A Random Assortment of Fun

Hey Everyone!

A bunch of book-related awesomeness has been brought to my attention over the past week, so I just wanted to do a quick post to put said awesomeness on your radar. I know, I know. I'm a giver through and through ;-)

First up: ENTICE ME DAY

Entice Me Day: September 15th, 2012

Entice Me Day is going to be an amazing day for both fans of the Violet Eden series as well as those who are new to it, with all sorts of amazing giveaways and a live chat with author Jessica Shirvington. From Sourcebooks:

During the day, @EmbraceSeries and Facebook.com/embracetheseries will be posting cool character quotes, informing readers about the character videos, directing people to quote quizzes, announcing a new chapter release and hosting a giveaway.

ENTICE ME DAY Sweepstakes: We are offering one lucky grand prize winner the chance to win a NOOK Color!  We’re uploading this device with the e-books for EMBRACE, ENTICE, and early chapters from the next book in the series, EMBLAZE.  PLUS, we are including a “YA Starter Library” with a selection of our other cool YA titles, for a total of about 10 books.  The Sweepstakes entries will begin midnight on September 7th and end midnight on September 15th. 

If that weren't exciting enough, the entire week leading up to Entice Me Day will be filled with special character profiles each day, giving you behind the scenes info on everyone involved in this world. I'm thrilled to announce that I will be hosting bad boy Phoenix here on Supernatural Snark, so be sure and check in on the 12th for all the juicy scoop on this delicious baddie!

A full schedule for the week as well as all the details for Entice Me Day can be found here. I hope you guys are as excited for this as I am!

BREATHE

Thanks to the fabulous people over at HarperTeen I have a very cool video in which author Sarah Corssan discusses her writing process to share with you! I'm very excited about the world of Breathe, how cool does it sound?

In a barren land, a shimmering glass dome houses the survivors of the Switch, the period when oxygen levels plunged and the green world withered.

A state lottery meant a lucky few won safety, while the rest suffocated in the thin air. And now Alina, Quinn, and Bea—an unlikely trio, each with their own agendas, their own longings and fears—walk straight into the heart of danger. With two days’ worth of oxygen in their tanks, they leave the dome.

DEFIANCE JEWELRY GIVEAWAY!

Pop over to Epic Reads (such a great site - all sorts of entertaining things like giveaways, polls, and quizzes happen here) and enter to win some custom jewelry based on C.J. Redwine's Defiance. Awesome.

Last, but not least, I want to quickly announce the winners of my past several giveaways. A huge thank you to Sourcebooks Fire and Authors on the Web for providing such fantastic books, and to all of you who entered! All winners have been emailed.

ANASTASIA FOREVER

Winner: Rebe

ANGELFALL

Winner: Asheley

BACK TO BOOKS

Winner: Anatea

Review: Embrace

EMBRACE
(The Violet Eden Chapters #1)
Jessica Shirvington
Paranormal Young Adult
367 pages
Sourcebooks Fire
Available Now
Received from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
It starts with a whisper: “It’s time for you to know who you are…”

Violet Eden dreads her seventeenth birthday. After all, it’s hard to get too excited about the day that marks the anniversary of your mother’s death. As if that wasn’t enough, disturbing dreams haunt her sleep and leave her with very real injuries. There’s a dark tattoo weaving its way up her arms that wasn’t there before.

Violet is determined to get some answers, but nothing could have prepared her for the truth. The guy she thought she could fall in love with has been keeping his identity a secret: he’s only half-human—oh, and same goes for her.

A centuries-old battle between fallen angels and the protectors of humanity has chosen its new warrior. It’s a fight Violet doesn’t want, but she lives her life by two rules: don’t run and don’t quit. When angels seek vengeance and humans are the warriors, you could do a lot worse than betting on Violet Eden…

MY THOUGHTS
Embrace is a maze made up of light and shadow, each step we take alongside our protagonist exposing us to both in equal measure as we twist and turn through a story where it seems as though we're the only ones denied a map to help navigate the labyrinth, and we tread carefully in a world of angels who defy all previous definition. One of the more fascinating elements of the story is the angel mythology itself, giving us beings free for the most part from any ties to organized religion and God who occupy a realm all their own where light and dark don’t necessarily correspond to good and evil, but rather each type muddies the waters and we must open our minds to a new interpretation full of blurred lines and complex lore.

For as interesting as Ms. Shirvington’s history of angels is–our naturally inquisitive minds itching for more of the fresh and new relationships between human, angel and Grigori while reading–protagonist Violet poses a rather unique set of problems for us. Her behavior through ninety percent of the book is confounding and at times downright frustrating, her seemingly illogical anger toward Lincoln for withholding information from her causing us to grit our teeth and groan out loud every time she opens her mouth to berate him. Yes, someone she loves desperately kept secrets that involved her, but his intent was never the slightest bit malicious, and so while we understand her initial pain and hurt, the intensity of her continued reaction to him tests the limits of our patience as she seems to grant extraordinary leeway to a stranger while denying the young man she supposedly loves even the smallest of courtesies.

It’s not until the very final pages that we come to understand Violet’s behavior fully and completely, and while the revelations suck some of the heat out of our ire, we’re given so little time to deal with the person Violet actually is as opposed to the one we’ve seen for the past three hundred pages that we’re left somewhat at a loss as to how to feel about her. We want to believe in her and disregard her words and actions based on our new information, but the end of this first installment finds us before our opinion of her can really change. Thus, we finish this story with a character who is a complete stranger to us despite all the time we’ve spent with her, and we now have to wait for the second installment to reintroduce ourselves to a young woman who will hopefully prove herself more worthy of our affection.

Overall, Embrace is a rather tricky read given our tumultuous relationship with Violet, Lincoln and Phoenix, but ultimately the world is interesting enough and the characters certainly written in a way that guarantees an emotional response whether positive or negative that our desire to pick up the next book is strong upon finishing.

Rating: 3/5

Guest Post: Jessica Shirvington + Embrace

I'm extremely excited to share the blog today with young adult author Jessica Shirvington who's going to share with us her experience in creating a setting for Embrace, the first book in her new paranormal series. Take it away Jessica!

WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

In my first draft of EMBRACE (there were eight!), I didn’t set the city. I was in two minds the entire time. I suppose I was drawing on all the places I have been around the world. Although I now live in Sydney, when I started to write EMBRACE, my family and I had just moved back from six years living in London. And prior to that, I’d spent quite a lot of time travelling to many cities around the world – so much so, that when I was writing scenes in EMBRACE, I found myself thinking of different cities around the world and never being able to truly decided which one most suited Violet’s world.

In my second and third and fourth drafts, I chose different cities (I’ll never tell) from around the world and set Violet’s story there. But each time, it felt forced.

I wanted her to live in a city, as opposed to some small town where all these major apocalyptic events just miraculously found her. To be believable she had to be in a metropolitan environment, but which one?

In the end, the answer was … any of them, and none of them. It wasn’t that the cities I chose didn’t work; it was that in my mind I’d amalgamated them into what I needed for her story to work for me. So I made the decision to give that option to all of my readers and simply called her city, the City.

It isn’t the ‘done thing’ usually, but I believe for this story, it works. I want readers to be able to put this story where they know. If they live in a city, it can be there, if they live in a rural area, then it isn’t a stretch for them to imagine a city nearby. It is an element of control that I wanted to give to the reader.

That said, I like a little control myself … and I discovered that by giving this open setting for Violet’s hometown, it also opened up the possibility to use other locations around the world that would really pop off the page.

In ENTICED (the sequel, out in September!), Violet and her friends find themselves travelling to Jordan – on a quest to the place of Moses’ death – Mount Nebo. In EMBLAZE (book 3, out March 2013) they travel to the island of Santorini in Greece, which is small and stunning, and holds terrors that none of them are prepared for.

Each book I take the characters somewhere new and as I write the series, I have discovered how very important this is to me. I want my characters to go to the world, to find the problems and be part of the solution, rather than the fight always, and too conveniently, finding them.

Thanks so much for taking the time to stop by Supernatural Snark Jessica! More information on Jessica and her books can be found here:

Website
Blog
Embrace official website
Facebook
Goodreads

EMBRACE

It starts with a whisper: “It’s time for you to know who you are…”

Violet Eden dreads her seventeenth birthday. After all, it’s hard to get too excited about the day that marks the anniversary of your mother’s death. As if that wasn’t enough, disturbing dreams haunt her sleep and leave her with very real injuries. There’s a dark tattoo weaving its way up her arms that wasn’t there before.

Violet is determined to get some answers, but nothing could have prepared her for the truth. The guy she thought she could fall in love with has been keeping his identity a secret: he’s only half-human—oh, and same goes for her.

A centuries-old battle between fallen angels and the protectors of humanity has chosen its new warrior. It’s a fight Violet doesn’t want, but she lives her life by two rules: don’t run and don’t quit. When angels seek vengeance and humans are the warriors, you could do a lot worse than betting on Violet Eden…

Cover Reveal: Embrace by Jessica Shirvington

I'm super excited today to share with you the beautiful new cover for Jessica Shirvington's upcoming paranormal young adult novel Embrace, releasing March 1st from Sourcebooks Fire. I think most of us love to swoon over pretty book covers, it's almost as much fun as reading the books themselves, so here we go:




It starts with a whisper.

“It’s time for you to know who you are…”

Strange dreams leave her with very real injuries and there’s a dark tattoo weaving its way up her arms. The guy she thought she could fall in love with just told her he’s only half-human—oh, and same goes for her. And she keeps hearing a distant fluttering of wings.

Violet Eden is having a very bad 17th birthday.

But if angels seek vengeance and humans are the warriors, you could do a lot worse than betting on Violet Eden…

I have to say angel books have been pretty hit or miss with me in the past, but lately I've been enjoying them more and more and I absolutely cannot wait to dive into this one! For more information on Embrace and the series as a whole, be sure and visit the Sourcebooks site:

Embrace Series

Embrace Cover Reveal Teaser from Sourcebooks Inc on Vimeo.