Middle School Doom Takes Off
Rising on Amazon’s sales rankings is Frazzled: Everyday Disasters and Impending Doom, Booki Vivat (HarperCollins; HC Audio; OverDrive Sample), a debut novel about middle schooler Abbie Wu who is full of worries.
The book is soaring up the charts on the strength of an NPR feature on All Things Considered, moving from #6,572 to #76.
Vivat tells NPR that the highly illustrated novel was born from her own daily planners which she fills with images and doodles.
Through what she calls “a series of very fortunate events” her planners ended up in the hands of a HarperCollins editor who found an “illustration that I had done in a moment of extreme crisis and very dramatic emotion that read, I live my life in a constant state of impending doom. And she pointed to the girl in that picture and said, there’s a story here; that’s our girl.”
Abbie, that very anxious girl, starts sixth grade full of doubts about what her “thing” will be, “The thing that makes her who she is, the thing that everyone knows her for, her capital-T thing.”
She does not find it in the first book, but she does manage to start an “underground lunch revolution” and set things up for a cliffhanger ending that will be followed up by a Frazzled two.