Hello, lovelies! It gives me great pleasure today to host David
E. Gumpert and his new book, “Gouster Girl”! For other stops on his 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 $25 Garrett Popcorn Gift Card OR a Chicago
Flagged Water Bottle OR a Chicago Flagged Coffee Mug!!! Yep – that’s right!!! There will be THREE lucky
winners!!! Also, come back daily to
interact with David and to increase your chances of winning!
Thanks for stopping
by! Wishing you lots of luck in this
fabulous giveaway!
Gouster Girl
by David E. Gumpert
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GENRE: YA, Young Adult
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BLURB:
Gouster Girl is the coming of age, risky affair between Valerie
Davis a cute black girl from the South Side of Chicago and nerdy white Jeffrey
Stark.
While
the two are somewhat smitten they are late to realize that falling in love on
Chicago’s South Side in 1963 is a highly risky business for an interracial
couple.
Opportunities
arise for both of them to help one another out of tough fixes—he saves her from
attack at an all-white amusement park and she saves him from injury in a racial
brawl at their high school. But as their romance becomes more serious, so do
the racial dangers. White police target Valerie as a prostitute and black gang
members see Jeffrey as trying to sexually exploit a black girl. Seemingly
inevitably, the blossoming romance collides head on with the realities of
Northern-style racism one hot summer afternoon at one of Chicago’s most
beautiful Lake Michigan beaches, when a racial protest turns ugly, confronting
the couple with terrible choices.
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EXCLUSIVE
EXCERPT:
Evie
and I bonded a year or two later, in my first year of high school, at an unlikely
series of events put on by the local YMCA on 71st Street. It had the strange
name of “Fortnightly”—apparently because the gathering of girls and boys for a
couple hours occurred every other Saturday afternoon late one winter.
Somehow
the Y convinced dozens of parents in our neighborhood that it was important to
pay some money to have a competent adult teach their kids good manners with the
opposite sex. It was nothing a group of self-conscious young teens would ever
have agreed to independently, but in a big room one Saturday afternoon in early
March, about sixty boys and girls—all white, the boys with their hair combed
and wearing dress shirts and slacks, the girls in white blouses, dark skirts,
and shiny black patent leather shoes—gathered together, subdued and shifting
awkwardly.
The
woman in charge, Miss Vickers, was a slender kindly looking, high-energy woman
with closely cropped black hair who clearly knew what she was doing. She was
about my mother’s age, firm, yet good humored. “I know, some of you aren’t glad
to be here,” she said in a gentle way, letting her words hang there a few
moments as everyone relaxed slightly.
I
had come with Nate, and was immediately relieved to see a number of other kids
I knew from the neighborhood. Miss Vickers instructed the boys on how to
politely ask girls to dance—“May I have this dance?” She limited our choices
and the awkwardness that would result by instructing each boy to ask the first
girl to his right to dance.
That
girl for me was Evie. It was a relief for both of us that we recognized each
other from Sunday school, even if we had said barely a dozen words to each
other over the several years we were together each Sunday.
Miss
Vickers then instructed us in the box step—“Boys, you want to lead your
partner, with your movement and with your hand around her waist, and be careful
not to step on her toes. Girls, follow along with how your partner is leading.”
Then,
“Boys, escort the girl back to where you made your dance request and thank her
for dancing with you.”
Evie
wasn’t especially pretty, with short brown curly hair that had an oily unkempt
look, and a nose a little too large for her pasty-skin face. She also had a
mild case of acne and was a little chunky. But she also had large blossoming breasts
pushing against her blouse and she was immediately friendly. “Did your parents
make you come to this?” she asked when we began doing the box step.
I
nodded my head and put on my pained-look face.
“Yeah,
mine, too,” she allowed. Feeling her boobs as we bumped each other awkwardly
doing the box step definitely helped keep me focused on the dancing. Or, let’s
put it this way, it replaced one source of painful embarrassment with another
more pleasant source.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AUTHOR BIO:
David E. Gumpert grew
up on the South Side of Chicago, in South Shore and Hyde Park. In the years
since graduating from the University of Chicago, he has attended Columbia
Journalism School and worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and an
editor for the Harvard Business Review and Inc. magazine. He has also authored
ten nonfiction books on a variety of subjects—from entrepreneurship and small
business management to food politics. His most prominent titles include How to
Really Create a Successful Business Plan (from Inc. Publishing); How to Really
Start Your Own Business (Inc. Publishing); Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of
Food Rights (Chelsea Green Publishing), and The Raw Milk Answer Book (Lauson
Publishing).
He
spent ten years in the 1990s and early 2000s researching his family's history
during the Holocaust. The result was a book co-authored with his deceased aunt
Inge Belier: Inge: A Girl’s Journey Through Nazi Europe (Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing).
He
spent much of the last half-dozen years going back to his own roots in Chicago
to research and write the historical novel, Gouster Girl. While some of it
stems from his own experiences growing up in South Shore and Hyde Park, he also
conducted significant additional research to complete the book in late 2019.
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CONNECT WITH DAVID:
Website:
Website:
Blog:
Blog:
Newsletter:
Twitter:
LinkedIn:
BookBub Book 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:
Apple iBook Ebook:
The Book Depository Paperback:
BAM! Books-A-Million Paperback:
Indigo CA eBook:
Scribd eBook:
Books2Read eBooks/Paperbacks:
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GIVEAWAY INFO:
David will be awarding a $25 gift card to
Garrett Popcorn, then a Water bottle with Chicago flag for a second winner, and
a Mug with Chicago flag for a third winner, all randomly drawn 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.**
David ~ 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!
ReplyDeleteSounds amazing.. I love reading about interracial couples..
ReplyDeleteGreat post and awesome giveaway, thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great opportunity
ReplyDelete