YASH 2017 Fall Edition! YA Books to #WIN!

Welcome to this year's fall Young Adult Scavenger Hunt!

*thick wooden door panels crack and clunky hinges clank as I open the door*

Hi! I'm so glad you've stopped to visit me. Come on in. 

I'm S.A. Larsen, but feel free to call me Sheri.

I'll be your guide for this stop of the hunt.

~HERE'S A FEW FACTS ABOUT ME~

My favorite holiday is Halloween.🍂🎃

I love the color black.

👻Cemeteries are cool.

I write middle grade & young adult books because 

being a tween or teen is hard and fictional stories 

are a safe place to escape and think about life. 

💀💀💀

You are currently hunting on TEAM ORANGE.

Excited to hear about the exclusive bonus contest I've added to this leg of the hunt? You'll have to search for it. I've hidden six capitalized/colored words somewhere within the text below. When you put them in the correct order, they make a sentence that shares an important message from my upcoming YA release MARKED BEAUTY. (You may or may not have just read two of the words you'll need.) Before you go look, check out the amazing author I'm hosting and read over a few rules:

SCAVENGER HUNT PUZZLE RULES

*A brief intro for 1st time hunters: this bi-annual event was first organized by author Colleen Houck as a way to give readers a chance to gain access to exclusive bonus material from their favorite authors...and a chance to win some awesome prizes! 

At this hunt, you not only get access to exclusive content from each author, you also get a clue for the hunt. 

Write down all the secret numbers for one team, total them, and submit the answer to BE entered for the grand prize. There are 7 teams participating this year (TEAM RED, TEAM BLUE, TEAM ORANGE, TEAM GREEN, TEAM GOLD, TEAM PINK, & TEAM PURPLE) each with 20 author members! Think of all the books you could win. You can collect the numbers for just one team or you can do it for every team and enter in all 7 giveaways! But play fast: this contest (and all the exclusive bonus material) will only be online for 120 hours! If you’d like to find out more about the hunt, see links to all the authors participating, and see the full list of prizes up for grabs, go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page.

Below, you'll notice that I've hidden my favorite number. Collect the favorite numbers of all the authors on the orange team, and then add them up. (If math is not your thing, #highfive! It's not mine, either. So feel free to phone a mathematical friend.) 

PSST...MY SECRET NUMBER STANDS OUT IN LIGHTS.

ENTRY FORM: Once YOU’ve added up all the numbers, make sure you fill out the form here to officially qualify for the grand prize. Only entries that have the correct number will qualify.

RULES: Open internationally, anyone below the age of 18 should have a parent or guardian’s permission to enter. To be eligible for the grand prize, you must submit the completed entry form by SUNDAY, OCT 8th, at noon Pacific Time. Entries sent without the correct number or without contact information will not be considered.

I am super excited to be hosting 

KAT ROSS!

ABOUT KAT:

Kat Ross worked as a journalist at THE United Nations for ten years before happily falling into what she likes best: making stuff up. She's the author of the dystopian thriller SOME FINE DAY, the FOURTH ELMENT fantasy triology (The Midnight Sea, Blood of the Prophet, Queen of Chaos), and a  new gaslamp mystery series. She'll never forget the first time she read The Shining. At age ten, she went on a camping trip in the Adirondacks with her mother. She was reading by flashlight in the tent at the moment it dawned on her that redrum was murder backwards. She didn't sleep for the rest of the trip. 

She's still a huge fan of horror, along with fantasy and sci-fi and mysteries, or all of those combined, especially if they're funny too (any recs for her?). Kat doesn't eat meat because she like animals. Mostly, she eats a lot of this. 

THE BOOK KAT IS SHOWCASING IS...

PSST...me, again. I was so mesmerized by her cover, I discovered how many words make up the series sentence at the top of the cover - 

Just looking at her cover made me want to find out more. So I peeked. ARE you ready to see what I found?

ABOUT THE BOOK

Gladiator meets Romeo and Juliet in this "Spellbinding Fantasy" (Kirkus Reviews) set in ancient Persia. As a girl and her demon pursue a deadly foe across the arid wasteland of the Great Salt Plain to the glittering capital of Persepolae, she's forced to question his slavery - and her own loyalty to the empire. Book I of the Fourth Element Trilogy.

TOP SECRET BONUS MATERIAL!

Sneak Peek at NOCTURNE - 

Nazafareen woke to the creaking of ropes. The ship swayed from side to side like a cradle rocked by an overly enthusiastic giant. She didn’t know how long they’d been aloft. There was no wind, but the air burned her cheeks, a damp, penetrating cold unlike anything she had ever experienced before, its needle claws finding every gap in her cloak. 

She hadn’t planned to reveal herself until they reached Samarqand, and not even then if she could find a way to quietly sneak off the ship, but the pendulum-like motion and occasional sudden, brief drops made her stomach roil. Nazafareen swallowed hard.

I will not vomit, she said to herself. I will not.

She peered between the bags of sand. The captain of the wind ship had his back to her, standing with his legs braced wide on the deck. He wore a quilted brown coat that came down to his knees and thick fur-lined gloves. As she watched, he peeled one off and took a handful of something gritty from his pocket, tossed it into the air and muttered words under his breath. The ship gave a small lurch. He nodded and put the glove back on, steadying himself on one of the ropes.

Forks of blue-white lightning illuminated the surrounding clouds, followed almost immediately by a shattering cymbal crash of thunder. The ship moved in tandem with the wind so she couldn’t judge its speed, but Nazafareen had the impression they were going very fast. She wondered how far away the ground was. Then the deck gave a sudden, violent lurch. Her head snapped back into one of the sandbags and a small cry of pain escaped her lips.

She was shaking her head to clear it, pinpoints of light dancing in her vision, when the canvas cloth she hid beneath was yanked back. Eyes widened in shock as the captain registered the stowaway aboard his vessel.

Now that she saw his face, Nazafareen realized he was closer to her own age, or even younger. He had fine-boned, delicate features, with a mop of chin-length black hair and smooth cheeks that looked like they’d never seen the edge of a razor. 

“How in the name of the Holy Father did you get here?” he demanded. 

Nazafareen crawled out, joints complaining from so many hours in a cramped space. She tried on a penitent smile and found her face to be as stiff from cold as the rest of her.

“I’m sorry, really, but I needed to leave and your ship was the only way out. I’ve no money to pay for passage, but perhaps I can work it off—” 

The boy cut her off. “Are you human or daeva?”

“Human,” she answered quickly.

His relief was clear. “What were you doing in the darklands?”

Nazafareen had already concocted a story, which she related with just enough detail to be convincing but not so much that she’d be caught in an obvious mistake. She was from a flyspeck village in Solis, nowhere he’d ever heard of, and ran away when her father pledged her to a much older distant cousin who smelled of onions. She’d hoped to find work as a housemaid in a city, but got lost and went the wrong way, wandering across the Umbra until the daevas of House Dessarian found her. 

“I’d only been there a little while, while they decided what to do with me.” She grasped a rope and held on for dear life as the ship lurched again. “When you came, I thought I’d save them the trouble.”

He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at it distractedly. “You could have asked first.”

“I was afraid you’d say no,” she replied, and that was the truth.

“What’s your name?”

“Ashraf.” Darius said it had been her sister’s name.

“All right, listen, Ashraf. My name is Javid and I’m sorry for your troubles, but by all rights, I ought to bring you back. What if the daevas think I kidnapped you?”

Nazafareen paled. “They won’t think that, I swear! I did tell one of them where I went, and she agreed it was for the best. Please don’t turn around. You don’t understand—”

“I said I ought to.” He studied the clouds, heavy with moisture and churning like a vast grey whirlpool. “If I’d found you earlier, perhaps. But it’s too much of a risk now. I got lucky with fair weather on the journey over, but the hot currents from the deserts of Solis meet the cold winds of Nocturne in the Umbra. It’s notorious for storms.” He grinned, revealing crooked white teeth. “I hope you have a head for heights.”

Add THE MIDNIGHT SEA to your TBR List.

This story sounds amazing!

Interested in holding your own copy in your hands?

You can buy it HERE.

And for more on Kat, follow her Website, Facebook Page, & Twitter account. 

And remember: ENTER the contest for a chance to win a ton of signed books by me and many more! Just check out all these books on TEAM ORANGE...

To enter, you need to write down my favorite number, find all the other 

numbers on TEAM ORANGE, add them up, and you’ll have the 

secret code to enter for the grand prize!

Also, to stay on top of what's happening during the hunt feel free to follow YASH on Twitter, Facebook, and the Website.

Thank you so much for visiting my blog! Don't forget to enter the Rafflecopter bonus contest I'm running exclusively during the 2017 Fall YA Scavenger Hunt! Did you find all the words to piece together Marked Beauty's message? GREAT! I hope you live by it because you are a Marked Beauty. 

One lucky winner will receive a 

$15 Amazon gift card & this custom MARKED BEAUTY Tote for your books!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Leave a comment and tell me what you think! Are you having fun during the hunt? What's your favorite part?

Ready to move on to the next link in the hunt? Then head on over to visit author LISA MANTERFIELD'S page.

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