The Switch Up: L.A Exchange Blog Tour- Introducing by Katy Cannon

Hello everybody! Today, I’m so excited to get to kick off the blog tour for Katy Cannon’s new release L.A Exchange, with a guest post from Katy talking about her inspiration for the Switch Up series! I really enjoyed the first one last year, and I’m so excited to read this sequel. Onto the post!

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Introducing…

Willa and Alice dragged their suitcases through the airport in my mind very early one morning, just over two years ago. I was half asleep at the time, but I woke up and instantly typed the following into the notes app on my phone: Two teenagers who look similar enough to pass as sisters (or each other’s bad passport photos) meet on a plane from LA to London. By the time they land, they’ve decided to swap lives for the summer…  That was all I had. I didn’t know why they were swapping places, or how anyone else wouldn’t notice that they’d done it. All that came later – after lots of phone calls with my agent and my editor where they both asked the questions ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ a lot, while I felt my way towards the answers.  Oh, I did have one more note:  It’s about discovering who you are, by being someone else. About deciding to be your own person, and living up to your own ideals. About hiding away from your own life, except that only ever works for so long…   And that’s the story I wrote, the book that became The Switch Up. I think this might be the only time in my writing career that the first image of the story I imagined stayed completely true, all the way through to the finished book.  I wanted to tell a story I needed to read when I was the age Willa and Alice are in the book. A story that shows that, in the end, the only person any of us can be is ourselves – and that no one else can be that person as well as we can. Our individuality is our power, and pretending to be anything else only makes us weaker.  I hope that’s the message that all my readers, especially the teen girls, take from my books.  By the end of The Switch Up, Alice and Willa have both come a long way towards accepting who they are – faults, mistakes, talents and all. But learning to be and love ourselves is something I believe we do our whole lives. And when Alice goes out to visit Willa in LA for spring break in The Switch Up: LA Exchange, it’s clear they both still have some things to learn.  Willa is absorbed in her film making dream, determined to make her mark on Hollywood – or at least her new school. Meanwhile, Alice is searching for the confidence she had when she was pretending to be Willa, and feels she’s lost since.  Because they’re both such polar opposites – Willa extroverted, fun-loving and spontaneous, Alice more introverted, more serious, or thoughtful, and definitely a planner – their unlikely friendship helps them to see the world from another’s point of view. And that empathy has a lot to teach them both – about friendship, crushes, passions, and the sort of people they want to be.   I hope that you’ll will enjoy taking that journey with them and – in between the pizza, the kayaking, the milkshakes, the sightseeing and all the clothes-swapping hijinks – that you’ll see yourself in the characters too, and recognise how special you are, just for being you.

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Have you read any of Katy’s other books? Are you planning to pick up this one? I’d love to hear in the comments!

Amy x

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