Guest Post by Denise Grover Swank (Here Blog Tour)

This post is part of The Teen Book Scene's blog tour for Here by Denise Grover Swank.You can find out all about the tour here. Make sure to visit all the other stops if you'd like to know more about Here!

Today we have Denise Grover Swank here for a Teenage Garage Sale post! A Teenage Garage Sale post is basically just a guest post on what kind of things we’d find if Denise were to have a garage sale of items from her teenage years.

A yellow skateboard—My younger brothers and I all got skateboards and we spent most of the summer between my 6th and 7th grade year plowing down a huge hill in our neighborhood. It’s a wonder someone didn’t break anything. Oh, wait. My brother broke his clavicle. Twice. 

An Eight-Track stereo/record player—I saved every bit of money I could to buy that stereo during my seventh grade year. The Kmart clerk wasn’t sure how to handle all of my coins. I think I paid ten dollars in pennies. The stereo cost $100, which when I think about it now, was a small fortune. The first thing I listened to when I got home? Barry Manilow. Gawd, I’m old.
Sean Cassidy Albums—yes albums. Sean Cassidy, younger brother to former teen heart throb David Cassidy of The Partridge Family. Sean was in a very short lived show called The Hardy Boys. But the show lived long enough to plaster Sean’s face on more than a few Tiger Beat magazines. 

Eight-Track of Pat Benatar—Disco was alive and well when I was in high school until I heard “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” My taste in music has never been the same.
Spiral Notebooks, used—I constantly wrote in spiral notebooks, be it poetry, short story ideas or love letters. 

A brown beret—I took three years of French and loved anything that had to do with France. However, some things are better left to the French. 

Gauchos—God save the poor soul who thought those wide leg capri length monstrosities looked good. And have mercy on those of us who wore them. 

A 1976 Mustang, yellow with black leather seats and a custom installed eight-track player—I seem to have a thing for eight-tracks, huh? They were our CDs back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The Mustang was my second car. My first was a Plymouth Cricket. Never heard of it? Yeah, neither had I. I bought it for $600 with my own money from my part time job at Wendy’s. It died about a month later, prompting the purchase of my used Mustang. It didn’t have air conditioning, but a couple of guy friends installed the stereo for me. I loved that car.

Thanks for the great guest post, Denise!

Make sure to check out all the other stops of this blog tour, and keep your eye out for Here - it's already been released! You can read my review here.

Here by Denise Grover Swank
(Amazon | Goodreads)

Sixteen year old Julia Phillips buries herself in guilt after killing her best friend Monica in a car accident. Julia awoke in the hospital with a broken leg, a new talent for drawing and false memories of the accident, in which she dies and Monica lives. The doctors attribute this to her head injury, but no one can explain how a bracelet engraved with her name ended up at the scene of the accident. A bracelet no one has ever seen before.
Classmate Evan Whittaker paid Julia no attention before the accident, let alone after. Now suddenly he’s volunteering to tutor her and offering to drive her home. She can't ignore that his new obsession started after his two-day disappearance last week and that he wears a pendant she’s been drawing for months. When the police show up one night looking for Evan, he begs Julia to run with him, convincing her that Monica is still alive. Julia agrees to go, never guessing where he’s really from.

Review: Here by Denise Grover Swank

Title: Here (On the Otherside #1)
Atuhor: Denise Grover Swank
Publisher: N/A
Pages: 350
Release date: November 7th 2011
Genre: YA; paranormal; dystopia
Source: Thank you to the author and The Teen Book Scene for providing a review copy in exchange for an honest review

Goodreads description:

Sixteen year old Julia Phillips buries herself in guilt after killing her best friend Monica in a car accident. Julia awoke in the hospital with a broken leg, a new talent for drawing and false memories of the accident, in which she dies and Monica lives. The doctors attribute this to her head injury, but no one can explain how a bracelet engraved with her name ended up at the scene of the accident. A bracelet no one has ever seen before.
Classmate Evan Whittaker paid Julia no attention before the accident, let alone after. Now suddenly he’s volunteering to tutor her and offering to drive her home. She can't ignore that his new obsession started after his two-day disappearance last week and that he wears a pendant she’s been drawing for months. When the police show up one night looking for Evan, he begs Julia to run with him, convincing her that Monica is still alive. Julia agrees to go, never guessing where he’s really from.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

When I got the e-mail about this blog tour, I just read the description for Here quickly and though this was contemporary YA, so I signed up for the tour. Looking back, I have no idea how I could have not seen that Here is... well, I'm not even sure what it is; it's somewhere between paranormal and science fiction. Since I'd said take part in the tour and had received a review copy, I started reading it anyways, without expecting much. However, I ended up liking this a lot more than I thought I would!

As someone who reads contemporary YA almost exclusively, it feels wrong to judge anything about Here. Since the only paranormal YA I can think of that I've read is the Twilight series, I don't have much to compare Here to. But I do know that I enjoyed reading it.

The world-building, as far as I can tell, is really well done. One of the things I disliked about Twilight (I know, the comparison to Twilight is very far-fetched, but like I said, I have nothing else to compare this one to) is how the paranormal aspect is completely obvious to every reader, but the main character just doesn't get it. That's not the case at all in Here - I didn't figure it out up until the moment Julia does. You can't know for sure what's going on - is Evan from the past or the future, is he a ghost, and so on. I really enjoyed making up different theories about what was going on, and the mystery aspect is really well-done. I would have liked some more information on how the whole paranormal thing works, though.

The characters are pretty good. In the beginning, Julia is easy to relate to, and I understood her grief and her problems with her family. Later, when the story crosses over into the paranormal realm, I found it a little harder to relate to her - the strong feelings she develops for Evan and Reece so quickly seemed a little unrealistic to me. I don't want to say too much in order not to give anything away, but I liked the secondary characters, too, and enjoyed reading about their different sides.

I was a little disappointed by the ending. Yes, this is the first book in a series, so of course there needs to be some suspense left, but the ending is a little too open, in my opinion - some kind of conclusion would have been nice.

This was a surprisingly enjoyable read for me. I had a few complaints, but all in all, Here is well-done. Like I said, I haven't read enough books in this genre to know whether this is an average book or outstanding, so I'm not sure whether to recommend it or not, but I can say it was fun to read and a nice change of pace from the contemporaries I normally read.