Hello everyone and welcome to my stop of Kate Brauning blog tour to promote the release of her novel, How We Fall, in paperback! I hope you all enjoy her guest post and make sure to enter the giveaway to win a copy of How We Fall.
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How We Fall
Author: Kate BrauningPages: 303
Publisher: Merit Press
Release Date: November 3rd 2014
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Ever since Jackie moved to her uncle's sleepy farming town, she's been flirting way too much-- and with her own cousin, Marcus. Her friendship with him has turned into something she can't control, and he's the reason Jackie lost track of her best friend, Ellie, who left for...no one knows where. Now Ellie has been missing for months, and the police, fearing the worst, are searching for her body. Swamped with guilt and the knowledge that acting on her love for Marcus would tear their families apart, Jackie pushes her cousin away. The plan is to fall out of love, and, just as she hoped he would, Marcus falls for the new girl in town. But something isn't right about this stranger, and Jackie's suspicions about the new girl's secrets only drive the wedge deeper between Jackie and Marcus. Then Marcus is forced to pay the price for someone else's lies as the mystery around Ellie's disappearance starts to become horribly clear. Jackie has to face terrible choices. Can she leave her first love behind, and can she go on living with the fact that she failed her best friend?
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Guest Post
Hello, readers! I'm so pleased to be here with Kaitlin for How We Fall's paperback release blog tour. Though my book is shelved in YA romance or YA contemporary, or even with thrillers, I see the genre as romantic suspense. It's about 70% romance and 30% suspense/thriller, which is much more common in adult fiction than in YA, for some reason.
In addition to being romantic suspense, it's rural romantic suspense. I set the book pretty much exactly where I grew up-- in sparsely populated, hilly northwest Missouri, on the county line between the two poorest counties in the state. Jackie's family moved to this area, like my family did, rather than being one of the local, multiple-generation families to farm the area. It's a gorgeous part of the state, full of winding blacktop highways, rolling hills, rivers, creeks, and little ponds. Oaks, hedge trees, maples, and scrubby brush pepper the hills. The view is hard to beat.
I set the book there because I knew the area well, but also because rural suspense is so different from urban suspense, and I wanted the particular dangers of an isolated, rural area.
One of the elements of rural suspense is the sparse population. With occasional family farms spread across the county, and tiny towns ranging from populations of ninety-five to a few hundred, there's a good chance that if you get into trouble, no one will be around to see. If your car breaks down, you might have to wait a long time for someone to drive by, and you'd have to walk possibly ten to twenty miles to find a house. Cars have been found in ponds or lakes years after they wrecked. Witnesses to a crime are few, if any.
Another danger is how far away emergency services can be. When the closest police station, fire department, hospital, etc., are twenty to thirty miles away, that makes accidents, break-ins, and the like even more dangerous. When my sister badly burned herself, it was faster for us to drive her to the hospital than it would have been for an ambulance to come get her (and it was a horrifying situation for everyone).
Yet another issue is spotty communication. Though this depends a lot on the area and the service provider, dead spots are common, and your phone not working in a sparsely populated area with long response times for emergency services can make a bad situation so much worse.
And of course, all the small town truths apply here, too-- rumor mills, insular cultures, insider versus outsider mentality, strong sense of community pride, power struggles among community leaders, family feuds, unwavering community support, and the determined backbone of a small town can make rural suspense such a rich, fascinating, evocative genre. It's so different, specific, and has so much vitality that I love writing it, and am working on my 3rd book that could be considered rural suspense.
Have you read anything else you think fits into this genre? Any recommendations for me?
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Kate Brauning
Kate Brauning grew up in rural Missouri and fell in love with young adult books in college. She now works in publishing and pursues her lifelong dream of telling stories she'd want to read. This is her first novel. Visit her online at www.katebrauning.com or on Twitter at @KateBrauning.| Tumblr | Facebook | Pinterest | Goodreads |
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Goodreads Book Giveaway
How We Fall
Giveaway ends November 30, 2015.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.
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