[Wattys 2022 Winner!] Vanessa Brooks, an anxious and cynical seventeen year-old, discovers she can travel to the summer of 1953 through the run-down community pool in her rural Michigan town and risks her future as she falls for a boy who lives in the past.
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On the last day of junior year, Vanessa Brooks joins her friends for a traditional jump into the city pool to celebrate the beginning of summer and the last year they plan to spend in Palmer, Michigan; a dead-end riverside town with an eerily abandoned historic main street and decaying Victorian mansions.
But when she resurfaces her classmates have been replaced by girls in retro swimsuits and bathing caps and guys in thigh-baring briefs with cigarettes tucked behind their ears. When Pete Harrison, an unfamiliar face who seems somewhat familiar with hers, offers a dizzy and confused Vanessa a towel and a ride home, she discovers her house and family missing. She has somehow slipped into 1953, the year her grandparents graduated high school.
Using the pool and vivid imaginings of her grandfather's memories, Vanessa continues to escape to 1953- and to Pete, who, despite his unaffected kindness and optimism, has a mysterious bad reputation around town. But as she dives deeper into the summer her grandparents fell in love, she finds herself unable to return to the present without venturing even further into the past to correct a mistake that threatens her family and future.
*Content Warning: this story contains scenes of near drowning and other perils on the sea, swearing, smoking and alcohol use*
This story is complete at ~90,000 words.
Wattys Winner 2022- Catchiest Hook and Wild Card
Shortlisted Wattys 2021
Featured on @WattpadTimeTravel
Featured on @WattpadHistoricalRomance
Featured on @TeenFiction
Editor's choice list, December 2022, May 2023
Cover by @eva3382
Book #1 of "His & Hers" book trilogy
Warning: Mature (18+) Content!
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25 year old Sienna Williams hooks up with a handsome stranger. As a result of her time with the charming stranger, she later gives birth to a son. It isn't until she learns he's the leader of a Mafia that her entire world is completely flipped upside down.
27 year old Tristan Lucci hooks up with a beautiful stranger. As a result of his time with the enchanting stranger, he finds himself needing to have her. So he tracks her down. It isn't until he learns that he's a father that his entire world is completely flipped upside down.
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All it takes is one time to create a life. And all it took was one life to bring two people together. But can that life keep them together, despite being apart of two completely different worlds? Find out what happens in the first book of the "His & Hers" book trilogy!