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Life After Coffee by Virginia Franken Review & GIVEAWAY: A Hilarious Must-Read for Stressed Out Moms

Life After Coffee by Virginia Franken Review & GIVEAWAY: A Hilarious Must-Read for Stressed Out Moms

I received this book for free from TLC Book Tours for review consideration, opinions expressed are 100% my own. This post contains affiliate links as indicated by an asterisk. Purchases from these links provides a small commission to me at no extra cost to you.

Life After Coffee by Virginia Franken
Published by Lake Union
Publication Date: Sept. 13, 2016
Setting: North America > USA > California
Pages: 255
Format: eARC
Goodreads
four-stars

Life After Coffee by Virginia Franken is filled with humor and raw, real emotion about the messiness and joys of motherhood. A must-read for any stressed out mom who needs a laugh and longs for a great cup of coffee!

 

Blurb:

4* I really liked it! Life After Coffee by Virginia Franken is filled with humor and raw, real emotion about the messiness and joys of motherhood. A must-read for any stressed out mom who needs a laugh and longs for a great cup of coffee! 

 

Synopsis from Goodreads:

“When globe-trotting coffee buyer, Amy O’Hara, assures her husband—who stays at home to watch the kids—that it is He Who Has it Harder… she doesn’t really believe it. That is, until the day she gets laid off, her husband decides to devote all his waking hours to writing a screenplay, and she discovers she’s actually the world’s most incompetent mother.

Amy’s only possible salvation is to find another high-flying job as quickly as possible, but with the coffee industry imploding around her—and the competing buyers in her field being much hipper prospects—things look pretty dire. Even if Amy does manage to find full-time employment ever again, as her life slowly becomes more and more entwined with her children’s, how will she be able to bear leaving them to travel for weeks on end?
When salvation appears in the form of a movie-mogul ex-boyfriend who wants to employ her husband and rekindle their relationship, Amy starts to find she’s sorely tempted…
 
One thing is certain: whatever happens, she’s going to need a lot more caffeine.”

 

My Thoughts:

 

I thought I’d be happy when I quit my stressful full-time job to become a stay-at-home mom for my 3 angelic boys. Surely it couldn’t be THAT hard having my 3 year old home all day while the older 2 were in school, I naively thought. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it would be hard physically to keep up with the little speed demon. But I thought I’d have all this time to get my house perfectly organized and decorated while I was home and accomplish all these things I’d daydreamed of the 13 years I was a full-time working outside the home mom.

 

That was 3 years ago and still I’ve only made a small dent in my wish list of goals. No one told me that the mess regenerates faster than I can clean it it seems… even when they aren’t home! I’m happier…100% yes…but no one told me soon my daydreams of a beautiful home and perfectly mannered and brilliant kids would turn into daydreams of just wanting to pee alone. You moms of kids under 5 years old can relate, right? 

 

So when Life After Coffee came across my email and author Virginia Franken described her ideal reader as â€śA strung out, stressed out mom would understand”, I said that was me and just about every other mom I know whether she wants to admit it or not! And boy, DID I understand.

 

I understood every fear that Amy had every time she had to pry them off of her screaming and crying to go to work. I understood every self-doubt Amy had of why am I doing this? I understood every heartbreak when the kids preferred to be with their daddy instead of her (have you met my Superhubby? He’s a tough act to compete with when it comes to having fun). And I understood every simple, magical, heart-pounding-out-of-your-chest, tears-streaming-down-your-face joy that only motherhood can bring. 

 

I really enjoyed Life After Coffee, so much so that I nearly read the entire book in one day. I like stories where the characters are flawed and yet manage to grow and learn from their mistakes. With both humor and real, raw emotion, Franken brings the plight of the working mother and SAHM’s to light. Neither job is easy and there is a lot of messiness and winging it along the way. Amy has the added pressure of thinking about the one that got away and what will happen when he wants her back. Can her marriage and family survive her decisions?

 

Life after Coffee will make moms laugh and cry (just a little) and will make coffee lovers seek out their favorite quality cup of coffee.

 

Books Like This You Might Enjoy:

These would be great gifts for any mom or mom-to-be! 

The Big Book of Parenting Tweets: Featuring the Most Hilarious Parents on Twitter – 4*, a quick and funny read that all parents can relate to

The Mother of All Meltdowns Book Review – 3*- you think meltdowns are only for the kids? These moms confess their worst meltdown for all to read! 

My 3 Favorite Short Story Collections about Motherhood – some funny and some that redefine what a “good” mother means

 


Blog Tour Schedule

tlc tour host

Tuesday, September 13th: A Chick Who Reads
Wednesday, September 14th: Chick Lit Central â€“ author guest post
Thursday, September 15th: Bibliotica
Monday, September 19th: Books and Bindings
Tuesday, September 20th: Wall to Wall Books
Thursday, September 22nd: Back Porchervations
Monday, September 26th: Write Read Life
Wednesday, September 28th: The Book Chick
Monday, October 3rd: Rebel Mommy Book Blog
Thursday, October 6th: Tina Says
Friday, October 7th: Mrs. Mommy Booknerd
Monday, October 10th: Books a la Mode â€“ author guest post
Tuesday, October 11th: A Bookish Affair
Wednesday, October 12th: Lovely Bookshelf on the Wall
Thursday, October 13th: From the TBR Pile
Monday, October 17th: All Roads Lead to the Kitchen
Tuesday, October 18th: 5 Minutes for Books
Wednesday, October 19th: Reading Cove Book Club
Thursday, October 20thMom’s Small Victories
Monday, October 24thCaryn, The Book Whisperer
Sunday, October 30thWriter Unboxed â€“ guest post

 

GIVEAWAY!

I loved this book so much I want you to win a copy! TLC Book Tours is letting me give away one copy of this book! Thank you TLC Book Tours!

Rules: Open to US/Canada residents only, giveaway ends 11/3/2016 at 12:00am. Mom’s Small Victories will notify the winner via email. The winner must respond with mailing address within 48 hours. If a response is not received within 48 hours, another winner will be selected. Mom’s Small Victories will send the winner’s address to TLC Book Tours who forwards it to the publisher. The publisher is responsible for mailing the book to the winner.

Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Pin for Later

Life After Coffee by Virginia Franken is filled with humor and raw, real emotion about the messiness and joys of motherhood. A must-read for any stressed out mom who needs a laugh and longs for a great cup of coffee!

What fiction or nonfiction books made you laugh out loud about motherhood? What are you reading now that you recommend?

 

About Virginia Franken

From Goodreads: Virginia Franken was born and raised in Medway, Kent, the place where Henry the 8th sent his wives on holiday in the hope that they’d be eaten alive by mosquitoes and save him the trouble of beheading them. Most her childhood was spent wearing a dance leotard and tights, and at age 11 she attended the (sort of) prestigious dance school The Arts Education School, Tring, where she spent her teen years trying to do pique turns in a straight line and getting drunk in the village. (The inability to do the former possibly informed by too much opportunity to do the latter).

After graduating from The University of Roehampton, she worked on cruise liners as a professional dancer before deciding she’d had enough of wearing diamanté g-strings for a living and somehow managed to blag a job in book publishing. Getting fed up of having to choose between paying the rent or buying groceries, she eventually moved from London to Los Angeles where life was affordable and every time she opened her mouth she got to act all surprised and flattered when someone said they liked her accent. She then spent years trying to convince everyone else that it was them who had the accent, but this was never met with anything more emphatic than a polite, “Is that so…”

These days she lives in Monrovia, near to Pasadena, with two kids, a dog, one ever-lasting goldfish and her bearded lover, in a house that’s just a little bit too small to fit everyone in quite comfortably. She gets most of her writing done when she should be sleeping. LIFE AFTER COFFEE is her first novel. If enough people buy a copy, there’s a good chance she’ll write another…

10 Comments

  1. I’m reading now The Secret Ingredient of Wishes by Susan Bishop Crispell. This is a really good book! Thank you for the giveaway chance!

  2. hahaha I think this book would made me even more firm in my conviction of not having children!
    I admire you, moms of the world; I wouldn’t last even for one day with a baby.

    1. I will have to check out Little Earthquakes, I usually call me kids tornadoes or hurricanes since we live in NC but earthquakes would be a good description too. I need lots of cream and sugar or flavored creamer in mine too.

  3. I don’t know that I have a favorite book about motherhood, but I like my coffee with a bunch of cream and sugar 🙂 I am the mom of 4, so I think I would enjoy this book. I am adding it to my Amazon wishlist.

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