Teaser Tuesdays!

It's Tuesday and time for another episode of Tuesday Teasers!

You know the rules: take your current read, let it fall open to a random page and choose 2 "teaser" sentences to entice us into wanting to read it. No spoilers, please!

First, for those of you who were kind enough to comment on last week's teaser from God Says No, please check back this afternoon for the full review.

Today, I've got 2 teasers from the 2 books I just finished. The first is from The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel, historical fiction about Yoshiko Kawashima, also known as Eastern Jewel. She was a Chinese princess, raised by a distant Japanese relative, who eventually spied for Japan and betrayed the Chinese emporer. It is a fascinating story and I expect to post the review next week.

"However my father chose to justify my banishment, it had always been the case that whatever my behavior, I would be given to Kawashima merely because he requested it. Of my nineteen sisters and ten brothers, I was the only one to be given away."

The second book is waaaaay at the other end of the spectrum, in terms of material. It's Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, a collection of short stories about life after the end of the world. If you stop by here regularly, you know that I have a particular fondness for the genre and there are some fabulous examples in this anthology. This teaser comes from a story by Paolo Bacigalupi called "The People of Sand and Slag." The introduction says it features "characters barely recognizable as human," and this quote will make you understand why:

"After dinner we sat around and sharpened Lisa's skin, implanting blades along her limbs so that she was like a razor from all directions. She'd considered monomol blades, but it was too easy to take a limb off accidentally, and we lost enough body parts as it was without adding to the mayhem."

Come on - you can't tell me those don't get your attention! I hope you'll stop back and read the reviews. Now tell me: what's teasing YOU this week?