Waiting on Wednesday (69)

For those who don't know, Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill of Breaking the Spine where book bloggers showcase books they are particularly looking for to. For the next few weeks, I'm going to be doing this a little differently. Like I did last year, each week I will be talking about books that are coming out early next year from different publishers. Up this week are the last of the January 2013 releases coming from Amulet Books, Bloomsbury & Egmont USA.

Splintered by A.G. Howard
January 1, 2013
Amulet Books

This stunning debut captures the grotesque madness of a mystical under-land, as well as a girl's pangs of first love and independence. Alyssa Gardner hears the whispers of bugs and flowers--precisely the affliction that landed her mother in a mental hospital years before. This family curse stretched back to her ancestor Alice Liddell, the real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alyssa might be crazy, but she manages to keep it together. For now.

When her mother's mental health takes a turn for the worse, Alyssa learns that what she thought was fiction is based in terrifying reality. The real Wonderland is a place far darker and more twisted than Lewis Carroll ever let on. There, Alyssa must pass a series of tests, including draining an ocean of Alice's tears, waking the slumbering tea party, and subduing a vicious bandersnatch, to fix Alice's mistakes and save her family. She must also decide whom to trust: Jeb, her gorgeous best friend and secret crush, or the sexy but suspicious Morpheus, her guide through Wonderland, who may have dark motives of his own.

I remember seeing this book popping up everywhere for quite some time, but never really paid attention to what it was really about. All I really knew was that it had a pretty cover. But once I looked into it more, I realized that this was a story that I was really interested in reading and all the positive reviews I've been seing are only adding to this want. So yeah, I really want to read Splintered.

Doomed by Tracy Deebs

January 8, 2013

Bloomsbury

Beat the game. Save the world.

Pandora's just your average teen, glued to her cell phone and laptop, surfing Facebook and e-mailing with her friends, until the day her long-lost father sends her a link to a mysterious site featuring twelve photos of her as a child. Unable to contain her curiosity, Pandora enters the site, where she is prompted to play her favorite virtual-reality game, Zero Day. This unleashes a global computer virus that plunges the whole world into panic: suddenly, there is no Internet. No cell phones. No utilities, traffic lights, hospitals, law enforcement. Pandora teams up with handsome stepbrothers Eli and Theo to enter the virtual world of Zero Day. Simultaneously, she continues to follow the photographs from her childhood in an attempt to beat the game and track down her father, her one key to saving the world as we know it. 

Part The Matrix, part retelling of the Pandora myth, Doomed has something for gaming fans, dystopian fans and romance fans alike.

There are plenty of retellings out there but this is the first I heard of a retelling of the Pandora myth so it definitely piqued my curiosity. And the whole concept of it also sounds really interesting, and to an extent almost realistic. Who knows what would happen if the world were to go completely dark? All I know is that I'm definitely looking forward to reading Doomed. 

Nobody by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

January 22, 2013

EgmontUSA

There are people in this world who are Nobody. No one sees them. No one notices them .They live their lives under the radar, forgotten as soon as you turn away.

That's why they make the perfect assassins.

The Institute finds these people when they're young and takes them away for training. But an untrained Nobody is a threat to their organization. And threats must be eliminated.

Sixteen-year-old Claire has been invisible her whole life, missed by the Institute's monitoring. But now they've ID'ed her and send seventeen-year-old Nix to remove her. Yet the moment he lays eyes on her, he can't make the hit. It's as if Claire and Nix are the only people in the world for each other. And they are--because no one else ever notices them.

I absolutely love Jennifer Lynn Barnes' Raised by Wolves series so I get excited any time I hear she has a new book coming out. And as we all know by now, I am a sucker for anything that vaguely resembles a thriller. So this book just sounds perfect for me. I can't wait to be able to read Nobody.

So that's the last of the January 2013 books I'm waiting on. If I want to make it to February I may have to finally get around to renewing my library card because I don't know how I'm going to be able to afford all these books. Or even how I'm possibly going to even be able to read all the books I'm looking forward to.

Guest Post: Tracy Deebs & Giveaway

Today I have the pleasure of having Tracy Deebs, author of Tempest Rising, here on the blog as a part of her blog tour. Tracy was kind enough to put together a list of items from her teenage years we would find if she were to have a garage sale.

Hi Emilie, thanks so much for having me here today. I love the idea of a garage sale from my teen-age years, though I’m not sure there would be much there of value, lol. But I’ll give it my best shot!

1. My old pink and yellow surfboard: $20 Though it’s not a Brewer (Dick Brewer, master surfboard maker) like the one my main character, Tempest, got for her sixteenth birthday (funny, isn’t it, that she got the exact surfboard I begged my parents for way back when—some things aren’t forgotten, lol) it’s still a good board. It saw me through many surfing adventures up and down the California coast.
2. My VCR tape of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid: $3 My absolute favorite movie from the time I was three until I was about seven (and switched allegiances to Wonder Woman) I watched it every single day for nearly four years. It’s a beautiful and poignant story, one filled with darkness and deception, but one that also involves sacrifice and true love. I’m convinced that it is the love of this story (and not the Disney version) that inspired me to write Tempest Rising to begin with.
3. My Early ‘90s Alternative Music Collection: $35 First edition CDs of Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Counting Crows and Stone Temple Pilots. I can’t begin to count the number of hours I spent hanging out with my friends—or boyfriend—listening to these CDs. I did countless English projects dissecting the lyrics and probably had the words to every song on every CD memorized (to be honest, I think I still do).
4. My four-inch heeled black leather, designer knee boots: $20 I saved for three months to buy these boots and wore them everywhere for two entire winters. Seriously, everywhere, and despite my propensity for clumsiness, somehow managed to never fall on my butt in them (something I can’t say about my current favorite pair of five inch high hot pink platforms)
5. My Collection of Art Posters: $5 I love art. Love, love, love art. From Van Gogh to Picasso, from Kandinsky to Kahlo, I love art of all types. My high school bedroom, and college dorm rooms, were plastered in all directions with posters of famous works of art. While I have no artistic talent whatsoever, or maybe because of it, I love to write characters who are artist. Tempest, besides being a mermaid and a kick-butt surfer, is also an artist. Picasso is her favorite artist, too.
6. My book collection, comprised of romance novels, existential works of literature, the complete collections of the Romantics and the Beat Poets and various other works: $6 I’ve been a reader as long as I’ve been a writer, which is about the same time I realized that those letters my preschool teacher made me practice actually made words when I put them together. When I was in junior high and high school, and even college—okay, for my whole life, if I’m being honest—I’ve gone through books at an alarming rate. My husband, who is not a big reader, always laments the amount of money I spend on books—and the copious amount of boxes he has to carry every time we move, but I can’t stop. It’s an addiction that led to me being a writer and a college professor. And when I was young, my Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden and Sweet Valley High books saw me through many a crisis.

Okay, now it’s your turn. What one thing would you sell in a garage sale that represents who you are. Leave a comment with your answer and fill out THIS FORM (you need to do both!) to be entered to win lipgloss and nail polish in Tempest purple.