Monday Book Review: The Marriage Ultimatum, by Charlotte O'Shay

The Marriage Ultimatum, by Charlotte O'Shay
Published June 2016 by The Wild Rose Press

About the Book:

Dead-end job? Dreary apartment? Disastrous love life? Check, check, and check. Toddler who makes it all worthwhile? Absolutely. Juggling work, college, and the care of young Alex was never Sabrina's plan.
But Sabrina's dreams are bigger than any curve ball life can throw at her. Her top priority is keeping her small family together, no matter what the cost.

Vladimir Grigory doesn't believe in dreams. He earned his position at the top of New York's corporate ladder with his own sweat. His empire is his baby, and he'll destroy anyone who threatens it. Even the sexy employee who challenges him on every level. When the New York tabloids and the world call him the baby daddy of Sabrina's son, Vlad believes Sabrina is part of a plot to expose the secrets of his past. He threatens to destroy her future. But since Sabrina has secrets of her own, she has no choice but to agree to Vlad's marriage ultimatum.

My Take

I absolutely love the cover of this author's debut romance! And the story, while it has a few quirks, is sassy, fast-paced and truly fun to read. 

The tag line on the cover reads "is love worth the risk of telling your secrets," and these main characters have a few whopper secrets they're not only keeping from each other, but trying to hide from the world. The story may be flawed in places, like its characters, but the first thing I wanted to do when I finished was to start over again from the beginning and live through it all a second time.

Life has not been easy for Sabrina Boyd. Her dad took off when she was small, leaving her single mom to struggle in poverty and through a series of failed relationships. When it seemed her mother had finally turned the corner, with a steady job and steady guy, she got pregnant. After the baby was born, a tragic accident left Sabrina alone with an infant to care for.  Not wanting to lose her only remaining family to DSS, Sabrina dropped out of college to raise her baby brother as if he were her own.

Vladimir Grigory might be a billionaire, but he started life as an orphan on the docks of St. Petersburg, his younger brother clinging to him. He escaped that fate by going to sea on a merchant ship, and later made his fortune in the U.S. shipping industry. In all that time, he never forgot his lonely origins and vowed to make life better for Russia's other abandoned children.

So when tabloid stories and photos surface accusing Vlad of fathering - and abandoning - Sabrina's child, he understandably goes a bit ballistic and overreacts. Sabrina is caught up in the whirlwind, and even though she is a strong, independent woman, she gets totally sucked along in Vlad's plan, his seduction, and his marriage ultimatum. But what happens when her secret gets out? And how will Vlad keep his own childhood secret as Sabrina grows closer to his heart?

As I said, the story has a few quirks, but all in all was well written, well told, and  thoroughly enjoyable. Totally recommend for a fast paced, absorbing beach read, filled with both heart and sizzle. I'm looking forward to reading more from this author.

Grab a copy today on AMAZON

Friday Feature: The Darker Side of Mermaid Life

You might be thinking, “What could be so dark about mermaids?” 

And while you are asking this question, most of you are picturing the Disney version of Ariel in your mind. Sweet, innocent, cartoon-ishly benign. Go ahead, admit it. She is the most famous mermaid of our times.

But mermaids and sea creatures aren’t so one-dimensional. After all, remember the sea witch, Ursula?

Throughout history, there have always been tales of mermaids. There are cave paintings of evil mermaids. Seriously. Over the centuries, mermaids have been closely associated with shipwrecks, drownings, storms and floods. Think of the syrens of Greek mythology, luring sailors to their deaths on the rocky shores.

In one popular Greek legend, the gods turn Alexander the Great’s sister into a mermaid. She lives in the Aegean Sea and when she encounters a ship she asks its sailors only one question: "Is King Alexander alive?" The proper answer is yes, saying "He lives and reigns and conquers the world." Placated, the mermaid calms the waters and wishes the ship farewell. Any other answer spurs her into a rage where she summons a storm, dooming the ship and its sailors.

Just a few hundred years ago, Christopher Columbus famously reported sighting mermaids in the Caribbean, saying they weren’t as beautiful as legend proclaimed. And just a few years ago, Johnny Depp befriended those same Caribbean mermaids as Jack Sparrow, in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Remember how scary those mermaids could be?

The main character of my Son of a Mermaid YA series is fifteen-year-old Shea MacNamara. He grew up in Oklahoma far away from any oceans, never thinking about mermaids. Raised by his emotionally distant father, he never knew the mom who left when he was a baby. Since Dad never even mentioned her, Shea figured it had been a surprise pregnancy, and that his dad had gotten “stuck” raising the unwanted child.

Shea never understood why his dad always seemed sad and isolated, urging Shea to keep his odd abilities secret. He’s never felt like he quite “fit in” with his classmates, but couldn’t figure out why. He endures the taunts of school bullies, developing a deep mistrust of authority but a strong sense of right and wrong. When a freak tornado destroys his farm and claims his father, Shea feels completely abandoned. A grandmother he’s never met arrives on the scene, and he’s forced to leave everything familiar to move back to Cape Cod, where his father was born and raised.

He meets a mysterious girl along the shores of the Atlantic – a girl with secrets, and who knows secrets about Shea as well. The girl introduces him to an undersea world he never knew existed, and suddenly all the odd abilities he’s developed over the years make total sense. He also discovers that not all mermaids are beautiful and sweet, and that bullies and evil exist everywhere.

Descent: Son of a Mermaid~Book One tells the story of Shea’s introduction to this undersea world, where he meets Prince Demyan, a ruthless merman from another clan who is trying to take over the Atlantic Ocean. In the second book of the series, Defiance, Prince Demyan seeks revenge on Shea for spoiling his evil plans.

We readily accept that there are all sorts of vampires in literature – from the sparkly kind to the more grim and bloodthirsty versions. Why is it we think all mermaids should be sugary sweet?

Just as people come in all shades of good and evil, so should merfolk. It makes life under the sea that much more intriguing!

Grab copies of DESCENT and DEFIANCE on AMAZON - or ask for them at your local bookstore.

Writing Wednesday: The Dark Side of Controlling your Characters

You get to a point when you’re reading a book when you understood all the characters. Who’s the hero, who’s the heroine, who are the bad guys… You’ve got them figured out. Then someone goes and does something you totally didn’t expect. That completely changes your perception of them.

That happens to authors too.

At least, it happens to me.

In the second book of my Son of a Mermaid series, one of the key characters is the sorcerer Zan. We met him a few times in Descent, the first book, as the sidekick to Prince Demyan. He’s part of the inner circle of evil guys trying to overthrow the Atlantic kingdom, and we see the deadly consequences of his magick. The tornado that destroys Shea’s home in Oklahoma. The storm that kills Shea’s grandfather and uncle. The poison that makes its way into food at the Solstice banquet. 

Prince Demyan may have given all those orders, but Zan followed through with their execution.

In Defiance, Book Two of Son of a Mermaid, we meet Zan right from the get-go, with the first chapter in his point of view. We find out that even though the rebellion failed, he’s still in league with the evil prince and signing up for more dirty work.

When I started writing Zan, he was pretty one-dimensional. A bad guy. 

Originally, Zan was only going to narrate a few chapters, like he did in the first book, to give the reader insight into what the bad guys were up to. But as I was writing subsequent chapters, Zan’s voice kept popping up, asking me – begging me – to let him tell the scene from his perspective.

I decided to let him have a voice. And he surprised me!

Something happened to him when he went to kidnap Kae. Giving him one of the point-of-view voices let him show me what was going on inside of his head, and gave voice to his inner doubts.

Bad guys aren’t supposed to have doubts. But Zan did. He wanted to be better, to be worthy of a mermaid like Kae.

By the end of the book, he’d redeemed himself in my eyes. Even though he was originally going to die – yes, really, I planned to kill him off – I didn’t want to punish him at all. He’d done terrible things under orders from Prince Demyan, but I convinced Shea to let him off the hook… except a full pardon didn’t sit well with beta readers or with my editor.

Evil deeds demand consequences.

Zan’s character at the end of the book is not who I thought he was going to be. I gave up trying to control him and I like the way he grew up.

What do you think of characters who change and grow into something different? Or do you prefer to read characters who are black and white, with no grey wiggle-room for redemption?

 About the Book:

Shea MacNamara sank to the bottom of the ocean and survived. As the son of a mermaid, saltwater is in his blood. He discovered a whole new world under the sea, one more beautiful and complicated than he ever imagined.

But shadows and dark secrets also lurk beneath the waves.

When his girlfriend Kae is kidnapped by a powerful young sorcerer named Zan, Shea learns having royal blood means difficult choices.

All three face life and death decisions, balanced precariously between doing what they are told… and defying authority to do what is right.

Grab your copy on AMAZON or ask for it at your local booktore.