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Book Review: The Haunting of Sunshine Girl by Paige McKenzie and Alyssa Sheinmel

The Haunting of Sunshine Girl by Paige McKenzie and Alyssa Sheinmel

Weinstein Books, 2015

ISBN-10: 1602862729

ISBN-13: 978-1602862722

 

Sunshine and her mother have left the comfort and warmth of Texas for the damp and chilly world of Washington State, a beautiful if isolated place.  She and her mom have a tight relationship, with little of the typical YA angst. Their relationship is tested and strained when the house turns out to be haunted, and only Sunshine can sense the ghost.

At first, Sunshine is intrigued by the laughter in the attic, but soon things become problematic. The ghost’s mood swings and temper tantrums start to worry Sunshine. Then the ghost sets its sights on her mother. Darkness seeps in, souring everything, and threatening the life of Sunshine’s mother,  who shows increasingly erratic and violent behavior.

The requisite love interest shows up, but in a satisfying twist, has a dark side which may cause Sunshine and her mom more harm than good.

The Haunting of Sunshine Girl originates from an ongoing YouTube webseries created by Paige McKenzie and hosted by The Haunting of Sunshine Girl Network, which has over 200,000 subscribers. With this novel, McKenzie, a teen prodigy, has entered publishing with a platform other authors would kill to have, with the assistance of Alyssa Sheinmel’s adept ghostwriting skills to guide her. The incredible success of the series means that fans already have expectations, and the book has to satisfy both fans of the show and readers who love supernatural fiction who know nothing about it: a difficult challenge. Rather than merely rehashing the plot of the show, McKenzie and Sheinmel’s approach meets the challenge, honing in on the story between the pages, and Sheinmel polishes the book into a slick, enjoyable read.

While this isn’t the most original tale, it is done very well. While common tropes appear frequently, they are twisted and turned in fresh ways. In addition, it’s interesting to see how the transmedia element was pushed front and center, with emphasis on the web series. While the idea is not new anymore, it’s fascinating to see how experiments in multiplatform technology in children’s and YA fiction is are playing out.  This book appears to be the start of a series, and, even without the emphasis on other media, is gripping enough to send readers unfamiliar with the web series on to looking for the next book. 

Reviewed by Dave Simms

Posted on December 15, 2015 by , Reply

6 YA Horror Series You Could Be Reading

I was over at Dread Central and they had posted a list of 5 horror series you should be reading, and it’s an interesting list. Inspirational, even. So I’m going to thank them for the idea and offer you a list myself of YA series you should read, if you haven’t already. There are so many more, it’s hard to limit it to just a few. Enjoy! If you have other ideas, I’d love to know them!

 

Product Details

Bad Girls Don’t Die by Katie Alender (Book 1: Bad Girls Don’t Die, Book 2: From Bad to Cursed, Book 3: As Dead As It).

Creepy ghostly possession is now apparently a “thing” in the horror genre, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, but Katie Alender was way ahead of the trend in this series about a girl whose younger sister is possessed by a malignant ghost.

 

 

The Enemy by Charlie Higson (Book 1: The Enemy, Book 2: The Dead, Book 3: The Fear, Book 4: The Sacrifice, Book 5: The Fallen, Book 6: The Hunted)
A plague hits London, transforming nearly all adults into zombies. Children and teens are on their own, fighting for survival in post-apocalyptic world. Higson, somewhat controversially, claimed to be writing for boys, but he has strong female characters as well. The books in this series are fast paced and action packed, and there’s plenty of gore, but not at the expense of character development.

 

 

Product Details

Zom-B by Darren Shan (13 book series).

Darren Shan gets hardcore in Zom–B. B, the protagonist, is not a nice person. B comes from an abusive environment that reeks of racist attitudes, and has not problem passing that on to weaker victims. The first half of the first book sets up B’s background, character, and moral dilemmas, but the second half has all the graphic gore and zombie action fans of zombie novels could desire. There is a surprising twist at the end of the first book that will change your perception of B, and Shan handles it well.
Product Details

The Haunting of Sunshine Girl by Paige McKenzie and Alyssa Sheinmel. (Book 2: The Awakening of Sunshine Girl)

This series is based on a YouTube webisode series, Sunshine Girl, created by Paige McKenzie. After Sunshine Griffith moves from sunny Texas to gloomy Washington, she discovers she is living in a haunted house, inhabited by a malicious spirit. Fast paced, intense, and incredibly creepy.

 

 

 Asylum by Madeleine Roux. (Book 2: Catacomb, Book 3: Sanctum).

 

This is a creepy, photo-illustrated series with a design similar to that of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. It begins by introducing students in a summer college prep program that just happend to take place in a renovated mental asylum. Nothing could go wrong there, right? The photos give the story a disturbing sort of realism. As a digression, Ms. Roux also is an alumna of my own alma mater, although I’ve never met her personally.

 

 

Lockdown: Escape From Furnace by Alexander Gordon Smith. (Book 2: Solitary, Book 3: Death Sentence, Book 4: Fugitives, Book 5: Execution)

 

In a dystopian future where there has been a massive backlash against teen crime, 14-year old Alex, caught committing a burglary, is sentenced to time in the underground prison Furnace. Violent, rife with gang activities, and patrolled by monstrous creatures, Furnace is a terrifying place to try to survive, and Alex decides to make the attempt to escape. Gripping and fast-paced, Smith takes you on a breathless tour of the next thing to hell.

 

Posted on December 13, 2015 by , Reply

Medallion Press Tries A New Approach to Ebooks With Gregory Lamberson’s “The Julian Year”.

I’m not writing creatively today, just sharing this information because I think using new technologies with ebooks is intriguing. Sometimes it makes no difference, sometimes it’s cool on an individual level but there’s no ripple across the publishing pond. But all kinds of things we can’t imagine yet are POSSIBLE… And this time it’s also interesting because it involves horror author Gregory Lamberson’s novel The Julian Year, so readers will get to experience how this technology can affect the experience of the horror reader.

 

So, to the news– straight from the press release:

 

Medallion Press, a subsidiary of Medallion Media Group, has developed a new technology aimed at revolutionizing the reading experience for millions of book lovers across the globe.

 

TREEbook is a patented new technology which allows authors and publishers to create novels with multiple story branches, giving readers the possibility of a unique and completely unpredictable reading experience over and over again. Based on each reader’s individual reading habits, each TREEbook-enhanced story has the potential to seamlessly branch down new and undiscovered story lines, giving greater insight to the characters, a deeper look at the story, and even alternate endings—all within one book. There are no choices to make. Readers simply read at leisure, while the TREEbook technology works in the background.

 

“It gives readers a chance to experience a story like never before,” says Adam Mock, COO of Medallion Media Group and one of the inventors of TREEbook. “We’ve taken the traditional reading experience and enhanced it with our innovative TREEbook technology, which has the ability to organically branch a story down alternate paths. So if you’re ready to dive into the next level of reading, this is it.”

 

Medallion Press has five TREEbook-enhanced novels scheduled to release by end of 2015. Genres range from Horror to Historical Fiction.

 

As of now, there’s only one way to experience TREEbook-enhanced novels, which is to download Medallion Media Group’s free MMG Sidekick app for the iPad.

 

The very first TREEbook-enhanced novel release is The Julian Year by award-winning horror author Gregory Lamberson (The Jake Helman Files, The Frenzy Wolves Cycle). In The Julian Year one of the main characters, Julian Weizak, an obituary writer in New York, celebrates his birthday alone in a bar on New Year’s Eve. At the stroke of midnight, scores of homicides break out on the East Coast.

Julian discovers that, in all, 20,000 murders are committed that night in New York alone, with the murder epidemic spreading across the country and the world, time zone by time zone. At midnight each day thereafter, 19,178,082 people around the world become homicidal maniacs, contributing to the biggest killing spree in history. It looks as if the chaos can lead to only one end: the extinction of mankind.

To learn more about the TREEbook visit www.thetreebook.com.

 

For more information about Gregory Lamberson or his TREEbook novel The Julian Year, visit www.thejulianyear.com.

 

For questions about the technology behind the TREEbook visit the blog of MMG’s Executive Director of Technology, Brian Buck, accessible from the homepage at www.medallionmediagroup.com

 

Medallion Media Group, which includes Medallion Press, Medallion Movies, and Medallion Music, is on a mission to provide dynamic multimedia entertainment in collaboration with innovative writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, and technologists. With a creative approach to book, music, and film production, we seek to synergize the arts and cultivate developing technologies to carve a path on the leading edge of content delivery.

 

Posted on June 1, 2014 by , Reply
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