Blog Tour for Normalish by Margaret Lesh; Extract + Int Giveaway

Normalish
by Margaret Lesh
Release Date: October 5th, 2012

Pages: 175
Buy: Amazon UK / Amazon US 

Fifteen-year-old Stacy questions the strange world of high school, love, her role in a harsh universe, and life, in Normalish.

People tell you high school's so great and wonderful, but they're lying. It's mostly horrible and full of disappointment. It sucks. Your best friend abandons you. The jerk you're in love with pretends to be into you, and then the big dump. The boy you've really clicked with as a friend decides to go all crushy over you, so you break his heart just like yours was -- smashed into little pieces. Your sister goes mental, and you get involved with a guy who’s even crazier than she is (who you know is a very bad idea, but you do it anyway). Math only adds another stink of failure to the whole thing.

High school blows. Just ask freshman Stacy. She’d want you to know.

August 22 - So Who Am I Really? (In 250 Words Or Less)

    Horrible high school has begun. It is horrible for many reasons—the reasons you’d usually suspect—and it is horrible on so many levels—the ones you’d also usually suspect—not to mention the fact that it starts in August. (But I won’t even go there.)

    One horrible thing that was particularly awful and egregious happened the first week of school. In English, our teacher Mr. Selden (a nice-looking, older man—broad shoulders, deep brown eyes, nicely-shaped eyebrows—someone I could really sit back and daydream about) asked us to do a quick-write about our family, which, by itself, was not so bad. What was horrible was the fact that he read it out loud. For everyone to hear. If I’d known this in advance, I would have either:

    1. lied, saying I was raised by wolves, or

    2. made it much less entertaining so that my teacher wouldn’t have felt the compelling need to humiliate me in front of the class.

    If I had known my life was going to be made public, I wouldn’t have written about my sister Jill being bossy and overbearing, or how she literally has a cow when I squeeze the toothpaste tube from the wrong end, or how she’s been known to smack me upside the head for using the wrong subject-verb agreement.

    I also wouldn’t have written about how I went to Ms. Liz’s Modeling School or how she taught me to make the perfect gin & tonic—one part gin to three parts tonic over three ice cubes with a twist of lime. (Since we weren’t actual model material, I think knocking back a few during Runway Class was her own personal coping mechanism. Also, I’m beginning to wonder if she ever really was a model.)

    I wouldn’t have written about being in the gifted program because—well, you know how that sounds. I mean, I don’t want to brag or anything. And I wouldn’t have written about math—how it doesn’t like me and I don’t like it—because that just made me sound like a loser.

    Lastly, I wouldn’t have mentioned Becca being strange. I mean, people know her. If she ever found out about it, I could get seriously hurt.

Author Bio: 
California girl Margaret Lesh lives with her husband Steve and son Andrew in a quiet suburb near Los Angeles. Co-creator of StoryRhyme.com, she writes middle grade, young adult, and women’s fiction. When she’s not writing, she’s thinking about baked goods, especially donuts, far too often. She believes tacos are magic.

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