Guest Post: Featuring Karen Rivers+ GIVEAWAY

I am so happy to have Karen Rivers on my blog today! I love featuring Canadian authors and I truly enjoyed her book. It truly demonstrates what a teen sounds and thinks like all the while dealing with their lives and mental health issues. My full review of the book will be up on Monday. Anyways, let’s just get right to the good stuff! And don’t forget to read all the way through to the end of the post and enter the giveaway!

Synopsis:

Can you want something—or someone—so badly that it changes your destiny?

Elyse Schmidt never would have thought so, until it happened to her. When Elyse and her not-so-secret crush, Josh Harris, are the sole survivors of a plane crash, tragedy binds them together. It’s as if their love story is meant to be. Everything is perfect, as perfect as it can be when you’ve literally fallen out of the sky and landed hard on the side of a mountain—until suddenly it isn’t.

When the pieces of Elyse’s life stop fitting together, what’s left?

You Are the Everything is a story about the fates we yearn for, the fates we choose, and the fates that are chosen for us.

Goodreads | Amazon | Indigo | Book Depository | Kindle

Guest Post:

Can you tell us about how you got the idea and inspiration for this book?

I really can’t. Like migraine auras, new ideas are always flickering around in my head while I’m working on something else, trying (usually unsuccessfully) to ignore them long enough to get the other project finished first.  Shiny New Idea Syndrome is real!  Sometimes the flickers turn into full-blown lights and then I have no choice but to follow where they lead.   They light the path.   That probably sounds crazy, but that’s how it feels.   When I sat down to write this book, I didn’t realize it was going to be in the second person.  I had a girl with an intense crush.  I had a band trip to Paris.   When I started to type, I wrote, “You are on a plane.”   I swear that the rest of the book wrote itself.   That’s how it works sometimes, at the best of times.  

About the Author:

Karen Rivers’s books have been nominated for a wide range of literary awards and have been published in multiple languages. When she’s not writing, reading, or visiting schools, she can usually be found hiking in the forest that flourishes behind her tiny old house in Victoria, British Columbia, where she lives with her two kids, two dogs, and two birds.

Website | Goodreads | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Spoiler Free Review

I always thought there was a hole in YA books. There were plenty of books that dealt with the hardships that teens face nowadays, especially with the grim reality of school shootings, and the like. I found that while there were a bunch of books on how teens dealt with those situations, there weren’t that many that dealt with the aftermath and the mental health issues that could arise from it. Enter You Are The Everything, which deals with two teens and being the only surviviors of a plane crash. I love how we really get into the mind of a teenager, which in my opinion (although I no longer am a teenager) was really well done. I really appreciated how it was shown each person deals with trauma differently and the mental health issues that come with it manifest differently as well. The problems to overcome were different for Elyse than they were for Josh. I thought this was a wonderful dive into the emotions and thoughts of the younger generation that everyone could at some point in their life relate to. I would recommend both teenagers and adults read this book, and maybe discuss what it means to them.

Giveaway

The winner will receive 1 copy of You Are the Everything (HC) by Karen Rivers.

Giveaway Details: 

• Canada Only (full rules found in the T&C on Rafflecopter)
• Giveaway ends on Wednesday Nov. 28^th @ 11:59 pm EST
• Winner will be drawn randomly through Rafflecopter, contacted via email & will have 48 hours to claim their prize

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Check out the rest of the Tour stops!

Nov. 12 – RemarkablyLisa

Nov. 13 – TurningPageBooks

Nov. 14 – FabBookReviews

Nov. 15 – StellarBookBlog

Nov. 16 – TrishaJennReads

Nov. 19 – AdventuresinYAFiction

Nov. 20 – MickeyReads

Nov. 21 – allthingschristine