Friday Feature & Giveaway: Laugh by Mary Ann Rivers

This week’s Friday Feature is an interview with Mary Ann Rivers. Currently on tour for her latest release Laugh, Ms. Rivers answered a few get to know you questions for us today.

Kathy: What book do you recommend everyone should read? Do you have a comfort read?

My favorite book is A SUMMER TO DIE by Lois Lowry. It is a strong, first person narrator featuring a girl at a precarious age in late childhood – which is a time when so many of our own voices as women are both formed and ignored. The narrator is precocious without preciousness, and she’s smart without knowing everything. So much happens to her, and the book follows her to a summer where the worst and the best things happen to her all at once. Which is just exactly how I experience life, how I am experiencing it now.

A SUMMER TO DIE is the book I would recommend everyone read and my comfort read, both. The narrator’s voice, her insights, her experiences, deeply comfort me, and I think everyone should read it and have their own voice validated as interesting and full of experience.

Kathy: What is your guilty pleasure?

I like sex-romp comedies where the protagonists make one horrifically bad decision after another, don’t change, and I root for them anyway.

Kathy: Favorite meal?

Right now, tea with honey and cream and kettle chips — in bed.

Kathy: If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?

I can’t ever remember not writing. I’m introverted and overly serious and sensitive – writing is the primary way I express myself. If I weren’t a writer I wouldn’t be me.

Kathy: If you could time travel, what time period would you visit?

I talk about time travel a lot and mainly, in my imaginary scenarios, I travel to times in my life, or in the lives of those I love, and I make painful things less painful, or simply see something wonderful that happened, first hand.

I actually have a time travel book in the works, writing with Ruthie Knox.

Kathy: Ooooh, I can’t wait to read your collaboration with Ms. Knox!

Thank you for chatting with us today. Congratulations on your new release, Laugh

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Title: Laugh by Mary Ann Rivers
Burnside Series
Publisher: Loveswept
Genre: Contemporary, Romance
Length: 281 pages

Summary:

Mary Ann Rivers continues her Burnside family series—perfect for readers of Kristan Higgins, Jill Shalvis, and Ruthie Knox—as two people try to share their hearts without losing their cool.

Dr. Sam Burnside is convinced that volunteering at an urban green-space farm in Lakefield, Ohio, is a waste of time—especially with his new health clinic about to open. He only goes to mollify his partner, suspecting she wants him to lighten up. Then Sam catches sight of Nina Paz, a woman who gives off more heat than a scorcher in July. Her easy smile and flirty, sizzling wit has him forgetting his infamous need for control.

Widowed when her husband was killed in Afghanistan, Nina has learned that life exists to take chances. As the daughter of migrant workers turned organic farmers, she’s built an exciting and successful business by valuing new opportunities and working hard to take care of her own. But when Sam pushes for a relationship that goes beyond their hotter-than-fire escapades, Nina ignores her own hard-won wisdom. She isn’t ready for a man who needs saving—even if her heart compels her to take the greatest risk of all: love.

Purchase Links: Amazon * B&N * iTunes

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Mary Ann Rivers was an English and music major and went on to earn her MFA in creative writing, publishing poetry in journals and leading creative-writing workshops for at-risk youth. While training for her day job as a nurse practitioner, she rediscovered romance on the bedside tables of her favorite patients. Now she writes smart and emotional contemporary romance, imagining stories featuring the heroes and heroines just ahead of her in the coffee line. Mary Ann Rivers lives in the Midwest with her handsome professor husband and their imaginative school-aged son.

Author Links: Facebook | Twitter | Website

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Contest

Grand Prize: $25.00 E-giftcard to Book Retailer of Choice.
Second Prize: Loveswept Mug and Tote Gift Pack
Third Prize: Copy of THE STORY GUY and LIVE from Mary Ann Rivers.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Follow the rest of the tour HERE.