Blog Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway: Where I Found You by Heidi R. Kling
Where I Found You by Heidi R. Kling was released on December 4th, and we are thrilled to be a part of the blog tour today! We have all the book details, a guest post from the author, as well as a tour-wide giveaway!
Where I Found You (Sea #1) by Heidi R. Kling
Category: Young Adult, Contemporary
Publication: December 4th, 2017; Entangled Teen
Purchase: Amazon
After her mother’s plane went missing over the Indian Ocean, seventeen-year-old Sienna Jones gave up everything she loved about living in California. No more surfing. No more swimming. No more ocean, period. Playing it safe, hiding from the world, is the best call.
Until her dad throws down the challenge of a lifetime: spend the summer with his humanitarian team in Indonesia, working with orphans who lost everything in a massive tsunami.
The day they arrive, Sienna meets a mysterious boy named Deni, whose dark, intense eyes make her heart race. Their stolen nights force her to open up and live in a way she thought she couldn’t anymore. When she’s with Deni, she remembers the girl she used to be…and starts to feel like the woman he sees in her.
A woman he wants for his own.
Gulp.
But when Deni’s past comes looking for him, Sienna’s faced with losing another person she loves. She can’t do it. Not again.
Fortunately, this time, she has a plan.
Excerpt:
My face feels drizzly, like lying under sprinklers on a hot summer day.
And I’m not alone.
He leans over me, strong arms bent, peering from behind a wedge of thick brown hair, haunted eyes holding me in place under the fresh grass mist. I can’t unlock my eyes from his and without waiting to be invited, I need to find out why. Without fear or guarded delay, I reach out, grazing his cheek with my fingertips. I’m not sure if I’ll burn or break, and I don’t care.
Why are you looking at me this way?
What do you want to tell me?
Are you going to kiss me?
His skin is soft and hot like wet velvet under my fingers.
Cocking his head to the side, a piece of wet hair falling across a deep scar on his forehead, he looks at me like he wants to tell me his story, but doesn’t quite know how. My heart blows up like an overfilled water balloon that might burst from all the sadness.
And then…pop.
I woke up in a panic. The boy, his eyes, his secrets, evaporated into sauna-like vapors, vanishing with the rain.
Where did he go, where had he come from, and how had he known where to find me flooded my brain, and all I wanted was to get him back and force him to stay so I could touch him again, and then bam! I banged my head on something hard and sharp. I cried out in pain, rubbing my forehead as my eyes slowly focused on a blunt blue corner.
The shutters. The dorm. The orphanage. Or pesantren. Whatever.
Light streamed through the dewy crack in the window. I blinked.
How long had I been out? More importantly, how could I have imagined something so vivid? My dreams were real, but never that real.
Guest Post:
Since Where I Found You was inspired by real events, is there a message you are hoping the readers will take away from your work?
WHERE I FOUND YOU (Sea series #1) was inspired by true events. After the shocking tsunami of 2004 on Christmas, my husband pulled together a group of new doctors and flew, on their own dime, to Indonesia to help the orphans. He came back a changed man. I was working on another novel, and he looked at me dead on and said, “You should write about this.” So I did. Deni was inspired by a real boy, Usul, who outran the tsunami on his “motor” which is what Indonesians call their mopeds or scooters. He really rebelled against the scary and powerful pesantran (orphanage) owner, and raised a group of orphaned kids on his own. Homeless, on the streets, he never let them go hungry. For months, we sent them money as they couldn’t even afford money for rice. Usul is now a graduate student, married with a beautiful infant daughter. Some people are born with courage. Some embody resilience. Usul is one of those people and why Sienna is drawn to my fictional version, Deni, is also what Deni sees in her: a hidden strength and also the willingness to let the other see their flaws. Their beautiful cracks and scars. In that rawness, they fall in love. In making Sienna a couple years older, I was able to deepen their relationship. Spending time with Sienna, Deni and the whole Team Hope again was such a gift for me. I loved every second, and hope new readers find the same joy I did, and old readers gain even deeper feelings for this new version and stay tuned for WHERE THE SEA TAKES ME (Sea series #2) the long-awaited sequel out in April! 🙂
Author Bio: Heidi R. Kling
Heidi R. Kling writes about normal girls in fantastic situations. PAINT MY BODY RED, a romantic thriller about a girl fleeing secrets from home launches November 2 with EntangledTeen, followed by several more novels on various Entangled imprints. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the New School, but has been writing books, plays and screenplays since she could practically hold a pencil.
Her first novel, SEA (Putnam), was a Gateway Readers Award Finalist & Northern California Book of the Year nominee, was a Summer 2010 Indie Next Pick and a Goodreads “Mover and Shaker”.
Links:
Giveaway:
I love Usul’s story!
I “travel” through books so I love finding exciting ones set in foreign countries. The latest one I really enjoyed was Warcross which took me to Japan.
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