Hi everyone! Today I’m excited to participate in the bookstagram & creative blog tour for Aix Marks the Spot by Sarah Anderson organized by MTMC Tours! I absolutely adored this book and so excited to share this guest post today.
Sent to live with her estranged grandmother in Provence, 16yo Jamie finds her parents’ old love letters – and clues to a secret treasure hunt that could save her family after the accident that tore them apart. This YA Contemporary Travel Romance releases on June 16th, 2020 from Seabreeze Books!
The Story Behind The Story
Let me preface this by telling you two key facts about me: one, I am a rational, scientific person, an astrophysics PhD candidate who thrives off research and order. Two, I am a writer who enjoys planning and plotting and spending years on a story.
Aix Marks the Spot threw both of those facts to the wind: it was neither rational nor planned. It sprung from my brain to the page in two weeks and left me winded and burned out.
Let’s back up. I was born in England to American parents and raised in France. I learned to speak the language before either of my parents and had to navigate a lot of this country and culture without any kind of guidance. This led to some unfortunate events, misunderstandings, and just the pure weirdness of life in Provence being thrown full into the face of a confused first grader. Whenever anything confusing happened, my mom would tell me to ‘put it in my memoir,’ so as soon as I could take up a pen, I wrote down the strange and utterly confusing moments wherever I could.
Twenty years later, I still have a folder on my computer named ‘Frenglish’: a collection of memories that don’t string together but bring up quite a laugh. Like that time when I was in second grade when my classmates went on strike because Bush stole our spring break. Or more recently, when my university cancelled and then rebranded my masters partway through and decided that FunPhys was going to be taken seriously by the international physics community. Ok, maybe they’re not all that funny, just absurd and weird and a little infuriating in hindsight. But one thing’s for sure: no one would want to read that jumbled mess. It’s like if A Year in Provence had an existential crisis every chapter.
Back in 2018, I was going through a seriously dark period in my life. I had everything going for me career wise: I was halfway through a great masters (the name change hadn’t happened yet), and my SciFi books were selling, so it was a grand old time. Except for the fact that my gut had turned on me and decided to stop processing food like it was meant to. In and out of hospitals and doctors, I was at the end of my rope: no one knew what it was, so doctors could only offer suggestions for what and what not to eat – and screwing up meant flare ups and potential visits to the ER.
It got to the point where I was so miserable that a good friend of mine suggested an energy healer. One she regarded so highly that she paid for my session in full.
I was hesitant. As I mentioned earlier, a fundamental fact about me is that I am a scientist. Healing like this, I have to admit, I usually scoff at. Or at least I did until my session. While the intent was to focus on my gut, the healer brought up the fact that she could feel my disconnect to the world. She gave me some grounding techniques and worked her practice on me to tie me back down to earth. While I still don’t know exactly how much of what she did was effective, the experience was a really positive one and I felt amazing afterward.
As I said, I don’t know how much of what she did was effective: maybe on my way home I was a little more open and perceptive than usual; maybe it was the gorgeous day outside while I was spending those hours riding the busses and trains across the Provence; maybe I had just reached the boiling point with all the craziness I had been saving in a corner on my computer. Whatever it was, it was the perfect storm, because the next day I woke up with the entire novel in my head.
I got to work immediately, dropping all other projects and writing in such a frenzy I thought my fingers would fall off. Every day I wrote for hours, filling pages, feeling more like the story was flowing through me than coming from me. I have never had this feeling before nor since – I was a writer possessed.
And so Aix Marks the Spot came to be. After a few rounds of editing – which were actually pleasant for a change – the book was done. So I sent it to a few close friends, closed it up, and left it on a shelf for two years.
I wasn’t ready for anyone else to read it. But somehow, I know that now is the right time to put it out there. I didn’t initially intend to self-publish, but after a particularly spit-take worthy response from an agent telling me it would sell better if it was set in Paris, I realized that I couldn’t wait on anybody else to put it out into the world. This is my story: everything that happens in Aix Marks the Spot, except for the treasure hunt that ties it together, is real. Every event – as absurd as they sound – is something that happened to me or to a friend.
I am so very excited – and a little terrified – to put it out there, but I couldn’t be happier to share my home with everyone. To give readers a tour of the amazing place I grew up in and the people who make it so unique.
Now here’s hoping I get another book dropped into my brain like this!
Synopsis – Aix Marks The Spot by Sarah Anderson
About the Book:
Title: Aix Marks the Spot
Author: Sarah Anderson
Publisher: Seabreeze Books
Publishing Date: June 16, 2020
Genres: YA Contemporary
Links: Amazon | Goodreads | Book Depository | B&N
Synopsis:
Sent to live with her estranged grandmother in Provence, 16yo Jamie finds her parents’ old love letters – and clues to a secret treasure hunt that could save her family after the accident that tore them apart.
BLURB: Jamie has been dreaming of this summer forever: of road trips and intensive art camps, of meeting cute boys with her best friend Jazz. What she didn’t count on was the car accident.
Exiled away from her family as her mother slowly learns to walk again, Jamie is sent to Provence and trapped in an isolated home with the French grandmother she has never met, the guilt of having almost killed her parents, and no Wi-Fi. Enough to drive a girl mad. That is, until, she finds an old letter from her father, the starting point in a treasure hunt that spans across cities and time itself. Somehow, she knows that the treasure is the key to putting her shattered family back together and that whatever lies at the end has the power to fix everything.
Armed only with a high-school-level of French and a map of local train lines, she must enlist the aid of Valentin, a handsome neighbor who’s willing to translate. To save her family, she has castle ruins to find and sea cliffs to climb; falling for her translator wasn’t part of her plan…
About the author: Sarah Anderson
S.E. Anderson can’t ever tell you where she’s from. Not because she doesn’t want to, but because it inevitably leads to a confusing conversation where she goes over where she was born (England) where she grew up (France) and where her family is from (USA) and it tends to make things very complicated.
She’s lived pretty much her entire life in the South of France, except for a brief stint where she moved to Washington DC, or the eighty years she spent as a queen of Narnia before coming back home five minutes after she had left. Currently, she is working on her PhD in Astrophysics and Planetary sciences in Besançon, France.
When she’s not writing, or trying to science, she’s either reading, designing, crafting, or attempting to speak with various woodland creatures in an attempt to get them to do household chores for her. She could also be gaming, or pretending she’s not watching anything on Netflix.
Website | Twitter | Goodreads | Instagram
INTL Giveaway on Instagram!
Head over to my Instagram account to win a hardcover copy of Aix Marks the Spot + woodmark and postcard included.
Tour Schedule:
June 8
@thereaderandthechef – Bookstagram + Blog
June 9
@rebireads – Bookstagram
June 10
@paperfury – Bookstagram + Blog
June 11
@linathebookaddict – Bookstagram + Blog
June 12
@tainasbookadventures – Bookstagram + Blog
June 13
@womanon – Bookstagram
June 14
@bookphenomena – Bookstagram + Blog
June 15
@tata.lifepages – Bookstagram
June 16
@l.m.durand – Bookstagram + Blog
June 17
@ve_xo – Bookstagram
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