THE BOOK: Girl Without Borders
PUBLISHED IN: 2013
THE AUTHOR: Katya Mills
THE EDITOR: Katya Mills
THE PUBLISHER: Amazon.com
SUMMARY: Chicago. West side. Follow the paths of three young lovers, at the turn of the millennium. Working-class punks and degenerate-labelled youth move across the urban landscape, effortlessly, at night. Suffering the depths to which culture has sunk. Looking for refuge. Fearless in love.
Will is a young man with a big heart and big dreams. Intelligent, sensitive and compassionate. Determined to make a life for himself in the city. Determined to learn the code of the streets. He falls for a girl, Bella, who has a punk attitude and style all her own. In no time, she steals his heart. There is another woman, Cass who has her heart set on Will. But the love is unrequited. LIfe gets complicated, as Will gets lost in love. Danger, drama, and emotional turmoil loom on the horizon.
Generation X. Raised on punk rock, hip-hop and celebrity worship. Raised on high fructose corn-syrups. Pop and pop culture detritus. Raised on flat land, with crazy straws. Wannabe rockstars and burnouts. Follow the tale of youth who live and love large, in the shadow of the generation before them. Praying not to be reduced to culture’s blind carbon copies. Where love becomes power… with tragic consequences.
THE BACK STORY: “I began this story when I was living in Chicago, the heart of the setting. I finished the book a decade later. Having an emotional connection to a place is the foundation off of which I like to build my fictions. I wrote the book mostly in coffeehouses in Bucktown and Wicker Park, and I swear I almost got my ass kicked for using a laptop in a café in some parts of the city back then, pre-millenium. This is my first publication, and a complete – DIY- labor of love. I did everything and designed the cover. (I still do everything on my books, I just don’t design my covers anymore). I put everything and my heart into this work.”
WHY THIS TITLE: I have a MA in Psychology. I chose this title in consideration of BPD: borderline personality disorder. One of the main characters clearly suffers from this condition (and those around her suffer from her suffering from it, too). Just so you know, I do not preach psychology or discuss diagnoses within the text, it’s just a feeling you get by the characterization.
WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: The book is character-driven and told from the perspective of a young man who is struggling to makes sense of his life, not always thrilled to be caught between two or more women, somewhat aimless and reckless and pretty honest about it all. You might want to read it if there was a time in your life where you were fighting the tendency toward becoming jaded and/or numb. I cannot doll it up. If that sounds interesting to you, check it out. I do think my writing style is pretty original, but not everyone and their mother is into it, so be sure and read the sample.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
Yusuf Toropov (an Amazon reviewer) wrote: “A fresh, authentic, and confident new voice in American fiction. This is not a YA novel, a fact the cover design could do more to get across. Some minor quibbles: The book still needs a power edit for minor style errors, and perhaps a little cutting in places. And the female protagonist’s first name is not one I would have chosen. But tiny problems like that, juxtaposed with the feast of inventive, sprawling, muscular, character-driven writing here, are no big deal. Tiny problems just remind you that you are getting in on the ground floor with a writer who is going to do important things. Which she is.
“It’s marvelous stuff and you should read it RIGHT NOW — a) because it’s superb and b) so you can say you saw it all coming.”
Sarah V. Arnold (an Amazon reviewer) wrote: “With an intriguing plot line, storytelling that channels bits of Hemingway and Faulkner, and descriptions reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mills creates a rich American subculture in which she places her characters–deeply fragile, but living forcefully, and at times, frantically. The read is entertaining and enveloping; my only negative is that is left me wondering in a few places (I won’t give any spoilers)–is there a part 2 to follow? Definitely worth checking out!”
AUTHOR PROFILE: Katya was born on February 1st,1973, and raised in New Hampshire. She recently published her first novel, Girl Without Borders. She exchanged a whole lot of drama on the streets of Oakland and Chicago, for a simple life. Today she lives in California with her two kittens, Boo and Mouse. She is a survivor.
Katya has been reading and writing since an early age. She received her BA in English Literature from Northwestern University, and more recently, her MA in Psychology. She has developed a signature style all her own. Academics and street science equally inform her writing.
Today she can often be found in her backyard, reading Edgar Allen Poe and gathering fresh mint and oregano. Her old Royal typewriter has taken a backseat to her Chromebook. She writes dark, psychological thrillers. Her characters are often young punks with the ‘me against the world’ mentality. You can find her long form work (including 2 novels, 1 novella, and a short story) on her Amazon Author page: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?ie=UTF8&text=Katya+Mills&search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Katya+Mills&sort=relevancerank
AUTHOR COMMENTS: All I have to say is thank you to Darrell and the owners of this website for helping independent authors find readers and vice versa. And if you do like my work, good news, you can expect many more publications from me going forward. Right now I am on pace to deliver one novella every six months. I really love to write (sometimes to the detriment of getting outdoors and really living).
SAMPLE CHAPTER: Here is the link to the sample on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Girl-Without-Borders-Katya-Mills-ebook/dp/B00F21WQ5E/
That redhead, Bella, dragged Will out nights to dance every couple of weeks, and in the day they got high together on the quilt on his bed and walked to the old Logan Beach Café a few blocks away (and miles from a beach) for huevos rancheros and coffee, then walked back and admired the facades of turn of the century homes with turrets and stained glass. She spoke of excavating her kitchen floor, vinyl over vinyl over vinyl. They laughed about the doors they stole out of an antique shop alley and rolled back to her apartment in a shopping cart.
She had a nice laugh. They returned to his place and made out but did not make love, and she had her mango paleta for dessert, he his horchata. The best summer afternoons were about storms coming over the city, and he would open all the windows and lie on the bed and the light would recede slowly, in hours, longer than the hymn of the breeze that rose to a wind that carried velvet sheets of rain, and she would rest her head on his chest as he drifted in and out of consciousness, and together they would fall away and meet up again, or miss each other and watch the other in sleep for a few peaceful moments. As a continuum it was meditative. They sometimes lay for twelve hours like this. The phone would ring and nobody would answer. The radio a room away pissed classical into time, and time was clear and the piss was sparkling and the two went well together so there was no reason to flush.
All that was missing were the wind chimes he remembered so well from the years he lived by the shore. Books did take him away. But life, when it was on, was fantastic. There needed be no going to distant imagined lands. The world was so small they knew it was round and found the poles and all that lay in between. And killed the cat.
Coming back to himself felt good, though it could be so very painful, like falling a couple of stories and hitting the ground so hard; hard as truth hits with a look from that pretty, pretty face that destroyed and rebuilt the entire human race, from knots of shedding twine to silk edged with lace.
The night turned in on itself, through much of it he slept, until half past three when he rose and watched a movie in the dark and alone, and Bella rose to embrace him with the sunrise. He played the beads on her wrist while she touched the seeds on his necklace and still she was tired, and they lay down together and pulled the sheet over themselves which he drew back again so to put his feet back on the floor and pull the tapestry over the window off its hooks to make the night go on into day while they lay in bed. What a dream this is, what a nightmare! He would have gone down and sucked the dirt off her toes had she asked, but she would not ask.
That afternoon was summer hot in America and they went to a diner and sat in a booth across from one another and were handed paper menus. Coffee was poured into heavy mugs before them. There were few people in the diner. Outside, a young child walked down the sidewalk with heavy feet, each arm wrapped around a wheel of cheese, past the large plate glass window and the two of them in the booth on the other side.
LOCAL OUTLETS: Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Girl-Without-Borders-Katya-Mills-ebook/dp/B00F21WQ5E/
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Barnes And Noble
PRICE: $9 Paperback $3.50 Kindle/Nook
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
email: katyamills@live.com twitter: katya444ever
website: www.katyamills.com
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 
Should be interesting based on the style Katya shows on her blog and on Google +–where I see a lot from her.
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Like always Katya, Our Awesome Sister, This Book has a Great Feel about it!!!
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