Alice (The Wanderland Chronicles) Comparison Reviews

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Alice

The Wanderland Chronicles

By J.M. Sullivan

Publication Date: August 7th 2018
Publisher: Bleeding Ink Publishing
Genre: Fantasy, Fairy Tale Adaptations

Pages: 360

ALWAYS PROTECT YOUR QUEEN

 

Ever since the outbreak of the Plague, life hasn’t been easy, and for seventeen-year-old Alice Carroll, it just got worse. Her sister, Dinah, has contracted the ‘un-deadly’ Momerath Virus and without a cure, will soon be worse than dead. She’ll be momerath.

 

Alice must leave the safety of the Sector and venture into Momerath Territory to find the antidote – if it exists. Chasing a rumor about a mysterious doctor with the cure, Alice falls down the rabbit hole into Wanderland, where ravenous momerath aren’t the only danger lurking.

 

Coming August 7th 2018!

 

Becca

Alice is a fast paced, apocalyptic zombie tale with a kick ass heroine. This Wanderland is not your typical Wonderland, and the deeper you follow Alice down the rabbit hole, the more dark it gets. This is not the tale you grew up with. Alice: The Wanderland Chronicles is about a girl who is set out on a mission to save her sister whom she suspects is sick with a virus. A virus that changes you into a momerath. Alice’s journey leads you to Chess, a handsome and charming young man, whom decides to help her as she searches for the doctor who rumors say, is on the hunt for the cure. Their paths take Alice to meet the Red Queen, whom is just as violent and terrible as she is in the original Wonderland tale. And the question is, does the Red Queen actually want to help Alice find a cure? Or is the Red Queen more evil than Alice realizes?

If you are a fan of Wonderland tales, then this tale sure won’t disappoint. One thing I loved about reading it was that it was so refreshing to read a story that was based on a fairy tale, and yet did not fall into the typical fairy tale category. It honestly felt more like a horror/supernatural story with just slight hints of the original. In fact, JM’s story is very creative and unique, which is one thing I just loved about it. Another thing I enjoyed was figuring out which characters came from the original story. I had a lot of fun with that! And speaking of characters, my favorites are Chess and the Red Queen. They are both cleverly written and fans of Wonderland will simply love them!

There’s so much to love about JM Sullivan’s Alice. It’s action packed, with amazing world building, and characters to die for!

Haley

Alice runs headfirst in her mission with no hesitation. First, she needs to find a mysterious doctor that is rumored to have the cure. Second, bring it back and save her sister Dinah. Overall..don’t die? It seems love can make you do the impossible and become anything in the process. That’s what happens to Alice. I have to say even I underestimated her when the book first began. Despite, Alice’s experience going out into the momerath territory with Dinah, she seemed unprepared to last a day. Her determination moves her forward though. With the help of a speedy and joking boy named Chess, she has her first clue.

A bug. A building. A queen. Just maybe a cure. Alice becomes the wandering of Wanderland and unfolds secrets about the plague.

I read Alice In Wonderland as a young kid and watched the movie but never really got into the characters and story enough to love it. I really liked the characters in this book though. They’re complicated. All mostly crazy as you would expect in this world. Some spout nonsense that somehow can make sense and even convinces Alice at some points. Others take a shine to Alice and become allies to her mission.

What I most enjoyed in this book were the play on words and characters from the original Alice books. J.M. Sullivan cleverly ties in characters and expands on their background in this chilling tale. I mean chilling. Knowing the old characters may bring you recognition of who they are but the twists and turns to them keep this story surprising. Alice finds herself fighting nearly every moment to survive not just against the plague-ridden momeraths but the monsters yet discovered. There’s even more to unfold. Alice was always going to be part of the story versus just discovering it. While I’ll shy from too many spoilers, expect to end this book on a cliffhanger that will leave you wanting more.

 

J.M. Sullivan is a Science Teacher by day, and an author by night. Although known to dabble in adulting, J.M. is a big kid at heart who still believes in true love, magic, and most of all, the power of coffee.

 

If you would like to connect with her for a healthy dose of sparkle, positivity, and a touch of crazy, you can find her on Twitter or Instagram @jmsullivanbooks.

July 23rd
Hall Ways Blog | Review w/ Audio Excerpt 1
A New Look On Books | Guest Post 1

 

July 24th
Just Books | Audio Excerpt 2
The Page Unbound | Comparison Review
Ishiee’s Book Blog | Author Interview

 

July 25th
Books and Ravens | Guest Post 2
Everywhere and Nowhere | Author Interview 2
Rebecca R. Cahill | Audio Excerpt 3

 

July 26th
Budgie Bigelow’s Blog | Author Interview 3

 

July 27th
Turn The Page | Review

 

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Kiss of the Royal: Promo and Giveaway

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Kiss of the Royal
by Lindsey Duga
Genre: YA Fantasy
Release Date: July 3rd 2018
Entangled Teen

Summary: 

In the war against the Forces of Darkness, the Royals are losing. Princess Ivy is determined to end this centuries-long conflict once and for all, so her new battle partner must succeed where the others failed. Prince Zach’s unparalleled skill with a sword, enhanced by Ivy’s magic Kiss, should make them an unstoppable pair—but try convincing Zach of that.

Prince Zach has spent his life preparing for battle, but he would rather be branded a heretic than use his lips as nothing more than a way to transfer magic. A kiss is a symbol of love, and love is the most powerful weapon they have—but try convincing Ivy of that.

With the fate of their world on the line, the battlefield has become a testing ground, and only one of them can be right. Falling for each other wasn’t part of the plan—but try convincing their hearts of that.  

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Purchase links can be found HERE!

 

 

About the Author

Lindsey Duga developed a deep love for courageous heroes, dastardly villains, and enchanting worlds from the cartoon shows, books, and graphic novels she read as a kid. Drawing inspiration from these fantastical works of fiction, she wrote her first novel in college while she was getting her bachelor’s in Mass Communication from Louisiana State University. By day, Lindsey is an account manager at a digital marketing agency based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. By night, and the wee hours of the morning, she writes both middle grade and young adult. She has a weakness for magic, anything classical, all kinds of mythology, and falls in love with tragic heroes. Other than writing and cuddling with her morkie puppy, Delphi, Lindsey loves catching up on the latest superhero TV show, practicing yoga, and listening (and belting) to her favorite music artists and show tunes. KISS OF THE ROYAL is her YA debut novel. 

 

Author Links:

Website: https://lindseyduga.com/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lindseyduga

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/linzduga/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lduga

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15853318.Lindsey_Duga

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Lindsey-Duga/e/B07BJNMRHX/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1524077289&sr=1-1

 

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The Changeling’s Fortune: Blitz

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The Changeling’s Fortune


By M.C. Aquila & K.C. Lannon

Genre: YA Urban Fantasy


Release date: May 25th 2018



Summary

When optimistic seventeen-year-old orphan Deirdre travels to Neo-London, a city created after a near-apocalyptic attack by Unseelie faeries, she is caught in the tension between faeries and the Iron Guard, a militarized faction created to keep the peace. After a banshee tells her fortune, Deirdre develops destructive magical abilities but quickly discovers she cannot control them. These powers soon make her a target of Alan Callaghan, an extreme anti-faery general.

His sons, Iain and James, cross paths with Deirdre. Iain is a rookie soldier in the Iron Guard trying to atone for past mistakes and keep his younger brother from harm. James, a fourteen-year-old aspiring scholar fascinated by faeries, becomes fast friends with Deirdre. They soon plot to escape the barriers and lies of the city to find answers about her magic and James’s disappeared mother.

However, when Deirdre is framed for a treasonous crime, their search for answers soon becomes a quest for freedom. Beyond the iron walls of Neo-London that protect the city from the Winter Court lies a landscape of unchecked magic, faeries, and monsters.

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The Changeling’s Fortune

From Chapter 15

They were following a deer trail between two groves of trees when suddenly the birds shot up from the branches around them, beating their wings fast into the sky, crying out in alarm. They both stopped, looking around.

“Do you see anything?” James asked, sidling beside her.

She shook her head and was about to reply when the ground shook hard beneath them, knocking them both off their feet. Immediately she pushed herself up, her gaze darting up and down, searching through the darkening groves.

The ground shook again, but this time they were ready; they both got to their feet, and Deirdre tugged on James’s shirt for him to follow her. Staying low, they continued down the narrow path, both alert as hunted rabbits.

Once again the earth shuddered, making them stagger.

“What is going on? What’s happening? This can’t be an earthquake,” James began to ramble in a hoarse whisper. “It could be a giant monster or something with earth-shaking magic or—”

“James.” Deirdre grabbed his shoulder hard, nodding up above the nearest tree, her mouth a grim line.

He followed her gaze and gasped.

Behind the nearest tree was what first looked like a gigantic, grey-green boulder, thick as five trees. But through the leafy branches a gigantic, single eye looked at them. The eye was humanoid save for its size and deep bloodshot color, and it stared at them without blinking. The rest of the face was hidden.

James was gibbering, perhaps trying to guess what it was but falling short of pronouncing anything clearly. They were frozen as the eye considered them, looking from one to the other.

Then it shifted, and they heard a low growl as the eye rose up higher, narrowing slightly, fixed on them.

Run. Deirdre willed her frozen legs. We need to run. Run. Run…

Then the eye stopped and there was a slow sniffing sound. It continued on for nearly half a minute, the pupil of the eye looking away and around, an invisible nose loudly smelling the breeze.

Then, without another glance at them, the eyeball disappeared and the ground shook again and again. With each stomp, the hidden giant moved farther and farther away, the clomping and sniffing fading off into the distance.

“W-w-what was that?” James finally gasped. “Was that… what…”

“A…” Deirdre gulped. “It was a giant or something, I guess. And it didn’t seem to be all that interested in us.” She giggled hysterically. “Lucky us!”

“It could have been a giant. But wasn’t it a bit small? And there aren’t many giants.” James rambled on, “Probably it was something else, like a Red Cap or troll or a Fachan, or maybe…”

“A Fachan? Fachans come down this far? I thought they were only in Scotland.”

James nodded; some color was coming back into his cheeks as he talked. “They used to just be up there, but they and other Winter Court creatures have been coming farther and farther down south. I think the Court sends them. I heard my father talking about it once.” He shivered. “Should we… What are we going to do?”

About The Authors

M. C. Aquila graduated from Winthrop University with a degree in English. She grew up in Pittsburgh, PA but currently resides in South Carolina. When she is not co-writing the Winter’s Blight series, she tutors both native and ESL students in English, giving her a renewed love for the strange wonderfulness of the language. She also enjoys drawing daily, baking recklessly, hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains, searching for the best red wine in existence, and reading any story with a villain she loves to hate.

K.C. Lannon graduated from the University of South Carolina with a Bachelor of Arts in English. When she is not co-writing the Winter’s Blight book series, she tutors English, walks dogs, and dabbles in painting, drawing, or just making a general mess on paper. She enjoys cooking vegetarian meals, daydreaming she is a Gothic Heroine, and playing tabletop RPGs.

Author Links
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Seventh Born Cover Reveal

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Seventh Born
By Monica Sanz
Genre: YA Paranormal/Mystery & Suspense

Release Date: September 4th 2018
Entangled Teen

Book Summary

Abomination. Curse. Murderer. All names hurled at eighteen-year-old Seraphina Dovetail. As the seventh-born daughter to a witch, she’s the cause of her mother losing her powers and, in turn, her life.

Abandoned as a child, Sera dreams of becoming an inspector and finding her family. To do that, she must be referred into the Advanced Studies Program at the Aetherium’s Witchling Academy. Her birth order, quick temper, and tendency to set things on fire, however, have left her an outcast with failing marks…and just what Professor Nikolai Barrington is looking for.

The tall, brooding, yet exceedingly handsome young professor makes her a proposition: become his assistant and he’ll give her the referral she needs. Sera is quickly thrust into a world where witches are being kidnapped, bodies are raised from the dead, and someone is burning seventhborns alive. As Sera and Barrington grow ever closer, she’ll discover that some secrets are best left buried…and fire isn’t the only thing that makes a witch burn.

Pre-Order links can be found HERE!

About the Author


Monica Sanz has been writing from the moment she could string together a sentence. Her stories have come a long way from mysterious portals opening in the school cafeteria, transporting classmates to distant worlds. A classic by the name Wuthering Heights is responsible for that. She’s been lost to dark romances and brooding fictional men ever sense. Now she writes about grumpy professors, cursed ringmaster, tortured soul collectors, and the girls they fall in love with.

Monica’s books have received many accolades on the social writing website Wattpad. She’s accumulated over six million reads, eighty thousand votes, and fifteen thousand comments since posting her books on the website. She is also a member of the Wattpad4, a group of writers who host weekly Twitter chats on the subjects of writing and publishing.

Author Links

Website | Goodreads | Twitter | Facebook 

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Stricken: Guest Post

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Stricken
By C.K. Kelly Martin
Publisher: CBD
Release Date: January 27, 2018
Genre: Middle Grade/Young Adult Dystopian Adventure/SciFi

About the Book

Naomi doesn’t expect anything unusual from her annual family trip to visit her grandparents in Ireland. What she expects is to celebrate her thirteenth birthday, hang out with her friends Ciara and Shehan, and deal with her gran’s Alzheimer’s. What she finds is a country hit by an unexpected virus that rapidly infects the majority of the Irish population over the age of twenty-one.

Amnestic-Delirium Syndrome (ADS) starts off with memory loss, but the virus soon turns its victims aggravated, blank, or violent. Naomi and her friends must survive on their own, without lucid adults, cut off from the rest of the world, until a cure is found.

But there are whispers that ADS is not terrestrial, and soon Naomi and her friends learn the frightening truth: we are not alone.

Guest Post

If I Knew Then What I Know Now About Writing.

If I knew then what know I now about writing, whoa boy, I would have had a much better understanding of just how long it takes to achieve a passable level of proficiency in writing a novel. And longer still to really be any good. Kicking around my apartment somewhere there’s an old floppy disk with a 51,000 word version of my first young adult book on it. I haven’t looked at that particular copy of the manuscript in over ten years (because who has a disc drive anymore?), but the last time I peeked at it I remember wincing.

Objectively it wasn’t the worst thing ever—it didn’t reek of egg salad left baking in the sun—but it was limp and skeletal. The most painful thing about the book was that it lacked voice, something that a character-driven novel (which it was) sorely needs. I wrote two sequels to that novel. I even eventually landed an agent for it, who gave me extensive notes on the book and who then sent the revised copy out to several editors. By then it was a competent enough entity, but still lacked presence and depth. I didn’t know my main character the way I thought I did so her characterization felt flimsy and weak, generic. I’d let her down.

At the time I didn’t truly know what I wanted to accomplish with the book and as a result there were too many elements that didn’t work together. I’d thrown everything in like a stew with fridge leftovers. This is the revised version, I’m talking about remember. So it was an improvement on the novel I’d started out with but not by much, not by enough. Okay, I’m being harsh because once you see the problems with your work you can’t unsee them (they kick dirt in your face and stab at your eyes!), but in effect, that whole trilogy was like a bicycle with training wheels for me.

Unsurprisingly, that first book didn’t sell, but the mistakes I made in it helped me grow as a writer. Over time, as I read more, wrote more, and received more feedback, I grew as a writer. The fourth book I wrote was called I Know It’s Over and it became my first published novel when Random House released it in 2008. Ten years later, after having worked with two editors and authored numerous other books, I believe in some ways I’m a better writer than when my first book came out. I don’t know that I could write a better version of I Know It’s Over today but I believe I’m more capable of writing different sorts of  books (in various genres and for various age groups). Probably in another ten years times I’ll look back on 2018 in wonderment at all I’ve learned since then. I hope so. I hope the learning and growing never ends.

About the Author

Long before I was an author I was a fan of books about Winnie the Pooh, Babar, Madeline, Anne Shirley and anything by Judy Blume. Throughout high school my favourite class was English. No surprise, then, that most of my time spent at York University in Toronto was as an English major—not the traditional way to graduate with a B.A. (Hons) in film studies but a fine way to get a general arts education.

After getting my film studies degree I headed for Dublin, Ireland and spent the majority of the nineties there in forgettable jobs meeting unforgettable people and enjoying the buzz. I always believed I’d get around to writing in earnest eventually, and I began writing my first novel in a flat in Dublin and finished it in a Toronto suburb. By then I’d discovered that fiction about young people felt the freshest and most exciting to me. You have most of your life to be an adult but you only grow up once.

Currently residing near Toronto with my Dub husband, I’m an aunt to twenty-one nieces and nephews, and a great-aunt to two great-nephews. I became an Irish citizen in 2001 and continue to visit Dublin as often as I can while working on novels about young people.

My first young adult book, I Know It’s Over, came out with Random House in September 2008, and was followed by One Lonely Degree, The Lighter Side of Life and Death, My Beating Teenage Heart and sci-fi thriller Yesterday. I released Yesterday’s sequel, Tomorrow, in 2013 and put out my first adult novel, Come See About Me, as an ebook in June 2012. My most recent contemporary YA books, The Sweetest Thing You Can Sing and Delicate, were published by Cormorant Books’ Dancing Cat Books imprint in 2014 and 2015.

Author Links

Website • Twitter • Facebook • Goodreads

 

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