IWSG - CARRY ME HOME

Hello! If you haven't heard of the IWSG, I encourage you to join. It's a wonderful network of authors and bloggers. Today the question posed is this:

Have you ever said "I quit"? 

If so, what happened to make you come back to writing?

It couldn't be more fitting. The book I'm preparing to release, officially titled CARRY ME HOME, started as my sister's novel over ten years ago. In her youth, she experienced some crazy things and the book started as a therapeutic release of that dark time in her life. She stopped at about 40 pages, but somehow it ended up in my hands (with her permission of course).

That was the first "I quit" moment. It was so unbelievably brutal and shocking that I couldn't finish reading it. Most of what she'd written were memories of things I had no idea actually happened to her when we were teenagers. She lived in her world and I lived in mine.

But the truth is a hard thing to ignore. Eventually I did finish it, and as a writer, I couldn't help but recognize the depth of the experience and the amount of growth that had occurred in her as a person (and as a character) in this unfinished book.

I felt inspired and amazed at what she'd gone through and the person she'd become in spite of it all. The three of us (my mother, sister, and I) set out to finish her story. They gave me memories, and I weaved them into a fictional novel. Re-living one of the hardest times in all of our lives was difficult, and I'd say all three of us quit more than once. It has taken years for us to get through the whole process.

The one thing that kept us going was that true darkness and pain yield powerful stories. This is ours.

C A R R Y    M E    H O M E

Release Date: 9-26-17

“A riveting page-turner…Jessica Therrien broke my heart into a million pieces—and then put it back together again. This book will haunt and uplift readers long after they turn the last page.”

-KAT ROSS, best-selling author of The Midnight Sea

CARRY ME HOME is a fictional novel inspired by the true story of a teenage girl’s involvement in several Mexican gangs in San Jose and Los Angeles. The members of her crew call her, Guera, Spanish for “white girl” and it doesn’t take long for her to get lost in their world of guns and drugs.

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Lucy and Ruth are country girls from a broken home. When they move to the city with their mother, leaving behind their family ranch and dead-beat father, Lucy unravels.

They run to their grandparents’ place, a trailer park mobile home in the barrio of San Jose. Lucy’s barrio friends have changed since her last visit. They’ve joined a gang called VC. They teach her to fight, to shank, to beat a person unconscious and play with guns. When things get too heavy, and lives are at stake, the three girls head for LA seeking a better life.

But trouble always follows Lucy. She befriends the wrong people, members of another gang, and every bad choice she makes drags the family into her dangerous world.

Told from three points of view, the story follows Lucy down the rabbit hole, along with her mother and sister as they sacrifice dreams and happiness, friendships and futures. Love is waiting for all of them in LA, but pursuing a life without Lucy could mean losing her forever.

Ultimately it’s their bond with each other that holds them together, in a true test of love, loss and survival.

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If you'd like to participate in the cover reveal, blog tour, or virtual release party, please fill out the form below! Thank you so much in advance!!