Publishers Weekly - 02.09.2019

Fall Indie Books

Readers and the NCIBA and
PNBA holiday catalogues;
Goodreads giveaway; teachers’
guide and discussion guide.
This young reader’s edition of
Peter Wohlleben’s bestselling
book on trees and how they com-
municate will change children’s
understanding of and appre-
ciation for parks, woods, and
forests. The book includes
hands-on activities for children. The Hidden Life of Trees was an Indies Choice Adult
Nonfiction Book of the Year in 2017 and has sold three million copies worldwide.
Ages 8–10.

Yonder
Rat Rule 79
Rivka Galchen, illus. by
Elena Megalos (Sept., $19.99,
hardcover)
First printing: 10,000
Publicity & marketing highlights:
Author tour; 1,200 ARCs; fall
Kids Indie Next List selection.
From the New Yorker “20
Under 40” author of Atmospheric Disturbances comes an adventure story about a girl
named Fred who sets off in search of her mother, who has stepped into an enormous
paper lantern in their living room and disappeared. “Rivka Galchen’s Rat Rule 79 is
clever and strange and so very much fun,” writes David Gonzalez of Skylight Books
in Los Angeles, calling it “a subversive Wizard of Oz for kids too smart for their own
good. It’s sure to become many a young readers’ favorite book for years to come.” Ages
10–up.

WordSong
Ordinary Hazards:
A Memoir
Nikki Grimes (Oct., $19.99,
hardcover)
First printing: 25,000
Publicity & marketing highlights:
Author tour, including appear-
ances at NEIBA and at RJ Julia
in Middletown, Conn., and
Politics & Prose in Washington,
D.C.; Goodreads giveaways;
extensive ARC distribution at conferences.
In this memoir in verse, award-winning poet and author Nikki Grimes describes
growing up in 1950s and ’60s New York with a mother suffering from paranoid
schizophrenia and a mostly absent father. Terrorized by babysitters, shunted from
foster family to foster family, and preyed on by her mother’s second husband, Grimes
discovered the power of writing at the age of six. Ages 12–up. ■

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