Coming Soon...: Mistakes

Mistakes by A.M. Hayward & L.J. Holder
Published April, 2011 by The Writer's Coffee Shop
ISBN 978-1-61213-032-3
Read April, 2011

My publisher sent me an advance copy of Mistakes to read. It is BRILLIANT! I have followed the writing of the dynamic duo Hayward & Holder online for a while now. It is sometimes a bit scary what their minds can come up with (seriously, I have read some of their online work by peaking between my fingers). But while their online work is good, Mistakes, their first published novel, is absolutely wonderful.

Maddy is a high school senior at a private school where she is a step or two down on the socio-economic ladder of her peers. Her parents have tried to protect her from the snobbishness of the upper crust. However, Maddy is ready to break out of the sheltered bubble and experience the life she has only read about in fairytales.Add in a debonaire college guy that shows her a bit of attention and you have a recipe for disaster.

Hayward & Holder are talented in bringing forth emotion in their readers. By the time Maddy left for Spring Break, my stomach was twisting with the guilt Maddy had for lying to her parents. The desperation and despair she experiences later in the book, combined with the tenderness of fellow captive Dalton, had tears streaming down my cheeks. You can't help but feel connected to these characters.

I started reading Mistakes in the early afternoon on Saturday, by bedtime I still had 30 pages or so to read. There was no way I was going to bed. I stayed up until I finished it. I can count on 1 hand the number of books I have read in one day. Now, even days later, I can't help think about the story and the characters. I wonder how much begging I would have to do to see an early draft of the sequel to this wonderfully suspenseful novel.

Mistakes will be published April 28, 2011. Pre-orders for the paperback are now being accepted at the publisher's website and I encourage you to order it NOW. I should warn my readers that the series does involve human trafficking, but in this first novel there was no graphic sex, though there was a bit of violence. At this point, I think the book would be suitable for high school students (and may serve as a warning to the dangers faced by young adults during Spring Break parties).