Win SURRENDER and POSSESSION by Elana Johnson!

Happy Monday all!

I know I changed the blog schedule to Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, but this post has been in the works for several months. That's when I signed up to be part of Elana Johnson's SURRENDER blog tour.

As many of you know, SURRENDER is the companion novel to Elana's debut POSSESSION, and I hope there's another one in the works because SERIOUSLY I MUST KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT AAAAAHHHHH!!!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First a bit about the author and the book, and then the review. And after that I'm going to GIVE STUFF AWAY!

(I know how much you all love it when I give stuff away.)

Onward!

Elana Johnson wishes she could experience her first kiss again, tell the mean girl where to shove it, and have cool superpowers like reading minds and controlling fire. To fulfill her desires, she writes young adult science fiction and fantasy.

Elana's works, including POSSESSION, REGRET, and SURRENDER is available from Simon & Schuster wherever books are sold. She is the author of From the Query to the Call, an ebook that every writer needs to read before they query, which can be downloaded for free on her website. She runs a personal blog on publishing and is a founding author of the QueryTracker blog. She blogs regularly at The League of Extraordinary Writers, co-organizes WriteOnCon, and is a member of SCBWI, ANWA and LDStorymakers.

You can find her on her blog, Facebook or Twitter.

From Goodreads:

Forbidden love, intoxicating power, and the terror of control…

Raine has always been a good girl. She lives by the rules in Freedom. After all, they are her father’s rules: He’s the Director. It’s because of him that Raine is willing to use her talent—a power so dangerous, no one else is allowed to know about it. Not even her roommate, Vi. 

All of that changes when Raine falls for Gunner. Raine’s got every reason in the world to stay away from Gunn, but she just can’t. Especially when she discovers his connection to Vi’s boyfriend, Zenn. Raine has never known anyone as heavily brainwashed as Vi. Raine’s father expects her to spy on Vi and report back to him. But Raine is beginning to wonder what Vi knows that her father is so anxious to keep hidden, and what might happen if she helps Vi remember it. She’s even starting to suspect Vi’s secrets might involve Freedom’s newest prisoner, the rebel Jag Barque....

One of my favorite pieces of writing advice ever is from the awesome Terry Brooks and it goes like this. The strenth of the protagonist is determined by the strength of the antagonist. In other words, your heroes are only as strong as the villains they are up against.

If that's true, then Elana Johnson's characters have strength in spades. This isn't one of those neatly packaged dystopias where the heroes decide to rebel or escape and somehow make it happen with only two or three major complications. This is dystopia in the old school tradition, where impossible choices and double crosses and bittersweet victories are the rule of the day. A world where your friend can be brainwashed into your enemy and there's no one you can fully trust. There were many points in the book where I honestly wondered how the crap these poor kids were going to get out at all. (And I'm usually pretty good at guessing that sort of thing.)

And did I mention impossible choices? Like loving two people in totally different ways and not wanting either of them to get hurt and NOT BEING ABLE TO STOP THAT FROM HAPPENING? I'm not a fan of love triangles in general, but the ones in these books feel sad and real and...well...impossible!

The upshot is, that I feel like I've been through a lot with Raine and Gunner and Vi and Jag and the rest of them. I'm invested and I want to know what happens next!

*pokes Elana* *grins*

So now that I've told you all about the book, on to the contest. And this one is super simple. All you have to do is leave a comment! One lucky winner will receive both the hardcover of SURRENDER, and the shiny white hardcover of the first book POSSESSION.  The contest is international, and ends midnight,  PST on July 30th.

Go forth and enter!