Cover Reveal: Afterlife Academy by Jaimie Admans

Afterlife Academy by Jaimie Admans
Publication date: March 15th 2013
Genre: YA Paranormal

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17335477-afterlife-academy

Synopsis:

Even being dead isn’t enough to get you out of maths class.

Dying wasn't on sixteen-year-old Riley Richardson's to-do list. And now, not only is she dead, but she's stuck in a perpetual high school nightmare. Worse still, she's stuck there with the geekiest, most annoying boy in the history of the world, ever. In a school where the geeks are popular and just about everything is wrong, Riley has become an outcast. She begins a desperate quest to get back to her perfect life, but her once-perfect life starts to unravel into something not nearly as perfect as she thought it was.
And maybe death isn’t really that bad after all...

Welcome to Afterlife Academy, where horns are the norm, the microwave is more intelligent than the teachers, and the pumpkins have a taste for blood.

----

AUTHOR BIO

Jaimie is a 27-year-old English-sounding Welsh girl with an awkward-to-spell name. She lives in South Wales and enjoys writing, gardening, drinking tea and watching horror movies. She hates spiders and cheese & onion crisps.

She has been writing for years, but has never before plucked up the courage to tell people. She writes mostly chick-lit and young adult. Kismetology is her first novel and there are plenty more on the way!

Author Links:

Jaimie's Website / Goodreads / Facebook / Twitter

Feature and Follow Friday!

Feature and Follow Friday is a weekly book meme hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read, with the goal of increasing followers and letting book bloggers get to know each other.

This week's question:

What is a book you didn’t like that all your friends raved about or what book did you love that wasn’t popular?

I try not to read other book reviews unless they're by friends, at least if I plan to read the book.  It kind of tends to tilt my opinion one way or the other.  However, a book I reviewed when I first made this blog, Starseed, only had one other negative review and the rest were raving about what a treasure it was.  If you've read the review, you can understand why I'd wonder about their taste.  I found absolutely no redeeming qualities in the thing!  Ah well.

I Can Actually Work!

I feel like I procrastinate too much, but that's not entirely true.  I get a lot of stuff done, just not things I should do, like editing my novel.  But when I do?

Track Changes is a glorious feature.  I need to start talking more about my novel on here if I'm gonna build up hype, huh?  Guess when I get more edited.

Book review: Toothiana, Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies (The Guardians #3) by William Joyce

When last we heard, the guardians were resting easy with the knowledge that the children of Santoff Claussen were finally safe from Pitch's dastardly plans.

But is it all a ruse, a scheme, a lull the evil Nightmare King has deviously concocted?  Whatever Pitch's plans, what he doesn't know is that there's a new Guardian in town, and she's not the type to forget old grudges.  Actually, she's not the type to forget anything, because this Guardian is none other than Toothiana, the Tooth Fairy herself.  She's fierce and fast, and crossing her will lead to a multitude of troubles.  And it turns out that, well, all those teeth she has been collecting?  They contain memories: the forgotten memories of childhood.  Young Katherine hopes that these memories might help her to remember her parents.  The Guardians hope they'll offer even further protection from Ptich.

You can see how this information would be invaluable to our heroes.

But it could also be invaluable to Pitch...

The third book in the Guardians series introduces us to Toothiana, as shown in the title and description.  She’s the tooth fairy, essentially, and like with all the mythical figures before her, she comes from an interesting background, one you wouldn’t really think of when asked about the Tooth Fairy.  That’s one of the advantages of this series; it’s creative, not dumbed-down just because it’s aimed at pre-teens.

Toothiana, Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies follows the same fairytale-like storytelling as its predecessors, but the tone of it is darker, getting progressively so as you get through the book.  Especially in the end, in fact, though I won’t give those details of course.  Toothiana’s backstory is quite sad, and when she goes in to get Katherine’s tooth and the Monkey King attacks, she goes crazy.  There’s a bit of talk about death, mostly aimed at the Monkey King and Pitch, whom is, of course, still alive.  There’s nothing wrong with that, though, and I think the lesson in the end is one that can be applied to anyone, not just children.

However, the end is a cliffhanger. A very frustrating cliffhanger, in a way.  However, I have read much, much worse.  It still works as an end for the book, and doesn’t leave you wondering “Wait, where’s the rest?” as other series books I’ve read have unfortunately done.  Meanwhile, however, the fourth book, The Sandman and the War of Dreams, doesn’t come out until September.  But it’ll be worth the wait!  And for those who were fans of Rise of the Guardians, the back teaser informs us that “a wayward lad of considerable interest named Jackson Overland Frost” shows up!  I personally look forward to it.

Teaser Tuesday!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB ofShould Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
 •Grab your current read
•Open to a random Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
•BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teaser Tuesday:

"Perhaps if you chant the ancient Atlantan phrase 'Sleep-o deep-o slumberly doo-'" Ombric began to suggest.

Bunnymund interrupted with, "Counting!"

-Toothiana, Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies by William Joyce

Book review: E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth's Core! (The Guardians #2) by William Joyce

Pitch, the Nightmare King, and his Fearlings had been soundly driven back by Nicholas St. North and company in the first Guardians’ adventure. But now Pitch has disappeared completely—and out of sight does NOT make for out of mind. It seems certain that he’s plotting a particularly nefarious revenge, and the Guardians suspect he might have gone underground. But how can they find him there?

Enter E. Aster Bunnymund, the only emissary of the fabled brotherhood of the Pookas—the league of philosophical warrior rabbits of imposing intellect and size. Highly skilled in martial arts (many of which he invented himself), Bunnymund is brilliant, logical, and a tunnel-digger extraordinaire. If the Guardians need paths near the Earth’s core, he’s their Pooka. He’s also armed with magnificent weapons of an oval-sort, and might just be able to help in the quest for the second piece of the Moonclipper.

Well, here's the second book in the series.  If you read my review of the first one, it was clear that I really enjoyed it.  And I loved this one, too.  These books are meant for about junior high level maybe, but there's so much to them that anyone can enjoy them, providing they haven't grown up so much that they think themselves above fairy tales.

This time we learn about E. Aster Bunnymund, the Easter bunny.  Bunnymund has invented pretty much everything useful used on Earth and will continue to do so if the book's hints are anything to go by.  He has a serious nature, but he slowly warms up to Katherine, North and even Ombric as the book goes on and he helps them find the next relic and fight against Pitch.

The writing itself hasn't changed; as I said earlier, it's like a fairy tale, telling the true origins of characters that everyone knows.  This time around, we even get hints as to Katherine's fate; she writes more stories that are common nursery rhymes and gets a goose.  Mother Goose?  Maybe.  I guess only time will tell.

Though it has the quality of a fairy tale, the writing has plenty of suspenseful parts as well, leaving you genuinely worried about the characters, such as when the Guardians get back to Santoff Clausen and find that Pitch has already gotten to the villagers and turned them into enslaved dolls.  Things don't always go perfectly, and that's the sign of a story told well, in my opinion.

There's only one more book in this series out right now, and the review for that one will be coming soon.

Feature and Follow Friday!

Feature and Follow Friday is a weekly blogging meme hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read.  It's designed to help people network and gain followers, as well as let us get to know each other a little better!

This week's question:

Confess your blogger sins! Is there anything as a newbie blogger that you’ve done, that as you gained more experience you were like — oops?

The blogs I used to run were never very popular because I'm kind of... too shy to promote myself to others? I suppose that would be a blogger sin: not putting yourself out there.  I'm still learning the ins and outs of book blogging so I hope I'm not doing anything bad right now!  Although I wouldn't be surprised if I was.