Stacking the Shelves #18 May Haul

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews and is a great way to showcase books you've recently added to your bookshelves. It is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course ebooks!

But for my STS, I'll be showing here only the physical copies of books I recently owned/borrowed/won. eBooks/eARCs will be showcased on my In My Mailbox posts.

I spent my summer vacation at the province so there's no bookstore hoarding that happened. But still, I got some books that made me dance awkwardly but happily. Special thanks to Sarah and Megan of HarperCollins International for these review copies!

1. The Murder Complex by Lindsay Cummings

2. Fan Art by Sarah Tregay

3. How To Meet Boys by Catherine Clark

4. Don't Call Me Baby by Gwendolyn Heasly

5. Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern

6. Exile by Kevin Emerson 

How about you? What's added to your haul? :)

{Blog Tour} Excerpt: THERE WILL COME A TIME by Carrie Arcos

There Will Come A Time
by Carrie Arcos
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary
Published April 15th 2014 by Simon Pulse

Mark knows grief. Ever since the accident that killed his twin sister, Grace, the only time he feels at peace is when he visits the bridge on which she died. Comfort is fleeting, but it’s almost within reach when he’s standing on the wrong side of the suicide bars. Almost.

Grace’s best friend, Hanna, says she understands what he’s going through. But she doesn’t. She can’t. It’s not just the enormity of his loss. As her twin, Mark should have known Grace as well as he knows himself. Yet when he reads her journal, it’s as if he didn’t know her at all.

As a way to remember Grace, Hanna convinces Mark to complete Grace’s bucket list from her journal. Mark’s sadness, anger, and his growing feelings for Hannah threaten to overwhelm him. But Mark can’t back out. He made a promise to honor Grace—and it’s his one chance to set things right.

EXCERPT

Everyone is going to die.

You could wake up, get out of bed, trip over a pair of sneakers on the way to the bathroom, fall down the stairs, and break your neck. You could get some crazy disease. You could cross the street and get hit by a car. You could have a brain aneurism, or maybe choke on a piece of hot dog like Jimmy Trevino did during lunch freshman year. While most of us were standing there with our mouths open, thinking, Do something! Miles crashed through the tables and chairs, grabbed Jimmy around the middle and jammed his fists up under Jimmy’s rib cage until the small piece of meat shot out of Jimmy’s mouth. Jimmy lived, but another minute and he could have been brain-dead, which is pretty much like being dead, or he could have been dead-dead.

The point is you die. Most of the time you don’t see it coming.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Arcos

Carrie Arcos is a National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature for OUT OF REACH. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.  You can find more about her at carriearcos.com

Author Links:

Goodreads | Twitter | Website

GIVEAWAY

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{Blog Tour} Excerpt: INFINITE SKY by C.J. Flood

Infinite Sky
by C.J. Flood
Series: Infinite Sky #1
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary Romance
Published May 10th 2014 by Atheneum Books for Young Readers

A truly beautiful book about the summer that changed one girl's life, as her mum leaves home, travellers set up camp in the family's field, her older brother goes off the rails, and she falls in love for the very first time. Opening with a funeral, Iris is mourning the boy in the casket - but who is it? Sam, her tearaway brother, or Trick, her tentative boyfriend? Over one long hot summer, we find out just how their three lives were turned upside-down.

EXCERPT

I couldn’t wait till the summer holidays. Everyone at school was getting on my nerves. Especially Matty. At registration, when I told her about the gypsies, she told me this story about her second cousin’s boyfriend’s brother: he was on his way to the newsagent’s to buy a magazine when a gypsy girl burst out and cracked him over the head with a golf ball in a sock. For no reason. I told her we didn’t have any girls, only a boy, and described the way his hair flicked out, but she curled her nostrils at me.

‘Pikeys are gross, Iris,’ she said. ‘You’d get gonorrhoea.’

Matty was always name-checking STDs. She thought it made her look sophisticated.

At dinner time, we watched the boys play football.

‘Your socks are odd,’ Matty told me. ‘Don’t you care?’

‘Not really.’

‘Maybe you should.’

I took my shoes off and folded my socks down so their oddness was less obvious.

‘That’s your problem, Iris,’ she sighed. ‘You think that makes a difference.’

Before maths, next lesson, I nipped into the toilets and took them off.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C.J. Flood

Hi, I'm Chelsey. I grew up in Derby, and now live in Bristol. I like fire and the sea and trees.

Author Links:

Website | Goodreads | Twitter

{Blog Tour} Excerpt: SCAN by Walter Jury and Sarah Fine

Scan
by Walter Jury and Sarah Fine
Series: Scan #1
Genre: Young Adult Science Fiction
Published May 1st 2014 by Putnam Juvenile

Tate and his father don’t exactly get along. As Tate sees it, his father has unreasonably high expectations for Tate to be the best—at everything. Tate finally learns what he’s being prepared for when he steals one of his dad’s odd tech inventions and mercenaries ambush the school, killing his father in the process and sending Tate on the run from aliens who look just like humans. 

All Tate knows--like how to make weapons out of oranges and lighter fluid--may not be enough to save him as he’s plunged into a secret inter-species conflict that’s been going on for centuries. Aided only by his girlfriend and his estranged mother, with powerful enemies closing in on all sides, Tate races to puzzle out the secret behind his father’s invention and why so many are willing to kill for it. A riveting, fast-paced adventure, Scan is a clever alien thriller with muscle and heart.

EXCERPT

She squints at the almost transparent film over my index finger, a thin strip of plastic I fetched from my room on our way down here. “And that is…”

“His fingerprint.” I slide my finger into an opening in the control panel next to the door, then use my other hand to punch in my dad’s code, which took me six solid months of hacking to figure out. “It’s his fault, really. He’s the one who started teaching me chemistry when I was still in kindergarten.”

“Is that why you’re so good at it?” she asks, lifting my hand to the light. She’s a senior, and though she breezes through every other subject, I’m tutoring her in chemistry.

“I guess. It’s not that hard.”

Christina rolls her eyes as I carefully slip the transparent tape off my finger and place it in a little plastic case I pull from my pocket.

“Really.” I say. “Take this here, for instance.” I wave the plastic case at her face before putting it away again. “When you touch something, your skin leaves behind all sorts of stuff – amino acids, isoagglutinogen, potassium, and a bunch of other compounds. You can’t see any of it, of course, and it can be wiped away easily. But it’s there and available if you know how to find and use it. All it took to gather the fingerprint was a lightbulb, some foil, a bit of superglue, this strip of tape, and some vodka.”

She gives me this raised-eyebrow look. “Vodka?”

I shrug. “Okay, maybe vodka was just the beverage of choice for the evening.”