Who do you trust when you can’t trust yourself?
Welcome to one of the many stops on the book blitz for Alter by H.R. Truelove with XPresso Book Tours. Look for others participating in this blitz across social media and on your favourite bookish blogs February 28 – March 6, and don’t forget to enter the giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.
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About the Book
Alter
Alter Book One
by H.R. Truelove
Published 26 January 2022
Midnight Tide Publishing
Genre: YA Science Fiction
Page Count: 445
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!
Who do you trust when you can’t trust yourself?
Lennox, Erris, Wisdom…
There are many voices in Laura’s mind but no one, not even her family, will believe her.
Laura’s life is far from normal. After spending years in a medical center for seeing visions no one else can, Laura is transferred to the Tomlinson Institute of Research. There, she’s promised, lies the truth she’s been after her entire life.
But as her eighteenth birthday looms closer, Laura’s already complicated life takes a sudden turn. When she discovers what hides behind her unusual abilities, Laura’s reality is blown to pieces, and she must learn to make sense of her super-natural gifts. With a little help from the voices in her head, Laura needs to fight to save herself, the world she lives in–and every other world in the multiverse.
Alter is a gripping and intricate tale of conspiracy, mad scientists, and broken lives. A multiverse of blurry lines, lies, and deceit where we come face-to-face with the best of humankind… And it’s very worst.
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Excerpt
I cleared my throat, going over the mental script in my head one last time. “I’ve dreamed of Aquarius for as long as I can remember. I guess you’d call them dreams. Sometimes, I was asleep. But other times, I’d slip away in the middle of the day. A certain smell or memory was all it took to see this new place, where everyone was miserable because it was raining all the time.” I stopped, glancing around the circle of folding chairs that held both of my fellow patients and a jury of my peers.
Group therapy had become a trial. No one at Clover Center listened when I talked about my dream visits or the voices I heard when I closed my eyes. They only wanted to judge me for the things I couldn’t control. The things they thought I was imagining.
“Can you see Aquarius now, Laura?” asked a girl with a long braid and soulful green eyes. She wore a hoodie three times too big for her, and the shadows covering her face looked like bruises. “When you look at Dr. Z, who do you see?”
“Haily, stop that,” Dr. Z said. “Let Laura speak.”
Haily retreated into her hoodie, her excited grin turning to disappointment.
The others in the circle hid smirks and giggles. If Dr. Z turned her back, they’d be gossiping and making faces. They’d witnessed the real me. The one I’d worked so hard to hide from the doctors.
A few lucky girls seemed disinterested. They were busy counting ceiling tiles or picking at their nails. Clover Center was nothing but a brief stop in their lives. But for ten years now, these white walls had been my home. Only two weeks until my eighteenth birthday, and nothing was keeping me from leaving then.
Dr. Z trained her dark eyes on mine. The other patients didn’t know it, but a secret conversation was taking place between my longtime therapist and me. A test. A little game of Truth or Dare, where either choice could lead to my freedom or more years of confinement.
I took a deep breath, daring myself to give my best performance yet. I didn’t need an award; all I needed was to get out of Clover Center.
“—But now I know those were only dreams. I wasn’t seeing another reality where me and my family live a bizarro life on some war-torn island. I was coping.” Dr. Z gave me an encouraging smile. “And now that I’ve learned new tools, I can find a better way to cope.”
I paused, almost expecting the room to break out in applause over my success story. But they ignored me, only peeking up for long enough to see if I was still talking. They didn’t like it when I was well; I was so much more interesting when I did things like threaten to jump off the roof or stay up all night screaming.
About the Author
H. R. Truelove lives with her family in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
She developed a thirst for reading during her long bus rides to school, and has been writing poetry, song lyrics, and short stories most of her life.
Truelove’s debut trilogy, Alter, will release in 2022, with book one ready to launch in January.
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Giveaway Alert!
Blitz-wide giveaway (INT)
$25 Amazon gift card
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