Omnivoracious

YA Wednesday: Not-urban YA, Sonya Hartnett, and Twilight (Yes, Twilight)

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we defy classifications.

"Hi, I'm Paula and I don't write urban lit..."
I enjoyed this guest post at Ypulse Books by Paula Chase Hyman, author of the Del Rio Click series (the latest of which, Who You Wit?, comes out next week) about the problems of the label "urban lit":

"Many Black authors writing contemporary fiction for teens find themselves reminding people that what they write is not urban/street lit just because they've featured an African American protagonist in a present day scenario.

The culprit here is the use of the word "urban" to describe everything-African American."

She offers some advice to librarians and booksellers for how to be more inclusive when presenting reading options to young African Americans--urban, or not.

Go ahead...try and age-band me!
Amanda at A Patchwork of Books posted a review of Sonya Hartnett's The Ghost's Child last Friday, including some questions she had about its potential appeal to young readers:

"I can see many of us adults enjoying it, but I can't see any of my patrons reading it."

I enjoyed this strange, haunting little book, and yet the whole time I was trying to pin down who its best readers would be, age-wise. YA didn't quite seem to fit. The plot is tied up in some pretty adult concerns (e.g., the doldrums of settling down with someone in a cottage). But it's also a fable, populated with magical creatures, adventures, and mystery. And when it comes to the central themes--the search for beauty, love that you can't hold onto, etc.--these seem pretty universal. 

In a review of the book, The Guardian brought up similar questions, and quoted the author, who said in a 2002 interview:

"I do not really write for children: I write only for me, and for the few people I hope to please, and I write for the story."

A guy's defense of Twilight
HARRY at AICN wrote a funny piece this week, asking guys to give Twilight (the saga and the movie) a chance. Why? It will bring its fans over to the dark side. Basically, it's a gateway to geekdom:

"I've seen it before with BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, FIREFLY, BEAUTY & THE BEAST, THE BIONIC WOMAN, WONDER WOMAN, LORD OF THE RINGS and many more.

All of these phenoms led women to de-flower a geek. TWILIGHT will lead young ladies and their MILFS and Older Sisters not only to TWILIGHT, NEW MOON, ECLIPSE and the odd BREAKING DAWN... but perhaps to LOST BOYS, EVIL DEAD 2, DEAD ALIVE and on and on and on.

Fandom needs franchises and phenomenons like TWILIGHT, it brings people to the wider world of fandom. It leads them into FAN ORIENTATED STORES like Comic Shops, it takes them to the Action Figure aisles, into the video stores and... Maybe, just maybe, to you."

Quick links...
Bookgasm reviews Breaking Dawn: "overall it wasn't too bad," except when it was:

"Honestly, I was expecting to read next that a flying unicorn whisked Bella and Edward off over a rainbow while a choir of Care Bears sang the 'Hallelujah' chorus."

The Comics Reporter interviews Lucy Knesley about her new book (a "drawn diary"), French Milk.

The Cybils post their nominees (way too many to list!) for best YA, YA SciFi and Fantasy, and YA Graphic Novels of 2008.

Chasing Ray writes about light reading and Joan Aikin's The Serial Garden, the first book from Big Mouth House (Small Beer's "imprint for readers of all ages").

MTV Canada gossips with Gossip Girl author, Cecily von Ziegesar, about the show. (Jezebel)

YALSA posts this year's Teens' Top Ten. #1? Eclipse (What do you mean, what Eclipse? Sheesh).--Heidi

Small Pets and Lies: An Interview with Bragi Ólafsson

Bragi Ólafsson, the Icelandic writer (and former bassist for the Sugar Cubes) came to Seattle last week to promote The Pets, the first of his books to be translated into English and published in the U.S. (thanks to Open Letter). Paul, Silas, and I were lucky to have him over for dinner with a few friends. We talked about a lot of things—his beautiful two year-old daughter, eating shark (that, apparently, smells awful but tastes pretty good), and Jack Kerouac. He also talked about the process of getting The Pets translated:

Bragi: “The publisher went through and changed some of the words to American words.”

Guest: “What were some of the words they changed?”

Bragi: “Well, there’s this one word, love bite?”

Me: “Hickey.”

Bragi: “Yes, they changed it to hickey.”

Guest: “I didn’t think anybody used the word hickey after the age of 20.”

Bragi: “Oh, maybe I should talk to them about that.”

The Pets is a dark, funny book about a man, Emil, who having just returned from a trip to London, opens the kitchen window and puts some water on to boil for coffee. He then spots a man in an anorak who he recognizes as Havard, an unsavory old friend who, last Emil heard, was in a mental institution in Sweden. Havard decides to crawl in through the open kitchen window, so Emil does the only thing he can to get away—he hides under the bed.

Ólafsson uses his keen sense of space—which he’s developed writing plays (did I mention that he’s also a successful playwright, and poet?)—to give the novel the perfect claustrophobic tone that is at turns wildly hysterical and eerily foreboding. The Pets is everything I want a novel to be—spare, perfectly paced, reflective without being brooding, and, best of all, a total crack up.

We had coffee outside Top Pot Doughnuts under the monorail track, where we discussed the book, and a few other things:

Amazon.com: Have you done a lot of interviews?

Bragi Ólafsson: Yeah. Well, with the Sugar Cubes, we did.

Amazon.com: Tell me more about that, what that was like.

BÓ: Most of the time it was very stupid questions and silly answers. That’s what the pop press is basically about. Playing around. Because there isn’t so much to talk about. And, of course, we had to talk about Iceland because people were curious about the music scene in Iceland and how cold it is in Iceland. We told a lot of lies about Iceland because we were in the position to make fun of the whole thing, instead of just giving dry answers to these questions. And, I think Björk still does that sometimes. She gives really strange facts about our country.

Amazon.com: Do you remember any of your lies?

BÓ: Well, it was about what the food is or the drinks or some extremities. Probably something about drinking, because Iceland, like Finland, has a reputation for being big drinkers. So we tended to exaggerate that a bit. Here’s a story about playing with the media: Once, when in Denmark the government passed the laws on gay marriage--it would have been ’89 or ’90--they were the first European country to allow gay persons to get married. Me and the main singer of the Sugar Cubes, we sent out a press release to the press saying that we had gotten married in Denmark and had gone on our honeymoon in Sweden, and the press believed it. Every single newspaper. It was on the front page of Liberation in France.

Amazon.com: So it was the worldwide press?

BÓ: Worldwide press. Yeah. If you read some rock encyclopedias today--I think the Rolling Stone encyclopedia, Virgin--they both have this information that we were the first people in the rock business to get married.

Amazon.com: But it was a total fabrication?

BÓ: Yes, yes.

Amazon.com: Were you writing when you were in the Sugar Cubes?

YA Wednesday: Teens Read, Awarders Award, Bellas Discuss

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we spark discussion (or not).

Who will be the next Alexie?
Lots of blogs are posting the list of National Book Award finalists in the Young People's Literature category. I was hoping to unearth some controversy, or strong opinions (there is some love for E. Lockhart on Ally Carter's blog, Reviewer X, and Bookshelves of Doom), but no dice. It's probably too early, or maybe, like me, bloggers have only read one or two of the books. The Underneath might be the kidliest one of the bunch (yes, it opens from the perspective of a calico cat), but don't underestimate its chances. This is a tremendous book--dark, poetically and narratively satisfying, and surprising throughout. What are your favorites?

Here's the list, in case you missed Tom's wrap-up yesterday:
Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains
Kathi Appelt, The Underneath
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now

Teens Read Week, Books they've bitten through...
YALSA's Teens Read Week is nearly over, and there's still time for teens to vote on their favorites for the Teens Top Ten. Author discussions are starting to go up:

At readergirlz, they've posted highlights of their chat with An Na (The Fold) and Coe Booth (Kendra):

"My teen years are always right on the surface for me. I feel like it was all yesterday sometimes. All I have to do is close my eyes and remember all that angst. I didn't have to tap into my own experiences for Kendra. It's not based on my life in any way, but the feelings Kendra goes through are definitely the kind I would have had. Like Kendra, I was (and am) very sensitive!"

That's the only one up so far, but I assume that Tuesday and Wednesday discussions will be up soon.
Tonight: Fantasy. Friday: Gothic.

YA authors cafe is posting interviews every day. Their twist: every writer gets the same 13 Halloween-ish questions (favorite spooky novel? favorite costume? trick or treat?). So far, they've posted Kimberly Pauley (Sucks to Be Me), Annette Curtis Klause (Blood and Chocolate and Freaks), and Cynthia Leitich Smith (Tantalize).

coming up...
Thursday, October 16, Kristopher Reisz (Unleashed)
Friday, October 17, A.M. Jenkins (Night Road)
Saturday, October 18, Marlene Perez (Dead is the New Black)

Quick links...

Racked on Diane von Furstenberg's Wonder Woman.
(found on YPulse Book Essentials)

The New York Times on how Lake Rescue (Beacon Street Girls series, ages 9-12) helped some girls lose weight.

ALAN Picks for October.

Bella's Book Club (from the Tecumseh Branch of Allen County Public Library in Indiana): all about books and vampires and Twilight, the movie.
(from Cynsations)

The Story Siren on Vibes, the next book on my to-read list. --Heidi

YA Wednesday: Dogs, Monsters, and Links, Links, Links

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we are getting back into it, slowly.

Is this book really YA?
This is the question posed by Bookshelves of Doom in a recent review of The Dust of 100 Dogs by A.S. King: 

"There's no topic here that I haven't found in other YA books -- it's the tone and the perspective(s).  Then again, the genre is constantly evolving and expanding.  Maybe in the future the line between YA and adult will get more and more blurred."

I'm reading this book now (it's really fun, by the way) and the tone seems like YA to me, at least so far. It will be interesting to see if this sparks more discussion. As I said last week, people love this book.

Monsters inside of Monsters
I enjoyed this article on Kelly Link and her book, Pretty Monsters, in the Boston Phoenix:

"It’s partly a tale of a teenage girl named Clementine whose life is saved by a blond-haired boy named Cabell, partly a tale of girls at a private school enacting an initiation rite on one of the new kids, and partly an examination on the act of reading and how stories can be shape-shifters. Plus latent-lesbian urgings. Also: werewolves."

Found through Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray, who reviews the book in this month's Bookslut in Training, also titled "Pretty Monsters." 

Quick links...

It's Poetry Day in the UK. Do students hate poetry?

I posted last week about Neil Gaiman's amazing The Graveyard Book and completely missed this (videos of him reading a chapter at a time on his book tour.)

Some interesting discussions on Murderati (Tess Gerritsen, Harvest) and A Lovely Shore Breeze: Can a bad review end your career? (found via My Friend Amy)

Something we missed: Dave Eggers questioning the frequently reported, though apparently unsubstantiated, notion that kids don't like to read.

This week, I'm also reading Downtown Owl, by Chuck Klosterman. It's not YA, but the perspective of the teenagers in a small town is pretty accurate as far as I can remember. And pretty dang hilarious. --Heidi

YA Wednesday: Hiatus (Mostly) and Awards (by Bloggers)

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we have one quick announcement because I'm supposed to be on vacation...

Forget Nobel snubbery, this time it's the bloggers' turn to award the literary honors. The 2008 Cybils (3rd annual) will honor the best children's and YA books published during 2008 in the following categories:

YA Fiction
Poetry
Nonfiction Picture Books
Middle Grade Fiction
Nonfiction Middle Grade/YA Books
Graphic Novels
Fiction Picture Books
Fantasy and Science Fiction
Easy Readers

If you have a book blog or just want to add your favorites, check the Cybils blog for rules and lists of 2006 and 2007 winners. You can submit nominations through October 15. (Thanks to Jen Robinson for the heads up.)

We'll be back next week with more from the YA world. Meantime, we *finally* have A.S. King's The Dust of 100 Dogs coming up next on our reading pile, so we're catching up with all the other bloggers who love this book. --Heidi

Out Today: The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book was officially released in the U.S. today. I've been slowly reading this book--intended for middle-grade readers--over the last couple of weeks, savoring Bod's adventures one chapter at a time. (It's like my own personal serial!) I'm completely charmed by the story of the little boy named Nobody ("Bod") who is raised in the graveyard by a cadre of the long-dead and intermittent human interlopers--and by the mischief he gets into with ghouls and witches and other kids whenever he strays from his usual play among the headstones. (It's a bit like The Jungle Book except with a graveyard cast that's reminiscent of Under Milkwood or Spoon River Anthology.) 

Gaiman was inspired to write the book when his son (who is now in his twenties) was two years old, and they played together in the graveyard near their house, reading the headstones. The beginning is a pretty scary, something Gaiman acknowledges in this video:

To commemorate the release today, Gaiman posted this widget on his blog, Exclusively Neil. Press play to hear him reading the first chapter on the audiobook.

He also announced yesterday that the latest incarnation of Mouse Circus, Gaiman's official website for young readers, is now live with many extras, including this Graveyard Book Sudoku game. 

Gaiman is touring the U.S. now. If you want to read more about the book, it's been widely reviewed over the past couple of months. One of my favorite takes on the story was from Elizabeth Bird at Fuse #8:   

"The Graveyard Book has this strong, strange, wonderful metaphor about kids growing up, learning about the wider world, and exploring beyond the safe boundaries of their homes. There's so much you can read into this book. I mean, aren’t all adults just ghosts to kids anyway?"

After watching my 1-1/2 year-old son interact with his friends during his first days of pre-school last week, his parents quickly forgotten, I'm starting to get a sense that she's right. --Heidi

YA Wednesday: Elizabeth Scott, Christopher Paolini, Maureen Johnson and Friends

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we have questions! And the usual news recaps.

Beautiful, but disturbing: to read or not to read?

This week, I was pretty intrigued by the reviews popping up on various blogs of Elizabeth Scott's Living Dead Girl. It's told from the point of view of Alice, who was abducted when she was ten years old, and who is now 15 and still living with her abductor/abuser.

from Bookshelves of Doom...

"The most disturbing thing about the book, for me, was that it made me feel like a huge voyeur."

"Now I never want to let my future children go on field trips.  Or, you know, outside."

from The Book Muncher:

"While it’s not right to like a story such as this, I think Living Dead Girl should be read by everyone, if not for enjoyment then to inform readers. It is a short but fast read, beautifully written and impossible to ever forget."

The book sounded stylistically unique (a voice people haven't heard before, unusual point-of-view tricks, etc.) but I was worried that it might fall into the category of "great books I will never read" because the scenes are reputedly so disturbing that I would never be able to get them out of my head. (So far, Cormac McCarthy's The Road is the only other book in this category for me.) I guess I have to ask: how disturbing is it, and how great? 

Let's see: The book got starred reviews in both Booklist and Publisher's Weekly.

I read the excerpt, and it is beautiful and haunting and disturbing. I suspect that the "ick" factor of the book is part of its brilliance. Alice's voice is so matter of fact, and while the abuse isn't graphic, it isn't ambiguous either. You feel like you might know what it's like to be there. And that's pretty scary. And gross. 

The thing that finally sold me on the book, though, was this ALAN interview with Scott, which convinced me that it's way more interesting than just an abduction story for the sake of inducing fear and showing abuse:

"I think it’s easy to get outraged over a child’s abduction, but it’s also equally easy for us to see something--someone--that makes us uncomfortable, a moment or an expression that give us pause, and to do nothing. And that moment where we see and turn away is, I think, the heart of Living Dead Girl. Alice’s story isn’t just about what she endures with Ray. It’s what she endures at the hands of the world. How it doesn’t see her."

"...I am Bloodgarm, son of Ildred the beautiful..."

Christopher Paolini's Brisngr, the third book in the Inheritance Cycle, launched last week--with the popular-series-standard Friday night book launch parties--selling 550,000 copies in its first day. While this might seem a mere pittance compared to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (8.3 million) or Breaking Dawn (1.3 million), it is four times more than the series' second book, Eldest. Brisingr draws on a loyal fan following, which has been growing since the first book, Eragon, was published in 2003 then made into a movie in 2006.

If you're not familiar with the series, I highly recommend listening to Paolini read an excerpt.


YA for Obama: Social Networking or "Undue Influence"?

"Hi, I'm Maureen Johnson. I'm a YA author. I started this site because I realized a lot of my friends who are also YA authors were big Obama supporters. And I thought to myself, 'Wouldn't it be great if we all had a place where we could write about Obama? And if we invited everyone to join?'"

A number of YA-interest blogs have been buzzing this week about the new social-networking site, YA for Obama, founded by Johnson (Suite Scarlett) and other best-selling YA authors like Judy Bloom and Meg Cabot.

Most of the response has been positive, but Chasing Ray asks:

"Is it a good thing to present only one side of the story, on any subject, to teens?"

and suggests that teens need to learn about both candidates to truly learn about the political process. Her post was spurred by this post on Finding Wonderland questioning the potential for "undue influence" of writers on their fans:

"I know that this site intends to provide a place for people who aren't yet voting age to enter into the democratic process, and use their creativity to help Mr. Obama get elected, and a venue like that is certainly a good thing. The content of the site isn't what I wonder about. I do wonder whether we're using our position as storytellers inappropriately. I wonder if we're overstepping our role, and using that privilege as a platform from which to push political views."

(Obama photo posted by Beth, a YA for Obama member. McCain photo from johnmccain.com.)


Quick links:

Flux has a new editor.

Reviewer X asks "What makes the perfect YA guy?"

Authors Michael Grant (Gone) and K.A. Applegate (Remnants series) recently started a blog called Stupid Blog Name. The blog will eventually include posts from other writers, editors, agents, publicists, and teens, including The Book Muncher (featured above), who is currently "the *only* teen contributor."

The Guardian has posted four reviews written by recipients of their Young Critics award. Books reviewed include: Before I Die by Jenny Downham, The Goldsmith's Daughter by Tanya Landman, The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, Bad Blood by Rhiannon Lassiter. These talented reviewers have one thing in common: they're all 13 years old.--Heidi

My Grace is Writing: An Interview with Graceling Author Kristin Cashore

Anyone who reads YA Wednesday probably knows by now that I’m a big fan of Kristin Cashore and her first novel, Graceling. Katsa, the book’s 18-year-old, beautiful-yet-angsty girl protagonist lives in a world of seven kingdoms (it’s a fantasy novel, did I mention?) where she’s a Graceling (which means she has a “Grace” or special talent). Katsa's Grace happens to be her ability to kill with her bare hands, and she’s spent much of her young life as a henchman for the king. Her fighting skills are unmatched until she meets Po, a mysterious fellow Graceling from another kingdom. Fighting ensues. Romantic confusion ensues. Adventure ensues. It’s awesome.

People have been buzzing about this book since ALA last January, and raves were popping up on blogs all summer long. Cashore has also been connecting with readers through her fun website/blog, This is My Secret, where she talks about writing, blue herons, Graceling bookstore spottings, her other books in progress... and this photo (below) part of a recent SLJ shoot by Jensen Hande. (She also pre-answers the old standbys: “What’s your writing process?” and “How did you decide to become a writer?”)

As she was getting ready to kick off her fall book tour, a busy Cashore talked to us about her experience of writing the book, and what she’s working on now:

Amazon.com: You had an interesting post on your blog recently about the YA classification being more for libraries and publishers, and that from a writing perspective it is simply about creating a book that you would want to read. At some point, though, you must know that you’re going to tell the story from a teenage perspective, which is subtly different from an adult perspective. When did that happen for you?

Kristin Cashore: It happened at the very beginning--my characters came into my head as teenagers. And for me, the difference in perspective is a very simple one. The challenges and confusions my characters face are no different from those an adult might face--questions about independence and interdependence, love versus entrapment, protecting the powerless, standing up to terrible injustice in the world, seeing yourself for all the things you are. But because my characters are young, they’re facing these issues for the first time, which adds this wonderful, palpable intensity to the writing process. (And hopefully to the final book, as well!) I think this is what I love so much about YA. Often, the same things happen in these books that happen in adult books, but in YA, they’re happening for the first time, which makes every problem huger and more confusing, every emotion more intense, every failure more shattering, and every success more triumphant. It’s a wonderful setup for getting at the emotional truth of basic life experiences. It’s also great for myth-making!

Amazon.com: On your website, you describe your writing process as starting with characters, or more specifically with arguments between characters. What was your inspiration for Katsa? How did she develop beyond the initial argument?

KC: I went back to my original book plan to look for the answer to this question, because the honest truth is that I can’t remember. It was funny to go back, because the very first note I ever wrote was something about a clinic for teaching self-defense to others—which is a natural progression for Katsa’s character, but doesn’t start to reveal itself until well into the book. I’d forgotten how early I was thinking of Katsa that way. I also seem to have been focused on the tiredness and sadness she feels about the violence of her own Grace, and also on her ferocious independence: her determination never to get married or have children is on my very first page of notes. So is her loneliness and her sense of herself as an “unnatural” person. And of course, I also have about 8 scribbled pages of arguments between Katsa and Po (even though I wasn’t sure who they were at that point—their names and circumstances keep changing in the arguments)!

Seriously, though, getting your characters to squabble is a great way to get the sense of who they are. People reveal their vulnerabilities when they’re all wound up and maybe saying things they shouldn’t, you know? And conflict is helpful when you’re trying to plan a book. Character and plot grow from conflict.

YA Wednesday: Bad Questions, Books With Bite, Blog Appreciators

In this week's edition of YA Wednesday, adults ask dumb questions about teens, teens read, and bloggers vote. 

"How do I develop an authentic teen voice?" Huh?
Author Ally Carter (Gallagher Girls series: I'd Tell You I love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You and Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy) recently expressed her disgust at this and other "wrong" questions asked by an audience at an unnamed writer's conference.

"There is no such thing as a 'teen' voice. And no amount of hanging out in shopping malls and eavesdropping on the kids at the next table is going to teach you to write in a manner that will appeal to those kids.

Furthermore, trying to mimic those readers is an almost surefire way to make those kids hate your book."

Another hateful question: "How much should I lower my writing for teens?" Someone actually asked this? Ech. (Found via Reviewer X, my new favorite book blog.)

Books with Bite, Teen Read Week 2008 (October 12-18)
Speaking of Ally Carter, she's one of many YA authors who will be live chatting on Readergirlz Nite Bites, featuring three authors per genre every night during YALSA's Teen Read Week.

This year's TRW theme is Books with Bite, and the brochure lists 100 suggested titles under four "bite" categories: Big Bites, prehistoric creatures and dinosaurs (um, this is for teens, right?); Biting Questions, philosophy and religion; Sound Bites, audiobooks; and Books with Byte, technology. 

For more info and suggested books, go to the TRW website or wiki.

When Candace Bushnell, I mean Carrie Bradshaw, was a teen...
The New York Observer reported yesterday that Candace Bushnell, who used her mid-'90s sex column as a jumping off point for Sex and the City, is now going to mine her early years to write a YA novel (and a sequel). This time, readers will meet Candace/Carrie as a teenager.

Publisher Donna Bray outlined the early details:

“I think she’ll come [to New York] the way Candace did, with her friends, to hang out in the city on the weekend, and have a lot of social interaction there, and then eventually she’ll come to college here, as Candace did.”

The Carrie Diaries is due out in fall 2010. (Found on The Book Bench.)

Quick links...
Galley Cat reports on the YA scene at last weekend's Brooklyn Book Fest, with photos by Melissa Walker (Violet on the Runway, Violet by Design, and Violet in Private).

Publisher's Weekly reports on Easthampton's Small Beer Press and founder Kelly Link's upcoming book of short stories for teens, Pretty Monsters. (Found via YPulse.)

On Brainstorm, Chronicle of Higher Education blogger Mark Bauerlein discusses teens and technology (or tech smarts v. book smarts) with author Siva Vaidhyanathan (Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies).

Today is the last day of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, initiated by book blogger My Friend Amy. Many of the participating bloggers are teens, and it's fun to see how many blogs got into it. They've accumulated a ton of interesting content (author and blogger interviews, favorite blog nominees, blogging tips, etc.) and they have awards--28 awards! Winners so far: Neil Gaiman (Best Author Blog), GalleyCat (Best Industry Blog), Bookgasm (Most Concise and Best Design). More awards will be announced tomorrow. --Heidi

Reginald Shepherd and the Art of the Poetry Blog

As many people in the poetry world already know, the poet and critic Reginald Shepherd passed away last Wednesday, after a nearly year-long bout with various health problems. He was an accomplished poet and essayist, widely published and anthologized. But he became best known for his intelligent, thoughtful, uncompromising blog.

This is pretty funny for a guy who opened his February 2008 Critical Mass post:

"'Blog' is a very ugly word. It resembles the sound of someone retching."

According to Shepherd, he started his blog "accidentally" in January 2007 when he tried to post a comment on Silliman's Blog (probably the most established and widely read poetry blog) about a post that infuriated him. Blogger routed him instead to a "start your blog" page and so he did. He was shocked at the quick response:

"Perhaps I’m still a bit of a Luddite, but I still wonder: How did this person even know of my blog’s (at that point very brief) existence? It seems that there are people who do little with their time but trawl the blogosphere looking for posts relating to their interests, perhaps doing keyword searches for phrases like 'fascist aesthetics.'"

Despite his ambivalence about the nature of blogs, Shepherd was respectful of his readers and of the Internet's ability to create a space where people outside of academia could be exposed to literary work and engage in thoughtful discussion. After disagreeing with Shepherd on many topics, Ron Silliman wrote in his thoughtful tribute post yesterday:

"...what I appreciated most about Reginald Shepherd’s writing and his person was his ability, unparalleled in the world of letters, to address those with whom he disagreed about all else with great respect, dignity and humor. To argue with him was to participate in a debate at a very high level, in which you knew that he would give no ground unless he really felt persuaded by your point, and that he expected no less from you."

I spoke briefly with Emily Warn, Shepherd's editor on the Poetry Foundation's blog, Harriet, where he had been posting since January 2008:

"He was a scholar, but the way he made himself known was through his blog. He was logical, philosophical, and witty--and he brought a rigor of thought to the form. He had a generous spirit, but he also had a feisty spirit."

If you read his posts, you can see how he invited (sometimes heated) debate on a variety of topics--poetry and criticism, translation, specific poets or poems, "accessible" vs. "difficult" poetry, and many others--and how people (to his surprise) always responded. Following his blog is like having free access to a really interesting class. But for his readers, it was much more than that. He connected with them through his candor, and he inspired them to write better blogs. The comments on his blog and Harriet give a hint of his influence and how dearly he'll be missed by the poetry community.

Books by Reginald Shepherd:
Lyric Postmoderisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries (editor, 2008)
Orpheus in the Bronx: Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (essays, 2008)
Fata Morgana (poems, 2007)
The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (editor, 2004)
Otherhood (poems, 2003)
Wrong (poems, 1999)
Angel, Interrupted (poems, 1996)
Some Are Drowning (poems, 1994, winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry)

...and a few poems online:
The New Life
You, Therefore
Days Like Survival
Probably Eros

--Heidi

What I'm Reading this Week: Siobhan Dowd's Bog Child

I have 92 pages left in Siobhan Dowd's Bog Child and it's already one of my favorite books of the year. Fergus, a teenage boy, the "smart kid," finds a mummified girl in the bog near his hometown around the same time he finds out that his brother, in prison for alleged acts he has committed as a member of the IRA, has gone on a hunger strike. The characters are funny and sympathetic, the prose is fluid, the dialogue makes you feel like you're really in Ireland in 1981, and the emerging story of the mummy girl mixes nicely with Fergus' coming of age.

Searching for news about the author (a renowned humanitarian who I found, to my dismay, passed away last August shortly after finishing Bog Child), I came across a thoughtful blog review of the book from dovegreyreader scribbles "a Devonshire based bookaholic, sock-knitting quilter who happens to be a community nurse in her spare time."

Dovegreyreader and I are not alone in loving this book: Bog Child is on the shortlist for the Guardian's children's book prize. They've posted an excerpt, so you can check out the first chapter. Dowd's first novel, Swift Pure Cry, won and was shortlisted for numerous awards, as well.--Heidi

YA Wednesday: King on Hunger, Fat-pol Friendly, and Samurai Girl

In this edition of YA Wednesday (on Thursday), we talk about one new book, some old books made into a new TV show, and a couple of other things.

Stephen King likes The Hunger Games, too.
From this week's EW: King calls out the book for resembling "TV badlands" we've walked before (including two by "a guy named Bachman," The Running Man and The Long Walk), but he recognizes the appeal:

Reading The Hunger Games is as addictive (and as violently simple) as playing one of those shoot-it-if-it-moves videogames in the lobby of the local eightplex; you know it's not real, but you keep plugging in quarters anyway.

Although people have been writing about this book feverishly for the past couple of months, it officially comes out September 14.

Westside Books: All YA, for real
PW and Cynsations both reported this week on Westside Books, a new press dedicated to YA novels. Their focus: realistic stories about teens and real issues. In PW, the publisher describes it as:

“We’re not doing chick lit, we’re not doing fantasy. These are serious books. They’re fun to read and funny but they’re about real things.”

Their website includes a list of all their inaugural titles, due in spring 2009.

Fat-positive YA books
One of Westside's new titles is One Wish, by Leigh Brescia. From the book description: "Overweight Wrenn Scott desperately wants to be popular and snag a hot boyfriend." Apparently, Wrenn is lured into diet tricks and becomes a bit of a jerk, at least for a while.

This reminds me of an interesting post by children's book reviewer Rebecca Rabinowitz on a site called "Shapely Prose: LOL Your Fat." (found via Kristin Cashore's blog)

She recommends the following "fat-pol friendly" books (i.e., with "something to offer in terms of fat politics") for young adults: 

This Book Isn’t Fat, It’s Fabulous, by Nina Beck
Fat Kid Rules The World, by K.L. Going
The Earth, My Butt, And Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler
Fat Hoochie Prom Queen, by Nico Medina
Myrtle Of Willendorf, by Rebecca O’connell
Big Fat Manifesto, by Susan Vaught

Rabinowitz dissects each book, and illuminates instances of fat/skinny stereotypes (like equating emotional growth with weight loss) that seem worth calling out.

I have one more to possibly add (although I probably need Rabinowitz's help to give it a full fat-pol analysis): All About Vee, by C. Leigh Purtill, a light follow-your-dreams story about Veronica May, a 217-lb actress trying to make it in Hollywood. The main character is positive and tenacious, and refuses to let shallow execs make her feel badly about herself. She exercises, but it seems to be for health reasons. From teenbookreview:

C. Leigh Purtill does an awesome job of tackling the tough issue of body image and our culture’s idea of beautiful as unhealthily thin. Veronica is an awesome girl, someone I’d really like to know!

(Purtill also has a cute site, and she worked on The Gilmore Girls, so she's now my personal hero.)

Samurai Girl on TV!
On Friday, ABC Family premiered Samurai Girl, showing three episodes about the girl made famous by the book series.

Early reactions from fans...

omg jake is safe and hot and the dad is way scary

Please, you have to bring back Samurai Girl!! Its so addicting.

My boyfriend Brenden...He's perfect! I can't breathe...We need to PROTEST! I need to see my boyfriend WEEKLY!...DAILY!*Sigh*

Sign the petition to make Samurai Girl an ABC Family regular series!

Wait. All these posts are about the guy. What about the girl? According to the show's website, the next Samurai Girl marathon starts September 27.--Heidi

Politics, Meet Poetry: An Interview with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Zapruder

This is not a declaration of love or song of war
not a tractate, autonym, or apologia
          --Peter Gizzi, from “Protest Song”

yes: the 1st photo after the end of America.

would you care to unwrap it?
hang it in your cockpit?
          --Rachel Zucker, from “To Save America”

If we the people were as funny as you say, then
we the people would laugh at us the laughers!
          --Edwin Torres, from “E-Man’s Proclamation”

Political poems have a bad reputation. The worst of them hit you over the head, scream at you, or try too hard to be funny or sly or rebellious. But when you encounter even one good one, it can change the way you look at the world (or at least make you thankful that some crazy fool out there feels the same as you).

This week, my friends over at Seattle-based Wave Books published a rare anthology: a slim volume of 50 good political poems by 50 poets aptly called State of the Union. Covering a surprising generational and stylistic range, the book comes together as a unified front, a sort of collective voice of contemporary poetry taking on the frenzied political state of our country and our world.

And, if that isn’t cool enough: all royalties from the book are going to Swords to Ploughshares, a nonprofit organization that helps homeless and low-income veterans get back on their feet.

I caught up with the book’s busy poet-editors, Joshua Beckman (right) and Matthew Zapruder (left), by email:

Amazon.com: The timing for State of the Union seems perfect, with such a historic presidential race. How did you decide to do a political anthology?

Matthew Zapruder: It has been clear to everyone for a long time that this current presidential election was going to be a historic one, with far-reaching consequences for the U.S. and the world. We wanted as editors, and poets, to contribute to the conversation at this crucial time, by putting together an anthology of poetry that would engage with the themes and issues that confront us, in ways that only poetry can.

Over the past several years (especially since 9/11, and then the start of the Iraq war in 2003) we have been noticing an increase in the number of poems that feel to us, or could be called, "political." This is obvious and natural; poets get their material from what surrounds them, and what has surrounded all of us in the last several years is an unmistakable feeling that the position and role of the United States abroad and at home has become more problematic and dangerous. Surely it has always been that way; this is just a time where that consciousness is more clear and urgent. Which is probably a good thing. While the events of the past seven years in particular have been traumatic, it is good that artists are waking up and paying more attention to their role as citizens.

Amazon.com: What makes a poem political? How did your definition of a political poem evolve as you went through the process of compiling the anthology?

Joshua Beckman: In creating this anthology we tried very hard not to have a definition of what a political poem was, while still constantly asking the question of what makes a political poem. I think we searched for work that felt like it was genuinely motivated by the needs of our present political circumstance. Historically it is easy to identify poetry that responds well to its time, and looking at a broad view of literary history one can see the amazing variety of poetry that has been politically motivated. But it feels far more daunting to have any grasp of the range and depth of contemporary work in relation to a political environment one is experiencing first hand, and I believe that was our challenge before we edited the anthology and continues to be. The more poems we saw the more we recognized the vastness of the needs that created them.

YA Wednesday: Poor Holden, YA Propriety, and Pullman's 40

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we link to a lot of books, many of them not YA at all.

Caulfield too tame for most American teens?
There's been a fair amount of buzz about Anne Trubek's article in GOOD magazine about J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Trubek, professor of English at Oberlin College, merely suggested that it may be time for Holden Caulfield to step down as the go-to representative for disaffected teens.

If you've been following this, or if you just plain love Catcher and want to get in on the discussion, it's definitely worth listening to Trubek's comments from NPR's Weekend Edition (found via the GOOD blog): 

"I don't have a problem with The Catcher in the Rye, but it's often assigned as the end-of-the-year, as it were, contemporary novel that's supposed to resonate with high school students.... It was written in 1951, and I think we should start looking at what novels might do a better job of reaching high school students and talking about their experiences." 

Here are some of the titles she nominated as possible replacements:
Freaks and Geeks (oh, wait, that's not a novel)
Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson
Drown, Junot Diaz
Project X, Jim Shepard
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky

These are all great, but I don't see a solid Caulfield replacement here yet. Thoughts? Other suggestions? 

John Green discusses Catcher
Back in May, Tom posted about YA author John Green's video projects on YouTube with his brother Hank. In the midst of all this Salinger talk, I found this video of Green discussing The Catcher in the Rye...

There are several video responses, most of which are unrelated to the book. At least one teen here was totally able to relate (although she says "Colden Haufield," a mistake she highlights.)

No uncrossable lines in YA?
Green also had an interesting post yesterday on his blog responding to complaints about sexuality in his book Looking for Alaska, particularly to one reviewer who asks "Are there no uncrossable lines in YA anymore?"

"In fact, all that matters is why and how the line gets crossed. See, for instance, the sex in Coe Booth's brilliant new novel Kendra, which is so incredibly sad that you cry while reading it; sex is a vitally important part of the book..." 

(A review of Green's forthcoming Paper Towns was included yesterday on ALAN's Picks for September.)

What would a YA author take to a deserted island?
My favorite thing about His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman's list of 40 favorite books, blogged in a few places this week, was his detailed description of how he came up with the list. This tidbit was especially fun (confirming again that Brits are way more into poetry than Americans)...

The hardest area to select from was poetry. How could I leave out Coleridge? Wordsworth? Keats? Or Donne, Marvell, Herbert? Or - and so on. In a list of 4,000, of course, they would be there automatically. But then they'd be there in everyone's 4,000.

And, if you haven't read the list yet, here are some highlights (and by highlights, I mean books that are also my favorites, plus some kids' books that seemed particularly exciting):

Complete Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Richard Burton
The Complete Fairy Tales, the Brothers Grimm
The Castafiore Emerald, Herge
Finn Family Moomintroll, Tove Jansson
Lavender's Blue, edited by Kathleen Lines (nursery rhymes)
The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft
The Complete Maus, Art Spiegelman
The Magic Pudding, Norman Lindsay
The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James

Quick links...
Freakonomics offers some interesting teen pregnancy stats and facts. 

Paper Cuts points readers to "Two weeks of Friday Night Lights," an ongoing discussion of H.G. Bissinger's book about high school football on The Quad, the Times college sports blog.

The Guardian reports on the shortlist for the 2008 Booktrust teenage prize in "Sharp words: knives out in teenage prize shortlist."

Notable Fine Lines from the last couple of weeks: Lizzie Skurnick on Bridge to Terabithia and on her insistence that a friend read the book I remember most vividly from my pre-teen reading years, Flowers in the Attic. (Hmm. Maybe I shouldn't admit that.) --Heidi

YA Wednesday: Banned! Revolution! Links!

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we make it easy for you to find banned books, talk about a revolution, and continue our obsession with the Twilight debates.

How do you get teens to read a book? Ban it.
The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and the American Library Association (ALA) launched a Banned Books Week website this week. Censorship is no laughing matter, but it still cracks me up that the people who work so hard to ban books don't seem to get how much banning helps a book. During Banned Books Week (September 27 - October 4) bookstores and librarians will display these books, and bloggers will list them and link to them for people to buy--while all the lonely non-banned titles sit on the shelves, wishing they were just a little more controversial.

So, I'm doing my part now for the continued success of the following books, YA and adult titles for teens among the 10 most challenged in 2007:

The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
TTYL by Lauren Myracle
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

You can see the full list with the reasons for the bans, plus more stats from 1990-2007, on the ALA website. (Reported yesterday by SLJ)

What I'm Reading Now: The Revolution of Sabine
Beth Levine Ain's The Revolution of Sabine came to me just at the right time. I watched HBO's John Adams a couple of weeks ago, devouring the whole series DVD-style in a couple of days--so I'm pretty into Ben Franklin and powdered wigs. It's a great idea: what better setting for a rebellious teen than an actual revolution? (Sabine is from a French aristocratic family in the 1770s.) The early scenes have a slight Edith Wharton-like sensibility, with strict fashion rules and an overbearing, social-climbing mother who is devastated when Ben Franklin fails to show up at her ball: "How will they manage to run a whole country when their leaders behave this way?"

Quick links...
ALAN (Assembly for Literature of Adolescents) has posted a preliminary schedule for their 2008 ALAN Workshop, coming up in November. With titles like "Gods, Foods, and Tattoos: The Mixed Mythos of Urban Fantasy" and "Advice for the Lovelorn: Dating Faux Pas and Successes in Young Adult Literature," it looks pretty intriguing. 

Yesterday, Alison Morris on PW's ShelfTalker blog linked to Flux ("A new imprint dedicated to fiction for teens"), complimenting them on their teen-friendly covers. Then Flux linked to ShelfTalker complimenting Alison Morris on her "awesome post." Ah, blog love.

In the Salt Lake Tribune, columnist Rebecca Walsh talks about how Breaking Dawn author Stephenie Meyer is now getting it from all sides (with one LDS blogger even calling for her to be excommunicated). Walsh's take? Lighten up, people.
--Heidi

End-o'-the-Week(end) Kid-Lit Roundup

In this week's roundup, I'm filling in for Paul as we go back to the UK for more controversy and demonstrate our uber-Ameri-sentimentality about Lady Liberty and something all kids love--play!

No naughtiness at Random House
On Thursday, the Guardian reported that Random House was removing the word "twat" from Jacqueline Wilson's boarding school book for 10+ year-olds, My Sister Jodie. Because of three complaints, the publisher and author have decided on a less offensive replacement:

"The word 'twat' was used in context. It was meant to be a nasty word on purpose, because this is a nasty character," said a spokesperson for Random House. "However, Jacqueline doesn't want to offend her readers or her readers' parents, so when the book comes to be reprinted the word will be replaced with twit."

Amazon.uk has a charming video of Wilson talking about the book. Could this lady possibly be offensive? Please!

This comes on the heels of Sian Pattenden's report earlier this month that Random House was adding a "morality clause" to their author's contracts. (reported by Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing last week)

 

Even Americans aren't this gooey
I still haven't seen Meghan McCain's picture book, My Dad, John McCain, but these words from Derek Draper in the Guardian don't necessarily inspire me to pick it up:

It's easy for us Brits to assume that such sentimental spin will backfire but, having lived in the US for three years, I can assure you that Americans are made of gooier stuff. There, a commitment to "family values" isn't seen as a devalued political soundbite but the sine qua non of a politician's suitability for office.

Where did Draper live in America? I don't think it was Seattle. (found via Read Roger's "Fighting Words..." post)

O.K., well, we are gooey about our national landmarks
A Patchwork of Books posted a review last Monday of Lady Liberty, by Doreen Rappaport and illustrated by Matt Tavares--one of my favorite picture books of the year.

One thing I loved about this book, besides seeing the whole history of how the statue was conceived and built, was learning about how it was paid for. Basically, when sculptor Auguste Bartholdi visited the U.S. "everyone was polite and seemed interested. But no one offered to raise money to build her." So they got donations from French citizens to help build the statue, then Joseph Pulitzer asked his readers to chip in with the donations for the base (including one girl who sent her two pet roosters).

And we're not alone in loving the book. It got starred reviews from Booklist and The Horn Book. Here are a few more reviews from earlier this year:

Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast
YA and Kids Book Central
I.N.K. (Interesting Nonfiction for Kids)

It's time to play!
Speaking of I.N.K., contributor Anna M. Lewis posted Friday about her favorite book of the summer, The Case for Make Believe by Susan Linn, a book that's also been a favorite at our house, especially as we've watched 16-mo-old Silas begin to make up games of his own.

Lewis adds a list of books that encourage or celebrate play, such as Smart Play, Smart Toys and Unplugged Play: No Batteries. No Plugs. Pure Fun. One of her commenters also recommends the The Big Book for Little Hands, which looks really cute and fun. We'll be checking it out, for sure. --Heidi

---

YA Wednesday: A Hand-Holding Librarian, a Grown-up Bella, and Olympic Triumphs

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we walk the blurry lines between kids and YA, and YA and grown-ups.

The Kids want YA: What's a librarian to do?
Last week, Publisher's Weekly kicked off a new column, Talkback, with kid-lit opinion pieces submitted by readers. In "My Say: When YA Books May not be OK," a children's librarian explains her process of interviewing too-young children who ask about YA titles, to make sure they're ready for the YA room:

"In recent years, the trend in YA fiction has been toward a proliferation of darker, edgier fare, aimed at a more mature audience. As a result, I don’t ever send younger kids to browse “over there” unaccompanied. It feels too much like throwing them into the deep end of the pool."

Roger Sutton questions her tactics, and wonders if they even work: 

"What we don't know from the essay is how easily kids are allowed to dodge the librarian's best intentions entirely and simply go to the YA or adult books by themselves. That would have been my own strategy as a sixth-grader, particularly if I had had a previous encounter with a librarian that made me feel snooped upon or deflected."

The bright lights of Beijing
If watching synchronized diving, impossible gymnastics contortions, and cross-country biking in the rain inspires you (to contort or dive or... read!), check out School Library Journal's YA-recommended list (posted in early summer) of books by or about Olympic champions including: 

Letters to a Young Gymnast by Nadia Comaneci. (Was there any girl in the 70s who didn't want to be Nadia Comaneci, the first perfect 10?)

Venus to the Hoop: A Gold Medal Year in Women’s Basketball by Sara Corbett, which follows the 1996 U.S. Women's Basketball Team all the way to Atlanta.

Gold in the Water: The True Story of Ordinary Men and Their Extraordinary Dream of Olympic Glory by P.H. Mullen, Jr., an "adrenaline-charged account" of the Santa Clara Swim Club in 2000. 

All American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe by Bill Crawford

Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics by Jeremy Schaap 

(The video here is Beijing Welcomes You, a music-video-style promotion with welcoming messages: "Flowing charms are filled with vigor and enthusiasm." I also highly recommend Stand up, a history of China's Olympic teams, sung primarily by Jackie Chan.)

Still weighing in on Breaking Dawn
Gail Gauthier speculates on one possible reason that Breaking Dawn disappointed some fans--the characters grew up too much:

"Bella and Edward are no longer in high school. They're dealing with grown-up, family problems, not teen problems. When young readers were reading about people they could relate to in the earlier books, they were willing to ignore the way so many characters roll their eyes, chuckle, and snore, the improbabilities regarding plot, and the scenes that went on way too long. But Bella becomes matronly in Breaking Dawn, and Edward seems as if he ought to be out playing golf."

And a few quick links...
The YALSA blog posted this video encouraging people to register for the first ever Young Adult Literature Symposium, "How We Read Now," coming up this November in Nashville. 

Cynthia Leitich Smith (Cynsations) interviewed Zu Vincent, author of The Lucky Place. Vincent talked about influences, challenges, and her experience at the Vermont College MFA Program in Writing for Children and Young Adults (responding to a question that must have been awkward coming from CLS, who's a faculty member there):
"The Vermont College writers' community is so caring and the faculty amazing, you can't help but dig in."

Is Colleen Mondor the busiest blogger in YA-dom? I think so. Her August 2008 Bookslut column, Bookslut in Training, features a wide coming-of-age variety. She particularly recommends Barbara Shoup's Wish You Were Here. 

She also moderates Guy's Litwire, which reminds me that I totally forgot to plug Paul's post there two weeks ago, with three guys from Fantagraphics Books talking about their early comics influences.

Speaking of Seattle-based comics folks, David Lasky signed with Abrams to publish his graphic novel about the Carter Family. It's not YA, but Lasky's earned serious teen cred by teaching at the nonprofit kids' writing center 826 Seattle, where he helped budding teen comic artists create and publish three 826 Seattle Comic Books: All Systems Go!, Family Portraits, and Happiness?. Oh yeah, and it's all volunteer. --Heidi

YA Wednesday: Meyer on Stage, Ashley and Mary-Kate, Talent, and The Debs

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we're completely surrounded by the glitz, and the glamour.

Vampire Glam: Breaking Dawn is Here!
(photo courtesy of TheTwilightSaga.com's Flickr photostream from last weekend's launch event in Manhattan)

There's not much else to be said about the hordes of screaming teens at Friday's Breaking Dawn parties. The New York Times had an article about it, and a post on the Paper Cuts blog describing the Stephenie Meyer/Justin Furstenfeld concert, including this insider-y scene:

"A stadium-sized sigh escaped the crowd when Furstenfeld, who writes rather dark, introspective songs, played the delicately acoustic “Hate Me” — but you would have to have read chapter 3 of volume 2, “New Moon,” to understand why."

Lizzie Skurnick continued the coverage in her Chicago Tribune essay, in which she compares the Twilight Saga to The Lost Boys, then goes on to compliment Meyer's unique take on life and the afterlife:

"Meyer understands there's no true meat to her tale without Bella, Jacob and Edward's agony alongside their amazing skills—and no humanity. Bella, like us, is flawed and irredeemably normal. But being blessed with superpowers can be a bummer too."

Glam that inspires us
People magazine interviewed Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen last week about their upcoming coffee table book, Influence.

"We interviewed the people who have inspired us, with the hope that they will inspire and teach others," Mary-Kate said. "We want to explain culturally how ideas evolve."

 

Chimed in Ashley: "We have filled Influence with the most interesting, challenging, creative people we know--the ones who helped pave the way for us and our generation."

The book, coming out in October from Razorbill (Penguin's YA press), features the Olsen's interviews with people they admire--including fashion luminaries such as Diane von Furstenberg, Lauren Hutton, Christian Louboutin, and of course, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.

Get some glam for yourself: Hollywood-style
Razorbill also announced on their blog Monday that they're hosting a Zoey Dean's Talent contest, related to the recent YA novel: "where a trendy trio of Hollywood fabettes find their way into the L.A. lifestyles of the rich and talented."

To win a meeting with a Hollywood agent, contestants are posting videos of talents like cartwheels, impressions, and bird calls--or monologues from Talent--for other contestants to vote on. Last day to post is August 13.

There's also a new trailer for the book here, with a small dog that plays with cashmere and a very enthusiastic host that invites you to "Glam on the glitter."

From chapter one:

"Mackenzie Little-Armstrong held her iPhone high above her golden-blond head, pouted, and snapped a self-portrait. She needed to cross-check her outfit. Mirrors could lie. So could camera phones, actually. But they didn't lie at the same time."

Texas Glam: Do teenagers really wear Manolo Blahniks?
I've just started reading Susan McBride's The Debs, book one in a new YA series by the author of The Debutante Dropout Mystery series (with adult titles such as Night of the Living Deb and Too Pretty to Die). It opens with Laura, a girl who's a size fourteen in a clique of Houston debutantes (The Glass Slipper Club) who call anyone over a size eight a "debutank." Laura's fresh off the plane from "camp hellhole," a fitness camp where she didn't lose a pound. There's already a hot guy, a mean girl, and disconnected parents. And French manicures, Blackberries, Louis Vuitton bags, and a Prius (Mary-Kate and Ashley even get a mention on page 8). McBride is having a lot of fun here, as you can tell in The Debs trailer...

and in "The Deb's Ten Commandments": No tattoos. No weird piercings. And no partying...

--Heidi

YA Wednesday: Reading, Alexie, Comic-Con, and Bella Live On

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we are (still) talking about Twilight, and a lot of other news.

(image from someecards... thanks, shelftalker!)

Are you really reading right now?
On Sunday, The New York Times kicked off its series, "The Future of Reading," about how the Internet and other technologies are changing how people read. And the focus is on, you guessed it, teenagers.

The article profiles one teen in particular who regularly chooses fanfiction.net over books. Liz B. over at Tea Cozy took issue with the fanfiction vs. "real books" slant of the article:

"Fanfiction existed before the Internet. So it's entirely possible Nadia would be writing it even without the computer. What she wouldn't have is the community that the Internet brings."

Overall, the article, along with the thoughtful comments it sparked from readers, presents a very comprehensive view of the whole topic. Pro: people who say that online reading is beneficial because A) it's reading (engaging with text, although there are also arguments that create-a-quiz sites and Facebook updates don't add up to much actual reading) and B) it provides community; and C) it will help prepare kids for a their future jobs of staring at computers. And con: people who feel sad that their kids may never have the joy of losing themselves in a book.

Did the wrong book win?
Author Gaul Gauthier (Happy Kid, Saving the Planet and Stuff) posted some thoughts on Sunday about Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian and another Alexie novel, the non-National-Book-Award-winning Flight.

"The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian was last year's big YA book. What I find so fascinating about that situation is that Alexie published another book last year with a teenage main character, a wonderful, unique, magical book called Flight. Flight, however, was published as an adult book. What's going on here?"

It happened at Comic-Con
For those of us who just couldn't make it to Comic-Con, Comics Reporter has an excellent overview.

Create your own Comic-Con
Greg Hatcher at Comics Should Be Good wrote about some exciting discoveries he made in an antique store on his family's annual comics hunting road trip, including this find (from the jacket copy):

MEET…
CHRISTOPHER COOL/TEEN AGENT as he plays the deadliest game of all––international intrigue––in America’s newest exciting spy stories.

Christopher Cool and his Apache Indian roommate, Geronimo Johnson––sophomores at an Ivy League university––combine their campus lives with undercover assignments for a vital arm of U.S. Intelligence: Top-Secret Educational Espionage Network.

Expertly schooled in all the arts of espionage, the two daring TEEN agents work closely with red-haired Spice Carter, a clever coed agent, to thwart enemy spies in trouble spots throughout the world.

(found thanks to Fuse #8)

An interview with Jay Asher
YPulse posted a thoughtful interview today with Jay Asher, author of Thirteen Reasons Why, about a young girl's suicide and the events that lead up to it. The book is also the July Readergirlz selection, and although the transcript of last Thursday's live chat with Asher doesn't seem to be up yet, they do have some some Jay Asher info on their website, and some recommendations about similar books.

The buzz continues...
Twilight will not abate. Quick links:

Capone at Ain't it Cool News reports on the screaming Twilight panel at Comic-Con last week and interviews Catherine Hardwicke and Bella (I mean, Kristen Stewart).

Laura Miller at Salon on Bella, who is no Buffy Summers: "Even the most timorous teenage girl couldn't conceive of Bella as intimidating; it's hard to imagine a person more insecure, or a situation better set up to magnify her insecurities." Comments ensue here and here (and that's just from day one).

Joseph Wilk over at YALSA created this magic-8-ball-type widget using quotes from the first three Twilight Saga books. He also has a link to download the full code and instructions so you can make a similar widget from any favorite book. Very cool. --Heidi

YA Wednesday: Margo Rabb, Skinny Girl, Ghostgirl, and John Wayne

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we have the authors who are published as YA, and the bloggers who have the review copies of their books piling up.

Margo Rabb: "I'm YA, and I'm OK"
The most interesting thing written about YA (or publishing in general) this week, by far, was Margo Rabb's great essay in this weekend's New York Times Book Review about the experience of publishing her first book, Cures for Heartbreak. In addition to personal anecdotes, the essay quotes last year's National Book Award winner for young people's literature, Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian). She also quotes other authors, librarians, publishers, editors, and booksellers who talk about the current state of YA literature, and the fine line between YA and adult lit. (Rabb interviewed 25 authors, mostly from her bathroom in Brooklyn.)

She's posting full interview text every couple of days on her blog--Books, Chocolate, Sundries--so far including Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and Markus Zusak (The Book Thief).

According to the blog, she's getting a lot of comments, positive and negative:

"One blogger commented “I wanted to punch the author.” Um, what?! I’m a very petite person–one might say completely unthreatening– and hearing that a strange man would like to punch me (even if it is metaphorically) and for him to admit it in a public forum…let’s just say it’s rather ungentlemanly, to say the least, and perhaps downright creepy."

Skinny Katsa
I enjoyed Kristen Cashore's post on her blog about the British cover of Graceling, and the svelte appearance of Katsa, the main character, on the cover:

"It does remind me that I wish the default woman in magazines or on TV or on book covers wasn't always so skinny. To be fair, I never specifically state that Katsa isn't skinny."

Chasing Ray's Issue-o-rama
A couple of weeks ago, we posted about the call from Chasing Ray for YA bloggers to air their frustrations with YA publishing starting this week. We've been following the updates every day, including today's rants on the difficulties of blogging...

7-Imp's Identity Crisis had some apologetic whining in the form of a conversation between Jules and Eisha (Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast) about blogger guilt, or what to do with all these review copies and the obligations that come with them. Then, Jen Robinson sympathized and offered tips for how she keeps her blog life manageable. Other bloggers joined in the advice-giving.

 

ghostgirl, the Website
I came across the charmingly black and pink ghostgirl.com, the promotional site for Tonya Hurley's ghostgirl, this week (thanks to the YABC blog). Among other engaging novelties, they have a "Rest Room" where you can scrawl your own graffiti, a couple of nearly impossible to win games in "Dead Ed," and a ggfilmfestival, featuring original short films (maybe Hurley's, maybe from the NYC Horror Film Fest... it's not explained).

I haven't had a chance to read the book yet (it's due out August 1), but it received a starred review from PW last week, plus the set up is pretty tempting (from the YABC review):

Charlotte is obsessed with becoming popular. ...Why should one little gummy bear stand in her way, even if she did choke to death on it?

What I'm reading this week: Girl, Hero
So far, I'm completely hooked on Carrie Jones' upcoming novel, Girl, Hero, about a girl who writes letters to John Wayne to help her sort out the many changes that seem to be happening in her life. (I'm about 1/3 of the way in... I'll be posting a full review here on Amazon soon.)

I'm also pretty taken in by Jones' JacketFlap blog, which has cute pictures of buildings, cheerleaders, and high school basketball games--all from her hometown, Ellsworth, Maine.

And, come to find out, John Wayne is more to Carrie Jones than just a literary device. Just today on her Amazon blog, she posted dialogue of her recent discussion with not-so-recently-passed movie star (who she calls her "internal editor") about her new-book anxieties:

Mr. Wayne: Well, what's making you so stressed?
Me: I'm worried no one will a. read it, b. like it, c. notice it exists.
Mr. Wayne: I'm in it, right?
Me: Sort of.
Mr. Wayne: Then people will notice it exists.
Me: I wish.
Mr. Wayne: What do you mean by that, neurotic little writer person?
Me: Well, you are a dead movie star from a long time ago.
Mr. Wayne: Woman, I'm an American icon!
Me: Uh... sort of...
Mr. Wayne: What do you mean 'sort of?' I'm on a damn coffee mug, see?

--Heidi

 

YA Wednesday: Twilight, Twilight, Twilight

In this issue of YA Wednesday, we jump on the Stephenie Meyer bandwagon.

It's been difficult to avoid reading about The Twilight Saga this week. What have people been calling it? Oh, yeah... "the Twilight juggernaut." Hmmm. Somebody has a pretty awesome publicity machine...

Fans have been following the Twilight series for years, but the EW cover story and the upcoming release of Breaking Dawn (the last Bella book) have launched Stephenie Meyer and her vampires into a pop culture frenzy.

Twilight, the movie based on book one of The Twilight Saga, opens Dec. 12, 2008. Breaking Dawn comes out August 2nd. Meyer is currently working on Midnight Sun, told from Edward's perspective.

Here's a timeline of the recent insanity...

Tuesday, July 7
The author herself asks fans to please, please, please not spoil Breaking Dawn for everybody else:

"I want to ask you guys for a favor. As we saw with Eclipse (not to mention that last Harry Potter book), there is always the potential for copies of the book to be leaked early. My publisher is doing everything they can to prevent this, but there is only so much that can be done. This is the favor: if someone, somewhere, somehow, gets a copy early, I'm asking you to please not post any spoilers on the internet. And if you see something, please don't spread it around."

She also lets people know that message boards on the fansites will be taken down soon, just in case anyone can't wait to discuss it. (She talks about this a little bit in her Amazon interview here.)

Thursday, July 10
The new EW shows up in my mailbox with its cover story about The Twilight Saga, including two features, "The Vampire Empire" (about Meyer and her books) and "Twilight Hits Hollywood" (about the Catherine Hardwicke film). EW.com includes the opening pages of Breaking Dawn and an interview with Meyer. A teaser in the magazine promises that EW.com will run "a super-exclusive spoiler about Bella's love life" on July 28.

An L.A. Times blog posts about Twilight fans who are displeased with the EW cover, based on comments from fansites. According to the post, complainers cite Rob Pattinson's open shirt (Edward, despite his extreme hunkiness, is quite virginal), among other too-sexy concerns, mostly related to the fact that the people on this cover look nothing like Bella and Edward, or the actors for that matter. (Have the people on EW covers ever not looked totally weird and unlike themselves?) This sparks comments from fans that they are *not* upset...

Friday, July 11
Summit Entertainment releases these two clips:

"Ballet scene"

And behind the scene footage and interviews

Saturday, July 12
The New York Times runs this opinion piece, with Gail Collins speculating that The Twilight Saga's appeal lies in the sexually innocent vampire boy, every girl's dream in a world where human boys choose porn over live girls:

YA Wednesday: Urban Lit, Cycler, Joey Ramone, and Riot Bloggers

Urban lit: Too racy, or just too "uneven"?

School Library Journal's cover story this month is all about urban lit, and how it's become increasingly popular with teens, but not so much with librarians:

"The most troubling thing about street lit isn’t necessarily its graphic descriptions of sex, violence, and drugs or its occasional fondness for gangsta rap’s explicit language or even that it seemingly glamorizes thug life. No, what many librarians may wince at is the uneven quality of its content."

If you're not too familiar with this genre, the article provides a full retrospective from the pulp novels of the '50s and '60s to Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever and K'wan's Gangsta, books that helped kick off the current wave of popularity. They also cover tamer teen series like Bluford High and Kimani Tru and include a list of urban lit titles for both adults and teens.

What I'm reading this week: Cycler
Nothing sets up comedy like an inexplicable, middle-of-the-night gender-swap. Lauren McLaughlin's debut, Cycler, is a whirl of hormonal confusion, featuring a 17-year-old girl who has a slight problem--every month she turns into a guy for four days.

Once I finally figured out what was happening (the first, somewhat dizzying scene drops you directly into a cycling transformation), I totally bought off on the character(s), Jill and Jack, and now I can't wait to see where she takes it (I'm about 40 pages in). The dialog is fun and movie-like, not too surprising since McLaughlin is also a screenwriter. In fact, she is working on a screenplay for Cycler (as well as a sequel to the book).

In a recent interview on Sybil's Garage, McLaughlin offered one of the more straightforward answers I've seen to the question of "Why YA?" (found via BoingBoing):

"I never knew the category of YA existed until I started meeting science fiction writers who were suddenly being shelved in the YA section. I'm not an expert in publishing, but my sense is that it's a new category. My original idea for Cycler dealt with the main characters at age twenty-five. But as soon as I started writing it I realized all the juicy identity stuff was being shoved into the backstory, so I simply backed up and wrote it from the teenagers' points of view."

About a punk rock girl
Stephanie Kuehnert is having a busy week. She's hosting a week-long "cyber extravaganza" to kick off the release of her first novel, I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone (from MTV books). She's interviewing writers, musicians, and filmmakers on her Blogspot blog, Life, Words, and Rock 'n' Roll, as well as her LiveJournal and MySpace pages. (See the big ad on her website for more info.)

I like this tidbit about the author, from her website bio, about things she did in high school:
"She wrote several feminist zines including Kill Supermodels, Goddess Defiled, Hospital Gown, and Do Not Go Quietly Unto Yr Grave."

You can read an excerpt from the beginning of I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone here (scroll down...if you love music, I dare you not to get hooked).

The book has already received raves from Bust, YABC, and Teen Book Review, as well as an extensive review from the L.A. Times that describes the writing as "punk on the page":

As a fictive artifact of an aggressive, didactic genre in which shades of gray are often obliterated by black and white beats of rage, Kuehnert emerges as a true subversive -- retaining her cred while expanding the form.

And if the title alone makes you nostalgic for Sleater-Kinney, here's some concert footage of them performing I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone (and, weirdly, the YouTube comments also talk about this book.)

What's your YA beef?
Colleen Mondor over at Chasing Ray is inciting YA bloggers to riot--or at least write about aspects of teen publishing that frustrate them. The big YA debate kicks off on July 20th.--Heidi

YA Wednesday: Hunger Games, Locus Mag, Mundania, and More

In this week's edition of YA Wednesday, we say nothing about the 4th of July, or fireworks.

Hungry Reading
I lost Paul to a book for about a day and a half this week--he was buried in Hunger Games, the first book in Suzanne Collins' futuristic trilogy about an annual tournament of death between teenage boys and girls (on TV, of course). This book doesn't come out until October, but people have been raving about it for a couple of months now. Paul says it's a "good book for girls and boys"... something about the "action, and fashion."

He also mentioned that it reminded him of Battle Royale. Elizabeth at Fuse #8 also pointed out her husband mentioning Battle Royale in her review last weekend (because, according to Paul, "all guys" know about that movie), and she also had a hard time putting it down:

"About the time you get to the fifth chapter that ends with a sentence that forces you to read on, you’re scratching your head wondering how the heck she DOES that."

YA and SciFi, together again
This month's Locus Magazine is a special YA issue with essays from Neil Gaiman, Scot Westerfeld, Sharyn November, and other YA authors, as well as interviews with Garth Nix (whose Superior Saturday comes out next month) and Christopher Barzak. I particularly enjoyed this piece from Cory Doctorow on writing for younger readers (hat tip to Justin over at Guys Lit Wire).

Piers or Jack: What kind of girl are you, anyway?
E. Lockhart (The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks) extols the pleasures of Piers Anthony's A Spell for Chameleon (and, basically, anything else in the Xanth or Adept series) over Kerouac's On the Road in "Exile to Mundania," a fun, short piece in the July/August issue of Horn Book Magazine (online today) about her teen self trying to conform to the books she thinks her boyfriend wants her to like:

"The thing about falling in love when you are seventeen: you haven’t yet figured out who you are. So when your significant person says, “Hey, don’t you love Kerouac?” you think, “Hmmm. I did fall asleep and feel annoyed most of the time I was reading On the Road, but maybe I did love it without really noticing, because it certainly was deep and I’m fairly sure I’m a deep person--and anyway, I’m outgrowing that kid stuff I used to like,” and so you answer him, “Yes. A total genius.”"

Let the super-readers have their big-kid books (more against age-banding)
Alli at Ypulse provides some helpful background--and thoughtful insights--today on the ongoing Brit discussion of whether or not books should be marked for certain age groups (which Paul mentioned in last week's kid-lit roundup). 

"...a sort of literary, slightly random, Word-Association-Rorschach-Blotty-Blog-Interview"
On her Imaginary Blog last weekend, author Lynn E. Hazen (whose Shifty comes out in September) asked bloggers Cynthia Leitich Smith (Cynsations), Elizabeth Bird (Fuse #8), and Eisha and Jules (Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast) to respond to the following:

8 Words: About Why You Blog
7 Words: About What You Blog About
6 Words: About What Makes Your Voice Unique
5 Adjectives: Used By You or Others to Describe Your Blog
4 Adverbs: About How You Write/Blog
3 Words: Culled From Your Comments
2 Words: Any Words
1 Noun

And here's one of the responses, from Jules (and she explains her noun in the interview that follows)...

   

 

--Heidi

A Book about Books We Loved When We Were Girls

Every Friday, Lizzie Skurmick writes Fine Lines, in which she re-reads and then reviews the books she loved in her youth, mostly pre-teen and near-adult books from the '60s, '70s, and '80s (think Judy Blume, who she calls "A GENIUS").

Fine Lines has now inspired a book, which HarperCollins will publish next summer. Here are excerpts from some of my favorites (and a warning on the content: the column is geared toward adults--not kids--although older teens will likely enjoy it)...

On re-reading a book she's read "like, 34 times" but thought she'd forgotten (The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare):

"...upon reread, like some annoying little brother who keeps repeating everything you say exactly as you say it, my memory kept catching up with the text in front of me until the entire read was but one self-pleasuring session of deja vu."

On teendom now vs. 30 years ago (The Cat Ate My Gymsuit by Paula Danziger):

"I feel bad for teens today. Their parents listen to them. Teachers are invested in their intellectual development and well-being. Books are published on their optimal care and feeding; violins brandished for their edification; trips abroad marshaled so they may broaden their horizons and spread this wealth to others, eventually spearheading their own microloan organizations and so forth. ..."

  And, "Quit Tesseracting Up" (on A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine l'Engle):

"If I had my way, none of us would have to read this review at all. Instead, we'd join hands, hear a great dark thunderclap, and be whisked off to a rambling house in the country, where we'd view odd things bubbling in a lab with a stone floor, then eat limburger-and-cream-cheese sandwiches while swinging our legs at the kitchen table. We'd sidestep for a moment onto a planet inhabited by gentle gray creatures with dents for eyes, then be inserted into some mitochondria. We battle for the soul of Madoc/Maddox, and eat small crayfish with our lesbian kind-of aunt who insisted on calling us our full name (Polyhymnia). We'd hop on a freighter and solve a mystery, then go to boarding school in Switzerland. We would make a brief detour on the Upper West Side by way of Portugal, and be concerned with cell regeneration in starfish. We'd be smacked on the ass by a dolphin. Most important, whatever happened, we'd know we could get through it--because we are creatures that can love."

Fine Lines has many comments every week, with people sharing their own experiences of these books. I certainly won't be the only book-loving girl waiting for more from this reviewer. --Heidi

YA Wednesday: Graces and Magic and Proms, Oh My

In this week's edition of YA Wednesday, some new books, some books to come, and... slumber parties?

This is my Grace: Writing
On her blog, This is My Secret, author Kristin Cashore tells her readers all her secrets--at least the ones about her writing. Graceling, her first YA novel (out in October 2008) and the first in a series of at least three novels, follows 16-year-old Katsa as she learns to master her Grace (a preternatural talent or power) for fighting, among other things. I just finished the book yesterday, and Katsa ranks right up there with the best of the tough girl-angst heroes. (Here, Cashore shows off the notebook where she first sketched out the novel's seven kingdoms.)

New out this week: The Magician, Michael Scott's follow-up to last year's The Alchemyst, featuring a cast of both current day teens and more-than-600-year-old "real-life" characters, such as Nicholas Flamel (alchemist and bookseller, b. 1330; in fact, the series is called, "The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel.") The Magician will likely be a welcome continuation for readers who were thrown by the sudden cliffhanger ending of the first book--not too surprising, as the author has pointed out that each of the six books in the series is just a part of one large, very complex story:

"The entire series is plotted out in great detail. It had to be. With a series of this complexity, it would be so easy to get lost. The notes for book one, for example, are bigger than the book itself."

For girls who like to read, we salute you!
Am I crazy, or does Readergirlz always sound like a big slumber party? This Friday night (yes, Friday night, 6:00 p.m. Pacific) the girlz are getting together on MySpace for a live chat with the authors of How to Be Bad (and giveaways galore!). The Readergirlz MySpace page and website both include fun info and links on Laurie Halse Anderson in celebration of their June pick--her book, Prom--including a link to her prom picture (right) on her blog, and some highlights from her live chat with Readergirlz last Friday. (Note: You do have to be logged in to MySpace to read the content there.)

Guys fall in love, too
"Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: Guy-centric YA romance," Carlie Webber's article in the most recent Readers' Advisor News, a quarterly e-newsletter from Libraries Unlimited (linked yesterday on Tea Cozy), shows us that romances are not just for girls anymore. Webber highlights several examples, including Steve Kluger's My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins & Fenway Park and Greg Leitich Smith's Ninjas, Piranhas and Galileo.

The ultimate intrepid girl hero
In case you missed it, NPR had a story Monday about Nancy Drew, including these comments from 11-year-old Zoe Dutton, whose mom passed on her childhood favorite, The Bungalow Mystery:

"She's always nice to everybody. She's even polite to the criminal after she catches them and knocks them out ... I mean slightly ridiculous, but it's nice if you're her friend."

--Heidi

YA Wednesday: Inaugural Edition

My 14-month-old son is a long way from being a teenager, and I'm in no hurry for him to get there. However, I do find myself drawn to YA novels, as do many adults who love a good story, I suspect, based on the seemingly infinite number of enthusiastic blogs devoted to the subject.

This is YA Wednesday, my humble offering of discussions and tidbits about world of YA this week. Paul and I will be working together on this update every Wednesday, so if there's something you'd like to see more--or less--of, please comment!

*

Do books for teens need better boy heroes? CNN's Glenn Beck thinks so. In a recent interview with author Ted Bell about his new YA book, Nick of Time, Beck opened the segment with a diatribe about how books for teen boys are "emasculating." Colleen over at Guys Lit Wire disagrees, and she (and her commenters) cite many examples to the contrary.

Scandal of the week, part I: YA is in a category all its own... unfortunately? One fun thing about following YA is the inevitability of the philosophical discussions that pop up every few weeks, sparked by the mere existence of the YA category. A recent example is Frank Cotrell Boyce's review of The Knife of Never Letting Go by Frank Ness. After praising the book ("so cunningly written that I was 100 pages in before I even realized what genre it was"), Boyce brings up his fears about it being relegated to the YA section, as well as concerns about the whole category of books (which he writes, by the way):

Is there anything more depressing than the sight of a "young adult" bookshelf in the corner of the shop. It's the literary equivalent of the "kids' menu" - something that says "please don't bother the grown-ups". If To Kill a Mockingbird were published today, that's where it would be placed, among the chicken nuggets.

Scandal of the week, part II: Ulterior motives? From Monday's Read Roger, stating that the arguments against Boyce's statements:

...are missing the funnier semi-scandal of one Guardian children's fiction award longlister (Boyce) queering (albeit probably obliviously) the chances of another (Patrick Ness) by saying his really isn't a juvenile book at all!

Giveaways?! Along with reading challenges, giveaways are a regular feature of book blogs that I've just become aware of this year (yes, I know, where have I been?!) This week, A Patchwork of Books is giving away five copies of Mary Pearson's The Adoration of Jenna Fox, which Amanda calls "a page turner from the very beginning." Post a comment before Sunday for a chance to win.

Speaking of Mary Pearson, she wrote a guest post last week on Teen Book Review about writers' inspirations, including some of the things that have inspired her novels, for example: "With A Room on Lorelei Street, the spark was simply an image of a tired house, a tired girl, and a few opening lines... ." (Good news: A paperback version of this 2005 novel is coming out September 28th).

This tidbit has nothing to do with YA books, but it is about teens. According to Scholastic's 2008 Kids & Family Reading Report issued last week, 51 percent of the students surveyed from ages 15 to 17 listed the Internet as a place they go for book suggestions. This is the same percentage that listed teachers.

And last, but not least: This cool Breaking Dawn countdown widget is available now for readers eagerly awaiting the fourth installment of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Series, Breaking Dawn, on August 2nd. You can get one for your own blog via Crepúsculo-mx, a Mexican fan site, or read more about it on Stephenie's Meyer's site.--Heidi

Get this widget!

George Washington, Organic Farmer

Another farming picture book that I've been excited about is Farmer George Plants a Nation. This history book for slightly older kids--fourth to sixth graders--tells all about George Washington from a perspective we haven't really seen before, highlighting his life as a farmer.

George Washington started with 2,000 acres at Mt. Vernon, which grew to 8,000 acres on five different farms during his lifetime, so you'd hardly think of him as a hands-on farmer.  And he sort of had his hands full with the revolution and running a new country. But Farmer George gives a surprising amount of detail about his farm work. Author Peggy Thomas smartly intersperses excerpts from farm diaries and letters that bring out his love of the land. (She also smartly includes a short appendix about Washington's progressive views on slavery, which, as we know, made his prosperous farming possible.)

Here we see our first president as a revolutionary agrarian. He rotated crops to preserve the quality of the soil, while his neighbors struggled with poor soil from repeated tobacco plantings, and he traveled around the country sharing what he learned with other farmers. While he was president, he designed a double-decker barn, where horses could trot in a circle and tread the wheat, as well as a stercorary, or dung house, for his extensive composting experiments. ("President George thought a lot about manure, too.") It's all very cool: seeing Washington in this light, and thinking about how his methods are being used to revitalize farms even today. --Heidi

Old MacDonald Had a Diverse, Sustainable Farm

Yesterday's post about farmers markets on the Green Scene blog inspired me to post about a couple of farm books I've stumbled across recently. While there's nothing unique about a picture book set on a farm, these books show kids that farms are more than just faraway places for animals' cavorting and mischief. (The books I've just linked to are great, by the way, for reasons completely unrelated to the fact that they take place on farms.)

In On the Farm, David Elliot uses playful verse to show how each animal contributes. The rooster crows and gets everything going. The cows graze and make milk. The goats clean up by eating "everything from trash to trillium." The dog guards. (Elliot gracefully scoots around what the pig does.)

And my favorite,

The Barn Cat
Mice
had better
think twice.

Essentially, each animal is part of the complex ecosystem of a diverse family farm. This is the kind of farm you see all the time in kids' books but rarely in modern life. The good news is that people are getting more of their food from small farms; the number of farmers markets in the U.S. has more than doubled since 1996.

(I should also mention Holly Meade's fabulous woodcut and watercolor illustrations--I would love to paste these all around Silas' crib so he could have his own little farm in the city.)

I'll post about the next book later this weekend. Meantime, enjoy some fresh seasonal food, and, if you can, visit a farm. --Heidi

Emily the Strange... The Movie

Emily the Strange's story has taken another amazing turn. The "subculture of one" that started out as a design on a few t-shirts and went on to become the Emily we know from the Dark Horse Comics series is now going to be--a movie.

The film will tell the origin story of Emily (the character, not the franchise) and feature her four cats--Sabbath, Nee-Chee, Miles, and Mystery--along with some new characters.

The Hollywood Reporter has all the details, plus some background on Emily (the franchise, not the character) from creator Rob Reger:

"It was one my many designs that just stuck. I remember three years (after I created it) thinking 'They're still ordering the same dang shirt!' There's something there."

The film's story will be similar to the first Emily the Strange YA novel, due out next year from Harper Collins (part of a four-book deal based on Emily's diaries.)--Heidi

Sloane Crosley, Why Are You So Funny?

I picked up Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake because of the dioramas.

Following a link on Critical Mass, I found that Crosley had not only created Plexiglas-encased diorama sets for her essays, she had also narrated video tours of them. (The full story of The Diorama Diaries is on her website, including a trip with her dad to a place called PlasticWorks.)

And, there's more. The book has a video trailer with paper pony stand-ups, a Hot Wheels ambulance, and a bit with fingers wearing pants that I can't really write about on this blog. Every book should have a video trailer.

Though Crosley has been widely published, with essays in the Village Voice, Playboy, Salon, and The New York Times, I Was Told There'd Be Cake is her first book.

I read the book. It was hilarious. I had questions, and she was kind enough to answer them. --Heidi

Amazon.com: People have compared you to David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Dorothy Parker, even a post-modern Mary Tyler Moore. Do you relate to this at all or does it just seem like a way for people to place you in a category that readers can connect with in some way?

Sloane Crosley: A little bit of both. I try not to relate to the part of the Dorothy Parker comparison where she’s suicidal and swallows a bottle of shoe polish. But what huge and wonderfully distinct compliments each of those comparisons are. I don’t flatter myself by assuming I’m in the same ballpark as those people in terms of their end products. But I do hope that I have some of the same basic motivations behind writing humor essays.

Amazon.com: What has been the response to the dioramas and videos?

SC: So far the response has been quite positive. Then again, are people likely to become enraged by videos of dioramas? I certainly nose-dived into the crazy pool by making them to begin with and then soaked myself to the bone by having them filmed. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with the dioramas themselves. Maybe auction them off for charity. Diorama rescue.

Catching Up with Rebecca Woolf in Seattle

After I had my son, I went in search of all these DIY, irreverent mommy blogs that I just knew were out there. All I found were tips and tricks, ways to pamper myself or get organized, or cool gadgets I had to buy. I quickly gave up, and now I realize that I missed at least one irreverent mommy, who, thankfully, has now turned her blogs into a book.

Rockabye: from Wild to Child is Rebecca Woolf's first book, and it's more than just a compilation of entries from her blogs. (She writes Girl's Gone Child and Babble.com's Straight from the Bottle.) It's a fully formed book of essays about her experience of motherhood.

Woolf had always planned to become a writer, and she had been freelancing since she was 16. She was living in L.A., collaborating with a guy on a script, then they started dating, then she was pregnant. She was 23. She decided to have the baby, marry the guy, and keep writing. After her son, Archer, was born, she not only worked two jobs, she kept blogging and freelancing, writing when he took his naps.

People kept giving her unwanted advice: you need to cover his face, you can't be out walking with him, he's too little, etc. One stranger even grabbed her son's hands and tried to teach him how to walk (!). Exploring these anecdotes allowed her to keep asking, Why? Why do I need to do this? Why do I need to do it this way?

On Saturday, Woolf had a reading a couple of blocks from my house, so I got to meet some of her very loyal fans, who braved the neighborhood on the day of a baseball game and a gigantic motocross event (read: $40 parking). Here are a few highlights from the reading and Q/A:

After she read the title of the first chapter, "Holy Shit! I'm Pregnant," she looked around the room to see if any kids were there. "I have to edit the expletives," she said. "I keep saying, Duck. Duck. Duck. Everyone gets very confused."

For Rockabye, Woolf said she took the blog entries, hundreds of pages worth, and put them in order to decide what she wanted to use. About 25 percent of the book came from the blog, then she went back and filled in the rest.

The book is not exactly what she pitched. Her original pitch to Seal Press was a DIY Parenting Guide with lists and funny anecdotes.

For her next project, she was going to pitch a book called Love in the Time of Jason Priestly, essays about growing up in the '90s. But when she started to write them, they were too much in her teenage voice. (One of her teen writing gigs was Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.) Instead, she is writing fiction and working on a pilot with her husband, Hal, based on Rockabye.

Someone in the audience asked, "How long did it take you to get to the new normal, as a mom?" Her answer: "I don't think you ever go back to what normal was. I know that I'm more myself now than I ever was. You figure out a way to be engaged with your life. But you have to do it for yourself. You can't fake it. What's the point of life if you just lie there and wait?"

Oh, and she's pregnant. She finds out whether her second baby is a boy or girl as soon as she gets home from the book tour. --Heidi

A New World for Lemmy Caution

I love Godard, so whenever I find a new interpretation, I'm pretty excited.

BoingBoing reported this morning that the next Scott Teplin exhibition at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York would be Alphaville, based on the 1965 Godard film about a futuristic city where the hero, American private eye Lemmy Caution, meanders until he learns that, basically, love has been weeded out of human experience.

Teplin's version doesn't look quite so dark. In his vivid pen and ink and watercolor drawings, Teplin has created his own Alphaville, preserving the humor and sense of confusion of the original with modern-day rooms that play with scale and unexpected juxtapositions.

Even if you won't be in New York for the exhibition, which runs May 1 through June 7, 2008, you can see previews from the gallery or Teplin's site of the Alphaville drawings, the alphabet rooms (like the "O" shown here), and photos of an artist book set “Sinker Down and Out,” which the gallery describes as "a Kafkaesque journey of a donut’s travels through the digestive path."

One of the Alphaville drawings will also be the cover of McSweeney's #27, due out in early summer.

And, if you're into seeing art in progress (I'm a sucker for it), you will probably enjoy Teplin's blog, Future Trash, which shows the evolution of the drawings as he's been working them out.

After discovering Teplin's awesomeness in his work and his blog, I was excited to also discover that he and I (and fellow Omnivoracious contributor, Paul) worked on the same book: Beasts! (2006) for Fantagraphics. His Loathly Worm can be found on p. 121. --Heidi

More from the Conjuring Chabon...plus a Script!

McSweeney's has posted bonus materials for Michael Chabon's new essay collection, Maps and Legends--Chabon's proposed script for Spiderman 2, which, apparently, has never been seen. According to McSweeney's, Chabon was the third of four screenwriters assigned to the project. He received shared "screen story" credit, but the actual script as written was not used.

I haven't had a chance to look at Maps and Legends yet, but Harper's (in "New Books" from the April issue) makes Chabon's ruminations on the adventures of reading and writing sound pretty exciting:

Readers ... will enjoy his wind-chiming on genre fiction from Poe to Nabokov; “tricksters” from Loki, Coyote, and Krishna to Borges, Calvino, and Pynchon; horror stories by M. R. James, Sherlock Holmes under Conan Doyle’s hood; Norse myths, Philip Pullman, John Milton and epic fantasy; Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Captain Marvel; Howard Chaykin and Citizen Kane; Ben Katchor and Julius Knipl; Cormac McCarthy, Will Eisner, and other golems. What is so startling is how much more interesting most of these indulgences are to read about in Chabon’s pages than they were on their own, in the pulpy original, as if the nostalgic novelist, like the magician-for-hire in his Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, can make paper roses consumed by fire bloom from a pile of ash.

Both seem worth looking into, though it looks like the script may not be out there for long. --Heidi

April is the Baby-est Month

I've been reading poetry to Silas since he was born (since before he was born, actually--yes, I'm one of those). I have to admit, it was based more on a selfish need to get in my poetry reading than on some idea that he would grow up loving poetry or out of an obligation to help him develop language or musical skills, though those are definitely nice side benefits.

This Saturday, April 12, HBO Family will air the next installment in their Emmy-winning Classical Baby series: Classical Baby (I'm Grown Up Now): The Poetry Show. Even though it keeps the Classical Baby title, the show is geared more for kids ages 4 to 9, and features the baby from the first three (for music, art, and dance, produced in 2005). Now he's a little boy and into poetry.

The idea: if we introduce kids to poetry at an early age, they have a positive association and become lifelong readers of poetry. (This is not just rhetoric. The Poetry Foundation found this generally to be true based on their 2006 study of adult poetry readers--the majority of them had poetry, especially nursery rhymes, read to them as children.)

HBO collaborated with the Poetry Foundation on this special, which features 12 animated short poems from a range of poets (all dead--this is "classical" after all), and readers ranging from famous actors (who doesn't want to hear the beyond-awesome Jeffrey Wright reading Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII?) to kids (Finn, age 7, reads "The Red Wheelbarrow") to the poets themselves, which is actually my favorite. Let's face it: no one reads Gertrude Stein like Gertrude Stein.

If you're thinking, what's an animated short poem, you can watch ladybug Stein's "A Very Valentine," as well as Lorca's "Mariposa" and Langston Hughes' "April Rain Song" on the Poetry Foundation's website.

Between the poems, children comment on "the meaning and mystery of poetry." I haven't seen this interspersed commentary, but, come on, it sounds pretty cute.

HBO has the full schedule posted here. And, if you miss the show, the DVD will be available for purchase next week. Or you can just check out the list of poems, find them (most are online), and read them aloud to your kids. You do a mean Robert Frost, right?

Meantime, Silas and I will be starting That Little Something as soon as I finish this post. --Heidi

Trust no one over 14: The Children's Choice Book Awards

I know. I know. Another set of book awards. But this one is actually different, I promise. This time the kids get to decide who wins.

Finalists have been posted for the first-ever Children's Choice Book Awards (sponsored by the Children's Book Council). Finalists in the following categories were determined through the CBC's Children's Choices program, which means that they were chosen by kids from all over the country:

Favorite Book, Grades K to 2

Dino Dinners by Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom
Five Little Monkeys Go Shopping by Eileen Christelow
Frankie Stein written by Lola M. Schaefer, illustrated by Kevan Atteberry
Three Little Fish and the Big Bad Shark written by Ken Geist, illustrated by Julia Gorton
Tucker's Spooky Halloween by Leslie McGuirk

Favorite Book, Grades 3 to 4

Babymouse #6: Camp Babymouse by Jennifer L. Holm and Matt Holm
Big Cats: Hunters of the Night by Elaine Landau
Magic Treehouse #38: Monday With a Mad Genius written by Mary Pope Osborne, illustrated by Sal Murdocca
The Richest Poor Kid (Another Sommer Time Story) written by Carl Sommer, illustrated by Jorge Martinez
Wolves  by Duncan Searl (Smart Animals series)

Favorite Book, Grades 5 to 6

Beowulf: Monster Slayer written by Paul D. Storrie, illustrated by Ron Randall
Encyclopedia Horrifica:The Terrifying TRUTH! About Vampires, Ghosts, Monsters, and More by Joshua Gee
Ghosts by Stephen Krensky (Monster Chronicles series)
The Short and Incredibly Happy Life of Riley by Amy Lissiat and Colin Thompson
When the Shadbush Blooms written by Carla Messinger with Susan Katz, illustrated by David Kanietakeron Fadden

Kids can also vote on finalists in these categories, which were essentially the top-selling books of 2007:

Author of the Year

Anthony Horowitz for Snakehead (Alex Rider Adventure Series) (ages 9 to 12)
Erin Hunter for The Sight (Warrior: Power of Three, Book 1) (ages 9 to 12)
Jeff Kinney for Diary of Wimpy Kid (ages 9 to 12)
Rick Riordan for The Titan's Curse (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Book Three, grades 6 to 9)
J.K. Rowling for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (YA)

Illustrator of the Year 

Jan Brett for The Three Snow Bears (ages 4 to 8)
Ian Falconer for Olivia Helps with Christmas (ages 4 to 8)
Robin Preiss Glasser for Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy (ages 4 to 8)
Brian Selznick for The Invention of Hugo Cabret (ages 9 to 12)
Mo Willems for Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity (ages 4 to 8)

Children have until May 4 to cast their votes at bookstores, school libraries, or online. (Actually, anyone can vote on the website, but of course we know that you'll all stick to the honor system.) Winners will be announced during Children's Book Week, which runs May 12-18.--Heidi

A Real-life Kids' Publishing House, and its Really Close Imitation

"My mom says you write kids books."

"I don't write kids books. I edit kids books. It's a very different job. Hard to explain."

"She said you wrote Brambles McGee."

"I didn't write Brambles McGee. I edited Brambles McGee."

"How come you made Brambles die?"

"I didn't make him die, I made him die quicker. And with a fancier font."

So began last week's pilot of The Return of Jezebel James, the latest show by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino (the pop-culture quipping creators of Gilmore Girls). The new sitcom, which will run its next episode tonight on Fox, features a children's book editor, Sarah (Parker Posey), who asks her sister (Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose) to have her baby.

It's no mistake that Sarah's office looks like the real-life Harper Collins Children's Division. PW had a nice article today about how the Palladinos worked with HarperCollins to make the show as true to life as possible, down to the classic book quotes painted on the conference room windows. Their attention to detail is no surprise to Gilmore fans.

(True confession from one of those fans: Silas is napping while I write this, and G.G. is playing in the background--our afternoon nap routine since I received the complete series over the holidays. The credits just came on and I'm waiting for his head to pop up.)

Now, Fox and Harper Collins are commemorating the TV show with a sweepstakes. If you want to fly to New York City for three nights and get a tour of Harper Collins Children's Division--home of Charlotte's Web, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and a few other children's titles you may have heard of--you just need to go to the Jezebel James website and register by March 28.

In the final scene of the pilot (which you can watch online, if you missed it), Sarah looks out at her sister through the conference room window. The quote painted in cursive above her head sets the tone for shows to come: Let the wild rumpus start!--Heidi

New This Week: Foxie is Back in Print

This week (today, actually) The New York Review Children's Collection is releasing the latest installment of the works of Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire: Foxie, a stunning reprint of their 1949 picture-book adaptation of Chekhov's story, Kashtanka, about a "singing" dog who loses her master.

The d'Aulaires are best known for the way their children's books were made, particularly in the early years of their nearly 50-year career. At the time of the original Foxie, they were sketching their illustrations onto slabs of Bavarian limestone (weighing up to 200lbs a piece!), and one four-color illustration would require four slabs of limestone. This gave their books a hand-drawn vibrancy that the re-issue has definitely captured.

Other bonuses that set this book apart are the endpapers, with a storyboard extra of Foxie and her bone (the coveted item that sparks her master's teasing, and leads to her getting lost), as well as two musical notes on the first page, so we know how it sounds when Foxie's master calls her name.

Foxie is the sixth of the d'Aulaire's books that the press has re-issued since 2005. It follows their acclaimed collection of Norse myths, D'Aulaires' Book of Animals, D'Aulaires' Book of Trolls, The Two Cars, and The Terrible Troll-Bird. --Heidi

Golden Kite Award Winners

The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators recently announced the winners of their Golden Kite Awards, which honor the most outstanding children’s books published during the previous year. The SCBWI distinguishes the Golden Kites from the slew of book lists and prizes as "the only award presented to children's book authors and artists by their peers."

2007 winners include:

Fiction: Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate (ages 9-12)
"American culture, the Minnesota climate, and personal identity are examined in this moving first-person novel written in free verse."--School Library Journal

Nonfiction: Muckrakers by Ann Bausum (ages 9-12)
A story of investigative journalism in America.

Picture Book Text: Pierre in Love by Sara Pennypacker, illustrated by Petra Mathers (kindergarten-grade 2)
Pierre, a mouse who sails a fishing boat, falls in love with Catherine, a ballet-teaching rabbit.

Picture Book Illustration: Little Night illustrated and written by Yuyi Morales (preschool-kindergarten)

"Morales has created a sumptuous feast of metaphors in her text: a bathtub filled with falling stars, a dress crocheted from clouds." --Booklist

Honor recipients:

Fiction: Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree by Lauren Tarshis (ages 9-12)

Nonfiction: 1607: A New Look at Jamestown by Karen Lange (grades 3-6)

Picture Book Text: The End by David LaRochelle, illustrated by Richard Egielski (preschool-grade 3)

Picture Book Illustration: Who Put the B in Ballyhoo? illustrated and written by Carlyn Beccia (kindergarten-grade 4)

The awards panel members aren't the only ones who think these are really great books: they've also received consistent five-star ratings from Amazon customers. --Heidi

Do Adult YA Readers Need to Grow Up?

Roger Sutton, editor-in-chief of The Horn Book, sparked an interesting discussion on his blog today with some casually derisive remarks about grown-ups who prefer to read children's books and YA novels:

As annoying as adults who dismiss children's books as unworthy of attention can be, I also feel my jaw clench when a fellow adult tells me that he or she prefers children's books to adult books because they have better writing or values or stories. This is just sentimental ignorance. ... Adults whose taste in recreational reading ends with the YA novel need to grow up.

Some fans of his Read Roger blog (with its "rants and raves" on children's books) were not too happy when he turned his barbs on them. Many of the commenters gave surprisingly specific reasons for liking YA better, like this one:

Ouch! I feel indicted. I do prefer to read children's literature, mainly due to narrative structure. I like fairly linear plots and neatly resolved endings, which puts me off a lot of adult literary fiction (with the exception of some South American authors). So I read a lot of Dickens and children's lit.

Commenters identified Scott Westerfeld and Stephenie Meyer among the YA authors who write the kind of stories they like to read, grown-up or not. --Heidi

Nikki McClure and The Midnight Folk

When I got Nikki McClure's The First 1000 Days: A Baby Journal and Awake to Nap as pre-baby gifts, I knew these were not your average baby books. What I didn't know from looking at her serene paper-cut illustrations--of babies, moms and dads, crows, boats, and vegetable gardens--is that Nikki McClure is a rock star.

A Different Stripe, the blog for NYRB Classics, clued me into this when they posted an appreciation of McClure with a preview of a cover she illustrated for The Midnight Folk, an upcoming edition in their children's classics line. This 1927 story by Brit poet John Masefield will be coming out in September as a follow-up to last October's The Box of Delights (Masefield's other Kay Harker book, written in 1935). 

McClure is definitely emerging as a rock-star illustrator. Her books and calendars are on display everywhere from quirky children's boutiques to chain bookstores to galleries. She cuts her illustrations by hand from a single sheet of black paper, a process she has used to propel herself from starving artist to the author-illustrator of an annual calendar series, various children's books, and, most recently, a collection of images from her calendars and other works, Collect Raindrops: The Seasons Gathered.

And she's a real rock star. McClure has been part of the Olympia rock scene as a collaborating visual artist since the early '90s and has designed posters and CD covers like this one for years. (Her website has a discography, as well as a portfolio of her current work.)

The downside to having a baby journal illustrated by Nikki McClure? Fear of spoiling the paper-cut images with ugly handwritten notes. Our pages all look something like this:

I'd better dive in soon with a black Sharpie so Silas doesn't get a baby journal on his 21st birthday full of stickie notes. --Heidi

A Six-Word Memoir Family

Heidi: Bookish farm girl citifies, finds love.

Silas: Almost a year, not much sleep.

And, after a grueling session of rejections, almost culminating in "Still deconstructing after all these years"...

Paul: You can do it, Charlie Brown.

More Margaret Wise Brown... And More Moon

What's the deal with Goodnight, Moon? That's what I thought every time I saw it on a toddler's shelf or at a baby shower, and when Seattle Children's Theater made it into a play (now playing in Dallas!). Even when I first started reading it as part of my son's night-time ritual, I didn't really get it: Goodnight nobody? Huh? And what's that mush doing in his bedroom?

Like so many great things, the brilliance of Goodnight Moon reveals itself only with repetition. Silas caught onto it before I did; it's the only book he can sit through without squirming. I've even found myself reciting the rhymes in a cheap effort to make him laugh when he's cranky.

I recently found this fun, thoughtful analysis of the book by Elizabeth Kolbert in the December 6, 2006 New Yorker. Kolbert includes some background on its author, Margaret Wise Brown (who admitted to Life magazine, "I don't really like children..."), and says of the book:

Goodnight Moon is more restrained, more exacting, and more lyrical than anything written for children today. In its own quiet way, it is also more brutal.... Time moves forward, and the little bunny doesn’t stand a chance.

Now that the book is a family favorite, we were excited to see that a new Margaret Wise Brown story, The Moon Shines Down, is about the see the light of day.

Thomas Nelson acquired Brown's manuscript, which was found among a "sheaf of yellow pages held together by paper clips" in her sister's attic, according to Publishers Weekly. The picture book, with Clement Hurd-style illustrations by Linda Bleck, will be available in November of this year.

This time the moon story is based on an old prayer/nursery rhyme: I see the moon, and the moon sees me... --Heidi

 

 

100 Books Every Child Should Read, UK-style

In mid-January, Telegraph.co.uk published a list of the "100 books every child should read." Like many must-read lists, it includes expected stalwarts such as Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte's Web, The Chronicles of Narnia, and To Kill a Mockingbird. But this Brit list focuses on stories that are exciting to read (vs. books that teach you things you ought to know) and it actually has some titles I haven't seen on American recommended book lists.

I'm adding a sampling here, but I recommend clicking through to the actual list for the thoughtful introduction by author Michael Morpurgo about kids and stories, as well as fun thumbnail reviews like "A stirring tale," "No reader remains untouched," and my favorite: "Runcible." 

Early and Middle Years

The Tiger Who Came To Tea, Judith Kerr
Quoting their blurb:
"[The BBC's] Newsnight's Emily Maitlis has a theory that this book is an allegory about sex. Most children understand it as the story of a tiger that eats its hosts out of house and home. Debate continues."
If you're unfamiliar with this book, you can enjoy a lovely reading here.

Roald Dahl has five books on the list: The Twits, Danny, the Champion of the World, George's Marvelous Medicine, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The BFG. (Notable exclusion: American favorite James and the Giant Peach.)

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, T.S. Eliot
I was surprised to find poetry on a general reading list. Maybe that's not so surprising in Britain, I don't know. I started reading these poems to my son based on a tip from my ex-hippie uncle who read them to his kids--and I love reading them aloud--but I have been afraid he might grow up unknowingly quoting lyrics from Cats. (Although, let's face it, quoting T.S. Eliot could be equally dorky.)

Comet in Moominland, Tove Jansson
A new discovery in our family, though very popular in Europe ("the Mickey Mouse of Finland.")

Early Teens

Frenchman's Creek, Daphne Du Maurier
"A swashbuckling love affair," chosen over her potentially more familiar titles, Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel.

Junk, Melvin Burgess
A "clear-eyed story of heroin addiction." This winner of the Guardian Fiction Award and the American Library Association's Carnegie Medal appears on a number of UK teen book review websites, though little seems to have been written about it in the U.S. (A more extensive review is available at Amazon.co.uk.)

The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes
More poetry(!), recommended for the "higgledy-piggledy mix of glories within."

The American Library Association's website and Book Crush, by Nancy Pearl, contain similar lists focused for young American readers in case you want to compare. --Heidi

The Three Potentially Offensive Pigs

I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow down your shoddily constructed...

Shoo-fly publishing's The Three Little Cowboy Builders is circulating the blogosphere as the latest casualty of eager political correctness. The digital pop-up book based on the classic story, The Three Little Pigs, was not shortlisted for the first annual (British government-backed) BETT Awards because, according to the panel of educator-judges, "the use of pigs raises cultural issues."

Today's BBC News report elaborated on the panel's judgment. Apparently, the use of pigs in the story was considered potentially offensive to Muslims. And Asians. And, well, construction workers:

The judges criticised the stereotyping in the story of the unfortunate pigs: "Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?"

(Examples of judges' comments must have been released by someone associated with the book, because they are not reflected at all in this vague public statement, which essentially says that the book just wasn't good enough.)

Looking for some kind of response from any of the potentially offended communities, I found this Daily Mail article from March 2007, about a church school that renamed their Three Pigs musical "The Three Little Puppies." It includes a statement from Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain who said, "The vast majority of Muslims have no problem whatsoever with the Three Little Pigs. There's an issue about the eating of pork, which is forbidden, but there is no prohibition about reading stories about pigs."

No comment so far from the builders. Bob?

For the oft-maligned wolf's perspective, you can also check out children's laureate Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! --Heidi

Can Michael Pollan Fix the American Diet, One Kid at a Time?

Feeding our kids should be simple, right? We've been feeding ourselves for years. How hard can it be to whip up some oatmeal and crush a banana? But everywhere you turn, there's an edict on what they can eat and when (yogurt and cheese at nine months, but no milk until one year--huh?), or how they should drink water (regular cup vs. sippie-cup), or how we need to make sure meal time is enjoyable so the kids don't grow up with food issues.

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto speaks to one of my biggest anxieties as a new parent--feeding my child.

Talk about food issues, Pollan highlights the pitfalls (or pratfalls) of our culture's obsession with healthy eating. Expanding on his indictment of "nutritionism" from the January 28, 2007 New York Times Magazine, he presents tidbits of recent studies and statistics that range from the absurd (like how lobbyists manage to keep the acceptable level of free sugars in the U.S. diet at 25 percent of daily calories, despite the World Health Organization's recommended limit of 10 percent) to the downright embarrassing, like this statement from a 2001 study: "It has now been recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences." Oops.

Such factoids are entertaining (or disturbing, depending on what you've been eating), but what really comes in handy is Pollan's list of easy-to-remember guidelines like, "Avoid food products that make healthy claims" and "Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." It's a great philosophical companion to helpful yet overwhelmingly detailed parenting staples like Super Baby Food.

Will In Defense of Food do for the local food movement what An Inconvenient Truth did for environmentalism? Maybe. I don't know. I do know that this book that never once mentions parenting or children is one of the best parenting guides I've found so far on the subject of food.

(For a quick NYT Book Review excerpt, see Old Media Monday, January 8.)--Heidi

What Silas is Reading: Baby Loves Books

Until recently, our son Silas has been fairly disinterested in books. I thought, hmmm, maybe he won't be into books. Weird, but possible.

Everything has changed. In the last couple of weeks, seven-and-a-half-month-old Silas has adopted his own book-loving tendencies. He prefers board books. He likes to hold them, turn the pages (or at least grab at them in a seemingly purposeful matter), and chew on them. He doesn't mind hearing stories from other books, but he prefers quick sentences, lively words, and repetition.

This is an exciting development for our family. We have reading time in the morning and just before bed, and Silas sits on my lap while we read (just like the parenting books say you're supposed to).

One small downside is that I can't read my books to him anymore. We started The Brothers Karamazov this summer, and he stuck with me through long excerpts of Parts I and II. In Part III, though, he started this "mom, I'm bored" humming, which escalated the longer I read until I finally gave up.

Meantime, here are the books he's into right now:

Count the Birdies (Matthew Porter): Silas loves counting the birds. And I'm excited that we found this imaginative book to introduce him to counting (and Porter's paintings, a bonus for parents).

Urban Babies Wear Black (Michelle Sinclair Coleman, illustrations by Nathalie Dion): My theories about why Silas likes this snappy book include the stark contrast of white text on black pages, the repetition ("Urban babies wear black. Urban babies do yoga. ..."), and the size--it's easy for him to hold and put in his mouth.

Black on White (Tana Hoban): A gift from Grandma. He loves the contrast. He loves the familiar objects. And it's wide and thin so it makes the best drum.

Fairy Tales (E.E. Cummings): We have a fun 1974 edition that's on the verge of falling apart, so he does not chew on this one. Silas' favorite story is "The Old Man Who Said 'Why'," probably because of the silly voice Mama uses when she says "Why" over and over again.

On the Banks of Plum Creek (Laura Ingalls Wilder): Ok. I am using this as an excuse to re-read my favorite book series from childhood, one chapter at a time. He seems to like it. I hear that boys don't like this series much, so I hope he doesn't resent me for it when he gets older. But if he is going to resent me for something, it might as well be a book. --Heidi

Another Short Note on Elizabeth Hardwick

I found my copy of Sleepless Nights today and realized that I read it at a time when I was color coding my annotations. It's pretty funny. My copy is littered with purple and green: purple whenever there is a significant shift in time, green whenever she talks about a man.

This un-narrative in pieces with its author as the main character (before either of these things were commonplace), was easy for me to relate to even more than 20 years after it was written. It gives a picture of a writer, a woman, using the tools of her craft--character development, scenic observation, a unique lyrical style--to sort out the arc of her life and her relationships. In the end Hardwick tries, in a way, to sum up what she has learned by this pursuit, which is not much:
"The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs."

Susan Sontag called it a "novel of mental weather" and I think that's apt, although I'm still not sure it's a novel. Whatever it is, I like it, and I'm excited to read it again. Hardwick is probably better known for her essays and criticism, but I think this is her best and most enduring work.
--Heidi

Comics: Not Just for Grown-ups Anymore

Françoise Mouly, art director for the New Yorker, and her husband Art Spiegelman have parlayed their love of comics into a mission to help kids learn how to read. Following the success of the RAW anthologies for grown-ups, then the Little Lit comics for young adults, Mouly and Spiegelman have launched Toon Books, a line of full-color, original comics for children ages 4+, i.e., kids who are just learning to read.

Mouly, who says her family learned their love of reading from comics, got grade-school cred for the books by getting feedback from librarians, teachers, and kids in Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and Pennsylvania. She also met with the Maryland State Superintendent of Schools, who is planning to use the books in K-3 classrooms as part of the Maryland Comic Book Initiative.

In a recent Publishers Weekly article, Mouly talked about her ambitions for Toon Books:

“Comics are the gateway to literacy for young kids,” said Mouly, who expects Toon Books to transform books for early readers the same way RAW influenced indie comics. “RAW showed that comics can be taken seriously,” she said. Little Lit... “was an intermediate step using the RAW model. Now there are more comics for kids 10–12 years old but not for very young kids.”

Toon Books will release three titles in spring 2008: Benny and Penny by Geoffrey Hayes (April), Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons by Agnes Rosenstiehl (May), and Otto's Orange Day by Frank Cammuso and Jay Lynch (June). And, exciting news for Spiegelman fans whose little ones aren't quite ready for Maus--in the fall he will release his own Toon Book, Jack and the Box. --Heidi

The Story Behind the "Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2007"

In case you missed it, the New York Times published its annual list of the Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2007 in last weekend's Book Review, featuring sample art work from each book in its centerfold—and in a cool online slide show.

Like most year-end lists, it has many people asking why this book and not that book. The School Library Journal just posted an interview with Ellen Loughran, a panel judge, who provides perspective on the judges' decision-making. She admits that the list is probably more for parents and industry professionals than for kids (which is why librarians often disagree with the selections):

I have always felt that this particular list is like the Society of Children’s Book Illustrators’ list—a lot of those picture books do not have child appeal, but they do have wonderful art and wonderful illustrations. And what that says to me is, “Look for this person’s next book”—artists feel the art in this book is exceptionally strong.

Here's the list (with writer/illustrators) so you can judge for yourself if they got it right:

• Every Friday (Dan Yaccarino)
• Jabberwocky (Christopher Myers)
• The Arrival (Shaun Tan)
• First the Egg (Laura Vaccaro Seeger)
• Not a Box (Antoinette Portis; image shown above)
• 600 Black Spots (David A. Carter)
• The Frog Who Wanted to See the Sea (Guy Billout)
• The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (Peter Sis)
• Old Penn Station (William Low)
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Brian Selznick)

--Heidi

A Brief Kids' History of Time

The NBC Today show's Al Roker announced last Friday that Stephen Hawking's new book, George's Secret Key to the Universe, will be the next selection in Al's Book Club for Kids, Roker's Oprah-style discussion group for young readers

George's Secret Key, co-authored by the renowned physicist and his daughter Lucy, is the first in a trilogy that the father-daughter team are writing together to present the cosmology of Hawking's A Brief History of Time for children ages nine to 12. They are calling the books "science fact," interspersing adventure stories with mini science lectures.

If you're thinking this sounds too much like a dry science text thinly disguised as a children's book, you should check out this Los Angeles Times review, which compares the adventure to the Captain Underpants series, calling it a "manifesto to the irrepressibility of the scientific mind."

The Today website has an excerpt from the book, a Q&A with the Hawkings, and--the coolest part--a form for nine-year-olds to email Stephen Hawking with questions like: "What is the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect and can it be used to calculate the Hubble Constant?"

(This question actually came from NASA's Ask an Astrophysicist, an extensive Q&A source for young physicists-in-training. Or for their parents who haven't taken a science class since the 10th grade and want to brush up on atoms and quarks before their family reads the book.)--Heidi

"Daring" and "Dangerous"? Hardly, Says the New York Times

The New York Times yesterday included an editorial titled "Childhood for Dummies" responding to last week's release of The Daring Book for Girls and its predecessor, the UK (and later U.S.) phenomenon, The Dangerous Book for Boys.

The editorial points to the un-daring, un-dangerousness of both books--with suggestions for girls like "wear high heels" and "try sushi or another exotic food" and with equally hazardous activities for boys, like making a paper hat and wrapping a package in brown paper and string. The Times editors attribute the appeal of the books for parents not to nostalgic design, or even wry humor, but rather to a deeper cultural need to offer a simple how-to manual to a generation of kids who have "superior thumb-joystick coordination" but who can't tie their shoes:

These books are so clearly not about daredeviltry. They are about ineptitude. They seem to perfectly capture a fear, floating in the culture, that a generation of preoccupied parents has been raising a generation of children full of sophisticated knowledge that is useless when the power goes out or the batteries die. ...

How strange, yet telling, that parents would see a pair of $25.95 how-to manuals as the keys to a richer childhood. … We do hope the trend dies out before the next book:

“Lying on your back in your crib, point your knees outward and draw your heels toward your stomach. Using both hands, grasp your left ankle, if you are right-handed (or right ankle, if left-handed), and slowly draw your toes into your mouth. Chew with caution!”

--Heidi

About a (Young Adult) Boy

Does labeling a novel YA change the way someone writes--or reads--it? Nick Hornby's recent foray into YA fiction, Slam, was released by Penguin U.S. last Tuesday. The novel, which has received mostly positive--though limited--acclaim so far in the U.S., is narrated by Sam, a teenager who finds out that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant.

Hornby briefly talks about his inspiration for writing a YA novel in this Seattle Times interview. He says that writing the novel "didn't feel different" from writing his adult novels, and he was inspired by the teenagers who were coming to his readings (who apparently already liked his non-YA novels).

Author Steve Almond reviewed the book in last Sunday's L.A. Times and he believes Hornby adjusted his style significantly for the YA format. While he praised Hornby's writing in general, he criticized him for dumbing down his narrator, avoiding the topic of abortion, and generally talking down to his readers:

That Slam is supposed to be a young-adult novel only makes matters worse. It suggests that Hornby sees teens, and teen readers, as incapable of adding up those narrative twos, let alone grappling with complex feelings and issues. That's not just condescending, it's flat-out wrong.

I wonder if Almond's critique is tougher, and other reviews more forgiving, because of the YA label--as though adult readers of YA expect more or less from a book because it is YA. In fact, adult readers have compared Slam, favorably and unfavorably, to The Catcher in the Rye, a compliment to any writer, though this comparison probably would not have been made had it not been YA. It'll be interesting to see what the intended audience--actual young-adult readers, not reviewers and other YA authors--think of Sam as a narrator. --Heidi

Best of 2007: Mother's Little Literary Helper

It's hard to imagine a book written by Lydia Davis not being one of my favorite books of any year. As a language geek, I've always been drawn to the technical aspects of short forms--poems under 12 lines, one-page essays, aphorisms, and the like--and Davis is famous for her mastery of short fiction, encapsulating life's little (and big) situations in stories as short as one page, or even one sentence.

Hi, I'm Heidi (a.k.a. Silas' mama), and I write for the Family Room with Paul (a.k.a. Daddy). Davis' latest story collection, Varieties of Disturbance, came out at the perfect time for me--less than a month after Silas was born--when reading short prose shifted from a pastime to a necessity.

This collection traveled with me many times around the house, even before it was a National Book Award nominee. The shortest pieces were convenient for a new mom with limited time (letting me focus my analytical skills on something other than my son's poop). But the real reason this is my favorite book of 2007 is the way it illuminates all the craziness inside the ordinary, without talking on and on about how crazy life is, or leaning on quirky characters or hyperbolic dialogue. Davis accesses emotion simply by being deliberate about language--and, believe me, that's pretty appealing when your emotions are all over the place.

(A close second favorite for 2007 would be Sorry, Tree by Eileen Myles. I first heard these poems while helping out on the Poetry Bus tour last fall. Myles reads in a casual, matter-of-fact way that quietly slaps you in the face and kisses you at the same time. I couldn't wait to get to the book, which was also perfect for me this year: it's all about big changes.) -- Heidi