Beth Kephart Books In Order

Dangerous Neighbors

It is 1876, the year of the Centennial in Philadelphia. Katherine has lost her twin sister Anna in a tragic skating accident. One wickedly hot September day, Katherine sets out for the exhibition grounds to cut short the haunted life she no longer wants to live. Filled with vivid detail that artfully brings the past to life, National Book Award nominee Beth Kepart’s Dangerous Neighbors is a timeless and finely crafted novel about betrayal and guilt, hope and despair, love, loss, and new beginnings.

Undercover

Like a modern day Cyrano de Bergerac, Elisa ghostwrites love notes for the boys in her school. But when Elisa falls for Theo Moses, things change fast. Theo asks for verses to court the lovely Lila a girl known for her beauty, her popularity, and a cutting ability to remind Elisa that she has none of these. At home, Elisa’s father, the one person she feels understands her, has left on an extended business trip. As the days grow shorter, Elisa worries that the increasingly urgent letters she sends her father won’t bring him home. Like the Undercover agent she feels she has become, Elisa retreats to a pond in the woods, where her talent for ice skating gives her the confidence to come out from under cover and take center stage. But when Lila becomes jealous of Theo’s friendship with Elisa, her revenge nearly destroys Elisa’s ice skating dreams and her plan to reunite her family. National Book Award nominee Beth Kephart’s first young adult novel is a stunning debut.

House of Dance

Rosie and her mother coexist in the same house as near strangers. Since Rosie’s father abandoned them years ago, her mother has accomplished her own disappearing act, spending more time with her boss than with Rosie. Now faced with losing her grandfather too, Rosie begins to visit him every day, traveling across town to his house, where she helps him place the things that matter most to him ‘In Trust.’ As Rosie learns her grandfather’s story, she discovers the role music and motion have played in it. But like colors, memories fade. When Rosie stumbles into the House of Dance, she finally finds a way to restore the source of her grandfather’s greatest joy.

Eloquently told, National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart’s House of Dance is a powerful celebration of life and the people we love who make it worthwhile.

Nothing but Ghosts

Ever since her mother passed away, Katie’s been alone in her too big house with her genius dad, who restores old paintings for a living. Katie takes a summer job at a garden estate, where, with the help of two brothers and a glamorous librarian, she soon becomes embroiled in decoding a mystery. There are secrets and shadows at the heart of Nothing but Ghosts: symbols hidden in a time darkened painting, and surprises behind a locked bedroom door. But most of all, this is a love story the story of a girl who learns about love while also learning to live with her own ghosts.

This is a heartfelt, lyrical tale from the National Book Award nominated author of Undercover and House of Dance.

No Such Thing as the Real World

Graduation from high school?

A senior thesis?

A betrayal by someone you love?

A loss of innocence?

The death of a parent?

Losing the family you always wished you had?

Facing a harsh reality?

What’s the line that separates childhood from the ‘real world’? And what happens when it’s nothing you imagined it would be?

Do you want to be a published author?

The editors at HarperCollins invite you to submit a short story about a character who has to face the ‘real world’ for the first time. The story must involve a single, life changing event. First prize is the opportunity to be published alongside your favorite authors in the paperback edition of the No Such Thing as the Real World collection. All stories must be between 5,000 and 10,000 words long, and all contributing authors must be between fourteen and nineteen years old.

A Slant of Sun

At a time when as many as one in five children face the challenge of growing up with a behavioral disorder, more and more parents are finding themselves at a loss to know how best to raise their children. For Beth Kephart’s son, the diagnosis was ‘pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified’ a broad spectrum of difficulties, including autistic features. As the author and her husband discover, all that label really means is that their son Jeremy is ‘different in a million wonderful ways, and also different in ways that need our help.’ In intimate, incandescent prose, Kephart shares the painful and inspiring experience of loving a child whose ‘special needs’ bring tremendous frustration and incalculable rewards. ‘What, in the end, are you fighting for: Normal?’ Kephart asks. ‘Is normal possible? Can it be defined?…
And is normal superior to what the child inherently is, to what he aspires to, fights to become, every second of his day?’ With the help of passionate parental involvement and the kindness of a few open hearts, Jeremy slowly emerges from a world of obsessive play rituals, atypical language constructions, endless pacing, and lonely frustrations. Triumphantly, he begins to engage others, describe his thoughts and passions, build essential friendships. Ultimately this is a story of the shallowness of medical labels compared to a child’s courage and a mother’s love, of which Kephart writes, ‘Nothing erodes it. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things hard as the rock of this earth.’

Into the Tangle of Friendship

With her first book, A SLANT OF SUN, Beth Kephart wrote about parenting and drew us, in the words of the National Book Award jurors, ‘into a world of timeless and universal themes: the art of mothering, the cost of difference, and the difference one individual can make.’ In her second work of nonfiction, she again explores something we often take for granted friendship and invites us to see it as if for the first time. Beginning with the rediscovery of a long lost best friend, Into the Tangle of Friendship follows the intertwining stories of a cast of characters for whom friendship is a saving grace. We meet a next door neighbor facing the death of a spouse, watch two young boys learn what it means to be friends, and feel the heartache of a professional caregiver whose compassion and dedication ultimately come up short. Kephart is concerned with the haphazard ways we find one another, the tragedy, boredom, and sheer carelessness that break us apart, the myriad reasons people stay together and grow. What is friendship, and what is its secret calculus? Telling stories to illuminate this question, she also engages us in an essential dialogue about what it means to be fully alive. Profound, original, and exquisitely written, Into the Tangle of Friendship is a hymn to the intimate realities of our lives and what makes those lives not only worth living but magical. It will resonate with anyone who has ever had a friend, or lost one.

Still Love in Strange Places

A love story and a journey across the continents of marriage. When Beth Kephart met and fell in love with the artist who would become her husband, she had little knowledge of the place he came from an exotic coffee farm high in the jungle hills of El Salvador, a place of terrifying myths and even more frightening realities, of civil war and devastating earthquakes. Yet, marriage, she finds, means taking in not only the stranger who is one’s lover but also a stranger’s history in this case, a country, language, people, and culture utterly foreign to a young American woman. Kephart’s transcendently lyrical prose often compared to the work of Annie Dillard has already made her a National Book Award finalist. In each of her memoirs she has written about love, using her own life to seek out universal truths. 19 b/w photographs

Seeing Past Z

Impassioned and eloquent reasons and inspirations for nurturing your child’s creativity. Kids today seem to be under more competitive pressure than ever, while studies show that reading, writing, and the arts in schools are suffering. Is there any place for imagination in kids’ lives anymore? In a dog eat dog world, why dream things that aren’t there? In gorgeous prose and through personal stories, Beth Kephart resoundingly affirms the imagination as the heart of our ability to empathize with others, to appreciate the world, and to envision possibilities for the future. The star of her story is once again her son, Jeremy as in her National Book Award nominated A Slant of Sun, now fourteen years old a child who at first resists storytelling, preferring more objective and orderly pursuits, but later leads a neighborhood book club/writing group and aspires to follow Steven Spielberg into moviemaking. Embedded in the text and appendices are examples of how to inspire children to read, write, and dream.

Ghosts in the Garden

National Book Award nominee Beth Kephart’s new book is an enchanting midlife meditation on aging, identity, and memory set against the backdrop of Chanticleer garden in Pennsylvania. On the morning of her forty first birthday, Kephart, a mother, wife, and writer pressured by deadlines, finds herself at Chanticleer, one of the world’s most celebrated pleasure gardens. She knows little of the language of flowers. Week after week, she returns to Chanticleer, recalling her childhood self, mulling over legacy and soul, striking up friendships with gardeners and conversations with other visitors. Succored by the seasons and the weather, she finds the grace notes in approaching middle age. There are lessons in seeds, and she finds them. There are lessons in letting go. Kephart writes about questions we all ask ourselves: How do we remember who we used to be? How do we imagine who we’ll become? Have we lived our lives as we set out to do? What legacies do we wish to leave behind? The book spans a two year cycle, and each chapter is accompanied by a gorgeous black and white photograph of Chanticleer by William Sulit. Ghosts in the Garden pulses with possibility and purpose, with wisdom that is ageless and transcendent.

Flow

The Schuylkill River the name in Dutch means ‘hidden creek’ courses many miles, turning through Philadelphia before it yields to the Delaware. ‘I am this wide. I am this deep. A tad voluptuous, but only in places,’ writes Beth Kephart, capturing the voice of this natural resource in Flow.

An award winning author, Kephart’s elegant, impressionistic story of the Schuylkill navigates the beating heart of this magnificent water source. Readers are invited to flow through time from the colonial era and Ben Franklin’s death through episodes of Yellow Fever and the Winter of 1872, when the river froze over to the present day. Readers will feel the silt of the Schuylkill’s banks, swim with its perch and catfish, and cruise or scull downstream, from Reading to Valley Forge to the Water Works outside center city.

Zenobia

Zenobia a former industry giant that is bedeviled by paralyzing hierarchies, grossly inadequate communications, and distrust is a broken place. Zenobia is a fortress doomed to collapse upon itself. Enter Moira, who has responded to a help wanted ad and seeks to find a given office, Room 133A. As she moves through the Zenobian maze, Moira makes some surprising discoveries about the power of teamwork, the role of the imagination, and the qualities that define true leaders. Her story is complemented and deepened by the story of a long time Zenobia employee named Gallagher, the man who issued the help wanted ad and who watches, and comments, as Moira makes her way to the ever elusive Room 133A. This unusual book will move readers to take a fresh and fearless look at their own organizations and imagine what they could be, always keeping in mind that, as the want ad Moira answers puts it, ‘creative persistence a prerequisite.’

Handling the Truth

Zenobia a former industry giant that is bedeviled by paralyzing hierarchies, grossly inadequate communications, and distrust is a broken place. Zenobia is a fortress doomed to collapse upon itself. Enter Moira, who has responded to a help wanted ad and seeks to find a given office, Room 133A. As she moves through the Zenobian maze, Moira makes some surprising discoveries about the power of teamwork, the role of the imagination, and the qualities that define true leaders. Her story is complemented and deepened by the story of a long time Zenobia employee named Gallagher, the man who issued the help wanted ad and who watches, and comments, as Moira makes her way to the ever elusive Room 133A. This unusual book will move readers to take a fresh and fearless look at their own organizations and imagine what they could be, always keeping in mind that, as the want ad Moira answers puts it, ‘creative persistence a prerequisite.’