About the Author:
Adriana lives and writes in beautiful Charleston, SC. A huge fan of spooky stuff and shoes, she enjoys alternately hitting up the historic graveyards and outlet malls. World of Shell and Bone is her first book.
You can buy World of Shell and Bone at: Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Kobo, Sony, and iBookstore will follow soon!
Top Pet Peeves When Reading:
After I started writing full-time, I began to see books I read for leisure in a different light. Even when I’m just lost in the story, my mind begins to automatically catalog craft techniques like pacing, characterization, and plot holes. Occupational hazard, I guess. If I had to pick my top three pet peeves as a reader, they’d be:
1. Characters doing things, well, out of character. I once read a book that really had me flipping the pages till the end, wanting to figure out what exactly was going on. The big denouement at the end, though, the explanation for everything, was so against the character’s basic nature that I was really annoyed. I felt cheated of my time. It was as if the author got tired of thinking up original ideas and just decided to finish the book the easiest way possible.
2. Cardboard cutout women characters. This is something I’ve found in selected works of genre fiction by men. The side characters, always women, are extremely one-dimensional. There’s one bestselling author who I feel is notorious for this, and it makes me want to fling his books across the room. It’s a pity, because his plots are amazing. If only he’d put more of an effort into developing the women! They’re almost always beautiful (but don’t know it), demure, and pliant. Grr.
3. An author pushing an agenda. Some books I’ve read are very obviously meant to be the author’s soapbox. I’m not sure what this is about. Does the author feel unheard in his or her personal life? Did he or she mistake the novel for a work of non-fiction? In any case, it totally takes me out of the story. It also makes me crabby.
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World of Shell and Bone
By Adriana Ryan
Futuristic/SF
In a world ravaged by a nuclear holocaust, Vika Cannon knows there are no guarantees: no guarantees of safety, no guarantees that your neighbor is not actually a spy for the government, and no guarantees you’ll be allowed to emigrate to a new life in Asia.
New Amana is dying. Food and water are scarce, and people suffering from radiation-caused mutations—the Nukeheads—are the new class of homeless.
Vika has just one purpose: to produce healthy progeny using a Husband assigned by the Match Clinic. Unhealthy children are carted away to Asylums to be experimented on, just as Vika’s little sister Ceres was, eight years ago. Parents incapable of producing healthy progeny are put to death in gas chambers.
When she’s assigned a Husband shortly after her twentieth birthday, Vika expects him to be complacent and obedient. But Shale Underwood has a secret. He is a member of the Radicals, the terrorist group intent on overthrowing the government. And Shale has information about Ceres.
As she learns more about the Rads’s plan, Vika finds herself drawn to Shale in ways she’d never imagined. When freedom calls in the way of a healthy pregnancy, will she betray her government and risk death for Shale and Ceres?
Thank you so much for having me, Annette! :D
ReplyDeleteYou're very welcom :)
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