Title: Let's Get Lost
Author: Adi
Alsaid
Release Date: July 29, 2014
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Summary from Goodreads:
Five strangers.
Countless adventures. One epic way to get lost.
Four teens across the country have only one thing in common: a girl named LEILA.
She crashes into their lives in her absurdly red car at the moment they need
someone the most.
There's HUDSON, a small-town mechanic who is willing to throw away his dreams
for true love. And BREE, a runaway who seizes every Tuesday—and a few stolen
goods along the way. ELLIOT believes in happy endings…until his own life goes
off-script. And SONIA worries that when she lost her boyfriend, she also lost
the ability to love.
Hudson, Bree, Elliot and Sonia find a friend in Leila. And when Leila leaves them, their lives are forever changed. But it is during Leila's own 4,268-mile journey that she discovers the most important truth— sometimes, what you need most is right where you started. And maybe the only way to find what you're looking for is to get lost along the way.
Hudson, Bree, Elliot and Sonia find a friend in Leila. And when Leila leaves them, their lives are forever changed. But it is during Leila's own 4,268-mile journey that she discovers the most important truth— sometimes, what you need most is right where you started. And maybe the only way to find what you're looking for is to get lost along the way.
Early Praise
“Reminiscent of John Green’s Paper
Towns and road trip novels that feature a teen paving the way to
adulthood, Alsaid’s debut is a gem among contemporary YA novels.” – School
Library Journal
“Five love stories, beautifully woven
together by a special girl in search of adventure, hope, and full
appreciation of life’s simple pleasures. A do-not-miss. ” – Justine Magazine
“Moving and poignant.” - Glitter Magazine
“An entertaining and romantic road-trip
debut.” – Kirkus
"Leila's quest to find the Northern
Lights takes readers on a captivating cross-country journey, where four
strangers' adventures collide into one riveting tale of finding yourself." ―YABooksCentral.com
“This will likely be a popular summer
hit, especially for older teen about to embark on their own journeys of
self-discovery.” –Booklist
About the Author
Adi Alsaid was born and raised in Mexico City, then studied at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas. While in class, he mostly read fiction and
continuously failed to fill out crossword puzzles, so it's no surprise that
after graduating, he did not go into business world but rather packed up his
apartment into his car and escaped to the California coastline to become a
writer. He's now back in his hometown, where he writes, coaches high school and
elementary basketball, and has perfected the art of making every dish he eats
or cooks as spicy as possible. In addition to Mexico, he's lived in Tel Aviv,
Las Vegas, and Monterey, California. A tingly feeling in his feet tells him
more places will eventually be added to the list. Let's Get Lost is his YA
debut.
Author Links:
His First Big Trip Alone to Israel
My sister likes to say that before I
came back from my trip to Israel, she’d never heard me speak. That’s probably
an exaggeration, but not an extreme one. When I boarded the plane to Israel on
the eve of my eighteenth birthday, I was a shy kid, reserved, talkative only
with my closest friends.
My brother puts it a different way:
“Before, you couldn’t decide if you cared or not. Then you decided you didn’t.”
He said this when we shared an apartment in college, when I was doing things
like taking spontaneous road trips to Baker, California just to have lunch, or
founding a student organization at UNLV called Students for the Advancement of
Silliness. I brought my first girlfriend to the top floor of a library and
rained down thirty notecards with book quotations on them. I wrote editorials
in the school newspaper about choosing to be happier.
Let me be clear about this: I didn’t
notice it happening. In Israel, I read a lot. I walked around a lot. Though
fluent in Hebrew, I didn’t speak a lot, because outside of my grandmother and
some cousins, I didn’t know anyone. I could have made friends on the basketball
courts where I played, or the bar full of American expats and travelers from
all over the world, but I didn’t. By the end I was having more and more
conversations with people there, because I’d learned that if I didn’t I could
go days without saying a word. But that didn’t feel like growth; it just felt
like loneliness, which wasn’t anything new. I had fun in Israel, and though I’d
imagined something life-changing (I brought a notebook, thinking that maybe I’d
write a book while there), I left thinking it hadn’t happened. The first day I
returned to Mexico and had coffee with a friend, within twenty minutes, she
said, “You’ve changed.”
It’s not like I went to Israel and came
back a new person. I was simply more myself. The layer of shyness that usually
hid parts of me from the world was washed away by the Mediterranean, or burned
away from my skin from the suntan I gained on the beaches of Tel Aviv. I broke
out of my proverbial shell, deciding, as my brother pointed out, that I no
longer cared to reside within it.
Here’s what I’m trying to get at, and why Leila’s travels in Let’s Get Lost serve as the perfect backdrop to five coming-of-age stories: Travel leads to self-discovery. You grow, even if you don’t notice it happening. Especially if you do it at the age I did, the age the characters in the book are, the world seeps into your cracks and pulls you further out.
Here’s what I’m trying to get at, and why Leila’s travels in Let’s Get Lost serve as the perfect backdrop to five coming-of-age stories: Travel leads to self-discovery. You grow, even if you don’t notice it happening. Especially if you do it at the age I did, the age the characters in the book are, the world seeps into your cracks and pulls you further out.
Giveaway
1 signed hard
cover copy of Let’s Get Lost
1 Let’s Get Lost
luggage tag
1 Harlequin TEEN
notebook
1 Let’s Get Lost
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1 Harlequin TEEN
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