Author Guest Post: Tracy Deebs

Image from author's website

First of all, thanks so much for having me—and for giving me such a great topic to write on.

I think young women are playing a totally kick-ass role in dystopians today and I am absolutely thrilled to see that this is so.  I’m sure this is helped along by the fact that so many strong, wonderful women are writing dystopian novels right now, so of course they are creating strong characters of both sexes who meet challenges instead of shrink from them.  But I also think that the female, dystopian heroine is simply, finally, having her day.  We’ve read/seen dystopians with male heroes (Anthem, Brave New World, 1984, Star Wars) for decades and while I love them, I do think it’s kind of fun to see things from an alternate perspective, as well.  With that in mind, I thought I’d make a list of my favorite female dystopian heroines of the last few years, and see what you guys thought of it 

1. Katniss from the Hunger Games—This, I’m sure, is no surprise to anyone.  Here’s a girl who has never aspired to be a revolutionary, never aspired to do anything more than keep her family safe, who somehow manages to survive the most dangerous competition on earth.  And, not only to survive, but to somehow find love in the midst of a society gone terribly, terribly awry.  Though I’m a Gale fan, I still admire everything Katniss is able to do, as well as her ability to see that the new government was leading them right back down the same path that was taken by the government she’d worked so hard to bring down.

2. Saba from Blood Red Road—Like Katniss, Saba isn’t your typical YA female character, but I fell in love with her in the first chapters of the book.  She, too, never meant to be a hero.  She sets off to find her twin brother, who was kidnapped right in front of her, and along the way she learns a lot of truly terrible things about the world in which she lives.  And while she doesn’t deliberately set out to change them—her quest is to find her brother—she can’t overlook the bad that’s happening and changes things anyway.  She’s strong and smart and, like Katniss, above all a survivor in a world that could so easily crush her.

3. Beatrice from Divergent—I, like a lot of others, love Beatrice.  She’s brave and smart and strong and insecure and scared and determined all at the same time.  What’s not to like?  But seriously, she’s a really interesting character, one who—like the others—does what has to be done no matter the personal cost.  That’s a thing in my mind, the ability to set self aside in order to do what’s right, even if it means you end up dying .  

I love these three heroines and think they are exceptionally strong, well-written characters and I really enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) reading about them.  But when I wrote Pandora, my main character in Doomed, I wanted to do something a little different.   I wanted there to be nothing textraordinary about her at the beginning of the book—I wanted  her to be just a regular girl who is thrust into extraordinary circumstances.  Katniss was always incredible with a bow and already knew how to survive in bleak circumstances.  Beatrice was Divergent.  Saba was incredibly strong.  But what would happen if a girl who really was just completely ordinary, who lived in the world we live in today, ends up thrust into a major quest to save the world as she knows it.  Would she rise to the occasion?  Would she falter?  What mistakes would she make?  

The great thing about women in Dystopian stories today is there is no one, right character.  Authors have created all kinds of different worlds and all kinds of different heroines to live in these worlds.  As a reader and a writer, I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Thanks again to Tracy for taking the time to post here! Here's where you can find her on the web:

Tracy's website
Tracy's blog
Tracy on Twitter

Review: Doomed by Tracy Deebs

Beat the game. Save the world.

Pandora’s just your average teen, glued to her cell phone and laptop, surfing Facebook and e-mailing with her friends, until the day her long-lost father sends her a link to a mysterious site featuring twelve photos of her as a child. Unable to contain her curiosity, Pandora enters the site, where she is prompted to play her favorite virtual-reality game, Zero Day. This unleashes a global computer virus that plunges the whole world into panic: suddenly, there is no Internet. No cell phones. No utilities, traffic lights, hospitals, law enforcement. Pandora teams up with handsome stepbrothers Eli and Theo to enter the virtual world of Zero Day. Simultaneously, she continues to follow the photographs from her childhood in an attempt to beat the game and track down her father, her one key to saving the world as we know it. Part The Matrix, part retelling of the Pandora myth, Doomed has something for gaming fans, dystopian fans, and romance fans alike. (From Goodreads)

Best Bits: This book was a thriller! The book begins on Pandora's birthday, and the rest of the story spans the country, and two realities (the second being the virtual world of Zero Day). I wasn't sure whether it was going to work to have a portion of the story take place in-game, but it did. Not only did the game emphasize the ultimate message behind the virus, but it also helps her understand exactly who is behind it. Although I knew there would be some tension regarding a love triangle, I was glad that it wasn't too long into the book where the reader is clear on who Pandora will choose (see my nit pick below). As many readers of this blog know, I'm a bit tired with this trope. It was nice to have a simple, non-dramatic conclusion to it. The end of the world does take precedence over dating, after all. Deebs also does a good job showing the severity of the worm. Sure, at first it didn't seem like much was wrong. As chaos and fear begin to take over, so does violence and crime. It put urgency behind Pandora's quest, and that kept me flipping pages.

Nit Picks: My nit pick for Doomed is related to one of the stepbrothers who end up helping Pandora navigate Zero Day (called Pandora's Box in my galley edition). Eli, although very useful throughout the story, also seemed to invade Pandora's personal space. Now, this doesn't happen all the time, and Pandora does struggle at the beginning of the book about whether she's attracted to him...but in one scene at a motel he is supposed to be keeping watch and ends up falling asleep in bed with her. 



Doomed 
By Walker Books
Published by Bloomsbury USA
480 Pages
Received for review
Rating: A

Stacking the Shelves (November 3)

Stacking the Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga at Tynga's Reviews! It's a way to highlight the books that everyone got throughout the week.

These books I've gotten over the past couple of weeks

Purchased

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey romantic expressions: honeysuckle for devotion, asters for patience, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it’s been more useful in communicating mistrust and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster-care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings. Now eighteen and emancipated from the system with nowhere to go, Victoria realizes she has a gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But an unexpected encounter with a mysterious stranger has her questioning what’s been missing in her life. And when she’s forced to confront a painful secret from her past, she must decide whether it’s worth risking everything for a second chance at happiness. (From Goodreads)

The Assassin's Curse by Cassandra Rose Clarke

Ananna of the Tanarau abandons ship when her parents try to marry her off to an allying pirate clan: she wants to captain her own boat, not serve as second-in-command to her handsome yet clueless fiance. But her escape has dire consequences when she learns the scorned clan has sent an assassin after her. 

And when the assassin, Naji, finally catches up with her, things get even worse. Ananna inadvertently triggers a nasty curse — with a life-altering result. Now Ananna and Naji are forced to become uneasy allies as they work together to break the curse and return their lives back to normal. Or at least as normal as the lives of a pirate and an assassin can be. (From Goodreads)



Darkest Hour (Mediator 4) by Meg Cabot

When the nineteenth--century ghost of Maria de Silva wakes her up in the middle of the night, Suze knows this is no ordinary visitation -- and not just from the knife at her throat, either. In life, Maria was the fiancee of Jesse -- the same Jesse who was murdered a hundred and fifty years before. The same Jesse Suze is in love with.

Maria threatens Suze: The backyard construction must cease. Suze has a pretty good idea what -- or rather, who -- Maria doesn't want found. But in solving Jesse's murder, will Suze end up losing him forever? (For Goodreads)




For Review: 

Doomed by Tracy Deebs

Beat the game. Save the world.

Pandora’s just your average teen, glued to her cell phone and laptop, surfing Facebook and e-mailing with her friends, until the day her long-lost father sends her a link to a mysterious site featuring twelve photos of her as a child. Unable to contain her curiosity, Pandora enters the site, where she is prompted to play her favorite virtual-reality game, Zero Day. This unleashes a global computer virus that plunges the whole world into panic: suddenly, there is no Internet. No cell phones. No utilities, traffic lights, hospitals, law enforcement. Pandora teams up with handsome stepbrothers Eli and Theo to enter the virtual world of Zero Day. Simultaneously, she continues to follow the photographs from her childhood in an attempt to beat the game and track down her father, her one key to saving the world as we know it. Part The Matrix, part retelling of the Pandora myth, Doomed has something for gaming fans, dystopian fans, and romance fans alike. (From Goodreads)

Published by Walker Books
Release Date: January 8, 2013

Velvet by Mary Hooper

Velvet is a laundress in a Victorian steam laundry. With both her mother and father dead, she is an orphan and has to rely upon her own wits to make a living. The laundry's work is back-breaking and Velvet is desperate to create a better life for herself. Then Velvet is noticed by Madame Savoya, a famed medium, who asks Velvet to come to work for her. Velvet is dazzled at first by the young yet beautifully dressed and bejewelled Madame. But soon Velvet realises that Madame Savoya is not all that she says she is, and Velvet's very life is in danger ...A romantic and thrillingly exciting new novel from an acclaimed and much loved historical writer for teens. (From Goodreads)

Published by Bloomsbury USA

Tempestuous by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes

Recently banished, unfairly, by the school’s popular crowd, former “it girl,” Miranda Prospero, finds herself in a brave new world: holding dominion amongst a rag-tag crew of geeks and misfits where she works at the Hot-Dog Kabob in the food court of her local mall. When the worst winter storm of the season causes mall workers and last-minute shoppers to be snowed-in for the night, Miranda seizes the opportunity to get revenge against the catty clique behind her social exile. With help from her delightfully dweeby coworker, Ariel, and a sullen loner named Caleb who works at the mall’s nearby gaming and magic shop, Miranda uses charm and trickery to set things to right during this spirited take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Published by Merit Press
Release Date: December 18, 2013

Halifax by Leigh Dunlap

When the Halifax siblings arrive at Lexham Academy, they don't seem any more or less odd than any other students. They have more important things to do, however, than take exams or find dates for the prom. They have aliens to kill. With the help of his sister Izzy and brother Rom, Farrell Halifax has to stop an escaped alien and save the Earth --- though that's hard to do when the captain of the basketball team is after you and you're falling in love with his cheerleader girlfriend --- who may or may not be an alien herself. Halifax is a teen Torchwood meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer --- with a little bit of The Breakfast Club thrown into the mix. (From Goodreads)

Out now as an e-book

Author Interview & Contest: Tracy Deebs

A big thanks to Tracy for stopping by to answer a few questions! You can check out her website here: http://tracydeebs.com/, and her blog here: http://www.tracy-deebs.blogspot.com/

1. Tell us a bit about your upcoming release, Tempest Rising.

Tempest Rising a dark paranormal romance that tells the story of sixteen-year-old surfer, Tempest Maguire, on the cusp of her seventeenth birthday. The daughter of a pro-surfer and a mermaid, she has to make a choice between staying human as she’s always wanted, or becoming mermaid, a fate that she’s dreaded her entire life. But as her birthday approaches, she realizes the choice might not be as simple as she’d hoped (growing gills in English class will do that to a girl).

Add in a love triangle between Tempest and two (very) hot guys, a lot of surfing, an underwater kingdom and a showdown between Tempest and the most evil creature in the sea, and you have a good idea about what Tempest Rising has in store …

2. The book deals with mythological sea creatures, what inspired you to create a novel dealing with this topic?

I’ve loved mermaids since I was three years old and my dad brought me home a VHS copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. I fell in love with the story the first time I saw it and then tortured my parents for the next three years by watching the movie at least once every single day. Seriously. When we moved to California when I was six, I fell in love with the ocean and all things in it (except sharks, which I have a terrible fear of) and when I first learned of selkies many years later (from a Nora Roberts novel, actually) I became just as fascinated with them. So when I told my agent I wanted to write a YA and she answered with, “How do you feel about mermaids …” I couldn’t resist. Tempest Rising is the book I’ve always wanted to write.

3. This is your first YA novel, would you mind sharing a bit about your journey to getting published?

For me, getting published in YA has been a really fabulous experience. I have an amazing agent whose first love is young adult novels. She was incredibly supportive when I told her I wanted to switch genres from romance and try my hand at a YA. Within two weeks, we’d come up with a credible idea, within six weeks I had a full proposal together (eighty pages and a synopsis) and just about three months from the day I told her I wanted to write YA, she sold Tempest Rising to Walker Books :)

Since then, I’ve sold two more YAs to Stacy Abrams, my awesome editor at Walker—one called The International Kissing Club (January 2012) which I wrote with two of my good friends and another that I’m working on now, tentatively called Zero Day, that is a modern day retelling of the Pandora myth, except instead of a box Pandora opens an attachment and brings about technological Armageddon.

4. One of the things that I loved about Tempest Rising was the variety of unique names in the book. How did you decide on those?

I love names and I’m never happy until they are exactly write. Tempest’s name was the hardest for me—she went through a bunch of different names and I had taken to calling her mermaid girl in my own head as I plotted out the story, when I finally decided to just relax and let the name come to me. Almost immediately I heard her voice in my head, along with a demand to be called Tempest. Everything else about her stemmed from her name—including her abilities and the prophecy.

The other names were easier for me to come up with. I had a general idea of what I wanted each character to be, so I looked for names that would suit their personalities/role in the novel.

5. Tempest Rising leaves things open for a sequel, can we expect another book in the near future?

I really hope so. I’ve always conceived of Tempest as a trilogy and the synopsis for the second book, Tempest Unleashed, is under consideration with my publisher as I write this :)

Enter to win an ARC of Tempest Rising by filling out the form below. This is only open to US residents, because it's being shipped straight from the publisher.

CONTEST CLOSED

Book Review: Tempest Rising by Tracy Deebs

Tempest Maguire wants nothing more than to surf the killer waves near her California home; continue her steady relationship with her boyfriend, Mark; and take care of her brothers and surfer dad. But Tempest is half mermaid, and as her seventeenth birthday approaches, she will have to decide whether to remain on land or give herself to the ocean like her mother. The pull of the water becomes as insistent as her attraction to Kai, a gorgeous surfer whose uncanny abilities hint at an otherworldly identity as well.

And when Tempest does finally give in to the water's temptation and enters a fantastical underwater world, she finds that a larger destiny awaits her—and that the entire ocean's future hangs in the balance. (From Goodreads)

I'm going to attempt to make this review as free of spoilers as I possibly can.*

It's no secret to Tempest that she's half-mermaid. Her mother was open about it, her father thinks it's a gift, but Tempest sees it as the thing that broke apart her family. So, when she begins to develop mermaid characteristic (i.e gills), she has a bit of a meltdown. It's justified, since the first time she begins to change she goes from surfing to almost drowning. She's attempting to live a normal human life, including a romance with Mark, despite knowing that she'll soon have to choose between her life on land, and a life in the water. When Kai shows up, it becomes clear who she's really meant to be with. There was a bit of a love triangle, but her relationship with Mark didn't really stand much of chance. She does try to cling to it, much like she does to her human life, but it was obvious that she shared something deeper with Kai. I won't spoil too much about who Kai really is, but I can say that it came as quite a surprise.

Tempest played the role of mother to her younger brothers, so that made her attraction to the sea bittersweet. She still deals with the abandonment that she felt when her mother returned to the sea, and refuses to do the same thing to her brothers. Avoiding the water is painful, too. Especially since every time she tries to resist, it seems like a certain sea witch shows up to try to lure her in. I thought that all of these struggles combined to make Tempest an extremely well-developed character.

The beginning of the book deals mostly with Tempest's human life, and relationships. Her relationships with her family, friends, and lingering resentment about her mother take center stage. While I really appreciated being able to get into her head, I think I was expecting more of her time to be spent in the water. The tension built up, but I was hoping that she would get to explore more of the undersea world.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of the world that Deebs has created, so I'm crossing my fingers in hopes of a sequel.

Tempest Rising

By Tracy Deebs

Published by Walker Books for Young Readers

352 Pages

Release Date: May 10, 2011

Received for Review

Rating: B

Check back later today for an interview with the author, and a contest

In My Mailbox (May 1)

In My Mailbox was created by Kristi of The Story Siren, who was inspired by Alea of Pop Culture Junkie. All of the synopses you see below were found on Goodreads. Here are the books I got this week...

Happy May! I realized that I haven't posted an "In My Mailbox" in a couple of weeks, but I got some books worth posting about last week.

For Review:

Tempest Rising by Tracy Deebs

Tempest Maguire wants nothing more than to surf the killer waves near her California home; continue her steady relationship with her boyfriend, Mark; and take care of her brothers and surfe

r dad. But Tempest is half mermaid, and as her seventeenth birthday approaches, she will have to decide whether to remain on land or give herself to the ocean like her mother. The pull of the water becomes as insistent as her attraction to Kai, a gorgeous surfer whose uncanny abilities hint at an otherworldly identity as well. And when Tempest does finally give in to the water's temptation and enters a fantastical underwater world, she finds that a larger destiny awaits her—and that the entire ocean's future hangs in the balance.

Published by Walker Books for Young Readers

Release Date: May 10, 2011

Flawless by Lara Chapman

Sarah Burke is just about perfect. She's got killer blue eyes, gorgeous blond hair, and impeccable grades. There's just one tiny-all right, enormous-flaw: her nose. But even that's not so bad. Sarah's got the best best friend and big goals for print journalism fame.

On the first day of senior year, Rock Conway walks into her journalism class and

, well, rocks her world. Problem is, her best friend, Kristen, falls for him too. And when Rock and Kristen stand together, it's like Barbie and Ken come to life. So when Kristen begs Sarah to help her nab Rock, Sarah does the only thing a best friend can do-she agrees. For someone so smart, what was she thinking?

This hip retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac is filled with hilariously misguided matchmaking, sweet romance, and a gentle reminder that we should all embrace our flaws.

Published by Bloomsbury

Release Date: May 10, 2011