A couple of months ago I mentioned receiving a black and white rough sketch of the cover for my upcoming middle grade sci-fi book, STRICKEN. Well, the actual cover came in a few weeks back. In a flurry of excitement I splashed it across Facebook and Twitter, but if you haven't seen the cover image yet, voila:
I couldn't be more thrilled about the fantastic illustration by Canadian artist Nick Craine. Thank you, Nick, for this absolute awesomeness! This is the BEST cover I've ever had right down to main character Naomi's defiant posture atop an overturned car.
Naomi doesn't expect anything unusual from her annual family trip to visit her grandparents in Ireland. What she expects is to celebrate her thirteenth birthday, hang out with her friends Ciara and Shehan, and deal with her gran's Alzheimer's. What she finds is a country hit by an unexpected virus that rapidly infects the majority of the Irish population over the age of twenty-one.
Amnestic-Delirium Syndrome (ADS) starts off with memory loss, but the virus soon turns its victims aggravated, blank, or violent. Naomi and her friends must survive on their own, without lucid adults, cut off from the rest of the world, until a cure is found.
But there are whispers that ADS is not terrestrial, and soon Naomi and her friends learn the frightening truth: we are not alone.
{{shivers}}
In Canada you can pre-order Stricken through Chapters.Indigo and Amazon.ca. The book will be released in the U.S. in spring 2018.
I'm also ever so happy to say that last week CM Magazine: Canadian Review of Materials published a wonderfully thoughtful review of my most recent contemporary YA, Just Like You Said It Would Be.
Just Like You Said It Would Be review by Joanie Prosek, CM . . . . Volume XXIII Number 39. . . .June 16, 2017
CM give it their "highly recommend it" designation and rate the book a 3.5/4, but more than that I'm just so appreciative of all the background research the reviewer did, including quoting a blog post I wrote in 2013 on why I feel it's important to have realistic sex scenes in YA novels and not just fade to black. I couldn't be any happier!
