Now Is Not the Time to Panic

Frankie Budge is sixteen in the summer of 1996, bored and restless in Coalfield, Tennessee, and sure she wants to be a writer. Then Zeke arrives. He is a new kid in town, a gifted artist, and just as awkward as she is.

The two of them make a poster and sign it with nothing. It carries a single odd line about the edge being a shantytown full of gold seekers, and about fugitives hunted by a skinny, hungry law. They begin quietly putting copies up around town. Soon the copies multiply, strangers make their own, and the town slides into what people come to call the Coalfield Panic.

Twenty years later, Frances Eleanor Budge has a careful life as a wife, a mother and a novelist. She has kept that summer to herself, and her first love with it. Then a journalist named Mazzy Brower phones, wanting the poster's origin for an article. Frances must choose how much she is prepared to reveal about her own past and about Zeke.

The novel is contemporary literary fiction told in two timelines, the teenage summer and the adult present. It reads as a story of a first creative partnership and a first love, with a mystery about an anonymous object at its center, and the weight falls on what Frances will admit.