Review ~ FEATHERMORE (Feathermore, #1) by Lucy Swing

"When the one thing you live for is taken from you, do you let it go or do you fall?
Jade, like any other student at Brushwood High, awaits the start of the school year with a certain measure of dread. Worse, she is being threatened by a voice that only she can hear—a voice that lurks at the edges of her awareness, haunting her and warning her of something unknown. She has always been able to count on her two best friends, Claire and Nate, but can she confide in them now? About this? Would they even believe her?
Life takes a turn for the better when she meets Avan, a darkly handsome new student who, somehow, seems to drown out the voice and make her feel at ease.
But Jade soon comes to realize that good things don’t last forever. When everything spirals out of control, she is shattered by something she never saw coming. Dazed and despairing, she must now overcome tragedy and embrace her true existence and a new but dangerous love. Will she be able to save herself and those she loves, before it’s too late? Or will she let the surrounding darkness consume her?"

FEATHERMORE, by Lucy Swing, is the story of Jade, her journey of discovery about herself and the hidden world around her. Jade's path is tumultuous, filled with love, pain and loss. Will she survive?
I have to start by saying, I feel like I've read this story before. But this may be my fault. I feel really torn about this and I talked about it with a fellow blogger. We read so many books. Here's how insane I am: I've read SIXTY-ONE books so far in 2012. It's April. Granted, some of those are novellas, but still. Sixty-one. That's just too many. And when you read as many books as some of us do, they start to run together. Especially when the stories follow the same path. So how this ties in with my review is this: avid readers need/want to be Wow'd. And it needs to happen fairly quickly in the story. Otherwise, they blend together. To sum it up, while I liked the story in general, because it didn't feel new to me, I didn't get overly excited about it.

So back to FEATHERMORE. And I'll try to do this with no spoilers. It does follow a fairly typical path for young adult paranormal books. Jade is a quiet, sweet girl with a problem, she hears a voice in her head. Enter Avan, a mysterious new guy with whom Jade feels a quick connection. Jade learns that things aren't even close to what they seem and she is set on a dangerous  path. She must learn to embrace her new life.

While the general premise isn't new, I have to give the author major credit for her writing. The writing is very easy to get lost in and the flow of her words is excellent. And it's easy to see that she put so much thought and love into her story. The lore behind her premise is detailed and interesting, without being overly complicated.  I found the last half of the book to be fairly exciting and the ending was definitely a heartbreaking cliffhanger that will leave you dying to read book two in the series, FALLENMORE.



Favorite Quote:

"The warmth that came from his body made me feel at home, as if, somehow, this was where I belonged. He smelled of woods after a thunderstorm, clean and elemental." (ebook, pg. 103)


Published March 2nd 2012

You can purchase FEATHERMORE at:
Barnes & Noble  |  Book Depository  |  Amazon


Source: Received from author for review.

Cover Reveal ~ FALLENMORE, by Lucy Swing

I am happy to share with you the cover of FALLENMORE, by Lucy Swing. FALLENMORE is book two in the FEATHERMORE series. So here is the cover, along with a teaser. Enjoy!

LOST SOUL:

Silence.

Darkness.

Stillness all around me. There was only the endless blackness that stretched out into infinity and swallowed me whole. I floated, weightless, suspended in a starless universe.

I had fallen, hadn’t I?

I’ve gone to hell.

I didn’t understand when, or how, but I must’ve had become a fallen angel. I would forever live and succumb to the darkness that I felt inside of me. I would roam the mortal realm with a heart filled with hate and destruction.

I moved my arms but I couldn’t see them. It was as if I didn’t exist. I was only mind in this world. Wherever this was. The air around me was thick and I took long, deep breaths, but it only caused the feeling of suffocation to enclose me even more.

I thought of what had happened before I had come here, an attempt at trying to piece it together. How and why I had been the one to end up in this place. My memories were hazy, distant, but they were there. I maneuvered around the fog that kept them hidden but I couldn’t tap into them. They were blocked off.

I allowed myself to wander through my life before any of this happened. My parents. Memories flashed through and I gripped on to each one, holding on to the past. Holding on to the love once filled my heart, yet there was nothing there now. No love, no happiness. It seemed like a distant memory, but why? Why had I fallen? There was a faint noise that sent vibrations all around me. I extended my arms, trying to feel for something. Nothing.

“Hello!” Although I couldn’t see myself, I was able to hear. My voice echoed fiercely but no one responded. It was silent for what felt like forever.

“What are you doing here?” Claire. She sounded distant and muffled. I wanted to call back to her, to ask her to help me, but something stopped me. Something deep inside me made me doubt her, almost hate her.

I tried to move, but I couldn’t really tell if I was moving at all. I just floated.

“I can protect her. She will be safe with me, and most importantly, she will feel no pain.” Blake? Why was Blake here? Or, there? Wherever it was that they were. Did they know each other? Questions gathered in my head, but there was no one around to ask them to. I still screamed them out.

“What is going on? Where are you?!”

There was a warm feeling on my hand and then it spread along my arm, as if the darkness was caressing me softly. I twitched away from it, scared by the feeling it brought. The fear was instantly gone. Left behind was emptiness, I just was; the darkness no longer scared me. I wanted to go where he was. Blake. He would know what to do.

“Michael, you can’t think for one second life will go back to what it once was, can you?” Claire’s voice rippled though my body, awakening a monster.

Michael? Who the hell was Michael?

“Of course it won’t, but it’s not because of me, is it?” He spat out. “It was your hand that killed him.”

Killed him.

Who?

A set of blue eyes flashed before me.

And something inside of me broke. Again.

I saw his face and that was all it took for the pain to come crashing down like a tidal wave. I tried to hold on to his face, to the emotions that were coming across in his eyes, but he was gone, and the glimpse of my own emotions was gone with him. I stared down at my own arms, they way they had been wrapped around his body as he took his last breath. The way his bright eyes had lost their intensity; not even the moon that washed the forest with light could brighten them up. His eyes had moved through my face as if searching for something that would save him. But I couldn’t save him, and his eyes soon stared, lifelessly at the star filled sky above us. He had died in my arms and I had done nothing to stop it. I had nothing to prevent it from happening.

Could I had saved him from the doom that loving me had brought upon him?

I screamed, or at least I thought I was screaming. There was no more sounds coming out from me.

I dug deeper through the memory. I could still feel the weight of his body in my arms. There had been a tear deep inside of me the moment I felt his soul vanish, when he had become just another useless death in Lilith’s game.

Lilith. Who had left him there to die. Who just stood by as Shemer’s sword took the one person I lived for. Who stood by when Claire, my best friend, killed him. Lilith, whom I would have sacrificed it all to, if only to see his face one more time. If me dying meant I would be with him again, that’s what I wanted to do. Where I wanted to be. But I was trapped here.

Alone.


So intriguing, right?
And just in case you missed it, here is book one in the series, FEATHERMORE.

"When the one thing you live for is taken from you, do you let it go or do you fall?
Jade, like any other student at Brushwood High, awaits the start of the school year with a certain measure of dread. Worse, she is being threatened by a voice that only she can hear—a voice that lurks at the edges of her awareness, haunting her and warning her of something unknown. She has always been able to count on her two best friends, Claire and Nate, but can she confide in them now? About this? Would they even believe her?
Life takes a turn for the better when she meets Avan, a darkly handsome new student who, somehow, seems to drown out the voice and make her feel at ease.
But Jade soon comes to realize that good things don’t last forever. When everything spirals out of control, she is shattered by something she never saw coming. Dazed and despairing, she must now overcome tragedy and embrace her true existence and a new but dangerous love. Will she be able to save herself and those she loves, before it’s too late? Or will she let the surrounding darkness consume her?"

You can purchase FEATHERMORE at:

 Amazon (ebook)   |   Amazon (pb)  |   Lucy Swing.com  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Smashwords

FEATHERMORE Blog Tour ~ Guest Post from author Lucy Swing

Welcome to The Bookish Babe's stop on the FEATHERMORE Blog Tour!

Today, I have a truly lovely guest post from Lucy Swing, author of FEATHERMORE. The post is followed by details of the fabulous blog tour giveaway hosted by Lucy.

And now... author Lucy Swing. Enjoy.

WHY I WRITE YA

As an avid reader, I will pretty much read any genre at all. When I started reading as a child I was obsessed with R.L. Stine. My parents had a clothing store at the mall and I would spend hours at the bookstore reading Goosebumps. Whenever I came across any kind of money at all, it would go toward a book. When I started growing up, and although I kept reading Stine’s books, my taste became a little bit broader. Now, whenever I had money I spent it on clothes or going out with my friends, and that is why I began reading my Mom’s books. She, like I, has to go to sleep with a book in hand. And so there were plenty for me to choose from, however her genre was a little different that mine, she loved romance novels. Think Nora Roberts and Danielle Steele. And so I daydreamed of handsome and romantic men that would come to sweep me off the floor, the romantic in me was born. I went on, for years reading anything my mom purchased. The DaVinci code drove me wild!
                                                                                                                                     But it wasn’t until I was told about Twilight that I became a DIE HARD reader. I was working at the hospital at the time. I had taken a very lunch break and so I was completely alone in our break room. On the table was a paperback of Twilight. The TV wasn’t working and so I picked it up, after all, I had half an hour to kill. OH MY GOD, the half an hour disappeared. I don’t know how it is possible, but time fast forwarded! I had gotten so into the story that by the time I came up for air it had been an hour! I was so busted. Reluctantly I put it down and headed back to work. I couldn’t concentrate, I had Meyer’s story engraved in my mind. 7pm came around and I bolted to my car. I didn’t go home, I told my Mom I would pick up the kids a little bit later and drove like a maniac to the bookstore. By then, the first three were already out, so I bought them all. It might have taken me a week before I had read them all. I was ADDICTED. Since then I have read all four about 10 times each, and every time, it’s like the very first.
                                                                                                                                         It was because of the Twilight saga that I decided to become a writer. I wanted readers to feel the way Meyers had made me feel. To become the character and have a break from our everyday lives. I wanted to create an escape that readers would want to escape to.
                                                                                                                                     And so my genre of choice was easy, Young Adult. It is the genre I like reading most.
How many of you were told by a parent, aunt, grandmother how we would one day miss our teenage years? How we would one day want to turn back time and be in high school again? Everything my Mom has ever said to me and was brushed off as “Yeah, right. Whatever” has come true. And so, what better way to re-live those days than by creating my own?
                                                                                                                                     The Young Adult genre is not just for teenagers, it is for everybody that misses those days and wants to, even if for a few hours a day, go back and reminisce. YA is also for the teenagers dealing with the realistic issues sometimes mingled in the stories, in the case of Feathermore, bullying. I was bullied when I was younger and I completely stand against it. It breaks people and scars them for life in one way or another. For adults, as I said before, YA is a getaway to times already passed.
                                                                                                                                            What is your genre and why?
                                                                                                                                  Thank you ladies for hosting me in your amazing blog today.

"When the one thing you live for is taken from you, do you let it go or do you fall?
Jade, like any other student at Brushwood High, awaits the start of the school year with a certain measure of dread. Worse, she is being threatened by a voice that only she can hear—a voice that lurks at the edges of her awareness, haunting her and warning her of something unknown. She has always been able to count on her two best friends, Claire and Nate, but can she confide in them now? About this? Would they even believe her?
Life takes a turn for the better when she meets Avan, a darkly handsome new student who, somehow, seems to drown out the voice and make her feel at ease.
But Jade soon comes to realize that good things don’t last forever. When everything spirals out of control, she is shattered by something she never saw coming. Dazed and despairing, she must now overcome tragedy and embrace her true existence and a new but dangerous love. Will she be able to save herself and those she loves, before it’s too late? Or will she let the surrounding darkness consume her?"

Lucy Swing lives in sunny Florida with her husband and two children.

She is a YA Paranormal/ Romance writer, whose works include: Feathermore #1 (Feathermore Trilogy), Bloody Valentine, the novella, and Bloody Valentine is also offered in "Death by Chocolate," an anthology consisting of 6 fantastic YA short stories with a chocolaty twist.
She is an absolute book hoarder and must always have a book at arms distance. Music is her muse, and there is always a soundtrack that plays along her life.

For more information on Lucy Swing please visit her website:

http://www.LucySwing.com

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