Blog Tour (Excerpt): Finding What Is by Tabitha Vohn + Giveaway!

 

 

MY POST:

 

For this blog tour, I'm participating with sharing an excerpt. Read on and get hooked!

 

The last warm remnants of summer passed out of their lives like a guest who slips away through the parlor in the early hours before dawn, with only a brief note slipped between the gardenias and candles on the foyer table, saying what a lovely time they had, but regret that they must leave immediately. Willie sat in the front yard one morning, her back gloriously bare in a gray halter against the final offerings of heat from a cloudless sky. Children screamed joyously through the neighboring yard, gliding down slip-n-slides and drawing huge rainbows and sunflowers with chalk in the street. Guys with their shirts off and their jeans slung low massaged greasy waxes into the hoods of their cars, tipping their beers to one another across the boundaries of their mailboxes.

Her easel was set up in the driveway, with Xavier at work and her car pulled down to the road. She faced the house, the white, wrap-around porch with chipping paint. On the ledge, against the banister, she painted a young woman dressed in white, painting her toenails the color black. Her long chocolate hair fanned around one side of her face like a wedding veil. Her eyes are lost in complete concentration and the sun shimmers in ribbons over her bared jawline. Behind her, in the shadows of the open door, stands Xavier. He’s holding a little child in his arms, her legs wrapped around him and her thumb to her mouth. She has long, chocolate hair as well, and her chubby fist is wrapped in a tendril of Xavier’s hair.

As she paints, Willie feels a warm, milky balm wash over her. The days had passed by without number or consequence, and she and Xavier had wandered through the house as if they were the ghosts, learning how to relive. They fell asleep together on the pullout couch most nights, neither of them able to face the places where her body had lain, calling for him. Not in his bed or in the room that she and Willie had once shared, her spirit was too thick and unrested there.

Willie was learning a new way to deal with a grief that was shared, and not hers alone. She learned that grief for her was falling into people and falling into painting. Most days after work were spent either working in a fever or with Storm. She would invite people to the apartment as often as she could, even suffering Jase as company for Xavier, who too often shut himself up in the impenetrable cocoon of his own grief and suffered alone.

His silence was deafening to Willie, who grieved the loss of him deeply. Some nights he would take her into his arms during his sleep, but would turn away guiltily in the mornings, or would come home and kiss her passionately, only to apologize afterwards and stumble from the house, the sound of his keys in the ignition sending tears down her face. Some days she would bare it bravely, others would degrade into shouting matches where objects were thrown and words best left unspoken were shot like bullets and, inevitably, no one would win. It was these times that Willie would throw herself mercilessly into her work, finding Xavier, finding her own heart, in the turning of her wrists and the press of the colors against the blank spaces.

Willie would start college in the spring. After glancing through her portfolio and learning of her current deal with The Muse, the dean agreed to allow her the fall to continue to work and to save toward her tuition. She was working on a series of paintings now for Vanessa that she called, The Ghost of Nicole. It had become her therapy, to vent how she felt Nicole’s spirit permeating her life, her home, her love with Xavier. In one painting, she is lying in bed in Xavier’s embrace, his mouth to her neck, and looking over his shoulder at the mirror on the opposite wall, she sees Nicole’s pale, transparent reflection glossed over her own, hidden behind or swallowed up by his memory of her. “I’m sorry, baby,” Xavier had said as he stood behind her, watching her paint it. She hadn’t known whether he was talking to her or Nicole.

 

 

Book & Author details:

Finding What Is by Tabitha Vohn
Publication date: September 29th 2013
Genres: Contemporary, New Adult

Synopsis:

Willie has always lived an unconventional life. Surrounded by the sensual, ethereal images of her artist-mother, she fantasizes about the half-wolf, half-human, but all-gorgeous face that stares out at her from her mother’s wall, and drinks in her mother’s stories of past lovers and adventures. She shares her home with a man who calls himself “uncle” (who stalks her through the house, naked). Her closest friends are a band of misfits who’ve forged their own way in life-including Xavier, who has carved his name in her soul- and her heart is torn between him and a college professor, a fellow artist who wants more than a student-teacher relationship.

Willie stands on the brink of womanhood poised to follow in her mother’s footsteps, with a gleaming future as an artist looming before her, and a maturity beyond her years that has enabled her to be the protector and caretaker of others, a mender of wounds. But as a devastating illness rips her mother from her life, Willie is left bereft of a home and of a sense of self. Guided only by her instincts, Willie wanders from her Professor’s arms to the home that Xavier shares with his live-in girlfriend Nicole (who insists that they can “share”). Her path becomes a search for peace, for family, for a love that’s real, and for her place in this world.

Finding What Is chronicles the journey that we all must take-to find ourselves, to reconcile our past, and to get back to that place we once called home.

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18593747-finding-what-is?ac=1

Purchase:

--Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Finding-What-Is-Tabitha-Vohn/dp/149099095X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382896188&sr=8-1&keywords=finding+what+is+tabitha+vohn

----

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tabitha is a pen name. Her creator is a certified bookworm, thanks to the countless fairy tales, Bible stories, and nursery rhymes she was read as a child, and the Gothic, Romantic, and Contemporary novels she enjoys today. She has earned a B.A. in English and a M.A. in Teaching, and currently teaches high school English.

On Writing, Tabitha says, “I strive to write the type of stories that I enjoy reading. Ones that question those blurred lines between love and lust, between good and evil. Ones that make us question human nature while simultaneously seeing the beauty in it as well.”

 

GIVEAWAY DETAILS:

Open to US and Canada: 
-A paperback copy of Finding What Is 

a Rafflecopter giveaway