On Giving Up by Hannah Barnaby
Let’s talk about giving up. Well, not exactly giving up. Let’s talk about giving up’s little sister: not starting in the first place.
Elizabeth Gilbert (currently the patron saint and fairy godmother of all us creative types) says that everything that holds us back from creating is based in fear. Procrastination, writer’s block, all of it. Ideally, we find our inner strength and push through that fear and come out on the other side with something we’re proud of. Sometimes this is what happens, and sometimes it’s not.
I don’t like to give up. Which is why I often don’t start things that seem like they’ll be difficult to finish. Like writing a novel.
I put off novel-writing as long as I could. I graduated from college with a BA in English, I finished an MA program and an MFA program without completing a novel-length manuscript. Then I decided to really challenge the universe and I applied for a grant from the Boston Public Library to be their first children’s writer-in-residence. If I won, I would agree to spend twenty hours a week at the library for nine months and hand in a finished first draft of a novel at the end of it.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Sometimes bad things happen, and we are not the same when they are over.
For months, Tallie McGovern has been coping with the death of her older brother the only way she knows how: by smiling bravely and pretending that she’s okay. She’s managed to fool her friends, her parents, and her teachers so far, yet she can’t even say his name out loud: “N—” is as far as she can go. But when Tallie comes across a letter in the mail, it only takes two words to crack the careful façade she’s built around herself:
ORGAN DONOR.
Two words that had apparently been checked off on her brother’s driver’s license; two words that her parents knew about—and never confided to her. All at once, everything Tallie thought she understood about her brother’s death feels like a lie. And although a part of her knows he’s gone forever, another part of her wonders if finding the letter might be a sign. That if she can just track down the people on the other end of those two words, it might somehow bring him back.
Hannah Barnaby’s deeply moving novel asks questions there are no easy answers to as it follows a family struggling to pick up the pieces, and a girl determined to find the brother she wasn’t ready to let go of.
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About the Author
Hannah Barnaby has worked as a children’s book editor, a bookseller at independent children’s bookstores, and a teacher of writing for children and young adults. She holds an MA in Children’s Literature from Simmons College and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College. She began writing Wonder Show, her first novel, during her time as the first Children’s Writer-in-Residence at the Boston Public Library. Ms. Barnaby lives in Charlottesville, VA.








