THE SUMMER ESSENTIALS Blog Tour!

I LOVE Hélène Boudreau’s Real Mermaids series. Love, love, LOOOOOOOOVE! So I’m over-the-moon-so-giddy-I-can’t-breath happy to be hosting her today as part of The Summer Essentials blog tour! Hélène is from my neck of the woods (I’m on a different Island, but still a Maritimer) so I was beyond curious to find out about Hélène’s childhood.  AND, I have one copy of Hélène’s Real Mermaids Don’t Hold Their Breath along with Stacey Graham’s The Girls’ Ghost Hunting Guide (Both amazing summer reads).

Summer Island Breeze: Find out what it was like for Hélène to grow up on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean! Salty sea smells every day? I’ll take it!

Okay, so not exactly in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean but I grew up on a very small island off the coast of Canada and it may as well have been the middle of nowhere because looking back, it sure felt like a different world.

First, you have to take a causeway, then a drawbridge, then another bridge before finally arriving to my little slice of island paradise called Petit de Grat. Petit de Grat is not a tropical utopia but it was a pretty unique place to grow up in that:

1. My friends and I used to have sleepovers on my dad’s fishing boat while it was moored in the middle of our harbour.
2. The island only had a few hundred inhabitants but was full of kind-hearted, colourful characters.
3. Wild cows roamed the east end of our island and were known to chase us through forest paths.

So how did my childhood affect my process of writing the Real Mermaids series?

1. My dad took us for boat rides to a town on the mainland called St. Peters. We sailed up a canal from the ocean to a fresh water lake. That canal inspired the setting of my fictional town of Port Toulouse. I often wondered if the purple jellyfish in the ocean knew about the white jellyfish in the lake. It amazed me that two totally different underwater worlds could be separated by just a mile-long canal. That was the inspiration for the mer-world in these books.
2. I wanted my fictional town of Port Toulouse to be small and quaint, with a strong sense of community and full of fun characters like where I grew up.
3. It was a bit harder to work in the wild cows so mermaids seemed like a good alternative.

You can find Hélène on Twitter, Facebook and on her Website.

Thanks so much for stopping by Hélène! And now on to the giveaway!

Giveaway

Like I said, I have a copy of Hélène’s Real Mermaids Don’t Hold Their Breath and Stacey Graham’s The Girls’ Ghost Hunting Guide to one lucky American or Canadian reader. All you have to do is comment below and tell me of a favorite childhood summer activity or a ghosty experience you’ve had. I’ll choose the winner on June 6th.

Real Mermaids Don’t Hold Their Breath – Helene Boudreau

Normal is Never Coming Back

Jade is totally confused. As in, “will this be a leg-day or a tail-day?” kind of confused. Even worse, it’s been forever since her first kiss with Luke and now—nothing. Not even a text message.

Sigh.

But Jade doesn’t have time to figure out the weirdness of boys and how to use her shiny new tail. (Seriously, being a mermaid should come with a handbook.) She has to come up with a plan to get her missing mermaid mom back on dry land.

The only problem is…Jade is afraid of the ocean. But even aqua-phobic mer-girls have to take the plunge sometime…

I don’t know about you, but when I read the first book in a series and absofreakinglutely love it, I’m always nervous reading the second book. What if I don’t like it? What if it isn’t as addicting as the first book? What if it totally sucks? This was so not the case with Real Mermaids Don’t Hold Their Breath. It was as funny, charming, addicting and well written as the first book. I fell in love with it from the first page and continued loving it until it was over. Then I hugged my ARC whispering to the book gods “Please bring me the next book SOON”.

I just love Jade. She’s so cute and awkward and smart and dorky that I just want to put her in my pocket and take her home. Boudreau writes her in a such a way that Jade never becomes a caricature of herself, even when she’s at her goofiest. That’s a fine line to walk and it’s done beautifully. She’s one of my favorite YA characters.

I also love the tone of Real Mermaids Don’t Hold Their Breath. It was light and airy and funny and snarky and just wonderful. The pacing was also top-notch. Boudreau kept things moving, but not at a breakneck speed. It was a super balance of action, mystery and character development.

*Slight spoiler, but a good one*

THERE’S NO LOVE TRIANGLE!!!!!!!!!! For this alone I could fly out to Boudreau’s home and hug her. Or bring her cookies if she’s not the touchy-feely type. While love triangles done right are super, it was refreshing to have some romance-y stuff in a YA book and not have more than two people involved. Cuz in real life? Most teens are lucky to have one love interest.

*End of spoiler*

I really could go on and on and on and on about how much love I have for this book and for Boudreau’s writing and how happy this series makes me. But I want you to experience it for yourself. So if you haven’t read Boudreau’s Real Mermaids books, please do. Your book-loving heart will be all the happier for it.

Thanks an unbelievable amount to the folks at Source Books for the review copy.