BREAKING GLASS by Lisa Amowitz
Blurb
On the night seventeen-year-old Jeremy Glass winds up in the hospital with a broken leg and a blood alcohol level well above the legal limit, his secret crush, Susannah, disappears. When he begins receiving messages from her from beyond the grave, he’s not sure whether they’re real or if he’s losing his grip on reality. Clue by clue, he gets closer to unravelling the mystery, and soon realizes he must discover the truth or become the next victim himself.
Author Bio
Lisa Amowitz was born in Queens and raised in the wilds of Long Island, New York where she climbed trees, thought small creatures lived under rocks and studied ant hills. And drew. A lot.
When she hit her teens, she realized that Long Island was too small for her and she needed to escape. So she went to college in Pittsburgh. Go figure.
On leaving college, Lisa became a graphic designer living in New York City. She eventually married her husband of a zillion years, had two lovely children, and was swept away to a fairy tale life in the Bronx, where, unbelievably there are more trees and wilderness than her hometown. She can see the Hudson River from her kitchen window.
Lisa has been a professor of Graphic Design at her beloved Bronx Community College where she has been tormenting and cajoling students for nearly seventeen years. She started writing eight years ago because she wanted something to illustrate, but somehow, instead ended up writing YA. Probably because her mind is too dark and twisted for small children.
BREAKING GLASS which will be released in July, 2013 from Spencer Hill Press, is her first published work. VISION, the first of the Finder series will be released in 2014,
along with an unnamed sequel in the following year. LIFE AND BETH will also be released in the near future, along with graphic novel style art.
My Review
Breaking Glass by Lisa Amowitz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I loved this book! the character of Jeremy Glass is heartbreaking and made me want to climb into the story and stand up for him time and time again. He is such a broken and sweet boy who has no clue what he is getting into and no one to look up to.
The Mystery: where is Susannah? is she really dead? is Jeremy going crazy just like his mother did? and if Susannah is dead who killed her? Jeremy is afried that time is running out for him to find her, because he just might be the next victim.
Susannah was a very complex character who you want to hate but you just end up feeling bad for because she had a horrible life. Susannah who has gone missing is starting to send Jeremy messages from the other side or maybe he is just going crazy, it is possible. His mother was crazy they say and she did drive herself off that bridge but then you can't always believe what people say in town for they are all under the thumb of one man, Patrick Morgan.
Patrick Morgan was the ultimate bad guy smooth as silk when it came to public appearances but behind the scenes was a right a-hole! there were about a hundred times I wanted to jump right into the book myself and strangle the man for his high handed ways. His son is the town Golden Boy who every girl wants to have, every boy wants to be and is Jeremy's Best friend and Susannah's boyfriend.
This book was amazing! I cried for Jeremy's heartache and pain. I savoured each and every word! Lisa Amowitz is a amazingly talented writer and I enjoyed myself immensely in her world of fiction. The Book does have a back and forth between the past and the present but without it the story couldn't be told properly. Lisa did an wonderful job on this book and I for one am now a huge fan!
View all my reviews
The Interview
I got to Interview and get a glimpse inside the incredible mind behind Breaking Glass with its Amazing Author and my good friend Lisa Amowitz! Lisa is a amazing writer and I quickly fell in love with Breaking Glass as I am sure you will all to the minute you read it!
Breaking Glass is a tragic and heartbreaking tale of a teenage boy trying to find the killer of his best friends girlfriend and his secret crush. Meanwhile the whole town seams to just want to forget she existed in the first place. Are they in on it? or is something else going on? find out when you get your copy of Breaking Glass!
Read on for this super special interview! you will not want to miss a thing!
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what made you delve into the world of fiction?
My background has always been art. I drew incessantly as a child and studied illustration in college. But somehow, intertwined with the drawing was this craving to tell a story. I don’t think, however, I was completely aware of it until I started reading Harry Potter to my daughter when it first came out. A deep and sudden need to tell my own story, maybe as a way to process the still raw fear I had from the events of September 11 ( I live in New York City and I think we were all traumatized to almost paralysis for that following year)—the sudden awareness that you had to find a way to live with the terror that you will never really be safe. I think Harry Potter was very healing for parents to read to children around that time. It showed us a way forward—living with possible doom, but not cowering in a corner. My first attempts at writing were almost therapy to help me through that scary time. From that point forward, I began to realize that writing was in my blood and I never looked back.
Q: Can you please tell us a little about your book Breaking Glass and what inspired you write it?
Probably, a good psychologist can link all my books to events in my life or in raising my children, but I link them to locations. I wanted to tell a story about someone who had been deceived and struggled to look past the myth they had built for themselves. Breaking Glass had started as a little story seed about a boy who is injured, and during his recuperation dwells on a girl who has died so intensely, he decides to summon her ghost. I had called it Spectacular. But I set it aside to write other things, but it wouldn’t go away. The town of Croton on Hudson the setting for the fictitious Riverton started to give me a sense of the developing story. This is a tough question, because it’s just so many things. I think once I wrote that first paragraph and “heard” Jeremy’s voice, I knew I had to write the book.
Q: How did you come up with the name Breaking Glass?
I spend a good bit of time naming my characters before I begin writing. I wanted a name that sounded sympathetic and a bit like the name of someone smart. I wanted a last name that was short and vague, but yet had a suggestive manner about it. I knew that Jeremy was going to be falling apart in this book and at first I called it Broken Glass. Then I realized Jeremy isn’t totally broken—he is on the verge of it—so therefore Breaking Glass—because Jeremy is beginning to fall apart as are the illusions he’s clung to to avoid dealing with his real problems.
Q: What kind of research did you do––if any––to make your ghost summoning more life like?
Mostly hours and hours of internet trolling.
Q: If faced with the same problems as Jeremy would you take the same path?
Who knows?
I, luckily don’t have a terrifying childhood trauma to deal with, but I think in a sense we all have things from our past we carry with us. Jeremy is really nothing like me or anyone I know. My books are sort of like those computer weather models where you tweak a setting and get a different result. I wanted to tell the story of this particular boy, so I created his backstory, poor kid, and researched how people respond to trauma. That gave me a framework to write this book.
Q: We all know writing isn't easy. Can you tell us all what you love and hate most about being an author?
Things I love:
Words
Other writers
Books
Book covers
Bloggers and readers like you! I’ve met so many wonder bloggers during this time and it is great to connect!
Things I hate:
Book promotion
My addiction to social media
The politics of publishing
Self-doubt
Q: Can you tell us about your writing process? Do you dream up these characters and then build the journey, or rather, do you dream the journey as you create?
I think in the answers above I’ve hinted at my process. But I’ll sum it up for you.
1. story seed—just a smidge of an idea that may germinate for years.
2. the spark—whatever it is that tells me to dig that seed up and look closer…also may take years or months.
3. a setting. Location and atmosphere are really important to me, so often I wait until I can find the right place to plant my little seedling.
4. character. I know I’m getting closer when I start to create character profiles.
5. plot viability. This is usually the period where I harangue everyone I know and test the idea. For Breaking Glass a talk with a therapist friend gave me the main piece of info I needed to get the story going. Jeremy suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—and ALL of his problems stem from that. The mystery is born of what caused the terrible incident that traumatized him in the first place.
6. Outlining. I do outline. But I often adjust the outline as I go or totall veer off course. But I need to have a sense of the road ahead before I begin.
7. the writing of the first chapter. I may do this over seven or eight times until I feel comfortable moving forward. This is also the time I harass my critique group and beta readers to make sure the book’s voice is working and that the story is unfolding in a coherent manner. I have a tendency to throw too much information in all at once, so it takes me a while to get started.
8. Once all that takes place, hopefully the story begins to write itself and I get to that place I crave: The Zone, when the characters begin to speak in my head and I have to tune them out to hear the real people in my life speak.
That zone is the place we all writers want to be. It is also the state of mind that made me realize after a lifetime of being a kooky artist, that writers are FAR crazier!
Q: Do you have plans to write a sequel to Breaking Glass?
Well, that depends on my publisher. Nothing is set in stone at the moment, but we have spoken about the possibility of following Jeremy to college. It would necessitate a genre change, from young adult to new adult, which is fine with me. When I began writing Breaking Glass there was no such thing as new adult!
Q: What are you working on at the moment / next?
I am gearing up for the release of my next book with Spencer Hill Press, VISION, which is a paranormal thriller, with a little more romance and a little more horror. I’m doing a lot of cover designs for SHP. I am also writing a YA murder mystery with a lot of the creep factor of Breaking Glass but without the paranormal element.
Q: Thank you so much for the interview, Lisa. Would you like to tell my readers where they can find you on the web.
Thanks so much for having me on here, Amanda! You are one of those wonderful bloggers I’ve met along the way and I am so thrilled we connected!
Me too Lisa! it has been so wonderful having you here and talking about this awesome book! I love this job as I get to connect with amazing people like you!
A Special Givaway and Download!
(1) custom pendant like the one pictured on the book cover
(2) signed ARCS
(1) original work of Breaking Glass related art created and signed by the author.
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