Blog Tour: The Knife & the Butterfly by Ashley Hope Perez (Excerpt & Sneak Peeks)

Hey everyone! SO sorry! This post was supposed to go up yesterday, but life has still been insanely crazy lately and I have had no time to do anything bookish or blog related. :( BUT, it's here today! I have Ashley here, talking about her new book!

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Hi everybody, and a big thanks to Ashley (great name!) for having me by. I’ll give you the synopsis of my new novel, The Knife and the Butterfly, and then after that it’s one of my favorite scenes from the first part of the book. The little numbers throughout correspond to my notes at the end about what inspired certain details. I hope you enjoy.

About The Knife and the Butterfly:

Azael Arevalo wishes he could remember how the fight ended. He knows his MS13 boys faced off with some punks from Crazy Crew. He can picture the bats, the bricks, the chains. A knife. But he can’t remember anything between that moment and when he woke behind bars. Azael knows jails, and something isn’t right about this lockup. No phone call. No lawyer. No news about his brother or his homies. The only thing they make him do is watch some white girl in some cell. Watch her and try to remember.

Lexi Allen would love to forget the fight, would love for it to disappear back into the Xanax fog it came from. And her mother and her lawyer hope she chooses not to remember too much about the brawl—at least when it’s time to testify. Lexi knows that there’s more at stake in her trial than her life alone, though. Azael needs the truth. The knife cut, but somehow it also connected.

Excerpt from Chapter 6:

After Pops got picked up, me and Eddie laid low for a week. When we heard that the CPS people weren't coming by to look for us anymore, we headed back to the Bel-Lindo Apartments. The Bel-Lindo was bad parents and crackheads, dog shit and dirt for lawns, and pissed-off fools everywhere, but it was still home. There were things I liked, too. Like Jorge Ledesma’s grandma praying out on the balcony to beat the heat in summer. Or the soccer games with the little guys on the dirt courtyards between buildings. And nowhere else in Houston you could find Mrs. Guzman selling calling cards and Coronas and spicy-as-fuck cheetos [1] right out of her living room window.

Even after Pops got sent back to El Salvador, we stuck to the Bel-Lindo. Our old neighbors knew how things was for us—no moms, no pops—and they kept an eye out and told us when an apartment went empty so we’d have a place to crash for a couple of nights. [2]

When people got evicted, they didn’t bother cleaning the walls or carpet or nothing before they split. Those empty units could be pretty sick. Used condoms and weird stains and a million cockroaches, some dead, some alive. Torn-up photos, suitcases that didn’t zip, broken dishes. All kinds of random shit.

When Eddie forced the door to 17B, he knocked over some trash bags. He gave them a kick, spilling used toilet paper everywhere.

“Nice work, shit-for-brains,” I told him. “You check the kitchen.”

“Fuckin’ Mexicans never flush it,” Eddie grumbled. [3] He used his foot to push a Barbie doll head over toward the trash pile, then he headed for the kitchen.

I went into the bathroom to see if there was anything worth keeping. An old, gunked-up bottle of dollar-store pine-scented cleaner was all I found under the sink, and I thought the drawers were empty till I pulled the bottom one all the way out. At the back there was a message in girly writing Sharpied right onto the rough wood. [4]

I aint doing this cuz you cheated on me. Not cuz you hit me.

Its cuz if I dont Im scared I wont ever leave you. The way

Ima go, I wont have no way to come crawlin back. I aint

gonna have this baby. Where me and him is goin, nothing

                                    can hurt us.

I stood up fast, not wanting to think about what I just read. But it was like the girl’s message skipped my brain and jumped into my legs, and I started kicking the shit out of that drawer. Every time I kicked it shut, it bounced back open, and finally I just had to shove the drawer back in.

I walked out of the bathroom, and there was Eddie chowing down on some old crackers like nothing bad happened in this shithole. But I didn’t want to talk about what I found, neither. So when he tossed me a package of Pop-Tarts, I caught it and opened it up. Some girl and her baby was dead, and here I was, eating her food like it didn't even matter.

When we threw down our blankets, Eddie passed out right off, but I lay there thinking for what seemed like forever. I almost wanted the neighbors to get into it or for somebody to break a bottle in the parking lot, anything. It was too damn quiet, and I was stuck with what I knew about that girl beat up on by her man and thinking she had to off herself just to get away from him. Finally I went and sat in the bathroom and got out my
black book.

Mostly I tagged for MS-13, but when I got my hands on enough cans, I’d work out a real piece, like the one I did to honor my moms on the wooden fence between the Bel-Lindo and the vacant lot. I showed that shit off for two weeks before it got painted out by some punks on a city work crew getting their community service hours. Erased, just like that. Some writers take pictures of their work and show it off that way. Me, all I got to keep was the memory of killing it out there with my cans, the thrill of throwing something up on a wall without getting caught. [5]

I was still thinking about the girl who wrote the message. Thinking about her by drawing. I started by sketching in the shapes. “Bel-Lindo” in big letters across the top. Over the bottom half, trash spilled out of some bags to spell out, AINT SO PRETTY. I drew an X-ray shot of one of the trash bags to show a girl all curled up around herself. And inside her stomach I drew an even smaller figure with the weird alien eyes and big head you see in pictures of unborn babies. I put a speech bubble out from him that said, “Damn! Already fukt!” [6]

After a while, Eddie banged on the door and asked if I had the runs or was I jacking off? That made me laugh. I put away my black book and went out, but I still couldn’t sleep. Sometimes you just can’t.

[1] When I used to teach in Houston, my students were crazy about spicy cheetos. They would eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and sometimes they did. I remember begging a pregnant student to swap her two bags of cheetos for something more nutritious from my lunch. They never called them “spicy-as-fuck” cheetos to my face, but this phrase is something I overheard when I was doing hall duty one day. I scurried back to my room and wrote it down in my writer’s notebook.

[2] This bit—the brothers sleeping in abandoned apartments—came straight from the news about the event that inspired the novel. I still have the quote that I pasted into my research file, although I've lost track of the specific source. Here it is, followed by a translation: “El último lugar donde durmió fue la casa de Marlene Martínez, una vecina que lo conocía desde niño. ‘Había días en que dormía en departamentos vacíos,’ dice ella.” TRANSLATION: “The last place where he slept was the house of Marlene Martínez, a neighbor who had known him since he was a boy. ‘There were days when he slept in empty apartments,’ she said.”

[3] Until I worked with teens in Houston, I had no idea there was such animosity between Mexican-Americans and immigrants from El Salvador. But there is. I remember having to work long and hard just to get students from these different backgrounds to cooperate on class projects. So that’s where Eddie’s snide remark comes from.

[4] Confession: I am totally obsessed with bathroom graffiti. I wrote an essay about it once in college, even. Of course, usually I read what’s on bathroom stalls, but this part of the scene is a kind of spin-off of some of the extremely personal confessions I've come across during my many years as a bathroom wall reader.  There’s something intensely personal and very frightening about seeing a message like this one and not knowing what happened to the person who wrote it.

[5] I can’t even tell you how much time I spent researching the logistics of canning and graffiti clean up. A lot. A LOT. This is stuff I knew nothing about, but I studied tons of Houston graffiti, stalked online tagger and street art groups, and even watched a YouTube video that explains how to steal (“rack”) spray paint. Not what you imagined as an author’s research, huh?

[6] A couple of things here. First, I used to have a student who doodled constantly, and while it annoyed me at first (especially when he chose to do it directly on the top of his desk) I came to realize that drawing for him was what writing was for me. I write to discover what I think—he drew to accomplish the same. The second thing I wanted to mention was that “Lindo” in the name of the apartment complex means “pretty” in Spanish, hence Azael’s commentary, “AINT SO PRETTY.” The third thing: I know the cussing fetus is disturbing. But this is how Azael sorts out what he’s just seen. The fact that he does anything about it is, in a way, pretty mature.

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Ask for The Knife and the Butterfly from your favorite local bookseller or order it online.

More interviews, excerpts, guest posts, and secrets (including two truths and a lie) coming throughout Ashley’s The Knife and the Butterfly blog tour. Click to see the full your schedule.

Can’t get enough? Check out Ashley’s blog, follow her on twitter @ashleyhopeperez, or find her on facebook

Contemporary Posts Linky

Have you written a post involving Contemporary YA?! Link it up!

You do not have to be a participant in the Just Contemporary Challenge to you this linky! It's for any and every post involving Contemporary YA! Let's spread the love! :)

You can link any Contemporary post (review, giveaway, author interview/guest post etc) but it does have to be Contemporary.

And I know I'm behind, but I do promise a read & a comment to anyone who links up! :)

Review: In Too Deep by Amanda Grace

In Too Deep by Amanda Grace was one of those books that got my inner reader all a-flutter the very first time I heard about it. It's no secret that I'm in love with Contemporary, or that the books dealing with those real tough issues are almost always my favorite. And here was a book about a girl who lets everyone in school believe that Mr. Big Man On Campus raped her at a party. Umm... Yes please! I haven't had much time to read lately, but I made time for this one. And oh my goodness, let me tell you- Wow. Was this book worth it.

Sam was such a hard character for me to read about, because I personally had a hard time putting myself in her shoes. So I spent a vast majority of the book flopping between wanting to slap some sense into Sam and feeling so sorry for her and wanting to hug her and help her make life better. But most of the time, the urge to slap her won. Because Sam doesn't have a strong sense of self, doesn't have confidence in herself or her abilities and because of this, she allows other people to make her decisions for her. I hate to say it, but she's really a rather weak character. She falls into the easiest course of action and just allows it to take her where it will. So, when she gets to school and starts to learn that everyone believes Carter to be a rapist, she doesn't speak up and quell the rumors, because she doesn't know how, and is terrified of even the idea of needing to announce something like that, and then others who feel wronged by Carter (like the girl he dumped because she wouldn't have sex & the girl he dumped because she did) tell Sam that she's doing the right thing- Carter deserves this comeuppance & there is only a week left until graduation when he can leave all of this behind.

But actions have consequences, and even choosing to do nothing is a choice.

It doesn't take long before the lie spirals out of control and Sam loses the ability to hold onto it. Her life is falling apart. She's being threatened by the Jocks at school, cheered on by the girls who think Carter is a jerk and comforted by her best friend (now boyfriend, yes?!!!), watching Carter lose his firm confidence and more, and she is feeling completely confused and overwhelmingly guilty.

I think, for the most part, Sam is a good person. But, like most teenagers, she is a little confused about her place in life, and is trying to determine where she fits. But she places far too much weight on what other people think and I don't think she ever really allowed herself to be herself, meaning she's about to graduate high school with no idea who she really is or what she stands for. And when you don't have a clear and definitive idea of who you are, you allow other people to mold you & their influence becomes far stronger over you than your own moral compass.

There are a lot of nuances to this book, a lot of layers that allow us to see how Sam grew to be who she is. Her mom walked out on them when Sam was just a baby, her father is the Sheriff and far more authoritative than loving, and she's got some deeper feelings for the best friend/boy next door that she agonizes over, etc. We learn a lot about Sam, and I really liked that the incident was not the only part of this story. We really learn a lot about Sam and you really get the sense that she could be a real person, that you probably know or have known a teenager very similar to her.

This is a book that has firmly found its strength in reality. I honestly believe that a situation like the one that plays out in this book could happen in real life, and I don't actually think it's that hard to imagine. But it does lead me to the best part of this book, which is the ending.

I want to extend an enormous THANK YOU to Ms. Grace for not being afraid of her ending and for allowing her story to take it's characters to the natural and honest conclusion without cheating us into a happily ever after. I've read far too many books that take a hugely honest and emotional story that could do so much for its readers and then leaves us with a beautifully crafted "happy place" for each and every character. A warning to those of you who enjoy unrealistically happy endings- This is not that book.

You cannot have a character who willingly participates in the destruction of another human being's life and not expect there to be consequences. Sam didn't want to hurt anyone. She didn't set out to ruin Carter, but she did stand by and watch while it happened, knowing that she could easily have fixed things for herself and for Carter had she simply opened her mouth and been honest. But instead, she sits back, allows other people to convince her that he deserves it (because that makes it "ok" for her to take the 'easy' way out) and watches while Carter's life falls to pieces.

This is a book that I think needs to be widely read. Because it teaches us a lesson that people, especially teenagers, NEED to hear. Your actions and choices DO matter. The MAKE a difference. And staying silent about something important? That IS a choice and it WILL have an impact. You ARE responsible for the result and you DO have to accept the consequences for that choice.

I can't stress enough how honest this book felt, how true to life, how real. This isn't a story where one magical speechifying moment is enough to fix all the damage that has been done, and the book is going to leave you feeling shaken. But Sam learns from her mistake. She begins to grow as a person and find her own self. And what more to ask for in a book than honesty, growth and emotion.

I don't know how to recommend this book more highly. There were things I didn't love about the book, things that weren't perfect. But the tone of the story and the ability of Ms. Grace to be honest with her readers and leave us in a place both dark and hopeful while still being true to her characters and the situation she's created more than makes up for any faults within the story. And the lessons learned in this book are lessons that every needs to learn.

Please. Read this book. And, if you have teenagers living at your house, have a copy at home.

*Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. 

Contemporary Link Up!

I've been meaning to get this post up for a while now, but as I've mentioned before, I've been insanely busy lately and my real life doesn't seem to want to allow my blogging life to be a *thing*. Ahem...

Anyway- This is going to become a regular feature here each Saturday. (Yes, I am well aware that today is Monday, but bear with me...)

Each Saturday I'm going to put up a linky where ANYONE can link ANY post dealing with Contemporary YA. It can be a review, author interview/guest post, a giveaway, opinion post, anything, as long as it is related to Contemporary YA.

You do NOT have to be a participant in the Just Contemporary Reading Challenge to use this linky. I want everyone to link up their posts! So tell your friends, tweet about it & get linking. I would love to have a huge linky each week with all the awesome Contemporary happenings online.

Feel free to link retroactively too! Please only add each post to one linky, but the post does not have to be written this week to be added. :)

AND- I will guarantee a read and a comment from me to every single person who links up using this linky system. And, I'll tweet about it and do all that I can to spread the word.

Contemporary is a genre that I wish got more love and attention, so let's get linking!! :)

News!!

Hello everyone!! :)

My apologies for my very sparse month of January! I've been incredibly busy and have had absolutely no time for blogging or reading or anything lately. :(

BUT. I do have a legit excuse!! My sister had baby #4 in the beginning of January, so I've been helping her out a lot. And, on top of that, I started two new jobs, right at the same time and spent two weeks in training for both new jobs while also working at my current job to fill my two weeks notice and I had to finalize the purchase of my new car in there as well as upgrading my phone (although that last thing is really just something I'm excited about, cuz it was easy :) )

BUT-

Training for new job #2 ended on Tuesday, yesterday was my last day at my old job and today is my last day of training at new job #1. New job #2 is back at the place I worked all through college, so I already know what I'm doing, and it's super part time. I am on schedule for 4 days a month, but I can pick up any extra shifts I want. And new job #1 officially starts for me on Monday AND it's a job that actually uses my college degree!! How awesome is that?! :) I'm pretty stoked!

So, this post is to let you know why I've been so MIA from the internet in general AND to let you know that life is slowing down some, and I should be able to be back up and running soon!! :) I'm excited to be back! I've missed the blogging world!