#tracy darnton

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Blog Tour: The Rules by Tracy Darnton

Blog Tour: The Rules by Tracy Darnton

Happy Thursday Book Dragons!

It’s blog tour day! I’m thrilled to be hosting a date on The Rules Blog tour. This book is incredible and I can’t recommend it enough! The Rules is one of my favourite 2020 reads that I know will still be in my top ten at the end of the year. I have a Q&A with Tracy to share with you all today, I hope you enjoy.

Happy reading!

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Author Interview: Tracy Darnton

Author Interview: Tracy Darnton (@TracyDarnton #TheRulesTrustNoOne @LittleTigerUK)

The Rules by Tracey Darnton

Hey All!

Today is my stop on the The Rules blog tour and I am here today with an interview with Tracy Darnton for you all.

*I was gifted a copy of the book from the Publisher for the tour*

Title: The Rules Author: Tracy Darnton Publisher: Little Tiger Group Published: 9th July 2020 Format: Paperback Source:: Publisher Add It: Waterstones. Goodreads. Summary: A gripping…

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Why we all need a Grab-and-Go Bag after reading Tracy Darnton’s The Rules

My latest YA thriller The Rules is about Amber on the run from her prepper dad. Her childhood was spent preparing for catastrophic scenarios and having to live by her dad’s strict set of Rules. But now Amber must stay hidden from him – the man who taught her everything she knows about survival and staying under the radar. The Rules are kicking in again even though she’s tried to forget them.

One of Dad’s rules is Always have your Grab-and-Go Bag so that’s what Amber takes with her when she flees. It’s a handy bag that enables you to get through the first seventy-two hours of any emergency. 

While I was editing the book last September, Police Scotland issued a tweet suggesting everyone should have a #GrabBag as part of preparedness month (no, I didn’t know we had one of those either). Suggested contents of a torch, whistle etc were swiftly amended by Twitter readers to include essentials like chocolate and gin. This was well before anyone had heard of coronavirus, when the emergency anticipated was localised flooding or power cuts. I changed from the more American term Bug Out Bag or BOB I’d used in my first draft to Grab-and-Go bag and incorporated the slogan Prepared. Not scared used by the US Department of Homeland Security.

So what’s in a typical Grab-and-Go bag?

Emergency plan with contact numbers

Water bottle with filter straw

Wind-up radio

Torch and batteries or wind-up torch

Solar battery pack

Phone charger

Spare specs and contact lenses.

Extensive first aid kit

Basic toiletries

Change of clothes

Pen and notepad

Energy bars

Swiss Army knife

Flint and steel for lighting a fire, matches

Antibacterial gel

Black bin liners

Lastly, just like Amber, I can’t survive without my tweezers and lip salve.

Enjoy The Rules and take a peek inside Amber’s bag – hers also has the advent calendar she was given by her social worker at the beginning of the book. 

Are you going to prepare one yourself? As one reviewer said when reading The Rules recently, maybe Amber’s dad has a point…

Tracy Darnton’s The Rules is published by Stripes. Tracy’s last book The Truth About Lies was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and was a World Book Night title.  She lives in Bath with a very large Grab-and-Go bag and a laminated emergency plan.

You can follow Tracy on Twitter @TracyDarnton or Instagram tracydarnton

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Review: The Rules by Tracy Darnton

I love a good unique thriller and I was so happy when Charlie at Little Tiger agreed to put me on the blog tour for this upcoming YA pulse-racer. A guest post from the author Tracy Darnton on Grab-and-Go bags can be read here.

Amber has been training her whole life for survival in the wake of disaster. Her dad taught her everything she knows about staying hidden and all she needs to do is follow The Rules. But it seems that the one person she is hiding from is about to catch up to her. Suddenly The Rules that she has been running from are the key to keeping her safe.

Amber leads a life that most of us can only imagine and therefore she’s a very unique character. In some ways, she is a typical teen girl who purposely doesn’t fit in -a non-conforming rulebreaker, ironically- but she has been conditioned to think about things that wouldn’t ever enter the average person’s head. Her mind -like her life- is unsettled, constantly ready to run and full of ideas on how to survive independently on limited supplies. 

Her friendship with Josh is the one ray of light in the whole book. When they first meet at their shared former foster home, I wasn’t sure whether he could be trusted but he provided Amber with a glimpse of a slightly different outlook on the nomadic lifestyle. He becomes instrumental to her at the very end and I was a little upset at their parting, despite it not being on bad terms.

There are some content warnings at the start of the book but it’s worth me mentioning that Amber has suffered years of severe abuse -both physical and mental- at the hands of her father. It’s never explictly stated but her constant anxiety about confinement and reluctance to attach to anyone, even to those who are kind to her, made me suspect that she may have PTSD. All the pieces are there and my heart broke for her, as I could clearly see how the damage had been done and how it manifested within her, as her character developed.

Amber’s feelings about her father reminded me of another highly disturbing father-daughter literary relationship -that of Turtle in My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent. Like Amber, Turtle suffered extreme abuse at the hands of her dad but although she knows it’s wrong, she still feels an obligation to obey and abide by his chosen way of life and expectations for her. It’s so easy for these young girls to lose their true selves in doing this and it’s one of the most unsettling relationship types to read. Bolstered by our continuous patriarchal society, it’s a dynamic that is so horrifyingly realistic. 

Amber’s dad shares many of the personality traits of dangerous cult leaders and I knew that this is ultimately what he was trying to create. Thankfully, he is stopped in his tracks by a blazing ending but it’s easy to see how he managed to pull so many people into his doctrine. These people do exist and if given the right platforms, they can do serious damage to vulnerable people. Painting such a clear picture of what they’re so often like in a YA novel will hopefully give young readers a heads-up on how to recognise them.

The Rules is a page-turning, fast-paced thriller that focuses on a phenomenon that isn’t often addressed in books -Doomsday preppers. Of course, in the midst of a global pandemic, a lot of what Amber’s dad believes in won’t seem quite as crazy as it perhaps would have done previously but his behaviour still reeks of the extreme and dangerous. I didn’t see the ending coming at all and I turned the final page with a shudder, wondering if the horrors were really over.

The Rules by Tracy Darnton will be published by Little Tiger Group on 9th July 2020. 

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Illustration for Tracy Darnton’s “Milo and Operation Stepdad” (shortlisted for the Times Chicken House Children’s Fiction competition 2016) by Mara Dellavedova  for Inklings Anthology https://inklingsanthology.com/