I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the GOING WILD by Brittany Geragotelis Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
Author: Brittany
Geragotelis
Title: GOING WILD
Series The Infamous Frankie
Lorde #2
Pub. Date: August
3rd 2021
Publisher: Pixel + Ink
Formats: Hardcover,
eBook
Pages: 304
Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, B&N, iBooks, Kobo, TBD, Bookshop.org
Summary
In this upper middle grade series, a pre-teen international thief turns over a new leaf (sort of) to right societal wrongs in her snooty new town. For Frankie, using her less-than-legal set of skills to pull a heist against a crooked real estate mogul with the help of her new friend Ollie was super gratifying, but she's getting restless now. In the second book in the series, the potentially reformed thief dives into the dangerous and political world of trafficking exotic animals. Frankie and Ollie hear that there's a dangerous exotic animal farm supplying Greenwich's elite with lions and tigers and bears. Feeling an instant kinship with the endangered creatures locked away in their cages, Frankie makes it her mission to find the perpetrators, free the beautiful beasts, and ensnare the bad guys in a trap of her own.
Reviews
"Fast and cinematic."—School
Library Journal
"A thriller for fans of plot-driven stories."—Kirkus Reviews
Grab book 1 Stealing Greenwich now!
Excerpt
Entry One
I’m a thief.
No joke.
And not the cute kind of thief that steals a lipstick or toy at the corner store. You know, like you might’ve done that one time on a dare. For me, that’s child’s play.
Nope. I’m the kind of thief that studies the layout to a billionaire’s mansion and then steals his four-million dollar suit of armor. Or sneaks in through the window of a factory to take a two-pound European white truffle worth over $300,000.
I’m that kind of thief.
And so is my dad—
Was.
Is?
Can he still be considered a thief if he’s in prison?
Never mind. I suppose that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that my dad is Tom Lorde: the most notorious international thief the modern world has ever seen. Before the FBI caught him and threw him behind bars, my dad had pulled over forty jobs, stolen around $57 million, and conned some of the smartest people on the planet out of their hard-earned treasures.
And I, Frankie Lorde, helped him do it.
See, I was his right-hand gal.
His coconspirator.
His partner in crime.
His student.
And now, with Dad locked up, and me on my own, the student has become the teacher.
Sort of.
Because what I’ve learned these past few months while living my new life is that some things you just don’t grow out of. They’re a part of you, like having a crooked smile or a cowlick. No matter how many times you try to get rid of it, it always creeps back.
So, yeah.
Like I said before: I’m Frankie Lorde, and I’m a thief.
Entry Two
This is my confession.
Well, not so much a confession. More like a memoir? My government-appointed therapist, Dr. Deerchuck, calls it a journal. Which I suppose is accurate, though there’s something about that term that makes me all prickly. I think it’s because it reminds me of the overly happy girls in commercials who are laughing as they write in their glittery pink diaries about their crushes.
I am so not a pink, glittery kind of girl.
The truth is, the only reason I’m writing in this journal at all is because I was forced to. Dr. Deerchuck swears that the more honest I am about my past, the quicker I can let go of it. AKA, the quicker I can be reformed.
The only thing I believe is the sooner I do what she says, the sooner I can let go of her.
But back to the journal thing. The problem with her logic in letting go of my past is . . . I’m not sure I want to.
See, I don’t exactly view my life before getting caught as being, well, bad. Sure, Dad and I broke a few (hundred) rules. Took some stuff that didn’t exactly belong to us. But because of our lifestyle, we got to travel to incredible places, like Paris, Greece, and India. I got to light a candle at Notre Dame. Touch monuments in the Acropolis. Eat sushi while climbing Mount Fuji.
What other middle schooler can say that?
None that I know, that’s for sure.
So, when the courts sent me to live with my closest relative—my dad’s younger brother, Uncle Scotty—in the quasi-perfect Greenwich, Connecticut, I sort of freaked.
Greenwich is like Pleasantville. Only, with mansions and money. Not exactly my style.
And being stuck here for the foreseeable future felt a little like being locked away myself.
It still does, sometimes.
There are a few things that make living here suck a little less, though.
One is my uncle Scotty.
Which is a surprise, because he’s a cop.
That’s right.
We’re literally playing Cops and Robbers here.
But for whatever reason, it works for us. We even have fun. Like this morning, for instance.
Over the past few months, we’ve taken to doing a sort of music roulette in the morning. Whoever gets
to the kitchen first chooses whatever song they want to listen to. Then the other picks the next song and so on and so forth. But after a few rounds of listening to some pretty great songs, we switched to choosing awful songs for some reason. Sort of like finding the best of the worst to torture each other with. It had become a game of trying to out-annoy each other, until there was a clear winner.
Which was usually me, since I had a plethora of current cringe-worthy pop music to choose from.
This morning Uncle Scotty was already in the kitchen drinking an espresso when I trudged in, which meant he got first pick.
I yawned as I plopped down into what had become my chair.
“Pick your poison, Detective,” I said, pulling the container of cereal over to my bowl and pouring until it was full.
“I think today’s my day, Frankie,” Uncle Scotty said, leaning against the counter in the same lazy way my dad always had.
A sudden wave of sadness rushed over me as I thought of him, and I tried to shake it off. It was far too early for nostalgia.
“You say that every morning,” I answered, pointing at him with my spoon.
“Today it’s true,” Uncle Scotty replied.
“Doubt it,” I said, my mouth full of crispy cereal.
“But go ahead and give it a shot.”
He just looked at me and raised a determined eyebrow.
“Google, play ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 miles).’”
The rhythmic strumming of a guitar filled the room and I immediately felt the urge to start nodding along. This was almost always the case. The songs tricked you by starting out sounding normal. But then once the lyrics came into play, it usually went downhill—fast.
A few chords into this one and I could already tell there was something about it that was off.
Or rather, awful.
One thing was sure, Uncle Scotty had definitely brought his A-game this particular morning.
“Oh, yeah!” he said loudly over the beginning of the
song. “When I wake up . . .”
Then to my surprise, my very professional uncle suddenly leaped from his place at the counter into the middle of the kitchen, and struck a crazy pose while holding a spoon up to his mouth like it was a microphone. When the chorus finally hit, he began to march around me while singing the lyrics at the top of his lungs and wiggling his butt back and forth.
“Oh. My. God,” I said, momentarily frozen in place.
“What is happening?”
This was not the uncle Scotty I knew. The uncle Scotty I knew wore a serious expression most of the time, jeans and a button-down shirt all of the time, and a silly side . . . well, none of the time.
Until now. This uncle Scotty was new.
“Say it,” he demanded, a smile creeping onto his face.
“No way,” I said.
“Say it or I’ll keep singing,” he added, jumping around again. “I might even make it your ringtone.”
“Fine!” I said, giving in. “You win!”
“What was that?” Uncle Scotty said, putting his hand to his ear like he hadn’t heard me.
“You win!” I yelled, with a little laugh. Then I added, “This round.”
“All I heard was that I win,” he said, picking back up his coffee and smoothing down his hair.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you actually liked that monstrosity,” I said, raising an eyebrow.
He smiled, unashamed. “Correction: I loved it.”
“But we’re choosing awful songs,” I said, confused.
“I said I loved it,” he explained. “I knew you’d hate it. Your generation could never appreciate its greatness.”
I shook my head at him. “Who are you even?”
“I’m your blood, kiddo,” he answered, slightly out of breath. “And this—” he said, motioning to his crazy display of dancing, “—is hereditary.”
“What’s hereditary?” someone chimed in from behind me. “And what in the name of all things Gucci are you guys listening to?”
I recognized the voice right away and didn’t bother turning around. Instead, I grabbed one of the danishes we’d picked up from our favorite yummy bakery in town, Black Forest Pastry Shop, and held it up in the air as an offering.
It quickly disappeared from my hand as my friend Ollie collapsed down into the chair next to me.
About Brittany Geragotelis
Brittany Geragotelis, a former Olympic-bound
gymnast and magazine editor, is a self-professed pop culture junkie turned
author. Her paranormal action book Life’s a Witch received 18 million reads on
the writing site Wattpad.com. What the Spell is the first published book
in the series, followed by Life’s a Witch and The Witch Is Back. The
Infamous Frankie Lorde is her first series with Pixel+Ink. Brittany lives
in Los Angeles with her awesome husband, two clever boys, one scaredy-cat, and
a crazy dog.
Website | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Goodreads | Amazon
Giveaway
3 winners will win a finished copy of GOING WILD, US Only.
Tour
Schedule:
Week
One:
|
7/26/2021 |
Guest
Post |
|
|
7/26/2021 |
Guest
Post |
|
|
7/27/2021 |
Excerpt |
|
|
7/27/2021 |
Instagram
Post |
|
|
7/28/2021 |
Review |
|
|
7/28/2021 |
Instagram
Post |
|
|
7/29/2021 |
Review |
|
|
7/29/2021 |
Instagram
Post |
|
|
7/30/2021 |
Review |
|
|
7/30/2021 |
Instagram
Post |
Week Two:
|
8/2/2021 |
Excerpt |
|
|
8/2/2021 |
Review |
|
|
8/3/2021 |
Review |
|
|
8/3/2021 |
Instagram
Post |
|
|
8/4/2021 |
Review |
|
|
8/4/2021 |
Instagram
Post |
|
|
8/5/2021 |
Guest
Post |
|
|
8/5/2021 |
Instagram
Post |
|
|
8/6/2021 |
Review |
|
|
8/6/2021 |
Review |
No comments:
Post a Comment