The Last Faerie Queen by Chelse Pitcher Blog Tour: Guest Post & Giveaway!!

Hello guys!! Today I'm super happy to take part of the Blog Tour for The Last Faerie Queen by Chelsea Pitcher hosted & organized by the lovely ladies of RockStar Book Tours!!

I will be hosting Chelsea over in the blog talking about the importance of diversity and how she feels she will always include it be it contemporary or fantasy stories! And not only that, there will also be a giveaway to enter at the bottom of the post!

But first a lil bit more information about the book!

THE LAST FAERIE QUEEN
Author: Chelsea Pitcher
Release Date: November 8, 2015
Pages: 408
Publisher: Flux
Formats: Paperback, eBook

A FAERIE REVOLUTION . . .


After risking her life in the mortal world, the faerie princess Elora returns home to incite a revolution. Allied with the Bright Queen, Elora rallies her people for a battle aimed at overthrowing her mother, the Dark Queen. While some question their ability to win, Elora senses victory, knowing she has a secret weapon: Taylor, the human boy she loves, and a motley crew of his school friends, each armed with a skill that can turn the tide of the coming battle. 


A MORTAL SACRIFICE . . .

But then Elora's supporters in the Dark Court turn on her, believing she has forsaken them in favor of humans. When the Dark Queen kidnaps two of her human friends, Elora must mount a daring rescue mission to free them before her mother offers them up as a sacrifice. 

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Diversify Your Faeries! 

Why My Fantasies Will Never Be White-Washed or Straight-Washed 

Several years ago, I was tinkering around in a shop in Eugene, Oregon. It was the kind of shop that specialized in magic-related items (less cards tricks and sleight of hand, more faeries and paganism). I was just rounding a corner, looking at the little winged figurines, when I overheard a conversation between a customer and the shop-owner.

“I’m looking for the goddesses,” the customer said.

The shop owner, a middle-aged man with a Jerry Garcia beard, pointed to a row of statues from Africa and Asia.

The customer shook his head. “No, the real goddesses,” he said, pointing at a poster. I followed his gaze. There, splayed out in a come-hither pose, was a blond, buxom lady with milky-white skin. The real goddesses, I thought, gaze trailing back to the statues along the wall. Not, mind you, the goddesses from the oldest civilizations on earth. Not the ones with brown skin and curves. No. To him, the word “goddess” conjured up an image of a pale-skinned, golden-haired lady who looked remarkably like Pamela Anderson with a pair of wings slapped on her back.

I wanted to say something, but I didn’t. Questioning random guys in magic shops isn’t exactly my thing, and besides, people can like what they like. Still, this idea of “real” stuck with me when I sat down to write “The Last Faerie Queen.” Creating a white-washed fantasy world just didn’t make sense. If faeries are elemental beings (the spiritual aspect of the earth’s physical body), wouldn’t they have skin in shades of golden brown, or even inky black? They might have branches for limbs or leaves growing out of their hair. They definitely wouldn’t all be pale and blonde:


“She rose, and that light bled away from her like rivulets into the sea. Now unburdened by her luminescence, I could see her more clearly: those curves, bound tightly in a gown of diaphanous green; that skin, warm and brown as the earth kissed by sunlight. She was larger than life, this great forest queen. And she had power I could not comprehend.” 


~ Elora, describing the Queen of the Bright Faeries in “The Last Faerie Queen” ~ 


Once I had a clear idea of how the faeries would look, I started to think about their sexual identity. I knew that faerie sexuality would be different, because they wouldn’t be influenced (biologically or socially) by a need to reproduce, and they wouldn’t believe in human religions. In my version of Faerie, people would love who they loved, and want who they wanted. The gender of the lover wouldn’t be important.

Still, knowing something and effectively portraying it in fiction are two different things. If all of my faeries were bisexual (or polysexual or pansexual) would they indentify that way? Or would they take for granted that love was love and desire was desire, and not feel the need to label themselves? In “The Last Changeling,” Elora chooses to define her sexuality because she’s in the mortal world:


“Human distinctions of sexuality don’t exist in Faerie, but if they did, I would probably identify as polysexual.” 


But in “The Last Faerie Queen,” I decided to show the fluidity of faerie sexuality, rather than announce it. It isn’t hidden (in a “Dumbledore is gay, but I’m telling you after the fact” kind of way), but it also isn’t explicitly explained. As an author, and a bisexual person myself, I knew it was important to put this information into the novel, but using human definitions in the Faerie world didn’t make sense. So, while two human characters (Kylie and Keegan) openly identify as bisexual and gay, the faerie characters illustrate that their sexuality is fluid. You can see it in their actions (when a satyr leads Keegan off into the forest) and hear it in their conversations (whenever the Bright Queen’s affections are discussed). In the end, I found I’d written a story with one straight character, and a whole host of queer faeries and humans!

Thank you so much to Pili for having me, and please leave us comments about the kinds of diversity you love to see in fantasy worlds!!

Thank you so much Chelsea for this amazing guest post, I just cannot wait to read the book! Faeries are never ones to let themselves be judged by human standards!

  

About the author:

Chelsea Pitcher is a karaoke-singing, ocean-worshipping Oregonian with a penchant for wicked faerie tales. She began gobbling up stories as soon as she could read, and especially enjoys delving into the darker places to see if she can draw out some light. She is the author of THE S-WORD (Simon and Schuster), THE LAST CHANGELING (Flux), and THE LAST FAERIE QUEEN (Flux 2015).

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Blog | Goodreads | Tumblr

GIVEAWAY

  2 winners will receive a signed finished copy of THE LAST FAERIE QUEEN, US/Canada Only.


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TOUR SCHEDULE

Week 1

11/2/2015- Seeing Double In Neverland- Interview

11/2/2015- Driftless- Spotlight

11/3/2015- Mama Reads Hazel Sleeps- Excerpt

11/3/2015- Revolutionary Reads- Review

11/4/2015- Kelly P's Blog- Interview

11/4/2015- PBC - Spotlight

11/5/2015- Books Eater- Guest Post

11/5/2015- Arkham Reviews- Review

11/6/2015- Two Chicks on Books- Interview

11/6/2015- Curling Up With A Good Book- Excerpt


Week 2

11/9/2015- Once Upon A Twilight- Guest Post

11/9/2015- Milky Way of Books- Review

11/10/2015- The Cover Contessa- Interview

11/10/2015- alwaysjoart- Review

11/11/2015- In Love With Handmade- Guest Post

11/11/2015- Literary Musings- Excerpt

11/12/2015- BookHounds YA- Interview

11/12/2015- Cover2Cover- Review

11/13/2015- Me, My Shelf and I- Guest Post

11/13/2015- The Book Lovers' Lounge- Review 

Friday Reads: Review of The Last Changeling by Chelsea Pitcher!!

As the final Friday Reads entry of this week I have the review for one of those books that I was expecting to like and was not surprised when I did, but that surprised me on how they managed to make me love it! It's urban fantasy, with the Fae as central part of the story but also set in high school and it's one of those wonderful diverse books full of queer characters that weave everything together flawlessly!

I read the finished copy of this one, but I also got an ARC from Flux Books via NetGalley (THANK YOU FLUX!!) so I'm also counting this one towards my 2014 Review Pile Reading Challenge and I'm hoping it'll also improve my NG ratio! Will I manage to reach 80% before the end of the year??

The Last Changeling by Chelsea Pitcher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I loved Chelsea Pitcher's debut last year, The S Word, a wonderful contemporary book and when I heard she was writing a fantasy book about the Fae next, I knew that I had to read it too. She had written a contemporary that I had loved, and I'm not the biggest contemporary fan, so I knew she'd write a Fae book that I as a not a big Fae fan would like. And I was right!

I got the ARC for The Last Changeling via NetGalley but with my vacation time I run out of time to read it before release day, so I ended up reading my finished copy I had preordered. I also read the finished copy because Chelsea said she had added a lil change to the finished book and I decided I wanted to read that small but big detail.

The Last Changeling is the first book in a duology of urban fantasy with some queer characters mixed with Fae politics. The book is told in dual POVs, Elora a Fae princess of the Unseelie court and Taylor, a broken boy that is surviving along and not living.

Elora comes into the human world on a quest to find the answer to a riddle to end the war between the Fae but she finds herself embroiled in human life and human affairs in a way she didn't expect. She comes to care for humans, their lives and their causes and she finds herself leading another revolution, like the one she leads in Faery. And most surprising of it all, she finds that some of the rules she has always believed in are harder to believe in when your feelings say a different thing.

Elora was a character not as hard to connect with at first as I had expected, give her Fae princess on a mission, but when she shows that she will always find herself fighting for what she thinks it's right now matter if it's about the Fae or the humans, I was rooting for her and hoping she will find a way to get the Seelie court on her side without turning herself again into a monster.

Taylor was somewhat easier to connect with, even with his grief and his prickly exterior, even when it seems to take him a while to take a stand against what he thinks it's wrong. He finds himself falling for a stranger girl he takes into his small space and ends up not only head over heels in love with her, but also finding a way to heal himself from his emotional wounds of the past because of her.

I was mesmerized at how well Chelsea managed to mix both the fantasy part of this book with the wars between the Fae courts and the Fae politics with the contemporary setting and the fights the characters are undertaking, all mixed up but separate till the very end when from one victory we go to an unexpected fight with what looks like a sure defeat.

The ending felt like both a proper conclusion to a book but of course more than open enough to prepare the way for book two. The stage is set, the players have already shown some of their cards, but there are some questions teased about and there's some things that happened that change everything. Thankfully no horrible cliffhanger in this one and for that I'm ever so thankful!

Very much deserving of 4 to 4.5 stars this one!



View all my reviews

Tell Me Tuesdays #19!!

Tell Me Tuesdays is a meme/feature created by the awesome ladies of Please Feed The Bookworm and La La In The Library where we can share how we choose the book we are currently reading from our TBR pile!

I'm always curious about that, cause as much as I tend to make myself a rough schedule for books to read and the like, I'm quite a mood reader and sometimes I just HAVE to ignore my schedule and read something else!

The Last Changeling by Chelsea Pitcher

A Kingdom at War . . .

Elora, the young princess of the Dark Faeries, plans to overthrow her tyrannical mother, the Dark Queen, and bring equality to faeriekind. All she has to do is convince her mother’s loathed enemy, the Bright Queen, to join her cause. But the Bright Queen demands an offering first: a human boy who is a “young leader of men.”

A Dark Princess In Disguise . . .

To steal a mortal, Elora must become a mortal—at least, by all appearances. And infiltrating a high school is surprisingly easy. When Elora meets Taylor, the seventeen-year-old who’s plotting to overthrow a ruthless bully, she thinks she’s found her offering . . . until she starts to fall in love.


I am almost done with this one but I've had so little time to read as of late! Be it cause I've been busy doing other things, including sleeping and a lot of work, I am at 82% on my Kindle copy and at the most tense and interesting part of the book! I got an ARC from NetGalley for this one too, but since I'm already late with it I'm reading my finished copy of it and loving it to bits! Highly recommended for those who love Fae books! (I'm looking at you Britt!!) ;)

 So what are you all guys reading and how and why did you decide to pick up that book? Shiny new ARC? Comfort read? Scheduled for review? Must have new release? Tell me!!