The Secret Journeys of Jack London by Christopher Golden & Tim Lebbon

Are you ready to take a journey into the wild?

Bestselling authors Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon have teamed up to create THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON. Jack certainly lived a wild life, which inspired Golden & Lebbon to create this new book series based on his real-life travels. They've taken his true stories and his fiction and mixed in urban legends and myths of the time. While THE SECRET JOURNEYS series is fiction, not biography, the books are extremely well-researched, and spooky elements add another level of intrigue to the richly detailed stories.

But don't just take my word for it -- check out the awesome reviews in VOYA (5Q 4P) and Booklist ("Golden and Lebbon's gamble is peppering their story with the fantastic and the supernatural, and it pays off in this gung-ho series starter...Golden and Lebbon write with gritty assurance. Best of all, this first chapter kicks the door wide open for almost anything in book two.") Also, 20th Century Fox has acquired the film rights to the series, and don't you want to read the books before the movie comes out?

The first book, THE WILD, is now available. (Get it from IndieBound!) When seventeen-year-old Jack London travels to Alaska to join the Klondike Gold Rush, the path he treads is not at all what he expected. Along the way, he encounters kidnappers, traders, traitors, and a mysterious wolf. Jack must face the wild head-on in order to survive.

I had the pleasure of setting up and kicking off the blog tour for THE WILD. Drop by all of the stops on the tour to learn more about the authors, the illustrators, the Gold Rush, urban legends, and, of course, Jack London.

* Little Willow interviews the authors at Bildungsroman
* Tim Lebbon blogs at Lectitans with Kiba Rika
* Kim Baccellia interviews the authors for Si, Se Puede! and reviews the book for Young Adults Book Central (YABC blog)
* Discover the secrets behind the creation of the book's cover with Melissa Walker, author of Small Town Sinners and readergirlz diva
* The authors chat with Justin, another GLW poster, at Little Shop of Stories
* The authors swing by Rebecca's Book Blog
* Martha Brockenbrough picks the brains of Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon...and considers what Jack London may have said
* Martha Brockenbrough interviews Jordan Brown
* Martha reveals The Evolution of a Monster
* Golden and Lebbon visit Brian Keene, author and journalist

Want to help spread the word about this action-packed new series? Download the electronic press kit for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON.

2012 Update: Check out my review of The Secret Journeys of Jack London, Book Two: The Sea Wolves.

Pick-Up Game edited by Marc Aronson and Charles R. Smith Jr.

It's not just basketball games that go down at The Cage, the fenced-in court on West 4th Street in New York City. In Pick-Up Game: A Full Day of Full Court, nine short stories introduce a handful of players and spectators there on one July day.

I'm calling Charles R. Smith the point guard in Pick-Up Game, since it's his photographs and poems that lead in to the stories that comprise the book. Told in different voices, from different perspectives, each story picks up where the previous story leaves off. As co-editor Marc Aronson writes in the Afterword, "We chose the setting and the date and gave each author a time slot. Each author knew who was on the court because we didn't let an author write a new story until the previous one was done. Each writer came on the court knowing who was playing, who had won, but ready to tell his or her own story." (p. 164)

Nothing by Janne Teller

Sometimes reading a book can be like sticking a wet finger into an electrical outlet. Some books – not many, but some – have the power to zap you across the room. And not necessarily from great writing or characters, but from the sheer boldness of the story or the scope of the subject matter. The amazing novel Push by Sapphire is like that. Nothing is also an electrical outlet book; it shocks you and blows your synapses into overdrive. Is it a good book? Yes. It is a great book? Probably not. Is it worth reading? Absolutely.

Nothing is not for the faint at heart or perhaps for some who take their religion seriously. This book, like my previously reviewed book, the brilliant, Tales of the Madman Underground, will just about never set foot into a classroom. I’m sure it will at some point, and when that happens the censors will come crawling (and clawing) from every direction. The fact that a school or parents would try to ban it is even more reason to read it.

Christopher Rowe Interview

As I mentioned in my review of the novel Sandstorm last Thursday, author Christopher Rowe is a friend. He's also one of the most interesting guys I know when it comes to talking about books, especially fantasy and science fiction. His knowledge is deep and broad, and if you ever have a chance to go hear him read, he's fantastic. After conducting the interview, though, I realized I never knew just how much thought he as an author has put into figuring out what the books he read as a teen still mean to him and for him today.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend

Way before I went through my own angsty teen phase, and long before I had ever even heard of a guy named Holden Caulfield, I was absolutely devoted to another teenage wonder. He is the namesake of the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾.

Living in lower-middle class England in the early 1980’s, Adrian is a curious guy just trying to figure out what do with his life. Adrian doesn’t want to be a punk like his friend Nigel, he doesn’t want any more spots on his face, and he definitely doesn’t want to take up drinking after hearing the disgusting noises he heard his parents make downstairs on New Years Eve. He thinks that he wants to be an intellectual, but he’s still not quite sure what that requires…possibly some poetry.

Adios, Nirvana by Conrad Wesselhoeft

Does it count as required reading if you assign a book to yourself? Even if it doesn't, I would still have to read Conrad Wesselhoeft's Adios, Nirvana.

There's the guitar-o'-fire cover that alone would compel some of us to give it a read, and there's the main character's bond with his buddies -- his "thicks" -- that leaps right out at you from the novel's very first lines ("Hey, man, get down!" "Dude, don't be an idiot!"). But for me, there's more to it than that.

When you think Dark do you think Dark Beer?

I've mentioned in a prior blog entry how much I enjoy the work of Tim Powers (if Pirates of the Caribbean 4 is any good, it will be because the based some of it on his excellent On Stranger Tides). One of my favorite of his books is Drawing of the Dark... which is a terrific blend of beer and Arthurian lore and magic. Yes, I said beer

The Floating Islands by Rachel Neumeier

In The Floating Islands Trei‘s world is falling apart. His home is destroyed in a natural disaster, leaving him without a family and grieving the loss of his talented sister. After an Aunt and Uncle closer to home decides not to take him in, he leaves on a long journey to Milendri, one of The Floating Islands.

As his ship approaches the exotic lands, Trei is astonished by The Floating Islands and the dragon magic that keeps them hovering above the ocean. When he sees the kajurai glide over his ship, he desires more than anything to become one of the men who fly through the sky with wings made of feathers.

Once there, he attempts to settle in with his Uncle Serfei and Aunt Edona and cousin Araene, who acts cold towards him at the beginning. Eventually they bond, as Trei leaves for a chance to become a kajurai and Araene secretly stumbles upon a society of magicians and her own magical powers.

Loyalties are strained as Trei begins training to be a kajurai. Rumors of war between Trei’s birth place and his new home become reality and The Floating Islands are not prepared to withhold the powerful attacking navy. Araene and Trei become integral parts in whether the islands can survive.

I love fantasy books with a clear sense of place and history, with J.R.R. Tolkien being the obvious master. Neumeier creates a vivid and unique world, which I would put on a level of some of my favorites like Sharon Shinn, Kristin Cashore and Shannon Hale. At times the plot builds very slowly, but this is a good, exciting fantasy.

Fans of book like Incarceron by Catherine Fisher and Monster Blood Tattoo by D.M. Cornish will enjoy The Floating Islands.

Annexed by Sharon Dogar

Sharon Dogar's novel, Annexed, presents the story within Anne Frank's famous diary through a new, imagined perspective. Peter van Pels was the teenage boy who shared the Annex with the Franks and his parents. In this novel, Dogar tells the story of their struggle for survival through Peter's eyes. This dramatic shift in point of view has the potential to influence readers' perception of Anne's story, and that fact is part of why there has been some controversy around the release of this book. You should take a few minutes now or later to read some of the opinions (1, 2), and then Dogar's response. I hadn't been aware of the discussion prior to reading the book.

I read Anne's diary at least three times when I was young, beginning when I was twelve or so. It's been a long time since I reread it. Dogar's book made me want to do that, and I hope that this response is shared by other readers. I think I need to reread the diary in order to say definitively how I feel about Annexed. I don't think that the characters - particularly Anne - come off with the same complexity as I remember in the diary, though the tone of the book often felt very much in line with the original work - tense, at times hopeful, full of frustration and barely suppressed fear.

Sandstorm by Christopher Rowe

Rowe is a Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Award finalist who has written several fantastic short stories of speculative fiction. He’s also a good friend, so when he told me his first novel was going to be a Dungeons & Dragons book, I thought, “huh. Well, at least he’s got a book coming out.”

I haven’t read a D&D novel since before the original Dragonlance books. I’ve always heard good things about those in particular, but my experience with stories based on role-playing, or even based on other kinds of properties (the Star Wars movies, or the Legend of the Five Rings CCG, or even comic books), has been rocky to say the least. It seemed that the very way in which RPGs free your imagination to create any kind of story you might want to tell somehow constrained fiction, limited it and made it feel flat and small.

Questions like this occupied my mind as I picked up Sandstorm, Christopher’s book. In the initial pages, I found myself asking whether or not characters or actions worked “in-game” or not. What might be a character’s stats? How might a fight work in terms of attack dice and hit points and initiative?

Without realizing, though, those kinds of questions and thoughts quickly faded. Instead, I asked questions like, “what’s going to happen next?” and, “how will the hero, Cephas, get out of this situation?” and, “what does the mysterious Corvus Nightfeather, a crow-headed assassin, want with Cephas?” In short, all the things you ask about a compelling, character-driven fantasy adventure.