Cover Reveal and Giveaway: Anyone But You by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes

Anyone But You: A Modern-Day Spin on Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes (Book #3 in the Twisted Lit series)

Two Italian restaurants, both alike in dignity, in Chicago’s Little Italy where we lay our scene... After her family’s struggling eatery, Cap’s, falls prey to another of the Monte clan’s vicious and destructive pranks, sixteen-year-old Gigi Caputo finds herself courting danger during a clandestine encounter with Roman Monte, the very boy whose relatives have brought her family such grief. When the daughter and son of these two warring factions fall
for each other, their quest to mend this bitter family feud turns out to be a recipe for disaster. Their story is irrevocably linked to the summer of 1933, when two twelve-year-olds, Benny and Nick hop the turnstile at the Chicago World’s Fair. While enjoying some of the fair’s legendary amusements, Nick has a “love at first sight” encounter with Stella, a young girl who unintentionally causes a lasting rift between the two boyhood pals. Deftly winding its way through past and present day, this modern take on Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet has much to do with hate — but more with love.

Authors Kim Askew and Amy Helmes are excited to offer a sneak peak at the third book in their “Twisted Lit” series of Shakespeare-inspired YA novels. This time around, they’ve put their unique spin on Romeo & Juliet. Published by Merit Press, Anyone But You will be released in January, and is currently available for pre-order at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Powell’s.

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Author Guest Post: Kim Askew and Amy Helmes

Hi everyone, and thanks, Lizzy, for allowing us to drop by!

Tempestuous and Exposure, the first books in our Twisted Lit series, are modern-day spins on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and “Macbeth,” respectively. If you’re not gasping with excitement at the thought, you might be gasping with horror. In addition to being lauded as one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language, old Will manages to occasionally strike terror (or boredom) in people’s hearts, particularly anyone who’s sat through a poorly-performed play or a too-dull classroom lecture devoted to his work. To that end, we’ve decided to write a two-pronged guest blog post explaining why our books will appeal to both the Shakespeare fanatics of the world and the Shakespeare-phobes. Whether you fit into either end of the spectrum (or somewhere in between) we think our books offer a little something for everyone.

I HATE Shakespeare:
We get it. Having to translate all that Elizabethan mumbo-jumbo can be mind-numbing when all you really want to do is escape into a story. And picturing dudes wearing frilly lace collars and shoes with giant buckles? Yeah, uh...no thanks. Our books yank the Bard into the 21st century, taking his universal themes of love, revenge, loyalty, and death and setting them in situations that are thoroughly modern, with characters that are completely relatable. For example, Tempestuous, our take on “The Tempest,” takes place over the course of one night in a shopping mall, but thanks to our fresh spin, it embarks on an entirely new trajectory. We specifically wrote our novels so that you don’t have to be familiar with Shakespeare at all to appreciate them. So go ahead, pretend we never even mentioned him. (And if our books happen to be the “gateway drug” that convince you to give Shakespeare a second look, it’ll be our little secret.)

I LOVE Shakespeare:
Are you the sort of person who dreams in iambic pentameter? Have you seen Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, like, 73 times? Okay, great then, we’re speaking the same language. In that case, you’re likely to pick up on all the subtle Shakespeare references we’ve sprinkled throughout our books, and you’ll probably swoon over our chapter titles, which are direct lines from the Bard himself. Yet because you’re so well-versed in Shakespeare’s most popular plays, our aim in writing the series was to entice you with something a little bit different. To that end, Tempestuous and Exposure (which is our homage to “Macbeth”) aren’t “paint-by-numbers” retellings. Instead, we used Shakespeare as a springboard for our own unique, 21st-century take on the stories. (We’ve added substantially more girl power, for starters.) There’s a good reason we named our series Twisted Lit, and we sincerely hope you’ll give our version of Shakespeare a shot.

Best,
Kim and Amy

Amy (with Kim's dog Macbeth) and Kim

About the Authors
Kim Askew and Amy Helmes are the authors of the Shakespeare-inspired YA series Twisted Lit. Tempestuous will be available on December 18, 2012 and Exposure will be available January 18, 2013 from Merit Press. Kim and Amy been writing together since 2004, when they launched Romancing the Tome, a blog dedicated to their obsession with book-to-film adaptations. For more information on their books, visit TwistedLitBooks.com.

A huge thanks to Kim and Amy for taking the time to stop by! You can check out my review of one of their books, Tempestuous, here.

Teaser Tuesday (November 27)

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.

"I reached into the backseat and grabbed the ridiculously tall, absurdly colorful hat I was forced to wear as part of my Hot Dog Kebob uniform. Sadly, my recent fall from grace and subsequent mandated employment had coincided with a lack of decent part-time jobs." 

-Tempestuous, 1% on Kindle, by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes

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

Waiting on Wednesday (October 24)

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

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. (From Goodreads)

Published by Merit Press
Release Date: December 18, 2012

So much awesome! They've also done a re-telling of Macbeth...so excited to read these