about the book
Sixteen-year-old Imogen can break wooden boards with her feet. She can toss a man twice her size with ease. And when the diner where she is eating one day is held up by a teenaged gunman leading to a shootout between the gunman and the cops, Imogen is ready to help.
Only she does nothing.
She finds herself cowering down inside the diner and doing nothing, along with the rest of the witnesses to the shootout. The gunman ends up dead, and Imogen did nothing.
Imogen thought her black belt in Tae Kwon Do made her tougher than anyone else. But when it really mattered, where was all that toughness? Where was all that self-confidence? She could have stopped the gunman! She could have stopped him from dying!
The toughness and confidence are gone. Now Imogen doesn’t quite know who she is. Her schoolwork is failing, and she feels dead inside. She tempts fate by walking down dangerous streets alone, but nothing ever happens. She just wants a chance to prove that she could, can, and would do something the next time her martial arts and confidence really matter.
Maybe the cute boy Ricky, who also was at the diner, could help her regain her confidence? He wants her to teach him how to throw a punch.
She wants him to punch her. It is a match made in martial arts heaven…
about the author
Sarah Skilton and her sister grew up in the Chicago suburbs writing radio shows together, which they would record on cassette tapes (they are not that old, she swears). Sarah would write dramas, comedies, soap operas, talk shows, and advertisements. Sometimes they were about cats. Sometimes they were about Howl Aloud, a pill Sarah and her sister “invented” that, once swallowed, would make you able to howl like a wolf….
Unsurprisingly, Sarah got a degree in TV/Radio from Ithaca College in New York. After graduation she moved to Los Angeles and got work as a production assistant, an extra in TV shows, a reviewer of films, a script analyst, and a blogger for a marketing company in Japan.
All this time Sarah tried to make a living as a screen writer as well, but she learned that it is incredibly hard to make a living doing such work. Therefore, after ten years, Sarah turned back to one of her first loves—novel writing. She managed to sell her first YA book to Amulet Books, and now she is a full-time author!
Her husband, Joe Skilton, is a professional magician. While Sarah hasn’t yet been sawed in half during one of his shows, there is still time.
Source:
Author website
Author interview : Sophia the Writer
Also by Sarah Skilton:
High and Dry. Amulet Books. 2014.
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