Sharing the Love Book Giveaway No. 5

Tip of the Day: YA Librarian Lena is the winner of THE BOYFRIEND LIST from yesterday. Yay Lena! Please send us an e-mail at author2author dot blog at gmail dot com with your information!

Love.
Romance.
Sex.

It can be tough, sometimes, being a writer for teens.

If you have a book with love, does there need to be sex?

If you have a book with romance and sex, does there have to be love?

Of course, there’s no right or wrong answer. You have to ask, what’s true to the characters? What’s true to the story? And then you hope like crazy you’re getting it right.

I think Kristen Tracy’s book, LOST IT, our giveaway book for today, gets it right. It actually has all three of the above elements PLUS a bonus. Yep. A bonus!

Humor.

Now you’re asking, wait a minute. Humor with love? With romance? With SEX???

Yes. Absolutely. Because let’s face it, when you’re a teen in the middle of a relationship, and you’re figuring everything out for the first time, it’s often awkward. And yes, FUNNY! Okay, so maybe it’s hard to see the humor at the time. But come on. It was there, wasn’t it?

I adore the way the author uses humor in this book. It makes it all so real.

Check out this starred review from Publishers Weekly.

“Readers will be immediately drawn to this hilarious and heartfelt first novel about a girl who falls in love—and has her first sexual experience—and tries to let go of her fears. Tess Whistle lives in Idaho with paranoid parents, who ‘became born again’ after a kitchen fire. The book begins with an account of how she loses her virginity, then flashes back to the start of junior year, when she expected to stay a virgin until she is ‘at least engaged.’ Tess has plenty of phobias, mostly of the natural world where she could be ‘torn to pieces by a pack of recently relocated gray wolves.’ Just before her whole life crumbles, Benjamin Easter transfers to her school. Tess falls intensely in love without realizing ‘that you can't depend on another person to provide your own balance.’ And there's no doubt that Tess's life is out of balance: Her best friend is building a bomb, claiming she wants to blow up a poodle, her parents run off to join a survival camp, and Tess tells Ben she is diabetic as way of explaining her ‘juvenile’ apple juice box, then maintains the lie. Readers may be so busy laughing out loud at the eccentric characters and outrageous plotting that they may not realize how much they have grown to empathize with desperate Tess until her relationship is in crisis. Readers will fall in love with this offbeat story—and its rich lesson about living a life without guarantees.”

To enter to win this book, just leave a comment here or at the Livejournal feed. If you’ve posted about the contest this week, you’ll get another entry (but please let me know about it when you enter). Look for a special post tomorrow morning announcing the winner!

Have a great weekend!

~Lisa (Miss Pinch Me I'm Pubbed