If you haven’t yet, you should check out this week’s Teaser Tuesday. (Speaking of Grapemo, I’ll have to get some serious writing done tomorrow–I’m two days behind!) There’s also some great contests floating around the web this week, including…

Query magic

Elana Johnson (YA author) is running a query contest on her blog, offering a query letter critique from some very cool agents, namely:

1. Kate Testerman-Shafer of KT Literary (critique will be posted on her blog, Ask Daphne)
2. Michelle Andelman of Lynn C. Franklin Associates
3. Mary Kole of Andrea Brown Literary Agency
4. Michelle Wolfson of Wolfson Literary Agency
5. Joanna Volpe of Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation

Visit her blog to enter.

Marketing ahoy

Shelli Johannes (MG/YA author) is also running a week long contest, which offers some great grand prizes:

Grand Prize Package #1 – The Unagented Writer Package is for those who currently DO NOT have an agent and want one. This includes:
- A lot of books on writing and querying
- A query/ 3 Chapter Critique by my awesome agent, Alyssa Eisner Henkin at Trident Media Group!!!!!!!

Grand Prize Package #2 – The Agented Writer Package is for those who do not want an agent, have an agent, are on submission, have a book deal, or are published. This includes:
- A lot of marketing books
- Free 2 hour consultation with me on marketing you and your book
- One free marketing item – design of a business card, bookmarker, postcard etc

Enter over at her blog.

You’ve got me wrapped around your finger

For everyone who read and loved SHIVER, Stiefvater has nine ARCs to give away. Nine!

In Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver, Grace and Sam found each other.  Now, in Linger, they must fight to be together. For Grace, this means defying her parents and keeping a very dangerous secret about her own well-being. For Sam, this means grappling with his werewolf past . . . and figuring out a way to survive into the future. Add into the mix a new wolf named Cole, whose own past has the potential to destroy the whole pack.  And Isabelle, who already lost her brother to the wolves . . . and is nonetheless drawn to Cole.

At turns harrowing and euphoric, Linger is a spellbinding love story that explores both sides of love — the light and the dark, the warm and the cold — in a way you will never forget.

Comes out in stores everywhere July 20th. Pre-order here.

Enter to win an advanced review copies of LINGER, Sisters Red, The Dead-Tossed Waves, and The Replacement on Maggie’s blog.

THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN by Sherman Alexie had me laughing from the first paragraph. Sweet, sad, true. Junior is flat-out irresistible. And yet…it’s hard for me to gauge my overall reaction to the book, since I’m not sure what to make of the ending. On the one hand, it’s very realistic. On the other…it petered out. Everything that was going to happen, happened, and then there’s extra pages about other things.

Still, I haven’t laughed aloud like that from a story for a while, and will definitely look for other of Alexie’s books to read. ABSOLUTELY is on my list-of-books-to-buy-once-I-get-myself-to-give-this-copy-back-to-the-library.

lust, fear, and flat-out stupidity

HUSH HUSH by Becca Fitzpatrick has sexy teenage lust down to a science, steamy scenes abound, but the outcomes are all Twilightesque. (The characters do, eventually, kiss later in the book.) It’s a fun page-turner, and I enjoyed the escapism.

On the BUT side, I’ve got three things:
1) Fear for your personal safety isn’t sexy. Sure bad boys and the aura of danger can be attractive – but if you are honest-to-God afraid of being alone with him? It’s time to back up, find your pepper spray, and get the hell outta Dodge. To reiterate: IF YOUR GUT IS SAYING THIS MAN MIGHT/WILL DO YOU BODILY HARM, THEN (and I seriously cannot stress this enough) DON’T GO OUT WITH HIM!!!! This is dating basics 101, or What Your Parents Should Have Taught You When You Were Twelve. Or Seven. Or Straight Out Of The Womb.

Getting into the whole Nora/Patch romance was, at times, near impossible. If a guy frightened me as much as Nora was frightened of Patch, I’d be calling 911. You should too.

Just so we’re clear on that point.

(Read on: book trailers and points 2 & 3)

Update Jan 21st: Bloomsbury is changing the cover!

It’s 2010, the new millennium. 2010. Swapping out a protagonist’s skin color in a book cover shouldn’t even cross our minds. You’d think, as a nation, we’d have grown up by now. At this point, there’s just no excuse. But then, there never was.

What am I talking about? The Bloomsbury YA book covers for LIAR by Justine Larbalestier and MAGIC UNDER GLASS by Jaclyn Dolamore. For in-depth coverage of MAGIC, read the timeline at Chasing Ray, Ari’s open letter to Bloomsbury, and Jaclyn’s response.

There’s also a petition in motion. Feel free to sign.

The covers of doom

And the million dollar question is…

Why?
How is this ok?
How does it continue to go on?

Several bloggers (see links above) have already addressed the fundamental devaluation of people in this issue. So I’ll just say, they’re right.

It’s also fundamental devaluation of the stories and the authors themselves. Think about it, a publisher must have little value for an author and his or her work if they completely rewrite the protagonist’s image. Sorry, your character isn’t really someone we think deserves to be on the cover of your book.

If the publisher can’t stand behind the story enough to show the protagonist on the cover, then why exactly did they publish the story in the first place? What’s the point?

If a story is worth printing, isn’t it worth printing the actual story? If a character is worth reading an entire book about, isn’t he/she worthy of representing his or her own journey?

Don’t we hold these truths to be self-evident?

Seriously? We’ve had 234 years to figure this out.
The answer is yes.

I follow Lisa Schroeder’s blog, so when I saw CHASING BROOKLYN, at Borders, I snagged it from the shelf & peeked in.
Novel-in-verse? Not my thing. Put it back.
But hey, I like her blog right? So I might as well read a few pages.
Interesting…
Still, not my thing. I put it back again.
Next day, the images from those few pages won’t let me be.
I bought it via iPhone’s kindle. (Three cheers for pj-book-buying.)
And read the story. Read and read.
And read.

Can I just say I am completely, utterly, hopelessly smitten with this book? One of these days, I’ll write an ode to it. Yes, it’s that good.

(I’ve included quotes from the book in the header. Keep hitting Refresh. You’ll see one.)

Girl Templar supreme

In library news, DEVIL’S KISS by Sarwat Chadda arrived at my local branch last week (along with a few others I’ve yet to read). While I didn’t entirely buy the book trailer’s promise of “Forget Buffy, Billi SanGreal is all you need to know” (I’ve seen five seasons of Buffy, and I can tell you – Billi just isn’t at that level of kickass yet. However, I will grant you that Billi SanGreal is a much cooler name than Buffy Summers), it was certainly a fun read with a beautifully well thought out ending sequence. How the antagonist is defeated took my breath away. Very inventive. I like muchly. Her adventures continue this year with a new book, coming out in the fall I think, which I will definitely add to my list.

On a side note, one of the supporting characters, Percy, has massive shoulders and a tanklike chest. I bring this up because Percy’s tanklike massiveness is mentioned nearly very time his name shows up. There were several key scenes where I was lost to the dramatic intensity due to general eye rolling and thoughts such as “What? Massive? Percy? I had no idea!” The other characters are mercifully free of never-ending description, except perhaps for **** (name removed for non-spoiler purposes) who, for a while, is unbelievably sexy in every line. Of course, every good YA with a dash of romance needs one of those, right? Heck, some super popular books contain nothing but sexy line descriptions. (cough*twilight*cough)

In case my general recommendation just isn’t enough for you (there’s no pleasing some people), I’ve embeded the trailers for both books after the jump.

(Read on: watch the book trailers!)