Hello, lovelies! It gives me great pleasure today to host Christine
Potter and her new book, “Gracie’s Time”! For other stops on her Goddess Fish
Promotions Book Tour, please click on the banner above or any of the images in
this post.
Be sure to make it to the end
of this post to enter to win a $30 Amazon or Barnes and Noble Gift Card!!! Also, come back daily to interact with Christine
and to increase your chances of winning!
Thanks for stopping by! Wishing you lots of luck in this fabulous
giveaway!
Gracie's Time
by Christine Potter
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GENRE: Young Adult Paranormal Romance (Time Travel)
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BLURB:
October, 1962
It's
almost Halloween, but something a lot scarier than ghosts is on everyone's
mind: nuclear war. After President Kennedy's speech to the nation about the
Cuban Missile Crisis, Grace Ingraham overhears her parents' plans to keep her
safe. She'll be sent off to live with a wealthy uncle—in the nineteenth
century.
Gracie's
from a family of Travelers, people who can escape into time. Too bad her mom
and dad haven't Traveled since their honeymoon trip to the Lincoln
Inauguration. So Grace will have to go alone—even though taking a wrong turn
can have serious consequences: like heading for 1890, and ending up …in 2018.
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EXCERPT TWO:
“Dylan,
this is Gracie Ingraham,” said Claire. “She’s going to be staying with us.”
“Hi,”
I said. Dylan smiled a huge smile, a really fine-looking smile. Maybe it was
strange to be noticing that just then, but some people have great smiles, and
he’s one of them. Dylan has a smile that makes you smile, too. He put down his
cocoa and stuck out his hand. I shook it.
“Hey!”
he said. “Dylan Musser. You going to school here and all?”
Most
guys I knew were kind of weird around girls. They got embarrassed. Or worse,
put on some kind of embarrassing he-man act. This was a nice change. Then I
wondered what high school might be in 2018. I couldn’t even imagine it.
Probably really hard. Something else to worry about!
Claire
jumped in. “Eventually. She just arrived. We’re giving her a few days to settle
in.”
Maggie
cruised his ankles, too. “Maggie-cat!” he said, “Good kitty!” He stroked her
back and she turned her turquoise-blue eyes on him.
I
tried not to stare at Dylan. Guys look much better with a little hair, I
decided. His was in a crazy red halo around his head. He wore jeans like
Claire’s and Father Higbee’s, and a black hooded sweatshirt with funny little
holes in both cuffs he could poke his thumbs through. He kept playing with
them—thumbs in, thumbs out.
No
one said anything for a second.
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GUEST POST:
Fierce Heroines!
I'm a
feminist from way back. My dad, possibly
disappointed that I came out a girl, taught me the stuff he would have taught a
son: how to develop film in a darkroom, how to use a light meter and a camera
you had to focus by hand and set the exposure on. It was the sixties when I was little, and I
didn't know any other little girls who did that. I ran around with a tripod and a flash gun
when I was nine.
So I
guess the thought that there were guy things and girl things seemed weird to me
from the get-go. I mean, what did my
being a girl have to do with anything around cameras? But I didn't end up a photographer. I ended up a writer of poetry and young adult
fiction.
A lot
has changed since I was a kid. Now girls
have "permission" (I put it in quotes because they shouldn't NEED
permission) to do what they want.
Supposedly, anyway. But when I
look at who makes the decisions in the world, it's still mostly men. And you know what? They could have made a lot of better
decisions! I want to write female
characters who will make my young readers stand up and be the lionesses they
truly are.
My
two major female characters in Gracie's Time are tough young women. Gracie Ingraham is a time traveler who got
lost trying to escape the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Her parents, fearful that there was going to be a nuclear war, panic,
and try to send her into the safe past—the 1890s. She learns that acting out of fear, even fear
born of love, never leads to anything good.
They
say there are planners and pants-ers in plotting novels, and I'm totally a
pants-er. I let my characters tell me
what happens next. Over the course of Gracie's
Time, I watched as Gracie went from a frightened high school kid to a tough
young woman. Because she started out in
1962, she'd been raised by parents who didn't have her tethered by a cell
phone. In 2018, where she unexpectedly lands, she is taken in by a couple who
try very hard not to helicopter over her—and often fail. Having faced down the terror of nuclear war
at the beginning of the book, Gracie must come to terms with a terrible new
fear of young people: getting gunned down in their classrooms. I like the way she stands up to the
challenge.
Gracie's
best friend Zoe, like Gracie, is a nerd—a kid who loves weather forecasting,
upcycling clothes, and vinyl LP's. She's
a non-conformist afraid of the mean girls (and mean kids in general) in the
beginning of the story, but being best friends with Gracie and learning about
time travel slowly but surely teaches her how to roar.
Partners
for my girl characters need to be solid, smart young men—but they can't be too
perfect to be believed. I refuse to
allow them to rescue my heroines—or to simply invert a tired trope and have the
girls rescue the boys. I don't want to
spoil the romance part of this book by saying more than that here, but I've got
both good and terrible men in this book—and some men who could simply be better
and braver. No knights in shining armor.
I
hope you'll give Gracie's Time a look.
The young girl who read the first issue of Ms. Magazine cover to
cover (that would be me) thanks you!
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AUTHOR BIO:
Christine Potter lives
in a very old, haunted house, not far from Sleepy Hollow. She’s the author of the time-traveling Bean
Books series, on Evernight Teen: Time Runs Away With Her, In Her Own Time, What
Time Is It There? and Gracie’s Time.
She’s also a poet, with several books in print (the most recent is
called Unforgetting). Christine loves all kinds of music, DJ’s, and plays
dulcimer and guitar.
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CONNECT WITH CHRISTINE:
Blog:
Email:
chrispygal@gmail.com
Facebook – Personal Page:
Facebook – Beans Books Page:
BookBub Author Page:
Goodreads Author Page:
Goodreads Book Page:
Amazon Author Page:
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BOOK BUY LINKS:
Amazon Kindle eBook:
Amazon Paperback:
Barnes and Noble NOOK eBook:
Barnes and Noble Paperback:
Kobo eBook:
The Book Depository Paperback:
BAM! Books-A-Million Paperback:
Evernight Teen eBook:
Smashwords eBook:
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GIVEAWAY INFO:
Christine will be awarding a $30 Amazon or B/N
GC to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.
**This post contains affiliate links and if clicked and a
purchase is made, I may receive a small commission to help support this
blog. This does not cost you anything,
it just helps pay for all those awesome giveaways on here.**
This contest is sponsored
by a third party. Fabulous and Brunette is a registered host of Goddess Fish
Promotions. Prizes are given away by the
sponsors and not Fabulous and Brunette. The featured author and Goddess Fish
Promotions are solely responsible for the giveaway prize.
Christine ~ Good morning! Welcome to FAB! It is so great to have you here! Congrats on your new book and good luck on the book tour! :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for hosting!
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your book with us and for the giveaway as well. I appreciate them both.
ReplyDeleteHow long after you finish a book, do you start your next book?
ReplyDeleteGreat cover.
ReplyDeleteHi, everyone! Good to meet you Bridgett! Hey, Bernie & James! Thanks, Ally, for having me here today and giving me space to express my thoughts about feminist heroines in young folks' literature.
ReplyDeleteBernie, I'm usually working on a couple of things at once because I bounce back and forth between poetry and fiction. I have a grownup book underway (I use a pen name for those) now, and I'll probably start another Gracie/Bean in the New Year.
Bridgett, we are blessed at ET to have a FABULOUS illustrator named Jay Aheer without whom we would be lost. Since my books are a bit retro--time travel, you know--I told her I wanted the covers to look hand-drawn, 70s ish. And just LOOK at that!
I liked the excerpt, thank you.
ReplyDeleteI like the cover
ReplyDeleteGreat excerpt, sounds like a book I'll enjoy reading :)
ReplyDeleteGreetings, Rita, Gwen, and Victoria! I'd LOVE to hear what you thought of the book (said the review-hungry author). I had such fun writing this one!
ReplyDeleteGreat excerpt
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing sounds good!
ReplyDeleteDo you have a favourite character that you have written? If so, who? And what makes them so special.
ReplyDelete