From Frights to Flaws by Sunayna Prasad

From Frights to Flaws

Alyssa McCarthy's Magical Missions Book 1

by Sunayna Prasad

Friesen Press

Middle Grade Fantasy

216 pages

Twelve-year-old Alyssa McCarthy is sick of her uncle’s unfair rules and longs for a better life. After discovering the existence of magic, she finds out about a dark wizard hunting her down. An unforgettable storm occurs in Alyssa’s ordinary New Jersey town before the sorcerer kidnaps her to the Fiji Islands.

On the enchanted island of Yanowic, Alyssa learns that she is unable to get out of the country due to a giant shield. She must defeat some dangerous creatures and the evil wizard in order to leave. But with sorcerers and magical technology getting in her way, can Alyssa succeed?

And here she is. . .

SUNAYNA PRASAD!!!

Sunayna Prasad has been writing stories for several years, starting at the age of six. Now twenty-one, she is a college student will study who studies art and design as well write for children. Aside from that, Sunayna also likes to cook, watch movies, and draw. She lives on Long Island, New York, with her family.

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Beware the Little White Rabbit, an Alice in Wonderland inspired Anthology

Curiosity often leads to trouble...

Thirteen powerful voices in young adult fiction invite you to journey into startling new Wonderlands in this nod to the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s timeless character, ALICE. 

Mystery. Madness. Mayhem. Each story in this collection will intrigue, bewitch, and enchant. Through rich historicals, castles and keeps, wild wormholes, secret workshops, deadly plagues, and gritty urban explorations, we present new tales of Alice and her white rabbit. 

Whether an intrepid reporter, a would-be car thief, or the last human in a world ruled by machines, at the heart of each story Alice is a girl discovering who she really is in worlds that never fail to surprise.

What wonders await, oh curious reader? Leap down the rabbit hole and discover the truth...

Start your journey at. . .

ITunes / AMAZON / Smashwords

MY TIDBITS

This is a must read for all fairy tale fans, who have dreamed of following Alice into the rabbit hole and seeing where it might lead them. There are thirteen stories, each introduced with a lovely picture and accompanied with cute little rabbits between scene changes. (Yes, I love tiny little extras like this.) The stories center around an 'Alice', a rabbit and a hole, but that's where the similarities end.

Although I honestly wondered if reading about the same main character again and again might grow repetitive, the authors take Alice through all sorts of fantastical worlds and times - from steampunk to rides into history - making each adventure new and exciting. The Alices not only had to face very different situations, but each has a distinct personality, making the characters fresh and different despite the shared name. I especially enjoyed how many of the authors incorporated the strange and often topsy-turvy feel that Wonderland and it's inhabitants always have into the plot and dialogue. It peppered the tales with a fun bit of insanity even when some of the plots drew into darker worlds.

Summed up, this is a delightful collection of very different stories, which are just the perfect length for taking quick trips with Alice down a huge variety of rabbit holes. And several of the stories had me going back to read them again. . .and probably again.

TRAILER

Fall of Knight by Steven Cross with Giveaway

A normal teenager Dean Knight is not.

With a mental illness that threatens to take over his sanity; a sister who’s deep in her own problems; and a wasted mother who couldn’t care less about it all, Dean is left to battle real life on his own. School, bullies and medications are his realities.

Then there are also the ghosts, the hallucinations and of course – the monster.

In the middle of it all, when everything seems to lose purpose, hope comes shining down on Dean’s miserable life. Her name is Ella and for one reason or another, she actually wants to be close to Dean. With Ella’s help, the lost teenage boy decides that he could finally win a battle or two – both in real life and in his writing.

But hope is a tricky thing. And the monster seems to know that.

When secrets buried down for almost a decade come out in the open, what do you do?

No one answers when I pound again, so I try the knob. It turns and the door screeches open.

            “Hello!” I call out as I poke my head in. I don’t see anyone, and I once again fight the urge to turn around and walk back out the door. Lou could be lying on the floor bleeding somewhere or convulsing from an overdose. I take a deep breath and step inside the trailer.

            “Lou! Anyone home!”

            The trailer is a single wide, so it isn’t very big. When you open the front door, you are in the living room, which is right next to a tiny kitchen. Down one hall is a bedroom. First, I survey the living room and kitchen and don’t see anything unusual. I walk past the kitchen toward one of the bedrooms. As I step closer to it, my heart thumps wildly. The bedroom door is closed, but I can hear muffled head-banging music, as if someone is listening to it through headphones at two hundred decibels, and I sigh with relief. I open the door. No Lou, but an MP3 player hooked to ear buds lies on the bed.

            There might be a bathroom down the opposite hallway. Again, my heart thuds as I approach two doors, one on the right, a bathroom no doubt. I pause and look down. No pool of blood seeps from under the door. I grab the door handle, find it unlocked, and jerk it open. The bathroom is empty too. It’s dirtier than a public toilet at a crack house, and I feel like I want to throw up.

Quickly, I close the door. The last bedroom is all that remains. I don’t think he’s in there, but I check it anyway. As I suspect, the room is empty. This must be the master bedroom where Lou’s keepers live.

            I still can’t fully shake my feeling of dread, but then I think Lou was probably just late to school, and while I was traipsing through the woods, he probably went on to school, and at this very moment, he and Ella are laughing their asses off.

            I laugh a little too, but I also feel good about myself in another way. The old Dean wouldn’t have been too concerned with anyone else. I guess you could say the new Dean has learned to make a few friends. I realize how tired I really am from not only the walk but also the unbearable tension I have felt from thinking my friend is dead.

            I sit on the couch―a little reluctantly because it’s pretty dirty, but then again our couch is secondhand, so I can’t be judging other people’s possessions. I think about how ridiculous I feel, and then I laugh aloud again.

            I start to leave, but something outside the window catches my eye.

            I stare for a long time, feeling unsure.

            Lou swings from a tree outside the window; he’s hanged himself with an electrical cord.

MY TIDBITS

This was a bit outside of my normal reading area, but I was so intrigued by the blurb that I had to give it a go. And it was worth the jump. The writer does a great job of presenting a teen with all his feelings and fears...but even further in so far that this teen has a bi-polar personality. 

The writing is very good, and it's easy to understand Dean, even when his fears no longer matched reality. At times, I wanted to jump into the story and help him. Many emotions were at work, something the author deserves a big thumbs up for. I can only recommend this for young adults and am sure it will give them a deeper understanding of people like Dean and the different ways such problems change the views of the reality around us.  

Steve Cross’s first successful writing project was a play about a werewolf that his eighth grade English class performed. Though the play was never published, the warm fuzzy feeling from its public performance has never quite left Cross, who continues to sink his teeth into a variety of writing projects. His first publication was a haiku, followed by two middle grade novels published by POD publishers and a young adult novel published by Buck’s County Publishing.
A fanatical St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan; a lover of all kinds of YA fiction, as well as the writings of Dean Koontz and Stephen King; a fan of all kinds of music – from Abba to the Zac Brown band, Cross dreams of the day he will write a best-selling novel or sell a screenplay for seven figures, so he can retire and write more best-selling fiction.  Until that day, he and his wife Jean, Missourians born and bred, will continue to toil in the field of education and live in peace with their two dogs and two cats and wait around until their daughter Megan and son-in-law Sean give them grandchildren to spoil.

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The Shadeborn Series by K.C. Finn with Giveaway

Presented by: Sparkle Book Tours

The Book Of Shade -  Shadeborn #1

by K.C. Finn

Audience: General, 13+ - Genre: Urban Fantasy, Adventure and Romance - Formats: E-book and Paperback - Publisher: Starstorm  - Pages: 513  - ISBN: 1505677556 - ASIN: B00RD7SGK4 - Date Published: 21 March 2015

Lily Coltrane’s to-do list for starting university life is pretty simple:
1. Make friends
2. Meet a cute guy
3. Survive her first year in Modern History
In the little English town of Piketon this seems more than achievable, so much so that Lily even joins The Illustrious Minds Literary Society, an extra-curricular club that promises a truly unique social experience. What Lily doesn’t bank on are the society’s monthly visits to the mysterious Theatre Imaginique at the edge of town, a dark venue that houses the most obscure cavalcade of carnival performers she has ever laid eyes on.
Stranger still is the emergence of the theatre’s enigmatic proprietor Lemarick Novel, a stupendous showman with a frosty wit who never seems to smile, and who raises a plethora of questions in Lily’s fearful mind. How does he levitate with no sign of wires or mirrors? Why do the lightning bolts that shoot from his hands look so real? And why, of all the people in the theatre, do his pale eyes keep locking on hers?
The answers to this and more lie buried in heritage and blood. The Book of Shade is opening, and Lily Coltrane will read it, whether she wants to or not.

Amazon / Goodreads

“Ladies and gentlemen, your raucous applause, if you please, for the sensational Monsieur Novel!”
The audience obeyed the MC’s command, but when Baptiste had vacated the spotlight, nobody came to the stage. It wasn’t until the last clap died, some moments later, that Lily heard footsteps clicking along the old theatre boards. The illusionist stepped from total blackness into the shadow at the edge of the stage, and even craning her head only afforded Lily the frame of a man in a long Victorian coat. The tense air in the dated theatre was thick enough to be sliceable, and every spectator breathed in their portion of that heavy air, in anticipation of the moment when the odd Monsieur would step into the spotlight.
Novel did not disappoint them. A shock of lightning appeared from nowhere at all and in the split-second that it flashed he appeared for the waiting patrons to see. It seemed as though the contents of the theatre gasped as a single being, even those who must have seen him before were transfixed in shock. His eyes were cast into black, shadowy sockets by the bright white spotlight pouring down from above. Skin pale as a spectre’s was exaggerated by the darkly drawn eyebrows arching into points above those gloomy hollows. His lips too were black as coal, a superb effort in stage makeup that reminded Lily of a haunting cross between a French mime and a black-and-white movie serial killer. She didn’t know which to be more afraid of.
Perhaps more astonishing still was Monsieur Novel’s hair. It was long enough to be combed behind his ears, though it did not grace his neck, and in the dusty spotlight it appeared to be totally white. It was a strange whiteness, for even through his make-up, Lily thought that the gentlemen couldn’t be more than ten years her senior. The illusionist’s black mouth stretched into a serious sneer as he surveyed the awestruck crowd. He held out one pale hand with a slow and deliberate grace. Tiny blue sparks grew in his palm as he swept the hand from left to right in welcome.
“Good evening,” he purred in the darkest of tones.
And this time the lightning came straight from his palm when it exploded into life.
The dumbstruck crowd suddenly applauded in a blast of appreciation, but Lily’s hands remained still, clutching the sides of her chair. Novel stalked the very edge of the stage like a patient predator, the invisible orchestra striking up as the beams of lightning shot about the cavernous space in time to the music. He appeared to be controlling them, but his thin frame and well-fitted suit left no space in which to hide any apparatus on his body. Occasionally, he seemed to lose control of the larger forks of electricity which shot out towards the audience in frighteningly loud snaps. The patrons flinched as the whip of energy crackled above them.
All the while Monsieur Novel’s expression remained dark and thoughtful. Not once did his lips rise into a smile. They simply sneered continually at the power he was controlling, parting for him to suck in precisely choreographed breaths when he turned in his display of perfect grace, avoiding every spot the forks could hit. A few patrons in the front row, perhaps those who had never seen him before, were starting to panic at the multitude of power growing rapidly on the stage before them, with no reasonable explanation in sight. It looked like a major fire hazard for sure. One of them tried to get up.
“I would kindly recommend you stay in your seat for this performance, good sir,” Novel said loudly over the buzz of the lightning strikes. “It could be rather nasty for you, if you don’t.”
There was something foreign lurking in the shadows of his accent. Perhaps he had been living in England a long time, but he definitely wasn’t from around these parts. His voice had an amused kind of youth in it that didn’t suit his skeletal pre-modern look, and though he gazed upon the terrified patron as he sat back down in his chair, he still didn’t let the mirth in his warning show on his face.
All at once the lightning stopped. Novel stood in the dead centre of the stage, looking down at his feet with his shadowed eyes. Lily caught her breath as the flicker of hot white energy grew beneath his feet, sparking and growing into a ball of buzzing power. He thrust out his pale hands, raising them upwards as he slowly began to levitate into the air. Lily could see no wires to hoist him, and his clothes didn’t move as though they were under any strain. He simply rose up in a slow, straight line as the lightning ball grew larger and larger in the space where he’d been standing. In his ascent, his face was lit from under his chin and Lily finally saw a pair of pale blue eyes glowing out of the black sockets on his face.
And they glowed directly at her.
She started in her seat, shocked to find his gaze so blatantly fixed. She would have sworn the floating man had raised one of his black eyebrows at her, but a moment later the lightning ball exploded with a deafening crack that made the entire contents of the theatre sink down into their seats and clutch their heads in wild panic. When Lily looked up again, Monsieur Novel was gone. Someone behind Lily broke the shocked silence of the audience by starting to applaud. Gasps erupted as some of them looked beyond her to the source of the clap, then suddenly everyone was giving an ovation.
Lily craned her head around, almost jumping out of her skin when she realised it was Monsieur Novel sitting in the seat directly behind her. He had started his own applause. He sat with a casual grace, an elegant hand accepting the praise as he slowly got back to his feet and straightened out his beautiful clothes. Once more his frosty blue eyes snapped to Lily. She wanted to look away, but it just didn’t happen. Novel inclined his head to the rapt audience without breaking his stare, then swiftly retreated up the theatre aisle, his long coat billowing in another invisible gust of air.

he past of some of your favourite Book Of Shade characters, through two spine-tingling novellas:

The Bloodshade Encounters shows readers where present and past collide, as they learn the dark history of how the charming and enigmatic Baptiste Du Nord came to know Lemarick Novel. Prepare for vampires on the streets of revolutionary Paris, and the day when Novel first laid eyes on the Theatre Imaginique. Amidst all this, a dark secret about Novel is unearthed, one which may threaten his relationship with Lily in the future.
The Songspinner begins with the present-day Salem Cross, now weak and powerless, as the old shade looks back on his life, and the dirty deals he made to try to make a success of himself. Witch-trials loom in Salem’s murky past, and werewolves roam the streets of Victorian London, not to mention a certain dark lady who would one day become the mother of the heroic Novel. Can Salem face the demons of his past, or bear the thought of a future with no magic? Or will he decide that the end of his time has come?

 

 MY TIDBITS

As soon as I saw the blurb on this one, I was really looking forward to reading it. I wasn't disappointed. Lily, a young girl trying to battle the first days of school on her own, runs across an odd theater with even stranger performers. From the first page on, I had no problem connecting to Lily. Her fears and hesitations are so fitting for her situation, but yet she has a nice inner strength, which lets her shine.

There's a lovely hint of darkness through-out the story, which hangs masterfully on the border to creepiness but never quite tips over. This keeps the tension and suspense high, and had me guessing at what would happen next. In other words, this had me up to all hours of the night.

I really enjoyed the romance in this one. It's not clear right away what's going on and the hero doesn't come across as one at first. Lily's interest grows with hesitation as the reader learns step by step with her the golden heart hidden within Novel. This is a story of growing trust and friendship, and not the usual love at first sight.

I did hesitate at one spot, where Lily accepted her new found self a bit too quickly, and the ending scenes missed a little more from Novel in my opinion, but despite these moments, I really enjoyed this book. Can't wait to grab book 2!

 

K. C. Finn was born and raised in Cardiff, South Wales, where her love for storytelling grew at a precociously young age. After developing the medical condition M.E. / C.F.S., Kim turned to writing to escape the pressures of disabled living, only to become hooked on the incredible world of publishing.
As an author for Clean Teen Publishing and Crushing Hearts and Black Butterfly Press, Kim spends most of her time locked in the writing cave with an obscenely large mug of tea. When not writing, she can be found studying for her MA in Linguistics, watching classic British comedy, or concocting evil schemes in the secret laboratory in her attic.

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Lily, the Brave by Katherine Hodges

Lily, the Brave

The Lily Series # 1

By Katherine Hodges

Young Adult

Urban Fiction

Seventeen year old Lily Harrison is given an incredible gift. She doesn’t really want it, but she’s stuck with it. Lily’s best friend convinces her it can be used for the good of mankind, but it only seems to bring her trouble and put everyone around her in danger. Her life was already hard enough after the accident. How can she possibly deal with being a superhero too? One thing is for sure, her life will never be the same again.

“That’s only the beginning, Lily. Just imagine having the ability to stop a terrorist in their tracks. If we could get you close enough, you could hear the exact plans of someone who might want to bomb a building, or murder someone. It could be any number of situations, but the point is that you would be saving lives. People who would have died or been seriously injured would be alive because of you. Can you see how amazing this is? How amazing your gift is? This could change the world. You could change the world.” She had never seen her ability in that light before. She had never dreamed any good could come of it, but Mr. Turner seemed to see her gift in an entirely different way than she did. He made it sound like she was a super hero sent to save the world. Lily was still guarded and hesitant to trust this man, but she couldn’t help feeling like maybe he was right.