THE HALLOWED ONES giveaway!

By Lauren, on May 7, 2012

Giveaway closed! Thanks to all who entered; I’ll be posting the winners on Tuesday.

Well, it’s somewhere between 3 and 4 o’clock on a Monday afternoon, which means that it’s time for me to give you free stuff. OBVIOUSLY. Today I have an ARC of THE HALLOWED ONES by Laura Bickle, as well as a bunch of these really cool THE HALLOWED ONES card/bookmark thingies. I don’t know what you actually call them. You’re probably supposed to tape them to your doorknob at night to ward off garden gnomes. And during the daylight, hey, you can use them to hold your place in your book.

The text on the cover reads “If your home was the last safe place on earth, would you let a stranger in?”

SPOILER ALERT: It is. She does. And it’s epic.

I had the honor and the pleasure of reading this a few weeks ago, and guys, it was pretty much the most intense thing I had going on in my life at the time. Here’s the goodreads summary:

Katie is on the verge of her Rumspringa, the time in Amish life when teenagers can get a taste of the real world. But the real world comes to her in this dystopian tale with a philosophical bent. Rumors of massive unrest on the “Outside” abound. Something murderous is out there. Amish elders make a rule: No one goes outside, and no outsiders come in. But when Katie finds a gravely injured young man, she can’t leave him to die. She smuggles him into her family’s barn—at what cost to her community? The suspense of this vividly told, truly horrific thriller will keep the pages turning

When I was a kid, I was a fan of a little show you may have heard of called Are You Afraid of the Dark? In one particular episode, the characters found themselves in a silent theater. One of the vampires stepped out of the screen, into the theater, and effectively killed my chances of sleeping without a nightlight for the next five or six years. I have a little cousin who is eight, and when I told her about this freaking scary vampire, she didn’t believe that a vampire would be so terrifying. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll PROVE it to you.” I hopped onto google images, and it took me the better part of ten minutes and several queries before I found a very small, very blurry thumbnail image of this vampire. PS? Still scary.

THE HALLOWED ONES is going to make you dust off your childhood nightlight. When you get up at night to use the bathroom, you’ll be turning on all five lights between your bedroom door and the door of the commode. It is creepy, and realistic, and creepy again. It’s also wonderfully written. The protagonist, Katie, is astoundingly brave and strong while still mostly conforming to the rules of her Amish heritage. This is NOT something you want to miss. It comes out this fall, but if you start reading it now, you can buy up all of the nightlights and then sell them back to your friends at triple the price when they read it in September.

This giveaway is INTERNATIONAL. That means you are eligible to win whether you live in the US, Canada, Istanbul, or in the belly of a whale. Whenever I host an international giveaway, there are always “will you ship to X?” comments. The answer is YES. If you live on the moon, I will hire an astronaut. No worries. Cool stuff CAN be yours no matter where you live; believe it, my friend.

THE RULES:
In order to enter, tweet/facebook/blog/tumblr about this giveaway with a link to this blog entry (if you are on goodreads, please link to and comment on my blog post here: http://www.laurendestefano.com/blog/ as comments on my goodreads blog will not be counted). Then enter a comment below with the link to your tweet/facebook/blog/tumblr post. On Sunday, May 27th, at 11:59 PM, EST, this giveaway will end and I’ll select the winner using a random number generator. Your entry number will be based on the order in which you commented. The first randomly-generated number will determine the winner of the ARC, and 10 others will win the bookmark/postcard/gnome ward thingy.