To celebrate the release of The Alex Crow and the paperback release of Grasshopper Jungle, Andrew Smith will embark on a national Keep YA Weird tour this spring.
Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle is a delightfully weird book about a boy named Austin who’s exploring bisexuality while his small town in Iowa serves as the birthplace for a species of giant human-eating grasshoppers. The upcoming The Alex Crow tells the story of Ariel, a Middle East refugee, the only survivor of an attack on his small village, who now lives with his adoptive family in Sunday, West Virginia. The story of Ariel’s time at a summer camp for tech detox is interwoven with a schizophrenic bomber, the diaries of a Siberian iceman on a failed arctic expedition, and depress bionic reincarnated crow.
Both The Alex Crow and the paperback version of Grasshopper Jungle will be released on March 10.
The complete tour schedule can be seen below.
- March 10 at 6:30 p.m. – BookPassage (San Francisco, CA)
- March 11 at 7 p.m. – Books Inc. Palo Alto (Palo Alto, CA)
- March 12 at 7 p.m. – Rediscovered Books (Boise, ID)
- March 13 at 7 p.m. – Changing Hands (Phoenix, AZ)
- March 14-15 – Tucson Book Festival (Tucson, AZ)
- March 21 – NYC Teen Author Festival (New York, NY)
- March 22 at 4 p.m. – Oblong Books (Rhineback, NY)
- March 23 (time TBA) – Little Shop of Stories (Atlanta, GA)
- March 24 at 6:30 p.m. – Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)
- April 18-19 – LA Times Festival of Books (Los Angeles, CA)
While Smith will be celebrating his new book and paperback release, the “Keep YA Weird” tour will also celebrate general weirdness and experimentalism in YA fiction. Many other authors will be joining him on his tour. Fans can participate in the campaign by naming their five favorite weird YA books on Twitter using the hashtag #keepYAweird.
More information about the tour can be found at Hypable.
