The Storm by Virginia Bergin (Blog Tour Excerpt & Giveaway)


On tour with Sourcebooks.

Welcome to my tour stop for The Storm by Virginia Bergin! I read the first book in this series, H2O (or The Rain) and it completely sucked me in. Check out the info on book two, an excerpt, and enter the giveaway below...

The StormThe Storm
(The Rain #2)
by Virginia Bergin
YA Thriller, Dystopian
Paperback & ebook, 336 Pages
October 6th 2015 by Sourcebooks Fire

Summary

"I'll tell you a weird thing about apocalypses - a thing I didn't even know until I was in one: they seem pretty bad, don't they? Well, take it from me: they can always get worse."

Three months after the killer rain first fell, Ruby is beginning to realise her father might be dead . . . and that she cannot survive alone. When a chance encounter lands her back in the army camp, Ruby thinks she is safe - at a price. Being forced to live with Darius Spratt is bad enough, but if Ruby wants to stay she must keep her eyes - and her mouth - shut. It's not going to happen. When she realizes what is going on - the army is trying to find a cure by experimenting on human subjects - Ruby flips out . . . and makes an even more shocking discovery: she's not useless at all. The Storm begins . . .

    
(Affiliate links included.)

Excerpt
From Chapter 7 of The Storm by Virginia Bergin

     “Stop the engine!” a soldier yells at the glass.
     Just in case I didn’t get that, he points this big gun at me. There is glass between me and that gun, but I don’t suppose ice-cream vans come with bulletproof glass, or at least they probably wouldn’t have in Dartbridge.
     I’ve seen films. I turn the engine off, and I raise my hands.
     “And turn that off!” he yells.
     I kill the jolly tune. Raise my hands again.
     “Get out!” he yells.
     I get out. Raise my hands again.
     This sniggering murmur goes through the crowd; even the soldiers look like they’re trying not to laugh. Hilarious, no? A witch-­fairy driving an ice-cream van. Hilarious? NO.
I see soldiers prowl around the van—­and behind them, there’s a whole crowd watching, fingers hooked into wire for this evening’s entertainment. The back door of the van gets yanked open. Guns and torches get waved into the back of the ice-cream van…where Saskia lies, pale and sweating. Her blood filling the floor where a jolly person once stood asking, “Sauce? Sprinkles?”
     “She needs help!” I shriek.
     The crowd at the gate falls silent.
     My brain kicks up a desperate gear, and I realize what the soldiers must be thinking.
     “She’s not sick!” I gibber. “She’s not sick sick!”
     Yeah, Ruby, P-­R-­O-­B-­A-­B-­L-­Y?
     Ignoring all those films I’ve seen, I start to shout.
     “She had her foot chopped off! It happened hours ago! She’s going to bleed to death! SHE’S NOT RAIN SICK! SHE NEEDS HELP!”
     “SHUT UP,” says a soldier on a walkie-­talkie.
     When he says what he has to say to the person on the other end of the line, any normal, kind person would just say, “Oh my goodness! Those poor girls! Let them in immediately!” (“The driver must obviously be a brave hero,” etc.), but the person at the other end of the line… Oh, I can SO tell—­they do NOT want to be bothered by this drama.
     Know what it reminds me of? When you overhear parents talking to other parents about some kind of situation and TOTALLY FAILING TO APPRECIATE the seriousness of it.
     “We’re kind of busy here,” I hear the person at the other end of the line say. “It’s a one-­oh-­one.”
     In the silence, the crowd at the gate register that.
     A terrible booing and hooting and hissing starts up. I do not know what a 101 is, but they obviously do. I’m guessing it’s NOT GOOD.
     “One-­oh-­one!” the walkie-­talkie soldier shouts over the din.
     The soldiers, guns at the ready, step up to the gate I just came through—­the booing crowd quiets and backs off, snarling. You don’t have to be Einstein—­and I guess you know by now that I’m not—­to realize—­
     “We cannot assist you. You must leave,” the gun wielder tells me.
     I FLIP OUT.
     “NO! SHE’LL DIE! YOU HAVE TO HELP HER! HER FOOT WENT IN THE POND AND…AND”—­I see fish, nibbling—­“HER FOOT WENT IN THE POND AND WE HAD TO CHOP IT OFF!”
     I see my mom; I see my mom’s hand reaching out into the rain, trying to help someone.
My mom…my mom…my mom.
     I am thousands of breaths away from you.
     I cannot…I cannot think…if we had known to chop off your kind hand, would you have lived? Oh, Mom…my mom… These thousands of breaths? Every one of them hurts.
     I am not so lost in this terrible thought that I am not mad with myself for thinking it right now. I am Ruby. I VOW I WILL NOT CRY! I am strong. I am fierce. I am—

About Book One

H2OH2O
(The Rain #1)
by Virginia Bergin
YA Thriller, Dystopian
Paperback336 Pages
October 7th 2014 by Sourcebooks Fire

Summary

In this tense, psychological drama, debut author Virginia Bergin crafts a tale of desperation and survival about a world in chaos. Anyone who’s been touched by rain or tap water is dead. With a fascinatingly unique premise, a heroine that takes daunting risks and slim chances of survival, H2O’s fast-paced, unputdownable mystery and emotional survivor’s story will appeal to readers who enjoyed The Fifth Wave and The Hunger Games.

One minute 16 year old Ruby Morris is having her first real kiss at a party at Zach’s, and the next she’s being bundled inside the house by Zach’s parents, yelling at them to get inside. They don’t believe it at first. Crowded in Zach’s kitchen, Ruby and the rest of the partygoers laugh at Zach’s parents’ frenzied push to get them all inside as it starts to drizzle. But then the radio comes on with the warning, “It’s in the rain! It’s fatal, it’s contagious, and there’s no cure.” Two weeks later, Ruby is alone. Anyone who’s been touched by rain or has washed their hands with tap water is dead. The only drinkable water is quickly running out. Ruby’s only chance for survival is a treacherous hike across the country to find her father—if he’s even still alive.

  
(Affiliate links included.)

About the Author

Virginia Bergin learned to roller-skate with the children of eminent physicists.

She grew up in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in a house tied to her father’s job. Her parents, the children of Irish and Polish immigrants – and one Englishwoman – had moved from Liverpool to the south of England in search of work.

Virginia studied psychology but ruined her own career when, dabbling in fine art at Central St Martins, she re-discovered creative writing. Since then she has written poetry, short stories, film and TV scripts and a play that almost got produced – but didn’t.

In between and alongside more jobs than you’ve had hot dinners, she has worked as a writer on TV, eLearning and corporate projects and has 22 broadcast and non-broadcast TV credits, from children’s favourite Big Cat Diary Family Histories (BBC) to the award-winning series Africa (Tigress Productions for National Geographic). Most recently, she has been working in online education, creating interactive courses for The Open University.

She has lived in North Wales, London and Bristol. In May 2015, she moved from a council estate in Bristol to live in rural Somerset, somewhere between Taunton, Chard and Ilminster. Her nearest neighbour is a horse.


Tour-Wide Giveaway

No comments

Post a Comment

I love comments! I try to read and reply to them all. Feel free to agree or disagree and generally share your thoughts with me.