Blog Tour: Carry Me Home by Jessica Therrien – Review and Giveaway!

Carry Me Home

Author: Jessica Therrien

Publication Date: September 26th, 2017

Publisher: Acorn Publishing

Genres: Contemporary, Thriller, Young Adult

Synopsis: “A riveting page-turner… Jessica Therrien broke my heart into a million pieces — and then put it back together again. This book will haunt and uplift readers long after they turn the last page.”
-KAT ROSS, best-selling author of The Midnight Sea

CARRY ME HOME is a fictional novel inspired by the true story of a teenage girl’s involvement in several Mexican gangs in San Jose and Los Angeles. The members of her crew call her, Guera, Spanish for “white girl” and it doesn’t take long for her to get lost in their world of guns and drugs.

* * *

Lucy and Ruth are country girls from a broken home. When they move to the city with their mother, leaving behind their family ranch and dead-beat father, Lucy unravels.

They run to their grandparents’ place, a trailer park mobile home in the barrio of San Jose. Lucy’s barrio friends have changed since her last visit. They’ve joined a gang called VC. They teach her to fight, to shank, to beat a person unconscious and play with guns. When things get too heavy, and lives are at stake, the three girls head for LA seeking a better life.

But trouble always follows Lucy. She befriends the wrong people, members of another gang, and every bad choice she makes drags the family into her dangerous world.

Told from three points of view, the story follows Lucy down the rabbit hole, along with her mother and sister as they sacrifice dreams and happiness, friendships and futures. Love is waiting for all of them in LA, but pursuing a life without Lucy could mean losing her forever.

Ultimately it’s their bond with each other that holds them together, in a true test of love, loss and survival.

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I have a really soft spot for YA books that deal with main characters and their rough lives – I don’t know why, but I love reading about characters who can overcome obstacles and come out a stronger person at the end of the story.  So when I read the synopsis for Carry Me Home, I was already hooked on the idea of reading it before I even had the chance to.

Not only is Carry Me Home a deep, meaningful novel about coming out of a difficult situation, but it also features important family ties that are important to the story and to the main character’s life.

There are three points of view in this book, and every one of them are important.  The first point of view is from the main character, Lucy, the second is from her sister, and the third if from her mother.  All three of these viewpoints end up working together to make the story feel more complete and fleshed out rather than if we just had gotten the viewpoint of one character.  This is a really nice touch.

The relationship between Lucy, her sister, and her mother is a difficult one that has a lot of ups and downs, but it’s such a true feeling story of family ties.  I think that the author did a wonderful job with writing this one, especially when making Lucy’s story feel so realistic.

While this book and the characters are fiction, it is inspired by true events, which makes the feelings I had while reading this one a lot deeper and more intense than if it had just been a fictional novel.  It adds a little something extra to it.  It makes it more powerful.

The issues that Lucy faces are all issues that many teens face every day – drugs, falling in with bad crowds, and just various troubles in general.  Carry Me Home can be a bit difficult to read sometimes because of how much is going on and how real it feels, but the book is deep and meaningful, and definitely worth checking out.

Note: I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review – Thank you!

Jessica Therrien is the author of the young adult series Children of the Gods. Book one in the series, Oppression, became a Barnes & Noble best-seller shortly after its release. Her trilogy has been translated and sold through major publishers around the world, such as Editions AdA (Canada), EditionsMilan (France), and SharpPoint Press (China).

Aside from her Children of the Gods series, Jessica is the author of a kid’s picture book called, The Loneliest Whale. Her award-winning stories can also be found in a published anthology of flash fiction.

Jessica currently lives in Irvine with her husband and two young sons. She is working on an a YA suspense thriller series and a middle grade fantasy series.

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