Gail Shepherd

Gail Shepherd drew on journalism, poetry, education work, and her Southern family history when she turned to fiction for younger readers. Her debut novel The True History of Lyndie B. Hawkins follows an eleven-year-old history enthusiast in 1985 Tennessee as she tries to understand the silences surrounding her family and her father’s return from Vietnam. Penguin Random House lists the publisher as Dial Books; it also records recognition from Booklist, Junior Library Guild, and Publishers Weekly. A Publishers Weekly profile connects Lyndie’s insistence on finding the truth with Shepherd’s own years as a journalist and her earlier graduate study in poetry. Those two disciplines meet in the book’s blend of investigation and carefully shaped voice. Lyndie approaches family stories much as she approaches public history, questioning who benefits when inconvenient facts are withheld. The True History of Lyndie B. Hawkins uses that curiosity to explore loyalty, forgiveness, and the difference between preserving a family’s dignity and refusing to acknowledge its pain.