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Book Bingo (Fall Into Reading): a Virtual Adventure featuring NYT and bestselling authors Jeffrey Blount, Denise Heinze, Robert Kerbeck, Kerry Anne King, Gill Paul and Joe Stillman
September 14, 2022 @ 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Free – $106.38
About the Virtual (Zoom) Event
We are pleased to announce another fun Book Bingo (Fall Into Reading): A Virtual Adventure!
If you are already familiar with our popular Southern California series, you will understand why we receive so many requests to expand the program nationwide. Pivoting to virtual events has made this not only possible, but offers up fun opportunities for exciting partnerships, participation by more of our over 150 book club favorite authors, and space to accommodate many more readers!
As the trees change color and autumn comes our way, we hope you’ll fall into reading with us by playing book bingo with six book club favorite authors: Jeffrey Blount, Denise Heinze, Robert Kerbeck, Kerry Anne King, Gill Paul and Joe Stillman. Enjoy presentations by the authors, while playing an interactive virtual game of bingo, including fun prizes. All you have to do is show up (and why not invite your book club friends and fellow readers to join in as well) to learn about these great new reads!
While this event is free, your purchase of a book(s) below (to be shipped to you within the U.S.) provides much-needed support to these authors.
Your Adventure includes a book discussion with all six authors, an interactive virtual game of Book Bingo, Q&A, prizes, and the opportunity to meet the authors via Zoom. Books may be ordered below for shipping within the U.S. and will include a signed bookplate. See below for registration information.
About the Authors
Jeffrey Blount is the award-winning author of three novels — Almost Snow White, winner of the 2013 USA Best Book Awards. Hating Heidi Foster, winner of the 2013 Readers Favorite Book Award for young adult literature. The Emancipation of Evan Walls, winner of the 2020 National Indie Excellence Award for African American fiction, winner of the 2019 Readers Favorite Book Award, winner of the 2019 American Bookfest Best Book Award, and a Shelf Unbound 2019 Notable Book.
He is also an Emmy award-winning television director and a 2016 inductee to the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame. During a 34-year career at NBC News, Jeffrey directed a decade of Meet The Press, The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and major special events.
In his book, The Emancipation of Evan Walls, Evan Walls has been married to his wife Izzy for years, yet she knows nothing about half of his life. That part of him he put away long ago and they have lived peacefully alongside the dead spot it has left in their love. However, the birth of their first child changes everything. Evan, fearful of a reincarnation of his childhood in the life of his new daughter, finally finds the courage to tell his wife. Desperate, he hopes that she can help him protect their child.
It is June 1968. The Civil Rights movement is winding down after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. Negroes in the town of Canaan, Virginia has been used to acting the same, thinking the same and sharing in the unadulterated hatred of a common enemy. Evan is ten years old and, in the jargon of the times, young, gifted and black. In the presence of his parents and a summer porch gathering of their friends, he makes a startling declaration. From that moment on, the central question of his life is born. Is he black enough?
Evan has a dream that will turn the sleepy town of Canaan upside down, forcing him to walk the slippery and angry slope between blacks and whites. In time, his dream disintegrates a family, a marriage, countless friendships and a dramatic first love. Only his great-grandmother, Mama Jennie and mentor, Bojack, help him fight to keep his dream alive. And only Izzy can help him come to grips with what he learns from telling his traumatic life story.
To schedule a book club visit with Jeffrey or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:
Denise Heinze is an award-winning author who has published scholarly work, essays, memoirs, poetry, and fiction. Her debut novel, Sally St. Johns, is a “wickedly funny” eco-thriller that dramatizes the deadly seriousness of global warming.
Her debut historical fiction, The Brief and True Report of Temperance Flowerdew, was a finalist in the University of New Orleans Press Publishing Lab Prize. A descendant of Louisa May Alcott, she lives in North Carolina.
A transporting and evocative story, The Brief and True Report of Temperance Flowerdew is a fiercely hopeful novel — a portrait of two intrepid women who choose to live out their dreams of a future more free than the past.
Determined to set the historical record straight, and clear her conscience, Temperance Flowerdew — the wife of Virginia’s first two governors — puts quill to paper, recounting the hardships that nearly brought the Jamestown colony to its knees, and the extraordinary sacrifice of her servant girl, Lily.
When she steps aboard the Falcon in 1609, Temperance Flowerdew is not only setting sail from England to the distant shores of America, she’s embarking upon a future of opportunity. She doesn’t yet know how she will make her mark, but in this new place she can do or be whatever she wants.
Willing as she is to brave this new world, Temperance is utterly ill-equipped to survive the wilderness; all she knows is how to live inside the pages of adventure and philosophy books. Loyally at her side, Lily helps Temperance weather pioneer life. A young woman running from lifelong accusations of witchcraft, Lily finds friendship with Temperance and an acceptance of her psychic gifts. Together, they forge paths within the community: Temperance attempts to advise the makeshift government, while Lily experiences the blossoming of first love.
But as the harsh winter approaches, Lily intuitively senses a darkness creep over the colony and the veneer of civilized life threatens to fall away — negotiations with the Indians grow increasingly hostile and provisions become scarce. Lily struggles to keep food on the table by foraging in the woods and being resourceful. Famine could mean the end of days. It’s up to Lily to save them both, but what sacrifice will be enough to survive?
To schedule a book club visit with Denise or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:
His newest memoir, RUSE: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street, is a thrilling look into the world of corporate espionage and his career as a secret spy. In the world of high finance, multibillion-dollar Wall Street banks greedily guard their secrets. Enter Robert Kerbeck, a working actor who made his real money lying on the phone, charming people into revealing their employers’ most valuable information. In this exhilarating memoir that will appeal to fans of The Wolf of Wall Street and Catch Me If You Can, unsuspecting receptionists, assistants, and bigshot executives all fall victim to “the Ruse.”
After college, Kerbeck rushed to New York to try to make it as an actor. But to support himself, he’d need a survival job, and before he knew it, while his pals were waiting tables, he began his apprenticeship as a corporate spy.
As his acting career started to take off, he found himself hobnobbing with Hollywood luminaries: drinking with Paul Newman, taking J.Lo to a Dodgers game, touring E.R. sets with George Clooney. He even worked with O.J. Simpson the week before he became America’s most notorious double murderer.
Before long, however, his once promising acting career slowed while the corporate espionage business took off. The ruse job was supposed to have been temporary, but Kerbeck became one of the world’s best practitioners of this deceptive—and illegal—trade. His income jumped from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year.
To schedule a book club visit with Robert or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:
Kerry Anne King (who also writes as Kerry Schafer) is a Washington Post and Amazon charts bestselling author who writes compelling and transformational stories about family and personal growth with elements of mystery, humor, and an undercurrent of romance. Often, you’ll also find a touch of magic.
When not absorbed in her creative pursuits, you’ll find Kerry hanging out with her Viking and an assortment of animals on their little piece of heaven in rural northeastern Washington. She loves interacting with readers and is happy to make herself available for virtual book club meetings.
In Kerry Anne’s novel, Improbably Yours, an unusual inheritance leads to a life-changing journey of romance, secrets, and the treasure of found family.
Blythe Harmon is on the fast track to a life she never wanted. On her thirtieth birthday, just as she’s about to lock herself into a high-powered job and accept a marriage proposal to match, an unusual bequest from her beloved late grandmother, Nomi, offers an escape and an invitation to adventure.
Equipped with Nomi’s urn of ashes and a treasure map, Blythe sets off for a small island in the San Juans where she rents the mysterious and unsettling Improbable House. Secret by secret, clue by cryptic clue, she begins to unravel the puzzle her grandmother has left her to piece together. Her quest is complicated, though, by a powerful attraction to an enigmatic islander and empathy for his orphaned niece, both of whom are inexorably tied to the old house.
Just when Blythe thinks she’s on the verge of solving the mystery, her quest takes an unexpected turn, and she discovers that the treasure she’s really seeking is something that could never be buried in the ground. While she’s on the treasure hunt of a lifetime, the past and the future are coming together in this magical novel.
To schedule a book club visit with Kerry Anne or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:
Gill Paul’s historical novels have reached the top of the USA Today, Toronto Globe & Mail and UK kindle charts, and been translated into twenty languages. She specializes in relatively recent history, mostly 20th century, and enjoys re-evaluating real historical characters and trying to get inside their heads.
Gill also writes historical non-fiction, including A History of Medicine in 50 Objects and series of Love Stories. Published around the world, this series includes Royal Love Stories, World War I Love Stories and Titanic Love Stories.
In her book, The Manhattan Girls: A Novel of Dorothy Parker and Her Friends, it’s New York City 1921: The war is over, fashions are daring, and bootleg liquor is abundant. Here four extraordinary women form a bridge group that grows into a firm friendship.
Dorothy Parker: renowned wit, member of the Algonquin Round Table, and more fragile than she seems. Jane Grant: first female reporter for the New York Times, and determined to launch a new magazine she calls The New Yorker. Winifred Lenihan: beautiful and talented Broadway actress, a casting-couch target. And Peggy Leach: magazine assistant by day, brilliant novelist by night.
Their romances flourish and falter while their goals sometimes seem impossible to reach and their friendship deepens against the backdrop of turbulent New York City, where new speakeasies open and close, jazz music flows through the air, and bathtub gin fills their glasses.
They gossip, they comfort each other, and they offer support through the setbacks. But their biggest challenge is keeping their dear friend Dottie safe from herself.
To schedule a book club visit with Gill or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:
Joe Stillman co-wrote “Shrek” for Dreamworks which earned him an Academy Award® nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Annie and BAFTA Awards. Other produced features are “Beavis & Butthead Do America”, “Shrek 2”, “Gulliver’s Travels”, “Planet 51” and “Joseph King Of Dreams”. In television, he was co-producer and writer on “King of the Hill,” for which he received two Emmy Award® nominations. He was a writer and story editor for Nickelodeon’s “The Adventures of Pete and Pete” and a writer on MTV’s “Beavis and Butthead”.
More recently he worked on Nickelodeon’s “Sanjay And Craig” and “Kirby Buckets” for Disney. Other TV credits include “Albert” for Nickelodeon, “The War Next Door” for the USA Network, “Clueless”, “Doug” and “Danger And Eggs” for Amazon. Joe is currently working on a “Curious George” feature for streaming on Peacock.
The Man Who Came and Went, his novel of the new west, is a magically realistic story for the modern era that will tease your understanding and beliefs, and draw you into the mysteries of the universe. Fifteen-year-old Belutha Mariah, our storyteller, is the oldest of three kids from three different fathers. Her life’s goal is to keep her dysfunctional mom, Maybell, from procreating yet again and then to leave the coffin-sized town of Hadley, Arizona the second she graduates high school.
Along comes the new grill cook at Maybell’s Diner, Bill Bill, a mysterious drifter with the ability to mind-read orders. As word spreads in Hadley and beyond, the curious and desperate pour into this small desert town to eat at Maybell’s.
Some believe Bill knows the secrets of the universe.
Belutha figures he’s probably nuts. But his cooking starts to transform the lives of locals and visitors, and Belutha finds her angry heart opening, as Bill begins to show her the porous boundary between this life and what comes after.
In a normal American town, something new and strange, and yet achingly familiar, begins to unfold.
To schedule a book club visit with Joe or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:
For Book Clubs or Author Live Chats
Are you in a book club, library reading group, or are your group of friends, colleagues, and family members seeking fabulous authors who are excited and available to meet with you? Then you will be delighted to know that Jeffrey Blount, Denise Heinze, Robert Kerbeck, Kerry Anne King, Gill Paul and Joe Stillman are members of our wonderful community of over 150 NovelNetwork authors available to meet with small groups via video chat.
NovelNetwork is the nation’s first and only match(dot)com for authors and book clubs to find each other, so check it out today. Book clubs join for free and gain access to our database of dozens of authors, from NYT and international bestsellers to debut authors, cookbook authors, mystery and non-fiction authors, and representing various regions of the United States, and even Alaska and Hawaii, all of whom want to meet with you!
To schedule a visit with Jeffrey Blount, Denise Heinze, Robert Kerbeck, Kerry Anne King, Gill Paul, Joe Stillman or any of our authors, join FOR FREE here.
