Book Tour: If He Had Been With Me by Laura Nowlin

Today, we are featuring new YA release "If He Had Been With Me" and author Laura Nowlin stops by to tell us about the top 10 things she wishes she could change about her high school years :)

Title:  If He Had Been With Me
Author:  Laura Nowlin
Published: April 1, 2013 by Sourcebooks Fire

If he had been with me, he wouldn't have died.

Throughout their whole childhood, Finn and Autumn were inseparable—they finished each other's sentences, they knew just what to say when the other person was hurting. But one incident in middle school puts them in separate social worlds come high school, and Autumn has been happily dating James for the last 2 years. But she's always wondered what if...

The night she's about to get the answer is also one of terrible tragedy.

 Top Ten Things I Wish I Could Change about my High School Years 

1. I wish smart phones had existed, and that I'd had one.
   This seems frivolous, I know, but when I was in high school only the rich kids had cell phones at all, and wi-fi was a rare and wondrous thing. I can only imagine how cool it must be to get into hilarious hijinks with your friends, and be able to post pics of your shananigins in real time. If we did something cool, we had to tell people about it later, and we probably didn't have photographic proof, because pictures were these paper things you had to pay to have made. 
2. I wish I had broken up with my boyfriend.
   Now, my high school sweetheart was not a bad guy by any means, but looking back I see how I only dated him for my entire high school career because I liked the idea of only having one boyfriend ever. If I had really been following my heart, I would have admitted to myself that he wasn't the one and only guy for me, and I could have possibly had a wider range of romantic experience.
3. I wish I had broken more rules.
   I was a good kid. A really, really good kid. Sometimes as an adult I wish I had some of the when-I-was-a-crazy-teen stories that other people have.
4. I wish I had learned to drive.
   In If He had Been with Me, Autumn manages to graduate high school without learning to drive. I managed to graduate from college and get married without a driver's license. I let a small anxiety grow into a massive mental block, and I wonder what the ego-boost of conquering my fear would have done for teenage me.
5. I wish I had admitted to others that I needed help.
   As an adult I have been diagnosed with clinical depression, but as a teenager I hid my depressive episodes from my loved ones. I can only imagine how different those years would have been if I would have admitted my to struggle  and gotten the help I needed.
6. I wish I had worked harder in Spanish class, and gone to Spain on the class trip.
   I ended up minoring in Spanish, but I never did get the experience of full immersion, and now my skills are so rusty that I'll probably never be fluent.
7. I wish our exchange student had lived with us all four years.
   Swantje lived with my family for ten months. She challenged and inspired me, and ultimately changed me forever. To this day I keep a picture of her by my writing desk.
8. I wish I had cared less about what other people thought.
   I think everyone feels this way about their high school years. At the time, I claimed that I didn’t care what others thought, but when I compare that to how much I really don’t care now...
9. I wish I’d been less critical of my body
   When I look at pictures of my teenage self, I just want to grab that girl by the shoulders and scream, “Your stomach IS  flat! It is! It really is! And you are not appcreiating how high your breast are! Your stomach is flat and your breats are perky! Go put on a string bikini and feel fabulous! Right Now!”
10. I wish I had written more.
    To be fair, I think this is something I will always say about any time in my life. I guess it's nice to know that some things will never change. 

  Laura Nowlin holds a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Missouri State University. Her short stories have appeared in The Moon City Review and STEM. In addition to being ambitious writer Laura is also an avid reader who believes that books allow her to live many lives in one lifetime. When she isn’t at home agonizing over her own novels Laura works at the public library where the patrons give her plenty of inspiration for her writing. She lives in St. Louis with her musician husband, neurotic dog, and psychotic cat.

Website | Goodreads | Twitter

Now it's YOUR turn to tell us what are some things you wish you could change about high school!