March 4, 2015 In the Waves, Lennon and Maisy Stella’s debut picture book, is an adaptation of their first original song. The sisters celebrated the book’s release on a sunny Nashville day in April, and Chapter 16 was there.
April 16, 2015 In Dear Hank Williams, National Book Award-winning children’s author Kimberly Willis Holt tells the story of an eleven-year-old in 1940s Louisiana through letters the girl writes to Hank Williams. Holt will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on April 22 at 6:30 p.m.
Jessica Young
Picture Window Books
128 pages
$8.95
“When nature calls and the girls get lost on the way to the restrooms, Finley’s spooky ghost story comes back to haunt them. As they work together to find a creative way home, Finley discovers that there’s more than one way to be tough.”
–From the publisher
April 13, 2015 In Matthew Baker’s debut middle-grade novel, If You Find This, eleven-year-old Nicholas breaks his grandfather out of a nursing home and enlists the aid of two unlikely allies to find the family heirlooms his grandfather insists he hid years earlier—all to keep his parents from having to sell their family home. Baker will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 17, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.; and again in Furman Hall, Room 114, at Vanderbilt University on April 20, 2015, at 7 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.
April 7, 2015 It’s been a while since anyone produced a great American coming-of-age-novel, but Kingsport native Robert Gipe hits the mark with Trampoline, an inventive debut set in the coal country of Eastern Kentucky. Narrator Dawn Jewell, fifteen, is as smart as Scout Finch, more profane than Holden Caulfield, and as tough in a fight as Mattie Ross. Gipe tells her story not only in flawless prose but also with 220 comics-style drawings that keep the book grounded in the world of an Appalachian teenager.
March 19, 2015 Impressive artwork by Nate Powell, a gripping story by Andrew Aydin, and an eyewitness view of history from U.S. Representative John Lewis combine flawlessly in March: Book Two, the second volume of Lewis’s graphic memoir of the American civil-rights movement. This installment highlights Lewis’s Nashville-based efforts to launch Freedom Riders onto segregated bus lines throughout the South.
