WWW Wednesday: What Am I Reading? #amreading

On By Teri PolenIn WWW Wednesdays

WWW Wednesday is a meme from Sam at Taking On A World Of Words

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Battle of the Bands is an anthology featuring some of my favorite YA authors. I couldn’t pass up this one – because I was also in a band in high school. We didn’t enter anything like Battle of the Bands, but it was still a fun time.

Fifteen young adult authors and one real-life rock star band together for one epic—and interconnected—take on a memorable high school rite of passage.

A daughter of rock ’n’ roll royalty has a secret crush. A lonely ticket taker worries about his sister. An almost-famous songwriter nurses old wounds. A stage manager tires of being behind the scenes. A singer-songwriter struggles to untangle her feelings for her best friend and his girlfriend. In this live-out-loud anthology, the disparate protagonists of sixteen stories are thrown together for one unforgettable event: their high school’s battle of the bands. Told in a harmonic blend of first- and third-person narrative voices, roughly chronological short stories offer a kaleidoscopic view of the same transformative night. Featuring an entry from Justin Courtney Pierre, lead vocalist of Motion City Soundtrack, Battle of the Bands is a celebration of youth, music, and meeting the challenges of life head-on. 

I finished The Haunting of Leigh Harker over the weekend. I nearly DNFed this book because the first several chapters were going nowhere. I took a look at some other reviews that advised readers to hang on – the payoff was worth it. And it absolutely was. There was a jaw-dropping twist on this haunted house tale that made slogging through the first few chapters entirely worth it.

Sometimes the dead reach back…

Leigh Harker’s quiet suburban home was her sanctuary for more than a decade, until things abruptly changed. Curtains open by themselves. Radios turn off and on. And a dark figure looms in the shadows of her bedroom door at night, watching her, waiting for her to finally let down her guard enough to fall asleep.

Pushed to her limits but unwilling to abandon her home, Leigh struggles to find answers. But each step forces her towards something more terrifying than she ever imagined.

A poisonous shadow seeps from the locked door beneath the stairs. The handle rattles through the night and fingernails scratch at the wood. Her home harbours dangerous secrets, and now that Leigh is trapped within its walls, she fears she may never escape.

Do you think you’re safe?

I have no explanation for it, but I’ve always loved a Victorian London setting. Maybe I lived during that time period in a previous life or something. Either way, I’m anxious to get to this one. The Tournament of Freaks sounds fabulous.

As an African tightrope dancer in Victorian London, Iris is used to being strange. She is certainly a strange sight for leering British audiences always eager for the spectacle of colonial curiosity. But Iris also has a secret that even “strange” doesn’t capture…​

She cannot die.

Haunted by her unnatural power and with no memories of her past, Iris is obsessed with discovering who she is. But that mission gets more complicated when she meets the dark and alluring Adam Temple, a member of a mysterious order called the Enlightenment Committee. Adam seems to know much more about her than he lets on, and he shares with her a terrifying revelation: the world is ending, and the Committee will decide who lives…and who doesn’t.

To help them choose a leader for the upcoming apocalypse, the Committee is holding the Tournament of Freaks, a macabre competition made up of vicious fighters with fantastical abilities. Adam wants Iris to be his champion, and in return he promises her the one thing she wants most: the truth about who she really is.

If Iris wants to learn about her shadowy past, she has no choice but to fight. But the further she gets in the grisly tournament, the more she begins to remember—and the more she wonders if the truth is something best left forgotten. 

36 thoughts on “WWW Wednesday: What Am I Reading? #amreading”

  5. The anthology sounds like some fun reading, and I love the Victorian setting of the last one.
    I think I need to give Darcy Coates another try. I did DNF the first book of hers I tried (I don’t remember the title), but I keep seeing her stuff popping up everywhere and the reviews are always good. Plus she writes in a genre I love. Maybe, like this one, I just needed to stick with the book I was reading longer.

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  10. This was one of those posts where I was thinking the one I was reading was my fav until I got to your description of the next one. 3 winning titles here! Perhaps The Bones of Ruin, if I had to choose a fav of these. Intriguing…

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  16. Teri, a fun post and it’s always interesting to see what people are reading. An interesting selection … it’s good the horror book turned out into such a jaw-dropping finale. The Bones of Ruin sounds compelling and I’m going to take a closer look at this one. A book set earlier than the Victorian era but also in London is The Foundling by Stacey Halls. A terrific atmosphere of the time and a book that had me reading late into the night!

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    1. I looked up The Foundling on Goodreads – it’s got so many fabulous reviews! No wonder you stayed up so late reading it, Annika. The jaw-dropping point actually took place earlier in the horror book – maybe somewhere before the midpoint. After that, there’s no way I could have put it down.

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