Tag: jackaby

DOORS open in less than 7 weeks!

doors-cover

Beyond the Doors hits the brick and mortar bookshelves on August 1!

You can, of course, already pre-order it on Amazon should you feel the need. School Library Journal says of it: “the characters are well developed, the plot intriguing, and the pace well suited to middle grade readers. Minor characters add realism as well as laughs. VERDICT An entertaining romp.”

Well heck, who doesn’t love an entertaining romp?

One odd thing I’ve noticed is how the passage of time seems bent or warped depending on how I look at upcoming events. I have a bunch of stuff going on in July that even today still seems far away. Yet it also feels like the publication of Beyond the Doors is right around the corner. And yet, all that stuff that feels like it’s so far away has to come and go before the thing right around the corner can happen.

Where’s a TARDIS when you need one?

While you all wait with baited breath and hook for Beyond the Doors, here are a few good MG reads I’ve encountered recently.

Product Details Ghostly Echoes is the third of William Ritter’s Jackaby novels. Jackaby is a paranormal investigator in New England in the early 1800s. The series is written in first person from the POV of his new assistant, Abigail Rook. The whole series is a great read, and it does some interesting things with the whole “paranormal investigator” concept. But book three takes the series in a totally new direction. I was a bit taken aback at the unexpected shift, but by the end I was loving it and can’t wait for #4.

Product Details Heap House is the first book in Edward Carey’s Iremonger trilogy and it is deliciously weird. It takes place… well… there’s maybe, sort of, a Victorian vibe about it. There’s this house, mansion really, located all alone in the middle of massive piles of garbage. The garbage is added to the heaps from nearby London continuously, and the Iremongers who live in the house (the ‘Heap House’ if you will) are all totally and utterly rich and bizarre and they all carry their birth objects around with them and that doesn’t even begin to describe the mad insanity which doth run amok on the pages. Think Roald Dahl meets Lemony Snicket meets Tim Burton with an obvious Danny Elfman score. It rocks.

Product Details Motley Education follows the adventures of a young girl who can talk to ghosts, but only to three of them. She’s at a school where everybody has some sort of talent, manipulating the world around them as it were. What sets this book apart from all the other “school of magic kids” books is that it is steeped in Norse mythology. It’s fun to really get a chance to explode Yggdrasil and take it seriously, as opposed to how it comes off in the Riorden books. There’s also a nice element of spooky in Motley Education, which makes for a fun read.

 

New Title for Book Two!

So a couple of months ago I announced the title of my second MG book (due out next August). It was… Doors!

Except now it’s not. The new-and-improved, pretty-much-official, title of the book is now:

Beyond the Doors

The adventure of the Rothbaum children begins August 1, 2017!

I’ve seen some of the preliminary art for the book and it is fantastic.When I’m given the OK, I’ll share some of it with everyone.

In other news, Awesome Agent just gave his thumbs-up to my next book, which is now moving on to the next step of the creative process–sending it to Excellent Editor and crossing our fingers. I’m very excited about Book Three–which, unlike Beyond the Doors, has a ready-made title attached to it that shall be revealed in due time. As it is early in the process, there is very little I can say about it.

But I will say it involves a young girl, horrific mayhem, random, localized wind events, and a giant eyeball.

That out of the way, I want to mention a few really great books I’ve been reading. First up is The Blackthorn Key by Kevin Sands.

Set in 1665 London, this fantastic mystery follows a young apothecary’s apprentice into a world of mystery, clues, codes, and danger. I highly, highly recommend it. I was actually very excited because I finished it and thought to myself,  “I wonder if there’s a sequel? I hope there’s a sequel. There must be a sequel!” So I looked. There’s a sequel. It was published three days ago, on September 6th.

Kismet!

Next up is a really fun story set in 1892 New England. Jackaby, by William Ritter.

A young woman, scandalously on her own, begins working for R.F. Jackaby, an investigator of the unexplained. Ritter builds a great cast of characters and a fun world in which to settle in and enjoy. There are two others in the series, so I’ll be getting those soon.

The third book I finished recently is R.L. Lafevers’ Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos.

This one is set in 1906 London and follows young Theodosia, who has basically grown up in the museum where both of her parents work, specifically in the Ancient Egyptian wing. She can ‘see’ curses on all the artifacts her mother brings back from various digs and does what she can to dis-spell them along with her cat, Isis. Then, of course, she falls into a massive plot that could destroy the world and she, and she alone, can save us all. This was published in 2008, so there are a number of addition adventures of Theodosia which I shall need to explore.

Looking back at these three, all of which I enjoyed, I am struck by the fact that they are all historical fiction. I never would have thought that I was attracted to historical fiction, and I did not set out to find such, but I have really enjoyed entering these past worlds. Perhaps I’ll find a time period in which to write a book of my own someday. A few come to mind. I mean nasty things have happened all through history, right? Which should I confine the horror to our own modern day?