SYP Publishing - grace grits and gardening

Public Domain, Library of Congress

Game booths lined the walls of the school auditorium, one booth per class, not real games like at the Mid-South Fair, but simple ones like the duck game or fishing. All the games were kind of lame yet cool at the same time, because no matter how badly Gracie Lee and her friends played, the PTA mothers in charge gave out candy and prizes. Right off, Gracie and her best friend, Janice, played a tic-tac-toe game with beanbags. Janice won a candy necklace, and Gracie won a Chinese finger trap.

Over in the far corner of the auditorium, in the area that had been the girls’ locker room before Coach Greene’s new gym was built, the spook house scared anyone brave enough to pass through its doorway. The ninth graders were in charge of it, and Gracie Lee knew by all the screaming that it was real. She never went in or dared walk near the doorway because sometimes monsters dragged kids inside. That’s what had happened last year to one of her classmates, and he’d not been the same since.Continue Reading

It’s high time you officially met Gracie Lee, the nine-almost-ten-year-old protagonist of The Accidental Salvation of Gracie Lee. Over the next two months before official book release, I’ll be talking more and more about her. What she likes and says and does.

So who is she really?

Let me start by saying it’s true, the idea of “writing what you know”. Gracie Lee was born from a compilation of true life stories, what began as memoir. So it’s only natural that we share many memories. But Gracie Lee is her own person apart from me.

She’s precocious and mature beyond her years. And brave when it counts.

She counts the days until her tenth birthday, certain that ten will feel different than nine.

Her Momma sees to it that she practices the piano, a complete waste of time in Gracie Lee’s opinion. Instead, she’d much rather learn to speak French, a skill she’s sure will help her someday when she has an important job working somewhere other than in Arkansas.

She still plays with Barbie, but tries to keep this from her Daddy.

As Gracie Lee lies in bed at night, unable to sleep, her mind is chock-full of questions and notions and secrets that churn like the nearby muddy Mississippi.