Two Chicks On Books: Blog Tour- Scarlet Guest Post and a Giveaway!

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Blog Tour- Scarlet Guest Post and a Giveaway!

Hey y’all! Happy Super Bowl Sunday and welcome to my stop on the Scarlet Blog Tour!!!! I have an awesome guest post for you today from Marissa about why she chose France as a setting and some wolfish information too. Also make sure to check out my review of Scarlet here! I also have a giveaway US/Canada only for a paperback of Cinder and a hardcover of Scarlet to one lucky winner!

Scarlet

Marissa Meyer
Release Date: February 52013

Hardcover: 464 pages

Publisher: Feiwel and Friends (Macmillan)

ISBN: 0312642962

Source: ARC from the publisher

Rating: Obsessed!

Goodreads/Amazon/Barnes&Noble/The Book Depository

From Goodreads.

Cinder returns in the second thrilling installment of the New York Times-bestselling Lunar Chronicles. She’s trying to break out of prison—even though if she succeeds, she’ll be the Commonwealth’s most wanted fugitive.

Halfway around the world, Scarlet Benoit’s grandmother is missing. It turns out there are many things Scarlet doesn’t know about her grandmother and the grave danger she has lived in her whole life. When Scarlet encounters Wolf, a street fighter who may have information as to her grandmother’s whereabouts, she has no choice but to trust him, though he clearly has a few dark secrets of his own.

As Scarlet and Wolf work to unravel one mystery, they find another when they cross paths with Cinder. Together, they must stay one step ahead of the vicious Lunar Queen who will do anything to make Prince Kai her husband, her king, her prisoner.

Why France? Scarlet and the Beast of Gévaudan

By Marissa Meyer

I get asked a lot about the settings I’ve chosen for The Lunar Chronicles: China, France, the Sahara Desert… Having been born and raised in America, it would have been easiest for me to keep the series in a futuristic version of America, but setting the books in locations around the globe was a decision I made very early on in the planning of this series.

One of my main reasons was that I wanted the series to feel big. A lot of problems that are facing the characters—the plague, the war being threatened by the Lunars—are problems that would impact every person on the planet. So by spreading out the story locations I felt I could better convey the idea that these are big, scary, global issues.

However, I still had to decide where, exactly, to set each book. I’ve talked about my choice for China for Cinder on my web site (http://www.marissameyer.com/faq), and I’m sure I’ll talk more about choosing Africa for Cress in the future, but for the purpose of this blog tour and the launch of Scarlet, today I’m answering: Why France?

When I was first outlining Scarlet, I had a vague idea that werewolves were going to play a part, taking on the villainous role of the Big Bad Wolf. I wasn’t yet sure how “wolfy” they would be or how that very paranormal creature was going to tie into my very tech-oriented world, but I did know that I wanted a setting that would support some sort of werewolf beings.

Specifically, I wanted a location that already had a history of werewolves. Somewhere I could play up an almost subconscious terror of these mythical beasts, even in a society in which no one has given in to such superstitions for hundreds of years.

That didn’t exactly narrow it down, though, as werewolf mythologies are found all over the world. Then one evening, as I was skipping through channels on TV, I came across a documentary on the Beast of Gévaudan.

The Beast of Gévaudan was an animal described as being as large as a horse, with features resembling those of a wolf, bear, or hyena. It was thought to be responsible for at least sixty deaths in the farm areas surrounding Gévaudan in southern France in the 1760s—though some accounts put the death toll into the hundreds.

Many of the victims were children, including a young girl who was found to have had her heart ripped out of her chest.

However, the beast also attacked and killed numerous women and even men—sometimes it would attack large hunting groups, leaving multiple eye-witnesses behind.

The killings were never truly solved, and it’s impossible to tell how much of the story was peasant superstition and how much was fact. If the beast was real, it was like no animal we know of today—both with regards to its physical description, but also in the way that it hunted and devoured its prey. If the beast was a costumed human doing the killings, it did not follow any sort of victim pattern that would fit the modes of serial killers today.

In the 1760s, though, the townsfolk were convinced that the Beast was a Loup-Garou—a Werewolf. They believed that it was a human sorcerer who transformed into a vile beast in order to prey on humans and eat their flesh.

Eventually, King Louis XV himself put together a team of professional wolf hunters and charged them with finding and killing the Beast. The hunt continued for months, while the killings piled up. The hunters did kill an enormous wolf—the largest anyone had ever seen—and they believed they had finally brought down the notorious Beast. However, a few months later, two more children were killed…

When the Beast was finally killed for real (at least, in theory), it was by a local hunter named Jean Chastel. As the myth goes, Chastel shot the beast with a silver bullet after receiving a tip from God himself.

(And thus began the mythology of silver bullets alone being able to kill a werewolf.)

When I finished watching that documentary, it seemed the choice had been made for me. Southern France not only had a history of werewolf mythology, but it had a history that had influenced the mythologies we still talk about today. A history that is still largely based on an unsolved mystery, that merges elements of truth and legend, that combines the reality of horrific killings and eye-witness accounts with stories that have been skewed by superstition and terror.

So Scarlet came to be set in the rural farmlands of southern France, where the Beast of Gévaudan had roamed the countryside long before there was any notion of Queen Levana and her merciless werewolf army.

You can read more about the Beast of Gévaudan at http://mythbuster.hubpages.com/hub/Beast-of-Gevaudan.

Check out all of these cool extras!!!

Pre-Order Scarlet and send in your receipt! The first 1,000 people who do will get a Scarlet-branded lip gloss! US only! Get the details: goo.gl/yycA5

Marissa Meyer goes on tour! https://www.facebook.com/lunarchronicles/events

Download the short story Glitches for only 99 cents: http://goo.gl/ggtcJ

Download the new short story The Queen’s Army for only 99 cents: http://goo.gl/bmX4z

Download the first five chapters of Cinder for free onto your e-reader: http://goo.gl/XqLWG

Download the first five chapters of Scarlet for free onto your e-reader: http://goo.gl/S2Bcs

Become a fan of The Lunar Chronicles on Facebook where you can stay up-to-date on all things Lunar! https://www.facebook.com/lunarchronicles

Watch the Cinder Book Trailer!