Children & YA | Chapter 16

Making It in Music City

By Lacey Galbraith

June 30, 2010

June 30, 2010 It’s graduation day, and there’s little that Retta Lee Jones will miss about Starling High School. Nineteen years old and raised in small-town Starling, Tennessee—about two and a half hours outside Nashville—she’s desperate to “get on with my real life”—the life she’s been “staring out the window and daydreaming about all through high school.” The heroine of Suzanne Supplee’s new novel, Somebody Everybody Listens To, Retta has plans—big ones: Retta Lee Jones wants to make it in country music.

Putting the Fan in Fantasy

By Susannah Felts

June 25, 2010

June 25, 2010 After Franklin, Tennessee, graphic novelist Scott Christian Sava accomplished his childhood dream of illustrating an issue of the Spider-Man comic, he set his sights on creating an epic fantasy narrative of his own. The result, The Dreamland Chronicles, is now one of the most popular web comics in existence, read daily by more than ten million readers worldwide. And that’s not even counting the audience for his books.

Across the Age Barrier

By Maria Browning

June 1, 2010

June 1, 2010 Youth Speaks Nashville gives teens the opportunity to learn and express themselves through spoken-word poetry. Some of its talented young poets will add their voices to Nashville Now: 2010 Spoken Word Census, a portrait of the city in poetry, prose, and song. The three-day series of events will take place at the Darkhorse Theater at 7:30 p.m. on June 3, 4, and 5.

Catcher in the National Spotlight

By Susannah Felts

May 31, 2010

May 31, 2010 It began as just another school essay, with a due date for a grade. The assignment: to choose a book that speaks to you—any book you wish—and write a letter to its author, explaining how the story sheds new light on your own life experiences. Siori Koerner’s letter to J.D. Salinger ultimately won its author, an eighth grader from Murfreesboro, top honors in this year’s Letters About Literature contest, a national program sponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

Sherlock Holmes: The Fifth Generation

By Chris Scott

May 26, 2010

May 26, 2010 What if Sherlock Holmes had married? And what if that union had produced children, who produced more children, until there were two great-great-great-grandchildren who had inherited their famous ancestor’s detective skills? The siblings would star in a series of detective stories, of course. Welcome to The Sherlock Files by Nashvillian Tracy Barrett.

Appalachian Children's Literature: An Annotated Bibliography

May 25, 2010

Teachers, parents, librarians and others who regularly encourage children and youth to read and who would like to share more books about the Appalachian region have an extensive new resource available to them. … This comprehensive bibliography – volume 26 in McFarland’s “Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies” series – is a guide to books written about or set in Appalachia from the 18th century to the present. Annotations for the titles include brief reviews, critical analyses of the works, and indication of appropriate grade levels. Entries are indexed by author/title/illustrator and by subject, and appendices include a listing of authors and titles by grade levels and a listing of counties in the Appalachian region as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission.

—from the publisher