Taken Away Virtual Book Publicity Tour October 2011

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Join Patty Friedmann, author of the Young Adult Fiction novel, Taken Away (Tiny Satchel Press), as she virtually tours the blogosphere October 3 – 28 2011 on her second virtual book tour with Pump Up Your Book!

About Patty Friedmann

Patty Friedmann’s two latest books are a YA novel called Taken Away [TSP 2010] and a literary e-novel titled Too Jewish [booksBnimble 2010]. She also is the author of six darkly comic literary novels set in New Orleans: The Exact Image of Mother [Viking Penguin 1991]; Eleanor Rushing [1998], Odds [2000], Secondhand Smoke [2002], Side Effects [2006], and A Little Bit Ruined [2007] [all hardback and paperback from Counterpoint except paper edition of Secondhand Smoke from Berkley Penguin]; as well as the humor book Too Smart to Be Rich [New Chapter Press 1988]. Her novels have been chosen as Discover Great New Writers, Original Voices, and Book Sense 76 selections, and her humor book was syndicated by the New York Times. She has published reviews, essays, and short stories in Publishers Weekly, Newsweek, Oxford American, Speakeasy, Horn Gallery, Short Story, LA LIT, Brightleaf, New Orleans Review, and The Times-Picayune and in anthologies The Great New American Writers Cookbook, Above Ground, Christmas Stories from Louisiana, My New Orleans, New Orleans Noir, and Life in the Wake. Her stage pieces have been part of Native Tongues. In a special 2009 edition, Oxford American listed Secondhand Smoke with 29 titles that included Gone with the Wind, Deliverance, and A Lesson Before Dying as the greatest Underrated Southern Books. With slight interruptions for education and natural disasters, she always has lived in New Orleans.

You can visit her website at www.pattyfriedmann.com.

About Taken Away

What does young Summer Elmwood do when her little sister disappears during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and everyone blames her?

When Summer Elmwood’s hot, bedraggled, exhausted family arrives unannounced at the door of her aunt’s elegant Houston house, her mother explains. “We’ve had a disaster. Not the hurricane, a real disaster.”

It is one week after Katrina laid waste to the Elmwoods’ hometown of New Orleans, and like most residents, they were too close to the tragedy to see its scope. Besides, they were coping with a possible tragedy of their own, and only because their city has closed down have they evacuated. Summer’s baby sister disappeared the day the storm hit.

Two-year-old Amalia Elmwood had open-heart surgery three days before the storm, and in the chaos—breaking windows, loss of power, rising water, departure of doctors and nurses—Amalia has disappeared from Intensive Care. The Elmwoods find themselves helpless to find her in an abandoned city.

When her parents start to suspect Summer—who aches for some positive attention—might be the culprit, Summer musters all her resources to track her sister down. With parents who don’t like technology, she must sneak to use computers and cell phones, but with the help of a friend, Haydn Glade, who also is exiled in Texas, she picks up clues that the FBI ignores and eventually figures out what happened. Haydn, whom she “would be in love with if I didn’t love him so much,” seems a much more romantic boy in Texas. Summer has to decide how much.

Book Excerpt:

I go up to every person who’s not talking to someone else. “My sister’s two. She was in intensive care. We can’t find her.”
Oh, we’re airlifting them out first,” is the answer they all give.
“She was missing before the helicopters came,” I explain.
“We were lining people up before the helicopters came,” they all say.
I ask where the helicopters are going.
“They won’t know until they’re airborne,” is what I hear from everyone. “But close.” Close, I’m told, is like Thibodaux, possibly Baton Rouge, hopefully not Lafayette. That means sixty or eighty but probably not a hundred-twenty miles away.
I think I have facts to give to my parents, but I wonder if the sequence of events really fits. My head is too full of jumbled information, and I don’t quite have a time line. I’ve lost track of the days and the hours. Right this second it’s impossible for me to figure out if I can relax, to think that maybe Amalia went on a helicopter to another hospital.

Taken Away Book Publicity Tour Schedule

Monday, October 3

Book spotlighted at Literarily Speaking

Tuesday, October 4

Guest blogging at The Story Behind the Book

“Just when I’d decided it was time to take to the rocker with my grandchildren, mega-agent Charlotte Sheedy came to town and took pity on me. (Her client Eve Ensler was here for The Vagina Monologues.) She took me to breakfast, assessed my situation, and pointed out that no one had written a young adult novel about Katrina. She suggested a story about a baby disappearing during the storm.”

Thursday, October 6

Guest blogging at Literal Exposure

“One novel was at the printer when the storm hit. Its release made all the publishing industry news while I was trapped in New Orleans. It was a pre-Katrina story. Another novel went through the storm and came out in 2006, and I was battered worse than I had been sitting in my house watching the flood waters rise.”

Tuesday, October 11

Book spotlighted at The Plot

“I go up to every person who’s not talking to someone else. “My sister’s two. She was in intensive care. We can’t find her.”…”

Wednesday, October 12

Guest blogging at The Plot

“The last time I saw Haydn Glade was in 2005. My novel, Taken Away, was ending, and he was decidedly not in a good mood. He and Sumbie Elmwood had what I thought was a pretty terrific relationship for two people going into junior year in high school. Possibly the beginnings of being boyfriend-girlfriend.”

Thursday, October 13

Interviewed at The Hot Author Report

“Any writer who’s honest will admit that it’s possible to write for an hour a day and play the rest of the time. When I’m in writing mode, I get up when I feel like it, get to the computer, write for the middle of the morning, then fool around. The story is writing itself, particularly when I’m taking a shower or falling off to sleep or driving, so I’m working, but I don’t see how anyone can say that writing interferes with anything.”

Monday, October 17

Interviewed at Blogcritics

“I’d never been as excited about a piece of writing as I’d been about that story — even though I had six novels already to my credit. It was a Holocaust story, but I set the tragic repercussions to play out in the world of mean girls in the 1960s. Translation: I used it to shame not only my high-school classmates, but also everyone who ever attended the fancy school where I graduated. The prospect of building a novel around that work was irresistible.”

Tuesday, October 18

Guest blogging at Mama Knows Books

“Yes, if all anyone is looking for is full-blown naked lust. No, if the pictures painted titillate. Here is a scene when she and one boy go back to New Orleans after the storm, when all the electricity is gone, when it is hot and dark. They are on a backyard swing:”

Guest blogging at Thoughts in Progress

Wednesday, October 19

Guest blogging at Writing From the Tub

Thursday, October 20

Book reviewed at Between the Pages

Friday, October 21

Guest blogging at Motherhoot

Monday, October 24

Book reviewed at From the TBR Pile

“The author did a great job of conveying the desperation that the family felt as they realize their loved one is gone. I also got a good sense of the chaos that surrounded city in the aftermath of the hurricane.”

Book reviewed at Stuggles of a (Maybe) Teen Author

“The story itself was amazing.”

Tuesday, October 25

Guest participant at Literarily Speaking October Book Panel

Wednesday, October 26

Book spotlighted at Book Marketing Buzz

Friday, October 28

Interviewed at American Chronicle

Patty Friedmann’s TAKEN AWAY VIRTUAL BOOK PUBLICITY TOUR will officially begin on October 3 and end on October 28 ’11. Please contact Dorothy Thompson at thewriterslife(at)gmail.com if you are interested in hosting and/or reviewing his book or click here to use the form. Thank you!

If you would like to book your own virtual book tour with us, click here to find out how!

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Maria Andrade, DEFIANCE AND REDEMPTION

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Irene Woodbury, HONEYMOON ROULETTE

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Kathleen Shaputis, HIS KILT DROPPED HERE

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Joni Ankerson, TO KILL OR BE KILLED

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Aiken Brown, SON OF A SOLDIER

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Laura Preble, ANNA INCOGNITO

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Lena Gregory, GRAVE CONSEQUENCES

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Jennifer Chase, FLOWERS ON HER GRAVE

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Elysia Strife, A PROMISE IN ASH

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Miri Leshem-Pelly, SCRIBBLE & AUTHOR

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Shami Stovall, KNIGHTMARE ARCANIST

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Bacon Press Books

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Lee Papa, TEMPLE OF ALL KNOWING

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Madeline Wynn, DAUGHTER OF THE FALLEN

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Mary Lawlor, FIGHTER PILOT'S DAUGHTER

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Karen-Anne Stewart, ASH TO STEELE

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How do you make sales happen for you?

A lot of hard work! I sponsor a lot of on line parties, festivals and contests. Book sales don’t magically happen, believe me. An author has to work hard to earn her readers. And then she has to work hard to keep them by giving them something they’ll enjoy reading. I try hard to make my books worth a reader’s time.

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