Blog Tour: Identified: The Maya Price Story - Faith A. Rice-Mills

Identified: The Maya Price Story by Faith A. Rice-Mills
Series: The Maya Price Story series, #1
Publication date: December 3rd 2012
Genre: YA Paranormal/Fantasy

 Maya Price is a typical eighteen-year-old girl without many worries. Her biggest problems include getting ready to leave her hometown for college, figuring out how to avoid her ever-so-strange stepmother and trying to muddle though her feelings for her best friend, Pete. Yet, one of her last nights in her hometown, she and Pete are in a car accident. A stranger pulls Maya from the accident, leaving Pete behind, and takes her out of this world and into another dimension. Maya soon discovers that she has been taken to a dimension called Leets by a group of people that call themselves shifters. Shifters are of mixed human and onyx blood and have various abilities. These shifters are able to travel between dimensions, control the four elements (fire, earth, wind, water) and the five senses (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste). Their leader, Victoria, informs Maya that she, too, is a shifter and that she must choose to join them or risk being sought out by their greatest enemy, a shifter named Leonas. Maya joins Victoria and her ragtag group of rebel shifters at a training camp called Level One. he is teamed up with a group of seven other shifters, including a streetsmart girl named Luz, who is especially adept at controlling fire, her twin sister Espy, and a nervous boy named Lamar, who can manipulate sound better than any other shifter. Together, Maya’s team trains for the battles that will soon be inevitable. However, Maya soon learns that her purpose is not to just move the earth or send water flying into the air. There are rumors of a hidden prophecy and that the prophecy mentions Maya by name. Supposedly, the prophecy says that Maya will one day have to choose a side and will be essential in bringing her chosen ally to power...

Prologue My name is Maya Price. There it is, my name. Two syllables, then one. What does it mean, really? Do those three sounds tell you who I am? What I’ve done? Where I’ve been? My story is not so unlike yours, but in many ways it is. It is a love story, a tragedy, a triumph. It has suspense and mystery. In my story there is life, but there is also death. To understand my story, you have to know me. It’s not that I want you to know me or even that I don’t want to know you. I just need you to understand. Please don’t try to delve into the depths of my psyche and attempt to analyze every action that has led me down this road. Just try to be aware of the factors that brought me here. When I was seven, my parents decided that I needed to see a therapist. I understand. I mean, I wouldn’t talk to anyone except my sister. My therapist’s name was Dr. Thornbird. She wore a black suit, black kitten heels, and had black, short-cropped hair. I shrank away from her as she came to sit next to me on the couch. “Is there anything you would like to talk to me about, Maya?” she asked in a calm, emotionless voice. What is a Thornbird? I thought but did not voice my question out loud. We sat in silence for ten minutes, she scrutinizing my face and I scrutinizing her black pearl earrings. Finally, she stood up and walked to her mahogany desk. From inside its many drawers, she pulled out a black moleskin notebook and a brilliant blue ink pen. She walked back to me and stared resignedly before handing me both. “Why don’t you write it down.” It was a command, not a request. Maybe it was the grown-up looking notebook that convinced me, or maybe the pen, so brilliantly blue and so different from those we used in school, but I did write it down. I slowly took the pen and journal from her and wrote one sentence. I don’t remember anything. I looked back at Dr. Thornbird hesitantly, waiting, and she nodded her approval. From that day, I wrote everything down. There are hundreds of black moleskin notebooks lining the bookshelves in my bedroom. No one has read them. But recent events have called for me to provide a record of what has happened in a new set of notebooks. Explanations need to be made, apologies need to be written, forgiveness requested. I may not make it through this alive. To those of you who belong in both my worlds, this is my request: tell my story. Not so that I will be remembered, but so that you will learn from my journey. Change my name if you must, but advise anyone who will listen. The events that have affected us so profoundly need not reoccur. To you, the one that I love: do not wait for me in the dark corners of your room hoping that I will stretch out my hand and take you with me. I ask you this favor until it is we are finally together. Our time will come, and on that day, when you have finally stopped looking for me over your shoulder, I will come. Until then, I will forever wait for you. To those of you who don’t know me, I am Maya Price. This is my story.

Faith A. Rice-Mills is the author of Identified: The Maya Price Story and a handful of short stories. She moonlights as a Spanish teacher, but has wanted to be a writer since she wrote the poem “The Jackowhipp’s Wail” as an eight-year-old. Her writer’s spirit resides somewhere between Narnia and Mount Doom, but her physical body lives in Texas with her family. Besides writing, she loves reading (and will take recommendations!), yoga, coloring with her daughter, and watching Parks and Recreation with her husband. She dislikes snakes, the word “literally,” and teaching double object pronouns in Spanish. She is currently working on Burdened, the second book in The Maya Price Story series and is writing whatever short story she has to get out of her brain.

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