Forever Endeavor Book Club - Get Your Read On!

Welcome to the first official Forever Endeavor Online Book Club . . . Meeting? 

*waves*  Hi, All!  Please stop laughing at my elementary school attempt at making a banner. (What can I say? Tech stuff isn't my strong suit.)

My goal with this club is to find books that I feel might appeal to the majority of us, since we have quite varied reading interests -- at least, according to my highly scientific poll. That being said, I was unable to find an adult novel written for teens, that was a literary fantasy historical romantic mystery thriller of women's fiction.

Since the overwhelming results of the voting showed a strong preference for both Young Adult books, and stories that fall under the Fantasy category, it shouldn't come as much surprise that our February selection is a YA Paranormal.  And hopefully not something everyone has already read.

So without further ado, I give you  . . . 

Kaylee Cavanaugh doesn't see dead people, but she senses when someone near her is about to die. And when that happens, a force beyond her control compels her to scream bloody murder. Literally.

Kaylee just wants to enjoy having caught the attention of the hottest guy at school. But a normal date is hard to come by when Nash seems to know more about her need to scream than she does. And when classmates start dropping dead, only Kaylee knows who'll be next.

There are a LOT of really good YA paranormals to choose from. The reason I chose this story is because it steps away from the more prevalent vampire/ werewolf / faery mythology and takes us into one of my personal favorite folklores. The Banshee. (or Bean Sidhe, for the Gaelic amongst us)

Confession: I love most thing Irish, so that helped mold my choice a wee bit too.

It's also the first book in a series. So for those who enjoy going on an extended journey with their fictional friends, there appears to be much more where this came from.

To help everyone out, if you need to order and don't have a local bookstore (indie or chain) nearby. . .  here are some links.

For the e-reader crew 

Nook

Kindle

Sony / Kobo

For the paperback crew

Barnes & Noble

Amazon

Borders

**** How long do we have to read?? The discussion post for My Soul To Take will be posted on Friday, February 25th and will be open throughout that weekend ****

Hopefully, this is a selection that others are looking forward to reading as much as I am!

If it's not your cup of tea, that's cool. There'll be a different selection next month, no worries.

If you've already read it . . . Congrats! You get a freebie month to read whatever you want, but please come back to join in the discussion.

To everyone else:  Let's Get Our Read On!!

Timeless Teens?

My current WIP (whose rough draft I vow to have completed by the 15th even if it kills me) is my first attempt at YA. I read both adult fiction and YA, so it’s only natural my story ideas would cross between the two. 

Writing for teens and for adults are two different beasts entirely, I'm learning. It's not so much HOW you write or WHAT you write about. I think the main divider is the extent of the importance adults place on certain matters versus their teen counterparts. Since I'm a bit of a Peter Pan type myself that part isn't so hard for me to tap into.

The real problem I'm having is figuring out what cultural reference are still relevant to teens, even those they haven't necessarily lived through. Elvis Presley for instance. The man died before I was born, but I still know exactly who he is and I'm willing to bet most teens have heard of him before. But not all cultural references are quite so timeless.

For instance, In my story there's a constant bantering that takes place between two characters. He likes to pick on her because she's short. She teases him because his hair is a bit on the longish side. They do this by greeting each other with ever-changing snarky nicknames.

Even if this story were to be published four years from now, I'm pretty sure most readers would still get a Justin Bieber dig...

<---- For the record, Carter looks more like this. No offense, Beebs, but you can't compete.

(I must stop staring at the picture. Back on track)

So I know the Bieber deal is fine, but would a sixteen year old girl think to use a Beatles reference?

And the one I'm really iffy on is when he refers to her as Frodo.  Now several years back I wouldn't have questioned it, because the movies were huge, and there were plenty of teenage girls (and those of us a tad bit older) who were all kinds of googly-eyed over Orlando Bloom and Elijah Wood. But is it a reference they'd still get now? Do teen boys still tackle books like LOTR?

I guess what I'm asking of my other YA writing friends, what do you do to verify whether a particular reference makes sense to today's teens?  And/or does anyone know of a teen I can borrow for questioning?  :D