Interview/Review/Giveaway - Stitch by Samantha Durante

Welcome to my stop on the Stitch book tour. Today is the last day of the tour and it comes to an end after six weeks of touring!! At my stop today, you can read a summary of the book, my review and learn a little more about the author Samantha Durante in the interview. There is also a giveaway for THREE copies of Stitch, so please enter!!

Title: Stitch

Author: Samantha Durante

Series: Stitch Trilogy #1

Published by: Samantha Durante

Published Date: August 1^st 2012

Book Description

Her heart races, her muscles coil, and every impulse in Alessa's body screams at her to run... but yet she's powerless to move.

Still struggling to find her footing after the sudden death of her parents, the last thing college freshman Alessa has the strength to deal with is the inexplicable visceral pull drawing her to a handsome ghostly presence. In between grappling with exams and sorority soirees - and disturbing recurring dreams of being captive in a futuristic prison hell - Alessa is determined to unravel the mystery of the apparition who leaves her breathless. But the terrifying secret she uncovers will find her groping desperately through her nightmares for answers.

Because what Alessa hasn't figured out yet is that she's not really a student, the object of her obsession is no ghost, and her sneaking suspicions that something sinister is lurking behind the walls of her university's idyllic campus are only just scratching the surface...

The opening instalment in a twist-laden trilogy, Stitch spans the genres of paranormal romance and dystopian sci-fi to explore the challenges of a society in transition, where morality, vision, and pragmatism collide leaving the average citizen to suffer the results.

My Review

When I began reading this book, I expected it just to be a simple ghost story, where the characters discover each other and find love. Boy was I wrong!! It is way more than that!! Samantha Durante has written a fascinating story where all is not what it seems and it will keep you wanting more!

Alessa is a college freshman and has glided through her last year of high school after the deaths of her parents. Her grades slipped as a result and she didn’t get into one of the big colleges that she wanted to attend. Instead, she was accepted to Eastern State University as they overlooked her personal issues. She has settled into the Uni life, as a normal young adult, attending classes and the occasional party. She only has one close friend, Janie, who is her constant support person.

In various places around her dorm, Alessa keeps seeing a ghost. He pops up out of nowhere and he unsettles Alessa as she feels very emotional about him. She decides to learn more about him and does research about the original occupants of the house. This is how we learn about Isaac more personally as she is able to discover so much about him at the college library.

I like Alessa, she is portrayed as the normal, smart college chick who is doing her best at school. She has no family left and has had to regroup and set her own goals. She is a determined person and once she has her heart set on something it is hard to change her mind. So when she decides to try and help the ghost not even Janie can change her mind.

After reading about half of the book I was thinking, now this is a nice book, we may be seeing soul mates trying to get back together. We have the ghost and the girl from the future trying to connect through time, aww how sweet. But then BANG!! This massive twist is thrown in that I didn’t see coming and the plot takes an abrupt change. Samantha was able to keep me glued to the pages, waiting to see what would happen to Alessa next! With all the twists that come into it I have been left wanting more!

Purchase Links

Amazon (print $9.99 & Kindle $2.99): http://www.amazon.com/Stitch-Trilogy-Book-1/dp/0985804602/
Smashwords (multiple e-book formats $2.99): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/208278
Coming soon to B&N Nook and iTunes

Interview with Samantha Durante

Hi Samantha! Thank you for taking the opportunity to chat with me today!!

I have a few questions, nothing too stressful.... here we go!!

How long did it take to write Stitch? Did you have to wait long for it to be published?

S: Start to finish, Stitch actually only took around 8 months.  I wrote the first draft over the course of about three months last winter, and then I spent the spring and beginning of the summer revising it and getting it ready for publication (and all of this mainly on weekends since I work as a freelance business writer during the week).  I’m self-published, and actually one of the main reasons I decided to self-publish is because I was impatient to get Stitch into the hands of readers and I didn’t want to wait the months it would take to find an agent and publisher!  So as soon as the book was ready to go in August, I published it through Amazon and Smashwords and started the blog tour.  :-)

Did you do a lot of research to write this book? Alessa does research about wormholes and such, did you research as well or is it all fictional?

S: Believe it or not, all that wormhole stuff is science!  All of the crazy physics in the book comes directly from Stephen Hawking books or scientific articles online – I’d read some for fun in the past so I knew a little bit about it (what I could wrap my head around at least! 11 dimensions, really??), but then I did the research online just like Alessa would have and basically just recorded my findings.  I may have taken small liberties here and there for the sake of explaining things more clearly, but everything from the spacetime physics to the possible ghost explanations to the details of how a virus wiped out the world’s population (more about this coming in the next book) is very much based on fact, or at least the conjecture of qualified scientific experts.  There are plenty of crazy twists in the book, so I felt it was important to balance them out by making it as believable and based-in-reality as possible!

When you began writing Stitch, did you always plan the massive twist that occurs halfway through the book or did it come to you?

S: It was planned from the start.  I initially set out with the idea of a ghost romance, but I wasn’t totally happy with that because the only way I could think to get the main characters together was time travel.  And I’ve never been satisfied with time travel books because, well – as you saw from the physics that Alessa researches in the book – time travel just doesn’t make scientific sense.  And as a reader, I’m willing to suspend belief for the sake of enjoying a good book, but it’s just not where I wanted to go with the very first book I wrote – I wanted the idea to be something I was really excited about.  So I started thinking of other ways I could resolve this issue of Alessa and Isaac not being in the same time, and that’s when the idea for the twist occurred to me.  I knew it was the right one because I was SUPER excited about it!

You touched on the romance between Alessa and Isaac in Stitch, will we see more of how their relationship developed in the future?

S: Absolutely!  It was difficult to get too much romance in the first one because for the first half of the book, the characters don’t even know who they really are.  And I love that it’s romantic in that they still feel this deep bond for each other even though they don’t recognize each other, but since they don’t actually physically reunite until the climax, there’s wasn’t really much time for things to get steamy.  I tried to bring in more romance through the flashbacks, but it’s still only a glimpse of where these characters have been together.  But the good news is that Isaac and Alessa are together for much of the next book, and there’s a lot of explaining to do about the history of their world (and of course, their part in that history), so there will plenty of opportunity for romance to come!

How much of yourself or from personal experience have you put into the characters?

S: I would say that much of these characters are based on my personal experiences (and those of people I know well).  Since Stitch is my first book, I just figured that it’d be easier to think about how I would react in a certain situation instead of trying to guess what someone else might do, and I wanted my characters to be realistic and nuanced, so I thought, what better way to achieve that than to base them on real people?  Fortunately, though, neither I nor any of my loved ones has been through anything nearly as traumatic as what the characters in Stitch go through, so a lot of the emotional torment is based on stuff I’ve read about real tragedy survivors, that sort of thing.

Will we expect more action in the next books? I’m a bit of an action girl, and it appears to me we will see more of it, will we?

S: Oh yes!  Now that the characters know what they have to do, expect a LOT more action than in the first book.  It’s a big, dangerous world that Alessa and Isaac are trying to navigate on their own, and things aren’t exactly tranquil for the other characters back on the compound, either.  The second book will also allow you to get to know the antagonists a lot better, and they have some seriously nasty surprises in store...

Ok, so here are some fun questions...

Do you have any favourite authors that you read today?

S: I have a lot of favorite authors!  The most recent ones I’ve added to my list are Veronica Roth and Lauren Oliver – amazing!

If you could travel in a time machine into a book, what book would it be and why?

S: Oh wow, this is a tough one – there are so many places I’d love to go.  Probably any elven land: Lothlórien in Lord of the Rings, Ellesméra from Eragon, etc.  They always seem to be so peaceful and calm and whimsical, just beautiful places full of magic.  It’s like a spa on steroids.

Do you have a favourite book boyfriend?

S: You can never go wrong with a classic – it’s gotta be Darcy from Pride and Prejudice.

If you could travel anywhere in the world with a book, where would you go and what book would you take??

S: I would stay right in my house curled up with an immersive sci-fi/fantasy series a la Harry Potter or Hunger Games and go wherever the book takes me.  :-)

You are now at the end of the Stitch Book Tour. How do you feel now it’s all done?

S: The tour has been AMAZING.  I can’t even express how exciting it’s been to share Stitch with so many people and hear all the reader reactions and get to meet so many awesome bloggers.  So I’m sad for it to end, but I guess at the same time also a little relieved (it’s been A LOT of work and a very busy time for me between the tour, getting married, and buying/renovating my first home!).  So I’m super happy to have had such a fun and successful tour, but I’m really looking forward to settling in and finally having the time to start on book 2!

Thank you so much on allowing me to participate in the tour and for chatting with me today!

S: Thanks so much for hosting the final day of the Stitch Blog Tour today, Naomi!  It’s been my pleasure.  :-)

Author Bio

Samantha Durante lives in New York City with her fiancé, Sudeep, and her cat, Gio. Formerly an engineer at Microsoft, Samantha left the world of software in 2010 to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams and a lifelong love of writing. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology, Samantha is currently working full time for her company Medley Media Associates as a freelance business writer and communications consultant. Stitch is her first novel. Learn more about Samantha at www.samanthadurante.com.

Social Media Links

Facebook:
Stitch - http://www.facebook.com/stitchtrilogy
Author Samantha Durante - http://www.facebook.com/authorsamanthadurante

Goodreads:
Stitch - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15779886-stitch
Author Samantha Durante - http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6453465.Samantha_Durante

LibraryThing:
Stitch - http://www.librarything.com/work/12870151/book/88297636
Author Samantha Durante - http://www.librarything.com/author/durantesamantha

Shelfari:
Stitch – http://www.shelfari.com/books/30363286/Stitch-(Stitch-Trilogy-Book-1)
Author Samantha Durante - http://www.shelfari.com/authors/a1002689147/Samantha-Durante/

Giveaway

There are 3 eBooks up for grabs in the giveaway!! Just fill out the Rafflecopter below. Goodluck!!

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