Attraction Blog Tour: Excerpt + Giveaway

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the ATTRACTION by Ruby Porter Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

ATTRACTION

Author: Ruby Porter

Release Date: May 7, 2019

Publisher: Text Publishing

Formats: Paperback, eBook

Pages: 280

Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, B&N, iBooks, Kobo, TBD, Bookshop.org

Description:

The present reckons with the past in Attraction, Ruby Porter’s debut novel.

Three women are on a road trip, navigating the motorways of the North Island, their relationships with one another and New Zealand's colonial history. Our narrator doesn't know where she stands with Ilana, her not-quite-girlfriend. She has a complex history with her best friend, Ashi. She's haunted by the spectre of her emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend. And her period's now weeks late.

Attraction is a meditative novel of connection, inheritance and the stories we tell ourselves. In lyrical fragments, Porter explores what it means to be and to belong, to create and to destroy.

Praise:

‘Attraction peels back the landscape to reveal deeper truths. The writer is right inside her material – a road trip that delivers a political and sexual coming-of-age narrative. The book is a slow-burning fuse that brims with intensely felt experience. Porter is an exciting new talent.’―Lloyd Jones

‘Attraction abounds with sharp imagery, intergenerational relationships and the natural, historic and domestic environments of modern New Zealand. Ruby Porter is a gifted new writer.’―Patricia Grace

‘Attraction is an exquisite story…The prose is emotive and artistic…Attraction is impossible to put down…It is a brilliant, beautiful novel.’―Booksellers NZ

‘A coming-of-age story that is full of evocative sketches of the North Island’s landscapes.’―Traveller magazine

‘Tackling a complex, fraught topic – the very essence of what it is to be a New Zealander – with courage, style and insight.―Stuff New Zealand

‘Not a word is wasted. Imagery is of the sharpest level. There is so much to love about this angry, meditative novel that reading it is almost an act of catharsis.'―The AU Review

'Porter's style is spare, immediate and pared back...[A]n intriguing new voice.'―Overland Literary Journal

The narrator has just had a fight with her not-quite-girlfriend Ilana, on the way to Levin:

I wish we could leave the resentment, back there, on the road. But it’s lodged in me, sitting in my chest like a dumbbell, squashing all my organs. It’s going to solidify, become another knot in my back or lump in my breast, become the small pebble you feel rattling around inside your heart, but can never shake. You’d have to drill a hole, just below my collarbone, to get it out.

In heavy silence, we pass through Hastings, a city founded by men who called themselves the Twelve Apostles, harassing Māori into selling land. We pass through Bridge Pā and Pakipaki. Branches and chairs and rakes and toys lie in piles, bonfires not yet set. We pass Lake Poukawa, where all the bones were found. Palaeontologists trawled its waters from 1956, looking for remnants of things now extinct.

+

A bend in the road can hold a conversation.

I remember Chris and Helen fighting about the price of hiring a cleaner all the way along Tamaki Drive.

—I can’t keep living in this filth.

Chris.

—You don’t know what I do for you.

Helen. —You don’t know the half of it. And you don’t know the value of money. Go back to your Remuera parents. Go on, if you don’t like my house so much. Go on.

I remember Chris telling me, months later, as she took me to my art lesson in Newmarket, that just because she didn’t love Helen anymore, didn’t mean she would ever stop loving me.

—I’m still your mum, she said, as we drove under the brand new perspex canopies of Grafton Bridge. A preventative measure, designed to keep the suicidal in, move them along.

I remember Helen, on the stretch that spirals up from Taihape, saying that this would be the year, this would be the year she’d lose the weight and find a different school and meet someone new. This would be the year. It was 2008. That year still hasn’t come.

I remember Nick saying I love you right outside Mangatawhiri. I don’t remember what I said back.


When Ilana speaks next, I feel her words etch themselves into the tarmac, a fault line laid bare.

—You can really talk, you know, about hiding things.

She could be speaking about anything. But she’s not. She’s speaking about one thing in particular.

—It wasn’t me, she says, —who fucked someone else first, was it?

Ruby Porter is a tutor of creative writing at the University of Auckland. She has been published in Geometry Journal, Aotearotica, Spinoff and Wireless, and a selection of her poetry is available on NZEPC. In 2018, she also won the Wallace Foundation Short Fiction Contest.

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(1) winner will receive a $10 Amazon GC courtesy of Rockstar Book Tours - International.

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Tour Schedule:

Week One:

4/6/2020	Jaime's World	Excerpt
4/6/2020	Two Chicks on Books	Guest Post
4/7/2020	BookHounds	Guest Post
4/8/2020	momfluenster	Guest Post
4/8/2020	Mythical Books	Guest Post
4/9/2020	Locks, Hooks and Books	Guest Post
4/9/2020	The Book Junkie Reads...	Excerpt
4/10/2020	She Just Loves Books	Review
4/10/2020	A Gingerly Review	Excerpt

Week Two:

4/13/2020	Smada's Book Smack	Excerpt
4/14/2020	Fyrekatz Blog	Excerpt
4/14/2020	Reese's Reviews	Review
4/15/2020	Down The Rabbit Hole	Review
4/16/2020	A Dream Within A Dream	Review
4/16/2020	Books_andPoetrii	Excerpt
4/17/2020	Mowgli with a book	Review
4/17/2020	Books a Plenty Book Reviews	Review