Curling Up With A Good Book: Rockstar Book Tours Blog Tour, Guest Post, & Giveaway: Frost (M.P. Kozlowsky)

Title: FROST
Author: M.P. Kozlowsky
Pub. Date: October 11, 2016
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Pages: 352
Formats: Hardcover, paperback, eBook

Cinder meets The Walking Dead in a chilling futuristic fairy tale that will reboot everything you thought about family, love, and what it means to be human.
Sixteen-year-old Frost understands why she's spent her entire life in an abandoned apartment building. The ruined streets below are hunting grounds for rogue robots and Eaters.
She understands why she's never met a human besides her father. She even understands why he forbids her to look for medicine for her dying pet. But the thing is, it's not her real father giving the orders . . .
It's his memories.
Before he died, Frost's father uploaded his consciousness into their robot servant. But the technology malfunctioned, and now her father fades in and out. So when Frost learns that there might be medicine on the other side of the ravaged city, she embarks on a dangerous journey to save the only living creature she loves.
With only a robot as a companion, Frost must face terrors of all sorts, from outrunning the vicious Eaters . . . to talking to the first boy she's ever set eyes on. But can a girl who's only seen the world through books and dusty windows survive on her own?

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M.P. Kozlowsky lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters. He is the author of Juniper Berry and The Dyerville Tales, books for readers of all ages.

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WHAT GAVE YOU THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS BOOK?

The basis of FROST came to me when I was walking my dog to his death. Inspiration is a cloud, sometimes dark, sometimes light, and oftentimes it passes through us without taking hold because, in those moments, the world outside the fog is so overpowering and all-consuming. That day, the world had swallowed me whole.

Romeo, our beagle, (we called him B, Beezus, Wheezey, Wheezey-my-cheezey, That One, Toots, Toototties-toofruities, as well as a dozen other names, like all dog lovers, including, like the broot in the book, Romes) was in poor shape. 14 1/2 years old, he couldn’t breathe, could barely walk. He wasn’t eating and could hardly control his bowels — one last illness in a long line of them. My wife (whose love for her pet surpassed that of even Frost’s for hers) was in tears, hysterical. We knew it was time.

I tried picking Romeo up, but he cried and winced. There was too much pain for me to carry him. Luckily, we lived in Manhattan at the time and our vet was at the far end of the block. Still, it was a long block and he’d have to walk. Yet, if he didn’t, I would never have written FROST.

It was one of the worst walks of my life. Romeo was on the leash and sluggishly trailing behind. Every now and then he would stop, stubborn in his progression, his chest heaving. For some reason I found myself continuously apologizing to him. I’m sorry, B. I’m so sorry. And I’d give a little tug on the leash, nothing too hard, just something to get him moving. He would take a few steps forward, stop, and I’d have to tug again. It must have taken us a half hour to get down that one block. It wasn’t a walk; it was a crawl, an agonizingly slow crawl, allowing me far too much time to dwell on where, exactly, I was leading him. Did he know? Was he aware these were his final moments, his final steps? Did he know this was the last walk we would ever take together? Was that why he resisted? I staggered down that city street with tears dropping from my eyes to the sidewalk like a heavy rain.

People passed and avoided my eyes, the city taking on a tragic hue of gray, though it was a brilliantly sunny day. Not that I saw any of it. Toward the end of the block a black cloud enveloped me, and I found a dark world within it. I saw a little girl lost in the city. Alone and scared. And, behind her, she was dragging her dying pet through the streets in the hopes she might save him. Clear as glass, I felt the pain in her back and on her shoulders, the anguish in her heart.

And then the cloud vanished. That was all I saw. A flash of a vision, a few spasmodic seconds. But the image remained. It was powerful. So very powerful because it was rooted in something so very real. Out of grief can come beauty. I didn’t know where the girl was going, or what had happened to her pet and her family and the city itself, but within me were the seeds of a story.

That’s one half of a happy ending. Here’s the other: We reached the vet and I discovered Romeo had a collapsed lung, a tumor that they believed to be cancer, and pneumonia on top of it. But, guess what? He ended up living another two healthy years, the lung repairing itself when the pneumonia was treated, and the cancer mysteriously vanishing. He didn’t live to see the publication of FROST, but I believe the impact of his time here on Earth — the joyful thrall of a life shared with a beloved pet — will be felt by many, and for some time to come.