Scandal Season 4:Mid Season Finale. AKA: I ain't your Bitch, Baby!

The Mid-Season Finale, In a nutshell:

• Cyrus has his pictures of him and his man-ho Michael leaked, Olivia solves his problem with a happy ending. Um, oops. Meant a Happily Ever After story.
  
• Cyrus tries to resign in disgrace, and Olivia gets IN HIS FACE and calls him a Bitch Baby, lays the smack down, and makes him get his ass back in the oval office. We all need a friend like Liv to kick our ass when we need it.
  
• Lizzy wants war, goes to Mellie and gets it in a way she didn’t expect. Mellie tells her
  that they share the VP love. And possibly a STD.
  
• Papa Pope is cleaning house and seems like Jake, Quinn, and others have “kill cards” issued on them.
  
• Jake brought Olivia a gun and taught her how to use it. He wants to leave all the dramarama and danger behind and go live in the sun on their isolated beach. Olivia responds:  “The sun went down a long time ago and it’s not coming back up.” Ouch.
  
  
  
• Quinn hooks up with Charlie again, only to find he has a kill card on her. They kick the crap out of each other, then have make-up something or other. Not sure, they’re scary dysfunctional together. Charlie has some secret files so it’s a good thing that Quinn didn’t kill him.
  
• Speaking of files, Huck tries to visit his son, and his baby mama isn’t having any of it. She threatens to call the police, and he begs her to read the files that he’s left on her doorstep. Two boxes full.
  
• Mama Pope is pulled out of captivity, and thinks that Olivia is going to save her. After chatting about Papa Pope, Olivia tells mommy "You have a PhD in his crazy!"
  Mama Pope lashes out, makes Olivia cry, and tells her "Cry me a river...Whatever." All she needed was the hand to the face! Olivia has had it. Tells the men they can't keep her mother as she hasn't been formally charged. So charge her! Liv asks that she be charged with murder, among other things.
  
• Abby gets a visit from David Rosen, who is questioning her activities. When trying to ascertain where she was one evening, he finds she was with Leo. All night. He’s upset, but dude…really? You can’t be pissed if you’re not going to step up to the plate and someone else takes a swing. 
  
• Olivia gets a visit from dear old dad, who has a gun on the table. Yelling. Blame. Shame. Papa tells Liv "You have no comprehension of love," and no matter how hard she tries to be different, she is exactly like him.
  
  Olivia picks up the gun and pulls the trigger!!!! No bullets. Papa Pope is stunned and outraged that she actually pulled the trigger! “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!”
  I’m surprised as well.
  
  
  
• Jake comes over to Olivia’s place later to find her dancing around to some Stevie. She has their island wine. She’s choosing her. Not Fitz, Not Jake, but herself. She wants to get busy on the piano, so Jake runs to get a pillow and blankie, only to return and find her gone. GONE. The front door is open and no Liv in sight.
  
• The VP goes to Fitz and threatens him with the one thing he cannot live without. Seems like Andrew has something to do with Liv’s disappearance, and he wants his West Angola war. Talk about pushing the president into a corner!  

 Well, now we know who was taking pictures of Olivia and following her around. And we know why. Where is she? We'll have to wait and see.

Scenes from the City: A Wintertime Surprise by Penny Reid - Part uno.

When author Penny Reid announced she was releasing a novella called “Scenes from the City” with updates on the Knitting in the City gals, my first thought was “Hell yah! I love those girls.” 

Then I thought…”wait, maybe I should do a re-read so that I’m totally caught up and ready for these updates.” So that’s what I did. Then, because I’ve told friends to read these books (and they have) and said they would love them as much as I did (and they did), I decided to sit my booty down and write a review on each of the books and tie it to the release of Scenes. 

The Knitting Club meets on Tuesdays to knit, drink wine and margaritas, and gossip. The women include Janie, a financial wiz; Elizabeth, a doctor that is Janie’s best friend, Sandra – Dr. Shrink; Ashely, a nurse practitioner from Tennessee; Fiona, a mechanical engineer taking a hiatus to be a stay-at-home mom, and Marie, a free-lance writer and artist. Rounding out the bunch is Kat, who works as an administrative assistant to the executives at Janie’s former company. 

You need to know this before going into these books. The women make the story. Not because they’re women, and they swoon, and maybe (okay they do) fall in love. But because these women are smart, educated, witty, snarky, support each other, and love each other unconditionally. They remind me of my circle of friends, except without the knitting because we don’t do that.  I love when authors give women real degrees, real careers, and still have real problems – because that’s something that I can really connect with and believe. I’ve devoured these books, and look forward to each new release. 

With Scenes from the City, I felt like I was able to meet up with my best gal pals and catch up on what’s been happening. Hear all about what I’ve missed since the semester started and my life became filled with grading exams, dealing with educational policies, and whiny college students, and they've been busy with their own lives, families, and careers.

 I loved hearing about Janie and Quinn’s honeymoon. Jamie is just a quirky as ever, and Quinn loves her all the same.

Getting reacquainted with freaking Nico and Elizabeth and hearing him speak Italian to her. 

 I mean, seriously? Who doesn't love a man that's smokin' hot and speaks Italian? 

REALLY loved how Alex made Sandra’s birthday wish and check off one of her items on the “Things To Do Before I Have Children Because They Might Bet Me Arrested” list.  

 Most of all, I really loved hearing how Ashley and Drew kept in touch while she was preparing to move from Chicago to Tennessee and they were apart. 

The best part of Scenes from the City: you learn about Fiona and Greg. How they met, and how he instantly fell for her. Greg is awesome!!  He has an inappropriate sense of humor, is offensive, arrogant, and has an accent. An accent! 

“Ask me when I knew” he said.

“When did you know?”

“When I saw you…” he whispered… “ I saw you…and you’d bent over to pick up your pen or some such item…and I thought to myself…I thought, I am going to tap that ass. And other things.”

He's hilarious! Snarky! And he's all kinds of sweet.

So, stay tuned. I’m going to post each review and the Scene’s from the City quotes I love best from the book and the novella.

I encourage you to read the series.

Reading Order: 

Neanderthal Meets Human: Amazon / Barnes and Noble  / 

Friends Without Benefits: Amazon  /  Barnes and Noble

Neanderthal Marries Human:  Amazon  /  Barnes and Noble

Love Hacked: Amazon / Barnes and Noble

Beauty and the Mustache:  Amazon  / Barnes and Noble

Pre-Order Scenes from the City from Amazon

It's only available for two weeks! Two. That's it! Then it goes away so grab your copy now. All proceeds benefit Toys for Tots. 

Because Penny is generous and all kinds of awesomesauce. 

Don't believe me? Just check her out on Facebook
and on Twitter @ReidRomance

Neanderthal Seeks Human + Scenes from the City by Penny Reid

The review of the first book in the series. . Neanderthal Meets Human

Meet Janie. She’s quirky, highly intelligent (degrees in mathematics and architecture), spouts random facts (or rampant randomness), and talks too much when she’s nervous. She’s also having a bit of a bad day. She’s having a bad hair day, she just discovered her boyfriend of 5-years is cheating on her, she broke her heel while getting to work, spilled coffee on her favorite shirt, and her job has just been downsized. She’s out of work.

 Add to all that – while hiding in the bathroom before going out and clearing her desk, she discovers that the toilet paper roll is empty. EMPTY! She has to go back out and face the world, jobless, homeless (because she was living with the cheater boyfriend), and is escorted out by none other than Sir Handsome McHotpants. The guy she’s been “harmlessly admiring-slash-stalking for the past five weeks.”

McHotpants is Quinn. He’s silent and authoritative, and escorts Janie out of the building and arranges for her to get home. He doesn’t see her again until she shows up with her friend at a nightclub, and has her drink spiked by another man. Quinn takes her out of the club, to his home, where she wakes up and realizes she has a raging hangover, is not at her friend Elizabeth’s house where she’s currently crashing on her couch, and she’s in her underwear and wants to die. When she finally realizes she’s at McHotpants house (okay, actually his sister’s apartment), she freaks.  He ends up taking her to breakfast, where she reveals that she compares herself and her big head to a Neanderthal, has a freakish ability to crunch numbers, any numbers, in her head, and again, talks too much with rampant randomness. Quinn is intrigued by her, and since he knows that she's unemployed, he helps her find a position. What Janie doesn’t know is that it’s with his company. 

The two continue to interact, and seriously, the banter is hilarious. He teases her, and she responds with her quirky comments. Despite her resistance to carrying a cell phone, she does and he sends her quotes and jokes every day.

"There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary numbers, and those who don't"

NERD HUMOR!!! OMIGOD. I. Love. It. I. Get. It!!

As he tries to develop a relationship with Janie, she’s oblivious to the fact that he’s interested in her. She tries to find excuses to not be involved with him, while he tries to be a better man for her. She sees things in fixed definitions and black and white, he’s grey.  The two work. 

Some of the internal dialogue is laugh out loud material. 

"I was never one of those girls who could go comfortably bra-less; there was too much jiggle in my wiggle" 

 I’ve read, and re-read this book and still laugh so hard I snort, and get strange looks from those around me who are wondering what I’m reading. 

shutupshutupshutupshutup!

And If that’s not enough, Penny Reid may be my new girl crush because of this: 

“I thought about what steps I could take to remove the word “moisture” or even “moist” from the English language. I really hated the way it sounded and always went out of my way to avoid saying it out loud.”

See? That right there? Bonded. Like Janie and Elizabeth. Or more like Janie, and the harmlessly admiring-slash-stalking-but not really stalking but I still heart her kinda bond.  Only she doesn’t know it, so don’t go telling on me, mmmkay? 

After reading Neanderthal Meets Human I felt happy, satisfied, and just a bit like Janie "One thought galloped around and around in my brain: I can't believe that just happened. Eventually, it was accompanied by another thought: How can I make that happen again." 

Read the next book in the series, that's how. 

You really need to read Book 2: Friends Without Benefits before reading Neanderthal Marries Human. Then, read the first part of Scenes from the City for the Honeymoon! 

  Neanderthal Seeks Honeymoon: 

Janie and Quinn go on their honeymoon - a secluded island in the Caribbean.  Janie doesn't know how to do nothing so she brings along some tasks and research projects. 

 

"What's in the binder"

"Vaginas"

"Janie, why do you have a binder of vaginas?"

"For discussion. I got the idea when the ladies and I were at the spa in Las Vegas. Someone mentioned Vagazzling, so I looked it up..."

"I think I need a drink."

Quinn, has other things planned. Margaritas. Frozen and strong. He packed for Janie - bikini's and sunscreen. Get where his mind is at? Of course, since it's their honeymoon, they also have lots of sexy-times! 

Here are the linkies to get your own copies of Knitting goodness:

Reading Order: 

Neanderthal Meets Human: Amazon / Barnes and Noble  / 

Friends Without Benefits: Amazon  /  Barnes and Noble

Neanderthal Marries Human:  Amazon  /  Barnes and Noble

Love Hacked: Amazon / Barnes and Noble

Beauty and the Mustache:  Amazon  / Barnes and Noble

Pre-Order Scenes from the City from Amazon

It's only available for two weeks! Two. That's it! Then it goes away so grab your copy now. All proceeds benefit Toys for Tots. 

Because Penny is generous and all kinds of awesomesauce.