As promised, we have selected a winner in the Shoe Addicts Anonymous giveaway!

Erin is our lucky winner!

Thank-you so much to everyone who entered and suggested a great book! Stay tuned to see if your suggestion is a future Book Club selection, and please keep visiting for future giveaways.

(Truly Random Number Generator was used to select our winner.)

All I Have to Give
by Melody Carlson

All I Have to Give was my first holiday book of the season, and also marks my first book for the Christmas Reading Challenge!  It was a very enjoyable story that I zipped through in an evening, and it succeeded in helping to get me in the Christmas spirit – which was the intention! So, overall a successful reading venture.

The story opens with sisters Anna and Meredith chatting about their respective marital issues as they clean up from Thanksgiving dinner, and proceeds to follow Anna’s attempts at creating “the best Christmas ever”.  Despite her greatest efforts to have a happy holiday, Anna’s health and various family issues threaten to ruin the festivities. But as with any good holiday story, the good persevere, and miracles are waiting to occur.

I really liked all the characters in All I Have to Give, and found the story relatable and believable (sometimes this is not the case with holiday stories). It’s very nice to see romance and marriage portrayed in a realistic manner for a change.  My one complaint with All I Have to Give would be that it’s a little predictable. It’s loosely based on the traditional Christmas story The Gift of the Magi, so some obvious connections are hard to avoid, but one of the major plot points was pretty transparent as well. This doesn’t really take away from the spirit of the story though, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading All I Have to Give, and would definitely try some of Carlson’s other books.

Just a little reminder that our Shoe Addicts Anonymous Giveaway ends this Saturday. All you have to do is recommend a good book to be entered!

I recently received a copy of Shoe Addicts Anonymous, but since I’d already read it this summer, I thought rather than doing the always-uncomfortable exchange request, why not pass the book along to fellow book lovers instead?

So folks, we are offering up one copy of Shoe Addicts Anonymous by Beth Harbison.

Here’s a brief description:

In this entertaining novel set in Washington, D.C., three very different women are brought together by a shared passion: shoes! They meet once a week to trade Manolos and Maglis, but soon they rely on each other for much more. Lorna, a debt-ridden waitress, founded the group to curb her destructive shopping sprees. Helene, a senator’s trophy wife, attends to escape her loveless marriage and the banality of high-society life. Sandra, an overweight phone-sex operator, hopes the group can help cure her agoraphobia. They’re joined by Joss, a young nanny, who doesn’t care about shoes but needs a place to avoid her demanding boss. The four women become fast friends, trusted advisors, and eventually business partners. Readers will root for these four plucky women. Like the designer shoes that pepper its pages, this book is pleasing and stylish. This frothy confection is sure to fly off the shelves this summer.

All you have to do to be entered in the giveaway is tell us about the last great book you read! Easy right? While we’ve already selected our Book Club choices for the next few months, we’re always on the lookout for good books that people want to talk about! So let us know about a book you loved, and maybe it will be one of our future discussions. (Be sure to include an accurate email in the comment field so we can let you know you won. It won’t be published.)

For en extra entry tweet about this giveaway. (Be sure to comment and include your Twitter user name to let us know that you tweeted.)

The giveaway will close on December 5, 2009.

We’re still discussing Fablehaven, but wanted to make sure everyone was aware of our December book…

Since it is the season, we’ve picked something festive for our December Book Club book. This months selection is Grace: A Novel by Richard Paul Evans.

Last year I started a little personal tradition of reading holiday novels to help get me in the Christmas spirit, and the first novels I read were by Richard Paul Evans.  I enjoyed them so much that I thought Grace would make an excellent December Book Club choice. I got my copy on the sale shelf, so check your local bookstore to see if they have it on sale as well!

Here’s a bit about the book:

She was my first kiss. My first love. She was a little match girl who could see the future in the flame of a candle. She was a runaway who taught me more about life than anyone has before or since. And when she was gone my innocence left with her.

As I begin to write, a part of me feels as if I am awakening something best left dead and buried, or at least buried. We can bury the past, but it never really dies. The experience of that winter has grown on my soul like ivy climbing the outside of a home, growing until it begins to tear and tug at the brick and mortar.

I pray I can still get the story right. My memory, like my eyesight, has waned with age. Still, there are things that become clearer to me as I grow older. This much I know: too many things were kept secret in those days. Things that never should have been hidden. And things that should have.

Hopefully you’re all feeling in the spirit, and will join us in reading and discussing this great holiday read! Because it’s a very busy time of year, we’ll try and get the discussion post up a little earlier this month, to give everyone a chance to comment before we all get taken over by the holiday madness.

Happy Holidays!

PS – Don’t forget to vote for your favorite romantic read for our February selection.