Our guest today: Jessica Park
Why we love her: She's freakin' fierce-kicking ass and taking names. Not to mention the fact that she's funny as hell.
Her latest: Flat Out Love
The scoop: Something is seriously off in the Watkins home. And Julie Seagle, college freshman, small-town Ohio transplant, and the newest resident of this Boston house, is determined to get to the bottom of it. When Julie's off-campus housing falls through, her mother's old college roommate, Erin Watkins, invites her to move in. The parents, Erin and Roger, are welcoming, but emotionally distant and academically driven to eccentric extremes. The middle child, Matt, is an MIT tech geek with a sweet side ... and the social skills of a spool of USB cable. The youngest, Celeste, is a frighteningly bright but freakishly fastidious 13-year-old who hauls around a life-sized cardboard cutout of her oldest brother almost everywhere she goes.
And there's that oldest brother, Finn: funny, gorgeous, smart, sensitive, almost emotionally available. Geographically? Definitely unavailable. That's because Finn is traveling the world and surfacing only for random Facebook chats, e-mails, and status updates. Before long, through late-night exchanges of disembodied text, he begins to stir something tender and silly and maybe even a little bit sexy in Julie's suddenly lonesome soul.
To Julie, the emotionally scrambled members of the Watkins family add up to something that ... well ... doesn't quite add up. Not until she forces a buried secret to the surface, eliciting a dramatic confrontation that threatens to tear the fragile Watkins family apart, does she get her answer.
Our thoughts: Another great YA novel that adults will love too! Pick it up today!
Giveaway: FIVE Smashwords e-copies! Just leave a comment here and you'll be entered to win-we'll choose the winners after 6pm EST on Sunday July 29th.
Fun fact: Flat out Love hit the NYT ebook bestseller list recently after Jessica was featured on Amazon. A true inspiration to all self-pubbers!
Where to read more about Jessica: her website, Facebook and Twitter.
CHICK LIT IS NOT DEAD PRESENTS...JESSICA PARK'S 5 THINGS I'D TELL THE TEEN ME
1. All those boys who seem so hot and desirable in high school are not the boys you should be crushing on. The super popular, gorgeous, girls-hanging-all-over-them guys who are not paying attention to you? This is their heyday. Screw ‘em. Don’t waste your time getting caught up in hype. Ignore what the media tells you is boyfriend material because you are probably missing out on some pretty spectacular guys.
2. Along those same lines, stop worrying about what you look like. Enough with the self-loathing because you don’t have a 95 lb. body, huge boobs, and a perfect ass. You are beautiful just as you are. If your classmates don’t see that, brush it off. Wait until you get out of high school and you can create an amazing world for yourself. You have no control over who you are stuck with in math class, but high school is only high school. There are beautiful people who will come into your life.
3. Friendships can last forever. Friendships can also die a horrible death. It happens. You might screw up and get dumped by your bestie. If a friend isn’t willing to work something out with you, you don’t need that friend.
OR, maybe there is someone in your life who is simply exhausting and awful. You have the right to weed people out of your life. We put so much pressure on ourselves to stay loyal to friends no matter what, and there’s no reason for that. Sometimes it’s healthier to let people go.
Friends and relationships come in and out of our lives. It’s okay. That’s just how the world works. When we lose one connection, another takes its place. So mourn and be sad, but don’t drown in it.
4. Don’t be a slave to fashion trends. You will be severely traumatized later in life when you look at photographs of yourself in which you’re wearing a v-neck Gap sweater BACKWARDS with pegged acid-washed jeans and giant socks under your high-top sneakers. Seriously. You knew that you looked stupid and you did it anyway.
Wear what you want, not what you’re told to want. But don’t forget that you’ll have to look at yourself twenty years later.
5. You will fall in love, you will get your heart splintered into hideous little shards. It will hurt like all hell.
Most importantly, you will recover. It doesn’t feel like it in the moment, but there will come a day when you want to do something other than eat vats of ice cream and sob on the floor of the bathtub. I promise you. Don’t let the heartache stop you from falling in love again.
Thanks Jessica! xoxo, L&L