Wishlist Wednesday

The year is 2032, sixteen years after a deadly virus—and the vaccine intended to protect against it—wiped out most of the earth’s population. The night before eighteen-year-old Eve’s graduation from her all-girls school she discovers what really happens to new graduates, and the horrifying fate that awaits her. 

Fleeing the only home she’s ever known, Eve sets off on a long, treacherous journey, searching for a place she can survive. Along the way she encounters Caleb, a rough, rebellious boy living in the wild. Separated from men her whole life, Eve has been taught to fear them, but Caleb slowly wins her trust...and her heart. He promises to protect her, but when soldiers begin hunting them, Eve must choose between true love and her life.


Creepy, dystopian, exciting, romantic - I can't wait!  What do you think - will you be reading Eve when it comes out?

Author Interview: Sheenah Freitas

What was your favorite part of the writing/publishing process? Your least favorite?

My favorite part is the revising and editing stage. I love seeing the entire story evolve and actually sound like a story. The first draft is my least favorite part because there can be days where I’m balancing a pencil on my nose and staring at a screen running my mind over a billion different scenarios that could or should happen and yet none of them seem right. My first drafts are never pretty to look at so I love it when I can go through and polish things up.

What would you say is the most important element in a good story?

For me, I would say characters. If the characters aren’t interesting, why would you bother reading their story? An author could have brilliant prose and write a beautiful story about the human condition, but without characters that nobody cares about, whose going to want to read it?

Who is your favorite character from The Chosen, and why?

That’s a tough question. I love all of my characters, but I’m going to have to go with my merman, Derek. I think he’s the only guy in my book that truly acts like a guy. If there’s a pretty woman that he sees on the street, he’s going to look versus Reeze who will glance at her but only see her as a person and not as a female. And despite his fun attitude, he has his dark secret that he doesn’t want anyone to know. It’ll be revealed in the sequel, The Number, which I’m working on now.

If you had to pick just one thing for readers to take away after reading The Chosen, what would it be?

I think every author can agree that they hope the reader enjoys the book, but I hope that readers will think about responsibility. Throughout the book Kaia is trying to come to terms with her responsibility to save this planet that she’s never heard of. It’s not a choice for her and we get to see the consequences of her actions in the sequel. I know saving a planet is an extreme, but you could apply it to other things like a pet. You buy an animal because it’s cute and then once the newness and cuteness wears off what do you do? Keep taking care of it or would you get rid of it?

And just for fun, what would you say is the most interesting thing about you?

I have these incredibly vivid dreams. My family is a little jealous that their dreams are about mundane things like work or school. There are always these epic adventures or storylines going on in my dreams and most of the time I’m not even in them. I’m more like an observer, watching these people from the sky. So as long I keep dreaming, I’ll always have story ideas.

2011 Debut Author Challenge: Complete!

My second challenge is complete!  The challenge was to read twelve books by debut YA authors.

1. Wither

2. Broken

3. Tiger's Curse

4. The Iron Witch

5. The Iron Thorn

6. The Mumbo Jumbo Circus

7. Entwined

8. The False Princess

9. Breath of Angel

10. XVI

11. Ruby Red

12. Across the Universe

Review: Across the Universe

This book counts towards the Debut challenge.




Amy is told that when her body is frozen, she will go to sleep and wake up again 300 years later, on a new Earth.  But fifty years before the scheduled landing, Amy's pod is unfrozen.  She finds herself trapped inside the Godspeed, the giant space ship carrying hundreds of frozen bodies - including Amy's parents - and the strange world of Eldest.  The ship's living population has never known another world, and they are entirely under the control of the tyrannical and cruel Eldest.  With Elder, his teenaged heir, Amy discovers that the Godspeed holds many secrets.  She doesn't understand the Eldest's world, and she can't stop dreaming of an Earth that is centuries behind her - and her parents, frozen and unaware.  Who can you trust, in a world where you can never belong?

Entertainment:★★★★

This book really kept me in suspense - every page, I was dying to know what would happen next!  It was seriously intense.

Plot:★★★★★

Like I just said, super intense.  It was unique, at times jarring, exciting, and a little creepy.  The ending was amazing - bittersweet, semisweet, I don't know how to describe it, but it was beautiful.

Also, the world-building was incredible.

Characters: ★★★★★

Amy was okay - at times she came off as a bit bland.  Elder was awesome - I loved his personality, his inner conflicts, the way he matured over the course of the story, and even his slight moral ambiguity.  The villain(s) were interesting, believable, and even a bit understandable and relatable.  Overall, I thought the characterization was great.

Writing:★★★★

Quite well-written.

End Result: five stars.  An excellent book.  Read it.

Review: Lady Friday

On the fifth day, there was fear.

The Morrow Days are done playing by the rules.  Saturday has shut down the interHouse elevators, trapping Arthur in Friday's realm.  Lady Friday herself has vanished, after arranging a showdown between Arthur, Saturday, and an enigmatic enemy called the Piper.  Meanwhile, Arthur's friend Leaf has been captured by Friday, who plans to use her and all other humans for a sinister experiment...

Arthur is trapped and can't trust anybody.  Even those denizens of the House who honestly want to help him can be taken over at any time by the Piper's music and made to betray him.  The Will has been changing, and seems much darker and more determined than ever to fulfill its mysterious purpose.  Saturday and the Piper both want Arthur dead... and now, Arthur can't use the power of the Keys, the one thing that kept him alive during the previous four days...

Entertainment: ★★★★★

I devoured this book (somewhat ironically, on a Friday) and now I can't wait for the next!

Plot: ★★★★

I love how the plot has grown so much darker and more twisted with each new book.  Lady Friday wasn't straightforward or simple, it was exciting and suspenseful.

Characters: ★★★★★

The characters in this series started off great, and they've only gotten better.  First, Arthur.  I love how pragmatic he is; he doesn't go on about 'death before dishonor' or whine about how hard his life is or sulk or talk about how Super Special he is.  He's just a guy, and I'm honestly cheering for him to get an (eventual) happy ending.

The rest of the cast, meanwhile, is just as fascinating.  Many of them are morally ambiguous (see: The Will) and that's just plain interesting to read about.  Every character is quirky and unique and cool, and I think the series is worth reading just for the characters.

Writing: ★★★★★

I think Nix's writing might be addictive, because I can't seem to stop reading this series!

End Result: five stars.  An excellent book.  Read it.

Review: Ruby Red

This book counts towards the Debut challenge.




Gwyneth is one of the normal members of the family.  The time-travelling gene skipped her and landed on Charlotte instead.  Not that Gwen really minds; she's fine having a normal life and watching movies and doing other normal things with her best friend Lesley, instead of taking riding and fencing lessons like Charlotte.

But when Gwen involuntarily time-travels on her sixteenth birthday, her entire eccentric family is startled and horrified to find that Gwen is the Ruby, the twelfth time-traveller.  Too bad Gwen was never trained for any of it, and is totally unprepared to deal with time traveling...

Entertainment:  ★★★

It was an interesting premise, but it didn't hold my interest all that well.  In the end I finished it having liked it but not loved it.  I suppose what I didn't like about it was that it was so bland - definitely a vanilla-flavored book, not particularly memorable at all.  Which is too bad, given the great premise.  So, in the end, I felt neutral about it.

Plot:  ★★★

Although I predicted the twist of the ending, it was a unique and entertaining plot.  The time-travel element seemed fairly well-thought out and plausible.  I only wish that a few more questions had been answered in this first book - there's quite a lot of plot threads left dangling until the sequel.

Characters:  ★★★

Gwen was alright, albeit a little bland.  Really, none of the characters stood out as particularly good or bad to me.

Writing:  ★★★

Fairly well-written, although at times the vocabulary and sentence structure and such seemed kind of immature.  But given that the narrator was sixteen, I guess that makes sense.  So, it was fairly well-written.

End Result: three stars.  A decent book, but not amazingly excellent.

Review: Girl, Stolen

Cheyenne Wilder begs her stepmother to leave the keys in their car when she goes to fill Cheyenne's prescription.

Griffin stumbles on a shiny new car with the keys still in the ignition, sitting in the parking lot and practically begging to be taken.  He didn't realize there was a sick, blind girl in the backseat until it was too late...

Entertainment: ★★★

It was pretty good, and had interesting character development.  I guess I would have liked it more, except that the cover and description had me thinking that this book was full of action and adventure and such.  In reality, even the action scenes were a bit... muted.  So it was a fine book, just a bit slower and more introspective than I had anticipated.

Plot: ★★

It was all right, just, as I previously mentioned, kind of slow.  Not a whole lot of action, and a lot of talking about feelings and what it's like to be blind.  That's just not my kind of book.  And there's a lot of "coincidences" that are a little too orchestrated.

Characters: ★★

Griffin was okay - sweet in a misguided, confused son way.  I didn't find Cheyenne particularly likable,  for no real reason that I can name.  I just didn't identify with her.  The villains weren't particularly dislikable, either, for that matter.  Really, I just didn't find any of the really relatable or all that interesting.

Writing: ★★★

It was fairly well-written, aside from the random segues into discussions of blindness that really weren't relevant.

End Result: three stars.  A decent book, but not amazingly excellent.