What better way to start off your week than finding a great book to read? Gifted by J.A. George is an exciting tale of seven characters and their adventures, as told by Ava, the narrator.
There is no chosen one in this story.
Avery Gray was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and happened to make a decision that altered her future forever. It happens to all of us every day.
Avery is a size twelve university student with a penchant for dry humour, and she’s as normal as they come. Up until now, the biggest choice she’s had to make was glasses or contacts? At the moment, it’s stay and save, or leave and be saved.
Allow me to explain. One rainy afternoon, Avery had to make a choice: go through the alleyway or around it. Two possible options. One would have had her future continue on as planned, the other would ensure that her future never remained the same again. She unknowingly went with the latter.
But change is not always bad. Avery meets Theodore-James Connors, an enigmatic young man who takes her to Hayven, a city separated from the rest of the world, where only gifters – ordinary people with extra-ordinary gifts – can go. She soon finds herself in a close-knit group of friends she’d never have imagined herself in. Friends who are diverse in every possible way, from their ethnic backgrounds, to their personalities, from their gifts, to their life stories. Friends who make her laugh, who make her cry, who make her think and who make her…her.
However, change is not always good. The beautiful, golden city of Hayven has its dark side – Cliders. Gifters turned rogue, aka, Cliders are determined to aid fallen Clider, Madrina, return to rule Hayven. They will stop at nothing to make that happen, including harming those Ava has grown to love.
Again, Ava is faced with a choice: spend her days finding a way to inhibit Madrina’s return, or walk away. After all, she isn’t the chosen one. Yet, there exists a third option – rig the future itself and make it work for her.
Does this have you intrigued? Check out this recently released edition through the links below.
Get it on:
Well, hello there!
My name is J.A. George and I am the author of GIFTED – The Hayven Series. It took me a while to decide on what I would write for this guest blog post and I had many different ideas before I settled on perhaps the most obvious: writing. I assumed it’d be a bit odd if I’d spoken about something else, like baking, although I love to bake…
Writing a novel takes time, mainly because simply trying to figure out an original plot line is time-consuming as it is, but once I’d decided to write GIFTED, I couldn’t stop. Not to say I haven’t had road blocks because I certainly have and it’s definitely not to say I finished my novel in a couple of days – more like a couple of years. But at the very beginning, it was like one idea followed another and then another followed that one, and so on until I had a foundation for a contemporary young adult fantasy novel.
I’ve always loved writing, I think every author says that, but before I decided to become an author, I didn’t see it as something I could do as a future career. Until one day, I kissed goodbye to the idea of having a set future plan, sat on my bed, opened up a blank Word document and typed out a few lines. It was after those few lines that I brought myself a black journal and properly yet briefly planned out the storyline of all four books in the series. Since then, I’ve found it better to write on paper with pen before I type, and Gifted has seen me go through five different notebooks so far.
My favourite thing about the entire writing process has to be the building of my characters because, despite how weird this may make me sound, when I write about a character, build their life, give them a family, a past, and friends, describe their features and explain their personalities, their likes and dislikes, it’s honestly as if they come alive.
As you could probably tell from the blurb, Avery, or as she’s commonly known, Ava, is my main character, and possibly my favourite (it changes every day). She’s pretty awesome if I do say so myself. This published version of GIFTED is my second edition and in my first edition Avery was completely different. In the past, I’ve had problems with writing for other people. All authors want their books to sell and in order to do that, you have to write a book readers will want to buy. The annoying thing is, authors don’t know exactly what readers want. We may know a few things, but not all. In my first edition of GIFTED, I tried to write a novel that would make everyone happy, until I realised that that was impossible. So after two years, I randomly made the decision to write for myself. I am in serious danger of going off on a tangent, but I’ll be putting up a post on my blog about writing for myself if you’re interested in reading about me rambling on about that. Long story short, Ava was a bit boring, in my opinion, because I was trying to follow trends I’d seen before, trying to fit her into too many different boxes. Now, she doesn’t really fit into a box; she’s just…Ava, and I love her. She makes me laugh – a lot. I hope she’ll make you laugh too.
I immensely enjoyed writing Gifted and I hope readers can sense that when reading the book. I loved creating my characters, making up names for cities, building my settings, and coming up with different supernatural talents (as no two are the same), but most of all, I Ioved bringing my little idea to life in the form of a book.
Thank you, Tina, for allowing me to share my novel with your blog’s readers!
J.A. George is the author of the four-part series, GIFTED: THE HAYVEN SERIES. Jessica spent years of her life reading book after book before sitting on her bed one morning, opening her laptop and typing Chapter One into her word document. Now, not only does she read book after book, she now writes book after book too. When she’s not writing, she’s trying to break her record of finishing a tub of Oreo ice cream in less than forty-five minutes.
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