Blog Tour: SOOT by Dan Vyleta #SOOT @wnbooks @Tr4cyF3nt0n

Hi and welcome to my stop on the blog tour for Soot! As always, thanks to Tracy Fenton for the tour invite and to Orion Books for providing me with the excerpt I’m sharing here with you today.

Before we move on, please take a sec to admire that very bleak but gorgeous cover! If I’m not mistaken it’s a kid-ethic design (the mastermind behind most Orenda Books covers, as well as the Tuva Moodyson series by Will Dean, and lots of other incredible book covers and record designs) and that cover alone makes me want to pick up the book! Yes, I’m a magpie, but lots of you are too, don’t even try to deny it!

Instant cover love or not, we are not entirely shallow, so let’s see what SOOT is all about:

Mesmerising, electrifying, Dickensian, dystopian
Dan Vyleta’s SOOT welcomes us into a world in which your sin is visible, rising from the body as a plume of Smoke. It’s 1909, and desire has become a language, with bodies speaking to one another in many-coloured Smoke. There are those who celebrate this whisper of skin to skin, and those who wish to silence it forever.
Enter Eleanor, a young woman with a strange power over Smoke and niece of the Lord Protector of England. Running from her uncle and home, she finds shelter in a New York theatre troupe.
Then Nil, a thief hiding behind a self-effacing name. He’s an orphan snatched from a jungle-home and suspects that a clue to his origins may lie hidden in the vaults of the mighty, newly-risen East India Company.
And finally Thomas, one of the three people to release Smoke into the world. On a clandestine mission to India, he hopes to uncover the origins of Smoke and lay to rest his doubts about what he helped to unleash.
SOOT is a story that crosses continents – from India to England’s Minetowns – these three seek to control the power of Smoke. As their destinies entwine, a cataclysmic confrontation looms: the Smoke will either bind them together or forever rend the world.

And here’s a message from Dan Vyleta:

Stories and Song
It’s been ten years since an event that changed the very way we look at ourselves and one another. No wonder people need to represent it. They do so by telling the story—in theatres, around the kitchen table, or in songs sung on street corners by self-declared bards. Not all these songs tell the same story; and not all of them are fit for children’s ears.
In the words of SOOT:
And yet: the boys have been recognised. Of course they have. In Britain, on the Continent, up and down the North American coasts: there is not a story more widely told than theirs. Thomas Argyle and Charlie Cooper. Balthazar knows some songs about them that, well sung, never fail to move him to tears; others that would make a madam blush. He would bet good money that the audience knows some songs, too.

Thanks for stopping by! Be sure to check out the other stops on the tour!