5 Days With You by Ara Grigorian
Check out my stop on the 15 Days With You blog tour! Don't forget to enter the giveaway before you go!
by Ara Grigorian
Genre: YA Contemporary Fiction
Release Date: September 24th 2019
Summary:
“Filled with tumultuous emotions of grief, romance, guilt, secrecy and anger, 15 Days With You is an accomplished work of drama sure to be enjoyed by audiences of all ages.” 5-Star Review, K.C. Finn for Readers’ Favorite
A mother’s dying wish. A son in search of answers. A fifteen-day surf odyssey with the California girl who will dare him to rethink everything.
Alone after his mother’s unexpected death, seventeen-year-old Shep leaves Texas to crash with his uncle’s family in Malibu. Before he can hang his cowboy hat, Shep learns something that blows his mind—in her youth, his hard-working single mom was a gifted surfer on her way to international fame. And her dying wish was for him to recreate the surf tour she completed when she was eighteen—the summer she got pregnant with him.
Along with his cousin Carmen (the red-blooded competitive surfer) and her best friend Samantha (the opinionated and mildly annoying beach goddess), Shep hits the road for a surf trip up and down Pacific Coast Highway. Armed with his mother’s ashes and fifteen sealed envelopes—each containing a page from her high school diary—Shep will discover a new side of the complex woman he’d only thought of as Mom, and might finally learn the identity of a man he’s never met—his father.
But each time he paddles out into the waves, a nagging question haunts him—the one he may not be ready to answer: Is he learning to surf because he wants to honor his mother’s dying wish, or running from the real reason he can’t go back to Texas—his own terrible mistake?
Purchase your copy HERE!
Excerpt from Chapter 20
Day 2 - Shep
I wake up from my nap to the sound of
distant voices.
I sit up and look around. There are at
least a dozen or two surfers clustered now. I squint, focusing on whose out
there with the girls.
“Wow,” a blonde near me says.
I look up and catch sight of what has
stunned her—a beast of a wave. I had not seen anything like that in Encinitas.
When the wave crashes, it looks like a monster, devouring whatever is in its
path.
I walk over to the edge of the water.
They’re all repositioning, trying to
prepare for the batch of waves that are coming.
One of the guys takes a wave. A second
one attempts to also, but he crashes down hard the moment the wave opens up,
while a third surfer pulls back. The first surfer skids down the face of the
wave, but the wave is catching up from his right.
I witness a barrel for the first time.
That’s right, I know words. The surfer’s just outside the cave the wave’s
creating. He’s pumping his legs, pulling ahead of the wave by a head. Then he
somehow slows himself down. It’s hard to see what he’s doing but it’s clear he
wants to stay inside the abyss.
Without warning, the wave collapses on
him and he disappears in the white foam. A lot of white foam. I stand on my tip
toes, trying to find him.
“Where is he?” the blonde says, who has
somehow ended up right next to me.
“Not sure,” I say.
The next three seconds are long. Stretched
out. Maybe a shark ate him. Once the foam dissipates, a head pops out and a
board reappears.
“That was scary,” she says.
I don’t respond, because just then Carmen
takes a wave. My heart leaps into my throat. She’s on her feet streaking over
the wave before I’ve even had a chance to worry. Thankfully, this wave isn’t as
ugly as the last one. She carves out then points her board back up the face of
the wave. She snaps the board just as she summits the lip of the wave. A huge
spray of water is left in her trail. Back down the face of the wave and just as
quickly she rips another one.
Her movement is dynamic, powerful, and
beautiful all at the same time. She rides low to the board, her arms
continually changing balance and direction of the board.
I’m in awe of my cousin.
“Fierce! She’s bitchin’!” the blonde
says.
“She’s my cousin,” I say, the pride
unmistakable. Not sure if this makes me cool by association, but I think it
should count for something.
“She’s rad.”
Yeah, she is.
“Another one,” the girl says.
Now Sam is on the move.
Air doesn’t enter my lungs momentarily.
The wave is a beast. It rises higher and
higher, a roar of an aquatic lion. But Sam takes it without hesitation. She
skims the face of the wave, then drops down a good five feet without making
contact with water. I’m sure she’ll lose her footing when she hits the water
again, but somehow, she’s able to control her center of gravity and master the
board. She’s under the ominous shadow of the wave. I’m having an anxiety attack
just watching her.
She’s moving fast. She has to or risk
getting crushed by the huge mass that follows her. She pumps her legs, up and
down, up and down, gaining speed.
“Go, go, go!” Blonde yells.
I grin, more pride, more euphoria. Wow,
she’s amazing.
The batch of surfers begin yelling so
loud that even from this distance I can hear them.
Sam is just outside of the barrel. Then
she’s inside it. Then we can’t see her.
About the Author
Ara Grigorian is the international award-winning author of GAME OF LOVE, his debut novel. He is a technology executive in the entertainment industry. He earned his Masters in Business Administration from University of Southern California where he specialized in marketing and entrepreneurship. True to the Hollywood life, Ara wrote for a children's television pilot that could have made him rich (but didn't) and nearly sold a video game to a major publisher (who closed shop days later). Fascinated by the human species, Ara writes about choices, relationships, and second chances. Always a sucker for a hopeful ending, he writes contemporary romance stories targeted to adult and new adult readers.
Ara is committed to helping writers tell better stories. He is the co-founder of the popular Novel Intensive seminar. Also, he is a workshop leader for the Writer's Digest Novel Writing Conference, the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and the Southern California Writers' Conference (both Irvine, CA and San Diego, CA). Ara is an active member of the Romance Writers of America and its Los Angeles chapter.
He is represented by Stacey Donaghy of the Donaghy Literary Group.
Comments
Post a Comment