Monday, December 12, 2022

Check out Tom Durwood's fabulous novels – The Math Girls #HistoricalFiction #YAAdventure #BlogTour #CoffeePotBookClub @TDurwood @cathiedunn



 

The Adventures of...
Ruby Pi and the Math Girls
Ruby Pi and the Geometry Girls 


The Math Girls

by Tom Durwood





Publication Date: December 22nd, 2022
Publisher: Empire Studies Press
Page Length: 147 Pages each
Genre: YA Historical Adventure 


T H E   A D V E N T U R E S   O F

Ruby Pi and the
Math Girls

Young adult fiction featuring gambling, bandits, swordplay, probability and Bayes’ Theorem. An English teacher hopes to engage students with colorful STEM adventures.

In this outstanding collection, Tom addresses the chronic problem of our young women dropping out of STEM studies. His stories lend adventure to scientific thinking.

~ Tanzeela Siddique, Math Instructor


T H E   A D V E N T U R E S   O F

Ruby Pi and the
Geometry Girls

A collection of adventure stories featuring young heroines at turning points in history who use math to solve colossal problems. 
 
Smart girls take on buried secrets, villains, tanks, mysteries, codes, and economics to save their people. “Stories, mystery and math go well together… a welcome addition.”

~ Jeannine Atkins, author of “Grasping Mysteries: Girls Who Loved Math”



Girls Solving Problems
 
Tom Durwood

Our narratives are filled with images of attractive girls falling in love, girls being assaulted, girls reaching their starry destinies … but what about girls at work? 

Girls solving problems not related to beauty, love, or relationships? Girls trying and failing, failing, trying some more, failing, persevering, failing again, and finally succeeding.  
 
Our girls need critical thinking and grit more than they need perfect appearance and fantasies of romance.
 
Laura Ingalls Wilder is an author who runs the narratives of family and coming of age through inner workings – in this case, of farm life on the Great Plains. Wilder’s enduring series of “Little House on the Prairie” books derive their strength from the family’s labor and industry making a hard-won life on the plains.  Ingalls does not gloss over the processes of running a farm – digging a well, harvesting a crop, making dinner. Beauty and style are not factors in the characters’ successes. 
 
Another writer with close ties to the hard-won glories of work is Jack London. In The Call of the Wild, he makes a point of breaking down the proper way to load a sled. A group of Yukon rookies skips over this critical process and pays vividly for it (we hear the ice crack beneath their sled).  Another London story, To Build a Fire, centers entirely on this single, vital operation, and the moral worlds captured within that method.
 
Ignore the proper ways of working a problem, and the fall is steep.  It is a lesson our girls can use in their lives today, perhaps even more than one-upping the mean girls.
 
If the western writer Louis L’Amour likes a character, he shows the character working hard – driving cattle, chopping wood, climbing a rock-face, practicing with a six-gun.

Jane Eyre, John Green, and Jane Austen are excellent models for our YA stories, but adding a shot of Louis L’Amour, a little house on the prairie, and Jack London wouldn’t be such a bad thing. 



Ruby Pi and the Math Girls


Tom Durwood



Tom Durwood is a teacher, writer and editor with an interest in history. Tom most recently taught English Composition and Empire and Literature at Valley Forge Military College, where he won the Teacher of the Year Award five times. Tom has taught Public Speaking and Basic Communications as guest lecturer for the Naval Special Warfare Development Group at the Dam’s Neck Annex of the Naval War College.


Tom’s ebook Empire and Literature matches global works of film and fiction to specific quadrants of empire, finding surprising parallels. Literature, film, art and architecture are viewed against the rise and fall of empire. In a foreword to Empire and Literature, postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty of the University of Chicago calls it “imaginative and innovative.” Prof. Chakrabarty writes that “Durwood has given us a thought-provoking introduction to the humanities.” His subsequent book “Kid Lit: An Introduction to Literary Criticism” has been well-reviewed. “My favorite nonfiction book of the year,” writes The Literary Apothecary (Goodreads).


Early reader response to Tom’s historical fiction adventures has been promising. “A true pleasure … the richness of the layers of Tom’s novel is compelling,” writes Fatima Sharrafedine in her foreword to “The Illustrated Boatman’s Daughter.” The Midwest Book Review calls that same adventure “uniformly gripping and educational … pairing action and adventure with social issues.” Adds Prairie Review, “A deeply intriguing, ambitious historical fiction series.”


Tom briefly ran his own children’s book imprint, Calico Books (Contemporary Books, Chicago). Tom’s newspaper column “Shelter” appeared in the North County Times for seven years. Tom earned a Masters in English Literature in San Diego, where he also served as Executive Director of San Diego Habitat for Humanity.


Two of Tom’s books, “Kid Lit” and “The Illustrated Boatman’s Daughter,” were selected “Best of the New” by Julie Sara Porter’s Bookworm  Book Alert



Connect with Tom:


Website – The Math Girls


Twitter • Facebook • LinkedIn • Pinterest

Amazon Author Page • Goodreads



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