Review: The Dress Shop of Dreams by Menna van Praag

That would look beautiful on you. Why don’t you try it on?

How often do you hear that when you are shopping for the perfect dress?

Is it just fluff that the sales clerk is trying to make us believe or would it truly look beautiful on us? What if that statement was more like a promise?

Etta Sparks owns a dress shop where dreams actually do come true. A place where one dress could change your life.

Etta has the ability to make your dreams come true with the perfect dress and a little stitching to give you some courage.

Her granddaughter Cora has been grieving her parents death for years and Etta would like nothing better than for Cora to see what life has to offer her. For years Cora is determined to solve the mystery behind her parents’ deaths in a fire.

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Review: City of Dark Magic (City of Dark Magic #1) by Magnus Flyte

Sarah Weston has spent her life studying Beethoven. So naturally her dream job would be cataloging his manuscripts. Well that dream is about to come true.

She has just received word that her mentor and master’s supervisor committed suicide in Prague.

He was working at Prague Castle on some Beethoven manuscripts for the newly developed Lobkowicz Palace Museum.

The Lobkowicz family contacts Sarah to take up where her professor left off. A paid summer at Prague Castle handling Beethoven’s letters? SOLD!

Sarah departs for Prague immediately, and almost as soon as she lands, strange things start to happen. First she hears strange rumors about her mentor being addicted to drugs and acting erratically before he committed suicide….if he really committed suicide at all.

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Review: Princess of Thorns by Stacey Jay

I am excited to see all the fairy tale retellings out there, especially for Sleeping Beauty as Aurora is one of my favorite princesses.

Princess of Thorns is a different kind of fairy tale retelling. Princess Aurora AKA Ror is actually a warrior princess and Sleeping Beauty’s daughter who must fight to regain her throne. ‘

As a briar born child, Ror and her twin brother Jor have been gifted special powers. Jor has been kidnapped by the evil ogre queen and is being tortured.

Ror is the heiress to the fairy lands and she must not only save her brother, but she must regain her kingdom by any means necessary. She knows she will never marry because any boy she kisses turns into a mindless minion so she must do all this by herself. Dressed as a boy she plans on first saving her brother. Enter Niklass.

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Review: The Night Garden by Lisa Van Allen

In upstate New York there is a small farm that appears to be just another farm in the country. Normal. Ordinary.

However the Pennywort farm is anything but ordinary and normal….it’s magical. At the heart of the farm there is a magical garden full of imagination and color.

The locals have long said that entering the garden can gain insight to life’s most difficult issues by just walking through the gates, ironically the garden’s caretaker has never experienced any kind of revelation by entering the garden.

Olivia Pennyworth has been caring for the garden and has spent her entire life on the farm while harboring a dark secret which forces her to keep everyone at arms length…..until her childhood friend, Sam, shows up.

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Review: The Firebird (Slains #2) by Susanna Kearsley

Nicola Marter is a seemingly normal women, with an extraordinary gift. She can touch an object and see it’s past history.

But she doesn’t like using her gift. She is afraid of being called a ‘freak’ and that people won’t accept her.

So she hides her gift. While working in an art gallery specializing in Russian art, an old woman arrives with a wood carving of a firebird, claiming it belonged to Catherine the Great.

Nicola’s boss doesn’t have any way of authenticating it and thus, it has no value to an art dealer. But when she touches it she sees that it was in fact given to a girl named Anna by Catherine the Great…..but how can she prove it?

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