About Susan Crispell
Susan Bishop Crispell earned a BFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Born and raised in the mountains of Tennessee, she now lives twenty minutes from the beach in North Carolina with her husband and cats, Whisky and Peat. She is very fond of baked goods and is always on the lookout for hints of magic in the real world. She is the author of women’s fiction books, including The Secret Ingredient of Wishes (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, Sep 2016) and Dreaming In Chocolate (St. Martin’s Griffin, Feb 2018), which was selected as a SIBA Okra pick Winter 2018, and her forthcoming young adult debut, The Holloway Girls (Sourcebooks Fire, June 2022).
I cannot believe this day is finally here. The cover reveal for my YA debut, The Holloway Girls, which comes out June 7, 2022 from Sourcebooks Fire. (!!!) I started writing this book in 2015, right after I sold my first two adult novels. So many times since then, I’ve felt like my main character, Remy. Cursed. Not the typical background story of a whimsical/magical/ultimately happy story for teens, right? No matter what I did to the story, no matter how many changes I made, it just wasn’t working. I’m not even joking when I say that the words I’ve deleted from this book over the years probably equal the number of words that are in the final version. I’ve deleted characters, alternate timelines, and plotlines that took the characters in different directions. Even some parts of the story that I absolutely loved. All in hopes of making this the best book it can be.
I’ve loved this story, these characters from the initial idea spark about a girl who gives good luck with a kiss but ends up cursing a boy instead. It’s also a story of sisters, and friendship, and falling in love even when everything is screaming at you not to. I remember thinking more times than I can count that I’d broken my book. That my book broke me. But I never gave up hope for this book. I never stopped loving it and wanting to see it on shelves and in the hands of readers. As writers, that’s what we want. For our books to find the readers — teens especially — that need those exact stories.
That one thought is what ultimately kept me from giving up and walking away from The Holloway Girls and their stories. And it’s what led me to this version of their story that finally feels like the one I was always trying to tell all along. The one that I cannot wait to share with all of you.
Cover design by Nicole Hower and Brittany Vibbert, Cover art by Ana Hard
Title The Holloway Girls
Author Susan Crispell
Target Audience Young Adult
Publication Date June 7th 2022 by Sourcebooks Fire
Find It On Goodreads ● Amazon ● Chapters ● The Book Depository ● Barnes & Noble ● IndieBound
As a Holloway girl, this book is your legacy. You must agree to follow the rules, binding both Holloway girls and those you choose to kiss to the luck of the kissing season. Your kissing season will begin with the summer solstice that follows your sixteenth birthday. For that year, everyone you kiss will be granted a stroke of good luck.
During the kissing season, one kiss from Remy or her older sister Maggie will give the boy — or girl — good luck. Or so it has been for all the Holloway girls before. But this year, Remy’s first season, she doesn’t follow the rules, dooming the boy she kisses to bad luck that almost kills him and leaving Remy with a cursed kissing season.
Now Remy is adamant about keeping her lips to herself. But the new boy in town is making it hard to keep her promise. Especially because he seems to really want to get to know her, and isn’t just using her for the Holloway luck. But before she can even think about kissing someone else, she’ll have to find a way to fix the curse, or else her family’s legacy will be tainted forever.
