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YABooksPodcast's podcast

I interview Young Adult, YA, authors about their books. YA novels may be Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, Adventure, Action, Horror, or General Fiction. We talk about the author's lives, locations, work, careers, training, education, inspiration, writing methods and routines.
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Now displaying: September, 2016

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Sep 8, 2016

Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow
She's @kathglasgow on twitter. I saw that she had "Liked" a tweet about the "Killer in Me" review. When I checked her handle I saw she was launching her book. The title and book cover grabbed me.
Published on August 30th of 2016 by Delacort Press
She currently has 40 reviews with a 4.8 star average.
She's in the top 20K of books sold on the Kindle store and at #4, 10, and 60 on three of the Teen>Literature and Fiction lists.


https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Pieces-Kathleen-Glasgow-ebook/dp/B01A4B1S9Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1473134689&sr=1-1&keywords=girl+in+pieces


Here is the Amazon preview:
For fans of Girl, Interrupted, Thirteen Reasons Why, and All the Bright Places comes a novel Nicola Yoon, author of Everything, Everything, calls "a haunting, beautiful, and necessary book that will stay with you long after you've read the last page."

Charlotte Davis is in pieces. At seventeen she’s already lost more than most people do in a lifetime. But she’s learned how to forget. The broken glass washes away the sorrow until there is nothing but calm. You don’t have to think about your father and the river. Your best friend, who is gone forever. Or your mother, who has nothing left to give you.
Every new scar hardens Charlie’s heart just a little more, yet it still hurts so much. It hurts enough to not care anymore, which is sometimes what has to happen before you can find your way back from the edge.
A deeply moving portrait of a girl in a world that owes her nothing, and has taken so much, and the journey she undergoes to put herself back together. Kathleen Glasgow's debut is heartbreakingly real and unflinchingly honest. It’s a story you won’t be able to look away from.

"A haunting, beautiful, and necessary book that will stay with you long after you've read the last page." —Nicola Yoon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything


The book is divided into three parts. The chapters are really short. Some only a half a page. The longest I will read is about three pages. In the first part there are 46 of these chapters. The Amazon preview is the first 15 chapters. I will read 13 of those.

Sep 1, 2016

"The Killer in Me" written by Margot Harrison was published on July 12, 2016 by Disney Hyperion.

https://www.amazon.com/Killer-Me-Margot-Harrison-ebook/dp/B01FZLMTT8/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=SGHKDS7271H00NN4RKZ0

I bought this one a while ago. I think it was the same time that I bought "Learning to swear in America". I believe both of them were on the Goodreads top YA books for July.


Here's the synopsis:
Hasn't he lived long enough? Why not? I could take him like a thief in the night. This is how the Thief thinks. He serves death, the vacuum, the unknown. He's always waiting. Always there. Seventeen-year-old Nina Barrows knows all about the Thief. She's intimately familiar with his hunting methods: how he stalks and kills at random, how he disposes of his victims' bodies in an abandoned mine in the deepest, most desolate part of a desert. Now, for the first time, Nina has the chance to do something about the serial killer that no one else knows exists. With the help of her former best friend, Warren, she tracks the Thief two thousand miles, to his home turf—the deserts of New Mexico. But the man she meets there seems nothing like the brutal sociopath with whom she's had a disturbing connection her whole life. To anyone else, Dylan Shadwell is exactly what he appears to be: a young veteran committed to his girlfriend and her young daughter. As Nina spends more time with him, she begins to doubt the truth she once held as certain: Dylan Shadwell is the Thief. She even starts to wonder . . . what if there is no Thief? From debut author Margot Harrison comes a brilliantly twisted psychological thriller that asks which is more terrifying: the possibility that your nightmares are real . . . or the possibility that they begin and end with you?

The Kindle preview includes the first four chapters. I'm going to read you the first two, which ends up being about 19 pages.


I try to read the first couple chapters and put down my thoughts before reading the synopsis, so I can get an honest feeling for whether I would read on based on those pages. Here's what I got before I read the blurb on the Amazon page.
Nina is a girl who dreams a serial killer's life.
Plenty of opportunity for conflict and character developement.
She's on a life and death mission to save a couple who lives a hundred plus miles away. She's smart enough to realize no one will believe her--the woman she called certainly didn't.
The author's writing is crisp and clear, her characterization is solid, and her use of dialog is effective.
I want to read on initially to see how she does with firing the .38 and secondly to see if she is able to get to upstate New Yord to help the older couple. I believe that these two conflicts are just an introduction to the story and my hopes are that this will ramp up into a solid thriller.

I had an interview with an author scheduled tonight, but she had to cancel for her son's back to school night. Unless I can reconnect with her in the next couple days, it will be another first chapter review next week.
thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

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