Description: Subtitle on cover: True, tortured, wild, hilarious, and intense tales of teenage life.
Brief description: Sarah Beth Childers went to a tiny Christian school in Huntington, West Virginia, where she played basketball but never made a shot, ran track but never won a race, and played an old British woman who got strangled in a high school play. She now lives in Richmond, Indiana, where her cat pulled down the living room curtains so she could get a better view of passing cars and her Boston Terrier pried open a gap in the fence so she could play with the dog next door. Sarah Beth wrote about her and her mom s teenage years in her memoir, Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family.
Review Quotes: Moments of exhilaration and humiliation, narrow escapes, and epiphanies that opened their eyes and ended their childhoods are all given the significance of hindsight. . . .the authors, perhaps because they are working with true stories from their own pasts, show admirable restraint and reveal not how edgy but how nerdy and ordinary many YA authors were as teens. Sure to give hope to aspiring writers, then, this collection offers models for how ordinary moments turn into stories, and ordinary kids turn into storytellers.-- "Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books"