My Journey to the Ocean by Lena Mikado
What if you woke up one day only to find out that everything has changed forever?
Elena knows what she wants from life, she has her whole world charted out and is engaged to be married to Alex, but when she takes a trip across the Atlantic Ocean to the beautiful southern charm of Saint Simons Island, Georgia, her whole world is rocked and rolled when she meets handsome Chris. No one told her she may have to make a choice, but now, faced with the inevitable reality, she realizes that her final destination is not nearly as important as her endless Journey to the Ocean.
Targeted Age Group:: YA and adults
Heat/Violence Level: Heat Level 5 – NC-17
What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
When I was a little girl growing up in Voronezh, Russia, I have always dreamed of the Big Love. That Love that can take your breath away, make your heart perform crazy somersaults and inspire you to do something that will change everything. And my dream came true in a way that I could never have possibly imagined. Every morning when I open my eyes and look around, I can’t believe how happy and lucky I am. So one day it occurred to me that I wanted everyone on the planet to be as breathtakingly happy as I was. Everybody says, “Just follow your heart”, but doing exactly that is not easy sometimes. At least at first. I didn’t quite had a plan as to how I would bring happiness to everyone in the world, so I started doing the only thing I could do – write. It was almost a journal, some musings on how I met my Big Love. When I was writing, I imagined talking to our first son as if he was already grown. I wanted him to know how we met. I wanted him to know that we were not just mom and dad – we were Chris and Elena – wild, daring and madly in love. I hope that this novel will inspire everyone who reads it to truly “listen to their hearts”. They never lie. It’s just that sometimes they tell us something we don’t want to hear, but that doesn’t make it less of a true. I hope that it will help everyone to remember their childhood dreams, to leave behind all the rules we created for ourselves, and to just live the life you have always imagined. It is yours to live.
How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
All the characters are real :).
Book Sample
The wide-open beach was a wet carpet of white sand under our feet, and the ocean was rolling infinitely with dark and playful waves. The water was almost invisible, the great unknown, but it was definitely and unavoidably there. We could taste the crystals of sea salt on our lips, we could feel the light breeze brushing play-fully against our cheeks, and we could hear the serenade of the tide resonate somewhere deep in our rib cages. Sometimes you can’t see love – perhaps because sometimes you refuse to see it – but it doesn’t make its presence less there. All your senses are involved and no matter how hard you may try to shake the feeling off, it perseveres, it survives, and, most importantly, it stubbornly stays with you forever.
“Look, a lounge chair. Let’s have a seat.” Chris stretched his lean body out on the chair, his head kicked back on the reclined seat, the night breeze playing with his hair.
“Wow, you are a real gentleman,” I raised my eyebrows sarcastically and propped my fists against my hips.
“Easy, mama,” Chris smiled. “There’s plenty of space for both of us.”
I stood there for a few seconds with apprehension. If I sat down in that lounge chair, with my back against his chest, his arms wrapped around my waist, and stared at the ocean in front of us, it would quite possibly be the most romantic fucking moment in my entire life. I read about it in books, I cried over the scenes like that in my favorite movies, I dreamed about it in my glittery, fluffy, pink, girly dreams. I could die for it. I could get one of my hands chopped off for it. But the guy wasn’t my fiancé. A tiny little problem.
“Elena. It’s just a lounge chair,” Chris laughed and looked at me with those dirty, dirty eyes. God. Or whoever is out there. Help.
I decided that I could have a seat – after all, my legs were killing me after a long day in the park and if I sat down on the sand it would have just been just outright bizarre. So I laid down, my head propped against his chest, closed my eyes, and let the moon rays perform their crazy dance at the tips of my eyelashes. And we just stayed there. Lulled by the tranquil song of the rolling waves, we stayed there infinitely. The time will go by, the seconds and minutes of our lives will speed past us, people around us will change, the world that we have known will transform into something else, but we will always stay there – on that beach in Daytona, on that warm and breezy night in July 2004. Because moments like that don’t fade, don’t disappear. They linger in our bones, they dance on the top of pink clouds at sunset, they melt into books and movies and shape the beautiful stories of love that are passed on from generation to generation. We didn’t know what the future held for us, but then again – we didn’t need to know that. We had that moment and it made all our worries about future irrelevant. Who needs future when you have eternity? I understood that eternal love wasn’t an overly exaggerated, silly metaphor. It simply stood for something that will make the heart of a great-grandmother flutter as if she were still twenty-one. For some-thing that will make an elderly widower taking a stroll with a cane smile boyishly. For something that will make that second when you draw your last breath joyful, meaningful, and not even a tiny little bit sad.
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