Meet Kate Szegda, author of Pharmacy Girl on Wednesday, July 2nd at 6:30pm at Bethany Beach Books!
Kate Szegda
Kate Szegda credits her mother with engendering a love of history. Family stories about her grandfather’s drug store in Highland Park, NJ during the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 sparked Szegda’s curiosity and led to writing her debut, award-winning novel, Pharmacy Girl.
A Jersey girl by birth, Kate grew up in small towns: Highland Park and Point Pleasant Beach. As a kid, she played the trumpet and loved riding bikes, ice skating, and reading Nancy Drew mysteries. In high school, she worked on the Point Pleasant boardwalk selling penny candy.
After earning a degree in English and education, Kate married her college sweetheart. They have two grown children, and over the years, they’ve had three Labrador retrievers.
As a grown up, Kate taught middle school language arts in Wilmington and loved reading books with her students. Two favorites were Johnny Tremaine and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Historical fiction. No surprise there. Other favorites were Holes and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. After retiring for the first time, Kate taught ELA methods classes and supervised student teachers at the University of Delaware.
Currently, Kate lives in Wilmington and Bethany Beach with her husband and Labrador #3, Emma. With time to pursue her passions, Kate is working on a sequel, playing golf, and reading. Still a fan of middle grade fiction, she loves an afternoon with a good book. But, for Kate, writing Pharmacy Girl has been the best experience yet. Historical research, especially about your own family, is a lot like being a detective, and that is fun.
Pharmacy Girl
August 1918. Everybody likes twelve-year-old Josie Winslow. While she helps in the family drug store and plans for the first day of school, her pharmacist father is puzzled by newspaper articles about influenza arriving in New York on ships from Europe. It is still summer. Flu is a winter disease.
Billy Detwiler has been kicked out of prep school. No one, not even Billy, is happy he will be in Josie’s school let alone her eighth-grade class. He is a bully of the first order and is looking for his next victim. He calls Josie “Pharmacy Girl,” but it is no compliment.
By mid-October, what was once “just the flu” is now an epidemic. Doctors are baffled. Josie’s father has never seen anything like it. Flu is usually only a problem for the very old or the very young. But Spanish influenza is different: it is killing young and healthy adults—like Josie’s parents.
But there are no effective vaccines, no ventilators, and no anti-virals to stop a pandemic.
Can Josie help the people she loves, and the bully she hates, survive?
Published before COVID and inspired by stories of the author’s pharmacist grandfather, Pharmacy Girl is Kate Szegda’s award-winning debut novel for middle-grade readers and people who love history.
If you like historically rich page turners and heartfelt stories of hope and resilience, you will love Pharmacy Girl.