Author Interview + Giveaway Such A Rush by Jennifer Echols

9 July, 2012 / / Uncategorized / 67 comments Share:

I am thrilled to have Jennifer Echols on the blog today answering some questions about her fabulous new book, Such A Rush.

Here is a little bit about the book:

Such A Rush
Author: Jennifer Echols
Genre: Young Adult
Format: ARC
Publisher: MTV Books
Release Date: 7-10-12
High school senior Leah Jones loves nothing more than flying. While she’s in the air, it’s easy to forget life with her absentee mother at the low-rent end of a South Carolina beach town. When her flight instructor, Mr. Hall, hires her to fly for his banner advertising business, she sees it as her ticket out of the trailer park. And when he dies suddenly, she’s afraid her flying career is gone forever. But Mr. Hall’s teenage sons, golden boy Alec and adrenaline junkie Grayson, are determined to keep the banner planes flying. Though Leah has crushed on Grayson for years, she’s leery of getting involved in what now seems like a doomed business — until Grayson betrays her by digging up her most damning secret. Holding it over her head, he forces her to fly for secret reasons of his own, reasons involving Alec. Now Leah finds herself drawn into a battle between brothers — and the consequences could be deadly. – Goodreads 

You can read my review here.

How did you come up with the idea for Such A Rush? What kind of research did you do for this book? Are you a pilot?

I guess you could say I’ve felt this book coming on for a very long time. My dad was a doctor, but he was always interested in aviation and wanted to learn to fly. During the Vietnam War he joined the Air Force rather than one of the other branches of service so he could be around airplanes. After he finished his military service and his residency, he wanted to set up his private practice in the small town in Alabama where I grew up, for several reasons: it was close to my mom’s parents, it’s on a beautiful lake (see my book Endless Summer!), and it had a good airport, which was built by the military during World War II as a place for the Tuskegee Airmen and the pilots from Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery to practice landing.
He began lessons, and when I was five years old, he bought a tiny two-seater Cessna and started taking me up. Flying around the town and the lake and wandering around the airport tarmac were such a commonplace part of my childhood that it was a long time before I realized that’s kind of unusual. I never caught the flying bug myself, but my brother did. He is also a doctor and a pilot. And my son has caught it too. Someone who has the flying bug gets truly weird about airplanes. They love to watch them fly. They can identify anything in the sky down to the company that made it, the model number, a list of its possible modifications, and the years it was in production. (Yes, my son can do this, and he is ten years old.) I do not get it, okay? I can’t imagine wanting to be a pilot that badly. But I have wanted to be a published novelist that badly, so I can relate.
All of this was bubbling in the background when we took a family beach vacation a couple of summers ago. My dad can only stand so much family reunion before he asks me to go with him to the airport to watch airplanes take off and land. This is just another very common part of my life that I don’t see as weird until I really start thinking about it. On this particular day, since we were in a beach town where there were a lot of planes flying advertisement banners, he called around to figure out which airport they were using. He and my son and I sat in rocking chairs on the front porch of the airport office, watching the physics-defying process of these tiny airplanes snagging the long, heavy banners on tow cables. As we gawked, he happened to mention that most of these pilots are very young because they need to amass a huge number of flight hours in order to become airline pilots.
What did you say? This is a situation in which very young people are thrust into a position of danger and great responsibility?
DING DING DING DING DING
I wish more book ideas whacked me in the head like this.
As I’ve said, I have a lot of experience wandering around airports. I didn’t need to do any research there. But when I started writing the book in earnest, my dad very generously took me flying quite a few times and explained exactly what he was doing and why. The next time my brother came for a visit, we all had a long discussion about how to crash an airplane and why that might happen. I also stared at a lot of flight (and crash) footage on the internet, but I would not feel confident I had gotten things right without that input from my brother and my dad.
  

Leah grew up in poverty and is neglected by her only parent. What drew you to writing about someone growing up in such challenging circumstances?

I really can’t tell you what I came up with first–the idea that Leah was a pilot or that she was poor. I feel like she was a whole person before I even started to think very hard about her. But probably this is because the beach town where we were watching the banner planes is a vacation destination for the very rich and the very poor, with a very clear line between them. I am a jogger, so every morning while this idea was forming, I was starting at the huge house we’d rented with its private beach, and jogging five miles to the low-rent end of the beach and back. And when I asked my dad how a poor kid could learn to be a pilot, he said that was pretty much impossible, because lessons and airplane rental are so expensive. So that had to be my story.


I was really captured by this story because I felt it had a strong message about overcoming obstacles and not apologizing for who you are or where you come from. How do you feel when readers tell you that they get a “message” from your books? Is that something that you consciously think about when you are writing?
I absolutely love to hear from readers that my books have touched them. And I absolutely do not think about the “message” my books may send when I am writing them. I am trying to write the best story I possibly can, and that’s all I can do. However, if the story is a good one, it will have a very strong message, because that’s what makes it resonate with readers.
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on my next YA romantic drama, Dirty Little Secret, which will be out in July 2013.

Jennifer Echols was born in Atlanta and grew up in a small town on a beautiful lake in Alabama—a setting that has inspired many of her books. She has written eight romantic novels for young adults, including the comedy Major Crush, which won the National Readers’ Choice Award, and the drama Going Too Far, which was a finalist in the RITA, the National Readers’ Choice Award, and the Book Buyer’s Best, and was nominated by the American Library Association as a Best Book for Young Adults. Her next two teen dramas, including Such a Rush, will appear in 2012 and 2013, with her adult romance novels debuting in 2013, all published by Simon and Schuster. She lives in Birmingham with her husband and her son.

Thank you, Jennifer!!

I love this book so much that I am giving away two finished copies to two lucky winners!  You must be 13+ to enter and it is open internationally.  Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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Kate

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67 responses to “Author Interview + Giveaway Such A Rush by Jennifer Echols”

  1. Katie @ BlookGirl

    I loved reading this interview! Especially the part about Jennifer’s 10-year old son knowing SO much about airplanes. My boyfriend, Nick, is obsessed with airplanes and helicopters and eventually, I will buy him flying lessons 🙂

    Thanks to Kate and Jennifer for featuring a great interview and an amazing giveaway <3

    Reply
  7. laurawardle

    I absolutely adore Jennifer! Her books are consistently excellent and all extremely well-written. She’s just fabulous! Can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of SUCH A RUSH! 🙂

    Reply
  9. Eileen

    That is so cool how she thought up this entire idea! Sometimes everything just falls in place for a special reason! 😉 But thank you for the giveaway and interview! Such a Rush sounds SO amazing and my TBR list is so large at this point that I need to read this book and, like, fifty thousand other books! -.-

    Eileen @ ***Singing and Reading in the Rain***

    Reply
  16. Rachel

    I’m so excited for the chance to win and I loved the story about her dad and her son, interesting how flying is like an addiction for some people which is something one does not think about every day!

    Reply
  17. Alexa

    This interview is so awesome. It’s pretty cool to see where the idea for Such A Rush (which is FABULOUS, by the way) came from – and I think it was a story that was truly inspired!

    Reply
  18. Leoni400

    I am looking forward to reading Such a Rush. I’be heard such good things about it. I also think the storyline sounds really interesting too

    Reply
  26. Caroline

    Thanks for the giveaway! I understand having family members really obsessed with airplanes, because my brother is the same way 🙂 I’m really excited about this book!

    Reply
  27. Kim

    Fantastic interview! I love that this book actually has a message and I find it so cool how you can think up your characters just by looking at real life and jogging around the neighborhood! Me? Inspiration-less haha!

    Thanks for the international giveaway 🙂

    Reply
  30. Christina K.

    Love the interview! Jennifer Echols is amazing and I love how she doesn’t try to put in a message, but her story and characters are so incredible that the message emerges on its own.

    Thanks so much:)

    Reply
  37. Carl

    What a great-sounding story. It’s interesting how the character came to the author almost fully formed then so much of the plot was from her own experiences. Sounds cool. Please enter my name for the chance to win one of the available copies. Thanks.

    Reply
  43. Raíla

    GAH, Jennnifer echols is one of my favorite authors of all time! I just can’t wait to read SUCH A RUSH, and I already look forward to DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS. Can’t get enough of her romantic dramas!

    Reply
  62. andrea b

    I have yet to read a Jennifer Echols book, but I think that this one will be the first one! I liked several of the reviews that I’ve read so far, so I hope that I’ll enjoy the book as well…

    thanks for the giveaway!

    Reply
  63. Carley L.

    I’ve been reading so many wonderful things about this book! I always love reading interviews with authors, especially when they provide insight into their writing process and where their inspiration comes from. Leah sounds like she’s an awesome character and I love the idea of reading about a young female pilot. It’s something I’ve never read anything like before, so I think it would be a great read!

    Reply
  64. Chiquita Pruden

    Hi, the first letter was sent to my billing address, not my shipping address. I do not know if it is just me or other individuals had this issue but I just wished to let you guys know. It was definitely disappointing not getting the letter where I am right now!

    Reply

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