The Book Mashup Tag

This is a really cool tag that I saw on The Book Prophet’s Blog. It was originally created by Lia@ Lost in a Story

Pick 10 (I picked 8) books and divide them into two groups.

Then randomly select a book from each group and mash the two books together. The world’s your oyster here really.

Write a synopsis paragraph of your mashup book.

After serving out a year of hard labor in the salt mines of Endovier for her crimes, 18-year-old assassin Celaena Sardothien is dragged before the Crown Prince. Prince Dorian offers her her freedom on one condition: she must act as his champion in a competition to find a new royal assassin.

Celaena is Adarlan’s most infamous assassin, she has seen and done them all. But when the Crown Prince hands her a strangely glowing hair brush, she finds herself thrust into a strange world where children face unspeakable horrors armed with nothing but small sticks and strange words, all to win a mysterious cup. 

Will she learn to navigate this strange world in time to win the competition and her freedom?

Raim is fifteen. He lives in a world where each promise is sealed with a knot and breaking a promise means a life cast out in the desert.

Artemis Fowl is twelve. He’s a genius, a millionaire, and most importantly, a criminal mastermind.

 Raim has worn a simple knot around his wrist for as long as he can remember. No one knows where it came from, and which promise of his it symbolises, but he barely thinks about it at all—not since becoming the most promising young fighter ever to train for the elite Yun guard. But on the most important day of his life, when he binds his life to his best friend (and future king) Khareh, the string bursts into flames and sears a dark mark into his skin.

Scarred now as an oath-breaker, Raim has two options: run, or be killed. But when one of Artemis’ plots goes a little bit wrong, the two boys meet in the heart of the desert and realise that perhaps they could help each other. 

(This one should be interesting)

It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people’s home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The Mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there. But, as it turns out, Allan is not… Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and makes his getaway.

And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey involving a bunch of angsty warrior children (too angsty, truth told, for a man of Allan’s age), a stolen cup (Allan can’t really understand what the fuss is, the cup doesn’t even contain vodka), some demons (when you’ve lived as long as Allan, nothing is surprising, really) and the strained relationship between a father and his children (Allan never liked his own father much either, so he has the deepest sympathy for the youngings).

(Oh boy. How do I even. This is going to be so dark.)

So, my idea for a mashup for this was to have Liesel read Mia’s story and then decided she wants revenge for all the crap in her life and follows Mia’s example. But I just can’t bring myself to spoil the beautiful story that The Book Thief is, with something like that. It’s just… wrong. Or the alternative would be to have Mia somehow end up in Nazi Germany, meet Liesel and decide that the Nazis need some killing.

But I can’t think of any way to bring Mia into Liesel’s world without a massacre ensuing and stay true to their characters and I can’t bring myself to ruin The Book Thief any more than I have just by thinking what I just thought. So I’m not going to write a synopsis for this.

• Tweet