Waiting on Wednesday (9): Confessions by Kanae Minato

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly blog meme hosted by Breaking the Spine to highlight some upcoming releases that we're impatiently tapping our feet for. It's a great way to to keep track of some of the most anticipated releases amongst other book bloggers and a new way to discover books yourself.
This week I'm looking forward to:

Confessions
Author: Kanae Minato
Genre: Thriller
Publisher: Mulholland Books
To be published: August 19th, 2014
Find: Goodreads

Her pupils killed her daughter. Now, she will have her revenge.

After an engagement that ended in tragedy, all Yuko Moriguchi had to live for was her four-year-old child, Manami. Now, after a heartbreaking accident on the grounds of the middle school where she teaches, Yuko has given up and tendered her resignation.

But first, she has one last lecture to deliver. She tells a story that will upend everything her students ever thought they knew about two of their peers, and sets in motion a maniacal plot for revenge.

Narrated in alternating voices, with twists you'll never see coming, Confessions probes the limits of punishment, despair, and tragic love, culminating in a harrowing confrontation between teacher and student that will place the occupants of an entire school in harm's way. You'll never look at a classroom the same way again.

I'm bringing back this meme on my blog just for this week, because I'm actually really really excited for this book. The Japanese 2010 film adaptation of this book is one of my favorite movies, and I'm thrilled by the news that this book is finally going to be translated into English.

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Waiting on Wednesday (8): The Furies by Mark Alpert

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly blog meme hosted by Breaking the Spine to highlight some upcoming releases that we're impatiently tapping our feet for. It's a great way to to keep track of some of the most anticipated releases amongst other book bloggers and a new way to discover books yourself.
At the moment, the book I'm most excited for is:

The Furies: A Thriller 
Author: Mark Alpert
Genre: Science Fiction, Thriller
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
To be published: April 22, 2014
Find: Goodreads

For centuries, the Furies have lived among us. Long ago they were called witches and massacred by the thousands. But they’re human just like us, except for a rare genetic mutation that they’ve hidden from the rest of the world for hundreds of years.

Now, a chance encounter with a beautiful woman named Ariel has led John Rogers into the middle of a secret war among the Furies. Ariel needs John’s help in the battle between a rebellious faction of the clan and their elders. The grand prize in this war is a chance to remake the human race.

Mark Alpert's The Furies weaves cutting-edge science into an ingenious thriller, showing how a simple genetic twist could have inspired tales of witchcraft and sorcery, and how the paranormal could indeed be possible.

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Waiting on Wednesday (#7)

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly blog meme hosted by Breaking the Spine to highlight some upcoming releases that we're impatiently tapping our feet for. It's a great way to to keep track of some of the most anticipated releases amongst other book bloggers and a new way to discover books yourself.

At the moment, the book I'm most excited for is:

Illusive 
Author: Emily Lloyd-Jones
Genre: Science Fiction, Young Adult
Publisher: Little, Brown
To be published: July 14, 2014
Find: Goodreads

The X-Men meets Ocean's Eleven in this edge-of-your-seat sci-fi adventure about a band of "super" criminals.

When the MK virus swept across the planet, a vaccine was created to stop the epidemic, but it came with some unexpected side effects. A small percentage of the population developed superhero-like powers. Seventeen-year-old Ciere Giba has the handy ability to change her appearance at will. She's what's known as an illusionist...She's also a thief.

After a robbery goes awry, Ciere must team up with a group of fellow super-powered criminals on another job that most would consider too reckless. The formula for the vaccine that gave them their abilities was supposedly destroyed years ago. But what if it wasn't?

The lines between good and bad, us and them, and freedom and entrapment are blurred as Ciere and the rest of her crew become embroiled in a deadly race against he government that could cost them their lives.

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Waiting on Wednesday (#6): On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly blog meme hosted by Breaking the Spine to highlight some upcoming releases that we're impatiently tapping our feet for. It's a great way to to keep track of some of the most anticipated releases amongst other book bloggers and a new way to discover books yourself.

At the moment, the book I'm most excited for is:

On Such a Full Sea 
Author: Chang-rae Lee
Genre: Science Fiction, Dystopian
Publisher: Riverhead Books
To be published: January 7th, 2014
Find: Goodreads

On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee’s elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in.

In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class—descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China—find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement.

In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.

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Waiting on Wednesday (#5)

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly blog meme hosted by Breaking the Spine to highlight some upcoming releases that we're impatiently tapping our feet for. It's a great way to to keep track of some of the most anticipated releases amongst other book bloggers and a new way to discover books yourself.

At the moment, the book I'm most excited for is:

While Beauty Slept
Author: Elizabeth Blackwell
Genre: Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Fairy Tale Retellings
Publisher: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam
To be published: February 20, 2014
Find: Goodreads

A beautiful princess lies in a sleep so deep it is close to death. Was Sleeping Beauty revived by a prince's kiss? What really happened in that tower so long ago?

While Beauty Slept re-imagines the legend through the lens of historical fiction, telling the story as if it really happened. A Gothic tale of suspense and ambition, love and loss, it interweaves the story of a royal family and the servants who see behind the glamorous facade, following the journey of a young woman as she lives out a destiny that leads her to the brink of death.

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Waiting on Wednesday (#4)

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly blog meme hosted by Breaking the Spine to highlight some upcoming releases that we're impatiently tapping our feet for. It's a great way to to keep track of some of the most anticipated releases amongst other book bloggers and a new way to discover books yourself.

At the moment, the book I'm most excited for is:

Moth and Spark
Author: Anne Leonard
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Viking Press
To be published: February 20, 2014
Find: Goodreads

A prince with a quest. A commoner with mysterious powers. And dragons that demand to be freed—at any cost.

Prince Corin has been chosen to free the dragons from their bondage to the Empire, but dragons aren’t big on directions. They have given him some of their power, but none of their knowledge. No one, not the dragons nor their riders, is even sure what keeps the dragons in the Empire’s control.

Tam, sensible daughter of a well-respected doctor, had no idea before she arrived in the capital that she is a Seer, gifted with visions. When the two run into each other (quite literally) in the library, sparks fly and Corin impulsively asks Tam to dinner. But it’s not all happily ever after. Never mind that the prince isn’t allowed to marry a commoner: war is coming to Caithen.

Torn between Corin’s quest to free the dragons and his duty to his country, the lovers must both figure out how to master their powers in order to save Caithen. With a little help from a village of secret wizards and a rogue dragonrider, they just might pull it off.

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Waiting on Wednesday (#3)

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly blog meme hosted by Breaking the Spine to highlight some upcoming releases that we're impatiently tapping our feet for. It's a great way to to keep track of some of the most anticipated releases amongst other book bloggers and a new way to discover books yourself.

At the moment, the book I'm most excited for is:

The Waking Engine
Author: David Edison
Genre: Scifi & Fantasy
Publisher: Tor Books
To be published: February 11, 2014
Find: Goodreads

Welcome to the City Unspoken, where Gods and Mortals come to die.

Contrary to popular wisdom, death is not the end, nor is it a passage to some transcendent afterlife. Those who die merely awake as themselves on one of a million worlds, where they are fated to live until they die again, and wake up somewhere new. All are born only once, but die many times . . . until they come at last to the City Unspoken, where the gateway to True Death can be found.

Wayfarers and pilgrims are drawn to the City, which is home to murderous aristocrats, disguised gods and goddesses, a sadistic faerie princess, immortal prostitutes and queens, a captive angel, gangs of feral Death Boys and Charnel Girls . . . and one very confused New Yorker.

Late of Manhattan, Cooper finds himself in a City that is not what it once was. The gateway to True Death is failing, so that the City is becoming overrun by the Dying, who clot its byzantine streets and alleys . . . and a spreading madness threatens to engulf the entire metaverse.

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Waiting on Wednesdays (#2)

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly blog meme hosted by Breaking the Spine to highlight some upcoming releases that we're impatiently tapping our feet for. It's a great way to to keep track of some of the most anticipated releases amongst other book bloggers and a new way to discover books yourself.

At the moment, the book I'm most excited for is:

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
Author: Leslye Walton
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Magical Realism
To be published: March 25th, 2014
Find: Goodreads

Magical realism, lyrical prose, and the pain and passion of human love haunt this hypnotic generational saga. 

Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender. Ava—in all other ways a normal girl—is born with the wings of a bird. In a quest to understand her peculiar disposition and a growing desire to fit in with her peers, sixteen-year old Ava ventures into the wider world, ill-prepared for what she might discover and naïve to the twisted motives of others. Others like the pious Nathaniel Sorrows, who mistakes Ava for an angel and whose obsession with her grows until the night of the Summer Solstice celebration. That night, the skies open up, rain and feathers fill the air, and Ava’s quest and her family’s saga build to a devastating crescendo. First-time author Leslye Walton has constructed a layered and unforgettable mythology of what it means to be born with hearts that are tragically, exquisitely human.

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Waiting on Wednesday (#1)

Admittedly, I would've rather had my first (well, second) post be an actual review, but I can't review any books until I actually finish reading them, so please be patient with me. In the meantime, I leave you this.

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly blog meme hosted by Breaking the Spine to highlight some upcoming releases that we're impatiently tapping our feet for. It's a great way to to keep track of some of the most anticipated releases amongst other book bloggers and a new way to discover books yourself.

At the moment, the book I'm most excited for is:

Cress (Lunar Chronicles #3)
By Marissa Meyer
To be published: February 4th, 2014
Find: Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Rapunzel’s tower is a satellite. She can’t let down her hair—or her guard.

In this third book in the bestselling Lunar Chronicles series, Cinder and Captain Thorne are fugitives on the run, with Scarlet and Wolf in tow. Together, they’re plotting to overthrow Queen Levana and her army.

Their best hope lies with Cress, who has been trapped on a satellite since childhood with only her netscreens as company. All that screen time has made Cress an excellent hacker—unfortunately, she’s just received orders from Levana to track down Cinder and her handsome accomplice.

When a daring rescue goes awry, the group is separated. Cress finally has her freedom, but it comes at a high price. Meanwhile, Queen Levana will let nothing stop her marriage to Emperor Kai. Cress, Scarlet, and Cinder may not have signed up to save the world, but they may be the only ones who can.

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