Blurb:
Abandoned
by Hotness.
Held
hostage by the Yellowstone eruption, I’m stuck at home instead of loving life
at college.
Sanity
is restored when my college roommate arrives, but I’m still trapped in my
hometown with a bunch of people just trying to survive. Some of them are
surprisingly interesting, like the HAM radio opera singer lady. Or the pop star
who crushes on me while waiting for an air filter for his tour bus.
Unfortunately
there’s also my roommate’s gangster little brother who pushes Grandma to her
conservative edge, and the local entrepreneurs determined to capitalize on hard
times. They tick me off.
Despite
all this I’m determined to find a path to the fabled land of Adulthood even if
my heart is broken and all the roads are ash covered.
And
where the heck did that Nebraskan cattle rancher go, anyway?
Review by Rochelle Weber:
Violet
Perch is bereft with the loss of Boone Ramer, aka Hotness, when her college
roommate, Mia Carbone straggles up in the drive with her kid brother, Tony. Mia
and her grandmother hoped that by getting Tony out of Camden, New Jersey, they
could get him away from the punks and hoodlums with whom he was running, but I
could have told them from sad experience that a geographic change is not a
cure. Tony refuses to help around the house and soon finds his own kind of “friends”
to hang with in town. Mia tries to control him, but the damage was done long
before she came home from college.
One
would think Violet would perk up when a rock star asks her to accompany him
back to Miami where the sun still shines, fruit still grows, and people still
laze on a beach that is not yet ash-covered, but she just can’t quite accept.
His kisses don’t quite make her spine tingle. He’s hot, but he’s not Hotness.
Not that she’s heard from “The Nebraskan” since he left or even ever expects
to.
Meanwhile,
she survives. She helps her family survive. She puts one foot in front of the
other, delivering the rural mail via bicycle, shooting and skinning squirrels and rabbits, trying to learn to shoot
deer, trying to help her family fend off entrepreneurs who want to turn the
family’s free spring water into a business, even if it means evicting them from
land they’ve lived on for almost two centuries, showing a heck of a lot more
courage and guts than I fear I’d have in similar circumstances.
Even
though Rhyolite Drifts picks up exactly where Eruption left off, each book stands well on its own. Again,
I had real problems putting the book down, and the only reason it took a couple
of days to read it is that I was trying to finish the Marketing for Romance
Writers Newsletter, and get caught up with some editing before helping a friend
move downstate from the Chicago area. As it was, I read until 4 a.m. one night when
I had an 8 a.m. appointment that morning.
The
Yellowblown™ books tend to stay with me. Ms. Hughey knows whereof she speaks,
as the Yellowstone caldera is a good ten thousand years overdue to blow. I was
telling a friend about these books. He said while he was up there last year
part of the park was closed, because the ground was so hot the asphalt was
melting on the roads. Furthermore, Ms. Hughey is a literate writer. Her dialog
could be a smidge looser, but I do love an author who learned grammar and
spelling somewhere along the way and uses it in her writing. Brava, Ms. Hughey.
I can’t wait for Coldera, but I suspect I shall be
bereft knowing the series is finished.
Length:
321 Pages
Digital Price: $0.99
