Blog Tour + Giveaway: Teacher's Billionaire by Christina Tetreault

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Every once in a while I like to step out of my comfort zone to read something on the lighter side. My usual go to genre for this is pure romance. Sometimes you need something that’s just not quite as taxing on your brain cells after a long day at work has worn you down. And I really did have a couple of long, difficult days around reading this book. It turned out that it was a very good way of unwinding!

Information:

Title: Teacher’s Billionaire

Author: Christina Tetreault

Series: The Sherbrookes of Newport

Publisher: Createspace

Target Audience: Adult

Genre: Contemporary romance / chick lit

Length: 200 pages

Story: Callie Taylor's life is turned upside down when she learns the truth about her birth following the death of her mother. Not only is her father alive, but he's none other than presidential candidate Senator Warren Sherbrooke. 

Billionaire and confirmed bachelor, Dylan Talbot, is devoted to his family. When his stepfather Warren Sherbrooke receives a letter from a past love telling him they have a daughter together, Dylan is instantly suspicious. In order to keep the media vultures away and protect Warren's political aspirations, Dylan convinces Warren to let him handle the situation. 

As Callie and Dylan spend time together, they can't resist the feelings that blossom between them. However, when Callie learns the real reason he has been spending time with her their fledgling romance is put in jeopardy and only complete honesty can save it.

Thoughts and impressions: As of the very beginning things were not going to be easy for me with this book. Sod’s law and all that. For some reason the PDF wouldn’t covert to .mobi so I was stuck reading the book in PDF form, which is hard on my eyes. I ended up reading it on the Kindle as the boyfriend was using the tablet and I know from experience that reading from the PC screen no longer works for me. So I just had my nose smushed up against the screen and went from there!

The plot is fairly simple: Callie’s mother leaves a confession in a letter that, upon her death, was sent to the father she’d hidden Callie from all her life. Said father is Warren Sherbrooke, who happens to be running for president. The revelation comes as a shock to all parties involved but Warren is determined to meet this long-lost daughter and bring her into the family fold. His campaign manager, wife and step son, Dylan, aren’t convinced that she really is his daughter and not just some bawd with her own agenda trying to scam them / hurt Warren’s chances of winning the election. So Dylan offers to be the one to go and meet her in order to take her measure.

As soon as he sees her he can’t deny the family resemblance and knows that she is who the letter claims she is. Warren’s campaign manager is still wary though and Dylan agrees to keep an eye on her in order to make sure that she doesn’t do anything potentially disastrous, such as taking her story to the media.

Spending time together soon leads to initial attraction transforming into deep feelings taking root and it’s not long before their relationship turns physical. It can’t be that easy, though, and an overhead conversation leads to Callie feeling shattered and betrayed, and Dylan having to overcome old fears in order to ensure future happiness.

The vast majority of the book focuses on Callie and Dylan and what they get up to together. There are various activities and landmarks described, which the author certainly has a knack for, but I did occasionally find my interest waning as things took too long to get to the point. In fact, it isn’t until the 75% mark that the spanner actually gets thrown in the works. Although I did enjoy reading about their outings together and the author did a fantastic job of bringing Massachusetts to life for me, I would have preferred to see more interaction between Callie and the other Sherwoodes instead. She doesn’t get to spend very much time with her father at all, despite it being his desire to get to know her that pushes the narrative. The ending also felt a little rushed in comparison with how drawn out a lot of the rest of it was.

There are some minor continuation errors, such as Callie claims she’s only ever left Massachusetts once to go to Florida, but later in the book she talks about a school trip to New York. Now, admittedly I’m not all that familiar with US geographical layout, but I’m 99.99% sure that New York is not in Massachusetts, although I suppose it could be considered close enough that it’s not all that exciting (like how my home in France is close enough to Switzerland that a trip across the Swiss border is not all that out of the ordinary).

Generally speaking, I prefer my stories to have a little bit more conflict in them, but as an easy-read romance, this book succeeded in alleviating me of the headache my day had caused!

Style: There are commas missing all over the place, which meant that I had to stop to unravel the meaning of some sentences. There’s also usually no tense agreement: if you’re writing in the past tense and mention something that happened prior to your moment of narration then you have to go back a tense to the past perfect. This author forgot (or didn’t know) to do that.

Final verdict: The perfect easy read to end a long day. There are some issues that could have been addressed better but despite that it was still a good read. 3.5 stars

Extra notes: Bad language didn’t stand out but it’s entirely possible that it was present. Sex is present.

*Disclosure of Material Connection: I am a member of Reading Addiction Blog Tours and a copy of this book was provided to me by the author. Although payment may have been received by Reading Addiction Blog Tours, no payment was received by me in exchange for this review. There was no obligation to write a positive review. All opinions expressed are entirely my own and may not necessarily agree with those of the author, publisher, publicist, or readers of this review. This disclosure is in accordance with the Federal Trade Commision’s 16 CFR, Part 255, Guides Concerning Use of Endorcements and Testimonials in Advertising*

The author:

I wrote my first story with characters similar to those in the Sweet Valley Twins books at the age of 10 on my grandmother's manual typewriter. As I got older my stories and characters became more mature. During my frenshman year at UMass Dartmouth, I read my first romance novel and fell in love with the genre. I have been writing romance ever since.

Today I live with my husband, three beautiful daughters and two dogs in Massachusetts. Whenever I have a free moment you'll find me either reading a romance novel or working on my most current story.

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The giveaway:

This is, of course, open internationally.

I like to keep these things simple so the possible entries are:

- follow the blog

- follow me on Twitter

- follow the author on Facebook

- tweet about the giveaway

- leave a comment

See? Nice and simple.

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