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Thursday, February 20, 2020

Gouster Girl by David E. Gumpert - Book Tour - Exclusive Excerpt - Giveaway - Enter Daily!


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.

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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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BOOK BUY LINKS:

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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.**

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.

5 comments:

  1. 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! :)

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  2. Sounds amazing.. I love reading about interracial couples..

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  3. Great post and awesome giveaway, thanks for sharing!

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