Tag: Detour (Transportation #1) by Reesa Herberth and Michelle Moore

A Lucy Review: Detour (Transportation #1) by Reesa Herberth and Michelle Moore

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Ethan and Scott were best friends and boyfriends.  All through high school they planned on this amazing cross country trip.  They were going to see all the kitschy things together.  An all too common tragedy occurs senior year – Scott is killed by gunfire in a school shooting.  Ethan has to get out of his town because of the guilt he feels for still living and the sympathy/pity of people, even as he doesn’t want to do this trip alone.  So he hits the road, promising his parents he will call them and will not pick up hitchhiker’s who might take him to a murder cave and kill him.

He’s driving on a stormy night in the dark and nearly hits a hitchhiker.  Despite his parents’ warning, he can’t leave the man there in the rain, so he offers him a ride.  This is Nick and Nick is running away from a ton of bad things as well.  Namely, he just escaped an abusive pray-the-gay-away conversion camp as well as an abusive ex-boyfriend, Kyle.   Nick has a painful history and he knows what it’s like to grieve for someone, having lost his little brother to cancer.  He accepts the ride with Ethan and Ethan offers him the chance to be a part of his great adventure, seeing all the ridiculous roadside attractions they can see.

There is a moment when Nick admits he has no money to do the sights and Ethan tells him Scott’s parents had given him a large amount, probably what they were going to give Scott for graduation, and it just made me cry. There are so many shattered dreams here.   Ethan suffers from panic attacks, which Nick handles with care and kindness.  For his part, Ethan treats Nick with the same care and kindness.  The two of them can be snarky and funny and I thoroughly enjoyed.  The scene at the haunted train tracks just made me happy and made me think that they could learn to be happy again.

Nick has a seriously abusive ex-boyfriend in Kyle and feelings of betrayal by his parents after being sent to Camp Cornerstone, i.e. abusive conversion therapy.  He was able to walk away from the camp only because he turned eighteen.  Ethan’s gift to him really showed the sweetness of Ethan and the vulnerability of Nick.  “Eventually it became too much, got too close to the place inside him that wanted nothing more than to beg for any scrap of care he could get.”  Oh, Nick, you deserve so much. 

Ethan sends text messages to Scott and he’s very afraid he’s doing the trip wrong. “I don’t know if I want my life to happen without him.”  There is no shying away from all the emotional turmoil for these guys.  They have to work through it and though they have different issues, they are equally painful and hard to deal with.  Nick’s trip through Cornerstone is horrific and it is brought on by the abuse of Kyle.  And Kyle continues to be crazy, abusing, texting and going as far as to call Ethan’s parents, posing as Nick’s brother, to get information.  That’s probably the least of what he did but stalker, abuser and psycho cover it.  Add in that Nick doesn’t feel worthy of happiness sometimes.  He has his own survivor’s guilt. 

The book doesn’t pull its punches on dealing with some serious issues but it also conveys that these guys are young and they talk and act that way, even through stress and grief.  They are there for each other, through the biggest guitar and talking to the police, but they work through their grief and guilt on their own as well. Their conversations could be so emotional, other times so sweet and funny.  The “lie to me” made me want to cry sometimes. 

“But, mostly, I think we get so obsessed with missing someone, trying to stay connected with who they were as people.” That is so true and it was the lesson both of them needed to understand.  Ethan’s grasping that Scott was really, truly gone was just heartbreaking. “Scott would have changed.  He would have learned things, and seen things, and we’d both be different people now than we were when he died.  I think that was the ghost I was hoping to find.  The person Scott would have become.”  And that’s what you really can’t find, because that person will remain the same as you remember them while you continue to learn things, to grow and to change.   “Instead of keeping Scott’s memory alive, I was trying to get away from the person I was becoming without him.”

Both Nick and Scott, so young to be dealing with such things and yet they do, working their way through guilt and through grief, through fear, learning they can lean on each other.  I was pulling for these guys to get a little happiness.  The one thing I would have appreciated was an epilogue to show that they were still together, still happy and still working on it.

The cover art by Kanaxa light and fun. Which doesn’t exactly speak to the reality of the storyline.

SALE LINKS  Riptide Publishing | Amazon

BOOK DETAILS

ebook, 339 pages

Published May 7th 2018 by Riptide Publishing

ISBN 1626497435 (ISBN13: 9781626497436)

Edition Language English

A Stella Review: Detour (Transportation #1) by Reesa Herberth  and Michelle Moore

RATING 5 out of 5 stars

Ethan Domani had planned the perfect graduation trip before tragedy put his life on hold. Smothered by survivor’s guilt and his close-knit family, he makes a break for the open road. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he’s got the whole summer to figure out who he misses more: his boyfriend, or the person he thought he was. It’s just him and his memories . . . until he almost runs over a hitchhiker.

Nick Hamilton made some mistakes after his younger brother died. His violent ex-boyfriend was the most dangerous, and the one that got him shipped off to Camp Cornerstone’s pray-the-gay-away boot camp. His eighteenth birthday brings escape, and a close call with an idiot in a station wagon. Stranger danger aside, Nick’s homeless, broke, and alone. A ride with Ethan is the best option he’s got.

The creepy corners of roadside America have nothing on the darkness haunting Ethan and Nick. Every interstate brings them closer to uncharted emotional territory. When Nick’s past shows up in their rearview mirror, the detour might take them off the map altogether.

I loved the new release by these new to me authors, Reesa Herberth and Michelle Moore. I first picked it brcause the blurb was so interesting and I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed at all, on the contrary it was so much more. I wasn’t ready for me to be so engaged from the characters I quickly finished Detour. And for me spending just a couple of days for a book so long is not easy, that’s why I tend to choose books max 250 pages long.  Plus I usually don’t read about characters so young, I prefer my couple to at least being into their thirties. That’s to say, although the interesting blurb, Detour could have been a disaster to me.

Then it happens I found a story so well done I had to stay up late in the night.

In my opinion the main reason why I adored the book stand in the MCs. Sure, Nick and Ethan are very young, but they are not the usual eighteen years old boys with  nothing to worry about. Both of them, in different ways, already went through hell and they are not back yet. This trip they are taking (well, actually only Ethan is on his graduation trip, Nick sadly has nowhere to be) will try to heal their hearts and give both of them some hope, it will help them to overcome the deep grief they have.

So many details caught my heart and I confess more than once I shed a couple of tears, they way they lost themselves, how Nick is scared and angry, how Ethan feels guilty to have survived the death of his beloved boyfriend. Some scenes were so packed with emotions, I felt my heart ache for these young men. But the authors did a great job and at the end Detour is a light book, funny and sweet. I completely fell in love with Ethan and Nick, they were adorable and I so hope to have more about their happy ending.

The cover art by Kanaxa is not a winner to me, I usually like this artist works but this one is fitting but I don’t like it at all.

SALE LINKS  Riptide Publishing | Amazon

BOOK DETAILS

ebook, 339 pages

Published May 7th 2018 by Riptide Publishing

ISBN 1626497435 (ISBN13: 9781626497436)

Edition Language English

Release Tour and Giveaway: Detour by Reesa Herberth and Michelle Moore

Detour (Transportation #1) 

by

Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words is happy to host Michelle Moore and Reesa Herberth on tour for their new release, Detour.

♦︎

 

 

We’re Michelle Moore and Reesa Herberth, and if you know our writing, you probably know that we’ve won awards for our science fiction and mystery romance.  (That was the same book, for the record.) What you might not expect from us is a New Adult rom com… but that’s exactly what our new book, Detour, is.  Sort of.  Mostly? Definitely, yes.

 

Detour is the book of our heart.  It’s a story we’ve always wanted to tell- and one we’ve been telling each other, in some fashion, for as long as we’ve known one another.  It’s pretty funny in some places, and sad in others, and delightfully quirky throughout. It’s the story of Ethan and Nick, two strangers on a summer road trip.  One of them is running from ghosts, and the other is looking for them. Somewhere along the way, they find themselves in love, and in possession of a plush Titanic.

 

But not necessarily in that order.

 

About Detour

 

Ethan Domani had planned the perfect graduation trip before tragedy put his life on hold. Smothered by survivor’s guilt and his close-knit family, he makes a break for the open road. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he’s got the whole summer to figure out who he misses more: his boyfriend, or the person he thought he was. It’s just him and his memories . . . until he almost runs over a hitchhiker.

 

Nick Hamilton made some mistakes after his younger brother died. His violent ex-boyfriend was the most dangerous, and the one that got him shipped off to Camp Cornerstone’s pray-the-gay-away boot camp. His eighteenth birthday brings escape, and a close call with an idiot in a station wagon. Stranger danger aside, Nick’s homeless, broke, and alone. A ride with Ethan is the best option he’s got.

 

The creepy corners of roadside America have nothing on the darkness haunting Ethan and Nick. Every interstate brings them closer to uncharted emotional territory. When Nick’s past shows up in their rearview mirror, the detour might take them off the map altogether.

 

About Reesa Herberth

 

Reesa Herberth grew up in Hawaii, tried Arizona for a few years, and eventually settled in the D.C. area, where they have trees and rain.

 

She’s held a variety of crazy writer jobs, including book and video store manager for a defunct chain of music shops, office goddess for an artisan ice cream maker, cheese-cup scrubber at an organic goat dairy, high school secretary, and dye-stained proprietress of a small yarn and fiber business.

 

When not writing, she can usually be found reading, gardening, cooking, or spinning yarns of another sort entirely. She often resents her need for sleep.

 

With Michelle Moore, she is the author of the Ylendrian Empire books, including The Balance of Silence, the award-winning space opera caper, The Slipstream Con, and Peripheral People, a sci fi thriller with psychics and squishy feelings, coming soon.

 

Connect with Reesa:

 

About Michelle Moore

 

Michelle Moore has a well-documented obsession with travel, television, frappaccinos and flamingos. These, however, come in a distant second to her love of writing. Most evenings she can be found huddled over her laptop at the local Starbucks, dividing her time between actually writing and pretending to be a barista.

 

While Michelle would like to claim child prodigy status, the truth is that she’s only been scribbling words on paper since she was six.  However, she’s moved beyond those initial Dick and Jane story knock-offs to the Ylendrian Universe, a much more rewarding and enjoyable choice of subject matter.

 

Connect with Michelle:

Giveaway

To celebrate the release of Detour, Reesa and Michelle are giving away a $20 gift card to the Ripped Bodice! If the winner is outside the US, it will be a $20 Amazon gift card instead. Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on May 12, 2018. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following along, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!