Into The Night Book Reviews: Blog Tour: Mandatory Release by Jess Riley

Welcome to our stop on the Mandatory Release Blog Tour.
Described as "Lad lit meets chick lit in this dark comedy about broken people who work in a dangerous place, finding hope where they least expect it" Mandatory Release sounds like one you won't want to miss! The excerpt we've got is sure to peak your interest too.

Title: Mandatory Release

Author: Jess Riley

Release date: July 16, 2013

Age Group: Adult

Genre: Dude Lit / Edgy Women’s Fiction

Tour organized by: AToMR Tours

With appeal for fans of Jonathan Tropper, Tom Perrotta, and Laurie Notaro, this snarky mashup of Girls and Oz is so painfully honest you might think you’re reading a memoir—except the author isn’t a smart-ass guy in a wheelchair who works in a prison.

Recently paralyzed in a car accident, thirty-year-old Graham Finch spends his days trying to rehabilitate a caseload of unruly inmates and his nights on one bad date after another, attempting to rehabilitate his heart—

—until his high school crush Drew Daniels walks through the prison gates one hot summer morning. On the run from a painful past that’s nearly crushed her faith in love, Drew is a new teacher at Lakeside Correctional. Graham, smitten all over again, tries to redirect his unrequited feelings. But when your heart keeps looking back, it's not easy to turn it forward.

Amidst escalating violence at work, Drew is forced to confront her secrets, find a way to forgive old sins, and learn how to listen to her heart and her head when it comes to men. Graham must also learn to make peace with his own past. Together they realize that if you’re going to save yourself, sometimes the best way to do it is by saving someone else first. If only finding their way to one another was easier than working with convicted felons.

Loaded with twisted humor and pathos, Mandatory Release is a darkly comic, unexpectedly sexy love story about broken people putting themselves back together. People who learn that no matter what you lock up—a person, a secret, or your heart—sooner or later, everything must be released.

Unfortunately, we never became more than lab mates, our breezy friendship limited to playful hallway smacks, bad jokes about Bunsen burners, the occasional beer bong at a party.

Well, aside from one night at the beginning of our junior year, when Drew came over after a fight with her boyfriend. We watched Good Will Hunting in my basement, sharing a bottle of peach schnapps that we hid behind a throw pillow every time my mom came down the creaky stairs. Ostensibly, to do about seventy loads of laundry. Drew was curled up on the other side of the old orange sofa, but an hour into the movie, she leaned back against one of the armrests and casually lifted her feet onto my lap. Her calves, really, and she had a skirt on. Bare legs. I immediately began to panic. Didn’t know what to do with my hands. It was the kind of comfortable, affectionate thing girls might do with any of their friends, but I felt a big question mark on the end. She may as well have punched me in the balls, because I sat there for the next hour with the most painful hard-on I’d ever had in my life, compounded by the fact that my jeans were too tight and there was no way I was giving away my state with even a subtle adjustment. I have no idea how the movie ended, because a 3-D porno had begun to play in my head, of me pushing her skirt up and doing hot, filthy things to her that would have been scrambled on cable. But I just sat there frozen like an idiot, my dick an iron rod in my pants, wondering if I should try to kiss her, paranoid that my breath smelled like Cool Ranch Doritos, wanting her to stay forever but also wanting her to just leave so I could breathe again. The next weekend she took a road trip with Brooke to visit her boyfriend in college. When she returned, she was wearing a new pair of diamond earrings. She never came back to my house, which was just as well, because I had no idea how to handle a girl like Drew when I was sixteen.

Jess Riley’s experiences teaching in a medium-security prison inspired the novel Mandatory Release. Her debut novel (Driving Sideways, now in its fourth printing) was published by Random House in 2008. She lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin with her husband and nutty Cairn Terrier in a 130-year-old ~~money pit~~ farmhouse. When she’s not writing novels, she’s a Grant Writer for school districts nationwide.