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The Palmer Pool by AnnaWestley
AnnaWestley
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[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 But when she resurfaces her classmates have been replaced by girls in retro swimsuits and bathing caps and guys in thigh-baring briefs with cigarettes tucked behind their ears.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
dangle by averykwrites
averykwrites
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When opposites attract and temptation lives next door. * After life throws Fallon Davis a curveball, she finds herself living in a dingy apartment, single-parenting her 3 year old son, and working at the dive-iest dive bar in town. College seems like an impossible dream from a lifetime ago. And dating? What's that? Hunter Kensington has had everything handed to him. Elite boarding schools; college tuition paid in full; and a cushy job waiting for him at his father's billion-dollar mining company. Sure, his secret aspirations to play professional hockey never panned out, he can't stand his backstabbing friends and family, and he's in a toxic on-again/off-again cycle with his ex. Everything is fine, because he numbs his brain with all the distractions money can buy-until his father cuts him off. When Hunter finds himself living in the same rundown apartment complex as the cocktail waitress he met at the bar, sparks fly... then ignite. Fallon is attracted to her handsome, athletic neighbor but knows she'd never get serious with a trust fund brat. Hunter is intrigued by his gorgeous, jaded neighbor but knows they're from different worlds. Fallon has walls, and Hunter has issues. Neither's had any reason to change... until now. Cover designed by Anastasia Wright