The first and most exciting for me personally is… drum roll please…. my copy arrived today! I’ll probably start reading tomorrow.

The second bit of interesting news came from this interview Ms Roth did with NPR.  Two tidbits I found of particular note: 1) Cyra did not start out as a major character in the book and 2) the character and her “currentgift” were inspired by some acquaintances of Ms Roth who are chronic pain patients. Chronic pain is a problem often addressed by psychologists along with physicians, so I am hopeful we will see some more of Ms. Roth’s fascination with psychology shine through in the series. In the NPR interview, she states that a person’s “personality is like a mold that shapes how it comes out”–  “it” being the gift-giving “current” that seems to the the “force” of Ms. Roth’s new world.  Could there be more personality psychology showing up in the new series?  We’ll know soon enough.  I hope there are plenty of Hogpro regulars reading along.

You can also view this CBS clip to hear Ms. Roth talk about reading Harry Potter in the shower.

Veronica Roth engages with her readers through a variety of social media outlets, notably Twitter, Instagram and Tumblir. With a scant two weeks remaining until the release of her new book, Carve the Mark, she is clearly doing what she can to generate and maintain interest, including offering an bonus epilogue to the Divergent series for those who pre-order. And yes, that particular bit of marketing strategy worked very nicely on me–not that I wouldn’t have ordered the book anyway.

In addition to releasing a preview chapter, Ms. Roth has been sharing regular “teasers:” sentences from Carve the Mark she has been releasing weekly, along with a photograph or painting, at least some of which her mother assisted in preparing. I thought it would be fun to look through the ten teasers released so far, speculate about what they could mean for the new series and look for any possible echoes to the Divergent trilogy.  So, here are the ten teaser quotes, in the order they were released, and including the art.

1. The first was the opening line of Carve the Mark.

Hushflowers always bloomed when the night was longest. The whole city celebrated the day the bundle of petals peeled apart into rich red– partly because hushflowers were their nation’s lifeblood and partly, Akos thought, to keep them all from going crazy in the cold.

As other previews have mentioned, plants apparently play a big role in this book. The red flower pictured above–presumably the hushflower–bears a strong resemblance to the red flowers featured in the book trailer.  A second plant, the “iceflower” is also mentioned as providing “lifeblood”–and given the opening trailer images of snowscapes interspersed with the fiery red flowers, and the red, black and white theme of the accompanying artwork, it is a possibility we could be looking at an alchemical organization, as Christine Wesley brilliantly deduced for Divergent. That would certainly be a nice Yuletide gift for John.

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