Four Secrets by Margaret Willey + Giveaway!

Published October 1, 2012.

Author website.

"To you the idea to kidnap Chase Dobson might seem like a mistake. But to us... we were just trying to stop him from being so...evil. We just...we had to stop him. No one helps kids like us. Not at my school. We aren't the important kids. We knew it wouldn't stop unless we stopped it ourselves." 

Katie, Nate, and Renata had no farther to fall down the social ladder. But when they hit bottom, they found each other. Together, they wanted to change things. To stop the torment. 

So they made a plan. One person seemed to have everyone's secrets—and all the power. If they could stop him... 

But secrets are complicated, powerful things. They are hard to keep. And even a noble plan to stop a bully can go horribly wrong.  (netgalley.com)

The most prominent issue I had with FOUR SECRETS was the age of the three protagonists and the talked-about antagonist.  They're all supposed to be in eighth grade but I kept finding that I had to remind myself that these weren't kids in high school.  Just the extent of the issues they were having, how they spoke about it, how they carried it out it, just seemed so far beyond someone still in middle school.

Granted have it set their freshman year in high school and I probably wouldn't have batted an eye.  Not much of a difference age-wise in the slightest but the association is different.  In my mind there's a pretty big gap between middle school and high school and the voices I kept reading, at least to me, were high school age.  I just wasn't convinced they were middle school, especially when body sizes came into play.  All except Renata were described as large, either in stature or bulk (and by bulk I mean muscle).  It just didn't fit for me and it was a point of contention throughout and every time I was reminded of their ages it wrenched me out of the story a little bit.

But other than that it was a really good, pretty fast, read told from the perspectives of four different people, Chase excluded.  I could wholly empathize with the feelings of the social worker whose job it was to get to the bottom of why these kids kidnapped their classmate.  Because they entered into some kind of pact they wouldn't talk and she ended up getting the creative runaround from all three of them.

Nate told his view in story form, referring to the people involved by assigned fantastical names and set in a scene that only vaguely alludes to what actually happened.  Yeah you can get what he's saying but his was the portion of the book I liked the least.  I was over his method of storytelling pretty quickly and while I'm sure it helped him to cope with the situation he was seeking solace in a fantasy world instead of coming to terms with what happened.  He frustrated me the most.

Renata you see very little of within her own viewpoint, told, or rather shown, through her drawings.  Otherwise you get a picture of who Renata is by the way Nate and Katie describe and talk about her.  That would have been annoying to me if it weren't such a perfect way to get across Renata's personality.  She is very much a background girl that doesn't speak very often but when she does, whether it's actually with her vocal chords or with her drawings, it's so poignant you can't help but listen.  She's described as incredibly small and for most of the book that's the image I had in my mind: someone who was frail, tiny and needed rescuing when in fact she was exactly the opposite.  Next to the social worker I think I liked Renata the most.

Katie is the most prominent voice in the story aside from the social worker and its through her you learn the most information in a manner that won't have you trying to put puzzle pieces together.  Her method is very straight forward and when she started the second "rouse" journal I grunted in agitation.  I WANTED her to reveal what happened because I knew it wasn't what the situation looked like.  I think that was pretty evident from the beginning.  But there wouldn't be a story if that happened so I bided my time reading Katie's story broken up by lunches and homework and recreation time.  She was the most readable in terms of figuring everything out.

All three were hard-set in their ways when it came to not breaking this pact.  For the life of me I couldn't figure out why and while it worked out in the end I don't feel there was proper punishment doled out for the responsible parties.  The story resolved itself nicely enough but it was a little on the abrupt side and lacking in satisfaction.  I wanted more.  Comeuppance, maybe.  A knock off one's high horse, if you will.  The story resolved itself within one book which is a plus all around but there's a little bit more there, even if it's just ten or twenty pages.

While not my favorite Carolrhoda Lab book that's not to say it wasn't a good read.  FOUR SECRETS has points of view for every type of reader of a multitude of ages telling a story about bullying and how NOT to go about remedying it.  I don't want to give away the ending but through the eyes of the social worker you can see just how hard the gears are grinding, what's up against these kids and just how thin of a wire they're all walking on.  Bullying sucks, sure, but there are ways to go about fixing it that won't land someone in jail.  There's an air of noble cause and valiance in the book as well that may sway towards, in my eyes, the wrong way of fixing things but there is a balance there and Willey does a good job of playing both sides of the game.  It also goes to show that everyone has secrets, even the most perfect of people, and sometimes they're far darker than bad hair days.

Ban Factor: High - Kids taking matters into their own hands and being OKAY with going to juvenile detention?  Le gasp!

Giveaway Time!!!

Want to win my ARC?  Then just fill out the form below for your chance.

• Open to US residents 13 years of age and older only.
• One entry per person per email address.
• Duplicate entries will be deleted.
• Entrants must be a follower of Bites via one of the following mediums: GFC, RSS, Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr.
• Giveaway ends October 23rd at midnight AZT (3 am EST).

Blog Tour: Skylark by Meagan Spooner

Pub date: August 1, 2012.

Author website.

Vis in magia, in vita vi. In magic there is power, and in power, life.

For fifteen years, Lark Ainsley waited for the day when her Resource would be harvested and she would finally be an adult. After the harvest she expected a small role in the regular, orderly operation of the City within the Wall. She expected to do her part to maintain the refuge for the last survivors of the Wars. She expected to be a tiny cog in the larger clockwork of the city.


Lark did not expect to become the City's power supply.


For fifteen years, Lark Ainsley believed in a lie. Now she must escape the only world she's ever known...or face a fate more unimaginable than death.  (Meagan Spooner)

SKYLARK is a bumrush of intensity from the very beginning, throwing Lark Ainsley into the middle of what is rightly a conspiracy theory that few, if any, deign to think about.  Carolrhoda Lab comes through for me again, delivering a story that doesn't let its protagonist get away with a damn thing and makes sure she suffers from beginning to end, forcing her to earn every right she obtains for herself.

The world itself is vaguely familiar, giving hints that it could be our Earth but it might not be, cloaked over with fizzling bubbles of magic that keep people human.  Lark lives in one such bubble artificially generated by what she thought was harvested magic from children but what it turns out to be is a person, or people if the government is lucky enough, thought extinct, regenerating their energy and having it constantly siphoned off of them for the purpose of fueling the city.  And Spooner isn't shy about giving you details so if your stomach lies a little on the weaker side you might want to skim through some of the passages detailing what Lark sees, and what ultimately happens to her.

What I especially loved about SKYLARK was that every time I wanted to slap Lark for being dumb someone else was there to do it for me in the story.  One of my favorite quotes?

"You can't come crashing into the wilderness, half-starved and wholly incompetent, and imply I'm some kind of monster for keeping your skin intact."

 This is Oren and he had me going YES!  Logic makes my brain waves happy.  And when Lark first tumbles out of the city, out from under an artificial sky and under the real one, the depth of her discomfort is so excellently portrayed that I couldn't help feeling her fear of the sky on Lark's part.  There's something to be said for something so simple being so brilliantly portrayed.  It's the sky.  It's something so totally natural but Spooner tapped into aspects of Lark that are otherwise difficult for authors to access.  I believed every second of Lark's fear for the sky as if I were living it myself.  If that's not good writing I don't know what is.

The greater story arc, the one about the city parasiting power where they can, spurning some giant conspiracy theory, isn't a wholly original one and I definitely had moments of comparing it to AVATAR (the blue people movie, not the airbender movie), where a seemingly primitive people are harvested for what they can provide to the more "advanced" people, read: seemingly stronger.  But it's the way it was written that kept me hooked.  The world is an amalgam of steampunk and fairy, melding the two together in this clinking hybrid that was both organized and chaotic, with machines making nature frightening and the absence of magic dementing a person beyond human recognition.  And where the story ends is just the beginning for Lark as she desperately comes to terms with herself before she loses herself entirely.

The steampunk is exceptionally light but I do think steampunk fans would be won over by its use and the same goes for the fairy/magic aspect.  But combine the two and they're a thundering driving force throughout the story, neither existing without the other in some fashion.  Lark is a strong yet at times nonsensical heroine that's trying to get by on her own strength but recognizes her weaknesses.  She admits to her faults, begrudgingly, and at times lets her heart lead instead of her brain.  If you start reading SKYLARK for any kind of romance stop now.  You won't really find it here and what is there shatters to infinite pieces the definition of romance.  Really if you're looking for something inherently familiar and grounded in a reality that's both within reach and fantastical with a character made strong by her situation and forced to stand on her own (most of the time) then you'll find it in SKYLARK.  Let me tell you how refreshing it is not to have a YA novel of some kind of fantastical type NOT focused on romance.  Like being able to breath after being bound in a corset, let me tell you.

Ban Factor: High - Magic in a maybe-not-earth with no hint of a religion other than the magic that is the source of a city's power?  Ha!  Banned!

Meagan Spooner grew up reading and writing every spare moment of the day, while dreaming about life as an archaeologist, a marine biologist, an astronaut. She graduated from Hamilton College in New York with a degree in playwriting, and has spent several years since then living in Australia. She's traveled with her family all over the world to places like Egypt, South Africa, the Arctic, Greece, Antarctica, and the Galapagos, and there's a bit of every trip in every story she writes. She currently lives and writes in Northern Virginia, but the siren call of travel is hard to resist, and there's no telling how long she'll stay there. In her spare time she plays guitar, plays video games, plays with her cat, and reads. She is the author of SKYLARK, coming out August 1 from Carolrhoda Lab/Lerner Books. She is also the co-author of THESE BROKEN STARS, forthcoming from Disney-Hyperion in Fall 2013. (author blurb)

Stay tuned for an interview with Meagan herself and a nifty swag giveaway coming up later today!

I'm in PW!

That's me, second from the left.  One of my fellow YAckers was scrolling through the Children's Books at BEA in Photos page and brought this particular snapshot to my attention.  This particular shot is either from Andrew Karre (the Lab's resident mad scientist) or Lindsey Matvick (the marketing maven extraordinaire).  I can't remember who was standing where so I know it was one of them.  This was our little breakfast with Tessa Gratton (immediate right of me), Brenna Yovanoff (right of her), Maggie Stiefvater (over to the right again) and Meg Spooner (the tall one) and a small bunch of awesome bloggers nomming on tasty food stuffs.  Good times were had by all.

Win an Invite to a Kick Ass BEA Breakfast from Carolrhoda Lab!

If you're a blogger and you're going to BEA this June you can enter for your chance to win an invite to an author breakfast featuring Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, Brenna Yovanoff and Meagan Spooner, all courtesy of Carolrhoda Lab!  Since, you know, these are two Carolrhoda Lab titles coming out this fall.  And both happen to be on my NetGalley list waiting to be read.  Anxiously.  Yeah, I'm entering.

And you can too!  Just check out their Facebook page for more information.  And be sure to LIKE Carolrhoda Lab on Facebook!  Step one, after all.  You can't enter until you LIKE them.  So hop to it!  Go enter!  Nao.  It ends 5/4 so hurry your ass up!

ETA - Another awesomer thing that I just found out since I entered, you can enter once a day.  Sweet!

A Week with Carolrhoda Lab Epic Giveaway Finale!

To wrap up a fantabulous week with Carolrhoda Lab, they've graciously chipped in a nice little prize pack to give away for one lucky winner!

Here's what you can take away from this awesome imprint -

• A finished copy of DROWNING INSTINCT by Ilsa J. Bick
• A finished copy of THE KNIFE AND THE BUTTERFLY by Ashley Hope Perez
• A finished copy of ULTRAVIOLET by RJ Anderson
• A finished copy of IN TROUBLE by Ellen Levine

Wicked, right? A super huge thanks to Carolrhoda Lab for offering these titles up! So here's the deal -

• Open to US residents 13 years of age and older only.
• One entry per person per email address.
• Duplicate entries will be deleted.
• Entrants must be a follower of Bites via one of the following platforms: GFC, RSS, Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter
• Giveaway ends March 9th at midnight, EST.

Got all of that? Good. Now just complete the form below to drive it all home. Good luck!

A Week with Carolrhoda Lab Ends Tomorrow . . .

. . . with an epic giveaway! Be sure to come back tomorrow (3/2) to see just what you can win! You know you want it, even before you know what it is! Yes, it's that awesome.

A Week with Carolrhoda Lab Review: The Knife and the Butterfly by Ashley Hope Perez

Published February 1, 2012.

Author website.

After a marijuana-addled brawl with a rival gang, 16-year-old Azael wakes up to find himself surrounded by a familiar set of concrete walls and a locked door. Juvie again, he thinks. But he can't really remember what happened or how he got picked up. He knows his MS13 boys faced off with some punks from Crazy Crew. There were bats, bricks, chains. A knife. But he can't remember anything between that moment and when he woke behind bars.

Azael knows prison, and something isn't right about this lockup. No phone call. No lawyer. No news about his brother or his homies. The only thing they make him do is watch some white girl in some cell. Watch her and try to remember.

Lexi Allen would love to forget the brawl, would love for it to disappear back into the Xanax fog it came from. And her mother and her lawyer hope she chooses not to remember too much about the brawl—at least when it's time to testify.

Lexi knows there's more at stake in her trial than her life alone, though. She's connected to him, and he needs the truth. The knife cut, but somehow it also connected. (goodreads.com)

I took a huge risk on THE KNIFE AND THE BUTTERFLY and gave it the benefit of the doubt. This whole gang, thug life thing, totally not my bag in the slightest. And characters like this? I pretty much don't give two shits about. But I am SOOOOO glad I took the chance because it ended being worth it and then some just for the ending. Like to the point of me being winded and speechless and not even moving worth it.

Azael is a thug. He's entrenched in gang life and quite frankly, until he really started breaking down in his prison cell and we start delving into his past I didn't feel much for him. He's a punk, someone that's starts ridiculous fights over some imagined blast to his or his friends' pride. At first I was really worried this would be a first for me: the first Carolrhoda Lab book I really didn't like. But once Perez started chipping away at the surface and really started getting into who Azael really was under that whole thug facade it became interesting. His life with MS-13 ended up being akin to addiction. Throughout the book he kept coming back to his girlfriend Becca and how he wanted to get clean for her, actually using those words. But it was always tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. I ended up feeling bad for him because he is so young (15) and once his mom died his childhood pretty much sucked thanks to a selfish father that couldn't get over it enough to take care of his kids.

And then you have Lexi. I found the blurb just a touch misleading because I thought it was going to alternate POVs between Azael and Lexi but it sticks with Azael the whole time although we learn everything about Lexi through him and her journal. We don't really NEED to be in her head because we already kind of are when Azael is doing his observation.

What really bothered me was how quick Azael was to discount Lexi's problems because she's white. That really got under my skin and I wanted to slap him for it. Just because she's fair doesn't mean her life doesn't suck, and it certainly sucked. She was basically pseudo-raised by a mom in denial that had a revolving door of boyfriends, some of which abused her. She acted the only way she really knew how, through sexuality, and the gang life she sought provided her a bit of protection that she couldn't get at home with her mom. They were family where she didn't have any, except for her grandmother, who really tried. That's who Lexi warmed up to the most, that's where she looked to for encouragement or whether she should feel disappointed. Her mom didn't matter but her grandmother did.

The ending was so insanely sudden for me and hit me so profoundly that I actually gasped, my hands started shaking and I didn't know what to do with myself. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm not even halfway decent at picking up on twists in plots early in the story so I didn't see it coming AT ALL. And you know what? I'm glad. Because it took me aback so much that I think if I'd guessed before had, it would have ruined the story for me. It would have kept the story an okay story instead of launching it into FUCKING PHENOMENAL territory as it wrapped a rubber band around the whole thing and brought it all together. The ending really did it for me. If it had not ended the way it did I wouldn't have liked the book nearly as much. In fact I can't really imagine it ending any other way because it wouldn't have had nearly the same impact. Flabbergasted. Seriously.

THE KNIFE AND THE BUTTERFLY is not for the faint of heart. It's told through the eyes of a male MS-13 member (for those that don't know, it's a brutal gang based out of Los Angeles) and Perez is not shy about language, sexual innuendo or violence. It's all there, raw and uncensored for you to read and absorb. But she's written it so well that you'd think an actual member wrote it, that the story was coming from someone really living it. And in a way it did as it was inspired by actual events. Perez made me feel for someone that I would rightly brush aside, whose story I wouldn't have even considered before and I thank her deeply for that. Now I'm pretty much screwed because Azael's story was so phenomenal that I don't even know if anything else will compare. I don't know if I want it too.

Ban Factor: High - Gangs, swears, sex? Far too terrible for the eyes of banner babies.

Next on A Week with Carolrhoda Lab . . .

A review of THE KNIFE AND THE BUTTERFLY by Ashley Hope Perez! This one totally threw me into speechlessness at the end! Stay tuned for that tomorrow (3/1)!

A Week with Carolrhoda Lab Continues with Elizabeth Dingmann, Epic Lab Promoter

I've been working with Elizabeth since I started hoarding Carolrhoda Lab books and she's such a gem to interact with. Always sweet and attentive and super on top of everything, I'm always glad to help her promote something just based on her attitude alone. So of course she gets a spot this week to talk about her part behind the curtain and to throw some leads out to you all!

Promoting the experiment

When I first started working at Lerner Publishing Group, back before Carolrhoda Lab existed, we only published one YA novel a season—just two a year. Some of them were wonderful, and I truly loved helping to promote them. But we heard over and over again from our customers that people didn’t associate us with YA, and that made it difficult for us to figure out what our space was in the YA world. We worked hard to help these books get some attention, but they were such a small portion of our publishing program that it was very much a challenge.

So when Andrew Karre came on board as the Editorial Director of Carolrhoda Books and started talking about creating a YA imprint, our marketing and publicity team took full advantage of the opportunity to develop a brand for ourselves surrounding Andrew’s image of an imprint dedicated to publishing provocative, boundary-pushing fiction. When we launched Carolrhoda Lab in Fall 2010, we were able to create that space we had been looking for—a space where we could establish ourselves as publishers of distinctive YA. We’ve been pleased by the recognition we’ve received so far, and we were particularly honored when Blythe Woolston won the William C. Morris YA Debut Award for The Freak Observer, which we published in our inaugural season. We think we’re off to a great start—and trust me when I say there’s a lot more excitement to come in the future.

When it comes to YA, one of the most useful promotional tools is the modern-day word of mouth created by social media. The YA authors we work with are among the most savvy social media users I know, and we make a point of using our own @CarolrhodaLab Twitter handle to amplify our author’s voices. We also have some exciting developments in the works on Facebook, so be sure to keep an eye on facebook.com/carolrhodalab starting in March for giveaways and exclusive excerpts from our upcoming releases!

Thanks so much, Elizabeth! Now to tempt you all with some pretty books, here's a look at some of Carolrhoda Lab's backlist. Look at what you're missing! Stop it and go get them!

TRAITOR by Gudrun Pausewang

DRAW THE DARK by Ilsa J. Bick

CATCH & RELEASE by Blythe Woolston

IN TROUBLE by Ellen Levine

THE FREAK OBSERVER by Blythe Woolston

THE ABSOLUTE VALUE OF -1 (|-1|) by Steve Brezenoff

And the winner is . . . + Up Next on A Week with Carolrhoda Lab!

The winner of an ARC of PARANORMALCY by Kiersten White is . . .

Munnaza!!!

Congratulations! I've already sent the email off so be sure to reply! And a big thanks to everyone who entered!

Coming up tomorrow evening on A Week with Carolrhoda Lab, a guest spot with publicist du jour, Elizabeth Dingmann! And a few shameless review links to Carolrhoda Lab's older titles that I've featured. I gotta be just a little shameless. Just a smidge. No more.

A Week with Carolrhoda Lab Review: Ultraviolet by RJ Anderson

Published June 2, 2011.

Author website.

Once upon a time there was a girl who was special.

This is not her story.

Unless you count the part where I killed her.

Sixteen-year-old Alison has been sectioned in a mental institute for teens, having murdered the most perfect and popular girl at school. But the case is a mystery: no body has been found, and Alison's condition is proving difficult to diagnose. Alison herself can't explain what happened: one minute she was fighting with Tori -- the next she disintegrated. Into nothing. But that's impossible. Right? (goodreads.com)

ULTRAVIOLET threw me a bit for a loop because it's not what I was expecting out of Carolrhoda Lab. See, CL puts out mainly very gritty contemporaries. Ilsa Bick's DRAW THE DARK had a hint of something nominally paranormal but it could have rightly been psychological. Here it actually takes that leap and I was insanely surprised by it. I didn't think it was going to go there. And I really didn't mind.

As the reader you're in Alison's head the entire time and really it's not a bad place to be. She's not crazy. She's just SUPER sensitive because of her synesthesia. A synesthete is someone that processes letters and numbers as colors and/or feelings. Those symbols might even have particular moods and noises usually carry with them their own shapes. Yes, this is a real issue. Look it up. I don't know whether to call it a disorder or problem or just a quirk. It really just seems like a different way for a very few people to process information. But it was alive in ULTRAVIOLET. I've read one other book where the MC was a synesthete and it fell completely flat. Here, with Alison, I was able to see what she saw. When she reacted so did I. I could see the shapes the noises around her made and I could feel what she felt at the mention of a name. The writing was exquisite in its ability to do that. Alison's synesthesia was so realistic that it in and of itself was its own character.

In context of the greater plot is was all encompassing. It's because of this issue that Alison believes she disintegrated a girl that she was less than thrilled about. Now reading this, and knowing CL's deal with what they published, I absolutely did NOT see it going where it went. I don't want to go into detail because that would spoil it but it totally swept the rug right out from underneath my feet. But the thing is, it was written so well and, really, so scientifically, that I believed it. Within the story and the imprint itself, I bought it. I still feel it a little odd for CL but if this is what they're gearing towards, the little toe dip in the pool, I'll take it. It was pretty awesome.

Alison as a character is someone you can't help but root for. Here's a chick that's basically nothing more than hypersensitive stuffed in a psych ward against her will because people believe she's crazy and a threat to herself and others. Being in her head you know this isn't the case. Sure, you share her blackouts of past events but given everything you can see her sanity and it's angering because she just can't express that without it being flipped around on her. There are times when I wanted her to just come out with it and tell her doctor what was going on. It would have made things so much better! Someone would have understood and someone did. But that was wrenched away from Alison and I couldn't help but feel wrecked when it happened. Her one lifeline gone and she was convinced she'd never see him again.

While the spin ULTRAVIOLET took isn't necessarily something I'd normally be in to and threw me off totally, it was still a phenomenally written book. When I say you feel everything Alison goes through, you really FEEL it. It just can't be helped. Anderson really has a grasp on synesthesia and was able to write it in such a way that it was both beautiful and terrifying at the same time. My understanding is this is the first in a series so I'm definitely looking forward to the next installment. There are relationships established in this book that I really want to see morph in the next. It'll be interesting to see how those dynamics changed from one to the other. Overall well worth the read and definitely a kick to the teeth at the end! Totally didn't see it coming!

Ban Factor: High - Between the psychology and the older man/younger girl potential relationship, the banners would be twitching.

Last Call for Booksahol! + My Next Carolrhoda Lab Review!

Just a friendly reminder that tonight's the last night to enter my giveaway for an ARC of PARANORMALCY by Kiersten White! So be sure to get your entries in by midnight, EST, for your chance to win!

And then just to let you all know my Week with Carolrhoda Lab will continue tomorrow (2/28) with a review of ULTRAVIOLET by RJ Anderson! It totally turned me ass over tea kettle and I DID NOT expect it to end like that. Look for it tomorrow evening (after I get my work and work out on)!

A Week with Carolrhoda Lab Review: Drowning Instinct by Ilsa J. Bick

Published February 1, 2011.

Author website.

There are stories where the girl gets her prince, and they live happily ever after. (This is not one of those stories.)

Jenna Lord's first sixteen years were not exactly a fairytale. Her father is a controlling psycho and her mother is a drunk. She used to count on her older brother—until he shipped off to Iraq. And then, of course, there was the time she almost died in a fire.

There are stories where the monster gets the girl, and we all shed tears for his innocent victim. (This is not one of those stories either.)

Mitch Anderson is many things: A dedicated teacher and coach. A caring husband. A man with a certain...magnetism.

And there are stories where it's hard to be sure who's a prince and who's a monster, who is a victim and who should live happily ever after. (These are the most interesting stories of all.) (netgalley.com)

I've been sitting on reviewing DROWNING INSTINCT for about two months now, doing the Homer Simpson "I wanna" dance waiting for Carolrhoda Lab's special week so I can finally put it up. And now I'm faced with what to say. What can I say other than Ilsa's done it yet again? She's ripped my heart out, stomped on it, sewed it back together and gently placed it back in my chest. I cried like a freaking baby at the end of DROWNING INSTINCT. It's hard to see such a sad character lose a rare piece of happiness in her life.

DROWNING INSTINCT was also the book that made me realize that I needed to step away from these kind of contemporaries for a while. It's so real and honest and gritty that it hurts me to read. As much as I shy away from the prospect of loinfruit, to see a child hurting kills me. Ilsa killed me with Jenna. She was so wounded and so alone and when she finally found the support she needed it was wrenched away from her again. And the story leaves you hanging. Kind of. You know what happens but you really DON'T. You can kinda tell how Jenna's going to do but you don't REALLY know and it's a killer. Is she okay, Ilsa? Please tell me.

Like DRAW THE DARK the story is a bit drawn out and slow at points but that's really the only nominally negative thing I can say about DROWNING INSTINCT and Ilsa's writing in general. She gets so thoroughly into her characters' heads its scary, like she could be automatic writing with a ghost or something. Or she trances out and channels the characters living inside of her. When she's writing she's not Ilsa, she's Jenna and that's why it feels so realistic. That's why every pang and pain and piece of anger jumps off of the page, grabs you by the collar and shakes you until you feel it too. It can't be helped. The story won't let you walk away without feeling something.

Jenna isn't just your average overcoming, strong heroine. She's life. She's reality. She's a piece of soul torn and put through the wringer. It's like you can hear her whispering the story in your ear. As she's talking into that recorder the cop gave her, it's like she's sitting right next to you and she's looking you dead in the eye while she's telling it. She isn't just a character that's been through some terrible crap. She hit the delete button at the end of the story and you don't even know if there's hope. But you pray there is. Because you're looking at her and you have to hope. You have to carry on her hope.

Before I completely jump off the cliff of nonsensical fangirling praise, I'm ending this here. DROWNING INSTINCT is as gritty at they come. It's realistic, poignant and will punch you in the gut by the end of the book. You will feel everything Jenna does. You will go through all of her ups and downs with her, even when you think you probably shouldn't. You still will. And then you'll get to the end and try to will more pages to appear because it can't end there. It just can't.

Ban Factor: High - Student/teacher relationship? I can hear the banner squeals already.

A Week with Carolrhoda Lab Begins with Andrew Karre, Mad Scientist!

So begins my week featuring the awesomely epic imprint, Carolrhoda Lab! I first stumbled upon Carolrhoda Lab two years ago through a well-placed advertisement on the Publisher's Weekly site. The imprint was but a mere infant then, relatively unknown but damn I loved their font. Kinda creepy and since I'm a touch on the morbid side, I gravitated. They gladly sent me some of their titles and thus began my love of not only Carolrhoda Lab but Ilsa Bick (DRAW THE DARK), Blythe Woolston (THE FREAK OBSERVER) and Steve Brezenoff (THE ABSOLUTE VALUE OF -1).

Carolrhoda Lab and it's authors have never ceased to amaze me with the unabashedly amazing stuff they put out. They're stories that hit you in places no other book can and they're continuously good. Carolrhoda Lab, and its editorial director Andrew Karre, has so successfully carved out a niche that, really, he (and they) should be bowed to. Andrew has his finger on the pulse of exactly what it is he's looking for and he snatches it up every time. I've reviewed nearly every title on the CL list and they're all mind-blowingly phenomenal. How Andrew manages to hit them out of the park every time is most likely a secret he's keeping closely guarded. As long as he keeps going what he's doing, I'm okay with that.

From here I hand over the reigns to him so he can wax scientific about just what Carolrhoda Lab is all about. I hope this little event on my little blog opens up the world of Carolrhoda Lab to more people and helps get the word out about these awesome books even more. All this week look for CL reviews, an awesome giveaway and another awesome guest post from Elizabeth Dingmann, publicist extraordinaire!

What we put in the test tubes: the science of Carolrhoda Lab

Carolrhoda Lab is two experiments at once, as far as I’m concerned. On the individual book level, it has been my goal from day one to create editorial spaces where the author and I can test the fundamental YA hypothesis: this is a book that will appeal to people who are interested in the teenage condition (notice that the fundamental YA hypothesis is not “this book is for teens”). Our testing instruments are questions like how does the book fit into (or, better still, disrupt) the world of teen fiction as we know it now? What part will this book play in the larger drama that is contemporary adolescence? What light does this shed on the teenage experience? And so on. Under this kind of testing, there are really only two unacceptable indicators and they involve phrases like “reading level” and “teen-appropriate subject matter.” Not only do I believe these issues are irrelevant to young adult fiction, but I find them deeply boring (and they smell bad if you leave them open in the lab too long). Aside from that bit of unabashed subjectivity, we are very scientifically rigorous. Like any good lab, we are always retesting our assumptions with each new specimen. I’m very fortunate to have fearless experimenters like Steve Brezenoff and Blythe Woolston and tinkerers like Ashley Hope Pérez and R.J. Anderson who like to mix combustibles.

The second, larger experiment takes place on the imprint level, and the hypothesis in that case is that an imprint can forge a coherent identity based on no more than a commitment to exploring every nook and cranny of teenage existence, one book at a time—even if this leads to books that are superficially wildly different. I take the “lab” in our name very seriously on a personal level. I am disposed to approaching YA as a genre, and I’ve thought that way ever since I helped launch Flux in my previous editorial incarnation. However, Lab means I have to test that hypothesis too, and I’m as proud to have published books that challenge that hypothesis (Vaunda Micheaux Nelson’s No Crystal Stair is a perfect example) as I am to have published books that affirm it (like Ilsa J. Bick’s Drowning Instinct). You might say that the only unacceptable indicators in this experiment are repetition and thoughtless trend following. This is an ongoing experiment, but data is trending in a good direction.

These are the things we think about when we think about Carolrhoda Lab books (we also think about things like trim size, dot gain, epub3, the serial comma, the viability of the second person, whether we could ever publish a vampire novel, book trailers, Facebook, what the hell is Pinterest, etc. but I won’t bore you). In the end, though, it’s probably all beside the point for readers. The process is a curiosity. The “science” is, I hope, in service of the stories, and we want those to last.

Thanks, Andrew! Be sure to follow Andrew Karre on Twitter!

Coming Soon - A Week with Carolrhoda Lab!

Carolrhoda Lab should be no stranger to the readers of this blog. I've read nearly every title on their list since they formed into existence and I've loved them all. An imprint of Lerner Publishing, Carolrhoda Lab focuses on the different, the intense and the impacting. There isn't a book with Carolrhoda that won't grip you to pieces. Every single one of them will latch onto a piece of your soul and stay there, festering and pulling at you. Their books are powerful and they'll leave a mark. Andrew Karre, the big editor over at Carolrhoda Lab, has been able to nail down a niche and hit the mark so hard he's blown a hole the size of a watermelon through the target.

It's because of this inherent awesomeness that I wanted to give them a platform to be able to talk about themselves a little because, in my opinion, they're still one of the silent knights of the publishing industry. They're quiet, sitting in the corner while the big guys function around them. They deserve to be heard and their books deserve to be talked about.

So I've dedicated February 27th to March 2nd as Carolrhoda Lab's official week here on Bites where Andrew Karre and Elizabeth Dingmann, Carolrhoda Lab's awesome publicist, will stop by to talk about the behind the scenes workings of CL while I keep throwing CL title reviews at you all. And at the end of the week I'm going to be having an awesome giveaway filled with Carolrhoda Lab goodies!

It will be truly awesome so mark your calendars and stop on by at the end of the month. You won't want to miss it.

The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston + Giveaway!

Published August 1, 2010.

When her younger sister dies, 16-year-old Loa's clockwork galaxy collapses. As she spins off on her own, Loa's mind ambushes her with vivid nightmares and sadistic flashbacks a textbook case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. But there are no textbook fixes for Loa's short-circuiting brain. If she keeps her eyes open and her neurons busy, there's less chance for her imagination to brew up nightmares and panic attacks. Maybe then she'll be able to pry her world from the clutches of death. (goodreads.com)

Carolrhoda Lab for the win yet again! Seriously, I've been on top of this inprint since they debuted with DRAW THE DARK and TRAITOR and they've yet to publish anything even remotely resembling a word turd. Their books are so rich and deep that you just get sucked right in and you don't even realize you were under water until you emerge breathless. THE FREAK OBSERVER is no exception.

Now this is literary YA that I can sink my teeth into. It's succinct but vibrant. Loa doesn't pity herself even though she is probably someone that should. The story is relatively plotless, with Asta's death happening before the story even starts. When you first enter, you're walking into Loa's shit storm of a life without an umbrella and you can feel every ping and fleck of poo as it hurls at her.

The main antagonist is someone that exists only in Loa's mind, The Bony Guy. Death. He's always there, haunting her, keeping her alone in life. And her loneliness is tangible. Her parents don't see her as their child but as a burden, especially when she falls out of line, like getting hit by a car. Such a bad kid. Her only friend moves away but she finds something out about him that makes her doubt the relationship for most of the book. Her little brother is kept at a distance by her parents, as if they're afraid he'll catch something from her. This girl leads such a loveless, lonely life that you can't help but feel for her.

The good thing (as if there's only one) is that Woolston doesn't drag the drama out for hundreds upon hundreds of pages. The story is poignant, telling the parts that need to be told for Loa's mind to get from point A to point B and then it's done. And it's marvelous. It's literary without the heinous, door stopper fat.

If you're jonsing for a phenomenal character-driven story that's low on plot but amped up with a multi-faceted character whose crutch is physics because it's the only dependable constant in her life, you'll love THE FREAK OBSERVER. I feel like all I'm doing is expounding on the fangirlishness with this review but it is that level of amazing. It's a character study with a glimmer of hope at the end. It's near hopeless but not quite. Loa is one of the most amazing characters I've seen and to have gone through everything that she has, it's a miracle she's not in the fetal position sucking her thumb by the end of the story. No. At the end she's standing up straighter than at the beginning. And for that she's all the more amazing.

Ban Factor: High - It's chock full of swearing and some sexual scenarios, not to mention the craptastic home life the MC has. Book banners would pee themselves with this one.

Giveaway Time!!!

Want my finished copy? Then just fill out the form below for your chance to win.

• Open to US residents 13 years of age and older only.
• One entry per person per email address.
• Duplicate entries will be deleted.
• Giveaway ends September 29th at midnight, EST.

The Absolute Value of -1 by Steve Brezenoff + Contest!

Published September 1, 2010.

Lily: "For three years, I'd been trying to hold on to Simon and pull him up against me. He was a bar of soap in the shower, though: slippery as hell, and one false move - squeeze a little too tight - and he's gone. And picking up a wet bar of soap in the shower is pretty difficult."

Noah: "Lily has these big brown eyes. It sounds corny, but they totally get me. They make my stomach and heart flip five times a piece. So I looked away quickly, because I have a tendency to kind of stare at her if I don't catch myself. It's been like that forever."

Simon: "I never thought much would change with Lily being my girlfriend. I mean, she and Noah were the only people I hung out with much anyway, so now I'd be kissing her and fondling her and she'd be kissing me and fondling me. Not much of a difference, really." (book flap blurb)

Don't let those blurbs fool you. The only one that's the most relevant is Lily's. The others all look like they're wrapped up in some weird love triangle of angst but it's so much more than that. Except for Lily. That's really all it is about since she had such tunnel vision for Simon.

Again, Carolrhoda Lab has not let me down with one of their books. Brezenoff's writing digs so deep, gets down underneath the emo and the angst and the teenagery to something so much more powerful. Lily and Noah are chasing pipe dreams, from a pipe. Just not each others. And Simon, he's the absolute value. He's not a positive or a negative. He's the normal, the end result of walking through the absolute and coming out the other side alive.

The story is told in three very distinct points of view: Lily's, Noah's and Simon's and they all cover relatively the same timeline but you get to see the world from different eyes and it makes all the difference in the story.

Lily's story is rose-colored but running, like red ink splattered with water. She has her eyes set on Simon and she's so blinded by that want she doesn't see the forest for the trees. There is no forest, no trees. Just Simon. Noah's world is a baked out Scooby van with douchier friends. Like Lily, he's so blinded by the path he's made out for himself that he can't see the change. Or doesn't want to. So he envelopes himself in a protective seal in order to save himself. He likes what he has. It saves him from what he walks away from every day and it's worked. Why change something that works so well? It could ruin everything.

And Simon. Simon's the be-all end-all of the storyline, in so many ways. His piece of the puzzle is the most powerful, the most poignant. When he cries, you can feel his tears hitting your hand. You can feel the pain he feels when he starts learning hard truths. And through his eyes we see just how absolutely far away from Lily and Noah he really is. From their eyes, he's the quiet dude that keeps to himself but smokes a lot of bud. No one digs any deeper and if they tried, he really wouldn't let them in. But he's not. He's coping. He's normal. Sort of.

There really wasn't anything about this book not to love. I could have been reading the stories of three real kids for how authentic all three voices sounded. The only issue I had with any part of the story was Suzanne. I'm not sure of her relevance nor if she was even necessary for the story. As Simon's sister she was definitely a crutch for him and at times I found their relationship uncomfortable for how close they were. I saw the path it was headed on really early on but I don't know why the story went there, especially since it happened so late in the plot (like the last few pages) and the aftermath wasn't delved into at all except they kept their distance from each other at the grieving. I honestly don't know if it was another wrench in the spokes of life or if there's a bigger picture I'm missing. I just didn't find that particular part necessary. I think it was too underdeveloped for what it became.

Other than that, this could be a life study of teenagers in the wild. This is what it's like to be a fly on the inside of their craniums. You see how they act and you're privy to what they think and it's so much deeper than the cigarettes and beer and weed and cutting class and slang and whatever. There's pain and torment and sorrow and loss and longing and love going on underneath it all and Brezenoff captured it all fantastically. Reading from one cover to the other was as effortless as walking from one side of the room to the other. At the end I wanted more, especially of Simon. There was so much left hanging there that I didn't want it to end. But it did. And it was oh so good while it lasted.

Contest time!!!

Want my copy? Then fill out the form below for your chance to win. Open to US residents 13 years of age and older only. One entry per person per email. Duplicate entries will be deleted. Contest ends January 20th at midnight, EST.

More Carolrhoda Lab Love

At this point I don't think it's any surprise how much I love the Lerner imprint Carolrhoda Lab. First it was Draw the Dark by Ilsa J. Bick that sucked me into a strange boy's head and then back in time. Then it was Traitor by Gudrun Pausewang, a story told from the eyes of a girl we tend to overlook. I have two more titles of theirs to read, The Absolute Value of -1 by Steve Brezenoff and The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston, which I'm sure will be just as amazing as the first two.

Carolrhoda Lab is about pushing the boundaries of YA. They don't publish your normal, run of the mill YA. Their stuff isn't of the norm and it's no surprise that one of their titles, coming out in Spring of 2012, is equally as unconventional.

Compiled by Maggie Stiefvater, Brenna Yovanoff and Tessa Gratton, the currently untitled book will be a behind the scenes look at how these authors write. Complete with IMs, tweets and emails, you'll be able to get a raw look, through this book, at how some of the greatest YA authors out now create, and revise, their works. Like a behind the scenes featurette of a movie, this is the book world's version.

So keep Carolrhoda Lab on your radar and look out for this book. You know you want it!

A Winner and Traitorous Contest!

First, the winner of my Prophecy of Days, The Gatekeeper's Grimoire Book 1 by Christy Raedeke is . . .

Emma Michaels!!!

Congratulations! I've already send you an email. And a big thanks to everyone who entered!

Now normally I like to sync up book giveaways with their reviews but in this case, I just got the go ahead for it the other day, a few days after the review posted. So it's a little belated but better late than never, right? So here's the book you can win thanks to the awesome people at Carolrhoda Lab -

An enemy is hiding in Anna's barn - a Russian prisoner of war on the run from the Nazis.

Only Anna knows he's there. If she turns him in, he'll be shot.

But if she hides him, she'll be a traitor to Germany. And for that, she could be shot herself . . . (book back blurb)

This is another title from Carolrhoda Lab that you definitely don't want to miss. They're batting two for two with me, man, seriously. Their books are full of win. First Draw the Dark and now Traitor.

You can read my full review of Traitor here to see if it's something you'd like to read. But I can tell you, if you like historical fiction, especially World War II historical fiction, you won't want to miss it.

So you want to win a copy? Just fill out the form below for your chance. Open to US residents 13 years of age and older only. One entry per person per email address. Duplicate entries will be deleted. Contest will end on August 26th at midnight, EST.

Traitor by Gudrun Pausewang

Pub date - October 2010.

An enemy is hiding in Anna's barn - a Russian prisoner of war on the run from the Nazis.

Only Anna knows he's there. If she turns him in, he'll be shot.

But if she hides him, she'll be a traitor to Germany. And for that, she could be shot herself . . . (book back blurb)

This isn't my first time reading a translated book. I've read both good and bad and usually, regardless of what it is, something's missing. It's the natural act of translating. Only the original language can hold the beauty the story was meant to portray. The thing is, with Traitor, hardly anything's lost. Yeah, there's some off punctuation, no doubt carried over from the original German. But the beauty? The emotion? The gut-wrenching feeling that kept me turning the pages? Oh yeah. All there. Didn't miss a beat. Reading this book makes me wish I knew German so I can read it in its original language. It can only be better in German.

Initially I got the feeling from reading that Anna was this little girl. And I guess in her head she was. Very naive, very close-minded about everything that was going on. She was literally smack dab in the middle of a war and all she cared about was socializing and where the greatest places to hang out were.

Maxim changed everything and throughout the course of the story, you see Anna harden. When the fear sets in, the fear that she could be shot for hiding this Russian POW, the fear that her brother really was capable of turning her in for the good of the Fatherland, her skin thickens. She no longer acts or talks like a little girl. Her mannerisms, her actions, are all adult. A guilty adult trying to hide as much as possible. At first her actions to help his man were purely innocent. She didn't know he was Russian. She thought he was mentally challenged and felt bad for him. But the she finds out and despite everything she was taught about Russians in the Hitlerjugen, their brutish, animalistic nature, she doesn't see that in Maxim. She sees a man like everyone else and she can't let him die.

Felix literally had me crying. He was younger than Anna by a couple of years (14, maybe) and he was wholly indoctrinated into the Third Reich to the point that he'd turn over his own family because nothing came before the good of Germany. Not even his life. By the end I wanted to scream for his fate, and the fate of the rest of his family because of him. The Reich got them when they were young and impressionable. They were more easily swayed. And Felix got sucked right into it.

Every loss portrayed in Traitor, every flinch of fear, every pang of sorrow, or hunger, every rumble of a bomb, you could hear and feel through Gudrun's writing. It's a different view of yet another World War II novel. The ending isn't happy. In fact it's a blackout that has you wondering what happened next but at the same time you know exactly what happened. Everything is true. Everything is true. And it had me wanting to screaming, "Noooooooooooooo!" It says something when you spend a few seconds flipping the last page back and forth, willing some more words to appear to give a more well-rounded ending to the story but there were none. Really, I liked where it ended for all the frustration it caused. I think it's perfect. Sad and heart-crushing and gut-churning but it's where the story needed to end. I can't picture it ending anywhere else.

If you read Traitor, and you should, it'll suck you right in. You'll feel everything Anna feels. You'll be able to hear everything, taste everything, shudder with her every shudder, flush with her every stroke of panic when she thinks she's been found out. You won't want it to end and you'll scream when it does because you won't be ready for it. It's just done, just like Anna. And then you'll want to go back to the beginning and start again just to feel everything she did all over again.