This is a book I wrote:
It has a pretty face!
Kirkus gave it a star (!!!) and said this:
The atmosphere in Yovanoff’s latest is eerily reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, if only Harper Lee’s Maycomb residents had been given magical families as a focus for their bigotry.
I say this:
It’s about magic and monsters—even more monsters than I have ever written about before, and also more magic. Also: girls, boys, cousins, best friends, Trans Ams, tattoos, and catfish. It’s about a girl who has spent ten years underground, and now she’s finally waking up.
Fiendish hits shelves August 14th and then everybody can have it! But three of you can have it RIGHT NOW, so the contest part:
I’m giving away three ARCs, and unfortunately (as usual), ARC rules means no international entries. HOWEVER. As soon as I have finished copies in my hot little hands, I’ll do another giveaway, with prizes set aside exclusively for international entries.
Also, today I’m trying something new. It is called rafflecopter. You probably know more about it than I do, because I set it up this morning. I think it even works. If it doesn’t, we’ll … just roll with it?
You can get entry points by commenting here and telling me about a childhood memory, and also by tweeting (it’s all in the … rafflecopter?). Contest ends next Tuesday at midnight Eastern.
Okay, here we go!
Brenna Yovanoff 
A simple childhood memory for me is playing in the sand with my siblings. We’d usually get yelled at because we always were tearing up the driveway when making our sculptures, roads, dragon pens, and so on. But we still kept doing it, and every night came into the house with dirty feet. Even now, when I walk out on a sandy driveway barefoot and see my feet getting dirty, those memories always come back into my mind :)
I have a very early childhood memory of my father not long before he passed away. He was sitting in his chair, with his dinner plate on his lap and I was standing at his knee and he was feeding me from his plate. I can even remember what he ate. It was steak, corn and potatoes. I was only two years old when he passed and this is the only memory I have of him so I cherish it. :)
One memory that sticks out to me is from Halloween. Back when the costumes were plastic sheaths and plastic masks. Whenever I open a new shower curtain, the smell takes me back to those silly costumes. I remember being Princess Leia and Raggedy Ann in those.
my biggest memory was driving home from Christmas at my grandmas & having my oldest brother trying to convince my single mother to get us bikes for next christmas (my mom worked sometimes 2 or 3 jobs at a time & money was tight)…when we got home & walked in the house, there were four bikes waiting for us. The neighbors had put them up when we were out of town & they were all there to see us get our bikes. that was the best Christmas & one of my fave memorires.
I have a lot of memories associated with pieces of clothing. Different places I went I remeber what I wore that day.
I was a terrible child.
When I was very small, maybe three or four years old, I once told my mother that there was something in the basement. A poisonous spider or something, I can’t quite remember. She said to stay put in the kitchen and went downstairs to check it out. The instant she yelled that there was no spider and nothing was wrong, I slammed the door shut, locked it, and ran off cackling.
…I was a very, very terrible child.
One of my biggest childhood memories is when I beat my dad in a competition. We would tell each other random tidbits that we hoped the other wouldn’t know and usually he would win (because I was eight and had a lot to learn) but I finally beat him with the red panda brcause he ddidn’t know it existed.
I remember tearing up and down the sidewalks of our neighborhood with my little sister on our big wheels (are those still a thing?). I would always run into the back of hers if she was in front of me because I thought she was too slow. I was probably just jealous though since I got a hand-me-down big wheel from one of my boy cousins and my sister got a brand new sparkly pink one lol.
Sledding back in PA. We never had the money to buy fancy sleds, but my dad would MacGyver something together for us that was so amazing, the other kids would line up to try our crib mattress wrapped in pool lining :)
I remember making little houses out of dirt in our backyard. We had a dirt hill behind our house, and my little brother and I would make “fairy houses” in the dirt. We had a whole village. It’s one of my favorite memories of playing with him.
One memory that stays with me is our weekly summer trips to the lake. Every Sunday we would pack a picnic lunch and travel to a nearby lake with my parents, my brother and my Aunt and Uncle. it was such a wonderful time. Then,every Sunday evening we went to the Polish dance/ outside celebration. Amazing! I learned to polka there!
I have a childhood memory that sticks with me to this day. My uncle had a pet monkey that I loved playing with. I also collected little bottles of perfume. One day, the monkey stole one of my bottles and wouldn’t give it back. I remember being upset, but these days it makes me laugh to think about.
One memory that will probably stay with me forever is the one where I played with a friend in the fields around our house. We were about 6 or 7 years old and it was early March. (I don’t remember that, but there was nothing growing in these fields yet and it was cold and rainy) The soil was so wet from the constant rain that at some point we got stuck with out boot, sinking knee deep into the soil. A lot of giggling and rolling around in mud was required to get out of there again – our rain boots were lost forever (I still sometimes mourn the loss of mine. They were blue and had yellow stars all over them). We made our way back to the house – in that delightful mood only kids seem to be able to tap into – on socks – through the mud – in the cold. Then we went staright for the bathroom (as muddy as we were) to clean ourselves and later the bathroom – with the use of the shower head making a gigantic mess of everything inside it. We even managed to get mud on the ceiling. It was one of the best days ever. :)
When MarineWorld wasn’t yet connected to Six Flags, my parents would take me there, and even though they had huge impressive animals and the flashy bird show, my favorite part was the touch tide pool. They had a couple of sea cucumbers and I remember the sign said to not squeeze them. I squeezed them every chance I got, every time I went there and it makes me laugh to remember when my mom finally caught me.
When I was four, I attended a Rosh Hashanah dinner at my mother’s cousin’s house. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year, and it is generally a time of celebration. Therefore, while four year old me had grown bored with dinner table conversation hours before, the adults were still drinking and laughing, hardly paying me any attention at all. Since I was a gymnast at the time, and had done plenty of front flips before at the gym, I decided to do flips off of the couch onto the granite floor. Needless to say, it did not turn out very well. The whole family ended up at the ER with a cracked headed child well past midnight on a celebratory holiday, though we got to skip the infamous ER wait (well, at least infamous to someone like me who visited the ER way too many times in their childhood) because the man who was hosting dinner happened to be a doctor at the hospital we went to. I would like to say that I learned from that experience that I not immortal, but I honestly didn’t figure that out until much later in my life. All I really took away from that experience was A) I should not do flips over granite (but concrete is fine) and B)I have a surprisingly high pain tolerance (which is not a very good thing, considering that I broke my arm once and then continued tumbling on floor for at leat ten more minutes before I noticed how large my arm was getting)
When I was a kid there was this styrofoam treasure chest in my grandmother’s guest room closet. I wasn’t allowed to look in it but I always wanted to. To this day it’s a mystery to me.
We have an old rundown house in the neighborhood that no one has lived in for years and it always reminds me of that house old creepy and a mystery waiting to be discovered.
I was homeschooled, so my mother tried to teach us interesting things along with the math and grammar. I remember one week when we’d been learning about the things that the Paiute did to survive in our (extremely unforgiving) climate. The winters are really cold in Nevada, and we’d been talking about the things they’d used as insulation.
Unfortunately for my mother, she’d explained the insulating properties of cattails to two children who had an abundant number of cattails in their backyard. During an especially vicious cold snap that left our wetlands completely frozen over, my sister and I were outside playing and got very cold, so, in the interests of scientific exploration (we were being homeschooled by a biologist and an engineer), we decided to put some of those stories to the test. The cattails dry out and lie down in the winter, so we laid on top of them and pulled more over us, and then stuffed handfuls and handfuls of cattail fuzz into our hats, our boots, our gloves, our jackets. We found out that it was in fact quite insulating, and we could lie down directly on the ice and still feel pretty warm if we had cattail fuzz in our coats and reeds pulled over us.
This was a delightful discovery–my family hikes a lot, so How Not To Die If You Get Lost was a topic with very real-world importance–and we ran inside to tell Mom all about it. But it was warm inside, so as soon as we got in we started taking off our hats, and our boots, and our gloves, and our jackets…
In hindsight, I think my mother would have appreciated our survival skills more if she wasn’t trying to clean up a substance that flies into the air and scatters at the slightest puff of air.
When I was little (actually, up until high school), we lived on my family’s farm. On part of the farmland was “The Swamp”. I remember it taking on these extraordinary mystical properties because my parents, my aunt, and my grandparents would always tell me and my brother not to go into “The Swamp”. It even looked the part because it was surrounded by these really big, really tall ancient oak trees and dead kudzu vines hung down at it was a rather dark and spooky place anyway. I was just always fascinated by it because, as a kid, you never really understand why things are off-limits other than they just are and I was never brave enough to check it out. I imagined there were bizarre creatures haunting it instead of realizing like I did as an adult that we just weren’t allowed to go over there because it was snake infested.
I was just talking about this memory in my public speaking class at school:
When I was about 4 I lost my first tooth. My Grandma was babysitting me that day so I was at her house when it happened. It fell out and flew somewhere on the carpet and went missing! I was searching the floor everywhere looking for it. A big problem was that my Grandma was a bit of a shopaholic so I kept confusing bits of excess packaging peanuts for the tooth. Not to mention that this was a huge deal for me because as a Jewish Child I didn’t have Santa or the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy was the only fantastical being I had (a classmate would reveal the truth to me in first grade). Finally I told my Grandma what was going on (for some reason I guess I didn’t tell her right away, maybe I felt irresponsible for losing it) and she handed me a flashlight and then boom like nothing I found it!
Thank you so much for this giveaway Brenna! I hope you enjoyed my little memory. I am so excited to read “Fiendish”! I’ve loved all of your books since I discovered “The Replacement” in Middle school! I’m heading into my Senior year of High School and I feel that “Fiendish” is just the kind of book I need to read at this stage in my life right now!
We lived in an old farm house. My mother was a fantasic cook. See had the best fresh Vegetable garden around. When I was about 4yrs old. she had me go out to the garden to pick some tomatoes.I felt like such a big girl being able to go to the garden on my own. I was singing away while looking for the just the right tomatoes. when a scary creature popped his head out of the ground and stared at me with his milky beatty eyes and huge yellow teeth. It was huge. I dropped my tomatoes and ran screaming with my heart pounding so hard I thought it would pop out of my chest.. My mother came running out. She tried to explain to me that it must have been a mole. I never would go into the garden again. I had nightmares for a long time. I still get the willies thinking about how scared I was.
After my father had joined the Navy and spent time over seas. When I was about 2 years old my mother took me to see him and the first thing I did was stick my bottom lip out and started to cry. The picture was cute.
When I was little, my mom would set up a tray table on the front porch and bring me a bunch of clear cups. She would fill them with water and then use food coloring to make each cup of water into different colors. Then I would sit there and mess about with the water, pouring cups together to make more colors or just watching the water swirl when I stirred, and eventually I ended up with murky, mostly brown water. I’ve been keen on colors ever since.
When I was eight my dad took me to visit a friend of his from a neighboring town. He led me through a ranch style home and into the backyard. There was a huge cage that took up most of the yard. Inside of the cage was a large male lion. He said, “This is Simba.”
There was a pond that we’d drive by twice a week, on the way to church. It was partially hidden by a ring of trees that led to that forest. I always wondered why there was this random pond, shrouded by trees, not too far from the road. I always wanted to stop and explore, even though it was this tiny pond, nothing to it but shrubs and moss and noisy frogs.
Thank you!
Alyssa @ The Eater of Books!
The cover of this book looks absolutely stunning and I’d love to get my hands on it!
Oh and for the childhood memory part: there’s this old rickety bridge that spans this creek near my house. I was always too afraid to cross it as a child because the one time I tried it swayed so much that I promptly ran off. I finally crossed it as an adult two years ago.
I remember my 5th birthday pretty clear- me and my mom were stuck at my grandma’s house because of a flat tire and I went to sleep there, when I woke up I went downstairs and everyone screamed:happy birthday
My dad and I were absolutely Fiendish (see what I did there?) about catching the Muppet Show every week, and I recall the Halloween when Alice Cooper was on. Dad recorded it for me on audio tape, so I listened to it again and again. “Welcome To My Nightmare” is still a favorite song, and I still love the Muppets.
I remember my father pouring ketchup on my youngest brothers head when he wouldn’t behave one night at dinner
I remember when I was 3 maybe 4 years old, we lived in an old house. There was a circular hole on the bathroom floor upstairs to push the heat from the downstairs. I was in the bathroom looking outside at my mother hanging laundry on the clothesline. I wanted to get to my mother but didn’t want to go down the stairs. I saw the hold in the floor. I peered down to see the chair in the living room right below. I decided to go- feet first- down the hole and landed on the chair. My mother came in seconds later and asked me how I got there. I pointed up to the hole in the floor above me. She looked back at me in utter shock. I love that story. LOL.
One of the most vivid memories I have from childhood is mostly a snapshot, a small trivial fragment of a moving image stuck deeply into my mind. It was October of my first year of school. I was a tiny, little blond thing in kindergarten, barely five, my world of imagination far bigger than my physical size would ever be. I suppose some things never change, and for that, I can be glad.
My grandmother had come to pick me up from school because my parents were at the hospital and my baby sister was about to be born. I don’t remember gathering my things or getting out of class or taking the nearly half-hour trip to the hospital (we lived several miles out of town and my current school was of the country variety). All I remember is the parking curb, much like the concrete kind you might find in front of your car in the Walmart parking lot, except this one was wooden and uneven like a railroad tie. There was no car in front of this one. It was open, and it was was calling. And as children are wont to do, I naturally climbed atop it and walked across it as though it were a tightrope or a rickety bridge leading to something grand. My grandmother never rushed me or said a word that I remember, even though we were quite considerably in a hurry. She only waited patiently for me to journey across my beam and in through the car door she held open for me.
My grandmother passed away last year in August, a few days after my birthday. But I like to think she’s still holding that door open, waiting for me to finish crossing my beam. She won’t ask me to rush though. She’s still patient, after all these years.
I’m twenty-three now. And sometimes I still walk across parking curbs, just because I can. Because it reminds me that there’s always a little time to waste.
I remember this one time when I was about two or three and had a ball to play with that I absolutely loved. One day, the ball went missing and I enlisted my baby sister to help me find it. She would only point to where one of my arms were but I only urged her to keep helping me . . . only to realise that what she was pointing at was the ball in my hand.
Whoopsies ;p
When I was in kindergarten, I had two lovely teachers: Mrs. Becker (a petite young blond) and Mrs. Wilson (a tall, beautiful woman with long, black hair and fair skin.) I was certain Mrs. Wilson was a witch: not because she was mean (she wasn’t at all: she was very nice) but because she always wore dark colors, had long raven colored hair and looked like she walked off the set of Hocus Pocus. That year, during the night of trick or treating, my parents took my younger sister and I around our small town. On our route was Mrs Wilson’s house. I walked up her walkway, knocked on the door, and was about to say “trick or treat!” when Mrs Wilson answered the door: head to toe decked out in full witch costume. I screamed, dropped my candy-filled plastic pumpkin and yelled “She really is a witch!” I ran back to my dad’s car, unable to be convinced all was ok, and watched my sister pick up my pumpkin and score my candy. I didn’t get out of the car again the rest of the evening, until we arrived safely at home. The bright side of the story: Mrs Wilson showed up to school Monday morning and showed me her costume, explained it was fake, and gave me a bag of yummy candy goodness.
I grew up in a small town in the Swiss countryside. There’s no such things as school buses. Usually, I walked to school with others from my neighborhood, but everybody doesn’t start at the same time, and there were a few times — for whatever reason — that I had to walk on my own. There were a few different ways to school, but only one was the best way if you were in a hurry, or if your dad dropped you off halfway on his way to work. Unfortunately, as everyone knew that was the way that had a kidnapper living along it. (This was common knowledge among all children who had to walk that way, no one knew what he did with children when he had them…maybe eat them? Or make a coat out of them? Or worse: Make sure they’d never see their parents again.) Anyway, I remember the few times I had to walk that way on my own, I always prepped before I got to that spot by talking to the weather, as you do. Then, I walked really fast (I’m not a runner, never have been) past the house and thanked the weather afterwards. Seems to have helped, too, as I’m still here.
I think I was 6 or 7 years old. I wore a pink (I hated pink) petal gown (I hated gowns) when my ever-absent parent decided that a child must love to go to the zoo. But I was a simple, strange little girl, they forced me to go and I cryed all the time. I have a photo where I was so pink, so flowered and so weeping that – now – is very comic. I don’t know why but I never enjoyed seeing the animals behind bars.
Thanks for this giveaway, I love your books (although in Italy – for now – we have only two of your book).
I was 4 years old and we were at the hospital so ky baby sister could get the hole in her heart checked out. I had a really nasty scrape on my knee from an accident playing outside church with my 2 cousins. A nurse saw my scrape and my parents told her I wouldn’t let them clean it properly. She came back with another nurse and a huge bottle of peroxide and antibiotic ointment. One nurse held me back while the other poured peroxide all over my scrape and cleaned it. I screamed my head off the whole time. I am still terrified of peroxide and haven’t ever used it again. This incident happened almost 26 years ago.
When I was around 5, my mom and her friend took a bunch of us kids shopping for Halloween costumes. There was four of us; I was the oldest and my sister, around 2, was the youngest. The adults in this story, left the children in the cart and went one aisle over. Masked adults then jumped around the corner, in front of the cart, causing four unsuspecting young children to scream and cry.
They had to go back to the other aisle to take their masks off before the two youngest children would stop crying. Being the loud and grumpy child I was, I lectured my mother on why she shouldn’t do that when she returned sans mask.
Needless to say, I don’t wear masks. Ever.
When I was around 3, my grandpa took me to Costco with him and when he was done he decided to leave me in the cart while he unloaded everything he bought and put it into the car. I decided that I didn’t want to remain in the cart anymore, so I climbed out. I ended up falling head first onto the concrete. I still have vivid memories of all of that, and the big bump on my head, and going to the doctor and everything else.
I was four years old when my mom and I made the trek from Colorado to North Carolina, by bus no less. The ride is a fuzzy collage of images and smells. We moved in with my grandparents and I remember everyday when my grandfather came home from work, I would stop whatever it was I was playing and run to him. He would pick me up, still in his mechanics coveralls smelling of grease and sweat (which became a combination I still find comforting), throw me over his shoulder and spin me around until I was squealing and laughing and a little wobbly when he placed me back on my feet.
Most of the more amusing (sometimes embarrassing) childhood memories I have were told to me by my parents. Recently, while watching Sailor Moon with my friends and joking about Tuxedo Mask’s role in the series, my dad told me that out of all of the characters I pretended to be from the show when I was a child (I had an assortment), I pretended to be Tuxedo Mask at some point. Even to the point where I had a little cape and stole one of his hats for it. I also remember one Halloween in elementary school I dressed as Hotaru with whatever leotards and nylons I had in my closet, even a scratchy wig to complete it. I remember being quite proud of myself that day, regardless of the head rash.
When I was in pre-school there was this a white plastic toy dog that I would always play with. It wasn’t anything special, but I loved it. It could swivel its head, but other than that, it didn’t really move. But it was still my favorite, and I always picked it out and carried it around with me when I got there in the morning.
I remember that, one day, there was this boy that grabbed it when I put it down and then took off running with it. We were outside when it happened, and I was horrified. He then took a red crayon out of his pocket and started to scribble all over the dog. I became so angry that I chased after him, and our “teachers” had to hold me back.
In some strange way, I think my inner child is still very upset over that dog. I haven’t forgotten the moment when it was “ruined.” It just didn’t feel like the same toy after that. It’s weird how something that small feels life-ruining when you’re only four.
Congrats on the new book! I cannot wait to read it :)
One of my childhood memories: When I was a kid, I used to play with my brother in the backyard. We would take huge sticks and pretend they were swords and fight each other with them (I’m sure we gave our mother heart attacks as we swung sharp pointed weapons at each other’s faces!). My brother found a stick that had a swirling pattern underneath the bark, like an ant colony. I wanted one soooo badly and he convinced me that in order to get one I would have to make sacrifices to the Ant Queen and offer up things that I loved in order to convince her to make one for me. I believed him for a good year and kept trying to think of something to offer a colony of ants, because I didn’t think they’d like my favorite stuffed animal :)