Taste Trailer Reveal + Excerpt

Hi everyone! Today you’re in for a treat! In February, I featured Taste by Kate Evangelista as my Waitingon Wednesday pick. Today is the trailer reveal for Taste. ;)

But for those of you who don’t know about to Taste yet, here’s the blurb:

Add Taste on Goodreads

At Barinkoff Academy, there's only one rule: no students on campus after curfew. Phoenix McKay soon finds out why when she is left behind at sunset. A group calling themselves night students threaten to taste her flesh until she is saved by a mysterious, alluring boy. With his pale skin, dark eyes, and mesmerizing voice, Demitri is both irresistible and impenetrable. He warns her to stay away from his dangerous world of flesh eaters. Unfortunately, the gorgeous and playful Luka has other plans.

When Phoenix is caught between her physical and her emotional attraction, she becomes the keeper of a deadly secret that will rock the foundations of an ancient civilization living beneath Barinkoff Academy. Phoenix doesn’t realize until it is too late that the closer she gets to both Demitri and Luka the more she is plunging them all into a centuries old feud.

It sounds awesome, right?? I’m so excited for this post because…believe it or not, this is also my first chance to see the trailer.

Song Credits: "Hunger" © Noelle Pico.

Youcan download the full song here.

And if you still want more after that, here’s an excerpt.

Note: This excerpt is really important to me because when I was beta-reading Taste (it was entitled Lunar Heat back then, this was one of my favorite scenes):

Taste Excerpt

I mentally stomped on the intimidation their perfection brought into my mind and said, “Excuse me.”

The group froze, startled by my words. The girls had their brows raised and the boys stopped mid-speech, mouths agape. They stared at me with eyes the shade of onyx stones.

I smiled and gave them a little wave.

The boy a step ahead of the rest recovered first. His stunning features went from shocked surprise to intense interest. He reminded me of a hawk eyeing its prey. I gulped.

“A Day Student,” he said, his eyes insolent and excited.

Something about the way he said “Day Student” made my stomach flip. “Excuse me?”

They snickered. The boys looked at each other while the girls continued to stare, muffling their laughter by delicate hands. I seemed to be the butt of some joke. 

“You broke the rule.” The boy’s grin turned predatory.

The students formed a loose semi-circle in front of me. My gaze darted from face to face. Hunger filled their eyes. The image of lions about to chase down a gazelle came to mind. I mentally shook my head. I was in the mountains not the Serengeti for crying out loud.

I took a small step back and cleared my throat. “Can any of you give me a ride back to the dorms?”

The boy wagged his forefinger like a metronome. “Ah, that’s unfortunate for you.”

One of the girls pinched the bridge of her nose. “Eli, you can’t possibly—”

“It’s forbidden, Eli,” another boy interrupted, pronouncing the word “forbidden” like a curse.

The nervous murmur at the pit of my stomach grew louder. Six against one. Not good odds. Instinct told me to cut my losses and run. Bad enough I faced expulsion, now it seemed like weird, beautiful people who’d suddenly appeared on campus wanted to beat me up. No, scratch that. Judging from the way they studied me, beating me up wouldn’t satisfy them. Something more primal prowled behind their looks.

I definitely wasn’t going down without a fight. Years of self-defense and hand-to-hand combat classes had me prepared. While other children from rich and important families got bodyguards, I got defense training. But I think my father meant for my skills to go up against potential kidnappers, not against other students who may or may not be crazy. Oh God! Maybe I stepped into a parallel universe or something when I reentered Barinkoff.

“None of the students are supposed to be on campus,” I said. Then, realizing my mistake, I added, “Okay, I know I’m not supposed to be here either. If one of you gives me a ride back to the dorms, I won’t say anything about all this. Let’s pretend this never happened. I didn’t see you, you didn’t see me.”

“We’re not ordinary students,” Eli answered. “We’re the Night Students.”

He’d said “Night Students” like the words were capitalized. I didn’t know Barinkoff held classes at night. What was going on here?

Eli smiled with just one side of his mouth and said to the group, “She’s right, no one will have to know. We’re the only ones here. And it’s been so long, don’t you agree?”

The rest of them nodded reluctantly.

“What’s been so long?” I challenged. I fisted my hands, ready to put them up if any of them so much as twitched my way.

“Since the taste of real flesh passed through my lips,” Eli said. He came forward and took a whiff of me then laughed when I cringed.

“Flesh.” Yep, parallel universe.

“Yes,” he said. “And yours smells so fresh.”

Someone grabbed my shoulders from behind and yanked me back before I could wrap my mind around the meaning behind Eli’s words. In a blink, I found myself behind someone tall. Someone really tall. And quite broad. And very male.

I realized he wore the same clothes Eli and the other boys did. Not good. He was one of them. Although… I cocked my head, raking my gaze over him. He seemed born to wear the uniform, like he was the pattern everyone else was cut from. My eyes wandered to long, layered, blue-black hair tied at the nape by a silk ribbon. Even in dim light, his hair possessed a sheen akin to mercury.

I looked down. The boy’s long fingers were wrapped around my wrist like a cuff. His fevered touch felt hotter than human standards, hot enough to make me sweat like I was standing beside a radiator but not hot enough to burn.

“I must be mistaken, Eli,” the boy who held my arm said in a monotone. “Correct me. Did I hear you say you wanted to taste the flesh of this girl?”

A hush descended on us. It had the hairs at the back of my neck rising. How was it possible for the atmosphere to switch from threatening to dangerous? Unable to help myself, I peeked around the new guy’s bulk. Eli and his friends bowed. They all had their right hands on their chests.

“Demitri, I’m sure you misheard me,” Eli said.

So the guy standing between me and the person who said he’d wanted to taste me was named Demitri. I like the sound of his name. Demitri. So strong, yet rolls off the tongue. Definite yum factor.

“So, you imply I made a mistake?” Demitri demanded.

“No!” Eli lifted his gaze. “I did no such thing. I simply wanted to show the girl the consequences of breaking curfew.”

“Hey!” I yelled. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here!”

Demitri ignored my protest and continued to address Eli. “So, you threatened to taste her flesh.” His fingers tightened their grip around my wrist. “In the interest of investigating this matter further, I invoke the Silence.”

All six students gasped, passing surprised glances at one another.

Before I could ask about what was going on, Demitri yanked me down the hall toward the library. But why there? Oh, maybe we were getting my things. No, wait, he couldn’t have known about that. Everything was too confusing now.

Eli and the others didn’t try to stop us when we passed them. Demitri’s cold command must have carried power. Handsome and powerful, never a bad combination on a guy.

We reached the heavy double doors in seconds. He jerked one open effortlessly. I’d needed all my strength just to squeeze through that same door earlier. To him, the thick wood might as well have been cardboard. I raised an eyebrow and mentally listed the benefits of going to gym class.

“Why are we here?” I asked after my curiosity overpowered my worry. I’d almost forgotten how frightened I’d been right before Demitri showed up. I wasn’t above accepting help from strangers. Especially from gorgeous dark-haired strangers with hot hands and wide shoulders.

Demitri kept going, tugging me along, snaking his way deeper into the library. I had to take two steps for every stride his legs made. I tried to stay directly behind him, praying we didn’t slam into anything.

He stopped suddenly and I collided with him. It felt like slamming into a wall.

“Hey,” I said, momentarily stunned. “A little warning would be nice!”

He faced me, and I gasped. His eyes resembled a starless night, deep and endless. Their intensity drilled through me without pity, seeming to expose all my secrets. I felt naked and flustered beneath his gaze.

“You could have died back there,” he warned.

A lump of panic rebuilt itself in my throat.

I remember reading THAT and wanting more! Demitri is just so..nice. ;) And after reading it again now, I can't wait to get my hands on Taste!

About Kate:

When Kate Evangelista was told she had a knack for writing stories, she did the next best thing: entered medical school. After realizing she wasn't going to be the next Doogie Howser, M.D., Kate wandered into the Literature department of her university and never looked back. Today, she is in possession of a piece of paper that says to the world she owns a Literature degree. To make matters worse, she took Master's courses in creative writing. In the end, she realized to be a writer, none of what she had mattered. What really mattered? Writing. Plain and simple, honest to God, sitting in front of her computer, writing. Today, she has four completed Young Adult novels.

Stalk Kate: Website | Twitter | Facebook

Review: Delirium by Lauren Oliver

Book Description via Goodreads:

Paperback, 441 pages

February 7, 2012, Harper Teen

Before scientists found the cure, people thought love was a good thing. They didn’t understand that once love -- the deliria -- blooms in your blood, there is no escaping its hold. Things are different now. Scientists are able to eradicate love, and the government demands that all citizens receive the cure upon turning eighteen. Lena Holoway has always looked forward to the day when she’ll be cured. A life without love is a life without pain: safe, measured, predictable, and happy.

But with ninety-five days left until her treatment, Lena does the unthinkable: She falls in love.

Source: Bought

My Thoughts:

The story world that Oliver built was a very believable one, backed up by the epigraphs at the beginning of every chapter. The concept of amor deliria nervosa was fresh, unique and so terrifying. Love, any kind of love, was a disease. Imagine any trace of affection erased from your world. It would be like talking to someone without really reaching out, without really connecting. The thought of being detached and being numb after getting cured, of not being the same person again, was too scary for me.

Lena was an average girl. She liked to call herself ‘in between’ – not pretty nor ugly, just plain simple. Her mom committed suicide after remaining tormented by the disease after three attempts to get cured and since then, her aunt Carol took her and her sister, Rachel, in. She lived with them and acted as polite and obedient as possible. She has been counting down to the day of her procedure, the day when she would be cured at last. She looked forward to it, wanted to be safe from the disease, wanted to be safe from the fate of her mother. Lena was a likable character but I have to admit that in the beginning, I didn’t like her that much. But Lena started changing after she met Alex.

Alex was a guard working for the government. But there was something about his stance, his eyes and his words that convinced Lena that he was different. True enough, he was not a simple rule-following, rule-implementing guard, he was more than that. At first, there was just a mild attraction tossed in with irritation between the two. But his wild bright auburn hair, his gleaming eyes, his warmth and his natural charms made Lena fall for him. He was different from all the other boys – he was daring, thinking, laughing, feeling, and most of all, he was alive. Their relationship was the sweet first relationship sort with heightened intensity and urgency due to the danger and the risk they were in every time they were together but for the two of them, it was all worth it.

I loved how Lena grew in Delirium. In the beginning, she was so eager to get the cure, so eager to be saved from the possibility of her having amor deliria nervosa and so against breaking the rules. But meeting Alex changed her in a way that meeting other people couldn’t and wouldn’t possibly do. She fell in love with him and amor deliria nervosa – the very thing that she wanted to be saved from – changed her. Together with Alex, she broke the rules, embraced freedom, life and love, and saw the world through a different lens. Instead of seeing a safe, secure and peaceful world, she saw an unfeeling, numb, detached world. Everyone seemed to have a bubble surrounding them, protecting them from the rest of the world and at the same time, preventing them from really touching, reaching out to people on a deep, emotional level.

Delirium is a beautifully written dystopian romance that will sweep you off your feet. I love, love, love Lauren Oliver’s writing. It’s too beautiful! Fans of Matched by Ally Condie and Before I Fall will love this one. However, this book is more suited for readers who aren’t looking for a kickass, action-filled, fast-paced dystopian. Delirium dwells on every moment of Lena’s life. Imagine pausing a video and zooming inside the character’s mind. I think that’s the best way to describe it. I highly recommend it!

 

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Review: Growing Pains: Kendra's Diaries by K.P. Smith

Book Description via Goodreads:

Ebook, 286 pages

May 25, 2011, Doin It Publishing

Growing Pains; Kendras Dairies is the first book in the series chronicling the journey of Kendra Foster from adolescence to adulthood.I aspire to encourage, entertain, and inspire young adults. Life has its ups and downs, its bumps and its bruises. But with perseverance, determination, and faith you can be all you were born to be. Never Give Up.

Source: Author (Thank you!)

My Thoughts:

Kendra was a typical teen with an average not-so-perfect life. She had things to be confident about and things to complain about. She was conscious about her looks. But unlike most typical tweens, Kendra was not boy crazy. She was more hardwired to pursue her dream. I liked this about her. She kept trying again and again. She lifted herself up and gave cheerleading another go.

I liked how the author weaved different kinds of relationships in the novel: Kendra’s relationship with her mom – how her mom somewhat burdened her daughter instead of fostering a close relationship with her; Kendra’s relationship with her dad – they were not close and it was strained because Kendra and her dad never talk about real, deep father-daughter stuff; and Kendra’s relationship with her younger sister, Patrice, – how Kendra anchored her sister, gave her comfort and gave her a sanctuary. The issues, the weight, complications and consequences of these relationships added pressure to Kendra.

From time to time, I want to get hooked on reality with realistic fiction like this. The years have passed but I think that girls still deal with the same problems especially nowadays when a perfect family life is rare. They would be able to relate what Kendra was going through. The only thing that I didn’t like about Growing Pains was how the dramatic, life-altering scenes were carried out. I felt that the scenes would’ve been better if they were done a bit differently – with more drama, more length, more focus on Kendra’s feelings and how they flickered from one to another, more focus on how her world shifted a little bit when something big happened. I wanted to see Kendra pause. I wanted to see more of Kendra’s soft, vulnerable and thoughtful side during these scenes.

Overall, Growing Pains is about a girl’s journey through everything that the world threw at her, towards maturity and towards her dreams. Growing Pains would appeal to preteens (tweens) and young teens but I think adults will appreciate this as well.

Rating:

 

Waiting on Wednesday: Grasping at Eternity and Splintered

Hi everyone! Today I have two exceptional, awesome-sounding books for you.

 

Grasping at Eternity by Karen Amanda Hooper

Publication Date: May 2012

Leave it to Maryah Woodsen to break the one rule that will screw up eternity: Never erase your memories.

Before entering this life, Maryah did the unthinkable—she erased. Now, at seventeen years old, she’s clueless that her new adoptive family has known her for centuries, that they are perpetually reincarnated souls, and that they have supernatural abilities. Oh, and she's supposed to love (not despise) Nathan, the green-eyed daredevil who saved her life.

Nathan is convinced his family’s plan to spark Maryah's memory is hopeless, but his love for her is undying. After spending (and remembering) so many lifetimes together, being around an empty version of his soulmate is heart shattering. He hates acting like a stalker, but has no choice because the evil outcast who murdered Maryah in their last lifetime is still after her.

While Maryah’s hunter inches closer, she and Nathan make assumptions and hide secrets that rip them further apart. Maryah has to believe in the magic within her, Nathan must have faith in the power of their love, and both need to grasp onto the truth before they lose each other forever—and discover just how lonely eternity can be.

X-MEN meets MY NAME IS MEMORY in Karen Amanda Hooper’s latest young adult release. Coming in May of 2012.

Why I Chose this:

I love Karen Hooper! She wrote the amazing, addicting Tangled Tides! (which has so many handsome mermen ;) And memory problems, undying love and magic in one novel? I want! 

Splintered by A.G. Howard

Publication Date: January 1, 2013

Published by : Amulet Books

For sixteen years, Alyssa Gardner has lived with the stigma of being descended from Alice Liddell -- the real life inspiration for Lewis Carroll's famed novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But cruel jokes about dormice and tea parties can’t compare to the fact that Alyssa hears the whispers of bugs and flowers ... the same quirk which sent her mother to a mental institution years before.

When her mother takes a turn for the worse and the whispers grow too strong for Alyssa to bear, she seeks the origins of their family curse. A set of heirlooms and a moth tied to an unusual website lead Alyssa and her gorgeous best friend / secret crush, Jeb, down the rabbit hole into the real Wonderland, a place more twisted and eerie than Lewis Carroll ever let on.

There, creepy counterparts of the original fairytale crew reveal the purpose for Alyssa’s journey, and unless she fixes the things her great-great-great grandmother Alice put wrong, Wonderland will have her head.

Why I Chose This:

It sounds so twisted! Love it! And there’s a gorgeous best friend/ secret crush? I like.

What about you? What are you waiting for this Wednesday?

Review: Struck by Jennifer Bosworth

Book Description via Goodreads:

ARC,

May 8, 2012, Farrar, Straus and Giroux BYR

Mia Price is a lightning addict. She’s survived countless strikes, but her craving to connect to the energy in storms endangers her life and the lives of those around her.

Los Angeles, where lightning rarely strikes, is one of the few places Mia feels safe from her addiction. But when an earthquake devastates the city, her haven is transformed into a minefield of chaos and danger. The beaches become massive tent cities. Downtown is a crumbling wasteland, where a traveling party moves to a different empty building each night, the revelers drawn to the destruction by a force they cannot deny. Two warring cults rise to power, and both see Mia as the key to their opposing doomsday prophecies. They believe she has a connection to the freak electrical storm that caused the quake, and to the far more devastating storm that is yet to come.

Mia wants to trust the enigmatic and alluring Jeremy when he promises to protect her, but she fears he isn’t who he claims to be. In the end, the passion and power that brought them together could be their downfall. When the final disaster strikes, Mia must risk unleashing the full horror of her strength to save the people she loves, or lose everything.

Source: Netgalley (ebook), Ksenia, Macmillan (print ARC) (Thank you!!)

My Thoughts:

Struck is definitely one of a kind. There was no virus. There were no zombies. There was no killing spree. Struck was an honest to goodness new fresh take of the end of the world. Imagine being thrust into a world where there was a man who claimed himself to be the Prophet of God having a show on television three times a day that basically told you the world was going to end really soon and if you haven’t taken his word as the word of God, you’ll surely go to hell. Here’s the thing about Prophet. He predicted the time that the earthquake will hit Los Angeles a few moments before it happened. That was just freaky.

Mia Price was a not-so-ordinary girl. She was a lightning addict. I don’t think she was really masochistic – I just think that Mia, who has been struck by lightning over and over again, was accustomed to the pain. Mia was driven by her want to be one with something greater than her and this drove her to spread her hands up in the air and reach out to lightning. She was filled with panic, anger, disappointment and a strong sense of protectiveness for her brother and mother. She was also one of the most consistent and realistic characters I’ve ever met. I like how she stood her ground and kept the same opinion about the things around her. Being logical and realistic, she was not easily swayed. She knew her facts and she knew risk management. Plus, she could shoot red lightning bolts out of her hands and that’s pretty cool.

Jeremy was the Clark-Kent-glasses-wearing, blue-eyed handsome stranger in Mia’s life. He kept popping everywhere – at school and at home – in a semi-stalkerish manner but he has a reason to do so. Jeremy was hard to figure out. He was mysterious with his holding back and his gift. I knew he had tons of secrets and I was dying to know them all. But he was quite tight-lipped about them. On the other hand, he had this soft, sweet and tortured side. He had many faces and he kept me guessing about his true intentions. To other people, it might seem that Jeremy and Mia had instalove. But these two teens lived in the very problematic, depressing post-apocalyptic LA. If you knew the world was about to end in just a few days, would you hold back, would you let the chance of getting to know a person slip through your fingers? Sometimes love happens fast, especially if your life is chaotic.

One of the things that made Struck stand out for me was the religious theme. There were two sides: the believers and the seekers. The Followers of ‘Prophet’ wore all white. They were kind, gentle and helpful especially when they were recruiting people. But don’t worry, Struck was written in a non-preachy way. The Seekers, on the other hand, wore red cloaks and black masks. It sounds sinister, right? Both of them appeared to be cults – two opposing teams bent on recruiting as many people as they could on their sides. The tug-of-war of the two sides brought out the good and bad in them. I enjoyed reading about them even though they freaked me out a little. Mia was stuck in the middle of these two. She was the most wanted recruit but she didn’t want to be a part of either team. But could she really resist if her family would be dragged into the equation?

Struck is a well-written post-apocalyptic debut that burned with panic, desperation and chaos, ignited doubt and love, and zigzagged its way to my heart. I highly recommend this to dystopian and post-apocalyptic readers!

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