About the Book: 
The Casquette Girls by Alys Arden 
(The Casquette Girls #1) 
Genres: Paranormal, Young Adult

Synopsis:


Seven girls tied by time.
Five powers that bind.
One curse to lock the horror away.
One attic to keep the monsters at bay.

* * *

After the Storm of the Century rips apart New Orleans, Adele Le Moyne and her father are among the first to return to the city following the mandatory evacuation. Adele wants nothing more than for life to return to normal, but with the silent city resembling a mold-infested war zone, a parish-wide curfew, and mysterious new faces lurking in the abandoned French Quarter, normal will have to be redefined.

Events too unnatural – even for New Orleans – lead Adele to an attic that has been sealed for three hundred years, and the chaos she unleashes threatens not only her life but everyone she knows.

Caught suddenly in a hurricane of eighteenth-century myths and monsters, Adele must quickly untangle a web of magic that links the climbing murder rate back to her own ancestors. But who can you trust in a city where everyone has a secret, and where keeping them can be a matter of life and death – unless, that is, you’re immortal.

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18717360-the-casquette-girls?from_search=true

About the Author: 
ALYS ARDEN grew up in the Vieux Carré, cut her teeth on the streets of New York, and has worked all around the world since. She still plans to run away with the circus one day.

www.facebook.com/TheCasquetteGirls
www.thecasquettegirls.com
www.alysarden.com

Review: 
The Casquette Girls is a Young Adult, paranormal novel set in the aftermath of the storm in the New Orleans French Quarter.  Adele and her father decide to return home to their storm ravaged city, thankfully their historical home has minimal damage.  Adele was not about to go back to the boarding school in Paris with her mother who barely saw her the entire time she was there.  Upon their return, Adele is not only attacked by a weird bird in their house, but notices several strange but beautiful guys showing up in the abandoned city all wanting to be around her.  A power within Adele grows and as she finds out secrets of her families past, the danger mounts.  

This story had an extremely slow build, but it was totally worth it.  The setting of the New Orleans French Quarter is spooky enough, but after the storm, the choice of the pretty much abandoned city made for an eerie setting.  With all of it's history and culture, voodoo, witches, vampires. werewolves and century-old curses fit right in. Adele is a very believable 16 year-old character and I got to know her very well in the first third of the story.  Her actions and behaviors were well thought out and I'm glad that she did not completely fall for the first hunky vampire that she saw (or the second, or the third...).  I really enjoyed reading about the Adele's ancestor and the voyage of the original Casquette Girls.  I do love dual time stories and a little bit of history.  I did have a question about the very end, but there was a lot going on then and it was a very exciting ending...it may just need a re-read. 


This book was received for free in return for an honest review. 

About the Book: 
When a daredevil teen pushes herself too far, she must choose between two boys: the one who wants to keep her safe, and the one who dares her to return to her old self.

Seventeen-year-old Dyna comes from a family of risk takers and is an avid thrill-seeker herself, until the day she splinters her ankle in a terrible fall. Her whole life goes from mountain biking and rock climbing to sitting at home and attending group sessions at the bizarre alternative healing center that her hippie mother found. The boy who witnessed Dyna’s accident believes her injury is a wakeup call and he encourages her mild new lifestyle, but a young Afghanistan War veteran she meets at the healing center pushes her to start taking chances again. Forced to face the consequences of her daredevil impulses, Dyna finds herself in danger of risking the one thing she’s always treated with caution—her heart.

AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | BOOK DEPOSITORY


About the Author:
Laurie Boyle Crompton is the YA author of BLAZE (or Love in the Time of Supervillains) and THE REAL PROM QUEENS OF WESTFIELD HIGH (Sourcebooks, 2013 & 2014) as well as the upcoming ADRENALINE CRUSH from Farrar Straus Giroux. Laurie graduated first in her class from St. John’s University with a major in English and minor in Journalism. She’s written for national magazines like ALLURE as well as numerous trade publications and has appeared on Good Day New York several times as a Toy Expert. Yes, that is an actual thing that people sometimes get to be.

When she’s not writing Laurie enjoys hiking, cycling, reading, cross-country skiing, running, going to the movies and drinking tea by the gallon. She lives near NYC, but loves to escape to the mountains in New Paltz, NY where she and her family can often be found climbing over rocks or tromping through the forest. She is represented by Ammi-Joan Paquette of the Erin Murphy Agency.

WEBSITE: http://lboylecrompton.com/index.html
TWITTER: @lbcrompton
GOODREADS: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5421048.Laurie_Boyle_Crompton
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/laurie.b.crompton

About the Book:
The explosive conclusion to the series reviewers have likened to Ender’s Game and “Hogwarts-in-Space”

This exhilarating, explosive, and heartrending conclusion to the Insignia trilogy brings Tom and his intelligent, passionate, and brave young friends stunning tests and dangerous confrontations and through to an impossible future they could never have predicted.

Tom Raines and his friends are eager to return to the Pentagonal Spire to continue training for the elite Intrasolar Forces, but they soon discover troubling changes: strict new regulations and the revelation that the Spire is under new military control. What begins as an irritating adjustment soon reveals a dangerous shift in reality. Those now in control are aligned with corporate sponsors and their ruthless agendas. And when the military academy begins welcoming new cadets with suspicious neural processors, the first step in a plan with horrifying worldwide ramifications, Tom is desperate to stop it, even if that means keeping secrets from his closest allies.

Then a mysterious figure, the other ghost in the machine, begins fighting against the corporations, but with methods even Tom finds shocking. And when the enemy comes for Tom, how much can Tom endure in the battle to save himself? He must decide if he can still fight when the odds of success seem to be sliding from his grip.

AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | BOOK DEPOSITORY


About the Author: 

S.J. Kincaid was born in Alabama, grew up in California, and attended high school in New Hampshire, but it was while living beside a haunted graveyard in Scotland, that she realized that she wanted to be a writer. Her debut, Insignia, came out in July of 2012. The second book in the series, Vortex came out in July of 2013. The final book in the INSIGNIA trilogy will come out in Fall of 2014.

WEBSITE: http://sjkincaid.com/
TWITTER: @SJKincaidBooks
GOODREADS: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18054017-catalyst
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/SJKincaidBooks

About the Book: 
Fantasy Anthology
Date Published: November 7, 2014

Tantalizingly bloody tales featuring human pitted against beast and gods, with the true majesty and horrors of the afterlife, with love and death and desire...

 Eight writers modernize ancient mythologies in DISTORTED, proving that not every story has been told.

Read an Excerpt: 
"I'm still not sure it’s a good idea," Cassandra said, adjusting the top of her black corset.  Dressed like a cyber goth club kid, multicolored glow sticks dangled from the zippers and belt on her baggy black pants matched her glowing bracelets, necklaces, and earrings.  She scratched her short, spiky black hair with hot pink tips from her eyes before crossing her arms.

Theo wasn’t sure why Icky wanted Europe so bad—Cassandra's green gaze and hourglass figure made her the prettier of the two.  Other than a hint of social awkwardness and her taste for illegal intoxicants, Cassandra was a catch.

"Chicken," Icky said, clucking.

"Well, what is it?" Ariadne asked.  "Going to sit around with your fingers in a bowl of peeled grapes and tell each other stories about vanishing hitchhikers and perverts with hooks for hands attacking Lovers' Lane?"

"No," Icky said.  "Something way better.  We're driving to Hamilton Heights and looking for the Bullman."

Ariadne puffed.

"The Bullman?" Theo asked conscious of his date's aggravation.  The tale stemmed from a dark page in her family's history, so he tried downplaying it.  "There's no such thing."

Everyone knew the town's most famous urban legend.

Before Ariadne was born, her parents' first child came into the world stillborn.  Refusing any public response or funeral, the prominent family ignored the tragedy, and, as will often happen when scandal rubs elbows with the rich, their terse reaction prompted immediate gossip.

Stories claiming that the child survived began circulating the community.  The myth grew, taking on an insidious nature.

The most common account had Ariadne's mom falling in love and fornicating with their prize winning snow-white bull, resulting in the birth of a ferocious monster.  Fearing disgrace, Judge Hamilton ordered the creature destroyed.  Their doctor, taken by the genetic anomaly and unable to terminate the atrocity, gave the creature to hobos living in scattered shacks dotting the dense woods outside of town so he could study it in secret.

According to rumors, the creature matured and now lurked the forest near Cretan Road and Hamilton Heights, a sprawling park on the lake bordering the state's thick wilderness.  Campers and hikers would return from the forest with stories of a hairy, malformed creature stealing food and gear from their campsites before scurrying off into the brush.  Once in a while, someone would vanish in the woods, and parents told their kids that the Bullman roamed the neighborhood streets after sunset, stealing and devouring misbehaving children.

No one ever managed to photograph the thing.

No footprints emerged in the rich, dark soil or red clay hills surrounding Hamilton Heights.



Despite a lack of hard evidence, the stories lingered on the public tongue, whispers spoken around crackling campfires and in tight alleyways.

The Hamilton family did not appreciate the yarn and ignored the accounts, debunking them whenever the newspaper reported sightings or ran spotlights for their Halloween editions.



Of all the embarrassing things that could go wrong on a first date with Ariadne Hamilton, Theo couldn’t think of anything worse than Icky seeking out her fabled brother.