Go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page to find out all about the hunt. There are SIX contests going on simultaneously, and you can enter one or all! I am a part of the GOLD TEAM –but there is also a red team, a blue team, an orange team, a red team, and an indie team for a chance to win a whole different set of books!

If you’d like to find out more about the hunt, see links to all the authors participating, and see the full list of prizes up for grabs, go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page.

“It’s been a century of peace since Earth became a colony of an alien race with far reaches into the galaxy. Some die-hard extremists still oppose their rule on Earth, but Donovan Reyes isn’t one of them. His dad holds the prestigious position of Prime Liaison in the collaborationist government, and Donovan’s high social standing along with his exocel (a remarkable alien technology fused to his body) guarantee him a bright future in the security forces. That is, until a routine patrol goes awry and Donovan’s abducted by the human revolutionary group Sapience.

When Sapience realizes who Donovan’s father is, they think they’ve found the ultimate bargaining chip. But the Prime Liaison doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, not even for his own son. Left in the hands of terrorists who have more uses for him dead than alive, the fate of Earth rests on Donovan’s survival. Because if Sapience kills him, it could spark another galactic war. And Earth didn’t win the last one..”

With Exo, I set out to write an alien conquest story unlike any other I’d read before. There are plenty of stories about aliens invading Earth, but I set Exo over a century after the alien arrival, at a time when humans and aliens live together on Earth in an uneasy truce. I designed the alien race, the zhree, to look very different from us (humanoid aliens are a pet peeve of mine!) but I knew I needed them to be able to communicate and live alongside us, so I made them land-dwelling, highly social creatures, with vocal language and prehensile limbs. The end result: six-legged, six-eyed, dome-bodied creatures with body armor, who live in great circular cities, in towers that resemble huge termite hills. Some humans in Exo refer to the zhree using the derogatory term, “shrooms.”

Speaking of cool body armor, the zhree in Exo have passed on their biotechnology to a subset of humans, endowing them with an “exocel” – a flexible, organic, superstrong body armor that can be deployed or retracted at will. I imagined it as kind of like having a layer of whatever the T1000 in Terminator 2 is made out of, coating your body whenever you want. And it turns out there is lots of very cool next generation body armor being developed by the military that isn’t too far off of that concept!