Blog Tour and Giveaway: The Fire of Dawn by V.V. Aku

Happy Friday beautiful readers! I am so excited to share this incredible book with you. This tour is being hosted by Reading Addiction Blog Tours and by clicking on the above banner you can find all of the blogs participating and check out more reviews and giveaways.

Today we will have V.V. Aku share 5 interesting things we should know about her, include an exclusive excerpt from The Fire of Dawn, and give TWO lucky readers the opportunity to win an eBook of The Fire of Dawn! AWESOME-FRIGGIN-SAUCE! :)

If you haven't already, you can read my 4.5 Star Review of The Fire of Dawn HERE.

Here is the blurb:

It’s the last day of the summer holiday in The Hague when Leah Koopmans’s carefree life as a teen is brutally flipped upside down. Her pale skin turns a dazzling gold, her senses heighten, and her muscles possess an uncanny strength. But with these exhilarating new powers comes a thirst that can only be quenched by one thing: human blood.

While her body craves for fresh victims and her heart drowns in guilt, she meets inhumanly handsome Max Machiavelli, who claims that Leah is an immortal like him. Infatuation ignites into blistering passion when Leah joins his coven in Amsterdam. But as the mysteries shrouding her sudden change to immortality unravel, she quickly learns that her aversion to taking life isn’t the only thing that sets her apart from this group of herculean strangers.

From the picturesque canals of Amsterdam to Corsica’s limestone cliffs and the untamed Siberian wilderness; from first loves to fierce battles, The Fire of Dawn is an extraordinary tale packed with romance, betrayal, and bloodsucking suspense that will keep you on the edge of your seat till the very last page.

And now lets get to the gush: introducing our lovely author, V.V. Aku:

V.V. Aku has always believed in beautiful stories. She found the man of her dreams and her way in complex China, and wrote a fairytale of her own: The Fire of Dawn－a scintillating tale about strength, self-discovery, and a girl who dared to follow her heart.

Born and raised in The Netherlands, V.V. Aku (Veerle Ackerstaff) soon discovered that the world was a place worth exploring. After graduating high school, she set out to travel the globe until she finally touched down in China. On the border of Tibet she met Anzi Aku, a wild Black-Yi man who lives at the foot of the Himalayas. She has joined his clan and tries to find her place among the tribe and its shamans. When she’s not researching the clan’s mythology on vampires, she shamelessly gives in to the compulsion to write about the countless characters that haunt her dreams.

V.V. Aku is the author of The Fire of Dawn and Black Dusk. She has been the creator of stories since the age of three, and has a Post-Graduate Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults from The University of Cambridge ESOL. After nearly a decade of working as an English language teacher and TEFL trainer in China, Thailand, The Netherlands, and the UK, she now devotes all her time to writing, her family, and practicing Kung Fu. The Fire of Dawn is her debut novel.

Five Things You Didn't Know About Me

1.      Like most teens, I made my parents’ life a living hell. I hated the fact that I couldn’t be free. I saw school as prison and the years of mandatory education as unjustified jail time. Above all else, I yearned to spread my wings, turn eighteen, and explore the world. The first thing I did after graduation? I bought an open ticket to Asia and I haven’t lived in the Netherlands since.

2.     My life with a Himalayan tribe in China is no secret. But what most people don’t know about my marriage to wild, Black-Yi man Anzi Aku, is that I never said, ‘I do,’ or ‘Yes, I’ll be your wife.’ His family presented my parents with tokens of silver and expensive liquor. Normally, they would have offered my dad a dozen goats, a yak, and two horses, but realizing that these animals wouldn’t fit in their suitcase back to Holland, Anzi’s family kept it low scale.

3.     I absolutely adore animals of all kinds. I’m not a diehard vegetarian, but I never thought I would be able to endure seeing an animal suffer until I moved to China. It has been one of the biggest culture shocks I’ve had to deal with, but an important part of integration and acceptance into my husband’s Black-Yi clan. My first duty as his wife was to shave a freshly slaughtered pig (after I had nearly tore the ears off my head listening to the hog’s terrified squeals) after which the village shaman ceremoniously cut the poor animal into pieces and put me in charge of cleaning its intestines and stuffing them with blood, meat, and mushrooms.

4.     Another part of Black-Yi integration was looking like a true Black-Yi women. Soon after I started my life in the mountains of northwest Yunnan, Anzi’s family began insisting that I not only dressed like one of them, but also tried my best to be seen as one of them by their ancestors. In order to complete this trying endeavor I needed to sacrifice the virgin skin of my forearms. The shaman’s wife gathered herbs and ash then took a bunch of needles and began tattooing round dots on both of my arms. The dots represent coins which I will take with me to my afterlife.

5.     Four months ago, my husband and I found out that I was pregnant. Although we were both ecstatic, my pregnancy discomforts soon kicked into high gear. With a sudden supernatural sense of smell, life in China became unbearable. Everywhere I went, I wanted to gag on the foul blend of garlic, ginger, spices, stinky feet, unbrushed teeth, and days-old sweat. But this prenatal torment was trumped by one other. Chinese food became the most disgusting thing to eat in the world.

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As if you needed any more encouragement, here's an exclusive excerpt from The Fire of Dawn:

"‘Something’s wrong!’ Max gasped, sitting up in bed so quickly that the unexpected movement sent me over the bed’s edge. I caught my balance before I smashed onto the walnut parquet. We had dozed off about an hour ago. Outside, the sun had risen.

Max was panting, his face filled with fear. ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’

‘What’s going on?’ I yawned, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

‘They’re near! Pietro can hear them.’

He had said ‘they’ with such abhorrence that it could only have meant one thing. He got to his feet, scrambling for his clothes that were scattered over the floor together with mine. I had never seen him this alarmed. The bedroom door flung open and Pietro and Sam barged into the room, both in the same frantic state as Max was.

‘How did they find us?’ Max shrieked.

‘I don’t know, but we must leave immediately!’ Pietro yelled.

We left the house and darted toward the city center. The streets were deserted. Livorno was still asleep. In the morning sunlight, our legs were heavy, moving tediously slow while Pietro broadcast the thoughts of the advancing Brotherhood as they tracked where we ran－his voice without emotion. ‘There are four: two males, two females… They have entered the boulevard. Stand by for confirmation... They have turned right on Via Grande.’

Then Pietro’s face twisted in horror. ‘Stop,’ he whispered, his voice shaking. ‘They’re here.’ "

And finally, here is the GIVEAWAY:

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