Blog Tour: Sources Say by Lori Goldstein (Excerpt + Giveaway!)

Item: Sources Say
Author: Kaity

Posted September 7, 2020 by Kaity in Book Tours, Bookstagram, Excerpt, Giveaways / 1 Comment

Happy Monday and welcome to my stop on the SOURCES SAY blog tour! I’m so excited because today I have an excerpt of the book to share with you! This book is truly amazing and I’m so so excited to for you to find out more about SOURCES SAY and Lori Goldstein, plus enter to win a print copy!

Sources Say by Lori Goldstein
Published on September 8, 2020 by Razorbill
Genres: YA, Contemporary
Pages: 300
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Two exes. One election. All the drama.
At Acedia High School outside of Boston, student council has always been nothing more than a popularity contest. Nobody pays attention. Nobody cares.
But all that changes when the Frankengirls show up. During the very first week of school, someone plasters the halls with Photoshopped images of three "perfect tens"--images of scantily clad girls made from real photos of girls at school. The student body is livid. And the two presidential candidates, Angeline Quinn and Leo Torres, jump on the opportunity to propose their solutions and secure votes. After their messy break up, Leo and Angie are fighting tooth and nail to win this thing and their constituents are mesmerized as they duke it out.
As if things couldn't be more dramatic, the school's two newspapers get involved. The Red & Blue is run by Angie's sister Cat and she prides herself on only reporting the facts. But her morals are tested when The Shrieking Violet--written by an anonymous source and based less on facts and more on fiction--blatantly endorses Leo. Rumors fly, secrets are leaked, and the previously mundane student election becomes anything but boring.

Chapter Three

When Cat Comes Down with Election Fever

30 DAYS TO THE ELECTION

Cat flicked on the lights of the supply closet turned newsroom. Poorly ventilated with not a single window to let the outside in, the room could double as a sauna. The stale air invited dust mites to take up residence. They clogged the keyboards and coated the monitors with a haze of dirt. Just inside the door, someone had left a used plunger and a chewed-up broom, which she hoped weren’t used for the same purpose.

Still, instantly, Cat’s mind calmed. Her sister was wrong. The newsroom wasn’t her second home. It was home. The place she dreamed of escaping to when her actual one brimmed with so much Angeline, she couldn’t breathe.

Okay, so days like today, breathing brought a sneeze or two, but Cat could fix that. Here, she could do anything, be anything, become something. Someone. Someone who’d leave this small town behind and enter a world she’d report on, like her grandfather had done.

She relished these few minutes before the first day of her senior year officially began. The solitude let her think, let her plan, let her wrap her head around what was to come. She set her backpack beside the chair that had been Jen’s, the one with “EIC” spelled out on the back in masking tape. She drew the seat toward her and hesitated before lowering herself into it.

A nervous smile spread across her face. She pressed her feet into the floor, kicking herself into a spin. But as the chair slowed, the emptiness of the room settled deep in her chest: the three other computer stations, the printer stocked with its last toner cartridge, the physics lab table she and Stavros had snagged from the dumpster. It’d been missing a leg, and the two of them had brought it back to life thanks to a roll of duct tape and two old ski poles Stavros had convinced the team to donate.

This year she’d be alone. Just her and Ravi Tandon, if he came back as the paper’s designer. He’d been flirting with moving on to yearbook at the end of last year. She could hardly blame him if he did.

Her hand dropped to the stack of last year’s undistributed newspapers, piled on the floor beside her chair almost as high as the seat. Jen had tried, Stavros too, but neither of them had been able to make The Red and Blue something anyone wanted to read.

Cat’s investigative reports hadn’t helped. She grabbed the top newspaper with her byline on the front page. It had been good journalism to uncover the source of last January’s daily fire alarm— hotboxing in the server room. She thumbed through the stack and found another: this one exposing the perpetrator selling the password to the school’s unblocked Wi-Fi.

Then there was the series that began with her report on the notorious spirit week incident in which the hard work of the cheerleading squad—who’d gone to state for the past four years, unlike the football team—was rewarded with the sexist “cupcake” being scrawled across their uniforms. The series continued by asking why such pranks seemed rampant at Acedia. Whether weak investigations by the administration fostered an environment that gave pranksters license to act and to amp up their stunts, which had begun to reflect a sexist and intolerant culture that no one wanted to talk about. There were even rumors that students, namely male students, had been caught in various acts but let go with barely a warning after parental pressure on the school.

Turned out, such articles didn’t endear her or The Red and Blue to student, faculty, or parental readers. By the end of last year, it’d been practically impossible to get anyone to even agree to be quoted in the paper.

She might be riveted by Gramps’s stories of reporting on everything from the war in Vietnam to the attacks on 9/11, but she knew the media of his day was not the media of hers.

One look at her sister giving a tutorial on “identifying your good side” to the delight of two hundred thousand followers on YouTube told her that.

From Sources Say. Copyright © 2020 by Lori Goldstein and reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House.

Enter here to win a print copy of SOURCES SAY by Lori Goldstein!

(US Only!)

Week One:

9/7/2020	Kait Plus Books	Excerpt
9/8/2020	BookHounds YA	Review
9/9/2020	Lilly’s Book World	Review
9/10/2020	Do You Dog-ear?	Review
9/11/2020	Rajiv’s Reviews	Review

Week Two:

9/14/2020	Emelie’s Books	Review
9/15/2020	Book-Keeping	Review
9/16/2020	BookBriefs	Review
9/17/2020	Nerdophiles	Review
9/18/2020	Nay’s Pink Bookshelf	Review

Coming Soon!

Lori Goldstein earned her BA in journalism but eventually found her true writing passion in the world of fictional people. She’s never met a beach she didn’t love, a book she wouldn’t read, or a strange food she wouldn’t try. She is the author of SOURCES SAY, which Kirkus calls “Entertaining, thought-provoking, and heartwarming”; SCREEN QUEENS, which Kirkus calls “a fun and uplifting story that celebrates female friendship and empowerment”; and the VOYA-starred young adult contemporary fantasy series BECOMING JINN.

Find her on Twitter @loriagoldstein and Instagram @lorigoldsteinbooks.

Also follow on Facebook, Goodreads, and BookBub.