Truest by Jackie Lea Sommers
Genre:YA realistic contemporary
Published on September 1st, 2015
Published by Katherine Tegen Books
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Silas Hart has seriously shaken up Westlin Beck’s small-town life. Brand new to town, Silas is different than the guys in Green Lake. He’s curious, poetic, philosophical, maddening– and really, really cute. But Silas has a sister– and she has a secret. And West has a boyfriend. And life in Green Lake is about to change forever.
EXCERPT
It didn’t take long to confirm that Silas was absolutely crazy.
One morning he showed up at my house wearing an honest-to-goodness
windbreaker suit straight out of the nineties: purple, mint green, and what is
best described as neon salmon. I curbed a grin while Silas gathered our
detailing supplies from my garage. “What?” he deadpanned. “What are you staring
at?”
“Your windbreaker is just so …”
“Fetching?” he interjected.
“Voguish? Swanky?”
“Hot,” I said, playing along. “The
nineties neon just exudes sex appeal.”
“Well, I thought so myself.”
And after the sun was high in the
sky and the pavement was heating up, he took off the windsuit, revealing shorts
and a New Moon T-shirt beneath, Edward Cullen’s pale face dramatically
printed across the front. “Vader’s competition,” he said, shrugged, and started
vacuuming the floors of the Corolla left in our care.
He also talked about the strangest things: “Can you ever really prove
anything? How?” or “I read about this composer who said his abstract music
went ‘to the brink’—that beyond it lay complete chaos. What would that look
like? Complete chaos?” or “You know how in Shakespeare Romeo says, ‘Call me but
love, and I’ll be new baptized’? He’s talking about his name, but
baptism’s bigger than that; it has to be. It’s about identity, and wonder, and
favor, you know?” or “A group of moles is called a labor; a group of
toads is called a knot. Who comes up with this stuff? It’s a bouquet of
pheasants, a murder of crows, a storytelling of ravens, a lamentation of swans.
A lamentation of swans, West!”
One morning I was late coming downstairs, and Shea got to Silas first.
The two of them sat drinking orange juice on the front steps and discussing
Shea’s question of whether fish have boobs. “I think,” Silas said, sounding
like a scholar, “they do not, since they’re not mammals. But mermaids do, since
they’re half-fish, half-mammal.”
“Mermaids aren’t real though,” Shea said, the tiniest bit of hope in his
voice that Silas would prove him wrong.
“Who told you that?” said Silas sternly.
“You think they’re real?” Shea asked.
“I can’t be sure,” Silas said, “but I might have seen one when I
used to live in Florida. Probably best not to jump to any conclusions either
way.”
Behind me, Libby giggled. Silas glanced at us over his shoulder through
the screen door and grinned. “Libby,” he said, “what do you say? Mermaids, real
or not?”
“I don’t want to jump to conclusions either way,” my shy sister said,
then turned bright red.
“Smart girl,” said Silas.
That afternoon, Silas and I sat in the backseat of a dusty Saturn,
trading off the handheld vacuum as we talked—or rather, shouted—over its noise.
I ran the hand-vac over the back of the driver’s seat, while Silas said, “I
used to think I was the only one with a crush on Emily Dickinson until a couple
years ago.”
“You have a crush on Emily
Dickinson?”
“Durr.”
“Did you just ‘durr’ me? Is that
like a ‘duh’?”
He nodded as I handed him the Dirt
Devil. “But then I read this book that says it’s a rite of passage for any
thinking American man. And then I read a poem called ‘Taking Off Emily
Dickinson’s Clothes.’”
Just the title made me blush; I
averted my eyes to focus on the vacuum’s trajectory.
Silas, unruffled, sighed unhappily.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, frowning,
chancing a glance at him.
“I finally made it into the backseat
with a girl,” Silas cracked, looking hard at the Dirt Devil. “This is not all I
was hoping it would be.”
I slugged him in the arm, and his
wry smile gave way to laughter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jackie Lea Sommers lives and loves and writes in Minnesota, where the people are nice and the Os are long. She is the 2013 winner of the Katherine Paterson Prize. She dislikes OCD, horcruxes, and Minnesota winters. She likes book boyfriends, cranky teenagers, and Minnesota springs. Truest is her first novel.
www.twitter.com/jackieleawrites / www.jackieleasommers.com / www.facebook.com/jackieleawrites / www.instagram.com/jackieleasommers / www.pinterest.com/jackieleas / www.jackieleasommers.tumblr.com
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Thanks so much for joining the TRUEST blog tour, Roxy!!!
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It's different, I like it!
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