Claire Stevens's Blog, page 41

Cover Reveal - Wake The Hollow by Gaby Triana

Gaby Triana has today revealed the cover of her upcoming release, Wake The Hollow, and here it is: And here's the blurb:

Forget the ghosts, Mica. It’s real, live people you should fear.
 
Tragedy has brought Micaela Burgos back to her hometown of Sleepy Hollow. It’s been six years since she chose to live with her father in Miami instead of her eccentric mother. And now her mother is dead.
 
This town will suck you in and not let go.
 
Sleepy Hollow may be famous for its fabled headless horseman, but the town is real. So are its prejudices and hatred, targeting Mica’s family as outsiders. But ghostly voices carry on the wind, whispering that her mother’s death was based on hate…not an accident at all. With the help of two very different guys—who pull at her heart in very different ways—Micaela must awaken the hidden secret of Sleepy Hollow…before she meets her mother’s fate.
 
Find the answers.

Unless, of course, the answers find you first.
 
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Buy Links:
Amazon│Barnes & Noble│iTunes│Kobo│Amazon UK│Amazon CA│The BookDepository│Books a Million
 
About the Author
GABY TRIANA is the award-winning author of six YA novels—Wake the Hollow (Coming 2016), Summer of Yesterday, Riding the Universe, The Temptress Four, Cubanita, and Backstage Pass, as well as thirteen ghostwritten novels for best-selling authors. Originally a 4th grade teacher with a Master of Science in Elementary Education and ten years teaching experience, Gaby earned Teacher of the Year in 2000, wrote her first novel, Freddie and the Biltmore Ghost, then left teaching to launch a full-time writing career. She went on to publish young adult novels with HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, win an IRA Teen Choice Award, ALA Best Paperback Award, and Hispanic Magazine’s Good Reads of 2008. She spends her time obsessing about Halloween, Christmas, and Disney World, as well as hosting parties, designing mugs, making whimsical cakes, and winning costume contests. When she’s not writing, she might also be watching Jurassic Park movies with her boys, posting excessive food pics on social media, or helping run the Florida region of the SCBWI. Gaby lives in Miami with her three sons, Michael, Noah, and Murphy. She has one dog, Chloe, and two cats—Miss Daisy, and the reformed thug, shooting survivor, Bowie.
 
Author Links:
Website│Twitter│Facebook│Goodreads│Youtube│Instagram│Pinterest
 
Cover Reveal Organized by:
YA Bound Book Tours

Anatomy of a Misfit by Andrea Portes

Wow.  This was one hell of a book.  And that’s a pretty good achievement, considering I was tempted to DNF after about ten pages ...

Anika Dragomir is the third most popular girl in school, behind her best friend Shelli and her best frenemy Becky.  On the outside, she’s all lip gloss, boobs and blonde hair, but inside, she’s spider stew.  Constantly working hard to maintain her social position, she’s fully aware that if she shows one iota of interest to Logan McDonough, who has just come back from the summer break transformed from a loser to a hot fit guy, Becky will take her down to Chinatown.  But who needs Logan anyway, when supercool and socially acceptable Jared Kline is asking her out on dates?

So yeah, at around page ten I was seriously contemplating giving this book up.  I’d read Anika Dragomir’s internal dialogue for all of five minutes and already I despised her.  She speaks like a mallrat, she’s ridiculously judgemental and she slut-shames the girl who’s supposed to be her best friend.  Jesus, I thought, I don’t think I can stomach another 300-odd pages of this horrible girl.

But I plugged on.  I’m not entirely sure why - maybe there was something in the narrative that hinted to hidden depths in Anika’s personality, or maybe it was just to see where the plot was going, but I plugged on and bloody hell, I’m so glad I did.  This book was such an emotional rollercoaster.  Just when I start wondering if I’ve read so many books in my life that none will truly push my buttons again, a book like this comes along and I realise that yes, I have the capacity to be emotionally affected in as many ways as there are authors in the world.

So, first I want to talk about Anika.  She’s not a pleasant girl.  She’s snarky, foul-mouthed, irreverent, casually bigoted and judgemental.  But she’s also funny, loyal to the people she loves and grudgingly kind.

I’ve read a few reviews from readers who gave this book up because they hated Anika so much, and while obviously other people’s opinions are totally valid, I do wonder whether some people picked this book up thinking they were going to get a hero rather than a protagonist.  Where a hero is always the good guy, the protagonist has mixed motives.  They have flaws, sometimes lots of them.  They’re REAL.

Anika is a protagonist.  She’s not like ... (racks brains for an example of a hero)  ... I dunno, maybe Clary from TMI.  Clary is self-sacrificing, loyal, brave, pure - a true hero.  

Anika is not a hero.  She’s having a thing with Logan and hides it from everyone because she’s terrified (with some justification, admittedly) of what everyone (Becky) will think.  She’s utterly incapable of being true to herself in this regard, and yet at other times she shows flashes of humanity that took my breath away.  This book was sold to me as a version of Mean Girls, but really it’s a lot more than that.  And I LOVED Mean Girls.

***Spoiler Alert***
One of the things I loved most about this book, was this scene right at the end, where Anika calls Becky out on her Mean Girl ways and everyone applauds and Becky scuttles off, shamed and (hopefully) repentant.  It was incredibly emotional and the whole scene had such a John Hughes feel to it, totally in keeping with the time the book was set in.  I could completely imagine Molly Ringwald up there on the podium as Anika and like Shannon Doherty or someone as Becky.

The plot is a love triangle mixed in with Anika’s attempts to reconcile her twisted insides with what she thinks she ought to be like and what everyone else expects her to be.  The only thing I wanted to see more of was Anika’s relationship with Logan - he was such a sweetheart - but I could see why some aspects were skated over - Anika is so terrified that people will find out, that she can barely even admit her feelings to herself.  

I’ve read reviews from other readers and it would seem that Anatomy of a Misfit is a Marmite book - you’ll love it or hate it.  I’d recommend anyone going in to bear in mind from page one that Anika isn’t a hero and maybe you'll enjoy it too.

5 stars

Cover Reveal - Princess of Tyrone by Katie Hamstead

Katie Hamstead has today revealed the cover of her upcoming release, Princess of Tyrone, and here it is! Aah ... so pretty!  And here's the blurb:

Apolline is happy hunting magical creatures on her pirate infested outer-perimeter planet. She is a fantastic shot, and doesn’t flinch at the blood and guts of her kills. Never once did she consider she could be the missing Princess of Tyrone.

All her life, she has heard the story of the Princess, cursed to sleep for eternity, unless her betrothed, the Prince of Oran, gave her true love’s kiss. Although Apolline knows she is betrothed, she thinks her fairy guardians arranged it out of ignorance of human ways. The thought she could be a princess is inconceivable.

Then Allard appears. Handsome, charming—but he’s not hers to have. He’s betrothed, too. Her guardians warn her against her new found friendship, but she and Allard meet in secret anyway. Despite her rough exterior, he sees beyond her gun-slinging bravado, and their love blossoms.

But the deadline for the sleeping curse is approaching. If Apolline falls in love with the wrong person, she could end up sleeping forever.

A quirky, adventurous retelling of Sleeping Beauty, with a less than princess-ly princess! 
 
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About the Author
Born and raised in Australia, Katie's early years of day dreaming in the "bush", and having her father tell her wild bedtime stories, inspired her passion for writing.

After graduating High School, she became a foreign exchange student where she met a young man who several years later she married. Now she lives in Arizona with her husband, daughter and their dog.

She has a diploma in travel and tourism which helps inspire her writing.

When her debut novel, Kiya: Hope of the Pharaoh, climbed into bestselling status, she believed she was onto something, and now has a slew of novels now available, and is published through Curiosity Quills Press, Soul Mate Publishing, and REUTS Publishing.

Katie loves to out sing her friends and family, play sports, and be a good wife and mother. She now works as an Acquisitions Editor to help support her family. She loves to write, and takes the few spare moments in her day to work on her novels.
 
Author Links:
Website│Goodreads│Twitter│Facebook
 
Cover Reveal Organized by:
YA Bound Book Tours

Waiting On Wednesday - My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking The Spine and it's a chance for us all to highlight the upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows.  Here's the blurb:

For fans of The Princess Bride comes the comical, fantastical, romantical, (not) entirely true story of Lady Jane Grey.

Lady Jane Grey, sixteen, is about to be married to a total stranger—and caught up in an insidious plot to rob her cousin, King Edward, of his throne. But that’s the least of Jane’s problems. She’s about to become Queen of England. Like that could go wrong.

I'm really looking forward to this!  Tudor history is a bit of a fascination of mine and the power plays around this period were mind-boggling, with everyone trying to get a hold on England's throne.  Lady Jane Grey was only queen for nine days (spoiler alert) before she was beheaded for treason and Mary I took the throne, so I'm really interested to see what these authors are going to do with the plot.

What about you?  What's your Waiting One Wednesday pick?

When Everything Feels Like The Movies by Raziel Reid

I knew literally nothing about this book going in.  I had no idea about the controversy that surrounded it, that it was awarded the Governor General’s award in Canada or that there were calls for the award to be revoked and I knew nothing about the author.  All I knew about it was the blurb (which sounded interesting) the cover (which looked gorgeous) and that it was being published in the UK by Little, Brown (whose books I have a track record of really enjoying).
 
From the blurb, I understood that this is a story about a kid called Jude.  Gay and cross-dressing, he is stuck in a school that is basically a movie set - you have the Crew, the Extras and the Movie Stars and no one is really real, least of all Jude and all this is set to come to a head when Jude asks the boy he has a crush on to the Valentine’s Day dance.
 
What I was anticipating from this book: something akin to Hold Me Closer, The Tiny Cooper Story by David Levithan.
 
What I got:  not that.
 
Which isn’t to say either book is better or worse, just that they were about as different as it’s possible for two stories to be whilst having similar underlying themes.
 
So to start, I want to point out that I really admired this book.  It made for difficult reading at times, very difficult, but it was completely compelling and the themes it explores are really important.
 
One of the best things I found about this book was the way it shines a light on hate crimes and shows that despite the huge advances that have been made in the last couple of decades surrounding LGBTQIA rights, there is still a lot of work to be done. Jude is subjected to near-constant abuse, mostly verbal but sometimes physical, both at home and at school, and yet he refuses to be a victim. 
 
Instead of hiding and biding his time until he can escape his horrible small town, which you’d totally understand him doing, he plays up to the cameras and gives his classmates exactly what they’ve come to expect from him: star quality.  When walking down the street, he envisions the sad, shingled houses as Beverly Hills Mansions.  When someone scrawls ‘faggot’ on his locker door, it’s really just a love letter from an adoring fan.  He and his friend Angela dull the edges of their lives by indulging in sex (Angela) and drugs (both of them) and Jude constantly lays a Hollywood filter over everything he experiences.
 
The writing is shocking, in that the author deliberately sets out to shock the reader.  Jude and Angela speak in a casually offensive way and the things they do are fairly eyebrow-raising, but still totally believable.  I hate the word gritty, but I’m struggling to think of a better word.  This book is gritty.  There is a huge juxtaposition between Jude’s glamorous outlook and the depressing facts of his life.  Only sometimes do cracks in Jude’s narrative appear and we see the harsh reality of his existence. 
 
About halfway through the book I had a brief look on the internet at the background to this book and found out that this was actually based on a true story.  In some ways
 
The only thing I wasn’t sure about with this book was an aspect of the protagonists.  I started off reading it, and pretty soon realised that it was a bit darker than I had anticipated: there are lots of sexual references (like, a lot) and references to drug-taking, neither of which I have a problem with in YA, I hasten to add.  No problem, I thought, and adjusted my reading expectations. 
 
Then I found out that the protagonists were in middle school!  Middle school!  That means they’re like fifteen years old!
 
Bloomin’ heck, I thought, and re-adjusted my expectations of the book again.
 
Now, I need to point out that I’m not anti books that reference fifteen year olds having sex or taking drugs - it takes a very naive sort of person to think that these things don’t happen in real life - but up until that point I had assumed that they were in high school, possibly seniors.  But they were fifteen!
 
And then I started to question why I was so surprised at their ages.  God knows, fifteen year olds have sex and take drugs. It may be less widespread in that age group, but it definitely happens, especially in miserable towns where there are few prospects and even fewer things to do of an evening.  These situations don’t horrify me and I don’t think they should be banned from YA literature.  So what was it that bothered me so much?
 
Then I realised.  It wasn’t so much that Jude and Angela were in these situations, it was their reaction to them.  They were both just so utterly cynical and world-weary.  That was the thing that, for me, didn’t really ring true.  Their attitudes were those of people much older than fifteen.  It jarred slightly and while it may have affected my enjoyment very slightly, it didn’t impact my respect for what this book is trying to do.
 
I think there are going to be people who say this book shouldn’t be read by younger teenagers, that it deals with themes that are too mature for their impressionable minds.  It’s one of the things about the YA classification - you have YA books like the Lunar Chronicles, which I would (and have) happily recommended to nine-year-olds, but this book?  My initial reaction was to only recommend this book for ages seventeen and up, but do you know what?  I was reading Stephen King, Jilly Cooper and James Herbert when I was thirteen and I got along with those books just fine, so actually I would say that this book is acceptable for around thirteen years and upwards.  I definitely think it’s a book that educators, parents and young adults alike should read as I think we could all learn a lot from it.

4 stars

Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis

Okay, I can see why people call this book a masterpiece.  If you're really into reading about violence, sexual abuse, paedophilia, hard drugs and vacant sex and despicable people doing awful things to each other, then this book would be right up your alley.  Ultimately, though, for all that I could see the talent of the author, I found this uncomfortable, unpleasant reading.

Reading Less Than Zero was just like when I'm at the gym and the people in the office downstairs start dicking about with the television reception and all of a sudden we get The Jeremy Kyle Show instead of MTV.  It's horrible, I don't want to see it and yet I just can't seem to look away.

Less Than Zero is the story of Clay, a young man who is back in LA from university for the Christmas holidays.  He and his friends are all ridiculously wealthy and instead of actually doing anything with their lives, they all seem to be engaged in this massive game of See Who Can Be The Most Abhorrent Human Being.  Spoiler alert - no one wins.

And yet, for all that the characters in this book are vile and do awful things, they don't seem to get off on it.  They have no emotions.  They're not even enjoying the depraved things they're doing.  And I get that it's supposed to be because of the environment they're in and everything, but really?  Not one emotion in an entire city of dreadful people?  It was very bizarre, like watching the Cybermen in Doctor Who.

The short little vignettes that Less Than Zero is carved up into are kind of like Clay's coke-addled brain: all choppy and flickering.  The writing is good, and I'm told it's incredibly evocative of early 80's LA.  I wouldn't have a clue, but if it's true and I ever invent a time machine, that's sure as hell one place I won't be visiting.

1.5 stars

Winter by Marissa Meyer

Winter is that fourth and final instalment of the Lunar Chronicles – a series I picked up last year and was incredibly impressed by.  I devoured Cinder, Scarlet and Cress and also read Meyers’ supplementary short stories on Wattpad and loved them all, so I was super excited to read Winter.
 
Okay, so a basic summary of the plot is: Cinder and pals have decided to invade Luna and try to take down Levana and put Cinder on the throne.  It’s quite a simple premise and you might be wondering how this stretched to nearly 900 pages.  To be honest, I’m wondering the same thing.
 
Don’t get me wrong: there were things I loved about this book.  I love Meyer’s ingenuity and how she takes elements from the original story (the poisoned apple, the glass coffin) and gave them a futuristic twist.  I love that Winter is a stop short of East Ham but that she still has a personality.  I love all the girls getting busy with their STEM subjects.  And the awesome characters … and a-a-l-l-l the shipping …  There were good point to this book and overall I think Winter gave us a good wrap-up to what has been an excellent series overall.
 
It’s just … It’s just it was too long.
 
One of the things I loved about the previous books, was that Meyer just throws plot points at you like snowballs and it’s just one big, crazy ride.  That didn’t happen here.  Like I said before, the whole premise of the book is that the gang invade Luna and take down Levana.  Well, they don’t actually arrive on Luna until page 150.  And then, without wishing to give too much away, the plot consists of the gang being split up and finding each other over and over again.  And every time they do, they have to fill each other in on what’s been happening since they last saw each other.  I really think that Winter could have been shortened by about 400 pages without damaging the plot in any way.
 
So yeah, it was a bit wandery and weavy, and there were definitely times I wanted to shout, ‘Just get to the point, would you?!’  Luckily, though, Marissa Meyer’s writing is still very good – it flows right off the page and even if the dialogues maybe weren’t quite as snappy as in previous books, it was still very readable.
 
I did think Winter lacked some of the tension of the previous books.  We know it’s the last book, and we know they’re all going to get an HEA (obviously – it’s a fairy tale!), so I think a lot of the book was just waiting around for the HEA to happen.  There was never a moment when I thought ‘My god, how the HELL are they going to get out of this scrape?’  You know with some books, you think your MCs are definitely, definitely doomed this time and you just can’t see how they’re going to escape and then the author pulls a neatly foreshadowed rabbit out of the hat?  Yeah, not so much here.
 
Still, I’m glad I read it.  The characters are just so much fun and the twist on the traditional fairy tale is great.

3 stars

Waiting On Wednesday - Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking The Spine and it's a chance for us all to highlight the upcoming releases we're eagerly anticipating.  This week my Waiting On Wednesday pick is The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood.  Here's the blurb:

This is what it means to love someone. This is what it means to grieve someone. It's a little bit like a black hole. It's a little bit like infinity.

Gottie H. Oppenheimer is losing time. Literally. When the fabric of the universe around her seaside town begins to fray, she's hurtled through wormholes to her past:

To last summer, when her grandfather Grey died. To the afternoon she fell in love with Jason, who wouldn't even hold her hand at the funeral. To the day her best friend Thomas moved away and left her behind with a scar on her hand and a black hole in her memory.

Although Grey is still gone, Jason and Thomas are back, and Gottie's past, present, and future are about to collide—and someone's heart is about to be broken.

Again, I'm racking up a summer book to read and it's only February, but this one looks so good I'm going to have to give it a shot.

What about you?  What's your Waiting One Wednesday pick this week?

Cover Reveal - Life After Juliet by Shannon Lee Alexander

Shannon Lee Alexander has today revealed the cover of her upcoming release, Life After Juliet.  And here it is!​​ Becca Hanson is a reader-a voracious reader. And with all those fictional friends, she never had time for real ones. Plus real ones come with uncontrollable quirks, like constantly filling a room with song, drawing on any available surface, and worst of all, dying. Real friends are more trouble than they're worth. Since her best-and only-real friend Charlotte's death six months before, Becca has returned to a life of books in order to distance herself from heartache and constant loneliness as her junior year at Sandstone High begins.

When a class project forces her into the Drama Club, she attracts the attention of not one, but TWO guys involved in the production, onstage and off. Meanwhile, she's still dealing with the grief of Charlotte's death--the fact that Charlie is away at MIT--and that she finally has to build a life for herself on her own terms. Ultimately she learns more about who she is, what she wants, how she feels--and how to find what she's looking for. (And while she isn't sure what comes next, she's pretty sure there'll be more kissing involved.)
 
Add to Goodreads
 
Buy Links:
Amazon│Barnes & Noble│iTunes│Kobo│Amazon UK│Amazon CA│The BookDepository│Books a Million
 
About the Author
Shannon Lee Alexander was compelled to write this story after the death of her best friend to ovarian cancer. She is a member of SCBWI and She Writes, and works as a copy editor for Sucker Literary, a showcase for new and undiscovered writers of young adult literature. She recently completed her seventh Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure in Washington D.C., and is an active supporter of cancer research.
 
Author Links:
Website│Twitter│Facebook│Goodreads
 
Cover Reveal Organized by:
YA Bound Book Tour

The Monogram Murders by Sophie Hannah

I don’t even know where to begin with this review.  I thought initially that I should wait a few days before writing it, just to get my thoughts in order, but really I just want to draw a line under this book and forget all about it, so here goes...
 
As a disclaimer, I’d like to say that I am an Agatha Christie fan.  I’ve read most of her books over the years - And Then There Were None is one of my favourite books of all time and I also really like her Poirot stories. 
 
While I’m definitely a fan, I wouldn’t say I’m a purist.  When I heard another author - and a respected crime writer at that - had brought out a new Poirot book, I was interested to read it.  I didn’t care where it fit in the canon, and I haven’t read any of Sophie Hannah’s other books, but I was interested in seeing what she’d done.
 
Usually when I give a bad review, I start off with what I did like about the book.  Unfortunately, I didn’t like anything about this book.  From the opening pages, I was just bored.
 
The characters were bland and uninteresting.  Poirot has suddenly gone from being one of the most idiosyncratic characters in literature to this boring little man with no spark or interest to him.  The narrator, Detective Catchpool was the thickest policeman I’ve ever read about.  Seriously, if I’m ever murdered I hope to god Scotland Yard get someone a bit cleverer than Detective Catchpool on the case.  And for a detective, he’s really squeamish about dead bodies.  Maybe no one at Police School thought to pre-warn him that he’d be seeing them occasionally.  He has this ongoing thing where he has flashbacks to when his granddad died and he had to go and view his body but it never really gets resolved.  I didn’t care.
 
Their dialogue between Poirot and Catchpool was boring and rambly.  All Poirot does is sigh at Catchpool, tell him how he’s being blind and then go on to explain things.
 
The surrounding characters were bland and one-dimensional.  The villagers were caricatures, and not very flattering ones.  I didn’t really care about any of them and wasn’t interested in who the murderer turned out to be.
 
The plot wasn’t terribly complex, but because the prose was so boring I found it really hard to concentrate on what was happening.  My eyes kept skimming over the text, so I’d then have to re-read passages. Even now I’m struggling to remember who actually did the murders.  I kept wanting to DNF and now I wish I had.  The denouement, when it happened, lasted for seventy pages.  Seventy!  This came after a twenty-two page admission from one of the characters, which turned out to be a lie and only served to confuse me.
 
The Ive scandal just seemed a bit unbelieveable.  I didn’t see how an entire village of people would get behind a gossipy old woman just because they were afraid of what she’d say about them if they stood up to her.  Also, was Rev. Patrick Ive secretly Channing Tatum?  He had three women so much in love with him that they were willing to murder, defame and die for him. 
 
The writing was dull and had no sparkle or shine to it.  Sentences rambled on before petering out without actually getting to the point, making it really hard to work out what point was being made.  Again, I just kept thinking how bored I was. 
 
Glad to have finished this book.  On to the next one.
 
1.5 stars