Recently, I stumbled across the website of Stacey Wallace Benefiel. She’s an indie author like me, and she writes YA paranormal romance. Now, I’ve seen lots and lots of indie authors out there, but most of them write for an adult audience, and recently, more and more I’ve chosen to read YA. I love YA. I love the pacing of the stories, I love the desperation of a teenage character, and I love the fact that teenage characters have limitations and emotions that adult characters don’t. I suppose the fact that I interact with teenagers all day at work doesn’t hurt either.
Anyway, for a while, I’ve been feeling like a hypocrite. Here I am, self-pubbing my fiction, but not reading anyone else’s self-pubbed fiction. I wanted to, but everything I came across just wasn’t something I was interested in. Finally, I have found not one, but two indie YA authors. I have just devoured both of their books in a weekend. The first one is Ms. Benefiel and her super-fun book, Glimpse.
Glimpse is about a girl named Zellie. (Love those Z names!) Zellie’s always been able to do little parlor tricks with her mom, guessing the future. What she doesn’t realize is that she has a gift. She sees “glimpses” of the future, and she has the ability to change it. This seems pretty cool, but it totally sucks when she has a glimpse of her major crush, Avery, dying in a car accident twenty years in the future. What’s worse, she’s in the glimpse, and she’s pregnant!
Talk about a set up! The minute I heard that, I was like, “I’m in.” It gets unbelievably more convoluted in the best ways. Zellie’s mother was in love with Avery’s dad, but kept herself away from him to keep him from dying. Oh, the agony of love denied! Zellie’s mom thinks Zellie should do that too, because if she stays with Avery, she’ll cause his death. But Zellie can’t keep away from Avery, and mostly, she can’t keep her hands off of him. The sexual tension was pretty awesome in this book. A couple scenes had me fanning myself. Whew.
My only complaint would be that the last half of the book is a little wobbly. Certain character’s motivations don’t make a lot of sense. In particular, when it turns out a character isn’t really dead after all, I wondered why the person didn’t just tell everyone she was running away instead of faking her death, which seemed pretty horrible and unforgivable. Also, after building to a suspenseful climax midway through the story, the rest of the book has a little trouble ratcheting up the tension again.
Overall, however, these things didn’t lessen my enjoyment of the book. I read it quick and fast, the way a YA novel should be read. I was engaged and interested the entire way through. And–there’s a sequel coming out this year, which is awesome, because I can almost smell the love triangle coming. Eee!
So…if you are sitting around wondering what to read while waiting for the rewrites of Stillness to be completed, definitely pick up Glimpse. The ebook is only $1.99, quite a steal, and she’s managing to sell her print book for $7.99 from Createspace and Amazon. (Personally, I don’t quite know how she’s doing it. My books are about 100 pages longer than hers, which means they’re a bit more expensive to print, but at $12.99, with the Pro Plan, I’m only making like a $2 royalty from Amazon sales. If I sold my books for $7.99 on Amazon, I would owe Amazon money. This leads me to believe that she’s not making any royalties to speak of from her Amazon print sales, so do the chick a solid, and, if you buy in print, buy it from Createspace!) Check out Stacey’s page here, where she’s got links to buy the book from lots of different places.
