Chapter 16 - Part 480

Double-Dealing

YA novelist Victoria Schwab has two more books on the way—and one of them is for grownups

By Margaret Renkl | May 7, 2012

May 7, 2012 Nashville YA author Victoria Schwab is a 24-year-old wunderkind who wrote her first novel, The Near Witch, while she was still in college and signed with an agent before she was old enough to buy beer. Even before the book was released last year, Schwab had become a leader in the literary community, rallying writers (and agents and editors) across the country to help in a unique fundraising effort to benefit the victims of Tennessee’s 2010 floods. When The Near Witch finally appeared last August, it was to great acclaim: Chapter 16‘s Susannah Felts called it “an accomplished take on the [fairy-tale] form, artfully deploying many of its traditional elements: a seemingly distant time and place, a dark forest, children, a young person on a quest, and, of course, witches.”

First-Person Point of View

Amy Greene and Ann Patchett may be novelists, but they have opinions, too

By Margaret Renkl | May 4, 2012

May 4, 2012 Tennessee’s legislative agenda this year has earned the state unwelcome notice in a national media that too often seems downright eager for any chance to portray Southerners as stupid, lazy, and mean. Late-night comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have had particular fun this legislative season with new Tennessee laws governing what may or may not be taught—or even said—by the state’s schoolteachers. So it was an especially welcome surprise to open last Sunday’s edition of The New York Time and find a smart, reasoned, historically nuanced response to the current political climate by an actual Tennessean: novelist Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot.

Native Tracks

Red Weather, Janet McAdams’s elegiac novel, follows a woman’s search for her missing parents

By Sarah Norris | May 3, 2012

May 3, 2012 Red Weather, the debut novel by poet Janet McAdams, tracks the story of Neva, a young mixed-race woman who’s searching for her parents. Lyrical and vivid, the mystery unfolds in Central America, in the capital of the small, fictional Coatepeque. There, mounting violence against the country’s indigenous people provides a menacing backdrop to Neva’s crisis of identity, mirroring her lifelong sense of uncertain belonging. Janet McAdams will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on May 13 at 2 p.m.

Getting Inquisitive in France

Jefferson Bass takes the Body Farm series overseas

By Chris Scott | May 2, 2012

May 2, 2012 In The Inquisitor’s Key, Bill Brockton, the fictional incarnation of Bill Bass, world-famous founder of the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm, travels to France, where ancient bones draw him into a very modern murder mystery. In their seventh outing, Jon Jefferson and Bill Bass, the writing team known as Jefferson Bass, have juxtaposed fourteenth-century religious fervor with twenty-first-century science. And if any combination of pursuits can prove deadly, it’s science and religion. Bass and Jefferson will be promoting The Inquisitor’s Key during May at several Tennessee venues.

The Collusion of Fact and Fiction

Gary Slaughter talks with Chapter 16 about the challenges and pleasures of writing an autobiographical novel

By Serenity Gerbman | May 1, 2012

May 1, 2012 Nashvillian Gary Slaughter combines personal memory with extensive research in the creation of his Cottonwood novels, which are based on his own childhood during World War II. Slaughter grew up in Owosso, Michigan, near a German prisoner-of-war camp, and his novels begin with this little-remembered facet of American life during the war years. The final book in the series, Cottonwood Summer ’45, brings the novel’s young protagonists, Jase and Danny, to Nashville as they continue their adventures.

Weight Lost and Love Found

Alice Randall’s novel romantic comedy tells the story of a Nashville woman’s renewed appetite for life

By Sarah Norris | April 30, 2012

March 30, 2012 When Ada Howard opens an invitation to her twenty-fifth college reunion, a year away, she is moved to step on a scale for the first time in as long as she can remember. Shocked to find that she’s ballooned to 220 pounds and inspired by the prospect of bumping into her former boyfriend, the five-foot-two-inch Ada sets out on a quest to shed a hundred pounds in twelve months. She starts by writing a list of fifty-three rules. Number one on the list: “Don’t keep doing what you’ve always been doing.” Alice Randall will read from and discuss Ada’s Rules at two Nashville events: Parnassus Books on May 8 at 6:30 p.m. and at Barnes & Noble at Vanderbilt on May 19 at 2 p.m.

I Gotta Sing!

By Alice Faye Duncan
WaterBrook
40 pages
$14.99

“A whole barnyard makes noise ‘in the Spirit of joy’ throughout this raucous picture book, a sweetly heartwarming sing-along by Duncan. Kellam conveys comfort and happiness as the loved ones reflect sunny enthusiasm in this gladdening rendition of the Black American religious folk song ‘I’m Goin’a Sing When the Spirit Says Sing.’”

~Publishers Weekly