Trampoline by ISBN: 9780821421529Dawn Jewell is fifteen. She is restless, curious, and wry. She lives in eastern Kentucky with her addict mother and her Mamaw, whose stance against the coal companies has earned her the community's ire. She listens to Black Flag, speaks her mind, and joins her grandmother's fight against mountaintop removal mining almost in spite of herself. Dawn decides whether to save a mountain or save herself; be ruled by love or ruled by anger; remain in the land of her birth or run for her life.
Check Out the Entire Canard County Trilogy
Weedeater by
Gene, the lovelorn landscaper who bears witness to the misadventures of a family entangled in drugs, artmaking, and politics, a family beset by both environmental and self-destruction; and Dawn Jewell, a young mother ;searching--for lost family members, lost youth, lost community, and lost heart. Picking up six years after the end of Robert Gipe's acclaimed first novel, Trampoline, in Weedeater, the reader finds Canard County living through the last hurrah of the coal industry and the most turbulent and deadly phase of the community's battle with opioid abuse.
ISBN: 9780821423097
Pop by
A coming-of-age story of hope, betrayal, and familial legacy set in rural Appalachia. Set in the run-up and aftermath of the 2016 election, Pop brings the Canard County trilogy to a close as Dawn, the young narrator of Gipe's first novel, Trampoline, is now the mother of the seventeen-year-old Nicolette. Whereas Dawn has become increasingly agoraphobic as the internet persuades her the world is descending into chaos, Nicolette narrates an Appalachia where young people start businesses rooted in local food culture and work to build community.
ISBN: 9780821424391
"A hole narrow and deep." © Robert Gipe, 2015. Originally published in Trampoline (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 33.
Robert Gipe
Review Essays about The Canard County Trilogy
- The Recalcitrant Redemption of Dawn JewellIf anyone’s life is a loaded gun, pointed right at the heart of the American literary canon, it is Dawn Jewell’s. Forget Katniss of Hunger Games and the recast Appalachia of Dis
trict Twelve. Her Artemisian bow may bring down piles of tent pole film dollars, but Dawn’s f-bomb dropping, liquor swilling, car wrecking quest to save her mountain, redeem her mother, and get her dead daddy back has shot her smack into the starry field of the classics. - "Aint That Something?""I had had my fill of Canard County," fifteen-year-old Dawn Jewell proclaims in the opening cartoon panel of Trampoline. Canard County is a fictional county in Eastern Kentucky. It's rural, poor, and white. Coal mining, unemployment, drug addiction, and religious fervor dominate the landscape and the culture. It is, in other words, straight-up Appalachia. But as Trampoline embraces its Appalachian-ness, it also questions commonly held notions of what it means to be Appalachian.
- Untelling: Trampoline as a Text of BlissRobert Gipe’s novel Trampoline meets Roland Barthes’s criteria for a modern novel because of its surprising use of a graphic form and a storyteller’s (or oral history) point of view that transcends the barrier between reader and narrator. It achieves these aims by its use of the surreal, placing it, in a uniquely Appalachian way, in the tradition of magical realism.
- Interview with Robert GipeH: Pop is the final installment in your trilogy that began with Trampoline back in 2015. Tell us about the trilogy.
RG: The trilogy started with Trampoline. In that one the narrator is Dawn, who is telling a story about when she was fifteen and kind of got caught between an environmental activist grandmother and a mother who was dealing with substance abuse issues. Dawn was just trying to figure out how to grow, to find her own way...
Illustrated Novels
The library has multiple graphic novels at the Prestonsburg campus. Graphic novels contain more illustrations than text.
Here are other examples of illustrated novels, where text is key but illustrations prove to show the reader more:
