about the book
THE WORST DAY EVER!!! I thought the day our house caught fire was the worst, but I was SO wrong. Sure the house was a total loss, and people thought I started the fire, and we had to move out of the state, but at least back then I knew WHO I was. Now I’m not sure of anything!
I thought Dad was a nerdy accountant and Mom was a museum curator. And me? Just a loner trying to fit in at a new school. My name is Evelyn Ronan Truelove. Yup, I’m a guy with a girlie first name and a sappy last name. Now thirteen, I go by Ronan and no one—NO ONE—bullies me.
Mom signs me up for every single extra-curricular class possible—martial arts, wilderness survival, trapeze training, fencing, even competitive tree climbing. Today I have advanced gymnastics after school, but Mom shows up in her yellow VW Bug. After I jump in, she pulls a crazy U right in the middle of the street and tears off, playing chicken with two huge SUVs. The big black vehicles come after us in a terrifying high-speed chase through the city. I try to get Mom to tell me what is going on but all she stammers is some weird stuff about her being a Blood Guard, Pure Souls, and assassins! And it seems Dad has been kidnapped!
After flying down a flight of narrow park steps in the VW, mom jumps out and fights off two guys with a sword! (Is this really my Mom?) We shake the bad guys and end up at the train station where she pushes me toward an express to DC, telling me to trust no one! Suddenly, I am all on my own! I have no clue what is going on until I run into Greta. She turns out to be a Blood Guard, firearms expert, and lock-pick extraordinaire. I also meet Jack Dawson, a sarcastic pickpocket who says he is my Blood Guard Overseer. He looks nineteen and claims to be over two hundred years old!. He is a real goof ball.
Here’s what I know so far. I’m to take my place in the secret Blood Guard organization. All those extra classes I took? Training! For millenniums, they have protected the 36 Pure Souls. These good people don’t know they are special, but they are so righteous, they keep the world going. Assassinate one, and the world starts to go bad; assassinate two and it gets much worse.
Now the superhuman Bend Sinister agents are determined to take them all out…and that means the end of the world. Think of it as an Old Testament apocalyptic war with a touch of Men in Black…and right now, I’m right in the middle of it all!
Like I said, WORST DAY EVER!
about the author
Carter Roy is the pseudonym that publishing agent Michael Steams uses for novels he writes for young readers.
The youngest of five, he grew up in tough circumstances in Southern California. He had a lot of friends, but his best were found within the covers of books. He began to write early. Michael’s first story, “The Night My Pillow Talked to Me,” was published in a school anthology when he was seven. To tell the truth, he stole the story from an older brother!
In sixth grade he changed from writing to producing claymation films. He won the California Student Film Festival with his animation, “The Bionic Mouse.”
Switching to a Super-8 camera, Carter enrolled in the University of Southern California film production school. After taking a creative writing class, Carter rediscovered the written word, but he didn’t jump right into being an author. He first tried being a film projectionist, a house painter, a construction worker, a waiter, a line cook, a delivery truck driver, a rock band stage hand, a cruise line videographer, a reference librarian, and a rhetoric teacher. He never planned to write for children, but after working for a children’s book publisher and earning a master’s degree from Hollins University, he began writing for both adults and young readers.
One day way back in the mid-1990s, the 6’4” writer was lounging around, reading a young adult novel about a small Hasidic community and the 36 tsadkikim, whose pure souls redeem the rest of humanity. He began to wonder what would happen if those souls were eliminated. Of course, he thought, they need protectors. Michael buried the concept in a folder until many years later. Then one day, a friend mentioned something about a mother being the most dangerous woman on the planet, and Carter thought “Aha! Someone to protect the pure souls!” That is how the Blood Guards got started!
Now Michael is working on the rest of the Blood Guard series and as an editor for Inkhouse Publishing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, “with his wife, a spiky cat, and far too many books.”
Sources:
Author website
Author interview: Publisher’s Weekly
Book trailer: The Blood Guard
Also by Carter Roy:
The Glass Gauntlet (Blood Guard, Book 2). Two Lions. 2015.
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After barely surviving his first encounter as a Blood Guard protecting the Pure Souls from the Bend Sinister, Ronan now heads to a weird school. There he is to take a series life and death challenges called the Glass Gauntlet. Ronan has to figure out fast just what is going on because his enemies have tripled…and one of them is a transmogrifying steampunk soul that looks bad—really bad.