A Shifter U Tale
Long nights lead to intrigue… and infatuation.
Chronically ill with a mysterious condition, Yusuf “Joey” Franke escapes his smothering family and doctors by moving halfway across the country to enroll in Cody College. Not long after arriving on campus, some of his symptoms disappear, only to be replaced by debilitating insomnia. Joey spends his nights wandering the halls of his dormitory and hanging out with gregarious and affable Owen, who works the night shift.
When he suddenly shifts from a sick college kid to a massive Asiatic lion, Joey discovers another side to Cody College—it’s a haven for shifters like himself… and like Owen, a part-time great horned owl. And being a shifter is hereditary, which means his parents have some explaining to do.
When Joey and Owen investigate, they discover more than they bargained for—a family deception, a dangerous enemy with international connections, and a love that might be too new to survive the backlash.
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Cat gives this one 5 Meows with a 2 purr heat index...
Joey has been sick his entire life and is tired of his parents coddling him and his doctor running painful tests so he goes away to college. He begins having more pain and finding himself roaming the halls at night with insomnia. he meets the night worker Owen and they start playing chess and become fast friends. then Joey shifts and still has a hard time accepting his new life. finding out that his parents have to be keeping secrets to him, Owen and his friends help Joey try to find the truth. Little do they know the trouble they unlock.
This story is very interesting from the beginning. It has so many fantastic characters. It's well-written and page-turning and has several twists and turns. I want to read the first two and am hoping for several more!
If you like a New adult, college kids, unique shifters, twists and turns and a good romance this is for you!
Excerpt...
Excerpt...
A GHOST roamed the corridors of Matthison Hall every night.
Okay, maybe I wasn’t a ghost, but I sure as hell wasn’t living. Not in any real sense. I was a shell of a human, lacking vitality. Lacking personality. Lacking… everything. I’d honestly thought escaping the sterile, nearly clinical existence of my parents’ house—not to mention their well-intentioned but completely overwhelming smothering—would change me. Not make me healthy, not that. I’d long given up any hope for medical science to advance enough to diagnose my encyclopedic collection of symptoms, let alone cure me.
I’d hoped going to college—living on my own, doing something normal for once in my miserable life—would somehow actually make me normal. Here at Cody College I wouldn’t be surrounded, monitored, coddled. I wouldn’t be pricked, prodded, and tested on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis. There would be no more experimental treatments, no more carefully designed diet plans. I was twenty-one for crying out loud. It was time to live my life on my terms, even if those terms went against medical and parental advice.
By God, if I wanted to eat donuts and pizza at three in the morning, then that was exactly what I’d do.
That particular stride toward independence ended up being a disappointment. Turned out pizza gave me heartburn and donuts made me queasy.
Such was my life.
Instead of celebrating my junk food rebellion, 3:00 a.m. found me drifting through the halls for the tenth night in a row.
Freaking insomnia.
It was bad enough I couldn’t easily fall asleep, but the jittery restlessness that came with it made it impossible to even sit still. So instead of going stir-crazy, trapped in the painted cinder block walls of my dorm room, I prowled the residence hall with little faith I’d eventually tire and pass out.
The worst part was, other than the insomnia, I felt better than I had in years. Maybe it was the fresh mountain air, but the debilitating headaches I’d suffered from for as long as I could remember had become less frequent. My body temperature always ran a little high, but there’d been no dangerous fever spikes in the last two weeks. If it wasn’t for the twitchy restlessness and the onset of insomnia, I’d have thought I’d finally found an effective therapy.
I pushed into the main lobby, starting to count. It was exactly ninety-seven steps from the entrance of the south wing to the entrance of the north wing. I didn’t pay much attention to my surroundings, as I’d made this same trek through the building every night for almost two weeks. Either my physical exhaustion had caused my vision to blur, or a new and less-than-exciting symptom had joined the Medical Mystery Tour that was my life. Or it might have been complacency or obliviousness. Whatever it was, one moment I skirted the bank of student mailboxes on my left, the next I lay sprawling on my back staring up at the boring beige ceiling tiles.
The squeak of rubber on marble told me I wasn’t alone. “Holy shit. Dude, are you okay?”
I closed my eyes. I wasn’t hurt. In fact, my landing had been relatively smooth, rather like a runner sliding into home on a Slip ’N Slide covered in Jell-O. Speaking of Slip ’N Slide, water seeped through my flannel pajama bottoms. Ick. I planted my hands next to my torso and braced myself to lever off the floor. My right hand landed in a puddle, and I slipped back and found myself reexamining the generic ceiling tiles. Nope. The view hadn’t improved.
“What happened? Didn’t you see the sign?” The voice, a surprisingly deep voice, wrapped around me like campfire smoke at midnight, reminding me of the single camping trip my dad had taken me on back before I’d gotten sick. The body accompanying the voice dropped next to me. “Careful,” the guy said, pressing a hand into my chest as I tried to sit up again. “We should make sure you’re okay before you move.”
I held my breath at the warmth building at the point of contact between his skin and mine. The thin cotton of my shirt wasn’t much of a barrier between us.
It had been so long, years really, since anyone had touched me without the protective layer of vinyl medical gloves. I wanted to press into the touch, to prolong it.
j. leigh bailey is an office drone by day and the author of Young Adult LGBT Romance by night. She can usually be found with her nose in a book or pressed up against her computer monitor. A book-a-day reading habit sometimes gets in the way of... well, everything...but some habits aren't worth breaking. She's been reading romance novels since she was ten years old. The last twenty years or so have not changed her voracious appetite for stories of romance, relationships and achieving that vitally important Happy Ever After.
She wrote her first story at seven, which was, unbeknownst to her at the time, a charming piece of fan-fiction in which Superman battled (and defeated, of course) the nefarious X Luther. She was quite put out to be told, years later, that the character's name was actually Lex. Her second masterpiece should have been a best-seller, but the action-packed tale of rescuing her little brother from an alligator attack in the marshes of Florida collected dust for years under the bed instead of gaining critical acclaim.
Now she writes Young Adult LGBT Romance novels about boys traversing the crazy world of love, relationships and acceptance.
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Sounds and looks really good.
ReplyDeleteI'm enjoying this titles, the shifters are so different from the common stories.
ReplyDelete