An Unlikely Story Event: GRACELING

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There is a wonderful, delightful, human-owned, independent book store in Plainville, Massachusetts called An Unlikely Story.

Jeff Kinney, author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and his wife Julie purchased a beat up, pre-Civil War-era, eyesore of a building in 2012, and created an oasis for lovers of books, an anchor for the downtown, and a counterpoint to Amazon (i.e., you can buy books and socks there, but we’ll let you discover that for yourselves).

The drive to Plainville from Boston was a quick 40 minutes, and well worth the effort. We got there early on purpose, to spend an hour wandering around browsing and buying books 🙂

We had forgotten what an amazing experience picking up and thumbing through real live (wha?!?!) books could be. It was almost a visceral relief to be able to do it again.

Graceling: The Graphic Novel

We have known Gareth for close to twenty years, and have accumulated a terrific collection of his graphic novels.

For one reason or another, though, we had not not been to one of his book signings in a while. But, having “emerged” from the COVID pandemic vaxxed, boostered, and grateful, we no longer take opportunities like these for granted!

The event was well-attended, lasted for almost exactly an hour, and was absolutely fascinating. Everyone was masked except when speaking.

It was especially heartening to notice how completely enthralled the younger attendees were by Gareth’s talk (and they also asked good questions in the Q&A session afterwards).

One of the most interesting sections of Gareth’s talk was his describing the mix of artistic processes—digital, photographic, watercolor, etc.—that he incorporates into his graphic novel adaptation workflow. 

He also gave us a behind-the-scenes look at the complexities involved in the project management aspects required to track, manage, and meet the almost innumeral deadlines, changes, and (whew!) progress.  

Interested RainyDayMagazine readers can see the entire live event here.

A bonus for attending the event was obviously the opportunity to have the book signed, along with a personal note, by Gareth. We took full advantage of that with the purchase of a few copies to give as presents and to add our own growing collection 🙂

For those interested in learning more about Graceling: The Graphic Novel and all Gareth’s other awesome works, we happily point you here. Go ahead, order your very own signed copies!!!

A word about Graceling

Graceling is an actual book by Kristin Cashore, a very-much-loved book, with a fan wiki and all other sorts of things, still very much in print and with two sequels out.

As things sometime go in the juvenile-to-young-adult-book world, Gareth and Kristin had become friends, and as things sometimes go with friendships, one thing lead to another and in this case her book became his graphic novel.

Tip-top suggestion from the RainyDay copyeditor who’s super-secret alter is research librarian: go buy both and be done with it.

IMPORTANT NOTE

The “quotes” in this article are not Gareth’s. They are, um, paraphrases of what Gareth said, but since our alphabet/character set has no paraphrasical characters like quotations have, we made a copy-editorial decision and put them between what we know are absolutely incorrect characters.