Blog Tour: What I Want You to See by Catherine Linka (Guest Post + Giveaway!)

Happy Tuesday and welcome to my stop on the What I Want You to See blog tour!! I’m so excited to be on this tour, and I’m even more excited for you to read about Catherine’s favorite scene from her book! Read on to find out more about the book, author, and tour, plus enter to win a print copy of What I Want You to See!!!

What I Want You to See by Catherine Linka
Published on February 4, 2020 by Disney-Hyperion
Genres: YA, Contemporary
Pages: 384
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Winning a scholarship to California’s most prestigious art school seems like a fairy tale ending to Sabine Reye’s awful senior year. After losing both her mother and her home, Sabine longs for a place where she belongs.
But the cutthroat world of visual arts is nothing like what Sabine had imagined. Colin Krell, the renowned faculty member whom she had hoped would mentor her, seems to take merciless delight in tearing down her best work—and warns her that she’ll lose the merit-based award if she doesn’t improve.
Desperate and humiliated, Sabine doesn’t know where to turn. Then she meets Adam, a grad student who understands better than anyone the pressures of art school. He even helps Sabine get insight on Krell by showing her the modern master’s work in progress, a portrait that’s sold for a million dollars sight unseen.
Sabine is enthralled by the portrait; within those swirling, colorful layers of paint is the key to winning her inscrutable teacher’s approval. Krell did advise her to improve her craft by copying a painting she connects with . . . but what would he think of Sabine secretly painting her own version of his masterpiece? And what should she do when she accidentally becomes party to a crime so well -plotted that no one knows about it but her?
Complex and utterly original, What I Want You to See is a gripping tale of deception, attraction, and moral ambiguity.

Do you have a favorite scene from What I Want You to See?

In What I Want You to See, Sabine’s a first semester art student whose painting instructor keeps attacking her work. She’s terrified she’s going to lose her scholarship, so she does something she knows is a bad idea. 

My characters are human which means they always make some not-so-great choices. I love putting them into messy, high stakes situations where everything and everyone they care about can be lost to them forever. 

So even though I love writing tense, emotional scenes, when you ask which scene was my favorite scene to write, I have to say the one where Sabine and her new friend Kevin go to The Broad art museum.

The Broad is a real museum of contemporary art in LA, and Sabine doesn’t like a lot of the art in the collection. She doesn’t know Kevin very well yet and she’s trying to hide what she feels about the art from him and the other students they came with, but he sees right through her. 

What made this scene so fun to write is the banter between Kevin and Sabine. Sabine’s been wrapped up in her own drama, but this is the moment when she starts to see there’s much more to Kevin than she realized. 

A lot of times we’re attracted to shiny objects—bad boys or hot girls—and we don’t see the person who doesn’t appear that exciting, but who has so much more to offer emotionally. 

One last thing about the scene. One of my writer friends absolutely loves how the scene disses some pieces of art at The Broad that people worship. I have this secret fear that if anyone from The Broad reads What I Want You to See, I’ll be banned from ever going back.