Hi Everyone!
It’s another great week of book releases. Here’s the roundup with a giveaway from from the fabulous Susan Dennard. Have you been waiting (im)patiently for any of this week’s releases?
The ladies of AYAP,
Martina, Alyssa, Jan, Lisa, Katharyn, Erin, and Clara
YA BOOK GIVEAWAYS THIS WEEK
Strange and Ever After
by Susan Dennard
Signed Hardcover (US winner) or Ebook (International winner)
HarperTeen
Released 7/22/2014
In the conclusion to the trilogy that Publishers Weekly called “a roaring—and addictive—gothic world,” Eleanor Fitt must control her growing power, face her feelings for Daniel, and confront the evil necromancer Marcus…all before it’s too late.
He took her brother, he took her mother, and now, Marcus has taken her good friend Jie. With more determination than ever to bring this sinister man to justice, Eleanor heads to the hot desert streets of nineteenth-century Egypt in hopes of ending this nightmare. But in addition to her increasingly tense relationships with Daniel, Joseph, and her demon, Oliver, Eleanor must also deal with her former friend, Allison, who has curiously entangled herself in Eleanor’s mission.
With the rising dead chomping at her every move and Jie’s life hanging in the balance, Eleanor is convinced that her black magic will see her through to the bitter end. But there will be a price. Though she and the Spirit Hunters have weathered every battle thus far, there will be consequences to suffer this time—the effects of which will be irreversible. And when it’s over, only some will be able to live a strange and ever after.
Susan Dennard will leave readers breathless and forever changed in the concluding pages of this riveting ride.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Strange and Ever After?
I have to say, I LOVE the Egyptian setting. I mean, Indiana Jones and The Mummy are still some of my favorite films, so it’s no wonder that I loved exploring 1876 Cairo so much! I mean, the dusty streets, the intense heat, the call of the muezzin, and the clash of modern buildings with old Turkish side streets–it was seriously a delight researching this book. Then, studying the Great Pyramid, Saqqara, and Heliopolis–there is just so much potential for conflict and romance in those settings!
Plus–c’mon–everyone knows that having mummies as part of a Dead army makes EVERYTHING cooler. 😉
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YA BOOK GIVEAWAYS LAST WEEK: WINNERS
Earthquake
by Aprilynne Pike
Hardcover
Razorbill
Released 7/15/2014
Winners: Katherine Ivan and Alisha Sienkiel
Tavia Michaels has discovered that she’s an Earthbound—a fallen goddess with the power to remake the Earth—and that a rival faction of Earthbounds, the Reduciata, has created a virus that is literally wiping swaths of the planet out of existence.
Tavia is captured and imprisoned before she can act on this information, along with her eternal lover, Logan. Huddled in a claustrophobic cell, they lose track of the days, their attempts to escape proving as ephemeral as Tavia’s newly gestating powers. But then Tavia and Logan are mysteriously rescued. . . .
They’re brought to the underground headquarters of the Curatoria, another group of Earthbounds that Tavia doesn’t fully trust. There, she’s told that she can save the Earth before it disappears. She agrees.
Tavia quickly realizes that she isn’t like other Earthbound, and as her abilities continue to awaken, they begin to threaten her centuries-long relationship with Logan. When Benson—Tavia’s former best friend and romantic interest—appears at Curatoria headquarters, Tavia will again have to make a choice about who to be with even as she tries to stop the virus that is destroying the world and uncover the truth about the two Earthbound organizations that have her tangled up in their webs.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Earthquake?
Oddly, the pacing. I have often said that pacing is not something that comes natural to me as a writer. And it’s not. But through a lot of work and tons of help from my editor, i am so happy with the pacing in Earthquake! It is quite frenetic in much the same way as Destined is, at the end of the Wings series. Everything moves really, really fast, and you get to about the last hundred pages, and there’s just no good place to stop!
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MORE YOUNG ADULT FICTION IN STORES NEXT WEEK WITH AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
Endless
by Kate Brian
Hardcover
Disney-Hyperion
Released 7/22/2014
An unthinkable betrayal threatens everyone Rory loves in the third installment of our dark, thrilling Shadowlands series from New York Times best-selling author Kate Brian.
Rory Miller didn’t just fall in love with Tristan Parrish. She fell in love with the idea of forever. He was the one who told her the truth about her existence in Juniper Landing: that her mortal life is over, and she will now spend eternity on the island, helping others in limbo move on.
But like Juniper Landing, a bright island with dark secrets, Tristan is too good to be true. The mysterious, heartbreakingly beautiful boy Rory thought she knew is responsible for unthinkable evil-sending good souls to the Shadowlands in order to get himself a second chance at life on Earth. He has already claimed Rory’s friend Aaron and her own father, but when SPOILER Tristan sends her sister, Darcy, to the Shadowlands, too, Rory decides to take matters into her own hands. She will do anything to save her family, even if it means going to hell and back.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Endless?
My favorite thing about Endless is that, since it’s the last book in the Shadowlands trilogy, I get to answer all the nagging questions. Every time I go to an event, people have tons of great, insightful questions about what’s going on in this trilogy, but I can never answer them without giving everything away. Now everyone gets to find out what happens to (protagonist) Rory, whether she’ll see her mom, whether (love interest) Tristan is really a bad guy, whether Rory ends up with Tristan or (second love interest) Joaquin, if (serial killer) Steven Nell is really dead and gone. It’s all in there! Hopefully the readers will be satisfied with the answers I provide.
I also love—and I hope this isn’t giving too much away—that I got to end things in a hopeful place. I piled so much horrible, devastating crap onto Rory throughout the first two books, and she gets some more dumped on her here, but by the end she’s figured out a few things and learned a lot about her new surroundings. She understands how to deal and what she has to do to help the people she loves.
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Extraction
by Stephanie Diaz
Hardcover
St. Martin’s Griffin; First Edition edition
Released 7/22/2014
“Welcome to Extraction testing.”
Clementine has spent her whole life preparing for her sixteenth birthday, when she’ll be tested for Extraction in the hopes of being sent from the planet Kiel’s toxic Surface to the much safer Core, where people live without fear or starvation. When she proves promising enough to be “Extracted,” she must leave without Logan, the boy she loves. Torn apart from her only sense of family, Clem promises to come back and save him from brutal Surface life.
What she finds initially in the Core is a utopia compared to the Surface—it’s free of hard labor, gun-wielding officials, and the moon’s lethal acid. But life is anything but safe, and Clementine learns that the planet’s leaders are planning to exterminate Surface dwellers—and that means Logan, too.
Trapped by the steel walls of the underground and the lies that keep her safe, Clementine must find a way to escape and rescue Logan and the rest of the planet. But the planet leaders don’t want her running—they want her subdued.
With intense action scenes and a cast of unforgettable characters, Extraction is a page-turning, gripping read, sure to entertain lovers of Hunger Games and Ender’s Game and leave them breathless for more.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Extraction?
My favorite thing about Extraction is the sci-fi elements, especially the big reveal related to why the moon is poisonous. And the fact I managed to include references (some subtle, some not so subtle) to my favorite sci-fi shows like Doctor Who, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica.
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Just LIke The Movies
by Kelly Fiore
Hardcover
Bloomsbury USA Childrens
Released 7/22/2014
Pretty, popular Marijke Monti and over-achieving nerd-girl Lily Spencer have little in common—except that neither feels successful when it comes to love. Marijke can’t get her boyfriend to say “I love you” and Lily can’t get a boyfriend at all. When the girls end up at a late night showing of Titanic, sniffling along with the sinking ship, they realize that their love lives could—and should—be better. Which sparks an idea: Why can’t life be like a movie? Why can’t they create perfect romantic situations? Now they have a budding friendship and a plan—to act out grand gestures and get the guys of their dreams. It seems like fun at first, but reality turns out to be much more complicated, and they didn’t take into account that finding true love usually requires finding yourself first.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Just LIke The Movies?
I think the thing I like best about Just Like the Movies is how I was able to explore the “other side” of romantic comedy storylines – the side where things don’t always work out the way you expect them to. It’s all well and good to blast a love song outside your crush’s window, but the movies don’t even show us the more embarrassing alternatives – like when you wake up your crush’s parents instead of him. While we all like a good happily ever after, I think it’s pretty easy to admit that those fairytale endings aren’t realistic. I liked weaving in a handful of movie grand gestures and having some of them work well and some of them bomb impressively – because, that’s life, right? Things don’t always work out the way we plan them.
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MORE YOUNG ADULT NOVELS NEW IN STORES NEXT WEEK
Dissonance
by Erica O’Rourke
Hardcover
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Released 7/22/2014
Delancy Sullivan has always known there’s more to reality than what people see. Every time someone makes a choice, a new, parallel world branches off from the existing one. Eating breakfast or skipping it, turning left instead of right, sneaking out instead of staying in bed ~ all of these choices create an alternate universe in which an echo self takes the road not travelled and makes the opposite decision. As a Walker, someone who can navigate between these worlds, Del’s job is to keep all of the dimensions in harmony.
Normally, Del can hear the dissonant frequency that each world emits as clear as a bell. But when a training session in an off-key world goes horribly wrong, she is forbidden from Walking by the Council. But Del’s not big on following the rules and she secretly starts to investigate these other worlds. Something strange is connecting them and it’s not just her random encounters with echo versions of the guy she likes, Simon Lane.
But Del’s decisions have unimaginable consequences and, as she begins to fall for the Echo Simons in each world, she draws closer to a truth that the Council of Walkers is trying to hide ~ a secret that threatens the fate of the entire multiverse.
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In Too Deep
by Coert Voorhees
Hardcover
Disney-Hyperion
Released 7/22/2014
Annie Fleet, master scuba diver and history buff, knows she can’t fight her nerd status as a freshman at her Los Angeles private school. And she doesn’t care—except for the fact that her crush, Josh, thinks she’s more adorable than desirable. Annie is determined to set him straight on their school trip to Mexico. But her teacher has other plans: he needs Annie to help him find Cortez’s lost-long treasure.
Suddenly, Annie finds herself scuba diving in pitch-black waters, jetting to Hawaii with Josh, and hunting for the priceless Golden Jaguar. But Annie and Josh aren’t the only ones lured by the possibility of finding the greatest treasure ever lost at sea. Someone else wants the gold—and needs Annie dead. In deeper danger than she ever imagined, can Annie get the boy and find the Jaguar, or is she in over her head?
Critically-acclaimed author Coert Voorhees delivers breathtaking romance and non-stop action in his newest novel, the spirited and captivating In Too Deep.
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Like No Other
by Una LaMarche
Hardcover
Razorbill
Released 7/24/2014
Fate brought them together. Will life tear them apart?
Devorah is a consummate good girl who has never challenged the ways of her strict Hasidic upbringing.
Jaxon is a fun-loving, book-smart nerd who has never been comfortable around girls (unless you count his four younger sisters).
They’ve spent their entire lives in Brooklyn, on opposite sides of the same street. Their paths never crossed . . . until one day, they did.
When a hurricane strikes the Northeast, the pair becomes stranded in an elevator together, where fate leaves them no choice but to make an otherwise risky connection.
Though their relation is strictly forbidden, Devorah and Jax arrange secret meetings and risk everything to be together. But how far can they go? Just how much are they willing to give up?
In the timeless tradition of West Side Story and Crossing Delancey, this thoroughly modern take on romance will inspire laughter, tears, and the belief that love can happen when and where you least expect it.
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Marina
by Carlos Ruiz Zaffon
Hardcover
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Released 7/22/2014
“We all have a secret buried under lock and key in the attic of our soul. This is mine.”
In May 1980, fifteen-year-old Oscar Drai suddenly vanishes from his barding school in Barcelona. For seven days and seven nights no one knows his whereabouts…
His story begins in an old quarter of the city, where he meets the strange Marina and her father, Germán Blau, a portrait painter. Marina takes Oscar to a cemetery to watch a macabre ritual that occurs on the last Sunday of each month. At exactly ten o’clock in the morning, a coach pulled by black horses appears. From it descends a woman, her face shrouded be a black velvet cloak. Holding a single rose, she walks to a gravestone that bears no name, only a mysterious emblem of a black butterfly with open wings.
When Oscar and Marina decide to follow her, they begin a journey that transports them to a forgotten, postwar Barcelona–a world of aristocrats and actresses, inventors and tycoons–and reveals a dark secret that lies waiting in the mysterious labyrinth beneath the city streets.
Written just before The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Marina has long been a cult classic in Spain and is now an international bestseller.
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One Past Midnight
by Jessica Shirvington
Hardcover
Bloomsbury USA Childrens
Released 7/22/2014
Name of overseas edition of Between The Lives.
Above all else, though I try not to think about it, I know which life I prefer. And every night when I Cinderella myself from one life to the next a very small, but definite, piece of me dies. The hardest part is that nothing about my situation has ever changed. There is no loophole.
Until now, that is…
For as long as she can remember, Sabine has lived two lives. Every 24 hours she Shifts to her ‘other’ life – a life where she is exactly the same, but absolutely everything else is different: different family, different friends, different social expectations. In one life she has a sister, in the other she does not. In one life she’s a straight-A student with the perfect boyfriend, in the other she’s considered a reckless delinquent. Nothing about her situation has ever changed, until the day when she discovers a glitch: the arm she breaks in one life is perfectly fine in the other.
With this new knowledge, Sabine begins a series of increasingly risky experiments which bring her dangerously close to the life she’s always wanted… But just what – and who – is she really risking?
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RUN TO YOU: Sixth Sense
by Clara Kensie
ebook
Harlequin Teen
Released 7/21/2014
Part Six in the riveting romantic thriller about a family on the run from a deadly past and a first love that will transcend secrets, lies and danger…
To save Tessa’s brother and sister, she and Tristan must deceive the entire town. But if their plan succeeds, Tessa will have to make an unbearable choice between her siblings and her true love. And when her nightmares become real, she may lose it all—her family, her boyfriend and even her life.
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The Burnouts
by Lex Thomas
Hardcover
EgmontUSA
Released 7/22/2014
Lord of the Flies in a 21st-century high school setting.Welcome to Quarantine 3: The Burnouts , where readers of The Maze Runner, Gone, and Divergent go when they’re hungry for more dark, compelling survival stories.
When an explosion rocks David and Will’s suburban high school one morning, a deadly virus is unleashed on the school. After a year of quarantine, with no adults around, the students have created their own society. All of the social cliques have developed into gangs-The Nerds, The Geeks, The Freaks, The Sluts, The Skaters, The Burnouts, The Pretty Ones, and The Varsity-and each gang provides a service with which they can barter for provisions. Without a gang, it’s almost impossible to secure food, water, territory, or supplies. In the final installment in the Quarantine trilogy, the brothers are reunited on the Outside and it appears as if, for once everything is going right. But inside the school, Lucy is alone with no gang and no hope, until the Burnouts welcome her into their filthy arms.
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The Fire Wish
by Amber Lough
Hardcover
Random House Books for Young Readers
Released 7/22/2014
A jinni. A princess. And the wish that changes everything. . . .
Najwa is a jinni, training to be a spy in the war against the humans. Zayele is a human on her way to marry a prince of Baghdad—which she’ll do anything to avoid. So she captures Najwa and makes a wish. With a rush of smoke and fire, they fall apart and re-form—as each other. A jinni and a human, trading lives. Both girls must play their parts among enemies who would kill them if the deception were ever discovered—enemies including the young men Najwa and Zayele are just discovering they might love.
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The Year of Chasing Dreams
by Lurlene McDaniel
Hardcover
Delacorte Press
Released 7/22/2014
In the vein of Eat, Pray, Love, this YA novel intertwines a family saga with a grand love story and is the companion to The Year of Luminous Love and Wishes and Dreams. For fans of Sarah Dessen’s The Moon and More and Ann Brashares’s Forever in Blue.
Ciana Beauchamp hasn’t seen or heard from Jon Mercer in months. Until now. He’s back in Windemere to see her. Deep down Ciana is filled with joy and relief. She’s never stopped loving him. It’s proof of Jon’s love that he has returned, but what will their future be?
When tragedy strikes, almost no one in town is left unscathed. Tragedy has a way of bringing people together, but it can also tear them apart. Ciana can hardly face her choices, but she knows she must, and there are now people who she can turn to if only she is willing.
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Uncaged
by John Sanford, Michelle Cook
Hardcover
Knopf Books for Young Readers
Released 7/22/2014
#1 New York Times bestselling Prey author John Sandford and Michele Cook debut a high-octane young adult thriller series.
Shay Remby arrives in Hollywood with $58 and a handmade knife, searching for her brother, Odin.
Odin’s a brilliant hacker but a bit of a loose cannon. He and a group of radical animal-rights activists hit a Singular Corp. research lab in Eugene, Oregon. The raid was a disaster, but Odin escaped with a set of highly encrypted flash drives and a post-surgical dog.
When Shay gets a frantic 3 a.m. phone call from Odin—talking about evidence of unspeakable experiments, and a ruthless corporation, and how he must hide—she’s concerned. When she gets a menacing visit from Singular’s security team, she knows: her brother’s a dead man walking.
What Singular doesn’t know—yet—is that 16-year-old Shay is every bit as ruthless as their security force, and she will burn Singular to the ground, if that’s what it takes to save her brother.
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Welcome To The Dark House
by Laurie Faria Stalarz
Hardcover
Disney-Hyperion
Released 7/22/2014
What’s your worst nightmare?
For Ivy Jensen, it’s the eyes of a killer that haunt her nights. For Parker Bradley, it’s bloodthirsty sea serpents that slither in his dreams.
And for seven essay contestants, it’s their worst nightmares that win them an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at director Justin Blake’s latest, confidential project. Ivy doesn’t even like scary movies, but she’s ready to face her real-world fears. Parker’s sympathetic words and perfect smile help keep her spirits up. . . at least for now.
Not everyone is so charming, though. Horror-film fanatic Garth Vader wants to stir up trouble. It’s bad enough he has to stay in the middle of nowhere with this group—the girl who locks herself in her room; the know-it-all roommate; “Mister Sensitive”; and the one who’s too cheery for her own good. Someone has to make things interesting.
Except, things are already a little weird. The hostess is a serial-killer look-alike, the dream-stealing Nightmare Elf is lurking about, and the seventh member of the group is missing.
By the time Ivy and Parker realize what’s really at stake, it’s too late to wake up and run.
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