Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

The Brooklyn Nine

The Brooklyn Nine

The Brooklyn Nine

By Alan Gratz
Dial
320 pages
$16.99

Gratz builds this novel upon a clever enough conceit—nine stories (or innings), each following the successive generations in a single family, linked by baseball and Brooklyn—and executes it with polish and precision. In the opening stories, there is something Scorsese-like (albeit with the focus on players, not gangsters) in Gratz’s treatment of early New York: a fleet-footed German immigrant helps Alexander Cartwright (credited with creating modern baseball) during a massive 1845 factory fire; a young boy meets his hero, the great King Kelly, who by age thirty is a washed-up alcoholic scraping by as a vaudeville act. … [T]aken together they present a sweeping diaspora of Americana, tracking the changes in a family through the generations, in society at large for more than a century and a half, and, not least, in that quintessential American pastime.”

—Ian Chipman for Booklist (starred review)

Huck Twin

The heroine of Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s debut children’s novel can stir up a mess of trouble

April 23, 2010 Autumn Winifred Oliver is eleven years old. She fidgets, speaks her mind, and has a talent for drawing. Her neighbors call her “rascally,” “rampageous,” and “up to no good,” but Autumn can’t help it; she’s restless, and most of all—as her creator, Kristin O’Donnell Tubb, clearly states in the title of this charming debut novel—Autumn Winifred Oliver Does Things Different.

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The Human Whisperer

For kids who struggle to read, therapy dogs can be the best teachers

On an early spring day, a visitor comes to Nashville’s Julia Green Elementary School. Her name is Emma, and she sits on the floor on a lime green blanket, in front of low shelves packed with books. Before long, a first-grader named Meghan joins Emma and reads her a story, finding her way slowly but confidently through the unfamiliar words. How does a dog help a child learn to read? Rachel McPherson, author of Every Dog Has a Gift: True Stories of Dogs Who Bring Hope & Healing into Our Lives, will be at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on April 13 at 7 p.m. to discuss her book about therapy dogs like Emma.

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Brothers and Lovers

Martin Wilson’s debut novel brings gay coming-of-age tales out of the YA closet

The debut novel from Martin Wilson is a welcome contribution to the small but growing genre of young-adult novels about first love between gay teens. The romance in What They Always Tell Us is wrapped in an authentic portrayal of contemporary, upper-middle-class teenage life. In its portrait of two brothers, the novel also offers an uplifting look at the challenges to—and triumphs of—family loyalty.

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Love Your Heart

Love Your Heart

Love Your Heart

By Tim McGraw & Tom Douglas
Thomas Nelson
32 pages
$16.99

“Tim McGraw and songwriter Tom Douglas once again join forces to write another book about the precocious Katie and her dad. Katie has many talents, but she wonders which one will win her school’s talent show. With the help of Dad and her faithful dog Palio, and after several amusing mishaps, Katie finally chooses one talent that includes Palio. But at the talent show, she decides to drop out of the contest to help her friend, showing kindness is the best talent of all. Katie’s proud dad reassures her that she did the best thing and that while he loves many things about her, he loves her heart most of all.”

—from the publisher

Debunking Revolutionary War Myths

Gary Paulsen, the wildly popular and prolific children’s author, talks with Chapter 16 about his latest novel, Woods Runner

In Woods Runner, Gary Paulsen creates a tale that returns to the wilderness of his beloved Hatchet but takes it back in time to the Revolutionary War. “I wanted to dispute the mythic, clean, even antiseptic qualities in many histories, because war is never, not ever, clean,” he writes. He will read at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville on March 2. Prior to the visit, he took some time to correspond by email with Chapter 16.

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