I am
thrilled to be hosting a spot on the BREATHLESS by Jennifer Niven Blog Tour
hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to
enter the giveaway!
About The Book:
Title: BREATHLESS
Author: Jennifer Niven
Pub. Date: September 29, 2020
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 400
Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, Audible, B&N, iBooks, Kobo, TBD, Bookshop.org
From Jennifer Niven, the New York Times bestselling
author of All the Bright Places, comes an unforgettable new novel about
a sensitive girl ready to live her bravest life--sex, heartbreak, family
dramas, and all.
Before: With graduation on the horizon, budding writer Claudine Henry is making
plans: college in the fall, become a famous author, and maybe--finally--have
sex. She doesn't even need to be in love. Then her dad drops a bombshell: he's
leaving Claude's mother. Suddenly, Claude's entire world feels like a lie, and
her future anything but under control.
After: Claude's mom whisks them away to the last place Claude could imagine
nursing a broken heart: a remote, mosquito-infested island off the coast of
Georgia. But then Jeremiah Crew happens. Miah is a local trail guide with a
passion for photography--and a past he doesn't like to talk about. He's brash
and enigmatic, and even more infuriatingly, he's the only one who seems to see
Claude for who she wants to be. So when Claude decides to sleep with Miah, she
tells herself it's just sex, nothing more. There's not enough time to fall in
love, especially if it means putting her already broken heart at risk.
Compulsively readable and impossible to forget, Jennifer
Niven's luminous new novel is an insightful portrait of a young woman ready to
write her own story.
Excerpt (from Edelweiss)
8 days till graduation
I open my eyes and I am tangled in
the sheets, books upside down on the floor. I know without looking at the time
that I’m late. I leap out of bed, one foot still wrapped in the sheet, and land
flat on my face. I lie there a minute. Close my eyes. Wonder if I can pretend
I’ve fainted and convince Mom to let me blow off today and stay home.
It’s peaceful on the floor.
But it also smells a bit. I open
an eye and there’s something ground into the rug. One of Dandelion’s cat
treats, maybe. I turn my head to the other side and it’s better over here, but
then from outside I hear a horn blast, and this is my dad.
So now I’m up and on my feet
because he will just keep honking and honking the stupid horn until I’m in the
car. I can’t find one of my books and one of my shoes, and my hair is wrong and
my outfit is wrong, and basically I am wrong in my own skin. I should have been
born French. If I were French, everything would be right. I would be chic and
cool and ride a bike to school, one with a basket. I would be able to ride a
bike in the first place. If I were living in Paris instead of Mary Grove, Ohio,
these flats would look better with this skirt, my hair would be less orange
red—the color of an heirloom tomato—and I would somehow make more sense.
I scramble into my parents’ room
dressed in my skirt and bikini top, the black one I bought with Saz last month,
the one I plan to live in this summer. All my bras are in the wash. My mom’s
closet is neat and tidy, but lacking the order of my dad’s, which is all black,
gray, navy, everything organized by color because he’s colorblind and this way
he doesn’t have to ask all the time, “Is this green or brown?” I rummage
through the shelf above and then his dresser drawers, searching for the shirt I
want: vintage 1993 Nirvana. I am always stealing this shirt and he is always
stealing it back, but now it’s nowhere.
I stand in the doorway and shout
down the hall, toward the stairs, toward my mom. “Where’s Dad’s Nirvana shirt?”
I’ve decided that this and only this is the thing I want to wear today.
I wait two, three, four, five
seconds, and my only answer is another blast of the horn. I run to my room and
grab the first shirt I see and throw it on, even though I haven’t worn it to
school since freshman year. Miss Piggy with sparkles.
At the front door, my mom says,
“I’ll come get you if Saz can’t bring you home.” My mom is a busy, well-known
writer—historical novels, nonfiction, anything to do with history—but she
always has time for me. When we moved into this house, we turned the guest room
into her office and my dad spent two days building floor-to-ceiling bookcases
to hold her hundreds of research books.
Something must show on my face
because she rests her hands on my shoulders and goes, “Hey. It’s going to be
okay.” And she means my best friend, Suzanne Bakshi (better known as Saz), and
me, that we’ll always be friends in spite of graduation and college and all the
life to come. I feel some of her calm, bright energy settling itself, like a
bird in a tree, onto my shoulders, melting down my arms, into my limbs, into my
blood. This is one of the many things my mom does best. She makes everyone feel
better.
In the car, my dad is wearing his
Radiohead T-shirt under a suit jacket, which means the Nirvana shirt is in the
wash. I make a mental note to snag it when I get home so I can wear it to the
party tonight.
For the first three or four
minutes, we don’t talk, but this is also normal. Unlike my mom, my dad and I
are not morning people, and on the drive to school we like to maintain what he
calls “companionable silence,” something Saz refuses to respect, which is why I
don’t ride with her.
I stare out the window at the low
black clouds that are gathering like mourners in the direction of the college,
where my dad works as an administrator. It’s not supposed to rain, but it looks
like rain, and it makes me worry for Trent Dugan’s party. My weekends are
usually spent with Saz, driving around town, searching for something to do, but
this one is going to be different. Last official party of senior year and all.
My dad sails past the high school,
over Main Street Bridge, into downtown Mary Grove, which is approximately ten
blocks of stores lining the bricked-paved streets, better known as the
Promenade. He roars to a stop at the westernmost corner, where the street gives
way to cobbled brick and fountains. He gets out and jogs into the Joy Ann Cake
Shop while I text Saz a photo of the sign over the door. Who’s your favorite
person?
In a second she replies: You are.
Two minutes later my dad is
jogging back to the car, arms raised overhead in some sort of ridiculous
victory dance, white paper bag in one hand. He gets in, slams the door, and
tosses me the bag filled with our usual—one chocolate cupcake for Saz and a
pound of thumbprint cookies for Dad and me, which we devour on the way to the
high school. Our secret morning ritual since I was twelve.
As I eat, I stare at the cloudy,
cloudy sky. “It might rain.”
My dad says, “It won’t rain,” like
he once said, “He won’t hit you,” about Damian Green, who threatened to punch
me in the mouth in third grade because I wouldn’t let him cheat off me. He
won’t hit you, which implied that if necessary my dad would come over to the
school and punch Damian himself, because no one was going to mess with his
daughter, not even an eight-year-old boy.
“It might,” I say, just so I can
hear it again, the protectiveness in his voice. It’s a protectiveness that
reminds me of being five, six, seven, back when I rode everywhere on his
shoulders.
He says, “It won’t.”
In first-period creative writing,
my teacher, Mr. Russo, keeps me after class to say, “If you really want to
write, and I believe you do, you’re going to have to put it all out there so
that we can feel what you feel. You always seem to be holding back, Claudine.”
He says some good things too, but
this will be what I remember—that he doesn’t think I can feel. It’s funny how
the bad things stay with you and the good things sometimes get lost. I leave
his classroom and tell myself he doesn’t begin to know me or what I can do. He
doesn’t know that I’m already working on my first novel and that I’m going to
be a famous writer one day, that my mom has let me help her with research
projects since I was ten, the same year I started writing stories. He doesn’t
know that I actually do put myself out there.
On my way to third period, Shane
Waller, the boy I’ve been seeing for almost two months, corners me at my locker
and says, “Should I pick you up for Trent’s party?”
Shane smells good and can be funny
when he puts his mind to it, which—along with my raging hormones—are the main
reasons I’m with him. I say, “I’m going with Saz. But I’ll see you there.”
Which is fine with Shane, because ever since I was fifteen, my dad has
notoriously made all my dates wait outside, even in the dead of Ohio winter.
This is because he was once a teenage boy and knows what they’re thinking. And
because he likes to make sure they know he knows exactly what they’re thinking.
Shane says, “See you there, babe.”
And then, to prove to myself and Mr. Russo and everyone else at Mary Grove High
that I am an actual living, feeling person, I do something I never do—I kiss
him, right there in the school hallway.
When we break apart, he leans in
and I feel his breath in my ear. “I can’t wait.” And I know he
thinks—hopes—we’re going to have sex. The same way he’s been hoping for the
past two months that I’ll finally decide my days of being a virgin are over and
“give it up to him.” (His words, not mine. As if somehow my virginity belongs
to him.)
About Jennifer:
Jennifer Niven is the New York Times bestselling author of
All the Bright Places and Holding Up the Universe, as well as the popular Velva
Jean series. She is also the author of several non-fiction books, including Ada
Blackjack, The Aqua-Net Diaries, and The Ice Master, which was named a top
non-fiction book by Entertainment Weekly. Her New York Times bestseller All the
Bright Places is soon to be a major motion picture starring Elle Fanning.
Although she grew up in Indiana, she now lives with her fiancé and literary
cats in Los Angeles, which remains her favorite place to wander.
Photo: Justin Conway
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Goodreads
Giveaway Details:
3 winners
will receive a Finished Copy of BREATHLESS, US Only.
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Tour Schedule:
Week One:
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Review |
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9/22/2020 |
Excerpt |
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9/23/2020 |
Review |
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9/24/2020 |
Review |
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9/25/2020 |
Review |
Week Two:
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9/28/2020 |
Excerpt |
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9/28/2020 |
Review |
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9/30/2020 |
Review |
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10/1/2020 |
Review |
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10/2/2020 |
Review |
Week Three:
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10/5/2020 |
Review |
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10/6/2020 |
Review |
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10/7/2020 |
Review |
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10/8/2020 |
Review |
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10/9/2020 |
Review |
Week Four:
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10/12/2020 |
Review |
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10/13/2020 |
Review |
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10/14/2020 |
Review |
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10/15/2020 |
Review |
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10/16/2020 |
Review |
The cover is beautiful. This novel sounds emotional and the exceprt made me want to read more.
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