UNWRITTEN by Tara Gilboy RELEASES TODAY!!!

Title: UNWRITTEN

Author: TARA GILBOY

Genre: MIDDLE-GRADE FICTION, SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASY

Age Range: 8 – 12

Grade Level: 4 – 6

Length: 200 PAGES

Publisher: NORTH STAR EDITIONS – JOLLY FISH PRESS

Received From: NETGALLEY

Release Date: OCTOBER 16, 2018

ISBN: 9781631631771

Price: $11.99 USD

Rating: 4 OUT OF 5 STARS⭐⭐⭐⭐

DESCRIPTION:

Twelve-year-old Gracie Freeman is living a normal life, but she is haunted by the fact that she is actually a character from a story, an unpublished fairy tale she’s never read.

When she was a baby, her parents learned that she was supposed to die in the story, and with the help of a magic book, took her out of the story, and into the outside world, where she could be safe.

But Gracie longs to know what the story says about her. Despite her mother’s warnings, Gracie seeks out the story’s author, setting in motion a chain of events that draw herself, her mother, and other former storybook characters back into the forgotten tale.

Inside the story, Gracie struggles to navigate the blurred boundary between who she really is and the surprising things the author wrote about her.

As the story moves toward its deadly climax, Gracie realizes she’ll have to face a dark truth and figure out her own fairy-tale ending.

MY REVIEW:

This book is going to be a hit with young girls. The story weaves all the magic of a fairy tale with all of the mystery of a middle-grade story well told.

The idea that the main character, twelve year old Gracie is actually a character from a storybook is interesting and will be unique for the younger generation.

At first Gracie is living a normal life, just like the rest of her schoolmates. As the story continues we learn where she came from and how it came to be that her mother escaped with her into the “real” world.

The Author writes with the perfect mix of preteen angst and magic. What twelve year old girl hasn’t fantasized about discovering that she is really a Princess?

Imagine discovering that you owe your life to an author, rather than to your parents. How bizarre would that be?

After Gracie discovers with where she came from, events quickly speed up. She is desperate to know more about what the story says about her, but her mother will not tell her anything.

With typical youthful exuberance, Gracie decides that if her mother will not give her the information she so desperately wants, she will find answers on her own. This leads to a snowball effect and soon events spiral out of control and Gracie discovers that her life is now in danger.

Will she survive returning to the fairytale she had been rescued from as a baby? Or will she discover too late the power of the fairytale?

Writing Gracie must have brought out the author’s inner child. She does a brilliant job of describing the way young girls often feel. They may think they are on the cusp of adulthood, and be aggravated by the way their parents still treat them “like a child.”

It is only later (and sometimes too late, or not all) that they come to realize that maybe, just maybe, their parents are right and should have been listened to after all.

I enjoyed the mother daughter dynamics and could empathise with both characters. The scenes from inside the fairytale are terrific, as are Gracie’s interactions with the characters.

I don’t want to give too much away, so I will say no more about the plot.

UNWRITTEN is due to hit bookstores on October 16th and it is sure to become a hit. It would be a great Christmas present for the preteen or young adult in your family.

I rate UNWRITTEN as 4 out of 5 Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐

**Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a free copy of this book.**

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

TARA GILBOY holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, where she specialized in writing for children and young adults.

She teaches creative writing in San Diego Community College’s Continuing Education Program and for the PEN Writers in Prisons Program.

Her work has appeared in Word Riot, Beloit Fiction Journal, Cricket, and other publications.

She lives in San Diego, California.

To learn more about this author, visit the following links:

OFFICIAL WEBSITE

GOODREADS

FACEBOOK

TWITTER

AMAZON

PUBLISHER’S WEBSITE

A truly exceptional read that will both break your heart and lift your spirits 5 Stars go to THE BITTER SIDE OF SWEET by Tara Sullivan

 

Title: THE BITTER SIDE OF SWEET

Author: TARA SULLIVAN

Genre: Young Adult Fiction

Length: 320 pages

Release Date: February 23, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-399-17307-3

Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP Penguin Young Readers Group, G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers

Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars

 

• I received a free copy of this book from the Publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

 

THE BITTER SIDE OF SWEET is the perfect title for this novel as the story within will both break your heart and lift your spirits. Sounds impossible, right? Well, I swear it is true.

Tara Sullivan has crafted characters that will settle themselves deeply into your heart and mind and that will stay with you long after you finish reading this incredible tale of bravery, determination,

The story begins on a cocoa farm in the remote farm region of the Ivory Coast (in Africa, for those of us who are geographically challenged.) It is on this farm that readers are introduced to fifteen-year-old Amadou and his eight-year-old brother Seydou.

We discover that the brothers are originally from Mali and that two years earlier they left their home in search of work and the opportunity to eat on a regular basis. Their family worked hard on their small farm, but drought made them unable to grow enough food to feed the entire family. The brothers had heard of school, but no one they know has ever been able to afford to attend.

Amadou and Seydou were “hired” by some men to work on a cocoa farm and were taken deep into the interior of the Ivory Coast. It was only after they arrived that the brothers realized they had been duped and would not be receiving any pay for the work they were to do. In fact, they were told that they owed the farmer money for what he had to pay the driver who had sold the boys to him and that they would have to stay and work at the farm until their debt was paid. So, in fact, they were NOT workers, they were SLAVES. Quickly they learned that if they did not work hard enough or fast enough to satisfy the farmers, they would be brutally beaten.

Children and chocolate: The sweet industry’s bitter side  By Annie-Rose Harrison-Dunn, 30-Jan-2014 NGOs say human trafficking and child labor remain deep-seated problems of the cocoa industry as a Nestlé, ADM and Cargill court case stirs up old supply chain concerns.

All Amadou cares about is protecting his younger brother. He obviously does not like the circumstances he has found himself in, but since he does not see any way out, he is resigned to it. The one time the brothers tried to escape, they were caught and instead of punishing Amadou, the overseers forced him to watch while they beat his brother bloody with chains. Seydou was only six at the time of the beating. From that day on, Amadou did his best to protect his brother and himself from more beatings.

Every day seems the same to Amadou and he has almost lost all hope of ever seeing his family again. That is, until one day when a new “worker” is delivered to the farm under unusual circumstances. Then, everything changed…….

I do not want to give any more spoilers for this book, so I will leave the details of the rest of the story out of this review. I will however, say that Amadou and Seydou are in for one heck of an adventure,

This is a story that highlights both the good and the horrible things that human beings do to one another.

When the average person thinks about slavery, we think about the past – back to a time when African-Americans were owned by white plantation owners in the Southern United States. What should instead come to mind is the fact that sadly, slavery still exists in our modern world.

Hand in hand with the issue of forced child labour is the issue of poverty. Seydou and Amadou grew up in a poor farming village in Mali and while they are fictional characters, there are literally thousands of children in identical situations today. For those of us that live in North America, the kind of poverty that Amadou and Seydou were born into is almost unimaginable. The closest most of us will get to seeing it is when we see television commercials showing starving children and even then, most people tend to look away.

THE BITTER SIDE OF SWEET brings these issues to light while also telling an absolutely fantastic story filled with action, adventure, love, hope and highlights the power within all of us to figure out how to make our lives better. The tale itself is fast-paced and readers will find themselves riveted to the page and fully invested in the outcome of the brother’s adventures. I cannot say enough good things about this book.

I also want to assure potential readers that although this book is billed as a Young Adult novel, it is written beautifully and will appeal to readers of all ages.

I rate this book with the highest possible rating I can give which is 5 out of 5 stars.

My advice?

BUY THIS BOOK!

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

*Author information was copied from her website www.tarasullivanbooks.com

Tara was born in Calcutta and spent her childhood and early adolescence moving around South America and the Caribbean with her parents who were international aid workers. Not only did this mean that many dinner table conversations centered around issues of international justice and poverty alleviation, but it was awkwardly normal for me to stick out like a sore thumb on the playground, at a birthday party, or on the bus.

Though she spoke Spanish like a native and felt more comfortable in Bolivia than holding her American passport, she was always seen as the outsider. When the UV rays from the hole in the ozone over the Andes badly damaged Tara’s eyes, her family was forced to leave what had always felt like home and move to the United States. Having never lived stateside before, Tara stepped off the plane at the age of 14 and started 9th grade the very next morning at a high school in rural Virginia.

Thus began her adventures in the United States. After high school she attended the University of Virginia, followed by a year as an AmeriCorps volunteer in Minnesota where she worked in refugee resettlement and interpreted at a prenatal clinic for indigent women.

Tara completed graduate school in Indiana before moving to Massachusetts in 2008. She currently teaches Spanish at Burlington High School and lives just outside of Boston with her husband, children, and a big furry mutt.

Back in 2009, when she came across a news story about the kidnapping, mutilation, and murder of African albinos for use as good luck talismans, she was struck by the topic on multiple levels. The grown-up in her, the one that studied for a dual Masters in Non-Profit Management and International Studies and worked with village micro-finance and refugee resettlement programs, wanted to publicize this human rights tragedy. The kid in her, the one who had to hide from the sun and could never blend into a crowd, wanted to tell a story about what it must feel like to be a kid who has those problems in the extreme.

It was then that she sat down and started to write GOLDEN BOY. And the rest, as they say, is history…

• Represented by: Caryn Wiseman of Andrea Brown Literary Agency
• Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books For Young Readers (a division of Penguin Books for Young Readers)
• Books:
  GOLDEN BOY, 2013
  THE BITTER SIDE OF SWEET, 2016

To learn more about Tara and her writing visit any (or all) of the following links:

OFFICIAL WEBSITE

FACEBOOK

TWITTER 

GOODREADS   

PUBLISHER’S WEBSITE

 

• The above picture is of the author in Haiti while researching cocoa farms.