, scoot over to their books on offer. You might discover a treasure there, too.

And, of course, if you don’t want to pay anything at all, there’s the valuable advice that we all learned when watching Arthur: “Having fun isn’t hard when you’ve got a library card!” Most libraries don’t charge you anything to join; all you have to do is be local to that area. And when you try a book at the library and don’t like it, you can choose from one of the bazillion other offerings! Many libraries also work with Libby, an app that allows you to read library books right on your e-reader.

“I like listening to books instead, but someone said it doesn’t count as reading.” Yes it does. Audiobooks count as books. And anyone that says otherwise can be directed to me so I can have a little chat with ‘em about how not to be a pretentious butt-head. You keep doing your audiobooks, champ. Enjoy them.

Have you ever been in a reading slump, or did you have to re-discover the joy of reading altogether? How did you do it? Let me know!