Pre-Release Tour: Guest Post from Morgan Matson - 5 Unexpected Things about The Unexpected Everything

The Unexpected Everything by Morgan Matson

Releasing: 1st May 2016

Published by: HarperCollins

Genre: YA Contemporary

Source: Publisher

Simon and Schuster | QBD | Booktopia

Andie has a plan and she always sticks to the plan. Future? A top tier medical school. Dad? Avoid as much as possible (which isn't that hard considering he's a Congressman and never around).

 Friends? Palmer, Bri, and Toby - pretty much the most awesome people on the planet, who needs anyone else? Relationships? No one's worth more than three weeks. So it's no surprise she's got her summer all planned out too. Until a political scandal cancels her summer pre-med internship, and lands both her and Dad back in the same house for the first time in years.

Suddenly she's doing things that aren't Andie at all - working as a dog walker, doing an epic scavenger hunt with her dad and maybe, just maybe, letting the super cute Clark in closer than expected. Palmer, Bri and Toby tell her to embrace all the chaos, but here's the thing ... can she?

Morgan Matson always knows how to write compelling YA contemporaries with a cute side, but also with real heart. I adored both Amy and Roger's Epic Detour and Since You've Been Gone - so to see that she had another book coming out soon, I was pretty excited!

 

So, to kick off this pre-release tour and give you some more reasons to also be adding it to your TBR, here's Morgan Matson with a few things that were unexpected in writing this book.

Guest Post by Morgan Matson: 5 Unexpected Things about The Unexpected Everything

1) It did not have a title for the longest time.  I had a really hard time titling Since You’ve Been Gone too, and I only came up with that one when I heard the Kelly Clarkson song playing and was like, Wait just a minute… But we went down to the wire with The Unexpected Everything.  Now, though, I can’t imagine it being  called anything else.

2) Bertie, the main dog in the book, is a Great Pyrenees.  He was originally a goldendoodle, but we found when we started looking at dog models (a real thing!) for the US cover, the goldendoodles didn’t photograph as well. We wanted  something…fluffier.  So Bertie became a big white fluffy dog instead.

3) It’s my longest book so far! It was just really important to me that the three sides of Andie’s life – friendship, family, and romance – all be equally balanced, with none more important than the other. I wanted them all to drive the story equally.  My editor and I kept looking at places where it could be cut, but while we trimmed a little, the way the subplots wove together made it resistant to cutting. So it’s long! But I’m so happy that nothing got shortchanged – because life isn’t just one main plot with a tidy subplot.  It’s usually everything, all at once.

4) From the beginning, I wanted to write a relationship book.  I’d been getting a lot of emails and tweets from readers who were mad my characters finally got together on the last page.  And so I wanted to show a real relationship between Andie and Clark through this book – the falling for each other and occasional fights, and bringing someone into your group of friends.  I’d never really done that before, and I was really happy to finally get to do it.

5) Andie’s friends – Bri, Toby, and Palmer – were so important to the story, for me.  I was part of a group of girls in high school (there were six of us) and I realized I hadn’t told that story in any of my books yet.  A lot of what happens with the friends is based on, or inspired by, my own friendships.  When I was in high school my friends and I spent tons of time at our local diner, talking for hours, just hanging out.  I wanted to try and capture that feeling in a book.

Other stops on the tour coming up!

Hope you all get to reading The Unexpected Everything - I know I will be!