Today I am happy to bring you a guest post from author Shevi Arnold and a review for her book, Ride of Your Life!
Ride
of Your Life
By
Shevi Arnold
Genre: YA Romantic Paranormal
Publisher:
CreateSpace
ISBN: ISBN-10: 1477477934
ISBN-13: 978-1477477939
ASIN: B0081ICVEQ
Number of pages: 296
Word
Count: app. 83,000
Formats
available: all digital formats and paperback
Book Description:
Seventeen-year-old
Tracy Miller met the love of her life . . . thirty
years after her own death.
Tracy was working at the House of Horrors at the Amazing Lands Theme Park when the fire broke out. Instead of running, she lost her life trying to save eleven-year-old Mack. Now thirty years have passed, and suddenly everything changes with the arrival of two new ghosts: a little girl named Ashley and a cute seventeen-year-old boy named Josh. Josh would do anything for Tracy, but can he help her let go of the past and accept his love?
Ride of Your Life is a bittersweet, romantic, YA ghost story that was inspired by a true event: the Great Adventure Haunted Castle fire, which killed eight teenagers in 1984. It is a fantasy novel about undying love, and it won third-place in Smart Writer’s Write It Now (W.I.N.) contest in the YA category, which was judged by Alex Flinn, the author ofBeastly and Cloaked.
Hang
on. Love can be as terrifying as a roller coaster, but it can also be
the Ride
of Your Life.
Short
Excerpt:
(From
the end of chapter one. At this point, Tracy the ghost has
desperately tried and failed to prevent a teenage boy and a young
girl from getting killed on a ride at the Amazing Lands Theme Park.)
People
continued to rush through her, but Tracy ignored the flashing of the
sunlight and shadows on her closed eyelids, ignored the screams and
the panic. She let her consciousness slip away from the scene, let it
blur until it faded into nothingness.
She
was in the ghost world now. Here everything was silent and still, and
nothing real could touch her. Although there was nothing to see,
Tracy kept her eyes shut. The darkness was comforting, like a soft
blanket on a cool night.
The
only illusion she held onto was her body. Letting go of that was
difficult, like stepping off a high diving board when she couldn’t
see the water below, like riding on a roller coaster with nothing
under her feet. It was a freefall into the unknown. Her body was what
she knew, even if it was no longer real. It was familiar, and it felt
safe. Everything around her was quiet and peaceful and still. She was
alone in her world. Completely alone.
Then
Tracy felt something hit her in the chest, and she returned to the
Amazing Lands Theme Park with a scream.
Author
Bio:
Shevi
Arnold loves writing, illustrating, and making people laugh—and
she’s been doing all three since 1987 when she started working as
an editorial cartoonist for a newsweekly. She’s also worked as a
comics magazine editor, as an arts-and-entertainment writer
specializing in comedy and children’s entertainment, and as a
consumer columnist.
Nowadays, though, she enjoys writing (and sometimes illustrating) humorous fiction, fantasy and science fiction, mostly for children and young adults. Shevi grew up in Philadelphia, and her family had a season pass to Great Adventure in the early 1980s. She was nineteen-years-old and studying overseas when a fellow college student asked her if she knew about the Great Adventure Haunted Castle fire. Eight teenagers had lost their lives.
Like many, Shevi was shocked by the news. In her mind, she wanted to give that tragedy a happy ending. Ride of Your Life is the result. Her previous books are Dan Quixote: Boy of Nuevo Jersey--a humorous novel for middle graders about individualism and friendship overcoming peer pressure and bullying--and Toren the Teller's Tale--a YA fantasy about the magic of storytelling and one girl's struggle to accept that magic within herself. Why My Love Life Sucks, the first in the Gilbert the Fixer, is a funny YA science-fantasy novel about the ultimate geek having to confront his ultimate fear--getting stuck with a gorgeous girl who wants to be his platonic best friend literally forever.
Guest Post:
The Most Romantic Moment
By Shevi Arnold
If you celebrated Canada Day on Sunday
or are celebrating the 4th of July tomorrow, happy
Independence Day! It’s the summer, time to take a break from the
everyday and escape into a sweet romance novel that lifts you off
your feet and carries you away like a thrilling roller coaster ride.
What does romance mean to you? What do
you think is the greatest moment of romantic love?
Is it the first caress? Holding hands?
A kiss? An embrace? Or is it something else?
I think it’s the moment just before.
It’s not the caress, but the moment a
hand reaches out to brush a strand of hair away from a cheek. Stop
and let the hand linger, not on the skin but close enough to feel its
warmth. That is the ultimate moment of true romance. It’s not
holding hands, but the moment one hand reaches to hold another, and
the other hand opens to accept it. It’s what John Keats described
in one of the most romantic poems of all time, “Ode on a Grecian
Urn,” a poem about a work of art depicting young lovers:
|
Fair youth,
beneath the trees, thou canst not leave |
|
Thy
song, nor ever can those trees be bare; |
|
Bold
Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, |
|
Though
winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; |
|
She
cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, |
|
For
ever wilt thou love,
and she be fair! |
Isn’t that what we all want, to be
young and beautiful and loved--forever?
It’s that infinite moment of pure
longing frozen in time that I tried to capture in my romantic YA
ghost story, Ride of Your Life.
The two main characters are teenage
ghosts who were both killed in the same theme park in two different
incidents thirty years apart. They will forever be young forever, and
their love can never die.
But there is something keeping them
from that longed for kiss.
Will her past continue to haunt her, or
will he find a way to help her overcome it, so that she can finally
accept his love? Let that hand linger there. Let the feeling of skin
touching skin wait. Let that greatest moment of romantic love last
seemingly forever.
I hope readers will find Ride of
Your Life the perfect frozen treat to enjoy this summer. After
all, isn’t the summer the perfect time for a trip to an amusement
park? And who doesn’t want to be young and in love for eternity?
Will their love ever be satisfied? You’ll have to read their story
to find out.
I hope this summer you discover true
love and that it takes you on the Ride of Your Life.
My Thoughts and Review:
I know I have said this before but I
can't help it, I am a sucker for a good ghost story, throw in a ghost
story that has romance in it too and it is just a win win for me.
Which of course is why Ride Of
Your Life appealed to me so much.
We get the story of a seventeen year
old named Tracy who died thirty years earlier in a terrible fire at a
theme park trying to rescue a young boy named Mack.
Tracy should have went into the light
but a mysterious past and the excuse to help “save” Mack has kept
her out of it and stranded in the theme park where she will have to
either eventually go into the light or spend eternity haunting.
Enter Josh and Ashley, two other ghosts
bound to stay with Tracy and Mack and be a part of their lives.
I don't want to go into too much
detail, because again, I hate giving anything away in my reviews but
this story really was different and just one of those fun summer
reads.
I liked reading about the budding
romance between Josh and Tracy, which really was sweet.
Ashley added an innocence to the story
and Mack, well, Mack added something slightly mysterious and a little
sinister to the story. A little of the unknown.
There really wasn't anything spooky or
scary in this one, mostly this was just a feel good type of read with
a hint of haunting and ghostly doings.
A great summer read for sure!
Overall I give this one 3 Stars!
I loved the Keats quote, and I'm a sucker for a good ghost story.
ReplyDeleteI'm not normally a ghost story fan but this book just sounds really good :)
ReplyDeleteIt isn't scary at all Becca, just a cutsy read!
ReplyDelete