2021 Carol Award Finalists (and a Giveaway!): S. E. Clancy & Victoria Grace the Jerkface

Happy Saturday! For the past 10 days (and today) I have had the privilege of chatting with all of the 2021 ACFW Carol Award Finalists! We are finishing up with the Young Adult category today and I’ll be posting the winners on Instagram tonight. Book award season is so fun – I love cheering on the finalists & the winners, and this series of posts I do every year is part of my celebration. Today I’m starting with S E Clancy and her young adult Carol Award finalist book Victoria Grace, the Jerkface! You can check out a list of all the finalists HERE and you can catch up on any posts you may have missed HERE.

VICTORIA GRACE, THE JERKFACE
GENRE: Inspirational Young Adult Fiction
PUBLISHER: WhiteSpark
RELEASE DATE: February 26, 2020
PAGES: 232

Ever since Tori Weston and MamaBear were abandoned by her dad, finances have been tighter than a new pair of skinny jeans. As if keeping her grades up for scholarships and working every spare moment weren’t enough, Tori gets suckered into visiting a retirement home and paired with ancient resident Marigold Williams. After learning she’s the only one to visit Marigold in decades, Tori becomes a regular at Willow Springs. Besides, someone has to help with her history homework.

Corbin Dallas barges into Tori’s life with a prosthetic leg and a dimple, working his way into her hectic schedule. Though she tries to deny it, there’s something beyond his Texan drawl that gets Tori hoping she’s more than his sidekick. Together, they race to find Marigold’s missing family before she fades away. Tori ditches her soul-sucking job, along with her dreams of having a paint-peeled clunker to call her own, in order to help her friend one last time.

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I asked the author…

What is something God taught you as you wrote Victoria grace, the jerkface?

Victoria Grace the Jerkface was never meant to be a full-length novel. It started out as a flash fiction, under 500 words. Yet, the characters really stayed with me, especially Marigold. No one, least of all me, expects a 90-something-year old woman to be one of the main characters in a Young Adult story. Around the same time as my original short story, a photographer Tom Hussey had a series of photos from his collection “Reflections of the Past” circulating on social media. Each older person looked into a mirror to see a younger version of themselves.

God nudged me through one particular picture. He reminded me that we often forget that our older generations have amazing stories to tell. Marigold needed to tell her story to Tori in a way that didn’t preach. Marigold needed to have meaning, grace, and laughter. So, it was ironic for God to teach me through my own words to honor the past for our future generations, but to still have humor and sarcasm along the way.

An adrenaline junkie, S.E. Clancy has skydived and worked as a 9-1-1 dispatcher prior to releasing stories in anthologies, publishing contemporary Biblical retellings including True and Mercy. Her young adult novel Victoria Grace the Jerkface (WhiteFire Publishing) is a semi-finalist for the 2021 ACFW Carol Awards. She currently serves on the Inspire Christian Writers board and is a co-leader of Quills, a local writer’s group. A bit of a sci-fi nerd, geek, and self-proclaimed dork, there isn’t much she won’t try at least once … unless it involves mayonnaise, because that stuff is just gross.

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S E Clancy is offering a signed, print copy of Victoria Grace, the Jerkface to one of my readers! (US only. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.) This giveaway is subject to Reading Is My SuperPower’s giveaway policies which can be found here. Enter via the Rafflecopter form below.

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What about you? What makes you want to read the young adult Carol Award finalist Victoria Grace, the Jerkface by S E Clancy? Or, if you’ve read it already, what did you love about it?