The Spring of 2102 only brought false hope...
Series: Progeny of Time #1
Publication Date: May 15, 2014
Publication Date: May 15, 2014
Genre: YA Dystopian
The future is bleak in the year 2102. The planet is in chaos and the weather patterns have completely shifted, turning most of the world into an uninhabited wasteland.
The rich and powerful of North America have pulled back into the six remaining megacities, erasing all trace of a central government and leaving millions displaced by the environmental crisis to fend for themselves in the dying world. Sixteen-year-old Maya has a gift, a power she thinks can heal the earth and make it habitable again. A gift that she must learn to harness. The school for the gifted in Neo York is the only place where she can learn to control her power and reach her potential.
Yet the school is not what it seems. Ran by the ruthless head of the city of Neo York, the school’s only objective is to extract the powers of the gifted and then discard them. Only Ty, heir to the city, can keep Maya from being destroyed there.
But Ty has a secret and his loyalty to his family has never wavered. Will his growing love for Maya be strong enough to save them both?
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Excerpt:
Purchase today on Amazon!
Excerpt:
Maya huddled into a nook in the fork of an old oak tree that must have seen hundreds
of years of spring and summer, winter and fall. The bark now peeled off the majestic
trunk behind her and she felt no life inside it. The tree didn’t have many more years
ahead of it.
Below her a stream, swelled by the torrential rains that fell for the last three days
and washed away the last of their grain, frothed and raged. Already it had formed a
river with no bank. The current brought a piece of roof here, a chest there, a chair, a
table, sometimes a doll. Only yesterday the current brought a woman. Bloated, tinged
purple, unrecognizable. She wasn’t from their town, so they let her float on by for
some other town or village to worry about. Maya shuddered at the memory, tears
welling in her eyes. She bit down hard on her bottom lip.
I’m too much of a crybaby. I can’t ever help anyone if all I do is cry.
In the distance, along the horizon, the afternoon sun was setting dusty orange, and
cold white stars already twinkled in the sky. Frost would come this night.
Some spring we’re having.
Maya had known it wasn’t the real Spring when the temperatures rose so soon after
New Year’s. She should have tried harder to warn the people of her town not to plant
yet. Not that they ever listened to her. Winter snows had started back in September,
and everyone was eager to begin planting. The Spring of 2102 brought only false
hope. A fine start to the new year that was. Nearly everyone lost their crops in the
floods that followed the brief spring. Many had feared the end of the world. Yet if
the world was ending, it had started years ago. Earth had been dying a slow death for
decades now, as had the people who still survived in the Badlands.
Frosts would last for months, the thick snow clouds obscuring the sun. And people
froze or died of heat and dehydration when the sun beat down mercilessly, drying
everything in its path, the soil, the plants, animals and people. There was no more
telling when either would come, or if the next flood would take your home in its
frothing passage.
There was only today in the Badlands and what you made of it. And you were either
happy to be alive, or not. Too many weren’t.
Vanna Smythe is the author of the Anniversary of the Veil fantasy trilogy and The Grower's Gift, the first book in a new YA dystopian series. She has been writing creatively since her early teens, though one could say her creative writing efforts started long before that. While still in kindergarten, she once tore up a library book to make alphabet soup, and has been fascinated with what words can do, the pictures and worlds they can create, ever since.
The Progeny of Time YA Dystopian series was inspired by the bleak future presented in The Hunger Games, the fight between good and evil played out in Harry Potter, and the TV show Heroes, but with a totally unique story and twist. The story is equally fun for teens as well as adults. The second book in the series will be released in Summer 2014.
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