Hi, everyone! Today I'm having a Book Blast for the book Love, Lucy by April Lindner. There's also a wonderful guest post by author where she shares some tips for travelling abroad just like the main character; Lucy in the book. Oooh I just love HOLIDAYS..don't you? I'm going to Phuket next month so this book just might get me into that vacation mood. Don't forget to enter the awesome giveaway to win a copy of the book and 3 signed Jane posters.
Title: LOVE, LUCYAuthor: April Lindner
Release date: January 27, 2015
Publisher: PoppyPages: 304
Formats: Hardcover, eBook
While backpacking through Florence, Italy, during the summer before she heads off to college, Lucy Sommersworth finds herself falling in love with the culture, the architecture, the food...and Jesse Palladino, a handsome street musician. After a whirlwind romance, Lucy returns home, determined to move on from her "vacation flirtation." But just because summer is over doesn't mean Lucy and Jesse are over, too. In this coming-of-age romance, April Lindner perfectly captures the highs and lows of a summer love that might just be meant to last beyond the season.
Find it: AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | THE BOOK DEPOSITORY | INDIEBOUND | GOODREADS
April Lindner is the author of three
novels: Catherine, a modernization of Wuthering
Heights; Jane, an update of Jane
Eyre; and Love, Lucy, releasing January 27, 2015.
She also has published two poetry collections, Skin and
This Bed Our Bodies Shaped. She plays acoustic guitar badly,
sees more rock concerts than she’d care to admit, travels whenever she can,
cooks Italian food, and lavishes attention on her pets—two Labrador retriever
mixes and two excitable guinea pigs. A professor of English at Saint Joseph’s
University, April lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two sons.
SOME RULES OF THE
ROAD
Like Lucy Sommersworth, the heroine of
Love, Lucy, my parents gave me the gift of a lifetime: a
backpacking trip to Europe. I was a bit older than Lucy—22, and just out of
college—but when I arrived in Milan, Italy
with a Eurail pass, a copy of Let’s Go: Europe, and a
seventy-pound backpack I could barely lift, I was a wee bit terrified. Like
Lucy, I spoke only a little bit of Italian, just barely enough to get by, and I
wasn’t particularly good at
reading maps or train schedules. Unlike
Lucy, I was travelling solo.
Luckily, my journey began with training
wheels. I’d just taken a college Italian class, and my professor had offered a
safe crash pad for the first few days of my trip—in
her family home in the Alps. Less luckily,
when I reached Malpensa airport, nobody was there to pick me up. Giddy with
excitement and jet lag, I wandered around the airport, eavesdropping on
Italians as they hugged each other hello and goodbye, and had noisy arguments.
I’d never felt more alone in
my life. Where would I sleep that night if
my ride didn’t show up?
Luckily, my professor’s brother arrived at
last to whisk me away to the family home in Domodossola. The extended family
welcomed and fed me, gave me tours of their city
with its charming medieval center, helped
me practice my Italian, and, when the time was right, brought me to the train
station where my solo travels began for
real. It was time to take off the training
wheels.
If I’d felt alone back in the airport, I
was even more so on that train to Verona, a city where I didn’t know a soul. In
those pre-internet days, I could disappear
into thin air and nobody would even notice
I was gone. The thought was chilling, but oddly exciting.
By nightfall, I’d made it to Verona. I’d
figured out the public transportation, found a youth hostel, and booked myself
a bed. Best of all, I had introduced myself to a handful of other backpackers.
We hung out together in the hostel’s common area, sharing bread and cheese,
exchanging stories, discussing the rules of the road—those bits of practical
wisdom our travels were teaching us. Here are a few.
Time passes differently on the
road. Spend a few very intense hours seeing the sites with
strangers and by the end of the day, those strangers have become a part of your
story. Years later you’ll see their faces in your photo album and still
remember stray details of the adventures you shared together, even if you can’t
quite recall their names.
Spontaneity is
key. There are few things as magical as showing up at a
train station with no idea where you’re headed next, picking a random
train, and hopping on.
Janis Joplin said it best:
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. When
you’re carrying all your possessions on
your back in a city where you don’t know a
soul, you’re absolutely free. You can go anywhere, do anything. That freedom
has its lonely moments—but it
can be the doorway to all kinds of adventures.
Embrace
misadventure. As carefully as you plan there will be crazy
mistakes: wrong turns, slept-through train stops, multilingual
misunderstandings, and all kinds of other blunders—and these will make the best
stories. My misadventures are some of my favorite memories. The time I missed
curfew and had to climb into my hostel through a second-story window. The
morning when, hanging out my recently washed clothes to dry, I dropped my wet
underthings out the window, onto a
stranger’s head. The night when, with no
room to stay in, I slept on Venice’s train station steps with about a hundred
other backpackers, the stars above us and the Grand Canal stretched out before
us.
Would I trade that last memory for a safe,
comfy night in an actual bed? Not on your life.
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