Blog Tour + #Review: 10 TRUTHS AND A DARE by Ashley Elston (w/ #giveaway)!
Welcome to Book-Keeping and my stop on the Rockstar Book Tours blog tour for 10 Truths and a Dare by Ashley Elston! The tour is running for the whole month of May, and I for one can’t wait to see my fellow participants’ reviews. Read on to find out all the book details, just how much I loved this book, and how to win one of three copies up for grabs during the tour!
title: 10 Truths and a Dare
author: Ashley Elston
publisher: Disney-Hyperion
release date: 4 May 2021
This companion to Ashley Elston's beloved 10 Blind Dates follows Sophie's high-achieving cousin Olivia as she juggles last-minute P.E. credit, end-of-year parties, and a secret new romance in the chaotic week before graduation.
It's Senior Party Week, that magical in-between time after classes have ended but before graduation, chock-full of gimmicky theme parties, last-minute bonding, and family traditions. Olivia couldn't be more ready. Class salutatorian and confident in her future at LSU, she's poised to sail through to the next phase of her life.
But when the tiny hiccup of an unsigned off-campus P.E. form puts Olivia in danger of not graduating at all, she has one week to set things straight without tipping off her very big and very nosy extended family. Volunteering to help at a local golf tournament should do it, but since Olivia's mom equipped her phone with a tracking app, there'll be no hiding the fact that she's at the golf course instead of all the graduation parties happening at the same time. Unless, that is, she can convince the Fab Four--her ride-or-die cousins and best friends Sophie, Charlie, and Wes--to trade phones with her as they go through the motions of playing Olivia for the week.
Add to Goodreads: 10 Truths and a Dare
Purchase the Book: Amazon | Kindle | Audible | B&N | iBooks | Kobo | TBD | Bookshop.org
title: 10 Blind Dates
author: Ashley Elston
publisher: Disney-Hyperion
release date: 1 October 2019
Add to Goodreads: 10 Blind Dates
Purchase the Book: **Only 99cents for Kindle right now!!**
Praise for 10 Blind Dates by Ashley Elston:
2020 ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers Top Ten Title
2020 Florida Teens Read Book List
"POSITIVELY DELIGHTFUL—all caps—from beginning to end."—NPR
"This piece-by-piece romance doesn't need its Christmas theme to sell, but it makes it glitter all the more."—Booklist
"A fun story of finding love, getting to know yourself, and getting to know your family."—Kirkus Reviews
"In a funny holiday romance that has Sophie dog-sitting in a hockey rink, watching porn at a drive-in theater, and playing the Virgin Mary in a middle school Nativity, Elston cleverly reflects the family members' personalities through their choices of dates for Sophie."—Publishers Weekly
Ashley Elston is the author of several novels including: 10 Blind Dates (a Top Ten ALA Quick Pick and the companion to this book), The Rules for Disappearing (a finalist in the Best Young Adult Novel category of the International Thriller Writers Thriller Awards), This Is Our Story, and The Lying Woods. She has a liberal arts degree from Louisiana State University in Shreveport and worked for many years as a wedding photographer before turning her hand to writing. Ashley lives in Shreveport with her husband and three sons.
Connect with Ashley: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Goodreads | Amazon
Okay, I don’t know how I didn’t realize that 10 Truths and a Dare was a companion book to 10 Blind Dates until I started setting up this post, but I didn’t! I knew it had a similar title with the use of “10″ in numerical form, and I knew both covers had the “10″ in balloons, but somehow it didn’t occur to me that they were related, ha! But no matter, because while this is a companion, I can say as someone who did it that you can absolutely read this book without having previously read 10 Blind Dates. That said, I will absolutely positively be going back and reading 10 Blind Dates, because of how much I loved 10 Truths and a Dare!
Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let me just say: I LOVED THIS BOOK. I literally read it in one sitting on Saturday, having no idea how completely I would get sucked in to Olivia’s graduation drama but so happy that I did! I was laughing out loud so much that both my son and my husband poked their heads in to see what on earth I was doing that had me giggling so loudly! (Are they not used to hearing me happy, or what?!) From the moment the book starts you meet Olivia’s large, loud, loving - and did I say large?? - family, which I just adored from the word go. To be honest, it was the kind of family I wanted growing up, because we had a similar family - definitely Southern, not Italian, but everything revolved around food; lots of cousins, though they were second cousins, because my father was an only child but grew up super close with his own cousins; in a very small Southern town - but my siblings and I were on the periphery because my dad was in the Air Force and we moved around a lot. Although I actually enjoyed being a military brat, I often wished that we’d been able to grow up closer to our cousins and be as tight as they all were. Anyway, you get that feeling of closeness and true family love - even for the cousins who seem not to like each other very much! - from the get-go with Olivia’s family, and I was all in.
Olivia’s plan to salvage her place as salutatorian and being able to graduate with her class instead of having to take a half-credit of PE over the summer is crazy and leads to some hilarious situations - it reminded me, in the best way, of the kind of plot you’d see in an episode of I Love Lucy! Her cousins Charlie and Sophie and their best friend Wes - they’ve dubbed themselves The Fab Four - are the best kind of friends, the ones who’ll do anything you ask and have your back at all times (just don’t ask Charlie to respond to Olivia’s mom’s questions about undergarments!). Clearly, hijinks will ensue, and Olivia will have to do everything in her power to keep her parents from finding out what’s really going on. (Side note: the text exchanges from Olivia’s mom had me howling at points!)
I love everything about this awesome family, and I am instantly going back and reading 10 Blind Dates (especially since it’s only 99 cents for Kindle right now!!). I am also down for future stories with the Messinas, and I wonder if there’s at least one in the pipeline based on allusions to “the other side of the story” from the Evil Joes. Anyway, long story short, pick this one up! 10 Truths and a Dare is such a delightful, quick, satisfying contemporary. I seriously needed this book right when it came to me and I’m so glad I read it.
Rating: 10 stars! (okay, 5...)
**Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for purposes of this blog tour. This review is voluntary on my part and reflects my honest rating and review of the book.
Three (3) lucky winners will each receive a finished copy of 10 Truths and a Dare by Ashley Elston! This one is US only and ends 4 June 2021. Enter via the Rafflecopter below, and good luck!
Here is the full tour schedule so you can follow along for all the great content!
5/1/2021 - The Book View - Review
5/2/2021 - What A Nerd Girl Says - Excerpt
5/3/2021 - YA Books Central - Excerpt
5/4/2021 - Fire and Ice - Review
5/5/2021 - BookHounds YA - Excerpt
5/6/2021 - YA Book Nerd - Review
5/7/2021 - Lifestyle of Me - Review
5/8/2021 - Moonlight Rendezvous - Review
5/9/2021 - Jenguerdy - Review
5/10/2021 - Ficticiouswonderland - Review
5/11/2021 - Book-Keeping - Review **you are here!
5/12/2021 - Amani’s Reviews - Review
5/13/2021 - booksaremagictoo - Review
5/14/2021 - Eli to the nth - Review
5/15/2021 - Emelie's Books - Review
5/16/2021 - Kait Plus Books - Excerpt
5/17/2021 - Zainey Laney - Review
5/18/2021 - onemused - Review
5/19/2021 - Midnightbooklover - Review
5/20/2021 - amandainpa - Review
5/21/2021 - Geauxgetlit - Review
5/22/2021 - two points of interest - Review
5/23/2021 - Book Briefs - Review
5/24/2021 - Momfluenster - Review
5/25/2021 - Star-Crossed Book Blog - Review
5/26/2021 - michellemengsbookblog - Review
5/27/2021 - Rajiv's Reviews - Review
5/28/2021 - Do You Dog-ear? - Review
5/29/2021 - Books and Zebras - Review
5/30/2021 - My Fictional Oasis - Review
5/31/2021 - Popthebutterfly - Review
