AUTHOR
Joyce Scarbrough
BOOKS BY JOYCE SCARBROUGH
Signed copies of all novels available at:
True Blue
ISBN-13: 978-1537368856
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It's 1972 in Chickasaw, Alabama—a time when kids ride their bikes all over town, spend lazy summer days finding shapes in the clouds, squirt each other with the water hose, catch lightning bugs in a jar, and play outside until the streetlights come on. Best friends Jeana, Wade, and Billy Joe have lived on the same street all their lives, but things start to change the summer after the fourth grade. The boys begin to look at Jeana and each other differently, and puberty is getting close to rearing its ugly head. Can the three of them stay friends, or will someone's heart get broken? And who is that new boy in Chickasaw with the royal blue eyes?
Fans of Stand By Me and Bridge to Terabithia will love the friendship bond between the characters and how it's affected by the sweet adolescent love story reminiscent of The Wonder Years. This is a book about growing up that's both for kids who are still in the middle of it, and for adults who want to remember what it was like.
Royal Blue
ISBN-13: 978-1537612232
Jeana and the boys are now sophomores at Vigor High School. Jeana still thinks she'll never find a boy like the men in the novels she loves to read, so when Mickey Royal moves back to Chickasaw from Washington, Jeana is baffled by her instant attraction to this three-sport athlete with the bluest eyes she's ever seen. Wade Strickland has gone from the sweet boy she grew up with to the reigning football phenom on the varsity team, setting him on a path to violence with Mickey from their first encounter. Billy Joe DuBose is still Jeana's wise-cracking best friend who bonds with Mickey instantly—or is he only pretending so he can keep an eye on Jeana? And which boy will be the one to win Jeana's heart?
Played out against a landscape painted with the music, muscle cars, and culture of the late seventies—sans disco of course—this second installment of the True Blue Trilogy is like the American Graffiti of the classic rock era.
True Blue Forever
ISBN-13: 978-1537775456
1980—senior year! In this final installment of the True Blue Trilogy, it's getting harder than ever for Jeana to deal with the intense and violent relationships that Mickey, Wade, and Billy Joe have with her and with each other, and they all have tough choices to make about college and the rest of their lives. Just when they think they have things all figured out, tragedy strikes and everything changes, forcing Jeana to make the hardest decision she'll ever have to make. The road they travel to adulthood is paved with laughter, tears, and more than one kind of heartache, but Jeana holds on through it all to the one thing she never questions: a love that's True Blue.
Fans of The Notebook will revel in the enduring love story, and baseball fans will adore the father/son dynamics like those in Field of Dreams.
After Me
ISBN-13: 978-1500740221
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After she’s murdered by an Internet predator, 18-year-old Jada Gayle arrives in the Afterlife Admissions office and discovers that an Administrative Hold has been placed on her account. Flo—Jada’s Afterlife Advisor—informs her that she must stay among the living until she finds and stops the man who murdered her. The now “transdead” Jada assumes the identity of a homeless teen and gets assigned to a nice foster home in Miami’s Coconut Grove where she’s expected to simply fit in as she hunts down her killer. But blending in isn’t so easy when you’re a zombie girl with super strength.
To make things worse, Jada hasn’t felt normal human emotions since her father and best friend died in an accident, so imagine her surprise when she discovers an addendum to her termination agreement was inadvertently left out of her paperwork and means she now must learn to deal with real feelings. How can a dead girl be expected to feel anything when life had left her so empty? Then she meets Lew Stanton—captain of the chess team and computer whiz who makes her dead heart beat phantom rhythms in her chest. How is any self-respecting dead girl supposed to focus on killing scumbags when she has the hots for a nerd?
While Jada deals with all this unwanted teenage angst, the man who murdered her is closing in on more foolish girls. Jada thinks she has plenty of time to handle everything until the night she gets a terrifying message: I HAVE YOUR FRIEND.
After Her
ISBN-13: 978-1686612756
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Like so many men in Alabama, Wade Strickland’s father thinks God created football on the 8th day. He makes Wade start using steroids when he’s 14 years old and justifies it by telling Wade he’s too dumb to do anything else but play football. After years of abuse from his father and a broken heart from losing the only girl he’ll ever love, Wade wraps his Corvette around a tree when he’s eighteen and takes his own life.
When he wakes up in the Afterlife Admissions office, his advisor named Flo tells him that there’s an administrative hold on his Afterlife Account and he has to serve time as a Transdead Trustee and prevent other young athletes from using steroids in order to clear it. If that’s not bad enough, the first guy he has to help is a baseball player like the blue-eyed Boy Scout who stole the girl he loves.
Wade toughs it out and actually becomes friends with the guy he has to help, but he runs into trouble when he meets a girl who looks just like the one he can’t forget, and she needs his help too. What’s a lovesick dead guy to do? It’s enough to drive Wade to drinking, but wouldn’t you know it? Dead guys can’t get drunk.
Different Roads
ISBN-13: 978-1517570088
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When Jaycee Stevens is six years old, her mother dies and leaves her with an abusive drunk of a father who only remembers she’s there when she gets in trouble. She grows up a foul-mouthed hellion who doesn’t take crap off anyone, and she lives in fear of anyone finding out she's also a love-starved little girl terrified of the dark. By the time she's seventeen, Jaycee has outrageous behavior down to an art. Her intrepid spirit carries her to college on an athletic scholarship, but she's tripped up there by a poor little rich boy on the baseball team named Bud Stanton. Bud hides in a bottle just like Jaycee's old man, and the last thing she wants is to get mixed up with another drunk. He's everything she despises, and she wants him more than she's ever wanted anything. When she finally stops fighting her attraction to him, they fall hard for each other, and God help anyone who gets caught in the crossfire.
Jaycee and Bud are an emotional paradox: drawn to each other because they're so much alike, and constantly at war for the same reason. They fight as frequently and as physically as they make love, but Bud's arms are the only place Jaycee has ever felt safe from the terror of her recurring nightmares. Their rollercoaster life is gritty, touching, and funny, and just when they think they've made it safely to the end of their wild ride, Jaycee's childhood comes back to derail her when she has to go home and face her biggest fear: What happened to her in the dark?
Shades of Blue
ISBN-13: 978-1517546748
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Southern Gothic about two kids precariously balanced on the ledge overlooking the chasm of adulthood, holding on to each other to keep from going over. Their innocence is shattered the day JoJo sees the bruises on Sam's back and knows his stepfather is beating him. And Sam won't let her tell anyone because of the hold his stepfather has on his mother and the power his wealthy family wields in the small Georgia town where they live. As JoJo tries to convince Sam to get away from the abuse, they discover just how dark the family secrets are, and just how dangerous of a man his stepfather really is.
Symmetry
ISBN-13: 978-1628302219
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Jessica Cassady is a copyeditor for a small newspaper in Georgia where her husband Lee is a sportswriter. While he’s at a convention in New York, Jess calls his hotel room in the middle of the night and a woman answers the phone. Lee swears things aren't what they seem, but Jess still kicks him out. While she's deciding whether or not to believe his story and forgive him, she realizes her hair pulling is more than just a nervous habit and finds out she has a condition called trichotillomania. As if that's not enough to deal with, her domineering mother shows up for a surprise visit.
Things become even more complicated when she runs into Noah Hamilton, a sweet, unassuming history teacher from her past. Jess’s interest in Noah makes Lee even more determined to win back his wife. Sparks fly as these two polar opposites on the testosterone scale compete for Jess's affection, and it makes Jess wonder if she should forego the beefcake brigade and give the sensitive type a try like her cat and her best friend Deb want her to do, or should she give in to the addictive rush she's always felt whenever she's close to Lee?
Will Jess be able to find her emotional center, decide which man is right for her and finally achieve the symmetry she craves in every aspect of her life? It's enough to make any girl pull out her hair!