[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. ****** 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 But when she resurfaces her classmates have been replaced by girls in retro swimsuits and bathing caps and guys in thigh-baring briefs with cigarettes tucked behind their ears.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

☆ 2022 ᴡᴀᴛᴛʏꜱ ᴡɪɴɴᴇʀ!! ☆ "Hell is empty and all the devils are here." On the cusp of the 20th century, blue blood heiress Lucy Penn has lost everything: her betrothed, her family and home, and even her ability to walk in the sunlight. As she struggles to acclimate to her new nocturnal existence, she makes the acquaintance of Dr. Thomas Reed: an intelligent and tortured immortal, still haunted by the horrors of his past. As the pair grow closer, Lucy becomes privy to a frightening world far below the surface of polite society, in which beings of ancient and unfathomable power live outside the confines of humanity. Carpe Noctem (or "Seize the Night") follows Lucy on her journey through the shrouded streets, eerie hospitals, and aristocratic parlors of nighttime London. As she seeks to exhume the insidious and terrifying purpose behind her transformation, Lucy finds herself drawn deeper into a dark nocturne world of unimaginable folklore and intrigue, begging the question: can love be found after death? HIGHEST RANKINGS ~ #1 Carpe Noctem #1 Period Fiction #1 Nocturnal #1 Gothic Romance #1 Gothic Horror #3 Dracula #3 Shakespeare #8 Vampire #17 Victorian #46 Historical Fiction