Deck The Malls with Purple Peacocks (Alice Chronicles #2)By Amy Gettinger
Genre: Chick-lit/ Women’s Fiction/ Sweet Romance
Age category: Adult
Release Date: November 18, 2017
Description:
It’s Christmas in Orange County, California, and the mall is full of purple peacock decorations, large and small. Department store employee Aracely Martinez has a goofy Cuban friend, Quito (who’s awfully cute in his mall Santa suit), distracting her from her night-shift restocking job. But Aracely has a long-held secret, which her supervisor at the store, Jacob Thinnes, is holding over her head to make her do his bidding.
Which is too much bidding.
Enter Aracely’s oldest friends: Alice Chalmers, Georgette Jones and Julie Bowers. The group’s “Venus Warrior” bond from the 2003 production of The Venus Monologues at Garden Beach Community College is still very strong, and these women are ready, willing, and able to kick some butt to help Aracely out of her difficult bind. Join Aracely’s “Three Wise Women” plus her ever-present trickster hunk, Quito, in one adventure after another as they work against the odds to give Aracely a fabulous, nearly impossible Christmas gift: the life of her dreams.
My Review:
Deck the Malls with Purple Peacocks caught my eye due to the festive and quirky title and matching cover.
The story is all about Aracely, whose illegal status has been noted and exploited by her unscrupulous boss. While there was plenty of the lightheartedness I’d hoped for by the packaging, there was a healthy dose of serious issues and an insightful look into what being an illegal immigrant might be like, particularly in today’s world.
It didn’t take me too long to know for sure that this was a sequel, but I felt this one stands alone pretty well. I enjoyed the missions and the banter between the friends in the Venus Warrior group, as well as the result of their benevolent meddling. Quito was adorable and his jokes as groan-worthy as I’m sure they were intended to be. The romance wasn’t as central to the story as I’d thought it would be, but that’s ok. This turned out to be more of a cozy mystery sort of thing with the team of Venus Warriors sleuthing and saving the day together, despite being total amateurs.
Jacob and the other cast of ne’er-do-wells were sinister and manipulative, and I had no trouble rooting against them. I thought it interesting how they could be so awful to Aracely, a good and hardworking person, while thinking of themselves as superior. Their self-righteousness paired with their awful behavior towards Aracely seemed designed to highlight a certain hypocrisy that seems all too realistic in today’s culture.
Overall, a good read. I wish I’d read the earlier book first because I think I’d have gotten more of the references and inside jokes between the characters. Anyhow, I’d recommend this to folks who like a little humor wrapped around a serious topic, middle-aged sleuths running missions to save their young friend, and a happy ending that doesn’t come easily.
I received the review copy of this book from the author via Lola’s Blog Tours. This review was written for my blog, I read too much!
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You can find Deck The Malls with Purple Peacocks on Goodreads
You can buy Deck The Malls with Purple Peacocks here on Amazon
Read on for an excerpt and more information about the author.
Excerpt:
She winced, waiting for the axe to fall. He’d let her off once with a warning for merchandise breakage before. But this time?
He glanced around him. “Okay. I’ll let this slide one last time. If you do me a favor in return. Come clean my house. Say later today at 1:00.” He scrawled an address on a slip of paper and handed it to her. “Here. Come dressed to work. And don’t be late.”
He half-smiled and winked. “Do it right and this never happened. There might even be a little bonus in it for you.”
Aracely balked. “But it’s my day off my other job.”
“So?”
“I need some rest.”
“Merchandise breakers can’t be choosers. If I tell the boss about this, it’ll be ugly.”
Maybe she should just quit this job there and then. It was the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and she already had two full-time jobs plus her college class. Taking on a cleaning job on her day off would rob her of much-needed sleep. But she was so close. So close! This night job paid pretty well, and in the next few weeks before Christmas, she planned to make the last few hundred dollars she needed to start up her business in downtown Santa Ana. She had her eye on a particular storefront, a small one which currently had a FOR RENT sign in the window, where she planned to open her own dress shop in February. February! Her own store! It was so close she could almost taste it.
So was she going to give up on her dream now—just because of a little stumble and some extra work?
“Yeah, fine,” she mumbled, and moved over by an all-blue tree to slice open another box of ornaments with her box cutter.
“Good choice. See ya later,” he said, and she felt a hand skim across her slim behind.
She turned around with fire in her eyes, the box cutter in her grasp, blade out.
He backed off, palms up. “Okay, okay. See you at 1:00. Without the box cutter.”
As she sliced into the new box of ornaments, muttering to herself in Spanish, another person approached. Mad enough to bite the head off a tiger, Aracely kept her head down, examining the new box full of bright purple and pink blown-glass peacocks.
But the familiar scent of fake Paco Rabanne lingered, as did the person. “Hey, Aracely. What the feck?”
Maybe if she ignored him, he’d go away.
“Aracely, where do cows go on dates? Huh?”
“Please, Quito. No jokes right now.”
“But it’s a good one. They go to the movies! Get it? Mooooo-vies. Aracely. What was Jacob buggering you about?”
“Quito, it’s ‘bugging’, not ‘buggering’.”
“Let me talk to you in Spanish then.” He flashed her a melting grin.
“No. We’ve been through this. You need to practice your English. It stinks.”
“But my slang is better than yours. You didn’t even understand when I said, ‘I’m your number one Stan, Sis. I ship you, hundo P.’ And you don’t know LB, FB, or RT.’”
She threw her hands in the air. “Quito. You have a cell phone. I don’t. And how can I learn English slang when I work and live with Spanish-speakers?
“Live with English speakers.”
“No. And why would I want to know slang? I hate slang.”
“You work too much.”
“And you not enough.” She placed a purple peacock on the blue tree. “Anyway, what’s ‘hundo P’?”
His eyes glinted and he switched to Spanish. “Not telling that to the girl who hates slang. Hey, those are like the ones on the big tree out in the mall. Coolio.” Quito grabbed two purple glass peacock ornaments, glittery confections with a spray of fluffy fuchsia and purple feathers sprouting from their purple glass tail fans. “Muchos lindos. Like, gangsta, man. TDF.”
She snorted. “TDF? Ugh. More slang? Look, don’t say ‘gangsta’ or ‘coolio’ or ‘TDF.’ Just say ‘pretty.’ And put those down.”
He said in Spanish, “Chica, what’s wrong with being creative with language? It’s fun. But these are weird turkeys.”
She hung up more peacocks. “They’re not turkeys. They’re peacocks.”
He sang his own words to the classic carol’s melody: “Jingle bells, Santa smells, Happy Halloween. Oh what fun it is to eat—tamales and peacocks. Jingle bells, Santa smells—”
Aracely cut in, “Americans don’t eat peacocks for Thanksgiving. Only turkeys.”
She went back to work.
"Hey. Am I pretty, wearing these turkeys?” He poked her shoulder, and she looked up. He wiggled his long, dark, wing-like eyebrows, batted his eyes, preened, and danced amid the Christmas trees, holding the sparkly ornaments to his ears like earrings.
Aracely clamped her mouth shut, but couldn’t keep a giggle from escaping her nose. “You’re not pretty, you turkey. The word is ‘handsome.’ You’re handso—”
Whoops.
Quickly, she caught herself and bent her head back to the box. “Don’t you have work to do, Quito?”
~~~End of Excerpt~~~
About the Author:
Amy Gettinger, once a community college ESL instructor, now writes novels and reader’s theater plays and coaches Reader’s Theater for Seniors. She’s a member of the Los Angeles Poets and Writers Collective. She lives in Orange County, California underneath a eucalyptus windrow full of parrots and crows. For fun, she walks the local beach cliff path with her husband and dogs--and thinks up perfectly ridiculous characters and crimes to write about.
You can find and contact Amy Gettinger here:
- Blog
- Goodreads
- Amazon
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