Save Me Blog Tour | Post + Giveaway

I’m so excited to be participating in the blog tour for SAVE ME, a debut from Swoon Reads’ author Jenny Elliot! A paranormal debut with witches and WHALES?! How awesome is this?? (Awesome.) There are so many interesting things going on in SAVE ME, but for me, I was most intrigued by the whales. Who doesn’t love whales? They’re big and gorgeous and sometimes dangerous and are basically some of the closest things left on this planet to DINOSAURS. I MEAN. So in this vein, I wanted to share some cool things with you all about the whales in SAVE ME because they’re really important to the main character, Cara, as well as a very intriguing side story.

Debut-novelist Jenny Elliott’s thrilling romance, chosen by readers, writers, and publishers for the first list in the new Swoon Reads imprint, pours on the tension and danger in an addictive combination that will keep you turning pages!

Something strange is going on in the tiny coastal town of Liberty, Oregon. Cara has never seen a whale swim close enough for her to touch it—let alone knock her into the freezing water. Fortunately, cute newcomer David is there to save her, and the rescue leads to a bond deeper than Cara ever imagined.

But then she learns something about David that changes everything, and Cara is devastated. She turns to her best friend for support, but Rachel has changed. She’s suddenly into witchcraft, and is becoming dangerously obsessed with her new boyfriend….

Cara has lost her best friend, discovered that her soul mate is off limits, and has attracted the attention of a stalker. But she’s not completely alone. Her mysterious, gorgeous new friend Garren is there to support her. But is Garren possibly too perfect?

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There are two kinds of whales in SAVE ME: gray whales and orcas. Cara spends quite a bit of her free time going on whale-watching tours and serving as a first mate, answering questions for the guests. The gray whales are her bffs, especially a mother and son pair named Crossback and Bobbi. But there’s some trouble with the whales when some transient orcas show up and start acting aggressive. RUH ROH. Instead of getting into the details from the book itself, though, I want to focus a little bit on the COLD, HARD FACTS. Love those.

So, friends, gray whales are kind of ugly. I can’t lie. They have barnacles on their skin, this orange stuff that’s literally called “whale lice,” and scratches and cuts, too. I mean…lice. Doesn’t sound pretty. But gray whales are also super friendly and will swim up to whale watching boats and let people touch them. That’s pretty awesome. Adults can weigh up to 30-40 tons so it’s good that they’re mostly nice. Wouldn’t want 40 tons of PO’d whale coming after me.

Also a good thing? Gray whales are baleen whales, so they don’t eat like people. Just little crustaceans and things. The largest remaining population of gray whales lives and migrates up and down the western coast of the United States. Well, they mostly live in the Pacific Northwest. They’ll often migrate down to Baja, California or Mexico in the winter to give birth to their calves where it’s warmer. Speaking of calves, gray whales are pregnant for 11-12 months (!).

In SAVE ME, Cara talks about how Crossback, the mother gray whale, does this thing called “spy-hopping.” I don’t know a whole lot of whale lingo, so I found myself just curious enough about what this is to look it up. It’s basically this:

Spy-hopping is when a whale pokes it’s head up out of the water. It doesn’t look like that big of a deal, but this can last for a few minutes at a time. No one really knows why the whales do it, though. Some people think it’s to help the whales breathe, others think it’s so the whales can see what’s going on around them. It’s also possible that whales spy-hop so that they can hear the waves breaking on the shore during migration, since they follow the coastline. Whatever the reason, Cara addresses it quite a bit, and Crossback often seems to do it as a reassurance (you’ll understand when you read SAVE ME).

So even though gray whales can grow up to 45-50 feet long and, as mentioned before, can weigh up to 40 tons, they still have natural predators. Sad face. Wouldn’t you know that one of their natural enemies is…orcas. That’s right. The other species of whale in SAVE ME is the gray whale’s nemesis, and they don’t behave nicely at all.

Orcas, as many of you likely know, are also known as killer whales. Not an ominous-sounding name at all, right? In SAVE ME, they very much live up to the unfriendly vibe one gets from their name. And yes, they are carnivorous animals. But like all predators, there’s a little more to them than that. Even though, let’s be real, I was totally rooting for Crossback and Bobbi.

So orcas are whales to most people, right? Me too, guys, but we’re kind of wrong. They’re actually members of the dolphin family. The largest member, in fact. They also literally get around everywhere: You can find orcas in all of the oceans on the whole planet. WUT. I mean, they like cold water best, so they are mostly in the arctic and on the northwestern coasts of the US and Canada, but still. EVERY. OCEAN. That’s bonkers.

One of the coolest things about orcas is that they are incredibly social and live in groups of up to 30 whales called “pods.” Also super cool? Orcas are matriarchal, so the pods are all run by the ladies. AWESOME. They are also known, unlike gray whales to a large extent, to have dialects that other orcas from other pods can understand. (Gray whales just kind of make noises, but no one knows for sure that they’re communicating, at least according to my very thorough internet research.) Orcas also hunt in pods. Unlike gray whales, orcas eat meat, so their hunting is REAL. Because they’re dolphins, technically, they also use echolocation to find their meals.

In SAVE ME, the kind of orcas Cara, David, and the gray whales are dealing with are called “transient.” There are three kinds of pods: transient, resident, and offshore. Resident pods are not necessarily apt to stay in one place, although they do tend to find a particular spot and stick near it close to the shore, but rather they stay together in what become really tight-knit pods of about 10-50 whales. Whales in these kinds of pods are  rad because whales of both genders will live with their mothers for their whole lives and they’ll preserve the female lines of their families. WORD! They also eat fish, but not always other marine mammals. Their dorsal fins are smaller and rounded.

Offshore pods live away from the coasts in pods of about 30-60 whales, which is quite a lot of whales. They like being away from the shore. I don’t know what they like to eat, particularly, or what their dorsal fins look like. Alas. Internet fail.

Those transient whales, though. THOSE whales are whales with a mission: eating. They travel constantly to follow food sources and their pods are much smaller, maybe 2-5 whales. While in resident pods the calves will grow and live with the same pod their whole lives, transient pods don’t have those ties. Whales leave transient pods all the time. The transient whales in SAVE ME are nasty, vicious, and aggressive. I don’t know if that’s how they behave in real life, but it would make sense, given that transient pods just want food, and gray whales are on their menu. Unlike resident orca pods, transient pods WILL eat other mammals and their dorsal fins are tall and pointed. *hums theme to Jaws*

Yeah, see? They’re not kissing. When gray whales are migrating north and south to give birth and then to return to the colder waters they prefer with their babies, orcas often get in their way and attack them. Orcas like going after the calves, being smaller, so they’ll separate them from their mothers. EW now I’m bummed out and sad so I’m done talking about this. Except to say that orcas and gray whales are NOT bffs.

There are lots of other things going on in SAVE ME that might appeal to a wide variety of readers: romance, witchcraft, angels, Scrabble.  Everyone should check it out! To help you guys along, the awesome people at Swoon Reads are giving away one copy to a luck winner! YAY!

Before you enter, the rules: must be 13 or older, US only, and you have 2 days to respond to my notification that you’ve won, otherwise you forfeit your prize and it will go to someone else. 

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Jenny Elliott is a lifelong resident of Washington State and lives in Spokane with her husband and four kids. Writing fiction is her favorite method for avoiding insanity. Other avoidance techniques include reading, playing Scrabble, and browsing social media sites. Save Me is her first novel. Follow her on Twitter at @jennykelliott.