Please welcome author Gene Gant to Boy Meets Boy Reviews on the Borrowed Boy blog tour! Gene not only gives a reality check, the author also shares an exclusive from the new Harmony Ink Press release. Learn more below!
Take it away, Gene
I think of myself as a glass-half-full kind of guy. This is a fairly dark period, not just in the USA but around the world. We Americans have a president and a political party that is using racism, lies, insane conspiracy theories and fear as tools to hold on to power, creating an environment that promotes violence against critics and political opponents, encourages white supremacists, demonizes the press, and curtails the rights of non-whites and people on the LGBTQ spectrum. People fleeing poverty, persecution and criminal gangs in their own countries are being denied asylum and turned away in European countries and the USA because of their skin color or the religion they practice. The rich are growing obscenely richer, with the world’s wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, while poverty is on a sharp upswing. The steady streams of filth we pour into the air and oceans is creating an environment unsuitable for life as we’ve known it. Dark times indeed.
But even when things seem their darkest, there is always a ray of hope. The characters in my stories usually face bleak and/or dire circumstances and, as in real life, things don’t always turn out the way they want. But in those awful situations they find reasons for hope, joy, gratitude. The following except from Borrowed Boy is illustrative of this. Here the main character, Zavier Beckham, finds himself in the middle of a legal battle between his adoptive and birth parents. Frightened and frustrated, he’s trying to blow off steam by taking a walk through the neighborhood with his best friend, Cole. Their conversation forces Zavier to take another look at himself.
Thanks for reading!
Blurb:
Thirteen-year-old Zavier Beckham is an average teen living in Memphis. He has great parents and a quirky best friend named Cole. He’s happy, and he thinks his life is totally normal… until an FBI agent shows up and informs Zavier he was stolen as an infant and sold to an adoption agency.
Now his biological parents want him back.
Forced to confront his distant past, Zavier faces an uncertain future. He may be taken from the only home he’s known by parents who are strangers living in Chicago. He may have to deal with a brother who hates and torments him. He meets Brendan, an older boy who offers him friendship and wakens a strong, unsettling attraction in Zavier. Brendan has secrets of his own, and he’ll either be the one ray of light in Zavier’s tense situation or the last straw that breaks Zavier under the pressure.
Buy Links:
https://www.harmonyinkpress.com/books/borrowed-boy-by-gene-gant-567-b
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GNDYH93/ref=x_gr_w_bb?ie=UTF8&tag=x_gr_w_bb-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B07GNDYH93&SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2
Exclusive Excerpt
Fear had been hanging over my head for more than two weeks, a cloud that suddenly began to pour rain. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, ducking my head and hunching my shoulders as if to ward off a blow.
Cole trailed behind me as we went. He was a background sort of guy around his parents and when we hung out with a group of friends, so quiet at times that you’d almost forget he was there. But he wasn’t usually like that when it was just the two of us, and it was odd that he was hanging back now. I looked over my shoulder at him. “Hey. You okay?”
“Yeah,” he sighed.
“No, something’s bugging you. I know it.”
His forehead was glistening with sweat. He swiped a hand over his face. “I always thought of you as lucky.”
“Cole, I’m feeling anything but lucky now.”
“I get that, but still, I’m kinda jealous of you—”
I spun on him. “Jealous? That’s dumb, Cole. Stupid. You saying you want your life to be as big a mess as mine? Nobody wants what I got. Nobody wants to feel the way I do. I hate when you say crazy stuff.” Two seconds after I finished talking, I felt like kicking myself. Cole just stood there, blinking patiently at me. “Sorry,” I added. “I shouldn’t have said that to you.”
He shrugged. “It’s okay. You blow up when you’re mad and you’re scared. I can take it. Let’s keep walking. We’ll dry up like raisins if we stand still in this sun.” He started walking again, and I fell in step beside him. “What I meant, Zay, is that I’m jealous of what you have with your parents. Even finding out about the whole adoption thing didn’t change that. Being adopted means your mom and dad really wanted you. And now you’ve got two sets of parents fighting over who wants you most. That’s better than just being an accident, like me.”
“An accident?”
“A few months ago, I found a baby scrapbook my mom and dad made for Lolo. It has everything in it, from the first little announcement they sent out after Mom’s doctor told her she was pregnant to a chunk of the blanket Lolo was wrapped in when they brought her home from the hospital. Just looking at that scrapbook, you can tell how excited they were to have her. And that got me wondering, where was my baby scrapbook. My mom and dad never gave me a straight answer, so I asked Lolo.”
“And what did she tell you?”
“That Mom and Dad weren’t planning to have any more children after they had her. One kid was all they ever wanted. I was a surprise four years after Lolo. An accident that wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Cole, you know how Lolo is. She probably made that up to prank you.”
“She didn’t make it up. She read it in a bunch of old emails she found on the computer, sent between Mom and our grandma. She showed them to me, and I read them myself. And it makes sense, because being an accident is exactly the way my mom and dad treat me most of the time. Lolo gets all of their attention, and I’m just an afterthought. Lolo got a baby scrapbook. I got squat. Lolo got a paintball party when she turned twelve. You know what I got when I turned twelve? Squat. Lolo got a car for Christmas last year. And I got… say it with me now… squat!”
“You got that new PlayStation last Christmas.”
“Uh-huh. Like a PlayStation is on the same level as a car.”
“You can’t even drive. And none of this means your parents don’t care. They wouldn’t feed you and keep you in the house if they didn’t want you. Remember when we both decided we wanted dreads? Your mom let you grow them. I begged like crazy, but my mom wouldn’t even think about it.”
“Because she believes dreads will make you look wild. Your mom doesn’t want you looking wild. My mom doesn’t give a fig what I look like.”
“Come on, Cole. You know your parents love you.”
“But I was just something that happened to them. I wasn’t a choice, like you were to your parents. I’m just saying… you don’t have to be so mad. You’ve got a lot of good things in your life, including a wicked smart and very good-looking best friend who doesn’t want you moving off to Chicago.”
Author bio:
Gene Gant grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. After living for a time in Missouri and Illinois, he now makes his home on a quiet country lane outside Memphis.
See our 4.5 ❤ Review of Borrowed Boy HERE.
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