Blog Tour: Clean

Title Clean

Author Mia Kerick

Release Date December 1, 2015

Tour Host Sage's Blog Tours

High school senior Lanny Keating has it all. A three-sport athlete at Lauserville High School looking at a college football scholarship, with a supportive family, stellar grades, boy band good looks… until the fateful day when it all falls apart.

Seventeen-year-old Trevor Ladd has always been a publicly declared zero and the high school badboy. Abandoned by his mother and sexually abused by his legal guardian, Trevor sets his sights on mere survival.

Lanny seeks out Trevor’s companionship to avoid his shattered home life. Unwilling to share their personal experiences of pain, the boys explore ways to escape, leading them into sexual experimentation, and the abuse of illegal drugs and alcohol.  Their mutual suffering creates a lasting bond of friendship and love.

When the time finally comes to get clean and sober, or flunk out of high school, only one of the boys will graduate, while the other spirals downward into addiction. Will Lanny and Trevor find the strength to battle their demons of mind-altering substances as well as emotional vulnerability?

Clean takes the reader on a gritty trip into the real and raw world of teenage substance abuse.

Review

Clean provides a raw look at how tragedy can fuel teenage substance abuse. It isn't an easy read, but it is a good one. Trigger warnings: substance abuse, sexual abuse

The book is broken up into two parts. I'd like to think of it as a before and after of sorts. While the first part is gritty and painful, the second part provides a powerful message of hope and redemption for Trevor and Lanny.

I was a bit put off by the writing style in the beginning. At times the internal dialogue didn't feel as genuine and realistic as the rest of the book. However, by the end of the book, I grew to enjoy it.

Rating

4 out of 5 stars

* This book was received from the author in exchange for an honest review. *

Excerpt from Clean

Anyway, he picks me up for school at seven sharp. And Trevor may appear like the total bad boy who just doesn’t care—shaggy dark hair hanging in his eyes, a scruffy face that hasn’t seen a razor in way too long, one of those classic black leather jackets that all rebels seem to wear, and the standard worn out Levi’s—but he’s punctual. I mean, the dude’s like clockwork. And if I’m not ready at 7:00 a.m. sharp, he takes off without me and doesn’t even check in his rear view mirror to see if I’m running down the street behind the car. Which I usually am—flailing my arms SOS-style in an effort to flag him down.

So I dart out of the house in the direction of his car, my too-long-for-the-football-team hair dripping wet from the shower, yesterday’s shirt not yet buttoned, and my backpack still unzipped. I shake out my hair to avoid getting droplets of water on his pristine leather-trimmed seats, open the passenger door, slip inside the car, and try to catch my breath.

Trevor doesn’t take his eyes off the road as he says, “Almost left you in my dust, prepster. Thirty more seconds and I’d have been history.”

I want to be mad but then he turns toward me, raises his left eyebrow, and I melt. “Um...thanks for waiting.” I couldn’t come up with a “funny”, or so Joelle says when I crack a joke. But his left eyebrow has that effect on me.

Trevor still doesn’t look at me as he grunts something like, “guess your ass got lucky today” and we head for the Java House drive-thru to grab our mandatory morning coffee. After I got booted off the baseball team last spring for missing too many morning conditioning sessions, Trevor taught me that there’s nothing better for a hangover than a large black coffee and an order of hash browns. He told me that together they have the perfect combination of grease and caffeine necessary to kill off the toxins in our blood. I take his suggestion seriously.

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About the Author

Ms Kerick is the mother of four exceptional children—all named after saints—and five non-pedigreed cats—all named after the next best thing to saints, Boston Red Sox players. Her husband of twenty-three years has been told by many that he has the patience of Job, but don’t ask Mia about that, as it’s a sensitive subject.

Mia focuses her stories on the emotional growth of troubled young people and their relationships. As a teen, Mia filled spiral- bound notebooks with romantic tales of tortured heroes (most of whom happened to strongly resemble lead vocalists of 1980s big- hair bands) and stuffed them under her mattress for safekeeping.

She is thankful to CoolDudes Publishing, Dreamspinner Press, Harmony Ink Press, and CreateSpace for providing her with alternate places to stash her stories.

Mia is a social liberal and cheers for each and every victory made in the name of human rights, especially marital equality, which is now the law of the land in the United States—woot! woot! Her only major regret: never having taken typing or computer class in school, destining her to a life consumed with two-fingered pecking and constant prayer to the Gods of Technology.

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