The Friday 56 & First Line Friday | Between Before & After

The Friday 56 is hosted weekly by Freda's Voice.
First Line Friday is hosted weekly by Hoarding Books.

Happy Friday!

Surprise book mail is the best! So, even though this Blink YA book doesn't release until February 2019, I couldn't resist sharing it today. Enjoy!

First Line: I found the envelope stuck at the bottom of my mother's lingerie drawer under some unmentionables.

From Page 56: "Elaine, it is my treat. After all, San Jose's first McDonald's is nothing to sneeze at. Milkshakes and burgers for everyone! Besides"—and here his eyes twinkled—"burgers are only fifteen cents!"

Quotes taken from an Advance Reading Copy.

ABOUT THE BOOK

“The carnage began with the roses. She hacked at their ruffled blooms until they dropped into monstrous drifts of red on the parched yellow lawn … Only two things kept my mother grounded to us: my uncle Stephen and stories.”

Fourteen-year-old Molly worries about school, friends, and her parents’ failed marriage, but mostly about her mother’s growing depression. Molly knows her mother is nursing a carefully-kept secret. A writer with an obsession for other people’s life stories, Elaine Donnelly is the poster child of repressed emotions.

Molly spends her California summer alternately watching out for her little brother Angus and tip-toeing around her mother’s raw feelings. Molly needs her mother more than ever, but Elaine shuts herself off from real human connections and buries herself in the lives and deaths of the strangers she writes about. When Uncle Stephen is pressed into the limelight because of his miracle cure of a young man, Elaine can no longer hide behind other people’s stories. And as Molly digs into her mother’s past, she finds a secret hidden in her mother’s dresser that may be the key to unlocking a family mystery dating to 1918 New York—a secret that could destroy or save their future.

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