Tuesday, January 22, 2013

ARC winners + new Quintana giveaway!

Congratulations to the Quintana of Charyn galley giveaway winners! Here are the four lucky winners:

Cate A.
Lacey T.
Angelica J.
Alice M.

They all have replied to our emails and the ARCs are on their way to them. Hope you all enjoy the conclusion to the Lumatere Chronicles!

If you didn't win, you have yet another chance to win an ARC of Quintana of Charyn through Goodreads! Click HERE to go directly to the giveaway. The giveaway is hosted by Candlewick, ends February 18, and open to US and Canadian residents. It's really simple to enter. All you need is a Goodreads account. Good luck!

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Giveaway: Quintana of Charyn Galleys

In case you haven't heard yet, Quintana of Charyn was scheduled to release on March 12 in North America, but the release date has now moved to April 9. So those patiently waiting for its release will have to wait just a bit longer. It'll be worth it though!

For now, thanks to Candlewick, we have Quintana of Charyn galleys (ARCs) up for grabs! There will be four lucky winners chosen. The giveaway is open to US/CAN residents only and will end January 18. The winners will have 48 hours to reply back to our email with their mailing addresses or new winners will be chosen. The galleys will be sent straight from Candlewick.

To enter, all you have to do is fill out the Rafflecopter form below. Good luck, everyone! :)

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Quintana of Charyn Preview

Quintana of Charyn will be released March 12, 2013 in North America. Candlewick, the North American publisher, has posted a preview of Quintana of Charyn on Scribd! It's the first two chapters, which you can read below. Or you can access it through the direct link, if the file isn't showing up. And don't forget that you can read the prologue HERE. Enjoy!

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Shelf Envy with Melina Marchetta




This is the final post for the Quintana of Charyn blog tour! If you missed the other dates, you can find the entire schedule here.

First and foremost, I'd like to thank Melina for the intrusion. I'm sure she's wondering why in the heck I've asked her to show us her bookshelves. Well, my primary reason is that I'm nosy and I've always wanted to know the type of books she reads or have read. It wasn't easy; but asking her to do this post took a few self-inflicted slaps in the face as I psyched myself out. I'm just glad I didn't have to resort to liquid courage.


1.    What was the last book you purchase?


Damien Echols’ Life After Death. It’s an autobiography written by one of three men wrongly accused of the murder of three little boys in West Memphis Arkansas almost twenty years ago when they were teenagers. It’s an amazing read about injustice and faith and growing up different.

2.    Which literary characters (other than yours) would you like to hang out with?

Too hard a question, but apart from Sydney, I love New York so I wouldn’t mind spending a night listening to Mia and Adam (from Gayle Forman’s Where She Went) play music.

3.    Name your ultimate top 5 books.

I’m very fickle about this so if someone is to ask me in a year’s time I’d probably have another list of five and if someone is to ask me about my most influential novels, I’d have a different list and so on and so forth, but for now my five are: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon; The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner; The Broken Shore by Peter Temple; Persuasion by Jane Austen; and Hills End by Ivan Southall.

4.    What is the most random item (knick knacks or book) in your bookshelf?

 Holy water (from my mum, who wants me to bless my house with it.

5.   Do you have a go-to book when you hit a wall in your writing? 

No, I think the worst thing I could do to myself is read someone else’s work when I’ve hit a wall with my writing.  But for solace, I find myself re-reading fantasy novels. My last re-reads were two of Anne Bishop’s books from the Ephemera Series. 


Huge thank you to Melina Marchetta for taking the time to answer our questions and to the bloggers who participated in the blog tour! This tour wouldn't have been successful without you all. It was our first time hosting a blog tour, so it was definitely a big learning experience for us. We hope everyone enjoyed following the tour and reading the posts for the past 9 10 days. :)

The giveaway is still up and will be running until the end of November. Please don't forget to enter for a chance to win the entire Lumatere Trilogy!

- Joy & Alexa

Friday, November 9, 2012

Melina Marchetta on the Secondary Women

You can find the entire schedule for the Quintana of Charyn blog tour here. For this guest post, we asked Melina Marchetta about the secondary female characters and how they find strength in hopeless situations.



I just wanted to start by saying a big thank you to Joy and Alexa and all those who have written such kind words about Quintana of Charyn.  I came back from being away and read all the posts and the art work this week and loved them all.

Joy and Alexa asked me to write a post and we settled on a question about the secondary characters of women.

What you do when you need characters to find the strength to keep going, even when everything seems hopeless, is you give them a role model. That’s why Quintana gets the title of the novel.  Because through watching her and understanding her past, the women of the valley begin to understand the complexity of Quintana.  Apart from Froi and Lirah, they are the only people who grow to love Quintana for herself, rather than because she’s the mother of the future King. She may not always be nice, but she earns that love by hunting for them, arming them, and being the leader her father never was.

When I was working on Froi of the Exiles, I knew that the women of the valley would be important to Quintana’s journey.  By the time I started the last novel, I had changed my mind and felt that Tesadora and Japhra and the Mont girls better assisted her journey.  And then I changed my mind again.  If I had just relied on Tesadora and the Mont girls, I think I would have gone over old ground and missed out on finding out more about the women of Charyn.  In one of the most crucial scenes in Quintana, Phaedra begs for their lives and Cora refuses to kneel at the feet of any man, and I loved them both for it.   That’s what I wanted to explore.  What would I do? Who knows, but I think I’d like to refuse to beg like Cora, yet I’d do anything to live much like Phaedra.

I loved writing those powerful prickly moments between Quintana and the women in her life because I got to discover more about her. Things I didn’t know. Her words to Florenza about the filth of memories are one of my favourite lines. It breaks my heart that I can’t remember this moment, but years ago, the real Jimmy Hailler (from Saving Francesca) told me that a defining moment for him was when we were sitting on the front steps of the school where I taught him and I told him something along the same lines. Something about not letting our past write the story of our future lives.  So I used that sentiment in this novel.  That’s how strange writing is.  You can have a conversation with a teenage boy about life, and ten years later it can end up a conversation between women in a fantasy novel.

And of course I didn’t want to forget about Tesadora.  Apart from the Queen of Lumatere, she’s one of my favourite characters and her story line and that of the generation of Charyn women who missed out on having children was the most heart breaking to write. Cora and Tesadora, and the women of Charyn who missed out on having children because of the curse, were very real to me. What I loved about Tesadora is that she didn’t give in and take a woe-is-me attitude. Nor did Cora.  Cora is the planter of the hope seeds. Japhra is a healer. I’d like to think there’s more to women than being defined by society’s expectations. I really wanted these women to be more than the sum of their experiences.



Don't you just love anything Melina Marchetta writes? It's always great reading what she thinks about her characters and this post was insightful. Thank you, Melina, for writing out this wonderful post for the tour! :D