Oh my gosh, fam! I got so lucky with this one because not only did I get to be on this tour, but I actually got to get a physical copy of this one! I think it’s going to be perfect for the creative post that I have in mind for this one! Thanks again so much to the team at Fantastic Flying Book Club for hosting this blog tour and considering me as a host! Be sure to click on the banner to see the rest of the stops on the tour.

The Swarm is unrecognizable, untraceable, and unpredictable—random attacks on the streets of Chicago by a mob of crazed teens that leaves death in its wake. It’s been two years since the last attack, but Lia Finch has found clues that reveal the Swarm is ready to claim a new victim.

Lia is the only one still pursuing her father’s killers, two years after attorney Steven Finch’s murder by the Swarm. Devastated and desperate for answers, Lia will do anything to uncover the reasons behind his death and to stop someone else from being struck down. But due to debilitating asthma and PTSD that leaves her with a tenuous hold on reality, Lia is the last person to mount a crusade on her own.

After a close encounter with the Swarm puts Lia on their radar, she teams up with a teen hacker, a reporter, and a mysterious stranger who knows firsthand how the mob works. Together, they work to uncover the master puppeteer behind the group. Though if Lia and her network don’t stop the person pulling the strings—and fast—Lia may end up the next target.

Kimberly Gabriel started writing in fourth grade when she wrote, bound, and gave away books of terrible poetry to family and teachers as holiday gifts. Today she is an English teacher, who still squanders all free minutes to write and uses it as the best scapegoat for her laundry avoidance issues. When she is not teaching or writing, Kimberly is enjoying life with her husband, her three beautiful children, and a seriously beautiful boxer in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Every Stolen Breath is her debut novel and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection.

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to BLINK and Fantastic Flying Book Club for this free copy.

OMGGGGG. The fact that this book is based on real life events that aren’t that far back in the past is seriously creepy and terrible. So not only did Gabriel make this realistic fiction by having the story take place in the same city where these events took place – Chicago, IL – but made it so we could have someone to really connect with that was personally affected by these crimes.

In this book, there’s these group of teenagers that call themselves The Swarm, that basically gang kill a seemingly random person in public by surrounding them and beating on them until they die. It’s freaking crazy, and I don’t understand how people – especially teenagers – could see that doing stuff like this is okay. The Swarm has killed before, and they ended up targeting and killing Lia’s father. It may seem like their victims are chosen at random, but Lia thinks otherwise, and this is her journey of finding out what’s truly going on.

I feel like this is one of the first characters in a young adult novel that I’ve read recently that truly claims to suffer from PTSD. I feel like a lot of characters will try to brush it off, thinking that it’s just going to go away or that they are in some sort of funk. It’s very rare – at least in the books that I’ve read in the past – where a character will understand that what they are dealing with is PTSD. Although every character I’ve seen has some coping mechanism, I don’t know if they all truly work out in the end. To me, it’s more of a band-aid rather than a more permanent solution.

Why did I go off on that tangent? My bad.

I have to say that this book actually gave me some nightmarish thoughts. My father was raised in Chicago, and he did always warn me about making sure I never went there alone, was always aware of my surroundings, stay away from the non-tourist areas. Just stuff like that, which made me scared to go back at all. I wouldn’t even go back to see my grandparents before they ended up moving to Mississippi. So being in this world from Lia’s perspective, knowing that there are teenagers that are brutally killing random people, was just so scary.

So very, very scary.

Ugh I can’t even talk about how crazy this book gets! Seriously, if you are into YA thrillers, I’d recommend this one. This book kept me on the edge of my seat from the very beginning, and honestly it makes me even more wary about going into crowds alone. You never know what goes on in people’s minds, at any given day.

So I did something completely different for my creative post, and hopefully you guys like it! I don’t know why I chose to be morbid with this book, but I ended up writing a letter to Lia… from her dead father.

Well, no. Her father wasn’t dead when he wrote this, but this was written shortly before he was killed. Yes, yes see how morbid I am?

I hope this totally counts, and I hope you guys like it!

Lia,

By the time you read this… well you probably already know. I’m sorry for leaving you. You know that I would have never done anything to put your life in danger, and I should have been more careful. I know you’re going to have questions, and while I wouldn’t expect anything less, I CAN’T have you digging into this. It was my mistake getting in too deep, and I can’t dream about losing you too. I know it’s too late for me, but it’s not too late for you. Please… let this go. I will always love you. – Dad

Can I just say that I freaking love Canva? I didn’t have to put my crappy handwriting on an actual letter for this to be the way I wanted it to look like, except for the photo. And even then, it’s not that bad! In case you were wondering why I had both the photo and the text underneath, it’s in case the photo doesn’t load correctly.

But I seriously hope it does because it looks pretty cool.

Thank you, thank you, thank you so freaking much for this opportunity again, FFBC! And thank you fam for enjoying this post with me. I hope you liked it, and my creative post. Until next time.