Love, Lucy by April Lindner
Release Date: January 27, 2015 by Poppy
Pages: 304
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance, Travel
While backpacking through Florence, Italy, during the summer before she heads off to college, Lucy Sommersworth finds herself falling in love with the culture, the architecture, the food...and Jesse Palladino, a handsome street musician. After a whirlwind romance, Lucy returns home, determined to move on from her "vacation flirtation." But just because summer is over doesn't mean Lucy and Jesse are over, too.
In this coming-of-age romance, April Lindner perfectly captures the highs and lows of a summer love that might just be meant to last beyond the season.
About April Lindner:
April
Lindner is the author of three novels:
Catherine,
a modernization of Wuthering
Heights;
Jane,
an update of Jane
Eyre;
and Love,
Lucy,
releasing January 27, 2015. She also has published two poetry
collections, Skin
and This
Bed Our Bodies Shaped.
She plays acoustic guitar badly, sees more rock concerts than she’d
care to admit, travels whenever she can, cooks Italian food, and
lavishes attention on her pets—two Labrador retriever mixes and two
excitable guinea pigs. A professor of English at Saint Joseph’s
University, April lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two
sons.
Here is a special guest post from the author in which she shares "Some Rules of the Road" for traveling abroad, as Lucy did in the book! :)
Some
Rules of the Road
Like Lucy Sommersworth, the heroine of
Love, Lucy, my parents gave me the gift of a lifetime: a
backpacking trip to Europe. I was a bit older than Lucy—22, and
just out of college—but when I arrived in Milan, Italy with a
Eurail pass, a copy of Let’s Go: Europe, and a seventy-pound
backpack I could barely lift, I was a wee bit terrified. Like Lucy, I
spoke only a little bit of Italian, just barely enough to get by, and
I wasn’t particularly good at reading maps or train schedules.
Unlike Lucy, I was travelling solo.
Luckily, my
journey began with training wheels. I’d just taken a college
Italian class, and my professor had offered a safe crash pad for the
first few days of my trip—in her family home in the Alps. Less
luckily, when I reached Malpensa airport, nobody was there to pick me
up. Giddy with excitement and jet lag, I wandered around the airport,
eavesdropping on Italians as they hugged each other hello and
goodbye, and had noisy arguments. I’d never felt more alone in my
life. Where would I sleep that night if my ride didn’t show up?
Luckily, my professor’s brother
arrived at last to whisk me away to the family home in Domodossola.
The extended family welcomed and fed me, gave me tours of their city
with its charming medieval center, helped me practice my Italian,
and, when the time was right, brought me to the train station where
my solo travels began for real. It was time to take off the training
wheels.
If I’d felt alone back in the
airport, I was even more so on that train to Verona, a city where I
didn’t know a soul. In those pre-internet days, I could disappear
into thin air and nobody would even notice I was gone. The thought
was chilling, but oddly exciting.
By nightfall, I’d made it to Verona.
I’d figured out the public transportation, found a youth hostel,
and booked myself a bed. Best of all, I had introduced myself to a
handful of other backpackers. We hung out together in the hostel’s
common area, sharing bread and cheese, exchanging stories, discussing
the rules of the road—those bits of practical wisdom our travels
were teaching us. Here are a few.
Time passes differently on the road.
Spend a few very intense hours seeing the sites with strangers and
by the end of the day, those strangers have become a part of your
story. Years later you’ll see their faces in your photo album and
still remember stray details of the adventures you shared together,
even if you can’t quite recall their names.
Spontaneity is key. There are
few things as magical as showing up at a train station with no idea
where you’re headed next, picking a random train, and hopping on.
Janis Joplin said it best: Freedom’s
just another word for nothing left to lose. When you’re
carrying all your possessions on your back in a city where you don’t
know a soul, you’re absolutely free. You can go anywhere, do
anything. That freedom has its lonely moments—but it can be the
doorway to all kinds of adventures.
Embrace misadventure. As
carefully as you plan there will be crazy mistakes: wrong turns,
slept-through train stops, multilingual misunderstandings, and all
kinds of other blunders—and these will make the best stories. My
misadventures are some of my favorite memories. The time I missed
curfew and had to climb into my hostel through a second-story window.
The morning when, hanging out my recently washed clothes to dry, I
dropped my wet underthings out the window, onto a stranger’s head.
The night when, with no room to stay in, I slept on Venice’s train
station steps with about a hundred other backpackers, the stars above
us and the Grand Canal stretched out before us.
Would I trade that last memory for a
safe, comfy night in an actual bed? Not on your life.
GIVEAWAY!
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