Events

Fri 9/14 7pm-8pm Book Party "Celebration of Friendship" with author Frances O’Roark Dowell to celebrate her new middle grade fiction book The Second Life of Abigail Walker We will be making friendship bracelets, have a graffiti wall, a school counselor from Estes Hills will be on hand to talk to kids about friends and bullying, and…Cookies! Frances will be on WUNC's The State of Things Friday afternoon. Atheneum Books for Young Readers  hc $16.99  middle grade fiction 9781442405936 Is it possible to start afresh when you're thoroughly weighted down? Seventeen pounds. That's the difference between Abigail Walker and Kristen Gorzca. Between chubby and slim, between teased and taunting. Abby is fine with her body and sick of seventeen pounds making her miserable, so she speaks out against Kristen and her groupies--and becomes officially unpopular. Embracing her new status, Abby heads to an abandoned lot across the street and crosses an unfamiliar stream that leads her to a boy who's as different as they come. This is a rousing, spirited story of a girl who is being bullied, a discharged soldier with PTSD, and the ancient, mysterious fox that connects them--and helps them see another way to live. This novel has already received starred Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus reviews.   Frances O’Roark Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Dovey Coe, the novel The Secret Language of Girls, and its sequel The Kind of Friends We Used to Be, the Phineas L. MacGuire series, and most recently Falling In and the teen novel Ten Miles Past Normal. She lives with her husband and two sons in Durham.