Welcome to Two Chicks on Books!!!

Thanks for stopping by! I'm here to share all things Bookish and also news about Movies, TV Shows, and even Video Games I love! I love to read your comments :)


Thursday, August 17, 2017

Blog Tour- SPELLBOOK OF THE LOST AND FOUND By Moïra Fowley-Doyle An Excerpt & Giveaway!


Hey everyone! I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the blog tour for SPELLBOOK OF THE LOST AND FOUND By Moïra Fowley-Doyle! 

I have an excerpt to share with you today! And make sure to enter the giveaway below!


Haven't heard of SPELLBOOK OF THE LOST AND FOUND? Check it out!



Title: SPELLBOOK OF THE LOST AND FOUND
Author: Moïra Fowley-Doyle
Pub. Date: August 8, 2017
Publisher: Kathy Dawson Books
Pages: 368
Formats: Hardcover, eBook, audiobook
Find it: Amazon, AudibleB&NiBooksTBDGoodreads
One stormy Irish summer night, Olive and her best friend, Rose, begin to lose things. It starts with simple items like hairclips and jewelry, but soon it's clear that Rose has lost something much bigger, something she won't talk about, and Olive thinks her best friend is slipping away.

Then seductive diary pages written by a girl named Laurel begin to appear all over town. And Olive meets three mysterious strangers: Ivy, Hazel, and her twin brother, Rowan, secretly squatting in an abandoned housing estate. The trio are wild and alluring, but they seem lost too—and like Rose, they're holding tight to painful secrets.

When they discover the spellbook, it changes everything. Damp, tattered and ancient, it's full of hand-inked charms to conjure back things that have been lost. And it just might be their chance to find what they each need to set everything back to rights.

Unless it's leading them toward things that were never meant to be found...
Now on to the excerpt

PROLOGUE



That night, everybody lost something.
Not everybody noticed.
It was a Saturday night on the cusp of summer and the air smelled like hot wood and burning rubber, like alcohol and spit, like sweat and tears. It was warm because of the bonfire in the middle of the field, and because of the stolen beers, the wine coolers bought with older siblings’ IDs, the vodka filched from stepparents’ liquor cabinets. There was the hint of a strange sound, that some thought might have been a trapped dog howling, but most decided was just in their imagination.
Some kept drinking, thinking this was just another night spent in a field at the edge of town, close to that invisible line where suburbs become countryside.
Some noticed without really understanding what they’d lost. Some kissed each other with cake on their tongues, rainbow icing dissolving between mouths to make new colors. Some took their schoolbooks and threw them on the bonfire, not caring that there were still two weeks before end-of-year exams.
Some turned around and went back home. Some forgot things they’d always known. Others stumbled, just for a moment, not knowing that they’d lost more than their step.
Some hung back, nervous, torn between edging closer to the fire and calling their parents to come get them. Some slipped small pills onto their tongues and swallowed them with soft drinks, the bubbles tickling their throats as it all went down. Some choked on cigarette smoke even though they’d been smoking for years. Some gripped others’ zippers in shivering fingers, lowered jeans or hitched up skirts. Others watched from the shadows.
By the time the fire had burned down to glowing ashes and a pile of charred wood, when everyone was dreaming deep in their own beds or lying through wine-stained teeth to their parents or getting sick in their best friends’ bathrooms or continuing the party in someone else’s house, apart from the few who’d passed out where they sat, there was nothing left in the field but the things we had lost.


OLIVE
Sunday, May 7th

Lost: Silver, star-shaped hair clip; jacket (light green, rip in one sleeve); flat silver shoe (right, scuffed at the toes)



Daylight is only just touching the tips of the trees when the bonfire goes out. I am leaning against a bale of hay upon which someone I don’t know is sleeping.
I roll my head over to look for Rose, who I was sure was sitting, legs splayed, on the ground beside me. The grass is mostly muck at this point, beaten down by many pairs of shoes and feet. My own feetbare, the nails painted a shiny metallic green that doesn’t show up in the morning darknessare dirty. So is the rest of me.
Rose isn’t here. I call out for her but nobody answers. Not that I expect she’ll be able to; sometime in the night she lost her voice from shouting over the music, from singing along to really bad songs and from all the crying.

Getting ready to go out last night, Rose told me, “Our plan for the evening is to get excessively drunk and then cry.” She swiped her lashes with another layer of mascara, which seemed fairly unwise, given the aforementioned plan.
“Can we make the crying optional?” I said. “My eyeliner’s really good right now.” It had taken me twenty minutes, six cotton swabs, and five tissues to get it even.
“Absolutely not.”
I sneaked a look at my best friend’s reflection. She blinked to dry her mascara. It gave her a deceptively innocent air.
“I don’t know why you want to go to this thing in the first place,” I said.
This thing was the town’s bonfire party. It’s held in May every year. Until midnight it’s filled with sugar-hyper children stuffed dangerously full of badly barbecued burgers threatening to throw up on the bouncy castle. Their parents bop self-consciously to decades-old pop music blaring from rented speakers while the teenagersour classmatessneak off to nearby fields to drink.
“I told you why I want to go,” Rose said. “I plan to get excessively drunk.”
“And then cry,” I reminded her.
“And then cry.”
“Well, you know what they say,” I said to the back of her head. “Be careful what you wish for.”

We slept in the field, which seemed like a good idea at the time. There is a growing chill despite the slowly rising sun and I don’t know if it means that a storm is coming or just that I’ve been in the same position for far too long. I’m beginning to lose all feeling in my right shoulder, the one propped on the prickly pile of hay.
When I look down, on one bare and dirty arm I see the words: If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found. They’re blurry because my eyes are blurry; it takes five blinks for me to make them out. They run from shoulder to wrist and seem to be written in my own wobbly handwriting, although I don’t remember writing them. When I lick a finger and rub at an n, it doesn’t smudge.
For about as long as we’ve been friends, Rose and I have written what we refer to as our mottos on each other’s arms. When we were younger, they were things like You are beautiful or Carpe diem. These days they’re in-jokes or particularly poignant quotes. We both got detention for a week last year because of our matching block capitals reading DO NO HARM BUT TAKE NO SHIT. I must have written this one during the party, although when or why, I have no idea.
My head feels fuzzy. With a wince and a sigh, I drag myself out of the last dregs of drunkenness and shakily stand up.
I take stock: I am missing a shoe (the other is half buried in the muck beside me) and my jacket. My dress is covered in grass stains and smells distinctly of vodka. I have the beginnings of an epic headache forming and I seem to have lost my best friend.
“Rose!” I call. “Rose?”
The boy on the hay bale twitches in his sleep.
“Hey,” I say to him loudly. I poke his shoulder when he doesn’t wake up. “Hey!”
The boy opens one eye and grunts. He has dirty-blond hair, a stubbly chin, and an eyebrow piercing. I vaguely remember dancing with him last night. He squints at me.
“Olivia?” he says hesitantly.
“Olive.” I have absolutely no idea what his name is. “Have you seen my friend?”
“Roisín?” he says in the tone of someone who isn’t sure he’s saying the right thing.
“Rose.”
“Olive,” he says, sitting up slowly. “Rose.”
“Yes,” I say impatiently. He’s clearly still very drunk. “Yes, Rose, have you seen her?”
“She was crying?”
I pick up my shoe and shove it on my foot, figuring that one shoe is still better than none. “I know. That was our plan for the evening. Did you see where she went?”
“Your plan?”
I scan the field for any sight of her. There’s a blue denim jacket crumpled up on the ground not far away. I take it because I’m beginning to feel very cold.
Pale blue light spills over the trees and into the field. My phone is dead so I don’t know what time it is, but it’s probably close to six a.m.
I start to make my way toward the road. The boy on the hay bale calls out to me. “Can I’ve another kiss before you go?”
I look back at him and make a face. Another kiss? “Not a chance.”
“See you around?”
I shake my head and walk away quickly. Most of my memories of last night seem to have disappeared with Rose.
I make my way around the field, scanning the faces of the sleepers (trying to keep my eyes averted from the ones who clearly aren’t sleeping). It doesn’t take long; she isn’t here. I glance behind me and see that the boy on the hay bale appears to have disappeared, probably slumped on the grass. I am the only person standing.
I turn around in a circle, taking in the stone wall and the tangle of bushes surrounding the field, the fence near the empty road on the other side, the small line of trees separating this field from the next one.
There’s someone there, almost hidden between two spindly pines, staring at me.
It’s a boy. He’s wearing a flat cap and an old, holey sweater that might be green or blackits hard to tell in the shadows. He has a lot of brown, curly hair under that awful hat and is wearing thick, black-framed glasses. He has a hundred freckles on his skin and a guitar slung over his back. He looks like a cross between a farmer and a teenage Victorian chimney sweep. He is unmistakably beautiful.
Before I have time to break his gaze, he turns and walks away and I lose him between the trees.
I look down at myself, at my dirty dress and borrowed denim jacket, at my one bare foot and my grass-stained legs. I could be Cinderella, if Cinderella was a short, chubby, hung­over seventeen-year-old with smudged makeup and tangled hair. And, while I’m very glad that I don’t have a dead father and an evil stepmother, I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to explain my current state to my parents when I get home. I try in vain to smooth the creases out of my dress and reach into the bird’s nest of my hair to pin it back with the silver, star-shaped hair clip I tied it up with yesterday, but either my tangles have eaten it or I lost it sometime in the night.
My bike is where I left it, chained to the fence by the side of the road, but it takes me several tries to unlock it because my hands don’t seem to want to work properly and my brain feels increasingly like it’s trying to turn itself inside out. When I clamber on, my bare foot sticks uncomfortably to the pedal.
I pass a grand total of three cars and one tractor on the road into town. The clouds above me are getting very gray, almost as if the dawn has changed its mind and wants to revert back to night. My dress blows up in the breeze, but there’s no one around to see, so I keep both hands on the handlebars and try to ride steadily. Under the sleeve of my borrowed denim jacket I can see the tail end of the sentence written there: You’ll never be found.
It comes back to me in a flash. Rose in my bedroom last night, staring at her reflection in my vanity mirror while pouring generous measures of cheap vodka into a bottle of Diet Coke.
She said, “If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found.”
We’d drunk a fair amount of the vodka already and her words were slightly slurred.
“At this rate,” I said to her, “the only thing we’ll lose tonight is the contents of our stomachs.”
My prediction was accurate: Another flash of memory has me bent over a hay bale, throwing up some unholy mixture of slightly Diet Cokeflavored vodka and the barbecued hot dogs that we all ate on sticks, posing for pictures, holding the phallic meat like rude children. My stomach lurches at the thought and I have to pull over to the side of the road to retch again.
If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found.
I cling to the low stone wall by the side of the road like a lifeboat, and sigh. Without warning, it begins to rain. Fat drops fall on the mess of my hair, darken my jacket, hit the dry roadside like cartoon tears. Splat. I have to blink them out of my eyelashes. I sigh again and drag my bike from the ditch.

I ride home through pounding rain and with a pounding headache. Maybe it’s that I drank too much and remember too little about last night. Maybe it’s that Rose left without me. Maybe it’s what the blond-haired boy said about another kiss. Maybe it’s the beautiful boy I saw at the edge of the field, looking like he’d lost something. But I feel like I might have lost something myself, and I have no idea what it is.

About Moïra:
Moïra Fowley-Doyle is half-French, half-Irish and lives in Dublin with her husband, their young daughters, and their old cat. Moïra's French half likes red wine and dark books in which everybody dies. Her Irish half likes tea and happy endings. Moïra started a PhD on vampires in young adult fiction before concentrating on writing young adult fiction with no vampires in it whatsoever. She wrote her first novel at the age of eight, when she was told that if she wrote a story about spiders she wouldn't be afraid of them anymore. Moïra is still afraid of spiders, but has never stopped writing stories. She is the author of The Accident Season and Spellbook of the Lost and Found.

Giveaway Details:


Enter for a chance to be one (1) of three (3) winners to receive a hardcover copy of Spellbook of the Lost and Found by Moïra Fowley-Doyle. (ARV: $17.99 each).

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Enter between 12:00 AM Eastern Time on August 7, 2017 and 12:00 AM on August 28, 2017.  Open to residents of the fifty United States and the District of Columbia who are 13 and older. Winners will be selected at random on or about August 30, 2017. Odds of winning depend on number of eligible entries received. Void where prohibited or restricted by law.


a Rafflecopter giveaway




Tour Schedule:
Week One:
August 7  ButterMyBooks  Book Photography
August 8  Stories & Sweeties  Review & Cupcakes
August 10  Bibliophile Gathering  Review 
August 11  A Page With a View  Bookish Spells

Week Two:
August 14  Icey Books  Spotlight & Book Photography
August 15  The Fandom  A History of Mystical Objects in YA (and whether or not they can be trusted)
August 16  Here’s to Happy Endings  Author Q&A
August 17  Two Chicks on Books  Excerpt
August 18  Ex Libris  Bookish Spells

Week Three:
August 21  Once Upon a Twilight  Favorite Quotes
August 22  Lost In Lit
August 23  The Book Wars  Review
August 24  Fiction Fare  Author Q&A
August 25  Tales of the Ravenous Reader  Bookish Spells




3 comments:

  1. This book is so deep and it sounds like so much fun! Thanks for posting the excerpt - it was an interesting read and I'm super excited for the book now!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the except today. I love the voice and enjoy first person so much. I'm excited to read this book.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This book just sounds completely intriguing and spooky.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...