Baby, I was born to read

You know you have a problem when...

2011-06-30T21:42:00.001-05:00

...there are 101 books in your to-read piles. Also, when you say you are going to bring only a few books back from ALA Annual in New Orleans and you bring back 61.

Is there a 12 step program for my bibliomanic hoarding? I'm sure of it.

Will post major ALA update sometime this weekend. But now, I'm off to enjoy my ARC of Michelle Hodkin's The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer. Word to the wise: it's super creepy. Perfect hot summer night read!

Crunch Time

2011-05-27T16:39:00.000-05:00

Okay, there are now 30 days until we begin meetings for this cycle of Best Fiction [in hot, sticky, but delicious New Orleans]. And as of today, 31 books I still have to read. YIPES!

But if I have learned anything from the Little Engine That Could, it is that mental power is everything. Which is why I am about to start training for a half-marathon. And start my new job. And continue hunting for the perfect sofa. And why not add a new round of edits on my manuscript?

Oy. Would that I could be this one kitty I know, lounging around all day because it is 84 degrees in our apartment.

But no. As usual, time to read!

I guess I fit right in

2011-05-26T14:03:00.000-05:00

Evidently Cambridge is the country's most well-read city. Given that I've read almost 300 books since moving here, I have to say I agree.

Back to Laini Taylor's ah-mazing Daughter of Smoke and Bone.

Book Review: Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey

2011-05-20T14:25:00.000-05:00

This afternoon I finished up the remaining 100 pages of Craig Silvey's Jasper Jones, an Australian YA novel. The day before, I gave myself the lofty goal of reading three books. Well, I read three books, but I only managed to finish one of them yesterday. The other two I finished off earlier today. While the other two were quite good, Jasper Jones was the one that truly kept me spellbound.

The effortlessly moody coming of age story starts off when teenage Charlie is awoken at night by Jasper Jones, the half-Aboriginal outcast in town. The two barely know each other at the novel's start, but as it continues, their stories become intricately entwined. Jasper has found something horrifying in his eucalyptus hideout: Laura, the head of the shire's daughter, whom he had been secretly seeing at night, is dead, battered, and suspended from the tree. He knows how he is seen in town. No one will believe that he didn't do it. So the two young men do the only thing they can imagine doing at that point. They hide the body and tell no one.

With purposeful echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird, Silvey sets Jasper Jones in a town with two Boo Radleys: Jasper Jones and the Jack Lionel, the reclusive old man that Jasper holds under suspicion for killing Laura. What impresses me about this book, though, is that there is so much of interest going on in addition to the murder mystery (itself quite captivating). Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War as witnessed in a small Australian town, there is Charlie's friendship with Jeffrey Lu, a Vietnamese refugee whose hilarious conversation topics belie the serious mistreatment his father receives from their neighbors. And we also have Charlie's family life, with his horrid witch of a mother, and his hapless teacher father, the tension bubbling to the surface only towards the novel's end. And then there's Charlie's budding romance with Eliza, Laura's sister.

This is a rich, textured novel that readers will want to soak in, not hurry through. Teenage Me craved books like this, with glimpses of the messy grown-up world, and beautiful writing.

This is coming of age at its best.

I love the mailman

2011-05-18T15:29:00.000-05:00

At least, I do when he deposits this on my doorstep.

I guess I know what I'm reading this afternoon!

New favorite authors

2011-02-09T13:30:00.000-06:00

There's nothing quite like discovering a new favorite author. That feeling, just a few paragraphs into a book when you realize that your specific reading taste and something about the way that author writes, imagines, or explains, are completely in sync. The other night, when I read the first page of Tim Tharp's latest novel Badd, I had that realization.

His National Book Award-winning The Spectacular Now was one of my favorite books the year it was published. It, too, was one of those delightful surprises, a book I read only because it was nominated for the National Book Award. Somehow, it fell just under my radar. Well, that was not to happen with his new book. When I saw the galley at ALA Midwinter, I thought in a Liz Lemon-y way, "I want to go to there." Finally, I've had the chance to go to there, to sit down and enjoy this book

Okay, enough blabbering. To the book!

Ceejay is not a girly girl. She's stubborn and a little difficult, and she idolizes her older brother Bobby, who was, to put it frankly, a badass all through high school. It was his final act of badassery, though, that put him in the situation that would change his life. He stole a car, and the repercussion for him would be either jail or a joining the army. He chose the latter, unaware that it would involve actually going to Iraq.

Bobby is finally coming home, and Ceejay's anticipating a hero's welcome, followed up by (fingers crossed) the opportunity to move out of her parents' house and in with Bobby. But life is never that easy. The Bobby that returns home is not the Bobby that has left. He's depressed, he drinks too much and in a different way than before, and he's befriended the town weirdo, Captain Crazy.

While a central part of this book is Ceejay's growing understand of what happened to Bobby and why he has changed -- that they can't so easily go back to the way things were -- it is also so much about family and the connections people make with each other. Ceejay and Bobby have been at odds with their parents and siblings, but at least for Ceejay, that starts to change. Big family events bring them together in ways that allow Ceejay to get a different perspective on her younger sister and her mother. And maybe a family isn't just your mom and dad, and your siblings. Maybe family means taking care of someone else that you grow to know.

Tharp's latest book is so refreshingly honest. It is about real people -- they live in Oklahoma, they do not have a reality show, they are not vampires or werewolves. They have to work, they fight in wars, they get by. Bobby's story, when it finally comes out, is heartbreaking and unforgettable, just like this book.

If you read and enjoyed Dana Reinhardt's excellent The Things A Brother Knows, you must read this one. I have a feeling we'll be hearing much more about it. Clearly, I have a new favorite author.

It's official

2011-01-17T11:46:00.000-06:00

After nearly a week of meetings in sunny and gorgeous San Diego, we hemmed and hawed and ultimately, committed to a list of 99 titles in the first ever YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults list. And here it is!

I'm so happy with our list and the diversity of titles recognized. There were some personal favorites that didn't quite make the cut (okay, and some that weren't even close) but that's all part of the pleasure of working with 14 individuals from around the country, bringing such a variety of tastes and experiences to the table.

Our work does not resume until February 1, so I am rewarding myself for all that reading with, okay, a bit more reading, but also some serious indulging in the things I have missed for the past several months. I am sorely behind in watching Oscar-worthy performances. My to-watch list is nearly matching my to-read list. Okay, that's not exactly true. My to-read piles are still rather impressive, in that they span about 5 shelves. But I'm trying to mix in some fabulous grown-up books with the must-read ARCs picked up at Midwinter. Just finished Rhoda Janzen's Mennonite In A Little Black Dress, a delightfully funny and surprisingly profound memoir. Next up: ARC of Sarah Dessen's forthcoming What Happened to Goodbye and the Newbery winner, Moon Over Manifest. Also, must finish Gary D. Schmidt's Okay for Now. I've historically never been one to read multiple books at once, but I think I'm embracing this new reality.

Holiday reading update

2010-12-26T15:25:00.000-06:00

Nothing says the Holidays quite like doing something you don't want to. Wait. That didn't used to be true! Well, this year, like it or not, that is my reality. Yesterday was all about spending time with family (including my hyped up 3 year old nephew who was still so excited about Christmas that he was playing with his fire engine in bed at 11:30 p.m.), eating lots of delicious food, and opening presents. Today is about hunkering down in the much-anticipated blizzard and reading.

Last night I treated myself to the last book of the remaining 10 that I actually had an interest in reading: Adele Griffin's Picture the Dead. It's my second Adele Griffin book this year, having read and reviewed The Julian Game for School Library Journal. While Julian didn't really do it for me on a personal level, I quite enjoyed Picture the Dead. I can't think of too many Civil War historical fiction titles that take place in Brookline, Mass., and I enjoyed the local connection. I must admit, I also enjoyed the really short chapters, as my attention span was limited due to frequent interruptions by my nephew. The packaging on this one is absolutely gorgeous -- no wonder Bryan Selznick blurbed it -- and I will be keeping it, since I allowed my nephew to color all over the inside of it during the Christmas Eve Mass.

I'm taking a little break from Lish McBride's Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, my second book in a row about the dead (actually, I think a good percentage of my remaining to-reads are about the dead or the undead). I just read the most startling scene out of this entire year's worth of reading. Which is kind of weird because until that point, the book had been pretty funny with hints of weird stuff under the surface. Only 8 5/6 books to go!

The one's I've been putting off

2010-12-13T15:29:00.001-06:00

I'm down to the final 15 books I have to read before BFYA. Some of these books I've been putting off reading for a long time, others just so happened to be among the last few nominations, and a few only just now came in via inter-library loan.

That said, I would be lying if I said that I was really excited about any of these books. A quick glance shows that there are no contemporary coming of age stories left. They were gobbled up nearly instantaneously. What remains are the ones I've been squeamish about, and for a wide variety of very random reasons. One of them uses a very small font; I don't care much for very small fonts. One that didn't make it into this photograph is about a pegasus. I've never been a big fan of, umm, pegasi? Needless to say, when I look at this pile and I have to choose what to read next, there's a big of cringing and trepidation. Sort of like when Buddy the Elf decides to ride the escalator. It's like, do I really have to? And yes, I do. I really have to. I'm soooooo close to having read all 191 nominations. The clock is ticking.

Let's see if there are some hidden gems here. I'll be posting my reactions over the next few weeks. In the meantime, a clip from Elf:

Back from my hiatus

2010-11-01T16:51:00.000-05:00

I received some exciting news these past few days. One, I have the right connections (one of the perks of dating someone in the physics world) to attend a taping of The Big Bang Theory. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have an affinity for Sheldon Cooper. Well, once I can find some room in my schedule to get to Los Angeles, I can make this dream a reality. This dream: meeting SHELDON. I mean, Jim Parsons.

The other exciting news came through over the past few days and this morning. Nominations for the Best Fiction for Young Adults 2011 list has closed as of midnight last night. There were 191 nominated titles, and I only have 35 left to read. Phew! Given that we have until January 7th to read them, this is a huge load off of my back. I mean, don't get me wrong, 35 books is a lot. But with a little more than 2 months, it is actually manageable. Heck, I might even have time to read some of the adult books I've been dreaming about reading. Like:

In the meantime, I've started the book with the dreamiest author photo ever. Also known as James Franco's Palo Alto: Stories. It's my current bedside book, which means I'm getting through it veerrryyyy sloooowwllly. Also, it means my dreams will probably be filled with violence and disaffected youth. Hooray!

Tonight's book: Forge by Laurie Halse Anderson. I looooved Chains. It's one of my favorite books to booktalk. So many gorgeous passages to from for read-alouds. So moving... but also so exciting. I can't wait to settle on the couch with my kitty and start reading.

The end of the picture book? Hardly.

2010-10-09T07:30:00.000-05:00

I heard the buzz surrounding the New York Times article "Picture Books No Longer A Staple For Children" on kidlit and library list-servs and now I've had a chance read it and think about it. And like most of my colleagues, I'm going to jump in and say, it's wrong. For one, the article seems to assume that the only place one might find a picture book for their child to read is a bookstore, a bookstore selling only brand new $16.99 picture books. Well, that was the author's first mistake.

Walk into any public library and talk to the people in the children's department or the circulation desk. Picture books circulate like crazy. After DVDs, they are usually one of the most highly circulating items. Picture books will always be purchased as gifts - I've certainly been purchasing 10+ a year for my 2 year old nephew - but when the economy goes south, I think most families of readers have looked at the price tag of picture books (and this is a case where the paperback versions do not stand the test of time and are hard to look through in any shelving unit) and decided they could go without buying them new. Also, half the time I head into a bookstore looking for a few titles that have been recommended by Horn Book or Booklist, I find they don't even have them and turn to Amazon (all the while wishing I still lived around the corner from the tremendous 57th Street Books).

I also don't buy the either/or argument, based off a few comments from individuals, that parents are en masse telling their kids not to read or look at picture books in favor of easy readers or beginner chapter books. Again, I think back to being at the library just the other day and checking out books to families with new readers. A young girl, about 5 or 6, handed me a stack of 8 books, 4 picture books, 3 easy readers. With no budget limiting them, the kids will choose as many as their little hands (or mom's tote bag) can hold.

The craziness of committee work

2010-10-03T14:35:00.000-05:00

I spent a good chunk of this morning filling out nomination forms for Best Fiction for Young Adults. Four, in fact. It had been a while since I nominated some titles and I've had these on my mind. I was really tempted to nominate this one book (which shall not be named) because I'd been growing fonder and fonder of it in my memory. Thankfully, I went back and read my notes. In reading them, it became quiiiiite clear that I enjoyed the book, but did not at all think it was worthy of being nominated. Duly noted!

It's getting to that point in the cycle where I'm edging closer and closer to having read 300 books. It's kind of a marvelous achievement, you would think, but man, I am already thinking about the lovely break I am going to give myself when this year's term ends. I am going to not try to read a book a day. I'm not even going to try to read YA fiction. I'm going to read an adult book or two (Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, if I can stomach it!) and watch my TV shows and, oh yeah, spend time with friends and family. It's been so frantic here in the hours after work, where it's become apparent that my boyfriend and I basically never stop working. Yes, the day job ends, but it's like our day job has created a night job. I'm reading and writing notes, taking a quick break for dinner and a Colbert Report, he's rushing in and out of lab. It's kind of crazy to think how easy our lives were a year ago. When the question was not, Can we please add more hours to the day? but rather, What should we do now?

Before I started my new jobs, I was trying to find a way to fill the time, all the while hoping and wishing with every new day that it might bring the news I so want to hear: a call or email from an agent. Now, I haven't given up on that search, but it's something I approach with both excitement and trepidation. I cannot imagine adding editing or any other work to my already overflowing daily responsibilities! ::Gulp::

Where did she go?

2010-09-11T13:08:00.000-05:00

I take a two week blogging hiatus and suddenly my blog has more hits than ever before (thanks to a certain photo of Tim Riggins, clearly, an in-demand kind of thing). I've found myself a bit overwhelmed with stuff to do after starting my new jobs. I had to run over to a delightful stationary store this morning in order to get more organized. My to-do lists scrawled in my too-small yearly organizer were too much to handle, so I've gone ahead and bought a much bigger organizer for 2011 and a supplementary, beautiful clairefontaine notebook to get me by until then.

The struggle has switched from finding a balance between writing (and everything that goes along that while trying to get published) and reading my committee work, to still trying to find time for those things now that I'm settling in at my two new jobs, which add up to 40 hours a week. A challenge indeed but one that I am up to!

Whenever I start to think about how it will be hard to find time for everything, I think about my alter-ego, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, who has managed to write many books while in college and graduate school. She makes me (and many other people) look like complete slackers.

Anyway, hoping to get some of the reading under control this weekend, taking advantage of the fact that the Red Sox are pretty much certainly out of the playoffs. Ideally, I'd like to finish 4 books this weekend, go apple picking, write at least 10 pages on my new WIP so I have SOMETHING for critique group next week, and watch Temple Grandin. Probably will need to back away from the computer to make it all happen.

Book Review - Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

2010-08-21T09:45:00.000-05:00

Talented musician Andi has not recovered from her younger brother Truman's death. More than a year later, she's still reeling, dependent on pills to get through every day. Her only solace is music, in all its varieties, from classical to the Decemberists to Radiohead to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. When her father comes to Brooklyn and sees the situation Andi and her mother (who relentlessly paints portraits of Truman) are in, he takes Andi with him to Paris and sends her mother away for intensive treatment. But a change of scenery doesn't take away Andi's pain, and all she wants to do is return to Brooklyn and rescue her mother.

At her father's friends' place in Paris, she comes upon the diary of Alex, a teenage girl living during the French Revolution. It's the one thing that offers her some kind of escape, someone else in the throes of unbelievable suffering and horror, whose relationship with a ten year old future king Louis-Charles very much mirror's Andi's relationship to her brother. The more Andi finds out about Alex, the more she is intrigued. And she's not sure if it's the pills she pops or something else, but there are these moments when she feels like Alex is calling out to her, begging for her story to be told, to be resolved, for the mystery of Louis-Charles to be solved.

Jennifer Donnelly's latest book is absolutely brilliant. Clocking in at just under 500 pages, this story absolutely warrants the length of the book. There's so much that happens as Andi and Alex's story become intertwined, never mind the economy of language. Donnelly has clearly done her research to make Andi's musical interests complex, compelling, and so real. The characters, from Andi and Alex, to Andi's parents, to Andi's friend Vijay, are well-developed and all interesting in their own right. This book will definitely be getting some worthy Printz consideration and I feel so lucky to have been able to read an advanced copy.

Definitely one of my favorite books of the year. Also, the first time I ever read a book at a baseball game. (I intended only to read in between innings but towards the end I was incapable of putting it down!)

Putting my eggs in a lot of baskets

2010-08-18T19:05:00.001-05:00

Every time I let a query out loose into the world (or realistically, into an agent or assistant's mailbox) I acknowledge that I've done everything I can. Whatever happens happens. It's a kind of zen moment, not unlike the way, all through junior high, high school, and college, I took that deep breath as the exams were handed out. I had done all I could to prepare; whatever happens happens.

I've been realizing that for all the research I do, querying is still a complete crap shoot. Agents that were interested in my last book? Well, by and large, they aren't interested in this one. And the agents that rejected my last manuscript? Well, okay, some of them definitely rejected this one. But a good deal (at least 4) that rejected my last book off the query are now requesting my new manuscript. And with enthusiasm!

As a result, I've been keeping my basket pretty full of eggs. Every time a rejection comes in, I send off one to two queries. I have four fulls out with agents at the moment, a number that makes me feel really good... until a few days pass and I start anxiously checking my email.

Luckily, at least for the rest of today and tomorrow, I've got a fabulous book to keep me busy (at least until the top of every hour, when I check my email): Jennifer Donnelly's Revolution. I picked up an ARC at Annual and had been holding off starting it because I wanted to read it over a few days when I could really savor its 470-something pages. So far, so sooo good.

Massive Disappointment

2010-08-17T19:42:00.000-05:00

I don't usually post negative reviews here, but I have to admit that I just read what very quickly and easily became my LEAST favorite read of 2010. I was on my way up to Montreal for the weekend and to ensure that reading happened, I brought along only books that I had to read (i.e. Best Fiction for Young Adults nominations). And I started reading the one that looked the most exciting. Oh boy, did I make a mistake.

The book that massively disappointed me debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, so it's probably not in any danger. Also, one of its two co-authors is mega famous, which probably won't hurt matters. I'm looking at you, James Frey.

The book in question is I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore (a pseudonym for James Frey and a co-author). I kind of wish the book had been written by an actual alien. Because maybe then it would have been written in a language that I am not able to read. I Am Number Four has an interesting premise-- I'll give it that. Apparently Hollywood gave it that as well, because Michael Bay is producing the film version. The book supposes that when the planet Lorien was being invaded by Magadorians, nine young children escaped and made it to the United States, along with the Lorien guardians. But the children were bound together by a really stupid--if you want to know what I truly think--curse. They can only be killed in order (Two could not die before One, etc). When the book starts, Three has been killed. Number Four, or known by the citizens of a small town called Paradise, Ohio, as John Smith.

If you're thinking John Smith isn't exactly original, well, you're onto something. The whole book suffers from "isn't exactly original." While there are some truly exciting action scenes at the end around the 400 page mark, the rest is highly predictable and extremely boring. John Smith falls for the waify blonde at school and any time they speak, I felt the need to find a spoon to gag myself with. It was that bad. John Smith (Number Four) finds out that his special skill is he is essentially fireproof. So of course his girlfriend gets stuck in the basement of a house on fire.

Let it be known that I went into this book with an open mind. I wanted to be entertained on the five and a half hour drive to Montreal. I didn't think that this entertainment would come in the form my dramatic readings of many a ridiculously cliched passage. Then again, I had a niggling doubt ever since the major typo on the first page of the first chapter ("blxew" instead of "blew") that this one may not have received the editorial attention that it needed. You know, because it really should've just been a script for the movie.

This is one of those rare books where I guarantee the movie will be better the book. It cannot possibly be worse.

On surprises

2010-08-12T12:31:00.000-05:00

I've been hesitant to write too much about my manuscript on this blog, but I think it's finally time. Yesterday was a bit of a doozy. It seems that agents are finally coming back from their summer vacations and ready to send out all those rejections. I was getting a little far away from modesty a few weeks ago, with 7 out of 10 responding agents requesting to see more (6 full manuscript requests, one partial request).

Well, this week isn't going like that at all. Yesterday I received a very nice, personalized rejection to a full request. And I guess I forget what it feels like -- especially as more time goes on and I started to wonder how things might turn out -- to be let down. It's crushing, frankly. And while there were glimmers of promise in the rejection (as in, the agent had nice things to say about my protagonist -- another agent, responding from a partial request, couldn't stop telling me how much he did not care for my protagonist!), I read the one line I dreaded. The agent mentioned that the fact that my book deals with the Iraq War would make it difficult to place with a publisher.

I guess this is the time to say it. My book is about a teenage anti-war activist finding out that her idol, her uncle, has died protesting the Iraq War. It shatters her worldview and puts her on a quest (okay, a road trip) to find out more about this man, because she's terrified at the idea that she might one day end up in his shoes. Now, based on my query letter, it's pretty obvious that the book deals with the Iraq War. Is it going to be my albatross?

I sincerely, sincerely hope not. On the one hand, it's kind of hard to believe that possibly the precise thing that catches an agents' eye (i.e. that the book has that kind of real world relevancy) would be what sinks it. I'd have to think that most agents who request the book aren't already thinking that they have no hope in finding a market for it. Otherwise, why would they have requested it? Meanwhile, in the same week where this full rejection came in, I've also been hammered with rejections. Nine rejections in a row! I'm almost (she writes, while checking her email every ten minutes) leery of checking my email, my inbox seeming so chocked full of disappointment.

But then last night I remembered something. I was out at the Druid participating in their weekly Wednesday trivia with some friends. I love trivia, and so I was having a great time despite the fact that our team was not doing very well after the first two rounds. We just let go of it and put it all on the line in the last bonus question, in the last round. We risked 20 points (knowing we had very little chance of winning either way), hedging our bets that the license plate with a blue background and gold (eh, yellow really) lettering is Delaware's. After a tie-breaker question, the trivia announcer starts reading off where the teams finished. With the exception of the top three teams, he reads the team names and points out in random order. One after another, a team is named, a score is announced. Our score, which I've tabulated on the handy sheet, is higher than them, still higher. He reads third place. We're still higher. And second place. And still our team has not been named. But the tie breaker? We shoot glances at each other across the table. No freaking way. And the winner is.... SUKI! We scream! We won?!??!

There were so many silly things we got wrong or didn't wager smartly on (Charlottetown is in Prince Edward Island, not Nova Scotia --- clearly, despite all of my Anne of Green Gables knowledge, that was a major gaffe on my part; also, paramecium, John Grisham, etc, etc.). But we didn't give up. We stuck around, we scored 39 points in the last round. We won. We've been to two trivia nights there now, and we won both times (albeit in very different fashions).

And so I guess this is what I come away with, thinking about rejection, about winning and losing, about sheer surprises. You do it because you love it (writing, trivia). And you keep putting yourself out there. I really believe in miraculous surprises. And I believe in my book. And I'm nowhere near done querying.

Book Review - The Red Umbrella by Christina Diaz Gonzalez

2010-08-12T09:53:00.000-05:00

Lucia has been looking forward to her first dance forever. So it's a huge relief when her mom actually lets her attend it, especially given everything that's been going on lately. It's 1961, two years after the communist revolution in Cuba, and Lucia and her family are finally seeing the changes in their neighborhood: so many soldiers that Lucia's mom won't let her and her younger brother leave the house alone and their doctor, murdered and hung on a tree in the park as an "example." But even the dance becomes a disaster, as everyone from her crush Manuel to her best friend Ivette is so gung-ho about the revolution. When someone betrays Lucia's parents, they find they have no other choice for their children but to send them to the United States, hoping to follow soon after with exit visas of their own.

Debut author Christina Diaz Gonzalez has crafted a harrowing story, based on true events during what became known as Operation Pedro Pan, which brought over 14,000 unaccompanied minors from Cuba to the United States. Lucia's struggles are so real, from the anxieties of leaving everything she knows behind, adjusting to life in an extremely foreign place (Nebraska), and watching her closest friendship slip away. This was the perfect read for the bum mood I found myself in yesterday. It absolutely transported me to another time and place, with the vivid descriptions of Cuba and spot-on 1960's dialogue. Gonzalez is an author to watch!

Grownups reading kids' books? No way!

2010-08-10T15:51:00.000-05:00

It seems like everybody and their mother has tweeted or blogged their response to Pamela Paul's essay in last week's New York Times Book Review. While I can't say I'm totally surprised, and agree with Gayle Forman that the NYTimes is a little behind on realizing that adults are reading YA and children's books -- I mean, seriously, who hasn't spied many a subway reader reading Twilight or The Hunger Games -- I guess my initial reaction is that Paul needed to have her interest in YA validated by the literary establishment. Or maybe it's just what the New York Times needed? I don't know.

At the Homewood Library, we recognized this trend and started a Cross Overs book discussion group, where we discussed YA titles with all ages (well, we opened it up to ages 11 to 111). Adults from all backgrounds have been drawn to YA for precisely the reasons that are pointed out in the article, from the books' raw emotion and the "immediacy of the prose," to the fact that, frankly, there's a lot of excellent storytelling going on in YA right now. As someone who is completely absorbed in reading and trying to parcel out my time for worthy books, I've found that I can no longer get through many adult books, even the ones with stellar reviews that appeal to my taste. Compared to most YA, it takes so long for the story to get started in these literary adult books that I flat out lose interest. Despite the fact that I used to get through an adult book a week before serving on the Best Fiction for Young Adults Committee, I've found that now, I can't even check adult books out from the library. I just can't seem to read them before their due dates arrive.

While it's great to read that Lev Grossman and Caitlin Macy are discussing and enjoying YA, it's kind of amusing to think that they've only been doing this since 2008. They've got a lot of catching up to do.

Track my reading

2010-08-06T14:28:00.000-05:00

Now that I've got my trusty new iPhone 4, I've joined GoodReads. I'm hoping that with a reliable iPhone--i.e. one that does not mysteriously run out of power whenever it feels like it--I will post lots of updates to GoodReads from their mobile app. You can find me by clicking on the widget to the right. Now, back to updating my reading log from 2010.

With 203 titles, this might take a little while. I guess it's something to keep me occupied during this weekend's Red Sox-Yankees series. Something tells me this series can go one of two ways. One, the Red Sox sweep despite all their injuries and become a force to be reckoned with. Or we go out there and showcase all our weaknesses and it's basically the end of the season, turning the rest of August and September into a major league tryout session for the AAA team. It wouldn't be the end of the world; I just didn't realize that when I first said this season was starting to feel like 2006, that it would actually turn into something worse than 2006.

I leave you with Youkilis, who has plenty of time to sit around reading, with his non-injured hand.

Book Review - Amy and Roger's Epic Detour

2010-08-03T10:56:00.000-05:00

I laughed, I cried, I... wanted to go on a road trip?

If you don't have those reactions to Morgan Matson's excellent debut novel Amy and Roger's Epic Detour, I just might wonder if we actually read the same book.

Amy's life is irrevocably changed in the aftermath of her father's death in a car accident back in March. The book begins just after the school year ends. Amy's mother is uprooting what is left of her family (17 year old Amy and her twin brother Charlie) and moving them all the way across the country from Orange County, CA, to Connecticut. She's already made the move out there and now she needs Amy to drive their car across the country. The problem is that Amy hasn't driven since the accident, so her mom has enlisted Roger, a rising college sophomore, to drive Amy out there. Amy hasn't seen Roger since he was a kid, but once she sees him... well, let's just say things start looking the littlest bit better (read: Roger is a hottie).

Once Amy and Roger set off on the road trip, one that has been meticulously planned by Amy's mother, they decide to take one detour, and then another. Pretty soon they've taken control of the road trip, leading them to much more exciting places than Akron, Ohio and Terre Haute, Indiana (Amy's mom's projected resting points).

Matson has a way of writing these characters--not just Roger and Amy, but the supporting cast that gets fleshed out during the detours--so that they feel absolutely, breathing-life real. I couldn't help falling for Roger, with his boyish obsession with explorers and understandable fixation on his recent ex, and I wanted so badly for Amy to come to terms with her father's accidental death and reconcile with her family. And I loved Roger's playlists, as well as the receipts, snapshots, and other road trip ephemera interspersed throughout the book. They made me feel like I went on the road trip too!

This trip is so worth the ride. Read if you like Sarah Dessen, Deb Caletti, Sara Zarr, etc. I think this one's going to find a LOT fans.

Book Review - A Little Wanting Song by Cath Crowley

2010-08-02T12:13:00.001-05:00

I could not get enough of the Australian YA books last week, apparently, going from reading Jaclyn Moriarty's Ghosts of Ashbury High to Cath Crowley's A Little Wanting Song.

It's summer in Australia, which means Charlie is heading to her grandparents' place for Christmas. But it won't be the same, because now, in addition to Charlie's mother being gone, Gran is gone as well. And the ghosts are everywhere. Charlie still carries on conversations with her mother and Gran, despite their physical absence from her life. She is coming off a terribly embarrassing situation--losing her bikini top at a party filled with her peers--and she feels her closest friendship slipping away from her. So she turns to music, to her guitar, to writing, playing, and singing her own songs. But not in public.

Then there's Rose, who is desperate to leave her small town, frightened to death of following in her mother's footstep, and being stuck there. She's seen Charlie, her neighbor's granddaughter, year after year, but they've never been friendly. But this year she sees Charlie in a new light. Rose sneakily applied to (and was accepted at) a private school in Melbourne, but there's no way her mother would let her head out there on her own. What if she befriended Charlie and went back with her at the summer's end?

Cath Crowley's beautiful but quiet novel is no ordinary take on one friend taking advantage of another. It's so much more than that. It's the story of a girl coming into her own, finding a way to push through her grief and get the attention of her father who's still so consumed with his own, and using music to do all of these things. This story is told in alternating perspectives from Rose and Charlie, but it also has a quiet power in its song lyrics, scattered throughout the text. Cath Crowley has accomplished a rare achievement: absolutely believable song lyrics. I could really hear these songs and the way that Charlie might sing them. They weren't cheesy or silly or cliche. In fact, they reminded me so much of the kind of lyrics in the soundtrack to Once that I couldn't help but hear them in Marketa Irglova's voice.

This book is a must-read for any aspiring musician, or really, anyone who finds music moving and inspiring.

The Call

2010-07-30T09:51:00.001-05:00

No, I have not received The Call yet. Yes, there is one "The Call." It means, the call you get when a literary agent is considering taking you on as a client. Granted, from what I've been reading lately, it seems that very often before The Call is The Email, when an agent writes you an email saying they want to call you and when. But anyway! Just because I have not yet received The Email or The Call doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about it a lot. I have. I've researched and bookmarked lists of questions I should ask during The Call (because if you didn't prepare, you'd probably just be a blathering mess, right?). I also daydream about The Call. And read new authors' blog posts about The Call. And I have to say, I do not think I will be having the reaction that some authors have had. Which is vomiting after The Call or The Email. Yeah, I don't see that happening. Perhaps these authors are more prone to nerves than I am, but I am pretty sure The Call--if and when it does happen--will be followed with one of the following two: crying or screaming. My default response to any big news (good or bad) is probably to cry. And because this would be good news, there's a decent chance for a scream. But a trip to the bathroom? I don't think so.

Once I've calmed myself down enough to just get excited about it, I am going to play my "happy dance" song. Basically, I've had this song picked out for this moment since I started querying my first novel (a project I later shelved sometime last year). I will blast MGMT's "Kids" to as loud a volume as I can get away with, with an upstairs neighbor who is 90 and thus hard of hearing, so pretty loud. I will also dance.

Anyone who knows me knows that I do not dance. At least, not in seriousness. I was known to perform a rather creepy jig after Red Sox won the World Series in 2007. And I may or may not have performed a beard dance (this involves swaying side to side with an extra long beard, so not the most complicated of dances) a few times in the library, dressed as Dumbledore. But in terms of real dancing or happy dancing? I do not do these things. Ordinarily.

Every time I listen to "Kids" though, I can see this moment, this future "happy dance" as if it already happened. And it's one of my favorite songs ever--also, one of the happiest songs ever--so I've seen it a lot.

I guess for now it's a matter of waiting and hoping, and when that's not enough, sending out more queries. So far, I've sent out 19 queries. I've heard back from 7 agents, 5 of whom requested more materials. Currently, I have 2 fulls and one partial out there. The happy dance? Pending.

For now, I guess I'll go back to reading the most excellent Jaclyn Moriarty's new book The Ghosts of Ashbury High and daydreaming.

How much do I love Diary of a Wimpy Kid?

2010-07-29T22:13:00.000-05:00

Let me count the ways.

1. I have read all the books, recommended them to everyone (regardless of age, reading ability), and own nearly all of them.

2. I drink water from a Diary of a Wimpy Kid 5 water bottle.
3. I saw the movie based on the book in the theater and laughed harder than... possibly everyone else in the theater combined. Especially in any scene featuring Fregley. Oh, Fregley!
4. I begged and pleaded with my boyfriend for us to join Blockbuster, despite the fact that we pay $14.99 a month to Netflix to watch any movie we like, because Netflix won't send us Wimpy Kid until late August but it hits other rental places on Tuesday (just 5 days from now).
5. He refused to join but I just placed an order on Amazon because, well, I can't wait to watch it again and to share it with family and friends. FREGLEY!
6. Today, I saw the cover for the new book, book 5, The Ugly Truth, and am now marking my calendar for its release on November 9th.

Can't wait!

Book Review: Fixing Delilah by Sarah Ockler

2010-07-28T11:04:00.000-05:00

Delilah Hannaford is a bit lost--kind of fumbling, actually. She's falling behind in school, she's hooking up with this guy Finn who probably isn't right for her, and she's so disconnected that she accidentally swipes some makeup and gets caught stealing. Delilah is the complete opposite of her single mother, a self-made business success, whose mode of thinking has more in common with a GPS device than an actual person. When Delilah's grandmother dies, necessitating a trip up to her house in Vermont, her two living daughters, Delilah's mother and aunt struggle to understand what broke apart their family eight years ago.

This is one of those rare YA books that is very much about family, with other action and plot-lines coming in second. There's plenty of intrigue here, as Delilah confronts the major mysteries of her family: her mother's sister Stephanie's mysterious death as a teenager, and what broke apart the family 8 years ago at her grandfather's funeral. Growing up in New England, I'm quite aware of the stereotype of New England families not talking about anything, of the secrets, the tough stuff that no one wants to discuss. It's captured so well here, as the truth gets slowly unraveled, both through Delilah's efforts and by chance. At the end of the summer, no one will be the same, but they'll be better off for the honesty.

Readers will swoon over Patrick, Delilah's childhood friend turned crush turned something more. The Vermont setting absolutely comes alive, so much that I could practically taste the maple-drizzled ice cream. I'd say this is the perfect summer read, because it was, except that it doesn't actually hit bookstores until the fall. There's so much to look forward to in this strong sophomore effort from Sarah Ockler, author of Twenty Boy Summer.

*** This review is based of the ARC, and it looks as though both the title and the cover are not finalized at this time. The title on my copy was Fixing Delilah Hannaford but it is abbreviated on the author's website. The book should hit bookstores November 2, 2010. ***

That watched pot

2010-07-21T08:51:00.000-05:00

It never boils. Never, ever, ever. Okay, it will eventually boil if it is actually a pot of water on a burner. But if you are using it as a metaphor for something else (as I am), well, good luck. Yeah, that's kind of how I'm finding myself since last Tuesday, when I started sending out queries to literary agents. At the very beginning, it's okay to watch the pot (or so I tell myself, checking my email once an hour, on the hour, from 9 to 5 p.m.) because those speedy agents will get back to you either way. And they did (1 rejected, one requested the full). But now we're back to the waiting game. I know it's summer and agents get behind due to holidays, conferences, etc. Or they might be on vacation.

I'm not complaining about their timeline at all. What I am annoyed with is only myself and my inability to stop watching the pot! It's summer and I don't have to work at the moment, so shouldn't I be enjoying myself and not thinking that if I go to the beach and I get a request, I won't be able to fulfill it because I don't have it saved on my phone. Sheesh! Luckily, I will be forced to just let it go (a challenge for me, clearly) because I'm spending a long weekend in Sonoma. Here's to hoping that I can leave the pot behind, and also the obsessive pot-watching tendencies.

I swear I am not as type-A as this entry seems to suggest!

Yes! Only 9 minutes until I can check my email again!

Oh, Self....

On real teens on television

2010-07-20T10:49:00.000-05:00

Heading into the summer, I decided to take on one trashy show. The show I started to watch was ABC Family's Pretty Little Liars. I thought: based on YA books, simple premise, trashy... perfect!

Ummm no. I tried, I really did, but it is too bad to enjoy. At least for me. So I have traded it in for Huge. Still ABC Family, still based on a YA book (in this case Huge by Sasha Paley). I just could not get beyond the horrible acting and terribly unrealistic dialogue in Pretty Little Liars. Not only did the characters not remotely look like the age they were playing, but they just didn't sound like it either. And that was the deal breaker. I'll admit that the acting on Huge is a little spotting, the absolute strength of the show being Nikki Blonsky, who plays a girl named Will, and the guy characters. But these kids are awkward, so honestly awkward, that I have absolutely fallen in love with the show. I don't need to be doing something else during the show because I am that bored (yes, this started to be the case with PLL). Is it going to join the pantheon of my favorite teenage-based shows of all time, Friday Night Lights and Freaks and Geeks? Probably not.

Which is why I'm rewatching season four of FNL as it airs on NBC finally, and the occasional Freaks and Geeks to get me through the summer, with its dearth of good TV shows. I am forcing the boyfriend to watch this season of Friday Night Lights with me, and while he doesn't tear up every time Julie does, in the wake of Matt Saracen leaving town, I think he's getting a kick out of it. We watched the episode last night where Glen kisses Tami Taylor (too funny, oh Glen!) and while we both got a kick out of that, he also thought Glen was really quiet a good karaoke singer. Okay, buddy... We both agree that the Landry-Jess relationship has provided so many great moments, particularly when she slapped him outside her locker, after he told her he wasn't sure but he might be hung up on another girl. Oh, Landry!

I leave you with a picture of Tim Riggins. Just because.

A terrible problem to have

2010-07-16T12:05:00.000-05:00

So last night I started reading Seth Baumgartner's Love Manifesto, this new book by Eric Luper that's been sitting in my to-read pile for weeks (the problem of having a to-read pile with about 30-40 must reads). And I'm reading and I'm digging it, and then I say to Colin, "What's that smell?"

He responds, "What smell? I don't smell anything. Not that skunk again."

"No, not a skunk," I tell him. "It smells kind of sweet but kind of bad." I think, God, I hope not, and sniff myself. Nope! Is it Colin? He's sitting across the room, so that's unlikely. (Though for other reasons too, rather unlikely.)

I take a break from reading, thinking of what the smell could be, and a breeze comes in and I get another big whiff of it. "God, what is that smell?"

Turning to look out the window, I spot it. The book, cover off, sitting there in all its red, brand new book glory. I take a big whiff. Sure enough, the book REEKS. Not the pages, just the cover. I have no idea why, but now I cannot bring myself to read the book.

What's a girl supposed to do when the book she wants to read smells? I'm pretty familiar with smelly books, having weeded lots of them from the library. Any time a coworker said, "Smell this!" while holding up a book, I always did. And always regretted it. But I never thought I'd have this problem with a brand new book! I'm going to let it air out, if you will, for a few days before trying to read it again.

Has anyone else ever had this problem? Any ideas? I have some scented draw lining paper somewhere, but it seems rather old lady to cover a YA book in lavender printed, lavender-scented paper. Right?

Book Review: Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters by Natalie Standiford

2010-07-16T10:34:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of iconic families in literature, and you can add the Sullivans to that list. Almighty, otherwise known as Arden Louisa Norris Sullivan Weems Maguire Hightower Beckendorf, is the head of the illustrious Sullivans of Baltimore. She's been married to, well, let's just say several scions of industry. And we learn just two pages into Natalie Standiford's brilliant Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters that she is dying. Her heirs are speechless. But that's just the beginning. Almighty plans to cut her rightful heirs out of her will. One of them (no one is named) has deeply offended Almighty, and she expects that person to come forward with their confessions. The latest generation of the Sullivan family has three teenage daughters, two slightly older sons, and one much younger son, just 6 years old. Everyone in the family thinks it has to be one of the Sullivan sisters. And so the story begins.

Sort of in the way that Carolyn Mackler's Tangled works, readers are privy to each daughter's confession, told in older, from oldest to youngest: Norrie, then Jane, then Sassy. I don't want to ruin the book by uttering their deepest confessions, but let's just say that there's a love story, there's a revenge story, and there's a murder story!

Heading into this book, I was in a reading rut, but I feel totally lifted out of this. This book is so fresh and new, but also paying homage to the stories of our (my?) youth. I love that the Sullivans live in an old mansion in Baltimore (who sets books in Baltimore these days?) and that they are that quirky, blue blood family, eminently more interesting than anything you'd find in the Gossip Girl series (no offense!). They are more of a cross between the Gilmores and the Glass family.

Exquisite writing, snappy dialogue, and brilliantly realized characterizations made this one of my most enjoyable reading experiences so far this year. Brava, Natalie Standiford! Two for two! (I also really loved How to Say Goodbye in Robot, her debut novel from 2009, which I read this year.)

But you'll have to be patient, because the book doesn't hit bookstores and libraries near you until September 2010.

*** Observation: The cover on the ARC I read is completely different, but I hope they are going with the cover I've used in this picture. The ARC cover shows three girls from behind, with notes in their hands, and to me it connoted a lighter, less literary read. This cover reminds me a lot of the cover of E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, and I think it more accurately markets the book's contents. Because seriously, do we always need people on the cover of books, especially when they don't look like the characters? ***

Book Review: A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend by Emily Horner

2010-07-15T13:03:00.000-05:00

Librarian Emily Horner's debut novel is one of the strongest of the year, IMHO. A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend is definitely a love story, but it's also a story about coming-of-age, about realizing your own identity, about realizing you are gay, and about a really kickass musical about ninjas that can divide by zero. In the aftermath of her best friend Julia's death, Cass is at a loss. She's always defined herself in relation to Julia. Julia was her closest friend but she was also her main connection to her other friends. They were all Julia's friends first, the theater nerds. Does she belong with them?

This story features two plot-lines, Then and Now. Now, Cass and her friends are turning Julia's secret project, her script for a musical about a ninjas, into reality. Then is the past summer, when Cass decided to bike from Chicago to California, to bring Julia's ashes to the beach, to the West Coast, a place Julia never got to visit. Both plot lines are equally compelling and would have sustained an excellent story, but what takes center stage, for this reader, is Cass coming into her own as a lesbian. She struggles with trying to figure out if she ever loved Julia that way, and if she did, why she didn't tell her. As her feelings change for her former enemy, Heather, she wishes Julia could have been there to sound her out.

This story is so skillfully realized by Emily Horner, with remarkable writing and keen sense of teenagers today. This is absolutely the kind of book that so easily transcends "liked it" and becomes a favorite, the kind you clutch to your chest. Highly recommended reading.

On keeping busy

2010-07-12T12:32:00.000-05:00

Lately, I've been having a hard time getting really sucked into the books I've been reading. That's sort of my excuse for not posting a lot lately. I've liked the books I've been reading, but nothing I read had me excited the way some of the BFYA books did. Maybe it's because I'm coming off a "reading high," as several of the BFYA feedback teens gushed, when talking about their favorite books. But if that's the case, then I tend to have the opposite reaction. If I read something I love love loved, it is unlikely that will make me more likely to go crazy over the following book. The exact opposite will happen. I will be possible hypercritical of the next book I read, making perhaps unrealistic comparisons to the first. That said, I am super excited to read the books I've selected for today and tomorrow: Emily Horner's YA debut A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (pretty sure I will love it because it sounded great in the NYTimes book review and it was blurbed by Steve Kluger AND Horner is librarian) and The Space Between Trees by Katie Williams (which has a completely gorgeous cover -- and the author has a short story in the Atlantic Fiction issue!).

But I have something else taking up a good chunk of my mental space. I'm closing in on beginning querying for my new manuscript. There's only one thing left to do, and it is time-consuming and exhausting, but it's the only thing that gets the job done. I read the entire book out loud. It is 240 pages. I read a 50 page chunk this morning, amazed 1. that I could read 50 pages without needing a glass of water, and 2. that there are still some ridiculous typos. Granted, this is the only way I've found to catch them. This manuscript has been read by several people and myself multiple times, and I've still found a couple genuine typos (like a missing quotation mark, misspelling of a character name)! Though most of the little notes I've made were more along the lines of "change this word," or "be consistent with how I spell anti-war." Fifty pages down, only 140 something to go. Sheesh! Luckily, I've got something to break up intimate reading performance, which my cat Lilly is, I'm sure, confused by: tons of reading!

Hopefully will be back to share more thoughts on Emily Horner book. For now: lunch!

Book Review - Mostly Good Girls by Leila Sales

2010-07-07T09:35:00.000-05:00

Mostly Good Girls by Leila Sales is an eminently relatable novel. (Perhaps I have a bit too much in common with the girls in the book, having attended an all-girls private school in Massachusetts with many similarities to the fictitious Westfield School.) Violet and Katie have the kind of friendship that so many girls experience as teenagers. They can finish each other's sentences, they have that quippy back and forth a la Lorelai and Rory Gilmore-- basically, they don't know where one ends and the other begins. Which makes it all the more startling for Violet, an academic overachiever who holds very high expectations for herself, when Katie starts making decisions that are not in her best interest: dating an older guy who works at the coffee shop (who her parents would NOT approve of, who in fact Violet does not approve of!) and taking risks at school.

This book is very much about friendship, and the way that friends can grow apart as they define themselves in relation to their world, and not just each other. There are so many funny, laugh out loud moments. Violet and Katie are witty and snarky, but most of all, they are pretty honest. I appreciated the way this book deals very frankly with the competitive nature of fancy private high schools. Unlike many other books that use these worlds as their settings (I'm talking to you, Gossip Girl), this one realistically captures what goes on in the classroom. While Mostly Good Girls treads some familiar terrain plot-wise, it is the wit and spark of the writing, and the strong characterizations that will keep readers enthralled.

Review is based on an ARC. Will be hitting bookstores and libraries in October 2010.

Yes, I am a sucker for verse novels

2010-07-05T12:16:00.000-05:00

So I was pretty excited to go through all the boxes and packages that came in the mail while I was out of town for ALA and find Stephanie Hemphill's Wicked Girls. I loved Your Own, Sylvia and I've found that having to read so many books these days (not that I'm complaining), it's such a relief to open up a book and find out that it's a verse novel. Verse novels, for the most part, read very fast, and have that great economy of language which I've grown to appreciate. There's so much mood and tone in the verse novels I've enjoyed, that I find myself absolutely racing through the pages.

So far out of this year's publishing cycle, I really loved Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs by Ron Koertge, Three Rivers Rising by Jame Richards, and most recently Carol Lynch Williams' Glimpse, which I read as an ARC, but which just had its release last week. Glimpse is an exquisitely crafted novel that packs an emotional punch, drawing readers in from the very first couple of pages, as our narrator, finds her sister with a gun, ready to kill herself. Perhaps what I appreciated most about this book, was how well Williams explores the sad and unfortunate truth, which is that for too many kids, the parent is the villain. In this one, we have the mother, who lost her husband when her two daughters were quite young, and has never recovered. She is a prostitute with very few redeemable facets, and yet, as we see with Precious' mother, so perfectly played by Mo'Nique, this character is so developed. She is a monster with a backstory, and as much as you (as the reader) don't want to excuse your behavior, at least you can understand how she got to the point. The moments where she is in Hope (the narrator's) face will get your heart palpitating like no other. And the central mystery of the story, what event(s) precipitated Lizzie's depression and suicide attempt, easily sustain the 400+ pages of this quick read. I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys the quick pacing and emotional nature of so many of the verse novels.

ALA 2010 Recap!

2010-06-30T17:46:00.000-05:00

Whew! Got back into Boston early last night from an amazing 5 days in Washington, D.C. My bag was stuffed to the max with books. My legs are totally bruised from my inability to control an 80 lb suitcase when wielding it onto buses and such. But it was so, so worth it. I'll share my highlights but first a cautionary tale, so you will never make the mistake I did. When attending conference, always book ahead! Do not wait to find bargain bed and breakfasts. They do not exist. I tried to go the bargain route, and ended up in a situation very reminiscent of the beginning of the Harry Potter books. You know how each one starts with weird stuff happening, the appearance of a new strange character, who will become important to that book? Well, that's truly how my check-in at the inn felt.

The dude working the front desk was seriously creepy in the way that, well, the villains of Harry Potter are. Complete with two wandering eyes, he proceeded to tell me that my room was flooded because, you know, the D.C. weather has been terrible, and it was moldy. Riiight (it's been very hot in DC but I've heard nothing of this "flooding" he mentioned). He then sent me trekking up the street to their sister inn, let's just say it rhymes with Shmembassy. When I saw the room they had for me there, well, it was all over. Literally, it was like 150 square feet, with two queen beds shoved in there. I could barely get my suitcase in the door. Besides the two beds, there was no other furniture outside of a coat rack and a bedside table. No closet. No place to put the suitcase. Absolutely no place to set up an ironing board (sort of essential for, you know, living out of a hotel for 5 days). Half an hour later, I was checking into a legitimate hotel, super thankful for last minute cheap rates, and trying to forget the whole episode. Unlike in Harry Potter, double-wandering-eye-French-fellow did not reappear later. THANK GOD!

Okay, so, the highlights!

1. My favorite part had to be getting to know my fellow committee members and the BFYA meetings. Talking about 93 books sounds completely exhausting and grueling, but it really wasn't. I loved hearing their observations about the books. It's so amazing how we can all have such different reactions to the same book.

2. I met the author Jennifer Lynn Barnes! She is the only other Jennifer Lynn Barnes I know... so far! So that was kind of amazing. We are going to start a club of Jennifer Lynns. Now I know there are a lot more of these. Off the top of my head, I can think of some. My guesses are, if you were born female in the 80s and named Jennifer, you very likely have Lynn as a middle name. True?

3. Watching David Levithan sing! David Levithan, along with John Green and debut author Andrea Cremer, were our awesome special guests for the BFYA Teen Pizza Party. I've never seen David Levithan before, or Andrea Cremer, (I've seen John Green a couple times), but they were super entertaining. The singing and a couple other moments were probably the highlights of that day. Also, I'm fairly certain I that I'm going to be in an upcoming vlog video as John panned his camera across the front row of the crowd, where several of us BFYA-ers were sitting. Will definitely post the link to the video if/when this turns out to be true.

4. Seeing Toni Morrison as keynote speaker. I have to commend the ALA for their selection of speakers. This was the only speech I could attend because of my meetings, but it was again such a special experience. I had to run out and buy one of her books the next day because I was so blown away by her insight and genius gift with words. Let's just say I am currently reading 5 books right now -- and I'm not one to read multiple books at once -- because I am just that excited about all these books and authors!

5. Meeting Jacqueline Kelly, author of Newbery Honor book The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. I told her how happy I was for her when it won, since it was my personal favorite of last year, and she said I wasn't as happy as she was. I truly think that book will be for many girls what Anne of Green Gables was for me growing up. When I read it, I could hardly believe it was a debut novel, it was that perfect.

6. The Michael L. Printz reception. Every ALA I attend, and every year I am not disappointed, and beyond that, always surprised by one of the authors. I'll admit that due to BFYA reading, I still haven't read Rick Yancey's The Monstrumologist, Adam Rapp's Punkzilla, or John Barnes' Tales from the Madmen Underground, but I'm working to remedy that. Each speech was moving in its own way, and several had me welling up in tears a little bit, but then Libba Bray busted it all open with her speech. For the first five or so minutes, I was seriously wondering if I was going to wet myself. She is soooo hilarious, and I've seen her before, but this was new heights of hilarity. And then the speech took its turn. It was so emotional and honest, and from a very different place than usual. It was definitely my favorite moment of the night. Also, I'm pretty convinced that if she wanted to, Libba Bray could be the next Oprah Winfrey. She has so much charisma, oh my god. And yeah, it's kind of cool that we were sitting right behind M.T. Anderson.

7. Books, books, books! I know I get books in the mail almost every day. And I have a huge library system at my disposal. But I cannot help myself when it comes to ARCs. And for the past few days, I didn't. I won't list everything I got, but here are my top acquisitions. Matched by Ally Condie (the first in a new dystopian series); Jane -- because when an author decides to pose the question, what if Jane Eyre dated a rock star, well, it turns out I want to know the answer; Raised by Wolves; Diary of a Wimpy Kid 5 water bottle! (!!!); Scumble, the companion to Ingrid Law's Savvy; Dirt Road Home, Watt Key's follow-up to the brilliant Alabama Moon (which evidently is being made into a movie starring John Goodman!); Prisoners in the Palace, which has maybe the coolest cover ever; The Kneebone Boy, which had a pretty amazing cover itself; Sarah Ockler's latest Fixing Delilah Hannaford and the new Jennifer Donnelly. Gaaaahhh!

And if that's not enough, I am also reading these:

Actually, I am not reading The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate or my foot, but you understand, right?

Washington, D.C., here I come!

2010-06-23T20:58:00.000-05:00

Come Friday, I'll be heading out to Washington, D.C. for the ALA Annual Conference. And I. Can't. Wait! Last time when ALA was in DC, it was my first time, and I have great memories of the city as host to thousands and thousands of librarians. I got to meet my idol Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, had my picture taken with Markus Zusak (hadn't read The Book Thief at that point), and snagged more ARCs than my back could handle. I'm so ready to do it all over again.

Here's what I'm most looking forward to:

1. BFYA meetings! No, really, I am super excited to talk about the books I've spent the last several months reading, and meeting my fellow committee members. I'm also pretty curious about the teen pizza party with David Levithan and John Green.

2. Michael L. Printz reception. I'll admit that unlike in past years, I have not been able to read the honor books that I hadn't already read (due to reading tons of 2010 fiction), but I'm still looking forward to seeing all the honor and winner authors. I've had the pleasure of hearing Libba Bray speak before, and she is a natural. So funny and effervescent.

3. ARC madness! On my wish list: Forge by Laurie Halse Anderson, Matched by Ally Condie, Delirium by Lauren Oliver, and if it's there (it may not be, I have no clue) Annexed by Sharon Dogar. And of course, whatever else looks good. Also, you will probably find me grabbing whatever else looks good. At least this year, I know I'll read them! Come to think of it, I'll probably end up getting through all my ARCs in a month or so. Sheesh!

4. Seeing Toni Morrison speak. With the busy schedule of meetings, I won't have the same freedom I did in years past to stalk author signings and go to the keynote addresses, but I will be able to see Toni Morrison.

5. Schmoozing! What I love best about ALA is the way you happen upon things you never expected. Like how I got to meet Sherman Alexie last year and have him sign a chapbook. Totally not on my agenda for the day, but a completely mind-blowing experience as he's one of my favorite authors ever. Also, last time at the Newbery-Caldecott dinner, Kirby Larson sat at my table. Yeah, that would be the Newbery Honor-winning author of Hattie Big Sky. Completely random, completely awesome. So, I'm open to all kinds of schmoozy surprises, and ready to share them here when I return.

Until then, happy reading!

Thursday Three!

2010-06-17T22:45:00.001-05:00

Yeah, yeah, I know, I haven't posted anything since last week's Thursday Three. It's been a hectic week here... oh wait, no, not really. I've been pulling overtime duty for sports-watching. Not only have I been following the Red Sox every day, but I've added the Celtics to my viewing schedule. By the end of the hour, we'll know whether or not they are this year's champions, but if my track record has anything to say about it, it does not look good.

Alas, the THURSDAY THREE!

Today's theme: what I really, really want to read. But can't right now.

1. The new Alice book, ahem, FINAL Alice book, Alice in Charge. I wonder if Phyllis Reynolds Naylor gets the Charles in Charge theme song every time she thought about the book's title, or if that's just a malady afflicting me. It is quite possible that the Alice books are sort of the reason I'm a librarian. They're certainly a contributing factor. Growing up, I devoured the books, but as I grew out of elementary school, I also temporarily grew out of reading. If it wasn't Seventeen or Rolling Stone, I probably wasn't reading it. And then I got a summer job at the library. And discovered that in the time that I'd given up reading, PRN had published many more Alice books. Which I surreptitiously devoured when I was supposed to be putting the picture books in order. I went to college and found myself, again, too busy to keep up with Alice. But then one summer I found myself in Wyoming with plenty of free time for reading.

Since then, I've kept up with Alice and all of her adventures. I've met Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, and I have the signed book to prove it. I even have a friend who emails regularly with her, and has for many years. It's hard to imagine coming to the end of the Alice series. I'll always remember Alice (okay, now I am sounding like she's a real person, and well, to me she almost is!) getting caught trying on boy's jeans because her brother and dad didn't know better. And I'll always fondly think of Lester as inculcating my future crushes on graduate students. Maybe it's okay that I have to wait at least a week to read this one, because I have a feeling it's an experience I'll want to savor

2. Is it just me, or is The Atlantic Monthly the best magazine ever? I meant to read just a little bit of one of three issues gracing our pseudo coffee table, and got totally sucked in for over an hour. I generally think of the Atlantic Monthly as not particularly interested in all things YA and middle grade, so I squealed with delight upon seeing James Parker's piece on Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I found myself nodding in agreement with pretty much everything he said, and then remembered how much I want my boyfriend to watch the movie with me once it's out on DVD. Oh, Fregley! Anyway, let it be known, Atlantic Monthly, I may not have time to read you cover-to-cover anymore, but I still love you!

3. It's a tie between Donna Freitas's The Gorgeous Game -- because I love love looooved The Possibilities of Sainthood -- and Ally Carter's Heist Society. I guess it'll come down to whether I want to read a serious book, or something very indulgent and fun.

Okay, time to catch the last minute or so of action, to find out if I've cursed the Celtics. It looks like I have... Sorry, Boston!

Thursday Three

2010-06-10T18:32:00.000-05:00

1. I now have only 13 BFYA nominations to read before we meet at the ALA Annual Conference. This means that as long as I knock off one a day, I might be able to read something else. I have to say, reading only nominations for weeks in a row has been kind of odd. It doesn't feel like required reading in college or high school - since they're all fiction and, well, reading fiction never feels like work for me - but I am really looking forward to being able to mix it up again. Also, my to-read pile is HUGE, thanks to a bunch of ARCs from Scholastic. And my bedside reading is Rick Riordan's new one, so... yeah, you could say I'm not lacking in reading material.

2. Finally have an idea for my next YA project. At least, I think so. Let's just say it was inspired by a redsox.com article that ran in the last couple days about Victor Martinez. Now, if I could just find some time to start writing it....

3. This is completely unrelated to all things YA... but I just found out that someone with whom I attended junior high has married Alanis Morissette. That's pretty crazy!

I think I've found my new guilty pleasure

2010-06-08T09:37:00.000-05:00

The TV series based off the Pretty Little Liars series by Sara Shepard debuts tonight on ABC Family! Now, I'll admit that I never read the books, but I replaced them so much at my last library that it almost feels like I did. Just when I said I was looking for some trashy summer TV (but not literally trashy, Hoarders!), I find out about this show. I've been backing off of non-vital TV-watching (i.e. Friday Night Lights, Big Bang Theory) but now that all of my shows are over for the summer, I feel like it's the perfect time to indulge in an ABC Family series.

Lest we not forget the summers spent watching (and loving!) Kyle XY.

Anyway, I'll be tuning in tonight!

48 Hour Book Challenge: Finale!

2010-06-06T13:36:00.000-05:00

Alright, we're about ten minutes or so from the end of my 48 hour span. Here's the breakdown:

5 books:
1. The Half-Life of Planets by Emily Franklin & Brendan Halpin (218 pages: 3 hours, 5 minutes).
2. The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (214 pages: 2 hours, 50 minutes)
3. The Extraordinary Secrets of April, May, & June by Robin Benway (282 pages: 3 hours, 25 minutes)
4. A Small Free Kiss In The Dark by Glenda Millard (180 pages: 2 hours, 13 minutes)
5. Not That Kind of Girl by Siobhan Vivian (322 pages: 2 hours and 29 minutes).

Page count: 1,216
Hour total: 14 hours, 2 minutes

Blogging reviews + Social Networking
1 hour on Friday, June 4
1 hour on Sunday, June 6
+ 1 hour of social networking:
3 hours

GRAND TOTAL: 17 hours, 2 minutes

Whew! I easily surpassed my goal of 12 hours, though fell short of my goal for 6 books. I really thought I read faster, but perhaps I read faster when I take more mini breaks? Due to the timing part of this, I worked really hard to read in larger chunks of time. And gained much compassion for my summer readers of summers past, who dutifully logged their time spent reading.

I'll definitely want to do this again next year! Perhaps taking a break in the middle for the horrible but fun Sex and the City 2 and dinner with friends was not the best way to get the most out of my 48 hours. But it did wonders for my sanity!

48 Hour Book Challenge, Book 5: Not That Kind of Girl by Siobhan Vivian

2010-06-06T13:27:00.000-05:00

It seems like every school has one. That girl that seems to rise above everything, the one who's so in control of her present and future, the one who has it all together. Or so it seems. Natalie Sterling is that girl, at Ross Academy. After watching her best friend Autumn lose her social standing after being humiliated by her jock, senior boyfriend, when she was a freshman, Natalie has basically avoided all contact with the male species. She's focused on school, her grades, saving Autumn, and becoming the ninth girl in her school's history to become Student Council President.

A last minute challenge by asshole jock Mike Domski isn't enough to derail Natalie, who narrowly defeats him. She's in charge as much as she's ever been. But success never comes easy, and Natalie's soon distracted by her old babysitting charge, now a spunk freshman, who has her own ideas about feminism, most of them along the line of using sexuality to get boys to like her. As much as they don't see eye to eye, Natalie still wants to rescue Spencer, convinced she's got everything all figured out. But she didn't count on Connor, the football QB, making a pass at her, and she certainly didn't count on her... liking him back.

Siobhan Vivian's latest looks at the double standards for guys and girls, but also puts a human spin on it. I found myself constantly reevaluating my own opinions and judgments, as much as Natalie has to, throughout the book. It turns out it's not so easy, to be just one kind of girl, and maybe...maybe that's okay.

This book is pretty hard to put down, especially when you're in a crunch to beat the clock. Vivian does an excellent job at getting at the nuances in the book's many relationships, whether its Natalie and Connor, Natalie and her best friend Autumn, or Natalie and her teacher-mentor, Ms. Bee.

In my opinion, a must-read for high school girls.

* This review is based off an Uncorrected Proof. The finished book will hit bookstores in September 2010. *

48 Hour Book Challenge, Book 4: A Small Free Kiss In The Dark by Glenda Millard

2010-06-06T13:05:00.000-05:00

Imagine if Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road and made it hopeful. Okay, I know, that's not what Cormac McCarthy would do, but it's sort of what Glenda Millard does in A Small Free Kiss In The Dark. Skip's a teenager who never quite found what he was looking for via the foster care system. He's homeless, but he gets by, spending time in the library and creating chalk art. Until something very not beautiful happens. His dingy city world, a world he still saw the beauty in, becomes war-torn. Buildings are blowing up, people are dead in the street, or cowered in what's left of the library, trying to figure out what to do next. His world is a war-zone. And nobody knows what to do.

With an older homeless man, Billy, and a kid named Max, whose mother never made it to pick him up from the library, Skip leaves the city, venturing through the underground tunnels where the trains used to run, and finds a new home, in an abandoned amusement park. Thinking the tanks and bombs won't come for them there, Skip, Billy, Max, and a beautiful ballerina/teenage mother Tia and her baby make their home there, carving out an existence in a place that's supposed to inspire hope and doing the best they can to survive.

Millard crafts a gripping story in an unreal setting, at least for this country. As much as this is not a story about the apocalypse, the setting nevertheless feels like it, with no one aware of what is happening, except the fact that everything has changed. Gorgeous, evocative writing, and a hopeful, thoughtful protagonist make this story both memorable and powerful.

48 Hour Book Challenge - Book 3 - The Extraordinary Secrets of April, May, & June by Robin Benway

2010-06-06T12:45:00.000-05:00

There's something powerful about sisterhood. I know this mostly because I only have a brother, and have always felt something missing when talking to friends who have sisters. There's something special about sisterhood: the antagonism, the rivalry, and the closeness that can only come from spending so much time in the same house, year after year, with someone related to you and also, so much like you.

April, May, and June are sisters whose parents got a little lazy when it came to picking names for their kids. They were all born a year apart; April is the oldest (a junior), then May (a sophomore), then June (a freshman). After their parents' surprising divorce, the girls were uprooted from the only home they knew and plunked down in Southern California, forced to start high school all over again in a place where they have no friends. April, the brainiac of the family, has her mind set on college, while May's seriously missing her dad, and the only thing June cares about is finagling her way into the popular crowd. But all of these plans are thrown for a serious loop when, on the way into school, their car almost hits another student.... and they realize they all have extraordinary powers. April can see into the future, May can become invisible, and June can read minds.

If you're expecting for the girls to bond together with their secret powers to save the world, you are reading the wrong book! These sisters use their secret powers, for good and for bad, dealing with the crises of high school that everyone -- yes, even those of us without super powers -- can relate to. Their powers pull them apart and divide them (can you imagine being able to read your sibling's mind?!), but they also bring them together, in a powerful finale that will remind readers of the fragile bonds that tie siblings together, for better or for worse, as family.

This is a perfect beach read for the end of summer (sorry, it doesn't come out until August) or for the start of the school year. Robin Benway is a witty writer with a deep understanding of all that goes down in high school: the good, the bad, the ugly. Each chapter is written by a different sister, and I have to say, my favorite sections were the ones narrated by Meg. She's the perfect moody antidote to June (who's basing her life off a little too much reality TV) and had some hilarious moments getting all snarky with her peer tutor, Henry.

Readers of Audrey, Wait! have been waiting a little while for this one, and it won't disappoint.

*This review is based off the Advance Reader's Copy. The book will be published in August 2010.*

48 Hour Book Challenge - Book 2: The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

2010-06-04T22:28:00.001-05:00

From the moment I picked up Carlos Ruiz Zafon's debut YA novel The Prince of Mist (finally out in the United States) from the library this afternoon, I've been dying to read it. The moody, mysterious cover totally sucked me in, and the blurbs from just about every reputable book review source on the back increased my enthusiasm.

And then I started the book. And I understood the power of masterful storytelling. That's exactly what's going on here. The skeleton of the story sounds familiar to anyone who appreciates a good mystery or horror story. A family packs up all their belongings, relocating to a huge house by the ocean. Huge houses by the ocean don't come easily, or cheaply, and so it's not completely surprising to learn that the young boy who lived here died, and soon after, so did both his parents.

Max, along with his two sisters, and mother, is sort of creeped out by the place when they arrive. It seems like it hasn't been touched in ten years, but every now and then, he gets a glimpse of what a grand place it must have been. And then he's getting glimpses of something else. In the expansive yard, he finds an overrun garden with statues, of circus performers, all pointed toward a clown in the center. His dad finds some old reels of film and plays them for his family on the wall (it's the 1940s, and that's how it was done back then). One of the reels has footage of the statues, except they aren't posed the same way. And the weird thing is, Max's sister just had a dream about the statue the night before.

This is a tale where nothing's quite as it seems, and Max has to do a fair bit of research and unraveling to get at the bottom of everything, in a race against time before the Prince of Mist returns for what he believes belongs to him. This one has all the atmosphere, creepiness, and cinematic flair to draw in readers of all ages who like a good, spooky, creepy tale. This is precisely the kind of book younger me would have loved (of course, current me loved it too) because I did go through a phase in which I was fascinated by this sort of paranormal stuff. Werewolves, vampires--not so much, but give me a good "ghost" story or something with an oracle doll or possessed doll house, and I was there.

This one will definitely appeal to Stephen King fans, but that's not to say it's straight-up horror. Mystery and supernatural fans will find much to admire as well.

48 Hour Book Challenge, Book One: The Half-Life of Planets by Emily Franklin and Brendan Halpin

2010-06-04T22:27:00.000-05:00

Disclosure: I haven't read anything by Brendan Halpin OR Emily Franklin before, but now that I've read this one, and found out that they live, basically, right in my neighborhood (okay, close: Newton and J.P.), I probably should read more! Also, those are not the real reasons to read more, the real reason is because this book was GREAT!

Most of the time, love does not come easy. And this is certainly the case for Liana, who has a hard time believing that she's not a "slut," as the note in her locker claims. She's done her fair share of kissing and running. And then there's Hank, who's never gotten close enough to a member of his opposite sex that wasn't Mother to even be thinking of love. A chance meeting in a hospital bathroom brings these two characters from disparate places (in social standings, life, though they are from the same town) together for an unforgettable friendship that blooms into something more, a challenge for the both of them.

Franklin and Halpin clearly are a pair to watch (dare we say, the second coming of David Levithan and Rachel Cohn?!?!). In fact, this book, for me, personally, surpassed Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. I found this love story so much more believable, because, let's face it, how rare is it to find love in a moment, in an evening? The best relationship stories take place over a longer period of time, say, a summer, giving both characters plenty of time to completely embarrass themselves in front of each other, because cringe-worthy moments and complete mistakes give way to the most redeeming of apologies and forgiveness.

Music buffs will appreciate the way these two have bonded over a shared love of rock classics.

It seems that I must mention that Hank has Asperger's syndrome, since it is relevant to the story, but I must also then admit that this one of the first stories I've read about someone with Asperger's where that's not their defining feature, nor is it what the story is about. Perhaps that is where the story really succeeds in defying stereotypes. When Liana starts hanging out with Hank, she has no idea he has Asperger's, he's just a little bit strange sometimes (umm... what teenage boy isn't?) and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of rock music (you can say that about pretty much every guy that's worked at a record store). He has to tell her that he has Asperger's, just so she'll understand how some things don't come natural to him (like reading gestures, etc.).

This is the perfect quirky summer romance for anyone that likes to read about real, flawed, kind of hilarious people, finding each other and finding love.

48 hour book challenge, starting NOW!

2010-06-04T13:41:00.000-05:00

Alright, here we are at 2:40 PM on Friday (who knows if I ever switched my time stamps from CST to EST) and for the next 48 hours, I'll be participating in the 5th Annual 48-Hour Book Challenge! I've got a stack of books ready and my schedule pretty much cleared (save an afternoon out for Sex and the City 2 tomorrow). My goal is to read at least 12 hours, and hopefully much, much more. Lord knows I need to, with all the BFYA nominations in my to-read pile, and even more fabulous books from publishers to read once those are done.

Will the reading ever end??

Stay tuned for updates and reviews between now and 2:40 PM on Sunday!

Book Review - Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett

2010-06-02T09:28:00.001-05:00

Plum is on the precipice of something, she just doesn't know what. About to turn fourteen, the one thing she wants for her birthday is her very own television, but getting that seems unlikely. She'll settle for a party with all her friends, who she clings to tightly, with fear that they will leave her if she isn't cool enough. While this plot doesn't sound entirely original or especially interesting, in the hands of a very capable writer, Sonya Hartnett, the story soars. Harnett turns the smaller events of life, like a 14th birthday, into moments the reader will contemplate for days.

Immediately, I felt connected to Plum, remembered myself being much like Plum. A girl on the edge of teenagehood, with all the connections to my “childhood” still apparent. For Plum, this line to her childhood, to the behaviors one might accept as a chid which are completely laughable as a teenager, is elucidated in her “treasure box” of sorts, the suitcase she keeps under her bed with ordinary objects that for her, have a magical element to them. They are talismans for her.

The idea that you can change yourself, that you can morph yourself into an entirely new person with the right amount of effort, pervades this book. This is not just Plum’s goal, but also one that her grownup neighbor (Maureen) is contemplating in her affair with Plum’s brother Justin. And it’s something to which all readers can relate. Likewise, the book plumbs the inner lives of people of all ages: kids about to become teens, older teens/young adults, and grownups, and finds all of them complex and often completely delightful.

Plum’s observations are what make her so endearing, so real to readers. As I read this one, I couldn't help underlining my favorite lines. Hartnett is so fantastic at getting into Plum's head, as these random thoughts flit through, some of which are so hilarious that they are so quickly dismissed, not acted on. For example, “Plum pauses—she’s seen people-beasts in movies with horns on their heads, and thinks the look charismatic. Horns would change her life” (p. 10). And also: “Perhaps she should intensify her time with the talismans—wear the badge, carry the coin, fling the yo-yo around. Sleep with them cuddled against her stomach. Maybe she should… eat them.… No” (p. 87).

From start to finish, I loved, loved, loved this book, and can't wait to hand it off to my best friend, my mother. There's something timeless and ageless about this one, and I can't wait to reread it years from now.

Turns out, I'm not the only one who loved it, as it has received a starred review in the July/August issue of Horn Book. Butterfly doesn't hit shelves until August 24, 2010. This review is based off the Advance Reading Copy.

Thursday Three

2010-05-27T21:19:00.001-05:00

A lot of YA authors I follow are fans of the Friday Five. But it's only Thursday and I want to share a couple random things. Thus, the Thursday Three! Inaugural! Hopefully, I can keep up with this. Somehow, thinking of three random things... well, I do that all the time.

1. While editing my WIP late the other night, I found the perfect way to work in some Bruce Springsteen. I guess the only question now is, if this book gets published, how much of the lyrics can you have before the royalties situation gets out of control? I recently read a book (wish I could recall which book) that had several bits of song lyrics from pretty major artists sprinkled throughout. Something tells me there's probably a limit of how many words from a song you can use before you have to pay for it? I don't know, but if anybody does, please, let me know. I'm pretty sure I tried to research this with my last book and never found a definitive answer.

2. The Red Sox have won 5 games in a row! And they're above .500 by more than a game or two! And they are (at the moment) in third place in the American League. A few weeks ago, if you had told me this would be the case, I would have had a hard time believing that. I guess that's one of the draws, for me, about the sport and my team in particular. They surprise me so often. Just when I get frightened by how many errors they've made or by how many walks Daisuke Matsuzaka has issued, they turn it around.

3. Words cannot express how much I am loving This American Life these days. I've been listening to a backlog of episodes while running and I think I've had every experience on the range of human emotion while listening. No joke. And running. Running while crying while listening to Dan Savage talk about losing his mother? Check. Running while cracking up and seeming like a crazy person? Check, so many times. And a whole lot more. [I'm kind of distracted at the moment because the baseball game is almost over and we're within a run of the Royals.] I tend to go through TAL phases, mostly due to when I actually have time to listen without getting distracted, and I really hope this one sticks. I love the extra stimulation of learning about something else, of listening to a story, of being really engaged in thinking about a topic I ordinarily wouldn't, all while running around the pond.

3.5 The Red Sox have no longer won 5 games in a row. We just lost. To the Royals. Thanks a lot, Dice-BB.

On editing

2010-05-25T12:39:00.000-05:00

When I'm not reading and writing up BFYA notes (side note: I spent several hours this morning catching up on BFYA notes! Bad Jenn! I would not recommend letting your pile get up to 7 books before taking notes on them. Never again!), I'm mired in the editing process. Perhaps mired is not the best word, because so far this edit has been not so grueling as I expected. I'm, oddly enough, finding it so easy to change things in my book, taking the advice from early readers to heart. I'm really grateful to have a friend who is also a full-time editor at an esteemed encyclopedia (and an aspiring author) give me some pretty thorough feedback. It's fantastic to have found someone who can look at both the tinier details and the big picture and give advice on what sorts of changes to make. I am not sure he realizes that I could be getting the same level of service from a paid professional, but I guess that's when it pays to have smart and talented friends, right? In any case, he will surely get acknowledged on my future acknowledgments page.

Anyway, the point of this is that I'm starting to wonder, when is enough enough? My last book (the first one I shopped to agents) took 4+ years from conception and early writing, to sending it to agents. That is a long, long time, folks. And, eventually I shelved it, metaphorically put it in a box under the bed, etc. But this one seems to be getting in good shape real fast. I don't want to jump the gun, but maybe I just learned something from the process of the first one? I've been working on my new manuscript since November 2009. I nanowrimo-ed (sure, it can be a verb!) the first draft, let it sit for a month (Stephen King's advice in On Writing) and then started tackling it.

My editing process thus far:

1. First read through: fix typos (something I never checked because I wrote the first draft on Scrivener, which I love and will recommend to anyone, but whose features I still don't entirely understand) and change tense. I couldn't decide on the tense when I wrote it in November, and now I knew I wanted it to be in the present tense. The only problem: 90% of it was in the past tense. Ikey barka.

2. Once that's done, send out to early readers.

3. Wait.

4. Wait some more.

5. Okay, two months later, my mom had read it. Geez, that was slow!

6. After feedback from three readers, I started in on editing it, going chapter by chapter, incorporating their feedback and my own check-list of weaknesses. About halfway into it, I got feedback from my friend Dan, the editor, and then went back through again and made his changes. Now I'm 30-ish pages from the end, making changes from everyone and myself. After that, I plan to read through again for continuity (and also to heavily look over any new content, which is likely to be riddled with typos) and look for duplication of information (I may have introduced some things earlier, need to make sure they aren't brought up again). This will be coupled with some serious spell check.

What next?

1. Sending out this second/third draft to readers, namely my friend Stephanie who is a great critical reader who also knows her YA very well.

2. Incorporating those changes.

3. The read-aloud-athon. Reading the entire book out loud is sort of time-consuming, but it is the best way to catch when you've repeated yourself, and is a catch-all for any stubborn typos.

4. Fix-y.

5. Send to agents!

Yeah, I'm pretty much mentally already at step 5, which is why I worry about jumping the gun. I read an interview with Donna Freitas, one of my favorite newcomers to the YA scene, in which she shares that she spends, on average, an hour on each page, on each stage of the revision. That made me feel like a lazy writer. Though, I also feel like for the stories I write, something comes out of the first draft that has a very strong flow to it, and for me, to much changes can really disrupt that flow of not just the story, but also the sentences, even the paragraphs. I'm more likely to cut and replace an entire paragraph, or pages, than I am to really, really tinker with each line. That said, Dan and I were realizing how much I overuse the word "well" in my story right now. It is so true. But before I noticed that was a problem, I found way too many "just"-s in the book. They just had to go! Really.

But then today, I read a post in Quest for Kindness about the revising process. And it made me feel like I should trust my instinct. I'll always find things I want to change, but as I make these revisions, I find that with this project, there is also a lot that I feel very confident about, that all of these moments in the book lead reader to the big moments at the end.

Maybe I've gained this confidence in cutting the unnecessary stuff from weeding books in the library. There's only enough room for so many books on the shelf before it becomes overcrowded, and some must go. In that same way, I think that there's always unnecessary stuff in drafts, and that it needs to get axed, regardless of emotional attachment. [I know, I'm the pot calling the kettle black because last week I unpacked boxes of books, including library discards that I couldn't bare to part with -- particularly, books I had read as a kid. Now my child favorites sit in my office, a little pantheon of children's and YA books.] I'm getting away from the point here, but I think the big point is I've been learning a lot about the editing process and I sure hope it leads to publication sometime, you know, soon.

Book Review - Faithful by Janet Fox

2010-05-25T11:51:00.000-05:00

Since I mentioned this one a few weeks ago when it came, I figured I should probably follow up on it!

Do you ever feel like books were tailor-made for your interests? Well, when Janet Fox's Faithful arrived a few weeks ago, I kind of got that feeling. I grew up visiting the mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, with my family, taking long walks near The Breakers, imagining what it would be like to live there. Granted, this was when I was ten, and for some reason I imagined I was currently living there, instead of taking a more historically accurate spin on things. I had my dream fancy rich life played out. I was always "Veronica." In more recent years, I traveled out west, to Yellowstone National Park, with my best friend and her mother. We stayed in the Old Faithful Inn, and it was impossible not to imagine that place at another time. It just oozes history. It's hard not to imagine what stories lay tucked into the cracks of the wood there. And so I settled into my favorite reading chair for Janet Fox's debut novel, hoping to get sucked into the atmosphere of these two places with which I already felt a connection.

Imagine living in turn-of-the-century Newport, RI, where it's the norm to be spending time in mansions like The Breakers. Places like that are your friend's houses, where you attend parties -- excuse me, galas. All of this is the norm for Maggie, a young woman whose often emotionally distraught (depressed, suicidal really) mother has gone missing, and is perhaps dead. When Maggie's father suggests they leave town, that there's a lead they're following about her mother being out near Yellowstone. Looking forward to her own coming out gala, Maggie is torn away from all that she has known, and a few train rides later, finds herself in the gorgeous, frightening wilderness of Yellowstone. And it's there that everything falls apart, slowly and surely, and everything is rebuilt. Her father and her uncle have deceived her, but there's more deception to unravel (yes, I'm being vague, but only so as not to be a spoiler!).

Yellowstone proves to be everything that Newport society is not. It's a place where a woman just might be able to stand up for herself, craft a life for herself that is not completely determined by men. Maggie finds a kindred spirit, an idol of sorts, in Mrs. Gale, a photographer who reminds me a bit of the "unsinkable Molly Brown" of Titanic fame. And then there is Tom, who tests Maggie again and again, who expects something of her that she hadn't imagined to expect of herself. The descriptions of Yellowstone resonate with my own experience, as does Maggie's reaction to this marvelous landscape. I was definitely saddened at the small role that bison play in the book (aside: I am a huge fan of bison in the way that children have favorite animals; I'm just playing that whole scenario out, twenty years too late), but recognize that for the sake of being historically accurate, it just had to be that way.

I would easily recommend this one to fans of Kirby Larson's Hattie Big Sky (one of my favorite historical fiction reads in recent years) and anyone interested in the challenges women faced in that era.

Oh, the horror!

2010-05-17T22:11:00.000-05:00

That is my kind way of saying that Papelbon's blown save tonight/the Red Sox loss to the Yankees was completely and totally demoralizing. Like, I want to cry right now.

To make matters worse, it happens just as I realized that I cannot find my A Curse is Dark as Gold notebook. Yes, that tiny little notebook that I got free at ALA in honor of the inaugural William C. Morris Award is missing. I haven't gotten to the tragic element of that yet. The notebook has all my hand-written notes from my research trip to Eugene from the one day that I forgot to bring my laptop and ended up doing research at the Eugene Public Library. Waaah!!!

That's what I get for writing stuff down on paper and not transferring it to my computer. Grrrr! It's not completely irreplaceable, but I'm not about to log onto databases to find those some newspaper articles again and takes notes on them AGAIN, at 11 p.m. Especially when I kind of need to drown my Red Sox sorrow in something that is not editing. ACK! Moving sucks! I am fairly certain that this notebook is somewhere in the apartment in one of the unopened boxes of books that I keep moving around and just yesterday stacked nicely in the dining room. But, so many boxes. So little will.

Feeling totally defeated, like my team must be feeling. :(

Why yes, I should be reading right now

2010-05-15T11:27:00.000-05:00

It's been another crazy week here in Cambridge, but I think I'm settling into things. Last Sunday, we picked up our adopted cat Lilly (pictured sleeping), which has led to some adventures this week. Most of them sleep-deprived, since Miss Lilly has decided that 5:30 AM is wake-up time. Okay, maybe that's not outrageous, but in this house, we go to bed around midnight and wake up around 8:00 AM, so 5:30 really is too early for us. Also, might I mention that when I say this house, I mean my boyfriend, but also, as we've found out, our 90-year-old landlord who resides in the apartment above us, and also, our neighbor who likes to watch (loud) TV and play around with a synthesizer until about midnight. At least we're all in this together!

Thursday, I trekked out to the Brimfield Flea Market, one of my new favorite thrice-yearly activity. After not being in the area for a while, I realized how much I missed gawking at the weird stuff (art made out of baby doll parts?) and also scrounging for deals and odds and ends. Also: fried food! Though we missed out on seeing Mary Kate Olsen, who was there on Wednesday, I did find 2 end tables, one with a really cool knob. I love cool knobs.

Last night, we headed out to Brighton to pick up some chairs we found on Craigslist, and finally, the apartment is shaping up. (As in, now we can stop eating dinner on the couch. Hooray!) Our trip to Ikea tomorrow should finish off our checklist of items needed, and then we'll just be waiting for our replacement custom bookshelf to be made. In three weeks, there will no longer be random boxes sitting around in the corners of rooms. Hooray!

But then there will also be no more excuses for not reading. Hrmph.

It's not that I'm not delighted about all the reading, but between the reading and the Red Sox watching and the editing and the scouring of Craigslist, there were TWO nights this week when I went to bed with bloodshot, tired eyes. With boyfriend working 12+ hour days on thesis, at least I wasn't alone in having weary eyes, but it's still kind of tragically funny that we essentially sit around the apartment all day and yet, our eyes look like we pulled some kind of climactic all-nighter. Nope. This will continue for... a while still.

That said, I must be insane, but I am seriously contemplating the 48 hour book challenge. I am a sucker for challenges. I've done Nanowrimo twice (and won! both times!), I've run a half-marathon and other long races. So, really, how hard can it be to read as much as possible in a 48 hour time-span?

In a few weeks, I will find out.

I guess we've moved past celebrity picture books

2010-05-11T12:48:00.000-05:00

I've gotten used to seeing, expecting, celebrity picture books. Jamie Lee Curtis, Madonna, John Lithgow, etc., everyone wanted to get in on the picture book industry. How hard can it be to write 32 pages, right?

Well, now they're encroaching on a territory even more near and dear to my heart, and I have mixed feelings about it. I didn't know what to expect when I heard Lauren Conrad would be "writing" YA. But then, for my teen readers, we ordered signed copies of her first book when she came to a nearby bookstore for a signing. Clearly, there's a bit of a learning curve, because she signed the inside cover of the book, not the title page, where authors are supposed to sign. As we all know, her first book was an instant best-seller, the next one too, and now it seems that every publisher wants to find their YA celebrity author. I was surprised to hear when Hilary Duff landed a deal with Simon & Schuster. We'll wait to see how that one pans out. I'm afraid Miss Duff may not have the same audience she had years ago, and that a stint on the low-ratings (but admittedly, fun) Gossip Girl does not compare to having her own TV show, a la Lauren Conrad, and constant presence in celeb-focused magazines. Then news came that husband-wife team from the Decemberists were writing a middle grade series (Harper Collins). Okay, I'll take that seriously. I mean, Colin Meloy's got writing experience from songwriting, his wife is an illustrator, and oh right, the guy that does their band's artwork also did the covers for the Mysterious Benedict Society books.

But then I hear in the news today that Tyra Banks has landed a deal with Delacorte (an imprint of Random House), to pen a 3-book YA fantasy series. As Seth and Amy would say, REALLY?!?!

Okay, it doesn't totally blow my mind that Miss Tyra might want to get into the YA action, but a fantasy series. REALLY!?! Let it be known that Tyra has already found interest from studios about turning her series into a movie/movies? but she says, "I'm writing true literature, which can than be adapted into film by Bankable." Again, I wish I had Seth and Amy here to do the duties.

BUT TRUE LITERATURE. BY TYRA BANKS.

REALLLLYYYY???

Okay, end of snarky post. I'll go back to reading my BFYA noms and hanging out with my newly adopted kitteh.

Sorta Like a Really Fantastic Book

2010-05-08T09:18:00.000-05:00

The other night, as the Red Sox swept the Angels, I found myself swept away by Matthew Quick's YA debut Sorta Like A Rock Star. It had been in my to-read pile thanks to a blurb from one of my favorite writers, Sara Zarr, but a starred review in SLJ made me want to pick it up and read it right away. And I'm so glad I did.

Amber Appleton has two things in droves: resilience and a sense of humor. For all that life has thrown at her -- a drunk mother who falls for the wrong guys, a father she never knew, homelessness -- Amber has, at least publicly, shrugged it off and made efforts, everywhere to be optimistic. She believes that through hard work, she can go to Bryn Mawr like her idol (her best friend Ricky's mother) and make a different kind of life for herself. When she's not hanging out with the guys (thanks to an effort in elementary school to help the school's "weirdos" socialize, Amber's got this great group of guy friends, her closest friend being Ricky, who has autism), she's volunteering at an old folks home, teaching English via song to Korean ladies at an inner city Catholic church, and hanging out with a Vietnam War veteran.

It is so easy to fall in love with Amber, our narrator through this journey. She's delightfully complex and constantly wise-cracking, whether she's calling the principle "Prince Tony" or exchanging insults with Joan of Old as part of a contest to get her to laugh, or Amber to cry. Her voice is honest and fresh, peppered with her favorite words, like "sorta." And so it is all the more heartbreaking for readers to see this hopeful, optimistic narrator shrivel into herself in Part Three of the novel. The novel is written in an effortless, casual style, which suddenly turns staccato in the aftermath of a tragic event. Amber's grief is palpable and will bring many readers to tears.

I don't really know want to say too much else, except that this book has a sorta genius way of working. It does not read like a serious work of literature, and yet it has all that good, meaty stuff going on underneath it all. With discussions of faith, the meaning of life, and why bad things happen to good people, this book will have massive appeal to readers that enjoyed Francisco X. Stork's Marcelo in the Real World.

Observations on the publishing industry

2010-05-05T12:46:00.000-05:00

Even when I was a librarian, ordering thousands of dollars of YA books a year, I still wasn't having access to the breadth and depth of what is being published every year the way I've been able to so far with BFYA. Granted, we are for sure not getting everything. But we sure are getting a lot of books. I've received 240-something titles as of yesterday, and I'm clearly in the throes of the beginning of the month torrential downpour of books.

Yesterday, 20-something titles arrived from Penguin, a smattering from its various imprints. While watching Glee and catching up with a friend on Facebook, I did what I always do when a new box comes. I read the flap copy, check out the acknowledgments page to find out what agent reps the author (sometimes this can be an indicator of whether or not I'll love the book), enter the title and author into my Excel spreadsheet, and put the title in a "to read" or "not to read" pile. This time, my "to read" pile was larger than my "not to read" pile.

It's amazing to see how many books are published in the same year with very similar plot lines or facets. Like there are two books coming out that are about a fat guy named Tiny and his friend named Will Grayson.... oh wait, no, no, that's just one book with a repetitive title. All kidding aside, there are two books that came in the same box yesterday that have to do with Yellowstone, my favorite national park. (You can bet they are both also sitting in my "to read" pile.) Kirsten Chandler's Wolves, Boys, and Other Things That Might Kill Me (Viking) whose title is awfully intriguing, is a modern story about wolves being introduced into Yellowstone. It's coming out May 13th, the same date as Faithful by Janet Fox (Speak), which is set in the early 20th century, and tells the story of a privileged young woman from Newport who is dragged off to Yellowstone by her family. Off the top of my head, I can't think of 2 YA books set in Yellowstone that I've even heard of until now. And then there are two coming out on the same day from the same publisher.

I was looking at Susane Colastani's Something Like Fate and felt a wave of deja vu roll over me. A book about a girl who starts seeing her best friend's boyfriend behind her back. Ummm... sounds like Elizabeth Scott's The Unwritten Rule, which I read a month ago. When you get down to it, I know there are only so many essential stories that are being told, just in many variations, but it's still kind of amazing to look at all the similarities. When I think of the manuscript I'm working on, there are a few comparisons I can draw, but nothing that seems to be the same thing. Which is good, right? But then I wonder if this is how the authors of these books felt, selling their stories to different publishing houses (or imprints) and then finding out that their book is coming out roughly the same time as another very similar book.

Another observation I've had from all the reading, is the way all the books I read seem to be loosely connected to each other in some weird tangential way. I almost want to track these tinier similarities, as I go from title to title, but I think I've got too much on my plate at the moment. When I say tiny similarities, I mean, reading two books in a row where there is a character obsessed with words for the groupings of animals, ex. "a murder of crows." That's weird, right?, to read two books in a row with a secondary character that has the same mini obsession.

Well, those are all the observations I have for the moment. The bf and I are in the middle of unpacking in Cambridge and oh, this one's a doozy. It wouldn't be doozy if the movers hadn't lost our custom made, 7 foot bookshelf... but that's moving. It's going to be a while until we're completely organized, but I'm sure we'll get there.

Book Review - Once by Morris Gleitzman

2010-04-27T21:42:00.000-05:00

From its brilliant first page, which will have you wondering why carrots are so important, to its startling, open-ended conclusion, Morris Gleitzman's Once will have readers spellbound. At least, it had me spellbound.

Felix, a Jewish kid, has spent the past three years in a Catholic orphanage ever since his bookseller parents dropped him off here. But when he realizes his parents haven't come to take him out (having mistaken the carrot as a sign that they soon would), he takes it upon himself to find them, wherever they are. The problem is that we're in Nazi-occupied Poland and the protective bubble where Felix has spent the last three years has left him naive and ignorant of everything that goes on. His naivete may recall, for some, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, but given his situation, it is much more believable, and not long-lasting. As he tries to return to his hometown and find his parents, he's understandably shocked at how everything has changed.

Beloved Australian author Morris Gleitzman (of whose books I clearly need to read more!) has written a searing yet compulsively readable high middle grade/ low YA historical fiction book that was beyond captivating for me. Anyone who recognizes the power of storytelling and fiction, will sympathize with Felix, whose imagination and capacity for telling stories gives him a chance. This is a book that's perfect for those readers to whom you want to recommend fellow Aussie Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, but fear that its heft will put them off. Simply, yet gorgeously written, with images and characters that you won't soon forget, this novel seriously impressed me.

I think it's time to find out what other Morris Gleitzman books have been published in the United States.

***UPDATE - Once is book one in a trilogy about Felix. I seriously hope that the others will be published in the United States in the future, but that's not the same as me admitting that I might look for them on Amazon.co.uk!***

Moving woes, part million

2010-04-23T22:13:00.000-05:00

This past week I've spent way too much time on Craigslist, time I'd much rather spend reading the stacks and stacks of books taking over the spare bedroom. These stacks are out of control! But so, it turns out, is furniture shopping. What I'd thought would be an easy task -- there are so many antique stores out here, how hard can it be to find a dining room table and chairs, 2 desks, a TV stand -- is turning out to be more in the realm of insurmountable. Had we known this beforehand, maybe we would've kept these same items from our Chicago apartment instead of practically giving them away because we thought we'd find something better out here.

Sure, I could find all these things, with a budget of infinity. Or, you know, if I lowered my standards a bit instead of growing my modern design knowledge base with each tremor of the fingers across the keyboard. But we're not working with that. And Cragislist has made this librarian very, very cranky. Finally it dawned on me to use another website to search Craigslist more efficiently. But that only made me more aware of how all the amazing furniture at somewhat decent prices is actually in... New York City? Whaaaa?

Meanwhile, Yelp hasn't made me any happier. There must be plenty of places to find affordable, decent, used furniture in Cambridge and Somerville, right? Then why am I only finding stuff that's $3000 and up.

It's a humbling experience.

The only highlight was when I found a library card catalog for sale in Western Mass. But when I emailed for the price, well, that was the end of that. Okay, I lied, the most amusing thing was finding really cute chickens for sale... and adult diapers. Not posted by the same person... or chicken. Also, an airport security Playmobil set. Yes, I am sure that in some universe I could make a table out of these things. No, no... I can't. This isn't some creepy version of Project Runway - Interior Design.

So, I'm hoping that tomorrow's trip to a neighborhood flea market will turn up something. Or that, at the very least, I can develop some self-control. Because searching every Craigslist location nearby for "farm table" and "antique table" and "farmhouse table" for hours on end. It's just sad. Especially when there are so many books to be read!

Tomorrow: Revolver by Marcus Sedgwick and at least one more. And hopefully a dining room table. And another series win for the Red Sox.

Book Review - Three Rivers Rising: A Novel of the Johnstown Flood by Jame Richards

2010-04-21T09:10:00.000-05:00

This might just be the first book I've read so far for BFYA that has really surprised and moved me; I just loved the experience of reading it that much. I've become a big fan of verse novels lately. Maybe it's because I can get away with reading several verse novels in the span of a few hours, or maybe it's because some of them are just extraordinarily well-written. This one certainly was.

In late 19th century, upstream from Johnstown, PA, there was a fancy mountain resort, attracting all the tycoons and high society types of the day. (Think: the fancy rich people in first class on the Titanic.) There we find teenage Celestia, our Rose Dewitt, if you will, well-breed and primed for cotillion next year. One day out at the lake she meets Peter, a young man from downstream working-class Johnstown, who works at the hotel (and our Jack).

Yes, my friends, this is a love story. And like Titanic, it's set against the backdrop of an extraordinary disaster: the Johnstown Flood of 1889, which took the lives of just over 2,000 people. Prior to 9/11, this was one of the biggest civilian disasters in the history of the United States. Part survival story, part love story, you'll find it hard not to race through the pages as the water overflows the dam (which created the lake at the fancy resort) and the huge wave barrels down the river, affecting town after town on its way to Johnstown, where the most casualties occurred.

This is Jame Richards's debut novel, and I can tell you that I will be for sure running out to read her next book when it hits the shelves. This a brilliant, exciting, heart-pounding story that will easily appeal to fans of Titanic style disaster-love stories, but so many others. Definitely one of my top favorites from the 2010 publishing cycle.

When they're playing this bad... why bother?!

2010-04-19T17:09:00.000-05:00

I know this is supposed to be about books and reading, but I need a moment to gripe here. When the Red Sox are playing this bad (off to a 4-9 start and just got 4-game swept by one of their main rivals, the Rays), it's really all you can do. It's hard to concentrate on reading a book a day when your mind keeps drifting off to the horrifying image of Bill Hall trying to catch a ball (sort of his job, but clearly, a bit of a problem right now), or of J.D. Drew trying to hit, or of any of our relief pitchers trying to make an out.

Right now I'm reading Dia Reeves' off-beat, oddly funny, and totally compelling Texan (!!??!) supernatural novel, Bleeding Violet. (I'm not always a huge fan of all things supernatural, but this one's had me hooked since the start.) Still, it's hard to keep my eyes glued to the page when I hear the crack of the bat and have to watch another Rays home run.

I know, it's April. I know, they can't be this bad forever. I just need to keep my nose to the page, get sucked into a story, and pretend the 4-9 start pure fantasy. As unreal as monsters hiding in the windows.

Book Review- Keep Sweet by Michele Dominguez Greene

2010-04-13T17:49:00.000-05:00

So, in my efforts to get back on track, I finished 3 books so far today. And it's only 6:30 PM. I could possibly squeeze in one more! But I also have Lost and Glee, so probably not.

Anyway, I finished up Keep Sweet this morning and while writing up my BFYA notes, realized that I really liked it. This should not be a huge surprise, since the FLDS church has been a subject of interest for me for awhile. I read Carol Lynch Williams' The Chosen One last year and also Shelley Hrdlitschka's Sister Wife, and I'm a devoted fan of Big Love. Needless to say, I found it slightly, umm... awesome that Michele Dominguez Greene has acted in Big Love.

Keep Sweet is a slight novel (not much more than 200 pages) that follows Alva Jane, a member of the FLDS community called Pineridge. Alva Jane grew up not questioning FLDS, but then again, it was her entire world, from her schooling to her parenting, her friends, everything. Yet at the same time, she had to know, somewhere in her, that it was not okay to pick out her own future husband: her secret boyfriend Joseph John. That's the prophet's job. The thing is, keeping sweet, well, it's the secret to everything in Pineridge. It's the only way to keep everything going as it always has been. The women must "keep sweet," they must marry the men the prophet has picked out for them, they must produce many children, and they must start doing this as soon as they begin menstruating.

Somehow, Alva Jane seemed to think she could circumvent their way of life, that she could leave with Joseph John when he went off to college at BYU.

Alva Jane was wrong.

What follows is the horrifying but trying story of how she attempts to get out. It seems that everything -- and I do mean everything-- is standing in the way of her making a break for it. What seems to work so well for young men to break out of the community (or more often, get kicked out) only leads to more abuse. As troubling as this story is, it's even more troubling to think that this is still something going on in the United States. That there are girls like Alva Jane, who know nothing more, who have never been educated about their choices, who have never heard of "age of consent" laws, who must, well, "keep sweet."

This is a powerful story that will easily appeal to people (like myself) who are interested in these seemingly crazy subcultures that I have trouble believing still exist in the United States, but also, for anyone interested in a story of a teen trying so hard to beat the odds.

Also read today: Broken Memory by Elisabeth Combres (Groundwood Books) and Sweet, Hereafter by Angela Johnson (S&S)

I was going to blog today but...

2010-04-12T21:26:00.000-05:00

I was going to blog today but...
...the Red Sox were losing to the Twins (and what has happened to Jon Lester?)
...the Life Unexpected season finale was too amazing and I can't focus on anything else
...I'm worried about Leonard and Penny
...I had to go out for a run
...I had to renew my driver's license
...I had to read the last manuscript for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest since the review is due tomorrow and it's 350 pages
...I had to pet the kitty
...I had to eat the leftover Easter candy
...I've only read 6 books so far in April because I've been so busy looking for apartments and moving
...I look at all the books sitting in boxes and piles in the other room and I can't even believe that these were all sent to me, to read. It's overwhelming! (In a good way!)

There was this Mercer Mayer book I had as a kid, one of the Little Critter ones, where Little Critter is telling you about what he meant to do, and what he did instead. It exactly captures how I feel right now. That despite my best efforts, I cannot seem to fit all the things I need to and want to do into the given day. Like my manuscript, waiting to be edited and updated from my trip to Eugene. Still waiting! And it's not the only thing, let me tell you. So, if blog postings are a little sparse over the next week, it's because I'm getting stuff done. Reading books, 2 a day starting tomorrow for as long as I can go until life throws something else my way.

For now, I leave you with this. My immediate to-read pile. There are also to-read boxes. Oh boy!

RIYL Gilmore Girls and Life Unexpected

2010-04-06T15:37:00.001-05:00

I don't know about you, but I love me some (bad grammar?) former teenage parent plot lines. Own more than one season of Gilmore Girls? Check! DVR Life Unexpected? Check!

If that sounds like you, you're probably going to enjoy Natasha Friend's latest book and YA debut, For Keeps. Like Rory and Lux, Josie Gardner's mother is roughly sixteen years older than her. But unlike Lux, her mother Kate never gave her up for adoption, thus allowing daughter and former teen parent to have unspeakably close bonds and the ability for guys in town to view her mom as a bit of a MILF. Josie grew up never knowing about her father. All she knows is that he moved away after finding out that her mom was pregnant with her, and that her mom never heard anything else afterwards. Kate is touchy about her past, we learn, as she freaks out in the grocery store upon realizing that her former boyfriend and the father of her child's parents are on the other side of the aisle. She hasn't seen or heard from them in since Josie's conception.

Suddenly, there's a real possibility that Josie could get to know her other set of grandparents, and even her father. And everything's up in question.

This intergenerational story set in Western Mass (which I appreciate, having grown up there) has massive appeal for daughter and mothers alike. I don't want to reveal anything else about the book, but by the lead in you can tell that this is a year that has some major changes in store for Josie. Definitely recommended reading for anyone currently enjoying Life Unexpected or former GG fanatics.

The true test awaits

2010-04-04T12:45:00.000-05:00

Here we are, on the 94th day of the year, the day when everything changes. So far, I have read 82 books (will hopefully have read 83 by the end of the day, it's only 10:30 a.m. in California right now). I'm slightly off pace for a book a day, but not by much, considering that earlier this year I also read some adult fiction. I'm trying to focus on this year's YA as more and more comes out, but there were times where my choices weren't fabulous, and I read a few from 2009 that I had missed. Anyway, the point is, today, everything changes.

Today is Opening Day for the Boston Red Sox. Since I became an adult with more free time (i.e. no homework filling up my evenings), I have pretty much devoted myself to the Red Sox, watching or closely following on Gameday, every single game, from the Opening Day until (every year, fingers crossed) the post-season games in October. That was before I set the goal of reading over 300 books a year.

So, today begins the ultimate test. Can I read a book a day and watch the Red Sox, every game? I know Stephen King has mastered the art of reading books during Red Sox games. But let's face it, I don't sit around comparing myself to Stephen King.

Can I read these

while also watching this?

Can I do this?

And this?

At the same time?

We'll see. Starting today, at 5 p.m. PST.

Pepper Roux... 14 year old male version of Amelie?

2010-03-30T13:40:00.000-05:00

I was just catching up on taking notes for some BFYA candidates (and nominees) and started thinking that Pepper Roux (of Geraldine McCaughrean's fabulously entertaining The Death-Defying Pepper Roux) really reminded me of someone. Especially with the match-making and the writing of fake, though kind of amazing and endearing, newspaper articles. Sounds kind of like... Amelie, no?

Research trip to Eugene = a success

2010-03-29T23:26:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday, I took off on the Coast Starlight--known for being one of the most scenic train rides in the United States or, known as the train that Sheldon and the gang take up to Berkeley on an episode of the Big Bang Theory--headed for Eugene, OR to do some detailed research for my work-in-progress YA manuscript. It wasn't the kind of research that involves libraries (though of course I couldn't resist visiting the fantastic Eugene Public Library two days in a row, and the Lane County Historical Society) but more about reminding myself why Eugene is so unique, and why I've chosen to set my book there. I wanted to make sure I got the details right--from the oddly decorated houses in the Whiteaker neighborhood, to the vegan pizza restaurant from which the characters get their take-out, to the other places the characters might have gone that were definitely there in 2006. It was a good thing I checked, because since I'd last been in Eugene (summer of 2003), several "institutions" had been bought out or gone out of business. Good to know!

Anyway, it was a really delightful trip that made me so excited to start edits on my book. It also helped that my early readers are finally coming through with feedback on draft one. Of course, I had to take breaks from all my challenging, burdensome research.

And... the highlights!

- Probably had the best soup of my life at Pizza Research Institute. As in, I am contemplating writing in to Bon Appetit for the recipe.

- Chatted with a friendly anarchist at Bad Egg Books, a radical lending library.

- Saw The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Diary of a Wimpy Kid - to take breaks from all the walking

- Ran part of Pre's trail. I wish I could've run the entire thing (4-ish miles) but I had to run 2 miles just to get there and running more than 5 miles after already having walked 5 seemed... like a bad idea.

- Trekked out to Springfield for roller derby - Emerald City Roller Girls!

- Took plenty of pictures. (It's research! The best kind!)

Now, I only have to integrate all my notes (and you know, turn ideas into paragraphs, pages, etc.) into my book, fix everything else that's wrong with it, and, start looking for agents, round two! Oh, and continue to read a book a day, and read and review the 5 books for the ABNA contest. And relocate and buy a car and unpack.

Geez, this is looking like a lot. Especially with baseball season starting on Sunday!

the University of Chicago YA world just keeps on growing

2010-03-21T15:16:00.000-05:00

As a University of Chicago alum and (unpublished as of yet) YA writer, I'm always excited to hear about YA projects from fellow graduates. I just started reading Swati Avasthi's Split, a BFYA nominee, and noticed that part of the book is set in Hyde Park. Either Avasthi grew up in Hyde Park or she attended the University. Not to rag on Hyde Park (I lived there for 8 years and love it) but it's sort of unlikely that you would know it well enough to write about it without having some connection to the U of C. Sure enough, I just visited Avasthi's website and lo and behold, she received her B.A. from the U of C.

Recently, there was an article in the alumni magazine about Stephen Barbara (A.B. '02), literary agent at Foundry, getting some pretty sweet book deals for fellow alums Lauren Oliver (her pen name) and Leila Sales. Oliver's book has already spent 2 weeks on the New York Times Best-seller list, while Sales's book won't be out until the fall. There's also Anna Jarzab, whose debut YA novel All the Unquiet Things came out a few months ago; she received her Master's from the U of C.

I wonder if there are more YA authors who graduated from the University of Chicago. I'll try not to become insanely jealous of all of them.

Reading Roger, and not so much hook-laden commercial YA fiction

2010-03-21T14:59:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about Roger Sutton's post the other day, about how YA hardcover is bursting at the seams with high-concept books that once upon a time were "what we called paperbacks." I have to say that as a librarian, I am not bothered at all by the huge amounts of heavily commercial, hook-laden, slickly produced fiction. I found that my teens read it in droves, but then also abandoned the same books a few years later as they fell out of favor for the latest commercial YA fiction. Yes, Lauren Conrad, I'm talking about you. In my last year there, I saw the Gossip Girl series beginning to languish on the shelf. And yet I can't tell you how many times I had to replace worn copies of Markus Zusak's The Book Thief. I know that ten, twenty years from now, this will endure while the others will not. (Unless they get updates a la the Sweet Valley High, and soon, the BSC series.)

But it's fair to say that I became pretty disillusioned when I started subscribing to Publishers Marketplace in the midst of finding an agent for my first book. Every Monday morning, skimming through the previous week's sales, my heart would sink as I read the listings. It seemed that every single book that was sold was overly commercial and derivative, at least for debut authors. Where are the John Greens, the Sarah Dessens, the Laurie Halse Andersons of the future? I hope they find their way out onto the shelves, amidst the zombie-fallen angel-vampire books.

Research trip

2010-03-17T21:33:00.000-05:00

Next week I'm taking myself (and my books, it looks like) on a whirlwind getaway... or something like that. I'm trying to turn my Nanowrimo project from last fall into the genuine article: a real, shoppable YA manuscript, this time with a hook (I'm not so sure my last book had a hook, or a real plot, but anyway!). It turns out that when you write a book in a month, you can't take breaks for research. Which just means that the research will have to come later.

My latest project, with constantly changing titles (including one that was the title of a John Farnham song), partially takes place in Eugene, Oregon (in the Whiteaker neighborhood). It also takes place in an unnamed Chicago suburb. Of course, that part was easy to write, since I worked in one every day and knew the area very well. But it's been something like 6 years since I spent a summer in Eugene and my memory's a little hazy. I recall bungalows painted in bright colors, lots of Tibetan flags, Rastafarians, college students on the 8 year plan, etc. The book is set in 2006, so I can take some liberties. I just hope that Eugene hasn't changed. It was the one place I traveled within the United States that felt truly unique, somehow untouched by all the changes and modernization. Sure, it had strip malls somewhere, but I hardly noticed them. Eugene had this unique energy and it radiated through most of the people I met there. I hope I can find it again.

Anyway, the whole idea of traveling somewhere especially for book research is kind of exciting, right? It would help if I knew exactly what I was looking for. I guess it's those details that connect the place to the story, that make it feel specific and real. I can't wait to take hundreds of photographs to keep the details real and firm in my memory, long after the trip. Or that somehow, I'll have the time and resources to actually integrate them into the story while I'm there.

Here's hoping the place I'm staying has plenty of outlets. I'm going to need 'em.

Book Review - How to Ruin Your Boyfriend's Reputation by Simone Elkeles

2010-03-15T12:56:00.000-05:00

I know these books flew off the shelves at my former library. And I cracked up at Simone Elkeles's presentation at a recent conference - she's one funny lady. And still, I had not read any of her books. What is wrong with me?

Oh right, they were never in at my library. Well, I finally had a chance to read one, and went with the BFYA-eligible How to Ruin Your Boyfriend's Reputation. Man, was I missing out! I was feeling under the weather last Saturday night and in lieu of going out to a party, I settled down with the book. Amy, the series' protagonist reminded so much of Mia Thermopolis. She was silly but real and so easy to relate to. Then again, she was doing something I'm not sure even Mia would be brave enough to do - spend 10 days in an Israeli Defense Forces boot camp! But, like my old pal Mia, she did this for love. What teenage girl isn't willing to do whatever it takes to be with her man? In this case, Amy wants to be near her boyfriend Avi, who is serving for the IDF, as part of a requirement for all Israeli citizens. (Sidenote: Amy is a Jewish American but her father's family lives in Israel.)

Of course, things never go easy in Amy's world, so it's no surprise that when she gets to the boot camp, their toilets are mere holes in the ground, and down go her designer sunglasses. Eeep! That's just the beginning of the troubles she has in this by turns hilarious and heartwarming story.

Missing my library system

2010-03-12T17:34:00.000-06:00

One of the joys of being on a YALSA selection committee, of course, is that publishers send you books. Boxes and boxes and boxes of them. One of the unfortunate things about moving is: you keep having to change your address. Which is why I had my books sent to my parents' house in this time of transition between Chicago --> California --> ??. Now that I know I'll be moving to the Boston area soon, it's a relief that my books are already going to Massachusetts. But it also means that while I'm in California, my books are 2,000+ miles away.

Which means I've been going to the library a lot. While Marin county is indeed a gorgeous place to spend your winter, it's sort of lacking in its library system. Going from a huuuuuge library system like the Metropolitan Library System to MARINet is, well, a let-down. I went from being able to get almost any book I wanted (that was released) in a matter of days, to patiently waiting weeks for books that have already been out for a month, or in the case of Melina Marchetta's Finnikin of the Rock, more than a month! As of two days ago when I last checked (system appears to be down at the moment), not one library in the system owned this book. Meanwhile, there are 16 copies in the MLS system. Back in Massachusetts, 40+ books (and more every day, it seems) are piling up, just waiting to be read.

So, I've been making many trips a week to the local library to pick up my requests. Up next:

ARCS/newly released titles that I can't wait to read (but are sadly back in Mass.):

For the Win by Cory Doctorow
Spotting for Nellie by Pamela Lowell
The Line by Terri Hall
and the aforementioned Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta

Time to read!

Book Review - The Vinyl Princess by Yvonne Prinz

2010-03-10T16:56:00.004-06:00

Well, I’m probably too biased to be evaluating a book like this. This is precisely the kind of book that’s crafted to the appeal of someone who watched Empire Records 200 times as a teenager, goes to record stores thinking Penny Lane’s line from Almost Famous about visiting all her friends, and who's college radio show was written up in the Chicago Reader. But I'm guess I'll just have to suck it up and do it!

Summer's the only time that 16-year-old Allie gets to work full-time at Bob and Bob's Records in Berkeley, the same place she works part-time during the school year. The college kids have fled town, leaving her with only the locals, and what colorful locals they are. There are all the usuals you'd expect in independent music stores: the homeless, the quiet nerdy guys, the cute quiet guys, etc. It's Allie's heaven, and not just because of the cute quiet guys. No, it's being surrounded by music all day long. But that's not all - this summer she's going to start a revolution, vinyl-style, debuting a blog where she shows off her vinyl knowledge, or rather, shares it with like-minded folks all over the world. And then there's her zine...

Prinz, who co-founded Amoeba Music, really captured the feel of a town like Berkeley in the summer. As a former/recovered music buff, I totally believed every shared sentiment about the music listening/loving experience as conveyed through Allie (and her co-workers, Zach). I loved the range of music knowledge that was shared, as it gave even me some ideas for stuff I’d want to hear, and it didn’t feel at all like name-checking for name-checking’s sake. Also, as someone who’s been to Amoeba Records one too many times in the last few months, I can guarantee that the author has plenty of credibility on this front.

Even for someone who’s not completely obsessed with music, there’s a lot to like here. The side plot about Allie’s divorced mother looking for love (and trying too hard) adds some humorous moments and balances very well with Allie’s own quest, and they actually end up mirroring each other by the end.

The best part? There's an actual Vinyl Princess blog that still gets updated!

The worst part? I have a feeling I'm about to blow a lot of money at Amoeba Records in the near future...

ARC review - Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs by Ron Koertge

2010-03-04T17:08:00.000-06:00

Wow, a verse novel that isn’t super emotional (most seem to involve a death or some intense event) but rather super fun and really explores other forms as well. I LOVED it, and I hadn’t even read the book that precedes it (Shakespeare Bats Cleanup), so I wasn’t coming in biased. Fourteen year old Kevin, a baseball player with aspirations, a poet in his free time, is a great male voice that defies stereotype. He’s a jock but not a jock, a poet but someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously and isn’t emo-ing out all over the place. He’s a breath of fresh air, as much as this book was. At times, funny, shy, embarrassed, confused, basically the whole range of teenage emotions (okay, maybe no self-loathing).

The book follows his team through the playoffs, his adjustment to the idea of his widowed father dating someone, and his confused feelings for his girlfriend Mira and his friend/crush Amy.

Koertge has a really great balance of poems in here - the ones moving the narrative forward, the dueling poems with Amy, and a few ones that capture the emotion that comes with losing his mother. “I Know What Dad’s Going Through” (p. 25) is so poignant and simple, no over-the-top emotions at all, just hitting the truth: “Sadness is a big dark bus with a schedule of its own. But when it pulls up and the door opens with a hiss, you pretty much have to get on,” it begins.

I cracked up at the back and forth Dracula and Frankenstein poems that he and Amy sent to each other, and could see teachers using these poems in classrooms to teach poetry. I don’t even like poetry that much (sorry!) but reading Amy and Kevin discuss poetry, I wanted to it. Their poems were hilarious and kept the book very light, quick, and fun to read.

There was nothing that I didn’t like about this book, or found flawed. Except this: it was too short!

Of course I wimped myself

2010-03-04T16:02:00.000-06:00

In honor of the soon-to-be-released Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie, I wimped myself today. Try it!

Book Review - How to say goodbye in robot

2010-02-18T23:23:00.000-06:00

How did I miss this one? Oh right, it was checked out from my library all the time back in the fall/early winter. Not surprising, since it has a rad cover and, oh yeah, it name-checks robots. This is exactly the kind of book I would have looooved as a teenager - a la Chbosky's The Perks of Being A Wallflower - which means that as an adult, I also pretty much loved it. Mysterious depressed boy? Check. Teens with weird film interests (John Waters)? Check. Close friendship that's so intense it's more intense than a romance? Check!

Natalie Standiford's literary YA debut (she also wrote The Dating Game series) had me from the very beginning:

"I turned a corner and came to a small church. There was a headstone near the path leading to the church's wooden doors. I stepped closer to read the headstone. It said FOR THE UNICORN CHILD. That is so cool, I thought. What a funky town this was. I imagined a neighborhood Legend of the Unicorn Child, about a one-horned little boy who'd died tragically, hit by a car or shot by a mugger or maybe poisoned by lawn pesticides. The story of the Unicorn Child was so real to these people they'd erected a stone in his memory. Then I read it again. The stone didn't say FOR THE UNICORN CHILD. It said FOR THE UNBORN CHILD" (p. 9).

Bea, the narrator, was just the right amount quirky. Something about her and Ghost Boy's relationship/friendship, at least to me, conjured up Daniel Clowe's Ghost World. But what I loved about this book was that it wasn't just quirky for the sake of being quirky. It managed coming-of-age realizations, captured those senior year feeling so well, and squeezed in an interesting mystery too.

I don't know about anyone else out there (okay, I guess I do, since this book had several starred reviews and was a BBYA selection), but I can't wait to see what else Standiford has up her sleeve.

Nerd break

2010-02-14T22:52:00.000-06:00

I took a break from reading upcoming and current year YA to read one of last year's BBYA books, Julie Halpern's Into the Wild Nerd Yonder. And I'm so glad I did. I met Julie at a conference a few years ago when her first book, Get Well Soon, was just hitting the shelves. I enjoyed meeting her so much that I bought her book at the conference for myself and read it in one sitting that night. It was smart and sad and still humorous in moments. It flew off the shelf at my library and so I was completely excited to get an ARC of her latest book. But then somehow, I got bogged down in other reading and it got lost in my bookshelf until it was time to move, which is when I found it and put it in my suitcase.

And I'm super glad I did. I have never really enjoyed a book the way I enjoyed this one. What I loved most about it was the way it achieved so many things, all in one book. Moments where I am cracking up so hard I almost pee my pants? Check. Touching older brother - younger sister moments? Check. Awesome skirt making? Check. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy like everything is right in the world? Check.

It was such an endearing story with characters that will stick with me for a long time. I can't believe I didn't read the ARC last summer when I got it, but then I'm so happy I found it so that I could, for one day, just really, really enjoy what I'm reading. With BFYA picking up steam, it was great to take a break for one day and remind myself what best books for teens are like. And I've found one of my new favorite YA books to recommend.

Now, back to my regularly scheduled reading.

ARC heaven

2010-01-30T13:23:00.001-06:00

Yikes! I jet across the country from New England to California and abandon blogging for more than a week. With suitcases laden with ARCS (causing both suitcases to inch over the magical 50 lb mark for Southwest), I made the loooong journey from Hartford to Oakland on one of the rainiest stormiest days they've seen in awhile. A reroute, 4 hours in the Nashville airport, and several books later, I made it.

I've been tackling my stack of ARCS. Conquered so far:

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

This World We Live In by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

Very LeFreak by Rachel Cohn

Juggling Fire by Joanne Bell

Real books:

A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle (I somehow had never read this?!?!)

The Secret Year by Jennifer Hubbard

I'm still plodding through "Under the Dome" thanks to scary book-induced bad dreams. Sheesh, what am I, 12? Anyway, my favorites? Probably Will Grayson x 2 and Very LeFreak. I knew I'd like WG since I'm a John Green and David Levithan fan, though I'll have to say, I was blown away by the writing in what I'm assuming at the DL sections. He had such a knack for getting into that Will Grayson's character and making me totally believe and feel for the guy. Not having read any Rachel Cohn before (I guess I need to, now), I didn't know what to expect for VLF, but I found the book to really ring true. Granted, I read it as a bit of a satire -- it's too exaggerated to really feel like the book is very realistic at times, but I still felt like I had a lot in common with Very, a college freshman technology addict who goes to rehab for her addictions. As I'm waking up every morning, I grab my iPod and check Facebook, Twitter, and email before getting out of bed. Definitely wasn't doing that a year ago. Maybe I'm just ramping up?

Okay, time for some ping pong. Not virtual, the real thing. I promise.

You can't win 'em all

2010-01-19T13:28:00.000-06:00

Well, I wasn't even close with my Printz predictions (1 of 5). I guess it could've been worse. I forgot to post my Newbery predictions, but I think those would've been better. I'm very happy to see When You Reach Me win the award, and for Calpurnia Tate and Claudette Colvin to be honor titles, as those were among my favorites for this year. I have to say that the Newbery selections this year were a little more predictable, with When You Reach Me standing out as a major contender basically before it even came out. That said, there seemed to be some backlash, online, for Calpurnia Tate, but I was so happy to see it get an honor I have have squealed at the awards announcement. And yes, I was there in person. And no, I was not alone in my squealing. Gosh, librarians can get really worked up over these things. People went crazy when Jerry Pinkney won the Caldecott for the Lion and the Mouse.

Back to the Printz, though, I think I'm not alone in finding out that my predictions were pretty far off the actual winners. That said, I've got some reading to catch up on from this year's group. I'd read the winner (as I have all things Libba Bray), but still haven't read John Barnes's Tales Of The Madmen Underground, Adam Rapp's Punkzilla, and Rick Yancey's The Monstrumologist. As usual, I think the Printz award jury picked some titles out of relative obscurity (none of the 4 and 5 starred review titles made the list, like, Fire, Wintergirls, and Marcelo) and I can't wait to read them.

Of course, I'm also officially on the BBYA committee BFYA committee starting now (since ALA Midwinter is over) so I'm pretty sure I've got my work cut out for me.

Award predictions

2010-01-12T10:18:00.000-06:00

After much hemming and hawing, here are my predictions for this year's Printz award (Newbery will be up in a few days). Now, these aren't necessarily my picks for the award, but rather my educated guesses as to which books will be honored by this year's committee. I'm going to be honest and say that every year, the committee picks a book that most people didn't see coming, so I'll be surprised if this year's any different. Also, how good was I at predicting last year's list? (So modest, too!)

And here they are. I predict...

Winning the Printz medal.... The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd

With Honors going to:

Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman

The Lost Conspiracy by Frances Hardinge

Fire by Kristin Cashore

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

My reasoning: I made a longer list of titles with multiple starred reviews, titles that appeared on Best of 2009 lists for Horn Book, SLJ, and Booklist, and wracked my own brain. Two of the YA books with the most starred reviews this year are Fire and Marcelo In The Real World. While Marcelo's received a lot of love, I think it might be like When You Reach Me, where there's almost too much consensus that it should win, and that that starts hurting it's chances. Of course, I could always be totally wrong. Charles and Emma has a lot of buzz going for it, and it was a strong year for YA nonfiction, so if that doesn't make it, there were surely be another YA nonfic in it's place, if not two. Wintergirls received a lot of acclaim, and it's also been awhile since Laurie Halse Anderson has been recognized by the Printz committee. Year after year of creating outstanding YA fiction -- she's overdue for an honor. Finally, The Lost Conspiracy and Carbon Diaries. Both titles appeared on several best of the best lists, and they're written by non-American authors. In fact, both of them are written by British authors (had to double-check on Hardinge). Unlike the Newbery, the Printz does not require that the author is an American citizen. The Printz has a history of recognizing writers from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Unless I'm missing something, I didn't pick up any notable books published in the US this year by writers from Australia or New Zealand (please correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway, I think the committee will go with another sort of under the radar title, so I'm going with Carbon Diaries as the winner!

Looking forward to finding out the winner bright and early on Monday morning at ALA Midwinter in Boston!

Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have by Allen Zadoff

2010-01-08T13:10:00.000-06:00

The cover picture and the title say it all. This is a book about a fat high school male. And while a lot of the book was about Andrew's weight, it was also about finding your place in high school, whether you're a fat kid, or a former fat kid, or a nerd, or a stellar athlete. At times this book seemed a bit of a fairytale: the fat kid Andrew plucked out of sophomore obscurity and suddenly on the varsity football team, and everyone seemed a little too nice, like in Steve Kluger's My Most Excellent Year, but the spectacular way it all fell apart in the end (that's all I'm saying) brought this book back to reality in ways that Kluger's never quite did. (Not that I found that as a problem with My Most Excellent Year, I liked it very much. It just wasn't 100% realistic.) That said, Zadoff's debut YA novel is a really fun guy read that's a pretty honest take on the experience. There were some things that I wish had been more fully explored, like Andrew's concern for his younger sister's health, and having gone to high school in Worcester, I couldn't believe that Worcester would ever be playing Newton in football before the playoffs. Still, on a whole, I really liked this book, and it's an easy one to recommend.

Weepy Thursday

2010-01-08T12:31:00.001-06:00

How had I missed Suzanne LaFleur's amazing book Love, Aubrey? This past week I was trolling through my blogs looking for great books from 2009 that I might have missed and I kept coming across this one. Delighted when it came into the library yesterday, I started it last night just before bed and finished it this morning. It starts off with eleven year old Aubrey all alone in her house in Virginia, taking care of herself by making cheese and crackers three times a day and watching television. Her mother left days ago, and there's an allusion to "an accident." Her grandmother, Gram, worried that no one's been picking up the phone, takes the train down from Vermont and finds her granddaughter all alone. The two return to Vermont, Aubrey's mother's whereabouts still a mystery, and the reader's given these flashbacks into Aubrey's family's pasts. Like If I Stay by Gayle Forman, one of my favorite YA books from 2009, this is a book about a girl who has lost most of her family. In If I Stay, the main character loses her entire immediate family in a car crash. Aubrey still has her mother... somewhere out there, but it's to the same effect. Both books are terribly sad reads, the kind you want to gobble up all at once for a good cry, not the kind you'd want to drag out over a week because the sadness is just that palpable. Audrey finds a really fantastic friend next door to Gram's place in Vermont, Bridget, but their friendship is tinged with sadness because, like Audrey, Bridget has a younger sister, and there are moments between little Mabel and "Bridgie" that clearly just break Audrey's heart. I don't want to give away any more of what happens in the book, because there are some surprises, but I want to say that it is easily right up there among my favorite middle grade reads of all time. I can't wait to read whatever Suzanne LaFleur is working on next, I was that touched and spellbound by this book.

A book a day

2010-01-04T11:52:00.000-06:00

Back in November, I learned I was appointed to the BBYA committee for the next year, and possibly the two years after that. I squealed walking down State Street while reading the email on my phone, and then, over the next several weeks, told everyone I knew that my life was going to change in 2010, in a couple big ways.

1. I would be mailed roughly 1,000 books a year, from publishers, to consider for the BBYA list.

2. The amount of books I read would at least double, or more likely, triple.

Wow. And wow. Since I'm in the process of moving across the country... to a place even I don't know yet, this is kind of crazy and exciting. As in, I need to make sure we have some place to put all those books (say, a spare bedroom for the first time in my life). And one of those really big Ikea bookshelves. And yes, I already have ideas for how to organize the books. Several. Ideas.

I won't start serving on the committee until after the ALA Midwinter Conference (in mid/late January), so I've got a little time left to savor the books I wanted to read that weren't published in Sept. 2009 - December 2010 (the period I'll be responsible for), nevermind books that are written for, well grown-ups and children.

I figured I'd prep myself for the increase of reading by, well, increasing my reading. With funemployment kicking in, I plan to shoot for a book a day. Just to get in the habit of reading more and more.

With four days into the month of January, I've finished four books. (Pretty good since it's only noon and I can probably finish another today.) They are:

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Shark Girl by Kelly Bingham

Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick

and

Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks by Lauren Myracle

None of them are eligible for BBYA, but they were books I had around and/or had been meaning to read.

As much as everyone out there seemed to love Eat, Pray, Love, I have to admit, I was just a little bit underwhelmed. Yes, it was interesting and well-written, and I enjoyed the travel-writing aspect of it, but I also found it a little self-indulgent. That said, I still enjoyed it and can't wait to see the movie, but I thought it had the potential to be a book that, you know, moved me. And it fell short of that.

Shark Girl was one of the Rebecca Caudill nominees that I never quite managed to want to read when it was actually in the library. A novel-in-verse from the perspective of a girl who lost her arm to a shark, I thought it captured so well the range of emotional responses that a teenage girl would have going through that. I came away from it admiring Jane's resilience and her utter disinterest in becoming pitied. I can see it really resonating with teen girls, and I loved how it could be read by such a large age group. I could see curious 5th and 6th graders getting a lot out of it, as well as high schoolers looking for a quick read (since that's the nature of most novels-in-verse).

My friend Janet gave me a copy of Freak the Mighty sometime in the last year or two but I only now had the urge to read it. What had I been waiting for? In short: I loved it. It's the kind of book where you're just clamoring to read the next page and also biting the inside of your cheek because you know it's going to have a sad ending. The pairing of an oversized hulk of kid with learning disabilities (Max) and brilliant but physically disabled kid (Kevin - Freak), which somehow makes both of them stronger and more able, is so moving. But what I loved most about the book was the voice of Max. The way Rodman Philbrick wrote the book, I was so thoroughly convinced of who Max was from the first page. He absolutely captured the voice of a kid like that, and it really made the book that much better than the story alone.

And then there's Peace, Love, and Babyducks. Sometimes, you just need a quick, fun, light read, and that's exactly what Lauren Myracle offers up with her latest YA book about two sisters with one year separating them. Now, I don't have a sister (except my parent's cat, who I call my sister...) but after reading this book, I felt relieved I don't have a sister! Carly's a sophomore and her little sister Anna is a freshman, which means they have to share the same high school. The thing is, little sister's looking a lot more grown-up than older sister (read: over the summer, the boob fairy came) and these new developments have thrown everything up in the air. As usual, Myracle is spot-on with the way she captures the intricacies of female friendships, and as far as I could tell (again, not having sisterly experience), she pretty much nailed the whole sister experience. Also, I appreciated that she set the book in Georgia, as I don't think I've ever read a book set in contemporary Georgia. All in all, a fun read.

Favorite Books of 2009

2009-12-31T17:26:00.000-06:00

These aren't necessarily the books that I think were the best - as if it's that easy to decide, right? - but they were certainly my favorites. I'm looking only at the books that were first published in the United States in 2009. Also, some of them are not YA! But, I don't think that they are so not YA that teenagers didn't read them or wouldn't be interested in reading them. Okay, no more rambling.

Oh yeah, and I think I'm also going to rank 'em.

10.The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen

9. Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork

8. Charles and Emma by Deborah Heligman

7. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

6. Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd

5. If I Stay by Gayle Forman

4. The Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

3. Columbine by Dave Cullen

2. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelley

1. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

Honorable mentions

Little Bee by Chris Cleave, After by Amy Efaw, Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice by Philip Hoose, Stitches by David Small

FYI, in 2009 I read exactly 130 books! A good mix of adult, YA, and juvenile literature, though not so good a mix of fiction and non-fiction. I read 32 adult titles, 60 YA, and 38 juvenile titles (I only count juvenile chapter books and up because counting picture books is just ridiculous); likewise, 111 fiction books, 14 non-fic, and 5 graphic novels/manga. Just a few more than last year, about a dozen more than the year before that, and well, before that I wasn't keeping track. Let's just say that prior to officially becoming a full-time librarian, I never read 100 books for pleasure in a year. Because I was always a student. Doing homework. Yeah, don't miss that so much!

I think my list reflects the diversity of my taste and how much some of the things I do to torture myself (like making sure I've read the National Book award nominees for Young People's lit before the award is announced) actually pay off. I truly loved reading Charles and Emma and the book gave me such an appreciation for who Charles Darwin and his wife Emma were, in their own time. It was also really sad! I'm glad to have finally read a Lorrie Moore book so that I'm clued into her genius, and I'm glad that I managed to squeeze Zeitoun in this year, reading the book in one long sitting a few days ago. With a sub-zero windchill outside, I found myself completely and utterly lost in this one man named Zeitoun's true story, and will be recommending this book to everyone. It was not only my favorite book of the year, but one that I think captures all the qualities of what makes a book truly remarkable and a "best book" kind of books. It's not only that Dave Eggers chose to tell this story, but the truth in the way that he chooses to tell is that makes it so remarkable. Never mind that it's so heartpoundingly (okay, not a word, but I don't have time to edit now!) real that you just can't put it down.

Looking back over what I read this year, I have to say that 2009 was another really good year for fiction, particularly children's and adults. For some reason, when I look over what I read in '09 for YA, I feel kind of lackluster. I wonder if it's one of those years where I somehow missed the amazing books because I was so intent on reading those written by my favorite authors.

Anyway, as usual, I can't wait for the Printz and Newbery announcements. Which reminds me... I have some work to do on reading the Morris Award nominees before January 18.

Yeah, I think I've got my work cut out for me... again.

Best Christmas present ever (for a librarian)

2009-12-28T13:31:00.000-06:00

My boyfriend gave me a Carol necklace! I guess it was featured on BoingBoing sometime this fall, so he's been holding onto it since then. I am wearing it right now! The dental hygienist thought it was an owl, but I made sure she knew it was Carol from Where The Wild Things Are! Sadly, it's sold out, but maybe Elaine Ho will make some more.

Book Review - After by Amy Efaw

2009-11-04T11:34:00.003-06:00

No one expected this from Devon, a straight-A soccer player destined for Division-I sports glory. And you could say that Devon didn't expect it either.

But now she's in juvenile hall, awaiting a judge's decision on whether or not she will be tried as a juvenile or as an adult for attempted murder and other charges, for putting her newborn baby in the dumpster behind her apartment.

Amy Efaw's compelling second novel, After, is the kind of book you can't put down, no matter how much some aspects of it disturb you. Was Devon aware that she was pregnant before giving birth? How could she not have been? Was she a manipulative liar, covering up her pregnancy, which went undetected by her mother, friends, classmates, everyone? The complexities of the story shed light on something most only know as a statistic and helped me, at least, see the issue from other angles. Devon is an utterly authentic character and reading the book, I completely felt sucked into her story, in such a way that I found the book really challenging to read at some points. By the end, I was relieved I had finished, if only to get on with my way less complicated life.

RIYL: harrowing tales, problem novels like Go Ask Alice, gritty stories about problems that real people face every day

Teens' Top Ten...REVEALED

2009-10-21T11:20:00.002-05:00

More than 11,000 teen voters (a lot of them, evidently, were Nerdfighters) chose John Green's Paper Towns as their favorite book in the 2009 Teens' Top Ten! Here's the full list of the top ten.

The Homewood Library owns all of these titles, so come check 'em out!

Book Review - Going Bovine by Libba Bray

2009-10-20T14:41:00.002-05:00

It's one of those mad cow disease road trip books, you know?

Ummm.
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To say that Libba Bray's newest book, Going Bovine, is hard to categorize is an understatement. A meaty book, clocking in at just under 500 pages, it's the story of sixteen year old Cameron, an ordinary, kind of losery guy whose life has been pretty unremarkable ever since his near-drowning at the It's A Small World After All ride at Disney World when he was five. Unremarkable, that is, until he finds out he has mad cow disease. Mad cow disease, a.k.a. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, gives Cameron these crazy hallucinations that really weird him out. Once doctors diagnose him, he's hospitalized and given a short time to live.

But that's when things just start to get interesting. Before he knows it, he's breaking out of the hospital to find a Doctor X who can save the world, hanging out with a hot punky angel, and setting off on a roadtrip with a dwarf named Gonzo and a yard gnome come to life who might just be a Viking, named Balder. Cameron and his assortment of pals trek from Texas to New Orleans to Florida in one of the most entertaining and bizarre road trip novels I've ever read.

I finished it last night and I'm still not sure what else to say about it, except that it's hilarious, poignant at times, and reminiscent of the episodic odyssies you take in feverish dreams. Yeah, it's something like that.

RIYL: Libba Bray's other books, John Green, Don Quixote

Book Review - Stitches by David Small

2009-10-20T14:13:00.003-05:00

People in the library and publishing worlds were pretty stunned last week when David Small's graphic novel Stitches was nominated for the National Book Award in the Young People's Literature category, stunned because the book was published by an adult imprint/press. You may remember David Small as the Caldecott-winning illustrator of such classics as Imogene's Antlers. Well, forget all about that because Stitches is not to be confused with children's picture books.

This graphic novel memoir tells the grim and harrowing story of David Small's childhood and young adulthood. He grew up in a dysfunctional family, with parents that didn't engage with their children, and a brother who could've cared less about him. His father was a doctor and since David was a sickly child, his father performed radiation on him for his sicknesses-- an accepted practice at the time, but something doctors wouldn't think of in a million years, today. As a result, David developed a growth on his vocal chord, a growth that his father knew much about, all of which he kept hidden from David. As a teenager, David went into the hospital for surgery thinking he was getting a malignant growth removed, only to come out to learn that he had cancer AND that he could no longer speak. One of his vocal chords was removed.

I had a chance to hear David Small discuss his memoir at the annual ALA conference in July, and I'll never forget it. His story, a perfect fit for the graphic novel form, is unforgettable. A grim tale that ends with a lot of hope. As Mr. Small shared with us at ALA, writing and publishing the book brought him back in touch with his estranged brother.

* * * * *
five out of five stars
RIYL: Art Spiegelman's Maus and Gipi

Book Review - Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

2009-10-20T13:59:00.004-05:00

Everyone knows about Rosa Parks, but have you heard of Claudette Colvin? At age 15, Claudette refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. This happened nine months BEFORE Rosa Parks did the same. Philip Hoose's brilliant National Book Award-nominated nonfiction book Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice, shares the story of a lesser-known hero of the civil rights movement. For refusing to give up her seat, Claudette was handcuffed, forcibly removed from the bus, and arrested. Around the same time that Claudette was arrested and stood trial, the NAACP had been trying to plan the right time, place, and person, to test the bus segregation. However, Claudette wasn't quite the person they had in mind. She was from a lower-class family and soon after her arrest, became pregnant by an older man. While we all know from history classes that Rosa Parks became the symbol of ending bus segregation, Hoose sheds light on a teenager whose story and brave challenge preceded the more famous one, and who made further contributions to the civil rights movement in a lesser-known but important case.

* * * *
four out of five stars
RIYL: true stories about teens who stood up for their beliefs and made a difference

Book Review - Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia

2009-10-19T16:18:00.003-05:00

Three girls, one day, one fight, one book. Rita Williams-Garcia's National Book Award nominee, Jumped, is a short book with a lot of impact. Peek into one day in the life of three high school girls: one athlete, one struggling student, one artistic diva. Leticia busts her acrylic nail in gym class; Dominique would love to bust a nail on court, but she's gotta earn the grades before coach'll put her back in; Trina envisions eyes following her [butt's] every move, and all eyes will be on her by the end. Between the short chapters and changing views, and the fact that it's a slight 160 pages, you can read through this one in an afternoon.

* * *
three out of five stars

RIYL: Kimani Tru books, other titles from Rita Williams-Garcia, books by Coe Booth

and this year's nominees for the National Book Award are....

2009-10-19T16:06:00.003-05:00

I'm a few days late at posting this, but this year's nominees for the National Book Award in the Young People's Literature category are:

Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose
Stitches by David Small
Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor
Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia

You can currently find all of them at the Homewood Library, except for Lips Touch, which should arrive shortly. Also, check back for reviews of all 5 titles!

The National Book awards will be announced at the 60th National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony on November 18.

Book Review - Crash Into Me by Albert Borris

2009-10-10T14:05:00.004-05:00

Owen. Frank. Audrey. Jin-Ae. Four teens that would not know each other if not for the one thing they have in common, the one thing they've all tried to do, the one thing that's bringing them together for a road trip across the country. Their common interest: ending their own lives. Brought together online by their sad and honest confessions, they set off on a road trip one summer to visit the resting places of celebrities who've committed suicide: Anne Sexton, Kurt Cobain, Ernest Hemingway, and more. Their final, final destination: Death Valley.

Narrated by Owen, whose depression stems from his older brother's death when he was just a kid, this is an exhilarating road trip novel that is hard to put down. Poignant, intensely sad, and amazingly revelatory, it's a book you won't soon forget.

* * * *
(four out of five stars)

RIYL: Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why, Ellen Hopkins' books

Book Review - Andromeda Klein

2009-10-06T14:56:00.002-05:00

Finally, punk musician Frank Portman's follow-up to his acclaimed first book King Dork has hit the shelves at the Homewood Library, and I've had the chance to read it. Andromeda Klein follows the titular character, a magic-obsessed high school junior, as she tries to understand her best friend's death, fight the "Friends of the Library" at the International House of Bookcakes (her nickname for the library where she works as a shelver), and navigates the sometimes treacherous terrain of high school, made even more treacherous because of her interest in the occult. This is the kind of book you might have to read carefully, as there's a lot of namedropping and nicknaming to keep up with, but it all comes together at the end. If you've ever belonged to a secret club, spent hours poring over tarot cards, or have been curious about either, this just might be the book for you.

* * * *
(four out of five stars)

RIYL: magic + magic history, King Dork

Also, Frank Portman is also releasing music to go along with the book!

Book Review - TTYL by Lauren Myracle

2009-09-30T18:00:00.002-05:00

In honor of Banned Books Week, which runs through this Saturday, I read one of the books from this year's list of the top ten banned books in the United States, TTYL by Lauren Myracle. This is not the first year that Myracle's Internet Girls series has appeared on the list. Written entirely in IM conversations, the first book in the series follows Maddie (mad maddie), Angela (SnowAngel), and Zoe (zoegirl) through the beginning of tenth grade. The three best friends want to make sure that nothing gets in the way of their friendship -- they've heard that high school drama can break up close friendships -- but of course that's exactly what happens, as the threesome take on their individual challenges, whether it's boy troubles, teacher troubles, or friend troubles.

Since it is written in IM speak, this is one of those books where you're zipping through the pages and wanting to read the next one, before you even realize it. Maddie, Angela, and Zoe, are super honest and as familiar as your own friends. There's plenty of laugh-out-loud and cringe-worthy moments in this one, but the girls will have you rooting for them and their friendship through the last page.

* * * *
Four out of five stars
RIYL: other Lauren Myracle books, E. Lockhart, Sarah Dessen

Book Review - The Sweetheart of Prosper County

2009-09-28T14:38:00.001-05:00

At the no-Jesus Christmas parade in her small Texas town, 15-year-old Austin Gray decides she's had enough of being the butt of Dean Ottmer's jokes. Next year, if she has any say in it, she'll be the one in the velvet dress atop a parade car. Reminiscent of Catherine Gilbert Murdock's Dairy Queen, Jill S. Alexander's debut novel The Sweetheart of Prosper County, is another book with a rural setting featuring characters with a whole lot of heart.

With her new goal in mind, Austin sets out to start making marks on her checklist, and the first thing on it is acquiring an animal-- a chicken named Charles Dickens. In order to get in with the FFA (Future Farmers of America) in-crowd, she'll need to step out of her comfort zone, and in many more ways than just acquiring a feathered friend. Along the way, she discovers her similarities with her deceased father and learns to stand up to the malicious Dean Ottmer.

RIYL: Catherine Gilbert Murdock or Sara Zarr's books, and/or getting a taste of the South
* * * *
four out of five stars

Book Review - Twenty Boy Summer

2009-09-13T12:54:00.003-05:00

If you're back in school and already wishing it were summer (or if the weather's got you fooled into thinking maybe it is still summer), pick up Twenty Boy Summer by debut author Sarah Ockler. This hot title has been checked out constantly this summer, but with the arrival of fall, maybe it will be on the shelf a bit more.

Anna, Matt, and Matt's sister Frankie have been friends and neighbors forever. But after Anna's birthday party, Matt surprises her with a kiss, and it looks like maybe two of them have always had stronger feelings for each other. Sneaking around, Matt and Anna find time for moments between just the two of them. They'll tell Frankie, when the time is right, but for now it's a secret. But their plans are shattered when, in an instant, everything changes. With Matt gone, Anna's left with the secret, but can she really tell her best friend that she's been secretly dating her brother for the past month?

Flash forward to a year later. Anna still hasn't told Frankie, and she's been invited to go out to California with Frankie and her parents, who are practically extended family to Anna. Frankie's changed a lot since her brother's death, and she's got a plan for how they'll spend three weeks on the beach in Cali: twenty boy summer. But is Anna ready to move on? Can she let herself fall for someone that's not Matt and never will be? And what can she do about the secret she's kept from her best friend for a whole year?

Find a spot in the sun and soak up what's left of the summer weather with "Twenty Boy Summer," the kind of book you can devour in an afternoon. Sarah Ockler is a new author to watch, and fans of Sarah Dessen, Susane Colasanti, and Deb Caletti, should check this one out.

* * * 1/2
(three and a half stars)

Book Review - Nation by Terry Pratchett

2009-09-01T14:20:00.003-05:00

I'm making my way through the Printz honors of 2009, and I have to say that this might be one of my favorites. Terry Pratchett is best known for his Discworld books and supposedly his hardcore fans might be disappointed with Nation just because it's not a Discworld book. But, if you're like me and you're not a huge fantasy reader, this just might be the best way to dip into Terry Pratchett's world. Nation starts with a catastrophe. A tsunami kills an entire island village while Mau, it's sole survivor is off becoming a man. He returns to find utter devastation -- everyone he knows is dead -- and a ship. Daphne, a royal heir, is also shipwrecked on the island. The baffling collision of their two worlds -- the small island nation and the British empire -- provides for many interesting encounters between Daphne and Mau, who have no choice but to get to know each other, in spite of their language barriers and a world of differences. As other survivors from nearby islands make their way to Mau's island, the novel builds towards another collision of differing factions, this time with Daphne and Mau on the same side.

By the time I finished Nation, I had fallen completely under the spell of Terry Pratchett. His writing is clever and entertaining, and in the right moments, completely tender and heartfelt. As I closed the book, I had to marvel at his talent, and I almost wanted to start all over at the beginning and enjoy it again.

* * * * *
Five out of five stars

RIYL: Terry Pratchett, survival stories, just plain old great books

Vote your choice!

2009-08-28T11:48:00.002-05:00

Voting is underway for this year's Teens' Top Ten, the only reading list with titles nominated and voted on by teens. Vote for your favorite book from the last year. The winners will be announced in a webcast at www.ala.org/teenstopten during Teen Read Week, Oct. 18-24.

Book Review - "Along for the Ride" by Sarah Dessen

2009-06-25T14:04:00.003-05:00

Anyone who reads this blog will know that I'm a pretty big Sarah Dessen fan. I read her blog every day and it's quite possible that she is the reason I became a teen librarian. Anyway, Along for the Ride is her latest and I bought it at a bookstore the day it came out.

It's the summer before Auden heads off to college at Defriesne, a prestigious university assumed to be not too far away from her hometown in North Carolina. She planned to spend it at her home -- she's been living with her mom, a well-known and well-admired professor at the U since her parent's divorce -- prepping for her fall classes, but an email from her dad's new wife and new mother changes everything. Auden opts out of the expected and enters the unexpected -- moving into her dad's beachside house in Colby with the stepmom and new little sister, Thisbe.

An insomniac looking to explore her temporary hometown, Auden keeps running into Eli, who she learns is a former biker who hasn't been riding since the accident that killed his best friend. They strike up the kind of friendship only two insomniacs can have -- meeting nightly at the Gas/Gro, then letting the evening take them to whatever's open that late. But then something more develops (a Sarah Dessen book is not complete without a romance) as Eli leads Auden to do all those thing she missed by being an overworked brainiac in high school.

But a person can't just change overnight (pun not intended). When a familiar scenario startles Auden in her new environs, she reverts back to her old ways, distancing herself from the one person she'd become real close with in Colby. But there's still time left in the summer for things to change, and a beachside fake prom.

Like all of Sarah Dessen's books, this one offers a world you wouldn't mind stepping into, that's familiar to your own, but somehow a little better.

* * * *
Four out of five stars

RIYL: Susan Colasanti, Sara Zarr, Elizabeth Scott, contemporary realistic fiction

Trio of Book Reviews!

2009-06-12T10:14:00.004-05:00

Intensely Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
It's the summer before Alice's last year of high school, and it starts off just like all the others, with the gang hanging out at Mark Stedmeister's pool. But this summer turns out to be full of surprises, both exhilarating, challenging, and devastating. Alice's cousin Carol is getting married in Chicago, which just happens to be where Patrick is starting school (at MY alma mater, the University of Chicago), so Alice visits him on campus. Lester busts out of town for a week, allowing Alice and her friends to stay at his place, and of course, this doesn't go exactly as planned. And at the end of the summer, something happens that no one expected, that changes the gang forever. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor does it again with the latest Alice book, a compulsively readable book for fans of the series, and one that could certainly pique interest for those that don't know every detail about Alice McKinley...yet. YA FIC NAY

Queen of Everything by Deb Caletti
Watching the evening news, do you ever wonder about the grisly lead stories, the ones where a seemingly normal person does something you can't even comprehend. Do you wonder, who was this person, and what kind of family did he/she have? Well, this is one of those ripped-from-the-headlines stories, told from the perspective of the headline-maker's daughter, Jordan. Jordan's parents have been divorced for awhile. Her mother runs a bed and breakfast, and her dad's your average eye doctor... until he meets Gayle. Jordan notices that her dad's become completely unlike himself ever since he met Gayle, and not in a good way. Gayle has taken his life by storm, and Jordan's unsettled. As his behavior becomes more erratic, one wild, stormy night changes everything. Jordan's life will never be the same. Fans of Deb Caletti's other work will appreciate her realistic, nuanced take on a story like this -- though it's not my personal favorite of hers. Recommended also to fans of Sarah Dessen's books. YA FIC CAL

The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams
I'd been hearing a lot of buzz about this one, so I devoured it last night watching the Red Sox-Yankees game. Thirteen year old Kyra has grown up in an isolated, polygamist community, where no one questions the authority of the Prophet, even as he leads his community's members to do what anyone else would consider, horrible, reproachable things. But Kyra has recently started to come into her own, first when Joshua, a guy around her age, shows interest in her, and in her trips to the library bookmobile. (Her community had a cleansing years ago when they burned every book there, except for the Bible.) She has passing thoughts about wanting to leave, but they become more serious when the Prophet comes to visit her family. She has been chosen to marry Hyrum, her sixty year old uncle. The rest of the book oscillates between Kyra thinking she can escape, and realizing how difficult, and potentially suicidal it could be. The gripping end will keep you on the edge of your seat, or at the very least, up past your bedtime. The writing is spare, at times poetic, and completely true to the thirteen year old narrator. Recommended for those who read Sister Wife and are fascinated by the reality of polygamous compounds existing in certain areas of the United States right now. YA FIC WIL

Book Review - The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart

2009-05-19T14:53:00.003-05:00

If you liked The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks but weren't totally intrigued by the covers of E. Lockhart's other books, try them anyway! I'll admit I found the covers of the Ruby Oliver books a little girly for my taste, but over the weekend, I took the plunge and found out I have a new favorite author = E. Lockhart.

Sometimes, it's a good idea to make a list of things. Like, when you're going to the grocery store and you don't want to forget an item. Or, let's say you are packing for a trip and want to remember underwear. But if you're going to make a list of every boy you've ever had feelings for, liked, kissed, etc..., well, Ruby Oliver might advise you to, um, NOT.

You see, Ruby made such a list, of more than a dozen guys, from the guy she liked in early elementary school, to the guy who once grabbed her boob at the movies, to her most recent boyfriend--now, her ex, Jackson. But her list somehow got into the hands of a former friend, and now everyone at Tate Prep has their idea of what the names on the list mean, and they have a new name for Ruby Oliver, and it isn't a nice one. So you can imagine why Ruby might be having panic attacks in the bathroom, and why she might want to go to a shrink twice a week.

The Boyfriend List is a hilarious book-- two parts Georgia Nicolson, one part Megan McCafferty, one part John Green -- that makes you think about who your friends, and boyfriend(s) really are. It's also spawned two sequels: The Boy Book and the upcoming Treasure Map of Boys.

* * * *
(four out of five stars)

Book Review - Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film About the Grapes of Wrath by Steven Goldman

2009-05-17T13:22:00.004-05:00

Sometimes, all you need for a great book are some hilarious characters, funny yet plausible scenarios, and potty humor. That's what Steven Goldman's first novel, Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film About the Grapes of Wrath offers, and it was more than enough to keep me cracking up on the train. Mitchell Wells is a kind of cute, kind of nerdy, guy who passes most of his time with his baseball jock best friend David, his constantly flirting with older guys sister Carrie, and Carrie's best friend M.C. But everything's kind of thrown for a loop when David comes out to Mitchell. What does it mean?

We never really get into what it means for anyone besides Mitchell because, let's face it, Mitchell's just a little bit hung up on his own problems. Like, when will the class hottie Danielle ever notice him. And if he's really going to get into trouble for the Claymation film supposedly about "The Grapes of Wrath" that he, in classic last-minute fashion, turned in for his English class in place of the paper. (Let's just say he never got past the first few pages of the Steinbeck classic, but that the film is hi-larious.)

This breezy, funny novel will hold appeal for fans of John Green, Barry Lyga, and Tim Tharp. (Also, yes, the cover is kind of lame, but the book is NOT!)

* * * 1/2
(three and a half/five stars)