Quick-on-the-draw Kelley Armstrong fans should whip over to SF Signal and enter their Waking the Witch giveaway. The contest ends at 10:00 PM (Central Time) tonight, so you've still got a little time, but the clock's a-tickin'...

Labels: contests, Kelley Armstrong

Kelley Armstrong is one of those authors whose work I rarely think about unless one of her books is right in front of me. I like her novels, but they just don't stick in my brain—at least, they haven't in the past, but the recently-finished Darkest Powers trilogy (her first series for young adults) may have changed that.

2008's The Summoning, 2009's The Awakening, and the just-released The Reckoning all center around Chloe Saunders, a fifteen-year-old girl whose family thinks she's crazy. Sure, she seems sane enough, but do sane girls claim to see ghosts? Chloe is sent to Lyle House, a group home for mentally ill teens. She promptly starts fretting over her social status amongst her fellow inmates, but when she meets the ghost of one of Lyle House's patients and realizes that her new “doctors” are less interested in her health than her potential powers, she decides she has bigger fish to fry....

I have always been impressed by Armstrong's gift for nuanced characterization, but found it hard to care about the ins and outs of her fantasy universe. (Plus, her cover art is usually terrible—like, distractingly bad.) Happily, the Darkest Powers books simultaneously play to her strengths and tone down her weaknesses: her characters are still multifaceted, but her writing for young adults is sharper, more coherent, and even a touch sexier—everything stays well below a PG-13 rating, but she doesn't distract from her romantic plotline with hundreds of pages of supernatural politics. The combination is delightfully creepy, far more memorable than her previous books, and has us eagerly looking forward to her next YA release.

Labels: Book Reviews, Kelley Armstrong

Kelley Armstrong has posted the first three chapters of her upcoming young adult novel The Reckoning (the third and final book in her "Darkest Powers" trilogy) on her site. Interested parties should totally click here to find out more.

Labels: Kelley Armstrong

I was so turned off by the cover art for Kelley Armstrong’s Personal Demon that I didn’t even feel like requesting a review copy, much less actually purchasing one. This is no reflection on Ms. Armstrong’s considerable writing skills, but an expression of my unwillingness to be seen reading anything that looked so much like an X-rated version of those R.L. Stine Goosebumps books that were popular when I was in elementary school:


See what I mean? The neon font (which is even brighter in real life)! The vaguely sexual pose involving a young woman feeling up a gargoyle! Why have Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld covers gotten steadily worse over the course of her career? Shouldn’t the opposite be true? She’s a big-name author now!

Anyway, I stuck to my guns for over a year, but eventually my mother bought a paperback copy, and I folded like a cheap suit. It was there and it was free, so I read it, my stance on butt-ugly cover art be damned. And you know what I discovered? Not only is the cover hideous, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the book. Nobody fondles a gargoyle in this story, and I’m pretty sure the heroine, half-demon tabloid reporter Hope Adams, never wears a strapless leather corset. Instead, Personal Demon is another entertaining installment in Armstrong’s horror/romance/suspense series, with a complex, well-structured plot that owes a considerable debt to The Godfather. (It focuses on a conflict between the “Cabal”—Armstrong’s supernatural mafia—and a Miami gang of otherworldly young thugs.)

I’m not sure who makes cover art decisions, but I hope whoever made this one has found a different line of work. Because when Laurell K. Hamilton’s most recent release (Blood Noir) has a cover that is both more interesting and less kinky than that of a Kelley Armstrong book, something is seriously amiss with the publishing world.

Labels: Book Cover, Kelley Armstrong

I just finished reading Kelley Armstrong's The Summoning—her first young adult novel, as well as the first book in a projected trilogy—and I thought it was awesome: totally fun, totally exciting, creepy in the best possible way. Even the cover art was about a thousand cuts above her usual stuff (although a little too reminiscent of Cynthia Leitich Smith's Tantalize). BUT! HOWEVER! HEED MY WARNING! This story ends on a nasty cliffhanger, and the next book isn't due out until May of 2009, so bear that in mind. Really slow readers should pick this up around Valentine’s Day, average-speed readers should wait until Easter, and speed readers should probably hold off until just before the next book comes out, because I promise: you'll be climbing the walls.

Labels: Fantasy, Horror, Kelley Armstrong, teen literature

We're a little behind on the calendar, so I was surprised to learn that Kelley Armstrong's new book Personal Demon is already out... and I was even more surprised to learn that this is the cover:


A babe in a vinyl dress, fondling a gargoyle? What on earth were they THINKING? Kelley Armstrong's old covers all looked more or less like this. Don't covers usually get more tasteful as the author becomes better known, rather than tackier?

Note: On the upside, I hear she's about to come out with a young adult series, which I am totally stoked to see!

Labels: Book Cover, Kelley Armstrong