Friday, July 22, 2016

Blog Tour/Giveaway: From the Sideline by Amy Avanzino


The author is generously offering to give away two e-copies of each of her books! Please scroll to the bottom for a chance to win one or both of them!

From the Sideline, by Amy Avanzino
2016, 266p, Women's Fiction
My Rating=4 Stars
Source: Received a copy from the author for an honest review



After losing her marriage, life savings, and waistline, Autumn Kovac is terrified of being hit by more heartache. So when her only child decides to try out for the football team, the overprotective, sports-illiterate mom has a near phobic reaction. But Zachary hasn’t smiled since his father left, and she’s desperate to make him happy (and doing nothing and hoping for the best hasn’t been working). She reluctantly enters a new world of youth competitive sports, full of overzealous coaches with Vince Lombardi dreams and fanatical parents trying to achieve vicarious glory.

Unexpectedly, Autumn begins transforming within this strangely addictive new culture, finding her voice, facing her past, tackling her fears…and uncovering the secret that’s been keeping her from her son. After meeting her ideal catch, she finds herself back in the dating game and discovers some fierce competition of her own. Will Autumn make it off the sideline? Can the underdog finally win?

Related subjects include: chick lit, women’s fiction, humor, humorous fiction, rom com, romantic comedy, friendship.


Autumn is recently divorced and her 10-year-old son Zachary is having a difficult time dealing with it. She encourages him to find his passion and regrets it when he chooses football. He tries out for a local team, with her secretly rooting against him, and makes it. Her life drastically changes as she moves into the world of competitive youth sports. 

This was a fun read! Autumn has low self-esteem and it comes through in everything she does. Her life is a bit sad at the beginning. She does, however, have a great sense of humor about it, and I laughed out loud several times. As certain friendships develop, she is able to come out of her shell and learns some surprising and interesting things about herself. She has a lot to balance and makes mistakes along the way.

This is the second book in Ms. Avanzino's Wake-Up Series. I haven't read the first book and this one works well as a stand-alone. It did start out a little slow to me, with lots of descriptions of football tryouts. It quickly picked up, though, and I had a hard time putting it down. Autumn's character grew quite a bit and I enjoyed getting to know her and the bits of wisdom she shared along the way!

There is a little bit of content: Autumn has a sexual relationship with another character. There is one quick sex scene and their relationship is referenced after that. There is also some swearing--one particular minor character uses colorful language a few times, with one use of the "f" word.


Learn more about the first book in this series!

Wake-Up Call, by Amy Avanzino
2015, 246p, Women's Fiction



Sarah Winslow wakes up with a terrible hangover… and a kid in her boyfriend’s bed. She makes the horrifying discovery that, due to a head injury, it’s not a hangover. She’s got memory loss. Overnight, five years have disappeared, and she’s no longer the hard-living, fast-track, ad executive party girl she thinks she is. Now, she’s the unemployed, pudgy, married, stay-at-home-mom of three kids under five, including twins. As she slowly pieces together the mystery of how her dreams and aspirations could have disintegrated so completely in five short years, she finds herself utterly failing to manage this life she can’t imagine choosing. When Sarah meets the man of her dreams, she realizes she’s got to make a choice: Does she follow her bliss and “do-over” her life? Or does the Sarah she’s forgotten hold the answers to how she got here… and how she can stay?

Praise for Wake-Up Call:

"Funny yet tender...witty and charming...a reminder of the things that really matter in life. - Jackie Bouchard, USA Today Bestselling author of What the Dog Ate

"Hilariously funny...endearing and heartfelt." - LibraryThing

"A lighthearted read, with lots of love, hilarity, some sexiness and definitely a good time." - Comfy Reading 


Amy Avanzino received a Bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley and a Master's from the University of Washington. She is a former special education teacher who has spent the last several years writing and doing extensive hands-on research for her Wake-Up Series, the first of which is Wake-Up Call. She's a contributing writer of Hap Scotch, a play performed at the 2008 Frigid Festival in New York, which won two Audience Choice Awards. Amy currently lives in the stands above the football fields, basketball courts, and baseball diamonds around Folsom, California with her husband and four children.


Please be sure to enter both giveaways below! The rules are simple: You must be 18 years old to enter, be able to accept e-copies of books and the winner will be emailed and announced here and will have 48 hours to respond or a new winner will be chosen. Good luck!

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