Recent Winners!

I've had a few giveaways on the blog lately and finally have gotten around to announcing the winners. I'm miserable at putting these up in a timely fashion, so sorry everyone! A big thank you to Mundie Moms and Amy Plum as well as Simon & Schuster for providing such amazing books, and thank you to all of you who entered! Winners have all been emailed.

WRECKED

Winner:

Wolfluvr420

DIE FOR ME

Winner:

Cayce/Maria

SPRING FLING

Winner:

Tiffany

Review: Until I Die

UNTIL I DIE (Revenants #2)

Amy Plum
Paranormal Young Adult
352 pages
HarperTeen
Available Now
Received from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)

Kate and Vincent have overcome the odds and at last they are together in Paris, the city of lights and love.

As their romance deepens there’s one question they can’t ignore: How are they supposed to be together if Vincent can’t resist sacrificing himself to save others? Although Vincent promises that he’ll do whatever it takes to lead a normal life with Kate, will that mean letting innocent people die? When a new and surprising enemy reveals itself, Kate realizes that even more may be at stake—and that Vincent’s immortality is in jeopardy.

In Die for Me, Amy Plum created a captivating paranormal mythology with immortal revenants and a lush Paris setting. Until I Die is poised to thrill readers with more heart-pounding suspense, spellbinding romance, and a cliff-hanger ending that will leave them desperate for the third and final novel in the series.

MY THOUGHTS

Until I Die is a story that treads softly, most of the story almost eerily quiet as the enemies of the Revenants decide to lay low and regroup after the events at the end of Die For Me, but the quiet is not a light one, instead each page of relative inaction is another weight laid upon our shoulders as we wait for the moment when noise is going to violently disrupt our comfortable calm. Because there is so little action for majority of the book, it does take us a while to settle back into this very unique world, our driving desire to learn more about a fresh and new group of paranormals stalled by a thick, almost viscous haze of pleasantness that prevents us from digging as deep as we’d like. We seem to tiptoe around anything overly emotional or physically taxing, stepping carefully page after page all the while hoping for something big to happen yank us into the story.

Ms. Plum has a rather difficult challenge in this second book in terms of us as readers, our contrary natures creating a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t situation with regard to Kate and Vincent’s relationship. On the one hand, we want to see them happy and together and enjoying each other after everything they went through in the last book, but at the same time we crave the tension and conflict that drew us to them in the first place. Ms. Plum grants us those sweet moments where feelings are given voice and growing attraction is acknowledged, and while we certainly release a contented sigh after such interactions, we also wait with bated breath for the delicious drama that seems to be missing from their blissful state.

All is not perfect in their world though, with Kate becoming increasingly aware of her mortality versus Vincent’s immortality, but even with the enormity of that particular obstacle we never quite feel the intensity or sense of urgency we would like to so we can overcome our slight disconnect and fully engage in their story. Finally, however, in the final third of the story Ms. Plum kicks things into gear in suspenseful and thrilling fashion, jolting us with certain revelations we had a sense were coming but hadn’t quite fully pieced together and leaving us with an ending that tears our hearts wide open while providing us absolutely no words of comfort to help stanch the bleeding.

While Until I Die starts slowly and proceeds to meander leisurely through some heartfelt moments between Kate and Vincent, it concludes in a blaze of painful glory, reminding us just how much we really do care for the characters, and shattering our sense of complacency with several well-aimed punches to the gut. The next book promises to give us that extra depth missing a touch from this second installment, our emotions sure to be in constant flux as everyone struggles to deal with a situation with which they’re all intimately familiar, though in this case familiarity fails to prepare them for the pain.

First 2/3 – 3.5/5
Last 1/3 – 4/5
 

Until I Die Blog Tour: Interview + Giveaway

I'm super excited today to be a part of the blog tour for Amy Plum's Until I Die, the second in her Revenants series. Amy is joining me on the blog to answer a few questions, and she is generously offering up a signed paperback copy of Die For Me as well! Woo hoo! 

This tour started on April 21st and will run through May 12th, so be sure and check out all the participating blogs for reviews, interviews, guests posts, excerpts and lots of giveaways. You can find the full list of blogs on Mundie Moms, and all the details for both this stop's giveaway and the grand prize giveaway are located at the bottom of the post. 

Welcome to Supernatural Snark Amy!

Let’s say you’re in Vincent’s shoes, struggling between the need to be with the person you love most and the need to save innocent lives. Are you the type to constantly agonize over a decision while analyzing every possible outcome, or are you the type to make a choice and stick with it?

I am very impetuous, and make instinctive, split-second decisions and then hold on for dear life. This gets me in trouble sometimes, but my brain just doesn’t work on an analytical level.

Is there another city other than the amazingly atmospheric Paris you think would have suited Vincent, Kate and company equally well should Paris not have worked out as you were writing?

I never actually thought I’m going to set DIE FOR ME in Paris. From the beginning Paris was one of the main characters, almost as important as Kate and Vincent. In fact, I’ll give Paris third ranking in order of importance behind those two. I would love to write a book set in New York or Rome, but this particular story could only be set in the City of Lights.

If the teenage version of you was sitting in a café in Paris and noticed a good looking boy a few tables over, would you have the nerve to approach and start a conversation or would you simply admire from afar?

Approach a cute straight boy? Absolutely not. Even the adult version of me wouldn’t have the guts to do that! I would admire from afar, but wouldn’t even have the courage to be blatant about it. I would totally be hiding behind my book.

In most paranormal stories, immortality comes with a hefty physical and emotional price. If you were offered immortality tomorrow not knowing the specific price (i.e. feeding from others as a vampire or self-sacrificing as a revenant) you would pay for it but were told you would meet the absolute love of your life in one hundred years, would you take it?

That’s an interesting question because it is very rare that you hear of immortals who had some sort of choice in their fate. I would bet you that 95% of them would say that they wouldn’t choose the destiny they were given. However, knowing that you would meet the love of your life...that’s one hell of a carrot. I admit that I would decline the offer. But if it were forced upon me, I would resist destroying myself if I knew that my future held love.

Can you tell us which of the characters was the first to pop into your head when the idea for Die for Me came to you?

Kate. I knew I wanted to write a paranormal romance, and was sitting in my usual thinking spot (the bathtub – lots of bubbles) when this sentence popped into my mind: “Ten days after I got my driver’s license, my parents died in a car wreck.” And all of a sudden Kate existed as an practically fully-formed character in my mind. After that, I set myself the task of figuring out what kind of supernatural creature she would fall in love with.

Just for fun, let’s say both Kate and Vincent make lists (a la Ross’s laminated list from Friends) of characters from other books they’d be allowed to kiss should they ever meet that person. Which young adult characters would be in the top spot for each of them?

Neither Kate nor Vincent wanted to participate in this exercise. (They’re still a new couple – they only have eyes for each other.) But when forced to give me a name, Kate chose Jace Wayland from Mortal Instruments. He’s the opposite of Vincent looks-wise, but there’s just something about those tattoos and sauciness. Vincent said he would settle for Katniss Everdeen from Hunger Games for her kick-assness, but only because she’s fictional so there’s no real chance of it happening.

What was your favorite part about returning to the world of revenants when you sat down to begin Until I Die?

In DIE FOR ME I had a whole world to set up, so I wasn’t able to delve very far into the revenant mythology without overwhelming the reader with too many details. In UNTIL I DIE, I’m able to add more Revenant Rules, so the reader will understand a bit more about these beings and how they work.

I also couldn’t wait to delve deeper into the characters’ personalities. When I finished DIE FOR ME, I actually felt lonely. I had been hanging out with the characters every day, and they felt like friends to me. So UNTIL I DIE was like a reunion. I got to see everyone again and get to know them better.

If you were to harness all the emotions and events of this second installment and reduce them to a single color, what color do you think would communicate the totality of Until I Die to us best?

Slate gray. It’s pretty dark. I’d say black, except it is shot through with a little bit of hope, a lot of passion, and some funny bits from our usual suspects.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions Amy! More information on Amy and her books can be found here:

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Goodreads

GIVEAWAY

For this stop of the tour, I have one signed paperback copy of Die For Me to give away on the blog! To enter, please just leave a comment on this post with a valid email address so I can contact you if you win. This giveaway is open internationally and will run through midnight EST on Friday, May 11th after which time a winner will be chosen and announced on the blog.

WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

In addition to individual giveaways on each blog, there will also be a grand prize giveaway for the entire tour. How do you enter you ask? I'll let Amy tell you:

Each day of the blog tour you will find one or more words in bold. Collect all of them and put them together in the right order to form a riddle about UNTIL I DIE’s plot. The blog tour ends here on my blog on May 12. At that point, send me the riddle and your name will go into the hat to win this gorgeous Longchamps bag:

But that’s not all. After the complete riddle has been posted here on my blog, you will have two months to email me with the ANSWER to the riddle (after reading UNTIL I DIE). If you answer it correctly, I will send you a signed book plate to stick inside your copy of the book!

WORDS FOR THIS TOUR STOP: Two ways

Review: Die For Me

DIE FOR ME (Revenants #1)
Amy Plum
Paranormal Young Adult
341 pages
HarperTeen
Available Now

THE STORY
Kate is still reeling from the sudden deaths of her parents. She hoped moving to Paris with her sister to live with their grandparents would help her distance herself from the tragedy, but she finds she's in as dark a place as ever despite her new home in the City of Light.

It's not until she meets Vincent that she's finally able to feel something other than pain and misery. He piques her curiosity, especially when she and her sister seem him leap from a bridge in order to save a young woman who's jumped.

As it turns out, Vincent is more of a distraction than Kate could have ever imagined, introducing her to an unbelievable world where there are more questions than answers and more dangerous encounters than quiet romantic moments. The more she learns, the more she realizes a relationship with Vincent might prove to be impossible, because no matter how much he's brought her back to life, death will always be trying to keep them apart.

MY THOUGHTS
For a story that walks hand in hand with death, Die For Me radiates life and vitality, its characters full-bodied enough that we see them clearly through the printed ink and the paper pages, and they are as real and full of color as if we were making our way through a picture book instead of a novel. Though there are a few stereotypical young adult elements sprinkled in here and there, Ms. Plum impresses us with a plethora of unexpected details and mythologies and sets the romantic in us aflame with a relationship so enviable we can't help but glare at our own significant others across the room and chastise them for not being as sweet as Vincent. In the midst of a beautiful romance, she ingeniously threads the utterly intriguing world of revenants, dazzling us with the intricacies of their existence and ensuring we are gleefully anticipating the next installment by the time we close the back cover.

Kate is an extraordinarily ordinary heroine–truly genuine and not overdone in any way, she wins us over quickly with her grief and mourning for her lost parents. While she is understandably devastated, her despair isn't so dramatic that we can't find our way to the heart of her character through the miasma of melancholy and despondency. She's coping but yet keeps enough to herself that we feel as though we are her only friend and our bond, though one-sided, strengthens and solidifies the more we read. Her initial response to Vincent is nothing we haven't seen time and again, but happily for us a declaration of love is slower in coming and seems to be earned on both sides rather than given away freely and easily. She keeps a level head through some fairly spectacular emotional and physical turmoil, and even when that level head seeks to protect her heart by pushing Vincent away, we can appreciate the logical nature of her decision though we do speed our reading to reach the part where the needs of the heart overpower the choices of the mind.

Vincent, though of course devastatingly handsome and charming, proves himself to be a young man of substance–a pretty face backed up by an intelligence and infectious wit. He and his fellow revenants are a true highlight of the story, seeming so beautifully normal despite their very unique existence. Vincent doesn't use sarcasm and swagger to downplay his interest in Kate, rather he chooses to put everything on the table fully knowing his complete honesty will most likely be met with hesitancy and even fear. Theirs is a relationship we want to see succeed with every fiber of our being, and we carve out a portion of our hearts to make room for the two of them knowing Ms. Plum has pieces in place that will challenge and test us all in upcoming installments.

Overall, Die For Me is a highly recommended read that blends new and unfamiliar elements with the comfort and normalcy of young love, managing to create its own delicious recipe that leaves us positively salivating for more. We are left grinning from ear to ear even though we're acutely aware this book is humoring us with only the temporary illusion of happiness, but we consume the crumbs Ms. Plum tosses us eagerly, making sure we absorb enough to sustain us through all that's sure to come.

Rating: 4/5

Tens List: Amy Plum + Die For Me

Today I'm hugely excited to welcome Amy Plum to the blog, her young adult novel Die For Me (releasing on May 10th from HarperTeen) is one I'm absolutely dying to get my hands on. As part of her blog tour through Teen Book Scene, Amy is going to share with us several of the oh-so fabulous, magnificently glamorous, and certainly unforgettable jobs she's had in the past;-) Take it away Amy!

MY TOP 10 WORST JOBS EVER

1. Receptionist at a place where I had to answer the phone saying, “Continental Hiney” (spelled Heine). I always felt I was announcing to the caller that I had a huge butt.

2. Orange Julius at the mall, where I wore a brown, orange and yellow polyester outfit and visor, and when I took the garbage out, the thin bags would break and I’d get chili all over my arms.

3. An art gallery for a control-freak diva dealer who made me wait after-hours for FedEx and miss my 22nd birthday party. (Yes, he was fully aware that would make me miss my party.)

4. Daycare worker, summer job when I was 17, thirty 4-year olds and...me. (I had no voice at the end of the summer.)

5. Job in a French office, where the other assistants would make fun of my bad French by urging me to repeat sentences after them, and then cracking up laughing when I did. When I finally learned dirty words in French—a couple years later—I remembered and CRINGED when I realized what I had said.

6. Same job: my boss offered me a raise and a company car if I would “be nice to him.” I quit a week later, after he started a habit of walking up behind me as I worked and massaging my shoulders. (Okay...gagging just from typing that.)

7. Managing a business where no one wanted to work on the top floor because everyone (including me) swore it was haunted.

8. Giving historical tours of a French castle—in English since my French wasn’t very good. And the day before I started, they told me I had to give the tours in French as well. My bloopers are now legendary throughout the region.

9. Cocktail waitress. For 2 days. Gross, drunk men telling sexist gross-out jokes. Say. No. More.

10. Working as bookkeeper for a monomaniacal nun.

Thanks so much for sharing Amy! Number 6 on your list made me cringe as well *shudders at the thought of creepy masseuse boss who probably has a definition of the word "nice" we really don't want to know about* If you don't have Die For Me on your lists everyone, be sure and add it immediately! For more information on Amy and her books, you can find her here:

Website
Blog
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DIE FOR ME (from Goodreads)

My life had always been blissfully, wonderfully normal. But it only took one moment to change everything.

Suddenly, my sister, Georgia, and I were orphans. We put our lives into storage and moved to Paris to live with my grandparents. And I knew my shattered heart, my shattered life, would never feel normal again. Then I met Vincent.

Mysterious, sexy, and unnervingly charming, Vincent Delacroix appeared out of nowhere and swept me off my feet. Just like that, I was in danger of losing my heart all over again. But I was ready to let it happen.

Of course, nothing is ever that easy. Because Vincent is no normal human. He has a terrifying destiny, one that puts his life at risk every day. He also has enemies . . . immortal, murderous enemies who are determined to destroy him and all of his kind.

While I'm fighting to piece together the remnants of my life, can I risk putting my heart—as well as my life and my family's—in jeopardy for a chance at love?

Waiting on Wednesday: Die For Me

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event hosted by Breaking The Spine and is a fun way to see what books other bloggers just can't wait to get their hands on!




DIE FOR ME (Revenants #1)
Amy Plum
Paranormal Young Adult
May 10th, 2011

From Goodreads:

DIE FOR ME is the first of three books about Kate, a sixteen-year-old American who moves to Paris after the death of her parents. She finds herself falling for Vincent, who she discovers is not the typical French teenager he appears: he is something else entirely.

That's not the most descriptive of blurbs, but when combined with the cover, it's more than enough to pique my interest and find it's way on my TBR list!