Congratulations to Alex Gordon on her debut novel being Library’s Journal’s latest Debut of the Month!
Library Journal (*Starred Review): VERDICT: With the pacing of a thriller, this debut supernatural tale does a solid job of portraying the menace of small-town evil. While the demonic figure of Blaine is scary, the petty viciousness of the townsfolk is even more chilling. This will appeal to fans of books such as Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane or Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches.
The death of her father sets Lauren Reardon on a collision course with a family legacy in this dark blend of fantasy and horror. Finding a strange book with a faded photograph tucked inside, Lauren realizes her father hid his past in a small, isolated Illinois town called Gideon. When she impulsively drives across the country to see Gideon for herself, she encounters hostile locals and the diabolical influence of long-dead Nicholas Blaine, who believes Lauren is the key to winning his way back to this world.
Congratulations to Joelle Charbonneau on The Testing being on the 2015-6 ballot for the Eliot Rosewater Indiana High School Book Awards!
At Parade, Lauren Oliver calls Andrea Portes’ Anatomy of a Misfit a must-read of 2014!
Congratulations to Owen Laukkanen on his book KILL FEE receiving the Society of Voice Arts & Science’s 2014 award for Outstanding Audio Narration for Crime & Thriller!
Booklist: Hutchinson’s latest is an unflinching look at loss, grief, and recovery. Seventeen-year-old Drew Brawley has been hiding from death for months in the Florida hospital where the rest of his family died. He passes the time working at the cafeteria and making friends with teen patients in the oncology ward. Drew has been working on a graphic novel, a disturbing story called Patient F that hints at the trauma he has been desperately trying to keep buried. The comic, interspersed throughout the text, provides a visual punctuation mark to Drew’s guilt and self-loathing. When he begins to fall for Rusty, a hate-crime victim admitted to the hospital after having been set on fire, Drew’s resolve to live his life ghosting about the hospital begins to waver. Dark and frequently grim situations are lightened by realistic dialogue and genuineness of feeling. The rapid-fire back-and-forth snark between Drew and his hospital “family” rings true, and the mystery of Drew’s past will keep readers turning the pages. This is a heartbreaking yet ultimately hopeful work from a writer to watch.
Library Journal: The family dynamics between Finn and his brothers are well done, and the author (winner of Writers of the Future’s 2014 Golden Pen Award) excellently shows Finn as an emotionally stunted teenager suddenly middle-aged and having to deal with the family and friends he left behind. A promising writer to watch.
Booklist: If contemporary Seattle is an apt setting for cyberpunk thrillers, it stands to reason that nineteenth-century Seattle should serve just as well for a steampunk adventure. Bear’s new novel follows the title character’s life as a bordello girl working along Puget Sound, from which steam-powered airships take gold prospectors up and down the western mountain ranges. But in the seedy dockside world of the Pacific Northwest frontier, the opportunities for criminals with powerful technology in their hands are ripe. Fans of the steampunk aesthetic will appreciate Bear’s affectionate treatment of the style. Weapons, gadgets, and their places in the characters’ lives put together a charmingly inventive fictional Seattle–especially for those readers bringing along some knowledge of the city’s nascent history. Karen’s first-person narration can feel a bit inconsistent with her swapping between eloquence and intentionally ungrammatical slang, but she always manages to hit the spot when her descriptions need to set the mood.
Kirkus: An enterprising loser hustles his way to ultimate popularity, at a cost. Adam’s older brother, Sam, was a star hockey player in his high school years, and by all rights, his younger brother should have been a high school god. Instead, Sam is paralyzed after a nasty body slam, and Adam is a wannabe in off-brand clothes who can’t score an invite to a single party. Tired of sitting at home playing video games and watching Scarface—the plot of which is handily and self-consciously summarized for readers who haven’t seen it—Adam launches a scheme to make himself useful to the school’s elite, initially by doing homework for pay. As his empire of term papers, booze and fake IDs grows, so does his status. The third-person narrative voice is slick, breezy and highly stylized, littered with hashtags and phrases like “our boy” and “Achievement Unlocked.” Chapters are short—none more than a couple of pages and some only a single line—creating a fast-moving and suspenseful tale. The unquestioned intensity with which the narrative voice despises Adam’s nerdiness and pities Sam for his disability is at first troubling, but it soon becomes clear that these views are Adam’s and that the overall story offers a more complex view. For all its slick hipness, surprisingly substantive.
Jo Ann Ferguson writing as Jo Ann Brown’s AN AMISH HOMECOMING, the first in new series “Close to Paradise,” to Tina James at Harlequin Love Inspired, in a six-book deal, by Jennifer Jackson.