Blog Tour: A Photographic Tour of Plus One by Elizabeth Fama + Giveaway

Plus One by Elizabeth Fama

Published: April 8, 2014 by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux (Macmillan)

Find: Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Goodreads

See below for full blog tour schedule 

About the book

Divided by day and night and on the run from authorities, star-crossed young lovers unearth a sinister conspiracy in this compelling romantic thriller.

Seventeen-year-old Soleil Le Coeur is a Smudge—a night dweller prohibited by law from going out during the day. When she fakes an injury in order to get access to and kidnap her newborn niece—a day dweller, or Ray—she sets in motion a fast-paced adventure that will bring her into conflict with the powerful lawmakers who order her world, and draw her together with the boy she was destined to fall in love with, but who is also a Ray.

Set in a vivid alternate reality and peopled with complex, deeply human characters on both sides of the day-night divide, Plus One is a brilliantly imagined drama of individual liberty and civil rights, and a fast-paced romantic adventure story.

I'm thrilled to have Elizabeth Fama visiting today to 

talk about the real locations highlighted in her story.

"One of my favorite aspects of Elizabeth Fama's writing is the way she makes her story seem real and possible. This includes the characters' travel thru Chicago and its surrounding areas, visiting national parks and places in around and under the city that actually exist."

The previous thoughts are from my review of Plus One, and I'm excited that I now have a visual guide through the pages of the book. The following post is a great resource as you read, or re-read, which is what I want to do with these images in mind. I'm such a visual person that this post helps me imagine the book even more clearly.

Welcome, Elizabeth!

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A Photographic Tour of Plus One 

by Elizabeth Fama

When I wrote Monstrous Beauty, I took research photos of some of the locations, to help inspire me while I was writing. (With Wendy Darling's design help, those photos became a gorgeous post at The Midnight Garden.) Plus One is set in a contemporary, alternate-history version of Chicago that is pretty much identical to my own, which means many of the locations were in my core memory. But I still took some walking tours to inspire myself, and we took a special trip to Maquoketa Caves State Park to record the setting. Note that I was researching this book in the fall and winter, but it takes place in the summer. You'll have to warm these photos up and leaf out the trees in your imagination!

Wooded Island is a tiny urban oasis in Sol's life. She and her grandfather, Poppu, and her brother, Ciel, walk there in the evenings after dinner, and Poppu often plays his ukulele, which would otherwise violate the Quiet Ordinance on the streets. Wooded Island "was a small lagoonlike park with willows along the shores, gnarled live oaks and scrub in the woods, and an improbable, beautifully manicured Japanese garden in the middle of it all." (p. 43)

 This is where Poppu was sitting when he, Sol, and Ciel encountered the Noma for the first time. (p.44)

The Osaka Garden, looking north, toward the Museum of Science and Industry. The garden and the museum are both remnants of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, although the garden was vandalized during WWII and was rebuilt with a donation from the city of Osaka, Japan. (That tall building in the distance is my brother's apartment.)

Pagoda (looking south)

(A lot of the live oaks were destroyed in a freakish high-wind storm (with microbursts) in July of 2003, including a Bur oak that dated to the 1700s. This is one of the survivors.) 

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is one of the places Sol camped with Poppu and Ciel when she was little.

The sunken ship Sol viewed with Poppu and Ciel from an inflated raft on one of their many camping trips (although she saw it at night, with flood lights). Photo credit: John McCormick, with permission.

SS Francisco Morazan Closeup. Photo credit: Jeffrey Lee, superiorpaddling.com.

Maquoketa Caves State Park (Iowa) is one of my favorite locations in the book, where Sol and D'Arcy trade their views of night and day. Speaking of this section of the book, if you've never seen a murmuration of starlings, watch this video. You won't regret it.

Stairs to Lower Dancehall Cave. "We followed the boardwalk for a short way, and Day Boy turned left at the first opportunity, down a stairway....I could make out the shadows of stone walls that rose around us. The air was all earth-smell: damp rock, dust, decaying leaves. We went down and down--it must have been a few dozen stairs and several landings--into what felt like a cool grotto." (p. 198)

Lower Dancehall Cave

"The rock looked like an exuberant version of gray limestone--jagged, pockmarked, riddled with holes." 

Looking back at entrance to Lower Dancehall Cave, from inside.

Using the flash inside the cave allows me to show you the spot where D'Arcy and Sol have to duck to pass through. Gene (pictured) is 5' 10"-ish. "When I reached him, he stood still and shone the light in every direction, carefully, allowing me to survey the cave. It was stark, eerie, and utterly lovely." (p. 199)

The exit from Lower Dancehall cave. 

If you've read the book you know how important this sign is! It's a bit like the "as you wiiiish" moment from The Princess Bride.

"We walked back the way we'd come: through the woods, the long saber of our flashlight slicing through the trees; down the dirt path; passing single file between two giant boulders with stairs cut into them." (p. 210)

Ice Cave: the cave that D'Arcy chooses for them to spend the night.

Yep, the real thing. Balanced Rock. All seventeen tons of it.

"For lunch we found a pretty spot to sit down, in a bed of dry leaves beneath the trees near the creek." (p. 224)

The natural bridge."The bridge was geologically ancient, an impassive observer, surrounded by life that was fleeting in comparison: tress that would only survive hundreds of years, tourists who would live decades, insects that would thrive only for weeks." (p. 227)

The stargazing meadow. (*Sigh.*)

And now back to Chicago: 

The 59th Street Tunnel from the Jackson Park parking lot to the lake:

This is the viaduct that leads to the breakwater where, um--how to say this without spoilers?--one group of kidnappers pulls up their yacht for negotiations.

And here is the breakwater itself, with the vastness of Lake Michigan beyond.

Revetment at the south end of 57th Street Beach: 

"D'Arcy rowed toward the Fifty-seventh Street Beach. Soon we pulled in at the southern tip, where the beach ended and the riprap was piled high--giant boulders of limestone with an overgrowth of volunteer trees and bushes that created a mini urban wilderness." Of course the story takes place in September, so imagine this spot warm and pretty. (p.336)

Harper Memorial Library is where Sol searches for Gigi.

"Harper Memorial Library was a Gothic-inspired building with leaded glass windows, a limestone façade, and crenellations at the top like a small castle. As theme-park as that description sounded, it had a stolid scholarliness and aged patina that gave it genuine gravitas." (p. 339) Photo credit: Tom Rossiter, architecture.uchicago.edu. 

"It was the most beautiful room I had ever seen, like something out of an old British movie. There were two massive chandeliers at each end of the cavernous space..." (p. 350). (I find this section poignant in the book, because we get a glimpse of the hidden longing Sol has for an intellectual life.) Photo credit: Avi Schwab, Web Project Manager, University of Chicago.

The Steam Tunnels at the University of Chicago are featured prominently in Plus One. Not many Chicagoans have been inside...just facilities workers and delinquent high school and college students.

In many sections of the tunnels you have to crouch to travel. (That's me in a hard hat.)
Photo credit: Gene Fama Cochrane.

Looking up through an entry/exit grate toward daylight from the steam tunnels. 

And finally, in this photo you can see the bench in Harper Quadrangle that Sol sits on to key-in the most important text of her life.

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About the author

ELIZABETH FAMA is the YA author most recently of Plus One, an alternate-history thriller set in contemporary Chicago. Her other books include Monstrous Beauty, a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection and an Odyssey honor winner, and Overboard, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, a society of Midland Authors honor book, and a nominee for five state awards. A graduate of the University of Chicago, where she earned a B.A. in biology and an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. in economics, she lives with (and cannot live without) her boisterous, creative family in Chicago.

More information: Website | Twitter | Tumblr

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Tour Schedule

March 31st  -  Fiction Fare

April 1st       - The Starry Eyed Revue

April 2nd      - Ivy Book Bindings

April 3rd       - Carina's Books

April 4th       - Presenting Lenore

April 5th       - Shae Has Left the Room

April 6th       - The Best Books Ever

April 7th       - Teen Librarian Toolbox

April 8th       - Love is Not a Triangle  (Release Day)

April 9th      -  The Bevy Bibliotheque

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Giveaway

A Hardback copy of PLUS ONE

Thank you Macmillan for this generous giveaway!

Policies:

Giveaway is for US/Canada residents only (Sorry, other international readers!)

You must be at least 13 years old to enter

See my policies HERE

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