Release date: January 26th 2014
Purchase: Amazon | Amazon UK
Synopsis via Goodreads:
Della Doe Deare isn’t like most people. Most people begin their life on the day they enter the world; the day they’re born. Della, well, hers began on the day she turned eighteen. After all, it was the day she first heard her real name, and that of her mother. With nothing but a couple of duffel bags and a folder full of questions, she travels to coastal North Carolina to claim a house that she inherited from a grandmother she never knew.
She has two goals: discover why her mother ran away from home all those years ago, and avoid the family that had left her to rot in an inept foster care system. Hard to do when the family she’s been trying to avoid is dragging her into an unimaginable world… a world on the brink of war, and both sides want her dead.
All Della ever wanted was to know who she was, but her journey to self-discovery might just lead to destruction.
About the Author:
A Tidewater girl born and bred, Regan Claire’s first friend and love was the Atlantic. Growing up being told the legends about Pirates and American Natives common in coastal VA and NC, coupled with being an only child, did wonders for her imagination; Regan had one foot in fantasy-land ever since, a trait her dear husband heroically endures (and one she secretly hopes her daughters have inherited). Her family moved inland to Nashville while she was entering tweenhood and not a day went by that she didn’t miss her childhood playmate and her crashing waves. Nashville has her perks though, namely the love of Regan’s life and their two sweet girls. Their insane mutt-dog and the stray cat that refuses to leave their porch aren’t too bad either. Regan loves fairytales A LOT, teen movies (preferably with dancing or singing), reads entirely too much, and is constantly late.
When I sign up for blog tours, I generally don’t pick guest posts as part of my blog post because I never know what to ask the author to use as the topic for the post they send me to use. For this blog tour I asked for a guest post about self discovery and was delighted with the post I received 😀
Guest Post:
Journey to self discovery
“Self-discovery. What does that mean, and how do you journey there? Can you route it on Mapquest? Is it a singular thing, or something different for every individual? Actually, I don’t know. What I do know is my own experience with it, and I’m in a sharing mood so saddle up.
Self-discovery is a funny thing. It’s something that, I think, most of us go through during our teen years and early twenties. That’s because it’s the first time we’ve actually have control over ourselves… the first time that our actions can truly affect us, the people around us, and our entire future. Where we find out what type of person we truly are, and what type of person we want to be as we grow older.
Remember how I said self-discovery was a funny thing?
See, it’s funny because after all that angst, and doubt, and passion… after you’ve finally gotten it all figured out, Life happens. And you lose your way. You’re not the person you’ve set out to be, and not achieving the goals you set out to achieve.
Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes life leads you down a path that’s better than the one you imagined for yourself. You become a better person than you set out being, you’ve made different goals and dreams and didn’t even realize it! But sometimes that detour is not so good. Sometimes, you’ve traveled so far from who you really are that when you finally realize you’re lost, you can’t even remember where you took that wrong turn. Then you have to start that whole ‘self-discovery’ thing all over again.
That’s how it happened with me. When I was young(er), I was crazy ambitious, wanted to travel, and write, and open a coffee shop, though not in that particular order. It wasn’t the things that I wanted so much as the act of wanting them. I knew what I was, and knew who I was.
Then Life finally happened to me.
I met a guy, an amazingly smart and funny guy. We got pregnant and had a baby. Then we got married. We were a little young, but not too young, and if this was all unexpected and rather rushed-feeling, it also felt right. It wasn’t enough to derail my sense of self. I was different, sure, but I had kept up with who I was and what I was about. I still knew what I wanted from my future.
Then, Life decided to knock down our door. Our daughter, our sweet, smart, and funny little girl, was diagnosed with a rare birth defect. The doctors told us it could be corrected with a simple and low risk brain surgery. However, low-risk doesn’t mean no-risk, and statistics have to pick on someone. We spent 17 agonizing days in the ICU, and over two months after that in two different hospitals. When she was finally released, that sweet, smart and funny little girl was different. She was still the same inside, but 7 weeks of inpatient therapy can’t magically cure Cerebral Palsy and bring back her vision. Still, we were lucky! She was with us and still as smart and funny and maybe even MORE sweet than before. Less than a month after being released from the hospital, we moved into our first house. We got a dog and a yard, and we managed. My husband changed jobs to spend more time with us just in time for me to become pregnant again, and we managed. Our second daughter was born, and our hearts grew bigger, as they do when you have more children… and we managed.
And then, I managed to wake up. I woke up, looked around and didn’t remember who I was anymore. I was a wife. A mother. A mother with a special needs child. But, I wasn’t “Regan” anymore. I didn’t even know who that person was. I’d lost her, years ago, and didn’t even know how to find her again. Tomorrow had become too hard to think about, so I didn’t. Finally, a foggy memory came to me. A memory of this dream to write, and because I was desperate to do anything that was mine, I found a writing group and started writing.
It was hard.
It was exhilarating.
As I discovered this new world, as I wrote this story about a girl going through her own self-discovery, I found out who I was. Well, not exactly who I was, but who I am now, because Life had changed me irrevocably.
I discovered the new person I was and decided I rather liked her. But, it was a discovery I wouldn’t have made without writing. Because my dream for writing, even though it had become a foggy one, had always been there. It was a backburner dream. A someday dream. I’d been putting it off, and unintentionally putting off myself. Because we ARE our dreams. We are made up of our hopes and goals. If we ignore or loose sight of them then we loose sight of ourselves.
So, what do I think self-discovery is? It’s finding that part of you that
wishes, that hopes, that dares to dream… And then it’s plucking up the courage to follow those dreams. It might be easier when we’re younger, when all dreams seem easily achieved, but we’re never to old to find ourselves; never to old to find that bit that makes us tick, that drives us, that defines us.
It may be different for you. It may be different for everyone else in the whole world. But me? Well, to me self-discovery is the act of dreaming, and then–and this is important–following those dreams” – Regan Claire
Awesome guest post by Regan.
Thanks for participating!
LikeLike
Thanks for arranging the tour Shane, and thanks to Regan for an epic post 😀
LikeLike