Title:
Sweetest Taboo
Author:
Eva Marquez
Release
date: October 1, 2012
Genre
and Age Group: *Mature* YA Adult Contemporary
Romance/Ages 16+/Females
Event
organized by: AToMR Tours
Links:
www.SweetestTabooBook.com
Book
Description:
Isabel
Cruz was fifteen years old when she met Tom Stevens. She was 15 when they
started dating, and 16 when she lost her virginity to him. By the time she
turned 18 and went to college, everything had fallen apart. This hadn’t been an
ordinary love, though. Not a love between two dear friends, or even high school
sweethearts. This had been the most taboo sort of love there was: a
relationship between a student and her teacher. Isabel started her high school
career as a normal student, but set her sights on Tom Stevens as soon as she
met him, and pursued him with an intense – and sometimes reckless –
fascination. When he finally approached her after swim practice and told
her that he shared her feelings, it was the start of a forbidden and dangerous
relationship.
Born in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, daughter of European immigrants, Eva Márquez has spent most of her
life outside of her home country. At the age of five, Eva accompanied her
parents to the United States, where the family settled permanently. After
graduating from university, she went on to complete graduate studies in
International Relations in Spain. Eva received her Master of International
Studies degree from the University of Sydney and went on to work in the global
health field in Sub Saharan Africa and South East Asia. Eva currently resides
in Southern Africa.
.
Visit Eva’s Amazon Author Central Page
EXCERPT (from the Preface)
Dear Reader,
My story begins in the early 90s, when a young girl started her high school
career. She may have been any girl – young, impressionable, and fresh
into the wide world of older boys, harder classes, and more choices. She may
have been quite beautiful, well developed for her age, and smarter than most of
the other students in her class. She may have been destined for the same high
school career as anyone else – honors courses, braces, a few high school
crushes, photography classes, a first kiss, and then a straight shot into the
college of her choice, and her future as a doctor, or teacher, or architect.
Instead, she fell in love with her swim coach, one of the most popular teachers
in the school, and became romantically involved with him.
I don’t believe that I have to tell you how dangerous
this would have been. She was a young girl of 15, 16, 17 and he an adult man in
his late 30s, old enough to be her father. Although this type of relationship
would have passed as acceptable and even normal in Medieval England, the modern
world frowns on such dalliances, and prosecutes the men – and women – who take
advantage of adolescent students in this way. The two of them, then, would have
been facing the threat of discovery, tarnishing of reputation, and even time
behind bars; throwing their relationship in the face of society, if you will,
but doing so quietly, in order to avoid detection.
Have you guessed, yet, that the story I’m telling you is true? Have you guessed
that it’s more than just a rhetorical question, more than an idea that developed
in my head one day?
The girl in the story is my mother, Isabel Cruz. She never told her story to
the world, though she could have, because she didn’t want her love and relationship
to be tainted by society’s judgments. This was a story of an illicit – and
illegal – love. It was a story of lying, cheating, and misleading the
authorities. My mother’s love for this older man was forbidden, and would have
been highly scandalous to the world at large. She might have lost privileges,
opportunities, and even her family, had they found out. And for him … his
future and very life would have been put in jeopardy if the nature of their
relationship were revealed, regardless of whether my mother sought to prosecute
him or not. Even when she was older, my mother feared that the truth about
their relationship might bring a backlash to the man she had loved so dearly.
She fought against that with all her might, with the ongoing wish to keep him
from any risk or pain. She never lost her love for him, scandalous as it may
have seemed to others.
She is older, now, and the man in the story is long gone. When I happened
across her diary from that time and asked her permission to write the story, she
acquiesced. It was time that the world knew, she said, so it could see that
this type of love – though it may be frowned upon, and even prosecuted – isn’t
always what it seems. Sometimes, regardless of the ages of the participants, it
is just that. Love. True and pure as it can be between two people, and strong
enough to last through the years. It was time, she said, for our family to know
its past, and its future.
I have just closed her diary, having squeezed every word from it, and written
my own last words, which means that the book is done and her story has been
told. I must pass it to you now, Reader, and trust you to hold it dear and keep
it safe. I must trust you to see the love that shines through, rather than the
social mores of the situation. I must trust you to care for my mother and her
past, as I have during the writing of this book.
This, then, is my mother’s story. It starts when she was very young, only 15
…
~ Claire Stevens
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