Waiting on Wednesday: Across the Universe, Beth Revis

Across the Universe Beth Revis (Razorbill)

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.

Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone—one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship—tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn’t do something soon, her parents will be next.

Now, Amy must race to unlock Godspeed’s hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there’s only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

YA sci-fi! I'm really hoping to see this genre take off in the near future. Across the Universe by Beth Revis sounds fantastic. Coming January 11, 2011 (Razorbill) in the US.

Waiting on Wednesday: The Eternal Ones, Kirsten Miller

I saw this over at The Undercover Book Lover. And it really sounds WoW!

Haven Moore can’t control her visions of a past with a boy called Ethan, and a life in New York that ended in fiery tragedy. In our present, she designs beautiful dresses for her classmates with her best friend Beau. Dressmaking keeps her sane, since she lives with her widowed and heartbroken mother in her tyrannical grandmother’s house in Snope City, a tiny town in Tennessee. Then an impossible group of coincidences conspire to force her to flee to New York, to discover who she is, and who she was.

In New York, Haven meets Iain Morrow and is swept into an epic love affair that feels both deeply fated and terribly dangerous. Iain is suspected of murdering a rock star and Haven wonders, could he have murdered her in a past life? She visits the Ouroboros Society and discovers a murky world of reincarnation that stretches across millennia. Haven must discover the secrets hidden in her past lives, and loves, before all is lost and the cycle begins again.

The Eternal Ones is available from Razorbill on August 10.

Waiting on Wednesday: Ness, Pike and Labyrinth

I just happened to be browsing Patrick Ness's blog, as I am wont to do, and I discovered that the UK cover of the third and final book in the Chaos Walking trilogy has been released. Like, weeks ago. WTF universe, why didn't you tell me?

How epic was the end of book two? How much were you yelling "Don't do it Todd! TODD HEWITT! NO!!"

Without further ado, here it is. I am pining myself out of existence waiting for this book. (May UK/Australia, September US.)

“War,” says the Mayor.“At last.” Three armies have marched on New Prentisstown, each one intent on destroying the others. And Todd and Viola are caught in the middle of it all. As the battles commence, can they hope to stop all-out war? Can there ever be peace when they’re so hopelessly outnumbered? And if, as they have been told, “War makes monsters of men”, what terrible choices await them? And what of the third voice that watches them, one bent on revenge... The electrifying finale to the multi-award-winning Chaos Walking trilogy, Monsters of Men is a heart-stopping novel about power, survival, and the devastating reality of war.

Released this week was the cover of Spells (May 2010), the sequel to Wings. I really liked Wings and dear Laurel, and I'm curious to see who she'll end up with as it's really not that obvious. Especially not to her. So she's kissing both David and Tamani, trying them on for size, conveniently forgetting about the other when she's with one of them ... Lucky girl!

Six months have passed since Laurel saved the gateway to the faerie realm of Avalon. Now she must spend her summer there, honing her skills as a Fall faerie. But her human family and friends are still in mortal danger--and the gateway to Avalon is more compromised than ever.

When it comes time to protect those she loves, will she depend on David, her human boyfriend, for help? Or will she turn to Tamani, the electrifying faerie with whom her connection is undeniable?

The cover art for Return to Labyrinth Volume 4 was released the other day as well. It's breath-takingly stunning. Released on August 3.

And now we gaze at the prettiness.


L-R: Toby, Moppet, Sarah, Jareth. Gods know why Moppet's in the gown. She's in love with Candlewic, who's totally evil and an ass to boot. And ew, surely she can't be marrying Toby. If you've read v3 you'll know why that would be ew!

Waiting on Wednesday: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Waiting on Wednesday was started by Jill at Breaking the Spine.

I rarely get my ducks in a row in time to put up a WoW post, or if there is a book I want to WoW, it's already been WoWed by plenty of other people.

But this week I came across a book that is literally wow. The Windup Girl is a debut novel by Paolo Bacigalupi, published by Night Shade Books, an indie that does genre fiction. (They have some seriously good-looking books on their website. Do check them out.)

How gorgeous is this cover? Not only is this book dystopian, but it's steampunk too! It's not YA, unfortunately, and it's contains graphic sexual violence at one point--though is never gratuitous according to the reviews I've read. One for us older girls (and boys!) then, or teens with a strong stomach. It was released last Wednesday (October 28) so isn't technically a contender for WoW, but it's out of stock at Book Depository and I'm still waiting on it, and that's good enough for me!

From the publisher's website:

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...

Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.

What Happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution? In The Windup Girl, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi returns to the world of "The Calorie Man" ( Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winner, Hugo Award nominee, 2006) and "Yellow Card Man" (Hugo Award nominee, 2007) in order to address these poignant questions.

This title has just been named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. Lucky, lucky reviewers who got a copy include SF Signal who said "This is a great novel and one of the best first novels in recent years, one which will surely be short listed for all the major science fiction awards" and gave it five stars, and Annalee Newitz who said "It's rare to find a writer who can create such well-shaded characters while also building a weird new future world."

Read the first NINE chapters here.

Get stock, Book Depository. GET STOCK! (It's available from the publisher too, but shipping to Australia is $35, which is a tad prohibitive.)

Waiting On Wednesday

I'm quite excited about my very first Waiting on Wednesday. This meme was started by The Story Siren.

My Waiting On Wednesday includes books I'm waiting to afford!!

First up is Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. If you've read my previous posts you'll know I loved The Hunger Games. There's still no cover for this yet, but I'm hoping it will be as good as the cover of book one--the hardback edition at any rate. The paperback here has a ghastly "fold your own" cover that shows either Katniss or Peeta, and the colours are dreadful.

Then there's Skarlet by Thomas Emson. I think this one might be more adult than YA as it involves clubbers and recreational drugs that turn people in vampires, but what a plot!

Next is Swoon by Nina Malkin. From fishpond: "Torn from her native New York City and dumped in the land of cookie-cutter preps, Candice is resigned to accept her posh, dull fate. Nothing ever happens in Swoon, Connecticut--until Dice's perfect, privileged cousin Penelope nearly dies in a fall from an old tree, and her spirit intertwines with that of a ghost." What a name and what a cover! This is a May release so not long to wait now.

Now, an Australian book! Arrival (Strangers of Paragor, Book One) is by Charlotte McConaghy and out under Black Dog Books. It was released in March and McConaghy is so young! Apparently she started writing this book when she was in her teens.

From the Black Dog Books website: “There will come a time when greatness is needed. Strength, passion… goodness. For in the land of Paragor an oppressor travels closer. Four is the sacred number, and it is only by looking beyond ourselves that we will find salvation, and only through love that we will defeat the darkness that threatens to consume us forever…”


E-e-pic.