Blog Tour Guest Post by Y.S. Lee

Today I'm lucky enough to host author Y.S. Lee as part of the Traveling to Teens tour!

Hello, and thanks for tuning in to the Body at the Tower blog tour. Today’s mini-theme is reluctant revolutionaries and today’s Notorious Victorian is Charles Darwin. I’ll start by saying that I know where I stand on the subject of evolution, but am not interested in persuading or converting others to my view. That’s not the point of this essay. Instead, I want to talk about how people sometimes find themselves triggering huge cultural flashpoints without really wanting to do so. Such is the case with Charles Darwin – naturalist, geologist, and one of the most simultaneously admired and hated Victorians.

Darwin was a painstaking character – an important trait in a scientist, and particularly a geologist – and slow to draw conclusions. He seems to have been of a nervous temperament, too: all his life, he was prone to heart palpitations, headaches and stomach ailments when he worked too hard. His research towards a theory of common origin took nearly thirty years. When Darwin finally published On the Origin of Species in 1859, it was because he was pushed: the previous year, a rising young scientist named Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a paper that outlined a theory of natural selection remarkably like Darwin’s own. A couple of weeks later, both Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers were jointly presented to the Linnean Society. It’s interesting to realize that there was very little response to these papers – no instantaneous outcry, no immediate earthquake.

It was only a year later, on the full publication of Darwin’s expanded book, that the uproar began. Although interested in the intellectual response, Darwin was too ill to comment himself. He did not participate in the famous Oxford evolution debate of 1860 and remained distant (in public, at least) from all discussion of his incendiary theory.

Darwin’s research changed much more than scientific dialogue. It shook Victorian beliefs to the ground, forcing people to question everything: faith, reason, humanity, and the meaning of existence. The generations following Darwin found themselves stripped of certainty, of confidence in old beliefs.

What Darwin “wanted” or “intended” to achieve is totally irrelevant. We do know that he had a difficult – even tortured – relationship to the theory he proposed, and its impact on religious belief. He was a Christian. The fact that he published Origin reveals him as a reluctant sort of revolutionary.

You can find Y.S Lee on her website here, and on twitter

You can check out my review of her newest book, The Body at the Tower (The Agency #2) here

Don't forget to follow the tour and visit Ari at Reading in Color tomorrow!

Review: The Body At The Tower by Y.S. Lee

This is another colourful, action-packed Victorian detective novel about the exploits of agent Mary Quinn. At a young age, Mary Quinn is rescued from the gallows and taken to Miss Scrimshaw's Academy for Girls. The school turns out to be a front for a private detective agency. At age 17, Mary takes on her first case (A Spy in the House). In this, the second book of the series, Mary Quinn sets out to uncover the truth behind a suspicious death at St. Stephen's Tower, better known as the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament. The accident occurred after hours in a highly public part of town and despite the presence of night watchmen. Mary, disguised as Mark Quinn, becomes a builder's assistant to find out the truth about the body at the tower.

*Copy provided for the Traveling to Teens Tour

Mary Quinn is back and better than ever! I read A Spy in the House (The Agency #1) in early June, and I loved it. So, I jumped at the chance to be part of the tour for the second book in the series. I wasn't disappointed.

In my review of A Spy in the House, I mentioned how much I loved Mary's character. When I finished it, however, the only thing I wanted to see in the future was more information about Mary's past. In The Body at the Tower, I was glad to see that Lee gave us more glimpses of Mary's past. She's a strong female character, but her weakness lies in her struggle with her heritage. It's because of this struggle that she faces quite a challenge in The Body at the Tower. Not only is she trying to solve a murder, she's forced to confront her past by returning to a life of hunger, and uncomfortable living (although, it's a step up from when she was on the street). Mary has also retained her kind nature in this book. She attempts to help Jenkins, a boy working at the building site, who is very much like she was as a child. From a psychological perspective, I found this plot point particularly fascinating.

What's great about this series are, in part, the mysteries. One of the things that Lee does extremely well is to create a mystery that can hold the reader's attention. While I love mysteries, I've found that in many books of the genre, the plot tends to slow down toward the middle. I personally want a mystery that I won't want to put down. In The Body at the Tower, any scenes that lacked action were filled with new information about the characters.

There is also a budding romance in this tale of intrigue. Mary and James first meet in A Spy in the House, and are reunited in the sequel. I find them to be a great pairing, and think that their relationship adds a new element to the story. James is a bit headstrong, and in her own way, so is Mary. Their interactions display this stubbornness, and their scenes together were a lot of fun to read. I'm looking forward to watching their relationship develop further in future books.

It's another strong book from Lee, and I am happy to say that it surpassed my high expectations. Now I just need the patience to wait for the third book in the series, The Traitor and the Tunnel.

The Body at the Tower (The Agency #2)
By Y.S. Lee
Published by Candlewick Press
352 Pages
Rating: A

Waiting on Wednesday (August 4)

Waiting on Wednesday was started by Jill at Breaking the Spine. This weekly meme shares the upcoming books that I'm most excited about.

The Gathering (Darkness Rising 1) by Kelley Armstrong

Maya lives in a small medical-research town on Vancouver Island. How small? You can’t find it on the map. It has less than two-hundred people, and h...more Maya lives in a small medical-research town on Vancouver Island. How small? You can’t find it on the map. It has less than two-hundred people, and her school has only sixty-eight students—for every grade from kindergarten to twelve.

Now, strange things are happening in this claustrophobic town, and Maya's determined to get to the bottom of them. First, the captain of the swim team drowns mysteriously in the middle of a calm lake. A year later, mountain lions start appearing around Maya's home, and they won’t go away. Her best friend, Daniel, starts getting negative vibes from certain people and things. It doesn't help that the new bad boy in town, Rafe, has a dangerous secret—and he's interested in one special part of Maya's anatomy: Her paw-print birthmark. (From Goodreads)

Published by HarperCollins
Release Date: April 12, 2011

Teaser Tuesday (August 3)

What is Teaser Tuesday?
It's a meme hosted by Should Be Reading and here are the rules:Grab your current read...
Open to a random page
Share two teaser sentences from somewhere on the page
Don't include spoilers

"Mid-autumn, and the telltale sounds of the season were echoing around Borough Farm. The gathering gloom of the past few evenings had been punctuated by the bloodcurdling screech of a barn owl, unseen somewhere in a stand if ash trees where the lower fields met the woods."
-A Shepard's Watch, Page 1, by David Kennard

In My Mailbox (August 1)

Happy August! In my mailbox was created by Kristi of The Story Siren, who was inspired by Alea of Pop Culture Junkie. Here are the books I got this week...

Borrowed:
The Dogs of Windcutter Down by David Kennard

These age-old words of wisdom have always guided Devon sheep farmer David Kennard. But as he battles to save his farm from extinction, they take on a greater weight than ever.
The storm clouds are already gathering when Borough Farm suffers a series of disastrous setbacks that threaten the Kennard family’s traditional way of life. Though the farm has survived foot and mouth disease, an invasion of stray sheep, and the threat of disease, a malfunctioning tractor and a sickly sheepdog all add to the farm’s daily pressures. How much longer can they stay afloat financially? And will David be the last shepherd to tend his flock in this rugged corner of England? Is there a way to achieve the seemingly impossible---making a living through farming sheep in the twenty-first century?

A shepherd since the age of seventeen, David offers an honest and affectionate, often comic picture of life on his sheep farm. But throughout this gentle meditation on his family’s rural way of life, David is in a fight for that life, and for the survival of his family and farm. He must rely---as always---on his faithful sheepdogs Greg, Swift, Gail, Fern, and Ernie. But even he is surprised when the dogs---and the new dog on the farm---exceed his expectations and prove to be Borough Farm’s secret weapon.



The Spell Book of Listen Taylor by Jaclyn Moriarty

The Zing family lives in a world of misguided spell books, singular poetry, and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment. They use these things to prot...more The Zing family lives in a world of misguided spell books, singular poetry, and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment. They use these things to protect the Zing Family Secret—one so huge it draws the family to the garden shed for meetings every Friday night.

Into their world comes socially isolated middle grader Listen Taylor, whose father is dating a Zing. Enter Cath Murphy, a young teacher at the elementary school that Cassie Zing attends, suffering from a broken heart. How will the worlds of these two young women connect? Only the reader can know!