Mundie Moms

Friday, February 17, 2017

DAUGHTER OF THE BURNING CITY by Amanda Foody / Cover Reveal, Excerpt + Giveaway

WELCOME TO TODAY'S COVER REVEAL for debut author Amanda Foody's DAUGHTER OF THE BURNING CITY. I am so excited about this book's upcoming release. I absolutely LOVE this cover. Along with today's exciting cover reveal, you can read Amanda's thoughts on the cover, read an excerpt & enter to WIN! CHECK OUT THE COVER BELOW!

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 fromAmazon 
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.

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.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR



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)
Find Amanda online: Website | Twitter | Instagram 

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:


a Rafflecopter giveaway 




Don't miss Amanda's swag pack giveaway! Details in the image above.

20 comments:

  1. If I could create an illusion, it would be of tranquility. A tap of the wand, and POOF, wherever you are, whatever is happening, everything is still and calm for a moment. All hell may break loose the next instance, but for a moment, everything is serene.

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    1. THIS is an awesome illusion! I need tranquility as well. :)

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  2. If I could create an Illusion it would be like stop time for one certain person, but things for everyone else would still happening :D

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  3. What a beautiful cover!! If I could create an illusion it would probably be something like a beautiful day or something that would make me feel happy lol. Sounds boring :P

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  4. Hmm....if I could create an illusion -- it would be of the beach. I love the beach and just being there calms me down. An empty beach though preferably with no seagalls...

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  5. This cover is gorgeous!!! And I would create reflective illusions, ie a reflection of the person's deepest desires or fears

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  6. I AM SO IN LOVE WITH THIS COVER! And creating an illusion is HARD--I don't know if I should do something wicked or with good intent.

    I think I'll go with the illusion of having more time when there really is none...

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  7. If I could create an illusion, it would be a replica of my favorite mystical creature....a dragon. And then I could ride the skies wherever and whenever I chose!

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  8. If I could create an illusion, it would be to make my entire house look like the library at Trinity College. AKA heaven.

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  9. If I could create an illusion, it would be of amazing scenery outside my window at all times!!

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  10. I create an illusion every day. Don't we all? Is not all this a mere illusion? Are our selves but mere illusions? Can we ever really know another person?

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  12. If I could create an illusion it would be a book that would re-write the horrible endings to AMAZING ones.

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  13. LOVE that cover!
    I think I would love to create an illusion that my house is always clean and welcoming and decorated really well (it's not, I have no eye for decorating) so I could just come home and relax!

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  14. I'd like to create illusion of places I've never been to!

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  15. If I could create an illusion, it would be of heaven as I imagine it.

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  16. I would create the illusion of revealing someone a glimpse at the deepest desire.

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  17. If I could create an illusion it would have to be summer all year round. Thank you

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  18. If I could create an illusion, it would be one of peace and harmony.

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  19. Eee, yesss. That cover is gorgeous :D Stunning post sweetie. <3 Thank you for sharing about this one :D I'm curious about it.

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