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Praise for Dot to Dot:

Award winning finalist, USA Best Books 2011, Children’s Fiction.

Twelve-year-old Dot is grieving from her mother’s sudden death when her Aunt Tab decides that the two of them need to travel from their home in Seattle to England… Dot to Dot by Kit Bakke is the story of a girl who goes on a journey of distance that turns into a trip where she discovers a lot about herself as well as the people around her.
-Cynthia Hudson, Mother Daughter Book Club.com

Bakke faces Dot’s pain head-on…the shifting relationship between Dot and her aunt, as well as Dot’s tender memories of her mother, are especially well done. With complex characters and eloquent prose, it’s an absorbing story of a girl’s surprising path through her grief.
-Publishers Weekly

Kit Bakke adeptly follows the mercurial moods and dawning insights of the book’s twelve-year-old protagonist, Dot, on her journey through grief. This is a banquet table of a book, filled with real and imagined heroes, would-be friends, irritating family, cherished memories, new experiences, and leaps through time. True to the best children’s novels we are treated to a plethora of clues that must be solved and secrets that must be uncovered along the way.
-Lynn Grant, Yellowwallpaperwriters.com

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Excerpt:

From Chapter 1: The Red Tsunami

No one had expected Dot’s mother to die. It was a freak accident, Dot heard the medic say when he screeched the van into the Emergency Room driveway of the hospital and doctors and nurses ran out to rush Thea’s prone body through a door labeled Major Procedures. Although everyone moved quickly, it was already too late to do anything but talk.

Staring at the blue yarn or the yellow walls wasn’t enough to block the pictures of that cloudy Saturday afternoon. Dot couldn’t stop them from unreeling over and over again in her mind. Against her will, she watched her mother and herself leave their neighborhood branch of the Seattle Public Library, as they’d done hundreds of times ever since Dot was two years old, happily loaded with two weeks’ worth of adventure, fun and, just possibly, wisdom.

Next she saw her mother and herself outside the library entrance, holding their books and pointing at the clouds in the sky with their free hands. Dot remembered every word of their discussion about the definite preponderance of nimbostratus formations. They agreed it might rain soon, so they decided they’d better take the bus instead of walking. Most of Dot and Thea’s decisions were like that—choices made together after an interesting chat. Thea always said she learned as much as Dot when they talked like that, which always made Dot feel good.

Dot stared harder at the tufts of blue, trying like crazy to hang on and not go past the cloud conversation. But she failed, like she always had this past week, and the next memory reel started up, the one where she walked to the corner with her mother. For the millionth time Dot watched as she and her mother stood waiting for the light to change so they could cross over to their bus stop. Then came the completely and totally unstoppable scene—the part when the big red trailer truck roared by and its huge, sticking-out side-view mirror hit Thea right at eye level. Dot heard the damp thudding sound echo again and again as it smashed the top of her mother’s head and broke her neck. It was over in a flash.

Dot never imagined the world could change so fast. One second she had a mother, and the next second she didn’t. One second she was an ordinary kid with ordinary problems, a second later she was an orphan who was afraid of everything. It wasn’t just her mother who had lost her hold on life.

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Cover:

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Buy Dot to Dot:

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About the Author:KitBakke-226x300
Kit Bakke is the author of MISS ALCOTT’S EMAIL and DOT TO DOT, books that celebrate the creative and independent young women who face down adversity with humor, persistence and friendship. Born, raised and still living in Seattle, Kit loves international travel and weaves her adventures into her writing. Like her characters, Kit asks a lot of questions and believes life should be lived out loud.

Her most recent novel, DOT TO DOT is about a young teenager who witnesses her mother’s bloody but accidental death. Kit uses her own travel experiences to take Dot on a healing journey through the English literary landscapes of Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Austen.

Kit’s first book, MISS ALCOTT’S EMAIL, is not only about Louisa May Alcott, the Civil War, the women’s suffrage movement and transcendentalism (all of which were part of Louisa’s life), but also reflects Kit’s rowdy politically active days in the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 70s. A former hospice nurse, Kit embraces the lessons learned through grief and courage.

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Connect with Kit:
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