Roxy's Reviews: Blog Tour: The Star Dwellers by David Estes

Hello, Therians!!

Well, once again, I'm excited to be sharing news of the amazing, The Dwellers Saga by David Estes.

A little while ago I was honored to be included in the cover reveal for The Star Dwellers, the second book in this exciting dystopian series, and today I'm even more honored to be able to give you all a sneak peek into just how amazing this book is.

But first, just in case you've forgotten, here's the awesome cover and synopsis :)

After rescuing her father and younger sister, Adele is forced to leave her family and Tristan behind to find her mother in the cruel and dangerous realm of the star dwellers.

Amidst blossoming feelings for Adele, Tristan must cast his feelings aside and let her find her own way amongst the star dwellers, while he accompanies Adele's father to meet with the leaders of the moon dwellers and decide the fate of the Tri-Realms.

Will Adele be able to rescue her mother and make it back to the Moon Realm before the President and the sun dweller soldiers destroy her family?

Can Tristan convince the moon dweller puppets of the error of their ways?

Was Adele's lost kiss with Tristan her one and only chance at love?

In her world there's only one rule: Someone must die

Excerpt taken from Chapter One of The Star Dwellers.

Chapter One

Adele

Tawni shrugs and keeps walking. Having no other choice, I do the same. That’s when I hear it.

At first a soft tinkle, the noise becomes louder, a swishing—and then a gurgle. Water, has to be. Tawni looks at me and we both smile. The map was right!

For only the second time since we entered this godforsaken tunnel, the monotony is broken as the passage opens up to our left. The right wall remains straight and solid, but to the left there is an empty darkness. I feel cool air waft against my face, ruffling my hair. At our feet is water, lapping against the edge of the tunnel floor.

We go a little crazy. Or maybe just I do. Letting out a Whoop! I sling down my pack and thrust my cupped hands into the cool liquid. First I throw a handful into my face. My breath catches as the icy water splashes over my skin. But I don’t shiver—it feels wonderful. It’s like the water is healing me, rejuvenating more than just my skin: refreshing my soul. The wet drips off my chin and dribbles down my neck and beneath the neckline of my tunic. It feels so good I can’t help myself.

With no room in my mind left for embarrassment, or modesty, I pull my tunic over my head and toss it aside, leaving just my undergarments. Oh, and my shoes, too, which I pull off, along with my socks. I leave my flashlight angled on a rock so I can see.

I splash into the knee-deep water, relishing the soft caress of the cooling elixir. The lake bed is covered with long, smooth rocks that massage my sore feet. As I scoop water onto my arms, stomach, and legs, I remember a story my grandmother used to tell me about the Fountain of Youth, a pool of water with life-extending power. The cool touch of this pool feels equally potent, and I half-expect to see myself growing shorter, shrinking to reveal a younger me, the size of my half-pint sister perhaps.

I don’t shrink, but I am cleansed. When I turn around, Tawni is grinning. She tosses me a sliver of soap, which I manage to juggle and then catch. As I use it to wash my body, she methodically uncaps each canteen and fills them. She is the responsible one.

Seeing her with the canteens reminds me of the hungry thirst in my throat. I finish with the soap and hand it to Tawni to use. She is already undressed and daintily steps into the pool, looking as graceful as a dancer, particularly when compared to my own clumsy entrance.

I turn around and splash some more water on my face.

“Where’d you get that scar on your back?” Tawni asks.

Looking over my shoulder, trying to gaze at my back, I say, “What scar?”

She moves closer, places a hand on my back, and I shiver, suddenly feeling cold. Her fingers linger somewhere near the center of my back, where I can’t possibly see, just below my undergarments. “Curious,” she says absently.

“What is it?”

“It’s a crescent-shaped scar, small, but slightly raised off your skin. It looks like a recent scar…”

“Maybe I got it in the tunnels somewhere—or from Rivet,” I say, but I know that’s not right—there would have been blood, and someone would have noticed the wound seeping through my tunic.

“No, it’s not that fresh. Just looks like it’s from something that happened in the last few years. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it looks just like…”

I turn to face my friend, taking in her quizzical expression in an instant. “Like what?” I ask when she doesn’t finish her statement.

“Nothing, I don’t know what I was thinking,” she says unconvincingly.

“You were going to say ‘Tristan’s scar’, weren’t you?” I laugh. “You’re nuts, you know that?”

She laughs high and musical. “And you’re not?”

I grin at her and cup my hands, once more using them as a scoop to lift a portion of water to my face. As I open my mouth to receive the glorious liquid, I see Tawni’s face change from mirthful to one of confusion. It looks like she’s playing with something in her mouth, moving her tongue around, side to side. Her eyebrows are lowered. I plunge the water into my mouth, delighting in the slick feel as it slips over my tongue, down my gullet.

“Ahh,” I murmur softly, just before Tawni grabs my arm. Her eyes are wide—she is scared. “What?” I say.

“Spit it out!” Tawni shrieks. Now I am the confused one. “Spit it out!” she says again, reaching around and thumping me on the back.

“I can’t,” I say over her shoulder. “I’ve already swallowed it.”

Tawni releases me and says, “No, no, no, no…this is not good.”

That’s when I taste it. Something’s not right about the water. Like Tawni, I make a face, swish some spit around in my mouth. Overall, the water was refreshing, delicious even, but the aftertaste is not good. The water is…. “Contaminated?” I say.

Tawni nods slowly. “I think so.”

Not good.

As kids, all moon dwellers are taught to look for the signs of contaminated water. Strange coloring, frothy film on the top, a unique odor, strange taste: All are possible clues that the water is not good to drink. At home we used a testing agent every four hours to check our water. If the water turns blue when combined with the agent, it is okay. If it turns green or brown, your water is bad. Even if we had the stuff we needed to test the water, it is too late. We’ve drunk it.

I peer into the water. It looks okay. No film, no discoloring, no malodor. The nasty aftertaste might just be a result of trace metals in the water, picked up somewhere along its winding path through the depths. I doubt we’re that lucky.

“What do you think it is?” I ask. There are a lot of dangers associated with drinking bad water. In mild cases, you might just get a bad case of diarrhea or perhaps light vomiting, but there are many worse diseases and viruses that can be picked up, too. Like…

“Bat Flu,” Tawni says.

“What? No. I doubt it. Can’t be. Why do you think that?” Bat Flu is the worst of the worst. Infected bats release their infected droppings into a water source, which then becomes infected. The symptoms of Bat Flu are numerous and awful: severe stomach cramps; cold sweats and hot flashes in conjunction with high fever; mind-numbing headaches; relentless muscle aches; hallucinations; and in many cases, death. There was a mild outbreak at my school in Year Three. Four kids, a dog, and one of their parents got the Flu. The only one that survived was the dog.

Tawni steps out of the water, leaving a trail of drips behind her. She picks up the flashlight and shines it across the pool. I follow the yellow light until it stops on the far wall, which is pockmarked with dozens of small caves. Bat caves. “That’s why,” she says.

I feel a surge of bile in my throat as I see piles of dark bat poo littered at the tunnel mouths. Each time the bats emerge from the caves, they will knock the piles into the water with the flap of their wings. Evidently, they’re sleeping now—the caves are silent.

I choke down the bitter, acidic taste in my mouth and say, “But this is a key watering hole for an inter-Realm thoroughfare. It’s even on the map.” My words don’t change anything. The water is likely contaminated. I don’t want to be in denial. I just need to deal with what has happened as best I can. My mother always told me to “face the truth with grim determination and a smile on your face.” I’m not sure about the smile. “Okay, let’s assume it’s contaminated. We need to vomit it out, Tawni. Now!”

Without watching to see what Tawni does, I stick two fingers down my throat, gagging immediately, the stomach fire rising so fast I can barely get my hand out of my mouth before I spew all over myself. I retch, gag, cough twice, spit as much of the vile liquid from my mouth as possible. At my feet, my own vomit is floating around my ankles. At my side, Tawni is throwing up, too.

Clenching my abs, I say, “We’re both going to get very sick. But we’ll get through it together.”

“What do we do?” Tawni asks, her voice rising precariously high. Her lips are tight. I’m afraid she might lose it. Since I met her, Tawni has always been strong, even when her best friend was viciously murdered. But now she looks seriously freaked out. She must’ve seen firsthand what the Bat Flu can do to someone.

“Who do you know that had the Flu?” I ask, stepping out of the bile-choked water, Tawni flitting out next to me. We are still filthy, but there’s not much we can do about it now.

Tawni’s eyes flick to mine and then back to the water, to the bat droppings. “My cousin,” she says.

“What happened?”

“She passed.”

“That’s not going to happen to us.”

“It was awful.”

“Tawni.”

Her eyes dart back to mine and stick this time.

“We’re going to be fine,” I say. “Stay with me.”

Tawni’s steel-blue eyes get steelier, and then, after reaching a hardness level I’d never seen in them before, soften, returning to their soft blue. “Right. We’ll be okay,” she says, almost to herself.

I take the soap from Tawni and chuck it, along with the two canteens, across the pool. They clatter off the far wall and plunk beneath the surface.

“We should dry off with our dirty tunics and then chuck them away, too,” I say.

Although it’s kind of gross soaking up the water with our filthy old clothes, we both do it because we have to. It’s the nature of things in our world. Out of necessity you have to do a lot of things you don’t want to do. I wonder if it was the same in the old world, before Armageddon, before Year Zero.

When we are dry and our old clothes have been thrown into the foul water, we each don one of the fresh tunics from our packs. It feels good—the simple act of putting on clean clothes. It’s like a rebirth, a second chance, a new beginning. At least usually. This time neither of us wants to turn the page on our story. But like so many things in life, we have no choice.

“How far to the Star Realm?” I ask.

“We’re in the Star Realm now, technically.”

“But how far to the first subchapter? Subchapter 30, right?”

Tawni consults the map. “Yeah, first we’ll hit subchapter 30. I’d say at least a twelve-hour hike if we move fast.”

“We’ve got to make it in eight,” I say.

Exciting, right??!! Well, trust me when I say it just keeps getting better!

Don't hestitate, get your copy of The Star Dwellers today!

Ebook- Kindle, Nook, Smashwords

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Haven't read, The Moon Dwellers? Get your copy here, and see where it all began!

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Early praise for The Star Dwellers

“Estes´s creative genius continues to shine in this installment. We get quite a few questions answered and more are raised.”

Author Christie Rich

“This is easily becoming one of the best dystopian books I've read.”

Lolita Goodreads

"The Star Dwellers surpassed all of my expectations and more. I was just completely amazed and thrown back into this fantastic world and left dying to know what will happen next."

Kayleigh Goodread

Early praise for the author

“David Estes you are a genius! This book kept me on the edge of my seat. I felt such intense emotion to the main characters and their cause.”

Tina Donelly Goodreads

“Another fantastic book by David Estes that had me gripped straight away”

Adele Goodreads

About the author

David Estes was born in El Paso, Texas but moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when he was very young. He grew up in Pittsburgh and then went to Penn State for college. Eventually moved to Sydney, Australia where he met his wife. A reader all his life, he began writing novels for the children's and YA markets in 2010. He´s a writer with OCD, a love of dancing and singing (but only when no one is looking or listening), a mad-skilled ping-pong player, and prefers writing at the swimming pool to writing at a table

Author of the Evolution Trilogy

http://davidestesbooks.blogspot.com