To Stephanie, Andrew Simmons seemed like the perfect man. He was smart, handsome, kind, and athletic. And best of all, he was interested in her. As their romance begins to blossom, the truth about Andrew’s past comes to light. A misguided choice made many years before, hung over him.
When they start a family together, Andrew tries to move on from the past and enjoy his family life, but the past still haunts him.
As Andrew and Stephanie build a stable and happy home life together, they long for the day they can stop looking over their shoulders. With resilience and perseverance, can they overcome the dark cloud together?
About the Author
When author Shawna James is not instructing at university or writing in her favorite coffee shop, Shawna spends most of her time reading, hiking, traveling abroad, and catching her favorite football games on Sunday afternoons.
Rose is a mom of 5 and influencer that grew from 1000 followers to 50k in
less than a year all by hashtags
About the Author
Rose Campbell is a mother's advocate, business owner, and Doula turned
well-recognized lifestyle and motherhood blogger, and the reigning Mrs. The
Woodlands - 2021. She currently co-stars in Stork's Nursery, a YouTube
reality nursery design show where she uses her skills and experience to
design and build the nursery of every family's dreams! She has been
influential across the nation, championing mothers in areas of extreme
importance such as postpartum depression, childhood-mortality, and
partnering with nonprofits and organizations to impact lasting change and
support parents where they need it most. Rose's Reach on social media is
100k.
Publisher : 47North (June 1, 2021) Language : English Hardcover : 352 pages ISBN-10 : 1542027810 ISBN-13 : 978-1542027816
Praise for BACCHANAL
“Henry skillfully layers historical realism with fantastic elements to explore the way times of desperation test the ethics of oppressed communities. Henry is a writer to watch.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Henry’s debut draws on a rich history of folklore from various African traditions, as well as African history and Black American history, and almost the entire main cast is Black. The carnival setting works perfectly for bringing together various strange and magical people who aren’t at home anywhere else…Come one, come all, this magical carnival has all the delightful dangers a reader could wish for.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“[Bacchanal is] gorgeous while somehow never losing sight of the need to unsettle. It captures a sense of wonder and reminds you that too much curiosity can lead to danger. And most importantly, it’s Black and never lets you forget it. If you want endearing characters, a charming setting, and characters that refuse to bend to the world’s injustices then Bacchanal is the book for you.” ―FIYAH Magazine
“Writer Veronica Henry pulls on a mix of African folklore, Black histories, and carnival culture to weave a story of mesmerizing, bizarre, and dangerous magic. With a heroine of unique powers and a cast as colorful as any sideshow, this story offers up its share of delights, adventure, and frights! Welcome to Bacchanal. Enjoy the sights. Hope you make it out alive!” ―P. DjΓ¨lΓ Clark, author of Ring Shout, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, and The Black God’s Drums
“Readers won’t want their travels with the seductive and dangerous Bacchanal Carnival to end. Veronica Henry’s debut impeccably conjures the 1930s and marks the bold entrance of a vital new voice in modern fantasy.” ―Gwenda Bond, New York Times bestselling author of Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds
“If you took The Night Circus and viewed it through the gaze of a young Black woman in the Great Depression, you might get Veronica Henry’s Bacchanal. Demons, lies, and secrets.” ―Mary Robinette Kowal, Hugo award-winning author of The Calculating Stars
Evil lives in a traveling carnival roaming the Depression-era South. But the carnival’s newest act, a peculiar young woman with latent magical powers, may hold the key to defeating it. Her time has come.
Abandoned by her family, alone on the wrong side of the color line with little to call her own, Eliza Meeks is coming to terms with what she does have. It’s a gift for communicating with animals. To some, she’s a magical tender. To others, a she-devil. To a talent prospector, she’s a crowd-drawing oddity. And the Bacchanal Carnival is Eliza’s ticket out of the swamp trap of Baton Rouge.
Among fortune-tellers, carnies, barkers, and folks even stranger than herself, Eliza finds a new home. But the Bacchanal is no ordinary carnival. An ancient demon has a home there too. She hides behind an iridescent disguise. She feeds on innocent souls. And she’s met her match in Eliza, who’s only beginning to understand the purpose of her own burgeoning powers.
Only then can Eliza save her friends, find her family, and fight the sway of a primordial demon preying upon the human world. Rolling across a consuming dust bowl landscape, Eliza may have found her destiny.
You can purchaseBacchanal at the following Retailers:
Photo Content from Veronica G. Henry
Veronica G. Henry was born in Brooklyn, New York, and has been a bit of a rolling stone ever since. Her work has appeared in various online publications. She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise Workshop and a member of SFWA.
Veronica is proud to be of Sierra Leonean ancestry and counts her trip home as the most important of her life. She now writes from North Carolina, where she eschews rollerballs for fountain pens and fine paper. Other untreated addictions include chocolate and cupcakes.
Veronica's debut novel, Bacchanal, will be published in the Spring of 2021.
A Night Twice as Long Andrew Simonet Published by: Farrar Straus and Giroux (BYR) Publication date: June 1st 2021 Genres: Contemporary, Young Adult
What do you call the difference between what you should feel and what you do feel? Life?
The blackout has been going on for three weeks. But Alex feels like she’s been living in the dark for a year, ever since her brother, who has autism, was removed from the house, something Alex blames herself for. So when her best friend, Anthony, asks her to trek to another town to figure out the truth about the blackout, Alex says yes.
On a journey that ultimately takes all day and night, Alex’s relationships with Anthony, her brother, and herself will transform in ways that change them all forever.
In this honest and gripping young adult novel, Andrew Simonet spins a propulsive tale about what it means to turn on the lights and look at what’s real.
“What’s that scar?” is Anthony’s second question this morning, after: “Do that yourself?”
“Kid threw a rock at me.”
I’m on Anthony’s unpainted porch, watching him feed the puppies. I thought we’d have a big moment of “Hey! You’re coming,” but, of course, Anthony assumed I was coming. No high fives for my bravery or for disobeying my mom.
“Damn. When?” He pulls a squirmy fur ball out of the pile and drops it by a separate bowl.
“Second-grade recess,” I say. There’s an inch of pink scar tissue above my hairline, a wound no one’s seen. I’ve never seen it till today.
“Bit late for stitches then.”
I lean on the splintery railing. I’m wearing my blue hoodie with the fuzzy lining, my green army shorts, my backpack, and my mom’s old hiking shoes. Ready for a trek. “How do I look?”
Anthony matters. His opinion matters.
He scans me up and down. I scan him back. The inner cavity of his ear shines like it’s wet.
“Like a cocky twelve-year-old boy,” he says. Nice. Is there a word for this, for what Anthony and I are to each
other? I was eleven when I met him. We were elementary school kids, little guys. Then he turned into a young man whose T-shirts hang on muscular shoulders. A young man whose deadpan sar- casm flips into a twinkly grin when I crack the right joke. And I turned into a young woman who finds all of that appealing. But our friendship was formed from simpler things. Board games, bikes, homework, hot chocolate.
It’s fine.
If you have one person in your life, you can’t kiss him. Cause who would you tell about it?
“Make sure Pepper eats.” His grandma—so young, could she really be?—steps outside. Her pale belly parts her tight shirt and pants, dark wiry hairs trailing down from her navel. “And take that bag when you go, see if you can find kibbles. Hell of a time to have puppies, huh?” She looks at me now, no hello, just inserts me into the conversation.
Tiny crunching noises from the dogs. The buzz of a green fly orbiting their butts.
“How they doin?” I say.
“Fine. What do they know? Soon as the lights come back, I’ll get good money for em. Feeding them’sgonna kill us, though. It’s like having two families.”
We talk about “the lights coming back” as if that’s what we’re missing. Lights are the least of it. We could live without lights, do stuff in the daytime, build fires at night. We lost our story. We lost our agreement. Or the illusion of agreement.
“Is that Alex?” Anthony’s little sister, May, peeks through the screen, tongue poking out of her Kool-Aid-smeared mouth.
Anthony calls his home “diverse.” His grandma looks white, paler than me, May looks pretty black, and Anthony looks, well, like Anthony. Tight curly hair, bronze skin, dark-green eyes. He has a black mom and a white dad, and he gets endless questions from people of all races. What are you? What’s your background? Before moving to Little Falls, Anthony lived in what he calls a “regular black neighborhood.” And while our little town has a lot more black people than most towns around here, the trio of Anthony, May, and Gram can still confuse people. One lady thought May was Anthony’s daughter.
“Yes, May, she got herself a haircut, now go finish your breakfast.” His grandma doesn’t ask about my hair, immediatelyaccepts it, relays it as fact. She never judges, never pins assump- tions on you. That must be where Anthony gets it.
Through the screen door, I see the couch covered with a plaid sheet where Anthony and I used to watch the shows I couldn’t see at home. Georgie fixates on TV, so it’s strictly rationed at our house. Was.
“If you do talk to your mom, Anthony, tell her we miss her and we’re doing fine. Don’t get her worrying.” His grandma sighs. “I don’t know, what do you think, Alex?”
“About what?”
“Talking to someone halfway across the world. Think it’s real?”
“I’m hopeful,” I say.
Since when am I the optimistic can-do person? Since I saw that fear in Anthony’s eyes.
“Anything else?” Anthony says, folding the dog food bag into his backpack.
His grandma shakes her head. “News.” What everybody wants. There’s endless “news,” explanations of what happened and
what’s coming, everybody filling the void with paranoia and wishes. The less people know, the more they proclaim. The thirst for a story line, any story line, turns opinions into rumors and rumors into facts. The strangest explanation is more comforting than no explanation.
Not for me. I don’t want news. I don’t want a Story. I step off the porch, smell the moist ground warming in the
May sun. I want to stay wide open.
Author Bio:
Andrew Simonet is a choreographer and writer in Philadelphia. His first novel, Wilder, published in 2018. He co-directed Headlong Dance Theater for twenty years and founded Artists U, an incubator for helping artists make sustainable lives. He lives in West Philadelphia with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two sons, Jesse Tiger and Nico Wolf.
I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the IN THE
SHADOWS OF THE CITIES by Laurel Solorzano Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post
and make sure to enter the giveaway!
Scarlett
would never kill her best friend, perhaps a Citizen if the situation called for
it, but never Rhys. There are quite a few rules in the training center, but a
few are the kind that are never broken.
1. Greens are not sent into Cities without officially being promoted to Blue.
2. Blues don’t kill each other.
So why is Scarlett being sent into a City without the proper training? And why
does a bizarre, elderly male say Scarlett will kill Rhys? In the Shadow of the
Cities details Scarlett’s life in the training center before she is pulled
unexpectedly into City life. Without the proper training, she is confused about
these things called “families” and why the Citizens aren’t grateful that she is
keeping them safe.
In this dystopian novel, In the Shadow of the Cities, the story is told not
from a Citizen’s point of view but from a Guard’s. Why do the guards seem to
tirelessly obey the government? How can they gun down Citizens mercilessly?
Find out as you follow Scarlett on her journey into the Cities.
Book
Trailer:
Chapter 1
Scarlett stared out the window of her history class.
The Blue droned on at the front of the room, but Scarlett hated the story ofthe Government, not that she would dare say as much aloud. Blah, blah, blah. Citizens couldn’t be trusted to share. Blah, blah, blah. They had been organized according to abilities and were allowed to live their best lives as long as they followed the rules. Blah, blah, blah.
Scarlett had never seen one of these Citizens, but she had been shown many pictures. They looked just like her, except for the fact they weren’t as intelligent. But that wasn’t always something you could see.
Scarlett shifted to a more comfortable position in her chair and dared a glance over her shoulder at Jaylin. Jaylin was staring intently at the Blue as though they hadn’t been told this same story before, as though she might absorb some detail that she had missed during another account.
Scarlett sighed softly as her mind turned to what she would do when she was finished with her classes for the day. She had exactly two hours of free time before dinner. Free time was the only chance she would have to see Rhys because males and females weren’t often allowed to mingle.
A piece of paper landed on her desk, and Scarlett’s eyes flew up. The Blue was already moving on to the next desk. A quiz? On what? They hadn’t learned anythingew. Scarlett waited for the signal to turn her paper over and quickly scanned the questions. Then, rolling her eyes at the quick bout of anxiety, she raced through the quiz, circling the correct answers.
All of her other classes moved on to new material after a week or two. But his- tory class—it was always the same. At least she was guaranteed a good grade. What Scarlett couldn’t wait for was the “Life in the Cities” class. But she wouldn’t be able to take that one until she was a Blue, and who knew when that would be. She had been a Green for three years, but she could continue to be a Green for an- other five if she wasn’t able to meet the right goals. She could potentially remain a Green forever, but she knew that wasn’t a real possibility, not with her dedication to thetraining.
A grating beep signaled the end of class, and Scarlett placed her book carefully into her satchel. Everyone remained silent until they exited the classroom, thenJaylin grabbed Scarlett’s arm.
“Female! You have got to come with me. Miya and I are planning on partic- ipating in the Optional Fitness Program, and you have to join us.”
Scarlett nodded, trying to match Jaylin’s enthusiasm for the program. Scarlett enjoyed working out, and she often spent time exercising during her free hours. But there was something about having another program in lieu of choosing her own exercises that made Scarlett wary of joining.
“Thanks, Jaylin, but Rhys and I are going to practice in the shooting range today.”
“You can practice tomorrow. The program is only four days a week.”
Scarlett and Jaylin were old friends. They had been promoted to Green on the same day and had nervously learned to navigate the new waters together. Scarlett knew her friend wouldn’t be hurt if she turned her down.
“I think I need more aim training than ab training,” Scarlett said. They had reached the end of the hall. “I’ll see you at dinner time.”
Jaylin shrugged, making a pouty face that Scarlett knew was exaggerated. “Fine, female, abandon me then. Miya and I will talk bad about you behind your back.”
Scarlett laughed. “Just don’t wear out your lips from using them too much.”
Scarlett hurried toward the front door, which led to the gate that separated the males’ and females’ training centers. There was only one way to pass from one to the other, and you had to be approved by the Blue guarding it. It was a fair process. Scarlett had never been denied entry.
She stepped up to the guard and presented her badge to be scanned. The guard nodded as the time flashed up on the board along with Scarlett’s information. She entered the males’ training compound, heading around the building rather than through it. Scarlett found most males maintained a horrendous odor, and it wasbest to avoid them in concentrated numbers when possible.
Scarlett entered the males’ shooting range, scanning the pods for the familiar dark curls. Pod 3. The pod where they had met.
Scarlett checked out a longer rifle and headed toward the pod, adjusting her safety gear. She waited for Rhys to lower his pistol and bob his head slightly to let her know he knew she was waiting to enter.
Carefully, Scarlett slipped the sound-proof glass door open then closed. She stood beside Rhys, taking her position on the other shooter’s mark. Rhys didn’t hogwash her with boring questions of how her classes were. He already knew. He took the same classes, just in the males’ training center.
“Five shots?” Rhys asked instead.
Scarlett raised her rifle. “I don’t have my gun of choice. I thought I would go with something I hadn’t practiced with for a while.”
“All the better,” Rhys responded, aiming and firing five shots in quick succes- sion. Four hit the middle of the target. The other one missed by two centimeters.
“Why? Because you’re assured of a win? Is that why you want to compete? Be- cause you can’t normally provide a challenge for me?”
Rhys smiled as he waited for her to take her turn. Scarlett hesitated, but she wasn’t one to back down from a challenge. She turned toward the target and took her time aiming, the bulky weapon unfamiliar in her grip. Finally, she took her shots, pausing between each one.
“Two,” Rhys declared bluntly.
“Yes, two. Thank you. My eyes are working very well.”
Rhys laughed a little as he lifted his safety goggles and propped them on the top of his head. “Hey, I couldn’t be sure after those shots. Besides, you agreed to it. I didn’t force you into anything.”
“Sure,” Scarlett said, copying his move with the goggles. “The ‘peer pressure’ came on pretty strong.” Scarlett looked toward the booth where she had checked out the rifle, wondering what had made her grab it. She hated being beaten.
Rhys laughed and turned toward the target once more. They had various competitions and “trick shots” they could try, but Scarlett had something else on her mind. She gazed through the pod toward the east. She couldn’t see the Mound from here. The dorm’s tall frame was too close, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t on her mind.
“Your turn,” Rhys responded impatiently.
Scarlett shook her head “I have a better idea,” she said, even as her stomach twisted into knots. “I’m ready to get over my fear.”
“Of heights?” Rhys knew her well. He followed her gaze, then laughed, rubbing his coffee-colored hands together in enjoyment. “What are you going to do? Scalethe dorm?”
Scarlett laughed. “Uh . . . no.”
“Then what? There’s nothing else taller than that, so if you don’t scale the dorm building, then you’re letting me down.”
“There’s the Mound,” Scarlett said, referring to the large thing that lurked just outside the fence, just outside the area they were allowed to go. No one quite knew what it was made of, but it looked possible to scale.
Rhys gave her an incredulous look. “You’re not serious. When?”
Scarlett shrugged, the nervousness making her feel weak. She turned to the tar- get and took a few shots to calm her nerves. They were near the bullseye, close enough with the unfamiliar weapon that she felt assured again.
“Tonight.”
“After lights out?”
Scarlett nodded. “Yes. The only question is . . . are you coming with me?”
Rhys cocked an eyebrow. “I never miss out on an adventure, but . . . I also don’t break the rules. The rules are there for a reason.”
The corner of Scarlett’s mouth curved up just a bit. “What rule would we be breaking?”
Rhys shook his head. “I don’t know. How about never leaving the training cen- ter walls? Or the one about staying in bed between lights out and morning wake up? Do you want me to go on?”
Scarlett sighed. “Those are Level 1 infractions; it’s not like you’ve never broken the rules before.”
“Yeah, but two Level 1 infractions?” Rhys sighed and inspected the pistol care- fully. “I’ll do it. I mean, for you. But I know I’m close to being promoted. I know I’m going to be a Blue soon, and when that happens, none of this. I can’t risk beingstuck at the training center for the rest of my career. I want to be in a City.”
Scarlett nodded. “Okay, tonight. I’ll see you an hour after lights out where the fences meet.”
Rhys considered her idea for a minute. “Okay, I’ll be there.” The seriousness of their plan weighed on them as they continued shooting.
Scarlett couldn’t back down. She had been considering the idea for weeks, and now seemed like the time to do it. After all, Mrs. said you should conquer all fears before entering a City. And that meant facing them. Now that the plan was in place, Scarlett felt nervous, like maybe she shouldn’t have suggested it, like maybe they would be better waiting one more night. She glanced askew at Rhys. She didn’t dare say anything to him now. He would never let her live it down. So, tonight it would be.
About Laurel Solorzano:
Laurel Solorzano has enjoyed writing since she was
in middle school, exchanging manuscripts for years with her best friend. After
traveling the globe for a time, Laurel set her goal to become a published
author. As she works teaching English andSpanish,shewrites storiesinherfreetime.LaurelcurrentlylivesinRaleigh,NorthCarolinawith her husband, Yader.
