Hello, everyone, and welcome to my stop on the HarperTeen Summer 2016 Tour hosted by Irish Banana Tours!
If you're unfamiliar with this tour, it highlights 50 upcoming HarperTeen (and its imprints) titles on 50 different blogs in 50 days! Be sure to follow the whole tour to check out what books will be available in just a few short months!
Title: Unplugged (The Wired #1)
Series: The Wired
Author: Donna Frietas
Genres: Science Fiction, Action and Adventure, Survival Stories, Romance
Genres: Science Fiction, Action and Adventure, Survival Stories, Romance
Publisher: HarperTeen
Publication Date: June 21, 2016
The first book in a provocative new series from acclaimed author Donna Freitas—Feed for a new generation.
Humanity is split into the App World and the Real World—an extravagant virtual world for the wealthy and a dying physical world for the poor. Years ago, Skylar Cruz’s family sent her to the App World for a chance at a better life.
Now Skye is a nobody, a virtual sixteen-year-old girl without any glamorous effects or expensive downloads to make her stand out in the App World. Yet none of that matters to Skye. All she wants is a chance to unplug and see her mother and sister again.
But when the borders between worlds suddenly close, Skye loses that chance. Desperate to reach her family, Skye risks everything to get back to the physical world. Once she arrives, however, she discovers a much larger, darker reality than the one she remembers.
In the tradition of M. T. Anderson’s Feed and Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, Unplugged kicks off a thrilling and timely sci-fi series for teens from an award-winning writer.
An Excerpt from Unplugged
I'll never forget the day the news rang through the App World.
It was early June and I was just another virtual girl, looking forward to unplugging on her seventeenth birthday. I couldn't wait to see my real family again and decide if maybe, just maybe, the real me was worth hanging on to. School hadn't let out yet for the summer and the atmosphere was set at a comfortable seventy degrees. I was at my best friend Inara's house. Her parents, my surrogate family, were there, too. I loved the Sachses' apartment, with its skyline views of the City, its chandeliers, and its plush white furniture, where Inara and I would sprawl while uploading our homework.
Wispy clouds floated by and the lights of the nearby buildings began to sparkle. I pressed my palm against the lass of the floor-to-ceiling windows, my eyes in the Empire State Building, then sliding sideways toward the Water Tower. It rose high into the atmosphere, its shimmering blue surface moving like ocean waves. The Sachses lived in a neighborhood where the architecture was coded with some of the most memorable buildings from The Real World.
Inara joined me at the window and placed her hand next to mine, the lengths of our fingers eerily similar, our skin color identical, the same shade of Caucasian 4.0 as every other citizen of the City. Her eyes were green and mine were blue, her hair a bright shiny blond and mine an inky black, but we shared the same standard settings for height, weight, and general attractiveness for all sixteens -- settings intended to highlight the changes that Apps brought to our appearance. We even shared the same birthday. Though it was true for everyone in our year. There were slight differences in age among sixteens, just as there were with fifteens and fourteens, and so on and so forth, but adjusting one's age to a standard setting was a normal part of virtual living.
Standard settings helped make the App World a harmonious place to be.
Basic sameness was a right among all citizens here. It saved people from enduring the random and often unfair that came with the real body.
Apps provided all the temporary diversity a person could need.
Wispy clouds floated by and the lights of the nearby buildings began to sparkle. I pressed my palm against the lass of the floor-to-ceiling windows, my eyes in the Empire State Building, then sliding sideways toward the Water Tower. It rose high into the atmosphere, its shimmering blue surface moving like ocean waves. The Sachses lived in a neighborhood where the architecture was coded with some of the most memorable buildings from The Real World.
Inara joined me at the window and placed her hand next to mine, the lengths of our fingers eerily similar, our skin color identical, the same shade of Caucasian 4.0 as every other citizen of the City. Her eyes were green and mine were blue, her hair a bright shiny blond and mine an inky black, but we shared the same standard settings for height, weight, and general attractiveness for all sixteens -- settings intended to highlight the changes that Apps brought to our appearance. We even shared the same birthday. Though it was true for everyone in our year. There were slight differences in age among sixteens, just as there were with fifteens and fourteens, and so on and so forth, but adjusting one's age to a standard setting was a normal part of virtual living.
Standard settings helped make the App World a harmonious place to be.
Basic sameness was a right among all citizens here. It saved people from enduring the random and often unfair that came with the real body.
Apps provided all the temporary diversity a person could need.
Discussion
If you had a choice, would you want to keep living the way that we do, or do you think you'd want to live in a virtual-like world where everything is already decided for you before you're even born? Feel free to let me know in the comments!
Donna Frietas is a professor of religion and the author of many young adult novels, The Possibility of Sainthood, This Gorgeous Game, The Survival Kit, and The Tenderness of Thieves. She has also written several nonfiction books. Donna lives in New York City.
including
Giveaways
#1 – A Harper Teen Summer 2016 Catalog Prize Pack of 45 Books*
*Titles not included: The Crown by Kiera Cass, Escape from Asylum by Madeline Roux, Sing by Vivi Greene, The Countdown by Kimberly Derting, & United As One by Pittacus Lore
In addition to the one massive prize winner, we will also have 4 winners who will be able to select 3 titles they want from the Summer 2016 Catalog.
US Only
#2 – 5 Finished Copies from the Harper Teen Winter 2016 Catalog
5 books are: Front Lines by Michael Grant, Revenge & the Wild by Michelle Modesto, The Lifeboat Clique by Kathy Parks, Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvin, & The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig
US Only
How to enter:
Collect the daily word from each blog stop during the Harper Summer 2016 Tour (a total of 50). Once you’ve collected them all, email the complete saying to: HarperTeenTour@gmail.com
Prize Rules:
1.) Winner must have a valid US mailing address to receive the prize
2.) Winner must be over 13
3.) Only one (1) entry per person for Prize #2 – duplicates will be deleted.
4.) Only a completed phrase will be accepted as an entry – do not email each word/phrase daily. Wait until you have the complete saying and then email in.
5.) All email submissions must be submitted by 11:59 PM EST by 3/31/2016.
6.) Winners will be chosen on 4/1/2016 and will have 48 hours to claim their prize before another winner is selected.
7.) Participating blogs and bloggers are not responsible for unsent, damaged, and/or stolen prizes offered by the publisher.
My keyword for this giveaway is sweeping.
Follow the Tour
The Last Time We Were Us
The Irish Banana Review
2/6/2016
The Countdown
Katie's Book Blog
2/7/2016
Unrivaled
Pandora's Books
2/8/2016
The Crown
Paperback Princess
2/9/2016
Shiny Broken Pieces
Teen Lit Rocks
2/10/2016
Meet Me Here
Dizneeee's World of Books
2/11/2016
Incriminated
Da Readaholic Book Bloog
2/12/2016
Escape From Asylum
Emily Reads Everything
2/13/2016
What Happens Now
Lost in Literature
2/14/2016
Queen of Hearts
The Innocent Smiley
2/15/2016
Lost In Love
The Book Cellar
2/16/2016
The Hunt
Novel Heartbeat
2/17/2016
The Crown's Game
My Friends Are Fiction
2/18/2016
Autofocus
The Petite Book Blogger
2/19/2016
The Blood Between Us
Bookwyrming Thoughts
2/20/2016
The Fall of Butterlfies
Tina the Bookworm
2/21/2016
What the Dead Want
Book YAbber
2/22/2016
Night Speed
Book Scents
2/23/2016
Traitor Angels
Alexa Loves Books
2/24/2016
A Walk In the Sun
Ex Libris
2/25/2016
Sing
NO BS BOOK REVIEWS
2/26/2016
Ruined
Fiction Fare
2/27/2016
Spark
In Wonderland
2/28/2016
Winning
BooksABlog
2/29/2016
Please Don't Tell
A Perfection Called Books
3/1/2016
Even If the Sky Falls
BCS Reviews
3/2/2016
Ivory & Bone
Reading Teen
3/3/2016
Ask Me How I Got Here
The Young Folks
3/4/2016
United As One
Krista's Dust Jacket
3/5/2016
Unplugged
The Hardcover Lover
3/6/2016
This Is My Brain On Boys
A Reader Under The Sea
3/7/2016
Red Velevet Crush
Nicole's Novel Reads
3/8/2016
The Season of You & Me
A Leisure Moment
3/9/2016
The Lost & Found
Pretty Deadly Reviews
3/10/2016
How It Feels to Fly
ReadWriteLove28
3/11/2016
This Savage Song
Please Feed The Bookworm
3/12/2016
Finding Abbey Road
Novel Novice
3/13/2016
A Season for Fireflies
My Guilty Obsession
3/14/2016
True Letters from a Fictional Life
Caught Read Handed
3/15/2016
We Were Never Here
Arctic Books
3/16/2016
Out of My Mind
Gone with the Words
3/17/2016
The Way Back to You
Addicted 2 Novels
3/18/2016
The Outliers
KellyVision
3/19/2016
Wanderlost
That Artsy Reader Girl
3/20/2016
Frannie & Tru
Such a Novel Idea
3/21/2016
Change Places With Me
I Turn the Pages
3/22/2016
Unforgiveable
Lekeisha The Booknerd
3/23/2016
Girl Against the Universe
fangirlconfessions
3/24/2016
The Marked Girl
StuckInBooks
3/25/2016
My Lady Jane
Mundie Moms
Come Chat With Us!
Throughout the tour, there will be a few Facebook chats with some of the summer HarperTeen authors, and we'd love for you to join us!
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