Rights will soon be reverted for three of my young adult books so I've been working hard on cover art plus print and ePub files. With any luck these new versions of The Sweetest Thing You Can Sing, Delicate and Shantallow (the latter published under the author name Cara Martin) should be available from major online booksellers within the next ten to fourteen days. Voila the new covers below!
Most of the text within hasn't been changed, aside from an updated section regarding intimate partner violence at the end of Delicate to include some fresher stats and resources. Unfortunately, since Delicate was first published in 2015 intimate partner violence in Ontario has increased substantially. "But most cases of domestic violence still go unreported. In fact in 2019, 80% of those who experienced intimate partner violence did not report to police."
Other things you'll see dealt with in Delicate are a dangerous peanut allergy, and a case of chlamydia. It's not the end of the world when one of the main characters, Ivy, catches chlamydia from having sex with her ex-boyfriend sans condom, but it really sucks. Or more accurately, it burns. The second cousin, Lucan, she barely knows at the start of the novel is having an exceptionally crappy summer too (losing patience with overhearing his mom and her new boyfriend have sex)—something the two bond over, until even that gets complicated . . .
Meanwhile in The Sweetest Thing You Can Sing fifteen-year-old Serena and her friends are intent on fighting the sexualization they continually face from many of their male classmates, including Serena's ex, as she tries to cope with the absence of a beloved older brother who is estranged from the family (whereabouts unknown) because of his unwillingness to undergo treatment for drug addiction. Enter down-to-earth nineteen-year-old Gage who feels like a breathe of fresh air among the fray, except that he's bothered by the age gap between himself and Serena. Something he doesn't even know the whole truth about.
Unlike the other two novels, Shantallow isn't contemporary YA but it does share some DNA with them in the form of an at first heady young relationship that later verges into abuse. The toxic relationship between Misha and Tanvi (the girl he has nightmares about before he ever sees her in real life) is enfolded into the horror tale of a kidnapping for ransom gone wrong when the remote, long abandoned house the kidnappers confine the young couple and two others in violently turns on all of them, determined to drag its warped past into the present.
Shantallow marks a shift from writing mostly contemporary fiction about young people to focusing on adult speculative novels, which is why I've chosen a different pen name for it and more recent books. Although Shantallow and Rise, Tomorrow Girl both feature seventeen-year-old main characters I think of them as crossover novels rather than strictly being YA in nature. Subsequent horror and sci-fi novels written as Cara Martin will primarily focus on adult characters, but I'm not entirely ruling out the odd speculative crossover. On the other hand, if I ever write more contemporary YA (which I'm not eternally ruling out either) it will likely be under the name C. K. Kelly Martin.
