About the Book
Title: Fire & Flood
Author: Victoria Scott
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication Date: Feburary 25, 2014
Genre: Young Adult
Length: 320 Pages
A modern day thrill ride, where a teen girl and her animal companion must participate in a breathtaking race to save her brother's life—and her own.
Tella Holloway is losing it. Her brother is sick, and when a dozen doctors can't determine what's wrong, her parents decide to move to Montana for the fresh air. She's lost her friends, her parents are driving her crazy, her brother is dying—and she's helpless to change anything.
Until she receives mysterious instructions on how to become a Contender in the Brimstone Bleed. It's an epic race across jungle, desert, ocean, and mountain that could win her the prize she desperately desires: the Cure for her brother's illness. But all the Contenders are after the Cure for people they love, and there's no guarantee that Tella (or any of them) will survive the race.
The jungle is terrifying, the clock is ticking, and Tella knows she can't trust the allies she makes. And one big question emerges: Why have so many fallen sick in the first place?
Victoria Scott is a teen fiction writer represented by Sara Crowe. She's the author of THE
COLLECTOR trilogy (Entangled Teen) and the FIRE & FLOOD series (Scholastic). Victoria lives in Dallas with her husband and hearts cotton candy something fierce.
Follow Victoria
FIRE & FLOOD by Victoria Scott
Scholastic, February 2014
First Excerpt Reveal
I drove
across the US of A, left my family without an explanation, and now I’m either
too late or there was never anything here to begin with. F my life. Rearing
back, I kick the door as hard as I can. Then I wrap both hands around the door
handles and release a noise like a wild banshee as I pull back.
The doors
swing open.
I’m not sure
whether to celebrate or freak out. I decide to do neither and slip inside. As I
walk around the inside of the museum, listening to the sound of my footsteps
echo off the walls, I imagine I am moments from death. It’s sad, I think, that
this is all it takes to break my sanity.
Two curling
flights of stairs bow out from the first-floor lobby, and red and white tiles
cover the floors. There are gilded picture frames everywhere. So many that I
think the placement of the frames — and not their contents — is the real art.
Everything, absolutely everything, smells like wax. I mosey up to an abandoned
reception desk and leaf through the glossy pamphlets littering the surface. I
hold one of the pamphlets up to my nose. Yep, wax.
I glance
around, having no idea what to look for. Will there be a sign like at school
registration? Students with last names A–K
this way?
On my left,
I notice a long hallway dotted with doors on either side. Nothing looks
particularly unusual. But when I glance to my right, I spot something. There’s
a door at the end of the corridor that has a sliver of light glowing beneath
it. I’m sure it’s just an administration office, one where someone forgot to
flip the switch. But I’ve got nothing better to go on, so I head toward it.
I pause
outside the door, wondering if I’m about to get busted for B&E. Then I turn
the handle and find myself at the top of another winding staircase.
You’ve got to be kidding me. What is
this, Dracula’s bachelor pad?
I’ve watched
a lot of scary movies, and I’ve learned nothing good is ever at the bottom of a
winding staircase. Pulling in a breath and preparing myself to be eaten alive,
I head down. My shoes are loud against the steps. So loud, I imagine they are
intentionally trying to get me killed.
When I reach
the final few stairs, I ready myself to look around the bend. My heart is
racing, and I secretly pray the worst I encounter is an angry janitor with a
wax addiction. I turn the bend — and my eyes nearly pop from my skull.
The enormous
room is perfectly circular, dotted with candles to light the space. Surrounding
the walls are rows and rows of dark, rich mahogany bookshelves. A large round
table stands in the center of the red-and-white-tiled floor. The room is
spectacular, but what it holds is so jarring, my ears ring.
Across every
shelf, every spot on the table, every tile on the floor — are small sculptures
of hands. And in a few of those hands — the ones still performing their duty —
are eggs. There are only nine eggs left, it seems. For a moment, I imagine how
amazing it would have been to see each hand holding an egg, but it’s enough
just to see these nine.
The eggs
seem to dance in the candle flame, and as I move closer, I realize why. The
surfaces of the eggs are almost iridescent, their colors changing depending on
how you look at them. They are different sizes, too; some as big as a
basketball, others as small as a peach.
I don’t need
the device in my pocket to tell me what my gut already knows.
This is the
Pandora Selection Process.
Who is excited now for Fire & Flood?
I know I am because I love Victoria Scott's writing and I want to see how she uses my home state of Montana!
What do you think of the excerpt?
