{Book Spotlight & Guest Post} The Gatekeeper's Challenge by Eva Pohler

Welcome one and all to my stop on The Gatekeeper's Challenge book tour brought to you by Reading Addiction Blog Tours. Here you will find information on the book and the author along with a short excerpt from the book. So, sit back, relax and have an enchanting time.

About the Book

The Gatekeeper's Challenge
(Gatekeepers Trilogy Book 2)
by Eva Pohler

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Series : Gatekeepers Trilogy
Pages : 228
Publisher : Green Press
Release date : December 1st 2012
Genre : Ya Fantasy

Book Description

Ten agonizing months have gone by since Therese faced off against her parents’ murderer at Mount Olympus, and she suspects Thanatos’s absence is meant to send her a message: go on with your life. She tries to return Pete’s affections even though her heart aches for the god of death, but when Than shows up to take her hamster’s soul, she becomes infuriated when he says he’s “been busy.” In cahoots with her new friend, who's gotten in with the Demon Druggies at school, Therese takes a drug that simulates a near-death experience, planning to tell Than off so she can have closure and move on, but things go very, very wrong.

Eventually she learns Than has been busy searching for a way to make her a god, and he’s found it, but it requires her to complete a set of impossible challenges designed by Hades, who hopes to see her fail.

Short Excerpt

The Majorelle Garden in Marrakesh, Morocco bustled with tourists weaving up and down floral-lined stone paths and over bridges across ponds of lily pads and through antique stone buildings full of paintings. Cobalt blue fountains, railings, and trim unified the otherwise multi-colored flowers and foliage. Therese sifted through the crowd and found her way just outside the garden near the trails leading up the Atlas Mountains. A dozen tents and donkeys peppered the valley with the aromas of freshly cooked dinners wafting toward the sky. Picnic tables, scattered across the valley, held tourists eating the food these makeshift restaurants prepared beneath their tents. Therese’s belly rumbled at the delicious smells even though back in Durango, she’d just eaten a burger and was full. It was lunchtime back home; here, it was seven in the evening.

She wondered what these people thought of her wearing the silk robe, the golden scabbard at her waist, and the golden shield on her back, carrying a flute in one hand and a crown in the other. Maybe they thought she was an entertainer. It occurred to Therese that, indeed, she was, for Hades.

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Guest Post
by Eva Pohler

Awakening Your Inner Goddess (Sans Fifty Shades of Grey)

When I say girls need to awake their inner goddesses, I’m not referring to the kind of inner goddess described by E.L. James in Fifty Shades of Grey (though I’m not opposed to awakening that type either). What I’m talking about is the warrior goddess of power inside each one of us, often latent and unrecognized in girls who continue to live in a world where men hold the highest offices in government, church, and the work force.  Girls are less subjugated today than they were fifty years ago, and although the playing field still isn’t perfectly level, the real culprit holding back most girls is themselves. As Alice Walker has said, “The most common way people give up their power is by believing they have none.”

At the beginning of my Gatekeeper’s Trilogy, a young adult contemporary fantasy based in Greek myth, fifteen-year-old Therese Mills believes she’s the least powerful person on the planet. Her parents have just died. Her aunt has come to live with her in her beautiful home in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, but even though this means her friends and school won’t change, Therese is ready to give up on life to join her parents. Death, known as Thanatos, has other plans.

Thanatos briefly meets Therese while she’s in a coma. Avoided by all gods and mortals because of his job, he’s shocked when she throws her arms around him and calls him lovely. He later makes a deal with his father, Hades, to go to the upperworld to win her heart. In return, Therese must agree to avenge her parents’ murder.

Throughout book one, The Gatekeeper’s Sons, Therese struggles with her feelings of ineptitude. Thanatos’s sisters, the fierce and beautiful Furies, help her hunt for the killer, but their strength and efficiency make her feel weak. She feels small and insignificant until she learns her aunt’s life is in danger. The desire to protect her loved one helps her rise above her self-pity to become the warrior she never knew she was.

In book two, The Gatekeeper’s Challenge, Therese is required to complete a set of five challenges designed by Hades, who hopes to see her fail because he’s disappointed with the way things turned out in book one. Once again, her desire to protect a loved one—this time Thanatos—pushes her past her doubts and insecurities into determined action. One by one, she faces each seemingly impossible challenge—including Ladon (the one-hundred-headed serpent), the Minotaur, and the Hydra—because it’s the only way to spare Thanatos from an eternity of torment.

The final book of the trilogy, The Gatekeeper’s Daughter (to be released December 1, 2013), once again forces Therese to look inward. All gods and goddesses serve humanity or the world in some way, and in order to remain at Thanatos’s side, she must discover her unique purpose while protecting her loved ones against antagonistic forces. In all three books, power isn’t something Therese derives from her environment, but something she finds within her once she believes it’s there. Girls need to awaken their inner goddesses and wield their power.

To celebrate the completion of this saga, I’m holding a contest from January 1, 2013 to October 1, 2013 for my readers. Details can be found at my website at http://www.evapohler.com/contest.

About the Author

Eva Pohler

Eva Pohler writes fiction and teaches writing and literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she lives with her husband, three kids, two dogs, and two rats.

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