Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Tina Chambers

Turning Something Awful into Something Good

A close look at death helps a boy grab hold of life

Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s The Decomposition of Jack features a boy whose daily chores include the collection of roadkill. It’s a slightly gross, very funny, sweetly poignant story about so much more than death. Tubb will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on October 26.

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We’re Back, Baby!

A booklover’s guide to the Southern Festival of Books

The festival is about love. Love for the beautiful words that move and delight us, love for the authors who put those words on paper and screen, and love for the culture and community of the book.

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What’s Most Sacred

Cemeteries reveal the good, bad, and ugly sides of U.S. history

In Over My Dead Body, author Greg Melville leads readers on a fascinating journey through time by means of the burial grounds and death practices of the United States from colonial Jamestown to the present day. Greg Melville will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.

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Everybody Has to Do Something

The effects of climate change endanger the lives of four teens

“Nature can take care of itself,” proclaims a climate change denier in Alan Gratz’s latest middle-grade thriller, Two Degrees. But by the end of the story, Gratz and his four teenage protagonists have made a strong case that the opposite is true. Alan Gratz will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.

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Be Not Afraid

Mystery and mayhem at a summer theater camp in the Berkshires

“The play’s the thing” in Twelfth, Janet Key’s debut novel for middle-grade readers. It was not 12-year-old Maren Sands’ idea to attend Charlotte Goodman Theater Camp. Now she’s stuck in the middle of the woods with a bunch of theater kids she doesn’t know — and, as it turns out, possibly a ghost. Janet Key will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.

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Seventy-Six Pounds of Wet Hair and Poor Decisions

Rick Bragg’s canine love story about the worst dog in the world

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Rick Bragg’s The Speckled Beauty is about finding the heart to love the most wayward and aggravating dog imaginable, who also turns out to be smart, tenacious, loyal, fearless, full of life, and just what the doctor ordered for a man who is learning new lessons about losing and letting go. Bragg will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville on October 14-16.

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