Blog Tour: Winter Falls by Nicole Maggi + Giveaway

Welcome to our stop on Winter Falls tour for Nicole Maggi. This tour is hosted by Me, My Shelf and I.

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Winter Falls
Author: Nicole Maggi
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Released: December 22 2014
Review Source: Blog Tour

Alessia Jacobs is a typical sixteen-year-old, dying to get out of her small town of Twin Willows, Maine. Things look up when a new family comes to town, but when she falls for the hot, mysterious son, Jonah, her life turns upside down.

Weird visions of transforming into an otherworldly falcon are just the beginning. Soon she learns she’s part of the Benandanti, an ancient cult of warriors with the unique power to separate their souls from their bodies and take on the forms of magnificent animals.

Alessia never would’ve suspected it, but her boring town is the site of an epic struggle between the Benandanti and the Malandanti to control powerful magic in the surrounding forest.

As Alessia is drawn into the Benandanti’s mission, her relationship with Jonah intensifies. When her two worlds collide, Alessia’s forced to weigh choices a sixteen-year-old should never have to make.

Twin Willows is a boring small town that confines Alessia to a redundant life. Enter the Wolfe family to upturn everything that bores Alessia about Twin Willows. Jonah is the beautiful stranger who Alessia sets her eyes on, while his father is the man making plans for a power plant that will change the future of the town. Much to Alessia's surprise she then gets the Call-joining the Benandanti may make her life more complicated, but it may also be her way of making her life more exciting.

I really enjoyed this book. The first half was a little too slow for me, I found myself dreading picking it up to read. But halfway through next thing I knew I couldn't put it down and I wanted to continue along this journey with Alessia. Nicole Maggi has a way of writing that transports you into Alessia's shoes, you almost feel as if she is a part of you. That made me love the character of Alessia so much more than any of the others, especially since the story revolves around her. You deal with her hardships and you deal with her tribulations, sometimes you're angry about these trials that she faces-but that just makes the story so much better. I am really looking forward to the sequel, there are so many ways the story could go; I cannot wait to see where Maggi decides to take the characters.

One of my favorite parts of this book was that it reminded me of the story of Taha-Aki in Eclipse. The Benandanti are shapeshifters essentially, except for they have a set animal that they change into. This reminded me of Eclipse because the wolves, before they were wolves, would leave their bodies behind but be able to communicate with those who had also chosen to let their soul roam the earth. Basically that is what the Benandanti are doing, although they are also fighting against the Malandanti. The history behind the Benandanti and Malandanti intrigued me and I really hope that Maggi goes deeper into the history in the sequels.

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Nicole was born in the suburban farm country of upstate New York, and began writing at a very early age. Of course, her early works consisted mainly of poems about rainbows and unicorns, although one of them was good enough to win honorable mention in a national poetry contest! (Perhaps one of the judges was a ten-year-old girl.) Throughout high school, her creative writing was always nurtured and encouraged.

Nicole attended Emerson College as an acting major, and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Post-college, she worked as an actress in New York City for over a decade, focusing mainly on Shakespeare and the classics.

Now living in Los Angeles, Nicole balances writing full-time with motherhood. WINTER FALLS, the first in her TWIN WILLOWS TRILOGY (Medallion Press, 2014) is her debut novel. She has a stand-alone novel, HEARTLINES, coming out in February 2015 with SourceBooks Fire, as well as the second and third novels in the TWIN WILLOWS TRILOGY in 2015 and 2016.

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