COVER REVEAL
I LOVE this cover! What are your thoughts on the cover? I'm completely intrigued. Yes, I would totally pick up this book based on the cover alone. This is one carnival I want to know more about. The details are amazing. I'm want to know more about the tents, the smoke, and the performers. This is one story I am looking forward to reading.
FROM THE AUTHOR
Daughter of the Burning City is a weird book that meshes a lot of elements of sweeping YA fantasies, magical carnival stories, and murder mysteries all into a single novel--which is why I love the direction of this cover. I think the combination of images, colors, and style reflects the themes of the book perfectly. The massive circus city below is a great representation of the smoldering Gomorrah Festival, and the smoked effects on the font strengthen the impact of the title and the image. I also love the font for the tagline, as it looks so creepy horror. The purple and pink colors are representative of colors mentioned in the story: the theme colors of the Gomorrah Festival are black (of course--how could a carnival of debauchery not be full darkness?), and then secondary colors of red, violet, and fuschia because everything in the Festival is over the top and clashy. The artists did a great job reflecting those strange colors while still allowing them to reflect the darker, murderous themes in a book where no one is safe and nothing is as it seems...
ABOUT THE BOOK
By: Amanda Foody
Published by: Harlequin Teen
To Be Released on: July 25th, 2017
Pre-Order from: Amazon
Add it to Goodreads
Sixteen-year-old Sorina works for the Gomorrah Festival, a traveling carnival of debauchery meant to cater to any pleasure or desire, whether that be the famous Gomorrah licorice cherries, or even sweeter nights spent at a renowned bordello. Sorina is an illusion-worker, meaning she can create illusions that others can see, feel and touch—which are nearly real, except for Sorina’s ability to control them or make them disappear as needed. Her illusions are her family, and together they make up the cast of the Gomorrah Festival Freak Show.
When one of her illusions is murdered, Sorina must determine who killed him, why, and most importantly, how they killed a person who doesn’t exist.
When one of her illusions is murdered, Sorina must determine who killed him, why, and most importantly, how they killed a person who doesn’t exist.
READ AN EXCERPT
I peek from behind the tattered
velvet curtains at the chattering audience, their mouths full of candied
pineapple and kettle corn. With their pale faces flushed from excitement and
the heat, they look as gullible as dandelions, much like the patrons in the
past five cities. The Gomorrah Festival hasn’t been permitted to travel this
far north in the Up-Mountains in over three years, and these people look like
they’re attending the opera or the theater rather than our traveling carnival
of debauchery.
The women wear frilly dresses
in burnt golds and oranges, buckled to the point of suffocation, some with
rosy-cheeked children bouncing on their laps, others with cleavage as high as
their chins. The men have shoulder pads to seem broader, stilted loafers to seem
taller and painted silver pocket watches to seem richer.
If buckles, stilts and paint
are enough to hoodwink them, then they won’t notice that the eight “freaks” of
my freak show are, in fact, only one.
Tonight’s mark, Count Pomp-di-pomp—or is it Count
Pomp-von-Pompa?—smokes an expensive pipe in the second row, his mustache
gleaming with leftover saffron honey from the pastry he had earlier. He’s
sitting too close to the front, which won’t make it easy for Iosef to steal the
count’s ring.
That’s where I come in.
My job is to distract the
audience so that Pomp-di-pomp doesn’t notice Iosef’s shadow-work coaxing the
sapphire ring off of his porky finger and dropping it onto the grass below.
A drum and fiddle play an
exotic Down-Mountain tune to quiet the audience’s chatter, and I let the
curtain fall, blocking my view. The Gomorrah Festival Freak Show will soon
begin.
This is my favorite part of the
performance: the anticipation. The drumbeats pound erratically, as if dizzy
from drinking several mugs of the Festival’s spiced wine. Everything sticks in
this humid air: the aromas of carnival food, the gray smoke that shrouds
Gomorrah like a cloak and the jittery intakes of breaths from the audience,
wondering whether the freak show will prove as gruesome as the sign outside
promised:
The
Gomorrah Festival Freak Show.
Walk
the line between abnormal and monstrous.
From
the opposite end of the stage, behind the curtain on stage right, Nicoleta nods
at me. I reach for the rope and yank down. The pulley spins and whistles, and
the curtain rises.
Nicoleta
struts—a very practiced, rigid strut—into the spotlight, her heels clicking
and the slit in her gown revealing a lacy violet garter at the curve of her
thigh. When I first created her three years ago, she had knee-shaking stage
fright, and I needed to control her during the show like a puppet. Now she’s so
accustomed to her role that I turn away, unneeded, and tie on my best mask.
Rhinestones of varying sizes and shades of red cover it, from the curled edges
near my temples to the tip of my nose. I need to dazzle, after all.
“Welcome
to the Gomorrah Festival Freak Show,” Nicoleta says.
The audience gawks at her. Like them, Nicoleta has fair skin.
Freckles. Pale brown hair draped to her elbows. Skinny wrists and skinnier,
child-like legs. Many members of Gomorrah have Up-Mountain heritage, whether
obvious or diluted, but these northern city dwellers always expect the
enticingly unfamiliar: sensual, audacious and wild.
The audience’s expressions seem
to say, Poor, lost girl, what are you doing working at Gomorrah? Where
are your parents? Your chaperone? You can’t be more than twenty-two.
“I
am Nicoleta, the show’s manager, and I hope you’re enjoying your first
Gomorrah Festival in…three years, I hear?”
The
audience stiffens; they stop fanning themselves, stop chewing their candied
pineapple. I curse under my breath. Nicoleta has a knack—a compulsion,
really—for saying the wrong thing. This is the Festival’s first night in Frice,
a city-state known—like many others—for its strict religious leaders and
disapproval of the Gomorrah lifestyle. Three years ago, a minor rebellion in
the Vurundi kingdom ousted the Frician merchants from power there. Despite
quickly reclaiming its tyrannous governorships, and despite Gomorrah’s utter
lack of involvement, Frice decided to restrict the Festival’s traveling in this
region. I can’t have Nicoleta scaring away our few visitors by reminding them
that their city officials disapprove of them being here, even to an attraction
as innocent as a freak show.
“For
those of you with weaker constitutions, I suggest you exit before our opening
act,” Nicoleta says. Her tone rises and falls at the proper moments. The
theatrics of her performance in our show are the opposite of Nicoleta’s role in
our family, which Unu and Du have dubbed “stick in the bum.” Every night, she
manages to transform—or, better put, improve—her entire demeanor for
the sake of the show, since her own abilities are too unreliable to deserve an
act. Some days, she can pull our caravans better than our two horses combined.
Others, she needs Tree to open our jars of lychee preserves.
“The sights you are about to witness are shocking, even monstrous,”
she continues. A young boy in the front row clings to his mother, pulling at
her puffed, apricot sleeves. “Children, cover your eyes. Parents, beware.
Because the show is about to begin.”
While the audience leans
forward in their seats, I prepare for the upcoming act by picturing the
Strings, as I call them. I have almost two hundred Strings, glowing silver,
dragging behind me as I walk, like the train of a fraying gown. Only I can see
them and, even then, only when I focus. I mentally reach down and pluck out
four particular Strings and circle them around my hands until they’re taut. The
others remain in a heap on the wooden floor.
“I’d like to introduce you to a
man found within the faraway Forest of Ruins,” Nicoleta lies. Backstage, Hawk
stops playing the fiddle, and Unu and Du reduce the tempo on their drums. I
yank on the Strings to command my puppet.
Thump.
Thump.
The
audience gasps as the Human Tree stomps onto the stage. His skin is made
entirely of bark, and his midsection measures as wide as a hundred-year-old oak
trunk. It’s difficult to make out his facial features in the twisted lumps of
wood, except for his sunken, beetle-black eyes and emptiness of expression.
Leaves droop from the branches jutting out from his shoulders, adding several
feet to his already daunting stature. His fingers curl into splintery twigs as
he waves hello.
From
backstage, my hand waves, as well. If I don’t control Tree, he’ll scream
profanity that will make half these fancy ladies faint. If he works himself
into a real tantrum, he’ll tear off the bark on his stomach until blood
trickles out like sap.
His
act begins, which is mostly him stomping around and grunting, and me yanking
this way and that on his Strings to make him do so. I crafted him when I was
three years old, before I considered the performance potential of my
illusions.
The
six other illusions wait with me backstage.
Venera, the boneless acrobat more flexible than a dripping egg
yolk, brushes rouge on her painted white cheeks at a vanity. She pouts in the
mirror and then pushes aside a strand of dark hair from her face. She’s beautiful,
especially in her skintight, black-and-purple-striped suit. Every night, the
audience practically drools over her…until they watch her body flatten into a
puddle or her arms roll up like a croissant.
Beside her, Crown files the
fingernails that grow from his body where hair should be. He keeps the nails on
his arms and legs smooth, giving him a scaly look, but he doesn’t touch the
ones on his hands and head, which are curled, yellow daggers as long as butcher
knives. Though Crown was my second illusion, made ten years ago, he appears to
be seventy-five. He always smokes a cigar before his performance so his gentle
voice will sound as prickly as his skin.
Hawk plays the fiddle in an
almost spiritual concentration while what’s left of a chipmunk—dinner—hangs out
of her mouth. Her brown wings are tucked under her fuchsia cape, where they
will remain until she unfolds them during her act, screeches and flies over
the—usually shrieking—audience. Her talons pluck at the fiddle’s strings at an
incomparable speed. Her ultimate goal is to challenge the devil himself to a
fiddle contest, and she figures by traveling with the world’s most famous
festival of depravity, she’s bound to run into him one day.
Blister, the chubby
one-year-old, plays with the beads dangling off of Unu and Du’s drum. Rather
than focusing on their rhythm, Unu and Du bicker about something, per usual. Du
punches Unu with their shared left arm. Unu hisses an unpleasant word loudly,
which Blister then tries out for himself, missing the double s
sound and saying something resembling a-owl.
Gill snaps at them all to be quiet and then resumes reading his
novel. Even wearing a rusted diver’s helmet full of water, he manages to make
out the words on the pages. Bubbles seep from the gills on his cheeks as he
sighs. As the loner of our family, he generally prefers the quiet company of
books to our boisterous, pre-show jitters. He only raises his voice during our
games of lucky coins—he holds the family record for the most consecutive wins
(twenty-one). I suspect he’s been cheating by allowing Hawk, Unu and Du to
forfeit games on purpose in exchange for lighter homework assignments.
“Keep an eye on Blister,” I
remind the boys. “Those drums are flammable.”
“Tell Unu to stuff a drumstick
up his—” Du glances hesitantly at Gill “—backside.”
“That’s your backside, too,
dung-brain,” Unu says.
“It’s an expression,” says Du.
“I like its sentiment.”
It would hardly be a classic
Gomorrah Festival Freak Show if the audience couldn’t hear my brothers tormenting
each other backstage.
“I’ll stick it up both your
assholes if you don’t shut it,” I say. They pay me no attention; they know I
never follow through with my threats.
“A-owl,” Blister says again.
“Language, Sorina,” Gill
groans.
“S*it. Sorry,” I reply, but I’m
only mildly chagrined. Blister’s been hearing all our foul mouths since the day
he came to be.
One by one, they perform their
acts: the Boneless Acrobat; the Fingernail Mace; the Half Girl, Half Hawk; the
Fire-Breathing Baby; the Two-Headed Boy; and the Trout Man. The audience roars
as Hawk screeches and soars over their seats, cheers at each splash of Gill
flipping in and out of his tank like a trained dolphin. They are utterly
unaware that the “freaks” are actually my illusions, projected for anyone to
see.
The only real freak in Gomorrah is me.
The only real freak in Gomorrah is me.
Amanda Foody has always considered imagination to be our best attempt at magic. After spending her childhood longing to attend Hogwarts, she now loves to write about immersive settings and characters grappling with insurmountable destinies. She holds a Masters in Accountancy from Villanova University, and a Bachelors of Arts in English Literature from the College of William and Mary. Currently, she works as a tax accountant in Philadelphia, PA, surrounded by her many siblings and many books.
DAUGHTER OF THE BURNING CITY, her first novel, will be published by Harlequin TEEN on July 25, 2017. Her second, ACE OF SHADES, will follow in April 2018. (source)
ENTER TO WIN
Thank you to Harlequin Teen, we have a giveaway for (1) galley of Daughter of the Burning City to giveaway to a Mundie Moms reader: