WINNER!

Sorry about the announcement delay, guys. I've had a very distracted week.

Thank you all so much for all your comments. I had so much fun reading about your favorite books, and reading that so many of you had similar experiences with books as children.  And we have very similar (read: amazing) tastes, which I'm pretty sure means we're supposed to be best friends. So here, I made you all friendship bracelets. We match!

Since we're besties now, I wish I could give every single one of you a copy of DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE because it is uhhh-mazing. Alas, I have just the one copy. And thanks to the superpowers of random.org, it is going to..... *drum roll*

MANDERIN_ORANGE

::confetti:: Wheeeee! Please email me your address and I will send it out posthaste. I'm so excited for you to read! 

For the rest of you, fear not. I have several other ARCs to give away in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

My Friends Live in There + GIVEAWAY

I love books.

I know, thank you Captain Obvious. But honestly, for the entirety of my life reading has been my favorite thing to do. I didn’t have a great home life growing up, and I didn’t have many friends until about middle school—and even then, I wasn’t able to hang out with them much outside of school.

Definitely had to brown bag this guy.

So I’d spend every single minute I could reading. In the summers I’d hole myself up in my AC-less bedroom, sweating my ass off and nearly suffocating, and just read. I didn’t have many new books, so I would just read the ever loving hell out of the ones I had. The Babysitter’s Club. The Witch of Blackbird Pond. The Anne of Green Gables books (which I read until the covers fell off. Damn, Gilbert Blythe, you are a smooth mother. And Kenneth? Oh, the swoons.) And eventually—thanks to my best friend and her older sister—a ridiculous amount of historical romance (for which I fashioned book covers out of brown paper bags so my stepmother wouldn’t freak out and give me The Talk).

Books have bettered my life in nearly every way. They’ve made me smarter, more self-aware, and given me a much broader understanding of life and the human condition and how to look at things from different perspectives than I ever would have gained from just living my boring life. I mean, I’ve time traveled. I’ve gone into space. Into the sea. I’ve fought wars. I fell in love a hundred times before I ever even knew how to talk to a boy. I’ve been to China and England and India and Alaska. I went to Hogwarts, guys. And Gondor. I babysat a crapload of kids and I definitely kissed Gilbert Blythe in the garden at Green Gables. A lot. I won’t speak of what I did on the pirate ship with that one shirtless Fabio-esque guy. Because that’s private.

Reading is what made me want to write. The stories I’ve read have inspired the stories I want to tell, and I am forever in debt to the hundreds of authors I’ve read for teaching me so much, for opening up worlds inside of me that would never have existed otherwise. For giving me friends when I had none, people who understood me when no one else in my real life did.

For giving me my own stories.

The thing is? I read too much. I read when I should be writing, because frankly it’s an addiction. And right now, I have way too many sitting there waiting for me to read. Or reread. They’re calling to me. Whispering my name. Putting on cookie-flavored perfume and dancing seductively.

It’s getting awkward.

So. I’m just going to give one of them away.



And guys, it kills me to do this. But I’m offering up my signed copy of Laini Taylor’s DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE. I’m so excited to give someone else the chance to read this BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN, UNIQUE, HEART STOPPING story. But I’m also sad because it means I won’t be able to read it again until September. SEPTEMBER.

*clings to Akiva*

All you need to do is comment before 11:59pm PST on AUGUST 10th and tell me what your all-time favorite book is and why. That’s all. I’ll choose the winner randomly and send my boyfriend, Akiva my best friend, Karou DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE to you.

Easy peasy.

Just… promise to take good care of my friends, okay? And come talk to me about them when you’re done.