Mindful Musings Book Blog

The author is generously giving away FIVE ecopies of this novel for Kindles! Enter to win the random drawing by commenting on this post below. How do you eat your jelly beans? Randomly? The best ones first? Or last? Poppy has a system. She arranges her jelly beans by color and flavor, then eats them in order: saving the best for last. It’s how she eats her jelly beans, and it’s how she lives her life. Until now. My contemporary YA fiction, The Jelly Bean Crisis , follows a straight-A student who pulls out of school for 30 days to try and find her true passion. Whether you’re sixteen or sixty, the world is full of possibilities. I love the idea of taking a time-out to redefine what happiness is for you. And then going for it! Excerpt: I’d used jelly beans to make decisions since my tenth birthday. My uncle in New York sent me a huge bag full of them, and a matching birthday card. The colors bounced off each other; reds, greens, whites, oranges. Before eating a single one, I spread them

Admission #1: I only found this novel because I was requesting Grabenstein’s Lemoncello Library series online from my local library for my kids. If I hadn’t scrolled all the way to the bottom of the search results, I might never have known he’d also written books for adults! Admission #2: After 13 years of New Jersey living, I have never been “down the shore.” Every summer I say I’ll make at least a day trip, but I never do find the time to get away. L Well, this story stole my last bit of motivation to hit the beach! Not because it’s a bad book, but because it’s a clear depiction of a place that frankly holds no appeal. Beginning with the introduction of annoying tourists and their bratty children, moving on to psychotic vagrants and drug paraphernalia peppering the sand, and, closing out the trifecta, murder on a boardwalk ride! Clearly not much here screams “vacation.” But just when I’m about to write off Sea Haven and all its sister cities, I read about the tomato, mozzarella, and