Lone Star Book Blog Tours - Angel Thieves by Kathi Appelt

ANGEL THIEVES

by

KATHI APPELT

Young Adult / Magical Realism / Historical / Contemporary
Publisher: Atheneum / Caitlyn Dlouhy Books

Date of Publication: March 12, 2019

Number of Pages: 336

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An ocelot. A slave. An angel thief.

Multiple perspectives spanning across time are united through themes of freedom, hope, and faith in a most unusual and epic novel from Newbery Honor–winning author and National Book Award finalist Kathi Appelt.

Sixteen-year-old Cade Curtis is an angel thief. After his mother’s family rejected him for being born out of wedlock, he and his dad moved to the apartment above a local antique shop. The only payment the owner Mrs. Walker requests: marble angels, stolen from graveyards, for her to sell for thousands of dollars to collectors. But there’s one angel that would be the last they’d ever need to steal; an angel, carved by a slave, with one hand open and one hand closed. If only Cade could find it…

Zorra, a young ocelot, watches the bayou rush past her yearningly. The poacher who captured and caged her has long since lost her, and Zorra is getting hungrier and thirstier by the day. Trapped, she only has the sounds of the bayou for comfort—but it tells her help will come soon.

Before Zorra, Achsah, a slave, watched the very same bayou with her two young daughters. After the death of her master, Achsah is free, but she’ll be damned if her daughters aren’t freed with her. All they need to do is find the church with an angel with one hand open and one hand closed…

In a masterful feat, National Book Award Honoree Kathi Appelt weaves together stories across time, connected by the bayou, an angel, and the universal desire to be free.

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PRAISE FOR ANGEL THIEVES:

Spiritual, succinct, and emotionally gripping. 

-- School Library Journal

A heartfelt love letter to Houston that acknowledges the bad parts of its history while uplifting the good. -- BCBB

Shows the best and worst sides of humanity and underscores the powerful force of the bayou, which both holds and erases secrets.  

-- Publishers Weekly

Narrative strands are like tributaries that begin as separate entities but eventually merge into a single thematic connection: that love, whether lost or found, is always powerful. -- Horn Book

Richly drawn and important. -- Booklist, starred review

One Small Sentence

Guest Post by Kathi Appelt

I want to tell you a small part of my experience of writing Angel Thieves. To a certain extent, all of my books feel a bit slippery as they come into being, but this one was like trying to walk a dozen cats on the ends of a dozen leashes. The various story lines kept getting tangled up and twisted. There were moments when I just wanted to toss it all, for sure. And just when I thought I had it in place, it slipped away again.

In fact, the ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) is basically draft #38 out of maybe 52 drafts? (I stopped counting a year ago). Anyways, I made substantial changes to the manuscript after the ARC came out, so if you happen to have one, use it to study and show how a book can change from one draft to another, especially when it comes to the ending.

There are over fifty-thousand words at play here. It took me three years to get those words all arranged in just the right way. And yet . . .

Yet . . .

There was one sentence that just kept eluding me. One critical sentence. Only three words long.

It first occurs on page 83 when my young protagonist Cade has just come face to face with his biological mother for the first time. At six years old, the trauma of it was overwhelming and Cade did the only thing he could think to do—ducked into the bathroom and locked the door.

Minutes later, he hears his dad Paul on the other side of the door, who tells him the best words ever: “I’ll always be right here.” Of course, those are perfect words to say to a kid who has just experienced a major moment in his life. They’re satisfying and comforting and all of that. They work well in that particular time and space.

But fast forward ten years and 213 pages. Now on page 296, Cade is sixteen, and he is the one who is in the position of being the comforter. I wanted him to say those exact best words ever, in an attempt to pull the story threads together. And while “I’ll always be right here,” suffices, it’s just not exactly right.

My friends, that sentence drove me nuts. I kept trying to massage it, to rub it into something more pliable and that suited both instances more fully. I could not figure it out. I kept changing it, kept trying other sentences, other words.

I knew what I wanted both Paul and Cade to express, I knew what their hearts had to say, but the way to say it kept slipping from my grasp. I can’t tell you how frustrating that was.

However, even more frustrating was the moment when I realized the exact right sentence, because by then it was too late. The book had already gone to the printer. I had this eureka moment, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

The good news is that my wonderful editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy, was able to make the change for the audio edition (which is brilliantly read by my daughter-in-law Laurel Kathleen), and if the book is lucky enough to go to a second printing, then it’ll show up then. But if it doesn’t, I hope you’ll write it in on pages 83 and 296.

“There’s love enough.” This is what Paul should have said to Cade, which in turn Cade says to Zorra. “There’s love enough.”

In so many ways, I feel like that small, three-word sentence is what the entire book is about. It means that when love is present, it doesn’t take mountains of it to create a miracle. It doesn’t require quantification. Love is love is love. When it’s present, there’s enough. And that’s what matters.

Kathi Appelt is the author of the Newbery Honoree, National Book Award finalist, PEN USA Literary Award–winning, and bestselling The Underneath as well as the National Book Award finalist The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp, Maybe a Fox (with Alison McGhee), Keeper, and many picture books including Counting Crows and Max ... Attacks. 

She has two grown children and lives in College Station, Texas, with her husband and their six cats. She serves as a faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts in their MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program.

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Learn more by visiting the Angel Thieves Pinterest Boards!

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Lone Star Book Blog Tours - Light From Distant Stars by Shawn Smucker

LIGHT FROM DISTANT STARS

by

SHAWN SMUCKER

Genre: Christian Fiction / Magical Realism / Rural Fiction

Publisher: Revell

Date of Publication: July 16, 2019

Number of Pages: 400

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When Cohen Marah steps over his father's body in the basement embalming room of the family's funeral home, he has no idea that he is stepping into a labyrinth of memory.

Over the next week, Cohen's childhood comes back in living color. The dramatic events that led to his parents' separation. The accident Cohen witnessed and the traumatic images he couldn't unsee. And the two children in the forest who became his friends--and enlisted him in a dark and dangerous undertaking. As the lines blur between what was real and what was imaginary, Cohen is faced with the question he's been avoiding:

Is he responsible for his father's death?

Master story weaver Shawn Smucker relays a tale both eerie and enchanting, one that will have you questioning reality and reaching out for what is true, good, and genuine.

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Chapter Two of

Light from Distant Stars

By Shawn Smucker

Click to visit the Lone Star Book Blog Tour to read chapter one!

PART ONE

Monday, March 16, 2015

Darkness was upon the face of the deep.

Genesis 1:2

two

The Preacher

When Cohen was a small boy, lying on the floor under the church pews on a humid summer Sunday night, the bright ceiling lights shone. He listened to his father’s voice boom through the quiet, the heavy pauses filled with scattershot responses. “Amen!” and “Preach!” and semi- whispered versions of “Hallelujah!” so hushed and sincere they sent goose bumps racing up his skinny arms. 

Under the pews, on the deep red carpet, drowning in the hot, stuffy air, young Cohen drifted in and out of sleep. It was as if he had descended beneath some holy canopy and settled into the plush red carpet surrounded by a rain forest full of trees, which were actually the legs of pews and the legs of people and women’s dresses draped all the way to the floor, rustling ever so slightly with the sermon. He could smell the hairspray and the cologne and the sweat mingling like incense, a pleasing offering to the Lord. 

Far above him, like branches moving under the weight of resettling birds, people waved paper fans created out of their Sunday evening bulletins, folded an inch this way, an inch that way, stirring the air. But to no avail. Sweat came out of their pores. Sweat welled up in droplets like water on a glass. Sweat trickled down, always down. And even there, from the floor, Cohen could imagine it: the sweat that darkened the underarms of Mr. Pugitt’s light blue collared shirt, the sweat Mrs. Fisher blotted from her powdery temples, the sweat that made his father’s bald head shine like a beacon, and the sweat that sweetened the nape of Miss Flynne’s slender neck. 

Ah, his Sunday school teacher, Miss Flynne! Cohen was only nine years old in 1984, but he could tell that something about Miss Flynne opened doors into rooms where he had never wandered. Why couldn’t he speak when she looked at him? Why did the lines of her body push his heart into his throat? She was all bright white smiles and straight posture and something lovely, budding. 

His mother was not all smiles, not in 1984 and never before that and never since. Sometimes, from his place of repose under the church bench, he could peek out and see his mother’s stern face, eyes never leaving his father. The intensity with which she followed his father’s sermon was the only thing that could distract her enough to allow him to slip down onto the floor. No one else seemed to notice her lips, but Cohen did, the way she mouthed every single word to every single one of his father’s sermons, as if she had written them herself. Which she had. 

Sometimes, when Cohen’s father said a word that synchronize with his mother’s mouth, she would pause, her eyes those of a scorned prophet, one not welcomed in her own town. Cohen could tell it took everything in her not to stand up and interrupt his father, correct him, set him back in the record’s groove. But she would shake her head as if clearing away a gnat and find the cadence again. Somehow their words rediscovered each other there in the holy air, hers silent and hidden, his shouted, and Cohen’s mind drifted away. 

If Cohen rolled over or made too much noise or in any way reminded his mother of his existence there beneath the canopy, she hauled him back up by his upper arm or his ear or his hair, whatever she could reach, hissing admonitions, hoisting him back to the pew. He felt the eyes of the hundreds of other people on the back of his own neck, sitting there like drops of sweat, their glances grazing off his ears, skimming the top of his head, weighing down his shoulders. There was a certain weight that came with being the only son of a popular country preacher. There were certain expectations. 

His sister Kaye was always there, waiting for him in the canopy, only four years older than him and sitting completely still. She had an unnatural ability to weather even the longest of sermons without so much as twitching, without moving a single muscle. Sometimes she didn’t even blink for long minutes at a time. He knew. He watched her, counting the seconds. When they got older, she told him her secret to this, the things she thought about to keep her in that central spot, the stories she made up. She told him about the things in the church she would count: the wooden slats on the ceiling, the imperfections in the wooden pew, the number of pores on the back of the person’s neck in front of her and how those tiny hairs became an endless forest through which she embarked on an adventure. 

When Cohen became bored contemplating his sister’s stillness, which took only moments, his gaze joined with those hundreds of other gazes, the way small streams drown into bigger ones, and he stared at his father on the stage. Cohen was transfixed by what he saw. His father reached up with his long, slender fingers and loosened his tie. He raised a pointed finger to the heavens and made a desperate plea, his voice a cadence, a rhythm, a kind of calling out, and the congregation heaved with emotion. People shouted. Women’s shoulders shook with poorly suppressed sobs. Men leaned forward, their faces in their hands, as if scorched by Isaiah’s coal. 

Cohen’s father pulled a pure white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his bald head dry, and the lights shone. An usher opened the windows that ran along the east side of the building, and a cool night breeze blew through, leaking in and spreading along the floor, gathering in pools that Cohen slipped into when his mother had been taken up again by the words of her own sermon.

Shawn Smucker is the author of the young adult novels The Day the Angels Fell and The Edge of Over There, as well as the memoir Once We Were Strangers. He lives with his wife and six children in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

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GRAND PRIZE

Copy of Light from Distant Stars

+ Look to the Stars 8”x5” Journal + $25 Barnes & Noble Gift Card; 

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Copy of Light from Distant Stars + Personal Library Kit; 

3RD PRIZE

Copy of Light from Distant Stars + $10 Starbucks Gift Card. 

July 17-27, 2019

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7/25/19	Review	Reading by Moonlight
7/26/19	Review	The Clueless Gent

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