Once Upon a Time *The Everafter* and *Lips Touch Three Times*

This time for Once Upon a Time, where I feature the start of a book so I can get very excited about reading it although not right away because I have other things on the go, I want to show you two books that seem very cool.

The Everafter (although my advanced reading copy is titled The After, which sometimes happens where a book will change its title just before its release date) looks pretty good. The cover is beautiful, and the premise goes like this:

Madison Stanton doesn't know where she is or how she got there. But she does know this--she is dead. And alone, in a vast, dark space. The only company she has in this place are luminescent objects that turn out to be all the things Maddy lost while she was alive. And soon she discovers that with these artifacts, she can re-experience--and sometimes even change--moments from her life: Her first kiss. A trip to Disney World. Her sister's wedding. A disastrous sleepover.

In reliving these moments, Maddy learns illuminating and sometimes frightening truths about her life--and death.

And here is how it opens:

I'm dead.
Not my-parents-told-me-to-be-home-by-twelve-and-it's-two-o'clock-now dead. Just dead. Literally.
I think.
I can't feel a body anymore. No hunger--not even a stomach. No fingers to wiggle, no feet to tap.
So I pretty much have to assume that I'm...gone?
No. I can't be gone, because I'm here.
I won't say that I've "passed on" or "passed away". I don't remember passing anything on the way here. For that matter, I don't remember dying, either. There's some saying about people "dying of curiosity". But I'm just curious about how I died.

And then I flip through the first chapter and she mentions that she didn't expect to die alone because someone named Gabriel should be with her. It definately grabs my attention. The Everafter is available in October.

And another book that is available in October is Lips Touch Three Times by Laini Taylor, with illustrations by Jim Di Bartolo, who is her husband (they have a daughter named Clementine Pie, aw!). Laini Taylor wrote the Faeries of Dreamdark series, which I haven't read yet but look neat. Here's the premise:

Three tales of supernatural love, each pivoting on a kiss that is no mere kiss, but an action with profound consequences for the kissers' souls:
Goblin Fruit: In Victorian times, goblin men had only to offer young girls sumptuous fruits to tempt them to sell their souls. But what does it take to tempt today's savvy girls?
Spicy Little Curses: A demon and the ambassador to Hell tussle over the soul of a beautiful English girl in India. Matters become complicated when she falls in love and decides to test her curse.
Hatchling: Six days before Esme's fourteenth birthday, her left eye turns from brown to blue. She little suspects what the change heralds, but her small safe life begins to unravel at once. What does the beautiful, fanged man want with her, and how is her fate connected to a mysterious race of demons?

And here is how it begins:

There is a certain kind of girl the goblins crave. You could walk across a high school campus and point them out: not her, not her, her. The pert, lovely ones with butterfly tattoos in secret places, sitting on their boyfriends' laps? No, not them. The girls watching the lovely ones sitting on their boyfriends' laps? Yes.
Them.
The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls.
Like Kizzy.

Whoa, chilly. It looks awesome. And the illustrations are perfect (from what I can tell. Again, the advanced reading copy only has some sketches with a banner across saying "sketches not final"). Laini has an author's note at the back which credits her inspiration in a Christina Rossetti poem, "Goblin Market", as well as the British Raj, Zoroastrianism, and the notion of Hell in different cultures. It sounds like these interests will bring a different depth to her book. I can't wait to read both of these books.

Mandy