I am super excited to be part of the blog tour for this new release Good Faith by Liz Crowe. This is the final installment in the Stewart Realty series. This book finished the series by telling the story of the kids of the main characters in the original books. I can’t wait to read this book as it sounds amazing!
The Blurb:
Strong personalities—volatile marriages—stressful careers—conflicting goals—difficult children.
Contemporary challenges facing close-knit families form the crucible that forges a new generation.
Brandis, Gabriel, Blair and Lillian emerge from the entanglement of their parents’ longstanding emotional connections, but one’s star will burn brighter – and hotter – than the others.
With a personality that consumes everyone and everything in its path, Brandis Gordon struggles to maintain control as he ricochets between wild success and miserable failure. His life proves how even the strongest relationships can be strangled by the ties that bind.
Brandis and Gabe Frietag are as close as any brothers, bound by both loyalty and fierce rivalry. The strength of their ultimate alliance is tested time and again by Brandis’ choices.
Companions from birth, Blair Frietag and Lillian Robinson share loner tendencies, but come to rely on each other through adolescence. As they mature, both are forced to confront their feelings for the men they knew as boys.
Somewhere between the tangle of good memories and bad, independence and addiction, optimism and despair, the intertwined destinies of the new generation finally collide, leaving some stronger, others broken, but none unscathed.
As a chronicle of three families navigating the minefields of teen years into the turbulence of young adulthood, Good Faith holds up a literary mirror to contemporary life with joys and temptations unflinchingly reflected. Its fresh, real-life voice portrays the sheer volatility of human nature, complete with the hopes, dreams, and unexpected setbacks of marriage, parenthood and “coming of age.”
Genre: Mainstream New Adult
Series: Standalone conclusion to the 8 part Stewart Realty series
Author: Liz Crowe
Add on Goodreads: Good Faith
Buy on Amazon US: Good Faith
Buy on Amazon UK: Good Faith
Buy at Barnes & Noble: Good Faith
Synopsis:
Three families—Gordon, Frietag, and Robinson—share complex connections previously established in the best-selling Stewart Realty series. This stand-alone, final novel explores the characters coping with mature marriages and challenging, adolescent children. Through shared experiences, their inherent strengths and fragilities as individuals and as couples are revealed forming the basis of relationships for the next generation.
Brandis Robert Gordon emerges as the golden boy from the crowd of children that have grown up together, the apple of his family’s eye, the kid the other kids follow — even when he heads over a cliff. He is being raised by fiercely focused parents who are determined to succeed at everything they do, even if it means unconscious neglect of their children’s emotional needs. Brandis’ star shines bright, blinding family and friends to his inner weaknesses until it’s too late.
Good Faith is, at its core, the story of this young man’s all-consuming struggles with success and failure. It is also a saga of his personal odyssey—his ultimate quest for normalcy, when everything around him seems destined to thwart that goal.
The intertwining relationships amongst Brandis, his best friend Gabe Frietag, Gabe’s younger sister, Blair, and her friend, Lillian Robinson, bracketed by the equally compelling lives of their parents and siblings, form the framework of this complex novel.
By the time Brandis fully grasps what Blair, the girl he’s known his whole life, means to him, he has embarked on a life journey plagued by multiple addictions. Recruited to play Division I football as a freshman starting quarterback, after years of dedicated effort towards that very goal, he attempts to focus and be the man his parents and girlfriend expect him to be. But his personal demons already have a firm grip on him, and his downward spiral threatens to drag everyone he loves into the vortex with him.
Blair Frietag has never considered herself strong or independent—she’s just “Gabe’s nerdy sister” and “Lillian Grace’s best friend.” But she is harboring a life-long obsession with Brandis Gordon. When he finally comes to her, she welcomes everything about him—the good and the bad—nearly destroying herself in the process. Because Brandis’ love is conditional and anchored in dependence, she must accept or reject her role as enabler. By the time she acknowledges the fact that her desire to help him overpowers her inability to do so, it’s nearly too late.
After being told that the man he considers his father is actually not, Gabriel Frietag’s final years of high school devolve into angry confusion. The fact that he has started to question his sexuality only compounds his misery and frustration. The love/hate relationship with Brandis, which began while the boys were small, is sorely tested by Brandis’ increasingly bad choices and is finally severed, thanks to what Gabe considers Brandis’ unhealthy dependence on Blair. In an uncharacteristic move, Gabe rejects everything he knows and loves, and accepts a scholarship to play soccer for a college on the West Coast, hoping he can break from the painful confines of his childhood home. But his connection to Lillian Grace Robinson, another instrument in their life-long quartet of friendship, remains seemingly unbreakable.
Lillian is Blair’s companion from birth. A shy girl at first, “Lilly-G” seems destined to live forever in Blair’s shadow. But as she observes her friend’s descent into emotional turmoil with Brandis, Lillian comes to terms with her powerful feelings for Gabe. This realization of her own inner strength molds her into the touchstone everyone reaches for: their anchor in the storm, the friend they are all lucky to have, while remaining the one who will forever hold Gabe’s heart in her hands — no matter how far he goes seeking escape.
The Gordon, Frietag and Robinson ties are born of circumstance, necessity and emotion. Yet the choices of the second generation seem destined to destroy all they have built together. When the shocking loss of one of their strongest members comes at the precise moment when healing seems within reach, it threatens their tenuously rebuilt bonds. The tragedy forces everyone to open their eyes to the fickleness of fate and to rely on each other once more.
Good Faith holds up a literary mirror to contemporary life with all its temptations, joys, and sorrows. The plot’s twists and turns are designed to reflect the volatility of human nature, with all its hopes, dreams, and unexpected setbacks.
More than just another coming-of-age tale, this compelling new novel from best-selling author Liz Crowe is told with sympathy, humor and a real-life voice that will not easily be forgotten.
Exclusive Post for Bec’s Book blog
By Liz Crowe
Topic: A mix of genres, what exactly is YA/NA/AA?
Lots of letters are floating around out in publishing land lately. Everyone seems to want to slap a label or a category on fiction. This has been in place a while of course. We all know what we are getting into when we choose a “genre” to read. The westerns, mysteries, sci fi/fantasy, romance, horror novel specifications are clearcut.
The “Young Adult” novel is an over arching categorization that includes many genres within its realm. My understanding of it is that it is written FOR young adults to read, in that it’s age rated (no explicit sex or other random inappropriateness). But it is also, typically ABOUT young adults. Case in point: Harry Potter novels. These are “Young Adult Fantasy” clearly. But if JK Rowling had wanted to, she could have had those teenagers acting up and out in ways that actual teenagers do, snogging in the magic closets and jumping each others’ bones in Diagon Alley and what not and then, apparently, these novels would have morphed into “New Adult” books.
The “New Adult” designation is a recent invention of a couple of publishing houses who had a bunch of books that felt like romance novels, complete with angst, but that featured younger people (as in old high schoolers or young college aged kids). They were definitely NOT “Young Adult” (way too much adult goings-on going on), they were not necessarily traditional erotic romance in that the main characters were not (yet) full on grown ups. So, the category of New Adult is born, and is now positively flooded with entries, gate-keeping info blogs and loud advocates who get pretty angry if you suggest that it’s less “new” and more “adult” than anything else. Case in point: There is a little set of books called 50 Shades of Grey that have been called, “New Adult Romance” due to the age of the female protagonist. You make that call.
According to the definitions I’ve read, absorbed and accepted I have already written two or three (or more) “New Adult” novels. Mutual Release, the 7th novel of my best selling Stewart Realty series, which was written as a stand alone for anyone not into series fiction, or as an intro to the series, tells two stories that easily reflect the New Adult Catch Phrase: Coming of Age. I tell how two young people, Evan and Julie, overcome obstacles in their teen years to emerge on the upside of thirty before they meet. If there were a New Adult BDSM sub genre, Mutual Release would definitely be in there.
Also, House Rules, the (free) backstory novella of the series gives the Jack Gordon story from teen to adult. And that guy does a lot of growing, emotionally speaking from the time you meet him standing in his kitchen worried about losing his virginity and being late to basketball practice to the end, when he’s in his mid thirties, still single, and on the cusp of meeting Sara Thornton, the woman who will change his life.
So moving from that into this, the final novel of this series, and telling the “kids’ stories” felt like a very natural move and one I made without a single thought to “NA,” or any other category.
What I have done with Good Faith is move a few steps further away from the “romance” genre that many of my books are categorized as. I never set out to write any sort of genre fiction. I like to tell stories about human relationships, the good, the bad, the sexy and the not-so-sexy. As a result, many of my early novels are labeled as romance and I assure you I have taken my fair share of holy hell from hard core romance readers angry with me, my characters, my story arcs and my general existence.
What I would suggest as you dive into this book, either as your last or your first experience with the Stewart Realty set of characters, is that you leave expectations aside and experience with me the growth of families, marriages and teenagers along a trajectory of success and failure. You’ll laugh and cry with these folks. Some you’ll want to sit down and have a beer with others you might want to push in front of a moving bus. But I assure you, by the end, you will care about them deeply.
Tourwide Giveaway
GRAND PRIZE: Nook Simple Touch loaded with the Stewart Realty series and the first 3 Black Jack Gentlemen books.
FIRST PRIZE: Signed set of Stewart Realty series (including Good Faith)
SECOND PRIZE: A Stewart Realty Zazzle swag pack PLUS a Wolverine State Brewing Co. t-shirt and pint glass
THIRD PRIZE: Signed set of the first three Black Jack Gentlemen books.
4 comments
THANK YOU for hosting me today!
You’re welcome & I’m super excited to be a host! Thanks so much for the guest post! 🙂
-Bec
I’ve read the book and it really does focus on the children of the original Stewart Realty Series. It shows the angst and love that people of all ages goes through. 🙂
Thanks Melissa! Yeah, it’s getting a lot of great reviews. I think it’s fun to see the next generation as well.