Hi guys! I'm so excited to share the blog tour for Small Town Hearts by Lillie Vale with you all today! It's a new YA Contemporary Romance. Keep reading for my interview with the author and a giveaway! And check out the tour schedule for the other tour stops.
by Lillie Vale
Publisher: Swoon Reads
Publication date: March 19, 2019
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Synopsis:
Rule #1 - Never fall for a summer boy.
Fresh out of high school, Babe Vogel should be thrilled to have the whole summer at her fingertips. She loves living in her lighthouse home in the sleepy Maine beach town of Oar’s Rest and being a barista at the Busy Bean, but she’s totally freaking out about how her life will change when her two best friends go to college in the fall. And when a reckless kiss causes all three of them to break up, she may lose them a lot sooner. On top of that, her ex-girlfriend is back in town, bringing with her a slew of memories, both good and bad.
And then there’s Levi Keller, the cute artist who’s spending all his free time at the coffee shop where she works. Levi’s from out of town, and even though Babe knows better than to fall for a tourist who will leave when summer ends, she can’t stop herself from wanting to know him. Can Babe keep her distance, or will she break the one rule she’s always had - to never fall for a summer boy?
Book link:
Could you describe yourself with five words or less?
Hi, Moa! Thanks for hosting me on your blog. So excited to talk about Small Town Hearts with you today!
Me in five words…hmm…
Ambitious. Imaginative. Author. Hedgewitch. Mythology/history.
Could you introduce us to the main character of Small Town Hearts?
Small Town Heart’s protagonist is 19-year-old bi babe Babe Vogel, a Maine native who lives in the sleepy coastal village of Oar’s Rest (in a freaking lighthouse!!! How cool is that?!) and works as a long-time barista at the Busy Bean, her neighborhood coffee shop. She’s pretty averse to change, mostly because it always brings emotional (and geographic!) upheavals to the content life of work and play that she loves. Her mom began working as a hostess on a cruise ship after Babe turned 18 (during her senior year of high school), even resettling in the nearby Bar Harbor with a roommate to be closer to her work. We meet Babe around a year after her secret girlfriend, Elodie (who isn’t out yet), dumped her to go to art school in California. Which, if you’ve looked at a map lately, is just about as far from Maine as you can get!
So she’s super super super not okay about her two lifelong best friends, Chad and Penny, breaking up right at the start of what she hoped would be their perfect summer—maybe the last one they’ll have. See, her BFFs are starting college in the fall, and she’s not, because she loves her job at Busy’s and is content to stay right where she is. Her co-dependency and fear of abandonment causes her to try holding on super tight during a transitional “growing up” time when she needs to learn how to let go. Right when she's dealing with the fallout of a reckless kiss that results in a messy BFF breakup, her ex Elodie returns home at the same time as Babe’s interest is piqued by the new summer boy, Levi, who’s in Oar’s Rest and renting her mom’s house on an art scholarship.
Babe’s entire summer, her perfect summer, is turned on its head, and she feels like a girl overboard. All of us can relate to being disappointed, to being devastated by all the things and all the people who we thought we were safe with. We, like Babe, have to learn to pick up the pieces, rebuild, grow up, and maybe, just maybe, chart a new future for ourselves that might look unlike anything we’d previously imagined. Not every end is The End, and not every beginning looks the way we think it should. It’s like “Closing Time” by Green Day: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”. <— this lyric says it best.
I love Babe sfm and I hope you will, too!
What's your favorite quote?
“The cardinal rule of every beach town is that locals do not get involved with tourists.”
So, uh, *spoiler alert* this is a rule that most certainly gets broken in Small Town Hearts…
They say don't judge a book by its cover, but we can probably all admit to have at some point judged a book by its cover... How important is the cover for you as an author?
Pretty much the moment my book sold, I was eager for cover art. I have experience in graphic design and marketing, so I was dreaming up so many possible covers! It was just a waiting game to see what I’d wind up with, as my publisher often selects covers based on a popular choice vote.
What was the hardest thing about writing Small Town Hearts?
Babe’s BFF Penny was an unlikeable character who I know a lot of readers despised, but I loved writing her scenes and her dialogue. She wasn’t really the book’s antagonist, but she was a source of conflict for Babe. The internal conflict was Babe’s love and co-dependency battling with guilt, while the external conflict was Penny’s anger at what she perceived as Babe’s betrayal in kissing their mutual BFF Chad only minutes after he and Penny had broken up. It was a balancing act to make sure Penny had the page time to be rightfully angry, while at the same time not villainizing her to the point that we couldn’t sympathize with her hurt feelings.
What advice would you give to aspiring authors?
Every book, every writer, every process goes its own pace. Keep your eyes on your own journey, keep writing, and don’t get too impatient for all the milestones you haven’t reached yet. You’ll get there.
No comments:
Post a Comment