Soho Teen to Release THE UNFINISHED LIFE OF ADDISON STONE by Adele Griffin, 8/12

Two-time National Book Award finalist Adele Griffin has never written anything like this. The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone tells the story of 17-year-old street artist Addison Stone, who burst onto the NYC scene only to die of apparent suicide at the height of her meteoric rise to fame. The novel attempts to discover the truth of Stone's mysterious death and the core of her work through first person interviews with her parents, friends, boyfriends, mentors, critics, and more-punctuated with 63 pieces offull color, original paintings and photographs.

To give life to what she calls a "docu-novel," Adele hired model Giza Lagarce tobecome Addison (that's her on the cover) and took hundreds of photos of Giza and an extended cast of characters, many of which are included in the book. Says Griffin: "I'd been working on a first draft of Addison, and I hadn't even thought about featuring a visual Addison; the original idea was to showcase the art. Suddenly there was Addison Stone in my kitchen... That's when I saw an entirely fresh component of the book, as an intimate biography."

To stand in for Addison's art, Griffin obtained the rights to pieces from no fewer than five different artists, all students and alumni from prestigious schools such as RISD and Pratt. Over the course of the book, this work displays the progression of Addison's short life from a frenetic, loose-cannon child to a brilliant celebrated artist whose last creation shocked the world.

About the Author

Adele Griffin is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the highly acclaimed author of numerous books for young adult and middle grade readers. Her works include Sons of Liberty and Where I Want to Be, and most recently, Loud Awake and Lost. Adele lives with her husband, Erich; their two young children; and their dog, Edith, in Brooklyn, New York.