Stories & Sweeties: Odd & True by Cat Winters {blog tour + guest post + giveaway!}

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Odd & True by Cat Winters {blog tour + guest post + giveaway!}

It's an exciting day! I'm always happy to host one of my absolutely favorite authors, Cat Winters, and her newest YA supernatural novel,

ODD & TRUE

Read on below to find out more about the book, learn more about sisters Odd & True and what they have in common with Cat and her own sister, and of course, don't forget to enter the tour-wide giveaway of three copies of the book!

• ABOUT THE BOOK•

Odd & True

by Cat Winters

♦publisher: Amulet Books

♦release date: September 12, 2017

♦hardcover, 368 pages

♦intended audience: Young adult

Trudchen grew up hearing Odette’s stories of their monster-slaying mother and a magician’s curse. But now that Tru’s older, she’s starting to wonder if her older sister’s tales were just comforting lies, especially because there’s nothing fantastic about her own life—permanently disabled and in constant pain from childhood polio.

In 1909, after a two-year absence, Od reappears with a suitcase supposedly full of weapons and a promise to rescue Tru from the monsters on their way to attack her. But it’s Od who seems haunted by something. And when the sisters’ search for their mother leads them to a face-off with the Leeds Devil, a nightmarish beast that’s wreaking havoc in the Mid-Atlantic states, Tru discovers the peculiar possibility that she and her sister—despite their dark pasts and ordinary appearances—might, indeed, have magic after all.

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Guest post with Cat Winters

5 Ways Odd & True are like Cat and Her Sister

ODD & TRUE was very much inspired by my relationship with my own sister, Carrie, who’s three years younger than me. It’s a work of fiction that’s not meant to be considered autobiographical, but my two protagonists, Odette and Trudchen, do, admittedly, share several things in common with Carrie and me.

Here are five examples:

1. Older sister Odette (Od) teaches younger sister Tudchen (Tru) how to read the future in tea leaves. Tea leaf readings and scenes of the sisters drinking tea appear throughout Odd & True. In real life, Carrie and I love visiting tearooms for special events, a pastime we’ve been enjoying since we found a tearoom tucked away in an antique shop in Escondido, California. In the opening chapter of ODD & TRUE, look for a nod to Escondido (which means “hidden” in Spanish) in the words of a magic spell.

2. Od has been telling Tru fairytales and legends since the week Tru was born, and she talks her sister into joining her in pretend adventures, even into their teenage years. I did the same thing with my sister when we were little, although I didn’t do so to hide the pain of our family’s secrets like Od. Thankfully, Carrie and I had a far less traumatic childhood than what my two protagonists endure, but I’ve always used stories as an escape from reality and a means of keeping us entertained.

3. For fun during their childhood, Od and Tru travel to neighboring farms and collect folktales and stories of monster sightings, which they catalog in a notebook. Od does the writing in the book, and Tru creates the illustrations. They call the book Odd & True Tales and plan to one day publish it. In real life, I wrote stories and poems all the time as a kid, and my sister would illustrate them. Our parents were often the recipients of cards that featured our joint creations (which probably weren’t as good as we thought they were). We always talked about one day publishing a book that I would write and she would illustrate.

4. Od and Tru grow up in a Southern California canyon populated by rattlesnakes and coyotes. They believe their mother is a monster slayer who protects them from diabolical creatures that prowl around after dark. My sister and I grew up in the hills of a Southern California suburb, and we heard coyotes at night and found various types of snakes in our yard, including the occasional rattlesnake. Our mom didn’t slay monsters, but when I was eight, we witnessed her climbing up to our roof with a hose to protect our house from a raging brushfire. She also fought off the black widow spiders that lived under our eaves, and she once even captured a snake that had slithered into our house.

5. Od and Tru are fiercely protective of each other and would slay monsters for each other. If I could do the same for my sister, I most definitely would.

Cat (left) and Carrie (right).

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Seriously, how super cute are they??? Thank you so, so much, Cat, for sharing these stories and this adorable photo with us!!

•ABOUT THE AUTHOR•

Cat Winters’s critically acclaimed debut novel, In the Shadow of Blackbirds, was named a 2014 Morris Award Finalist, a 2014 Best Fiction for Young Adults pick, a 2013 Bram Stoker Award Nominee, and a School Library Journal Best Book of 2013. Her upcoming novels include The Cure for Dreaming (Amulet Books/Oct. 2014) and The Uninvited (William Morrow/2015), and she’s a contributor to the 2015 YA horror anthology Slasher Girls & Monster Boys. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

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