We are absolutely over the moon excited about the Release Day Launch for Courtney Cole's GUARDIAN!!! GUARDIAN is a YA Paranormal Romance, and a book close to Courtney’s heart. Not only is this fabulous book back in a big way, it's Courtney's birthday! To celebrate all of the awesome she is making a few select titles only .99 TODAY ONLY! Grab them all and thank us later.
GUARDIAN Synopsis:
Sometimes, things that go bump in the night are real.
My name is Whitney Lane. I’m sixteen years old and at first, I thought I was crazy.
I kept seeing shadows move along walls, and hearing whispers around corners, but whenever I looked, there was never anything there.
Until one day, there was.
Our world isn’t what we think. There are things around us, good things, bad things, scary things.
Things that we tell ourselves aren’t real, but they are.
They’re very real, and they’re terrifying.
I’ve been swept up now, in a battle of good and evil, confused about love and what is supposed to be love, but isn’t. I don’t know what to think anymore. I can’t trust my emotions and I don’t know what is true.
There’s only one thing I know for sure.
Nothing is what it seems.
EXCERPT:
Sometimes the
things that go bump in the night are real.
Happy birthday to me.
I close my eyes and burrow into my pillow as I
try to sleep, as I try to escape this life.
It’s
a life I never thought I’d have, a life I most certainly don’t want.
I’m
still feeling sorry for myself as the blackness of sleep finally overtakes me.
I
don’t know what time it is when I shoot straight upward like a rocket. Something had yanked me from the oblivion of
sleep, something loud and shrill scraping my window.
My
room is completely dark and I glanceat my clock in confusion.
3:00
a.m.
As
my heart pounds hard against my ribcage, I quickly scan every corner of the
room.
In the last few hours, dark shadows had
migrated onto my pink walls, but they’re familiar, nothing out of the ordinary,
although in the night, they seem twisted and scary.
I
remain motionless as I allow the sleep-induced fog to clear from my brain.
As
I sit, I feel common sense and logic slowly returning.
Of
course nothing had touched my window because my bedroom is on the second floor.
Nothing can reach it. And there are no
trees near enough to brush against it.
It was just a dream.
It was only a dream.
I
chant it silently to myself like a mantra as I consciously slow my breathing
down, hoping that my racing pulse will soon follow. It was only a dream.
But
just as I’m calming down, I hear it again.
A
high-pitched shrill shriek, reminiscent of fingernails on a chalkboard,
scraping down my window. I gasp and pull my feet up to my chest, which is when
I notice the temperature.
I
notice because I can see my breath.
Timidly,
I blow a puff out again, watching the way my breath turns white in the
air.
Holy crap. Oh my God.
What
the hell?
The
sound stops and stillness surrounds me once again, the silence so loud that it
echoes in my ear.
Nothing
moves around me, the shadows are perfectly still as they twist across my
wall. They look like mangled fingers and
arms and legs, but they don’t move.
My
legs are weak and shaking, but I know I have to move. I have to move off my bed because it feels
like something is under it. Something
terrifying.
With
a leap, I bound across the room, my feet hitting the floor several feet away
from the edge of my bed.
The
floor is ice cold, as though it had been covered in a blanket of snow.
I’m
trembling
as I race to the far wall and check the thermostat. Because that’s the
only explanation. I must’ve bumped it earlier, I must’ve turned
the AC way down.
But
the luminous numbers stare at me in contradiction.
74
degrees.
It
must be broken. It has to be broken.
My
breath is coming in pants now, terrified, anxious pants.
My
fear isn’t logical. I know there’s
nothing here. I’m the only one in this
room.
Or am I?
The
air seems to push at me from all around, something dark, something heavy, something
real. Something unseen.
My
fingers shake, my legs tremble, and then all of a sudden, they can no longer
support my weight. I go down like a pile
of bricks, collapsing onto the floor. I
lie still because I can’t move, because something seems to sit on my chest,
holding me down.
The
shadows start to move, to slither across the walls, to reach and pull and
dance.
I
struggle to focus, to see what it is.
But
all I can see are the numbers on the thermostat suddenly moving, rapidly
counting down from 74 to 20.
Twenty
degrees?
The
air is frigid as I suck it in, as I try to pull the ice crystals into my mouth
so I can breathe.
All
of a sudden, there’s a blackness in front of me. It hovers over me, a shapeless mass, sucking
in the cells of the air, the atoms and the molecules. It’s darker than the blackness of my room,
blacker than the blackest black.
Something
is here.
With me.
“Dad?”
I whisper in a white puff. Because what
else could it be?
I
reach out a finger to touch it, and then I can’t see anything else, because the
darkness of it surrounds me, bleeding into everything else, even my
vision. The shriek is back, screaming
into my ears, bleeding into my brain.
Then
there’s nothing.
To celebrate the release of GUARDIAN and Courtney's birthday the following books are on sale for .99, today only!
GUARDIAN
Confessions of an Alli Cat
Dante's Girl
Mia's Heart The Minaldi Legacy Soul Kissed Soul Bound
Confessions of an Alli Cat
Dante's Girl
Mia's Heart The Minaldi Legacy Soul Kissed Soul Bound
What I thought about Guardian
I love Courtney Cole's Beautifully Broken series, I wanted to read this when I had the opportunity. Guardian is a re-release of Ms. Cole's debut novel and it's a YA paranormal tale of angels and demons.
Guardian does a good job of setting up a seemingly "normal" sort of world from the start. 16 year old Whitney is trying to keep her family together. It's only been 7 weeks since her father drowned, her mother is grief stricken to the point of being bed-ridden, and her 6 year old sister is having nightmares. Some heavy, real-life stuff going on here.
There's also a few bright spots-- a boy named Brady, the cutest guy in school who's taken a sudden interest in her. A romantic interest. And then there's Delaney, Whitney's best friend, But Whitney's mom gets worse and so does Whitney. She's seeing things and feeling things that she has no explanation for, and then things get really strange when she meets her guardian angel and learns not all is what it seems.
The reveal of the paranormal elements of the story is nicely paced, building gradually to an exciting conclusion. There were a few twists and turns, some that surprised me, and some that weren't so surprising but still fun.
So overall, I liked Guardian. It was a quick read that held my interest and had me guessing a few times. It's very well suited for the YA age group.
ABOUT COURTNEY COLE:
Courtney Cole is a novelist who would eat mythology for breakfast if she could. She has a degree in Business, but has since discovered that corporate America is not nearly as fun to live in as fictional worlds. She loves chocolate and roller coasters and hates waiting and rude people.
Courtney lives in quiet suburbia, close to Lake Michigan, with her real-life Prince Charming, her ornery kids (there is a small chance that they get their orneriness from their mother) and a small domestic zoo.
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