Giveaway: Nobody & Every Other Day

One lucky reader will win a paperback of Every Other Day by Jennifer Lynn Barnes and a hardcover of her latest novel Nobody courtesy of EgmontUSA and Media Masters Publicity. U.S. and Canada only, please.

Nobody
by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Release Date: Jan. 22, 2013
Buy: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound 

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.

Every Other Day

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Paperback Release: Jan. 22, 2013

Buy: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound 

Every other day, Kali D’Angelo is a normal sixteen-year-old girl. She goes to public high school. She argues with her father. She’s human.

And then every day in between . . . she’s something else entirely.
 Though she still looks like herself, every twenty-four hours predatory instincts take over and Kali becomes a feared demon-hunter with the undeniable urge to hunt, trap, and kill zombies, hellhounds, and other supernatural creatures. Kali has no idea why she is the way she is, but she gives in to instinct anyway. Even though the government considers it environmental terrorism. 

When Kali notices a mark on the lower back of a popular girl at school, she knows instantly that the girl is marked for death by one of these creatures. Kali has twenty-four hours to save her, and unfortunately she’ll have to do it as a human. With the help of a few new friends, Kali takes a risk that her human body might not survive . . . and learns the secrets of her mysterious condition in the process.

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YA Extravaganza Recap and giveaway

We all know I'll drive to get to a book event. I've trekked 13 hours to Chicago for a Dark Days of the Supernatural stop and 16 hours to New Orleans for a convention, and those are just a couple of the roadtrips I've taken in the name of fabulous fiction. This time though, the event came to me!

Lenore Appelhans sporting her Level 2 shoes. 

A while back the amazing Lenore Appelhans, author of Level 2, told me she was trying to get together a tour with a few other authors and asked if they should stop in Richmond. Of course I was like, "Hell yes!" And sure enough the event became a reality.

Lenore, Jodi Meadows (Incarnate and Asunder), Megan Shepherd (The Madman's Daughter), and Meagan Spooner (Skylark) stopped by Fountain Bookstore for a chat and book signing Wednesday, Feb. 6. Prior to the event I had to chance to meet up with the authors and some fellow bloggers, Rebecca from Book Lady's Blog and Becca from Lost in Books,  for a bite. (If you didn't think being with other bookish folks could get better then you should try having said get together in an awesome local hole in the wall restaurant, especially it serves corndog nuggets.) We chatted about everything from book edits to filing our taxes and had a great time.

After dinner, the party moved next door to Fountain. It was pretty packed for the event and I saw plenty of familiar faces, including author Anne Westrick, Jess from Books and Sensibility and even Elle Cosimano (Nearly Gone, Penguin 2014). Owner Kelly Justice moderated the discussion, coming up with questions and taking on the challenge of keeping the unruly authors in line or at least on topic. The authors introduced their books, discussed how they wound up writing YA and talked a little about their roads to publication.

Here they are introducing their books:

More books were signed then I can count, and swag was present in abundance. Megan Shepherd even had "Sweet Madness" tea she created specifically for the release of her book and tea bags packaged individually with  her book cover in miniature! Of course I got my books signed, but I also got two books signed for one lucky reader. Just enter below for your chance to win.

I've been jonesing for a good book event for a while so I'm insanely glad this one worked out and that Fountain was able to host. The entire event was very laid back in signature Fountain style, and the authors were extremely entertaining and friendly. I'm thrilled to have met them and have the opportunity to see Lenore again, and I can't wait to read their books.

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Release Days Round-Up: February 10-16

New Releases

In Paperback

Movie Review: Warm Bodies

R and Julie in a scene from Warm Bodies. (Courtesy Summit Entertainment)

Warm Bodies did not disappoint! I have been anxious to see this movie since it was a tiny seed of a project with a bare bones IMDB page and no cast. I fell in love with Isaac Marion's book in 2011 (review) and needed to see how the film industry would translate this quirky, emotional novel into a major motion picture.

The last three words of the previous sentence pretty much sums up my fear, but I'll spell it out for you anyway. Dumbing things down for the masses usually doesn't end well. I've witnessed it before. (Please reference early attempts to bring superheros to the big screen. You know what movies I'm talking about.)  I was afraid a post-apocalyptic zombie romance, narrated by a zombie who's desperate to feel again and befriends a human girl in an effort to do so was destined for a similar fate. I am infinitely gratefully that Summit Entertainment and everyone involved in the making of this film proved me wrong.

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Warm Bodies tells the story a zombie, R,  who falls in love with a human girl, Julie, after devouring the brains of her boyfriend and experiencing his memories. It's the epitome of insta-love yet it makes perfect sense here when the somewhat gruesome but logical explanation is taken into account.

Brains offer feelings. R wants to feel. R eats brains.

He'd normally spend his days riding the conveyor belts at the derlict airport where many of the zombies live or carrying on "conversations" in grunts with his best friend M, but his interactions with Julie change all that. R actively tries to be more human around her, struggling to communicate and remember how to engage with the living.

Yes, the film is toned down a lot if compared to the book. While I'm a purest and usually like movies to hew as closely to the book as possible, I'm glad the dialed back with this one. Some of the content in the book is very adult and, on occasion, graphic. Without some editorial changes the film likely would have been rated R instead of PG-13. I still shudder every time someone references this as a young adult novel because though its main characters are young adult I wouldn't give the book to anyone who wouldn't be admitted to an R rated movie.

Plenty of nods to the book are included. Julie and R's first interaction is well-preserved. It played out nearly identically to the images the book evoked in my mind. R's records are heavily featured, but the much talked about Sintara scene from the novel is missing. I understand this though as it would probably have been somewhat difficult to recreate and potentially harder still to convey without it coming off as corny, which is not at all the case in the book.

There is one sweet moment involving M toward the end of the story that's altered and made me a bit sad, but only I know it the way I read it. Movie goers who haven't read the book will be blissfully ignorant.

Warm Bodies looks the way you'd expect a zombie movie to look, full of grays and muted colors. It didn't detract from my experience, but that may be because I expect a darker or bleaker look from films that feature mythic monsters.The only technical flaw was some less than realistic CGI where the boneys are concerned. We're not talking Catwoman bad, but it wasn't amazing.

Overall, Warm Bodies was completely satisfying as a movie. So much so that I didn't even have to erase the book from my mind during the roughly two hours I was in the theater. I'd strongly recommend it, but.... The book is still better! (You knew I had to say it. :) )

Also Known As by Robin Benway

Release Date: Feb. 26, 2013
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Age Group: Young Adult
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
Pages: 320
Buy: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound
Description: Goodreads
Being a 16-year-old safecracker and active-duty daughter of international spies has its moments, good and bad. Pros: Seeing the world one crime-solving adventure at a time. Having parents with super cool jobs. Cons: Never staying in one place long enough to have friends or a boyfriend. But for Maggie Silver, the biggest perk of all has been avoiding high school and the accompanying cliques, bad lunches, and frustratingly simple locker combinations. Then Maggie and her parents are sent to New York for her first solo assignment, and all of that changes. She'll need to attend a private school, avoid the temptation to hack the school's security system, and befriend one aggravatingly cute Jesse Oliver to gain the essential information she needs to crack the case . . . all while trying not to blow her cover.

So, newsflash, y'all: I'm kind of weird.  One of the things that's weirdest about me?  My sense of humor.  It's a bit, shall we say, off the wall.  However, I am grateful and honored to announce that Robin Benway totally gets me and my quirkiness, because she's written a story that had me legitimately LOLing.  And not just in that book-laugh way.  I'm talking Bill-Hader-breaking-character-when-he's-being-Stefon kind of way.  In all of the very best and most ridiculous ways, Also Known As is a hysterically good time.

Maggie's a teenage spy, a veritable wunderkind at cracking safes and opening locks.  She and her parents work for The Collective, a supermegafoxyawesomely secret network of spies that brings down the worst criminals in the world.  Their work keeps them moving from country to country, which means Maggie's had the least normal childhood of all time.  One fateful day, Maggie and her parents move to Manhattan, where she's given her very first solo assignment: befriend rich kid Jesse Oliver in order to take down his media magnate father and keep him from printing a whistle-blowing article about The Collective.  Maggie's ready to do everything she can to prove she's a bona fide spy and not just a teenager, but in her attempts to keep her job, she may lose everything.

I know that doesn't sound like it would be snorting-in-public hilarious, but the laughs don't come from the plot; they come from the characters.  Literally everyone in Also Known As is a big heaping bag of random, even Maggie's parents and especially her best-spy-friend-forever Angelo.  When Maggie's inner monologue kicks off into a story about her imaginary relationship with her Icelandic neighbor, I knew I was in for a treat.  In my head, she sounds like a young Lorelai Gilmore who also solves crimes or even a less jaded Veronica Mars.  And it only gets better from there.  Maggie may be fantastically sharp, witty, and dry, but the award for Most Uniquely Voiced Character In Also Known As goes to Roux.  That girl is a trip.  She's chock-full o' whipsmart one liners and out of nowhere segues that keep both Maggie and the reader of their toes.  I mean, she says one of my favorite Dirty Dancing quotes to a dog and instructs a bagel to "get in my mouth!"  She's like how I'd like to think that I was in high school, minus the absent parents and the occasional excessive wine drinking.  As for the romance, while there's the hint of insta-love, Jesse and Maggie are far too perfect together for me to care.  Take, for instance, this exchange-- Maggie: I like you. Like, like like you. Like, a lot. Jesse: That's a lot of likes.

The only thing that bugged me was the ending.  After all this build-up, not to mention the constant talk of the amazingly awesome things that Maggie and her family have seen and achieved (and seriously, what happened in Luxembourg?), the final action sequence left me feeling whelmed, which I didn't think was possible outside of Europe.  I thoroughly adored the build-up, and Roux honestly kept saying more hilarious things than I could have imagined, but still... I would've liked a little more... oomph.

Oomphlessness aside, Also Known As is a must-read for anyone who loves snark and weirdness and hilarity and me.

Release Days Round-Up: February 3-9

New Releases

In Paperback