Review and Giveaway: A Drop of Night by Stefan Bachmann

ABOUT A DROP OF NIGHT:

Seventeen-year-old Anouk has finally caught the break she’s been looking for—she's been selected out of hundreds of other candidates to fly to France and help with the excavation of a vast, underground palace buried a hundred feet below the suburbs of Paris. Built in the 1780's to hide an aristocratic family and a mad duke during the French Revolution, the palace has lain hidden and forgotten ever since. Anouk, along with several other gifted teenagers, will be the first to set foot in it in over two centuries.

Or so she thought.

But nothing is as it seems, and the teens soon find themselves embroiled in a game far more sinister, and dangerous, than they could possibly have imagined. An evil spanning centuries is waiting for them in the depths. . .

A genre-bending thriller from Stefan Bachmann for fans of The Maze Runner and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods.

You cannot escape the palace.

You cannot guess its secrets.


LINKS: Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Indiebound | iBooks | The Book Depository

REVIEW:

The premise to this book was pretty good.  I liked the historical aspect a lot.  There were a lot of really scary parts that happen when the kids get trapped in the underground palace.  Some of the scenes were written in such a way that I could totally see a movie from those parts.  What I mean is that those parts were really intense and exciting.  However the book started a little slow.  At times I had a hard time liking the main character very much, even with the reasons that were given for why she behaved that way.  While it is usually good to keep the suspense and not giveaway what the real story is at the beginning, I believe that this story didn't really give us what exactly was happening.  The ending did give us an explanation for all of the crazy stuff going on, I just felt I needed more explanation for what happened.  It did all fit together, it just was kind of too quick for me.  I'd have loved maybe some more flashbacks to the times in between when the original family went down to the underground palace and the current day situation with our main characters.  There are a lot of good parts to the story, and for many people what happens will be plenty.  I definitely recommend the French history aspects, as they are a unique part of how the story goes.  The descriptions of the palace and all of the danger below are very vivid and definitely set up the scenes, and are part of what made it seem like it could be a movie!

 ABOUT STEFAN BACHMANN:

Stefan Bachmann was born in Colorado and spent of most of his childhood in Switzerland, where he's now a student of music at the Zürich University of Arts.

His debut, gothic-faery-fantasy THE PECULIAR, was a New York Times Editor's Choice and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2012, and was translated into eight languages. Its companion, THE WHATNOT, was released on September 24th, 2013.

THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES: 36 TALES BRIEF AND SINISTER, a collection of scary stories he wrote together with authors Emma Trevayne, Claire Legrand and Katherine Catmull, was released May 27th, 2014, from Greenwillow/HarperCollins.

His next book, YA thriller A DROP OF NIGHT, about a group of American teens fighting to survive after they become trapped in an underground Versailles, will be out March 15th, 2016, also from Greenwillow/HarperCollins.

LINKS: Website | Twitter

Tour Schedule:
Week 1:
3/14: Emily Reads Everything - Review
3/15: He Said Books Or Me - Guest Post
3/16: Lilybloombooks - Review
3/17: Brittany's Book Rambles - Q&A
3/18: Kissin' Blue Karen - Review

Week 2:
3/21: Pandora's Books - Q&A
3/22: Books In Her Heads - Review
3/23: Part Time Book Nerd - Top 10
3/24: Lisa Loves Literature - Review - YOU ARE HERE!
3/25: My Bookish Itinerary - Guest Post

Giveaway:

• 3 Finished Copies of A DROP OF NIGHT (US Only)

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Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

I got this book as an advanced reader's copy back in October, right before the author was coming to our bookstore to do a signing. I didn't get to go to the signing because it was right when our parent teacher conferences are, so didn't feel the urge to pick it up and get it read. Now that I have however, I am very excited to go back and read her first teen book, A Northern Light.

Revolution is a historical fiction about the French Revolution. Our main character is Andi, she goes to a very exclusive school called St. Anselm's in Brooklyn. Her father is a famous geneticist, and her mother an artist. However, her brother died a couple years ago, and we don't find out exactly how until later in the story, but we get some kind of idea, that Andi, who is hanging out with pot smokers and druggies from her school, may have been somehow responsible for his death. Andi is currently not able to do anything other than her music lessons. Music is the only thing that makes her feel okay. As she gets close to flunking out and messing up her chances of getting into a good college, her father who left the family, comes home. He sees that her mother is a mess and puts her mother in a hospital. He then makes Andi go with him to Paris. In Paris he will be working to prove whether a heart preserved in a glass jar is really Louis-Charles, son of Marie Antoinette's heart. While Andi is there she is expected to work on her thesis for school, which is kind of handy because the person she is researching is from Paris, his name is Amade Malherbeau, and supposedly he came up with some of the unusual note combinations modern musicians use today. The people Andi and her dad stay with are old friends of theirs. The man is a historian and the woman is an artist. They have all kinds of historical documents and artifacts where they are living because they are preparing to turn the building into a museum. There is even a guitar from the time of the French Revolution, and Andi finds a secret compartment in which there is a diary and a picture of Louis-Charles. The diary is of a girl who was a servant to him and how she tried to be there for him in whatever way she could, even when he was walled up alone in his final prison.

I loved this story, could barely put it down when I needed to. It made me eager to read more about this time period. I think a good historical fiction is one that makes you want to learn the real stories, and this totally does it. I could even see it being read in a classroom to tie in both literature and history. As I said, I will now have to go back and get her book A Northern Light and read it soon.

The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner

I picked this up as a stripped copy at work a week or two ago. Recently, or ever since the movie The Other Boleyn Girl, I've began enjoying more historical fiction. This book is set in the time of Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution. It's about a boy who is a gypsy and his friend/mentor a fellow gypsy who is a dwarf. They work with a magician whose biggest trick is that a bullet is shot at him and he catches it. They are called to a wealthy man's house to perform for his guests, and this time, the bullet hits its mark. Well, the person holding the gun is Count Kalliovski, who knows the magician, and Tetu the dwarf from an event he'd like to bury. Tetu knows Yann must get away before Kalliovski finds him. In their hiding and trying to escape, they end up being helped by Sido, the daughter of the Marquis de Villeduval. Sido is not treated well by her father. And turns out that Kalliovski wants to marry her.

Count Kalliovski is not what he seems, and so Tetu gets Yann away, but not before he is wounded, maybe killed. He sends Yann to a friend in London to raise him and turn him into a young gentleman. The family he goes to live with is actually related to Sido, and Yann gets a chance to go back and try to help her.

It leaves on a cliffhanger, and I was worried it would just end like that, but no, there is a portion of a sequel at the end, so I'll be waiting for that to come out to read as well. A good historical fiction book for kids.