The Geography of You and Me
by Jennifer E. Smith
The Geography of You and Me
by Jennifer E. Smith
YA Contemporary Romance
April 15th 2014 by Little, Brown for Young Readers
Lucy and Owen meet somewhere between the tenth and eleventh floors of a New York City apartment building, on an elevator rendered useless by a citywide blackout. After they're rescued, they spend a single night together, wandering the darkened streets and marveling at the rare appearance of stars above Manhattan. But once the power is restored, so is reality. Lucy soon moves to Edinburgh with her parents, while Owen heads out west with his father.
Lucy and Owen's relationship plays out across the globe as they stay in touch through postcards, occasional e-mails, and -- finally -- a reunion in the city where they first met.
A carefully charted map of a long-distance relationship, Jennifer E. Smith's new novel shows that the center of the world isn't necessarily a place. It can be a person, too.
Here's a special excerpt now!
CHAPTER ONE
EXCERPT ONE
On the first day of September, the world
went dark.
But from where she stood in the blackness, her back pressed against
the brassy wall of an elevator, Lucy Patterson had no way of knowing the scope
of it yet.
She couldn’t have imagined, then, that it stretched beyond the
building where she’d lived all her life, spilling out onto the streets, where
the traffic lights had gone blank and the hum of the air conditioners had
fallen quiet, leaving an eerie, pulsing silence. Already, there were people
streaming out onto the long avenues that stretched the length of Manhattan,
pushing their way toward home like salmon moving up a river. All over the
island, car horns filled the air and windows were thrown open, and in thousands
upon thousands of freezers, the ice cream began to melt.
The whole city had been snuffed out like a candle, but from the
unlit cube of the elevator, Lucy couldn’t possibly have known this.
Her first thought wasn’t to worry about the violent jolt that had
brought them up short between the tenth and eleventh floors, making the whole
compartment rattle like a ride at an amusement park. And it wasn’t a concern
for their escape, because if there was anything that could be depended on in
this world—far more, even, than her parents—it was the building’s small army of
doormen, who had never failed to greet her after school, or remind her to bring
an umbrella when it was rainy, who were always happy to run upstairs and kill a
spider or help unclog the shower drain.
Instead, what she felt was a kind of sinking regret over her rush
to make this particular elevator, having dashed through the marble-floored
lobby and caught the doors just before they could seal shut. If only she’d
waited for the next one, she would’ve still been standing downstairs right now,
speculating with George—who worked the afternoon shift—about the source of the
power outage, rather than being stuck in this small square of space with
someone she didn’t even know.
~*~
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- Hardcover copy of The Geography of You and Me
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Thanks for being on the tour, Bonnie!
ReplyDeleteAustralia is probably my favorite place in the world if I had to narrow it down. But otherwise, my favorite place is any place where adventure awaits. Thanks so much for the giveaway.
ReplyDeleteXO, Kristi
PS lovely blog!!