Owl Always Be Reading: Blog Tour + Giveaway + Review: Someday, Somewhere by Lindsay Champion

Welcome to our tour stop for Someday, Somewhere hosted by Rockstar Book Tours! We're excited to announce this one and see below for giveaway details. :)

This one hit shelves yesterday and we hope you check it out.

Title: SOMEDAY, SOMEWHERE

Author: Lindsay Champion

Pub. Date: April 3, 2018

Publisher: KCP Loft

Formats: Hardcover, eBook

Pages: 280

Amazon, B&N, iBooks, TBD, Goodreads

Dominique is a high school junior from a gritty neighborhood in Trenton, where she and her mom are barely getting by. Ben is a musical prodigy from the Upper East Side, a violinist at a top conservatory with obsessive talent and a brilliant future. When Dom's class is taken to hear a concert at Carnegie Hall, she expects to be bored out of her mind. But then she sees the boy in the front row playing violin like his life depends on it --- and she is transfixed.

Posing as an NYU student, Dom sneaks back to New York City to track down Ben Tristan, a magnetic genius who whisks her into a fantasy world of jazz clubs and opera, infatuation and possibility. Each sees something in the other that promises to complete them.

As Dom's web of lies grows, though, so does Ben's obsessive need to conquer Beethoven's famous Kreutzer Sonata. But Ben's genius, which captivates Dominique, conceals a secret, and the challenges of her life may make it difficult to help him.

Alternating perspectives and an unreliable narrator create suspense and momentum, romance and heartbreak. Author Lindsay Champion's deep roots in theater and music are evident on every page --- structured like a sonata with hints of West Side Story, her debut novel hits all the right notes.

I really didn't know what to expect from this book but I was pleasantly surprised. The cover is what drew me in and when I read New York and music - I was all in. I'm a big fan of Mozart in the Jungle and fellow Owler Katie pointed out that this might be why it interested me in the first place. The book is YA but with definite crossover appeal and is told from two points of view.

The pacing of the book, I thought, was fantastic. At first, I was more interested in delving into the characters' heads - because Dominique and Ben are engrossing characters. Ben is a student at a conservatory and when we are introduced, we know he is a master at his craft and one of the most advanced, even though he's a second-year student. Dominique, on the other hand, is living a more humble life, with a mother who has fought hard to provide a stable life - but also a life where Dom hasn't been able to fulfill her dreams as a dancer. Once we got the introductions out of the way, the pace slowed down, but then it picks up and in the end, it felt like a musical piece itself.

When these two meet, it feels intense because they're drawn to each other immediately. I know that most readers don't care for insta-love tropes, but this felt different and didn't bother me. And as they get to know each other and we read on, the author explores mental illness and the descent of someone who doesn't take care of themselves. It also explores the differences in class and the opportunities one is afforded, or not, and whether it's something that should impact your dreams. It's also an exploration of these tiny slices of life people experience that leaves you changed in a way you couldn't imagine.

Overall, I'm really happy I picked this one up because it was one of those books that really surprised me (but one in which I also went in partially blind). At times, it read like a literary fiction and Lindsay's writing is lyrical and poetic. I recommend this one!

LINDSAY IS...
...a YA author living in the best place on earth, New York City. She is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she spent most of her time doing high kicks and eating falafel. After a stint as a closed caption writer (best memory: captioning the first six Rocky movies for TV), she served as the Features Editor at Broadway.com, where she somehow managed to interview her celebrity crushes Paul Rudd, Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal without fainting or peeing her pants. She is an editorial director for the digital media company PureWow, where she sits in an extremely tall building and eats snacks. Her first novel, Someday, Somewhere, hits store shelves April 3, 2018.

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