Tag Archives: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
To celebrate the publication of Trial by Fire by the formidably talented Jennifer Lynn Barnes, we’ve put the first chapter on a wee tour around the blogosphere…
Trial by Fire tells the story of Bryn, a seventeen schoolgirl with all the usual schoolgirl worries: a new boyfriend, a new school and a new home. But she has one major concern that her friends don’t have: she is an alpha – a human girl in charge of her own werewolf pack!
Now, the last bit of the first chapter is here, but if you want to read the whole thing, from beginning to end, go to the fantastic Wondrous Reads blog and follow the trail!
Part Four…
“Ahem.”
I’d known before I kissed Chase that we’d be interrupted. There was no such thing as a secret in a wolf pack – let alone privacy. But I’d been foolishly optimistic and hoped that the interrupter would be Lake or Maddy or one of the younger kids.
Instead, as Chase and I pulled away from each other, we were confronted with the oldest member of our pack, a gruff, weatherworn man who didn’t look a day over thirty-five. Based on the way his lips were twitching, I concluded that the man in question was torn between smiling and scowling.
“Hey, Mr. Mitchell,” I said, hoping to push him toward the smiling end of the spectrum. A guarded look settled over Chase’s eyes, but he echoed my greeting, and Lake’s dad gave us a long, measuring stare in return.
“I suspect the earth would keep rotating round the sun even if the two of you called me Mitch.”
In the time I’d been living on the Mitchells’ land, Mitch and I had had this conversation more than once, but I wasn’t really the type to give in once I dug my heels in about something.
“So noted, Mr. Mitchell.”
The smile finally won out over his scowl, but it lasted only a second or two before Mitch eyed the space (or lack thereof) between my body and Chase’s. “Last I heard, Ali was on her way here with the twins,” he said, which I took as a not-so subtle hint that Chase and I should give each other some breathing room. Chase must have interpreted it the same way, because he stepped back away from me and away from Mitch, who delivered the rest of his update with a nod.
“Lake and Maddy are rounding up the troops, and I believe Devon said something about making an entrance.”
I was fairly certain that I was the only alpha in the history of the world to have a second-in-command who appreciated the impact of arriving fashionably late. Then again, I was also the only alpha with as many females in her pack as males and more toddlers and tweens than grown men.
Besides, it wasn’t like the whole human thing was status quo.
“Bryn!” The unmistakable sound of a very small person bellowing ripped me from my thoughts, and I smiled. There was nothing quite like hearing my name yelled at the top of a three-year-old’s lungs – unless it was having the aforementioned three-year-old barrel into me full blast and throw her arms around my legs like she was afraid that if she let go, I’d disappear off the face of the earth forever.
“Hello, Lily,” I said wryly. The kid acted like she hadn’t seen me in a lifetime or two, even though it had only been an hour, if that.
Moon! Happy! Fun!
With the older wolves, I had to go looking for thoughts, unless someone was using the pack-bond to actively send them my way, but with Lily, everything was right there on the surface, bubbling up the way only the strongest emotions did in adults.
Alpha-alpha-alpha! Bryn-Bryn-Bryn!
The two words – alpha and Bryn – blended together in her mind. As the youngest of the kids I’d saved from the werewolf equivalent of a psychopath, Lily was one of the only ones who couldn’t remember the time before our pack, or the things that the Rabid had done to her, to all of them.
In Lily’s mind, Bryn meant alpha, and alpha meant Bryn. It was as simple as that.
“Can we Change yet?” Lily asked. “Can we, can we, can we?”
Not yet, Lily, I answered silently, and she stilled, mesmerized by a power I’d never asked to hold over anyone.
“Lily, I told you to wait.” The voice that issued that statement was aggrieved, and the look on its owner’s face was one I recognized all too well from my own childhood.
Come to think of it, it was a look I recognized all too well from about a week ago, two tops.
“Hey, Ali,” I said, glad that Chase and I had heeded Mitch’s warning and put a little space between my body and his.
“Hey, baby,” Ali replied, a twin on each hip. “Everyone’s been fed, but I make no guarantees about their state of mind.”
For most of my life, it had been just Ali and me, but she’d taken to managing an entire brood with the same efficiency with which she’d once transformed herself from a twenty-year-old college student into my protector within Callum’s pack. Ali was human, but the words force of nature still applied, and I would infinitely rather have tangled with an irritated werewolf than Ali in mama bear mode.
“Now?” Lily asked, right on cue with Ali’s disclaimer about the younger werewolves’ state of mind.
“Now-now-now?”
“Shhhh,” I said, and Lily closed her mouth and laid her head against my knee.
“You know, Bryn,” Ali said thoughtfully, “if Lily minded me half as well as she minds you, I wouldn’t be considering renaming her Bryn Two.”
“Ha-ha,” I retorted. “Very funny.”
Ali smiled. “I try.” She looked toward Mitch, and without saying a word, he walked over and took Katie and Alex from her arms. Not even a year old, Ali’s babies already looked more like toddlers, and in identical motions, their hands found their way almost immediately to Mitch’s beard.
He smiled. “I’ve got them,” he told Ali, and she nodded before kissing the twins and turning to walk back out of the woods. Ali never stayed to run with the pack.
As far as I knew, she never had.
Now, Bryn? Now?
Lily refrained from asking the question out loud, but I heard it through the pack-bond all the same, and this time, the answer–soon, soon, soon–seemed to come from outside my body, from instincts I couldn’t have explained to the human world. Lily seemed to feel it, too, and a keening, whimpering sound built in the back of her throat. I ran a hand gently over her bright red hair and she began rocking back and forth on her feet. Within moments, the others had arrived, filling the clearing, and the effect was magnified a hundred times.
Our pack was small–twenty-two total, only eighteen there that night–but the air was electric, and as their thoughts swirled with my own, the connection between us became a living, breathing thing. I felt them, all of them: Lake and Maddy, Lily and the twins, Chase. From the youngest to the oldest, from those who thirsted for a hunt to those who wanted nothing more in life than to run . . .
They were mine.
Devon slid in beside me, and the moment I felt the brush of his arm against mine, I knew.
It was time.
In other packs, this was formal. There were petitions and ceremonies and marks carved into flesh, but here and now, I didn’t have words, and they didn’t need them.
Now. Now. Now.
I couldn’t deny the Change any more than they could. The treetops scattered moonlight across our faces, and I inclined my head. That was all it took.
At any other time of the month, the sound of tearing fabric and crunching bones wasn’t a pleasant one, but under the full moon, the effect was like the beating of a drum.
Run. Run. Run.
All around me, they could taste it. They could feel it. Furred bodies pushed at each other to get closer to me, to touch me, to sniff me, to be with me, and the roar from their minds was overwhelming.
Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.
I forgot about Chase, about Devon, about each and every one of them as anything other than my brothers, my sisters, my people, my pack.
Mine.
This was what I’d been born for. This was all that I wanted and all that I was, and as one overwhelming, unstoppable, incredible force, we ran.
———–
Many thanks to Wondrous Reads, Girls with a Bookshelf and Bloggers Heart Books – dedicated readers with fantastic blogs. Thanks again girls!
Jennifer Lynn Barnes has been a teen model, a competitive cheerleader and was first published when she was nineteen years old.
She is now a PhD student at Yale where she researches animal cognition and teaches an undergraduate class called Human Nature, Sex and Evolution. Her latest book, Raised by Wolves, is out now in paperback.
Parul Bavishi: Jen, we’re getting pretty excited about your upcoming tour next month. How do you feel about it? What are you looking forward to? Is there anything you’re nervous about?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’m so incredibly excited to be headed back to the UK! I spent a year there between undergrad and grad school and absolutely loved it, and the idea that my British friends will actually be able to get copies of Raised By Wolves in their own stores makes me really happy.
Add onto that the idea that I actually get to come over for a visit myself, and I’m ecstatic. I’m really looking forward to doing joint events with some other great authors, and to the blog party in London! I’ve heard rumors about an annotated and doodled ARC…
Parul Bavishi: Along with your publicist, you are going to be tweeting a behind-the-scenes exposé of a book tour on #JenLynnBarnesTour. How honest are you going to be?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I tend to be a stream-of-consciousness tweeter. So – very honest. You guys will probably know what I’m eating for breakfast before I do.
Parul Bavishi: You’re a PhD student at Yale, and before that you took a Masters at Cambridge and then an undergraduate at Yale. Whew! How much more studying remains?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’m on my fourth year of five of my PhD program–so that means I have just under two years left, but I’m done with taking classes and done with my teaching requirements, so from this point out, ‘school’ consists almost entirely of doing my dissertation research.
Parul Bavishi: Raised by Wolves is your first UK publication – what is the story of its evolution?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’ve always loved werewolves, and I always had it in the back of my head that I’d write a werewolf book someday. Over the past decade, I’ve probably started four or five different werewolf books, but none of them were ever quite the fit for me as a writer.
Then, one day, I more or less woke up with the opening scene of Raised By Wolves in my mind – a human girl interacting with the alpha of the werewolf pack in which she lives – and I immediately knew that this was the right story for me, because that first chapter raised so many questions in my mind. If you were raised by werewolves, how human could you possibly be? What would that be like?
I’m a sucker for family stories, and right from the start, Raised By Wolves hit that square on – it’s about the family you’re born to and the one that you choose, the people who raise you and the friends you’d die for… and that was what made me want to see it through.
Also, Bryn is much more of a badass than I am, and as a result, writing from her perspective is quite a bit of fun.
Parul Bavishi: How many more books are planned?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’m just wrapping up work on book two – Trial By Fire - which takes place about a year after the end of Raised By Wolves. I’m not sure how many books there will be in total – I’ve just started discussing that with my editor – but I think, in an ideal world, I’d want to do four: one a year every year from the time Bryn is fifteen until she’s eighteen.
In the US, that’s roughly the same amount of time that you spend in high school, and I like the idea of taking Bryn right up through ‘graduation’ into a more adult world.
Parul Bavishi: At Yale you help teach the Sex, Evolution and Human Nature class – what’s the one fact that always interests your students?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I think the thing the students find most interesting isn’t actually the facts, so much as one of the assignments. Every year (including the year I took the class as an undergraduate), the students are asked to design and run their own experiments on human mating behavior by using data already available on sites like Hot or Not or online dating services.
You come up with a hypothesis based on something in the animal world and then you look to see if your predictions are borne out in personal ads/attractiveness ratings/whatever. It’s fun seeing the similarities and differences between us and our closest non-human relatives first hand – especially since I write about werewolves, who fall halfway in between.
Parul Bavishi: I hear you used to be a competitive cheerleader – do you still have the pom-pom skirts? Do you still do any cheerleading? What role did you take in the cheerleader team?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’m pretty sure my parents still have all of my old uniforms, but I can’t swear that they would still fit! I’m quite a bit taller than I was in my cheerleading days (though I was, at the time, already really tall for a cheerleader!).
As for my role in the team, I was what we call a ‘back spot’, which is basically what it sounds like – whenever we did stunts, I was the person at the back, guiding the ‘flyer’ (the person on top) into position and making sure that, no matter what happened, they never hit the ground.
Parul Bavishi: You used to model as well. What was the best bit about modelling?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’ve never been the type to wear much makeup or spend much time deciding what to wear, so the best bit about the modeling jobs I did was probably just the novelty of having people do those things FOR me. You’d just show up, and they’d do your hair and makeup and dress you, and I always had this moment of ‘Huh. So this is what I’d look like if I was more into this kind of thing myself.’
But ultimately, the downsides definitely outweighed the pros – I was always pretty thin, but there were always people who wanted me to be thinner, and I didn’t have a whole lot of tolerance for that kind of thing. One time, a scout made some critical comments about my hips and then asked if I’d ever ‘thought about exercising.’ I responded by telling him that I played two school sports, one club sport, and took ballet and jazz classes multiple times a week. And then I decided that I’d rather be doing more of THAT and less modeling.
Parul Bavishi: Being the author of seven teen novels, you must have taken part in your fair share of touring and signing. Is it a bit of a shock, switching from PhD researcher to celebrity teen author?
Jen Lynn Barnes: By this point, I’m so used to doing both that there’s not much of a shock involved in switching – though if I’ve been doing author stuff for a while, I do tend to go into withdrawal when I first get back and have to buckle down and start combing through data or going to talks.
The best thing, though, has been that people on both sides of my life are really supportive of the other – my author friends are always asking about my latest experiment, and my academic advisor is the first one in line to buy every new book.
Parul Bavishi: What do your friends and family think of your very successful hobby? Have they read all of your books?
Jen Lynn Barnes: My mother is my first reader – she’s read pretty much everything I’ve ever written (including the stuff I haven’t published). My dad reads them once they’re in book-form, and my brother has read a few of them (though Raised By Wolves is the only one that made him call me at three in the morning, the second he was done).
Parul Bavishi: What’s the most glamorous book related thing you’ve ever done or taken part in?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I recently went to a writing conference put on by the Romance Writers of America. One evening, there was a 500-author signing, where I was sitting very close to writers I’ve been reading (and loving!) since I was about twelve, but the most ‘glamorous’ part was probably the awards show. One of my friends was nominated, and they really treat it a lot like the Oscars – fancy dresses, acceptance speeches, celebrity presenters, and all!
Parul Bavishi: Do you ever Google your own name or get Google alerts on your books?
Jen Lynn Barnes: No comment. (Read: yes. All the time).
Parul Bavishi: You lived in England for a bit –what do you love most about the English? Did you ever try curry and chips?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I love curry and chips, but the thing I probably missed the most about England after I left (other than the people, of course) was just how beautiful it was. I was living in Cambridge, and I never quite got used to how much history there was there, or how I could just stroll down a street past buildings that had been there for seven hundred years.
Parul Bavishi: A serious question now – where do you see yourself in ten years? Best-selling author? Head of Yale Animal Cognition Department?
Jen Lynn Barnes: I’m so busy juggling my double life *now* that I don’t have a lot of time to sit around and think about the future. Ten years from now, I’d love to be a bestselling author. I’d also love to have discovered something about the way the mind works that nobody really knew before.
And somewhere in there, it would be nice to start thinking about a family and kids! For now, though, I’m more focused on next week.
JEN IN THE UK
If you’d like to meet this hugely talented lady, here’s an overview of her public events:
Sunday 3rd October
Bath Literature Festival, Guildhall, High Street, Bath, BA1 5AW
6-7pm Panel event with Maggie Stiefvater
Wednesday 6th October
Foyles Charing Cross
5.30pm
Thursday 7th October
Christopher Ingold Ramsay, UCL Lecture Theatre, 20 Gordon Street, WC1H 0AJ
5-7pm
ULU Creative Writing Society & Quercus present a talk on writing and publishing
Guest speakers Jen Lynn Barnes, Roisin Heycock, Children’s Editorial Director & Parul Bavishi Assistant Editor and Publicist.
Open to all with free entry and wine!
A fantastic treat for you today: an audio recording of the first chapter of Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ Raised by Wolves (which Melissa Marr called, ‘quite simply, the most compelling YA werewolf book out there’).
Pack life is about order, but Bryn is about to push all the limits, with hair-raising results. At the age of four, Bryn watched a rabid werewolf brutally murder her parents. Alone in the world, she was rescued and taken in by Callum, the alpha of his pack.
But the pack’s been keeping a secret, and when Bryn goes exploring against Callum’s orders, she finds Chase, a newly turned teen Were locked in a cage. Terrifying memories of the attack on her parents come flooding back.
Bryn needs answers, and she needs Chase to get them. Suddenly, all allegiances to the pack no longer matter. It’s Bryn and Chase against the werewolf world, whatever the consequences…
To listen to the heart-pounding first chapter, simply click below..
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This Thursday sees the paperback publication of Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ Raised By Wolves. Those fortunate enough to have already gotten hold of a copy have been voicing their satisfaction on Amazon:
Reviewer Claire Mill enthused ‘I pretty much just loved every aspect of this book … if you like YA UF books, this is a must read!’
Sarah Gibson also showered praise, asserting ‘this is a must read book … I’d rate it right up there with Shiver, in fact I think I liked Raised by Wolves even more! This is definitely a book I would recommend to urban fantasy/paranormal fans.’
Blogging for Teens Read Too, Jennifer Rummel loved how Raised By Wolves ‘touches on friendship, loyalty, betrayal, strength, family, and a little romance’, adding ‘It’s absolutely perfect, and I can’t wait for the sequel.’
If you have also been lucky enough to get your hands on a copy, we would love to hear your comments.
If not, go get yourself one on Thursday!
And don’t forget the book’s very own Artwork My ARC tour!
Jennifer Lynn Barnes, author of Raised by Wolves, is coming to the UK in October and she’ll be touring the country with an appropriately glamorous Quercus representative.
But before the lady herself goes on tour, we are demanding that the book itself clock up the mileage and drum up excitement through a tour of its own. ‘A book on tour?’ I hear you ask. ‘Aha’, I respond knowingly and perhaps annoyingly, ‘It’s time to introduce you to UK Book Tours and the Quercus ARTWORK MY ARC Tour…’
UK Book Tours
UK Book Tours was set up by blogger Lynsey Newton and focuses on YA and teen books. Similar sites do exist in the USA but this is the first of its kind in the UK.
It’s a simple but brilliant idea of allowing a book or a proof copy/ advance reading copy (ARC) to be shared across bloggers in a co-ordinated schedule, using the services of Royal Mail.
The Raised by Wolves ARTWORK MY ARC Tour
Now, I knew I wanted to involve Raised by Wolves in the UK Book Tours but I wanted to try a different angle. After bribing Quercus Digital Manager Mark Thwaite with many breakfast cookies, we brainstormed some new ideas and ARTWORK MY ARC was the result. So what’s our brilliant idea? In partnership with the UK Book Tours we’ve asked bloggers to take ownership of the ARC, treat it as their own and artwork it for us.
With two Raised by Wolves ARCs in the package, the instruction is to read one ARC but to write and draw messages for Jen and the other bloggers in the second ARC. We’re not just talking about a message in the front; we’re talking about writing anything, anywhere and in any format. It can be inside the book or attached by post-it notes and postcards.
We’ve also asked bloggers taking part to take as many photos as possible of themselves with the artworked ARC before and after so that we can create a photo diary of the ARC’s journey. So far we have twelve bloggers signed up and the number is growing…
We’ll then all meet and present the artworked ARC copy to Jennifer at her bloggers’ party in October. I can’t wait.
To be part of this exciting journey, simply click here and sign up.
Parul Bavishi, Children’s Assistant Editor, Quercus Books
