Her entry begins:
You really want to know what's on my bedside table? Really? Well, I'll tell you. I got burnt out. I've read and read -- for reviews, blurbs, my grad students. The work was good -- sometimes really, really damn good. But everything was assigned. Everything had a due date. And, yes, I'll admit it. There was that keeping up with the Jones reading that I've always balked at. When everyone's reading The Help, I just simply refuse. I want to read what no one else is reading. So, in the past few months, that has included an ancient medical journal, an Old English Dictionary. I just rebel and then you can't make me read what everyone else is reading. Is this hard for me sometimes socially in literary circles (I still haven't gotten to Freedom.)? Well, yes, yes it is. But I'm already weird socially around other writers so forget it. And, I'll admit it, at this moment, a lot of people are reading The Orphan Master's Son -- it's on my bedside table and I'm loving it. And I haven't yet gotten my hands on Stewart O'Nan's latest and I feel a little ached about it. So I do read what others are reading, of course sometimes ... And I lose books. Did I mention this? For example, I just got my second copy of The Snow Child. I carry...[read on]About the book, from the publisher:
We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . .Learn more about the book and author at Julianna Baggott's website and blog.
Pressia barely remembers the Detonations or much about life during the Before. In her sleeping cabinet behind the rubble of an old barbershop where she lives with her grandfather, she thinks about what is lost-how the world went from amusement parks, movie theaters, birthday parties, fathers and mothers . . . to ash and dust, scars, permanent burns,and fused, damaged bodies. And now, at an age when everyone is required to turn themselves over to the militia to either be trained as a soldier or, if they are too damaged and weak, to be used as live targets, Pressia can no longer pretend to be small. Pressia is on the run.
Burn a Pure and Breathe the Ash . . .
There are those who escaped the apocalypse unmarked. Pures. They are tucked safely inside the Dome that protects their healthy, superior bodies. Yet Partridge, whose father is one of the most influential men in the Dome, feels isolated and lonely. Different. He thinks about loss-maybe just because his family is broken; his father is emotionally distant; his brother killed himself; and his mother never made it inside their shelter. Or maybe it's his claustrophobia: his feeling that this Dome has become a swaddling of intensely rigid order. So when a slipped phrase suggests his mother might still be alive, Partridge risks his life to leave the Dome to find her.
When Pressia meets Partridge, their worlds shatter all over again.
Julianna Baggott also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode.
The Page 69 Test: Bridget Asher's The Pretend Wife.
The Page 69 Test: Pure.
Writer Read: Julianna Baggott.
--Marshal Zeringue
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