Today Is The Day To Get TAKEN!

by Mindy McGinnis

To misquote Norman Bates, "We all get a little jealous sometimes."

Yeah, we totally do. And before I had my cover for NOT A DROP TO DRINK, I had a serious jealous-freak going on with Erin's cover for TAKEN. You can see why.

It's beautiful, colorful, and foreboding as hell. As a librarian I took one look at it and said, "OK, my kids are going to gravitate right towards this one." And as a reader I knew that pretty packages don't always live up to the promise of the wrapping paper. But this time, there was nothing misleading.

Check out my librarian pitch of TAKEN below, then look back at the cover and tell me you don't want this in a somewhat inappropriate way.

Claysoot is not a place anyone would stay- unless they had to. The Wall keeps them in, the women, the children... but not the men. Because there aren't any.
One their eighteenth birthday the boys disappear in a flash of light. It comes with wind, and the shaking of the ground, and then they are gone. Any boys who try to escape this fate by climbing the Wall are tossed back within hours, curled into an eternal fetal position, burnt to death.

Gray Weathersby watches his older brother disappear, well aware that his time is coming soon. Even though Claysoot has little to offer beyond emotionless Pairings meant to boost birthrates, Gray isn't eager to be taken by a Heist. No one knows what comes after the Heist for the boys that disappear, but he knows if he's taken that he will never see Emma again, the only girl he's ever hoped to be Paired with.

Climbing the wall could be suicide, but the discovery of a strange note from his dead mother leads Gray to believe that there's more at work in Claysoot than he could have guessed. The Council leaders have their secrets, and now Gray has his. Armed with the letter and the breath of a chance of survival, Gray has to decide whether he'll risk climbing the Wall into the unknown, or let the certainty of the Heist take him away from Emma.

Oh, and my little jealousy problem? Yeah, that's all cleared up now. When I got my cover I went ahead and fell in love with it. Part of the reason why is because Erin and I have the same designer. Yep. We both love Erin Fitzsimmons, and you should too - because she's making bookshelves everywhere a little more beautiful, one book at a time.

So go find one of those shelves today in a bookstore, and grab up a little bit of pretty - what's underneath that gorgeous cover won't let you down!
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Mindy McGinnis is a YA author and librarian. Her debut, NOT A DROP TO DRINK, is a post-apocalyptic survival tale set in a world where freshwater is almost non-existent, available from Katherine Tegen / Harper Collins September 24, 2013. She blogs at Writer, Writer Pants on Fire and contributes to the group blogs Book Pregnant, Friday the Thirteeners, From the Write Angle, The Class of 2k13, The Lucky 13s & The League of Extraordinary Writers. You can also find her on Twitter, Tumblr & Facebook.