Book Blitz of Things I Wish I Said by Gracie Graham (#Contests- Enter to win Book Swags)

Things I Wish I Said
Gracie Graham
Publication date: November 7th 2024
Genres: Contemporary, Romance, Young Adult

 

Lung cancer patient Ryleigh Sinclair wants a boyfriend for the summer.

And my mother wants me to be the one to make her wish come true.

Me. The eternal pessimist. The guy who no longer believes in happy endings after my dad died of pancreatic cancer and my girlfriend dumped me in the same month.

But after weeks of spending time with Ryleigh, she somehow does the impossible. She fills the gaping hole of my father’s absence until I’m the one hoping for a miracle.

I’ve learned my lesson about wishes.

Happily ever afters are a lie.

Yet I’m the one wishing like hell for another outcome for Ryleigh.

I lost my father to cancer; I can’t lose her too.

Goodreads / Amazon

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EXCERPT:

“You make me happy.”

I swallow, afraid to move and the break the spell we’re under. “No, I don’t,” I say, my throat raw.

“You do. This last month, I’ve laughed more than I have since I lost him. You make me forget to be so damn sad all the time.” His other hand rises, and he drags his thumb over my lower lip while my heart crashes into my ribs.

“Grayson . . .”

“You asked me why I kissed you.”

I nod, my resolve to keep him at arm’s length crumbling.

“I kissed you because I couldn’t stand another second of pretending I didn’t want to. Because watching you flirt with Cameron drove me fucking crazy. Because when I touch you, everything else fades away. All the shit in my life feels bearable. Like I can move forward as long as I have you. Simply put, life is just better with you in it.”

A sob escapes the back of my throat, and then his mouth is on mine, and he’s kissing me like his life depends on it. Like we’re the last two people on the face of the planet and the world’s existence depends on us. Like he is the Earth and I am the moon, just caught up in his orbit.

Butterflies take flight in my chest.

My toes curl.

The pulse drumming inside my ears reaches an ear-splitting decibel.

His mouth slants, his tongue brushing against mine as his hand tightens around my waist, and I’m hit with the scent of leather and cinnamon, bringing me back to his bedroom the other night when I sat there and promised myself I’d help him.

Losing his father nearly broke him. I’d hate to think of what losing me only a year later would do.

I place a hand on his chest and push him away.

The breath rasps in and out of my lungs as I come back down to earth, staring into gunmetal gray. “I thought you didn’t believe in love and happy endings?”

“I believe in you.”

Author Bio:

Gracie Graham is a contemporary young adult author who loves romance and writing fictional characters. She thrives on bringing angst and emotion to her books, and her greatest goal in life is to give readers a book hangover. When she's not busy telling lies for a living, she's likely wrangling her three kids, cooking subpar meals, over-caffeinating, and procrastinating. Feel free to reach out to her on social media.

 

 

Website / Goodreads / Facebook / Instagram

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Guest Post and Spotlight of Sunny Gale: A Novel by Jamie Lisa Forbes (#iReadBookTours)

 

 

 

I want. to Welcome Jamie Lisa Forbes to Books R Us. Jamie is the author of Sunny Gale: A Novel. She is touring the Blogosphere with I Read Book Tours. The author has provided a guest post for my readers. Let me tell you about the Novel and the author. Thanks for stopping by

 

SUNNY GALE: A NOVEL by Jamie Lisa Forbes

Category:  Adult Fiction 18+, 268 pages

 

 Book Description:

It's 1895 and fourteen year old Hannah Brandt is struggling with the hard life on a new Nebraska homestead. When her imagination is captured by a wild filly she becomes obsessed with horses, which opens the door to her destiny. Just four years later she enters the first Cheyenne Frontier Day rodeo where she wins the relay race and her fate is sealed. She gives herself a new name, Sunny Gale, and pursues a rodeo career, much to the disgust of her young husband and her very proper mother. Sunny defies convention with every move as the drive to compete takes over her life, leaving everything else behind, including husbands and children. It is a rough life she has chosen, but she craves the glory of the spotlight and refuses to bow to the expectations for a woman in her time.

​Award winning author Jamie Lisa Forbes has once again brought us complex characters in a story based on real women and the early days when rodeo was wide open for them to become stars. It is a story of the social mores of the times and of a woman determined to defy them no matter how high the personal cost or where that choice might take her.

 

Content Rating: PG-13 +M: There is no profane language. There are some sexual scenes, non explicit,  There is one instance of sexual abuse that is more recollected than described and there are two scenes where animals hare harmed intentionally.

 

GUEST POST:

 

THE SWEDE CABIN

The road that wound out of our Little Laramie River Valley was called “The Swede Cabin.” For years during my childhood, I thought the adults were saying “Sweet Cabin” and I wondered, looking over the prairie, where the sweets were.

“Swede, Jamie,” my father said. “Not sweet.”

“There’s no Swedes here, either. And where’s the cabin?”

“There used to be a Swedish guy here. He’s gone and so is the cabin.”

No, there was no trace of a cabin there. The land swept up and away to the top of a bluff and on trips to Laramie, I used to glance back for a last glimpse at the valley and the Snowy Range beyond. “The Swede Cabin” meant the last stop between the valley and the rest of the world.

In September 1973, I was waiting out the fall days at the ranch before I was due to begin at the University of Denver. One morning, my parents asked me to take my brother to school. He was starting high school in Laramie.

There had been heavy rain the night before which explained why I wasn’t back in the hayfields that morning. Coming down over the bluff on my return trip, I hit the mud too fast and slid off the road. I turned off the car and there was silence.

There were no cell phones in those days, no way to contact anyone. But I wasn’t anxious. I knew that my father would come looking for me. In whatever spot I had gotten myself into, I always knew Dad would be along. There might be less than positive consequences when he arrived, but at the heart of the matter, it always was reassuring to he was on his way.

While I waited and the engine ticked off, the clouds began to break. Sun streaked the green meadows and prairie below. The haystacks were piled high with the summer’s hay. The mountaintops appeared with the season’s first dusting of snow. The cattle would trail down the mountains soon. The aspen would turn. Time never stopped here. Halted, however inadvertently, I now had the luxury of lingering over this view. “This is not goodbye. My absence will be just a pause, an interruption. All of this will still be here when I come back.”

And there sure enough five miles away, I saw our green ranch truck traveling south on Forbes Lane, swinging east on McGill Lane, crossing the cattle guard and starting up the Swede Cabin.

 

Meet the Author:

Jamie Lisa Forbes was raised on a ranch in the Little Laramie Valley near Laramie, Wyoming. She attended the University of Colorado where she obtained degrees in English and philosophy. After fourteen months living in Israel, she returned to her family’s ranch where she lived for another fifteen years.

In 1994, she moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. In 2001, she graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law and began her North Carolina law practice.

Forbes’ first novel, Unbroken, won the WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction in 2011. Her collection of short stories, The Widow Smalls and Other Stories, won the High Plains Book Awards for a short story collection in 2015.

Forbes’ novel of rural North Carolina in the segregation era, entitled Eden, was published in 2020. Her historical novel about women bronc riders in the early days of rodeo, entitled Sunny Gale, was published in May 2024 by Pronghorn Press.

Ms. Forbes continues to live—and write—in North Carolina.

Connect with the author: 

 

  website  ~ facebook ~ pinterest ~ X ~  goodreads 

 

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