BooksChatter: ☀☄ Extraordinary October

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for Extraordinary October, a Young Adult Paranormal novel by Diana Wagman (26 September 2016, Ig Publishing, 264 pages).

Don't miss our interview with author Diana Wagman.

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below.

Author Diana Wagman will be awarding a set of three Mason jar firefly lights to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour. Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), interviews (ℚ), reviews (✍) and guest blog posts (✉).

Synopsis | Trailer | Teaser: Exclusive Excerpt | Author Q&A | About the Author | Giveaway & Tour Stops

Synopsis

October is an ordinary girl. From her plain looks to her average grades, there seems to be nothing special about her. Then, three days before her eighteenth birthday, she develops a strange itch that won’t go away, and her life is turned upside down. Suddenly, she can hear dogs talk, make crows fly, and two new and very handsome boys at school are vying for her affections. After she starts “transplanting” herself through solid rock, October learns that she is not ordinary at all, but the daughter of a troll princess and a fairy prince, and a pawn in a deadly war between the trolls and the fairies. Now October will have to use all of her growing powers to save her family, and stop a mysterious evil that threatens to destroy the fairy world.

In the fantastical vein of authors such as Julie Kagawa and Holly Black, Extraordinary October takes us on a magical journey from the streets of Los Angeles to the beautiful and mythical underground fairy kingdom.

Teaser: Excerpt

1. Four Days Until My Eighteenth Birthday

     It all started with an itch. A bad itch. A terrible, bone deep, muscle shuddering itch. Out of control. I had to scratch. Had to. Immediately.
     The itch started on the bottom of my right foot my shoe. I yelped loudly in class, couldn’t help it, and Mr. Fleming turned around from the board.
     “There’s something in my shoe.” I couldn’t get it off fast enough. I was wearing my tall, lace-up boots—my favorites—and I was cursing how long it took to get my foot free.
     “How could there be something in there?” Jacob the jock asked. “She never takes them off.”
     The class snickered. Okay, so I wore those boots a lot. Every day in fact, and for a moment I was kind of flattered he’d noticed, but the itch had taken over. I knew something hadn’t actually bitten me. This was deeper than that. It came from way inside my foot, somewhere close to the bone. I peeled off my striped sock and attacked the bottom of my foot with both hands.
     “Put it back on!” Jacob pretended to gasp from the smell.
     “Pee-ew,” his sidekick, Lance, echoed and held his nose.
     Juveniles. I was too absorbed in the itch to make a snappy comeback. If I could have thought of one. The problem was the scratching wasn’t helping. It made it worse, made the itch stronger. I was feeling it behind my knees, all the way up in my stomach, a jittery, weird sensation. I couldn’t help it; I started scratching all over. My arms, my legs, the part of my back I could reach. The class was laughing. I was practically crying. Scratching was useless. Finally, I sat on my hands and tried to will it to stop. I was starting to sweat and I could feel my hair frizzing from the heat.
     Mr. Fleming frowned. “All right now, Miss October?”
     The class laughed at me again and Mr. Fleming shrugged his apology.When people tack on the “Miss” in front of my name it makes me sound like a Playboy centerfold. Years of teachers doing it by accident and it still got a laugh. Ha ha ha.
     “I think I need to go to the nurse,” I said to Fleming. What I really needed was to get outside, take off my clothes and roll on the ground so I could scratch all over.
     “Go ahead,” Mr. Fleming nodded. “Be sure to get the homework from someone.”
     I knew I looked ridiculous hobbling out of class in one shoe, clutching my books, boot, sock, and backpack. As I shut the door behind me I looked back, but my fellow students had already forgotten me and turned back to the board.I was even less interesting than the Dual Alliance of 1879. Typical.
     Out in the hall, I stopped to scratch the bottom of my bare foot against the laces on my other boot. That felt pretty good, better than anything else so far, and I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall. Then my neck started itching and my scalp. I wondered if I had some dread disease, like leprosy or skin-eating bacteria. An itch ran up my spine and I rubbed my back against the rough cinderblock wall, back and forth and up and down.
     “Like a little bear.” A guy’s voice startled me.
     I stopped scratching and looked into the bluest eyes I had ever seen.Beautiful, startling, turquoise, no, a brilliant sky blue. And the eyes were surrounded by a face that was just as attractive. I blushed and the itching intensified. Even embarrassed as I was, my foot could not stop scratching itself.
     “What are you doing out of class?”
     Surprise, surprise, Principal Hernandez was there too, but I hadn’t noticed him beside Blue-Eyes.
     “On my way to the nurse,” I said. “Something bit me.”
     “Then go!”
     “Need any help?”
     The handsome young man was talking to me. Yes, I wanted to say, scratch.Put your hands on my body and scratch. Everywhere. But I just blushed again, shook my head and limped away. I knew he wasn’t a new student; school would be out in just three months and anyway, he looked too mature, too put together to be a high schooler. On the other hand, he didn’t look old enough to be a teacher. I sighed. Whoever he was, he thought I looked like a bear. Terrific.I lifted a hand to scratch my chin and dropped my boot. Bending over to get it, I dropped my books; then my backpack swung around and hit me in the face.
     So far it had not been a very good day.
     [...]

Extraordinary October
Available NOW!

About the Author

I have always written and always wanted to be a writer, but didn’t think I could make a living at it. So I became a mime. (You can imagine what my father had to say about that.) I worked on the streets of NYC with two partners, stopping traffic in front of the Met and annoying tourists.

When, to my great surprise, that didn’t work out, I returned to school in film–thinking screenwriters made a living. And when I had ten scripts and my agent had stopped returning my calls, I wrote a novel. I did it just because I wanted to love writing again and not think about selling or casting or marketability.

That novel was Skin Deep, and it’s a testament to writing from your heart that the first person to read it, bought it. I’ve been trying to write from the heart ever since.

Follow Diana Wagman: