I am happy to be hosting a spot on the MY SUMMER OF LOVE AND MISFORTUNE by Lindsay Wong Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours.
Check out my spotlight post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
ABOUT THE BOOK
Author: Lindsay Wong
Pub. Date: June 2, 2020
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Formats: Hardcover, eBook, audiobook
Pages: 384
Audience: Young Adult
Find it:
Find it:
B&N, iBooks, Kobo, TBD, Bookshop.org
A novel about a Chinese-American teen who is thrust into the world of Beijing high society when she is sent away to spend the summer in China.
Iris Wang is having a bit of a rough start to her summer. In an attempt to snap her out of her funk, Iris’s parents send her away to visit family in Beijing, with the hopes that Iris will “reconnect with her culture” and “find herself.” Iris resents her parents’ high-handedness, but even she admits that this might be a good opportunity to hit the reset button.
Iris expects to eat a few dumplings, meet some of her family, and visit a tourist hotspot or two. What she doesn’t expect is to meet a handsome Mandarin-language tutor named Frank and to be swept up in the ridiculous, opulent world of Beijing’s wealthy elite, leading her to unexpected and extraordinary discoveries about her family, her future, and herself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lindsay Wong's fearless writing and askew sense of humour chronicle adventures and disasters with copious amounts of playfulness and generosity.
She is the author of the #1 bestselling debut memoir The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug-Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family, which won the 2019 Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize and was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by Newsweek, CBC Books, the Globe and Mail, and the Quill and Quire. It was also a finalist for the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize and Canada Reads 2019.
In between Walmart parking lot holidays, Lindsay spends her time as a muscle for hire teaching writing workshops and editing manuscripts as a freelance editor.
1.FLOWER-HEART
I, Iris Wang, was born to be
unlucky.
This is because I was born in the
Year of the Tiger, and everyone in our Chinese family knows that girls born in
Tiger Year are bad luck.
A flower-hearted tiger girl, such as
yours truly, means that I’m destined to pick loser boys and never listen to my
parents. A flower-heart is someone who shows up hungover to her SATs and
half-asses her college admission essays. She’s also addicted to Starbucks
lattes, expensive makeup, and super-fun parties.
But a tiger son born into the family
is supposed to make a lot of money and bring honor to his family name. Total
sexist bullshit, am I right? Maybe that superstition existed in China in the
time of Confucius, but not in 21st century America, where Siri and iPhones
practically run our lives.
Can I tell you an embarrassing and
hideous secret?
When I was born, I was covered with
thick, abundant hair all over my entire body, like I was an actual tiger cub.
According to my parents, I even had coarse hairs growing on my chin, forehead
and cheeks.
My mom likes to joke that I actually
looked like a hairball spat out by a designer cat.
My dad says that he dreamed that my
mom had given birth to a tiger cub two weeks before I was born, but he’s deeply
superstitious. He’s the kind of guy who checks with a feng shui master before
buying a painting for the house or making a new friend. My dad is born in the
Year of the Goat, so he believes that anyone who isn’t a farm animal, like his
tiger daughter, i.e. me, brings him bad luck. Before he could propose to my
mom, who is a Zodiac Dog, he consulted the Chinese almanac. Then he hired a
Chinese monk to work out the math and interview his future bride.
When my mom told him she was going
to give birth to a tiger, he was extremely worried. “A Dog and Goat for parents
are no match for a tiger!” he exclaimed.
When he found out that his tiger cub
was going to be a girl, I think he actually cried from anxiety.
Anyway, I was lucky that a lot of my
facial hair fell off by kindergarten. But it doesn’t explain the gross,
extremely long mustache-like hairs that sometimes appear when I’m super
stressed. These hairs sprout above my upper lip and even grow out of my ears. I
swear, those hairs are like, my whiskers. Thank god for the invention of hair
wax and affordable laser treatment.
Without deluxe Nair Wax-Ready
Strips, I don’t think I could ever be seen in public during times of great
personal duress.
That, and I have to blame my bad
luck on my sometimes too loving, overprotective parents. As soon as I was born,
they took me to a famous fortune-teller who was visiting from China to ask her
how to fix my life trajectory.
It all went wrong from the very
beginning.
You see, the fortune teller, Madame
Xing, found a funny-shaped mole under my right eye and said it looked like a
teardrop. Like I was born to be permanently crying.
“This flower-heart is no good,” she
announced to my parents after a quick examination. My mom and dad were probably
horrified and praying that they could send me back to the hospital and switch
me for a Tiger Boy.
It also didn’t help that I was one
of those babies who was always crying and puking everywhere. My mom said that I
just barfed on Madame Xing’s mink fur and she got flustered and started cussing
nonstop. My dad swears that this was bad luck, as it offended a powerful
fortune-teller, who must have put a double curse on me.
After our first and only
fortune-telling session, Madame Xing cryptically said, “Keep both eyes on your
tiger daughter. If you take one eye off, she will bring shame on your family
with her weak flower-heart.”
Whatever she said was true. Since I
was born, I guess I was destined to be a flower-heart. I have a weakness for
terrible choices and terrible boys.
This brings me to my current
situation.
GIVEAWAY DETAILS
3 winners will win a finished copy of MY SUMMER OF LOVE AND MISFORTUNE, US Only.
TOUR SCHEDULE
Week One
5/25/2020 Kait Plus Books Review
5/25/2020 Lifestyle of Me Review
5/26/2020 Lone Tree Reads Excerpt
5/26/2020 BookHounds YA Excerpt
5/27/2020 Twirling Book Princess Excerpt
5/27/2020 Lizofwords Review
5/28/2020 Nerdophiles Review
5/28/2020 Volumes & Voyages Review
5/29/2020 Lala’s Book Reviews Review
5/29/2020 Emelies Books Review
Week Two
6/1/2020 The Bookish Libra Review
6/1/2020 Locks, Hooks and Books Review
6/2/2020 Eli to the nth Review
6/2/2020 Books A-Brewin' Excerpt
6/3/2020 Popthebutterfly Reads Review
6/3/2020 Bookwyrming Thoughts Review
6/4/2020 lifeofafemalebibliophile Review
6/4/2020 Yna the Mood Reader Review
6/5/2020 @_ebl_inc_ Review
6/5/2020 The Phantom Paragrapher Review