Spotlight & Giveaway: Six More Months of June by Daisy Garrison

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Daisy Garrison to HJ!

Hi Daisy and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Six More Months of June!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Six More Months of June follows Caplan and Mina, who have been best friends since elementary school and are as close as they are different. Mina has spent most of her life trying to be invisible and finding more solace in books than people. Caplan has always been the golden boy and is now laughing off prom-king predictions and the fear that he’s peaking too soon. In the whirlwind of the final weeks of high school, the rules of their social world and the lines between love and friendship begin to blur, and everything changes. For me, this is a story about who we let into our hearts enough to change them, and why.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

Quinn:
“Shit happens. I kissed Ruby at the Halloween dance in sixth grade. I missed her mouth…too much gas on the landing. But the point is I tried.”

Hollis:
“We are hot girls, not mean girls.”

Caplan:
“Let’s just do whatever we want forever.”

Mina:
“Maybe I talked in my sleep. Maybe he read my journal. Maybe you always tell one person, in tiny ways, every day, without realizing. And that’s how you come back to life. As long as they’re the right person. As long as they’re listening.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• Talking Points: Working title of the book / Inspiration / Song list / Influences / research, food cravings. Anything else you would like to share
• This book suffered through many terrible titles (I’ll spare you), and then for a while the word doc was just called June, since the feeling of the month, particularly when you’re in high school, was what I most wanted to capture. It’s a weird rare moment we all experience, because it’s both a climax and a transition. In other words, it hits the peak right as it ends. I kept coming back to a poem by Hannah Lachow, my best friend from college, called Six More Months of June. She shared it with me because we were the two most homesick freshmen in our dorm, and she captured the joy and the pain of opening your heart just in time to say goodbye better than I ever could. I asked her if I could name the book after her poem, and lucky for me, she said yes.
• A major source of inspo/background music I listened to while writing this book were the teenage love triangle songs from Taylor Swift’s pandemic albums– Betty, James, and August.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Caplan and Mina meet when they’re so little, and they don’t immediately get along, so this question stumped me at first. Ultimately, I think the things Caplan first fears and rejects in Mina (her mind, the intensity of her and her life) are the things that eventually pull him in. He ends up telling her that he’s just trying to keep up with her and has wanted to deserve her since 4th grade. I think she changes how he sees the world, and that’s a difficult thing to let go of.

For Mina, she characteristically names it pretty early on; if she runs blue, Caplan runs gold, and the sun is bright and warm. Caplan brings her to life, which is another hard thing to shake. This is what locks them into such a close friendship, and then that friendship (all the time and trust and history) starts to burst its boundaries in the last-chance light of senior spring.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

I thought a lot about how to write sex scenes for high schoolers that felt real and fun without being too intense. In the end, I decided to keep them as true to life as possible, and that meant they needed to be very awkward, and hopefully funny.

I pause in my driveway, waiting for them to see me as they get out so I can wave. I think maybe I’ll ask Quinn if he wants to smoke, but they walk to her front door without noticing me. Mina has her arms locked behind her back, gripping both her elbows. Suddenly I feel weird as fuck just standing there watching them, but I also don’t want them to hear me opening my door, so I sort of turn and shuffle and blink and then they are making out. Like really making out, hanging on to each other and swaying on the spot. I panic and duck down behind the trash cans at the end of the driveway. I squat there like a freak, hanging on to my knees and breathing like I’ve just run six miles. Like someone’s dropped something really heavy on my head. Like the whole sky. I look up at it. It feels like the street is swinging up to meet the stars. I think vaguely of how bad it would be to be caught in this position, crouching behind the trash. I decide it makes the most sense to crawl up my driveway on my hands and knees so they won’t see me but as soon as I start doing that I feel very fucking silly, so I force myself to be normal. Feel normal, act normal, just stand up and whistle at them or something, but when I do stand, I see that Quinn has his hands on her ass. The white skirt is up around her waist. She’s wearing plain white underwear.
I make myself turn around and walk up my driveway. I keep myself from running or slamming the door. In the event of an emergency proceed calmly toward the exits, and all that. My mom tries to talk to me as I pass her on the stairs but something is wrong with my ears so I just go to my room and lie the wrong way on the bed and stare at the ceiling.
Hollis once said to me that boys are so stupid about their own feelings, they don’t realize they have a problem until it’s a tumor. I decide, around four in the morning, that I will not let that happen to me. I will not be stupid. I will not be in denial. I will get ahead of this.
I am attracted to Mina. That is fine. This day was, I guess, always going to come. People are friends with people they’re attracted to. It happens every day. People are friends with hot people without it ruining their lives. I am probably only feeling this way because she is now attracted to someone else, my good friend, and that is human nature. This is very natural, no big deal, and I am on top of it.

The next day at school I walk out of first period and she’s standing with Quinn at the water fountain. When she bends over to take a drink, he puts his hands on her waist and bangs her hips into his. She laughs so hard she does a spit take. While I’m looking at them I walk directly into an open classroom door and smack my head so hard I see stars.
It occurs to me that I might already have a tumor.

I also wanted to make sure that even if the novel initially pits Mina and Hollis against each other, they’d ultimately get to break through that. Those scenes, in the end, made me more teary than any of the romantic ones.

“I just thought, the way you cried at my birthday, it just had a certain look to it. That I recognized. That kind of crying, the way you were holding your knees. And then tonight, you said that thing about, about something you thought Caplan told Quinn. Maybe that’s fucked up of me, I shouldn’t have—I shouldn’t have assumed.”
“No, that’s okay,” I say, “I was, I guess. Assaulted. Too. Do—do I know who—”
“No,” Hollis says, yawning, leaning her forehead against my shoulder, “it was two summers ago, at camp. He was a CIT. I had the biggest crush on him when I was younger. What a waste of a super hot person.”
I snort. “God, I’m sorry—”
“No, please laugh,” she says, “it makes me feel fucking invincible to laugh at it.”
“I think you are invincible, honestly,” I say. “I always have.”
“Did you take Plan B? That was the worst part for me. Like, facing the camp nurse. She didn’t even have it on hand, which I think is totally delusional at a co-ed camp.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t need to.”
“So, even monsters use condoms?”
“No,” I say, “no, I mean. Well, I hadn’t gotten my period yet. So.”
Hollis says nothing. She searches with her hand under the covers until she finds mine. She squeezes it, then lets it go. Then she says, “Have you thought about it yet? About New York?”
“No. I mean, that was sort of, sort of a big thing you just brought up.”
“Well. I’m moving in for the summer with other NYU girls. They said they have two rooms. The other one might still be open.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t freak out. Just consider it.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Goodnight, Mina.”
“Goodnight, Hollis.”
“Mina?”
“Mm?”
“I think you’re invincible, too. I wouldn’t want you to come, if I didn’t.”

Readers should read this book….

If they’re still waiting on their first love, or if they’ve forgotten how it felt.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m currently working on another novel about teenagers set on a very different stage 😉 but I know I have another book about the Two Docks kids in me. My dream is to write a novel all about Hollis, when she’s a bit older, maybe mid twenties. She’s one of my favorite characters, and I don’t feel quite done with her yet.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 1 finished copy of SIX MORE MONTHS OF JUNE

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: My best friends and I love to define a crush—where is that line? As Caplan says, people are friends with hot people without it ruining their lives all the time. It’s one thing to think someone is wonderful, good-looking, brilliant, funny, mysterious, you name it. It’s another thing for them to take up residence in your heart. My line has always been when a person feels stuck in my head, or when I think about them when they’re not in front of me. Where’s that line for you? How do you know when you have a crush?
Another question for fun: What song feels like having a crush, to you? Mine is Saturdays, by Twin Shadow (Feat. Haim). I stole this answer from my genius friend Harley, but what’s right is right.

 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
 

Book Info:

A romantic debut about the exhilarating highs and messy lows that swirl together when high school comes to an end, perfect for fans of Carley Fortune and Jenny Han

Golden boy Caplan and bookish Mina have been unlikely soulmates since third grade. Bound by growing up in single-mother households on the same cul-de-sac in Two Docks, Michigan, their friendship exists miraculously outside their high school’s social order. Mina is class valedictorian, expected by her late father’s parents to attend his Ivy alma mater; Caplan is laughing off prom-king predictions and the fear that he’s peaking too soon.

When Cap’s skateboard-toting, detention-dodging best friend confesses his feelings for Mina, she is whisked into a social life she never imagined, bumping shoulders with the likes of Caplan’s queen-bee girlfriend. Caplan is determined that things stay just as they’ve always been, while Mina faces the perils and privileges of opening her heart just in time to say goodbye.

As the sun sets on senior year, everything glows. What will Cap and Mina discover in the last-chance light?
Book Links: Amazon | B&N |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Daisy Garrison graduated from Northwestern University and lives in Brooklyn with her friends. This is her first novel.
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