NBtM Virtual Book Tour and Giveaway: The After Times (The Bean Books #5) by Christine Potter

Welcome to my stop on the NBtM virtual book tour for The After Times by Christine Potter. This book tour was organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. On my stop, I have an excerpt from the book as well as a great guest post regarding the setting from the author. There's also the tour wide giveaway for a chance to win a $50 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card. Be sure to visit the other stops on the tour for more content. Enjoy!

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Title: The After Times

Series: The Bean Books #5

Author: Christine Potter

Publisher: Evernight Teen

Publication Date: August 19th 2022

Print Length: 215 pages

Genre: Young Adult Time Travel Fantasy

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Say you’re Gracie Ingraham, nerdy but happy high school senior. But you’re also a time-traveler from 1962 who got a bit lost and has been living in the 2000’s since 2018. That would be plenty without it now being 2020. Covid has just shut down the world. Your pandemic pod? Your BFF Zoey—and your ex-boyfriend, Dylan.

Dylan still lives to spin weird vinyl LP’s with your sort-of, kind-of Dad, Amp. So your quarantine hobby is going to have to be Being Mature About Stuff.

But then your time traveling kicks into high gear again. And your long-lost brother and mom mix it up with a creepy, pyromaniacal force that is most likely demonic. How can love save the day when you can’t even go downtown without wearing a mask?

Goodreads * Amazon *

Barnes & Noble * Kobo * Smashwords

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EXCERPT:

We’d arrived at the first of the big, fancy gravesites: nineteenth century family plots, with tall, marble obelisks and statues of weeping angels. Some of them have creepy stone and marble mausoleums. Mausoleums are tombs the size of tiny houses with windows and even gates and front porches sometimes. You could go inside one if someone unlocked the door.

Some kids had obviously partied out by the mausoleums the night before. They’d left a White Claw can one at of the sad angels’ feet. A few more cans were tossed on the ground and on the stone stairs to one of the bigger tombs. There were beer cans, too.

Zoey shook her head. “Some people are still getting out at night.”

“They could have at least recycled!”

“Alas!”

See, Zoey, Dylan, and me… We’re the kind teachers and parents don’t worry about. We always recycle. We don’t break quarantine. We wouldn’t have gone to a midnight graveyard party before quarantine … well … not without seriously good reason.

Not that Zoey wouldn’t snag a White Claw. And I did sneak out on one serious midnight date when Dylan and I were first together. But I also had to zap a demon that evening. Which was the last time anything interesting happened to me… Up until the very next minute, that is.

‘Cause then it wasn’t a pretty April day anymore. It was very cold and very dark. Zoey and I were still in the cemetery, but we weren’t by ourselves anymore.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Christine Potter is a writer and poet who lives in a (for-real) haunted house in New York’s Hudson River Valley, not that far from Sleepy Hollow. She is the author of Evernight Teen’s Bean Books, a five book series that travels through time—and two generations of characters. 

 

Christine is has also been a teacher, a bell ringer in the towers of old churches, a DJ, and a singer of all kinds of music. 

 

Her poetry has appeared in literary magazines like Rattle and Kestrel, featured on ABC Radio News, and sold in gum ball machines. She lives with her organist husband Ken and two indulged kitties.

Blog * Amazon * Facebook * Instagram

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GUEST POST:

The Scarlet Letter. Yes, Really.
by Christine Potter

When I was still teaching English, I had two favorite standard-selection-by-dead-white-guys books: Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter. Other books I skimmed over and relied upon my notes as I discussed them with my students, but those two I read every word of, every year—Huck because, well, it’s just brilliant. Everything we do in fiction these days comes out of that novel. Fight me if you want, but fight me some other time, because I’m here to talk about setting.

Because the setting in The Scarlet Letter just fascinates me. It’s an historical novel, of course. Hawthorne published his tragic story in 1850, but it’s about a time in Salem, Massachusetts (where he lived) two hundred and ten years earlier. The way he draws back two hundred years of time in the last paragraphs of the introductory chapter, where the embroidered Scarlet Letter itself is discovered by the book’s narrator, is extraordinary. A scrap of cloth takes us from a dingy customs house (an office building where people paid duties and taxes) to a vital, believable 17th century Salem. It’s like a curtain opening. Yeah, the language is a tough go, but it’s such a worth-it book!

Look, I’m not saying yay Puritanism—and Hawthorne certainly wasn’t, either. But I’d love to spend a day in those old, almost medieval-looking structures (really early American houses, 17th century ones). They were maybe a teeny bit ornamented, maybe had a few sticks of good furniture that made it over from England—but actually were only a few steps past camping out,. And think about how dark the streets were at night! And how quiet it must have been. With no electrical glow over the tiny cities then being founded in the not-yet-US, the stars must have seemed huge.

The early colonists all had their reasons for having made the insanely long and dangerous journey in insanely small boats from England. Some of them would have been about the religion; some more business-minded.

So maybe you’d see a little candlelit window of your neighbor’s place from your shadowy living/dining/cooking room. You wouldn’t be dressed in black—that much dye cost too much for every day—but your clothing would be simple, maybe red or even violet. I just like thinking about it. How early it was. How nothing that we think of as being specifically American had happened yet. There were just these groups of people with admittedly super-harsh religious beliefs and/or a lot of guts.

If you were an outspoken woman like Anne Hutchinson (or indeed, Hester Prynne), you could get yourself punished and shunned and excommunicated. But still, the first poet in the US, Anne Bradstreet, was writing near Boston then. And she was remarkable: smart, and just a little rebellious. And by the way, she wasn’t the first WOMAN poet. She was our first poet. Period.

I think I write time travel myself because I’m into this sort of thing. I don’t want to live as a Puritan, for Heaven’s sake. But I’d love a peek—not just a politely restored little house with a docent from the local public library. I’d like to actually be there for a day, to see the sights, to smell the smells, and have a taste of whatever was for dinner. And then come home to 2022!

Books can do that.

Maybe I should consider the 17th century in the Northeastern part of the US as a setting for my next YA novel! Meanwhile, I hope you’ll have a look at The After Times, a book set in another challenging period: the first months of the Covid pandemic, when everything was still locked down. And also the 1980’s and 1918! Hope to see you there!

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GIVEAWAY:

Christine Potter will be awarding a $50 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter. Good luck!

(All the Ups and Downs is not responsible for this giveaway, its entries, or the prize. Goddess Fish Promotions and the author assume all responsibility over this giveaway.)

a Rafflecopter giveaway