Taken by Storm
Author: Angela Morrison
Genre: YA Contemporary
Release Date: June 13, 2012
Synopsis:
Mormon girl Leesie has life figured out
until devastated Michael lands in her small town high school. He needs
her like no one has before. A rare journey into a faithful LDS teen’s
intimate struggle.
"[Morrison] handles the topics of
religion and premarital sex gracefully without passing judgment. The
message has less to do with religion than learning to respect and
cherish others while staying true to one’s own beliefs.” – Publisher’s
Weekly, starred review Brand new paperback and reformatted ebook with
fully scalable fonts. Includes bonus, never-before-published scene,
"Airport Good-bye!"
10 Year Anniversary
Ten years ago
this week, Taken by Storm's scuba-diving hero, Michael, swam out of
Angela's brain and onto her page. Join the anniversary celebration! Win your own copy of the brand new paperback! Snag Taken by Storm's Kindleebook for only $ .99! Unbroken Connection (Book 2) and Cayman Summer (Book 3) are free on Kindle! Hurry. The promotion ends Friday,
July 20th. Don't own a Kindle? Download free Kindle apps for your
laptop, tablet, iTouch, or phone.
Meet Michael:
from Michael's Dive Log, Chapter 1, Taken by Storm, "Before"
The
dive starts perfect. Perfect water. Perfect sky. Perfect wall. The
ocean, warm, flat, perfect. I leave my wetsuit drying on the Festiva’s
dive deck. Saltwater slips silky over my skin like Carolina’s caress.
Jeez,
I miss her. Caroleena. She insisted on Spanish pronunciation. I thought
this trip would help, but I can’t forget lying in the sun, curled
together, my face lost in her thick black hair, holding on. Three
months. Every day. More when she felt like it. I always felt like it,
but I didn’t want to use her.
She dumped me on my butt when I
took off to dive all summer at the condo. I wanted to bring her to
Florida. Keep her close. Keep her safe. But she had to stay in Phoenix
and work. Her family’s got nothing. And Mom flipped when I mentioned it
was a shame the sofa bed in the living room would be empty. Dad was cool
with it. He’s cool with everything. It should have been Carolina and me
all summer, diving.
The creep b-ball jock she’s with now is
after one thing, as much as he can get. Possessive, too. Freaked when I
called her from the Keys. And when we were all back at school, she
wouldn’t even look at me. Dad knew something was up, let me cut a week
for the club’s annual “hot deal” hurricane season trip. So, I’m scuba
diving my brains out, free diving whenever I can get a spotter, trying
not to think about that jock pawing my Carolina.
Love. Makes me
crazy. All of it. You get so close, like she’s part of you. And then
she’s gone. You ogle the smiling waitress on the boat, who has your
girl’s hair and wears a loaded bikini top and a sarong slung dangerously
low. You appreciate the view while she serves you a virgin pina colada,
but you still ache inside because now you’ve got a hole in your ribcage
that won’t fill, a gash that heals way too slow.
Salt water’s my therapy of choice. [cut excerpt here for shorter post . . .but feel free to use the entire dive log]
I swim my makeshift free-dive raft, Dad’s old scuba vest packed with everything we’ll need, out to the wall. Mom’s late.
Lame.
I know. Diving with Mommy. But she’s missing her scuba dive with Dad
this a.m. to lie face down on the water all morning watching a
breath-holding fanatic sink head first into the ocean. I got to give her
props for that.
Spread out, Dad’s BC, the scuba vest, makes a
decent place to hang between dives. I blow air into it until it bounces
on top of the water and wonder if I’ll get that dive kayak I want for
Christmas. I tie my diver-down flag to the BC raft and hook it all up to
the buoy marking the edge of the reef. The ocean floor drops off
hundreds of feet here forming a sheer coral wall. Still no scary pink
slashed shark bait wetsuit jumping off the Festiva and finning toward
me. It’s okay. We’ve got all morning.
Good old Mandy in Florida
used to spot me. That was in no way lame. I faked shallow-water blackout
all the time so she’d have to swim down, wrap her sexy body behind
mine, pull me to the surface, and resuscitate me. Mandy. Another hole in
my guts.
I’m tired of waiting. I sling my weight belt around my
hips and cinch it tight. A few more pounds of muscle mass to my core and
I won’t need the weights. I’ve got my body taught and toned. I can hold
my breath forever. My heartbeat even goes slow-mo when I free dive.
Total control. I pop a quick sixty-footer down to the reef, bop with
the juvie fish—yellow and black, blue, purple. Wish I could shrink down
to their size and dart in and out of a coral mound happy, careless,
flitting, free. Easy to be a fish. I wouldn’t make a freak of myself
like yesterday when I finally talked to that waitress. She looks
eighteen, twenty tops.
I took my drink to the bar for a refill. “You want to hang out with me on your break?”
Chicks
usually say, “Yes.” Babes hit on me way more than I hit on them. Even
the older ones. I think it’s the hair. Boring brown, but it went wavy
post-manhood. I keep it long. Girls can’t resist. I don’t take up their
offers as much as I could. Mom’s got this thing about respect.
But
my waitress didn’t say, “Yes.” She pushed her own thick, black, sexy
hair that whispered, “Carolina,” out of her eyes and smiled to let me
down easy. “I don’t think so.”
“Come on. There’s nobody up on the bow. You could work on your tan.”
“Tan?” She’s Hispanic, gorgeous golden all over.
“Pretend.” I ran my finger down her arm. We both felt it. That charge when it’s right.
She
didn’t get uptight and jerk away from me. I was getting to her. “And
what will you do?” She blinked slow. Her mouth opened slightly as she
exhaled.
I traced her fingers. “I’m pretty good with lotion.”
She laughed again, throaty, teasing. “Sorry.” She pulled away then. “Next break the Captain lets me call my kids.”
No
lie. She handed me a picture. Three brown faces tumbling over each
other. They stay with her mom up in Belize City. She misses them pretty
bad. I felt sorry for her. Wanted to do something. I mean here’s this
young, beautiful girl stuck serving drinks to creeps like me until her
looks go. I wish I could get Dad to hire her, but I don’t think she
types. I laughed it off, hung out with her while my drink melted. The
whole thing made me feel useless.
So much easier to be a fish.
I
leave the juvies playing hide-and-seek in the coral’s tiniest caves and
swim over to the wall for a look. Nice. Steepest one we’ve been on.
Blue, deepening to bluer, deepening to a thousand feet of blue. Perfect.
I know I can break a hundred.
Today.
Every time I tried
at the condo last summer, either the waves were too high or the currents
too strong. That’s the Keys. None of that here. I turn away from the
promising depths and swim toward sunshine.
When I break the surface, Mom’s all over me. “Dammit, Michael, you supposed—”
“Just
warming up. Not a real dive.” I suck up. “Never without a buddy.” I
duck under the BC raft, grab the weight belt I brought for her from the
vest’s pocket, and surface.
“It looked like a real dive to me.” Mom fastens the belt, kicking slow to stay afloat.
I
grin and give her a saltwater kiss on the cheek before I move out along
the line stretched between the buoy and raft, positioned so I can dive
straight down the wall. I float on my stomach, blow through my nose to
clear my mask, shoot a spout of water out of my snorkel, and inhale—fill
my gut, hold it a few beats, then blow it out nice and slow, expelling
CO2, the waitress, Carolina, Mandy, even Mom, through that handy tube
stuck in my mouth.
“Take it easy, this morning.” Mom treads water instead of taking up her spotting position. “Don’t go too deep.”
I keep venting, soaking up the blue world under me, eager to immerse myself in it again.
“No blackout today, right?” She says that every dive. I was ten that one time. Get over it.
A
pair of painted angels drift over the top of the wall, their fins
waving in time to my slowing heartbeat. I blow up my chest and gut, nine
more mesmerizing cycles.
Mom maneuvers into position, face down on the other side of the line.
I
advance to super-vents, stretch my head back so I can drive air into
every chamber of my skull and torso, filling my throat and nasal
passages, again and again until my fingers tingle perfect breathe-down.
O2 maxed, totally zoned.
I inhale one last time, packing every
crevice, and then pack more air, and more. Mom bumps my leg. Doesn’t
matter. I’m Mr. Zen of the Deep. Nothing can penetrate this lean mean
free-diving machine.
I slip the snorkel out of my mouth, bend at
the waist, kick my massive free-dive fins skyward and shoot down through
the water. One kick, two. My buoyancy slides negative at fifteen feet. I
streamline it, conserving my
hoard of O2. Don’t need to kick
now. Pinch my nose and clear my ears—easy. I zoom past the top of the
wall, equalize my mask, glance at the dive computer strapped to my
wrist, seventy feet, clear again, eighty. The deeper I go, the faster I
fall. I blow past ninety. Hit a hundred before I know it. The water’s so
kicking clear.
I pull up hard, flip so my head points skyward,
and work my fins to stop sinking. I want to celebrate. Kind of a deadly
idea. A massive crab, all blued out, sits in a crevice sliced into the
wall. He waves his claws in my direction. It took less than a minute to
get down there. I have plenty of oxygen packed in my body, but I need it
all for the ascent. No time for underwater fans.
I begin kicking
for real, powering my giant fins back and forth. Don’t go anywhere.
Freak. Ditch my weights? No way. Dive won’t count. My depth gauge reads
99 feet. Good. I’m moving—just doesn’t seem like it. I paste my eyes to
the blaring pink triangle that is Mom and kick harder. Ninety feet,
eighty.
I make the top of the wall with upward momentum. Acid
scalds my leg muscles. My lungs weep for air. Still, I don’t chuck the
weights. I keep eye contact with Mom so she won’t think she has to save
me and wreck this dive. My chest vibrates with the effort of holding
onto the last dredge of O2.
My legs get stiff. I force them to keep wafting my heavy fins back and forth.
The
drowsy warmth of blackout creeps over me at fifteen feet, but I don’t
give it any room. I blow my CO2. Positive buoyancy propels me to the
surface. I blast through, plastering Mom. She squeals.
My starving lungs kick back mounds of fresh salt air.
“Your lips are blue, baby.” Her eyebrows draw together.
I suck O2 to my brain and stick my computer-strapped wrist in her face.
107 feet. Perfect.
“Whoa.”
She doesn’t yell it and give me skin like Dad would have. “From now on
you’re going to need a lot better spotter than me.” Mom starts untying
the diver-down flag from the buoy. “Let’s head back.”
“We’ve still got tons of time.” I fin over to her. “I’m going again in a few minutes.”
“No way.” She struggles with my knots.
“Yes. Way.” My mask fogs up. I rip it off my head. A few strands of wavy brown chick-bait hair come with it.
Mom gets the rope loose. “You need to work on your knots.”
“I
just got started.” I hock a ball of slime into my mask and rub it
around with my finger. “What am I going to do back on the boat?”
“You’ve got yesterday’s dives to log.”
“I’m staying.” I swish my mask around in the water.
“Not without a spotter.” She winds up the rope and hands it to me.
I
hook the scuba vest raft with an elbow. “Then spot me.” I put my mask
back on, mess around clearing it of my wild hair, remembering how
Carolina tore at it the last time we were together.
Mom
turns her back on me. “You’re diving way out of my league.” She
unlatches her weight belt, lifts it out of the water by one end, and
sets it on the BC raft. “You know I’m lucky if I free dive to thirty.”
“This is stupid. You always spot me.”
“Not anymore.”
“One more dive. Just to the reef. A baby could make that dive.”
“Can I trust you?”
How can I answer? We both know I’ll be down that wall again—freaking should be down that wall again.
“I’m
not going to lie there and watch you drown. End of story.” She pulls
her still pretty face into a crease. “You’re not free diving unless
you’ve got a qualified spotter at the surface and a scuba spotter at
depth.”
“Give me a break.” Nobody does that for a hundred feet. “It’s not like I’m riding a sled to 450.”
“Don’t give me nightmares.”
Right on cue, like Mom foresaw all and paid off the captain to get her way, the horn on the Festiva blares, over and over.
Mom frowns back at the boat. “Let’s go.” She starts swimming.
I hang back.
“Get a move on,” she yells. “They don’t blow that thing for nothing.”
About the Author:
Angela Morrison is the award-winning YA author of Taken by Storm (Books 1-3) and Sing me to Sleep. She graduated from Brigham
Young University and holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young
Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She grew up in Eastern
Washington on the wheat farm where Taken by Storm is set. She's an
advanced NAUI, Nitrox certified scuba diver. The hurricane that kills
Michael's parents was inspired by a real-life diving accident. After
over a decade in Canada, Switzerland, and Singapore, Angela and her
family are happily settled in Mesa, Arizona. She enjoys speaking to
writers and readers of all ages about her craft. She has four
children--mostly grown up--and the most remarkable grandson in the
universe.
Connect with Angela:
Links to Buy:
Hello Steph, Thanks for helping me celebrate today. I hope your followers enjoy the excerpt.
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