Guest Post featuring Liza O’Connor’s Saving Casey (Requires Rescue #1) w/a book review! @liza0connor

How to get a really bad reputation…without trying.

When I was growing up, mothers frequently thought me a terrible child and banned me from speaking to their kids. What was really weird is I wasn’t a bad kid. I was just imaginative and liked to make up stories. In other words, I was a budding author.

One of my characters was inspired by a plastic one-inch tall French poodle named Pierre. Pierre was a bit wild. I would write stories about his late night parties and his misbehaviors. Can you picture it? A drug crazed, drunken, French poodle running amuck in a in the backwoods of Arkansas. I loved writing stories about him.

Unfortunately, one of my friend’s mom got hold of one of my stories, concluded it was factual, and within a single day, I lost all 21 friends I had worked so hard to acquire. (You’ve no idea how hard it is to make friends in a small town that hates newcomers.) Having lost all my friends, I asked to go back to my former school.

It was like coming home and I flourished there. I didn’t need Pierre anymore. I joined Drama and we did five plays a year, I was in the band and even drum major my senior year, in five choirs, aced all my classes except for typing and graduated 2^nd in my class. And I had a regular afternoon to night job so I could go to college someday.

I didn’t realizing my mother was telling everyone in town that I was wild, probably pregnant, and failing all my classes. Why would a mother do this? Turns out that not all moms are good moms. In fact, some are highly defective, and sadly I got one of those. (So does Casey).

To be fair, my mother was wild as a kid, and evidently assumed I would follow in her footsteps. In truth, I used her as the model of what I did not wish to become. (Chain smoking, alcoholic, with a never-ending assortment of fellows in the house.) Since my mother proved incompetent and put my life at risk when I was a child, I took the task of raising me upon myself, having concluded no one else was up to the job. (My parents were divorced, so I only saw my dad 4 days a month. I loved him dearly, but rarely saw him.)

When my #2 ranking came out in the local paper, my mother was furious, claiming I had embarrassed her among all her friends. I refused to take the blame for that. I had told her I had straight A’s. She just refused to be believe me since I wouldn’t produce a report card to prove it.

In Saving Casey, Cass has an alcoholic mom worse than mine. And the accusations laid at Casey’s feet are far worse than what I endured. Plus, while my school was filled with supportive people (and one pedophile coach) poor Cass had to attend a nightmare of the school (with the same lascivious coach).

Finally, while I just had one mother to endure, poor Cass has a great deal of people trying to tear her down. Old Casey hadn’t survived this toxic environment, and all alone, Cass won’t either. She needs help. Fortunately, her ‘rarely around’ dad has asked his head of security to protect her 24/7.

Oh yeah! That’s just the ticket!

Hunky Troy is no doubt why I never realized the similarities to my life before writing this.  I never got one of those.

I want a Troy!

 

 

Saving Casey

By

Liza O’Connor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book 1 of the Requires Rescue Series

Contemporary Suspense

 

BLURB

When 80-year-old Cass Goldman learns she has inoperable cancer, she decides to end her life, peacefully on her terms. So imagine her horror when she wakes to find herself in a hospital with rich people staring at her. It’s not until the doctor arrives to examine her that she realizes she’s no longer old. She’s in the body of a seventeen-year-old teen.

Unfortunately, her new body comes with some serious baggage. First of all, the kid has burned every bridge imaginable. Secondly, those ‘people’ in her room are her outrageously rich parents and while the Dad seems friendly, the mother wants nothing to do with her. The moment they take her home to a horrifically huge mansion, which she dubs Tara, she’s abandoned to the care of the butler.

While Cass is determined to turn this train wreck of a life around, doing so is far harder than she expected. In fact, without help, she’ll end up dead just like the last occupant of this body. Thankfully, her dad has his hunky head of security become her bodyguard. Between her eighty years of life lessons and hunky Troy’s help, she just might live long enough not to be jail bait.

 

EXCERPT

Their new transport was a two-seater Cessna, which meant one of them had to fly the damn thing. “I hope you know how to fly because my license is expired. I’d probably push the throttle all the way in instead of the carburetor heat when landing.”

Troy chuckled. “Good thing I’m flying.”

She followed him about the plane during his walkabout and then read the checklist aloud once they were inside.

“You didn’t check the magnetos separately,” she complained.

“We’re in a hurry here,” he grumbled.

“So stop wasting time.”

Softly cursing beneath his breath, he checked first the right and then the left magnetos. They both purred. “Can we go now?”

She returned the checklist to its place. “Seatbelt on, luggage safely stored.”

Losing patience with her, he powered up and taxied down the runway.

She smiled. It had been over forty years since she had flown a plane. “Any chance you’ll let me take off?”

“None whatsoever.” He pulled out the throttle and barreled down the runway, picking up speed, finally pulling back on the yoke, lifting the plane smoothly into the night sky.

“Almost as nice as mine,” she said and stared out the windows. “Plane at three o’clock,” she warned as she spotted blinking red and green lights.

“Where? Got it,” he replied. Once they were away from the airport, he smiled at her. “Want to hold the plane steady for me?”

She smiled and took hold of the yoke on her side. “What’s our course?”

“280.”

Either she’d forgotten the joy of flying, or teenage supersized sensations enhanced the experience. Her body sang with happiness.

This review is from the original story.  I was assured that nothing really had changed.  Pink (Harlie’s younger sister) wrote this one.  Forgive her if you don’t “get” the review but its her own.  

 

Review:

*wipes tears from my face*  I’m not really sure where to start.  When Harlie gave me this book to read, she said it should be required reading for every teenager on the planet.  She also said that about the movie “The Breakfast Club”.  That should be a the ONLY teenage movie that we should watch because the movie had a message.  I watched the movie and I spent too much time looking at Judd Nelson to even bother with the “message”.  *giggling*  I did go back and watch it again and my big sister was right.  I hate when she’s right.  I would never tell her that so mum’s the word.  *Judd Nelson is hot*  Sorry, I’ll get serious…sorta.  Harlie’s right about some things and most of the time I don’t listen to her until it’s almost too late.  This book is one of those “it’s almost too late” moments.  Let me try to explain…

I’m older than Casey and I didn’t go to prep school.  Public high school and no uniforms.  Thank goodness.  Ugh!  Nor were we Uber rich like her.  A butler, cook, maid and a driver?  Seriously?  Harlie hated driving me anywhere when we were growing up.  Jeez…now I’m driving my nephew everywhere because Harlie is just sooooo busy.  :/  Whatever…Back on task…  Some other differences are I would NEVER be Goth.  Seriously Cass?  Attention much?  No one is Goth anymore.  It’s too 5 minutes ago.  Now, the tats were interesting but Ouch on getting them removed.  I hate needles so I’ll never get a tat.  Too much pain involved.  The cover scared me enough not to read it.  When Harlie kept badgering me to read it, I watched the YouTube trailer.  Okay, that alone changed my mind about the book.  I’m too much like Harlie when it comes to covers.

Okay, okay here is my review…I cried when I started reading.  Yes, Cass’s story made me relive both of my sets of grandparents funerals.  I was very close to my grandparents and 2 out of 4 died from cancer.  I still have flashbacks from the funerals.  Now when she woke in Casey’s body, I was laughing.  The whole time she thought God was being cruel to her in the body of a Goth teenager with the WORST parents ever…she must have thought she was in hell, or worse.  I know I would have been.  As Cass began to learn about Casey, I was kinda glad that she didn’t want to know everything that she had done.  Only the really, really bad parts.  Talk about a really screwed teenager.  But you know what, I had faith that Cass would turn around Casey’s life.

This book is so much more about bullying by kids and their parents.  It’s also about having faith in yourself and believing in yourself.  Casey stopped believing after what had happened to her when she was 13.  She gave up.  She didn’t have a support system to help her out.  I think I had too much of a support system but I’m extremely grateful now that I did.  High school is a bitch and kids are cruel.  Parents are even weirder sometimes than kids these days.  It’s all about one upping little Suzie’s mom because little Suzie didn’t get the invite to a birthday party when she was four.  Think about the mom that hired a hit man to kill another cheerleader mom? wackos!

My sister was right.  This book should be required reading for any teenager out there.  Casey should have been heard and supported in her situation and it almost cost her everything that she had in the end.

The one thing about the romance in the story…I didn’t get the attraction at first with Troy.  I mean, really?  The age difference was gross but when I thought about it afterwards, it made sense.  It was Cass not Casey anymore.  This story was as much about Cass as it was about Casey.

 

SALES LINK

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liza O’Connor is a nut.

Not a real nut, but she is prone to being a smart ass at times, and not surprisingly her heroines say odd and inappropriate things in her book, as well. So even in a suspense novel you can expect to laugh along the way. That’s because Liza loves to see humor in the crazy world around her.

Saving Casey was actually the first book Liza published. Having recently reclaimed her rights to the book, she is happily re-publishing it as her 18^th book. And because her books sell better when in a series, she using Saving Casey to kick off a new series called Requires Rescue. It will be different from her other series where the same characters show up in each book. This series will be about strong women who are trying to go it alone, only when help is offered, they have the good sense to accept the helping hand, because, in all of our lives, there will come a time you need someone else to help you. Being strong doesn’t make us invincible. Book 1 is Casey/Cass’ story. Book 2 will be about an entirely different young woman who desperately needs help before she’s murdered on the streets of NYC. Book 3, well the plot is super unique, and more books will follow.

You’ll be able to read the series in any order you want, but in each case, you’ll have a strong young woman, a guy stepping up to help when no one else does, and danger galore with humor stuffed in anywhere I can.

I hope you’ll come along with me so you can laugh, love, and get revenge.

 

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT 

LIZA O’CONNOR

 

Liza’s Blog and Website   Facebook   Twitter