W
e are excited to be part of the cover reveal for Jo Schneider's debut novel, NEW SIGHT, to be released April 2014 by Jolly Fish Press.
What an amazing cover!
Enjoy the brief synopsis and an excerpt from the novel below
and put NEW SIGHT on your Spring "TO READ" list.
Addiction equals power, but at what cost?
After succumbing to
the sudden and terrifying urge to rip people's eyes out of their sockets,
sixteen-year-old Lysandra Blake finds herself tied down in a psych ward,
convinced she's crazy. The doctors have no answers, and Lys is ready to give up
when the mysterious Jeremiah Mason appears, telling Lys that she's not
insane—she's addicted to a rare and deadly drug that she has no recollection of
using. Mr. Mason offers to take her to his facility where he can treat her.
Desperate yet suspicious, Lys agrees to go with
Mr. Mason to his facility where she meets with a fellow addict, the tall and
handsome Kamau. Together they discover that Mr. Mason may not have told them
the truth about their condition—they're thrown headfirst into a world of
daunting powers that are not only unbelievable, they are dangerous. Very
dangerous.
Excerpt:
The cobblestone
driveway looked about a thousand miles below her. Lys slid over and dipped one
toe out of the SUV. The tennis shoes she wore hit the ground, and she let the
bottom of her foot succumb to gravity. The other foot followed, and as she
stood, Lys felt her knees wobble. One hand reached out to use the roof of the
vehicle for support, and she took a step. She tried another, but her foot
stopped in mid-air, her body distracted by something much more insistent than
gravity. The Need.
Emotions, a week repressed
by medication, came bubbling up from the bottom of a cauldron. Anger, fear,
hunger—the Need. It swelled in her stomach and ached to make her fingers move.
She doubled over, trying to contain it.
“Lys, what's wrong?”
Someone pulled on her arm.
“Get away!” she
pleaded. “Please.” She felt herself start to shake. She fell to her hands and
knees and put her head down on the cobblestones, squeezing her eye shut. A
voice said her name, but she didn't care.
She wanted the feeling
back. The feeling like after she ripped the frog's eyes out—euphoria. She was a
hungry monster, demanding to be fed. The Need gnawed through her mind,
screaming at her to do something. To hurt someone.
On their own accord,
Lys' fingers began to twitch. Why did he take the handcuffs off?
The image of her mom's
bandaged face sprung into her mind. All of the times her dad flinched away from
her, and all of the looks the doctors gave her paraded through her memory. No,
she wouldn't hurt anyone else. Not while she had an ounce of control left in
her. She laced her fingers together and squeezed until her arms shook.
#
The dark behind her
eyelids flared to life, and Lys found herself in another place. She stood in
her room, looking at her bed. Everything was exactly as she'd left it, except
the blood on the carpet. Someone had cleaned that up. Her MP3 player sat on the
dresser, and her school bag lay on the chair.
Lys tried to look over
at the mirror. Her head wouldn't move. She attempted to look up. Nothing
happened. What was this? She floated out of her body. Had it taken too long to
get here? Was she dead?
Panic filled her mind,
and she wanted to scream. The picture of her room faded, replaced by the dark.
About the Author:
Jo Ann Schneider grew up in Utah and Colorado, and
wonders how people who live in flat places can tell where they’re going. In her sixteenth year, Jo went with her
family to Europe. This spawned a travel
bug that will never be satisfied. One of
Jo’s goals is to travel to all seven continents—five down, two to go.
Perhaps the most challenging thing Jo has ever done
(besides write novels) was stick with her Shaolin Kempo classes long enough to
earn her black belt. Persistence, not an
overabundance of mad skill, is what got her there, and she just keeps going back
for more. An intervention may be in order at some point.
Being a geek at heart, Jo has always been drawn to
science fiction and fantasy. She writes
both, and hopes to introduce readers into worlds that wow them and characters
that they can cheer for.
Jo lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with her adorkable
husband, Jon, who is very useful for science and computer information as well
as getting items off of top shelves. By day she is a mechanical designer of
disgustingly expensive hand-crafted steel lights, and by night she is a
ninja. Woosh, woosh.
Author web links:
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