Teaser Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Purple Booker. Here are the rules if you want to play along:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
Gin sent the message and watched her cursor blink, waiting for Felix’s response. She felt exhausted, but also wired, as though she had drunk an entire pot of coffee. Because Felix didn’t think she was crazy.
~ Crow Flight by Susan Cunningham
Just finished this book, and by “just finished,” I mean I literally just read the last sentence before I opened WordPress. Review to come on Thursday!
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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is:
The Ten Most Recent Additions to My To-Read List
This dovetails off my post from yesterday a bit, since those are all books that I found last week through the blogging community, but I wanted to list more than just those books again. The books below are books that I actually do have copies of, not just books that I want to find someday, along with their blurbs from GoodReads.
1. Never-Contented Things by Sarah Porter
Prince and his fairy courtiers are staggeringly beautiful, unrelentingly cruel, and exhausted by the tedium of the centuries―until they meet foster-siblings Josh and Ksenia. Drawn in by their vivid emotions, undying love for each other, and passion for life, Prince will stop at nothing to possess them.
First seduced and then entrapped by the fairies, Josh and Ksenia learn that the fairies’ otherworldly gifts come at a terrible price―and they must risk everything in order to reclaim their freedom.
2. Dion: A Tale of the Highway by Jonathan Maas
The Note
After a bizarre dream a man wakes up in the middle of a deserted highway, with no clothes, and no memory of who he is. In front of him is a vehicle with keys and a note inside: Drive this forward. Drive, or there will be consequences. The consequences will be immediate, and they will get worse with every transgression.
The Highway
The task is straightforward, but what happens next is anything but. As he unravels the mysteries of both his past and future, he’ll come to understand that there are dark truths around him, and he’ll find that those who wrote the note meant every word of their threat. But underneath the terror he’ll find an inner strength, and he’ll find the power that comes from reason. He’ll need them both – because his decisions on this lonely night will impact this world in ways he can’t even begin to imagine.
3. Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian
In an alternate Renaissance world, somewhere in an imaginary “pocket” of Europe called the Kingdom of Lethe, Death comes, in the form of a grim Spaniard, to claim his Bride. Until she is found, in a single time-stopping moment all dying stops. There is no relief for the mortally wounded and the terminally ill….
Covered in white cobwebs of a thousand snow spiders she lies in the darkness… Her skin is cold as snow… Her eyes frozen… Her gaze, fiercely alive…
While kings and emperors send expeditions to search for a suitable Bride for Death, armies of the undead wage an endless war… A black knight roams the forest at the command of his undead father … Spies and political treacheries abound at the imperial Silver Court…. Murdered lovers find themselves locked in the realm of the living…
Look closer — through the cobweb filaments of her hair and along each strand shine stars…
And one small village girl, Percy—an unwanted, ungainly middle daughter—is faced with the responsibility of granting her dying grandmother the desperate release she needs.
As a result, Percy joins the crowds of other young women of the land in a desperate quest to Death’s own mysterious holding in the deepest forests of the North…
And everyone is trying to stop her.
4. Zocopalypse by Angel Lawson
The last time Alexandra sees her scientist father he tells her to wait two weeks for him to return. If he doesn’t, she and her mother must find her sister, over three hundred miles away, in one of the states under quarantine.
A virus is infecting the healthy, turning them into raging, cannibalistic versions of their former selves. Dr. Ramsey has spent months studying the E-TR virus, including Alex in his trials. Before he leaves he hands Alexandra what may be the most valuable information in existence. Information that more than one powerful group would go to great lengths to possess.
Alexandra is no match for this world — one where men and women crave the taste of flesh and the weak are a liability, but she made her father a promise. One she intends to keep no matter how many lives are lost on the way.
5. The Girl In Between by Laekan Zea Kemp
Bryn Reyes is a real life sleeping beauty. Afflicted with Klein-Levin Syndrome, she suffers episodes of prolonged sleep that steal weeks, and sometimes even months, from her life. But unlike most KLS patients, she doesn’t spend each episode in a catatonic state or wake up with no recollection of the time she’s missed. Instead, Bryn spends half her life in an alternate reality made up of her memories. For Bryn, the past is a place, until one day a boy she’s never met before washes up on the illusory beach of her dreams with no memory of who he is.
But the appearance of this strange boy isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Bryn’s symptoms are worsening, her body weakening as she’s plagued by hallucinations even while awake. Her only hope of finding a cure is to undergo experimental treatment created by a German specialist. But when Dr. Banz reveals that he knows more about her strange symptoms than he originally let on, Bryn learns that the boy in her head might actually be the key to understanding what’s happening to her, and worse, that if she doesn’t find out his identity before it’s too late, they both may not survive.
6. The Rule of One by Ashley and Leslie Saunders
In the near-future United States, a one-child policy is ruthlessly enforced. Everyone follows the Rule of One. But Ava Goodwin, daughter of the head of the Texas Family Planning Division, has a secret—one her mother died to keep and her father has helped to hide for her entire life.
She has an identical twin sister, Mira.
For eighteen years Ava and Mira have lived as one, trading places day after day, maintaining an interchangeable existence down to the most telling detail. But when their charade is exposed, their worst nightmare begins. Now they must leave behind the father they love and fight for their lives.
Branded as traitors, hunted as fugitives, and pushed to discover just how far they’ll go in order to stay alive, Ava and Mira rush headlong into a terrifying unknown.
7. Stain by A.G. Howard
A high-fantasy gothic fairytale inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and the Pea.
Once upon a nightmare, her fairy tale begins…
After Lyra—a princess incapable of speech or sound—is cast out of her kingdom of daylight by her wicked aunt, a witch saves her life, steals her memories, and raises her in an enchanted forest … disguised as a boy known only as Stain. Meanwhile, in Lyra’s rival kingdom, the prince of thorns and night is dying, and the only way for him to break his curse is to wed the princess of daylight, for she is his true equal. As Lyra rediscovers her identity, an impostor princess prepares to steal her betrothed prince and her crown. To win back her kingdom, save the prince, and make peace with the land of the night, Lyra must be loud enough to be heard without a voice, and strong enough to pass a series of tests—ultimately proving she’s everything a traditional princess is not.
8. Rising Tide: Dark Innocence by Claudette Melanson
Isolated and sheltered by her lonely mother, Maura’s never been able to make friends. She seems to drive her classmates away—except for the odd times they pay enough attention to torture her—but she doesn’t understand why. Maura considers herself to be a freak of nature, with her unusually pale skin and an aversion to the sun that renders her violently nauseous. Her belief is only worsened by the fact that almost everyone around her keeps their distance.
Even her own father deserted her before she was born, leaving Maura alone with her emotionally distant mother, Caelyn. Even though Maura is desperate for answers about her unknown parent, Caelyn remains heartbroken and her daughter can’t bring herself to reopen her mother’s wounds. Or is there a more sinister reason Caelyn refuses to utter a word about her long-lost love?
When a cruel prank nearly claims Maura’s life, one of her classmates, Ron, rushes to her rescue. Darkly handsome & mysteriously accepting, Ron doesn’t seem to want to stay away, but Maura is reluctant to get too close, since her mother has announced she’s moving the two of them to Vancouver…nearly 3,000 miles away from their hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania.
If life wasn’t already challenging enough, Maura begins to experience bizarre, physical changes her mother seems hell bent on ignoring, compelling Maura to fear for her own life. Vicious nightmares, blood cravings, failing health and the heart-shattering loss of Ron—as well as the discovery of a tangled web of her own mother’s lies—become obstacles in Maura’s desperate quest for the unfathomable truth she was never prepared to uncover.
9. A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer
In a lush, contemporary fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast, Brigid Kemmerer gives readers another compulsively readable romance perfect for fans of Marissa Meyer.
Fall in love, break the curse.
It once seemed so easy to Prince Rhen, the heir to Emberfall. Cursed by a powerful enchantress to repeat the autumn of his eighteenth year over and over, he knew he could be saved if a girl fell for him. But that was before he learned that at the end of each autumn, he would turn into a vicious beast hell-bent on destruction. That was before he destroyed his castle, his family, and every last shred of hope.
Nothing has ever been easy for Harper Lacy. With her father long gone, her mother dying, and her brother barely holding their family together while constantly underestimating her because of her cerebral palsy, she learned to be tough enough to survive. But when she tries to save someone else on the streets of Washington, DC, she’s instead somehow sucked into Rhen’s cursed world.
Break the curse, save the kingdom.
A prince? A monster? A curse? Harper doesn’t know where she is or what to believe. But as she spends time with Rhen in this enchanted land, she begins to understand what’s at stake. And as Rhen realizes Harper is not just another girl to charm, his hope comes flooding back. But powerful forces are standing against Emberfall . . . and it will take more than a broken curse to save Harper, Rhen, and his people from utter ruin.
10. Reign of Queens by Melissa Wright
Three Full-Length Fantasy Series Starters from Author Melissa Wright
The Frey Saga Book One: Frey
Frey lives in a world where humans are fairy tales. A world where the powerful rule, where her magic is broken. That life is a lie. When dark secrets unravel, she’ll have to risk everything to rise above a dangerous past.
Shattered Realms Book One: King of Ash and Bone
When monsters break through the veil between worlds, Mackenzie Scott has nothing left to lose. Her brother is marked, her future is vanished, and all that remains is a desperate need for revenge. She devises a plan to stop them, and finds an injured stranger that just might be the key. But he’s not the helpless boy he appears to be. He’s one of them. And he’s got plans of his own.
Descendants Series Book One: Bound by Prophecy
Aern’s only job is to protect the chosen. The trouble is, she’s the key to a prophecy and everyone wants her. When the opposition descends, their only hope is to stick together, but the truth unravels, and together might prove the biggest complication of them all.
Happy Tuesday everyone!
