Gwenda Bond

I stumbled across Gwenda Bond’s Fallout on NetGalley, and was very much intrigued by the premise:

Lois Lane is starting a new life in Metropolis. An Army brat, Lois has lived all over–and seen all kinds of things. (Some of them defy explanation, like the near-disaster she witnessed in Kansas in the middle of one night.) But now her family is putting down roots in the big city, and Lois is determined to fit in. Stay quiet. Fly straight. As soon as she steps into her new high school, though, she can see it won’t be that easy. A group known as the Warheads is making life miserable for another girl at school. They’re messing with her mind, somehow, via the high-tech immersive videogame they all play. Not cool. Armed with her wit and her new snazzy job as a reporter, Lois has her sights set on solving this mystery. But sometimes it’s all a bit much. Thank goodness for her maybe-more-than-a friend, a guy she knows only by his screenname, SmallvilleGuy.

It’ll be interesting to see how Bond interprets the Lois Lane character. I’m not sure if/how this ties in at all with the DC Comics character, though (Capstone do publish other DC Comics-related books). Fallout is due to be published in the US in January 2015.

Note: I couldn’t find any mention of this novel on Bond’s website, but as far as I can tell, there isn’t another author of the same name.

Next up, Skyscape will be publishing Bond’s other upcoming novel, Girl On A Wire, in October 2014. Here’s the premise:

A ballerina, twirling on a wire high above the crowd. Horses, prancing like salsa dancers. Trapeze artists, flying like somersaulting falcons. And magic crackling through the air. Welcome to the Cirque American!

Sixteen-year-old Jules Maroni’s dream is to follow in her father’s footsteps as a high-wire walker. When her family is offered a prestigious role in the new Cirque American, it seems that Jules and the Amazing Maronis will finally get the spotlight they deserve. But the presence of the Flying Garcias may derail her plans. For decades, the two rival families have avoided each other as sworn enemies.

Jules ignores the drama and focuses on the wire, skyrocketing to fame as the girl in a red tutu who dances across the wire at death-defying heights. But when she discovers a peacock feather—an infamous object of bad luck—planted on her costume, Jules nearly loses her footing. She has no choice but to seek help from the unlikeliest of people: Remy Garcia, son of the Garcia clan matriarch and the best trapeze artist in the Cirque.

As more mysterious talismans believed to possess unlucky magic appear, Jules and Remy unite to find the culprit. And if they don’t figure out what’s going on soon, Jules may be the first Maroni to do the unthinkable: fall.

Gwenda Bond is also the author of Blackwood and The Woken Gods, which were published by Strange Chemistry.

Also on CR: Interview with Gwenda Bond; Review of Blackwood

I haven’t managed to keep on top of my Angry Robot/Strange Chemistry reviewing – certainly not as much as I would like. (They have had a considerable number of awesome-sounding titles coming out recently… I really should get my act together and read more of them…)

Nevertheless, one of my favourite debut reads last year was Gwenda Bond’s Blackwood. I was very intrigued, therefore, to learn about Bond’s next novel, The Woken Gods. I didn’t know much about it, but the cover certainly nabbed my interesting…

The US Congress, the All-Seeing Eye, Egyptian Gods…? Colour me intrigued. The Woken Gods will be published by Strange Chemistry in September 2013. Here’s the synopsis…

Five years ago, the gods of ancient mythology awoke around the world.

This morning, Kyra Locke is late for school.

Seventeen-year-old Kyra lives in a transformed Washington, D.C., home to the embassies of divine pantheons and the mysterious Society of the Sun. But when rebellious Kyra encounters two trickster gods on her way back from school, one offering a threat and the other a warning, it turns out her life isn’t what it seems. She escapes with the aid of Osborne “Oz” Spencer, an intriguing Society field operative, only to discover that her scholar father has disappeared with a dangerous relic. The Society needs it, and they don’t care that she knows nothing about her father’s secrets.

Now Kyra must depend on her wits and the suspect help of scary gods, her estranged oracle mother, and, of course, Oz–whose first allegiance is to the Society. She has no choice if she’s going to recover the missing relic and save her father. And if she doesn’t? Well, that may just mean the end of the world as she knows it.

I’m certainly looking forward to this.