Tilly & Turp
Is Tilly Foote, the new girl, a witch? She does do odd things––speaking in rhymed verse, often to her pet rabbit, Turpentine, sometimes even asking Anne Frank what she might do in Tilly’s place. Or maybe she’s simply eleven-and-three-quarters-years old, a little commonly awkward and, well … quirky? That was until, at a sleepover, she and her four best friends made a fanciful child’s curse. Their exhuberant, if thoughtless, spell is innocently forgotten by the next morning, after “Ninja Breakfast” … but a week later, something unimaginably horrible happens. Did they do it … or was it Tilly? She was the one who had made up the words … all the words. READ MORE …
About Zona Soares
Co-author Zona Soares grew up primarily in Fresno and has been an educator and advocate for at-risk, LD and multicultural students for over 30 years. Zona believes in the power of education, literature and the arts to help make the world a better place. She is a single mother who loves all kinds of activities and adventures and reads voraciously!
Zona Soares
Writer, educator, and advocate.
About Gwylym Ford
Co-author Gwylym Ford is also a native San Joaquin Valley writer who has over 50 years of crafting stories of this unique place and its people. Like Zona, this is his first YA novel. For next projects, he hopes to publish more stories in a Central Valley anthology and produce/direct an art house style film, Baseball Time. Gwylym is retired in Fresno County. He loves to bake bread in an adobe oven and bike the glorious Blossom Trail in late March.
Gwylym Ford
Writer, producer, and director.
What Readers Are Saying
“Tilly & Turp is a perfect read for both young adults and adults. Its poetic prose can be read out loud or silently to oneself in moments of discovery and introspection. Teachers, a great book for the classroom!”
Terry Sanville
Writer and musician, author of The Misplaced.
“One miracle is plenty for any novel, but Zona Soares and Gwylym Ford’s soulful, funny, poignant and celebratory Tilly & Turp, set in a public elementary school on the poorer side of Fresno, gives us a covey.”
Michael Harris
Book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times for 20 years, author of White Poison.
“In their young adult novel Tilly & Turp, Zona Soames and Gwylym Ford have together crafted nothing short of a modern classic.”
Art Hansen
Emeritus Professor of History and Asian American Studies and founding director of the Center for Oral and Public History at California State University, Fullerton
“A whimsical, heartfelt story of the childhood I longed for.”
Ivy Evans
Reader, age 18.
“The intergenerational threads of this novel deeply moved me.”
Anna Gade
Reader
“Good therapy, says a 73-year-old grandpa.”
Allen Smith
Reader, age 73.