Blog Tour! The Ticket (+$10 Amazon GC Giveaway!)

Title: The Ticket

Author: Debra Coleman Jeter

Series: N/A

Pages: 210

Date Published: 2015

Publisher: Firefly Southern Fiction

Format: Kindle

Genre: YA Suspense

Source: Goddess Fish Blog Tours
Buy Me!

Synopsis:
It is 1975, an ordinary year for an ordinary Southern family. TRAY DUNAWAY, like thousands of other teenagers around the country, longs to be part of the popular set at school. Tray’s mother, EVELYN, lies in bed most days with a headache, and her bipolar tendency toward extreme highs or desperate lows veers more and more often toward depression. Tray’s grandmother GINNY, who lives with the family, still grieves the loss of her husband, Brook. She believes it’s time for her to move out, if she could afford to, and find a place of her own, maybe even a new romance. This doesn’t look likely, given the state of the family’s finances.

Then something extraordinary happens. A down-and-out friend of the family, PEE WEE JOHNSON, buys an extra lottery ticket. He gives it to Tray’s dad as a thank-you for driving Pee Wee to Hazard, Illinois, where he purchased the tickets. And what do you know?

When Johnson demands his cut, Tray’s dad refuses. As Evelyn’s illness spirals toward madness, Johnson turns threatening, and Tray makes some poor decisions, what initially seems like a stroke of good fortune suddenly triggers a disturbing chain of events.

~Try an Excerpt!~

My name is Tray, and I live in Paradise, Kentucky.

They say Kentucky is known for its fast horses and beautiful women. The joke is maybe it should be beautiful horses and fast women. Neither applies to the women in my family, except maybe Mama. She’s definitely beautiful, but she isn’t fast. At least not normally, though she can be when she’s in one of her manic states. But those aren’t beautiful. In fact, they are downright ugly.

“How’d this town ever come to have a name like Paradise?” I used to ask Gram when I was little. Enough times I got to know her version of the story pretty much by heart. It goes like this:

“It started at a crossroads where there was a little store owned by a man name of Sullivan, and folks just called it Sullivan’s Stop. Some folks got there by foot, others by stage coach, and a lot by horse and buggy. It was on the turnpike between Paducah, Kentucky, and Nashville, Tennessee.

“One day, a rascal of a fellow came to Sullivan’s Stop and began challenging the men unlucky enough to be there that day with a pair of dice. Pretty soon he owned Sullivan’s store, and he discovered the men around there were such easy marks for his pair of dice, he started expanding. Before long, there was a blacksmith shop and a tavern, even a hotel. A bustling community, folks called it Pair o’ Dice.

“Then one day a traveling preacher came to town. He preached hellfire and brimstone, and showed the local folks the error of their ways: the sin of gambling. So when the church was built, they changed the spelling to Paradise.”

Even though I knew the answer to my next question, I’d ask it anyway. “Did you know those men yourself, Gram?”

She would laugh her deep-throated chuckle and her blue eyes would crinkle with amusement. “I may be old, child, but I haven’t lived forever.”

She changed up the words in the story a little from one telling to the next, but you get the gist. Now I don’t know if there’s any truth in the tale or not. But for a time the year I was fourteen, I thought the name might suit us after all. I’d never had much in the way of luck, and I was tired of being too tall, too bony, too uncoordinated. Then something unimaginable happened, and it looked like all our lives were set to change for the better.

~Meet Debra!~ 

The Ticket is Debra Coleman Jeter’s first novel. It was a finalist for a Selah Award in two categories: Young Adult Fiction and First Novel. A Vanderbilt University professor, Debra Coleman Jeter has published fiction and nonfiction in popular magazines, including Working Woman, New Woman, Self, Home Life, Savvy, Christian Woman, and American Baby. Her story, “Recovery,” won first prize in a Christian Woman short story competition, and her nonfiction book “Pshaw, It’s Me Grandson”: Tales of a Young Actor was a finalist in the 2007 USA Book News Awards. She is a co-writer of the screenplay for Jess + Moss, a feature film which premiered in 2011 at the Sundance Film Festival, screened at nearly forty film festivals around the world, and captured several international awards. She lives in Clarksville, Tennessee, with her husband.

 Debra will be awarding a $10 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway