Troubled kids find a balm for pain in the love of a good dog
Luna Howls at the Moon is Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s third middle-grade novel to feature a service dog as protagonist and narrator, a charming device that works well in this case to illustrate the value of pairing therapy animals with troubled children. Tubb will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 15.
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Caki Wilkinson discusses her latest poetry collection, The Survival Expo
In The Survival Expo, poet Caki Wilkinson guides us through an exploration of what it means to survive our past without leaving it altogether, observing it from within but also with newfound perspective. Caki Wilkinson will discuss The Survival Expo at a virtual event hosted by Novel in Memphis on June 29.
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In The Speaking Stone, Michael Griffith considers the contingent nature of existence
In The Speaking Stone, a collection of essays, Michael Griffith ambles among the gravestones of a Cincinnati cemetery to track the subtle ways history intersects with individuals. He reminds us, in light-hearted prose, that pride and ambition lead inexorably to oblivion.
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On the mystery of mothering
This spring, thinning my garden beds overfull with hellebores, the early- and long-blooming Lenten rose, I accidently exposed a rabbit’s nest. It was the first I’d ever seen. I gently pulled back the top layer of gray fluff — then the scream. A humanlike scream of innermost fear.
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Ashley Herring Blake pens a magical mermaid mystery about grief
In Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea, Ashley Herring Blake continues to confront the hard subjects of trauma and loss, identity and community, forgiveness and redemption — subjects she sensitively explored in her previous books for middle grade and YA readers. That she does so within the context of a magical beach-themed mermaid mystery can only be a plus for her young readers.
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William Gay’s Fugitives of the Heart is an homage to Twain
Times are hard for the characters who populate William Gay’s Fugitives of the Heart, the last in a string of posthumous novels pieced together by his friends from an attic full of scenes Gay left behind. For J.M. White, Sonny Brewer, and the other writers who figured out how the scenes fit together, the effort was worth it, a forensic labor of love they feel even now for a writer who died in 2012.
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