Jennifer Niven News

Velva Jean is the Costco Book of the Month for August!

Read all about it here.

Velva Jean Learns to Drive

My third book—and first novel—was just released by Penguin-Plume.  The novel is entitled Velva Jean Learns to Drive and is based on a screenplay by the same name which I wrote in 1995 while I was attending the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.  The screenplay became a short film that earned an Emmy Award the following year. 

Velva Jean Learns to Drive, about a young woman’s coming of age in the mountains of North Carolina circa the 1930s, is inspired by some of my own family history, which I uncovered while researching the book.  It is the story of a girl who starts learning to drive (literally and figuratively) after her mother dies. Her mama’s wish for her is to live out there in the great wide world, something ten-year-old Velva Jean doesn't understand. After her mother’s death, Velva Jean tests her boundaries. She turns wicked, she fights religion and tradition, she tries out a life of crime. At sixteen, she marries Harley Bright, the ex-convict moonshiner's boy, now a tent preacher, who seems poised to open up her life in new ways.  When he gets religion, his world grows smaller while hers grows larger, thanks to her big dreams, her feisty spirit, an old yellow truck—which she teaches herself how to drive—and a brand new road being built on top of the nearby mountains.  As Harley’s world contracts, Velva Jean’s world gets bigger.  But there is no room on her mountain, in her tiny holler, to live a wide open life.  When the new road threatens the security of a way of life that has always been there—and when an outlander commits a crime that causes all outlanders to be rounded up and banished from the mountain—Velva Jean realizes that in her heart and spirit she’s really an outlander herself, and that she actually belongs in the Great Big World.

Velva Jean Goes to Costco

Pennie Clark Ianniciello of Costco has chosen Velva Jean Learns to Drive as her August Buyer’s Pick for her famous and influential Pennie’s Picks column!  Read the article and review here (page 53)… 

Velva Jean Goes to Large Print

The Penguin Audio team has chosen Velva Jean Learns to Drive for their digital audio program, which means it will be made available simultaneously not only to Penguin but to Audible, ITUNES, Overdrive, INGRAM digital, BORDERS.COM, B&N.com, and EMUSIC.COM.  Look for it by early September or sooner…

My fourth book, a memoir, will be published by Simon Spotlight Entertainment, a division of Simon & Schuster in February 2010.  The book started out as an attempt at telling the history of high school in general—but quickly evolved into tales of my own crazy high school adventures at the enormous lone high school in my small Indiana town.  As my publisher says:  The author of Arctic exploration books The Ice Master and Ada Blackjack tackles her most harrowing expedition of all-- high school.  In so many ways, this book has been a complete departure from the first three.  It’s easily the scariest, most daunting thing I’ve written so far!  For a brief glimpse into what’s gone into the writing of the book (the research!  The reunions with friends!  The big hair!  The blue eyeshadow!), check out the Book Blog…

Pre-order your copy today!

Warner Bros. Buys Aqua Net

Warner Bros. is developing a TV show based on The Aqua Net Diaries.  It’s Will & Grace meets The Wonder Years, and my best friend Joe Kraemer and I are currently writing the pilot episode, which is based on our own experiences in our enormous Indiana high school. 

MySpace and Facebook

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Penelope Niven News

Penelope Niven (aka my mom) is at work on a biography of Thornton Wilder, to be delivered to HarperCollins this year.  She was one of nine authors invited to write forewords to the new Harper Perennial Modern Classics editions of Wilder’s major novels and plays.  Her foreword introduces Wilder’s early novels, The Cabala and The Woman of Andros, in an edition published in 2007.  Other authors who contributed to the series include John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Russell Banks, J. D. McLatchy, Donald Margulies, Paula Vogel, John Guare, and Christopher Buckley.  A recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature and the International Reading Association Prize, she also wrote the foreword to The Poet and The Sailor, the correspondence between Carl Sandburg and Kenneth Dodson, published in 2007 by the University of Illinois Press.