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FYA Book Club!

2011-08-18T21:21:00.002-04:00

Exciting news for us those of us who are adult readers of YA fiction! Forever Young Adult, a blog whose recaps of Sweet Valley High and V.C. Andrews books crack me up, has started a book club—an international book club! And not some online chat or anything like that; they've coordinated actual live groups of like-minded people all over the US and a few other places, who will meet at approximately the same time to discuss the same book.

The first meeting was a week or so ago (last Wednesday for those of us in Brooklyn), and the book was Beauty Queens by Libba Bray—which I had fortunately already read (twice cause I got so excited about it) so I didn't have to do any extra work. FYA recapped the first meeting here, and closed it out with a nice quote from my own group's lovely leader, Molly.
And she's totally right. It was so much fun! I didn't know what to expect or who would be there, but the ladies were awesome and funny and enthusiastic and full of cool book ideas, and I can't wait for next month's meeting.

The September book is going to be Hold Me Closer, Necromancer by Lish McBride, a book I read several months ago and quite enjoyed, and am excited to read again in preparation. So. I encourage everyone who's interested to go! The plan is to do it around the second week of each month. Click here for schedules and to sign up if there's not already one planned for your area.

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly!

2011-07-31T23:24:00.002-04:00

Well, it's been awhile since I've written anything. But I just read something that is worth writing about—Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly.

I remember getting Jennifer Donnelly's first book, A Northern Light, as a Christmas present from my parents. I had listed it on my amazon wishlist because it was a Printz honoree and therefore a necessary read, but I was not enthusiastic. It looked so serious and so historical. When I finally got around to reading it I saw how wrong I was to be reluctant, but somehow I didn't learn my lesson. I approached this one exactly the same way. It's thick. And it's about the French Revolution instead of zombies. So obviously my feet were dragging.

But one chapter in and I was hooked, even though at first I wanted to hate the snobby Brooklyn Heights characters, in spite of their genuine troubles. Back when I was new in Brooklyn, the first time I ever wandered around that neighborhood, I was horrified to see a stretch limo pull up to a brownstone, let out a small school-uniformed boy and then pull away, leaving him alone on the curb. To think he got driven home from school like that every day—just ugh.

But it's not his fault, and it's not these kids' faults either. The book is beautifully written and immediately engrossing and made me buy a bunch of classical music on itunes after the first few chapters. Then the scene changes to Paris, and rich twenty-first-century kids become entwined with accidental participants in the eighteenth-century Revolution. Catacombs and guillotines and mostly the mystery of what really happened to young Louis-Charles, the imprisoned child king Louis XVII. Also: archives! There are a whole bunch of scenes doing research in serious archives, which I imagine is only something you do as a high school student if you go to fancy BK private schools. I'm not thrilled that the archivist was a cranky old rule-follower—practically a shusher—but still it is always good to teach young people proper research etiquette, and there just aren't enough YA novels doing that. Bottom line: read it! Even if you don't particularly like historical fiction.

p.s. Covers often make me cranky, and this one is no exception. I get that the cover exists to sell the book. Ok. But the modern girl on the cover is pretty and wavy-haired and delicate and whatever, and in the book she is heavily pierced, among other things, and much is made of all her clanking metal and bad attitude and such. She just looks nothing at all like this cover chick. The paperback is even worse. What—punk/emo/alterna teens don't sell books?? Given the vast numbers of extremely popular vampire-y looking books out there with their dark moody covers, I don't believe that for a second. In fact, I bet this one could find a wider, very appreciative audience if the cover were more honest about the book's real contents.

Patrick Ness wins the Carnegie!

2011-07-02T18:12:00.000-04:00

Patrick Ness won this year's Carnegie Medal for Monsters of Men! Am I wrong to think it's the best book of the stupidly-named "Chaos Walking" trilogy? I read them far enough apart that I might not be remembering right. Mainly, I just remember the jaw-dropping ending to the first one that left me staring at the book I had just finished in disbelief. And Manchee, of course, but I can't even talk about that without bursting into tears... In any event, the previous two books, The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer were also shortlisted for the prize in 2009 and 2010, making it the first time that all the books in a series were nominated.

And speaking of Patrick Ness, I just read his latest A Monster Calls
which isn't out yet in the US, but can be purchased from amazon UK if you're not lucky enough to get an advance reader copy. An entirely different sort of book for Ness, and one that started as fellow Carnegie-medalist Siobhan Dowd's idea for a story she didn't have time to write before she died. I was expecting just a regular book to show up in the mail, but it is really, really beautiful. Slightly oversized, thick pages, lavish illustrations. Don't get an e-book of this one! (I accidentally made that mistake with Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, not realizing it was so full of photographs. After I read it I had to go to the bookstore and sit in the aisle with the real thing, flipping through all the pictures to see them properly.) So, it's a story a story of a boy so lonely and bullied and so self-loathing that, as his mother is being unsuccessfully treated for cancer, he conjures up a monster. But not the monster he was expecting. Seriously lovely and heartbreaking and redemptive.

Walden Award!

2011-06-30T16:51:00.000-04:00

You guys, I'm ashamed. For four years now, there has been an entire YA award out there, given by an organization I used to pay money to belong to, and I had never even heard of it until today.

It turns out that ALAN, the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, has something called the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Book Award, and the 2011 winner has just been announced:

The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, Francisco X. Stork (yay!)

And here are the other finalists:

After Ever After, Jordan Sonnenblick
I Will Save You, Matt de la Peña
Sorta Like a Rock Star, Matthew QuickWolves, Boys, & Other Things That Might Kill Me, Kristen Chandler

So the criteria for the award is not just good literature, but a book "demonstrating a positive approach to life, widespread teen appeal, and literary merit." I'm not sure how I feel about that positive approach to life business, but I bet the Wall Street Journal would be happy...

Robopocalypse!

2011-06-26T11:45:00.000-04:00

So I just read Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson. Which is not YA, but whatever. At first I was excited to have a whole new genre to catch up on: robot uprisings and whatnot. I can't believe I've been missing out on these my whole life! It's even better than zombie apocalypsi because the robot thing is probably actually going to happen someday, and debating survival techniques would therefore not be a total waste of time. Sadly, reading this book didn't leave me informed enough to develop a strategy. I will have to do more research. (FYI, my zombie plan: immediate suicide if there's an outbreak.)

So Robopocalypse kind of annoyed me because I was really gearing up for a rollicking sci-fi adventure, and it was pretty awesome for a little while and then I realized it was more than half over and was still just trudging along, one. scene. after. another. It's done in World War Z-style "oral history" bits. See, this one awesome hero found the robots' archive of war footage, so we get the story told in bits and pieces in a series of different voices, almost all gratingly "dude-ish." So mostly it's brief scenes of rad robot carnage that seem written with a movie script in mind, followed by a paragraph or two provided by our hero narrator attempting to tie the event into the big picture of the war. Just... lazy writing. Just go ahead and write a screenplay from the start! There's no actual need for it be a "novel" first. Then again, the very last scene? That cringe-inducingly unnecessary one after it's all over? Does not bode well for the movie version...

Anyhoo. I just saw this. Self-driving cars. And all I can say is noooooo!! It's just a matter of time before they start running us over.

2011-06-12T21:25:00.000-04:00

My kindle is costing me so much money. Also, the internet has changed how I read. More specifically, google reader has changed how I read. I follow a bunch of YA blogs and author blogs, and a lot of other sites too—science, politics, feminist, sewing, whatever, and they won't stop mentioning books. And then, because it's so easy, I decide that I have to read whatever they're talking about right this minute and because it takes approximately 2 seconds to have it downloaded to my kindle, I buy it.

Here's what I got in the last week:

Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (thanks to Forever Young Adult. Their review also helped me come to terms with my adoration of Libba Bray's Beauty Queens, which even though I couldn't stop talking about it, and turned immediately back to page one when I got to the end to read it again, I still felt kinda embarrassed to have loved so much.)

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser (due to my coworker talking about it, not actually the internet.)

Robopocalypse (Cause of the entire internet in general.)

Plus Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (also a coworker's fault..), Feed by Mira Grant,
The Time Traders by Andre Norton (thanks to weirdo misogynists who say that all books written by women suck and those who disagree.) And so on!

But then I realized that the library still exists, and it'll take me a minute to read what I've just bought, so I have some time before I need more. So I loaded up my holds list and now, eventually, I can read for free again. Fuzzy Nation! Zombies vs. Unicorns! A David Levithan I haven't read yet! A couple others!

Also, I read Sweet Valley Confidential this week, and it is terrible. Truly. Not that that's a shocker, but I mean really. I can't even. It took a slightly heroic effort to even finish it.

Onward!

misc. stuff

2011-05-27T20:00:00.000-04:00

Ok, this has nothing to do with anything. But I can't stop thinking about something that happened a few weeks ago, something very inconsequential. And that was that one afternoon I was walking across 3rd street to the thrift store when I saw a book lying on the ground just outside of someone's gate. And I almost picked it up because it looked like one of the gazillions of books that people leave on their sidewalks for people to take.

But! The book was What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen. In hardcover. And it wasn't even officially out in stores yet. Some kid must have dropped it out of their backpack or something, right? There's no way someone was giving it away. Maybe? Or maybe it was some librarian-type who gets loads of free books and was done with it.. It really was in a free-book location. Argh! Why didn't I grab it and run??! ..I know I have to just let it go.

Meanwhile, I've been reading loads of fun things. I'm halfway through Libba Bray's Beauty Queens, which magically downloaded to my kindle a few days ago since I'd pre-ordered it. Thank goodness I got the ebook version, too, cause I would have a real problem being seen with this cover on the subway. It's not what it looks like, though, in a very good way.

And I'm halfway through Neal Shusterman's Everfound, which so far I'm enjoying quite a lot though I can't stand that someone decided to name the series the "Skinjacker Trilogy." It just gives it such a dark feel printed all big on the cover like that. Why not just the Everlost Trilogy? Much better match to the tone of the books.

And!!!!!! I just picked up my copy of Sweet Valley Confidential from the library. I was only number 38 on the hold list when it came out, but it seems like I've been waiting forever. Definitely will be reading that one in the privacy of my own home, though.

Plus I chopped off all my hair and before that visited my nieces and nephews and then did other stuff and generally have had a completely terrific week off work.

Garden!

2011-05-01T17:11:00.000-04:00

I've been super late doing anything at all in my yard this year. Super late. I think I remember starting my tomatoes back in February last year. I waited until two weeks ago this time, so they're just little sprouts still. (Don't judge me for using one of those cheap, too-small little seed starting kits. I had a much better, less wasteful system last year, but like I said, I've been really really lazy about all this. Paying 5 bucks and sticking seeds in the peat was almost too much.) And even though they only have a couple of tiny leaves apiece, they smell like tomato plants already. I mean, duh, but it's still a nice smell to have in the kitchen.

And what else? Should have done this months ago, but I finally filled an entire bed (3'x4') with dwarf sugar snaps that supposedly don't need trellising, though I have my doubts. They're a few inches tall now. The strawberries that didn't do much last year are back, and today I noticed the first little sprig of mint pushing through the dirt. Soon it will take over everything.

And, you know, the ferns and the bleeding hearts, and Japanese Maple and the daffodils, and even my tree which is the last one in the neighborhood to start growing for some reason, has some leaves now. It's amazing that a month ago the ground was bare and now it's completely covered with green things. Yes, I realize that's how spring works, but it hasn't always happened right in my own mini-yard. After a terrible, long winter, watching it all happen has been making me feel human and hopeful again.

And!! Tuesday is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's annual plant sale! So there's that.

LA Times Book Prize Winner!

2011-05-01T13:55:00.000-04:00

The LA Times Book Prizes were announced on Friday, and the winner in the Young Adult category is A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen! See all the finalists here.

Also! This was already announced, but continues to be exciting: The 2010 Robert Kirsch Award, honoring the lifetime achievement of an author from the American West, went to Beverly Cleary, the best kid's book author ever! It's the first time the award has ever gone to a children's book writer, and it's about time!

Rita Awards!

2011-04-27T10:29:00.007-04:00

And!
This year's Rita finalists (for romance, duh) were announced approximately a hundred years ago.

Chasing Brooklyn, Lisa Schroeder
The Clearing, Heather Davis
Clockwork Angel, Cassandra Clare
I Now Pronounce You Someone Else, Erin McCahan
The Iron King, Julie Kagawa
Rules of Attraction, Simone Elkeles (who won last year for Perfect Chemistry)
The Summer of Skinny Dipping, Amanda Howells

Hideous-looking statuettes to be distributed July 1st. at the Romance Writers of America's annual conference in NYC.

Edgar Awards!

2011-04-27T07:29:00.000-04:00

I missed another award. Ack!
Here are the nominees for the Edgar Award in the YA category. Edgars is given by the Mystery Writers of America, and the winner will be announced tomorrow!

The River, Mary Jane Beaufrand
Please Ignore Vera Dietz, A.S. King
7 Souls, Barnabas Miller and Jordan Orlando
The Interrogation of Gabriel James, Charlie Price
Dust City, Robert Paul Weston

Los Angeles Book Awards

2011-04-26T23:15:00.001-04:00

Holy s***. I am bad at my non-job job.
Did I miss the L.A. Times book award finalists??? Months ago? Really?! I have been so out of it for so long that I feel like I'm just sticking my head out of my cave and looking around to see what's happened.

Ok. Here they are. (I only finally discovered this because of my recent obsession with Rick Yancey's The Curse of the Wendigo. I can't believe it took a 40% off Borders coupon to get me to find out that it even existed.)

Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom and Science, Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos
Wicked Girls: A Novel of the Salem Witch Trials, Stephanie Hemphill
The Ring of Solomon, Jonathan Stroud
A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner
The Curse of the Wendigo, Rick Yancey

Winners announced Friday!

The Last Little Blue Envelope

2011-04-26T22:36:00.001-04:00

Also?
I'm a sucker for anything free, so I totally grabbed my free kindle copy of Maureen Johnson's 13 Little Blue Envelopes a few weeks ago, even though I already read it a few years back. (It's not too late to get yours, FYI. Hurry!) So because it was on my kindle, and because I had just finished reading The Curse of the Wendigo, and because I didn't check anything new out of the library this weekend, I started re-reading it on the subway this morning and instantly got completely sucked in. I remember enjoying it before, but suddenly I'm ready to sublet my apartment and buy a ticket to Europe right this second! For real—though to be fair I've been feeling that way for awhile now, so it's not entirely the book's doing. I spent the evening googling some options, which goes against the spirit of the envelopes, but whatev.

Obviously, the free book offer is a promotion for The Last Little Blue Envelope, which came out on Monday. And of course I totally fell for it. Good work, HarperTeen marketing department! I didn't even check the library catalogue before buying the kindle version this afternoon. I needed it now. Can't wait to actually read it! (Too bad about the cover, though, but at least I won't be caught dead on the train with it... Book anonymity is the best thing about e-books, hands down. Like, a couple weeks ago I got through 3/5 of Jean Auel's new one with no public shame before finally giving up.)

Poly Styrene

2011-04-26T20:22:00.003-04:00

Oh man. Poly Styrene died yesterday. She was only 53.
I'm sort of shocked to find myself getting a little teary. I was a toddler when Germfree Adolescents came out and it took me way too long to discover her, but eventually I figured it out, and whenever an X-Ray Spex song randoms up on my ipod, it makes me happy...

The Curse of the Wendigo

2011-04-25T12:24:00.001-04:00

I have the day off work. "Easter Monday," whatever that is. So I slept until 10:30 for some reason, which never happens. I slept so long that the cats went from their panicking-about-getting-breakfast mode, to morning-sleep mode without me ever having to get up to feed them. And when I finally did, the cat just threw it up on the rug and went back to sleep.

But whatever. Guess what I read this week? The Curse of the Wendigo! It's Rick Yancey's sequel to Printz-award-winning The Monstrumologist, and I was pretty excited to see it on the bookstore shelves. (Apparently he's really cranking these things out now, because according to the internet, a third one called The Isle of Blood will be out in September.) Not that it matters, but I don't approve of the new cover designs. I kinda liked the original Monstrumologist hardcover; it looked like what it was. I was a little embarrassed to be seen on the subway with this new one.

Good book, though. Rollicking, even. The continued adventures of Will Henry, twelve-year-old orphan and assistant to famed monstrumologist Dr. Warthrop. In this installment, we learn about the doctor's romantic past (I know!), attend an elegant monstrumologist convention in New York City, and try to figure out whether or not an old friend of the doctor's—a fellow monstrumologist—has answered the call of the mythical wendigo. Lots of faces gets sliced off, I'll warn you now.

And speaking of sequels I'm excited about, The Dark and Hollow Places by Carrie Ryan is out now! I've been a little off my YA game lately, or I would have read it a month ago, but still. It's totally next on my list.

My Cat is Awesome

2011-02-13T21:36:00.003-05:00

Pip (looking stylish) and William James

Both cats were being weird tonight—pacing and yowling in a very irritating way. I thought it was because of the warmer weather and the fact that my door is still frozen half-shut so they haven't been able to go outside since Christmas. Nothing I can do about that though, and they were really quite annoying so I kept telling them to shut up and go away. Not that that ever works. Then I heard Pip playing in the bathtub, scratching around and warbling, which is very odd behavior for her (Willie does it all the time, rolling around in there for fun). It suddenly occurred to me that I had changed their litter earlier in the evening, and I realized that neither of them had used it yet, which was slightly surprising because, frankly, it was pretty rank. They should have been happy with the clean box. So I went and checked, and saw that I had accidentally put the box backwards, with the entrance against the wall. And then I looked in the bathtub, and found that ol' Pip had peed in there! Instead of in the bed or somewhere else awful! Poor thing... But still, totally awesome of her.

**This has nothing to do with YA, obviously. I've been busy reading other things, like Eating Animals, which has blown my mind all over again re: well, eating animals, and almost made me cry on the subway. Still working on reading all the Printz honorees, because the library is taking forever to get me my holds. Good to know they're popular with readers, even if my stupid local Borders is too busy hosting events with the cast of Jersey Shore to bother stocking them... (Not that I don't buy from indie stores usually, it's just that I had this 40% off coupon and was trying to get Please Ignore Vera Dietz for cheap.. Don't hate me.)

More on Bitch's YA 100 list

2011-02-01T23:53:00.001-05:00

Whoa. Ok, so when I just posted about Bitch's YA feminist list earlier, I was not even aware that it was controversial. Apparently, they initially included Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, and then removed it after some objections. Yeah, it's a boldish choice, depending how you define bold. It's one of those gazillions of books that non-YA readers can't believe even exist for younger readers. But a lot of the adult discomfort comes from a false memory and/or wishful thinking of a youthful innocence that has never existed. Kid's know more than some people want to think they do. Tender Morsel's is brilliant and important, because of (not in spite of) its uncomfortable moments. Not cool, Bitch.

100 Feminist Books

2011-02-01T21:57:00.001-05:00

Ok. Bitch Magazine/Bitch Media, a longtime favorite of mine, has just put out a list of 100 YA Books for the Feminist Reader. And when I saw it I remembered how several months ago I had enthusiastically posted a couple comments to one of their blog posts asking for recommendations of feminist YA. Thus, I am claiming personal responsibility for Brock Cole's amazing Celine appearing on the list. (The cover art, and especially the awful "tag line" are unfortunate, I realize, but it's not the book's fault since it came out in 1989—a full decade before the YA renaissance we all know today—and I think that's just how it was back then.)

I was rereading it for the dozenth time in the bathtub just a couple weeks ago, and wishing all over again that I had found it when I was an actual "YA." I only found it after Cole's 1996 book The Facts Speak for Themselves became a National Book Award finalist, but I was 13 when it came out and I really think it might have changed my life.

So. Celine is a weirdish high school artist who befriends her seven-year-old neighbor whose parents are having problems. And the boy's father is an artist himself, and an art professor at the local college. Celine develops a bit of a crush (but don't worry--that's not what the book's about). She destroys her own paintings for unrelated reasons and gets super excited about new art ideas. And she snarks about stuff, and notices weird things and people, and has to get a doctor's note so she doesn't have to swim in PE. The plot can't really be described properly and doesn't matter anyway so I'm not even going to try. It's the excellent writing and the complexly real characters that are the point. The part where the little kid is telling her what his therapist said about his parents' breakup and her response and the tears and the cookies and the matter-of-factness of it all? Oh my god, my own parents are married to this day and I have still wept indignantly every time I've read it. And the vomiting inside the sweater? The bathtub and the miniature tarts and the hand on the knee? You don't even know what you're missing. All creative and/or disaffected youth, and also general people who appreciate good books, should read it ASAP. Seriously.

2011 BBYA

2011-01-12T08:33:00.000-05:00

Gah!!
This was supposed to be a snow day!
My doctor's appointment was canceled; my stupid work meeting was canceled. I tidied the apartment and got myself snow day supplies and filled the coffeemaker in advance and had big plans to watch Jersey Shore from bed all day, but then it snowed less than they said and the public schools are open, so now I have to shower or something. Eventually.

More importantly, the ALA has released their 2011 Best Books for Young Adults, which is quite long, and also the Top Ten:
Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi
Revolution, Jennifer Donnelley
Finnikin of the Rock, Melina Marchetta
Amy & Roger's Epic Detour, Morgan Matson
Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, Lish McBride
Trash, Andy Mulligan
Bamboo People, Mitali Perkins
The Things a Brother Knows, Dana Reinhardt
Last Night I Sang to the Monster, Benjamin Saenz
Revolver, Marcus Sedgwick

2011-01-10T16:28:00.000-05:00

The great thing about following YA lit awards is that they're pretty manageable. The field's only been handing out big awards for the last 10 or 15 years. The Printz started in 2000; the National Book Awards added the Young People's Lit category in 1997, and so on. Even if you're new to the field you can catch up on all the big winners. Try doing that with "adult" literature, or with those Newberys that go back to, what, 1929 or something? YA is as do-able as it is awesome. Here's the full list of Printz winners and honor books.

So, as I do every year about this time, I've decided to finally get around to reading the handful that I still haven't read. I have huge mental blocks about The Ropemaker by Peter Dickinson (which I've checked out of the library several times and returned it unread again and again) and Black Juice by Margo Lanagan (which I've read the first quarter of about four times). But I will push through! Also, I had an off year in 2008 and totally ignored the honor books. So I've never read One Whole and Perfect Day or Dreamquake despite having heard good things about them. And I once picked up Your Own, Sylvia but as one of those ladies who spent her youth being a bit obsessed with Sylvia Plath, I was sort of bothered by the way they co-opted her style to tell her story. But I'm ready to be wrong on that one since I know so many people who really love it. Anyway. Just five books, plus a few from today, and then I'll be all caught up. A pretty pointless accomplishment, but what isn't?

ALA Youth Media Awards — 2011 winners!

2011-01-10T10:48:00.021-05:00

It's my favorite day of the year! The day I come into work and spend the whole morning watching an online video. Or I guess that's not so unlike any other day, except that the video I'm watching is not that double rainbow guy. It's the ALA awards announcements, and that's way more exciting!

Printz Award
Honor Books:
Stolen, Lucy Christopher
Please Ignore Vera Dietz, A.S. King
Revolver, Marcus Sedgwick
Nothing, Janne Teller

Winner:
Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi !!!!

This has never happened to me before in my entire YA-awards-following life, but just moments before the announcements started I was musing aloud to an uninterested coworker that Ship Breaker should win the Printz. I was gesticulating excitedly while he backed slowly away. So I was fairly certain that it wouldn't win, because that's how my predictions go.

And then the rest:
Alex Awards for adult books of interest to young people:
The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To, DC Pierson
Breaking Night, Liz Murray
Girl in Translation, Jean Kwok
The House of Tomorrow, Peter Bognanni
The Lock Artist, Steve Hamilton
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender
The Radleys, Matt Haig
The Reapers are the Angels, Alden Bell
Room, Emma Donoghue
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, Helen Grand

Schneider Family Book Awards Best Teen Book:
Five Flavors of Dumb, Antony John

Stonewall Children's and Young Adult Literature Award
Honor books:
Will Grayson, Will Grayson, John Green and David Levithan
Love Drugged, James Klise
Freaks and Revelations, Davida Willis Hurwin
The Boy in the Dress, David Walliams

Winner:
Almost Perfect, Brian Katcher

Coretta Scott King Author Award
Honor Books:
Lockdown, Walter Dean Myers
Ninth Ward, Jewell Parker Rhodes
Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, G. Neri

Winner:
One Crazy Summer, Rita Williams-Garcia

Margaret A. Edwards Award (for an author's lasting contribution to young adult lit)
Terry Pratchett!!!

William C. Morris Award (best book by a first-time author)
Finalists:
Hush, Eishes Chayil
Guardian of the Dead, Karen Healey
Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, Lish McBride
Crossing the Tracks, Barbara Stuber
Winner:
The Freak Observer, Blythe Woolston

YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award
Finalists:
They Called Themselves the KKK, Susan Campbell Bartoletti
Spies of Mississippi, Rick Bowers
The Dark Game: True Spy Stories, Paul Jaceczko
Every Bone Tells A Story, Jill Rubalcaba and Peter Robertshaw

Winner:
Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing, Ann Angel

Phew!
I assume there are full details at the ALA website (including results of the non-YA lit awards), but it seems to be loading verrrry slowly right now.

2011 Scott O'Dell Award

2011-01-08T15:33:00.001-05:00

The 2011 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction goes to One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia! It skews a little young for my usual YA tastes, but I loved this book about three sisters who spend the summer with the mother who abandoned them and end up going to a Black Panther summer camp. And judging by twitter posts it was a fan favorite for the National Book Award last year.

And OMG—all the YALSA award winners are going to be announced on Monday!! It's the biggest day of the YA awards year!

Tune in starting at 7:45 am pacific time (I'm glad I'm on the east coast...) to see who will win: The Printz award for excellence in YA lit, the Edwards Award for lifetime achievement by a YA author, the Alex Awards for adult books with teen appeal, the Odyssey Award for best audiobook, the Morris Award for first-time YA authors and the YA Nonfiction Award, which is pretty self explanatory.

Sweet Valley High

2011-01-04T19:40:00.006-05:00

A quick public service announcement: I am completely obsessed with Forever Young Adult's systematic Sweet Valley High book recaps. Very educational. I haven't been this impatient waiting for new entries since Maureen Johnson was reading Dan Brown's latest so we wouldn't have to. I thought I was a quite the fan back in my youth, but it turns out I missed a ton. Like, I somehow didn't notice that Elizabeth Wakefield was awful. And I totally missed the one where Regina Morrow dies the only time she tries cocaine. I know!

But you know they're making a SVH movie, right? And also that a new novel about the twins as adults is coming out in a couple of months (I just got the free preview chapter for my Kindle, and all I can say is ugh.)? So thanks to the hard work of the FYA ladies, we can all catch up without having to actually, you know, read 181 lousy books.

Ramoning bald girls

2011-01-02T20:02:00.008-05:00

You know what happens if you write a blog that's mostly about young adult fiction and then post some pictures of yourself with a bald spot and write about a stupid medical affliction? While also not posting much YA-related stuff? Virtually all my recent site traffic has come from people searching for alopecia or things like "bald girls," "bald spot on a girl" and so on. So let's check in! It's been 7 months since my first round of stinging head injections (as many as 60 at a time!), and I've made a handy photo guide of the progress, including a flattering and not 100% accurate shot taken today (the fresh spots that sprouted up last month are mostly hidden...)
Not bad though, right? I can almost make a stubble mohawk!

And now, let's never speak of it again. This is a YA blog, for pete's sake. (Though if you're going through this and want to talk about it, definitely feel free to send an email. I might have a tip or two.)

And! I got so carried away obsessing over my scalp that I almost forgot the whole reason I was going to make a post about search terms in the first place. Which is that someone--my lone reader who's not losing his/her hair, probably--got here searching for "wanna get ramoned," and that makes me smile. Good ol' King Dork! I realized after I posted about that ages ago that I had misheard the lyrics to the song, not getting the joke about bad French. How embarrassing for me..

Anyhoo. It's a whole new year, with a year's worth of opportunities to read good books and to not eff up and ignore this blog. We'll see how that goes, I guess. Cheers!

ETA: You guys!! Three weeks after that pic above I went to the doctor, and he told me it's maybe kind of ok now! A few injections just in case, but it's all growing back now and nothing new is falling out! Next month might be my last visit! Fingers crossed!!

National Book Awards 2010 - Young People's Literature WINNER!

2010-11-17T21:43:00.001-05:00

Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine!!

The twitter feed was engrossing, if looong...

National Book Awards Tonight!!

2010-11-17T11:08:00.000-05:00

Oh man. So today's the day the National Book Awards are announced, and I didn't get around to writing up little reviews of the finalists. Not surprising. Still, I have to make a prediction, just so I can be wrong again.

But I'm sort of torn. Personally I thought Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi was the best of the bunch.
If you haven't read it, it's story set in a future gulf coast where the cities are drowned and gangs of indentured servants scavenge old oil rigs. And then a wrecked clipper shows up with a not-quite-dead rich girl aboard, and adventure ensues. Plus there are bioengineered half-men—there's no way a story can go wrong if it's got that! So I enjoyed reading it; it felt similar to Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion in some ways, but I also realize that I'm sort of a sucker for a good dystopia, and I might be giving it extra points just for that.

My second fave, Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers, will probably win. Maybe. It's about a kid in jail who gets selected for a special work program that has him cleaning rooms in a nursing home. Of course he meets a patient who has a big impact and blah-di-blah, but this book should win a thousand awards for avoiding the cheesiness that you'd expect from such a plot. Good characters all around, good nuanced story. Etc. etc. Plus Myers has earned this. It's his third nomination—just give him the award already.

So, basically, one of the other three will win. Cause I'm always wrong.
Go here http://nationalbook.org/nba2010.html for all the finalists and interviews with the authors.

And then tune in tonight!
There's twitter: http://twitter.com/nationalbook
There's facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/National-Book-Foundation-National-Book-Awards/75553539481
Or, you know, check back here.

Feminist YA

2010-10-22T16:41:00.001-04:00

You wouldn't believe how quiet it is here at my work right now. Somewhere up front I assume people are laughing happily and sipping espressos, but I'm all alone in a cavernous back room with only the air purifier for company. It's so quiet that I'm alternately super-focused on what I'm working on (merging several databases into one rad super-database) and finding my mind wandering in strange ways. For instance, I suddenly looked up and realized that I had spent at least ten minutes reading online reviews of Bugaboo baby strollers. I don't have a baby or any interest in baby-related things, so it was really quite an odd thing to find myself doing. Fortunately, the internet is full of other, more interesting things to stumble across too. Like this over on the Ms. Magazine blog:

How I Picked 10 Best Feminist Teen Books of All Time Apparently there's an article that names the 10 in the current issue and this blog post is there to drum up interest. And it totally worked on me. But it's sort of an irritating little post, one of those ones written by someone who seems to have little familiarity with the YA world, yet is writing as some sort of authority.

She seems to think that YA is a label that happens by accident, usually to women writers, and is a derogatory comment on the literary value of the book. Of course it's true that sometimes books get labeled YA for marketing purposes, (sometimes even books written by men), but there are also many many many wonderful YA books actually written with a teen audience in mind. Also, apparently the only way to avoid being forcibly relegated to YA is to include some "particularly horrific sexual violence." And then she writes, after inventing that little problem: "Should we be concerned that girls are taken seriously as subjects of “adult literature” only if they’re brutally raped?" Oy. (Guess what! I know a kind of non-rape-y book that almost always gets published for adults: Books about characters who aren't teenagers, or that are written from the perspective of an adult looking back on their youth rather than through the eyes of the young person. Duh.)

Anyway. Being mildly annoyed by something on the internet has really killed a little time here! And as soon as I can escape from this endless afternoon, I'll be heading out to pick up a copy of Ms. so I can find out what the 10 Best Feminist Teen Books are. Brace yourself for an upcoming rage-filled rant, if my beloved Frankie Landau-Banks isn't on it.

2010 National Book Award Finalists!

2010-10-13T12:24:00.000-04:00

Ok, guys: it's totally on! The Finalists for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature are out, and I haven't read a single one of them...

Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi
Mockingbird, Kathryn Erskine
Dark Water, Laura McNeal
Lockdown, Walter Dean Myers
One Crazy Summer, Rita Williams-Garcia

Interesting looking list though, right? Some newcomers and some mainstays. Back-to-back nominations for Rita Williams-Garcia (who was a finalist last year for Jumped). A third nod for Walter Dean Myers (who was a finalist in 1999 for Monster and 2005 for Autobiography of My Dead Brother, and according to my calculations is the third most award-winning YA author ever.)

So it's time to hit the library and/or bookstore and get these read! The winner will be announced on November 17th.

A couple things:

2010-10-07T14:48:00.000-04:00

First, the internet problems that have been driving me mad all summer are finally fixed. I'm typing this from my bed (I'm home sick today) instead of from two feet away from the modem because I have a wireless connection that works 100% of the time instead of about 12% of the time. Turns out the cable company had connected me to the wrong box when I first moved in and it took about 800 different technicians to notice...

Also, I now have a Kindle and an account over at netgalley.com, which means I can read free ARCs (a few of them at least). For instance, right this second I'm reading Walter Dean Myers' new book Kick, which is due out in early 2011. So that's cool.

And, most importantly, it's fall again--i.e. book awards season. So get ready for timely updates of all the important news. I'm pretty sure I'm back at work on this thing. I might even update the upcoming events over on the right there. Cause that's just embarrassing.

Top 100 YA books

2010-08-17T10:47:00.000-04:00

A while back, I wrote about Persnickety Snark's list of the top 100 YA books. There was a poll where you could submit your own top ten (mine's here); 735 people participated, and then Adele compiled the results. All through July and August she's been counting down the results, a few at a time starting with this post, and finally the complete list is up.

Number 1 is Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and only two of the ones on my top ten made it to the top 100: Octavian Nothing at #91, and How I Live Now at #65.

Definitely check it all out, and click through the older posts; it's all very interesting, especially all the comments from voters and blog readers.

Cemeteries; eggplants; bald spots

2010-08-15T13:13:00.000-04:00

I haven't been reading any YA again. Or following the news about the goings-on in the biz. I did read Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men by Michael Kimmel, which everyone seemed to be abuzz about all at the same time. It's ok I guess, but it's awfully focused on frat culture. Mostly I'm just typing up a post to procrastinate, because there is so much else I really should be doing right now. And to whine about stuff.

Like: Something has gone wrong with my internet, and it's driving me mad. It doesn't work and then it does and then it resets itself and doesn't again, and the router doesn't work at all, which is unbearable. I have to sit on the couch with my laptop hooked directly to the ethernet like its 1999 or something. Gah! (The good part is, the other day I hiked over to the Time Warner office to trade in my modem for a shinier one, just in case. It didn't help of course, but the office is right across the street from Greenwood Cemetery, so I got to stroll through the graves after, which was very pleasant.)

And: A couple months ago I went to the garden center with a guy who also has a garden. We each bought an eggplant starter. I just visited his yard, which is way sunnier than mine, and his is a giant shrub now and is covered with eggplants, some many inches long already and dark purple. Mine is maybe a foot tall and has three sad little blossoms that don't seem to be turning into anything. Next year I will have to focus on shade-loving vegetables, cause this is frustrating. Also, the squirrels and/or raccoons are eating all my tomatoes.

And then in alopecia news (cause I know fans of YA fiction will care about my annoying scalp disease), check out my adorable stubble! Too bad I don't have a proper camera, but there's a bunch there now, even a bit in the parts that look bare. I know it still looks awful, but I'll take what I can get. It's been about six weeks since my first scalp shots, and a couple weeks since the second round. So, it's obviously good that the follicles are responding, and I'll just be cheered by that instead of being deeply unhappy about the way "the spot" is still spreading. At least it's not so achy anymore for some reason. I'm so tired of having to pull my hair back to cover it every day; I'm almost looking forward to the time when that stops working and I can shave it all off and get a totally realistic hair tattoo. (I actually googled that phrase after an awesomely detailed dream in which I got an elaborate librarian-bun tattooed on my head.)

Now, to work!

Recent Reading and Whatnot

2010-08-08T21:57:00.001-04:00

You know how when you read a bunch of books close together you often find unexpected synchronicities? Like I remember once being totally amazed when I read two books back to back, both of which used the exact same song lyrics as major plot points.

And several weeks ago I read For the Win by Cory Doctorow, which was quite a mind-blowing education about gaming economies and global labor movements—everyone should read it!—and a terrific, page-turning story besides. Immediately afterward, I read Fire Will Fall by Carol Plum-Ucci, the follow-up to Streams of Babel, where the almost-thwarted terrorists have developed an even more terrible biological weapon, and are about to deploy it. Less of a synch, but still both spent significant time on techy hacky computery moves that are supposed to sound impressive. It was almost a shame to have read them so close together, because Plum-Ucci's book was hard to put down and all, but Doctorow's meticulous technical details are a tough act to follow.

And then today I read two books, both grabbed almost at random from the new book rack in the library, and they both turned out to be about terribly alcoholic parents and kids hiding dark secrets. Happyface by Stephen Emond is about an awkward lonerish art kid who moves to a new school and is determined to not let on that there's anything wrong. So he smiles so much that he gets the nickname Happyface (this made me cringe right through to the last page—stupidest nickname ever); he makes friends surprisingly easily, but they don't who know who he really is. Of course eventually something has to give. It's heavily illustrated Diary of a Wimpy Kid style.

Dawn, By Kevin Brooks
Completely different tone and style, but there were so many similarities I kept getting confused and forgetting which book I was reading. Missing fathers, heavy drinking mothers, awful family secrets that take most of the book to be revealed, unlikely new friendships. And so on. (Also, the girl in the cover illustration looks so much like an exact mix of Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz that it's distracting. Right??)

And—awww!—my cat is curled up against my hip making sweet little sighs in her sleep.

Alopecia Areata

2010-08-01T21:45:00.005-04:00

So, one of the things I've been very busy with while I've not been writing in this blog is suffering from alopecia areata. Which is to say my hair is falling out, and I've been spending most of my spare time trying to hide a rapidly growing bald spot and freaking out about it. My spot is now three inches in diameter, right on the crown of my head, and is bruised-looking and achy. I've been getting steroid injections in my scalp which has caused some stubble to re-sprout in the initial spot, but hasn't stopping the handfuls of hair that keep coming out every time I shower. My bathroom sink actually got clogged from all the extra hairs getting washed down it. It's all so upsetting I can't even tell you!

Of course, at times like this, I turn to YA lit. Fairest of Them All, by Jan Blazanin is a problem novel about exactly this issue. Except that the alopecia sufferer is not a regular person like me, but a girl who has been groomed from birth to be a pageant contestant, dancer and actress; her identity and her paycheck depend on her beautiful hair. When she loses her hair she has to figure out a whole new identity for herself, and a whole new way to relate to her stage mom. Not as cheesy as it easily could have been, and I'm sure it will be inspiring for the average reader, but the terrifying progression of her hair loss was a real downer for me at the moment.

Because of Anya by Margaret Peterson Haddix is a book for slightly younger readers. Anya loses all her hair, is very upset, wears a wig, gets found out, and everyone's mean to her except for Keely who stands up to the mean girls and cuts off her own hair in solidarity. Informative.

But why can't someone write a book about a girl with a small bald spot that goes away and then everything is fine??

Ramona and Beezus

2010-07-25T05:28:00.002-04:00

So I went to see this new movie Ramona and Beezus. I've been a diehard Beverly Cleary fan since I was six years old, and I had a pretty bad feeling about it. There's no way a movie could capture the awesomeness of the books' memory for me. But I had to see. The pleasant surprise was Joey King as Ramona. When I saw her picture in the ads I was dismayed and immediately rejected her as a Ramona. Way too cute and blue-eyed. But she really did a great job; she somehow became pretty much the Ramona I've pictured forever. Selena Gomez was charming too as an older sister, but movie-Beezus wasn't really Beezus.

The problem with the movie was the script, which cobbles together plot points and seemingly randomly selected hee-larious scenes from all the books into an aimless mess. The thing is, what Cleary did better than most children's writers is remember and accurately capture the actual, unsentimentalized way it feels to be a kid going through everyday situations. It's all in the subtle details, not in the wacky antics. Not so with the movie. Five years of the most dramatic Quimby dramas and the most amusing visual gags get condensed into a few months of movie time, so there's no room to just be a kid. (Also, the books of course cover several years—years when kids grow up a lot. So when 9-year-old movie-Ramona yells "guts!" when she's frustrated, making everyone laugh at her because, you know, guts isn't really a bad word, it's just weird. It worked a lot better when Ramona the Pest did it as a kindergartener.) To be fair, the kids in the audience were howling with laughter at several points, so there's that.

So. Ok, it was sweet and charming and the occasional tension/mostly love in the family was obvious and as it should be. I'd happily take an eight-year-old to it, and they'd love it. But still. Not that anyone wants my opinion, but I think the Ramona books deserve the full Harry Potter treatment. A big-budget movie for each book in the series, with all the details meticulously recreated exactly as I grew up picturing them in my head. I mean, in the movie they were about to go to "Macaroni Joe's" for a special family dinner out, for f***'s sake! What happened to the Whopper Burger?! These details matter! Gah!
p.s. I'm not even going to talk about the Beezus/Henry romance. Can. Not. Deal.

The Metal Children by Adam Rapp

2010-05-14T12:26:00.000-04:00

Did you know that there's a new play out about the banning of a YA novel in a small town? It's true!
The Metal Children by Adam Rapp, who of course is himself an acclaimed and sometimes controversial YA writer (his latest, Punkzilla, was a Printz honor book this year) and also an award-winning playwright.

I picked it up at the bookstore because I tend to pick up anything with his name on it, and when I saw what it was about I naturally bought it. And then I read it and was like man, I hope they stage it in NYC someday. And then I googled it and found that it's opening Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theater next week! (Which explains why it was prominently displayed in the store.)

So. Who's coming with?!

Top 10 YA Books!

2010-04-30T12:13:00.001-04:00

So. Persnickety Snark is busy compiling a list of the Top 100 YA Titles. Anyone can take part--submit your top ten list to the poll and watch as she compiles the results in May. But today's the last day, and I've been procrastinating as usual.
Picking just ten was hard enough, but ranking them was almost impossible. For some reason I wanted to put more than half of them in the number 3 spot—good, really good, but not the best ever. I think if I had done this yesterday or did it tomorrow my answers would be different, but there's no time to dwell on that! These are ten awesome books for various reasons and I'm standing by them:
10. Witch Baby, Francesca Lia BlockI don't feel quite the same about this one when I re-read it now as I did in high school, but I remember exactly how I felt the first time I read it, and it was like I wasn't alone, and I cried and cried.
9. Rats Saw God, Rob Thomas
One of the best, honest stories about relationships from a guy's perspective I've ever read.
8. Celine, Brock Cole
Celine is a weird artist chick with a funny, unapologetic voice, even though she's often wrong.
7. The Canning Season, Polly Horvath
I've read this so many times. I've always been a fan of the misunderstood-kid-goes-to-live-with-the-eccentric-relatives kind of books, and this one does it up right. Am I allowed to say it's better than Roald Dahl?
6. True Believer, Virginia Euwer Wolff
This one just makes me want to be a better person.
5. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, M.T. Anderson
I mean, duh.
4. Skin Hunger, Kathleen Duey
Wow. Gorgeous and meditative and dark. It's about magic on the surface, but not really.
3. Fade, Robert Cormier
Bleak look at what would happen if an ordinary person could be invisible, could see things they weren't supposed to see and do things without consequences.
2. Bloodtide, Melvin Burgess
Best ever futuristic re-imagining of legendary creatures
1. How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
I'm not totally sure about putting this as number one, but one of them had to go here, and this is about as perfect a coming-of-age/war/survival/anorexia/bad parents/forbidden relationship story there is. It throws every single possible YA theme into one book and somehow ends up being much more than the sum of its parts.

Recent Reading, and etc.

2010-04-25T09:26:00.001-04:00

I've been taking a bit of a break from reading YA lately. And from this blog too. Too many adult books to read at the moment. Actually, among other things, I've been simultaneously reading The Feminine Mystique, Gail Collins' When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present and working my way through season three of Mad Men on DVD. The combination has been blowing my mind.

But now it's one of those Sunday mornings. It's raining gently, which means the stupid birds that usually start shrieking outside my windows at the crack of dawn are quiet; I'm wearing ugly sweatpants and drinking coffee; my fatter cat is curled against my hip snoring loudly and the other one is washing her crotch in my lap. Couldn't be more effing idyllic. Basically I have nothing better to do than try to remember the few YA-related things I finished in the last several weeks:

The Dead-Tossed Waves, Carrie Ryan
The sequel to The Forest of Hands and Teeth, this one features more zombie fun, plus new additions to the post-apocalyptic world of the first book: zombie-worshipping cults, the possibility of immunity to infection, other towns linked by the forest paths and so on. Plus romance and running from the law.

Funny How Things Change, Melissa Wyatt
Sweet story about a West Virginia kid who actually likes his small mining town and doesn't want to "get out" even though everyone's telling him he should.

I Am the Wallpaper, Mark Peter Hughes
This one's for slightly younger readers, and is slightly too silly. This girl decides to become more amazing so everyone will finally notice her and then her cousin starts posting her diary online and also some racy photos of her. So yeah, people notice.

Audrey, Wait!, Robin Benway
When I saw this in the library I had it mixed up in my head with Love, Aubrey, which I had been hearing good things about. But Audrey, Wait is fun, though I really doubt that some random girl would get quite so much paparazzi attention without doing anything at all. If she were some party girl or something, then maybe.

Things Not Seen, Andrew Clements
One of my favorite YA books of all time is Robert Cormier's Fade, so I am always excited to read a new story about invisible teenagers. Unfortunately, this one's more a relationship story than any kind of convincing exploration of invisibility. Nothing wrong with that I guess.

Unseen Companion, Denise Gosliner Orenstein
Lyrical story about racism in a small Alaskan town.

The Lost Conspiracy, Frances Hardinge
Will Grayson, Will Grayson, John Green and David Levithan

Since last time: 8
YTD: 32

2010 Carnegie Shortlist!

2010-04-24T17:36:00.002-04:00

Ok. The 2010 Carnegie Shortlist is out. Just in case you don't know, the Carnegie is the UK's big children's lit prize, like the Newbery in the US. To be eligible for the 2010 award, the books had to be published before August 2009, so it's a slightly older group of books, but quite a good looking bunch:

Chains, Laurie Halse Anderson
The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden: A Novel, Helen Grant
Rowan the Strange, Julie Hearn
The Ask and the Answer, Patrick Ness
Nation, Terry Pratchett
Fever Crumb, Philip Reeve
Revolver, Marcus Sedgwick

The winner will be announced on June 24th. And unrelatedly, can I just say that I am exhausted right now? Gardening is hard work. Or possibly just carrying 20 pound sacks of topsoil one at a time from the hardware store cause I can't figure out what I did with my roll-y cart. Things are looking sharp hough. Tomatoes are now in the ground, peas are up, and so on. I'm expanding from my two little vegetable beds into a bunch of other containers this year. And I turned my dead bamboo trees into trellises for the peas. It's underway!

Ramona and Beezus trailer

2010-04-21T07:36:00.000-04:00

No....

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

2010-04-21T06:58:00.014-04:00

I knew John Green was popular, but I had no idea. I had just bought a copy of Will Grayson, Will Grayson, the new book co-written by Green and John Levithan, and innocently went to a reading/signing the other day. It didn't even occur to me to try to get there early. Oy. There were hundreds of people there, mostly kids, and mostly the kind of kid I used to be. Except they were wearing John Green and nerdfighters-themed t-shirts. I felt old and weird, and also hot and uncomfortable because the collective body heat was out of control. Plus I was standing in the back unable to see anything. I slunk away before it was over, but was very charmed to see how enthusiastic everyone was.

So, the book. I know you already know this, but it's about two guys both named Will Grayson who are each trying to straighten out their own romantic situations when their paths cross one day. There's enough gay drama in both of their lives that things intertwine a bit. There's this part in the middle, right as they're meeting, that caused me to have to stifle an actual audible gasp while reading on the subway. One non-Will-Grayson character has been doing something terribly, terribly egregious to one of the Wills, and it's completely gut-wrenching. (If you know me and have also read the book you know I'd be in the fetal position on the floor forever if such a thing happened to me.) But the Will Grayson it happens to is a little more resilient, and eventually things work out surprisingly well. Lessons are learned, friendships grow, love blossoms (for some) and so on. And there's a musical. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's now my favorite John Green book, and my favorite David Levithan book. I think. (Except there are some mean-spirited fat jokes. Seriously guys, what's up with that?)

Happy Birthday Beverly Clearly!

2010-04-20T10:18:00.002-04:00

I was just scrolling through my google reader when I saw this picture of Beverly Cleary and my heart did a panicked little jump. For a moment I thought it might be the Beverly Clearly article, the final one—she's not exactly a spring chicken after all. But then I clicked the link and found that in honor of her 94th birthday SLJ interviewed her and got various contemporary writers to send her birthday greetings.

The whole thing is making me tear up a little. It reminds me of how I once wrote dozens of drafts of a fan letter but in the end couldn't send it to her because it was just so sappy and you-changed-my-lifey that I embarrassed myself, and also realized that she probably get millions of such letters a week and is totally over it. In any event, I'm grateful she exists.

CLA Young Adult Book Award!

2010-04-19T12:09:00.003-04:00

The Canadian Library Association announced (a month and a half ago, urgh...) this year's shortlist for it's YA Book Award:

Poster Boy, Dede Crane
Come, Thou Tortoise. Jessica Grant
Not Suitable for Family Viewing, Vicki Grant
Haunted, Barbara Haworth-Attard
Girl on the Other Side, Deborah Kerbel
Wondrous Strange, Lesley Livingston
The Gryphon Project, Carrie Mac
Dragon Seer, Janet McNaughton
Vanishing Girl, Shane Peacock
The Hunchback Assignments, Arthur Slade

The winner will be announced June 3!

CBCA Shortlist!

2010-03-30T07:13:00.000-04:00

The Children's Book Council of Australia just announced the shortlist for its Book of the Year award. Here's the Older Reader category:

Stolen, Lucy Christopher
The Winds of Heaven, Judith Clarke
Liar, Justine Larbalestier
Jarvis 24, David Metzenthen
A Small Free Kiss in the Dark, Glenda Millard
Loving Richard Reynman, Penny Tangey

RITA finalists!

2010-03-26T07:01:00.000-04:00

It's time for the 2010 RITA finalists! Here's the YA Romance category:

Fairy Tale, Cyn Balog
Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover, Ally Carter
Perfect Chemistry, Simone Elkeles
Going Too Far, Jennifer Echols
The ABC's of Kissing Boys, Tina Ferraro
Nothing Like You, Lauren Strasnick

I obviously have to stop reading so many zombie books, because I haven't read a single one of these. Winners to be announced July 31st at the Romance Writers of America's national conference in Nashville. I totally want to go...

Recent Reading

2010-03-21T21:18:00.000-04:00

Three weeks ago I was walking through almost two feet of snow in the park to get to the library, and this weekend I wore sandals and sunburned my shoulders sitting in the grass. Very very lovely, but it felt a little strange and wrong since the trees are completely bare and the food at the farmers market is still all apple cider and root vegetables. But who cares? On to the YA! Here's some stuff I've read recently:

This World We Live In, Susan Beth Pfeffer
I've been waiting so impatiently for this one. I really wanted a rousing and satisfying conclusion to what is now being called the "Last Survivor's Trilogy," about what happens after an asteroid collides with the moon, pushing its orbit closer to Earth and profoundly affecting the climate. The first two books (Life as We Knew It and the dead and the gone) followed two families in different parts of the country struggling to survive the immediate aftermath. This book picks up a bit after Life as We Knew It ends. Miranda and her family have survived the long winter, and then a band of weary travelers shows up at their door, and (OMG!) Alex from the dead and the gone is one of them! More surviving ensues, plus several rotting corpses, new relationships, bickering and cautious hope.

I know these are character-driven books, and I get that the nature of the event isolates everyone and cuts off the information supply, but I still really really want to know what else is going on in this world Pfeffer's created. I want to know what was happening in the rest of NYC while Alex was uptown stealing from corpses. I want to know more about what the powerful people were doing, and all the unfair treatment the rich must be getting. I want to know what the government's doing and what's going on in the safe towns, and how the rest of the world is doing. There better be a fourth "companion" book is all. I don't think that's too much to ask.

And some others:
The Chosen One, Carol Lynch Williams
Looking for Red, Angela Johnson
Fast Talk on a Slow Track, Rita Garcia-Williams
Albatross, Josie Bloss
Because I Am Furniture, Thalia Chaltas
Pieces of Me, Suzanne Ouriou

Since last time: 7
YTD: 24

Recent Reading: So Sick of Winter Edition

2010-02-28T18:53:00.004-05:00

OMG, I just read the best book!
The Monstrumologist, Rick Yancey
I was nervous about reading this, and almost didn't even though it was a Printz Honor book this year. I read several reviews that stressed that it was a "real" horror book, packed with gore and whatnot, which is not really my thing at all.
But I started it and got instantly hooked. Yes, it's horror and possibly the bloodiest, bone-crunchingest book I've ever read, and yes, it's a pretty great piece of literature. After reading Alfred Kropp I can't even believe this is by the same author.

Also, the picture for the Kindle version is cracking me up. If that were what the hardcover looked like I would have been less nervous, but also way less interested in picking it up. It just looks silly, and for some reason has been given a ridiculous subtitle. And anyway, is that really what the anthropophagi look like? They seem awfully buff and drooly...

And here's what else I read in the last coupla weeks:
The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, Rick Yancey
I picked this one up at the library because The Monstrumologist wasn't available yet and I wanted to read some Rick Yancey to see what he's all about. This is the first of a series about a bumbling kid who accidentally steals the sword Excalibur, which had been guarded by descendants of the Knights of the Round Table for centuries. And then it turns out he's descended from Lancelot himself, the only heir. Obviously, adventures ensue. Here's what I didn't get: This is the supposed to be the unbeatable weapon, right? Bad guys all over the world would pay any amount of money and/or kill whoever for it because they'd be unstoppable in battle. But twice Alfred gets it away from a guy by kicking him in the crotch and grabbing it when he stumbles? Twice!

Black Mirror, Nancy Werlin
The Bermudez Triangle, Maureen Johnson
Heaven, Angela Johnson

Recently: 5
YTD: 17

A little ARC help?

2010-02-28T14:08:00.001-05:00

You guys have come through for me before, so I am asking for one more favor, possibly the last ever. Please can anyone lend me an advance copy of Susan Beth Pfeffer's This World We Live In?? I can't wait until April to find out what happens! There's some organic homegrown heirloom tomato seeds in it for anyone who can save me...

LA Times Book Prize Finalists!

2010-02-22T14:11:00.001-05:00

So here are the just-announced finalists for this years LA Times Book Prize in the Young Adult Lit category. They went heavy on the non-fiction this year:

The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy, James Cross Giblin
The Lost Conspiracy, Frances Hardinge
Charles and Emma: The Darwin's Leap of Faith, Deborah Heiligman
Marching for Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don't You Grow Weary, Elizabeth Partridge
Tales from Outer Suburbia, Shaun Tan

This is the last of the major US YA awards, so now we're one step closer to definitively naming the award-winningest book of the year. I guess I still have to wait for the winner to be announced on April 23rd though.

Andre Norton Finalists!

2010-02-19T10:35:00.001-05:00

The 2009 Andre Norton finalists (for YA sci-fi/fantasy) are out!

Hotel Under the Sand, Kage Baker
Ice, Sarah Beth Durst
Ash, Malinda Lo
Eyes Like Stars, Lisa Mantche
Zoe’s Tale, John Scalzi
When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, Catherynne M. Valente
Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld

Interesting that When You Reach Me is on there. I never really noticed it was sci-fi or fantasy as I was reading it (even with all the Wrinkle In Time stuff!); it reads like a coming-of-age/mystery.

Also, I'm just now reading The Monstrumologist (a recent Printz Honor book) and it's pretty amazing. So far. Maybe it completely falls apart by the end and that's why it's not been on any list but the Printz so far. And yes, I know there're loads of awards yet to be given out, so I'll try to be patient and see what happens.

2010 BBYA!

2010-02-13T08:44:00.001-05:00

You guys, I have a cockroach problem and I need it to go away. It started a couple weeks ago with one in the kitchen sink rushing out from under a dirty plate. And now in the last week I've seen four more. The giant ones that fly and skitter. I've put out fresh bait traps and have been meticulously tidy in the kitchen, but they're not going away, and I just now tried to squash one with a shoe, but missed and now I can hear it scratching around under my bed. [update: the cat killed it for me!]

But that's neither here nor there. What I meant to say was that I just realized I had never mentioned the ALA's Best Books for Young Adults list. Here's the top ten:

Demon's Lexicon, Sarah Rees Brennan
The Orange Houses, Paul Griffin
The Great Wide Sea, M.H. Herlong
The Reformed Vampire Support Group, Catherine Jinks
Alligator Bayou, Donna Jo Napoli
Stitches, David Small
When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead
Marcelo in the Real World, Francisco X. Stork
Lips Touch, Laini Taylor
Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland, Sally M. Walker

If you look at the whole list of 90 books though, the description of the second item (Tales of the Madman Underground) uses a quote from the book that includes the word effing, but spelled all the way out, and for some prudish reason that bothers me. Shouldn't a professional publication like that bleep it with asterisks, (or just paraphrase and avoid the issue altogether)?

Recent Reading: Snow Day Edition

2010-02-10T18:46:00.015-05:00

This has been the best day in ages. I've had such a glum winter, but I think this one day makes it all ok. It was a snow day, and one that I got to plan in advance for so I had all the best food on hand (mainly pistachios). And then it snowed. All day. The cats gave up by 10 am. By late afternoon the trees and plants had leaned over from the weight, blocking the sky, and the drifts had climbed the fences, and it all met in the middle and turned my yard into a snow cocoon.

So anyway, you'd think I spent the day inside reading YA novels or something, but no way. Much better things to do. Here's the last few things I did read, though:

Tales of the Madman Underground: An Historical Romance 1973, John Barnes
This is one of the recent Printz honor books and definitely deserves a full review, but I bet I won't get around to it. As a lifelong fan of the "problem novel," I love it. The cheerleader getting molested by her grandfather? The hot chick who speaks via a stuffed rabbit? The animal slasher who might turn into a serial killer? The in-denial gay kid who turns tricks on the freeway when his dad's mean to him? And all the other kids with their variously effed up family lives? Whatev. Just like in real life, their stories are a dime a dozen, and the real story is just about day to day life. No one gets saved. (p.s. It's overly long and gets off-track a bit, but I don't care and you won't either.)

The Eyes of Kid Midas, Neal Shusterman
Yeah. I'm done with Shusterman after this. At least until his next book. I mean, he's great and I've made a pretty thorough go of it, and have read loads of good stuff. I loved Unwind and Everlost and several of the more recent ones. But I can tell that I don't necessarily need to read ever single word he's ever written just because everything's being re-released in pretty covers after the success of the more recent stuff.

How to Steal a Car, Pete Hautman
About a girl who steals cars, at first more or less by accident, and then it becomes a bit of a habit. According to the jacket flap she does this in the same way that cutters cut and anorexics starve themselves—to cope with the horrors of teen life and whatnot. And also for the thrill. It's quite a nice story actually, because it mostly isn't about car theft.

And there's something I already returned to the library that I just can't remember. Hardcover, not too thick, about a girl...

This batch: 4 (yes, I'm counting the unremembered one. I'll add the title when I figure out what it was)
YTD: 12

Recent Reading

2010-01-25T15:08:00.002-05:00

When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead
Obviously you already know that this won the Newbery Medal this week, and obviously you know it's terrific. A million people have written a million things about it, so I'll just say that I was very, very pleased to see how much space was spent discussing $20,000 Pyramid. That's a topic that just doesn't come up nearly enough, esp in books for young people.

Dread Locks, Neal Shusterman
Apparently Shusterman has written several books in a little series called "Dark Fusion" where he takes two different myths or fairy tales and re-works them into ultra-rad modern teen lit masterpieces. Here we've got a Medusa / Goldilocks and the Three Bears mashup. So... the new girl in town who has really curly hair and always wears dark glasses introduces herself to the neighbors, the Baers (get it??), by sneaking into their house and eating their cereal before falling asleep in their bed. And then kids at school mysteriously start turning gray and sluggish; they eat dirt and eventually turn completely to stone. "Don't expect subtlety or character development," says Booklist.

Sunrise Over Fallujah, Walter Dean Myers
A young soldier from Harlem and his unit go into Iraq in 2003, in the shock and awe days when everyone was expecting to be home soon. And of course it doesn't work out that way. It's messy and directionless, and it made me cry.

This week: 3
YTD: 8

Leviathan won the Aurealis Award!

2010-01-23T16:26:00.003-05:00

Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan just won the Aurealis Award for Australian Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror writing!

The finalists are here (they're not on the website anymore unless you download a PDF)

Amelia Bloomer 2010 List!

2010-01-23T13:29:00.001-05:00

The Amelia Bloomer Project released it's 2010 list of feminist books recommended for young people. It's a long list of everything from picture books to adult books, and it's pretty heavy on non-fiction and biography. But since you all know that the only thing in the world I care about is young adult novels, here are some of the ones that were included:

Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson
Rapunzel's Revenge, Shannon Hale and Dean Hale
Because I am Furniture, Thalia Chaltas
This Full House, Virginia Euwer Wolff
The Orange Houses, Paul Griffin
Flygirl, Sherri L. Smith
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
Bloodhound, Tamora Pierce

Award-winning Authors in the News

2010-01-23T10:03:00.000-05:00

Maureen Johnson, author both of YA books and a series of hilarious blog entries where she reads Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol so we don't have to, is featured in the New York Times! She'd been giving away free Kindle editions of her book Suite Scarlett (I helped myself to the iphone version in December) and I guess it went well.

ALA winners on The Today Show

2010-01-19T22:06:00.001-05:00

Rebecca Stead and Jerry Pinckney, winners of the Newbery and Caldecott medals respectively, were on The Today Show today for the world's briefest and least substantial interview. (It's taking a real effort, but I'm not even going to complain about the fact that Libba Bray wasn't there too. grrrr):

and p.s.: The article in the New York Times was written by someone who seems unfamiliar with the awards, and didn't mention Libba Bray either.

2009 Aurealis Finalists

2010-01-19T07:32:00.001-05:00

Here are the finalists for the 2009 Aurealis Award (for best Australian sci-fi, fantasy and horror) in the YA novel category:

The Puzzle Ring, Kate Forsyth
The Museum of Mary Child, Cassandra Golds
A Small Free Kiss in the Dark, Glenda Millard
Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld
Scarecrow, Sean Williams

There's a YA short story category too, plus loads of non-YA listed on the website.
Winners will be announced Jan. 23rd...

ALA Awards! (The Printz goes to Going Bovine!)

2010-01-18T08:01:00.022-05:00

I'm lying in bed with my laptop watching the announcements live!

MICHAEL L. PRINTZ AWARD:
Going Bovine, Libba Bray (!!!)

Honor Books:
Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith, Deborah Heligman
The Monstrumologist, Rick Yancey
Punkzilla, Adam Rapp
Tales of the Madman Underground, John Barnes

New Award! YALSA AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION:
Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith, Deborah Heligman

Finalists:
Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream, Tanya Lee Stone
Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice, Philip Hoose
The Great and Only Barnum: The Tremendous, Stupendous Life of Showman P. T. Barnum, Candace Fleming and Ray Fenwick
Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland, Sally M. Walker

WILLIAM C. MORRIS AWARD (for a previously unpublished author):
Flash Burnout, L.K. Madigan

And the finalists, announced in December:
Ash, Malinda Lo
Beautiful Creatures, Kami Garcia
The Everafter, Amy Huntley
Hold Still, Nina LaCour

MARGARET A. EDWARDS AWARD (for lifetime achievement):
Jim Murphy!

CORETTA SCOTT KING AWARDS:
Author Award:
Bad News for Outlaws, Vaunda Micheaux Nelson

Author Honor Book:
Mare's War, Tanita S. Davis

Illustrator Award:
My People, Charles R. Smith Jr.

Illustrator Honor Book:
The Negro Speaks of Rivers, E.B. Lewis

JOHN STEPTOE AWARD (for new talent):
The Rock and the River, Kekla Magoon

There's a new one this year, the CORETTA SCOTT KING-VIRGINIA HAMILTON AWARD for Lifetime Achievement. It went to Walter Dean Myers!

IMPORTANT REMINDER! ALA Awards Tomorrow!

2010-01-17T17:44:00.000-05:00

Taking a break from my string of dull posts about what I've read, it's time to get back to YA awards!

Tomorrow morning, at 7:45 am EST the ALA youth media awards will be announced live! And you can watch on the internet! Tune in here tomorrow morning: http://alawebcast.unikron.com/

I'm excited about this! And the best part is I have the day off work so I won't have to call in sick to watch.

Recent Reading

2010-01-17T17:34:00.004-05:00

The Killer's Cousin, Nancy Werlin
Maybe I read them in the wrong order, but the Elf, from Locked Inside is in this book too! Except in his real-life persona, where he's the loner skinhead-looking kid who befriends the new guy in school who moved in with relatives after being acquitted of killing his girlfriend. But something's up with the killer's young cousin Lily.

And then, continuing my recent Neal Shusterman kick, two more by him:

Full Tilt, which reminded me of Going Bovine in some ways. It's another book-length, brain induced fantasy-adventure-that's-maybe-really-happening wherein the only survivor of a childhood school bus crash finally comes to terms with it at a sinister amusement park.

The Schwa was Here, a sweet sort of book about a kid from Brooklyn and his "functionally invisible" friend the Schaw whom most people don't notice most of the time. It's of that sub-genre where an eccentric adult—in this case the mean, wheelchair-bound neighbor Mr. Crawley—unexpectedly changes their lives.

This week: 3
YTD: 5

Costa Award winners

2010-01-10T20:33:00.003-05:00

The Costa Book Award winners were announced on January 5th. In the Young Adult category it went to The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness!

I've not posted in so long that I didn't even post the finalists:
Solace of the Road, Siobhan Dowd
Troubadour, Mary Hoffman
The Ask and the Answer, Patrick Ness
Guantanamo Boy, Anna Perera

Recent Reading

2010-01-10T20:20:00.003-05:00

And here's what I read the first week of 2010. Blah!

The Brothers Torres, Coert Voorhees
I avoided this for a long time because the description I had read made it sound like some anti-gang cautionary tale. Not even close. It's really a sweet and nuanced coming-of-age story that feels really true. And there's enough violence and sexual awkwardness to keep it interesting. I want a stuffed sopaipilla so badly right now, just thinking about it.

Locked Inside, Nancy Werlin
This was a nominee for an Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery back in 2000. It was also a one-bath read (though I was pretty pruney by the time it was over) because I couldn't put it down. The daughter of a dead celebrity is flunking out of her fancy boarding school because she spends all her time playing computer games and alienating her classmates. Then she gets kidnapped by a woman who claims to be her sister and the rightful heir to half her mother's fortune. Good thing all that gaming taught her some survival skills... It's a page-turner.

YTD: 2

2009 Reading Summary

2010-01-10T19:55:00.009-05:00

My most boring post yet? It's ok—this one's just for me. For reference. It's a list of the YA books I read in 2009, listed alphabetically by author. It's just that sometimes I forget, and my periodic summaries of what I read aren't so easy to navigate. I think there's 95 if I counted right. [updated a couple of times cause I remembered a few that I hadn't blogged about.]

Also: Dying to know which are my 2009 favorites from this list (listed in alphabetical order by author, not by how much I loved them)?
Going Bovine, Sacred Scars, Andromeda Klein, The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Marcelo in the Real World, and Leviathan!

And my favorite non-2009 book? Knights of the Hill Country!

Here's the whole list:
Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson
The Waters & The Wild, Francesca Lia Block
Forever, Judy Blume
Kendra, Coe Booth
Going Bovine, Libba Bray
Black Rabbit Summer, Kevin Brooks
Two Moons in August, Martha Brooks
The Cry of the Wolf, Melvin Burgess
The Ghost Behind the Wall, Melvin Burgess
Nicholas Dane, Melvin Burgess
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
Ender in Exile, Orson Scott Card
Janes in Love, Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg
The Plain Janes by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg.
Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Discovering Pig Magic, Julie Crabtree
Skin Deep, E. M. Crane
Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
Bog Child, Shioban Dowd
Solace of the Road, Siobhan Dowd
Sacred Scars, Kathleen Duey
Seek, Paul Fleischman
Friction, E. R. Frank
Jerk, California, Jonathan Friesen
The Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
Coraline, Neil Gaiman
The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
The Sandman, vol. 1, Neil Gaiman
Paper Towns, John Green
Dark Dude, Oscar Hijuelos
The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, Phillip Hoose
Beating Heart, A.M. Jenkins
Suite Scarlett, Maureen Johnson
Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan
Liar, Justine Larbalestier
The Carbon Diaries, 2015, Saci Lloyd
The Boyfriend List, E. Lockhart
The Treasure Map of Boys, E. Lockhart
Gathering Blue, Lois Lowry
Slot Machine, Chris Lynch
Jellicoe Road, Melina Marchetta
Dough Boy, Peter Marino
Madapple, Christina Meldrum
TTYL, Lauren Myracle
The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness
Freaky Green Eyes, Joyce Carol Oates
Huge, Sasha Paley
The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Mary Pearson
The Dead and the Gone, Susan Beth Pfeffer
Streams of Babel, Carol Plum-Ucci
Andromeda Klein, Frank Portman
Nation, Terry Pratchett
After, Francine Prose
Punkzilla, Adam Rapp
The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan
Flygirl, Sherri L. Smith
Downsiders, Neal Shusterman
Everlost, Neal Shusterman
Everwild, Neal Shusterman
Unwind, Neal Shusterman
Finding Lubchenko, Michael Simmons
Stitches, David Small
Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie, Jodan Sonnenblick
Marcelo in the Real World, Francisco X. Stork
Skim by Mariko Tamaki
Lips Touch: Three Times, Laini Taylor
Knights of the Hill Country, Tim Tharp
The Spectacular Now, Tim Tharp
Blankets, Craig Thompson
Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine
Summer Blonde, Adrian Tomine
Adrian Mole: The Lost Years, Sue Townsend
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Age 13 3/4, Sue Townsend
Zoe's Tale, John Scalzi
Living Dead Girl, Elizabeth Scott
Runaways, Vol. 1, Brian Vaughan
Like A Thorn, Clara Vidal
Be More Chill, Ned Vizzini
Impossible, Nancy Werlin
Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld
Midnighters III, Scott Westerfeld
When Kambia Elaine Flew in from Neptune, Lori Aurelia Williams
Blue Tights, Rita Williams-Garcia
Every Time a Rainbow Dies, Rita Williams-Garcia
Jumped, Rita Williams-Garcia
Love and Lies, Ellen Wittlinger
This Full House, Virginia Euwer Wolff
After Tupac and D Foster, Jacqueline Woodson
Hush, Jacqueline Woodson
If You Come Softly, Jacqueline Woodson
Lena, Jacqueline Woodson
Eternal Smile, Gene Luen Yang
Rubber Houses, Ellen Yeomans

Recent Reading

2009-12-05T16:06:00.002-05:00

So last week I read a stack of books that all involved runaways and/or road trip adventures. And then this week I ended up reading two more:

Going Bovine, Libba Bray
This one has gotten so much attention recently that anyone reading this surely already knows what it's about. But just in case, it's about a boy with mad cow disease and the Don Quixote inspired hallucinations his spongifying brain is having wherein he escapes his hospital deathbed to find a scientist in a different dimension who can cure him and also save the universe. Assorted interconnected adventures ensue. It's like 400 pages of someone telling you about a weird dream they had, and for awhile I was wondering if it would never end, but then I got increasingly caught up in it and didn't want it to. It's awesome.

Punkzilla is Adam Rapp's latest about a boy who's gone AWOL from military school to live on the streets in Portland, but then has to Greyhound his way to Memphis to see his older brother before he dies of cancer. Along the way he meets various people, some who are nice and some who are terrible, and he spends his time writing long steam-of-conscious letters to his brother.

This week: 2
YTD: 84

Also: It's snowing! Well, mostly raining, but some of the drops are definitely solid and white.

Blah. Plus some stuff I read

2009-11-22T18:36:00.004-05:00

This afternoon I went for a run in the park and it was so sunny that afterward I lay happily in the grass in just my t-shirt. [Um. I've been notified that I should maybe clarify that I was also wearing running trousers. It was surprisingly warm and sunny for so late in the year was my point.] I was supposed to be stretching or something, but the sky was too blue. But meanwhile, the neighbors across from me spent the day decorating a Christmas tree on their deck out back. Too soon! At least wait until all the leaves have finished falling! And some nearby dad is playing a very long game with a bunch of kids that involves him growling and roaring while the kids shriek and laugh. Normally I would be wishing them all dead for making such a racket, but all it's doing is making me feel very home-y and content. Troubling.

But whatever, here's what I've been reading. (I am so sick of keeping track by the way, and am boring even myself. But I started at the beginning of the year and so I can't quit now.)

Three in a row that involve runaway journeys in one way or another:
Solace of the Road, Siobhan Dowd
Dark Dude, Oscar Hijuelos
Unwind, Neal Shusterman

Not to mention:
Runaways, Vol. 1, Brian Vaughan

Then:
After, Francine Prose
All about what happens after there's a school shooting in a nearby town. Crazy new security measures and such, except that it's all more sinister than that. Parents are being brainwashed via email and kids are disappearing and/or dying. There's no explanation given for it though, and the conclusion is unsatisfying to say the least.

TTYL, Lauren Myracle
I finally had to read what sounds like the most challenged book around after avoiding it for years due to its format and the potential embarrassment of getting caught with it on the train. (You know what I mean if you've ever seen this book and are older than 14.) I don't quite get the controversy. At first I was startled that fifteen year olds were discussing shaving their crotches like it was a given right from page 2, but I think that was the most shocking thing that happened. I assume the other books get more explicit.

And a few others:
Lips Touch: Three Times, Laini Taylor
Everlost, Neal Shusterman
If You Come Softly, Jacqueline Woodson

Last coupla weeks: 9
YTD: 82

National Book Awards!

2009-11-18T23:13:00.002-05:00

On the one hand, I totally called it for the first time in ages.
On the other, I didn't even get the date right and thought it wasn't happening until tomorrow.

Turns out the National Book Awards were announced this evening, and in the Young People's Literature category the winner was Philip Hoose for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. I'd put up a pic and a link, but if you scroll down one post it's already there. Because it was my pick for the win! I wasn't wrong this year!! Take that! And it was the only one of the finalists that really inspired me to annoy my friends and coworkers talking about it as I read, so I even feel ok about that now.

My cat! (also the NBA's are almost here)

2009-11-15T18:52:00.009-05:00

Now that it's getting colder, I haven't been leaving the side window open for the cats to jump in and out of, which means I spend most of my spare time opening and re-opening the back door for them. And one of them, when she wants to come in, doesn't meow, or scratch at the door, or figure how to turn the knob herself the way I hear clever cats do. She scales the door with her claws and howls through the window while looking possessed. Then when I open the door, she holds on and swings inside on it before hopping off. The first time she did it it was absolutely terrifying. So tonight, instead of letting her in, I took a really bad picture because I think it's funny.

But. That's not why you come to this blog, I know. I know you've been dying to know which of the five finalists I think is going to win the National Book Award this very Thursday evening!

I'm not super passionate about any of the books this year, but I guess I've made my pick. It's an unusually diverse group this time (2 non-fiction, a graphic novel, a collection of fantasy short stories and a realistic novel). There haven't been any non-fic finalists since 2004, and the only winner was Parrot in the Oven back in 1996, and that was a memoir. So, since none of the fiction is blowing me away (except for Stitches, but that better not win because it's amazing, but it's also an adult book and shouldn't even be on the list), my money's on non-fiction, and I think it will be Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. Phillip Hoose has earned it.

So basically that means one of the others will win. I'm nearly always wrong about these things. For instance:

In 2008 I was so into The Disreputable History of Frankie-Landau Banks, and also The Spectacular Now (as regular readers well know).
In 2007 I couldn't believe Skin Hunger didn't win.
In 2006 there was no way Octavian Nothing wasn't going to win, so it was hardly worth thinking about
In 2005 I was rooting for Inexcusable, but I wasn't that into it.
In 2004 all the finalists sort of sucked. I mean, Luna?? It's nice to recognize one of the only transgender-related books out there at the time, but it really is not a particularly good book.
And that takes us to 2003, which is the last time I picked a winner and wholeheartedly agreed with it. The Canning Season is still one of my fave YA's, and it is perfectly written (it's just too bad about the cover).

PW Best Children's Books of 2009

2009-11-09T11:18:00.000-05:00

It's best-of season again—those magical couple of months at the end of every year where billions of lists pop up on the internet, each and every one agreeing that the same handful of books (plus one or two weird choices apiece) are the best of the year.

Publisher's Weekly starts us off with their Best Children's Books of 2009. Here's the fiction picks (go to the website for an annotated list plus the other categories):

Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson
Going Bovine, Libba Bray
Fire, Kristin Cashore
Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
If I Stay, Gayle Forman
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
Purple Heart, Patricia McCormick
The Ask and the Answer, Patrick Ness
A Season of Gifts, Richard Peck
When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead
Shiver, Maggie Stiefvater
Marcelo in the Real World, Francisco X. Stork
Tales from Outer Suburbia, Shaun Tan
Lips Touch: Three Times, Laini Taylor
The Uninvited, Tim Wynne-Jones

OMG Raccoons!

2009-11-03T22:45:00.002-05:00

I haven't had anything to say about my little garden in awhile, because nothing's been happening. The season didn't end particularly successfully. But the raccoons came around tonight (while I was working on my nanowrimo novel, natch), and suddenly I don't hate them anymore. Maybe it's because there are no more vegetables for me to worry about defending, or maybe it's just that they've put on enough winter weight that they don't look all hollow and pointy-snouted anymore, but they turned cute!

I heard the dreaded baby-dinosaur squawks and went out to see them climbing through the bamboo. The more curious one got interested and crept towards me in slow motion, exactly the way the cats crawl across the couch—one foot always paused in the air—when they're trying to sneak into my lap without me noticing. I went inside for my phone to take a pic, and when I opened the door again, the friendly one was right there sniffing, but jogged away. Then they both went and sat in my mostly-empty vegetable beds and dug up some dirt while watching me over their shoulders. It's like I live out in the country or something. My phone camera doesn't have a flash, so this is all I came up with:

National Novel Writing Month

2009-11-01T11:59:00.001-05:00

You guys, I just joined NaNoWriMo! I don't know why, except that all the YA author bloggers keep talking about it and the pressure got to me. Now I either have to write 50,000 words in the next 30 days (just 1667 per day!), lie to the internet, or be totally humiliated. Since my current average daily output is zero words, I'm going to have to change my entire lifestyle—and fast! Also, since my alien hybrid trilogy didn't pan out, I don't even have a plot, so this really should work out well... Off to the coffee shop with my laptop then, like the pros!

p.s. Here's what I read this week:

Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith, Deborah Heiligman
Skim, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, Gabrielle Zevin
After Tupac and D Foster, Jacqueline Woodson

Week's YA total:4
YTD total: 73

Guardian Book Prize

2009-10-18T11:24:00.001-04:00

By the way, Mal Peet won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize for Exposure, a re-imagining of Othello where Othello's a South American soccer player and Desdemona's a pop star. I forgot to mention that.

Recent Reading

2009-10-18T11:06:00.000-04:00

Here's a boring list of stuff I've read lately, several of which I've posted on separately:

Sacred Scars, Kathleen Duey
Andromeda Klein, Frank Portman
Liar, Justine Larbalestier
Blankets, Craig Thompson

And now that the National Book Award finalists are out, I'm reading those. More on them when I've finished the other two.
Stitches, David Small
Jumped, Rita Williams-Garcia
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, Phillip Hoose

Recently: 7
YTD: 69

Sacred Scars by Kathleen Duey!

2009-10-18T10:54:00.001-04:00

Sacred Scars is one of my most eagerly-anticipated books this year. I loved Skin Hunger so much, as I've said more than once here, and I was so eager to read the next part of the story. And now I actually finished it awhile ago, but haven't written anything because I'm not quite sure what to say. It's a terrific book, but not quite a free-standing novel. It's more like the middle section of what's going to be a single long story once the third volume comes out.

I admit that I had a sinking feeling when the book arrived and I saw how thick it is—more than 500 pages. (What's up with all these trilogies/series that start with a regular-size book and then ratchet up the subsequent volumes to ginormous proportions? I'm getting back trouble from all the lugging about of giant hardbacks).

But that's neither here nor there. It takes a lot of pages to slowly and methodically unfold this rich, dark world Duey's creating. Hahp and the rest have been at the Academy for years and keep surviving their increasingly-advanced lessons; they continue to quietly plot to destroy the Academy. Gerrard's more of a mystery, and is it just me or does time seem to be doing funny things? Meanwhile, in the past, Sadima realizes Franklin is never going to leave Somiss and the caged boys. So she leaves, and eventually loses her memory and spends decade after decade magically not aging and quietly selling cheese (this is where the book drags a bit). Eventually she meets the Eridians, political tensions are at a peak, and you know that things are about to happen and worlds are going to collide, but the pages are running out! And then it ends abruptly. Augh!

So. It seems like the pieces are in place now for everything to come together, for all the accumulated little details to come into play. I've got a good feeling about the final book.

As an aside, here's something that's really bothering me: I can't find this book in stores! It came out in August, and I started eagerly looking for it, to no avail. Months later it's still not there. I haven't checked every store in NYC obviously, but I keep looking at quite a few, both big stores and indies, and they're not stocking it and it's driving me insane! If being the much-anticipated (I know it's not just me) follow-up to a National Book Award finalist isn't enough to get a book on store shelves, what in the world does it take??

National Book Awards Finalists!

2009-10-14T15:11:00.002-04:00

It's like my one-year blogiversary!
No time to check the exact date, but this all started last year with me writing about National Book Award finalists, and now it's happening all over again. Here are the finalists for Young People's Literature:

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

The winners will be announced on November 18th. I haven't read any of them yet, so off I go!

Liar by Justine Larbalestier

2009-10-05T22:10:00.002-04:00

I've been dying to read Liar for ages, was begging everyone for an advance copy, but it didn't pan out. In the end I was happy to spend actual money for it the day it came out. I've read tons of reviews, and many of them use the word 'brilliant.' It's gotten three starred reviews. It'll probably be all over the award winnings this season. My expectations were high.

I was not expecting to finish it and just feel sort of meh. It was fun, I read it fast and couldn't put it down, but I kept waiting for something to tie together that never did.

Everyone seems so enthusiastic about the fact that you can't tell if what Micah says is the truth or a lie, cause she's such a compulsive liar that she lies constantly. Did I mention that she tells lies? Because she's a liar? And also that's the title of the book? This girl is so obsessed with telling you what a liar she is over and over and over that I can only assume she is protesting too much and every word is the absolute truth—even the ones that contradict the other ones.

And that is just one of the many ways you can read the book! Each of which is apparently true. And that's why I didn't love it. Yes, it can be read a number of different ways. Basically you just have to make up rules about what to believe, about what you decide is true and what's a lie. And you can start again and make up a separate set of assumptions and come to a different conclusion, but there's no real basis in the text for any of it. It was definitely a good read and all, but if it's just me making stuff up, what's the point?

But definitely don't take my word for it, because obviously many who've read it would disagree. There's a great thread starting on Justine's blog, where she allows readers who have finished it to discuss the plot, including the top-secret twists we are forbidden to share in public (don't click on that link if you haven't read it and plan to, because I promise you don't want to know.) The readers over there are so enthusiastic and thoughtful, and several of them took what they read and created the book they wanted or needed to read. It's kind of inspiring. They're making me want to read it again, and maybe really get it this time.

Booktrust shortlist

2009-09-28T11:11:00.005-04:00

As promised, the Booktrust Teenage Prize shortlist is out:

Auslander, Paul Dowswell
The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
Ostrich Boys, Keith Gray
The Ant Colony, Jenny Valentine
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, Helen Grant
The Ask and the Answer, Patrick Ness

P.S. There are tadpoles in a bucket in my yard! It rained yesterday, and I was outside this morning and saw all these little sperm-like things thrashing about in the standing water. It's hard to describe how excited I am about this. I'll have to build a pond now!

Andromeda Klein by Frank Portman!

2009-09-23T20:21:00.008-04:00

~~You know what's odd? All the major online booksellers use the same cheap scan of this book's cover. What's up with that??~~ [Erm...on closer inspection that's just what the cover of the book looks like.] So I'll have to use this picture of John Waters reading it instead (as featured on Jersey Beat).

No matter. Andromeda Klein is the second book by Frank Portman (Dr. Frank of the punk band Mr. T Experience), and it's tons of fun. I loved his first book, King Dork, so I was excited about this one without knowing a thing about it. And when I read the first few pages I had that feeling I sometimes get when I start a book where I could tell it was going to be a good time, so I settled in happily and just let it wash over me.

I'm a sucker for books about passionate, hard-working experts of all sorts, from giant-pumpkin-growing teenagers (Joan Bauer's Squashed) to English professors (Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety), and Andromeda is a startlingly well-versed and hard-working teen occultist. There's an enormous amount of information about tarot and magic[k] and A. E. Waite. There's amusing wordplay. And also libraries! (I am so checking out the 133s next time I'm at the BPL.) Plus her father is a bit of a paranoid anti-government conspiracy guy and I am a fan of that sort of thing as well. But aside from that, it's really just a smart and funny book about high school culture and about how one "misfit" navigates it. The plot goes a little wild by the end, but whatev. It's good. Read it.

Also, I've discovered that Frank Portman actually recorded a couple of the terrible songs Tom Henderson wrote in King Dork. They're on the book's amazon page. Take a listen to my favorite, I Wanna Ramone You. "If we won't be chaperoned, and if you wanna get ramoned, come on come on come on...."

Guardian Award 2009 shortlist

2009-09-12T11:09:00.002-04:00

The Guardian Children's Fiction Prize shortlist is out:

Solace of the Road, Siobhan Dowd
Then, Morris Gleitzman
Exposure, Mal Peet
Nation, Terry Pratchett

The winner will be announced on October 8th. And here's the longlist, if you want to see what was cut.

(And you know, I love Nation as much as anyone, but I am very pleased that the year is almost over and very very soon it will be too old to be eligible for any more awards. My fingers are tired of typing it's name over and over and over...)

Brooklyn Book Festival

2009-09-09T17:31:00.001-04:00

Here's another important YA-related-event-in-NYC reminder: The annual Brooklyn Book Festival is this Sunday, September 13th. It's all day long at Borough Hall (which means it's very close to the only Housing Works thrift store in Brooklyn, so save some time to make a trip there).

Check out just a few of the awesome authors participating in the various youth panels: Kate DiCamillo, Matt de la Peña, Coe Booth, M.T. Anderson, Laurie Halse Anderson, Margaret Peterson Haddix. And lots more. It'll be a loooong day, and I mean that in a good way. Full details at the link above, of course.

Recent Reading

2009-09-07T06:17:00.016-04:00

Skin Deep, E. M. Crane
It's a "languid read for introspective girls" —sez the SLJ review.
I read this one because Jacket Whys, a cool blog about YA book covers (really, that's way more interesting than it might sound), mentioned it as a best cover of 2008. I'm not sure I agree with that, but I hadn't even heard of the book before, yet when I saw it at the Strand for a buck fifty I recognized it from the post and snapped it right up.
It's one of those books where a girl with some problems befriends a cool adult (and her dog) who shows her another way to live (see also: Suite Scarlett, by Maureen Johnson). It's lovely, full of gardening and raku firing and medicinal teas and a small-town art scene.
I just couldn't get over how little Andrea was paid to be this woman's assistant. Everyone kept acting like 70 dollars a week was extravagant for a dog walking job, but that's only 10 bucks a day, and she wasn't walking the dog, she was spending hours a day caring for a cancer patient, and then entire days on the weekends doing all kinds of things. I mean, I'd do it for free, just to get to make the pottery and learn how to make teas that would heal my reproductive woes, but sheesh.

Finding Lubchenko, Michael Simmons
It's another kid with a lousy home life. Only more so. Evan's dad is being held without bail for a murder he probably didn't commit, but Evan unwittingly stole the laptop containing the evidence the police need to clear him. Handing it over now would mean his own little thieving operation would be revealed, so he goes on an international caper to solve things himself. Which mostly means he and his friends eat a lot of chinese food in Paris and go to clubs while waiting for clues to fall into their laps. Features gross overuse of the word "anyway" as a breezy sentence-starter (almost as grating as my own use of "so").

Total this week: 2
Total YTD: 62

Gordon Korman!

2009-09-06T16:47:00.003-04:00

So this week here in NYC, on Wednesday the 9th from 6-7:30 pm, it's Teen Author Reading Night at the Jefferson Market branch of NYPL.

There are plenty of teen author related events around town, and normally I wouldn't bother to mention it, but this time Mr. Gordon Korman is one of the featured authors, reading from his new book Pop. Now Gordon Korman is the guy who is single-handedly responsible for me feeling hopelessly inadequate for most of my life. Because when he was twelve years old, unlike myself, Gordon Korman was busy writing his first novel, This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, which was the start of the "Bruno and Boots" series featuring hilarious boarding school hijinks. I totally loved them when I was about eight or nine, but I just couldn't compete. My writing was trite and childish; it was very depressing.

He's written approximately a billion books since then, and lately he just keeps churning out the award-winners. Jerk! He didn't even have the decency to peak young and live out his adulthood bitter and washed-up. But he'll be in town, and he's a funny, talented guy, so go be dazzled!

P.S. Loads of other terrific authors will be there too:

Justine Larbalestier, Liar
David Levithan, Love is the Higher Law
E. Lockhart, The Treasure Map of Boys (Yay!)
Lauren McLaughlin, Recycler
Bennett Madison, The Blonde of the Joke
Dan Poblocki, The Stone Child
Scott Westerfeld, Leviathan

Reading Lists and Such

2009-09-05T12:12:00.006-04:00

When I started reading YA it was only just because I was tired of wondering what I would read next on the subway. I wanted a ready-made reading list that would never run out, and at the time I had just re-read a bunch of the Cormier books I had loved as a kid and was amazed at how well they held up. I wanted to see what was going on in the world of modern YA, so I figured I'd just read all the award winners, and at first it was simple: the Printz winners and honorees, the National Book Award winners and finalists, the LA Times Book Prize and the BBYA Top Ten.

Which is approximately 25 books a year, except that there's always a bunch of overlap, so it's more like 15 or 20 depending. When I started all this maybe four or five years ago, there were a hundred or so books on my list (at first I was only going back to 2000, which is when the Printz began). But then every year more were added of course, and I started paying attention to all kinds of other fun awards—genre awards and non-US awards and so on. It's more or less endless. And so I never did finish everything on that original list.

And now, to get back on track and because I keep accidentally picking up such disappointing books lately, I'm resurrecting my list. I just put what's left of it over in the sidebar there. There are 34 books on it right now, and hopefully there will be 0 by the end of the year. Some are from the last couple years and some go back a little farther. I've been avoiding The Ropemaker for years, for instance, and I'm not even sure why.

So. As I do every Saturday morning, I trudged through the park to the library, planning for an extra-long bath later so I can start making a dent. But the library is closed today. Eff!! I forgot about the stupid holiday closing. It's closed until Tuesday. Now what'll I read all weekend??

Unrelatedly, I think this weekend I'll finally pull up my tomato plants. They're so diseased, and get sadder looking by the day, but they still have fruit on them and I've been hoping they'd hold on until it all ripened. But I just picked the last brandywines and gorged myself on tomato slices and fresh mozzarella. Really, I can't believe how delicious it was. They were the ones I was most looking forward to, so maybe it's time to put the plants out of their misery now. Poor guys. Next year will be better. I saved plenty of seeds and am not quite so incompetent anymore.

Booktrust longlist

2009-09-05T05:07:00.008-04:00

The new award season is almost here! I've just started adding a couple of new dates to the calendar in the sidebar, and of course there are many more to come. While you're waiting for the good stuff, here's Booktrust Teenage Prize's 2009 longlist:

Auslander, Paul Dowswell
The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, Chris Priestley
Numbers, Rachel Ward
Ostrich Boys, Keith Gray
Furnace: Lockdown, Alexander Gordon Smith
Three Ways to Snog an Alien, Graham Joyce
The Ant Colony, Jenny Valentine
Bloodchild, Tim Bowler
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, Helen Grant
Solitaire, Bernard Ashley
The Ask and the Answer, Patrick Ness
Exposure, Mal Peet

This and that

2009-08-31T19:32:00.004-04:00

You MUST go visit Scott Westerfeld's blog! He's posted the first chapter from the audiobook of Leviathan, and it's read by Alan Cumming!! It doesn't get cooler than that. Also you can download Uglies for free (though you have to give Simon and Schuster your email address...), which I promptly did in case I ever get around to getting an e-reader.

Also, I had meant to post this ages ago, like back when it happened, but I just found a half-written post about it that I guess I never hit publish on. Nothing big, it's just a article in the NY Times about how the Brooklyn Public Library deals with complaints about books. The cool part is a slideshow of documents from the archive—actual user complaints and the library's responses. They respond thoroughly and respectfully to even the most crackpot of complaints.

You know, summer's about over; the air is (temporarily) crisp, and it's getting dark soo much earlier already. For me that means working five day weeks again. With just two day weekends in between. Barbaric! On the plus side, an extra commute means an extra commute's worth of reading time, and cooler temperatures mean more time spent warming up in the tub with a book. So loads more reading time, hopefully some rad website changes, and an all-new YA awards season is right around the corner. There's much to look forward to after a lazy and change-filled summer. See you there!

WFMAD--it's not too late!

2009-08-30T12:07:00.004-04:00

It's almost September, which is shocking in itself, and which also means that I completely failed in my plan to keep up with Laurie Halse Anderson's WFMAD in August challenge. It's like Maureen Johnson's BEDA all over again, only more so. (I'm not really a writer, but we all need a hobby.)

So I didn't actually write a word, but much like watching exercise videos from the couch, I did read every one of her daily entries, full of inspiring writer-y quotes and prompts for the still-uninspired. Plus lots of news about her garden and Bitch magazine (she's a fan!), so it was like all my favorite things at once.

So the point about September is that it's a whole new month, with 30 new days in it, and all of Laurie's numbered posts still exist, so I'm going to do it then. After 7 and a half solid hours of writing spread out over a month my sci-fi trilogy should be well under way. You should do it too! Start here, and go from there.

CBCA Book of the Year

2009-08-30T09:36:00.008-04:00

The Children's Book Council of Australia's Book of the Year has been announced (ages ago). The winner in the Older Readers category is Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan.

I haven't read this; I didn't even know it existed until now, but as soon as I post this and take a shower I am going to head straight to the bookstore to buy it. If it's by Shaun Tan, it must be terrific.

Stuff I Read, vol. whatever

2009-08-30T08:55:00.005-04:00

It's that time again—where I try to remember what I've read since the last time I posted a list of what I read!

It hasn't been much actually, because I think I've been a little glum, or at least I've been re-reading and re-reading my little pile of frayed comfort books from way back. Adult titles, though, so they don't count here. Here's the YA, most of which I already wrote about, but didn't tally:

Nicholas Dane, Melvin Burgess
The Ghost Behind the Wall, Melvin Burgess
The Cry of the Wolf, Melvin Burgess
Forever, Judy Blume
Knights of the Hill Country, Tim Tharp
The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
Gathering Blue, Lois Lowry
Ender in Exile, Orson Scott Card
The Carbon Diaries, 2015, Saci Lloyd
Black Rabbit Summer, Kevin Brooks

Ack! It's useless. If it isn't something I already mentioned here or just finished, I can't remember. I'm sitting here trying to visualize past stacks of library books, but it's not going so well. So:
Total since whenever: 10
Total YTD: 60
*sigh*

Tim Tharp!

2009-08-17T22:42:00.003-04:00

Tim Tharp needs more attention! Why isn't he up there with the Chris Crutchers and the John Greens? Is it because of the southern accent?

I loved his National Book Award nominated The Spectacular Now, and I've finally read his earlier Knights of the Hill Country, and it's so great too. There just aren't enough books out there about regular decent boys doing stuff and figuring out their place in their world and having regular complicated feelings about their friends and their families and girls. Hampton's such a good guy, but in the way that real complex guys are good guys, not in a fake lesson-y way. Plus there's football—lots and lots of football. I hear that boy readers like sports, and I also hear that lots of people are very very concerned with boys' lack of interest in reading, so why isn't everyone falling over themselves to get this one into people's hands? I don't understand it.

p.s. Coincidentally, I read this just as Netflix had delivered two discs worth of PBS's "Country Boys" to my house, and they went well together. It turns out the whole show's available online.

Robert Cormier! Melvin Burgess!

2009-08-17T21:59:00.004-04:00

I've been a little Burgess-obsessed lately (I keep meaning to post a proper write-up of Nicholas Dane...), so imagine how happy I was to stumble upon this old article on the internet! The original master of dark, complicated, much-banned YA (pictured on the right) and the current one (looking up) talking in the same room at the same time. Awesome.

There's been a burst of internet articles lately/always about how awful and inappropriate for "children" recent YA books are. Like this tiresome piece that all the bloggers but me finished blogging about weeks and weeks ago—"Rape, abortion, incest. Is this what CHILDREN should read?" Boringly predictably, much of the article that's not spent mis-reading Tender Morsels is spent mis-reading Melvin Burgess's entire body of work, which in real life is so gentle and affirming and honest that it feels terribly cheap to just inaccurately sum up the skeleton of his plots and leave it at that. But whatever. He can obviously take it. And the kids who need to read his books seem to find them.

Virginia Euwer Wolff Interview Alert

2009-08-11T21:35:00.006-04:00

Dave Miller of "Think Out Loud," a show on Oregon public radio, was nice enough to let me know about a very exciting show coming up this Thursday, the 13th: Virginia Euwer Wolff will be on! I think readers of this blog already know how I feel about her books, so you know I'll be there. ~~(Whenever that actually is. I can't seem to figure out what time it's on, but I assume it'll be listenable on the website at some point). So tune in!~~ Yeah, it's up there. Go listen! She's so much more genteel than I was expecting.

Hugo Awards

2009-08-11T15:35:00.008-04:00

The Hugo winners were announced over the weekend. It was an exciting year with two of the five nominations for best novel going to books for young readers (and another—Scalzi's Zoe's Tale—can sort of go either way). To no one's surprise, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book won. Like that guy needs another award...

And for those with longish attention spans, here's a video from the 2008 National Book Festival wherein he talks about and reads from The Graveyard Book:

Forever

2009-08-04T10:16:00.003-04:00

So I was off reading Forever. It turns out that I had already read it after all (but when??). It wasn't until I got to the part where she's making the Planned Parenthood appointment that I started having vague, vague memories of having read it before. But now I see/remember what the fuss is about. It rivals this blog's namesake for best semi-graphic, awkward-but-sweet loss of virginity scene.

(And the BPL central branch didn't have any English-language copies of The Outsiders this weekend, so that will have to wait. But, really, I'll be chipping away at the YA classics for awhile. It'll have to be an ongoing project.)

Must. Read. The classics.

2009-07-30T21:04:00.000-04:00

I have a horrible confession to make: I've never read Forever.

I've also never read The Outsiders. It's because I was too busy reading The Girls of Canby Hall series and Caprice brand teen romances when I was thirteen.

Still, I'm tired of living a lie, pretending I'm allowed to type stuff about teen fiction on the internet under the circumstances. I won't be back until I've caught up on my reading.

Thrash

2009-07-29T00:05:00.006-04:00

The system works!
Now all I've got to do is write it.

Green Tomatoes

2009-07-27T20:40:00.004-04:00

I really mean to stop posting about my garden. I really do, but the thing is, it's all new to me and it's taking up more of my mental energy than reading YA is and so this is just how it is for a minute.

The thing is, I really effed up my tomatoes. How was I to know that just because all instructions say to plant them 2 feet apart and in cages or sturdily staked that I should plant them two feet apart and sturdily stake them?? Rules are for suckers with space to burn, I thought, and all I've got is this tiny Brooklyn patch and the plants were quite small when I started... So now they're really crammed in there—7 plants in the space 2 should have been, and they're way bigger than I thought they'd get and the bamboo that was supposed to be holding them up isn't as sturdy as I thought and the whole mess was collapsing under its own weight. Branches were snapping off and all light to the rest of the garden was blocked by this dense jungle. Heavy rains the last coupla days were the final straw.

So, I tried to fix things tonight, laboriously untangling all these intertwined branches, trimming fruitless branches and restaking everything slightly more neatly. It's still a mess, but it's better. What happened though is that in the process a bunch of fruit fell off and some stems got broken and also several branches had already snapped off and I didn't even know because they were being held upright in the tangle.

So now I've got myself an unexpected pile of green tomatoes, which is disappointing, but it's still a harvest! I've been googling for good recipes. So far I've decided to make a gratin and some green-tomato-lemon marmalade.

RITA Award Winners

2009-07-26T19:16:00.003-04:00

Oh, and according to my dwindling list of upcoming events over there on the right, the RITA award winners were announced last week. In the young adult category it's Hell Week by Rosemary Clement-Moore.

And one of these days I'm going to get around to updating my little list with some events that are actually in the future. One of these days...

Amelia Bloomer Project

2009-07-26T18:42:00.003-04:00

How'd I go this long without knowing about the Amelia Bloomer Project?? I only just found out about it this morning during my bimonthly or so read-all-the-feminist-magazines-for-the-price-of-a-cup-of-coffee at the Barnes and Noble. [Remember when Venus used to be the coolest publication around? sigh...]

So in a sidebar to Ms. magazine's boring article about Twilight in which they recommended more feministy alternatives, they pointed me to the Amelia Bloomer Project website which, as part of the Feminist Task Force of the American Library Association's Social Responsibilities Round Table, has put out lists honoring feminist children's writing since 2002.

Here's the YA fiction list for 2009. Check out the site for descriptions of each book, the non-fiction list, and for past years' lists.

A Curse Dark as Gold, Elizabeth C. Bunce
Graceling, Kristin Cashore
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Girlwood, Claire Dean
The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom, Margarita Engle
Girl Overboard, Justina Chen Headley
White Sands, Red Menace, Ellen Klages
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart
The Shadow Speaker, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Living Dead Girl, Elizabeth Scott
Big Fat Manifesto, Susan Vaught
Climbing the Stairs, Padma Venkatraman
The Kayla Chronicles, Sherri Winston

Cover Art

2009-07-23T21:28:00.006-04:00

So Justine Larbalestier's upcoming Liar is getting loads of attention of late. I haven't read it yet since, despite my pleas, I haven't gotten my hands on a galley, but apparently the narrator is a short-haired African-American girl who's a compulsive liar. The US cover features a photograph of a long-haired white girl, causing readers to wonder a) if the narrator is lying about everything, including the basics of her identity (apparently not) and/or b) if the publisher just wanted to have a white face on the cover, no matter the content, because people don't buy books with black people on the covers (duh).

There's an article in Publisher's Weekly here, and Larbalestier blogged about it yesterday. Plus there are tons of comments and everyone's got an opinion about race in publishing and authors' lack of control over how their books are represented and bad covers in general. It's all very interesting.

Warning! Reading "Baby Be-Bop" May Damage Your Mental Well-Being

2009-07-22T16:25:00.003-04:00

Man, this book-banning article is cracking me up for some reason (why are there so many of these lately??):

Ginny Maziarka, 49, said the books in the section of the library aimed at children aged 12 to 18 included homosexual and heterosexual content she thought was inappropriate for youths.
She and her husband also asked the library to obtain books about homosexuality that affirmed heterosexuality, such as titles written by "ex-gays," Maziarka said.
"All the books in the young-adult zone that deal with homosexuality are gay-affirming. That's not balance," she said.

Sounds reasonable! So, does anyone know an anti-gay YA book written by an ex-gay? Just asking... Also, since balance is the goal, can we please legally obligate librarians to also stock up on pro-date rape books? I want to make sure the kids in my life know all sides of the issue.

Meanwhile:

Outside West Bend, the fight caught the attention of Robert Braun, who, with three other Milwaukee-area men, filed a claim against West Bend calling for one of the library's books to be publicly burned, along with financial damages.
The four plaintiffs -- who describe themselves as "elderly" in their complaint --- claim their "mental and emotional well-being was damaged by [the] book at the library."
The claim, unconnected to the Maziarkas, says the book "Baby Be-bop" -- a fictional piece about a homosexual teenager -- is "explicitly vulgar, racial and anti-Christian."

Baby Be-Bop, of all things! Who knew such a sweet, poetic 80-page book had the power to force fragile adults to read it against their will.

Melvin Burgess and Tomato Blight

2009-07-17T18:37:00.011-04:00

Last week I read two Melvin Burgess books I'd not seen before. First, I read his first novel, The Cry of the Wolf, which is not the easiest book to find in the US. If I didn’t know, I would never have guessed it was a Burgess book, or that it was written in 1990 and not, say, 1965. It feels very old-fashioned both in its writing and in the sort of story it is. Even the cover is terribly old-timey (though later editions have incongruously updated designs.)

It’s about the last wild wolves in England, a small population that had survived undiscovered in a remote area until a strangely evil hunter learns of them and sets about killing them, pack by pack, just for the satisfaction of wiping out the species. All is grimly going according to plan, except for one plucky cub who just won't die.

And then I read The Ghost Behind the Wall, where a small-for-his-age boy finds that he can crawl through his building's air ducts and peer into other tenants' apartments through the grates, and/or climb into the apartments and do various petty meannesses. And then he finds out that he's not alone up there...

It's sort of well known among those who know me that one of my biggest fears is of being watched. It's not a very attractive trait, I know, and of course the rational part of my head knows full well that no one actually cares enough about whatever boring thing I'm doing to go out of their way to watch. But obviously the thought of ghosts—which really are just invisible beings hovering about and spying, and possibly also dead relatives judging you—are a special terror for me. Also I live in an apartment. With air ducts. So it was horrifying read, even though it quickly enough turns into a story that's not much about ghosts or mean boys at all.

So, perhaps not his two best efforts ever, but they can't all be Bloodtide. This week I'm looking to read any other of Burgess' books I've not yet read. Nicholas Dane is on ~~it's~~ its [ack!] way to me as we speak!

Additionally, I've got the tomato blight! Check out this pitiful specimen that was looking nowhere near this bad just a week ago. Shoulda kept a closer eye on it.. I had to "rogue" it today (which is what I have to say instead of "pulled it out by the roots" now that I'm pretending to be a horticulturalist.) Fingers crossed that the rest of my little guys didn't catch it.