#thrillerfest18

[authorjanellesamara-blog]

Our panel on building character relationships at #ThrillerFest18 was so much fun. Thanks to Dani Pettrey, Taylor Stevens, and Wendy Walker for their great input.

[drunkmeowbooknerd]

It was an awesome time as always at #ThrillerFest18. Such a great event for authors. George R. R. Martin is hilarious! #thrillerfest #GoT #author #couple #internationalthrillerwriters #alldressedup #georgerrmartin (at Grand Hyatt New York)

[authorjanellesamara-blog]

Sheila Sobel was kind enough to send me some photos of my panel yesterday at #ThrillerFest18 I look so upset, but that's just how my face usually looks. Lol

[authorjanellesamara-blog]

I found James L'Etoile and #notmycat at #ThrillerFest18 (at New York, New York)

[authorjanellesamara-blog]

Book Review: Appalachian Trail by Tim Wellman

I love dystopian novels. The possibilities are endless when it comes to the future. I love technical things, where math and science fuse with creativity to make a strange "maybe it could happen" novel. For a debut novel, I enjoyed this one quite a bit. Appalachian Trail by Tim Wellman was an adventure, full of mystery, suspense, and enough steampunk mechanisms to make an engineer cream their pants. 

In this novel, we find the characters in a dystopian future where all old electronics will never work again. Oil is worth far, far more than gold and there is no centralized government. Bandits roam wild over the wastelands between independent city-states. There are people known as Dark Children who were born during a period of death nearly two decades before. All of them remained small, slender, have gray hair, and purple eyes. They are also all geniuses like the world has never seen. People distrust them and they are all treated like second-class citizens. 

Pip is a dark child and Seb is a professor. Together, they embark on a journey to find more oil and make themselves rich beyond their wildest dreams. Along the road, they meet others who want to share in their adventurous undertaking, while also protecting them from the many perilous places that lie between them and their goal.

Now, I must admit, most of the technical stuff is way over my head. I'm not a gear-head and this novel is very engineering-heavy. I bought this book on my Kindle app and showed a page of it to this college kid I work with. He said that's totally something he's going to buy now. He wants to be a space engineer of some sort...I don't really know because he talks way over my head about things I don't understand because I've never studied them. Much like this book.

So, as a non-engineering person, I was lost in the many sections of detailed mechanical descriptions. About a quarter of the way through the book, I began to skim over these parts. I guess it's like people who don't care about the setting and just skim for action scenes? I really did enjoy the action scenes, though. 

I thought the characters were cute. Their banter was funny, well placed, and a little sexually charged. The genius of Pip, the dark child, is made apparent over and over as she solves problems and fixes machines she's never even seen before. 

I really enjoyed this book. It's definitely not for everyone, but then--what book is? I really hope this book finds its audience and gains a following. If you like technical stuff and engineering heavy novels, this one is totally for you!

[authorjanellesamara-blog]

Book Review: Mister Tender's Girl by Carter Wilson

Last year at ThrillerFest, I got my hands on an ARC of Carter Wilson's latest novel, Mister Tender's Girl. It just came out in February, so I'm sure you can find it in the bookstore this year. In fact, I know you can since I helped set up the bookstore. Find George R.R. Martin's books. Take a few steps left. Mister Tender's Girl is in the center row on the table. Oh, you're not at ThrillerFest? That's ok. You can buy it here. And you totally should. Let me tell you why...

Alice has spent half of her life suffering from panic attacks after two of her classmates tried to murder her with a kitchen knife because they thought a demon told them to. Alice has been running for so long, hiding to the point of changing her name and never telling anyone that she was the victim of the Mister Tender attack. Her father was the one who created the graphic novel that nearly ended her life, a fact her mother used to divorce him and move their kids to another across the Atlantic, from England to America. 

It's now fourteen years later, and she still suffers from panic attacks. She starts getting weird communications from a stalker, who seems to have been following her ever since her attack half a lifetime ago. She lives an isolated life and doesn't have any friends. She's extremely paranoid, but that comes in handy sometimes. 

I don't want to ruin anything for you by giving away more details. I really loved this book, though. I read it in only two days because I just couldn't put it down. The suspense was intense. I also loved how the opening tied into the closing. It was very well done. And even though it was an ARC I read, I found no more typos than I usually find in a completed book. (Which, I do always find at least 3 or 4 errors in pretty much every novel I read.)

Mister Tender's Girl reminded me a bit of Bone Music. Both were about a twenty-something woman who'd been damaged in her youth and was now hiding from stalkers by changing her name and moving. Both of them also faced a kill-or-be-killed moment that changed them forever. And both of them were absolutely fantastic! Buy this book. Seriously. You'll love it. 

[authorjanellesamara-blog]

Book Review: Never Be Alone by Paige Dearth

Never Be Alone by Paige Dearth is the second book of hers that I've read. It got me hooked. As soon as I finished it, I bought another one--Mean Little People. She has five books so far, and more in the works, of course. Her writing is heartfelt and emotionally invasive--in a good way. Her characters are well developed and her books are long. I love it. She really makes you feel for them in her character-driven novels. Each tale tackles a different aspect of child abuse and shows how it can be possible to overcome such tragedy.

Joon's parents die when she is only eight and she is forced into the foster care system. Her foster mother is incredibly abusive and torments her for four long years, much of which is glossed over only to be revealed later in the book by telling bits of her past to friends. When her foster brother tells her he's going to rape her, she runs away. At twelve years old, she finds herself homeless. The novel covers her next seven years in horrifying detail. She experiences loss after loss. She even gets sold into slavery, not too far from the setting of Maggie's own sexual slavery in One Among Us. Though, Maggie is likely only an infant, if she's even been born yet when Joon is going through her own wretched existence. 

Paige Dearth's books seem timeless. There is little reference to technology or the cost of things. But when you're dirt-poor, everything seems costly and technology like cellphones are an unnecessary extravagance. What connects them all is the city of Philadelphia and a few characters that dance through when they must. Emma appears in One Among Us as an adult, but she gets her own story in When Smiles Fade, which starts in her abusive childhood home. Tony is also in One Among Us as an adult and Never Be Alone as a teenager. Tony's book about his childhood is Mean Little People. I'm willing to bet that Dearth's other book, Believe Like a Child, is somehow tied into the others, as well. I love it when authors do that. The books go together, but don't have to be read in any order. They're all stand-alone novels, but they all tie into each other somehow. 

Never Be Alone didn't just tug on my heartstrings, it ripped me to pieces. I've never cried so much from a book. I've never been so into a book, so moved by its characters, that I had to just put it down and sob for a while. My husband thought something was wrong with me that he kept waking up to find me bawling in the living room in the middle of the night. But I couldn't stop reading it and I couldn't stop crying. Tragedy after tragedy kept striking Joon and I couldn't turn away. I had to know how she got through it all because I knew she had to. I knew there had to be a happy ending for her somewhere, someday. For over 400 pages, I told myself that like a mantra--she has to make it through.

Fiction with MEAN-ing is what Paige Dearth writes. It has deep, powerful messages. It is full of real-life tragedy. These stories are fiction, but someone, somewhere, has gone through things like this. Someone has lived portions of each of these tragedies. Those people need a voice and they are given one in novels like these. Compelling, character-driven, and an emotional rollercoaster that inspires you to do something, to take action. Donate time or money to a homeless shelter, a women's shelter, a shelter for homeless teens...just get out and do something. But first, read this book!

[authorjanellesamara-blog]

Book Review: One Among Us by Paige Dearth

It's been a whole year since this book came into my possession. For months, it stared at me from my bookshelf. No, really. The cover is of a girl, begging with her eyes for you to help her. It sat sideways because I wanted to read it. I had to read it. Not just because a new friend wrote it and I wanted to support her work, but because I knew how powerful it would be.  I met Paige Dearth last summer. She was a force all her own and we instantly clicked. We're both real and honest, perhaps to a fault. She's going to tell you like it is and so am I. After chatting with her throughout the week, I knew I'd enjoy her style of writing.  I also knew her subject matter would make me squeamish.  Paige writes fictions with MEAN-ing. All of her books are about children who are victims. One Among Us is about a young girl, Maggie, who is abducted from the mall when she is 12. She then spends the next decade being bought and sold as a sex slave, a prostitute, and even an indentured servant of a stripper.  This book is powerful, impactful, haunting, and full of pain. It is also full of hope. Maggie never fully gives up on herself. She is a pillar of strength for those around her, even though she feels weak. Page after page, Maggie drew my tears and gained my heart.  She is relatable, at least, for damaged folks such as myself. No, I was never a sex slave or a hooker. I've never been a stripper. But I know what it's like to feel utterly alone and hopeless. I know the feeling of abuse. I know what it's like to feel imprisoned--like there is no escape and the only way to be free is to die. But, like Maggie, I never gave up and I ended up even stronger for all I've been through. 

Personal rant below...

This book inspired me to do research and learn some more about this scourge of modern slavery. It made me realize how close I was to becoming a trafficking victim myself when I was young. A number of times, I believe my brazenness saved me from becoming a victim. In fact, my research made me realize that my own husband was briefly a slave. Had he not found friends at Mosque who saved him and gave him a new home, who knows what would have happened to him? I certainly never would have met him. Both of our tales are long and won't be told here. But they're not the only real life shit shows that this book reminded me of. I knew this girl in high school... We've drifted in and out of each other's lives for over 25 years now. I can't keep her around all the time because she's drowning. I can't emotionally/financially support her while also keeping my own head above water. At times when her life is not so dark and heavy, she'll find me or we'll find each other randomly in public. We'll briefly reconnect before she starts to sink again and I can't be there anymore.  That sounds bad--like I'm abandoning her. But it's hard to find a homeless drug addict when their phone gets shut off. Or when they block you because you didn't delete their mother or sister or auntie from your Facebook after they made some ranting status update that said everyone needs to do this or be blocked. Yeah. Once, I couldn't leave work to drive two hours to Jefferson City to pick her up at a bar. This was pre-Facebook, but my number got blocked.  Anywho... That girl was trafficked. It took me a long time to put it all together but once I was told, her home life when we were kids made a lot more sense. It all clicked when I found out the abuse, the rape, and the selling of her body had started so young. She wasn't even in kindergarten yet when her father started molesting her. He was gone before we were in high school, but the damage was done. She wound up being one of my friends who got pregnant and had a baby in high school. Most of them were 16; she was, too.  She didn't graduate. She became a stripper. And a hooker. She sold her body so that her family wouldn't lose their house. And so they could all do drugs. But they knew. They trafficked her.  Tragedy struck, and her baby died. She disappeared for months. It's a miracle she came back alive, but she always was a survivor. She was such a resilient person, I never feared for her with such an extreme severity as I have for others. She's strong and capable of healing, as long as she believes and doesn't give up on herself.  Last I heard, she'd gotten married. They have children and a mostly drug-free life. I'm happy for her, and for the fact that her family is no longer selling her body to pay their bills and fuel their drug habits. 

Rant over...back to the book

One Among Us by Paige Dearth made me cry more than any other book I've ever read. That has earned her a place as one of my favorite authors. She made me feel deeply for her characters. She breathed life into them on the page and made them tangible. Her subject matters are difficult but important. She puts a voice to those who can't speak for themselves loud enough to be helped. She writes about things that need to be discussed more, that need to be understood by more people. There are so many misconceptions about damaged people and this novel helps to dispel many myths about sex trade workers.  The truly horrid scenes aren't too graphic, but they are just graphic enough to get across how awful it is for poor, victimized children like Maggie and the others.  I highly recommend this book. It will make you cry. It will make you want to stand up and seek justice for victims of human trafficking. Do it. You won't regret it. Helping others is a noble act.

Find all of Paige Dearth's books here. Buy them. Read them.