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What not to miss at the Baltimore Book Festival

Fast and furious edition: (So fast, so furious, I am just copying the event descriptions off the festival website.) (All events take place in the Children's Bookstore Tent unless otherwise noted.)

 

 

DON'T MISS Tiger Beat, 5:30 PM on Friday Sept 27!

"YA rock sensation Tiger Beat features Libba Bray's charged lyrics, Dan Ehrenhaft's arena-ready power chords, Natalie Standiford's face-melting bass riffs, and barnabas miller's searing drumming.  They will open an evening celebration of YA literature."

Nat Standiford! Local hero! Her dad was my pediatrician! Also, obviously, LIBBA BRAY OMG.

KEEP READING THERE'S MORE

When you get to the bottom you go back to the top of the slide - some recent (mostly YA) reads

...which is my way of saying oh my life - and my reading - has been HELTER-SKELTER for the past couple of months. Here's why - allow me to solicit your interest in some excellent upcoming events and ongoing projects:

1). I'm on YALSA's Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults booklist committee (nominate your favorites today!)

 

2). I'm a facilitator at Enoch Pratt Free Library's biannual teen reading fest Books for the Beast (join us!). It's an all-day event (free lunch!) October 19th with super speakers and small group discussions. This year, we will be joined by RAINA TELGEMEIER! SHARON FLAKE! and ROBIN WASSERMAN!!

I want to read The Waking Dark so badly, but I have so much required reading right now, it's silly.  You however should read that book, and then come to Books for the Beast and tell Robin Wasserman what you thought of it! It's supposed to be scaaaary!

 

3). I'm moderating the Sassy Girls panel at the Baltimore Book Festival September 29 (and this one you better get to, if you are my friend at all). My sassy authors (I wonder if any of them are old enough to remember Sassy? Did you know that some marvelous hipster angel is scanning all of her old Sassys and putting them online? Damn, I still dress like that half the time) anyway my sassy authors are:

• Elisabeth Dahl (Genie Wishes)
• Erica Perl (When Life Gives You O.J. and many others)
• Shawn Stout (the Not So Ordinary Girl and Penelope Crumb books)
• Elissa Brent Weissberg (The Short Seller)
• Tracey West (about a million adaptation and series novels, also co-author of the very sweet Cupcake Diaries books)

 

4). Just announced! I'm a first-round judge for the Picture Books category of the Cybils Awards! Bring it on picture books YEAAAAHHH! Nominations are open to the public, and the online form will be up October 1!

 

 

5). I'm covering the Américas Award, given this year to Sonia Manzano for The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano, for School Library Journal's online newsletter. Sonia Manzano is also Maria from Sesame Street and that fact just fills me with love every time I remember it.

Also recognized this year by CLASP (the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs) are Martin de Porres: The Rose in the Desert by Gary D. Schmidt, the hyper-award-winning Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Drummer Boy of John John, and In Darkness, which has been on my to-read list ever since I saw that weird cover. Any novel that features Toussaint L'Ouverture as a guest character vaults right up my list. Blame Madison Smartt Bell.

 

All this extracurricular activity has led to periods of binge reading during the last few months: graphic novels, funny realistic YA fiction, heartbreaking YA fiction, and rock'em sock'em middle grade/YA speculative fiction. Plus picture books, I'm always reading the picture books, but those I manage to run down in gang posts on Pink Me fairly regularly.

So now I'm going to try to binge-review. GO:

I'm a highway star - Two new YA books that hit the open road

 

Nobody gonna take my car
I'm gonna race it to the ground
Oooh it's a killing machine
It's got everything
Like a driving power big fat tyres
And everything

I love it I need it
I bleed it yeah it's a wild hurricane
Alright hold tight
I'm a highway star!

 

God I love Deep Purple. Am I the only one anymore? To me, Deep Purple is the seminal sound of teenhood. It's music you listen to in stale basement rec rooms - mindless and churning, full of movement but not getting anywhere. The long-haired, cigarette-smoking boys who hung in a greasy cluster outside the bus port door at my junior high school LIVED and DIED by Ritchie Blackmore. Sigh. Those boys smelled so bad.