It’s the weekend which hopefully means a chance to snuggle up with a book for many of you. Today, Nia Lucas joins me with the blog tour for her new novel, Love Punked.

When her life is irrevocably altered by a post-Rave tryst on her mother’s floral patio recliner, Erin Roberts’ long-standing relationship with Humiliation takes her down a path that’s not so much ‘less well trodden’, more ‘perilous descent down sheer cliffs’.

Armed with a fierce devotion to her best friend and the unrequited love for the boy she might have accidentally married at age seven, when Erin falls pregnant at sixteen, life veers off at a most unexpected tangent.

Her journey to adulthood is far from ordinary as Erin learns that protecting the hearts of those most precious to you isn’t balm enough when your Love Punked heart is as sore as your freshly tattooed arse.

Whilst raising football prodigies and trying not to get stuck in lifts with Social Work clients who hate her, Erin discovers that sometimes you have to circumnavigate the globe to find the very thing that was there all along.

Erin has just turned sixteen. She is not the most popular of people with her peers but she knows that all she needs is her best friend Lees. If she could just get Daniel to fancy her too, it would make things even better.

However, when one night changes the course of her life, she has to make some very big adjustments with poignant and sometimes hilarious results.

From the first chapter, I knew that I was going to love Erin and her story.

With her being sixteen at the start of this novel, she is the same age I was in the middle of the 90’s (where this book is primarily set,) I found her very relatable. I saw flashes of awkwardness from my teen years in parts of her story. It made me feel quite nostalgic in places.

I couldn’t imagine being a mother at her age.

The plot is wonderfully developed, compelling and it all unfolds at a good pace. When I consider how this book begins, I really couldn’t predict how it was going to end.

Continue reading →

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