Author targets books at tweens, teens

(FOX Providence) - Anyone who survived junior high knows they're some of the toughest years of your life. A local author takes on the tragically funny follies of being a middle school student in her two books.

Author Erin Dionne joined The Rhode Show to talk more about them.

Dionne's first book called Models Don't Eat Chocolate Cookies actually started out as a shorty story about a girl being bullied in a cafeteria, before it was turned into a novel.

"A friend of mine read the story and suggested that there actually might be a book in there, and it kind of blew up into a novel about an overweight eighth grade girl who gets entered into a beauty pageant for chubby teens. And she doesn't want to win, so does things to sabotage the competition," explained Dionne.

Models Don't Eat Chocolate Cookies has received positive feedback and is currently in the Scholastic Book Club in schools, Barnes and Noble, and independent book sellers across the country.

"I think also, seeing the humor, and the exaggerated humor and the situations and the stories, actually allows students and readers to look at their own lives and in a different way," said Dionne.

Her second book, The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet, is about an eighth grade girl named Hamlet Kennedy. Her parents are obsessed with Shakespeare and Elizabethan England, and dress, eat and talk straight out of the 1600s! And if that’s not embarrassing enough, Hamlet’s seven-year-old sister, Dezzie, is a genius. And she’s going to eighth grade with Hamlet!

Online:

http://www.erindionne.com/