Tag Archives: BEA

The Suitcase Seven Giveaway: Part 7 – THE SNOW CHILD

8 Sep

Okay, y’all. You know the drill.

BEA. Lots of ARCS. Seven in particular, transported via suitcase due to awesome factor. Sparkly pink unicorn. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Let’s cut right to the chase this time.

This is the seventh and final Suitcase Seven giveaway, and it’s a very special giveaway indeed — not just because it’s the last, but because of the book I’m giving away. This book is special. This book is magic. This book is quite possibly the best I’ve read all year.

What book is this, you ask?

The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey (pub date 2/1/12!).

From the ARC’s back cover:

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart — he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone — but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

My Goodreads review:

This is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. I started it last night and couldn’t put it down until I finished it at 3:30 in the morning. It’s real, it’s wrenching, it’s raw and true and lovely in the best of ways. A haunting, heartbreaking fairy tale about love, longing, loss, magic, and the Alaskan wilderness, THE SNOW CHILD is a story timeless and out of time, and weaves an unbreakable spell. As someone else said, I had a feeling I knew where the story would take me, but I didn’t care, the telling of that story was so exquisitely powerful. One of the blurbs on the cover of my ARC describes it as the literary lovechild of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Willa Cather. Dead-on. Perfectly crafted magical realism that will leave your heart aching in all the best ways.

You want this book. Ivey’s prose is pristine and romantic and mysterious and visceral, perfectly echoing the Alaskan wilderness it describes. The characters are real and true, and by the end of the novel, they are family. The Snow Child will leave you with one of those indelible aches that never really goes away. Truly remarkable books tend to do that — leave some of themselves within you, like a mark on the soul. I consumed this book in an evening, as I so rarely do. Usually, I can put a book down long enough to go to work, run errands, work on my latest novel.

But this book? No. I physically couldn’t bear to part with it until I’d finished.

Even right now, flipping through certain passages, I’m tearing up, remembering. The weight of the book in my hands is familiar and comforting. You know that sensation, when you pluck a treasured book off the shelf and read it for the hundredth time, just to recapture that initial feeling of wonder? It feels like coming home. I know without a doubt that The Snow Child will become one of those books for me, and I’m equally confident that many, many others will also discover its magic. If I had the resources to buy a copy for everyone I know, I would. As it is, shouting from the virtual rooftops about how much I love it will have to suffice.

*wipes eyes*

Seriously. This book gets me so emotional. I just…mailing this one out is gonna sting. Whoever wins, just know that my ARC will come to you smothered with love.

~*~

And now you’re tapping your foot and snapping your fingers in my face. “CLAIRE,” you say, “STOP BLUBBERING ALREADY AND TELL ME HOW TO WIN THIS.”

Okay, okay!

For a chance to win an ARC of The Snow Child, simply comment below!

You can earn additional entries by tweeting about this last Suitcase Seven giveaway (with hashtag #SuitcaseSeven for 1 additional entry) and/or blogging about it (for 2 additional entries). Simply copy and paste the link from your tweet and/or blog post in your comment below! You can earn a maximum of 4 entries. If you’ve won a previous Suitcase Seven giveaway, you cannot win again!

The Snow Child giveaway begins NOW, is open INTERNATIONALLY, and will end Thursday, September 15, at 12:00 p.m. CST. The winner will be announced later that day!

Have fun, and good luck! And excuse me while I go cuddle this book.

The Suitcase Seven Giveaway: Part 6 – STEAMPUNK!

25 Aug

So, in May, I went to BEA and came home with a crapload of books.

Well, okay. Most of said crapload came a bit later, in a big brown box shipped to my house that made me jump around and clap my hands and make all sorts of undignified noises.

However, I could not part from some of my BEA books even long enough to ship them. Waiting several days to see them again was entirely unacceptable. I therefore shoved them in my suitcase for the flight home even though it ended up making my bag overweight and I had to pay a ridiculous overweight luggage fee.

BUT IT WAS SO WORTH IT.

Because these seven books gave me the special tinglies. I showed them to Roomie when I got home and felt so giddy while doing so that it was like all my words were scrambling up my throat and trying to choke me with the SHEER JOY of wonderful new books.

And I want to share this scrambly, squealy joy with YOU.

I therefore present to you…


*Brought to you by SPARKLY PINK UNICORN

Basically, this is how it’s going to work:

1) Every week and a half or so, I’ll be giving away A MAGICAL BEA-OBTAINED ARC right here on this very blog.

2) I’ll announce the start of each new giveaway on Twitter with the hashtag #SuitcaseSeven. If you want to use that hashtag whenever you re-tweet or talk about the giveaway on Twitter, that would be awesome!

3) All you have to do to earn an entry in each giveaway is comment on this blog (I’ll put up a new post for each new book)! You can earn extra points by talking about it on your blog or Twitter! Like so:

  • you get 1 entry just for commenting! Easy peasy!
  • you get +1 additional entry for tweeting about the giveaway (with the hashtag #SuitcaseSeven)! Only one tweet per individual giveaway, please. When you comment, include the link to your tweet!
  • you get +2 additional entries for talking about the giveaway on your blog and pasting the link in your comment! Only one blog post per individual giveaway, please.

So, you can earn a maximum of 4 entries for each book I give away. Once each giveaway ends, I’ll tally up the entries and random.org will choose the winner!

Also, once you win an ARC, you are no longer eligible to win any of the remaining giveaways. This seems only fair, n’est-ce pas?

Now, you might be wondering what ARCs I’ll be giving away. What, exactly, ARE The Suitcase Seven?

WELL. I shall reveal the titles one by one as I give them away, but I CAN tell you that The Suitcase Seven consist of

  • 3 YA books (one paranormal, one fantasy, one contemporary)
  • 2 MG books (both fantasy)
  • 1 adult book (magical realism)
  • 1 anthology (fantasy)

And trust me. You want these books.

~*~

As you can infer from the title of this post, the fifth Suitcase Seven book I’m giving away is Steampunk! (pub date 10/11!), a YA steampunk anthology consisting of stories written by a whole slew of awesome people like Cassandra Clare, Holly Black, Libba Bray, M. T. Anderson, Cory Doctorow, Kelly Link, Garth Nix, and more!

From the ARC’s back cover:

Think you have your trusty brass goggles focused on the steampunk ethic? Think again.

Imagine an alternate universe where romance and technology reign. Where tinkerers and dreamers craft and recraft a world of automatons, ornate clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never were. Where scientists and schoolgirls, fair folk and Romans, intergalactic bandits, utopian revolutionaries, and intrepid orphans — decked out in corsets, clockwerk, suits, and tall black boots — solve dastardly crimes, escape from monstrous predicaments, consult oracles, and hover over volcanoes in steam-powered airships.

Here, in the first major steampunk anthology for young adults, fourteen masters of speculative fiction, including two graphic storytellers, embrace the genre’s established blend of sci-fi and fantasy, action and adventure, history and romance, and refashion it in surprising ways and in settings as diverse as Canada, New Zealand, Appalchia, Wales, Ancient Rome, future Australia, and alternate California.

Visionaries [Kelly] Link and [Gavin J.] Grant have invited all-new interpretations, explorations, and expansions, taking a genre already rich, strange, and inventive in the extreme and challenging contributors to remake it from the ground up. The result is an anthology that defies even as it defines the genre.

Stories by M. T. Anderson, Holly Black, Libba Bray, Shawn Cheng, Cassandra Clare, Cory Doctorow, Dylan Horrocks, Kathleen Jennings, Elizabeth Knox, Kelly Link, Garth Nix, Christopher Rowe, Delia Sherman, and Ysabeau S. Wilce.

You want this book. This anthology is weird, beautiful, disturbing, thought-provoking, and sumptuous. You will want to read it slowly (as I did) and savor each story like a good wine — or, since I don’t like wine, like a good, expensive chocolate. Or heck, even a cheap chocolate, because chocolate is GOOD. I am in no way calling this anthology “cheap,” by the way. Just YUMMY. And calorie-free!

For a chance to win an ARC of Steampunk!, simply comment below!

Remember, you can earn additional entries by tweeting about The Suitcase Seven (with hashtag #SuitcaseSeven for 1 additional entry) and/or blogging about it (for 2 additional entries). Simply copy and paste the link from your tweet and/or blog post in your comment below!

The Steampunk! giveaway begins NOW, is open INTERNATIONALLY, and will end Thursday, September 1st, at 12:00 p.m. CST. The winner will be announced later that day!

Have fun, and good luck!

The Suitcase Seven Giveaway: Part 5 – DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE

16 Aug

So, in May, I went to BEA and came home with a crapload of books.

Well, okay. Most of said crapload came a bit later, in a big brown box shipped to my house that made me jump around and clap my hands and make all sorts of undignified noises.

However, I could not part from some of my BEA books even long enough to ship them. Waiting several days to see them again was entirely unacceptable. I therefore shoved them in my suitcase for the flight home even though it ended up making my bag overweight and I had to pay a ridiculous overweight luggage fee.

BUT IT WAS SO WORTH IT.

Because these seven books gave me the special tinglies. I showed them to Roomie when I got home and felt so giddy while doing so that it was like all my words were scrambling up my throat and trying to choke me with the SHEER JOY of wonderful new books.

And I want to share this scrambly, squealy joy with YOU.

I therefore present to you…


*Brought to you by SPARKLY PINK UNICORN

Basically, this is how it’s going to work:

1) Every week and a half or so, I’ll be giving away A MAGICAL BEA-OBTAINED ARC right here on this very blog.

2) I’ll announce the start of each new giveaway on Twitter with the hashtag #SuitcaseSeven. If you want to use that hashtag whenever you re-tweet or talk about the giveaway on Twitter, that would be awesome!

3) All you have to do to earn an entry in each giveaway is comment on this blog (I’ll put up a new post for each new book)! You can earn extra points by talking about it on your blog or Twitter! Like so:

  • you get 1 entry just for commenting! Easy peasy!
  • you get +1 additional entry for tweeting about the giveaway (with the hashtag #SuitcaseSeven)! Only one tweet per individual giveaway, please. When you comment, include the link to your tweet!
  • you get +2 additional entries for talking about the giveaway on your blog and pasting the link in your comment! Only one blog post per individual giveaway, please.

So, you can earn a maximum of 4 entries for each book I give away. Once each giveaway ends, I’ll tally up the entries and random.org will choose the winner!

Also, once you win an ARC, you are no longer eligible to win any of the remaining giveaways. This seems only fair, n’est-ce pas?

Now, you might be wondering what ARCs I’ll be giving away. What, exactly, ARE The Suitcase Seven?

WELL. I shall reveal the titles one by one as I give them away, but I CAN tell you that The Suitcase Seven consist of

  • 3 YA books (one paranormal, one fantasy, one contemporary)
  • 2 MG books (both fantasy)
  • 1 adult book (magical realism)
  • 1 anthology (fantasy)

And trust me. You want these books.

~*~

As you can infer from the title of this post, the fifth Suitcase Seven book I’m giving away is Daughter of Smoke and Bone (pub date 9/11!) by she who shall forevermore receive all my fangirlish love Laini Taylor!


HNNNNGGGGGGGGG THIS BOOK. <3

From the ARC’s back cover:

Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

In a dark and dusty shop, a devil’s supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly war.

Black handprints? A devil who collects human teeth? PRAGUE?? “I AM HOOKED GIMME GIMME GIMME,” you might be saying at this moment, if you are anything like me, because that’s totally what I said after reading that back cover for the first time.

BUT WAIT.

From the Goodreads page:

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she’s prone to disappearing on mysterious “errands”; she speaks many languages—not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she’s about to find out.

When one of the strangers—beautiful, haunted Akiva—fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

I MEAN.

My Goodreads review (and I don’t really leave reviews, either):

I’ve been toying with the idea of reviewing this book ever since I finished it over a month ago, and the thing is, I’ve sort of felt unworthy of leaving a review. It was such an amazing book that I felt my review had to somehow live up to it, had to match the poignancy, the mystery, the magic, the heartache, the refreshing originality, the unabashedly sumptuous world-building and prose that moved me to tears on several occasions.

But I’ve realized there’s no way I can do that. All I can say is that this book is astonishing and that I wish it spectacular success.

P.S. TEAM BRIMSTONE. I want a Brimstone. And a Kishmish. <3

P.P.S. More YA like this, please.

You want this book. This is one of the best books I have read this year, and I’ve read a lot of frickin’ good books, okay? In fact, it is officially one of my favorite books ever of all time. It is on my FAVORITES SHELF. In fact, I don’t even really want to give this book to you because I love it that much. But sometimes to love something you have to let it be free…like a butterfly…or whatever. So. FLY, my pet. FLY! Into the hands of a beloved blog reader/Twitter follower/et ceteraaa.

For a chance to win an ARC of Daughter of Smoke and Bone, simply comment below!

Remember, you can earn additional entries by tweeting about The Suitcase Seven (with hashtag #SuitcaseSeven for 1 additional entry) and/or blogging about it (for 2 additional entries). Simply copy and paste the link from your tweet and/or blog post in your comment below!

The Daughter of Smoke and Bone giveaway begins NOW, is open INTERNATIONALLY, and will end Tuesday, August 23, at 12:00 p.m. CST. The winner will be announced later that day!

Have fun, and good luck!