a gritty trip into the real and raw world - Clean by Mia Kerick

High school senior Lanny Keating has it all. A three-sport athlete at Lauserville High School looking at a college football scholarship, with a supportive family, stellar grades, boy band good looks… until the fateful day when it all falls apart.

Description:

Release Date: December 1st, 2015

High school senior Lanny Keating has it all. A three-sport athlete at Lauserville High School looking at a college football scholarship, with a supportive family, stellar grades, boy band good looks… until the fateful day when it all falls apart.

Seventeen-year-old Trevor Ladd has always been a publicly declared zero and the high school badboy. Abandoned by his mother and sexually abused by his legal guardian, Trevor sets his sights on mere survival. 

Lanny seeks out Trevor’s companionship to avoid his shattered home life. Unwilling to share their personal experiences of pain, the boys explore ways to escape, leading them into sexual experimentation, and the abuse of illegal drugs and alcohol. Their mutual suffering creates a lasting bond of friendship and love. 

When the time finally comes to get clean and sober, or flunk out of high school, only one of the boys will graduate, while the other spirals downward into addiction. 

Will Lanny and Trevor find the strength to battle their demons of mind-altering substances as well as emotional vulnerability?

Clean takes the reader on a gritty trip into the real and raw world of teenage substance abuse.

GUEST POST

Hello and thank you so much for welcoming me to your blog today to promote the release of my new YA LGBTQ Contemporary Romance, Clean. Clean is the story of two teenage boys who, for various, devastating reasons, experience a feeling of complete isolation in the world. Unable to face their problems, they search for an escape, and together find release in the world of drugs and alcohol. Trevor and Lanny soon hit rock bottom, partying constantly, and when one boy finally makes a decision to stop using, the other boy spirals downward into addiction. This is the edgy YA fiction illustrating how they are saved, by themselves and each other. 

Fitting in is very important to most teens. Here is a light story of how a girl who lived down the street from me used cookies to fit in during our high school years. 

This is the story of my secret recipe. Okay, I’m lying. This is the Brown Family’s secret recipe. I stole it. 

Ruth Brown moved into the house up the street in junior high. She was not a popular sort of girl, in that she was rather ordinary looking, not the typical popular-girl-beautiful, she was extremely outspoken, not the popular-girl-quiet- and-coy, and she just had this way about her that made people want to run away and bury their heads in the sand… But Cookie Brittle changed all of that for her. 

Ruth would show up at all sorts of important high school events—play practices, football games, colorguard practice, Homecoming Parade Float meetings—carrying one lunch size brown paper bag in each hand. The bags were full of something warm… and judging by the smell emanating from the bag and the growing grease spots, something buttery and chocolaty. The bags were filled to the brim with fresh from the oven Cookie Brittle. 

No matter where we were, teenagers flocked to Ruth Brown when she arrived, armed with these goodies. Hungry athletes, cheerleaders with chocolate cravings, the loud and obnoxious… the shy and detached… the studious… the total slackers—nobody could resist the smell… and then there was the taste. 

THE TASTE WAS MAGICAL!!! It was the stuff of sweet dreams… 

Ruth Brown became the most popular girl at the high school. 

She guarded the secret “Cookie Brittle” recipe with her very life. But one day, her absentminded mother left the recipe, written in neat script on a worn notecard, unprotected from prying eyes, face up on the countertop. I read the card, and like a secret recipe-swiping sleuth, committed it to memory. It is still in my memory bank right now. 

I kept this secret under my hat until after high school graduation. I started attracting people to me with this secret recipe in college. In addition, my children have attended many parties, athletic events, and meetings armed with the stuff. 

We have no shortage of friends. 

Cookie Brittle 

2 cups flour 

1 cup sugar 

1 cup softened butter 

pinch salt 

tiny bit of vanilla extract 

1 bag or Nestlé’s Semi-sweet Chocolate chips 

Mix together in a bowl. Should make a crumbly dough. Press onto a cookie sheet. Bake for 20 minutes or until just a tiny bit brown on top. Cool on cookie sheet. Break into pieces like peanut brittle. 

You will have to fights off the crowds. You have been warned. 

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About the author:

Mia Kerick is the mother of four exceptional children—all named after saints—and five nonpedigreed cats—all named after the next best thing to saints, Boston Red Sox players. Her husband of twenty years has been told by many that he has the patience of Job, but don’t ask Mia about that, as it is a sensitive subject.

Mia focuses her stories on the emotional growth of troubled men and their relationships, and she believes that sex has a place in a love story, but not until it is firmly established as a love story. As a teen, Mia filled spiral-bound notebooks with romantic tales of tortured heroes (most of whom happened to strongly resemble lead vocalists of 1980s big-hair bands) and stuffed them under her mattress for safekeeping. She is thankful to Dreamspinner Press for providing her with an alternate place to stash her stories.

Mia is proud of her involvement with the Human Rights Campaign and cheers for each and every victory made in the name of marital equality. Her only major regret: never having taken typing or computer class in school, destining her to a life consumed with two-fingered pecking and constant prayer to the Gods of Technology.

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