Blog Tour: The Last Good Day of the Year by Jessica Warman

I'm really excited today to be part of Bloomsbury's blog tour for Jessica Warman's newest thriller The Last Good Day of the Year, a creepy exploration of an old family mystery. I was asked to do a post about my own perfect day so keep reading to learn more about The Last Good Day, find out what I like to do on a perfect day, and enter Bloomsbury's giveaway!

Pub Date: May 19, 2015

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens

Genre: young adult contemporary thriller, mystery

Status: standalone

Summary: A new powerful thriller from the globally-embraced author of Between.

Ten years ago, in the early hours of New Year’s Day, seven-year-old Samantha and her next door neighbor, Remy, watched as a man broke into Sam’s home and took her younger sister, Turtle, from her sleeping bag. Remy and Sam, too afraid to intervene at the time, later identified the man as Sam’s sister Gretchen’s much older ex-boyfriend, Steven, who was sent to prison for Turtle’s murder.

Now, Sam’s shattered family is returning to her childhood home in an effort to heal. As long-buried memories begin to surface, Sam wonders if she and Remy accurately registered everything they saw. The more they re-examine the events of that fateful night, the more questions they discover about what really happened to Turtle.

Master storyteller Jessica Warman keeps readers guessing in this arresting page-turner.

My perfect day? Well, obviously:

Okay, okay, I had to. You know you laughed. In all seriousness, I have had several perfect days in my life, and I'm grateful for that. Here are some of the days that I can say have been absolutely perfect:

Perfect day 1: Any day on one of my family's ski trips. There are so many pieces to these trips my family takes, and they all come together to make something magical. Fluffy snow, the exhilaration of flying down a mountain, episodes of The Office, extended games of Cards Against Humanity, my family around (and getting along!), and my mom's home cooking.

Perfect day 2. Beach it up! Twice I went to a small beach in the Outer Banks with a massive group of friends from church. Once I went on a trip with my best friend and her family. There was lots of reading and sunning and swimming and running (well, running was one time) and deliciously not-good-for-us food and outlet shopping and touristing and mini golfing and karaoke-ing and CSI binge watching and midday napping. 

Sorry we're all so pasty looking.

 

Perfect day 3: Hanging out with my mom. My mom was never my best friend. She was my parent first and always. Buuuuut when I got older and my siblings moved out and my dad worked more and more and went on two deployments really close together, I started spending a lot of time alone with my mom. We went to plays together (Secret Garden and Twelfth Night were two of my favorites!). She took me to my diving practices. We talked books. We attended Shakespeare in the Square every summer for years. I took her to an Olympic qualifying soccer game and a minor league baseball game. She twice drove six-hour round-trip so I could meet Meg Cabot and Richelle Mead. My mom is...the best.


Perfect day 4: Hanging with my marching band friends. These goofballs got me through the toughest years of my life. Whether we were spending hours on buses riding to tiny towns in Louisiana and Arkansas watching all three Toy Story movies, playing rowdy yet oddly innocent rounds of vido games and truth or dare, making dinner, attending football and basketball games, hot-tubbing, or watching horror movies, we always made sure we were having the Best Night Ever.

Kid you not. This picture is one of 200 we took one night on Megan's laptop. We spent hours just posing and making the most ridiculous faces while sprawled on Garrett's bed. I don't know why we did it once, and I certainly don't know why we did it 200 times in a row but.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Good times were had by all!

*is an unashamed nerd*

 


Speaking of unabashedly nerdy things, perfect day 5 is all the times I let my true geek off her leash. This is from Dragon Con, which I've attended several times with my aunt in Atlanta. There's nothing like bonding with thousands of other true geeks over awesome things like Firefly, Harry Potter, Supernatural, etc. I remember the first time I saw a Katniss cosplay and realized how big Hunger Games was going to be. 







And speaking of bonding with true geeks, here's to all my perfect days with my book friends. Katie, Jess, Val, and Sara made perfect partners-in-crime for RT, and I'm grateful for all the other bookish weirdos I've had the pleasure to meet at parties and festivals and conferences and signings and panels. Here's to the sunburns and thrown out backs and bag burns and late-night dinners and drives. I've had a hundred perfect days because of all of you.



Here's what it boils down to: for me to have a "perfect day," I have to be surrounded by family and friends doing something I love and having fun and occasionally eating awesome food. Unless you give me a rainy day all by myself with Netflix and a stack of books and my bed. Ohhh, yeah. That's the stuff right there! So forget the people and all that. No, I'm just kidding. My perfect day has to be something that makes me feel completely relaxed and at peace, and what makes me feel that way is very different on different days.

I hope you guys enjoyed reading my post as much as I enjoyed the walk down memory lane I took while writing it. Be sure to check out more about The Last Good Day of the Year and enter the giveaway for a finished copy!

Book Buy Links:

   

About the Author:

Jessica Warman is the author of Breathless, Where the Truth Lies, Between, and Beautiful Lies, which have received seven starred reviews among them. Between was published in a total of twelve countries around the world. Jessica has an MA in creative writing and recently moved to Houston, Texas. Find her online at www.jessicawarman.com and on twitter @jkwarman.

Author Links:

  

Giveaway: 

1 finished copy of The Last Good Day of the Year

US only | must be 13+ to enter

a Rafflecopter giveaway