Happy August! We’re starting the month off with a bang, five giveaways! Don’t forget to enter below and check out all the awesome new releases.
Happy Reading,
Shelly, Lindsey, Martina, Jocelyn, Erin, Susan, Sam, Sarah, Sandra, Kristin, and Anisaa
YA BOOK GIVEAWAYS THIS WEEK
How to Keep Rolling After a Fall
by Karole Cozzo
Signed Paperback plus Swag Giveaway
U.S. Only
Swoon Reads
Released 8/2/2016
After a cyber bullying incident turns her life upside down, a handsome wheelchair rugby player shows a former mean girl that everyone deserves a second chance.
The party was at her house. The photos were posted to her Facebook account. That’s all the evidence anyone needed to condemn Nikki Baylor for a cyberbullying incident that humiliated a classmate and nearly resulted in the girl’s suicide. Now Nikki’s been expelled from her old school, her friends have abandoned her, and even her own parents can’t look her in the eye. With her plans for the future all but destroyed, Nikki resigns herself to being the girl everyone hates – almost as much as she hates herself. But then Nikki meets Pax, a spirited wheelchair rugby player who knows what it’s like when one mistake completely shatters your life. Refusing to judge her because of her past, he shows her that everyone deserves a second chance… and everyone deserves to be loved.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about How to Keep Rolling After a Fall?
Oh man. There are so many ways I could try to answer this question, but in my heart, I know the answer straight away. Pax. Pax is my favorite thing about this book. I always tell people it never felt like I created his character; rather, his character just was and all I did was type his words and tell his story. He felt very authentic to me from the get-go, and I really, really hope he feels that way to readers, too. Pax is so much more than a token character in a wheelchair, and I feel confident readers will sense that right away.
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Wax
by Gina Damico
Signed Hardcover Giveaway
U.S. Only
HMH Books for Young Readers
Released 8/2/2016
Paraffin, Vermont, is known the world over as home to the Grosholtz Candle Factory. But behind the sunny retail space bursting with overwhelming scents and homemade fudge, seventeen-year-old Poppy Palladino discovers something dark and unsettling: a back room filled with dozens of startlingly life-like wax sculptures, crafted by one very strange old lady. Poppy hightails it home, only to be shocked when one of the figures—a teenage boy who doesn’t seem to know what he is—jumps naked and screaming out of the trunk of her car. She tries to return him to the candle factory, but before she can, a fire destroys the mysterious workshop—and the old woman is nowhere to be seen.
With the help of the wax boy, who answers to the name Dud, Poppy resolves to find out who was behind the fire. But in the course of her investigation, she discovers that things in Paraffin aren’t always as they seem, that the Grosholtz Candle Factory isn’t as pure as its reputation—and that some of the townspeople she’s known her entire life may not be as human as they once were. In fact, they’re starting to look a little . . . waxy. Can Poppy and Dud extinguish the evil that’s taking hold of their town before it’s too late?
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Wax?
I really like the fictional town that WAX is set in – Paraffin, Vermont, a small tourist trap nestled in the mountains – and the Grosholtz Candle Factory, the retail destination that Paraffin is famous for. While it is a working manufacturing plant, it is also the flagship store of the company, and features all sorts of crazy attractions, like Scent Stations, Make Your Own Candle bars, animatronic shows for the kids, fudge shops, and lots more over-the-top elements that attract candle connoisseurs from far and wide – while its combined scents and fragrances serve as a constant odorous annoyance to the residents of the town.
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Recreated
by Colleen Houck
Hardcover Giveaway
U.S. Only
Delacorte Press
Released 8/2/2016
From Colleen Houck, New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Curse, comes Recreated, the second book in the epic Egyptian-inspired Reawakened series, in which a seventeen-year-old must literally go to hell to save the love of her life.
Lily Young thought traveling across the globe with a reawakened sun prince was a grand adventure. Now she’s about to embark on the journey of a lifetime.
When Amon and Lily part tragically, he transports himself to the Netherworld—what mortals call hell. Tormented by the loss of his one true love, he’d rather suffer in agony during Lily’s mortal years than fulfill his duty to protect humanity.
Heartbroken, Lily seeks refuge on her grandmother’s farm. Yet she can feel Amon’s pain, and she has been having dreams—dreams of Amon continually suffering.
For before he departed, Amon gave Lily something very special, an item that connects them even though they are worlds apart. Now Lily must use this object to free him, and to free their realms from darkness and utter chaos. She will do whatever it takes.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Recreated?
I think the idea of exploring a sphinx is my favorite thing about this book. In RECREATED, Lily has to test herself to the extreme in order to become an immortal so that she can save Amon the boy she loves. She goes through a trial that changes her and going on that journey with her is quite exciting.
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Three Truths and a Lie
by Brent Hartinger
Hardcover Giveaway
U.S. Only
Simon Pulse
Released 8/2/2016
A weekend retreat in the woods and an innocent game of three truths and a lie goes horribly wrong in this high-octane psychological thriller filled with romantic suspense by a Lambda Award–winning author.
Deep in the forest, four friends gather for a weekend of fun.
Truth #1: Rob is thrilled about the weekend trip. It’s the perfect time for him to break out of his shell…to be the person he really, really wants to be.
Truth #2: Liam, Rob’s boyfriend, is nothing short of perfect. He’s everything Rob could have wanted. They’re perfect together. Perfect.
Truth #3: Maia has been Liam’s best friend for years…long before Rob came along. They get each other in a way Rob could never, will never, understand.
Truth #4: Galen, Maia’s boyfriend, is sweet, handsome, and incredibly charming. He’s the definition of a Golden Boy…even with the secrets up his sleeves.
One of these truths is a lie…and not everyone will live to find out which one it is.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Three Truths and a Lie?
Probably the ending.
I consider myself a storyteller more than anything, so I’ve always really liked plot. Character and voice are important in books, and so is language and world-building, but to my mind it should all ultimately be about the story. That’s probably why I often don’t know what I think of a book until I reach the end. Does it all come together? Was there a point to it all?
THREE TRUTHS AND A LIE is a dark, edgy, twisty YA puzzle box thriller. Which means I hopefully keep you guessing right to the very last pages. I love twist endings, but only if they’re earned, if the author plays fair. I’d like to think I did. Dozens of people read the book in editing, and not a single one guessed the ending correctly. That makes me pretty happy.
Can I say one other thing I like about the book? That’s it’s a genre book, a horror/thriller story, and that the two main characters are gay, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with the book itself. I think that’s something relatively new for LGBT YA, and I’m proud of it.
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Wake the Hollow
by Gaby Triana
Paperback Giveaway
U.S. Only
Entangled: Teen
Released 8/2/2016
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.
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.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Wake the Hollow?
My favorite thing about WAKE THE HOLLOW is how the book works on two different levels. If you have never read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving, you can still enjoy everything about it. If you are familiar with the short story classic, you’ll find lots of fun Easter eggs hidden throughout as a nod to the original. It was very important to me not to write a modern-day straight retelling. I didn’t want readers to already know how the story would go, so instead, I jumbled things up. I turned the main plot of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow into a subplot (the romantic tale of three characters—Ichabod Crane, Katrina Van Tassel, and Brom Bones) and created an entirely new story for the main plot. This worked well, since the classic is a short story anyway, so I needed something more complex for a full-length novel. The result is a paranormal mystery reimagining that pays homage to the classic Irving tale. To get full benefits from WAKE THE HOLLOW, I highly recommend reading the original short story first, and maybe even watch the short Disney animated film. 😉
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MORE YOUNG ADULT FICTION IN STORES NEXT WEEK WITH AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
Enter Title Here
by Rahul Kanakia
Hardcover
Disney-Hyperion
Released 8/2/2016
I’m your protagonist—Reshma Kapoor—and if you have the free time to read this book, then you’re probably nothing like me.
Reshma is a college counselor’s dream. She’s the top-ranked senior at her ultra-competitive Silicon Valley high school, with a spotless academic record and a long roster of extracurriculars. But there are plenty of perfect students in the country, and if Reshma wants to get into Stanford, and into med school after that, she needs the hook to beat them all.
What’s a habitual over-achiever to do? Land herself a literary agent, of course. Which is exactly what Reshma does after agent Linda Montrose spots an article she wrote for Huffington Post. Linda wants to represent Reshma, and, with her new agent’s help scoring a book deal, Reshma knows she’ll finally have the key to Stanford.
But she’s convinced no one would want to read a novel about a study machine like her. To make herself a more relatable protagonist, she must start doing all the regular American girl stuff she normally ignores. For starters, she has to make a friend, then get a boyfriend. And she’s already planned the perfect ending: after struggling for three hundred pages with her own perfectionism, Reshma will learn that meaningful relationships can be more important than success.
Of course, even with a mastermind like Reshma in charge, things can’t always go as planned. And when the valedictorian spot begins to slip from her grasp, she’ll have to decide just how far she’ll go for that satisfying ending.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Enter Title Here?
I really like the protagonist, Reshma. I’ve always liked her. She’s spoiled and entitled in a lot of ways, but she’s also brutally effective. When someone is spoiled and ineffectual, they’re easy to dismiss. But when they know how to get what they want, then they carry with them a certain beauty. And the secret is that oftentimes their sense of entitlement cannot be separated from their effectiveness. They get what they want because they believe that they deserve it.
In Reshma’s case, too, she’s also sort of my apology to and panegyric for all the kids I knew, in both high school and college, who I dismissed as soulless study machines. It’s only now, after I’ve grown out of my slackertastic ways and begun to apply myself to something that I really love (writing), that I’ve become more fully able to appreciate how difficult it is to work really hard. I envy them, those kids, because they were seemingly born knowing how to do something that it took me years to learn. I wonder sometimes what I might have accomplished if I’d been as hard-working a high school student as Reshma. And yet we mock them, because there’s something that feels very cold about that kind of work ethic. It’s terrifying to think that there are all these kids who’re working so hard to learn things that they don’t care about. Or working to achieve ends that they don’t really want. But I prefer to look on the bright side: someday those kids will blossom into themselves and find the thing in life that they truly desire, and on that day all of their effectiveness is going to come in pretty handy.
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MORE YOUNG ADULT NOVELS NEW IN STORES NEXT WEEK
A Week of Mondays
by Jessica Brody
Hardcover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Released 8/2/2016
Sixteen-year-old Ellison Sparks is having a serious case of the Mondays. She gets a ticket for running a red light, she manages to take the world’s worst school picture, she bombs softball try-outs and her class election speech (note to self: never trust a cheerleader when she swears there are no nuts in her bake-sale banana bread), and to top it all off, Tristan, her gorgeous rocker boyfriend suddenly dumps her. For no good reason!
As far as Mondays go, it doesn’t get much worse than this. And Ellie is positive that if she could just do it all over again, she would get it right. So when she wakes up the next morning to find she’s reliving the exact same day, she knows what she has to do: stop her boyfriend from breaking up with her. But it seems no matter how many do-overs she gets or how hard Ellie tries to repair her relationship, Tristan always seems bent set on ending it. Will Ellie ever figure out how to fix this broken day? Or will she be stuck in this nightmare of a Monday forever?
From the author 52 Reasons to Hate My Father and The Unremembered trilogy comes a hilarious and heartwarming story about second (and third and fourth and fifth) chances. Because sometimes it takes a whole week of Mondays to figure out what you really want.
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Finding Abbey Road
by Kevin Emerson
Hardcover
Katherine Tegen Books
Released 8/2/2016
Catherine Summer Carlson has hit rock bottom. On the brink of a record deal, her band Dangerheart is in disarray. One member has gone rogue, and another is missing and wanted by the police. On top of that, Summer’s parents are pressuring her to choose a future that doesn’t include the music world she loves so much. She’s torn between wanting to stay with Dangerheart and her soulmate Caleb, and taking off in a different direction at her dream college.
Meanwhile, Summer and Caleb are closer than ever to finally unlocking the mystery of Eli White’s lost songs, but the last clues present an impossible challenge: can they outwit Candy Shell records, stay one step ahead of the police, and find a way to get to London before it’s too late? And if they can get there, will they be ready for what they may find? Summer’s dreams of the future, Dangerheart’s chances of becoming the band they’ve always dreamed of being: it all comes down to these next five days. Summer knows this would be the riskiest thing she’s ever done, that her relationship with her parents may never recover, but she also knows that this might be her last shot at figuring out what her heart really wants.
Packed with mystery and music, Kevin Emerson’s final volume in the Exile series is the pitch-perfect ending to Summer’s journey of self-discovery and love, and an ode to music fans everywhere.
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Infinite Risk
by Ann Aguirre
Hardcover
Feiwel & Friends
Released 8/2/2016
In a world of infinite risk, the stakes have never been so high.
Beyond the pull of life and death lies the Immortal game. Edie Kramer has leaped back to put things right and save the boy she loves. Alone in the wrong timestream, she must reinvent herself and square off against dangerous Immortals determined to win this mortal match once and for all.
But righting past wrongs carries fresh dangers. As she navigates a new school and tries to put Kian on a different path, she also battles those will stop at nothing to keep her from derailing their deadly schemes. With few allies and her first love treating her like a stranger, Edie faces the most dangerous enemy of all―time itself. Yet she’s come a long way from that dark night on the bridge, and when her back’s to the wall, she’ll go down fighting…
The conclusion of New York Times-bestselling author Ann Aguirre’s Immortal Game trilogy is thrilling and unforgettable.
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The Beauty of Darkness
by Mary E. Pearson
Hardcover
Henry Holt and Co.
Released 8/2/2016
Lia and Rafe have escaped Venda and the path before them is winding and dangerous – what will happen now? This third and final book in The Remnant Chronicles is not to be missed.
Bestselling author Mary E. Pearson’s combination of intrigue, suspense, romance and action make this a riveting page turner for teens.
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The Gilded Cage
by Lucinda Gray
Hardcover
Henry Holt and Co.
Released 8/2/2016
After growing up on a farm in Virginia, Walthingham Hall in England seems like another world to sixteen-year-old Katherine Randolph. Her new life, filled with the splendor of upper-class England in the 1820s, is shattered when her brother mysteriously drowns. Katherine is expected to observe the mourning customs and get on with her life, but she can’t accept that her brother’s death was an accident.
A bitter poacher prowls the estate, and strange visitors threaten the occupants of the house. There’s a rumor, too, that a wild animal stalks the woods of Walthingham. Can Katherine retain her sanity long enough to find out the truth? Or will her brother’s killer claim her life, too?
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The Smaller Evil
by Stephanie Kuehn
Hardcover
Dutton Books for Young Readers
Released 8/2/2016
Sometimes the greater good requires the smaller evil.
17-year-old Arman Dukoff is struggling with severe anxiety and a history of self-loathing when he arrives at an expensive self-help retreat in the remote hills of Big Sur. He’s taken a huge risk—and two-thousand dollars from his meth-head stepfather—for a chance to “evolve,” as Beau, the retreat leader, says.
Beau is complicated. A father figure? A cult leader? A con man? Arman’s not sure, but more than anyone he’s ever met, Beau makes Arman feel something other than what he usually feels—worthless.
The retreat compound is secluded in coastal California mountains among towering redwoods, and when the iron gates close behind him, Arman believes for a moment that he can get better. But the program is a blur of jargon, bizarre rituals, and incomprehensible encounters with a beautiful girl. Arman is certain he’s failing everything. But Beau disagrees; he thinks Arman has a bright future—though he never says at what.
And then, in an instant Arman can’t believe or totally recall, Beau is gone. Suicide? Or murder? Arman was the only witness and now the compound is getting tense. And maybe dangerous.
As the mysteries and paradoxes multiply and the hints become accusations, Arman must rely on the person he’s always trusted the least: himself.
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The Telling
by Alexandra Sirowy
Hardcover
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Released 8/2/2016
Lana used to know what was real.
That was before when her life was small and quiet. Her golden step-brother, Ben, was alive, she could only dream about bonfiring with the populars, their wooded island home was idyllic, she could tell the truth from lies, and Ben’s childhood stories were firmly in her imagination.
Then came after.
After has Lana boldly kissing her crush, jumping into the water from too high up, and living with nerve and mischief. But after also has horrors, deaths that only make sense in fairy tales, and terrors from a past Lana thought long forgotten: Love, blood, and murder.
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Whatever.
by S.J. Goslee
Hardcover
Roaring Brook Press
Released 8/2/2016
Hilarity ensues when a slacker teen boy discovers he’s gay, in this unforgettably funny YA debut.
Mike Tate is a normal dude. He and his friends have a crappy band (an excuse to drink cheap beer and rock out to the Lemonheads) and hang out in parking lots doing stupid board tricks. But when Mike’s girlfriend Lisa, who knows him better than he does, breaks up with him, he realizes he’s about to have a major epiphany that will blow his mind. And worse–he gets elected to homecoming court.
It’s like the apocalypse came, only instead of nuclear bombs and zombies, Mike gets school participation, gay thoughts, and mother-effin’ cheerleaders.
With the free spirit of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the raw voice of Winger, and characters reminiscent of Freaks & Geeks, this debut YA offers a standout voice and a fresh, modern take on the coming-out story.
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