It’s another small offering this week, with just two new books releasing: Kate Elliot’s Court of Fives and Tom Leveen’s Shackled. On Wednesday, voting opens to decide the Top 10 entries to our Red Light, Green Light contest – make sure to check back and vote for your favorite!
Happy reading,
Lindsey, Martina, Sam, Jocelyn, Erin, Lisa, Shelly, Susan, Elizabeth, Kristin, Jen, Sandra and Anisaa
YA BOOK GIVEAWAYS THIS WEEK
Court of Fives
by Kate Elliott
Hardcover Giveaway
U.S. Only
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Released 8/18/2015
In this imaginative escape into an enthralling new world, World Fantasy Award finalist Kate Elliott begins a new trilogy with her debut young adult novel, weaving an epic story of a girl struggling to do what she loves in a society suffocated by rules of class and privilege.
Jessamy’s life is a balance between acting like an upper class Patron and dreaming of the freedom of the Commoners. But at night she can be whomever she wants when she sneaks out to train for The Fives, an intricate, multi-level athletic competition that offers a chance for glory to the kingdom’s best competitors. Then Jes meets Kalliarkos, and an unlikely friendship between a girl of mixed race and a Patron boy causes heads to turn. When a scheming lord tears Jes’s family apart, she’ll have to test Kal’s loyalty and risk the vengeance of a powerful clan to save her mother and sisters from certain death.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Court of Fives?
The main character, Jes, because she is so incredibly determined and competitive and WILL NOT QUIT. Because she loves her family even when they frustrate her, because she is focused and pragmatic and willing to work hard to get what she wants, and because she doesn’t quite know her own heart and her own prejudices and has to learn the hard way that she has blind spots about how the world she lives in really works.
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Shackled
by Tom Leveen
Hardcover Giveaway
U.S. Only
Simon Pulse
Released 8/18/2015
From author Tom Leveen comes a taut, suspenseful novel about a girl’s abduction that leaves her best friend emotionally paralyzed, until a chance encounter points her toward the truth…and a terrifying new danger.
Sixteen-year-old Pelly has a master plan. After years of therapy, medication, and even a stint in a mental hospital, she’s finally ready to re-enter the world of the living. Pelly has been suffering from severe panic attacks ever since her best friend, Tara, disappeared from a mall six years ago.
And her plan seems to be working, until an unkempt girl accompanied by an older man walks into the coffee shop where she works. Pelly thinks she’s seen a ghost, until the girl mouths “help me” on the way out, and Pelly knows she’s just seen Tara.
Too shocked to do anything, Pelly helplessly watches Tara slip away again as she steels herself against a renewed spiral of crippling anxiety. But rather than being overcome by anxiety, Pelly feels more energized than she has in years. Determined to track down enough evidence to force the police to reopen Tara’s file, Pelly’s master plan takes a turn for the dangerous.
Pelly decides she cannot be shackled by her past—and the anxiety, fear, and grief that comes with it—any longer if she wants to save Tara. But in seeking answers through whatever means necessary, she’ll come face-to-face with true evil. And not all the shackles are in her head…
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Shackled?
My favorite thing about SHACKLED is that it’s the most intensely personal novel I’ve written. My third novel, MANICPIXIEDREAMGIRL, was sort of an homage to real events that happened to me in high school (although it was still entirely fictional)…but SHACKLED is me on a much deeper, serious level. I had to return to places in my head and heart that I’ve spent years trying to recover from, namely PTSD and a panic disorder. I think going there helped me, though, and I hope the novel will help others in the same way.
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YA BOOK GIVEAWAYS LAST WEEK: WINNERS
MORE YOUNG ADULT FICTION IN STORES NEXT WEEK WITH AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
Beyond Clueless
by Linas Alsenas
Hardcover
Amulet Books
Released 8/18/2015
Marty Sullivan’s life ends, basically, when her parents enroll her in a private high school. A private, Catholic, girls-only high school. Meanwhile, at their local public school, her best friend, Jimmy, comes out of the closet and finds himself a boyfriend and a new group of friends. Marty feels left out and alone, until she gets a part in the school musical, Into the Woods, and Jimmy and his new crew are in it, too! Things start looking even better when Marty falls for foxy fellow cast member Felix Peroni. And Felix seems to like her back. But the drama is just beginning. Can Marty and Jimmy keep up their friendship? And is Marty’s new beau everything he appears to be? Or is Marty too clueless to figure it all out before it’s too late?
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about Beyond Clueless?
It’s funny! At least, it cracks me up still, and I’ve read the text more times than is psychologically healthy. The story is narrated by the main character, Marty, who is a freshman at an all-girls high school outside Cleveland, Ohio. For me, the humour lands because it’s familiar; Marty’s world is not the one in which I grew up, but at the same time it’s exactly true to how I grew up. There aren’t that many books in which I recognize my own experience, with the very real limitations of suburban life for middle-class teens. Your perspective is smarter and more self-aware than adults give you credit for. You can’t drive, so you’re constantly waiting for a parent or a friend to give you a lift somewhere. And for kids with long commutes to parochial schools, they do lead divided lives between school and their hometowns. I tried depicting life as lived by most teens, of being on the edges of popularity, or notoriety. Of social groups that overlap but aren’t constantly in conflict – very few dramas can actually attract an entire school’s attention. Of having homework all the time, and talking about it.
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The Creeping
by Alexandra Sirowy
Hardcover
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Released 8/18/2015
Twelve years ago Stella and Jeanie vanished while picking strawberries. Stella returned minutes later, with no memory of what happened. Jeanie was never seen or heard from again.
Now Stella is seventeen, and she’s over it. She’s the lucky one who survived, and sure, the case is still cloaked in mystery—and it’s her small town’s ugly legacy—but Stella is focused on the coming summer. She’s got a great best friend, a hookup with an irresistibly crooked smile, and two months of beach days stretching out before her.
Then along comes a corpse, a little girl who washes up in an ancient cemetery after a mudslide, and who has red hair just like Jeanie did. Suddenly memories of that haunting day begin to return, and when Stella discovers that other red-headed girls have gone missing as well, she begins to suspect that something sinister is at work.
And before the summer ends, Stella will learn the hard way that if you hunt for monsters, you will find them.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about The Creeping?
Oh wow, that’s a really tough question. I won’t cop-out though and say I can’t choose, but I might cheat a little.
I love the relationships and friendships in THE CREEPING. That’s a pretty encompassing answer, I know. When I had this spark of an idea to write the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who eleven years before survived a very mysterious event in the woods of her small town, I knew I wanted to show the relationships that save her, both literally and figuratively. I wanted her friends to be as vivid and necessary to the reader as they are to the main character, Stella. Friendships can loom very large in life, especially when you’re young. I wanted to be truthful in representing their complexities: loyalty, the fierce love shared by friends, and the intimate ways friends can wound each other, unintentionally and intentionally.
Friendships between girls and women are of particular interest to me. It was an aim of mine to give THE CREEPING’s characters agency over their lives, bodies, and minds. Developing these relationships was one of my favorite parts of the process. Although it might not be obvious by its haunting title, THE CREEPING is a book about friendship as much as it is betrayal and about goodness as much as it is evil.
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MORE YOUNG ADULT NOVELS NEW IN STORES NEXT WEEK
Into the Dangerous World
by Julie Chibbaro
Hardcover
Viking Books for Young Readers
Released 8/18/2015
At a family meeting, Ror declares her purpose: I am an artist.
But she doesn’t really know what that means. Raised on a commune, she’s never attended a day of school, and has seen little of the outside world. What she knows best is drawing. To her, it’s like breathing; it’s how she makes sense of the world.
When her father torches the commune—and himself—Ror’s life changes. She, her mother and sister end up in a homeless residence in Manhattan, where she runs into trouble—and love—with Trey, the leader of Noise Ink, a graffiti crew.
On the city’s streets, and in its museums and galleries, Ror finds herself pulled in different directions. Her father wanted her to make classic art. Noise Ink insists she stay within their lines. Her art teacher urges her to go to college. What does she want?
Ror’s journey is a seamless blend of words and pictures, cinematic in its scope—a sharp-edged, indelible work of art that will live inside your head.
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