April, Maybe June – Bliss SIsters Magical Adventures, Book One
April Bliss is a precocious teen girl genius with a sister who is a year and a half older and even smarter. Of course April knows she's smart and funny--but not necessarily in the ways that she believes she is. Her life has been on an even keel until the day the police show up at their mansion and their family is thrown into chaos. Never mind that June finds a magic ring and puts it on and comes under its influence, or that April finds a magic book that shows her alarming pictures. They need to rescue their cousin Arlene from a renegade coven of evil witches--or is that a double-cross?
April is a delightful narrator, both witty and unintentionally funny, one of those kids people sometimes say were "born old," but young and earnest and energetic too. She is fiercely loyal to family and takes this loyalty to its logical conclusion in a twisty magical plot full of both humor and terror.
About Shalanna Collins (Dallas, Texas Author)
Shalanna Collins, the fantasy pseudonym of author Denise Weeks, has been writing since she could hold a crayon. Nevertheless, she holds bachelor's degrees in computer science and in mathematics (with an English minor) from SMU. Novelist, pianist, belly dancer, baton twirlerfade), and amateur radio operator, she lives happily in Richardson, Texas, with her devoted, long-suffering hubby.
She has worked as a software weenie, soft-serve cone maker at Dairy Queen, and secondary school math tutor. However, the entire time she was really a novelist--watching, scribbling, plotting. At age six, she discovered that her favorite books had not fallen from the sky whole like the Bible and the CRC Math Tables, but were written by mortal men and women. At that moment she determined she'd figure out how to tell the stories that she acted out with her stuffed animals during the lonely-only-child days before the Internet. Because books are important. They are worthy of your time and most of them have something to teach you. Whether a story is "slow-moving" or "gets right to the shooting", it's usually something that will feed your soul. That's why she's spending her life writing them.
She is currently at work on yet another novel. Visit her at deniseweeks.blogspot.com and shalannacollins.blogspot.com. See her website at http://shalanna.wix.com/aprilmaybejune.