Children & YA

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.”

April 23, 2012 Michael Sims is a curious—but not a nosy—biographer, as Chapter 16‘s Serenity Gerbman pointed out in her review of Sims’s bestselling 2011 book, The Story of Charlotte’s Web: “White was famously reclusive and—strange as it may seem for a biographer—Sims understands and respects that need for privacy. Allowing White’s words and experiences to speak for themselves, he offers readers a deeper understanding not only of the life and mind that created Charlotte’s Web, but of the creative process that led to the book and of the sheer work it entailed. The Story of Charlotte’s Web is quite literally that: a biography of the book itself. How did it come to be? What forces and experiences throughout White’s life shaped him and converged to bring his timeless classic into being?”