Book Picks: HarperCollins US Books January 2012

book cover of 

Winterling 

 (Winterling, book 1)

by

Sarah Prineas
                                                 

Sarah Prineas - Winterling - Published by HarperCollins - January 3 2012
“We live here, my girl, because it is close to the Way, and echoes of its magic are felt in our world. The Way is a path leading to another place, where the people are governed by different rules. Magic runs through them and their land.”
With her boundless curiosity and wild spirit, Fer has always felt that she doesn’t belong. Not when the forest is calling to her, when the rush of wind through branches feels more real than school or the quiet farms near her house. Then she saves an injured creature—he looks like a boy, but he’s really something else. He knows who Fer truly is, and invites her through the Way, a passage to a strange, dangerous land.
Fer feels an instant attachment to this realm, where magic is real and oaths forge bonds stronger than iron. But a powerful huntress named the MÓr rules here, and Fer can sense that the land is perilously out of balance. Fer must unlock the secrets about the parents she never knew and claim her true place before the worlds on both sides of the Way descend into endless winter.

book cover of 

The Cabinet of Earths 

by

Anne Nesbet
                                                   
Anne Nesbet - The Cabinet of Earth - Published by HarperCollins - January 3 2012
To protect her baby brother James, 12-year-old Maya has to take on the magical underworld of Paris, in which houses have bronze salamanders for door handles, the most beautiful people are all hooked on the sweet-smelling “anbar,” and a shimmering glass Cabinet of Earths has chosen Maya to be its next keeper.
 ". . . All at once the world went very still. She was floating; she was underwater: all the room’s sound was replaced by a throbbing hum, light streaking slowly away from everything it touched. She stretched one hand out (the air was as thick as syrup; her arm moved with the slow grace of an aquatic plant) and tried to say something, but her voice was gone, too.
......Maya......
The cabinet itself was calling to her . . ."


Comments

Nice to see Cabinet of Earths here - I can't wait to read it! Thanks for giving debut novelists a platform!