Alex Flinn
Love Jacaranda is out in the world! Hope you'll check out this fun wish-fulfillment romance!
Now, bio:
I grew up on a street called Salem Court. This probably influenced my interest in witches. When I was five, my mom said I should be an author. And when I was eight, I got my first rejection letter from Highlights Magazine.
I learned to read early. But I compensated for this early proficiency by absolutely refusing to read the programmed readers required by the school system -- workbooks where you read the story, then answered the questions. When the other kids were on Book 20, I was on Book 1! My teacher, Mrs. Zeiser, told my mother, "Alexandra marches to her own drummer." I don't think that was supposed to be a compliment.
My family moved to Miami when I was in middle school. I had a really hard time making friends, so I spent a lot of time reading and writing then. By high school, I'd made some friends and gotten involved in various "gifted and talented" performing arts programs. I studied opera in college (I'm a coloratura -- the really loud, high-pitched sopranos.) and then went to law school.
It was law school that probably helped with my first novel. Breathing Underwater deals with the serious and all-too-common problem of dating violence. I based the book on my experiences interning with the State Attorney's Office and volunteering with battered women. I thought this was a really important topic, as 27 percent of teenage girls surveyed have been hit by a boyfriend. I'm happy that the book is so popular, and if you are reading this bio because the book was assigned for school, I'm happy about that too.
I think I write for young-adults because I never quite got over being one. In my mind, I am still 13-years-old, running laps on the athletic field, wearing this really baggy white gymsuit. I’m continually amazed at the idea that I have a checking account and a mortgage. So I try to write books that gymsuit girl might enjoy. It’s a way of going back to being thirteen . . . knowing what I know now.
Right now, I live half a mile away from my old middle school, in Palmetto Bay, a suburb of Miami, with my husband, daughters, dogs, and cats.
“Good to know: Doctors can't cure you of being a beast.”
“In stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, they always say the heroine is 'as good as she is beautiful.' I wondered if people just wanted that to be true, wanted the beautiful to be good. I wondered if they wanted the ugly to be bad because then they wouldn't have to feel bad for them.”
“...if there´s a beast, maybe he´s just a regular guy with a skin conditon or something. Maybe he just needs some understanding. Maybe we judge people to much by their looks because it´s easier than seeing what´s really important.”
“Maybe Cinderella was the bad guy in the story, and her stepsisters were just nerdy girls who wanted a boyfriend. How politically correct was it, really, to make the villains ugly? And how realistic? In my experience, it was usually the pretty people who were mean to the ugly ones, not the other way.”
“I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes and the stars though his soul" - Victor Hugo”
“To be worthy of a princess, you must face your dragon... Your greatest fear.”
“I'm a better person when I'm with you. I don't want to stop being that person. I don't want you to go”
“I only came to give you a second chance.”
“Beside me, Philippe and Meg hold hands. He murmurs something that sounds like, "my dear leetle mongoose." I wish he'd turn back into a frog and hop away.”
“The magic is over, but its effects will live forever.”
“I just knew. There was no movie ending. There was only an ending.”
“Something with inner beauty will live forever, like the scent of a rose.”
“By the time Vizzini fell over, dead, I'd finished my popcorn and put the bag down. I wanted some more. It seemed like the beast was always hungry. I wondered, if I was transformed back, would I be fat?”
“Will, you look like hell!" I yelled through the glass door."I can't say how you look," he said. "But if you look like you sound, you look like a jerk. Please help me.”
“I can't go on like this”
“It's easier to fake it. When you fake it for sixteen years, it becomes part of you, something you don't think about.”
“But usually, I watched Linda read. I couldn't believe she'd read so much in summer! Sometimes she laughed, reading her book, and one time she even cried. I didn't know how anyone could make such a big deal about books.”
“You ever think that school dances are a form of legalized prostitution?”
“She's using me. And I like it.”
“Sometimes, unexpected things can happen.”
“Isso não funcionará, tentar conhecer alguém através da Internet, encontrar o amor dessa maneira. Não funcionará.-Por que diabos não? Quero dizer, é claro que alguns fingem, mas não podem ser todos...-Você não pode se apaixonar através de um computador. Não é amor verdadeiro.-As pessoas se conhecem através da internet o tempo todo. Até se casam.-Uma coisa é conhecer pessoas na Internet, então conhecer a pessoa e seapaixonar. Outra totalmente diferente é levar uma relação completa nainternet, convencer a você mesmo de que está apaixonado a trinta estados de distancia...”
“What happened to romance? sappy soppy longhand love letters.”
“What happened to romance?”
“I'm a bat, want to see me fly?”
“It had seemed like such a good, such a romantic idea, to drive and not stop for gas.”
“I’m a girl. Every girl pretends she’s a princess at one point, no matter how little her life is like that. And I like the idea of ‘happily ever after.”
“I wonder how many times in my life I would have been able to prevent something, change something, do something different, if only I'd listened to someone.”
“but now it all floods back—the euphoria of loving her, the agony that she's leaving, that i'll lose her”
“But sometimes it is just impossible to obey blindly. Sometimes a child must strike out on her own. A child cannot be a child forever”
“This is where he should say that he is in love with me, that I have changed his life and that he loves me for it. But he doesn't. Is it because he is shy? Or because he is too young to say such a thing? Or is it merely because he does not love me? The worst of it is, I am falling in love with him.”
“So what if I cannot be a model, if I am no longer considered beautiful, if Malvolia is trying to catch me. I am climbing a tree! And I am doing so with Jack.”
“I am a coward. I am a cowardly coward, full of cowardice.”
“Then what is there for you? What is there for you if he does not love you?" Nothing.”
“A boy admiring a pretty girl. A rare thing to be certain. But love—true love—is something else.”
“Sometimes, when one communicates with others, one produces results.”
“Then Jack takes me in his arms, and although I am still distraught, I cannot help but notice how well I fit in them, my head perfectly right for the crook of his neck.”
“I learned that it is possible to make conversation with anyone, if you figure out what they wish to discuss.”
“People are very fearful these days.”
“Still, as I watch the sun journey higher up on the horizon, I appreciate that, for only the second time in my entire life, I am alone, blessedly alone, with no one to tell me what to do or what to wear, no one to have to be polite to. Nothing. But I do not wish to be alone, not entirely. Now that I am finally alone, it feels...lonely.”
“Yeah, but where I come from, we have lights at night." "We do, too. They are called stars. They are quite romantic.”
“you desire to escape. I wish to run away. I thought we might help each other.”
“I wish to go with you, not as man and wife, but merely as friends, travel companions, the sort of happy-go-lucky chums about whom rollicking old ballads of the road are written.”
“I am a prisoner of love.”
“his brown eyes are intoxicating, and in that moment, I see my escape.”
“But this girl isn't just beautiful. She's perfect in a way that's unreal”
“I am living my death, little by little, each day.”
“You are right. I have no idea, and it is none of my business, and I was taught to obey my parents. But sometimes it is just impossible to obey blindly.Sometimes a child must strike out on her own. A child cannot be a child forever, whether that means not touching a spindle or . . . or . . .”
“Even in my time, we knew that men were not incharge. Oh, they might bluster as if they were. But when it came down to it, we women bore much of the influence. Often, my father would make some grand pronouncement in the evening. And the next morning, he had changed his mind. After a while, I realized that it was my mother who had changed it, quietly, in the night.”
“I remember how Talia got me to talk about the gardening thing. I’ve never told anyone else about that, but with this girl, I sort of feel like I can be myself without worrying about looking uncool. After all, she doesn’t even know what “cool” is.”
“i want to go back to bed. but i don't just want to go back to bed.”