The Fairy Tale Giveaway Hop is all about YA books that are adaptations of, or loosely based on, fairy tales.  There are tons of blogs participating and giving away books, so make sure the check them all out!     What I'm giving away:     A paperback copy of my debut novel, Awake: A Fairytale, which is an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty.  The paperback is so purty, and I'm not just saying that because it's my book.  I'm lucky to have the most awesome cover designer ever and it's stinking gorgeous.  She was smart enough to make our paperback cover slightly different from the ebook cover and it's seriously edible in real life.  Enough gushing!  Here's a synopsis of the story:

Alexandra Martin didn’t believe in fairytales…

Alex has always been more interested in rocks and science than stories about princesses and magic.Now she’s far too busy with her summer internship at the Gem and Mineral Museum to think about children’s stories. Between avoiding her former best friend and high school baseball star, Luke Reed, and trying to hide her unrequited crush on her mentor at the museum, the real world is occupying all of her time.

…Until she walked into one.

It turns out fairytales aren’t all fun and games. A curse has turned her neat and orderly world upside down, and to break it, she bands together with a fellow intern and a recently awakened princess who’s been asleep for almost 900 years. Can this trio of unlikely heroines put an end to an ominous enchantment, discover true love, and keep an ancient and evil magic from being unleashed on modern-day Los Angeles?

  In Which My Fairy Tale Characters Interview Me, Their Author:   Alex: Hi this is Alex, and Becca, and Lilia - Lilia: Princess Lilia de la Foret of Arraine. Alex: (cough) Yes, how could I forget?  And we are the main characters in Awake: A Fairytale by Jessica Grey. Becca:  Alex is the heroine. Whoo hoo! Heroine in the house. Alex:  Well, we are sort of all heroines - Becca:  Eh, not really.  We are like your awesome side-kicks. Lilia:  We all will get to be heroines in our own books.  I am sure it is all very exciting.  I probably should have been the heroine in the first book, though I have become quite fond of Alex. Alex:  Anyway, we are here today to interview our author, Jessica, about our book Awake. Me:  Hi.  Thanks for having me...here on my own blog. Alex:  You know I love science, both Becca and I do.  But you’re not a science person, so how did you come up with the idea to make us interns at a gem and mineral museum? Me:  The very first “image flash,” or idea, I had for Awake: A Fairytale was the bed that was part of the sleeping curse.  I saw the whole thing in my head - with a sleeping man on it, which is where the twist on the Sleeping Beauty story comes into this book - in accurate detail years before I started writing the book.  At the time I didn’t think to connect it with a natural sciences type museum at all.  However, when I sat down to finally start writing, I began with the scene where you discover the bed in the museum store room.  I was heavily influenced by my daughter, Maddie who was two at the time and is four TODAY, the 26th (Happy Birthday, Maddie!) who had this complete obsession with rocks at the time.  She still does actually, but when she was that age, she’d do things like take all of the eggs out of her Easter basket and fill it up with rocks.  I just thought about what she would be like as a teenager, and a gem and mineral museum intern made sense.  From there all of the magic in and around the gems just made sense. Becca:  So, what’s up with the male characters in our book?  First you stuck us with Nicholas as an advisor, and he’s a total smarmy jerk - Alex:  I think that’s a little harsh. Becca: Harsh, but true.  And then the hero, Luke, who is admittedly hotter than heck, spends more than half the book basically in a coma.  Can a hero be a hero if he’s knocked out for that long? Me:  Well, I’m truly sorry for giving you an advisor at the museum like Nicholas.  He really is kind of smarmy, isn’t he?  Though I know it’s hard for Alex to see, I always liked that you, Becca, can see right through him.  It’s making writing the second book in the series a lot of fun.  As for Luke, yeah, he’s pretty hot.  I think “good guy heroes” are sadly under-represented so I was happy to make him such a good guy.  As for the enchanted sleep thing, it was definitely a dilemma - how best to make him still involved as a character, not just asleep?  One of my favorite things to hear from readers is that they love the character of Luke and how he tries to protect Alex even when he’s enchanted. Lilia: My question would be, why did you send me to Los Angeles of all places?  Is it not bad enough that I have been asleep for over eight hundred fifty years?  I also have to leave the country of my birth and be awoken (by a peasant of all things), in a city such as this? Alex: Are we really back to the whole Luke not being a prince thing again? Me:  I love Los Angeles - Becca: Yes. Amen. Me: I’ve spent the better part of my thirty-two years on this earth living in LA County, so it’s what I know.  I moved to Montana last year right before I really started working on Awake, and the book became, in part, my love letter to my home. A little inside *wink wink* in the book (as in so “inside” I’m the only one who knows and/or cares) is the rain that lasts throughout the book is my own personal homage to The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.  He’s my favorite hard-boiled detective writer and his books not only reflected the Los Angeles of his era, they helped define it.  In The Big Sleep the out of season rain storms reflect the drama that’s happening in the story.  And his descriptions of the rain in Los Angeles are amazing.  The very first line? It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. L.A. is my home, I know it better than any other place, and that’s why I sent you there, Lilia. Alex:  Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions for us, I hope that everyone enters to win our book!   How to enter:   I know there's a lot of blog participating and you've got lots of cool giveaways to enter, so let's make this easy, shall we?   Mandatory entry:   Leave a comment and tell me your favorite fairy tale. That's it! Hard, huh?   Extra entry #1: Follow me on Facebook (please leave a comment telling me you did so).   Extra entry #2: Follow me on Twitter (please leave me a comment with your twitter handle so I can say hi!).   So, that's a total of three possible entries ... which would mean three comments.  Thanks guys, happy entering!   Also!  Amanda over at Living, Learning, and Loving Life is also participating in the Fairy Tale Giveaway Hop with a giveaway of Awake!   ***** The fine print and all that jazz: The prize for this giveaway is one paperback copy of Awake: A Fairytale by me.  This giveaway is open internationally.  Entries are open through 11:59 MST (that's Mountain Standard Time, I know, what?) on May 1st, 2012.     This giveaway is now closed, thanks for entering!