Undusty New Books

Australia Trip, Part 1.5

2012-02-22T14:06:00.001-07:00

Since I last posted, C has kindly shared a few pictures with me. So, here are a few from the last post, when we were in Melbourne with K and I didn't have a camera. But just a few.

An echidna. They are mammals that lay eggs. Wikipedia says that they have a four-branched penis. That was not on display. I thought they were poisonous, but a search says no. They do have spurs that would probably hurt.

Some elephants. If I wrote a picture book, it would be about a wild and wacky elephant. I think Mo Willems has that locked up, though.

A curious little penguin. The ones at the Melbourne zoo were in a fenced enclosure, and could come up right to the front of it. Little penguins burrow to lay eggs, so the dry, grassy, dirty exhibit isn't so different from how they'd otherwise live on land. This kind is about a foot tall and blue-ish.

The view from our hotel. Queen Victoria Market is at the bottom of the photo.

A view from the Eureka Skydeck of the Yarra River and waterfront.

Another view from the sky. In the lower left, you can see the Shrine of Remembrance.

Parks and sports complex. The one that looks like golf balls is Etihad Stadium.

I think that's the Melbourne Government House. Because I just blearily followed people around on this leg, I didn't ever really get oriented to what was what and what was where. K pointed out that Melbourne is a mix of modern and older architecture, but I really liked that and I think it works.

Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson

2012-02-21T11:55:00.001-07:00

Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam) is something I picked up as an e-book, and one that probably expected to be different from what it was. The story follows a handful of main characters in Antarctica for various reasons--adventure tour guide, McMurdo base employee, visiting artist, politician's assistant--and follows them through some major events, including a winter storm, an act of eco-tourism, and an operational shakeup of the base.

It's interesting to see what in the near-future tech from the last century came to pass; the characters use wrist phones and there's a reference to modem hookups on the golf course. We went in another direction, technologically, but I'm fascinated by what became and what didn't. And, even with futuristic inventions, the fate of any human in frigid Antarctica is touch and go--it doesn't take long to freeze to death. My biggest snicker was a reference to "secret masters of McMurdo," a reference to the "secret masters of fandom" who plan fan conferences (but, mainly, WorldCon), and the reference isn't entirely complimentary as used here.

I was seeking a little more tension and adventure, but truly, that wasn't promised. Instead, the journey was more a philosophical one about the environment and the future of our planet. While this is marketed for adults, and the adults are really adults, I don't think there's anything surprising for the mature teen reader. Offer this as a pairing for Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi or The Carbon Diaries by Saci Lloyd.

Australia Trip, Part 1

2012-02-20T17:35:00.001-07:00

The first thing: It's been a while since I took this trip, so I imagine that I'll be editing the posts about it to include forgotten details and pictures from other people's phones. I had expected to have more access to the internet while I was traveling, and more energy to post about the trip while it was happening. The best laid travel plans...

The Preparation
My brother has this very nice (recent) tradition of cycling through family members and taking someone on vacation once a year or so. In 2011, it was my turn--but I hadn't really thought about what I wanted to do. I did know a couple of things: I wouldn't have time to learn or brush up on a language, and I wouldn't have much time to make plans, I didn't have many available stretches of time, and for this trip, I wasn't really up for too much culture shock. I have plans, plans, I tell you, to get some of the last, but I figured I'd be overwhelmed enough, this time, visiting a country that operated much like my own. My brother had visited Australia before, I have a friend there, and so on.

The first order of business: a passport! This was pretty easy, though I decided to take it to a large courthouse in my home state where I forgot my belt and set off their metal detector. (Sorry!) The next was reading up on Australia, and then I was completely overwhelmed. I mean, it's a huge country, and I didn't know what to do first. Luckily, brother C had some favorite spots and some he didn't think I'd mind missing, and took our plans in hand.

As the trip crept up on me, I spent my last hours buying travel insurance, trying to find travel products (mostly unsuccessfully), and trying to edit my suitcase. I eventually got the total weight of my bag, which was pretty heavy even empty, to just over 30 lbs. for a three-ish week trip, and that included the weight of my backpack (I just took my coat and a small bag on the plane), presents, heat therapy items, and stuff like travel-size packets of liquid laundry detergent, as well as the weight of almost-used-up toiletries that I planned to use up and discard along the way.

If I had to do it again:

I'd collect more wash-and-drip travel clothes, including pajamas. It's nice to be able to squirt a little shampoo on your shirt, rinse it, and have it be dry in the morning; a couple of the items I took had to be laundered in a washing machine and dried.
I'd definitely take along laundry detergent! I had some foil packs of Tide from Target, which meant I saved money and didn't have to worry about allergic reactions to other brands.
I'd definitely take along these favorite products: a fold-up windbreaker/rain jacket, which warms you up fast; a fold-up shopping bag, which you can tuck in a purse or pocket and use to collect your purchases or to carry a picnic (especially when a bag isn't otherwise offered); a travel adapter, which was all I needed to run dual-voltage electronics; a dual-voltage e-reader, which, sure, won't work on takeoff and landing, but you probably have in-flight magazines for that, and they don't take up as much space--I'd have needed another suitcase just for the books I read; and a Donner bag, which is big enough for papers, camera, and wallet with two water bottles on the sides, but not so big it's hard to stash.
I'd still make room for plenty of pairs of fresh socks and at least one alternative pair of shoes, because that's a way to feel fresh the next day.

So! The weekend before I left, I was running around town because I had to go to multiple stores to get things I needed, my bag was too heavy, I had to print out my itinerary, I had to get another one-way to Los Angeles because I found out that my first leg was late with regularity and I wasn't sure I'd have enough time, etc. etc., and then Qantas went on strike.

I understand the strike to be complicated on both sides of the table, and that's all I'll say. I searched for alternative routes and information; would I need a visa to fly via Guangzhou, Dubai, or Frankfurt? It was probably a useless search, because so many folks had been stranded long enough to get the same idea. In the end, Qantas started flying again about 24 hours before my flight from Los Angeles departed.

The Tuesday that I left, I was anxious. I'd stayed up too late attending to last-minute details, gotten up too early to try to fit in a little extra work before leaving. Once in the office, I felt awful, which was just part of some health issues that started hitting hard about that time. I wasn't sure--go to the emergency room and maybe miss my trip, or hope things cleared up? I don't know what I should have done, but I eventually decided that I had some insurance, and to go to the airport. I was pretty miserable and out of it for most of the trip, but I wasn't going to miss it, either. Once I got in the car, things started feeling peaceful, and that's how I approached my travels. Even the most annoying of annoyances were part of the journey, and melted away within minutes.

Flying
I don't remember much of the trip to LAX. I know I spent some time with an agent trying to find out if my return domestic leg would be valid, because I wasn't taking the outbound leg (75% not on time, so no thanks). Both parts were on different airlines. The answer was no, and yes, and no, and I gave up. I'd upgraded and thought I was in line to board at the right time, and the gate agent yelled at me for trying to get on too soon; I blame my mistake both on unclear information about what the upgrade was and the gate agent's inability to use the PA system. I snacked on some fruit and cheese and I think I napped a little.

At LAX, I retrieved my suitcase and--I think--I changed my shoes. I arrived at terminal 7 and was to depart from Tom Bradley International, which is basically terminal 3.5. I was in no shape to pick up my suitcase to get on a bus, and the bus ran the long way around. After passing C, who arrived after I did, we finally met up in the right place.

The Qantas agent, whose name I have sadly forgotten, got us checked in. We then went upstairs to the food court, which is outside security, and I had a 7UP and C had--an ice cream, I think. I was sort of too hungry to eat, and I knew we'd get food on the plane. After a while, with nothing else to do and nowhere to sit, we went through security and all the way out to the end of the terminal. On the way out, I bought some JellyBellys. Obviously, my nutrition at this point has something to be desired. I did feel better with some extra sugar, though.

Our flight was delayed for a time, for something having to do with cargo, I think. I did, but should not have, spend some time on my cell phone. Finally, finally, about 45 minutes past pumpkin time in the middle of the night, we were called to board.

Our original departure time.

C and I were fortunate (and willing to pay) to get two seats together in the back of the plane where it turned into two seats instead of three next to the window, so were were some of the last to board. Our passports were checked again (by the same guy who checked us in), and we were pulled aside so that information could be "added to our travel documents." Others had been pulled aside too, and we had a few minutes' wait in the jetway. Eventually, a beleaguered Qantas employee informed us that the seatback entertainment system at our seats was broken. Obviously, there's nothing that can be done at this point, and both C and I were ready with our own personal entertainment in the form of music and books, so I, at least, was unfazed. After all, I just wanted to eat something and go to sleep, and we indicated that it wasn't a problem, which in turn seemed to faze the manager; I think she'd been getting an earful.

Next, we met a group of TSA agents, who grabbed my passport out of my hands roughly, looked at it (for what, I don't know, because no one compared my photo to me), and shoved it back into my hands. I'm not sure why exit control has been instituted in the U.S., and under whose authority.

Finally! Finally! We were on a plane--a BIG plane. The Airbus A380, back in our group of two seats. We had some overhead space, to our surprise, and the extra seat in front of us. The sides of the top folded inward, and the seatbacks were extra-thin, so there was knee room and neck support and a surprisingly comfortable space. And there were little travel kits and blankets!

A blanket. On a m-f airplane.

We were off--and so were the lights. The problem with the entertainment system extended to the lights and airflow, so C and I started filling out our arrival cards by cellphone light. I think the Qantas crew were horrified, but seriously, it was an adventure. They turned more lights back on to serve dinner because a chunk of the lighting in the tail area wasn't working. And they handled things admirably, because the plane was full of people who'd been stranded overseas due to the strike (and weren't happy, which I understand), and then those in the back were really angry. Crewmembers dropped off some duty-free coupons for our trouble, and checked on us repeatedly throughout the night to apologize, even waking us to do so.

Anyway, we were up and on our way, and I set my watch to Melbourne time, 8ish at night (the next day!). We were served dinner, which was corn/edamame/red pepper salad; a choice of chicken cacciatore with orzo and greens or mahi mahi with fennel and capers, mashed potatoes, and broccoli, and I picked the second and it was tasty; caramel cream cake; a Valrhona chocolate (which got trapped under my entree and was a squashy mess when I located it); coffee, hot chocolate, and regular or peppermint tea. I had a lemon squash, like a 7UP with only lemon and no lime. Mmm. One could also have any of a variety of alcoholic and non alcoholic drinks, but I passed on even the nice Australian wines, because I was too tired and dehydrated during this trip.

It took a while before the carts made it to the back of the plane, because someone had a medical emergency, the sort where they ask if there's a doctor on board, midway through the service. I don't know what happened. I was expecting us to land in Hawaii, perhaps, but we didn't.

Eventually, we ate and were cleared, and the cabin crew brought us little bags of snacks. Coming from the U.S., this was bottled water, pretzels, and little Hershey bars. I stowed mine away, found my sleep mask, and did the thing I never do in the U.S.: tilted my seat back and went to bed.

I woke up only to use the restroom (and when the crew was worried that I might not have been given duty-free coupons), and slept for about six hours, my record for plane sleeping. It was dark when I woke up around 3 a.m. Melbourne time, and I was RAVENOUS. C generously gave me his snack pack when I'd eaten mine, and I drowsed while my stomach growled through to about 6 a.m. (I didn't have much food on the plane because Australia has strict-ish rules on bringing even packaged foods in, and I didn't want to waste anything.) This all went by in a sort of haze, because as I mentioned vaguely earlier, I wasn't feeling well at all. I half-napped, half watched our progress on the in-flight map on someone's entertainment system a few rows ahead. And around 6 a.m., the cabin crew came by to wake us with ORANGE JUICE.

It was so weird. I had a pillow and a blanket and food. I mean, I remember the better days of plane travel in the U.S., but it was weird. I think they brought coffee around too, but fair warning that while the coffee I had in Australia was mostly the most delicious thing I have ever had to drink, on airplanes it was some of the worst instant ever.

Breakfast was juice, fruit salad, a cranberry-orange muffin, yogurt (mine had popped open, which seemed to be the case throughout this trip on airplanes), teas and coffees or other drinks, and a choice of cereal/milk (featuring the first appearance of Sultana Bran) or an asparagus omelette with bacon rashers, slow roasted tomatoes, and button mushrooms. I chose the eggs, and they were great, though I was suspicious because the asparagus were no longer green. C was a bit green, not being a breakfast person and not able to sleep on airplanes. Here's where I mention that the only reason I did was because I took a half dose of sleeping pills, and it was worth it.

We landed--a bit early? A bit late? I've forgotten. As you come into Melbourne, it's beautifully green and open, and you skim over the tips of trees as you hit the runway and taxi to the gate. It took a while for the plane to unload, and it was cheerier; the last couple of hours had been a party, with homebound Australians wandering the aisles, shaking hands, and planning playgroups for their kids. A lot of families had been split up to get on this flight, one of the first operating after the strike, and almost home, there was a party mood. I folded up my blanket and started up the aisle and was horrified--the angry girl behind C had been using the space between him and the window as a trash pile. There were blankets and pillows flung all over the plane, stacks of trash spilling into the aisles, discarded...everything, everywhere. It gave me new respect for the crew who ferried us for 15+ hours without a riot. Ha.

Out of the gate, you follow a maze of shopping (duty-free?) and then the customs lines. It was a bit of a wait to get through, and we were embarrassed to have incomplete cards. I didn't know what state I was visiting! But we were waved through, stopped a couple of times for checks, and went to retrieve our bags. Morning in Melbourne is a rush, and the bag claim area was a zoo. We managed to get our things and get into the end of a line that wrapped around the hall and, eventually, they let us out the door, where we pushed our messy, tired selves up next to a bench and I went to find K. I was looking for someone, possibly with pink hair, and she had black!

Melbourne, Pronounced Mel-Bun

I excused myself to the restroom, having not been able to find one after getting off the plane, and having not brushed my teeth in far too long. I was sleepy and muzzy and I could not figure out the toilet, much to my chagrin. Here was one of the things that had been an attraction--a familiar restroom system--and I can't figure it out. Finally, I read the fine print on the wall, and I learn that there are two buttons--a "half flush" and a "full flush." It takes me longer to figure out that this is not the same thing for every toilet! This isn't the first time I've seen something like it, but it's a good idea, and one I think would be a good idea in the U.S., even when we're not in a drought.

I give K a book that's not out in Australia yet and some champagne I got with the duty-free coupons and we head out. She's been able to park very close to the terminal, and has a very cute, wee car. I manage to confuse the driver and passenger side, heh. It's sunny, then cloudy, and a little cool. It's the time of the Melbourne Cup, a big deal and a local holiday. We drive past the cheesestick and toward Melbourne. Perhaps because I'm tired and perhaps because K is a good driver and perhaps because we're on a divided road, I get used to the reversed driver's side very quickly.

K takes us directly to the Melbourne Zoo, one of the best in Australia. My cell phone has died and I don't own a camera, but C takes some pictures. I pay the entry fee with some Australian money. It feels like plastic (well, it is plastic) and the coins confuse me at first, but after a while, I really like the convenience of $1 and $2 coins. And they mostly have interesting scenes and cute animals on them.

Inside the zoo, there are loads of things to see, and even with some school groups there, it's not very busy. I enjoy the kind but no-nonsense moms of toddlers that I see--you've fallen? You're all right. Up, have a second, and let's go. You stepped in a puddle? Well, your feet will be wet for a while, and then they'll be dry again. It simply strikes me as different from what I often see.

Zoos in Australia are pretty awesome. They seem to let you get closer to the animals without disturbing them, and a lot of them have open spaces, where the people are on a dedicated path, but animals can wander where they'd like to go. Usually, this means that animals like emus and kangaroos can walk right up to you, if they want. I enjoyed watching some very gregarious river otters and a busy echidna, laughed at a pack of African dogs running laps, spied birds in their aviaries, and walked right up to the fence for some little penguins (fairy penguins), who were initially curious, but then found a recycle bin more to their liking. There was a neat orangutan enclosure, too, where an orangutan crawled out of a hole, glared at everyone, and then grabbed a burlap sack and draped it into what some friends of mine call "closed for business," meaning a tight-pulled hood so that you can't see anyone and they can't see you.

What I didn't know at this point is this--well, two things. One, a lot of things in Australia can kill you. Like, kill you dead. Right now. Two, every zoo and animal park you visit will tell you something a little bit different about the animals, including the ones that can kill you dead. The numbers shift, the reasons for behaviors shift, the habitats change, just a little.

After a while, C and I are really drooping, and we ended up at the Lakeside Bistro in the park, which serves possibly the nicest food I will ever eat in a zoo. I have a Pepsi for the caffeine and a Morrocan chicken pie. I do not know what makes it Morrocan, but it comes with a salad and some fries. Two important things: one, your salad comes lightly dressed, and from what I can tell, that means lemon and oil and mixed greens, and two, nothing that is supposed to be greasy will be greasy. Your french fries with be golden, crisp, and delicious, and not oily, soggy, or sad.

I...think what we did next was drive into the Central Business District and go to our hotels, which were just a few doors apart. C and I stayed at the Central Sky Lounge Apartment Hotel, which looks a little spare in pictures but suited us well. We had a great view, we had enough space, and the medicine cabinet was so big, it was better than counter space. We checked in and stumbled upstairs, and after a couple of tries, I got my phone plugged in and charging--and on 220v, that happens very quickly! Also, I don't think we stayed anywhere we weren't required to put a room key into a special holder to activate all or most of the electricity, and there was a while when I, at least, was completely confused. Without C, I might never have figured it out! Or I might have, but I was too tired for coherent thought. It took me so long to organize myself that I'm afraid we kept K waiting a few minutes longer than planned.

Once settled, we headed out, and I've forgotten the order of it all. I know that we took a trolley around the CBD, and it was like a streetcar in New Orleans, and that Melbourne was very cute. We walked along the Yarra River and eventually ended up at the Crown Casino, where there is a density of restaurants, and had fish and chips in the pub. This day, or another, we went to the Eureka Skydeck and looked all around at the Yarra River, and the city, and the cricket ground, and the like.

About this time, we went home, though it was probably only around 8 p.m. Our hotel bed was something I'd always thought silly: two twins strapped together, but the upside of that is you don't feel anyone moving around if you're sharing. I don't know if anybody was wiggly, because I was asleep about three minutes after my head hit the pillow.

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

2012-02-20T14:24:00.000-07:00

Ah, the beginning of the year, when I always have this idea about spring cleaning and books--

Well, it's sort of working: I've read a book from my bedside pile and a book from the "read and sort" pile, and started re-sorting a bookshelf into "those books you can never get rid of, and books that you need to read."

One of the books I picked out of the read and sort pile was The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith (Little, Brown). Hadley misses the plane to her father's wedding, and when she does, she meets Oliver, on his way back to London to see family too. Their connection, made at first sight but deepening as they hurtle across the Atlantic, seems ephemeral when they lose track of each other upon landing. Somehow, though, they're drawn together over the next twenty-four hours, as Hadley meets her new stepmother for the first time, and Oliver says goodbye to someone.

I wasn't all that sure about the premise of this book, even as I went along. I kept thinking that surely I'd get bored reading about two people sitting next to each other on a plane--no changes in scenery, not much to do but talk, and honestly, I hate talking to people on planes. Yet, this works, and the personal journeys intertwine in a satisfying and romantic way. It was nice to read about two people who have individual personalities finding (young) love.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

2012-02-10T14:02:00.001-07:00

This is one of those "everyone has read it but me" books that sounded interesting, but languished on my e-reader. And then I started it while waiting at the doctor's office, an experience much like the time I read The Stand while I had the flu.

Henrietta Lacks had cervical cancer--a particularly aggressive strain. Despite the care she received at Johns Hopkins (segregated and with little bedside manner, but using the known medicine of the time), Henrietta died...and her cells lived. A swipe of her cells produced the first "immortal" cells: cells that keep dividing in medium and don't die.

Henrietta's cells were taken at a time when no consent was required, so changes in medical ethics are a part of this book. Henrietta's life, and the lives of her descendents, is another. The heart, though, is the tension between ends of the spectrum in the question of whether it's okay that Henrietta and her family were never recognized or compensated when her cells have been part of the last 60ish years of really important medical breakthroughs.

I found it fascinating, and I think this is a really interesting pick for book clubs. (I totally missed the original wave of popularity, but this is on my to-give list for the future.)

The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone

2012-02-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

In January, I tend to read adult fiction and nonfiction, and I spent a few minutes rearranging my to-read/to donate/to give away/to keep shelves. One book that looked accessible was--at right around 200 pages--The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone.

This is a pretty depressing book. Jacob is in juvie, which is like bad high school--only worse, because you can't leave, have less privacy than normal, are surrounded by (other) criminals, and so on. He earned his way there when he committed a robbery and assault, though vandalism and drugs might have sent him to the inside soon enough.

Jacob reminded me of Holden Caulfield--strike one, because I always want to punch him in the...elbow. Strike two: when I went to look up his name, all I saw were reviews about how funny the book was, meaning, obviously, that I didn't get it. I think this is fine, actually; it happens about twice a year that I just don't get something considered wildly funny by critics everywhere.

I point this out, I suppose, because we seem to be at a low point in the cycle of "no bad reviews," which often boils down to "no negative opinions," even though negative reviews seem to increase sales for most books. I'd rather feast on a variety of books and opinions that starve on the fear of engaging honestly with media.

The Way We Fall

2012-01-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

I have been burned by those Publishers Weekly e-mail blasts before. A perfect first chapter that degenerated into an implausible book, an ad for something that sounded right up my alley (but the ad lied), for stuff that has the marketing dollars but isn't more than a copycat.

However.

I got, and maybe you got, the ad for Megan Crewe's The Way We Fall (Hyperion), and lo and behold, there it was, next to my bed, in the reading pile. I've read blog posts and things by Megan Crewe, and I recognized her name, and I've been meaning to read something of hers for a while, so it was very easy to pick the book up--and very hard to put it down.

If you're tired of not knowing how the apocalypse happened, if you're tired of fast-forwarding to the point where the government is only a whacked-out dystopia, if you love stuff like The Hot Zone and The Stand, if you enjoy Robin Cook, well: I think you'll like this. Kaelyn's friend's dad is first. He's acting weird, and then he's dead. And then everyone on the island off Canada is stuck, the ferries stopped, the soldiers gone. The rate of survival is abysmally low.

But this isn't just action/adventure; Kaelyn's relationships with her former best friend and his girlfriend, her family (including the cousin she must care for), and the people she used to know before this all happened are complicated and rich. This is exactly what teen speculative fiction should look like: a mix of realistic relationships and sciences/futures/what-ifs.

For those of you doing collection development, Kaelyn is half black, half white. (It's not clear from the cover or a plot point, so it might be easy to miss; that said, I do like the cover, because it's not a girl in a flowy ballgown.)

Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History

2012-01-10T11:32:00.001-07:00

Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell covers the 2003 diamond (and other pretty things) heist in Antwerp that is still one of the largest thefts ever. This book gives readers a close-up look at how the perpetrators plotted and carried out the job, from how they obtained blueprints to how they, in the end, screwed up and only sort of got caught.

I really got into the parts that chronicled how the thieves bypassed the vault's security, and enjoyed the analysis of how the building housing a number of gem and jewelry dealers didn't live up to its secure potential. The inside peek at the diamond industry, too, was informative. The writing is a bit repetitive--it's necessary to repeat some details for the reader to recall an important detail, but I thought that sentences and paragraphs came back pretty much wholesale.

Still, if you're interested in an exciting read that goes well beyond petty crime, I recommend this.

Please, Sir, Can I Have No More?

2012-01-04T13:19:00.001-07:00

In 2012, what do you want to stop seeing?

For me, it's...

Looking in mirrors.

Strange things happening--strange things that the protagonist is not overly concerned about, but that would freak out a real person.

No driving reason for the book revealed by a (generous) page forty.

Science that isn't based on or spinning off of any actual science.

Specific writing tics, especially involving the construction "Doing this, I did this other thing at the same time (even though it is physically impossible)."

Disembodied body parts. ("Green and blue eyes met across the room. Two heavy feet walked up behind me. A pair of strong biceps fluttered becomingly.")

Series with brave, bold, ambitious plots in book 1, but the rest of the series acts to reverse all of the bad things, rather than asking the protagonist to grow or change or understand.

Teenagers utterly SO WHINY BORED with their comfortable lives.

You?

The Game/Invitation to the Game by Monica Hughes

2012-01-02T13:00:00.001-07:00

Darnit. No images.

The Game, or Invitation to the Game by Monica Hughes (Simon and Schuster - Simon Pulse, re-edition) is a dystopia that was originally published in the 80s, and it revolves around a group of about ten kids who graduate from school and go out into the world. Except, in this future, your schooling is about the only thing determines your job, and despite good performance, these kids have been designated as Unemployed, a timely (for today) connection to the recession, and boy, do all the employed workers haaaaate them. The group ends up in an old warehouse, scavenging a little food and belongings where they can. Eventually, they are invited to the mysterious Game, where they enter a virtual reality and get to stay in that world until they endanger themselves. And then they lose. And lose again. But what’s the point of winning? Could it be that the Game isn't just virtual, and that their survival depends on surviving the game--and working together?

I loved the idea, but the dialogue is so stilted and old-fashioned I mostly had to read around it, and the ultimate ending was far too neat for my tastes. It's worth a look if you're very interested in dystopia or looking at SF over the years--or, if you're me, still searching for a SF book from when you were a kid that had something to do with a Game that a girl could understand and a boy couldn't, and then they both escaped from...something, and the girl was really shocked when she bought food and found out it was rabbit.

Cybils: SF/F YA Lightning Round N-Z

2011-12-31T07:18:00.003-07:00

The final round: A selection of quick blurbs about some titles starting with N-Z. Books marked with a * are my favorites in this list. My favorites don't necessarily reflect any discussions or preferences of the other first round Cybils judges--nor do they represent any opinions but my own.

*Red Glove (Curse Workers, Book 2)
Holly Black
Margaret K. McElderry
If you liked White Cat, this is White Cat=n, and n+1. Red Glove's magical mafia/con/noir is built on the events of White Cat, and a complete story arc on its own, like book 1 was. Nobody else is doing this kind of stuff, and you should read it.

*Ripple
Mandy Hubbard
Razorbill
I have been getting angry about books set in Washington since Twilight. I am a sucker for books that read like the author has at least visited. Handily, Mandy Hubbard has, and then some. Ripple is a romance about a girl who's coming to terms with being a Siren, and what that means for her love life.

Slice of Cherry
Dia Reeves
Simon Pulse
I am always weirded out by Dia Reeves' books, and super glad she's writing them. Slice of Cherry is set in Portero, like Bleeding Violet was, and about two sisters who go for a horror-novel style of vigilante justice. Good, evil, and the veil between the real and maybe-not world all come into play. Actually, given how much my generation loved stuff like Evil Dead¹, I'm surprised that this kind of thing hasn't caught on among YA authors.

1. Please note that I think Evil Dead is a really barfy movie, however.

*Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
ed. Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant

Candlewick Press

The cover of this book is not all that compelling, even for steampunk fans, but don't judge. I was spoiled as a kid by extensive access to Windling/Datlow anthologies, and so I expect short story collections to get down and deliver--to deliver stories that I love or love to hate, that feel perfect or unsettling, and that offer something in a small package. While I'm pretty open-minded about the structure of short stories, a lot of anthologies miss the mark, including stuff clearly meant to be filler, advertisement, or worse, stuff that just cut off due to a time crunch. My favorite story in the bunch was This anthology focuses on taking steampunk away--temporally and physically--from Victorian England. Libba Bray's old West gang of girl bandits and, erm, clockmaker-physicists was my favorite, but I found nearly all to be strong stories.

*Tankborn
Karen Sandler
Lee and Low (Tu Books)
Tankborn, one of the first outings from newbie imprint Tu Books, is also one that I've struggled to write about. The review on Parenthetical says what I would have said, kinda. I thought it needed some more beginning and some more time on friendship; I was thrilled to have some dystopia that felt like it wasn't pulled out of a hat.

*Texas Gothic
Rosemary Clement-Moore
Delacorte Press Books for Young Readers
Amy (Amaryllis) and Phin (Delphinium) are spending the summer house-sitting--tiny ranch-sitting--for their aunt. Amy's the grounded one, and Phin's the mad magical scientist. They can't help getting involved when a ghostly legend swirls into real-life injuries following a nearby archeological find, and it turns out that Amy might be pretty good at communing with the dead. And there's a cute cowboy next door.

The Boy from Ilysies (Libyrinth)
Pearl North
Tor Teen
I didn't read Librynth, the first book in this series, but The Boy from Ilysies has prompted me to go back and read more soon. What grabbed me was how this flips gender roles and expectations in a way that doesn't often find a home in YA SF/F.

*The False Princess
Eilis O'Neal
Egmont USA
Nalia's life is just fine until her parents tell her she's the girl who was swapped in for their daughter at birth. A prophecy predicted that the king and queen's daughter would come to harm before her sixteenth birthday--and now that the danger has passed, Nalia can take up her old name and clear out so the princess can come home. Adjusting to a new and harsher life is one thing, but Nalia suspects that the danger isn't over, and that there may be more imposters in the palace. P.S. Nalia has to change her name, of course, and give the old one to the princess, but for the purposes of this blurb, that's all you need to know.

The Gathering (Darkness Rising, Book 1)
Kelly Armstrong
HarperCollins
Maya's paw-print birthmark might have something to do with all the mountain lions hanging around. Or maybe it has something to do with the creepy company town where she lives. Or part of her heritage that she thought was legend. Whatever it is, it's dangerous, and people are dying, and Maya's not sure whether to trust her old friend Daniel or Rafe, the new-in-town bad boy.

*The Girl of Fire and Thorns
Rae Carson
Greenwillow
I reviewed this here. I LIKED IT A LOT GO READ IT.

*The Name of the Star (Shades of London)
Maureen Johnson
Putnam Juvenile
Louisiana teenager Rory Deveaux moves to London, goes to boarding school, gets some culture shock--and finds out that she has unique skills that might help her solve the string of copycat Jack the Ripper murders happening in her neighborhood.

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer
Michelle Hodkin
Simon & Schuster
Mara can't remember what killed her friends. They went to a house, one night. And now she lives in Florida, and she's not sure what she sees, half the time. Is it real, or is it her imagination? Why is she losing big chunks of time? The story is a slow burn, but very atmospheric and creepy.

*The Vespertine
Saundra Mitchell
Harcourt
This is like if you crossed the Luxe books with A Drowned Maiden's Hair, except there's no scam involved. Is she seeing a terrible future, or is she causing a terrible future?

And that's it for this year. I'm sorry that I'm not able to review everything I read. Sometimes, I just don't have anything to add to what's out there about a book, or I read it a long time ago and need to reread before I can give a thoughtful review, or whatever. Now you: go forth, read, and gobble up stories in the new year.

Cybils: SF/F YA Lightning Round G-M

2011-12-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

The next round: A selection of quick blurbs about some titles starting with the letter G-M. (Note that some titles starting with "The" will come up under T, I think.) Books marked with a * are my favorites in this list. My favorites don't necessarily reflect any discussions or preferences of the other first round Cybils judges--nor do they represent any opinions but my own.

For the curious: Cybils by the numbers. There ended up being something like 170-180ish books nominated in the YA SF/F category that were ultimately deemed to be in the right spot and eligible. I reviewed 144 (I think), which includes everything I could borrow, everything I could buy (not part of the judging expectations, but I can buy some books, so I do), and everything I received as a review copy from publishers by the time we went to judging panel. I was reading right up until the day we made the first round shortlist. But, also, and I am sorry to say it, and I'm sure it was exacerbated this year by when the holidays fell, I know there are probably eligible books that got shipped out too late that will show up in mid-January, and I will be sad.

It's not at all easy to make the first round shortlist, either. I mean, it was easier for me because I got to be a first round judge last year, and I expected that the shortlist would reflect a group decision--that some of my favorites wouldn't be on that final list. I think every one of us in the first round group would have made a different shortlist, if it were just an individual thing; there would have been some overlap, but we would have recognized a wider range of books. What that should tell you, though, is that YA SF/F is a really, really strong category full of good reads.

Anyway.

*Glow (Sky Chasers)
Amy Kathleen Ryan
St. Martin's Griffin
At first glance, this looks like it's another of the many, many books this year that gets very personal about teens and fertility. A colony ship headed out to a new planet catches up with the advance team, and the colony ship is attacked, its fertile teens captured, ovum harvested. This is icky all on its own--and not treated lightly--but for me, the really interesting part of this book was the underlying theme of power/abuse of it, particularly when there's a charismatic religious leader involved. Also, I like self-rescuing people, of all sorts.

Goliath
Scott Westerfeld
Simon Pulse
Despite so many recommendations, I haven't found time to get into this steampunk series yet. Goliath made me want to go back and read the rest (and not just because I was missing a chunk of context).

How I Stole Johnny Depp's Alien Girlfriend
Gary Ghislain
Chronicle Books
This is one of the quirkier nominations this year. Firmly rooted in classic SF, it takes the alien Amazon woman stories of the past and brings them into today. By that, I mean that those stories where sexual, warrior-like women from another planet gets re-imagined in today's world, not that this solves all of the problems of those sorts of stories. Still, on the whole, I found it funny, and appreciated the nods to the past and to SF culture (Tor and Baen get shout-outs, for example). I suspect that adult readers will appreciate this as much, if not more, than teens.

*Huntress
Malinda Lo
Little, Brown
I like it when girls get swords and have adventures. Huntress, set in the same world as Ash, rewinds back in time to the story of Kaede and Taisin, two girls who are part of a prince's expedition to meet with a fairy queen and resolve the environmental disaster plaguing the kingdom. Fate, destiny, love (not just Kaede and Taisin's, but mother-daughter, father-daughter, etc.), power, and magic are all important themes.

Imaginary Girls
Nova Ren Suma
Dutton Juvenile
Imaginary Girls is a eerie, dreamy tale of two sisters whose relationship is hard to unravel. Chloe thinks--the whole town thinks--that her older sister Ruby is the compelling one, the one who leads all the adventures and spurs all of the misadventures. After spending time apart, Chloe finds that Ruby cares about her more than she expected, with disturbing results for reality.

Matched
Ally Condie
Dutton Juvenile
Matched is probably the most well known of the "government intrudes in teen love and lust" books of the past year, and rightly so. When Cassia is Matched with her best friend Xander, it looks like she's going to have a happy future--and when she finds out that he might not have been her true Match, she starts to wonder what else the government is wrong about. My high school ran some sort of computer-matchup program as a fundraiser, and you know we're all curious if there's a perfect ONE.

*Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Ransom Riggs (GO 'SC)
Quirk Books
Ransom Riggs' cinematic, photo-inclusive story of children in a timepocket in Wales has been slated to be a Tim Burton movie, and if you've seen even the cover of this book, you have an idea why. Jacob is seeing things, just like his grandfather. Now he wants to find out about his grandfather's childhood, about the monsters that go bump in the night, and, whether he likes it or not, about the children in the pictures.

My Favorite Band Does Not Exist
Robert T. Jeschonek
Clarion Books
I think this alternate-or-is-it-alternate-reality, weird book is a perfect read for fans of Fade to Blue. I'm not sure how to describe it (or, really, Fade to Blue), but if you liked one, try the other.

Cybils: SF/F YA Lightning Round C-F

2011-12-28T15:56:00.003-07:00

The next round: A selection of quick blurbs about some titles starting with C, D, E, or F, and one that I wasn't done reading from the A group. (Note that some titles starting with "The" will come up under T, I think.) Books marked with a * are my favorites in this list. My favorites don't necessarily reflect any discussions or preferences of the other first round Cybils judges--nor do they represent any opinions but my own.

*Ashfall
Mike Mullin
Tanglewood Press
When the apocalypse comes, it's coming from Yellowstone. I can't turn off the TV when volcanic disaster shows are on, and I couldn't sleep after reading Ashfall, because I was too busy figuring out the priority order of life-saving tasks in the event of an eruption. If there's just one of me, I do this, and if there's a friend around, we have to buyupfoodcovertheventsfillthebathtubfinddustmasks... I've seen two eruptions in the past (from a safe distance), but it's only a matter of time.

*Chime
Franny Billingsley
Dial
Briony would like to confess and be hanged. Now, if you please. Chime covers a lot of ground on emotional manipulation without necessarily focusing on abuse, and the prickly, unreliable narrator seems to be a tough one for a lot of readers. But if Charlotte Brontë wrote fantasy, this is what she'd write. Fabulous language.

Dark of the Moon
Tracy Barrett
Harcourt
Theseus and Ariadne retelling. You know you need more minotaurs in your life!

*Daughter of Smoke and Bone
Laini Taylor
Little, Brown
Lush, non-linear romance. Quirky Karou, an art student, draws amazing creatures in her sketchbooks, and her friends think she's got quite an imagination. Not exactly; instead of going home to milk and cookies, she goes home to monsters and demons, her much-beloved family. And she's not imagining the angel, or the closing of the doors she uses to jump around the world, running errands that involve gathering human teeth and getting paid in wishes. Her imagination only goes so far, though, and the biggest mystery to solve may be her own origin.

Drink, Slay, Love
Sarah Beth Durst
Margaret K McElderry
Vampires, vampires, everywhere--and this has a funny, my-family-is-unbearable take on the genre. After a run-in with a unicorn, safe-in-the-daylight Pearl is tasked with attending to high school, all the better to lure unsuspecting victims to the biggest vampire foodie event of them all.

Dust and Decay
Jonathan Maberry
Simon & Schuster
A worthy follow up to Rot and Ruin, one of my favorite reads from last year. The gang's back together and the simply can't stay in their isolated Californian town, waiting for the zombies to get them, so they take off in the hope of finding somewhere safe--and as always, the undead are waiting in the wings.

Fateful
Claudia Gray
Harper Teen
Tess has to be an obedient servant until she and her employer reach the other side of the Atlantic, and from there, she has grand plans to make it on her own. The only problem is that they're not riding the waves on the QE2, but on the RMS Titanic. With werewolves. I love the details of everyday life in the past; I'm much more interested in stuff like fashion and food than who won what war, so this speaks to my particular historical interests.

*Forgotten
Cat Patrick
Little, Brown
London's memory works backward. Each day, her past is gone, and the future spools out ahead in her mind. Careful note-taking helps her get by until she meets a boy she can't remember. She's tired of waiting out fights with her best friend and wondering whether she's losing her future mind, and tries to change things in order to bring her world to come into alignment.

*Fury of the Phoenix
Cindy Pon
Greenwillow
Where Silver Phoenix was an adventure, Fury of the Phoenix is an emotional journey as much as a physical one. Ai Ling follows Chen Yong on a boat trip to find his family, and is overwhelmed by visions of her past as Silver Phoenix. Long ago, she and her tormentor, Zhong Ye, were lovers; she slowly remembers his descent and fall. This is still, I believe, based in the wuxia tradition, but from a different angle than that taken by Silver Phoenix. Pon's writing and skill at storytelling is improved by leaps and bounds in this sequel, and the story is successful in charting the tragedy and romance of the story-world's past.

Cybils: SF/F YA Lightning Round A-B

2011-12-19T11:59:00.003-07:00

If I had to sum up the past two months, it would be: Rocks fall, everyone is covered under a pile of rocks. I have been covered under a pile of books and personal, off-line things, which means that I have not reviewed the YA SF/F Cybils nominees (www.cybils.com) as much as I would like.

So: Lightning round! A selection of quick blurbs about some titles starting with A or B. (Note that some titles starting with "The" will come up under T, I think.)

A Long, Long Sleep
Anna Sheehan
Candlewick Press
A Long, Long Sleep takes the Sleeping Beauty theme and gives it a futuristic twist. Rose has been asleep for a very, very long time, and now her parents are long gone. Now that she's awake, she finds herself in charge of an intergalactic business empire--but does she want it, or would it be better to just go back to bed? Not really a retelling, however.

Abandon
Meg Cabot
Point
A retelling of Hades and Persephone, with modern atmosphere.

Accused: The Fourth Ganzfield Novel
Kate Kaynak
Spencer Hill Press
Scientifically-induced telepathy? Check. Now Maddie has to use her waning powers to not just get herself and her boyfriend out of jail, but to keep other supernaturally-enhanced friends safe. Romance readers will probably prefer to start with book 1 in the series.

Across the Universe
Beth Revis
Razorbill
One of the best first chapters I've ever read. A girl who's in stasis for a journey to a new planet gets woken up--years before the colony team is set to arrive. In the meantime, the ship's society has been bent by odd leadership, and its denizens have all been intermarried so that they all look the same, so the redhead Amy, almost an artifact, is exotic.

Angelfall (Penryn and the Book of Days, Book 1)
Susan Ee
Feral Dream
Penryn's NoCal is now post-apocalypse, and she wants to get her mentally ill mother and wheelchair-user sister to safety. While on the run, they get in the middle of a war between angels, and Penryn must align herself with the beautiful Raffe to uncover her sister's whereabouts.

Anna Dressed in Blood
Kendare Blake
Tor Teen
Cas has followed in his father's footsteps, and he kills dangerous ghosts. He and his mother move to Canada so he can take on one of the most intriguing: Anna Dressed in Blood, who kills everyone who enters her haunted home. Anna's not like the others, though, so how can he stop her from killing again?

Ashes
Ilsa J. Bick
Egmont USA
Alex is out hiking when an electromagnetic pulse wipes out--well, she doesn't exactly know. She "adopts" a young girl named Ellie, and with Tom, a solider she meets, she's got to figure out how to keep herself safe, not just from the zombies that were created by the pulse, but by the societies that have cropped up in the absence of all electronics.

Ashes, Ashes
Jo Treggari
Scholastic
Most of the population got wiped out in the environmental apocalypse, and Lucy hardly remembers what it was like to not spend all of her days just trying to keep herself warm, dry, and fed in her camp where she lives alone in what used to be NYC. When she meets Aidan while running from a pack of dogs, she can hardly remember how to speak. After a tsunami takes out her camp, she joins up with Aidan's people, a ragtag group of children and senior citizens who weren't affected by the post-apocalyptic plague--which puts her within reach of a mysterious group of scientists who kidnap pretty much anyone they can get their hands on.

*Blood Red Road
Moira Young
Margaret McElderry
Saba, Lugh, and Emmi live on the banks of Silverlake, which is drying up. They might never have left--except that a group of armed men kills their father and takes Lugh away. Saba wants to rescue her brother, and Emmi tags along. The world outside Silverlake is harsher than they could have imagined, and Saba is captured and forced to fight in cage matches. Three losses, and she'll be killed. Another fighter, Jack, and a group of "lawless" fighting women, the Free Hawks, want her to lose--because that might be her path to freedom for all. This is a weird read; conventions of standard English are set aside for the book's particular dialect. Despite this, I was completely engrossed, and I recommend giving this a try if you like women warriors.

*Bumped
Megan McCafferty
Balzer+Bray
Now that the adult population is largely infertile, teen girls are encouraged to do what they can to populate the world, including surrogacy. Fake baby bumps have replaced dolls and bicycles. The best of the best at impregnating and being impregnated are tomorrow's teen idols. Melody and Harmony, twins separated at birth, meet and discover the bonds of sisterhood aren't quite so strong when you don't know each other--even if the world thinks conservative Harmony is about to provide a million dollar baby. This funny, wry book takes apart some of the less logical aspects of the fertility-fear science fiction books crowding the shelves, and offers an alternative--and much more scary--future. The ending is a little abrupt, but it's certainly worth a read.

Books marked with a * are my favorites in this list. My favorites don't necessarily reflect any discussions or preferences of the other first round Cybils judges--nor do they represent any opinions but my own.

Cybils! Australia! Other Things!

2011-11-28T13:17:00.001-07:00

Cybils!
The 2011 Cybils awards are in full swing. I bought a boatload of e-books before I left on vacation, so I'm not too terribly far behind in reviewing YA SF/F titles, but I'm certainly far behind on blogging about them. When I knew I had the privilege of being a first-round judge for a second year, I set aside a dozen almost-finished titles and started in on the (something like) 180 nominated books for this year. I've hit about a third of them so far, but my personal judge-o-meter wants to see as many as possible before we have to narrow down to a finalist list. Last year, that was about 80% of the nominations in my category, which means I need to read about 80 more books in the next two weeks... I have about 50 stacked up and ready to go, though, so that shouldn't be too hard. Thank you to the publicists and publishers who've so thoughtfully provided copies. I know that only a few will be shortlisted and that there can only be one winner, so it's fantastic to see your support for your authors.

This is always an interesting task, because for most of the year, I'm not reading so comparatively. I mean, I AM; I'm always evaluating, thinking about how this book has appealed or might appeal in the future, and so on. But creating a short list of books that fit the award criteria--as a committee--is not quite the same as if I were creating a short list of books that hit all my buttons.

Because I won't be able to blog about everything I've read, no matter how hard I try, I'm planning to do some themed posts, grouping books into like reading experiences.

Australia!
I was the very, very fortunate recipient of a trip to Australia this month. I had a fantastic time! I have about 1,000 unread e-mails! I have pictures to label, out of order, because I e-mailed some from my phone when I could find a wireless hotspot! I'll post some travelogues here, and please feel free to skip if you're only here for books.

Other Things!
While I was gone--well, the month before and after a conference are some of the busiest of the year. There are a lot of late nights and early mornings. There's a lot of figuring what can wait until later and what has to be done now. One right-now thing, that went up just as I left, was the 2012 update for Sirens, a small conference focused on women in fantasy. This means books and media, for all ages, written or created by or consumed by women. Next year's event will be held outside Portland, Oregon, on the Washington side of the Columbia River, and the theme is "tales retold," meaning fantasy connected to existing stories. Two of the guests of honor are Malinda Lo and Kate Bernheimer (I'll have to keep mum on the third for now, sorry).

Narrate Conferences has been working on a YA conference for a while, but the economy has been miserable, and in the meantime, I've found these retreat weekends to be really invigorating, smart, and thoughtful, and a great way to connect with fantasy that, being a YA-person, I wouldn't necessarily think to pick up on my own. And, what I meant to say from the get-go, is thank you to the staff who worked so tirelessly through October and November, and who made it possible for me to go on a vacation.

More Other Things!
Photobucket went to a commercialized photo service, so I had to wipe everything out of there. I'm trying to figure out what to do with my photos now. I'm enjoying Windows Live Essentials as an on-computer editor, because it is one click to some interesting features, like straightening up photos and the like!

Tip: Check the expiration date on your sunscreen before you hike two hours to a deserted, shadeless beach with a very inviting swimming area.

Overland Equipment's Donner bag is handy for carrying just enough and it has handy side pockets for water bottles, tickets, and small electronics.

It's almost the end of the year! I'd like to write a big long post on giving to charity, but I'll just give you these tips: 1) Give because you want to give and because you support the charity's mission and admire their work; your personal income and expenses might not mean you actually get any tax credits, 2) Give as directly as possible; small, local charities can use your help, and some workplace giving programs take HUGE percentages off the top, 3) Give unrestricted money as often as you can; charities can direct it to areas of most need, and won't have to deal with things like disposing of unusable items (think about how many too-old or too-dirty for use sofas Goodwill probably gets every year), and 4) consider offering your time and/or services, either for a short-term program or a project. The last probably isn't tax deductible--the cost of your time or services isn't--and you may be turned down, because it's never a best practice for a charity to put people to work if they can't provide appropriate supervision/training, or when they just don't have anything they need help with, but there are lots of ways to help if you can't give $.

How Tia Lola Came to (Visit) Stay by Julia Alvarez

2011-11-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I am really glad to have reviews stored up, because as I write this, Amazon Associates is down. I don't link to books in a way that you are buying them and giving me a kickback (at the time of this writing, anyway), but I do love the widget for book covers.

How Tia Lola Came to ~~Visit~~ Stay by Julia Alvarez (Random House - Knopf) is about two kids (but mostly about the older brother) who move to upstate New York when their mom and dad get divorced, and mom brings her sister Lola from the Dominican Republic to live with them during the transition. This is Tia Lola; I'm missing the accent, but Tia Lola is Aunt Lola. See how I just let on that this is a translated term without going all "...someone said, which means aunt in Spanish"? This book has a lot of Spanish text in it. Repetitious, perhaps, if you're completely fluent in both languages--or maybe interesting, as you compare the subtleties in what is and isn't always conveyed--but it's very appropriate that this book is bilingual, given that its characters are (and sometimes aren't) and that its characters are dealing with biculturalism (and I'm using that term loosely), moving between cities, countries, cultures, and other split situations.

Tia Lola is sometimes an embarrassment, sometimes magic (figuratively, not literally), always family, and I think this is an awesome book that I’d have read in one sitting if I’d had time for sitting when I was reading it. Beware, however: I read this as an e-book and the formatting is so awful I was not always sure what was going on. It’s an utter mess. I don't think anyone looked at it. It's not just the characters needed for Spanish, it's everything.

On the up side, there are sequels! A good middle grade read about family.

When a Fan Hits the Sh*t by Jeanine Renne - A 2005 Read

2011-11-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

By the time you read this, I'll be out of the country for a bit; I found this while scouring and shutting down an old blog. If you've participated in an online fan community, you know how easily, and how frequently, people use those interests and relationships to scam others, even though most people are kind and trustworthy.

When a Fan Hits the Sh*t by Jeanine Renne chronicles the Bit of Earth scandals of 2003ish and thereabouts. I didn't pay too much attention to this at the time it was going on, not being in the Lord of the Rings fandom--and besides, even in book form, the story is very convoluted and confusing.

The book starts by jumping back and forth between the beginning and end of the story, alternating chapters. If I'd known the players better, I'd have liked that more. It would make great cinema, but it's a little confusing, though I did figure it out. Something else: stories and parts of stories get repeated several times throughout, but I think the book had to be done that way; sometimes, the time-shifting is necessary to explain a certain specific happening, but telling the whole story at that point in the book is either unnecessary or confusing because other details can't be revealed at that juncture.

The basic story is this: A 19-year-old girl named Amy Player goes on the internet and adopts the pseudonym Victoria Bitter. Victoria Bitter writes slash. VB channels hobbits. VB gets fangirled, and when she's (supposedly) hospitalized and at her worst, Abbey "Orangeblossom" writes her a poem. It is the beginning of a very strange relationship.

Later, Abbey leaves her husband and gets involved with a boy named Jordan Wood. Abbey and Jordan are major players in Bit of Earth, which is both a website and a wanna-be charity. They are at the helm of a big line party for LotR II, build a children's reading garden with Sean Astin, and go on to organize film festivals and band festivals and even a fan convention. OR DO THEY?

Not to spoil anything, but nope. We even get into e-mails (e-mail is forever!) where we find that Jordan Wood and Abbey lied and manipulated some otherwise smart folks, including publicity agents and stars, that money disappeared, and that others were continually covering their asses in terms of events that were canceled and fell apart, including the fan convention that had only 28 tickets sold. There are fake suicide attempts, phony donations to charity, manufactured realities, and a detective who wants to know what happened to Amy Player. It's a fascinating read for people interested in scams and fan interaction. Like the reviewers on Amazon say, it's almost too strange to be true.

As a side note, this story is about real people who do still appear in the online world, and that have had other stories and criticisms leveled at them in the years since, probably easily found through your favorite search engine. And as a side note, as I'm out of the country and unable to moderate any discussion, I'm turning off comments on this post.

Guardian of the Spirit (Moribito) by Nahoko Uehashi

2011-11-04T12:59:00.001-06:00

I read Guardian of the Spirit (Moribito) by Nahoko Uehashi (Scholastic) last March--right at the height of the news about the earthquake and following disasters in Japan, and right in the middle of the debates in children's blogging circles about reviews, and whether or not anyone who was interested in publishing, at all, ought to write "bad" reviews. (The scare quotes are because there really wasn't a single definition of bad, and some of the example reviews, well, I didn't think they were all that bad...) I ended up writing this, explaining my position, but I didn't want to post this review at the time. I felt bad for anyone with a direct connection to Japan, vaguely guilty that I kept buying travel guides to different countries and that they all had huge natural disasters right after I did so, uncomfortable because I love the IDEA of this book so much.

So, let me outline in brief why I didn't enjoy it, but why I still recommend it.

Guardian of the Spirit is the first in a series of popular Japanese books that have been (maybe are being) translated into English. They follow Balsa, an adult martial artist. She rescues Chagum, the son of the Mikado, and is then tasked with keeping him safe from the father who would have him murdered--as well as an ancient, mysterious monster that only shows up every hundred years.

On a personal level, I often struggle with books in translation; I often find them flat, or rough, or awkward. So it's maybe no surprise that I felt this way about Guardian of the Spirit; at the same time, I know that it is very difficult to translate from language to language, and I think most of the issues I had were rooted in the original. There's a lot of telling where I wished for showing, a lot of coincidental or sudden revelations without support in the text, for example, and I wished for more emotional connection to Balsa and Chagum. I also felt a little adrift, because the story has one adult and one child point of view, but I didn't feel like the story was really middle grade or adult, and that it also wasn't universal enough to be all-ages--a very silly complaint, and one that puts too much faith in marketing categories to encompass everything readable, I know, but I can't quite articulate why this didn't grab me there. Finally, this seemed to me to read like a novelization of anime (maybe manga); the pacing and conventions of anime are there, but they didn't seem to work on the page as compared to how they would have worked on the screen. I was missing the quirk of a mouth, the sparkle in the eye, the wind of chi that accompanies a visually stunning battle. The story is available as an animated series, and I suspect I'll like that more than the written version. Maybe it's unfair to not give more leeway for a different storytelling style, and I admit that, and maybe I'm too tied to my ideas of how things should work. I'm still thinking about this, months later, and I'll be thinking about it when this posts in November, when I'm halfway around the world.

But now I will tell you why I feel an affinity for Guardian of the Spirit anyway.

I love that this book is...chancy. Risky. It's not a marketing category fit; books aimed at/marketed to younger readers rarely have an adult heroine at the heart. Sometimes marketing categories fit, like any other classification system, and help us make decisions and generalizations, but I also like when things break the mold.

I like that this book exists at the same time as the animated series does; there's potential for fans of one or the other to cross over. Readers get to experience a particular style of storytelling, and watchers get to reinforce the story by reading it.

I really appreciate the care taken in packaging Guardian of the Spirit. There's beautiful art, beautiful chapter headings, and a hint at the visuals that would go with the story. It's "just" a paperback, so that didn't have to be done, but it was anyway.

It is always good to have more diversity in the books available--for all ages. I could give all sorts of additional thoughts there, but I think that I'll leave it at that today.

Despite my personal quibbles, I'd hand this to children age 8-12, probably, first, and I think this is a good read for people who like adventure stories. If I were working with middle grade or young adult readers, I'd have this in my library.

Sugar Changed the World by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos

2011-11-02T13:03:00.000-06:00

Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science

This YA-marketed nonfiction book traces the world history of sugar and the industry’s ties to things like slavery, Caribbean/Hawaiian economics, Ghandi, immigration, and so on. One of the weirdest things I took away was the idea that during the so-called Dark Ages, Europe was not the superpower in the world that it is today, and that it was busy treating its own like dirt.

I like histories like this that tie together things I know about, and I learned a lot and got a better idea that some things were happening simultaneously in history, but I also think that in their enthusiasm, the authors, particularly in their wrapup/conclusion, gave sugar a little more credit for the world’s woes and triumphs than it might deserve.

Devilish by Maureen Johnson

2011-11-01T15:33:00.023-06:00

Before I talk about this read, I want to note that I read it back in February and stored the review for November because I'll be spending the next few weeks on vacation. I'm very excited, but I don't know how much reading I'll get done while I'm away!

I can't believe that I hadn't read anything by Maureen Johnson before Devilish (Penguin - Razorbill). This one gets both a fantasy and a science fiction tag, because it's the sort of story that doesn't fit neatly into either bookstore shelf.

Jane's friend Allison is a little, well, bumbly. Jane's been getting her out of scrapes forever, it seems, but one day, just a day after all the girls at their Catholic school witness Allison's mishap (which involves puking), Allison seems to have gotten it together. So together, in fact, that there are mysterious phones and clothes and other nice things. A little investigation and Jane figures out that Allison is sold her soul to the devil, and Jane, like always, will do whatever it takes to help her best friend.

It's a little funny to read this so long after it first came out. I can see shadows of today's YA, a genre that has really exploded in the meantime. One shadow: the book clocks in at about 250 pages. Today, it would be a hundred pages longer. (Maybe not the end of the world, even though I gripe about books that are too long for the stories within; I'd have liked to know more about Jane and Allison's friendship.) Also, I don't want to spoil anything, but there's a romance that presages a certain best-selling paranormal in a fairly funny way.

If you're looking for paranormal with a dose of humor and a dearth of angst, give this a look.

Fodor's Australia

2011-10-27T18:09:00.001-06:00

Last year, I brought a bunch of travel books into the house, and each country for which I bought a book suffered a major disaster. I'm starting to think that maybe I should--well, not buy travel books, I guess.

I particularly like the Eyewitness Guides and Fodors, the first because of the amazing pictures and diagrams (useful when you wander into, say, a museum or park), the second because it has a variety of items and suggestions that tend to be a little less expensive than some of the luxury-oriented guides and a little more mainstream than some of the no-frills guides.

My brother has started a tradition of taking a family member along on his vacations, and this November, I get to accompany him to Australia! We'll be visiting Melbourne, Cairns and the Daintree Rainforest area, Hamilton Island, and Sydney. This is the travel guide that gave me the best orientation to those areas.

Next month, all of my posts will be automated. That's not unusual, but I won't be able (or likely) to check on comments or posts while I'm gone. Maybe when I get back I can report on a bookshop or two!

Bunheads

2011-10-24T09:38:00.000-06:00

Bunheads by Sophie Flack (Little, Brown - Poppy) is a grownup version of Drina and all of those other books you read when you were me and you were little wherein a young girl became a ballerina or a gymnast or some other thing she'd always wanted to be. Always something that perhaps required a certain body type or degree of natural talent, yet something that seemed achievable with enough hard work and access to coaching. The stuff of dreams for most of us.

It's Hannah's dream, and she's there, a nineteen-year-old in the corps of the Manhattan Ballet Company.

I'm going to jump to the part I didn't like first. First, this was just one in a long line of books with teen girl protagonists wherein it seems like everything is about the teen not following her dreams. Life is going to come along and kick most of us in the butt long before we're famous, so why the predominance of the "give up, because only a few people get to be great" stories? Why, so often, is it the boyfriend that can't handle it when his girl has a life outside of falling in love?

So, once: if he likes you, he'll deal with your heavy schedule. You'll enjoy those moments together all the more because they're special; you'll have more to share when you do catch up. And, sometimes, people need to find ways to enjoy short stretches of time together, to appreciate that we can have lives beyond the moments of romance.

It sounds like I didn't like this book very much, but I did. I adored the inside look at a dancer's life--the excitement and boredom behind the scenes. I could almost smell the particular smell of dance equipment behind the curtain, the paint, the powder, that sharp and cloying smell of sweat. And I did like that the book addressed "What if I'm good enough, but still not the top? Do I still want to do this?" Even those of us talented at one thing or another have to decide if it's enough, so it's interesting to see the struggle in YA books.

Cybils!

2011-10-14T07:09:00.004-06:00

I just got back from Sirens (check it out after November 1 for registration...just outside Portland, OR, next year!)--and went off to a multi-day training. My laundry needs doing. My eyes are tired. My inbox is full. My job has been piling up in my absence.

But I did want to make a quick post about the Cybils, for which nominations are closed or closing shortly. (I didn't know if nominations would be open on the 15th or not when I wrote this.) I'll be a first round panelist for the YA fantasy and science fiction category. By the end of the year, I'll have attempted to read however many books get nominated and I'll have participated in creating a shortlist for the second round judges.

This is both awful and wonderful. Some of my favorite books last year didn't make the shortlist, for example. I do think, however, that the shortlists represent a collective decision, even if no particular panelist would have put forth that exact list. And I'm excited to get to participate in such a process--one that, this year, is about 50/50 newbies/oldbies.

I haven't decided how I will review what I read this year. For the record, I'll read about anything. I don't think YA is too dark or explicit; I do think that some books miss the mark on how they integrate dark/explicit/whatever. I wish for more diversity. I love both science fiction and fantasy, protagonists male and female, books driven by voice and by character and by plot.

Last year, I reviewed the best of what I was reading at any given time. I will probably do this again, even though there are some books that I'll love that I won't get around to reviewing, especially as we close in on the end of the year and scramble to read everyone else's favorites. I won't list every book I read, because I don't want to cause undue speculation about why I didn't give them each a full-on review. (I don't review more than half of the books I read here anyway.) Also, I'm pretty critical, and what I'm thinking about when I judge a book is a little different from what I'm thinking about when I'm writing up a blurb for readers. Because I'm reading so many books at one time, it's hard to disengage the Hunger Games-style brain and write blog reviews.

I thought I might comment a little bit on the updated rules:

Books (eBook criteria follow):
To be eligible for a Cybils award, a print book must be:
published in the US or Canada only(*please see note). This avoids outrageous shipping costs and double jeopardy when a UK title is nominated a second time after it comes out in the US;

I think this is a good change. It sounds like people think North America is queen of the world, but that's not the driving force. The Cybils draw participants, authors, and nominators heavily from the US. And here's what happened last year: I had an ARC of a book that was nominated. It was out in the UK, but not the US. It wasn't in the UK judge's library. It is very hard to convince your fellow judges that a book should be on the shortlist when none of them can read it. It's much easier if a book is available in the US to ship it to one judge outside the US than to ask someone outside the US to ship six copies here.

That's not to say that I think all books should be available around the world all at once; that actually doesn't work out so well, necessarily, for authors (who might have been able to sell rights in different locales) or for readers. For readers, the explanation is too complicated for this post, but involves actually not having one worldwide market for books so that regions and countries can have their own thriving book industries, creating jobs and maybe not letting the US publishing industry be the only one in the world deciding what's publishable.

published between one contest and the next. For this year, that means from Oct. 16, 2010 to Oct. 15, 2011;

Pretty self-explanatory. Any time you have a deadline, the books right before and after seem to get neglected, but you gotta cut things off somewhere.

widely available for public sale. Titles available only from book clubs or publisher websites are not eligible, for example, as we cannot obtain copies easily.

Also reasonable, I think.

aimed at the youth market up to age 18. Books marketed to adult readers that may also appeal to teens are not eligible.

In keeping with the idea of the awards.

eBooks
Note: This applies only to "born digital" ebooks that have no dead-tree counterpart.
To be eligible for a Cybils award, a born digital ebook must be:
published in both the Kindle and ePub format. It can be published in additional formats (such as PDF), but cannot skip those two;
marketed primarily to Young Adult Fiction and Science Fiction & Fantasy for teen readers. No other genre is accepting born digital titles this year. We'll revisit the idea if all goes well;
put out by a publisher in good standing with the American Booksellers Association (ABA), Children's Book Council (CBC), Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), or Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN) or their regional affiliates OR;
(alternate to #3) put out by a publisher who produces more than one title a year.

Also reasonable, I think, given that this is a new thing.

Book Apps
To be eligible for a Cybils award, a book app must be:
aimed primarily at kids or teens;
geared mainly toward storytelling and/or literacy and not just gaming;
be readable on an iPad.

This is interesting, because the book apps I've read (and not reviewed, I realize!), I've read not on an iPad. I have access to one, but I don't currently buy things for it. So, interesting. Also interesting was that when I was sorting through apps I wanted to nominate, I couldn't find a publication date for any of them, and had to guess based on media stories and stuff.

Also, this is a posted change to the judging:
We no longer have a 50-page rule. Each panel commits only to making sure every nominated book is read at least partway in by at least one person. You can set the book aside if it clearly isn't competitive with other nominated titles. This prevents wasting time on marginal books.

Having a 50-page rule helped me as a newbie, at least for the first 20 or so books I read. The biggest pressure was having books pile up, and knowing that I only had time to finish so many. By the second week, I could tell by the first paragraph of a book--and often, the first sentence--if I was going to want to read on when I hit page 50. I was right 99% of the time, at least. I will probably make a rule for myself--chapter one, chapter in the middle, chapter at the end--to help guide me in what to put down. That sounds harsh, but it's no different from the choices readers make about books every day, and is in line with my strong feeling that if there's nothing that's hooking me into a book by, say, page 25 or so, then that book might not be strong enough to win an award.

Anyway, judging is tough. It's hard to articulate subtleties in gut feeling and to find a coherent way to talk about books that cause passionate reactions, to negotiate a balanced list.

Probably not as hard as writing, though.

Best Of: One Year Ago

2011-10-01T11:17:00.004-06:00

Last October, I had already started plowing through the approximately 150 young adult science fiction and fantasy books nominated for the Cybils awards. I was afraid that if I waited for the nominations period to close, I wouldn't get through everything! Luckily, I only sidetracked into a couple of books that ended up not being eligible or that were moved to other categories.

From there, the first couple of books were the hardest. If you're a teacher, or someone who works for an educational testing company, you might go through a norming process--you might, in a small group, read and score essays, and then compare each individual's score. Through discussion, and through more scoring and comparing, the idea is that you train the group to align each individual's idea about what deserves a 5 out of 5, or a 4 out of 5, or whatever. Even if you have a scoring rubric, it can take a while to get to the point where you're mostly agreeing on scores. (From there, you still might drop a high or low score, or one that's out of line with the rest of the group.) Anyway, that's what I was doing with myself: trying to get to a place where I could say that a book I was reading was a good as or better than other books I'd read, and often, trying to understand what other judges saw in books that they admired and I didn't, or trying to get to a place where I could explain why I really loved a book and everyone else should too.

So, October is almost impossible to think about now. I think the honorable mention has to go to Plain Kate for stretching the boundaries of its genre-mates--I think it really told the story of a secondary character, for example, and the structure of the story wasn't as neat as is usually found at the border of YA and MG. Fade to Blue is one of those books that is so weird, a lot of readers won't get it, and even if they think they do, it's worthy of heated discussion. I loved Evanjalin in Finnikin of the Rock, was baffled by Hanna in Bleeding Violet, and so on, but I have to say that I especially admired Billi in Dark Goddess for breaking the fantasy heroine mold, taking on Baba Yaga, and keeping me interested when I hadn't read the first book in the series!

How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr

2011-09-27T13:11:00.001-06:00

So, it seems like the Amazon/CA tax spat is, perhaps, the reason why the Amazon Associates Blogger widgety thinger isn't loading. I don't use it for kickbacks, just for adding book covers to my posts, but I really wish it would be available again.

Without it, I can still tell you about a book I finished a few days ago. How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) is the first book I've read from the author; I often get her mixed up with someone else whose books aren't quite to my taste, and I keep accidentally avoiding Zarr. Oops, because this was really good.

Jill is a senior in high school who's coping with her dad's death and her mother's desire to adopt a baby. When soon-to-be mom Mandy, hardly more than a child herself, arrives in Denver to stay with Jill's mom ahead of childbirth and her open adoption, Jill can't believe what's happening to her family. Mandy can't, either; she's never been loved, but she knows what it feels like to be without love, and she wants her child to have a good home. Jill hates Mandy instantly, and suspects her story and motives. Mandy is suddenly unsure about everything besides her desire to get away from her mother and her mother's abusive boyfriend. But, maybe, Jill and Mandy have something to learn about the meaning of the word family.

What I loved: I was totally sucked in by How to Save a Life, even though it sounds like an "issues" book that I wouldn't be so interested in. This is a story where the issues are part of the story, as opposed to a story where the issue is the story. The latter tend to not work so well. Also, Bechdel test. Also, in alternating chapters, Jill and Mandy narrate the story and have distinct voices--something I'm finding to be rare of late. Jill is cynical, bold, suspicious; Mandy is straightforward but secretive, childlike, needy. Fantastic work.

I received this book in advance copy from the publisher.

Posted by e-mail. Tags and graphics TK.

Steel Trapp by Ridley Pearson

2011-09-26T09:33:00.001-06:00

Steel Trapp: The Challenge by Ridley Pearson (Disney Editions) is a middle-grade thriller about a kid named Steel Trapp, who gets involved in solving a kidnapping and terrorist plot on the way to the national science fair. His foil is Kaileigh, a runaway who's on her way to the science fair too, and whose help Steel will need if he's going to figure out why this strange woman was trying to leave a briefcase on the train, and what it has to do with a missing person.

I liked this more than I thought I would, especially given how much I hated an adult thriller I read by the same author. This kid thriller doesn't have as much science or tension or spies as I'd like, but unlike adult thrillers, it doesn't have the casual misogynism, racism, etc. that so many do. It's tough to get middle grade kids in on the action, but this worked for me.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

2011-09-23T11:58:00.002-06:00

Grace Lin's Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (Little, Brown) is one of those books you start hearing about, and you don't have, and then later, you wonder what took you so long to get around to reading it.

First, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a gorgeous book. The cover is beautiful. The interior is beautiful. There is color and nice paper. Even as I read more books digitally--in order to keep from feeling like I'm going to be buried by falling shelves, to avoid dust and illness--there are books I would always prefer to read in treebook format. I'm glad to have held this in my hands.

I'm pretty sure I read Where the Mountain Meets the Moon in March, so I can't quite remember why I didn't totally love the first twenty pages, but I'm pretty sure it was random personal preferences in how I feel about particular words and sentence construction. Nothing exciting there. I do recall that I put the book down for a couple of days, and when I picked it up, I was sucked in for good.
My remaining impression is that WtMMtM is utterly charming--gently whimsical, adventurous without brashness, positive. Lin provides a bibliography of resources for the many Chinese tales that served as inspiration; I've seen a lot of people comment that even when they're familiar with the originals, they don't know how the original works into the plot. I think that's fascinating! Retellings are tricky, but it's also tricky to turn lots of influences into something new. Let's face it: we love particular tales so much that we've handed them down over and over, problems and prickles and all, so it's not easy to let go in just the right places to make something feel both fresh and timeless.

Minli and her parents live in the Valley of Fruitless Mountain, and they have to work hard to eat. Minli's mother wants more, and Minli wants more for her, so she sets out to find the Old Man of the Moon and ask him to change her fortune. Before long, she's teamed up with a dragon and a talking goldfish, and before long, she's relying on the power of story to guide her to the end of her journey and home again. The power of story is a very nifty thing in this book. With no spoilers, let me just say that it's a book that manages to be both simple and sophisticated, that manages to address the mundane in a magical way.

Marketed as MG, the prose is accessible even for early readers (perhaps with an assist here and there), and there are multiple levels on which one can read the book, so it's a worthy pick for all ages.

The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

2011-09-13T10:13:00.005-06:00

I read The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (Random House - Ballantine) back in February. Yes, I am behind on reviews. (Only about 15 more books to catch up on, though!) I'd recommended the book as a gift for others, but hadn't gotten around to reading it myself, and I kept putting it off; I think I had the wrong idea about it from the cover, or maybe from not looking closely at the cover. (I was expecting something set along a boardwalk-like place in Italy. I have no idea why.)

If I had had a better idea of what the book was about--I was avoiding spoilers!--I might have read it sooner. The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is set in WWII-era Seattle and the modern day. A (first-generation Chinese) man, whose wife has just died, passes by a hotel that has been closed for many years, and sees that the belongings of Japanese families who were interned were retrieved from the hotel's basement. He remembers a Japanese-American girl he knew as a child, as well as what was happening with internment camps, politics (particularly local ones), music, discrimination, and the like, while--in the present story--trying to sort out his feelings about his wife's death, about his relationship with his son (who's marrying a white girl), and what happened to his friend Keiko.

I had a hard time getting into the first couple of chapters; they felt rough, to me. But, after that, I was completely hooked on this story of lost love--and the history, the setting, the story. Some of it shocked me; for example, there's a mention of two adults not able to be married because of their skin color, and I realized that it hasn't been nearly long enough since that was how things were. I recognized some of the same (often irrational) fears that drive people to do things not in keeping with human civility. And so on.

While I've never lived in Seattle, I've spent enough time there to enjoy the city as character; for example, there was mention of a street that's now a place to get on and off I-5, an exit that's always my nemesis when I visit. I've driven through some of the areas where the characters live and work on my way to other places.

Despite my interest in WWII-era music, I don't recall spending a lot of time on WWII in history classes, and I've always been much more interested in culture and pop culture of time periods than I have been in who was at war with whom and the details of battles. The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet isn't a history book, but it opened my eyes to some things that I never knew had gone on so near to where I lived. I would be very interested in reading more by this author, no matter what the subject.

Pretty Monday

2011-09-12T12:13:00.000-06:00

How about a collection of nifty kidlit book trailers? See them at http://publishingperspectives.com/2011/03/ultimate-childrens-ya-book-trailers/ -- and have a great Monday.

Best Of: One Year Ago

2011-09-01T18:17:00.000-06:00

Last September, I was deep into the Tomorrow series by John Marsden. I really, really love Ellie. I really love how that series makes war no fun at all, but keeps you hanging on the characters' every move. You want them to fight--and you want them to go home and rest.

But if I had to pick a best book from that month's reviews, I'd have to go with Room for being that book that you simply can't forget. It's horrible, thought-provoking, and amazing. I was at turns disgusted and at turns laughing at Jack, the five-year-old narrator. I couldn't believe the resilience of his mother. I wondered what was going on in the brain of their captor. I was angry. I plotted escapes. And when I was done, I was certainly exhausted. But if you're up for a read like this--one disturbing in many ways--I very much recommend Room.

Sirens Registration Deadline

2011-08-31T10:39:00.001-06:00

Registration for Sirens -- http://www.sirensconference.org -- ends in just a week. If you're a fantasy writer (or aspiring writer), an academic who's interested in fantasy, or a reader who wants to read about women and girls as characters in fantasy books, please consider coming out to a cozy retreat-style conference designed just for you. This year's guests of honor are Justine Larbalestier, Nnedi Okorafor, and Laini Taylor. Presentations range from formal papers to workshops to (often lively) small-group discussions, and just because you're in the audience doesn't mean you're expected to be a passive listener. A number of communal meals are included with registration; we also like oddball fun things like author readings where everyone shows up in their spa bathrobes and has hot cider. Because the event is small, it's possible to meet and connect with everyone over the course of the weekend.

Happy Wednesday, the day on which I hope to start getting caught up on things! I had a major crisis of time management this week, but at the breaking point, I saw a little beam of light in the dark and murky clouds of my inbox, so I have hope again.

Nonfiction Roundup

2011-08-25T14:25:00.002-06:00

Yeah, sometimes I read books that aren't marketed for kids. Who knew.

I somehow received an advance copy of Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality by Jonathan Weiner (Ecco). From where, I don't remember, but that's not really the point. I love "narrative nonfiction," even if I'm not always certain that my definition is the same as that of others. I like Smithsonian Magazine. I like the stories behind the dry side of science, history, and so on.

This is a science nonfiction narrative about aging. The first third spends too much time for my taste on philosophy and the ideas of one particular scientist who has his own ideas about how to stop aging. The middle third gets into the science in a way that (I think) is followable if you had biology and chemistry in high school, and I did find this interesting. The final third touches a little bit on ethics and considerations--like, if you live 200, 300 years, is driving a car an acceptable risk, who'll pay for anti-aging care, how do kids work if you're only going to be fertile before the first bone marrow transplant (and what does this do to the age spread and jobs and etc.). Nowhere is whether or not you ever get to retire discussed, which I found interesting. In summary, I found the last third of the book the most interesting; I wanted more science in my science.

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine (W. W. Norton & Co.) delves into the poor construction of most of the research about differences in brain function between men and women, and decides that there's not so much difference as there is bad science and social conditioning; by the time they're several months old, babies know about differences between men and women and are picking up on--perhaps categorizing--differences in what men and women do, even in the most gender-neutral parenting households. Fine touches briefly on how small children might cling to ideas of being girls or boys because, with few life experiences, they don't have other ways to construct a sense of self; there's no "I'm a kindergartener" or "I'm an engineer" or "I'm a Star Wars fan" to make meaning. I wished for more about this, but as it's shifty and she's focused on provable things, I can see why she didn't go there.

Most interesting bits: studies on how women are in fact as good at rotating 3-D objects in their heads, as long as they're not told that men are better at it ahead of testing (and being told that women are better at a task improves outcomes on tests for them; also interesting were reports on studies where the same resumes were submitted to hiring groups with a typical woman's or man's name on the top, and women's were perceived as worse).

An old, old read from my old (private) reviews, which I'm still finding and transferring: No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel by Janice Dickinson (HarperCollins - HarperEntertainment). Janice Dickinson slept with a lot of people, drank a lot of things, snorted a lot of things, and sometimes she modeled. I hear the sequel (yes, her memoirs have sequels) is happier. But it's probably less scandalous. It's always--okay, sometimes--interesting to peek into other people's trainwrecks, especially when you don't know any of the people involved. When all of this stuff was going on in Janice Dickinson's life, there was no Google, just gossip mill, and it's odd to think about how many more people today have to cope with being not just famous, but infamous, and infamous where the entire world can see.

Mare's War by Tanita S. Davis

2011-08-18T14:26:00.000-06:00

By the time this posts, it will have been many months since I read Mare's War by Tanita S. Davis (Random House - Knopf Books for Young Readers) and some weeks since I wrote this review, but probably only a few days since I last thought about the book.

Octavia and Tali are planning a nice summer in San Francisco. The thing is, their grandmother--she prefers "Mare"--who wears high heels and drives a fast car, wants road trip buddies for her trip to a family reunion in the southern U.S. The generation gap is a huge one, and the tensions between Mere and her granddaughters, and between Octavia and Tali, are the unwanted passengers riding along.

The soundtrack of the trip is Mare's stories about growing up: about the life she might have had and the one she left, about her complicated relationships with her own family, and about her stint in the Women's Army Corps during WWII, in the U.S. and in Europe.

I loved this book, and if you're wondering if a book about "grandma" could be YA-friendly, I assure you that it's fantastic. Mare is a firecracker of a character, and I don't think it's just my interest in WWI/WWII music that kept me turning pages throughout her scenes. I also was intrigued by the modern-day storyline, how the generations of women would figure out how to relate to one another, and the contrasts between how people mother, how sisters relate, and how each of the characters understands family make for a fascinating read on many levels. Mare was my favorite, though, and I could have read a whole book just about her.

This was one of the first e-books I bought, and it had the cover at the beginning of this post. There's an updated cover with a more realistic photo take on the girl in the helmet; unfortunately, that's not showing up in the Amazon results that allow you to link the image. I'll try, but I suspect there'll be nothing but a broken link here...

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

2011-08-12T16:18:00.001-06:00

Laini Taylor's upcoming Daughter of Smoke and Bone (Little, Brown - Books for Young Readers)...well, we don't want to spoil you for it. Instead, here are just a few details of the book that will be out this fall. A girl with blue hair whose name is Karou, who draws amazing beings in her notebook, who wishes her way through the day, partly for convenience, partly to protect her family from discovery. By day, she's an art student, and also, upon summons, courier of human teeth. She feels like something is not quite right, and that, despite her odd family's devotion, that she belongs somewhere else. When she meets Akiva, a strange, powerful man who seems otherworldly, she finds out that things are more dangerous than she could have imagined, and a war between chimaera and seraphim may be her undoing. The question is: who are the monsters and who are the saviors? A flexible approach to time makes the mystery unwind in compelling fashion.

This review originally appeared in the Sirens newsletter.

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Wonderstruck

2011-08-04T17:33:00.004-06:00

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently, it can be disconcerting to read a childhood favorite and find that it’s not quite the read one remembers. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg (Simon and Schuster - Atheneum) proved to hold up far better on a reread than I could have dreamed.

Claudia decides that she wants something. Something to know about, to make her different, special, changed. She wants to be--and to be, she decides, she will run away to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. For starters, how is that NOT awesome? Perhaps I just really enjoy kids on the lam stories; I liked The Boxcar Children and Secrets of the Shopping Mall, and my roommate played “Barbies run away from the government” when she was little, and Nancy and Plum touches on running away as well as survival without adults. I remember looking for the perfect little copse of trees along the road to hide in on long car rides even while I realized that camping out would only be fun so long as it wasn’t cold or raining (the local norm) or until I needed the bathroom or a shower, so running away to a place would be the brilliant solution.

Claudia is good at planning, but her younger brother is good at money, so she invites him along, and soon, they’re sleeping over at the museum and having a better and more meaningful adventure than Claudia anticipated: can they figure out who sculpted the angel that Mrs. Frankweiler donated to the museum? Running away--bathing in the fountain, eating not quite enough in cafeterias, hiding out in the bathroom at the end of the day--wouldn’t be nearly so much fun if it were all about the mechanics.

My heart aches a little at how hard it would be to create a modern adventure story for middle graders and teens. Now, the police would have you on a security camera before you were past the bus stop. Can you even get a post office box without adult I.D.? You’d call home and caller I.D. would reveal your location (if your cell phone hadn’t been triangulated, or your mom didn't have your phone on GPS). A kid would just want to peek at Facebook. A museum would be alarmed to the hilt. And if you showed up at Mrs. Frankweiler’s house, and she called to tell your parents that you could stay the night and talk about statues before going home, Child Protective Services would probably surround the house and demand everyone out, hands up. Maybe Mixed-Up Files is, today, an off-grid fantasy.

Set in--I think--the 60s, there are the moments of low-tech awareness and older attitudes toward unaccompanied children over a certain age, and just a few passing moments that made me frowny (for example, I recall Claudia remarking that it would take men to move the statue; maybe upper-body strength would be handy, and such a situation likely, but I had a tiny little bristle over that, as I know several women whose biceps I envy, and who would be happy to lend a hand). For a book of its time period, I expected that Mixed-Up Files would be much more dated than it seemed to me.

I love it when kids can function in books, when they have the agency to think things through--the lesson of growing up. Maybe the best part, however, is that this is a middle-grade friendly story that emphasizes seeking adulthood without losing the wonder of childhood.

I heard Brian Selznick talk about Wonderstruck (Scholastic) at the BEA children's authors breakfast, and skimmed right through it on the way home. This story is part running away to a museum (nods to The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler are deliberate), part, well, running away to a museum. I have a copy of, but have never read, Hugo Cabret, so I didn’t really know what to expect.

The very thick book is a regular-length middle-grade novel with a second story interwoven in pictures. The text version is a boy dealing with becoming deaf in the 1970s, and a series of life-changing events prompt him to run away to New York City to find his biological dad, where finds a friend and a new way to communicate before he gets to the end.

The other story, the visual story, is about a deaf girl in about 1920 who is being forced to learn to lip-read, and whose world is changing faster than she’d like (silent films, her refuge, are being replaced by talkies, and this ties into a huge betrayal, but it would be a spoiler to tell you more). Both of the stories converge at the museum, and on the boy’s resolve to unravel the mystery of his family, no matter what. At the beginning of the visual story, there’s an illustration trick that is repeated a couple of times in a row (and thus loses some of the power of its amazingness and trickery), but after that, this is a totally suck-you-in read about self-concept, family, and friendship.

This copy was provided at the BEA breakfast, one assumes by the publisher. Thanks!

Fun stats: This post was in draft for almost five months. I lost the disk with the review on it for a while... I have 14 more drafts, and a half-dozen books from the last month or two that I haven't even gotten into draft form yet, with 12 reviews scheduled for later in the year. After that, I have a couple hundred to move from my old, unstable blog. Anyone else out there behind schedule too?

Monsters!

2011-08-03T19:51:00.000-06:00

So, readers, I plan conferences sometimes, and one of those conferences is a series focused on women in fantasy--authors, readers, other professionals, academics, characters...

This year's theme is "monsters," encompassing not just the vampire boyfriends so prevalent in fantasy of late, but the monstrous, particularly the female as monsters and, in the abstract, monstrous. Guests of honor this year are Justine Larbalestier, Nnedi Okorafor, and Laini Taylor, and they'll all present keynotes; beyond that, anyone is welcome to propose a presentation to the programming vetting board. Here are the results: http://www.sirensconference.org/events/accepted/

I'm expecting a rich, fabulous discourse at the conference--most presenters build in time for discussion even if they're, say, reading a paper. Sirens is very interactive, as well as small, cozy, and supportive. If you can't join us this year, you might consider purchasing a supporting registration to ensure that the conference sticks around until that year when you can attend--and you might start thinking about putting together a presentation, gathering a group of friends to share a hotel room, or saving your pennies to buy all those books you won't be able to go home without!

Giveaway: Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta

2011-08-02T19:47:00.000-06:00

As it happens, there are multiple copies of this at my house, so surely I can give one away to a good home. I reviewed Finnikin of the Rock here: not quite for me, but as you know, that doesn't mean it's not for anyone else! I like matching books with people, and it's often more fun to match that book that wasn't quite for you up with a reader who will enjoy it wholeheartedly.

So!

To enter the giveaway, please leave me a comment no later than midnight Friday with your e-mail address (okay to break it up @ your e-mail to stop spam) and your favorite story with swords in it, and why. You must be a follower to win, but that's on your honor, as there are lots of ways to "follow" (and to be honest, I don't even check).

When I wake up on Saturday, I'll choose a random winner, and ask for a U.S. mailing address. I don't get to the post office as often as I'd like, but while the roads are clear for summer, I go about every other week.

Best Of: One Year Ago

2011-08-01T17:39:00.001-06:00

Last August, I was posting a lot of giveaways and freebies. I reviewed one of my favorites, Watership Down, which is an ongoing curiosity, as (I've mentioned) it seems to have everything I dislike in books in it. And, yet, it has those moments of triumph, like Bigwig defending the tunnel and the triumph of overcoming oppression. I keep meaning to read the book of stories that goes with it, Tales from Watership Down, as I hear that there are more girl bunnies in that one, and that it's an interesting expansion of the universe.

That month, I was also reading Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden, and enthralled by the survival and war aspects of the books. Ellie, the heroine, is one of my favorite girls in these sorts of stories; Katniss would want to have Ellie on her team, for sure, for her brain and for her humanity. I loved that the idea of war was always a struggle, even when the group of kids had no choice but to be involved in it. Since I read this, I've read some critiques about how the series addresses--or, more properly, doesn't--Aboriginal folks, who seem to be missing from the narrative and the world, and read some really interesting discussions about cultural tensions and relations in Australia.

Wildefire by Karsten Knight

2011-07-27T09:14:00.002-06:00

Ashline Wilde will fight you. She'll kick you in the groin if you deserve it. She'll knock your teeth right out. And her destructive, runaway older sister Eve might egg her on. Maybe even take things too far. She flees to boarding school in California, and you'd think that in the remote north coastal woods, a girl--even the sort of girl like Ashline who has a fake I.D. and isn't afraid to use it--would be able to keep out of trouble. Or no worse trouble than a rebellious teenager could get into at a prep school.

When Ashline and her new crowd foil a kidnapping, things start to change. It's no longer just about sneaking out at night, or that intriguing college student-slash-park ranger that Ashline's interested in; it's about a veritable pantheon of superheroes, gods, and amazing powers. As a hint, Ashline's Polynesian heritage comes into play both for her and for her sister.

But what's really scary is the moment Ashline realizes that maybe, just maybe, she shouldn't be in the woods alone at night. What's lurking just off campus, and what's a volcano goddess to do about it?

Not particularly relevant to my review: I was amused to see a reference to Fern Canyon (do an image search!), where I once hiked as a stop off on a Seattle-Los Angeles driving trip, sort of, because there was too much water and I didn't actually have appropriate gear and I could only wade so far, and even more amused to find out that some of Jurassic Park: The Lost World was filmed there, as I am scared of dinosaurs. Had I known, I might not have taken the steep, glorious drive over the coastal hills and through the stream to the trailhead. You never know when a velociraptor will just come out of nowhere chased by a T-rex.

Wildefire by Karsten Knight (Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers) is the start of a three-book series, and ~~is officially out today~~ out yesterday. I received a copy through S&S GalleyGrab. Thank you so much!

The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson

2011-07-26T10:31:00.000-06:00

Confessions, first: when I saw the sale announcement for this book, I cringed. It sounded terrible. Like, jaw-droppingly, pass-it-around-to-friends-and-laugh awful.

Then, when I read the first paragraph, I was hooked. And I had to wait and wait and wait to tell people about it.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson (HarperCollins - Greenwillow) is set in a Spanish-flavored fantasy world, and Princess Lucero-Elisa is the one person born in every hundred years to bear a Godstone, a blue jewel in her belly about which there are many legends.

Elisa doesn’t know much about the Godstone, and stress and a lack of self-confidence related to her mother’s death and her older sister contributes to Elisa’s tendency to overeat and her preoccupation with her weight. This is one of those things that could go either way with individual readers, but I really identified with Elisa’s image/weight/food issues. It's complicated--she overeats, but she also likes and appreciates food and is a hungry girl. Later in the book, her relationship with food changes against her will, and while she still desires it, she has more of an understanding of food as both fuel and enjoyment, and she’s forced into so much activity that she ends up stronger and slimmer, but muscle-y, not skinny or magically "healed."

Anyway, Elisa has been engaged to Alejandro, the much older king of a neighboring land, in order to cement better relations. When she leaves for her new home, she’s immediately tested--mentally, physically, spiritually--and finds that she’s not only capable of more than she thought, her Godstone may force her to be responsible for more than she thought. When she arrives in Joya D’Arena, Alejandro keeps their marriage secret, tasking her with spying on her peers, which she does...until she’s kidnapped by a fringe group that is already at war on the borders of the kingdom. Elisa’s always loved books on war and strategy, but can she help her captors, and help her king and country? If she can, what price war?

I love this book. It is my fall must-recommend, especially for fans of Kristen Cashore and Tamora Pierce. This is one of the most mature and well-concepted YA fantasies I’ve read in ages. It has a really wonderful, flawed, smart protagonist, struggling with herself in believable fashion as she struggles with things outside herself and how both intersect. There is romance, but it’s not the foreground. It hits a lot of my buttons. It comes out in September.

The cover linkable via Amazon is nice, though I don't like the middle (and only weeks after seeing it have I figured out that that's supposed to be the Godstone, I think); check out the UK edition for one that's a little more evocative of the setting. I suspect that version would have been a no-go in the U.S., and that's a shame.

I read this in advance copy that I stole from a friend.

Diversify Your Reading Challenge

2011-07-25T09:24:00.001-06:00

I've been meaning to post about the Diversify Your Reading Challenge for a while. Basically, read good stuff, write about it!

But why do it? If you're not sure, read on.

When I was small, I very much wanted to read books that felt like they were about me. I looked for girls with green eyes (more prevalent in fiction than in real life, I think), for example, and contrary to the rumor that girls will read books about boys, I tended to shy away from those! Now that I am not small, I have a better appreciation for the idea that everyone should be able to find something on the bookshelf that feels like me. Whether you take up the challenge to contribute to diversity in circulation statistics at a library, to encouraging profit and loss analyses that tell publishers you'll buy more diverse books, to reading to better understand what's not like me or seeking out more books like me, I think you'll find that there are more good reads out there than you expected.

When I was small, I didn't know that it was okay to read about not like me. I didn't know how to talk about it or if it was okay to talk about it. I wasn't even entirely sure what like me meant beyond superficials. I still don't know. It is okay to read something and not understand all of it. Really.

In a sense, I've been doing this challenge for a while now. Once you've made a conscious effort to try new things, to try things that aren't being recommended by the faceouts in big bookstores, the books that--let's face it--don't always get the promotional pushes, it's suddenly much easier. This book leads to that one, and that one and that one, and you wonder where you were all this time.

I'm being vague, deliberately so. I know that this challenge could mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The reason I'm posting is that I've seen a lot of positive changes in my life, in my ability to understand literature, in my ability to understand other people, as I've diversified my reading (along many axes) over the past few years. It hasn't made me a perfect human being, by any means, but it has helped me be more thoughtful, more curious, more aware.

Good luck to you, now, and go forth and read.

Don't Pirate Us; We'll Pirate You?

2011-07-21T11:43:00.001-06:00

I'm not the greatest NetGalley user. I occasionally sit down and pick out a bunch of titles I'd like to read, review, and (with luck) recommend. This year has been a surprisingly busy one, however, and the multi-step process of getting a book onto my not-Kindle is one I tend to avoid, not to mention the part where I am, really, trying to not only read books I scheduled for this year, but those on my shelves I've never read, as a book collection downsize is in order.

But that part's me--my not-blogging responsibilities, like work and volunteering, and my technology quirks. The other part, however, is something I've been thinking about for a while. I thought it was an isolated incident, and was willing to accept the not-answer I received about it when I inquired. I've been going through acceptances for e-galleys and I found another.

As I've received this from more than one publisher, I'm just going to quote the most offensive part:

By submitting a review through NetGalley, you agree that [redacted] and/or its related companies may use your review (in whole or in part) for promotional purposes relating to [redacted] products in any and all media with appropriate attribution. Please be sure to include the following when you post your review: • Name of the publication/blog/outlet where your review will be published/posted • Run date for when the review will be posted/published...

Hold on there, cowboy. This isn't a contract. It's probably not enforceable. It's certainly not enforceable if I don't ever review your book, or if I don't submit my review back through NetGalley's system. (I am not a lawyer; I just hang out with them sometimes.) It also seems to be in opposition to NetGalley's FAQ:

If you do choose to write a review, you can use NetGalley to send the review to the publisher. Your review is shared with the publisher as a courtesy — but the content and publishing rights for that review belong solely to you.

Right. This shouldn't need to be stated specifically, but I'm glad that it is. When you write something original--when you "fix" a creative work--it's yours to do what you please with it (in the U.S., anyway, for a certain length of time). I might have some other situation: I might license someone else the right to use my review, whether for free or for compensation. I might enter into a work-for-hire relationship, where my employer gets the copyright for all the work I do for that employer (in exchange for a salary, one hopes). Some folks prefer Creative Commons licenses. I don't; I can specify the same things that those do, if I want to, under existing laws.

And that's why I'm so concerned by the statement that companies may use your review (in whole or in part) for promotional purposes. I understand that publishers circulate reviews internally to find out what's working, what the buzz is, and so on, and I don't mind that. I don't care if I'm quoted in the media (including blogs), though I appreciate appropriate attribution. I don't even care if you read this post and write a very similar one, because I believe strongly that people can simultaneously, unknowingly create similar works--and that most written work is remixing something you've seen before.

Beyond that, however, I would expect to be asked if a publisher wanted to use a quote I've written for a promotional reason. Promotional reasons are not fair use, like it would be if, say, a reporter used my quote in a story or a teacher used my quote as jumping-off point for a classroom discussion. Heck, if you're a teacher, I've been there. Print this out and give your whole classroom copies if you want.

I would most definitely expect to be asked if a publisher wanted to use an entire review for a promotional reason. Attribution is not a fair use defense, nor it is sufficient to explain why one has used the entirety of a work. I do not want to waive or license my copyright before I've even read the book, something similar to how publishers ask that reviewers don't quote from advance copies, not that this e-mail notice is likely sufficient to waive or license anything. (I am also very wary of being quoted out of context now, too!) This article, though it's specific to the film industry, provides a more in-depth look at what I mean.

This is all hypothetical today. I don't write sound bites. I often review older books. The places where I'm most influential are not public, and when I recommend books in those realms, I'm not thinking about writing for the public eye. I can't imagine that a publisher would want any of my reviews--in whole or in part--for any reason at all, and thus, I can't imagine that I'd end up in a position to have to ask a publisher to cease and desist. But I am very concerned about the phrases in some publishers' NetGalley e-mails that seem to frame my reviews as solely for their promotional purposes, and in my case that bloggers are reviewing solely for the purpose of providing free advertising for books. (Sure, some are. But that's not what I'm talking about. And sure, there's a potential side effect of a review creating welcome buzz for a book, and there's the possibility that a blogger is happily promoting something or someone she loves, but giving any one of those as the whole of what's going on simplifies the blogosphere way too much for my comfort.)

It makes sense for publishers to use their resources wisely--to match advance copies of books with people who will enjoy them and create buzz for them, to match books with people who will review them honestly, and to get books into the hands of people who buy or influence buyers. Go promotional machine! I simply believe that legal overreaching is not the way to do it, and I won't review books where the publisher has an expectation that, in exchange for a copy, I must be a willing participant in its marketing and advertising, that I must give up copyright in my review as a condition of providing feedback for free. When a book is great, and I am not required to love it, I'll happily tell people in public, in private, at bookstores. Maybe I'll suggest that author be a guest at a conference I plan. Maybe that book will be the one I buy for everyone I know.

But I'm stubborn, and I like to make those decisions on my own.

Giveaway: Chasing Brooklyn by Lisa Scroeder

2011-07-15T09:03:00.002-06:00

I started Chasing Brooklyn by Lisa Schroeder (Simon and Schuster - Simon Pulse) last fall, got distracted in the middle and returned to it to finish late this spring.

I haven't read many novels in verse, and I have this idea that I don't appreciate poetry (which isn't true; I am most likely to appreciate it as song lyrics, or childhood rhymes, or something similar, though). While I don't think I'm quite converted to novels in verse yet (I have a handful more to read to help me get to know the--I don't know, is genre the right word?), I think I get them more.

First, white space: so much less intimidating than paragraphs, so much easier to fly through a book. You probably know some reluctant readers, some struggling readers, and here is a book that they and their more accomplished reader-friends can read together. That is no small potatoes, people.

Second: words, arranged, have a beauty of their own. There's a moment in this book ("d a n c e," for lack of a better reference) that, whenever I recall it, makes me wriggle in my chair. Given how quickly I clear out brainspace for the next book--my draft entries are looking at me and glaring and asking why I am struggling to write reviews of what I read six months ago--remembering something like that is, again, no small potatoes for me.

Third: here is a complete plot, with much for the reader to fill in and imagine. The nature of this book is that the plot is sketched in atmospheric pastels, where a non-verse book would focus on tight curlicued ink details. Readers want and need both, I think.

Would you like to read this book? I'm working on my great shelf-clearing project of 2011, and I'm happy to send this to a new and loving home. To win this book, you must...

1. Leave me a comment: What's your favorite poem, poetry collection, poet, or novel in verse? Include your e-mail address, but please mangle it (like, myname at someplace.com) to cut down on spam.
2. Leave that comment by midnight on Tuesday, July 19.
3. I'll choose a random winner who must be able to give me a U.S. mailing address.

Picture Books!

2011-07-10T23:34:00.001-06:00

I hope that before this auto-posts, I'll have time to have written up what I love in picture books. If it turns out that I haven't had time, I'll wish I had talked about:

picture books as amuse-bouche, perfect bites
whimsy
first experiences with language (spare, lush, bouncy, lyrical)
tales that stretch young minds (but that's not a requirement)
meaningful moments in lives of kids
whimsy
eye candy
structure

After that, two recent favorite picture book reads are below. Buglette, the Messy Sleeper by Bethanie Deeney Murguia (Random House - Tricycle Press, which is shuttered, but the book isn't) highlights some of my criteria for "great picture book." Buglette is a very neat bug by day, but her nighttime wriggles--despite being amaaaaaazing--are not just messy: they attract the very scary bug-eating crow. Buglette has to save the day!

Now, that might sound too scary for bedtime, but it really isn't. It's about a small being figuring out how to take care of a problem. Transfer that to something like "I'm four and I'm really scared of spiders, and here's one in my shoe; what do I do about it?" Transfer that to "I've spilled this glass of water; what do I do about it? Can I do it on my own?" Problem-solving skills: good for kid development! All that aside, I love this short, compact story with its playfulness and whimsy, and I LOVE the art. Check out her blog, which links out to her site as well.

Another recent PB read for the younger crowd was Little White Rabbit by Kevin Henkes (HarperCollins - Greenwillow). I saw this in f&G (folded and gathered--the loose pages without a binding) a long time ago (I think) and was really, really, wriggly-like pleased to receive a copy at BEA's children's authors breakfast, and even more intrigued to hear what the author had to say about it, particularly about the pictures. This book might mislead you: you might think it's going to be quiet and sedate, the sort of book that aunt you don't like wants to read to you because it will make you yawn and yawn and somehow magically play quietly. (I don't have an aunt like that.) Instead, the little white rabbit has a wild, wonderful imagination that encompasses multiple dimensions, and wonders what it might be like to be green, or tall, or a rock... This is perfect for those kids who go to bed in puppy mode one night and wake up barking you good morning. You probably know at least one. (Oddly enough, these puppies are quite interested in pizza and other non-dog foods.) Check out the author here.

Rapunzel's Revenge by Shannon and Dean Hale; illustrated by Nathan Hale

2011-07-06T17:36:00.000-06:00

Why, hello!

I think I have (nearly) cleaned up all my messes of having a month-ish without reliable computer access. I haven't cleaned up the work--not the piled-up inbox, nor the computer-related tasks, nor things that must be done/read/written by a week ago--but in a few programs' installation time, I can start in on tackling.

In between trips to New York (for BEA) and New Orleans (for event planning boot camp class, with a morning at ALA) (note: while fun, you can do lots of fun things and stay connected to people and books without attending either, and I'm happy to expand on that), and a long weekend with family, I read, among other things, Rapunzel's Revenge by Shannon and Deal Hale, with illustrations by (no relation) Nathan Hale (Bloomsbury).

Any graphic novel review I write should come with a disclaimer: I don't entirely "get" graphic novels, comics, manga, and other panel-illustrated writing. It's not because I have some big reason to not appreciate these forms of storytelling; it's probably most accurate to say that I'm very word-visual and linear about that--I read those Choose Your Own Adventures in story chunks, and then read the books from front to back. I love word ambiguity, but not linearity ambiguity, which panel-illustrated stories can sometimes have. I want more words and fewer pictures!

But: I liked this book, and in particular, I liked the first third, where Rapunzel's story is retold in drab browns where Mother Gothel has stripped the countryside bare and enslaved its people, and in vivid greens where Rapunzel is confined to a tower-tree which grows and prompts Rapunzel to grow as well. The next section is a quest to return home and rescue family, and the rest of the story is more episodic, with Rapunzel mostly saving the day, until the Big Confrontation. It's fun to see bits of other fairy tales get hinted at here and there, though.

I don't have a best of last July post, as I only posted giveaways, but it's going-to-the-post-office, no-snow season, so look for more of those coming up.

What Do You Say About YA?

2011-06-30T07:45:00.001-06:00

I'm still in the middle of computer woes, which won't be straightened out before the end of next week. This is terrible timing, but I'm sure I'll live. I didn't expect a monitor flicker to be a month's worth of bother; now I'll have to be more understanding of how long it takes other people to get up and running after a computer issue!

But this is kinda perfect for a question that I can post here via phone:

What do you talk about when you talk about YA?

I'm looking for a word, and I don't know what it is. A definition that's not in the dictionary. A justification that shouldn't be needed. A turn of phrase. A feeling.

What do you say? What do you associate, positive or negative, with YA?

A Countess Below Stairs by Eva Ibbotson

2011-06-27T14:52:00.003-06:00

My airplane and clearing-that-shelf reading this week has been A Countess Below Stairs by Eva Ibbotson (Penguin - Speak). I thought this was a YA book--and there's no reason it can't be read by a young adult, in my opinion--but it felt like the sort of book that's always been in the adult section. I don't know how I acquired this book, so I can't really say more.

Anna is a countess, and the sort of remarkable person who is kind, strong, and humble, despite a very privileged upbringing. But, when the Bolsheviks do their thing, she and her family must flee to England, losing touch with their servant (who's carrying the non-entendre family jewels). While a family friend has helped younger brother Petyr find a place at a respected boarding school, Anna and her cousin, Prince Sergei, end up in service, Sergei as a driver and Anna as a maid of many different responsibilities.

The Earl of Westholme's household staff are discomfited by the new arrival; they see through Anna's disguise and resent the intrusion on their space--but Anna is careful to fill her new role as one born to do so, and after winning a grudging respect, proceeds to charm the household. At least, all except for Muriel Hardwicke, the earl's common-born fiance, who has some unfortunate feelings about eugenics... But, if the family, the staff, and the Earl turn away Miss Hardwicke, will they have to sell their home and scatter to the winds? And is there any hope for Anna and the Earl's star-crossed love?

The stylized language and Anna's steadfast, grown-up Pollyanna-ish personality make this book loads of fun, though there are moments where information is deliberately held back from readers so the denouement can be fetchingly unraveled all at once. Problems with punctuation and spacing, particularly commas, happen often enough to distract, though not quite often enough to warrant avoiding this book if a sweet romance, not in-period but in a country atmosphere like Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, is up your alley. If you have an e-reader, I might recommend an e-version for the fun of quickly and easily looking up rarely-used words and those used in uncommon ways.

Jane by April Lindner

2011-06-22T11:02:00.003-06:00

As I write this on a teeny tiny cell phone screen, FedEx is probably circling my office with a new monitor, but not yet with the requisite parts to run said monitor. This has thrown a great big ugly wrench into my "get stuff done" plans, but has been very helpful in prompting me to continue the great shelf clean-out of 2011.

One of the most recent picks in said book downsizing was Jane by April Lindner (Hachette--Poppy). I was thinking that I might have some issues with a retelling of Jane Eyre, given that I have issues with Jane Eyre; while I did have some Jane issues, I should probably frame this review with the note that I wasn't reading with an eye toward putting the book down, counting pages. Instead, I stayed up past my bedtime two nights, something I can't justify very often, and something I tend to not do when my eyes feel like raisins well before I'd normally be asleep.

I think that retellings are difficult beasts. In retelling, it's easy to get mired down in the original storyline, or to lose the emotional thread in a retelling that goes further astray. The best of the latter are probably not so much retellings--just stories inspired by the originals.

I wasn't excited to find out that Mr. Rochester in Jane has been transformed into a(n) (probably) in-his-thirties rock star, but this worked far better than I thought it would, because it a) gave Mr. Rochester--well, Jane's Nico Rathburne--a reason to have been a bad boy beyond "I felt like it," b) gave Nico a (better) reason to be comfortable with famous friends and not-so-famous staff, and c) mitigated some of his neediness and disbelief that he could be loved for himself, as he's had fans of music and merely image.

Nineteen-year-old Jane is somewhat less transformed, coming to the Rathburne household as a nanny. I have always found Jane, in the original and here, hard to connect with. She feels dour and terse, and maybe too forgiving of that older man in her life.

Before I go off on the updating tangent, Jane has a pleasant length and pacing. That might sound like an odd compliment, but if you've read Jane Eyre and thought the part with St. John would never end, you might understand what I mean. There's much less Gothic horror and more of the traditional romance structure in Jane.

While I'm pleased with the update, I also feel that it magnifies some issues. For example, Jane and Nico's dialog sounds old-fashioned and odd. We don't get as much of Jane's development and feelings of desperate solitude, even when she's not sure where she'll spend her first night alone; she has siblings, and she must enforce separation from them and their unhealthy relationships. Jane also remembers her parents' less-than-perfect parenting skills, but it doesn't have as much impact in flashbacks and memories as it might if it directly affected her present problems. The...guest...in the attic, well, in today's world, adult protective services would probably be involved, and obtaining a divorce in this day and age, in the United States (where this story is set) would not be unduly scrutinized. I have no particular thoughts on--or maybe I find the good and bad balance in--Nico's ultimate karmic "punishment." But maybe I'm really missing issues of faith and morality, social class, and gender roles that by virtue of time period can't be the thematic hinges of this Jane, just a multitude of factors in personality.

I enjoyed the romance focus of Jane, as well as the streamlined story. I'd recommend Jane for those looking for the same. I suspect that teen Jane Eyre fans would like Jane, and those who've struggled with Jane Eyre might be able to return to the original after reading the bones in Jane. Finally, Jane is, I suspect, an entry into the field of "new adult" literature, filling in the gap of protagonists between age 18-ish and adult, and I can't fault that in any way.

A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

2011-06-08T10:23:00.001-06:00

Well, oops.

I don't use netGalley all that much; I've got a lot of requests lined up, but because I have a hard time (lately, at least) getting to a computer where I have Adobe Digital Editions, I try not to pick anything up unless I know, say, I'll be taking a trip, where I'd rather be carrying one e-reader than several real books. Also, because the ARCs expire off my device (and off my computer), I forget to review what I've read, and then I no longer have the file... And shoot, because I have about 20 half-written reviews waiting for me to polish them up and post them, and I want to get to it!

Thus, it's only after at least a couple of weeks that I stumbled upon a reminder that I read A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt - Clarion), based on a true story about a boy whose village in Sudan is attacked in 1985. His teacher tells him to run--and after that, he's on the run, on his own, with stragglers from his village, with other boys he meets at refugee camps. He sees gruesome sights along is journey, and there's a wonderful, wonderful moment when Salva and his group run across another group in the desert, and must decide whether to save them--or save themselves. (I can imagine, say, a fifth-grade class really debating what he should do, and how many threads for discussion open from there.) Despite all that's taken away from him, Salva survives, and helps others to do the same.

Interwoven in alternating chapters is Nya's story, set in 2008. She walks for hours each day to carry water to her home, and for part of the year, her family travels far away to dig for water, competing with wild animals and other desperate families. Her younger sibling gets sick. Her family can't earn any money. So, when a strange man shows up in her village with plans to build a well, she has no reason to believe that there's been water just a few feet from her front door all this time.

Eventually, as you might expect, Salva and Nya's paths cross. While I figured out how they would early on, I don't think this distracted or detracted from the story, and if a reader doesn't pick up on hints, I don't think it will ruin the reading experience, but rather, I think it will be a satisfying surprise.

It's really difficult to present history and current events to middle grade kids; their worldview is still very much in development--and I have to say that I learned some information about what was going on in the world when I was little, and about things I've been conveniently able to not know much about. I think A Long Walk to Water is a good introduction to the topic for middle grade readers (who most likely won't encounter it anywhere else in their public school curriculum), because it's simple in its telling, but it doesn't seem like a gloss: the important ideas are here, in terms a young reader will be able to understand and later build upon.

In addition to the fictionalized story, there are notes from the author and now-grown Salva at the end of the book--much appreciated for filling in some of the questions I had while reading.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

2011-06-08T10:06:00.002-06:00

Sometimes, I come to the end of a book and do not want to talk about it. This is not because a book is bad, but because I have come to the end and I am not done reading. Or, to be clearer, I'm done reading in a physical sense, but not in the sense of making sense of what I've read.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (Penguin - DAW), even days after I've finished reading, is one of those books that's difficult to distill, and I have never seen a summary that does justice to how very complex and compelling it is. If you've seen reviews, then you've seen words like genocide, female genital mutilation/circumcision/cutting (worth a websearch to get more information on use of each term, and reasons for and against each), rape, and war. Yet that's simplifying Who Fears Death.

In a futuristic, post-apocalyptic desert, similar to today's southern Sudan, Onyesonwu's Okeke mother is raped by a Nuru man, making her Ewu--visibly, irrevocably different, and outcast from both the Okeke and the Nuru. Onyesonwu, whose name means "who fears death," rebels against the restrictions of her society, and ultimately, decides to rebel against the rules of her world, destroying her father in order to save not just her loved ones, but people who have not loved her. The story, part fantasy, part science fiction, part magical realism, part many other things and Okorafor's original style of storytelling, doesn't shy away from brutal and graphic description, but difficult real-world themes are interwoven with the magical tale seamlessly. Onyesonwu's story is raw, emotional, and nuanced.

It would be easy to highlight a dozen craft elements that I found impressive, such as Okorafor's ability to make me feel like I'm right there, smelling the smells and seeing the sights Onyesonwu does, but I think my favorite is the recurring theme of transformative dying. Several times, a traumatic experience is referred to as a death, while the character lives on, changed, living a new life. I love the idea of the self being reborn throughout life, and death(s) being not endpoints, but waystations, and this theme brings an optimistic, hopeful note to otherwise tragic moments in the characters' lives.

Originally published on the Sirens LiveJournal.

#yasaves--It Scores!

2011-06-06T14:24:00.000-06:00

Saturday, I very successfully stayed away from the internet. I had errands to run, a body to rest and mentally refuel, and so on. But right before I went to bed, I checked Twitter, and there it was: a hashtag, #yasaves, all over the place and spreading.

I read the article the tag was in response to, rolled my eyes, and went to bed, but I couldn't get it out of my mind all weekend. You can read the--well, "book review," as it's labeled, and editorial as it is, here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576357622592697038.html?mod=WSJ_Books_LS_Books_6

And, given how connected the kidlit community is, it's no surprise that you can't throw a rock without hitting an excellent rebuttal. Obviously, the piece's comments are favorable, and I've seen a few comments in agreement elsewhere, as well as one defense of the reviewer that didn't give me any concrete reason why all those rebuttals were wrong.

I hate to give more attention to something I think as ill-conceived as what I've linked above, and if it had been published in a venue with less of an audience, I might be tempted to ignore it entirely. That said, I have some thoughts that reflect and expand on the responses I've seen.

First, the title: "Darkness Too Visible." I keep chewing on this one. Too visible? That means it's there and you just don't want to see it, right? Like an ostrich, head in the sand? There's something judgmental here already, something that seems to say that if you can't see it, it doesn't affect you.

How nice to be you.

Then, the blurb sounds like it's going to review a handful of specific books. Instead, we get treated to an anecdote about a mother who had a bad shopping experience. Now, this happens. I'm sure it happens a lot, and I'm sure it happens a lot in Barnes and Noble. First, the store clerk doesn't seem to have had any idea how to help the mother; I've worked in retail, been the person asked the unanswerable question (What size does my kid wear? Is your kid here in the store? No, she's at home--do you think she looks good in red?), been the person covering a department I know nothing about. The appropriate answer is to say hey, I don't know how to help you, but let me see if someone else in the store can. And maybe no one there could--retail survives on strings of part-time people, rarely paid enough to care, but certainly paid enough to agree with a customer that yeah, we don't carry anything you want to buy, whether the clerk really thinks that's true or not. (Heck, I'll even relate that I stood in a B&N recently and heard a bookseller who “specialized” in teen books give some of the worst recommendations ever--a mom looking for adventure was getting TWILIGHT read-alikes--but if you ask for opinions, you get opinions.)

I’d love to hear from the clerk in question: does this piece accurately reflect what you think happened?

Let's now note that there are lots and lots of places to get great book recommendations--often, very specific book recommendations. Librarians and teachers and indie booksellers (and yes, some booksellers at retail chains) really know their stuff, and the American Library Association puts out lists of popular and award-winning books. You can get a pretty good idea about books from their reviews on Goodreads, Librarything, Amazon, and other sites, and book bloggers review picture, middle grade, and YA books all over the place; some of the last even focus on particular types of books, particular themes, and so on.

And let’s note, too, that Barnes and Noble is there to make money. Money to pay its employees and shareholders, money to keep the lights on. To do that, they’re going to focus on what’s popular and selling, and focus less on what is purchased more rarely. I’m not always happy myself in how this plays out. New books that I think are fantastic aren’t picked up for sale at B&N, while books that I think are not so great have huge displays. Some perfectly teen-appropriate books end up in the middle grade (independent readers) section because there's nothing of sufficient explicitness to send it to the teen section. B&N recently separated its young adult section into paranormal romance and everything else, and I think that does a disservice to young adult readers, who’ve benefited from browsing a mixed collection, and based on my own browsing, it’s not even accurately divided! I’m really glad this wasn’t done in the last decade to follow the trends (witches, because those were confused with Harry Potter, then Potter read-alikes, then vampire boyfriends, and so on). I hope B&N drops the idea--in my closest store, you now have to actively seek out “everything else,” because it’s hidden where it’s even harder to find than before. It’s a long way from the middle-grade books, and it’s a long way from the adult books, too.

Really, what I’m saying is this: what you want might not be in your local B&N. That’s not good for you as a shopper, but it’s reality.

Next, I’m a little confused. “Hundreds of lurid and dramatic covers stood on the racks...” Where? Really, honestly, where? Most books are spine out--completely uncompelling blocks of today’s popular fonts, identifiable by colophon (if you pay attention to that sort of thing, and I do), mostly with unmemorable titles. Turn the books face out and sure, I can get on board with dramatic, in some cases:

(Man, I love some of these.)

That's ignoring many book covers with a different approach, like these MG and YA covers:

...but lurid? Do you and I use this word the same way? I’d sure like more books with bright, lurid (!) colors on them, but whatever; I can’t see that any of these covers are shockingly sexually or violently explicit, or especially gruesome. And: so what if they were, or if they think you are? Helps you figure out what’s in the package.

Here, by the way, are the covers for the books referenced in the article:

What a range.

I don’t get much further in Gurdon’s piece before objecting to Freeman’s quote that she couldn’t find anything that wasn’t dark, anything without the themes of suicide, vampires, and/or self-mutilation. Giving some leeway for hyperbole, and going ahead with the assumption that mom is looking for something pretty lighthearted and that, perhaps, that’s exactly what her daughter would indeed like to read at this time--both of which are perfectly okay--how about any of these, off the top of my head, some of which I’ve reviewed on this blog, without looking anything up (and without knowing whether the 13-year-old is willing to read something a little bit older or younger than her age might indicate):

WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON by Grace Lin (but wait: a girl runs away)
THE GALLAGHER GIRLS series by Ally Carter (but wait: girls using weapons and wearing short skirts on the cover)
FROM THE MIXED-UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER by E. L. Konigsburg (but wait: a girl runs away to a museum)
A GIRL NAMED HAMLET by Erin Dionne (but wait: a girl is embarrassed by her parents...actually, maybe this fits better than I thought)
ASH by Malinda Lo (but wait: a girl has a girlfriend)
PARANORMALCY by Kiersten White (but wait: some fantastic creatures die)
DRUMS, GIRLS, AND DANGEROUS PIE by Jordan Sonnenblick (I think)
BRIGHTLY WOVEN by Alexandra Bracken (but wait: a girl might accidentally harm some other people...with magic)
MARE’S WAR by Tanita Davis (but wait: WWII)
HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE by Diana Wynne Jones (but wait: old people)
CLOAKED IN RED or HEIR APPARENT by Vivian Vande Velde (but wait: Red Riding Hood, already a pretty iiiiinteresting story, and multiple video-game deaths in the latter)
WILDWING by Emily Whitman (but wait: there’s time travel!)
I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU SOMEONE ELSE by Erin McCahan (but wait: a girl struggles with whether or not to get married)
HOW TO DITCH YOUR FAIRY by Justine Larbalestier (but wait: there is a brief kidnapping)
ANNE OF GREEN GABLES by L. M. Montgomery (but wait: hair-pulling)
LITTLE WOMEN by Louisa May Alcott (but wait: war)

And there are loads more I’m not thinking of right now--I’d love to have given a more diverse (in many ways) list here, but I kept having to take things off because, you know, there are Problems That Must Be Overcome, Sometimes Related to Big Ideas along the way (and I like books with peril and danger and violence and swearing and all the rest, so). That’s the thing about good stories: they have conflict before the resolution.

That brings me to my next point. As the piece says, “How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear...” Thanks for dear-ing me, but when I was a child, I was reading V.C. Andrews. I was reading thrillers for grown-ups, with grown-up sex and violence. I was reading books of dirty limericks. I was reading AZTEC and THE COLOR PURPLE and GONE WITH THE WIND and A ROSE IN WINTER and LADY CHATTERLY’S LOVER (booo-ring). My seventh-grade teacher was using IT as a read-aloud. Let’s roll things back even further: when I was five, the family Reader’s Digest medical guide told me how to make babies, and even what positions to make them in. I was not a teenage mom, by the way. I was also reading ANASTASIA KRUPNIK and ANNE OF GREEN GABLES...and books about kids who disappeared, or got cancer, or ran away from home, or did drugs (in that inaccurate monstrosity of a book, GO ASK ALICE). Teen lit wasn’t the same then as it is now, and what there was of it I mostly read when I was a “middle-grader”; a lot of it was missing what I now understand as stakes.

The big problems the reviewer sees: pederasty! Kidnapping! Incest! Brutal beatings! You know, in my sarcastic voice, things that people age 12-18 don’t know about and never experience, and that, if they only had heard of them, they’d be doing all the time. I read an awful lot of YA, and I can only think of a handful of books that address these topics--and for most of them, I’d say that the topics are treated with respect and presented to the reader respectfully. Sure, in the 40 years since the reviewer seemingly last had a good idea of what teens know about (and well into the history of young adult literature, for those of us better-informed), and do, and think about, books (and all media) have become more explicit. And again, my question is: So? Is anything accomplished by sweeping tough topics under the rug, by telling people that their experiences don't matter enough to become stories?

Many readers and authors have mentioned their stories of how YA saved them at one point or another, stories better than any I have to share. Maybe they read a story that helped them to feel like they weren’t alone as they came out, or as they struggled with abuse or bullying or violence, or pregnancy, or any of the many other problems kids and their friends face; maybe they just needed to have a variety of things to read to help them escape their real lives for a minute or an hour. The books I read as a child and a teen helped me know more about and be more prepared for the world. They didn’t help me with everything in it, and didn’t particularly help me with the biggest problems I personally faced as a teen, but certainly let me live in other worlds and lives and times--and I do believe that books can save.

I remember listening to some 13-year-olds discussing a book that one had read about a girl having an affair with her teacher and becoming pregnant--the sort of book called out in the WSJ review, I think. They understood that this is not at all what should happen; they were able to articulate their disgust, and in one teen’s expression, an understanding of how the situation might occur, and how complicated it could have been for the girl in the story. I hope this helped them all down the line, as statistics say that at least one of them is likely to have been pressured to be in some sort of relationship they don’t want, whether it was inappropriate adult advances, an abusive relationship, or something else. I wish that the books I had access to as a child had--sometimes--addressed these kinds of topics, because there are times when, armed with more knowledge, I could have been a better friend to people in such extreme situations. If I’d been abused or kidnapped or hurt, maybe I could have drawn on a fictional character’s experiences to plan my own strategy (as, after all, young adult lit rarely can be classified as tragedy, so there are strategies to be had--but someday, we’re going to discuss THE HUNGER GAMES as tragedy 'round these parts).

The review goes on to say that books show us the world, but that young adult literature shows a distorted picture of life. If you’re “careless” or “depraved,” you’ll seek to be surrounded by bad things, and thus become a worse person. Okay, I can get on board with that, modified: books can show us the world. But they can show us dystopia, utopia, distortion, and reality. No book has to, or should, do it all. Art isn’t required to reflect Nice Things alone, and the world would be poorer for it if it did. I’d argue that understanding what is ugly allows us to reflect on and appreciate beauty as well as to understand when Things Are Not Right. It’s perfectly all right with me if you want to read just “happy” books, but I wonder if you’ll be able to make sense of the world if you don’t read a handful that deal with topics like suicide, abuse, and so on.

I won’t say that a reviewer must like every book that’s “dark”; there are a couple mentioned in the review and elsewhere that I’ve written about and never posted my negative reviews of. (I decided that the world wouldn't change much if I kept my thoughts to myself, as these books weren't my cup of tea at all.) I think books that deal with unhappy topics can be crap, and not be great at addressing these unhappy topics, but so can anything. I think it's okay to criticize how authors tackle themes and characterization and topics. I think the assertion that all books in which bad things happen normalize bad things is ludicrous, however, and removes agency from readers who are well able to understand when an action or situation is harmful even if it’s not made explicit in the text. I think wailing that books will teach teens to do bad things is silly; I think there are more complex and nuanced reasons why teens engage in self-destructive behavior than “I read it in a book and I thought it was cool.”

I also think, and not everyone will agree, that removing anything from teens’ lives that might harm them--or remind them that they can harm themselves, in the WSJ’s example--is about the worst way to help them grow up. Teens know the difference between reality and fiction. Life is an endless string of difficult situations, and we need the opportunity to practice dealing with such situations. And in reading, no one need be hurt in real life for lessons to be learned.

That’s why I’m a little horrified about the reasoning for why some of the books called out in the WSJ piece are so bad. In SHINE, a gay teenager is assaulted and left for dead. It’s like we’re supposed to ignore this in fiction, when instead, we need to be dealing with and preventing these situations in real life. Check out CNN. You won’t have to look back very far or wait very long for a report to come in. This is reality, and we must live in it. If we're lucky and willful, we can change it.

Next, the WSJ piece starts to talk about whether or not parents want their children reading “bad language.” Trust me, trust me, your child has heard it all before. If it’s a concern for you, talk about it with your child, and let your child take the next step. There are perfectly reasonable discussions to have without pretending bad language doesn’t exist. There are perfectly reasonable discussions to have regarding whether swearing is appropriate in particular situations (or not), and discussions to have regarding why an author may have chosen to use that particular word in lieu of another.

Just remember this: being a parent does not automatically qualify you to parent every child, nor does it give you the right to parent every child.

The author of the WSJ piece writes, “Alas, literary culture is not sympathetic to adults who object either to the words or storylines in young-adult books.” Besides my objection to that hyphen, I’ll tell you exactly why I’m not sympathetic. I’ve told you part of it: You’re policing me, my students, other people’s kids, teachers, librarians, and so on. Another part of it: There’s a big, wide world of literature out there, and the books you’re referring to are only a small slice of the whole, meaning that you can indeed find something else to read. The biggest part of it: The article goes on to advocate, in only slightly veiled terms, book banning. Calling it “judgment” or “taste,” as the author does, is not getting to the heart of the matter; “judgment” and “taste” are about what you choose to read, not what everyone else does.

Those people who make selections for teen readers generally genuinely care about teens, want to help them find books that match their interests, and want them to find books they will love. They will, sometimes, get it wrong. But it’s sickening when a so-called professional book reviewer says that the American Library Association “delights” in informing people about frequently challenged books.

What?

Since when is anyone happy to have to defend a book--maybe even a book they don’t like--but that has no reason to be removed from a library’s shelves? You know, that thing where a defender probably has to put her career on the line, be ripped apart in the media, explain every possible justification, and still not have it be taken as the bigger picture, the greater good?

And for the record, Sherman Alexie’s oft-challenged DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN is one of the best books I’ve ever read. There is masturbation in it. Teenagers do that, sometimes.

The article, review, whatever it is only goes downhill from there, telling parents that they don’t have to take it anymore! As if they didn’t have the opportunity to shape what their (own) kids were reading in the first place. Thank you mom, and dad, and Great-Aunt Barbara, and grandma, and grandpa, and everyone else in my family for reading a little bit of everything. I learned that there were many things to read, and that people might not agree on the content of these many things to read.

I know or know of some parents who screen everything their child reads (or everything they think their child is reading), and who read along; I know some parents who have a read-what-you-want policy. The important thing is that people are reading. Talk to a literacy expert, who’ll tell you how this benefits your teen’s facility with mechanics of grammar and spelling. Talk to a college composition teacher, who’ll appreciate how your teen has had extra opportunities to read and think about books without the explicit guidance of an English teacher. Talk to your child, or your child’s friends, who have a shared experience, a bridge between each other, a bridge for talking about weighty topics. Talk to your child about what’s important to you. And then trust.

And before I wrap up, note that the sidebar of the WSJ piece (visible to you if you’re on a computer, but not to me, reading on a mobile phone) that some of the recommended books are not free from the scary, violent, or explicit, and that they’ve been split out into books for boys and books for girls, rather than books for teens, or by theme, or genre. What I’m supposed to think of this, I don’t know, but it reinforces the WSJ piece as something not fully thought through.

Let me just end with a rebellion I always hoped would go away when I grew up:

Don’t tell me what to read.

Best Of: One Year Ago

2011-06-01T13:18:00.014-06:00

Last June, I only posted twice, but I reviewed four books between the two posts. It's not easy to choose a favorite among the books I reviewed; I feel like comparing the genres/bookstore categories alone is near impossible.

That said, the one that I talk about the most often is Dr. Franklin's Island by Ann Halam. I do love peril, and I do love saving oneself, and I do love science fiction, so this is up my alley to start. I have a vague memory that Semirah is the narrator, and that the story doesn't swap between her and her close friend, Miranda, and a boy, Artie, that they are stranded with. I particularly liked the ambiguity in the relationship between Semirah and Miranda; the nature of their feelings for one another can be read from several angles, from friends to frenemies to romantic. I found this noteworthy because I get cranky when I feel like someone's trying to keep all the character options open in order to please everyone, or because I feel like the author thought that it was just easier to be ambiguous about relationships than to be specific about them, or because I feel like an author is trying to be "cool"; here, I felt like the ambiguity was natural, an organic part of the story, and I appreciated that very much. (Hey, I can read for myself. Thanks for letting me.)

Listening to...

2011-05-27T07:57:00.002-06:00

Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books talk about how blogs are ubiquitous, but how even locally big, loud conversations are, in the grand scheme of things, small, and why no one should fear a bad review--and how those sell books and help people match up with other book people.

She articulated what I haven't quite been able to: readers are sophisticated. They can't be fooled by falsely positive reviews, and they won't just pass books by because of a negative review.

So, if you're blogging or writing a book, what I take away is to be truthful to your core, and not to sweat the disagreements. It's been coming up over and over, this idea that dissent and critique are somehow the antithesis of community, and I don't believe that. (Sarah noted that she wishes more authors could feel like they can review, and that they would--that authors know their genres very well. She acknowledged that it sucks to get a bad review, but you do move on; you have to remember that a review is not about you, but about your book.)

BEA YA Buzz Panel

2011-05-24T12:28:00.002-06:00

The session with editors buzzing upcoming YA books is standing room only, packed to the gills well before the start time, with more people pushing in (and really, really hot). (Hint: if you have eight bags of books, don't think you're coming in five minutes late and getting a seat in front.) Every time someone is all eh, young adult books are for losers--well, I guess there are a lot of losers, and I'm proud to be one.

You Had Me at Hello

2011-05-24T08:54:00.001-06:00

I always end up in the far left-hand back corner at the children's breakfasts at BEA, no matter how early I think I'm going to be there. Luckily, this year (unlike one past I remember), there is plenty of breakfast, and there are big screens--but really, one needs to listen, mostly. Well, squinting at Brian Selznick's shiny red shoes doesn't count as listening, but the good listening part is that his WONDERSTRUCK nods to FROM THE MIXED-UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER, a book that I recently re-read and have always loved. And now I have a copy to read!

Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper

2011-05-18T13:31:00.000-06:00

I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to read Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper (Simon & Schuster - Atheneum). Without being too specific, I had certain personal preconceptions about the book and what it might be about, and I wasn't interested in some fiction along that vein.

That said, I ended up enjoying Out of My Mind despite myself, and despite several points where I thought the book would go off the rails. Eleven-year-old Melody has cerebral palsy, and her ability to move and to communicate with her family is very limited, but at the same time, she's a very smart girl--and that was my first eyebrow-raise. Of course, we should never assume that a physical disability equals--or comes with--an intellectual one. I have had experience (not always directly) with the extremes, though: the almost-magical discovery that there is a brilliant mind at work with little physical sign of it, and the despair of hoping that someone's still in there. So, I was worried that this was going to be fiction of that super-idealized sort, where it's just--I don't know, not realistic.

What did become realistic for me was Melody's struggle for not just inclusion, but inclusion once she goes to school. She not only has to contend with the petty power struggles and bullying that come with growing up--the ones I think happen no matter how hard we try to encourage children to refrain--but with not fitting in in other ways related to her CP. And then there's the horror that even though Melody is vital to the school's trivia team, they don't see it that way.

Disability advocates will notice a few instances where person-centric language isn't used; I think that the differences make sense in context. One man says that his son is in a wheelchair, where person-centric language would have him say that his son is a wheelchair user, I think; the more important factor, for me, was that he acted to remove an access barrier for Melody without it being a big deal. Also, of course, people with disabilities are not all in agreement about a lot of things, including language use. Those with some knowledge of "the system" may get a little frustrated, too, with the slow pace of access to services like a communication device for Melody and her oddly-planned access to classes in school. I don't recall an IEP meeting for Melody, but it's been a long time since I read this, now (I've had a draft open for months), and it may have happened off-screen.

A fair warning is that Out of My Mind doesn't have the sort of ending where our heroine gets everything she wants, and that feels especially unfair because she starts at such a disadvantage. Yet, I still think this makes for a good middle-grade read, because middle-grade readers are--due to age, etc.--in a state of restriction, and even if their situations are different, I think they'll identify with Melody's desire to be heard and to have more agency. And Melody is a really fantastic character with an outstanding voice. I'd want her on my team.

Posting by E-mail

2011-05-10T10:59:00.000-06:00

I thought that I should see if I can actually post by e-mail ahead of upcoming travel. I (try to) sit down and set up posts every couple of weeks, and I use a plug-in to post book covers; I haven't found a great way to read and comment on journals (some layouts don't seem to show comment functions, even, for mobile users), but I've been thinking about creating a LiveJournal user who follows a bunch of RSS feeds, as that's a great way for me to keep up.

I think that photos will all come through at the end of the post, if they come through, and that I can't insert them where I choose, so let's see. One photo is a view from the restaurant at Salish Lodge, just east of Seattle. It's a really lovely place to stop, and I had a very nice time touring the property there last year. The views are very nice, even with construction.

The other is my concept of a chupacabra, not based on any actual chupacabras, but on my sadness at hearing Blue Moose Pizza in Vail was renaming their Chupacabra Pizza (which does not come with goat on it, for the curious, so it was not necessarily for chupacabras). I thought that a chupacabra should have features designed to attract goats, sort of like how Venus flytraps attract their prey.

Frankenstein on a Friday

2011-05-06T13:30:00.000-06:00

Frankenstein
Mary Shelley

*I think I read an edition from 1833, but it might have been 1826. I read this as part of the Sirens reading list and also because I had it on my review list for the conference newsletter, but as it turns out, I don’t think it will be needed, and so, here.

I admit it: After a few pages of Frankenstein, I wanted to put the book down. Even though I was interested in what it might have to say about women writing monsters, and in how it has influenced so many books and films, I wasn’t enjoying anything about the writing or characters--and my scanned, digitized version was riddled with so many errors that I was getting especially frustrated. I took a break to peek at Wikipedia for a little bit of background information. There, I found out a lot of things. I’ve sometimes confused Mary Shelley with her mother. I’d been told--and since forgotten--that Frankenstein is the monster’s creator, not the monster himself. The monster isn’t green, but a sickly yellow. This wasn’t Mary Shelley’s only book, but it is the most popular today; when it was first published anonymously, it was assumed to be Percy Bysshe Shelley’s work, and a second edition toned down the drama, supposedly with Mary’s cooperation. Armed with these tidbits, I approached Frankenstein with renewed curiosity.

In the end, I don’t know if the extra information helped me with my reading, as I found myself wondering what a reader of yesterday perceived, as opposed to my personal perceptions. You see, Frankenstein is riddled with big-picture monsters: class, race, gender, education inequities, colonialism, and other concerns appear one after another and are abruptly shouldered out of the way, opening multiple threads for further analysis. The question of whether or not people should mess around with nature--or a deity’s work--isn’t entirely buried, but the conflict between Frankstein the creator of the monster and the monster’s resistance to Frankenstein’s power takes a very long time to develop. That said, Frankenstein raises all sorts of interesting questions about monsters, about being a monster, about the value of life, and about revenge and regret.

Frankenstein is also very interesting structurally. The point of view spirals inward slowly; the story begins with the letters of a naive young scientist who hasn’t yet unraveled his own arrogance enough to understand that his ambitions might not be worth the lives of his crew, intensifies with Dr. Frankenstein’s account of creating a monster and then rejecting and fearing it, gives the monster a voice in telling his own tale of searching for place, and then has the monster relate a story of a family that he has observed and their “monsters.” After this close up, the point of view reverses quickly, as if we’ve seen the worst of humanity and recoiled. The tale was first a short story that was later expanded, so I was surprised to find so much structural sophistication.

Overall, while I didn’t truly enjoy Frankenstein, I think it has provided me with a foundation for thinking about monsters, the monstrous, and how monsters are created and defined.

Best Of: One Year Ago

2011-05-03T17:06:00.001-06:00

I decided that I'd like to highlight some past reads this month, as I'll probably be too busy to do much blogging. I only wrote two reviews last May--well, only two that I published on Blogspot, and I do have some transferring to do, of course--but one of the two reviews is of a book I liked a lot. If you haven't checked out The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, it's a great read.

Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary

2011-04-26T07:58:00.003-06:00

First, congratulations to Janelle, winner of the Hoppy Easter Giveaway here. This weekend might not be a post office run, but the weekend after probably will be! I really enjoyed reading all of your egg, Easter, and baby anecdotes; what a bright spot in the week!

Next, I think that giveaway marks the absence of about 50 books from my household. Between giveaways, borrowed books sent back to their owners, and the first round of distribution of “dubious books” to unsuspecting friends, I can see a small dent in the piles of books that don’t fit on the shelves. (Hey, it’s a health hazard!) I have ~~four~~ five in my current “deal with” pile, and I suspect that I’ll file two for later, read one, and just take a peek at the last two. After that, I’ve got ten or so books that are waiting for me to finish just the last chapter or so, and then--then!--I will have a dresser-top, and I can move on to the piles on the floor. This is exciting as I hate clutter and I like things to have a home. I’m grateful to have had so many great reads, but the time has come to redistribute the wealth.

Speaking of great reads, the back of my mind always holds a selection of books that I really, really loved between the ages of about five and ten. I remember reading stories about Ramona Quimby, and being excited that I had some idea about where she lived (within driving distance of my house). Because I felt so strongly about Ramona, I sometimes think less than kindly about Beezus, who is sometimes--in Ramona’s eyes--a pretty overbearing big sister.

While re-reading Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary (HarperCollins) recently, I was struck, as I often have been recently, by how times have changed. The more I think about it, though, I might have been frustrated by the disconnect between the new (and in my opinion, not as good) illustrations and the setting. Beezus and Ramona was first published in the 1950s, and reflects that fact; new illustrations showing a more modern mom and kids don’t provide the context that a kid reader might need to understand that this, that, or the other thing--well, it happened a long time ago. It’s okay that a book talks about things in the past, but it seems unfair to update illustrations without acknowledging that the text is the same, especially for younger readers. All that said, I guess I'm okay with a little creative misdirection--with updating a cover for a new generation, with encouraging readers to know and love and understand books that have staying power.

Aside from that, Ramona really is a pest in Beezus and Ramona, but that may be why I still like this as a companion to the Ramona books. After all, it’s all about point of view.

Hoppy Easter Eggstravaganza Giveaway Hop

2011-04-19T22:00:00.032-06:00

When I think of spring, I think of...

crocus

lambs

flowers

rain

cherry blossoms

And Peeps, because it's time for Easter candy!

For this hop, in the spirit of baby everythings, I'm giving away a copy of Stork by Wendy Delsol.

To enter:

1. Leave me a comment by midnight on April 25 and share one of the following:
a) a funny story about where you thought babies came from when you were little
b) a funny story about something kids do/have done
c) a favorite Easter tradition
or
d) something good to do with an egg

2. I'll select a winner at random and post the winner/e-mail the winner as soon as I can sit down at a computer, and put the book in the mail in 1-2 weeks, when I next visit the post office.

3. You must be a follower to win (on your honor--I don't care if you check this blog every day, use an RSS reader, or use another follower system), and if you win, you must provide me with a U.S. mailing address.

Have a great weekend!

You can visit the other blogs in the hop at here.

Thanks to Inspired Kathy at I Am a Reader, Not a Writer and Yara at Once Upon a Twilight for hosting the hop!

Sirens Conference Scholarship

2011-04-18T08:09:00.003-06:00

I borrowed this post from here, with permission. To quote another staff member, "I'm not eligible, so one of you may as well go for it!"

Proposals are due May 7, 2011. Please help us spread the word.

Inspired by the daring adventures of women characters and compelled by brilliant works by women authors, Sirens is dedicated to women in fantasy literature. Our conference is part scholarly examination and part networking retreat, and we welcome academics, authors, professionals, educators, librarians, and readers to attend and participate. We also encourage all attendees, regardless of background, to provide perspectives on fantasy books by women, female characters in fantasy works, and how to support women in fantasy literature.

We are pleased to announce two scholarships for excellence in programming for Sirens, starting with the 2011 programming year.

Sirens will award the first scholarship, the Sonnet, for one presentation that focuses on thoughtful analysis of women in fantasy. The winning presentation must focus on fantasy works by women, on the analysis of women in fantasy works, or on topics closely related to women in fantasy. Papers (and lectures, talks, and other informative presentations), focused and analytical panels, and roundtable discussions are eligible for the Sonnet scholarship.

Sirens will award the second scholarship, the Song, for one presentation that best addresses the creation of fantasy works, particularly as it connects to women in fantasy. Workshops, afternoon classes, panels that focus on professional or artistic education, and roundtable discussions that focus on professional or artistic topics are eligible for the Song scholarship.

ELIGIBILITY AND ENTRY

Entrants must be at least 18 as of the first day of Sirens in 2011 (October 6, 2011), and must propose a presentation for programming through the online submissions system at http://www.sirensconference.org/submissions by May 7, 2011. There are no educational or institutional requirements to be selected as a presenter.

Sirens will contact all presenters with an accepted proposal no

later than June 1, 2011, and provide them with eligibility information.

Sirens staff members (2011 and 2010) are not eligible for either scholarship; however, scholarship winners may become a staff member at a later date, may have been a staff member in 2009 or earlier, or may volunteer for Sirens in any given year. Those who are unsure of their eligibility may inquire at (help at sirensconference.org).

Information about making a proposal may be found at the Sirens website at http://www.sirensconference.org/programming/cfp.html. A series of posts on the Sirens blog with helpful information for preparing a proposal may be found at http://community.livejournal.com/sirenscon/tag/programming.

Entrants must submit their proposals online at http://www.sirensconference.org/submissions/. No mailed or e-mailed proposals will be considered by the vetting board or be eligible for entry. All entries must be original to the presenter(s).

SCHOLARSHIPS

Sirens will award one complimentary registration to the winning presentations for each of the Song scholarship and the Sonnet scholarship. Please note that only one registration is offered for each scholarship; if either scholarship is awarded for a presentation with multiple presenters, the group moderator must designate which of the presenters will receive the registration; if there is no moderator, the person who submitted the proposal must designate which of the presenters will receive the registration.

Should the winning presenter(s) have already registered for Sirens in 2011, the winner(s) may elect to receive a refund on registration, to receive an airport shuttle ticket and a Sirens Supper ticket, or to receive a credit toward one room at the conference hotel.

Neither scholarship is exchangeable for cash, and neither scholarship may be transferred. In the event that the winner of either scholarship refuses the scholarship or is unable to attend Sirens, the scholarship will not be given to another eligible entrant. Each winning presenter is solely responsible for any and all taxes due and payable upon scholarships.

JUDGING

Representatives of Narrate Conferences will review the eligible presentations for factors including but not limited to thoughtful analysis; quality of scholarship; relevance to the call for proposals; educational value for attendees; whether the topic is new to the conference or a necessary expansion upon previously-presented programming; and timeliness and relevance of the topic. Because the scholarships are intended to encourage high-quality programming proposals and recognize exemplary presentations, the judges may, in their sole discretion, decline to award one or both scholarships in any given year. Judging decisions are final and may not be appealed.

VOID WHERE PROHIBITED

This scholarship is void where prohibited or otherwise restricted by law.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

For questions about these scholarships, please write to (help at sirensconference.org).

Sirens is presented by Narrate Conferences, Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to creating dynamic, innovative educational events. Narrate Conferences' mission is to provide unique interactive opportunities for scholars, students, professionals, and readers to discuss books, television, films, other media, and popular culture. For more information on Narrate Conferences, including its past and future events, purpose, and staff, please visit http://www.narrateconferences.org or write to (info at narrateconferences.org). For more information about Sirens, please visit http://www.sirensconference.org or write to (help at sirensconference.org).

Wake by Lisa McMann

2011-04-11T12:13:00.002-06:00

First, congratulations to Alexis, randomly-selected winner of my Fool for Books Giveaway Hop.I really enjoyed reading all your "fool" answers. Loved ones, sugar (and chocolate), books, and puppies were some of the most frequent responses.

Next, Wake by Lisa McMann (Simon & Schuster - Simon Pulse) surprised me in a good way.

I admit it: I’m not particularly drawn to paranormal stories, of any subgenre, and I’ve had enough bad experiences to shy away from them, and Wake looked like a paranormal. I suppose it is a paranormal, even though my knee-jerk definition of paranormal is narrower than what’s really on the shelves. Even if my experiences aren’t bad, per se, I’ve always felt sort of cheated by ghost boyfriends, the inevitable turning into a vampire stories, the...I dunno, hairiness of werewolf stories. I’ve read some compelling books for all of the things I think I don’t like, and I’m always pleasantly surprised when I find a good read that challenges my assumptions.

Wake was a challenger for me. Janie Hannagan has pretty restless nights than can turn into restless days. If she’s near someone and they’re asleep, she gets sucked into their dreams--the embarrassing ones, the ones that are subconscious wishes and desires, the wish fulfillment, the nightmares. She can’t tell anyone, even her best friend, and she can’t remove herself from the dreams--and now, she’s not just an unwilling observer. She has to find a way to control the dreams, because she’s in a lot of danger and pain as a result, and she desperately wants to live a normal life, to go to college, to escape her somewhat lonely existence. And there’s a boy, but the boy doesn’t save her so much as he supports her in saving herself, so BOO YAH to that.

As the first part in a trilogy, Wake stands alone. It’s a relatively short book, coming in at around 200 pages, but I felt that was right for the amount of story in the book and to wrap up at a satisfactory spot.

I'm interested: Do you mentally classify paranormals as fantasy, science fiction, horror, or some combination of the three (or something else)? Labeling books is fraught with peril, of course, so I don't personally think there is a right or wrong answer, and I'm grateful that YA books haven't--until recently--been divided by genre in most book stores. Barnes and Noble, I'm looking (and glaring) at you for your recent changes.

Rebecca Black's "Friday" as YA Literature

2011-04-08T15:56:00.000-06:00

(Yes, this is tongue-in-cheek, except for the exploitation parts.)

Most of you have probably heard by now about Rebecca Black, her video, how it went viral, how it got negative YouTube comments, and how she got a lot more attention--in national media, even--for doing it wrong than for doing it right. I don’t know all of the details, because I didn’t care to follow all of the story, but I’m struck by how much of Black’s experience parallels bad publishing experiences and bad literature. I could springboard from this post by editor Cheryl Klein about Taylor Swift’s songs as musical versions of YA lit, and from my grudging respect for Swift, who I think is a pretty good songwriter.

So, Rebecca Black made a video that has been referred to as a “vanity video”; she paid somewhere in the range of $20,000 to have “Friday” written and produced by a company called Ark Music Factory. The idea, I think, is that young singers think they need to have a video so that they can attract attention, maybe get a recording contract or work acting. Sort of like models having a portfolio, I guess, and probably building on (rare) successes like Justin Bieber being discovered on YouTube.

But let’s back up for a minute. The cost of this video was $20,000.

Let me total it up. I had maybe two total years’ worth of piano lessons as a little kid, as your parents encourage you to do when you have access to a piano. And let’s say that you’d pay small-town rates for basic lessons and musicianship for two years, at a rate of $40/month. That’s $960 to learn an instrument that requires one to grasp universal concepts of music like beat, rhythm, tempo, style, and reading and writing the language. Or, how about this: you put your child in band, choir, and/or general music at school, for at least six years, and you might have expenses of nothing to perhaps $500 a year, if you have to buy uniforms or rent/buy an instrument. Schools may not be particularly forthcoming about funds, but there’s nearly always money available for kids who simply cannot pay for class materials.
Okay. Then, I had maybe two years of voice lessons in high school. Let’s say that was another $960; on the high end, in a larger city, with a very experienced and educated and professionally trained teacher, I could have paid $2400 over two years, maybe.

I always maxed out voice lessons in college when I could, but I didn’t take them all five years I was at a top five music school. But let’s pretend I did, and let’s imagine that I spent $700 a semester, and spent another $500 for summer lessons.
Even estimating high, I come out with a cost of about half of what it cost for Rebecca Black’s video. That’s nine years worth of music and voice lessons; she might have split those funds between voice lessons (the basics, music, and performance) and vocal coaching (teachers who help you work up specific songs for performance). And you know, I don’t have any quibbles with a music video costing $20,000 to make, but for $20,000, I’d want a BETTER music video.

This is vanity publishing. It’s the predatory publishing that happens when you’re told that you can get a “reasonable publishing package” to publish, and that there’s nothing for you in the traditional publishing world, because those big meanies just don’t know your talent--and they’re not telling you hey, you need to write another draft, spend more time editing, go deeper into your story. And then it should take you just another $10,000 or so to get your book out into an adoring world! My biggest beef with self publishing is just that, that it’s so often a way to exploit people. (I’ve done some micropublishing, and editing and book design and formatting, and buying ISBNs and stuff all takes money, but not THAT much money.)

So, let me analyze the video.

First, even though I’m not particularly good at hearing it--and I don’t always care about it if I can--it’s obvious that the producers used a lot of a program called Autotune. You’ve heard it in action in Cher’s “Believe” and Jamie Foxx/T-Pain’s “Blame It,” likely all of Britney Spears’s albums, and most episodes of Glee. This is meant to tweak vocals and instrumentals to get them right on pitch. Even though you can keep recording a line over and over in the studio and patch together a perfect performance, I have to say that I can understand why someone might say look, I can’t quite hit that note today, or that take was perfect, but we muffed that one note, or we’re expected to turn out a perfect album for that no-talent pop star or we won’t get paid, and we don’t have time to just let that star get better, so let’s just fix it with Autotune and move on. That doesn’t mean that I necessarily respect it, mind you, but that’s a whole other post. This is ghost writing when you use it all the way through. It’s telling you that you’re a fantastic author, even though you’re not doing any actual refining of that story you have to tell.

It’s hard to tell where Rebecca Black’s pitch ends and Autotune begins, and it’s hard to tell what she’d sound like without it, but perhaps she could have made some singing progress with vocal coaching. Not everyone can sing well, but most people can sing with decent pitch and tone if they have normal hearing (a big component in learning to sing) and if they are exposed to music from a young age, particularly if they get to sing along. Most of us will never have that extra spark of charisma that makes us superstars, but singing for fun is nothing to sniff at. A vocal coach could have worked on tone--the way the singing sounds--or suggested changing the key. I would have taken the whole thing a little bit higher; most women are sopranos, even if they don’t want to be, and the song seems to lie in a bad place for Black, one which is comfortable for teen girls, but not always their best sound, or their best choice for every song, or even well-developed (I think that that she’s forcing her voice down, and adapting by making it pretty bright and nasal, and it doesn’t sound relaxed or fun). Like boys, girls are going through voice changes, just more subtly, and the producers should have had an idea of what vocal range looks like for the typical teenager. It’s not usually an adult’s range of highs and lows. Also, a vocal coach would work on breath control and volume for this song; the whole thing is about the same volume throughout, and it’s choppy, and then breath control helps with pitch. Finally, a vocal coach would also work on pronunciation, because there’s a difference between saying a word and singing it so that it sounds good.

This is a first draft, not a final.

But all of that aside, while the song “Friday” has some catchy bits, admittedly, it’s also a first draft of a YA novel written by people who are supposed to be professionals. Let’s break it down.

The Beginning
To make this easier, I’m going to use “B” for the heroine of the video. I don’t think Rebecca Black had a lot of control over the outcome and I don’t think it’s “her” product, so I’d like to add a layer of separation, however small, between her the person and her the product of the video.

The first bits of the video aren’t the worst thing ever. I don’t like the sketchlike animation of B (there’s a word for that in Photoshop, but I can’t remember what it is), and I don’t entirely understand why we’re going with a school theme if we’re not going to make a bigger contrast between the weekdays spent in school and the weekend spent out of it; I think there should be more school or no school at all. Focus on one idea! In addition, the planner notes are pretty cliched. I do like the upbeat nature of the beginning and the “yeah yeah” part, before the real lyrics start.

At the beginning of the video, “B” is just waking up. In a YA novel, this is a cardinal sin! Heck, in a lot of novels, cutting out that part where someone wakes up in the morning and gets ready for the day is a major improvement. There’s also use of B holding relatively still while everyone around her moves quickly (and I don’t know the term for that, either). That effect never comes back again. (Also, I am somewhat disappointed that they straighten her glorious curly hair after she gets out of bed.) The narration of waking up is not insightful, different, catchy, or particularly suited to the music, and I can’t help thinking that someone is wedging pre-written words to a different pre-written tune.

Already, I’m stuck on a major issue that I have with the melody. If it were more graceful, it would be recitative, a convention from opera where the singer’s melody is a lot more like speech, often with a lot of repeated notes in a row and then a rising or falling line as the words indicate. But here, it sounds robotic and dull, and that’s the problem with a lot of repeated notes in a melody--the music isn’t going anywhere. Your only option is to get louder or softer, and that’s not happening.

Next, B sings about going to the bus stop, while standing in front of a sign that says BUS STOP. Have you ever seen a sign that says BUS STOP? Because I haven’t. I’d love to see her moving, hurrying down the street, anything that matches the lyrics about people rushing around.

Then, her friends appear in a convertible. She seemed to be planning to take the bus to school, but then the car comes; are they picking her up because they feel sorry for her? (The actors show some initial enthusiasm that seems almost sarcastic, like “come over here and we’ll drive away,” before switching to a more bored, less interactive demeanor.) Just how good of friends with B are these kids? Does she need FOUR of them? Could several friends be combined into one or two?
B asks, “Which seat can I take?” Given that there are already four people in the car--actually, I’m not sure if she’s asking if she can get someone to move so that she can take shotgun, but if she wants an empty seat, it’s the middle in the back, and as the back seat riders don’t move over to let her in--she ends up in the middle--it’s clear that she’s not valued by her peers, as she gets the least comfortable spot.

The Middle
The narrative jumps, very suddenly, and we change to a not-very-well-developed scene of B, in a convertible, with different friends, cruising in front of a static backdrop of the moon. What happened to Friday? We’ve fast forwarded past what makes it such a contrast from the weekend. The friends are wearing party dresses, but B seems to be wearing a suit, again indicating that she doesn’t fit in so well. And, while it’s a typical music video trope, the back seat of kids is sitting on top of the seat, which concerns me as--and this bit isn’t a joke--I’ve known kids who died falling out of and off vehicles. Seatbelts on, please, especially if you’re on the highway, as B sings.

There’s a big authorial cheat here. B sings, “Fun, fun, think about fun, you know what it is.” I can’t figure out what that’s a reference to, though I’ll admit that the lyricist may have been trying to be inclusive regarding all of the forms of fun.

B again returns to her friends, singing that she’s got her friend on the right, continuing the theme of not being sure if she has friends, or a friend, or many. We see a literal representation of kicking in the front and back seat, and B asks again: Which seat can I take? She puts her arms around the girls in the back seat, indicating another shift in friend relationships.

The Final Act
At last the “fun” is revealed: a house party for teens! Everyone is dressed up, and B has arrived.

The narrative jumps in time again, as B ruminates on the days of the week. It was Thursday, now it is Friday. It will be Saturday and then Sunday, and no one wants the weekend to end. There’s nothing particularly surprising about this interpretation, but I do wish again that we’d had more conflict between the weekday and the weekend. (Personally, I find that Monday mornings are a cause for copious swearing.) We return to the opening scenes, looking at B’s calendar, which keeps a school theme, and the lyrics provide just a bit of contrast at last: the lyrics to go with Thursday and Friday are grammatically correct, but once we reach the weekend (Friday night, one presumes), “we so excited” and need not include a verb. This illustrates B's freedom from the structures and strictures imposed by the school system, and by adults.

I that there is a major structural error here--or perhaps a stroke of genius. An employee of Ark Music Factory appears in this video (and others by the company) to feature a rap which, even though it makes no sense, particularly when the man raps about seeing a school bus during what is clearly Friday night, far outshines B’s performance. The man’s charisma and ease in front of the camera makes B’s performance seem worse in comparison; it’s as if a first-grader wrote a chapter book, but chapter six is written by Neil Gaiman. At the same time, it’s the emotional climax of the story--B has hit rock bottom. Can she overcome the final obstacle and have a happy ending? There is only a minute left!

B is now at the party, on some sort of raised area, singing to the other partygoers. The man in the car reappears, and it seems he is now grooving to B’s sound. The chorus is the strongest writing and singing, and it just might work out for B. The partygoers all say “yeah,” accepting and encouraging her--and by the end of the song, they’re clapping for her. She’s saved the day. Or, at least, the Friday.

NookColor Review; Blue Update

2011-04-05T14:48:00.000-06:00

Lou Aronica let me know that Blue is available in e-book format for $2.99. That’s, like, thirty years off a paperback, so you can’t go wrong! It's definitely a great deal, given my feelings on e-book pricing (below, in the middle of the post.) See my interview with Lou here and review of Blue here.

Also, the winner of the Fool for Books Giveaway Hop...I need to generate one! Look for that in the next post. I sent myself a reminder to do that, so I will get on it ASAP.

Speaking of e-books, I thought it about time that I reviewed a gift I received: a NookColor.

The NookColor is one of Barnes and Noble’s e-readers. The original Nooks (with wifi or 3G) were e-ink devices that look much like a Kindle, and I actually received one of these, but I wanted the power of a NookColor as well as the ability to read things like picture books, so I used another gift to “upgrade” to a NookColor, which has an LCD screen. I believe the cost is set at about $299, but sales and promotions regularly bring them into the $250 range, and I expect the price to drop further. You might, as I did, spend a bit more for a case (handily protective, and some act as stands) or screen protector films, but as there aren’t any (or many) accessories available for the NookColor, an owner’s biggest expenses are probably going to be in buying books.

Anyway, I was a little nervous when I found out that I’d received an e-reader, period. Even though I’m interested in new technology, and even though I’d read lots of stories online and read a few e-books (via free phone apps for Kindle or via buying them from online independent bookstores), I’d clung to that idea of books, physical books, as something special, meaningful, for the ages. (I still think that.) I’ve shied away from buying files that, a few technology updates down the road, won’t be readable by newer devices--how many of you still have some great big floppy disks around that you can’t bear to part with? In addition, I hate the idea that eventually, or maybe shortly, I’ll end up buying software to jailbreak my books from their proprietary formats, so that I'm not tied to a bookstore's reader or application. My consolation was that this was a Barnes and Noble product rather than a Kindle, which is more closed-system--and as an Amazon product, well, let’s just say that I am increasingly worried about Amazon’s power plays and undercutting of other businesses.

In the Box

The NookColor comes with almost nothing in the (nifty, magnet-clasp) box. You’ve got the NC, a (proprietary) USB/mini-USB cord that does double duty as charger cable and file transfer mechanism, and (I seem to recall) a quick start guide; the manuals are onboard. In my box, I keep a copy of the extended warranty that I bought. I got the warranty because the NookColor has a backlit LCD screen, and I figured that it would be a problem to fix on my own, but beware--when I made my return and swap, I wasn’t informed that there was a price difference, and I might have turned it down, as it’s about a quarter of the retail cost of the device!

Turn It On

The NC is wifi only, meaning that some of the features only work when you’re around a wireless network. There are no 3G options available. I think you need that wifi connection to get going, so if you don’t have a router at home, you’d have to charge up and then go to a B&N to get set up. I’d be a little hesitant to do that without knowing more about B&N’s wifi network security. And, though it’s possible to use your desktop to transfer files (and the only way to transfer files like PDFs or EPUB files you’ve purchased from a vendor other than B&N), it’s a bit of a pain, and if the NC burps, your only recovery option is to re-download those files. As far as I know, there's no way to use applications from other stores unless you root your device, and you need a real computer^TM and Adobe Digital Editions (or something similar) to transfer files bought outside of the Nook bookstore.

When you first turn the NC on, you go through a setup video. I need to find the instructions to make that play again, because--as there was no instruction manual to read and absorb--I started the thing up and started playing around. This was sort of a bad idea due to a particular flaw: when you have the charger plugged in, whether that’s to load files from your computer or to charge the unit (from the wall; the uptake from your computer isn’t enough to be practical), the touchscreen stutters and jumps and otherwise causes issues. It’s not impossible to use the NC while it’s plugged in, but it is very difficult to accurately enter passwords, turn pages, and so on.

And just as an FYI, some early purchasers of the NC had issues with the power cord/USB overheating and melting. This seems to have been solved, but I’d probably only charge up when I was awake and able to keep an eye on the NC the first couple of times, just to check.

The Buttons

There aren’t a lot of buttons on the NC. There’s an on/off button that I almost never use except for airplanes and to reset the device; some web page that I visit has some sort of script that makes it very difficult to close a pop-up window in the browser. (I suspect this is Twitter's fault--it won't load as a web page for me now, too. I hope that’s resolved in forthcoming updates.) There are volume buttons, which come in handy, especially as the speaker for the NC is on its back, and if you use it in a case, it muffles the sound quite a bit. That said, this isn’t really a device you buy for its audio quality!

The other big button is the “n” button. It looks like an...n. It’s the “home” button, and touching it wakes the NC up from sleep mode and always brings you back to the home screen.

The Home Screen

The home screen is really three screens; you swipe your finger back and forth to see three panes’ worth of books and periodicals you’ve recently downloaded, purchased, or read. There’s a place at the top of the screen to go back to your current read, and an easily accessed drop-down menu to get to the last couple of things you’ve been looking at.

The Tray

Along the bottom of the screen, in what amounts to the taskbar on a PC, are several icons you can touch to navigate or get information, even when you’re not on the home screen. There’s a little book-shaped icon at the bottom of the screen you can use to jump back to your reading, the time, an indicator of your wifi connection, and a battery icon (though not one that tells you the percentage of battery left; you’ll have to eyeball it).

Finally, there’s one touchable icon that looks like a U with an arrow in it, and that one leads you to the different NC features. This brings up a menu that lets you navigate to the B&N shop, your library, search, extras, the web browser, and settings.

The Shop

Perhaps interestingly, you can’t access the shop unless you have a wifi connection. That means you don’t load its menu, or the last cached version of the shop’s home--you’re out entirely. I’ve taken my NC to B&N to browse, but I found it clunkier and slower than just picking up books. I don’t know if there are any in-store specials--I think there are, and certainly I get coupons that I could take on the device to show a cashier--but you can read books for free for an hour in-store, I think; otherwise, there’s a free book available on Fridays, of varying quality.

Within the shop, you get a little home page with several horizontal panes, offering up specials, sales, new items, and recommendations (mine so far are not at all a match for my reading tastes). Then, you can “browse” sections, if what you like to read is in the section list, or search.

For me, searching for specific books has been the most fruitful. The available selection is pretty limited; I’ve looked for books that I know are available digitally, and they’re not in B&N’s shop. Another issue, I think, is the algorithms. If I look in a section, I’m going to see the most popular items for at least the first couple pages of results, but these might not be good results. If I look at YA, I can easily get pages and pages of Twilight and other bestsellers, but I can’t discover new books, and if I’m not looking for the most popular few books subgenre, I might get very discouraged. The other problem is that the most popular in the shop subdivisions tend to be...awful.

I’ve worked on several self-published(ish) books--prepared for small audiences by a very small publisher using Lulu's tools (which is why I call it self-published-ish; the process is similar for me to what self-published folks are doing), nonfiction, all of the most likely indicators for success for such a book. I know that some folks are taking their previously-traditionally published books and using their e-rights to put together very nice self-published versions. But, still, I can’t recommend self-publishing for fiction writers who want to see the same success as their traditionally-published peers, and here, it’s because even if you have a truly professional cover, even if you hire (and listen to) accomplished editors, even if you have the marketing oomph to get out of the pile, you’re going to be lost in a sea of dreck, Amanda Hocking aside. ( I'm not talking about nicely-produced books; I'm talking about "I slapped this together in a weekend" books.) Folks trying to get in ahead of the rush are self-publishing some truly awful material for free or really cheap, and those free-$.99-$1.99 books are what people are taking a chance on. In any section, you’re probably going to pull up a large chunk of a) really awful, poor quality books, and/or b) books that you would not normally see in a section.

Anyway, the point I mean to make here is that I go to B&N expecting traditionally published books to take up most of the shelf space--this isn't where I'm looking for self-published items--and a lot of my searches end up in “Hmm, not what I was looking for.” The other point I mean to make is about pricing.

I think it’s important that we not assume that the pricing model for digital music transfers to the pricing model for e-books. (And while I’m here: “indies” in publishing does not mean self-published! It refers to independent, usually small publishers instead of big conglomerates, and to bookstores that aren’t chains or that have only a few locations.) $.99 for a track of music isn’t the same as $.99 for an entire novel. The overhead is different. The supply chain is different. The cost of paper is relatively small, and some of it gets replaced by the cost of digital storage/software/support employees when you transform books into bytes. If you’ve ever worked with products, you know also that a product’s cost must cover things like employee salaries and overhead keeping the lights on and, hey, let’s pay the author.

There are some neat pricing things that folks can (and do) do, like Lou Aronica’s promotion, or how a publisher might put the first book in a series on sale or out as a freebie, but don’t expect books to cost less just because they’re digital.

And that brings me to my own needs and expectations--but first, back to the NC. When you view a book in the NC bookstore, you can see the price, often download a sample, see jacket copy and publisher information, see customer reviews (if there are any, and I don’t know how they get to be viewable or where they’re pulled from), and download the book on the spot. If you have gift cards attached to your account specifically for the NC’s use (and set up on via computer’s web browser, from what I can tell), your purchases should be applied to your gift card and then, when that runs out, to your default credit card, though there have been problems with that, and I’ve certainly had things be charged where I didn’t expect. Also, demand is outstripping systems supply, and it sometimes takes a long time for items to download, to be charged to your account after downloading, or to turn up an e-mailed confirmation receipt. I expect this to improve.

I wasn’t ready for e-books until I came to a point where I wanted more flexibility and portability for traveling, where my need to have digital rather than physical versions became a necessity (I have too many books right now and nowhere to put them, and clutter is upsetting, and I think I’m having health problems exacerbated by the difference between a dusty bookshelf and a dusty book hoard), and when there were many readily available books. I think those things are in place now. I do like to get a slightly better price for an e-book than for a hardback, and a paperback price feels about right; at the same time, I sometimes hesitate to buy a book that I might not like more than I would if it were a paperback. I probably need to make better use of free samples! The other hesitation comes from the ease of just buying and downloading and spending too much money, coupled with the first couple purchases that are like cotton candy--did I just eat air? E-books don’t feel tangible. Sometimes, I’ve gone into stores and found out that I paid almost the same price, but lost the niftyness of the design of the physical book; at the same time, I don’t really care about “extras” packaged with my book. I just want BOOK.

But when the books are great, they’re GREAT.

The Library and the Reading Experience

After downloading a book, or adding it via USB cable, you can find it in your library. As far as I can tell, you see things in reverse order of purchase. Some books show their covers; others don’t have them or the NC can’t handle them. I have heard that there’s a problem once you hit a couple thousand books in terms of things like seeing covers and being able to organize things, but I assume this will be updated eventually.

A section of the library is called Shelves, where you can create your own categories and sort books onto sections. One annoying, obvious, and (I hope) short-lived bug is the tendency for certain books to show up on shelves where you didn’t put them, though whether this is due to a problem with associating cover images to sections or a problem with allocating files, I don’t really know. There is no section for uncategorized, so it would be easy to browse your sections and not realize that you have a book in your library if you haven’t assigned it a “shelf.” Things like Google digital editions and some other files don’t keep their covers, or something goes wrong, or they never had covers, and the icons are so tiny that you might find yourself opening book after book to see what’s inside. There are similar “shelf”-like sections for periodicals and your own USB-loaded files, and a “LendMe” section for lending or finding friend-owned lendable books (with a very useless user interface, and I’ll be darned if I’m going to let it search my Google contacts for friends who might want to lend me something). I hear also that these self-created settings can’t be saved if you have to de-register and re-register your device, which is something that people are likely to have to do at some point, whether it’s to fix a bug or to loan to family. Also, beware of doing it wrong; I've heard stories of people trying to move books off their Nooks and deleting things in their account, which means that they can't access the book again--it's like throwing a book away versus archiving it in a box in the attic.

But on to reading. Right now, my eyes are pretty fatigued from too much computer time, I have to admit. I’m on a smartphone or a computer screen most of the day, and lately, I’ve been jealously guarding evenings and weekends away from having to look at things and think about and respond to things outside of stated commitment hours. At the same time, I haven’t noticed eye fatigue when using the NC unless I was already at the fatigue point, and there are some things one can do to reduce that while reading books--turn down the brightness, for example; make the font bigger; increase the space between lines; change the font; change the background color (with white on black good for some, and shades of gray another known anti-fatigue option).

Within an e-book, you can add bookmarks, jump chapters of content, look up words by highlighting them with a finger (and oh boy, I am lazy, and despite being a former spelling champ, I don’t know the meanings of a lot of words), and you can annotate files. But, WARNING: there is a limit to how much you can annotate a file, at present, before it won’t open, and you’ll have to find a way to erase your annotations using a desktop interface. Also, you can’t download, print out, or otherwise save your notes, so it’s currently a pretty useless feature. You can recommend the book to Twitter and Facebook, I think with a quote, even.

Also, the PDF interface, at present, is deplorable. You lose all these nice features and reflowingness and the like, and I don’t believe you can make notes. I haven’t tried reading any other file types on the NC, but it’s not yet worth it if I can’t track changes, if I need to; I know other folks who use theirs (NC and regular Nook) to download free stories, fanfic, and the like without too many issues, once they understand the limitations.

Also also, and I don’t know if this is a NC thing or an EPUB thing, but you have to hold the NC in portrait position while reading; you can’t turn it on its side for landscape/horizontal reading. This isn’t a big deal for me because the NC is pretty light, at about the same heft as a regular, not-too-thick paperback, maybe one of 200-300 pages. That contrasts for me with an iPad: when I used one for about twenty minutes, I earned myself two days of weak, shaky, achy arms.

Another point about the reading experience that’s not so much about the NC is that I find e-books to not be as nicely proofread as their paper-based friends. Sometimes, it’s a scanning issue or a conversion issue; sometimes I think that these versions missed a round of edits. Words that were probably broken over the end of a line in the paper version show up in the e-version with misplaced hyphens in their middles. Less-used characters turn up as gobbledygook. Sometimes, it’s quite bothersome; other times, I can let it go as part of the game for now. The nicest book I think I’ve read in an e-version is Ninth Ward, which was not only nice to read, but nicely prepared.

I guess we read slower on e-readers than we do on paper. I read documents very quickly on computer screens--I am a master skimmer--but I haven’t noticed a big difference on the NC.

Search

I don’t know what this actually searches; I haven’t felt a need to use it. It’s within-NC, though.

Extras

There is a small, small section of extras: a chess game, sudoku, crossword puzzles (this is the only game I’ve used, and it’s difficult to use because the touchscreen is dead around the extreme edges, which isn’t user-adjustable, and it’s hard to get your finger to touch the tiny square you want), a music player for music that you’ve loaded via USB, another portal to your picture files, and Pandora, the last of which is only usable if you’ve got a wifi connection, of course. I like Pandora, but it eats battery quickly.

That doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t; however, we’ve been promised that “sometime in the spring” we’ll have access to a B&N-curated app store, as well as a second firmware update. I only used my NC for a few days without the first firmware update, so I don’t know what’s up with that, but additional items like a calculator, calendar, e-mail application, and so on would be nice, especially as the NC is built on Android and theoretically is capable of running applications. For more on this, see rooting below.

Web Browser

Oh, the web browser. How I love it and how I hate it so very much.

Okay, so, most sites aren’t set up for touch screens. They have content all the way out to the edges, and it’s difficult to find a fingertip’s worth of blank space to use to scroll around. I find myself back buttoning a lot, and re-scrolling because I don’t remember to wait until an entire page loads, and I get taken back to the top of the page. As you scroll down, you can easily switch from portrait to landscape by tilting the device, and a floating button allows you to zoom in or out--but there’s no easy way to get back to the top of the page without scrolling allllll the way back up, and if you don’t go back to the top of the page, you can’t get back to the address bar or other navigation buttons. Hmph; I really hope this gets fixed.

In this version of the browser, there are other problems--something I visit frequently causes a menu (that pops up if I let a finger linger too long--again, not something user-adjustable) to get buggy; the only way to close it is to pick an option, and the quickest one is to view the page info. A restart fixes the problem temporarily.

Another issue I have is that while the browser handles most sites pretty well, there are a few it can’t handle well at all. Twitter is hard to use; the Blogger dashboard is nearly impossible to use, both the blog-reading, scrolly-window part and the editing/posting part, as is Google Reader, and NC time is prime time for me to try to catch up; CNN’s headlines get eaten in the rendering (and then it has no free scrolling space...). I don’t want to use mobile versions--of any site, really, but I’m tempted to in a few cases.

Finally, typing sucks. Period. If you have a reasonable password, you’ve got to have really nimble fingers and probably open up three or more keyboards within the keyboard function to type it in, and then I hope you manage to hit submit on the first try, or you’re doing it all over again.

But! Browsers get upgrades, and I expect some of these problems to disappear shortly. I really love it some evenings when I’m on COMPUTER NO mode, but I need to read some e-mails that my smartphone doesn’t handle well (truncation or poor handling of images). I’d never dare respond, but I like having a relatively large screen to browse on while I watch TV.

Settings

There’s not much to say here--it’s more or less as expected, though I often wish for a tray icon for brightness settings (or even a hardware button), and I definitely wish for user control of touchscreen sensitivity. I’d really like to set the sensitivity by application (more for e-books, less for the browser, perhaps a default for programs where I haven’t specified).

What I Don’t Like, the Summary
Can’t get apps at all at present, even though it looks you should be able to do so, and the price point is high enough that more and better user control seems warranted
Getting books from vendors other than B&N is a hassle (which I understand from a business perspective, but I don’t like it)
The bookstore seems to have a limited selection
There are little bugs that add up to an annoying amount of bugs
The battery is not user-replaceable, indicating to a lot of folks that when it wears out, you’ll turn in your device for a refurbished one and probably not get your old one back (ew)

What I Do Like
Size/weight is easy to hold, fits in a pocket for some people
Brightness, font, color, and other adjustability to reduce eye strain
I can get books elsewhere, even if it is a hassle
Can root

That last one is a big one, and I may still do it even if B&N opens up an app store, though I’d really miss the NC navigation/pre-loaded programs and such. Essentially, you can wipe your NC and turn it into a 7” Android tablet, and then customize it however you want. This takes some expertise--I suspect just a bit more than I have--and the willingness to source (maybe pay for) all the applications and bits you need, right down to onscreen keyboards. This especially interests me because I could, potentially, make this my on-the-go laptop, as long as there was wifi. I have been keeping an eye on the RIM Playbook because of its ability to use a BlackBerry as an internet connection...but the days of tethering may be just about over due to provider consolidation, so, for a while, we’re at the mercy of rather than free-agent audience.

Fool for Books Giveaway Hop

2011-03-31T23:37:00.020-06:00

Earlier this year, I signed up for a handful of book giveaways, and I am so glad that the giveaway organizers are so organized, because I'd never remember, I'm sure. Next up: the Fool for Books Giveaway Hop. Thanks to Kathy of I Am a Reader, Not a Writer and Belinda from The Bookish Snob

I'm offering a copy of I Now Pronounce You Someone Else, which I reviewed here.

To enter:

1. You must be a follower of this blog. It's on your honor; if you follow anonymously or through an RSS feed, or some other way, you are eligible to enter. One entry per person, please!

2. You must provide me with an e-mail address where I can reach you (I recommend mangling it to avoid getting spam), and with a U.S. mailing address if you are the lucky winner. I tend to be slow to get books in the mail during the winter months, and I apologize for that, but I always get books out eventually!

3. You must leave me a comment that answers this question: What are you a fool for?

The giveaway closes at midnight on Saturday, April 2. I'll use a random number generator to select the winner in the next week.

Check out other participating blogs! (In preparation for broken code on my end: Please use this link to check them out.)

StarCrossed by Elizabeth C. Bunce

2011-03-28T10:30:00.000-06:00

My reading buddy and I are not book friends. If I like a book, she often doesn't, and vice versa. My reading buddy liked another of Bunce's books, A Curse Dark as Gold, an awful lot, so I feared that I would be disappointed if I read it, and sometimes it's really disappointing to not share a love for the same books. So, I jumped on StarCrossed by Elizabeth C. Bunce (Scholastic - Arthur A. Levine Books) before my reading buddy could get it. HA.

I really enjoyed StarCrossed, and while I've whined a bit lately about not getting a complete story in one sitting, I am completely glad that this is open for a sequel (and I am happy to say that I felt like I got a complete story in this volume).

Digger is a thief. It's who she is, or who she's become, and it's dangerous; her partner and friend is killed, and she's left with a mysterious packet of letters. Her quick thinking and acting ability helps her hook up with a crowd of bored aristocrats, and soon, she's traveling away from danger as a companion to one of them--or, so she thinks. She's in just as much peril as she tries to hide her true identity from the people who trust her, and as she begins to unravel how precarious her lady's political stature is. Things are complicated further by the arrival of someone who could reveal her former life on a whim, and a mysterious, injured man who is confined in the depths of the castle.

All right. Maybe that doesn't sound quite specific enough to be good; it's been a good three months since I read this, and there have been many books in the intervening time. I can tell you that I was drawn in completely and the story stayed with me all this time. I can tell you that I thought this was an imaginative adventure that friends have compared favorably to Tamora Pierce's books with plucky girls. And I can tell you that I enjoyed the layers of intrigue and how Digger was perpetually thinking of how she could steal things, or break into rooms, or misdirect potential captors--and how that aspect of her didn't disappear just because she had the opportunity to dress up in fancy clothes and hang out with fancy people. In fact, her ruthlessness and moral struggles (or lack thereof) make Digger one of the most interesting fantasy heroines I've read this year.

Fury of the Phoenix

2011-03-25T14:08:00.000-06:00

March has been a drive-by month for me--I have a dozen posts in the queue, but none of them written. I've been reading (or re-reading) The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, a book on Disney animation, Frankenstein, Beezus and Ramona, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Moribito, Mare's War, and Out of My Mind, and I've never written up a review of StarCrossed or using a NookColor. Except for Frankenstein, which is more interesting for its history and structure than its readability (for me), it's been a string of compelling reads. (Of those, I especially enjoyed The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, StarCrossed of the Elizabeth C. Bunce sort, and Mare's War.)

But, speaking of good books, maybe you read Cindy Pon's wuxia fantasy, Silver Phoenix (I did!) If you want a bit of the feeling of the book, check out this trailer:

Or, you can visit her site to read the first seventy pages for free. And now, in just a few days, the sequel, Fury of the Phoenix, will be out too!

I have been avoiding, avoiding, avoiding spoilers. Don't spoil me! So, while I don't have any review for now--and boy, do I have a lot to catch up on!--I will review something a little bit related. Cindy is a talented brush artist. I got some cards from her Etsy shop, and you can see the carefully handcrafted, finely made haul below. I want to take a nice bite out of that marshmallowy panda! Anyway, I draw stick people, so I admire any sort of artistic talent.

Lucky Leprechaun Giveaway Hop! Win Six Books

2011-03-16T23:40:00.049-06:00

Bloggers appreciate readers, and so do I, so I'm giving away a six-pack of YA science fiction and fantasy books to one lucky, randomly-selected follower. Lure is a paperback; the rest are hardbacks. The Adoration of Jenna Fox is signed. My shelves are overflowing and my nose hates the book dust I'm too lazy to take care of--so I'm pleased to give them away to a lucky winner, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

To enter:

1. You must be a follower of this blog. It's on your honor; if you follow anonymously or through an RSS feed, or some other way, you are eligible to enter. One entry per person, please!

2. You must provide me with an e-mail address where I can reach you (I recommend mangling it to avoid getting spam), and with a U.S. mailing address if you are the lucky winner. I tend to be slow to get books in the mail during the winter months, and I apologize for that, but I always get books out eventually!

3. You must leave me a comment that answers this question: If you had to choose just one, would you rather have magic or science, and why?

The giveaway closes at midnight on Sunday, March 20. I'll use a random number generator to select the winner in the next week.

Thanks to Books Complete Me and I Am a Reader, Not a Writer for arranging the blog hop!

Wildthorn by Jane Eagland

2011-03-14T10:02:00.001-06:00

First, quick congrats to Lexie, who won my copy of Inside Out. I think I'm caught up on e-mailing for addresses; it's been a backside-kicking couple of weeks, so I'm looking forward to getting books out the door!

Today, I have a book that I didn't manage to review when I first took a look at it, but I am completely glad that I finally read.

Wildthorn by Jane Eagland (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children) drew me in with its close up of a corset. The image alone invokes a feeling, to me, of years past, of confinement, of rules, of formalities, of structured lives. Louisa Cosgrove, the book's heroine, wants none of it: she wishes to be a doctor--a school that will admit women has been opened in London. She's not particularly interested in making friends with the local girls, she abhors social visits, and she most certainly does not want to get married.

When we first meet Louisa, she thinks she's traveling to take up a position as a companion, but instead, she's taken to Wildthorn: an asylum for the insane, with all of the horrors of mid-1800s understanding and treatment. The staff calls her Lucy Childs, and Louisa struggles to keep the identity she's almost sure is hers while trying to figure out how she might, possibly, gain her freedom. Her present struggle is interspersed with memories from her past, such as the curiosity that had her dissecting a doll, her refusal to take on traditional female roles in her household, and, what Louisa fears was the thing that finally got her sent to the asylum, her romantic feelings for her cousin Grace. The present and past timelines eventually come into synchronization, and the focus turns to Louisa's increasing peril and the relationship she develops with Eliza, a girl who works at the asylum.

It seems like the sun never shines, literally and figuratively, for most of the book. Wildthorn is pretty intense--the descriptions of things that happen to Louisa while at the asylum are historical, but no less horrifying for temporal distance. The most frightening parts, for me, were the moments where I was acutely aware of Louisa's situation; an unknown person has her committed, there are locks on every door, no one trusts her, and worst of all, no one believes her. I also wondered if the author could find a way to give Louisa a happy ending--but I'm not about to give that part away!

Wildthorn is one of the most engaging books I've read this year. The review copy came from Houghton Mifflin via NetGalley. Thank you!

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

2011-03-10T09:56:00.001-07:00

This review of Incarceron by Catherine Fisher (Penguin - Dial, in the U.S. hardcover) first appeared in the February 2011 Sirens newsletter. I liked this so much that someone got me a copy of Sapphique from the U.K. so I wouldn't have to wait for the U.S. release! As soon as I find some time, I'd love to sit down for a re-read.

Finn lives in Incarceron, a prison conceived as a great utopian experiment, designed so that criminals and scholars could reboot society and create a paradise together. Instead, knowledge and humanity are lost, ailing, self-destructing. Within the prison, which is vast enough to contain isolated settlements and small enough to gather in close around its inhabitants, the question of self-determination--and what it means to be human--looms large as the prison both takes over and shuts down. When Finn finds a strange key with a symbol matching the tattoo on his wrist, and he can hear and see someone inside the key, he starts to believe that he came from Outside, and that maybe an Outside of Incarceron exists. Only one person is ever thought to have escaped from Incarceron, and if Finn is to escape, he'll need help--the prison wants him. Maybe wants him dead.

Claudia is the daughter of the warden of Incarceron prison, and she finds a matching crystal key that can be used to talk to Finn. She's about to marry the prince, Outside, and one day she is to be queen. It's all arranged: Claudia's world is one where it was decided that rules and protocols were the marker of a fine society, and so everyone must play assigned roles in a sort of Faire-esque dystopia. Only the upper classes can find comfort, because they're the only ones who can hide plumbing behind the holographic doors to the chamberpots and the only ones who can sneak a few modern conveniences (like medicines) in around the edges of the law. Even as Claudia discovers more about the world Outside, her thoughts keep returning to Finn, whom she suspects is someone more than the average prisoner--but the mystery of where the prison is, its nature, and who inhabits it could be her own destruction.

There's a lot going on in Incarceron, in a good way, and it's been a long time since I felt a book had just the right number of characters, all of them well-drawn and vivid. Incarceron's story is split fairly evenly between book 1 and its sequel, Sapphique. There's a lot to chew on, from the various plot lines to subtle references to legends that appear as broad stripes. I find it especially interesting that Incarceron draws its heart from science fiction, but makes its points through fantasy. I struggle with comparisons, but I think Incarceron has the beguiling and familiar charm of Harry Potter, where you want to climb in and look around even though you know that's not a good idea; the intensity of The Hunger Games, because these books are pretty relentless; the intricacy of The Golden Compass, with a plot bigger than any single hero/ine; the surreal imagination of Alice in Wonderland; and a sweep as wide The Lord of the Rings, if at the same time claustrophobic in its setting.

For me, the real appeal of Incarceron is the ensemble cast; the sense of danger and adventure; the blend of fantasy and dystopia, and even fantasy as dystopia; the gripping plot; and the twists. If you and I are book friends, then you'll be pleased to know that the sequel to Incarceron, Sapphique, came out in the U.S. last December. Both books are available in the U.K. A film adaptation is in the works.

Why I Write “Bad” Reviews and Why You Can Ignore Them

2011-03-07T15:29:00.000-07:00

So, I see that I ran out of reviews. As I write them in advance, and they post a week or two later, you can tell that I’ve been offline for some time. A combination of work and illness means that today is the first day in a week I’ve opened my e-mail; I’ve just skimmed subject lines and senders as they went by. That’s part of why I’m behind on things like giveaways, so I’ll be playing catch up this week (and probably next; I suspect work will still be busy until mid-month). It’s been an intense time, that’s for sure.

I did peek in on the Internet occasionally over the last two weeks, though, and what caught my eye was the YA Mafia discussion--not so much the mafia part, but the discussion about how reviewers need to be nice (or not). I came to the party a little bit late, so I’m just now reading some of the germs of the conversation, and those are pretty informative when you consider how everything has played out.
If you don’t know what I’m referring to, here are some links to get you started. I started with Holly Black’s first LiveJournal post, so that’s what prompted me to spend the weekend thinking about reviewing, reiterating why I do it and how I do it, and the written and unwritten rules that organize the YA community.

YA Highway’s roundup, which might be a good place to start

Holly Black on the YA mafia and a follow up

Cleolinda on who book reviews are written for

Janni Lee Simner on why she still reviews books as an author and why she’s okay with it if you don’t like hers

Justine Larbalestier’s response to Janni

And Megan Crewe’s response

Ilona Andrews on reviewing as an author

Alvina Ling, from the editor’s perspective

Anyway, my attention to what was going on started when Holly Black popped up with a post about how there’s no YA mafia.

To start, I believe this to be true.

I think that the online YA community is functioning much like a fandom, and much like a young fandom. There’s a LOT of enthusiasm. There are a LOT of people trying to figure out where they fit in. It’s very easy to focus on what seem to be impenetrable circles and wonder why you’re not in them. And, in a weird way, it’s a too-close fandom, because there isn’t the separation that usually exists between creators and their fan base. Here, creators (and gatekeepers!) are part of the fan base, part of the audience. Here, the audience, in many cases, is interested in being part of the profession (me included). And we want to be positive parts of our communities, all of us, even if we very much disagree about what it means to be positive. That’s why reviewing, in particular, is such a thorny issue, and it’s complicated by how part of the community is paid by others within it.

To reiterate, I don’t think there is a true YA mafia, pulling the strings to get their friends publishing deals and to keep out those mean people from the Internet. I think that doesn’t give enough credit to publishers, agents, authors, and booksellers who first and foremost want to deliver entertaining reads to people who will pay good money for entertaining reads and thus perpetuate the delivery of more entertaining reads. Do I think that connections can help? Sure--this is an industry. (And Jennifer Laughran makes a good point that people look for other people with whom they’re compatible and between whom there won’t be drama to work with. I do agree with this even while I sympathize with people at the point where they haven’t gained an understanding of how private their online thoughts are not.)

Maybe there’s no LinkedIn just for people in publishing, and connections won’t replace having talent and skill, but sure, I’ll grant you that a friend’s recommendation might help you somewhere, though I think it less likely that a few negative reviews will get you blacklisted (and the more I look, it seems like people are referring to scathing reviews versus just not liking something). I’ll also grant you that it can look like there are cliques; whether you’re, say, traveling together because you’re besties or your publisher suggested that you collaborate on a book tour, you’re likely to be noticed for hanging out with successful professionals than you are for the times when you’re hanging out with someone nobody’s heard of yet.

The office water cooler examples have worked for me. It’s a big office and authors don’t know everyone (and in my mind, aren’t required to like everyone in a let’s-be-friends way), and like you and me, they find that lunch table populated with people they know, most of the time. It’s a safer space; they can talk shop; they don’t have to worry so much about request to recommend something they don’t want to; they can take off that public face for a few minutes. From the outside, yes, that can look scary, especially if you haven’t found your people yet. At the same time, I’ve been struck by how kind many of the so-called clique has been in odd moments; I nearly puked on Ally Carter at a signing once (I was feeling very unwell and I was very distracted by this guy in the audience who kept talking about how he wanted to marry her and who approached her in an unnerving way after her talk, and I was worried, but impressed by how she handled the situation...but still very nauseated), and another time, a very perky Sarah Rees Brennan chatted to me while we waited in line for coffee early one morning, and I did not even know words yet because my brain does not turn on before approximately 9 a.m., and I may even have drooled or snored or something because as much as I’d like to be a fantastic, extroverted conference planner, I’m really susceptible to working too hard, and I’ve always felt that I have an obligation to be visible as a force for organization and invisible as a personality, so just being in a conversation at all was a surprise. Those are just two of my favorite examples.

The existence of a YA mafia isn’t so much what I’m interested in as the discussions going on about reviewing and responsibility. This post, in fact, was prompted by Janni Lee Simner’s public statement about how she feels about reviews, though my more recent understanding is that a lot of this all goes back to GoodReads, a site I gave up on because I wasn’t, as I thought, privately making a list of things I’d read, and I definitely wasn’t using the star rating system to mean the same thing as other people thought it meant. I think it’s very brave of Janni and others to stand up and say “I understand that you won’t necessarily like what I write.” In turn, I think I need to say the same thing as someone who is, primarily, a reviewer. In point #4.

1. I understand what it’s like to feel like you can’t speak your mind.
Hey, I used to be a teacher. You spend all day watching your mouth, worrying about whether or not to address something, worrying--in my case--whether a student can take that subjective, critical feedback you think they need, or whether you’re going to spend all of your free time for the next week soothing their/their parents’ hurt feelings.

When I was first on the Internet, I was anonymous. I was SO anonymous. It was great. And then I got involved in administering a website, and I started having to think about being “on” and “off.” I realized that no matter how off the clock I felt I was, some people would interpret some of my statements as being on behalf of that website. Handily, I had options for making my Internetting more private, and I did that, and while I was a vocal supporter of the website, I tried to remove myself from ever being seen as (unofficial) spokesperson.

Later, I got involved in (literature) conference planning, which is really a side part of all of this, but connected enough to literature and books that I think it’s relevant. I need, and keep, a network of people to whom I can say what I think in an unfiltered way, and those folks have earned my trust, but in public, I have to be very careful what I say. I have chosen to keep silent about what I really think about a lot of things, because I don’t feel comfortable having my comments extrapolated to apply to things I wouldn’t apply the same comments to. I’ve shut my mouth about some absolutely atrocious behavior (don’t worry; if you’re reading this, it’s not you, and it’s not even within this community...and if it is you, I’m well aware that you think I’m a poopoo head). I’ve refrained from correcting misstatements about events I have/do work on because I know that, no matter how right I think I am, it’s an unwritten rule that going into someone else’s space to tell them so is unwelcome, even when they write an open letter or something like that.

I’ve had other reasons to just stay the heck away and shut up online, but they’re confidential enough that I don’t even want to use them as examples. I haven’t always chafed at the restrictions I’ve had on saying whatever the heck I want, especially because I take requests for confidentiality very seriously, but what I want to say is that I understand how it feels to be told you are no longer allowed to share your opinions. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. People in health care, in government, in law enforcement, and in ethical businesses might have restrictions on what they’re allowed to talk about and when in their profession, or they might have decided that staying above the fray is good business.

I also understand that what I say online is meaningful, and not without consequences, good AND bad. In fact, and I’m not going to single her out, an author I came across in the course of the discussion wrote a very thoughtful comment that I appreciated. I really didn’t like her book. I didn’t care to finish it. I’ve struggled mightily with drawing lines on what to talk about on this blog, especially as I chose to go real-name, and decided that I didn’t have enough positive things to say about this particular author’s book to be able to write a useful review, particularly the book is in a subgenre that I’ve never much liked. I wouldn’t necessarily have avoided this author for life--after all, one book is not representative of what someone can do, and I have a lot of respect for people whose books I don’t like as well as for books written by people whose, let’s say, opinions I don’t like--but I’ve decided to look for something else this author wrote. I think most readers are hopeful that every book they try will be the one, that next fantastic reading experience.

I struggle with boundaries a lot as a reviewer. Maybe someone I know, and respect very much, is the editor of a book I didn’t like much, even though I love alllllll of their other work; do I review that less-liked book, or not? (I’m considering right now whether or not to review a book that I didn’t like, but that I think is important. Can I do it? Can I do it without hurting personal or professional feelings?) Can I give a fair review of a book by someone I know? Do I go with the author being dead, and ignore the human being behind the story? Or do I go with the author being present in the story, in which case I’m reviewing a person and not a standalone piece of art? O Hobson, you and your choices.

2. I get the weirdness of being critiqued by your own community.
I get being on the author side, but I'm going to skip how and why because that's not what I want to focus on. The majority of my life, though not my present, however, has been centered around subjectively-judged pursuits. Maybe that’s why, even though most of my present life doesn’t get judged by the public, I can keep some distance here; I’m not presently putting my personal creative work out into the world.

But when I have done that, when I have offered up my performance or art or whatever, here’s what happened. I worked hard, just as hard as you did. I sweated and practiced and fretted and tried. And all of that still had to add up for the consumer of my art. Once I put that puppy out into the world, it became of the world. It became something interpreted by the reader/listener/beholder, whose opinion is no less important for happening outside of mine. That’s the tough, miserable, gut-wrenching thing about art. You can’t just total it up. You can’t just say, okay, here are the 250 widgets you ordered, all in good condition. You’re not entitled to any specific reaction from your audience.

If you don’t want to receive criticism of your art, your only option is to keep it private. Notice that I didn’t say this option was without suckitude!

So, I understand the awfulness of Internet not being private, of having people critique you on past performances, of knowing that their critiques are posted where it's positively rude to respond, and where posting in your own space is preaching to the choir.

3. But I’m not going to stop reviewing books, for now.
I read to be entertained. When I find that rare book that makes me wish it would never end, when I’m so caught up in a story that I stumble out emotional and changed at the end, I am more grateful than I can say. Reading stories makes me real and unreal. It makes me a person who understands more every day, who understands the world more every day. It makes me unreal, a person I am not, able to be and think differently for just a little while.

I review books because I LIKE BOOKS. I enjoy reviewing books that I really, really like. I enjoy encouraging an industry that MAKES THINGS I LOVE, and that I want to make more things. (WRITE MORE SOON! I want to buy it!) I enjoy talking about books I like and getting other people on board with books I like. I also like that there are books I don’t like. I frequently review books that I may not have enjoyed all that much personally, that may not have been what I was looking for, but that I’d like to recommend to someone else. Where I see intriguing potential. Where my problems with a book are outweighed by other factors, which might include “I can see where there’s a big audience for this.” Dude, I am only one reader; the first part of this sentence should be read with emphasis on dude. Still, sometimes I want to get the word out about work I think is important, or about an author who has my respect. Maybe I want to review something because, while the places where I can really affect what other people read and buy are not this blog, I know that there are a handful of people waiting to see what I really love, because we are book friends, or what I really don’t love, because we’re book opposites, and what I dislike is exactly what they desire.

Ultimately, my reviews are about me. I want to continue to figure out, for the rest of my life, what I really like to read. I want to spend less time with books I don’t love and more time with those I do. I want that for everybody.

The books that I love without reservation are few. Since I figured out how to read critically, it’s hard to turn that part of my brain off. I’m thinking about how the author is getting from point A to point B. I’m thinking about why this part drags or that part kept me reading. I’m crossing out a word in every sentence, placing that modifier back where it goes, re-paragraphing. You’ll notice, however, that that’s not generally what my reviews are about, unless it was the big reason I’m ambivalent. That stuff is critique, and I give it when I’m invited to do so, and when I think I can have a respectful relationship with a creator (here, author). While I don’t think one is required to ask permission before turning a review (reader impression) into a critique (detailed critical analysis of an entire manuscript), it’s not why I blog.

And since the books that I love without reservation are few, it follows that I will not 100% love most of what I read. I am okay with that! And it sounds like not everyone is okay with that. As I mentioned on Janni Lee Simner’s post (linked above), when I review those books, I see people pop up and say they’re interested in those books just as often as when I give an unashamedly fangirly review of those books that push all of my buttons in all of the right ways. And as I’ve mentioned, the people that I talk to about books the most don’t often share my taste. I do think that “bad” reviews help authors, perhaps by giving more information, or getting people curious, or getting them angry and supportive! When I browse the bookstore, half the time I don’t even remember what people said about a particular book--only that people have been talking about it, and then I do things like read flap copy and a few pages to see if it might be a good fit for me.

4. You can disregard what I have to say, if you like.
As Janni said about being okay with people not liking her books, I’m going to say that, as a blogger, I’m okay if you disagree with my reviews.

The person I respect the most disagrees with me frequently, and lets me disagree with her. That doesn’t mean it’s always a pleasant process, and that disagreeing isn’t more work than agreeing. I do, however, learn a lot from disagreement, even though I don’t like the emotions that go with it. I worry when everyone agrees. It’s creepy. If not for disagreement, I would never have gotten past my seething hatred of a very, very popular book that not only misrepresents people and places from where I grew up, but that I think reinforces a lot of creepy things. I would never have recognized how many young people became readers because of that book; I would never have recognized how many opportunities the book afforded people to talk about tricky, icky subjects that might not have come up otherwise. Thank you, teen librarians, for defending Twilight. (Thank you also, 92-year-old grandma of mine, for reading and liking books that I don’t, because it’s interesting to talk about.) I hope that if you disagree here, you won’t be afraid to say so. (Though, as I’ve mentioned before, I can spot a troll at 100 yards.)

When I’m not 100% positive about a book, I make an effort to say why, so that readers can judge for themselves whether or not my concerns are valid in regards to their tastes. I hesitate, a lot. I hesitated about putting my name on this blog. I hesitate over whether I’ve been fair in every review. Over whether I’m saying what I want to say, in a way that I feel comfortable saying it. I know that none of those “be nice” posts were about me, as I’m small potatoes, and I do try to focus on books that I love, like, or just plain respect, but I took those posts to heart--as I think a lot of bloggers did--because people in the YA community generally make an effort to be nice. I don’t think people have to be “nice,” though; it’s just a nice extra.

We’re individuals. We have different likes and dislikes. We’re struggling with community shape and direction and etiquette. We can be supportive without liking. We can like without supporting. We can disagree with choices and direction in one manuscript and cherish another.

So what I’m saying is: it’s complicated. Go ahead and disagree.