#burning tracks

[interludepress]

Coming July 16: Lilah Suzanne’s SPOTLIGHT SERIES Boxed Set

“Hollywood style meets Nashville charm in this sweet, sexy fling turned romance.” —Publishers Weekly on Broken Records

Just in time for your summer TBR List!  Lilah Suzanne’s sweet and sexy series about finding love in unexpected places when a Nashville superstar falls for a Hollywood stylist—THE SPOTLIGHT SERIES.

The Spotlight Series Boxed Set is the complete series and with exclusive new “B-sides,” short stories featuring popular characters from the Spotlight Series universe—all available at a discounted series price of $8.99 at your favorite digital retailers.

Included in the set:

BROKEN RECORDS: Los Angeles-based stylist Nico Takahashi loves his job—or at least, he used to. Feeling fed up and exhausted from the cutthroat, gossip-fueled business of Hollywood, Nico daydreams about packing it all in and leaving for good. So when Grady Dawson—sexy country music star and rumored playboy—asks Nico to style him, Nico is reluctant. But after styling a career-changing photo shoot, Nico follows Grady to Nashville where he finds it increasingly difficult to resist Grady’s charms. Can Nico make his peace with show business and all its trappings, or will Grady’s public persona get in their way of their private attraction to each other?

BURNING TRACKS: Gwen Pasternak’s got it all. Or so it seems… In the sequel to RT Book Reviews’ Top Pick Broken Records, Gwen’s life looks perfect: She has a job she loves as stylist to the stars; a beautiful wife, Flora; and a house in the heart of Nashville. But the more she works alongside country music’s dynamic princess Clementine Campbell, the less Gwen is certain of her commitment to a life of domestic bliss. Meanwhile, her business partner Nico Takahashi is happily settled down with reformed bad-boy musician Grady Dawson. But when Nico questions the permanence of their relationship, Grady retreats into some dangerous old habits. Will Gwen ruin the life she’s built with Flora for something new and exhilarating? Can Grady be convinced of Nico’s devotion before it’s too late? Burning Tracks is a story of tough choices, taking risks, and the pressures of living life in the spotlight.

BLENDED NOTES: Grady Dawson’s future looks bright. He’s at the top of his country music career, has a close-knit group of friends who have become his Nashville family, and has found solid ground in his personal life as he plans his intimate, private wedding with Nico, his stylist-turned-lover, turned love of his life. It seems Grady has finally left his difficult childhood and tumultuous youth behind. That is, until his past shows up on his doorstep, news of his upcoming nuptials is leaked to the media, and his record company levels demands that challenge his integrity as an artist and as a person. The foundation of Grady’s new life begins to crumble, and fast. Will he be forced to make the ultimate choice between a private life with Nico and the public demands of his career?

Spotlight B-Sides: Spencer

Spotlight B-Sides: Clementine

Add it to your Goodreads TBR shelf at: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45991745-spotlight-series-boxed-set

Preorder at the IP Web Store, Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

[lilyvandersteen]

My Review of Burning Tracks by Lilah Suzanne

Burning Tracks by @lilahsuzanne

Oh wow, I raced through this book rather like Gwen lives - at double speed and diving in headfirst. This was quite the rollercoaster ride, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about how Gwen and Flora met and fell in love, about how Gwen and Grady try out Las Vegas at its most thrilling and about Gwen finds her true anchor once she stops to think.

Will there be a third book in this series? I'd really like to see Clementine find her match too instead of always being the third wheel everywhere...                                              

[lilahsuzanne]

Gwen Pasternak’s got it all. Or so it seems…

In the sequel to RT Book Reviews’ Top Pick Broken Records, Gwen’s life looks perfect: She has a job she loves as stylist to the stars; a beautiful wife, Flora; and a house in the heart of Nashville. But the more she works alongside country music’s dynamic princess Clementine Campbell, the less Gwen is certain of her commitment to a life of domestic bliss.

Meanwhile, her business partner Nico Takahashi is happily settled down with reformed bad-boy musician Grady Dawson. But when Nico questions the permanence of their relationship, Grady retreats into some dangerous old habits. Will Gwen ruin the life she’s built with Flora for something new and exhilarating? Can Grady be convinced of Nico’s devotion before it’s too late?Burning Tracks is a story of tough choices, taking risks, and the pressures of living life in the spotlight.

IP Store / Amazon / B&N / Kobo / IndieBound

[perryavenue]

Two Fans Review Burning Tracks By Lilah Suzanne

Published by @interludepress

My friend @flowerfan2 and I are a two-person book club. We select a title from the Interlude Press catalog that we think we’ll enjoy, read a group of chapters at a time, and comment back and forth about them.

Burning Tracks by @lilahsuzanne is our most recent choice.  Flowerfan had read the first book in the series, Broken Records, but I had not.  She patiently waited while I finished it. We then happily dove into Burning Tracks together.

There’s a lot to enjoy in Lilah Suzanne’s latest book.  We had initially thought it would focus only on Gwen Pasternak, fashion stylist and assistant to Nico Takahashi.  After rooting for Nico and country singer/songwriter Grady Dawson to become a couple in the first book, we were glad to see them again, this time as secondary characters, in Burning Tracks.

But make no mistake, Gwen is definitely the star here, fearlessly rescuing friends and felines alike while dispensing relationship advice that she invariably fails to follow. The result is a terrifically written near-train wreck that comes close to sending her eight-year marriage to Flora into a tailspin.  Gwen’s kryptonite is Clementine Campbell, Gwen’s client and popular country music star. Together, they take the phrase “self-aware but self-absorbed” to a whole new level.

The relationship fault lines form early for both Nico/Grady and Gwen/Flora.  If, as Gwen advises Nico in the very first paragraph of the book “the key to long-lasting relationships is that you have to think of yourselves as a team,” the choices they proceed to make, to varying degrees, take them in the opposite direction.  Gwen suppresses her own doubts and concerns, while determined to do everything to make Flora happy. In the process, she becomes so stifled that the only solution she sees is to jump at the chance for a change of scenery. Unfortunately, Las Vegas is not the place to find what she needs.  

The four major characters are all variations of the same theme. They make decisions they don’t necessarily agree with, because they don’t want to disappoint the people they care about, while keeping their true feelings hidden.  It's a trap for them professionally and personally.  Gwen is bold and brash but full of self-doubt. She doesn’t realize, until much later, how much Flora doubts herself as well.

Before she knows it, Gwen is full on in denial about practically everything, and as a result, fails everyone who is important to her. When she realizes how badly she's messed up, her rationale is that self-sabotage is just how she rolls.  Gwen also gets the most ironic line of the book, when she says to the bartender at a Las Vegas strip club, “Does no one have any respect for commitment?” Really, Gwen? Have you looked in a mirror recently?

While Gwen is having her relationship crisis, Grady is having one of his own.  He and Nico love each other, but unresolved misunderstandings cause both men to back away, rather than come together to work things out.  The lack of communication is a recurring pattern.  The characters are not really saying or hearing what needs to be expressed.

Suzanne uses flashback chapters to good effect throughout the book, providing Gwen and Flora’s backstories and allowing us to see the parallels between the younger version of the couple and their present-day selves.

We loved the glimpses of fashion, celebrity, and glamour that Suzanne gives us.  There’s a wonderful moment late in the book when Gwen is in the office, preparing packing slips for clothing and accessories purchased for Clementine and now being returned.  There’s a six thousand dollar alligator clutch that was never used, and a solid gold ring worth twenty one thousand dollars.  It’s an interesting take on the extravagance and shallowness of the world some celebrities inhabit.

Suzanne has created very likeable, albeit flawed characters who we can cheer for, commiserate with, occasionally shake our heads at, and hope they have a happy ending.  Watching these characters go off the rails and get back on them makes Burning Tracks a very enjoyable read. There’s a third sequel coming in 2017, Blended Notes, and we’re looking forward to it!

[alysia-constantine-blog]

Book Review: BURNING TRACKS by Lilah Suzanne

Burning Tracks by Lilah Suzanne (August 11, 2016); 224 pages. Available from Interlude Press here.

This is the second book in the Spotlight series (the first is Broken Records), which follows the lives of a quartet of people: Nico, the stylist to the stars, his business partner-stylist Gwen, Gwen’s wife Flora, and Nico’s love Grady, who just happens to be a big country music star.

While Broken Records focused mainly on Nico and his courtship with Grady, Burning Tracks is centered around Gwen and Flora’s lives. Nico and Grady are still around, and they get important story developments, but this is not their novel. The primary story—and the reader’s heart—belongs to Flora and Gwen as they navigate their new lives in a new town, pull apart and pull together and pull other folks into their circle.

When Nico and Gwen become business partners and take their star-styling business from LA to Nashville, Gwen and Flora need to make a new life for themselves in a new place. While Nico navigates a new and coltish relationship with Grady, Gwen and Flora are doing the hard work of staying together, weathering the long haul—it’s lovely balance: both couples are unsteadily trying to figure out how to live in new conditions, both literally (Nashville) and figuratively (new stages of lives and relationships, new pressures and possibilities). While Nico and Grady are stumblingly trying to figure out how to be in love, Gwen and Flora are trying to figure out how to stay in love—I don’t mean that they’re in constant danger of falling out of love, but that they’re trying to understand how to maintain their lives, keep beauty alive for each other, simply be in love without all the bang and fuss and glory that newness brings. There’s heartache and drinking, of course (I mean, there are country music stars in this, so it would disappoint if it didn’t happen), but there is also contentment and joy… and some kittens at one point, too. I admit I’m not a big country music aficionado, but I can’t think of a single country song about the joys of living with kittens—this novel goes well beyond the clichés, in other words, to give a real picture of real lives happening.

They’re great characters, all four of them: loving, but not saccharine; interesting, but believable; complex, but still relatable; just stupid enough to make them real (I hate the sexism of “Mary Sue” labels, but because most people understand that term, I’ll use it: there are none here).

In this second novel, the group grows a little bigger to include Clementine (another country music star/Nico client), a couple kittens, and an endearing little guy named Cayo—but I won’t talk about how he figures into the story, because I don’t want to give anything away. Instead, I’ll say that Clementine is a fun and interesting character: she’s a shining penny of a woman, with the sleek sheen that money and fame seem to give, and she comes across as a bit vain, a bit too big for her britches, and yet still very endearing and well-meaning. She’s the kind of girl who gets her hair colored and calls people “Sugar,” but she isn’t one-dimensional—she gets a moment of awkward redemption, plus she hides a kitten in her coat like a crazy lady, so I think she’s tops.

The book’s paced just right—one is pulled along without any dragging, and the prose is efficient but loving (if you can say that about prose; I mean it feels neither self-indulgent nor too airy and speedy). It’s one of those books I could have easily (had I the time and no other stupid life obligations) read in one sitting, though knowing it was waiting for me to pick it back up again each evening was a good motivation to get through the daily mire.

While Broken Records never felt unresolved to me, Burning Tracks feels like it resolves some of what got knotted up in Broken Records, and leaves off at the top of a cliff—all the characters are just starting big new life adventures (I won’t say what, and you can’t make me). It felt quite nicely resolved, but still leaves room for more to happen in a future third book. Which I’m hoping Suzanne has in the works.  

[alysia-constantine-blog]

I am utterly enjoying Lilah Suzanne’s new novel BURNING TRACKS, and then I came to a part in which one of the characters gets a tattoo of swallows. I have tattoos of swallows, one on each shoulder. And the character explains his reason:

“’The artist said sailors used to get them at the end of a long journey to show they had survived. That they could survive anything. And it means—’ He pauses, letting sadness pass over his features without pushing it down and away. ‘I wanted something that means loyalty. Swallows always return to the same place. The same person.’“

That’s pretty much the same research I did before getting mine. They’re supposed to carry the souls of the dead to heaven. I am forever getting lost and needing someone to navigate, so... precautions.

Anyway, loving the novel, it is SO much fun!

[mander3-swish]

Burning Tracks Book Review

Burning Tracks, the second book in @lilahsuzanne's Spotlight Series, is unlike any other @interludepress book I've read thus far. The girls are front and center! Gwen and Flora are attempting to navigate the perils of commitment and the possibility of becoming mothers. With flashbacks included to get a look at their history, Lilah weaves their story together with such precision and some pretty hot scenes. There's even an exciting Vegas weekend that marks an important turning point in Gwen's development in the story.  

Don't worry if you're here for the boys...Nico and Grady are definitely around, causing trouble and being the dumb boys they are. Still love that Grady's so into knitting, and I can't wait to read the third book featuring him!

I could go on with some of my favorite bits from the book, but I don't want to give away any of the major spoilers! Go read the book and find out for yourself!

[interludepress]

This is an interesting and complicated love story for a married couple that may be having some problems…and how it all gets back on “track.”

V’s Reads Reviews on Lilah Suzanne’s Burning Tracks

Burning Tracks is available to order from the IP Web Store and your favorite book retailers.