Cover Reveal: Deadly Little Scandals (Debutantes #2) by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Today Freeform Books, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, and Rockstar Book Tours are revealing the cover for her upcoming YA Mystery Book, DEADLY LITTLE SCANDALS, which releases on November 5, 2019! We're also revealing the new cover for book 1 in the series, LITTLE WHITE LIES! Check out the awesome covers and enter the giveaway!

On to the reveal! 

Title: DEADLY LITTLE SCANDALS

Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Series:  Debutantes #2

Pub. Date: November 5, 2019

Publisher: Freeform

Formats: Hardcover, eBook

Pages: 352

Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, Kobo, TBD

"Think of the White Gloves like the Junior League-by way of Skull and Bones?"

Reluctant debutante Sawyer Taft joined Southern high society for one reason and one reason alone: to identify and locate her biological father. But the answers Sawyer found during her debutante year only left her with more questions and one potentially life-ruining secret. When her cousin Lily ropes her into pledging a mysterious, elite, and all-female secret society called the White Gloves, Sawyer soon discovers that someone in the group's ranks may have the answers she's looking for. Things are looking up... until Sawyer and the White Gloves make a disturbing discover near the family's summer home--and uncover a twisted secret, decades in the making.

No one is quite who they seem to be in this twisty, soapy, gasp-inducing sequel to Jennifer Lynn Barnes' unputdownable Little White Lies. 

Title: LITTLE WHITE LIES

Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Series:  Debutantes #1

Pub. Date: November 6, 2018

Publisher: Freeform

Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, Audiobook

Pages: 390

Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, Audible, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, Kobo, TBD

"I'm not saying this is Sawyer's fault," the prim and proper one said delicately. "But."

Eighteen-year-old auto mechanic Sawyer Taft did not expect her estranged grandmother to show up at her apartment door and offer her a six-figure contract to participate in debutante season. And she definitely never imagined she would accept. But when she realizes that immersing herself in her grandmother's "society" might mean discovering the answer to the biggest mystery of her life-her father's identity-she signs on the dotted line and braces herself for a year of makeovers, big dresses, bigger egos, and a whole lot of bless your heart. The one thing she doesn't expect to find is friendship, but as she's drawn into a group of debutantes with scandalous, dangerous secrets of their own, Sawyer quickly discovers that her family isn't the only mainstay of high society with skeletons in their closet. There are people in her grandmother's glittering world who are not what they appear, and no one wants Sawyer poking her nose into the past. As she navigates the twisted relationships between her new friends and their powerful parents, Sawyer's search for the truth about her own origins is just the beginning.

Set in the world of debutante balls, grand estates and rolling green hills, Little White Lies combines a charming setting, a classic fish-out-of-water story, and the sort of layered mystery only author Jennifer Lynn Barnes can pull off. 

About Jennifer: 

Jennifer Lynn Barnes (who mostly goes by Jen) is the author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed young adult novels. She has advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science, including graduate degrees from Cambridge University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and Yale University, where she received her Ph.D. in 2012. Jen wrote her first published novel when she was nineteen-years-old and sold her first five books while still in college. In additional to writing YA novels, Jen has also written original pilot scripts for television networks like USA and MTV, and she is one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of fandom and the cognitive science of fiction and the imagination more broadly. Jen is an Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds a dual appointment in Psychology and Professional Writing.

Website | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads 

Giveaway Details:

1 winner will receive a paperback of LITTLE WHITE LIES, US Only.

Giveaway ends July 31st, midnight EST.

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Review: #murdertrending by Gretchen McNeil #DRBC

Book info:

Title:  #murdertrending
Author:  Gretchen McNeil
Series: ????  Goodreads shows a sequel next year maybe?
Genre: YA contemporary thriller
Release Date:  August 7th, 2018
Publisher:  Freeform Books/Disney Publishing
Source:  ARC received from publisher which did not influence my opinion
My rating:  5 stars

Synopsis:
WELCOME TO THE NEAR FUTURE, where good and honest 8/18 citizens can enjoy watching the executions of society’s most infamous convicted felons, streaming live on The Postman app from the suburbanized prison island Alcatraz 2.0.

When eighteen-year-old Dee Guerrera wakes up in a haze, lying on the ground of a dimly lit warehouse, she realizes she’s about to be the next victim of the app. Knowing hardened criminals are getting a taste of their own medicine in this place is one thing, but Dee refuses to roll over and die for a heinous crime she didn’t commit. Can Dee and her newly formed posse, the Death Row Breakfast Club, prove she’s innocent before she ends up wrongfully murdered for the world to see? Or will The Postman’s cast of executioners kill them off one by one?

Scream Queens meets The Hunger Games in #MURDERTRENDING (On Sale 8/8/18) by Gretchen McNeil. In this gruesome young adult novel, seventeen-year-old Dee Guerrera is wrongfully convicted and sent to a prison island where government-sanctioned killers hunt down convicts and stream their deaths on social media for "spikes.”

 

With its morbid, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor and twisty, gasp-inducing mystery, this novel has already been optioned for development by television studio ABC Signature.

My Review:
This was an awesome book!  It totally feeds into how social media works today, as well as having a great mystery to be solved that keeps you guessing until the very end!  I totally agree with the synopsis about how it is similar to The Hunger Games, because I definitely got that feeling as I was reading about how the executions/murders were televised.  So much of this story had all of McNeil's perfect humor while fitting into what would make itself a great horror film, or as it also says in the synopsis above, a great TV series.    All of the characters were were interesting,  even the ones we didn't get very long to know since they ended up being on the cutting block, literally.  

The story had a lot of creative, unique bits to it, but also pulled in a lot of pop culture references.  What is funny to me about some of those references is that while the teens in the story basically understood what movie it was from, they didn't get all the specific details.  I loved that, because so often teens may know of a movie or singer, etc., but it wasn't actually something they'd watched themselves, so little details authors who are adults, like I am, might go over their heads.  Like the scene from Zoolander that one of the "Painiacs" as Dee's new friend Nyles has named them, is setting up for.  

Of course, then there were some things that I felt surely Dee should have figured out earlier.  Like the Postman, his identity, and how it could connect with her past.  Especially since we got the whole story of it, something that she would really have been pretty well aware of.  But then to make up for it, I also really like how the author was able to throw in feelings about current situations in the real world, without actually getting in there and naming specific people, which could alienate those who are possibly supporters of them. The way that she got those digs in was done in such a way that it reminds me of all the discussion I had in English classes about how that classic book has all those themes, that I always actually hated talking about.  I mean, I just want to read for the story, and when I do my own writing, whether it is any good or not, I don't know that I throw in hidden meanings or themes.  But McNeil has layered it into the story in such a way that it totally makes me want to apologize to any English teacher I had in school that I might have rolled my eyes at (not to their faces, I was a good student) or been totally bored with the talk of that.  

It was a page-turner, one that at certain points I had a lot of trouble putting down.  Even to the point where I had promised myself to start going to bed at a normal time to get ready for school to start again, instead of staying up late reading.  

The ending was superb, and definitely left it like a good horror movie would, open.  Although I didn't realize quite how open it was left until I saw a sequel posted on Goodreads as I was getting my review ready today.

Gretchen McNeil has been one of my favorite authors since I first read 3:59 and Ten.   I highly recommend her books if you haven't started yet!  Also, don't you love the cover of this one?  And #DRBC!!

Two YA Contemporary ARC Mini-Reviews

I'm behind on getting these reviews up!  I couldn't find the emails from the publishers that sent them to me, even though I know or could swear one was a specific request for me to read and review.  Oh well, I did get them done and want to share!  Even though both were published on May 1st, I'm getting them back out in the public eye with these reviews today!

Everywhere You Want to Be by Christina June:

Publisher:  Blink YA Books/Harper Collins
Source:  Physical ARC from publisher which did not influence my opinion in any way
My rating:  4 stars

This is my 2nd book by this author, and once again I enjoyed it.  You can read my review of the first book here:  It Started With Goodbye.  While both books are standalones, they both include the same characters. We met Tilly, our main character in the first book. But this time she gets her own story, as she goes off to NYC to hopefully make her dream of being a professional dancer come true, in what is her last hope she feels after the accident that caused her ankle injury.  This was a pretty quick read, like the first one.  I loved all of the NYC bits, as well as the grandma/abuela.  It made me want to go back to NYC if I ever get the chance.  The dance aspects of the story were fun to read, I used to want to be a dancer myself.  And the romance was sweet as well.  There was a bully in the story, Sabrina, and I really, really like the way the author went with that at the end of the book.  Throughout the story it worked perfectly as well, but the way the author took it at the end, while not typical for YA stories, was definitely more realistic in my opinion.  I don't know for sure that I get the feeling of the fairy tale it was supposed to take after, but that's okay, I still really enjoyed it.

Here is the blurb from Goodreads:
From author Christina June comes Everywhere You Want to Be, a modern tale inspired by the classic Red Riding Hood.

Matilda Castillo has always done what she was told, but when she gets injured senior years, she watches her dreams of becoming a contemporary dancer slip away. So when Tilly gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend the summer with a New York dance troupe, nothing can stop her from saying yes--not her mother, not her fears of the big city, and not the commitment she made to Georgetown. Tilly's mother allows her to go on two conditions: one, Tilly will regularly visit her abuela in New Jersey, and two, after the summer, she'll give up dancing and go off to college.

Armed with her red vintage sunglasses and her pros and cons lists, Tilly strikes out, determined to turn a summer job into a career. Along the way she meets new friends ... and new enemies. Tilly isn't the only one desperate to dance, and fellow troupe member Sabrina Wolfrik intends to succeed at any cost. But despite dodging sabotage and blackmail attempts from Sabrina, Tilly can't help but fall in love with the city, especially since Paolo, a handsome musician from her past, is also calling New York home for the summer.

As the weeks wind down and the competition with Sabrina heats up, Tilly's future is on the line. She must decide whether to follow her mother's path to Georgetown or leap into the unknown to pursue her own dreams.

Ship It by Britta Lundin:

Publisher:  FreeForm Books
Source:  Physical ARC from publisher which did not influence my opinion in any way
My rating:  4.5 stars

I totally adored this book, although there is a .5 of a star I kept back, that is my own personal issue, one I will probably not address as it would probably make people angry.  I loved the characters, how real they were especially.  I loved all the nerdiness from the comic conventions.  I loved the people who LOVED the shows and were huge fans.  There was so much that made me laugh.  Parts that made me tear up a bit, as well as parts that made me frustrated.  I can't wait to order this book and put it in my school library next year.  There was one line that I hope makes it to the final copy, as it is such a true sentence:

"It's so much more exhausting being around people when you're sad, especially when they're not as sad as you."

If you've ever been sad, but had to still be around other people who weren't sad, then you totally understand this.  The shipping in the book totally reminds me of some of the crazy ships that exist in the world of one of my favorite tv shows, Supernatural.  As a heterosexual woman, I don't necessarily see the things that some people see, like the whole Smokeheart ship in this book reminds me of what people do with Castiel and Dean or Crowley and Dean.  Something that while I get the bromance thing, my straightness doesn't always quite pick up on the other, or at least it didn't used to.  My eyes might be a little more open to that these days.  

If you are a shipper, or enjoy a good lgbtq romance - with a teen girl who just still doesn't know for sure if she is gay or not, and plenty of other good examples of lgbtq characters, as well as the reality of people who are not accepting of this and will fight it in public, you have found the right book.  If you like reading about the craziness of fans at comic book conventions or online with fanfic or Tumblr, etc., this is also probably the book for you.

Here is the blurb from Goodreads:
Claire is a sixteen-year-old fangirl obsessed with the show Demon Heart. Forest is an actor on Demon Heart who dreams of bigger roles. When the two meet at a local Comic-Con panel, it's a dream come true for Claire. Until the Q&A, that is, when Forest laughs off Claire's assertion that his character is gay. Claire is devastated. After all, every last word of her super-popular fanfic revolves around the romance between Forest's character and his male frenemy. She can't believe her hero turned out to be a closed-minded jerk. Forest is mostly confused that anyone would think his character is gay. Because he's not. Definitely not.

Unfortunately for Demon Heart, when the video of the disastrous Q&A goes viral, the producers have a PR nightmare on their hands. In order to help bolster their image within the LGBTQ+ community-as well as with their fans-they hire Claire to join the cast for the rest of their publicity tour. What ensues is a series of colourful Comic-Con clashes between the fans and the show that lead Forest to question his assumptions about sexuality and help Claire come out of her shell. But how far will Claire go to make her ship canon? To what lengths will Forest go to stop her and protect his career? And will Claire ever get the guts to make a move on Tess, the very cute, extremely cool fanartist she keeps running into?