Blog Tour, Review & Giveaway: Finding Felicity by Stacey Kade

Finding Felicity by Stacey Kade releases tomorrow and I am thrilled to be a part of this blog tour! I love Stacey’s writing style and this is one of those contemporary YA novels that deals with having to discover yourself and adjust to live at college and I am sure you will love it too! Check out all the book details below, my spoiler-free review and be sure to enter the tour-wide giveaway!

 

Finding Felicity by Stacey Kade

Category: Young Adult, Contemporary
Publication: March 20th, 2018; Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Purchase: Amazon, B&N, iBooks, TBD, Kobo

Caroline Sands has never been particularly good at making friends. And her parents’ divorce and the move to Arizona three years ago didn’t help. Being the new girl is hard enough without being socially awkward too. So out of desperation and a desire to please her worried mother, Caroline invented a whole life for herself—using characters from Felicity, an old show she discovered online and fell in love with.

But now it’s time for Caroline to go off to college and she wants nothing more than to leave her old “life” behind and build something real. However, when her mother discovers the truth about her manufactured friends, she gives Caroline an ultima-tum: Prove in this first semester that she can make friends of the nonfictional variety and thrive in a new environment. Otherwise, it’s back to living at home—and a lot of therapy.

Armed with nothing more than her resolve and a Felicity-inspired plan, Caroline ac-cepts the challenge. But she soon realizes that the real world is rarely as simple as television makes it out to be. And to find a place where she truly belongs, Caroline may have to abandon her script and take the risk of being herself.

 

Spoiler-free Review:

[book rating=4/5]

“I was too scared to be myself and try to find people who might like me, because what if they didn’t? What would that say about me?”

Finding Felicity is the perfect story about finding yourself and where you belong in a sea of original and unoriginal people in the world. How do you stand apart, how do you know who you truly are? Sometimes you just have to risk being seen and finding your place. This book is absolutely perfect for high school seniors and college freshman; it fills the void of young adult books focused on what college could be like. Caroline’s experiences are universal and most will relate to the pressures that not only others put upon you but what expectations you put upon yourself.

Caroline moved to a new high school a few years back and just never made any true friends, in fact she convinced her mother she had a whole group of friends…they just happened to be the characters of an old TV show she was watching online. She manufactured her whole life, and now she actually has to make friends and real life experiences, except she has no idea how to just be herself and accomplish this task.

Everything Caroline goes through may seem a little extreme, but her anxiety is so true and real. Anyone heading off to college, those experiences of being in charge of yourself and your future are almost always riddled with fear and the unknown. However, determining how you tackle these new challenges are life skills every person needs in navigating the real world.

Stacey Kade is a master of character driven stories. You almost immediately connect and relate to each and every one of them, even the side characters. They all have such stand out personalities and experiences. I absolutely loved the dichotomy between Caroline, her mother, and Lexi (her party-girl roommate).

You may think you can reinvent yourself around a bunch of strangers but it is rather idealistic and in theory harder than it sounds. Caroline has many obstacles to tackle, and one of them is truly determining who she is – and accepting that life isn’t as easy as it looks on TV. Speaking of TV, if you have seen Felicity, the TV show, I think you will get some fun inside jokes as to what Caroline is thinking and planning, If you have never seen the show, it doesn’t hinder your ability to enjoy and pull the message from this very poignant novel about growing up and finding yourself.

 

Author Bio: Stacey Kade

The daughter of a minister and a music teacher, Stacey Kade grew up reading Har-lequin romances on the sly in the basement. Kade is the author of two young adult series (The Ghost and Goth trilogy and the Project Paper Doll series). Her first adult contemporary romance, 738 DAYS, was released earlier this year.

Prior to writing full time, Kade worked as an award-winning copywriter for several Fortune 500 companies. She lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband, Greg, and their two retired racing greyhounds.

Links:

Website  **  Twitter  **  Facebook  **  Goodreads

 

Giveaway:

A finished copy of FINDING FELICITY by Stacey Kade – US only, closes 3/29

 

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