Countdown; The Sixties Trilogy Book One

[6], 377, [17] pages. Illustrations. Signed by the author on the title page. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. Featuring a captivating story interspersed with footage from 1962, award-winning author Deborah Wiles has created a documentary novel that will put you right alongside Franny as she navigates a dangerous time in both her history and our history. "It's 1962 and Franny is dealing with her crush, her best friend & her big sister's secrets." A documentary novel filled with graphics. Deborah Wiles (born May 5, 1953, Mobile, Alabama, United States) is an author. Her second novel, Each Little Bird That Sings, was a 2005 National Book Award finalist. Her documentary novel, Revolution, was a 2014 National Book Award finalist. Wiles received the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship in 2004 and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award in 2005. Her fiction centers on home, family, kinship, and community, and often deals with historical events, social justice issues, and reactions to those events, as well as everyday moments and mysteries. She often says, "I take my personal narrative and turn it into story." Franny Chapman just wants some peace. But that's hard to get when her best friend is feuding with her, her sister has disappeared, and her uncle is fighting an old war in his head. Her saintly younger brother is no help, and the cute boy across the street only complicates things. Worst of all, everyone is walking around just waiting for a bomb to fall. It's 1962, and it seems that the whole country is living in fear. When President Kennedy goes on television to say that Russia is sending nuclear missiles to Cuba, it only gets worse. Franny doesn't know how to deal with what's going on in the world -- no more than she knows how to deal with what's going on with her family and friends. But somehow she's got to make it through. The Sixties Trilogy is a series of three companion novels about the 1960s. The books are a first of their kind: documentary novels. They contain scrapbooks of archival primary-source material as part of the narrative—photographs, song lyrics, advertisements, biographies, quotes, newspaper articles and more. Book one takes place in 1962, book two in 1964, and book three in 1969. Book one, Countdown takes place in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis and is a story about eleven-year-old Franny Chapman and her great desire to be seen, to belong, and to matter in a world that includes her authoritative mother, her Air Force pilot father, the interesting new boy across the street, a best friend who is turning into an enemy, a perfect little brother who wants to be an astronaut, an amazing older sister with secrets, an uncle who is still living through the trenches in World War I, and the real horror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for thirteen days in October 1962, when the world came as close as it has ever come to nuclear annihilation. Countdown was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, 2010; an Amazon's Best Books of the Year (2010), a Booklist Editor's Choice for 2010; a Book Links Lasting Connection of 2010; a Best Books of 2010, The Christian Science Monitor, and an ALA Notable Book. It received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. Book two, Revolution tells the sixties story of the civil rights movement through the eyes of 12-year-old Sunny Fairchild, who lives in Greenwood, Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. Jo Ellen Chapman, a character from book one of the sixties trilogy, Countdown, appears in Revolution as a Freedom Worker for SNCC in Greenwood. Revolution was a 2014 National Book Award Finalist, was a Golden Kite Award winner, a Jane Addams Peace Award honor book, an NAACP Image Award finalist, an Amazon best book of the month, and received reviews in The Washington Post,[5] Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, The Horn Book, and Booklist. Anthem, set in 1969, completed the trilogy. First Edition [stated]. First pr. …