April 30th is Independent Book Store
Day! We hope you will come out and
support us and other local shops that are keeping the word alive.
We will have new after-words
bags filled with gift certificates, FREE books and our new store
t-shirts. We will be giving them out intermittently
throughout the day.
We also have two local
authors of books for young readers that are helping us out by coming by to meet
you and sign copies of their books. If
you are first in line to see Marianne Malone or James Kennedy, win an
after-words t-shirt and bag along with one free paperback copy of their book!
Noon-1pm – Marianne Malone,
author of the 68 Rooms series for
young readers
Marianne
Malone is the mother of three grown children, a former art teacher, co-founder
of the Campus School Middle School for Girls in Urbana, Illinois and a popular
speaker in schools. Marianne says, “”Writing is a kind of conjuring. I write
because I believe in the magic of art to transport . . . to give a glimpse of another’s
world.”
The Sixty-Eight Rooms series takes place in
the Thorne Rooms of the Art Institute. Almost
everybody who has grown up in Chicago knows about the Thorne Rooms. Housed deep
within the Art Institute of Chicago, they are a collection of sixty-eight
exquisite – almost eerily realistic miniature rooms. Imagine… what if, on a
field trip, you discovered a key that allowed you to shrink so that you were
small enough to sneak inside and explore the rooms’ secrets? What if you
discovered that others had done so before you? And that someone had left
something important behind? The
Sixty-Eight Rooms is the story of an adventure Ruthie Stewart and Jack Tucker have
together. For a link to see photographs
of the Thorne Rooms, go to www.artic.edu/aic/collections/thorne
5pm-6pm James Kennedy author
of The Order of Odd Fish for young
readers
James Kennedy is the
author of the young-adult fantasy novel The Order of Odd-Fish and
the organizer of the 90-Second Newbery Film
Festival, an annual video contest in which
young filmmakers create weird movies that tell the
stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds,
screening annually in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other
cities. James lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters. He is
at work on a new novel and a collection of short stories. Visit him
at http://www.jameskennedy.com and learn more about
the 90-Second Newbery at http://www.90secondnewbery.com.
At the start of The Order of Odd Fish we meet Jo Larouche.
She has lived her 13 years in the California desert with her Aunt Lily, ever
since she was dropped on Lily’s doorstep with this note: This is Jo. Please
take care of her. But beware. This is a dangerous baby. At Lily’s
annual Christmas costume party, a variety of strange events take place that
lead Jo and Lily out of California forever—and into the mysterious, strange,
fantastical world of Eldritch City. There, Jo learns the scandalous truth about
who she is, and she and Lily join the Order of Odd-Fish, a collection of
knights who research useless information. Glamorous cockroach butlers,
pointless quests, obsolete weapons, and bizarre festivals fill their days, but
two villains are controlling their fate. Jo is inching closer and closer to the
day when her destiny is fulfilled, and no one in Eldritch City will ever be the
same.
