May 2, 2011 Cloaked, Alex Flinn’s latest recipe for fairy-tale mashup, calls for a ditsy princess and an enchanted prince, a hapless shoe repairman and a level-headed waitress, a handful of talking animals, at least one witch, and two very stupid giants. Add a heaping tablespoon of magic, mix well, and bake in the Florida heat until all is “uncloaked.” Alex Flinn will read from and discuss Cloaked at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood on May 5 at 6:30 p.m.
April 28, 2011 New York magazine once called Candace Bushnell “the patron saint of high-end power girls, the woman who got the ball rolling on the who-needs-a-husband-when-you-have-a-doorman mentality.” In her new YA novel, Summer and the City, Bushnell tells the backstory of Carrie and friends, before they swear fealty to fashion, friendship, and social climbing. Today Bushnell talks with Chapter 16 prior to her appearances in Memphis on April 29 at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Booksellers.
April 26, 2011 A breathtakingly diverse assortment of characters culled from fairy tales, nursery rhymes, mythology, folktales, children’s literature, and even Manga inhabits Fantasy Baseball by Knoxville children’s author Alan Gratz. It’s a fast-paced adventure, a thrilling come-from-behind sports story, an artistic tour de force, and a heck of a fun read.
April 8, 2011 The four starred reviews—one from every pre-publication review site in the industry—for Ruta Sepetys’s Between Shades of Gray was a pretty good clue that this debut YA novel was bound to be a big hit, but now the glowing reviews are really rolling in for the Nashville novelist.
March 22, 2011 Robert J. Blake’s latest picture book features the tale of two best friends who’ll do anything to stay together. The protagonists of Painter and Ugly are a pair of dogs whose love for one another is nearly matched by their love of competing in Alaskan dog-sled races. Blake, who is also the book’s illustrator, immerses readers in the story of a Junior Iditarod race, a grueling test in which a group of competing teenagers push their dog-sled teams on a nearly eighty-mile trek into the Alaskan wilderness, only to complete the return run the very next day, after a night of camping in the cold with their dog teams. He recently answered questions from Chapter 16 via email.
March 21, 2011 In 1939, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were occupied by the Soviet Union. In the years that followed, Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of millions of Baltic civilians to forced labor camps. More than twenty million people perished in the gulags, but even those who managed to survive and return home were forbidden to reveal the atrocities they’d suffered in the camps. Nashville author Ruta Sepetys, whose stunning debut novel Between Shades of Gray aims, finally, to tell the long-suppressed truth about Stalin’s mass atrocities, grew up in the culture of silence imposed on camp survivors.
