Fierce Reads Tour Recap!

Sooo I suck and forgot to take pictures when I was there - I know, I'm sorry! I was disappointed too. But I forgot because I was laughing too hard!

The Fierce Reads tour stop came to San Diego on June 6. We were lucky to not only have Anna Banks, Leigh Bardugo, Jennifer Bosworth and Emmy Laybourne present, but also Jessica Brody and Marissa Meyer! I'd only read Struck and Cinder before the tour, but all the books have been getting rave reviews and it was exciting to hear them speak about each one.

I won Struck from another blogger, but it hasn't come in yet :(

They showed the Tour Trailer and the book trailers (their names above link to each trailer!), with each author introducing and giving the inspiration behind their book after the trailer. They then opened up for questions and finished with a massive signing and swag spree.

The usual bullet point recap! (It's long this time since there were six authors to cover! You should see my notes, super scribbled and I had to make symbols for each author for shorthand.)

• Emmy says Monument 14, even though it is violent, has a lot of heart.
• Leigh had the idea for her book when she was staying at a friend's house and in the middle of the night was in the dark and scrabbling around for a light.
• Leigh started to think what if darkness were a place you couldn't leave and had to cross.
• Jessica considers herself "decisionally challenged" (her own term!), similar to her character in My Life Undecided.
• Her idea came while she was watching The Hills. She thought to herself, "I could make better decisions!"
• Marissa saw a contest on a website that gave a list of things that had to be included in a story; she wrote a "Sci-Fi Puss in Boots" story. She didn't win, but ran with the general idea.
• Marissa had a dream vision of Cinderella losing a foot rather than her shoe.
• Anna thinks the model in her trailer has sexy feet.
• Anna felt everything else was taken and taken well, so she chose to write about mermaids. She calls Of Poseidon a "cousin" of Little Mermaid.
• Marissa says Anna has great comic delivery. (and I have to agree!)
• Jennifer had to take Benedryl right before the event and was awesomely loopy/spacey.
• Struck came together really well and shortly after Hurricane Katrina.
• Jennifer says Mia (main character in Struck) is a piece of her, and figured if she put her character into an extreme situation, maybe she would get answers and find out something about herself.
• Leigh envisioned Shadow and Bone as a trilogy. Since it is a High Fantasy, there are a lot of places it can go.
• Emmy likes writing series because it allows her to create a continuous connection with readers.
• Jennifer says she wanted Struck to be a trilogy, though it is currently a stand-alone. At the time it was sold, trilogies were not popular.
• Jennifer has a title for Book 2 if it were to exist: Aftershock. (As someone who lives in Earthquake country, I heartily endorse that title!)
• Anna made several references to a Sasquatch novel. (For the record, I am totally for that!)
• Jennifer wrote 3 stories before getting published.
• Cinder is Marissa's first finished story - she's had 7 or 8 other attempts.
• Emmy has written 5 screenplays, but Monument 14 is her first story.
• Emmy was a comedian and actress - if you've seen Superstar (with Molly Shannon), she played the best friend.
• Of Poseidon is Anna's second novel, but her first one will be coming out later in the year - which she can't tell us about. (Such a tease!)
• Jennifer wanted to be Stephen King when she was younger.
• Leigh is a make-up and special effects artist, and has also worked as a journalist and copywriter.
• Emmy used to be a ghost writer for RL Stine - she wrote several of the "give yourself goosebumps" (choose your own adventure) books!

This group of authors is probably the funniest I've ever seen, because they each have their own little brand of dry, sarcastic humor - and it's very unassuming! They're all really well spoken (seriously - my note on Emmy Laybourne was 'strong, confident voice') and clear, it was awesome to hear them. They've all got their own version of humor.

Also, anyone else agree this is possibly the most attractive tour group ever?! Because damn, yo.

And of course, they are awesome and signed everything that was asked of them. I'm constantly grateful and amazed at authors for the patience and smiles they have for us readers.

I saw after the event I forgot to have Marissa sign it :(

Since I didn't have any of Jessica's books or Of Poseidon yet, they signed a bookmark/book sampler. 

And the swag! I know it's a ton, but I grabbed two extras of most because of a future giveaway - two lucky people will get these plus more!

This was also an AWESOME event for me as a blogger because I finally got to see and meet other bloggers!
 > Sierra from Yearning To Read.
> Natasha.
> Jamie from The Lost Lola - awesome to meet her, but so short :( It's ok, next time we shall chat! (Also, you should check out her awesome post of fashion from Masque of the Red Death. So cool!)
> Lisa Cannon, from YA Know and I'm certain a future author!
> Andrea, Debra and Nikki, who I met at the YA or Bust signing a few months ago - I was a little nervous they wouldn't remember me, but it was a useless worry because they were just as friendly and fantastic as I remember.
> Jon Yang (maybe you've read his book Exclusively Chloe?), who is actually an author/blogger I've "e-known" for years - before I even had a book blog! It's rare for me to meet anyone who knows about my personal blog, so I was nervous - but all was fine, Jon is awesome and I'm glad we finally got to meet!

So, another successful author tour - and so much fun! Every author was wonderful, I loved all the people I finally got to meet/see again, and now I have a freakin' sweet stack of books to get crackin' on! I'm thinking I may have to go for Shadow and Bone first, because the cover art, map and reviews are too positive to ignore.

How COOL is that map?!

The remaining Fierce Reads tour dates/locations are below - and I highly recommend going if you can!

June 14: Naperville, Illinois | June 15: Lansing, Michigan | June 16: Pensacola, Florida

June 17: Rhinebeck, New York | June 18: New York, New York

Review: Struck by Jennifer Bosworth (ARC)

Struck by Jennifer Bosworth
Farrar, Straus and Giroux BYR, 384 Pages
Expected US Release Date: May 8, 2012
Format: ARC
Source: DAC ARC Tours (thank you!)
Challenge: Debut Author Challenge

Mia Price is a lightning addict. She's survived countless strikes, but her craving to connect to the energy in storms endangers her life and the lives of those around her.

Los Angeles, where lightning rarely strikes, is one of the few places Mia feels safe from her addiction. But when an earthquake devastates the city, her haven is transformed into a minefield of chaos and danger. The beaches become massive tent cities. Downtown is a crumbling wasteland, where a traveling party moves to a different empty building each night, the revelers drawn to the destruction by a force they cannot deny. Two warring cults rise to power, and both see Mia as the key to their opposing doomsday prophecies. They believe she has a connection to the freak electrical storm that caused the quake, and to the far more devastating storm that is yet to come.

Mia wants to trust the enigmatic and alluring Jeremy when he promises to protect her, but she fears he isn't who he claims to be. In the end, the passion and power that brought them together could be their downfall. When the final disaster strikes, Mia must risk unleashing the full horror of her strength to save the people she loves, or lose everything.
-----------------------------------Goodreads summary

Notable Quote

This whole city is dangerous. The whole world is dangerous. You know what's really dangerous? Standing next to you, Mia, but I've done that my whole life, haven't I? I've always stood by you...even when a storm was coming.

Struck is unlike any other book I've ever read - which doesn't mean too much since I've read like 1% of all books ever, but still! It's action-packed, adventurous and tense all at once. It seemed quite clear to me that the author is also a screenwriter, as I felt the pacing of the novel was done really well. Normally that isn't something I pay attention to, but I felt like it was a very smooth ride through a sticky, potentially complex mix of people and groups.

Focusing on Mia Price, a girl who has a past of being struck my lightning and seems to feed off it, Struck tells the tale of 3 days. But not just any 3 days: it's been a little over a month since a devastating earthquake in Los Angeles that's destroyed and displaced most of the residents, and a Prophet has been speaking that another, even more destructive storm will come in 3 days.  It's almost a pre-Apocolyptic novel, except it's like...Apocolypse-is-coming-tomorrow-get-your-shit-together.

Obviously, knowing the storm is coming in 3 days creates incredibly tense situations, and my fear was right up there with Mia. I wanted her to protect her family, I wanted her to figure out what her role was in the entire story, everything was done with bated breathe. Jennifer Bosworth plays the reader well, bringing you high and low and increasing tension and quelling it just so.

I don't know what I was expecting exactly, but I had no idea just how much this book is about Cults. I've a weird relationship with Cults, in that I just don't know how I feel about them. They're cast in such a bad light, but then it's such a subjective thing about what's a cult and what isn't...I mean, I was at the library once and this woman would not stop calling Mormonism a Cult. And while I don't agree with that, she's not the first I know to believe it is. So when this book started showing the Prophet's Followers as believing they spoke the Word of God, and then the opposition of the Seekers who believed in the Spark...it kind of made me squirm. Just because I felt like it could be at touch political and religious, two topics that are incredibly difficult to tread.

That said, Jennifer Bosworth handled them pretty well. The concept of them and how they related and needed Mia in this inevitable End of the World was creative, and I really loved how it was obviously a Good vs. Evil battle -- but you couldn't be sure which side was what. I actually felt pretty conflicted as to who to believe; enough where I was kept guessing to the end.

One of the problems I had though was the general tone...there were a few times where I thought Mia's dry humor or sarcasm was ill-placed, as well as a few times where I thought the writing and thoughts were a bit cheesy and could use a good comic relief sentence. Don't get me wrong, most of the time I liked the little bits of humor - they were an unexpected laugh -- but sometimes it just felt inappropriate. It also seemed a few ideas or thoughts could be inferred, but the author decided to spell it out. Maybe there was a reason for it, maybe I'm just being nit-picky...but there were definitely times I got distracted and enough for me to notice.

I'm also unsure how I felt about the romance aspect. I don't want to spoil it for anybody, so I won't get into the details. I'll admit that it killed me the first times because the boy's name + description is an EXACT replica to the last boy I had a small heartbreak over, so it's still a bit of a tender issue. I honestly had to start switching the name in my head because it was bringing up a lot of feelings I thought were buried; which made me wonder if that was influencing how I felt about the romance. It felt like a story I'd read before, and truthfully, I never questioned how it would end up. Even when the plot seemed to change or felt like it made the relationship uncertain, I always knew how it would end. That part was predictable.

Despite a disappointing romance and distracting lines, Struck is a BOOMING, phenomenal debut novel, filled with CRACKLING tension and STRIKING action that deserves THUNDEROUS applause. (Ya like that? I had to do it.)  I hope you pick it up, because you'll get swept away, too.

PS. Is Struck a series? Or a stand alone? It could stand alone, but I definitely think there's room (and the set up) for a second one...I'd be interested to find out the futures of the characters!

4 Stars / 5