cantwaitwednesday – Among the Authors

Waiting on Wednesday: Toil & Trouble

Waiting on Wednesdays spotlights highly anticipated upcoming releases, and was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. Since Jill is no longer hosting, I’m now joining up with Can’t Wait Wednesday at Wishful Endings. Check it out, and leave a link to your “can’t wait” book of the week!

This week for Waiting on Wednesday, I’m doing something I haven’t done before – I’m highlighting an anthology! Anthologies aren’t usually my go-to reading material because if I really enjoy a story, I want to live in it for so much longer than a short story. However, there are plenty of reasons to look forward to this exceptional young adult collection…

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RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 28, 2018

Summary (via Goodreads)

A young adult fiction anthology of 15 stories featuring contemporary, historical, and futuristic stories featuring witchy heroines who are diverse in race, class, sexuality, religion, geography, and era.

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

Glinda the Good Witch. Elphaba the Wicked Witch. Willow. Sabrina. Gemma Doyle. The Mayfair Witches. Ursula the Sea Witch. Morgan le Fey. The three weird sisters from Macbeth.

History tells us women accused of witchcraft were often outsiders: educated, independent, unmarried, unwilling to fall in line with traditional societal expectations.

Bold. Powerful. Rebellious.

A bruja’s traditional love spell has unexpected results. A witch’s healing hands begin to take life instead of giving it when she ignores her attraction to a fellow witch. In a terrifying future, women are captured by a cabal of men crying witchcraft and the one true witch among them must fight to free them all. In a desolate past, three orphaned sisters prophesize for a murderous king. Somewhere in the present, a teen girl just wants to kiss a boy without causing a hurricane.

From good witches to bad witches, to witches who are a bit of both, this is an anthology of diverse witchy tales from a collection of diverse, feminist authors. The collective strength of women working together—magically or mundanely–has long frightened society, to the point that women’s rights are challenged, legislated against, and denied all over the world. Toil & Trouble delves deep into the truly diverse mythology of witchcraft from many cultures and feminist points of view, to create modern and unique tales of witchery that have yet to be explored.

Why I’m Waiting:

Like many other women, I really enjoy stories about witches. Whether it’s Hermione Granger or the Sanderson Sisters, I’m all about magical and mystical characters. From those just discovering their powers to those who wield power like a sword, these women are intriguing, complex, and they reject the ordinary. I can remember reading and rereading Roald Dahl’s The Witches as a child, and instead of rooting for the main character as he took on an entire gathering of witches, I just wanted to figure out how I too could become a witch and turn boys into mice.

Witches tend to be very strong, female characters, and an entire collection of diverse stories that delve into their myth and legend sounds right up my alley. Luckily, I was just granted an ARC copy from the publisher, so if you’re looking forward to this one as much as I am, go ahead and subscribe to Among the Authors (at the top of this page on the right) so that you’ll be updated when I post my review a little closer to publication time. I can’t wait to get started reading it!

Waiting on Wednesday: Smoke & Iron

If you’ve been a follower of my blog, you probably know by now that I’m a huge fan of the Great Library series by Rachel Caine. I even have a signed poster of the series hanging over my desk as I type this. If you’re not familiar with the series by now, it starts with Ink & Bone, then its sequel Paper & Fire, and then what many people thought would be the end (it wasn’t!) Ash & Quill. It gives me great joy knowing that we are now less than a month away from the release of book four, Smoke & Iron (and even more joy knowing that an ARC copy just arrived in my inbox). I’ve heard that there will be five books total in the series, but I for one have my fingers crossed that the story won’t end there.

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RELEASE DATE: JULY 3, 2018

Summary (via Goodreads)

“The opening moves of a deadly game have begun. Jess Brightwell has put himself in direct peril, with only his wits and skill to aid him in a game of cat and mouse with the Archivist Magister of the Great Library. With the world catching fire, and words printed on paper the spark that lights rebellion, it falls to smugglers, thieves, and scholars to save a library thousands of years in the making…if they can stay alive long enough to outwit their enemies”

Why I’m Waiting:

It seems like every time a new book in this series is about to be released, I’m in a reading slump. While I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m in one right now (as evidenced by my current marathoning of the Shades of Magic series), I am definitely in one in regards to the young adult genre. YA is usually my go-to genre, and I’ve uncovered so many incredible titles that have found a forever home on my shelves.

But lately? Not so much. I’ve combed through pages and pages of upcoming releases in the YA genre, and there aren’t many titles that stand out to me. I want something different. I want a story that really grabs me. I’ve struggled to find that in many of the descriptions.

That’s why I’m so thankful that it won’t be long before I’ll be rejoining Jess Brightwell and friends. Each book has been fresh and unique. The world is so finely crafted and the characters so well developed that even when you finish the last page, the story stays with you. The Great Library always revives my faith in the genre, and it tells a story that’s exciting for all ages.

If you haven’t started the series, now’s the time! Happy reading!

Check out my reviews of the rest of the series:
Ink & Bone
Paper & Fire
Ash & Quill

Add Smoke & Iron to your To Be Read List on Goodreads

Waiting on Wednesday: The Cabin at the End of the World

I read Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts last year and walked around for days afterward with the ultimate book hangover. It was incredibly suspenseful, twisted, and I just couldn’t stop talking about it to everyone I knew (or to total strangers). Seriously, if you haven’t read it yet, GET ON IT. You won’t be disappointed. Tremblay has a delightfully dark writing style that I’m hoping will also be present in his June release, The Cabin at the End of the World.

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RELEASE DATE: June 26, 2018

Summary (via Goodreads)

The Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts adds an inventive twist to the home invasion horror story in a heart-palpitating novel of psychological suspense that recalls Stephen King’s Misery, Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood, and Jack Ketchum’s cult hit The Girl Next Door.

Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road.

One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault”. Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: “Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world.”

Why I’m Waiting

Tremblay has a habit of taking the played out horror tropes and reinventing them in new and creative ways. In A Head Full of Ghosts he took the idea of possession and combined it with the scary world of reality television. Now, in The Cabin at the End of the World, he pulls the suspense from a home invasion story and ups the tension by making it also a story of an apocalypse. I am really looking forward to seeing how those stories meld together in The Cabin at the End of the World. If it’s half as good as A Head Full of Ghosts, I can already picture myself reading Tremblay’s entire collection of work.

Click Here to add The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay to your To Be Read Shelf on Goodreads.

Waiting on Wednesday: The Perfect Mother

I’ve only recently discovered my deep love of thrillers, and I’m starting to think I can’t get enough of them. The darker, the better. When I saw the summary for The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy, I knew immediately that it would fit the bill. Even better, there’s a short wait for this one, as it’s releasing in just six days.

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RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2018

Summary (via Goodreads)
An addictive psychological thriller about a group of women whose lives become unexpectedly connected when one of their newborns goes missing.

They call themselves the May Mothers—a collection of new moms who gave birth in the same month. Twice a week, with strollers in tow, they get together in Prospect Park, seeking refuge from the isolation of new motherhood; sharing the fears, joys, and anxieties of their new child-centered lives.

When the group’s members agree to meet for drinks at a hip local bar, they have in mind a casual evening of fun, a brief break from their daily routine. But on this sultry Fourth of July night during the hottest summer in Brooklyn’s history, something goes terrifyingly wrong: one of the babies is abducted from his crib. Winnie, a single mom, was reluctant to leave six-week-old Midas with a babysitter, but the May Mothers insisted that everything would be fine. Now Midas is missing, the police are asking disturbing questions, and Winnie’s very private life has become fodder for a ravenous media.

Though none of the other members in the group are close to the reserved Winnie, three of them will go to increasingly risky lengths to help her find her son. And as the police bungle the investigation and the media begin to scrutinize the mothers in the days that follow, damaging secrets are exposed, marriages are tested, and friendships are formed and fractured.

Why I’m Waiting

The reviews coming out for this book tout it as a perfect binge read for the summer. Forget summer, I want to binge read it right now! The summary does make me wonder if it will be something like Jessica Strawser’s Not That I Could Tell (which I’ll eventually finish, but has sat on my nightstand for a few weeks now). Even though The Perfect Mother isn’t out yet, it’s already becoming a movie starring Kerry Washington, leading to more hype for this new release. Now, normally I don’t follow the hype, but I might have to for this one because I can’t help but judge a book by that gorgeous cover!

What are you waiting on this week? Let me know in the comments! 🙂

Click here to add The Perfect Mother to your To Be Read Shelf on Goodreads!