BEAUTIFUL CONFIDENCE
Fashion runway shines with teen with cancer.
This month, local nonprofit Hand to Hold released podcast “NICU Now” on iTunes and Stitcher. Hand to Hold connects parents of babies who are born early or are medically fragile to resources like peer mentors and written materials about life in the neonatal intensive care unit. The podcast is a new way for Hand to Hold to reach more parents and make them aware of the services Hand to Hold provides.
Founder Kelli Kelley started Hand to Hold officially in 2010, but the roots of it go back to when Kelley gave birth to her son, Jackson, in 2000 at 24 weeks gestation.
The idea for the podcast started in 2015 when Kelley received a concussion after being hit in the head by a volleyball at her daughter’s practice. She had that queasy, unsettling feeling that comes with motion sickness or early pregnancy. She couldn’t follow a recipe or do much of anything. Her doctor prescribed her time in bed doing nothing: no reading, no watching TV.
She turned to listening to podcasts after a friend who was a podcast junkie had serendipitously showed her the week before how to download them. She started with the popular “Serial” but soon discovered a “Radio Lab” podcast talking to Tom and Kelly French, who wrote about their daughter in the book “Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon.”
Kelley recognized that a podcast could be t hewaytocon- nect more families. “This is a way for NICU fami lytoshare their stories,” she says.
Since Kelley started Hand to Hold ,shesa ys, s he realized the limits of what hospitals can provide their families, as many hospitals have hadtocutthi ngs like social workers and support groups. “This is free and easy,” shesaysofthepodc ast.
Often, parents bring their phones into the NICU while
Writing the sequel to a successful novel can be even more challenging than penning the original.
An author must revisit the elements that made the first book a hit while steering clear of retreads. The plot must be kept fresh enough to satisfy stalwart fans, yet still win over new ones who might not be familiar with the backstory.
Back in 2015, Austin author P.J. Hoover tapped into the mythology-hungry middlegrade fan base of Rick Riordan with “Tut: The Story of My Immortal Life,” a funny and fast-paced fantasy novel rooted in the idea that the boy king Tutankhamun was rendered immortal at age 14. Doomed to repeat eighth grade for eternity in present-day D.C., Tut suffered the indignities of middle school while thwarting evil gods still seeking to empirebuild in modern times.
Now comes “Tut: My Epic Battle to Save the World” (Starscape/Tor, $15.99), which hits all the hallmarks of a topnotch sequel and then some. Hoover — wh o’llbea t BookPeople next weekend for the