Education this week is a weekly newsletter for parents navigating schools

in Chicago and the suburbs from reporters at WBEZ and the Chicago Sun Times.

Sign up now just in time for back to school at WBEZ.org slash education news.

From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson and this is the Nerd Out Book Club.

It's just like a regular book club except sometimes the author stops by.

We did it. We made it to an entire new year and our pick for January 2023 is Kevin

Wilson's newest novel now is not the time to panic. It's about teenage Frankie,

a misfit girl living in Tennessee, and the very weird and amazing summer that she can't let go of.

She meets Zeke, a fellow weirdo, and they make an enigmatic poster that upturns her small town

and eventually the world. In Kevin's words, this is a book about friendship, about art,

about memory, and about what it means to hold on to the person who we were even as we become

someone else. That's all I'm going to say for now since this is a spoiler-free conversation.

Kevin, welcome to Nerd Out. Oh, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

So I mentioned that this is sort of a book about like a teenage girl and like kind of that one

summer that changed her life, but this is extremely not your typical that one summer kind of novel.

If you do what I mean, can you talk a little bit about just sort of like, I don't know,

you're doing so much here with the power of nostalgia and the frotness of being a teenager

in the pain and delight of figuring out how to be weird. It's just it's just so beautiful.

I don't think you I think you know, I think a lot of this is just I'm 44 and I have my own kids

now who are 14 and 10 and it feels like as much as I live in the present with them because their

experiences are such that they keep pulling me back into the past. So and we live in this they're

growing up in the same county I lived in. So you get it even weirder kind of blend of time, but

...