Learning to Swear in America | Giveaway + Guest Post by Author Katie Kennedy

Hi guys, today I have the lovely Katie Kennedy here to talk about her upcoming debut, LEARNING TO SWEAR IN AMERICA. If you know me, you know I really love science in my YA and I’m especially partial to physics, so this book has been on my to-be-read list since I first heard about it. I love that there’s this 17-year-old physics prodigy who’s going to learn how to be a teenager from this normal kid…with a backdrop of living your life to the fullest. SO my kind of book.

Read on to find out more about the book, then hear from Yuri (the physicist) and Dovie (the normal kid) themselves on their Top Five things you should do (spoiler: they’re pretty funny). Oh, and did I mention there’s an adorable swag giveaway? Check it all out below!

Learning to Swear in America

Goodreads
Author: Katie Kennedy
Find the author: Website, Twitter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Publication date: July 5th 2016
Buy It: Indigo.ca | Amazon.com | The Book Depository | iBooks | Google Books | Audible

A Summer/Fall 2016 Indies Introduce selection
An asteroid is hurtling toward Earth. A big, bad one. Maybe not kill-all-the-dinosaurs bad, but at least kill-everyone-in-California-and-wipe-out-Japan-with-a-tsunami bad. Yuri, a physicist prodigy from Russia, has been recruited to aid NASA as they calculate a plan to avoid disaster.
The good news is Yuri knows how to stop the asteroid--his research in antimatter will probably win him a Nobel prize if there's ever another Nobel prize awarded. But the trouble is, even though NASA asked for his help, no one there will listen to him. He's seventeen, and they've been studying physics longer than he's been alive.
Then he meets (pretty, wild, unpredictable) Dovie, who lives like a normal teenager, oblivious to the impending doom. Being with her, on the adventures she plans when he's not at NASA, Yuri catches a glimpse of what it means to save the world and live a life worth saving.
Prepare to laugh, cry, cringe, and have your mind burst open with the questions of the universe.

 

Hi! I’m Katie Kennedy, and Tiff asked me to share with you Dovie’s top five things a seventeen year old should do—and Yuri’s top five things a physicist should not do. So I asked them, and here’s what they told me. (I should note that Yuri hasn’t mastered English articles—a, an, the—and so he just skips them. You get used to it after a few minutes of talking with him.)

DOVIE’S TOP FIVE THINGS A SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD SHOULD DO:

1. If you get a chance, pilfer a doughnut. You never know what it will lead to. The worst case scenario is you get to eat a doughnut, right?

2. Do stuff with your brother. Lennon and I like to watch bad movies we’ve seen a thousand times and say the dialogue with the actors and eat potato chips out of the same bag. I mean, he’s my brother, and obviously he’s annoying. But I still love him, you know?

3. Share snacks. I don’t believe in the separate-bags concept—it helps lead to the atomization of post-industrial society. I mean, look at Yuri. You think he’s ever shared a bag of chips with anybody in his life? Doubtful.

4. Study the Enlightenment, in case someday a kinda cute Russian physicist needs life advice.

5. Create. Use any medium you want—paint or clay or fabric or old cars or wood or a saxophone, but make some kind of art. Because you’re not just creating art, you’re becoming art. If you don’t understand this, you need to keep creating until you do.

6. Keep all your colors. Don’t be less for anybody. Don’t be quieter or more muted or more pruned. Look at me—I mean this: keep all your colors

7. Um, also when someone asks you to list five things, you should really just list things until you’re done. Because people can’t be squished into a bullet-point list.

YURI’S TOP FIVE THINGS A PHYSICIST SHOULD NOT DO:

1. Climb over hotel roof, or down side of hotel, particularly while wearing dress shoes. When you think about forces involved—especially gravity—this becomes even more apparent.

2. Take fashion risks. It’s best to alternate between grey and black suits for work. Wearing blue dress shirt is okay for casual occasions. You can wear yellow dress shirt if you’re affiliated with institution in some wild Bohemian type of place, like California or Paris. But don’t try that in Moscow.

3. Pretend not to be as smart as they are because older physicists don’t believe in their abilities. If you’re smartest guy in room and somebody else doesn’t like it, they can go get better.

4. Watch baseball. Have you seen this game? It is very slow. This is may be why America has so many foreign adventures—it can fit one in between periods of play. Probably also it is why Americans do so well in world wars—they’re well rested.

5. Fail to win Nobel Prize.

(Also I would like to apologize for Dovie exceeding her numeric limit. Numbers should be taken seriously.)

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Thanks, Katie, for that hilarious list – I’m so looking forward to seeing how Yuri and Dovie interact – and how they save the world!

 

Katie has a bunch of really fun LEARNING TO SWEAR IN AMERICA swag including signed bookmarks, door hangers and buttons that she’s offering to two lucky readers.  Sign up below – and yes, this giveaway is international!

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