Welcome to the Official Blog Tour for Carissa Miller's Magnetic. The tour will consist of various posts from participating blogs. Today, on our tour stop, we have an exclusive excerpt to share! Not only that, there's a cool tour-wide giveaway, too! Check out all the tour festivities and follow the tour, HERE... and grab your copy now!!!
Genre:
Young Adult
Contemporary Romance
Mystery
Publish Date:
September 10, 2017
Synopsis:
When Elle Christiansen’s rebellion leads to her father’s expulsion from a parsonage in small-town Ohio, the forlorn pair is forced to move to Oklahoma to live with an aunt neither of them has ever met. Here she encounters her aunt’s neighbor—Maverick Mason, the quietly confident son of a wealthy oil tycoon who infuriates her as much as he inexplicably draws her in…
Maverick slowly gains Elle’s trust and coaxes her out from the seemingly impenetrable walls of self-protection she erected around her heart when her mother was murdered. He convinces Elle to confide the secrets of her tortured past: that she saw her mother’s murder before it took place, and she was the one who found her, bleeding to death at the end of a lonely dirt road. Together the unlikely pair begins to unlock the secrets of not only Elle’s sordid past, but her mother’s and grandmother’s as well, to uncover decades of greed, corporate corruption, lies, and murder. Quickly, the sobering realization hits: if they do not solve her mother’s murder, Elle will undoubtedly suffer the same fate. As she continues her journey toward truth alongside the boy she is magnetically drawn to in a way both frightening and uncontrollable, Elle finds the road she is most afraid of going down—that one lane dirt road where her mother was murdered—just might be the only place she can truly find redemption.
Magnetic tells of the enduring pain of living with unsolved violent crime. Inspired by debut author Carissa Miller’s true-life events, it’s a haunting account of a young girl’s struggle in the aftermath of shattering loss. With an unraveling love story, puzzling mystery, unexpected twists and turns, and a gripping pace that will keep you turning pages, our heroine takes you on her journey as she learns one of life’s great lessons: facing your fears instead of running from them, is the only way to truly find freedom.
Within ten minutes the Tulsa city limits were behind me and I saw the sign for highway OK 11W. I drove into the darkness, away from the lights of the city. The stars in the sky burned brighter out here and I was all alone, except for a pair of headlights far off in the distance that I occasionally saw flashing behind me.
I began to pass old two-story houses that obviously had been beautiful once upon a time but now sat ravaged by time—paint chipping off the wood, sagging porches, and broken windows. Without looking at my directions, I pushed the turn signal and pulled onto a county road. The radio was on but oddly there was an eerie silence that deepened as I traveled further into darkness. I didn’t need to look up or check my directions; somehow I knew exactly where I was going. Something was drawing me into the darkness and at the end of the road, I knew I would find a yellow clapboard house.
The road narrowed then suddenly turned sharply to the right. I made the sharp turn, then found myself on a narrow gravel road. I drove on into the night, and although I had never been on the road before, I recognized it as the exact same path I had drawn from my dream. There was not a single street light. Only my headlights shined into the black of night. I could see nothing beyond a few feet in front of the van, but I knew that on either side of the road, flat Oklahoma prairies stretched on endlessly for miles. I knew that where the grass met the sky, oil wells dotted the horizon and pumped up and down without cease.
Finally, I came to a fence with a gate that was open, but not large enough for a car. I pulled over to the side of the road and parked the van. I should have been scared—a teenage girl, alone on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere—but I was at complete peace.
I pulled my backpack out, put on my black hoodie, then without hesitation, I shut the van door and turned my flashlight on. I saw the outline of a row of houses before me and I knew what would be waiting for me in the middle of them. I put one foot in front of the other and passed one house, two houses, then another. The houses were lined up perfectly on either side of the street, just as I remembered them from my dream. I passed three more houses then my flashlight met the form of a house in the distance. It was separated slightly from the others and though the darkness was all consuming and my flashlight lacked the power to show me the color of the house, I knew that it was yellow.
My legs moved forward, stepping purposefully, and as I climbed onto the threshold, I noticed a dreamcatcher blowing in the wind. Just as it did in my dream, the door cracked open as if welcoming me inside and a light orange hue emanated from a tiny, flickering candle. As the door continued to open of its own accord, the soft light from the candle illuminated the shape of a woman standing inside the tiny house—just as I knew she would be.
Unafraid and feeling an inexplicable calm despite the unknown, I walked through the door and stepped into the house that called me to it. The room was dim; a small fire burned in the fireplace. The modest kitchen could barely be seen off the living area and in between the kitchen and living room was a small corner for a table. Around the table sat four tiny wooden chairs.
I stepped further into the house and approached the woman. Our eyes met. They were black—the color of the charcoal that I used to help my mom pour into our grill on our back porch in Ohio—and as I stared into the blackness I knew that she had experienced immeasurable pain and loss, grief and suffering; but I could also see that she was strong and courageous. I saw her spirit, and I knew she was a fighter.
I longed to know her. I yearned to sit down and lose myself in her story. I ripped my eyes away from hers and took in her slight but sturdy frame; her long dark braids laced with silver-grey hair that shone in the candlelight like a halo; her white leather dress hanging to her knees where it split into tiny strands of leather that fell to the floor and ended with small blue and silver beads. I turned my eyes back toward hers but neither one of us broke the silence. Eventually she reached behind her and grabbed something off the table, never taking her dark eyes away from mine.
She slowly pulled a dark wooden box from behind her back, then she moved her weathered hands toward my chest in a gesture of offering. She still didn’t speak and I realized with sadness that perhaps she was not capable. As I looked at the object in her hands more closely—the dark, aged mahogany wood carved with intricate details—I knew that it was meant for me. In my hands, it felt at home.
As I took it from her, her eyes spoke of happiness, relief even. We stood there, both of our hands on the wooden object, our dark eyes peering into one another’s souls. A hundred questions passed through my mind, but as I found the courage to ask, I heard a noise outside. I turned quickly to look behind me. Headlights glazed through the open door.
The peace was gone, replaced instantly with fear. When I turned back to the woman, she had vanished. It was as if she had never been there but I looked down and saw in my hands a reminder that she had been—the dark wooden box she had given me.
~~~~~
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Thanks for sharing, Jasmine! :)
ReplyDeleteHappy to help! :)
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