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What do we think about the old guys? Some Writer and The Best Man - reviews

Guess what I'm doing? I'm kind of ridiculously excited - I'm participating in my first Mock Newbery! It's a bunch of grownups reading a whole bunch of kids' books that seem to be getting award buzz and then we're going to get together and eat snacks and argue about them! The books. Although maybe also the snacks.

If you live in Baltimore and this sounds like fun, give me a jingle. We're well underway, but we haven't had our first meeting yet, and we might be able to squeeze you in ;)

Some of the books on our list are Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk, Ghost by Jason Reynolds, and The Inquisitor's Tale by Adam Gidwitz. This week, I mightily enjoyed reading Jenni Holm's Full of Beans. Historical fiction without the weight, that's Jenni's M.O. She makes it look easy.

I also read The Best Man, by living national treasure Richard Peck, and Some Writer!, the biography of E.B. White by Melissa Sweet, possibly the best match of biographer and subject I can imagine. And god help me, I have thoughts.

 

 

Some Writer! The Story of E. B. White by Melissa Sweet

My goodness did I lap up this book! Every page, every scrap was balm and wisdom and joy - the excerpts from White's correspondence, the photos of him in canoes and on porches, the sketches and scraps from Melissa Sweet's magic art studio of treasures. Even the page numbers, some of which are typed on old red-bordered gummed labels, make one want to pull out the art supplies and a journal and go sit on a stump somewhere.

But - and jeez I hate typing this - is it for kids? Is there enough 'this is where Stuart Little came from' to sustain a young person's interest, or will the (and I mean really stellar) evocation of White's appreciation of simplicity and the outdoors seem repetitive or obvious to people who have not yet had to face the kind of economic and emotional realities that might keep them locked indoors 40 hours a week?

And if not, would that make it less 'good' of a book? I guess that's yes and no. You know what, wait a minute, that's a no. The book is 100% a great book. Whoever it's written for, it stands as a finely honed, perfect encapsulation of an extraordinary talent. Well, two of them. Melissa Sweet comes off almost as well as E.B. White.

Do I buy it for a school library? I do, and I expect it will be used at the very least for author studies. Do I buy it for the public library? Of course I do. Public libraries need to have all the good stuff. Do I buy it for my niece or nephew? I have at least 18 nieces, nephews, niece/nephewlike cousins, and grandnieces and -nephews. I would buy it for like... 4 of them. Hold on. *counts on fingers like a big girl. Five.

But for sure I would buy it for myself:

"There was a lake, and at the water's edge a granite rock upholstered in lichen., This was his pew, and the sermon went on forever." -- E.B. White, "A Boy I Knew," Readers Digest 1940

 

The Best Man by Richard Peck

Agghhh!! I'm drowning in a morass of ambivalence!

This book is terrific. The writing, the insight, the characters - all the things that are here are terrific. It's like... like the objects in the curio cabinet in my mother's dining room. Each item: each miniature domino set, porcelain sea urchin, loose semiprecious stone, expedition medal and antique fountain pen is a treasure, and each for different reasons. In this book, the parents who work from home, one as a marriage counselor, the other restoring antique automobiles - are treasures. Grandpa the architect, in his seersucker suit and straw hat - a treasure. Beloved Uncle Paul, in his bespoke sportcoat and wingtips, who will turn out to be both wise and gay, is a treasure. Archer's house is a treasure. Large, square, situated in a "leafy suburb" of Chicago - I can picture it, I just can't afford it.

Which is not entirely an insignificant point.

Because, like my mom's beautifully lit collection, this book is just about the whitest thing I've come across in a long time. There are things that are *not* here, amid its sparkling array of treasures. There don't seem to be any black people, for one thing. Nor anyone with a Hispanic or Asian surname. And, regardless of the skillful references to Angry Birds and YouTube and Uncle Paul's wedding - it is missing a true feeling of contemporaneity.

Now of course my mom's cabinet doesn't have to represent every facet of the human experience. It would be weird, for example, for her to include a set of manumission papers - to our knowledge, nobody in our family was ever enslaved. And the expedition medal is an object to be proud of - not everybody does the dangerous thing for which it was awarded. But at the time it was given, it was almost exclusively white men who had the opportunity to earn it.

And while Mom may add a new item to that cabinet every few years, it is by its nature disconnected from the present time. That collection (and I mean this as a compliment rather than the reverse) reflects her point of view, and her point of view is that of a white woman born in a leafy suburb sometime before the middle of the last century. God, she's going to kill me for writing this.

In the case of The Best Man, I feel a similar point of view applies. And it's not - it's a valid point of view, and for sure there are kids in Evanston going to one-class-per-grade seemingly all-white elementary schools that are close enough to home that they can walk. But although this may be an increasingly rare point of view, it's not one that is lacking in representation.

I also take issue with the hunky student teacher who shakes up Archer's fifth grade year. All of a sudden, there are field trips! Something new every day! Mr. McLeod takes over for the regular teacher, Mrs. Stanley, when she gets tripped up by improper fractions. Really? Guy teacher shows the ladies How It's Done? Hrrumph.

But my gosh, it just KILLS me to quibble with this book. Uncle Paul's orientation, love story, and wedding are treated so wonderfully - that is, as if being gay were not a big thing, which it isn't. In many families. In many communities. But not all. So that's really nice.

And lord Richard Peck is funny. And his main character learns some things without the reader feeling Taught, which is no mean feat. I personally, a white woman born in a leafy suburb who walked to school until she was 17, very much enjoyed the book.

But I think its time, like that of the quotidian antiques resting on glass shelves in my mom's dining room, has passed. Now is the time for it to be admired for its form and craft, because we are not likely to need to use it.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear by E. K. Johnston - review

 

In her author's note, E. K. Johnston admits straight out that she wrote this book while very, very angry. I bet she did. This is a fucking great novel.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear is about a teenage rape survivor. Hermione, a popular athlete - co-captain of her cheerleading team - is drugged, raped, and left half-submerged in a lake. She cannot remember the crime or identify her attacker. She is angry, hurt, and sad, but she and her team and her family tackle each step of her recovery process with courage, love, and determination.

And there you have the bare bones of your standard-issue Problem Novel, during the course of which we will watch our heroine struggle bravely to regain her confidence, conquer her self-doubt, and perhaps find love. Excuse me while I never ever read a book like that again. Maybe, because Emily Johnston has written this book, I never have to.

Because Hermione does NOT struggle with self-doubt. She is quite clear that the only person to blame here is the guy who attacked her, and if she even momentarily loses her clarity on that score, her best friend Polly is burning with fury at her side, ready to remind her. Nor does Hermione have to deal with parental shellshock or smothering. Hermione's team rallies around her - even the boys try to act normal, with mostly pathetic results (ehh, boys). When she slaps her ex-boyfriend, whose stance is that "she'd have been safe if she'd been dancing with me," her therapist is eager to hear how hard. And when Hermione stops in to see the pastor to ask him to stop reminding the congregation to remember her in their prayers - she does not WANT to be Hermione the Rape Victim and who can blame her - the pastor looks her in the eye with compassion but not pity.

Everyone holds their breath when she has to endure examinations, pregnancy tests, and a termination procedure, but they never once utter the word "options" - which Hermione notices with gratitude. 

Exit, Pursued by a Bear is a freaking casebook of How to Think and Do when dealing with a victim of sexual assault.

And in the hands of a lesser writer, this might result in tedium or sanctimony. It might at least be distracting. I think we've all seen movies like that - cancer movies especially perhaps. Debra Winger spewing love and forgiveness from her hospital bed in Terms of Endearment, Susan Sarandon nobly handing over the reins to Julia Roberts in Stepmom.

But bless her, E.K. Johnston (author of The Story of Owen, which is my sons' hands-down favorite book of all time right now, and in my own top ten) is NOT a lesser writer. I read this book in three hours, propelled onward by characters I loved and who loved each other. It is marketed as a cross between Veronica Mars and A Winter's Tale, but honestly I saw more Jessica Jones in it than Mars - Hermione faces her trauma with some of Jessica's belligerence (but none of her bourbon), and the friendship between Hermione and Polly is just as rock-solid as Jessica's relationship with Trish. Remember, at the end of the series, the big climax is Jessica telling her best friend that she loves her? Same thing here. "I love you." "I know."

I imagine that Emily Johnston wrote this book after seeing yet another young rape victim publicly blamed for the crime perpetrated against her. I imagine that she sat down, all gritted teeth and flared nostrils and hair on fire, and wrote this book for all those girls, to show them that SOMEBODY knows the right way to treat them, to talk to them and about them. And if that's what we need, if we, as parents, faculty, friends, cops, teammates need a template for how to respond in a situation we hope no woman ever has to endure, well, now we have it. Lucky for us it's a compulsive, easy read, because I'm hoping it gets assigned in about a million advisories, homerooms, and health classes.

Look for this stellar work of realistic fiction in March, 2016.

The Tapper Twins Go to War (With Each Other) by Geoff Rodkey - review

Sometimes my children like a book. Ok, if you are at all familiar with my two sons you might be rolling your eyes right now. Yes, Milo and Ezra are enthusiastic readers. But that doesn't actually mean that they just loooove all books. The fact is that they, like most enthusiastic readers, have developed into fairly critical readers as well.

They'll race through a book and then when you ask about it, say, "Ehh." That's good intel. I need to know that. It doesn't do to falsely praise a book to a kid.

I won't give an ehhh book to a picky reader. I might give an ehhh book to an avid reader, especially if she is impatiently waiting for a favorite to come in. In that case I am happy to say, "Listen, can I give you something to read until the next Artemis Fowl/Cupcake Diaries/Origami Yoda gets here? Here's something that will tide you over. It's ok. It's exciting enough, but it may not knock your socks off."

And she'll respect you for it - they can't all blow you away, and you're not doing anybody any favors by pretending otherwise. Especially not a kid who reads two or three books a week.

 

 

But The Tapper Twins Go to War (With Each Other) is NOT THAT BOOK. NOT, I repeat, the "ehh" book.

ABaFT (Adult books for teens): Wolf in White Van plus a picture book for teens: Home

 

Something bad has happened. It was a long time ago, but it was really bad, and Sean's life is now carefully constructed from and around the consequences of that thing.

He's not lonely, exactly. He's not sad, exactly. He's also maybe not reliable, exactly.

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:

Trash Can Days by Teddy Steinkellner - review

 

I am sorry that Teddy Steinkellner was dumped in a trashcan in middle school. Truly I am. Nobody deserves to be humiliated like that, and I hope the boys who did it look back on that episode and feel gut-wrenching, ball-twisting shame. I hope they grow up and have children and experience the fear that some little pack of fourteen-year-old pricks is going to do something like that to one of their kids.

And I have to praise a book about middle school that gives us an episode of upside-down in a garbage can. The clarity of the prose, the observational exactness as the garbage juice trickles into the boy's hair - it is necessary to hear this. If it happened, and especially if it is likely to happen again, we need to know what it is like. It's a little like climbing Everest - if a person has been there, they owe it to the rest of us to tell us what it's like.

Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls by Mary Downing Hahn - review

I am violating my own rule here. My rule is I don't review books by people I know well enough to hug.

I know Mary Hahn well enough to hug, and to kiss on the cheek. Both of which things I did last time I saw her, the day after I finished reading this book. I think you would, too.

Mary's an old friend of my parents - I think her first husband and my dad went to college together? Maybe mom was a bridesmaid? She and my mother were pregnant with their first children at the same time, and compared notes. Some time after those girls (one of them me) were born, she and my parents more or less lost touch.

Mary started working as a school librarian, and in the mid-1970's started writing novels for children. Mysteries. Ghost stories. And though most of these stories stay well within the range of "comfortably spooky" - excellent choices for middle-grade readers who crave just enough chill to keep them turning pages, but not enough to keep them up at night - that's still thirty-some years' worth of haunted houses and restless spirits, guilt, revenge, and loss.

And now we know why.

Boy21 by Matthew Quick - review

Finley is the only white kid on his basketball team. He's not the tallest, or the most talented, but he is the hardest-working player, and that has earned him his position as starting point guard. That hard work might just one day propel him out of his crime-infested ruin of a hometown.

So is Boy21 a sports novel? Not exactly.

Finley has played and trained - obsessively, single-mindedly - since he was ten years old, when something bad happened to his family and he found that shooting 500 free throws in a row allowed him to not think about it.

Is Boy21 a coming-to-grips-with-crisis novel? Not exactly that either.

Finley has time for only one thing in his life besides ball, and that's his girlfriend, best friend, and only friend, Erin. She is beautiful and the star of the girls' team and has a lot of patience. She gets along with Finley's drunk grandfather, his sorrowful father, and she loves Finley, even though he speaks rarely and breaks up with her every basketball season.

So it's a young love novel? Ok I know I'm getting annoying with this - I'll stop.

12 Things to do Before you Crash and Burn by James Proimos - review

Short. Raucous. Undiluted. Pungent. Sneaky. Foulmouthed. Bright.

These words describe one of two things - your favorite uncle or James Proimos's first book for young adults.

Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet - review, plus bonus Battle of the Books prediction

Clem was born premature, when his pregnant mother was startled by a heartbroken Nazi pilot shooting her chimney to pieces at the end of World War II in rural Norfolk, England.

Using this birth as a pivot point, Mal Peet tells us the story of Clem's family from the time his grandmother was a girl to nearly the present day. We see the twentieth century work its changes on this family, as wars take men away and bring them back, social movements carry Clem's family out of their indentured hovel and into estate housing and allow Clem to attend an exclusive school, and romantic love finds a foothold.

Pink Smog by Francesca Lia Block - review

Louise at thirteen is friendless and flat-chested. Bad luck and worse decisions have torn apart the cozy canyon life she shared with her parents, B-movie director Charlie Bat and starlet-turned-homemaker Brandy-Lynn, and now she lives in a courtyard condo down below the smog line. Instead of her tiny, hippie elementary school, she's attending a big public junior high where everything seems like a competition. And then, after one too many drunken arguments with Brandy-Lynn, her dad leaves.

Pink Smog: Becoming Weetzie Bat is the prequel to Francesca Lia Block's popular Weetzie Bat stories - this is Weetzie before she becomes fully Weetzified: not yet blonde, only partially sparkly, showing barely a hint of the wistful siren to come. With some of the glitter swept away, the emphasis is on Louise's feelings and encounters, which have always been well-written, but can be overshadowed by the feathered, flowing, Mod Podge fabric of Weetzie's later life. Heartbroken, teased, neglected, and possibly hexed, Louise begins to learn about risks that are worth taking and people who are worth cherishing. She is a peaceful child who, when faced with cruelty and loss, develops into a young woman who is pliant but not wimpy, strong but not aggressive.

A fresh gem for Weetzie's fans, Pink Smog stands comfortably alone as well. It would serve as a Gateway to Francesca Lia Block (which is an arch a lot of us are happy to have passed through - Jezebel once called Weetzie Bat ""The Book for Girls Who Ended Up Taking a Gay Dude to Prom" - I myself took my best friend's much-older brother), and although marketed to grades 9 and up, this book could be wise comfort to a reader as young as 5th grade whose family has undergone sudden change.

A version of this review appeared in VOYA a few months ago.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews - review (plus bonus rant, again)

 

Rules are for sissies. Yes, yes they are. Especially, I would say, in Young Adult fiction. All this hoo-ha and malarkey about people debating What is Young Adult lately - with so many grownups reading adventure fiction like The Hunger Games, why is one novel with a teen protagonist (let's just say Going Bovine) marketed to teens and why is another (call it Huge) marketed to adults - and as far as I'm concerned the fastest, funniest, most wrenching, most challenging stuff is YA and all the rest is non-age-specific genre fiction.

Mad at me yet? Read more!

The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler - review

I spent the weekend without Internet access. Yup. No service where we were staying, no bars on the phone, and a 3G indicator that winked in and out when the wind blew through the pines.

As it happens, I needed to get ahold of someone, and so I was a little infuriated by this lack of connectivity. But I was also reading The Future of Us, a sort of post-dated YA sci-fi novel set in 1996, so it was kind of apropos.

The Downside of Being Up by Alan Lawrence Sitomer - review

Given all the news recently about the inconceivably arrogant, morally chthonic behavior of certain people in central PA - people who make me type in all caps, people whose f-ing job it was to teach teenage athletes about discipline and integrity and in the process turn them into admirable men, and yet who somehow valued winning or the status quo or... something - I mean, I just can't fathom what possible motive there could be for keeping silent - over the safety and well-being of a legion of children...

Yes. Given that, I would like to offer up a healthy, happy novel about a healthy, normal boy, a boy fortunately unmolested by predatory old men - a boy whose only real tormentor is the tail that wags his dog.

That's right - I'm talking about Bobby's boner. Allow me to relate a conversation I had with my boys.

Numbers by Rachel Ward - review

Here is the trick with magic realism: if you're going to add a little magic to your realistic story, just drop it in there and don't futz with it. Like cold butter on warm bread, if you try to even it out you will just tear holes in your plot and make yucky little crumb-butter tumbleclots. In other words, if Grandpa can fly, he can just fly, ok? Don't start rattling off a long and involved explanation about curses or fairies or mitochlorions - people will get suspicious.

If your main character can see the date of a person's death when she looks into their eyes, you should just tiptoe out on stage, hand her that little piece of business, and then back off real nonchalant-like.

Like Rachel Ward does. Oh, Rachel Ward. Nicely done.

The accidental genius of Weasel High by Rick Detorie - review

Slipping into the boy-friendly spot between Diary of a Wimpy Kid and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a new young adult novel by Rick Detorie, creator of One Big Happy, a strip you may have seen on your newspaper's comics page.

Not a graphic novel but in fact a liberally illustrated prose novel (with extremely short paragraphs), The accidental genius of Weasel High is about a 14-year-old boy named Larkin navigating his freshman year of high school. Larkin's not too bad off - he has a couple of good friends and nobody picks on him much. He has a dreadful sister who manages to throw things into sharp relief, when she's not actually throwing things, and parents who are basically ok even if they are generally clueless and embarrassing.

 

Bigger than a Bread Box by Laurel Snyder - special guest review!

 

I love my friends, and when I think of the friends I have, I realize what a fortunate person I am.

First: A few years ago, I got to chatting with a brilliant, funny author at the annual KidLitCon - Laurel Snyder. It turned out that in addition to sharing certain opinions, vices, and an inappropriate sense of humor, we share weird geographic coincidences: she grew up a couple blocks from where I live now, and in high school she moved to the neighborhood where I grew up. Her friends were the younger siblings of my friends. When she lived in freakin' Iowa, her downstairs neighbor was a woman I've been friends with since birth. We might actually be the same person.

So I can't review her book.

Next: Also a few years ago, we got a new librarian at work. Yes I know that's a weird construction, but that's how we say it. We got a new librarian. She had the same name as me! Then we found out that we both have a kid the same age, a kid who loved to read and went to a Baltimore City charter school; and we also discovered that we both read a lot of teen fiction, and have almost the same taste! In books, accessories, food, you name it. We might actually be the same person. On Pink Me, I call her Eerily Similar Paula, and she's helped me out before.

Today, she and her Eerily Similar Kid, Thespian Girl, have contributed a mother-daughter review of Laurel's new book, Bigger than a Bread Box.

 

 
 

ESP: How did you get your hands on an advance copy of Bigger Than a Bread Box, Thespian Girl?
Okay, so me and Daddy were walking around at the ALA conference, and the lady at Random House said “Oh honey, I have a few books that you might like!” and I picked one up and started reading the back of it. Meanwhile, Daddy poked me in the ribcage and said “You have to get this book. Look at the dedication. It’s for Baltimore.” I said okay and I took it even though I didn’t really like the cover. I thought it might be a murder mystery or something about wizards.  

ESP: What made you read it anyway?
Well, it was on my shelf and you told me I needed to read the next day and not watch any “stupid TV shows”. I read the first page and I was like “huh.” Then I read the next page, and the next page and the next page….”

ESP: I remember you read a part out loud to me. You said “this author really is from Baltimore. I can tell because of the detail when she describes Rebecca’s row house.”

There weren’t doors or walls between the downstairs rooms of our row house. The flooring just changed colors every ten feet or so. You knew you were out of the kitchen/dining room when the fake brick linoleum stopped and the pale blue carpet started. Then you were out of the living room and into the front room when the blue carpet changed to brown. That was like a lot of row houses were in Baltimore, like tunnels.

ESP: Kind of like our house?
Yes, quite!  

ESP: So that made you keep reading? What’s it really about?
Yes. And the book got better and better as it went on. I read it mostly in one day while you were at work. It’s about a twelve year-old girl named Rebecca. She lives in Baltimore with her mom and dad and her toddler brother Lew. Her mom and dad have been arguing a lot, and then her mom decides it’s time to “take a break.” She drives Rebecca and Lew all the way to Atlanta, Georgia to stay with their grandmother. She doesn’t bother to tell Rebecca that they’ll be staying for a long time and that she’ll have to go to school there too. During the first night her and her mom get into an argument. Rebecca misses her dad. She gets mad and runs upstairs to the attic, where she discovers a collection of bread boxes. She only knows that’s what they are because they say “bread” on them. While she’s poking around up there, she says she wishes she had a book. She starts opening the bread boxes. They’re all empty except for the last one, which, coincidentally, has an Agatha Christie book in it. She brings the box down to her room.  

ESP: Does she know right away that it’s magic?
No. She figures it out that night when she’s feeling homesick. She’s crying about all the things she misses about Baltimore. She says “I wish there were gulls” into her pillow, and then she hears a skreeeee noise coming from the breadbox. There are two seagulls inside! 

ESP: So what does she wish for next? Is it a unicorn?
No, and I don’t want to ruin the story. She can only get things that are real. And that fit inside the bread box.  

ESP: So it’s a book about a magic bread box? Is that how you would describe it?
Not just about a magic bread box. It’s about school drama, family, and how unfair it is when adults make decisions for you that you don’t like.  

ESP: How did the book make you feel when you were reading it?
I was excited and on edge! I couldn’t guess what was going to happen at all. She (Laurel Snyder) did a great job with the entire story. There wasn’t too much of anything or too little of anything. It was a perfect book. The ending is a good set up for a sequel, hint-hint!

 

Paula is a good friend and I want to thank her and Thespian Girl thoroughly for this thoughtful take on a terrific book. My only regret is that when either of them starts writing books herself, I won't be able to review them. Maybe I'll get Laurel to do it!

Here's some more help, from 12-year-old kid named Lily, who made this beautiful book trailer for Bigger than a Bread Box:

 

I swear, tween girls should be running this country. They are so smart!

Darth Paper Strikes Back: An Origami Yoda book by Tom Angleberger

I love it when an author slaps a reference to another book into his or her own, especially in kids' or YA books. It's a sly way of suggesting to the reader, "If you are enjoying my book, here's what I like - you should try it!" Rebecca Stead not only drew inspiration from A Wrinkle in Time when she wrote When You Reach Me, but she wove the older book firmly into the narrative. I don't know anybody who finished that book and didn't at least consider re-reading Madeleine L'Engle's classic. If there's bookshelf in a picture book, I always squint to see what titles the illustrator has drawn.

Charlie Higson wrote a bookworm character into The Dead, and that kid's finest moment was when he defended himself from a mindless cannibal attacker using his copy of The Gormenghast Trilogy as a weapon. That's a great little glimpse into Charlie Higson's head.  

 

The book that Tom Angleberger slides into Darth Paper Strikes Back is Robot Dreams, Sara Varon's nearly wordless graphic novel about a dog and a robot who are pals. That book is full of emotion without being mushy. It says a great deal about loyalty and love without embarrassing the reader.

Hm. Hmm, I say.

If you liked The Hunger Games - YA for everyone!

"You're listening to Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast on 88.1 WYPR, your NPR news station, good morning! I'm your host, Tom Hall... oh wait a minute, I can't be your host, Tom Hall - I'm only eight!"

That's right. I took my kids with me to the radio station yesterday when I taped a segment on you crazy, stunted adults who read Young Adult fiction. What's wrong with me? Didn't I know they would act like crazed monkeys and pull out all the wires and make fart noises into the microphones? (They were very well behaved, although there were fart noises, I admit.)

 

Milo making fart noises while producer Stephanie Hughes sets up.

More to the point, what's wrong with you? Seriously, you're a full-on adult with a car payment and a job, and when you pick up a book, you're all looking for violence and mayhem, and allegory, and characters you can fall in love with, and dialogue peppered with witty insults and wordplay - what's that about? Why can't you just read your age-appropriate Literature or Fluff like you're supposed to? (This is also me being FACETIOUS.)

As I tried to organize my thoughts about what it is that adults see in YA literature - and it's a huge trend, believe me, you're not the only one - I remembered a recent conversation with a young woman looking for something to read. I asked what she'd enjoyed lately, and she said she'd really liked The Road (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature) and the The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris (winner of the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original and inspiration for Snoop Dogg's Oh, Sookie).

Now, these two items have more in common than you might initially think, but still, it would be a biiig Venn diagram that managed to include them both. Trying to imagine the sweet spot between Cormac McCarthy and Sookie Stackhouse, my gaze naturally drifted to the Young Adult section.

 

Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos - review

 

I made it to page 12 of Dead End in Norvelt before I was giggling so loudly that my family made me stop and read aloud to them. You may not get that far.

Jack Gantos writes two kinds of books: good books and great books. (Also Love Curse of the Rumbaughs, which might be either, but which is so spectacularly weird that it's hard to tell.) Dead End in Norvelt is one of the great ones, for sure. It concerns an eleven-year-old boy named Jack Gantos who lives in a New Deal planned community in Western PA in 1962. He is a kid who likes "history or real-life adventure books, mostly," a mostly-good boy with frequent nosebleeds, an active imagination, and a knack for getting blamed for stuff that is not entirely his fault.

Ghetto Cowboy by Greg Neri - review

 

What does it take to break a cycle? To pluck a kid from a life hemmed in by poverty and lack of opportunity and show him wider horizons? What does it take to convince a kid that cultivating respect and demonstrating responsibility are worth the trouble?

In some communities it's chess. Or ballroom dancing. Debate. Not infrequently, it's song - a low-overhead activity, not a lot of equipment needed. But in the Fletcher Street neighborhood of Philadelphia, deep in a bad, bad neighborhood, it's horses. Dedicated adults tend an improbable set of stables and barns, teach the neighborhood kids how to care for the horses and how to ride, provide a safe place and a sense of usefulness for children who might otherwise find themselves in trouble or in danger or both.

Into this backdrop Greg Neri drops Cole, short for Coltrane, a teenager from Detroit who has been quietly falling into truancy and other bad habits. Not a fighter, nor a criminal, he has merely been losing touch with school and with his single mother. Cole's overwhelmed mama makes the difficult decision to send the boy to live with his father, a father he's never met.

You see where this is headed, don't you? Cole's dad is one of Philadelphia's cowboys, a gruff, uncompromising man who lives for the horses and is unprepared for family. A crisis looms as the city attempts to close down the stables. But in the end, Cole and his dad come to terms over caring for the beasts, prove themselves to each other, and even develop a certain amount of affection. Cole learns about hard work and self-respect.

We have been down this trail so many times before that I am a bit torn: does the fact that this time we are in the city and on a horse make up for the fact that almost any reader will have seen its resolution from a mile away? Am I more interested in the stables and the adults who frequent them than I am in Cole's rather muted sorrow and rebelliousness? Does the sheer unlikeliness of a crowd of cowboys in urban Philadelphia distract from the family drama?

Maybe. But. In the end, I will recommend Ghetto Cowboy, partly because we are low low low on realistic YA fiction for boys nowadays, partly because the horse thing is so damn unlikely, but I think mostly because I think boys will recognize gentle Cole, a boy who could have dropped out of school and faded carelessly into idleness, who only needed one extraordinary thing to wake him to his potential.

Ghetto Cowboy is Greg Neri's follow-up to last year's grim but great graphic novel Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty. They share a little sense of detachment and a sharply observant main character. Both books are also inspired by real people, in this case the black urban cowboys of Philadelphia and New York City.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley and read it on my Sony Reader.

Guys Read: Thriller, edited by Jon Scieszka - review (plus bonus rant!)

 

The first book in the Guys Read Library, Guys Read: Funny Business, is one of my favorite shortcuts when I'm at work in the children's section. When I see Mom hauling her cranky middle grade boy over to the shelves, I will grab a copy of Funny Business, crack it open to the Christopher Paul Curtis story or to Jack Gantos's The Bloody Souvenir, and start to read. When I get to the part about the blood poisoning, that's when our young man usually stops farting around and looks at me.

I hand him the book, and say, "When you come back - if you come back - come find me and I'll give you something else disgusting to read." Mom looks at me and can't decide whether she's repulsed or grateful.

Spoiled by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan - review

 

Deathbed confession!

Long-lost sibling!

Exclusive private school full of duplicitous bitches carrying designer bags!

Hot guys - gorgeous girls!

Shopping!

And you know, that's really all I need to do to booktalk this book to teen girls. Teen girls? Sure. Also tween girls, grownup girls, and a select few guys I know. We kind of love all those novels with fancy clothes and scheming.

Are you going to kiss me now? by Sloane Tanen - review

All that really has to happen here - if you're me, at least - is to see the words "Sloane Tanen."

 

 

"Samantha looked around the playground in amazement. Her mother had been right. She really was the smartest and the prettiest."

 
"Goodnight moon, hello, martini."

 
"It's dad calling about the birth control prescription I took out of your backpack and taped to his cell phone."

 

At least, that was all I had to see when my friend Sarah messaged me on Facebook: "Have you heard of my friend Sloane's new book? Do you want to?"

I have the coolest friends.

Leaving it all on the field

Hothead by Cal Ripken, Jr. and Kevin Cowherd

Football Champ by Tim Green

 

 

 

My cousin is a groundskeeper for the Baltimore Orioles, and Cal Ripken, Jr. is his hero:

 

In fact, it wouldn't be too far off the mark to say that here in Baltimore, Cal Ripken, Jr. is everyone's hero. He's my hero just for being a worthwhile hero. So many sports stars aren't. But even if he's not your hero, it is at least impossible to say anything not nice about the guy. Gentlemanly demeanor. Sterling work ethic. Humility. Compassion. Intelligence. Humor. Blue eyes like lasers. And his sense of responsibility toward the kids who look up to him verges on the ecclesiastical. Every sports star should be setting an example like this.

Five Flavors of Dumb by Antony John - review

Piper's senior year of high school is not starting all that auspiciously. Her best friend Marissa has moved away. Her parents raided her college fund to pay for a cochlear implant for her baby sister Grace. And she the same social nonentity she always has been, a fact that is thrown into painful relief by the fact that her younger brother Finn, a freshman this year, already has more friends than she does. And as this novel begins, she somehow dares the rock band at her school to hire her as manager, regardless of the fact that she is deaf.

Piper's nominal challenge is to get this band a paying gig within a month, but her actual challenge is to build them into a team. Each member - smiling frontman Josh, his silent brother Will, growling lead guitarist Tash, virtuoso drummer Ed, and newly minted rhythm(less) guitarist Kallie - has his or her own motivation for being in the band, and I don't think I'm giving too much away to say that some of these motives prompt behavior that is, shall we say, in opposition to the cohesiveness of the group.

Ahem. We have all been there, I think.

The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston - review

 

This is not a great YA novel. Sure it won the William C. Morris Debut Award for YA novels, up against two of my very favorite, most cherished YA novels in recent years, Lish McBride's Hold Me Closer, Necromancer and Karen Healey's Guardian of the Dead. Sure I'll urge every teen I see at the library or pass in the street to read it.

But The Freak Observer is not a great YA novel. The Freak Observer is a great novel, period.

Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine, read by Angela Jayne Rogers - review

Ten year old Caitlyn seeks closure. She's not entirely sure what closure is, but she knows that it will help her come to grips with the death of her big brother Devon. And Caitlyn's not the only one who needs closure - the school shooting that claimed Devon's life has plunged her entire town into a morass of sorrow and confusion. Everyone she knows - the kids at school, her teachers and counselor, and especially her father - is shaky and stunned. But Caitlyn has Asperger's syndrome. She experiences the behavior of others as a series of unrelated vignettes whose meaning she must puzzle out, and while she has some tools for solving these puzzles - the facial expressions chart in the counselor's office helps - her best guide has always been Devon.

At first blush, this book may seem too full of sorrow and unusual circumstance to be interesting or applicable to many readers. But Caitlyn's extremely literal interpretations, unbiased reactions, and open-hearted attempts at friendship and empathy help those around her gain fresh perspective on words, actions, and events. Devon always knew this about her, which is why he called her Scout, after the character in To Kill a Mockingbird. Caitlyn's errors and successes at parsing her world invite discussion and reflection, and although it can be difficult to distinguish between Caitlyn's thoughts and her dialogue when listening to the book, Angela Jayne Rogers's unadorned narration is poignant and forthright, and makes Mockingbird ideal for a group read/listen.

Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty by G. Neri, illustrated by Randy DuBurke - review

Yummy looks at you from the cover of this book and you can't help but stare back. His glare is impenetrable, challenging, blank, hostile. The coldest stare you've ever seen.

Yummy's eleven, and he was a real person, and that cover picture is a faithful reproduction of his mug shot, the only known photo of him. It's almost impossible, meeting that gaze, not to want to break it, not to want to find something that is not hard, not injured, behind those eyes. No eleven-year-old should seriously look like that. He ought to be playing, with that look.

The Rise of Renegade X by Chelsea Campbell - review

Say you're writing a book about a teenage boy. You sit down, close your eyes, and start free-associating:

"Teenage boy. What do I think when I think teenage boy. Boners. Boners for sure, yeah. Aspirations. 'Why are my parents such idiots?' Okay, what else... stuck at home, but almost ready to fly away... good, good... Impatient for more autonomy, afraid of what he might do with it. Poor decision maker. Self-absorbed, defensive. Uncommunicative, distrustful. Wow. Teenage boys are kind of a-holes most of the time, aren't they?"

And I think it's this kind of honest introspection that has led to many of the most believable teenage boy narrators in realistic YA fiction of late. You've heard of the Unreliable Narrator? Well, I'm calling these kids the (Mostly) Unlikeable Narrator.

Spud by John van de Ruit - review

I find it a little odd that I love boys' boarding school memoirs so much. I'm an American woman who walked to public school every day for twelve years - the British-style boarding school experience could not be further from my reality.

But then I pick up Moab Is My Washpot and I collapse with laughter. Roald Dahl's Boy is dear to my heart. Hogwarts School is my favorite place in Harry Potter. And doesn't J. M. Coetzee attend boarding school in his memoir Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life, which I only remember as being devastatingly naked and sad?

Heck, I might even be talked into reading Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens's account of his prep school years. But I can't read A Separate Peace again. Made me cry in 11th grade, would make me cry now.

The Ghostwriter Secret by Mac Barnett - review

Transcribed from recording made on hidden micro-spy recording device. Subject: Mao (not his real name) age: 9. File: Barnett review 10-20-19-46. Indoctrination sequence begun...

 

Your Neighborhood Librarian: Ok, so Mao, here we have the The Ghostwriter Secret, the second of the Brixton Brothers books by the perilously undershaven Mac Barnett and compulsively undercapped Adam Rex.

Mao: Who?

YNL: The guys who wrote and illustrated the first one (ooh, new paperback cover). And Guess Again! What did you think of this book?

M: Well I think that it's good, and the cover gives you a really good idea of how it is -- exciting, but also like kind of suspenseful. On the cover, you see them underwater in a pool with bullets coming down, and that is really suspenseful.

YNL: Because?

M: Because, well, I don't want to ruin anything if you haven't read the book...

YNL: But I have.

M: Ok well then because THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS IN THE BOOK!!

YNL: The bullets raining down on them in the pool.

M: Yes!

YNL: And that's important to you because...

M: Kids do not usually get shot at in kids books! That part was great!

Violence 101 by Denis Wright - review

Whew. I am not usually a summarizer, but I think in this case, the only way to introduce this book is to introduce you to its main character, Hamish Graham.

Hamish is a smart, middle-class New Zealand boy of European descent, and, at the age of fourteen, he's already killed a man. And a poodle. And those are just the incidents that made the papers. There's more.

He is, quite naturally, boarding at a facility for troubled youths - boys with violent tendencies and/or brushes with the criminal justice system. The trouble with Hamish's brand of 'troubled' is that nobody can figure it out. He's not a product of an emotionally damaging environment. He doesn't have autism, nor any other disorder that he's been tested for. He has baffled the teachers and counselors charged with his care for years, developing a hearty contempt for them along the way, a contempt that occasionally bursts into violence.

freak magnet by Andrew Auseon - review

Did you see that thing recently about the pediatric neurologist who found the behavior of her teenage boys so anomalous that she started looking into their brains? More or less literally? She was on NPR last week.

I've never been all that impressed with neurologists, I have to say. I (temporarily) lost the ability to use my left leg after my first son was born, and when I went to the neurologist there was a lot of 'can you feel this?' and 'push against my hand.' I'm sure it was a lot more sophisticated than it seemed. But. And then when my husband's brain went kaflooey once... well let's just say after two weeks of hospitalization and a zillion tests, "His brain went kaflooey" is kind of the best diagnosis anyone came up with.

But this lady, she seems to have made some headway. She found research that suggests that the teenage frontal lobe, the evaluative part of the brain, is not yet optimally connected with the parts that, say, drive a car or put on eyeliner or twitter.

For the Win by Cory Doctorow - review

I am not a teacher, but I used to do a lot of training - I taught museum staff how to use the database software that helped them keep track of all their stuff. Because of that experience, I now feel comfortable addressing any group not actually armed with edged weapons. Let me put it this way: you ever read From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler? Of course you have. How would Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler react to having her files transcribed into database entries, so that they could be searched, shuffled, and read... by strangers?

Yeah. These were people who had avoided anything that even faintly smelled of maths or science since, sometimes, freshman year of undergrad. Many used a computer for email, but plenty affected a contemptuous and disdainful attitude, and considered it unfair that now, in addition to being profoundly knowledgeable about, say, Heian period sword guards, they were expected to operate machinery.

Not unlike teaching social studies to high school students, I'm thinking.

Dirty little secrets by C.J. Omololu - review

Lucy's mom is a compulsive hoarder, and Lucy is sixteen years old. Think how embarrassed you were about your parents when you were sixteen, and then think about how Lucy must feel.

Luckily, nobody at her school knows that Lucy's house looks like those houses on that show, and Lucy is bent on keeping it that way. She's keeping her head down, avoiding close friendships, checking to make sure her clothes don't smell when she leaves the house, waiting out the year and a half until she can get out of that hellhole like her older brother and sister, and hoping nobody ever, ever sees past her front door.

And listen, that may sound like a metaphor, but in Lucy's case it's just true. I swear, poor kid.

Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O'Malley - review

Dear Internet,

I thought you were looking out for me! How have you not forced me to read Scott Pilgrim before now?

I ask again: HOW has someone not held me down, pried my eyes open, and shoved Scott Pilgrim into my face?

The School of Possibilities by Seita Parkkola - review

I'm staring at the cover of this book and wondering what to say about it. The cover is awfully busy, in its overly geometric way - a giant factory looms over a little red brick schoolhouse, smokestacks rising into the gray clouds, from which descend feathers, like snow. Below the school, stairs descend into a darkness in which half-lidded yellow eyes lurk.

Also, the O's in the word "School" are eyes. And there's a... you know what? I'll quit with the cover. Except to point out the one enticing element of it, the one element that you should pay attention to and use as your barometer when you consider whether you need it for your kids, or your library.

"SEITA PARKKOLA"

The Amanda Project Book 1: invisible i, by Melissa Kantor

Let's dispense with the disclosure right away - Melissa Kantor, the author of this, the first Amanda Project book, is an old friend of my husband's. Am I letting that influence my review? Absolutely not. Did that influence the fact that I opened this book in the first place? For sure.

I am guilty - more than most - of judging books by the cover, and this one has a cover that I might not have been able to get past. It's hot pink. There's a picture of a slender white girl on the front, her back to the camera. Yes, it's the faceless girl again.

On the other hand, the typography and illustrated doodads on that cover are original and hip. A key, a bird, some vine-y floral stuff - despite the fact that it seems like EVERY teen girl novel is embellished with vine-y floral stuff right now, the vine-y floral stuff in invisible i manages to look classy and fresh. That, as it turns out, is because it was drawn by a young man by the name of Brian Floca (Moonshot, Lightship).

And this, dear friends, is the crux of my review. You can put together a book whose premise has been done before, load it up with ancillaries and gimmicks, clothe it in hot pink and put a faceless girl on the cover, and if the writer is amazing and the web designers are the best and the illustrator is multi-award-winning Brian Floca, you will have a fantastic book.

The Amanda Project shows us how it's done.

BEA (no longer so) brief recap

 

Your Neighborhood Librarian with some of the guys of Guys Read: Jon Scieszka, Adam Rex, and Mac Barnett. David Lubar is lurking off to the right.

Wow. Was this a great show or what! I am still a little breathless, not least from hauling the giant bag of great books away from the Javits Center. And I swear, I only took the great ones, or the ones I expect to be great, or the ones I really want to know about. I didn't take any random stuff, and still there's got to be 30 books in there.

Everything from Charlie Higson's new book The Enemy, which I find especially intriguing because it intrigues my 15 year old friend N, who usually restricts his reading to game guides... to David Ezra Stein's Interrupting Chicken. The title alone tells you that this book is going to be a mega hit at storytimes for preschoolers on up. My son Zhou read it to us this morning - it's a star!

She Thief by Daniel Finn - review

The obvious and inevitable comparison that this book will invite is to Vikas Swarup's Q & A, aka Slumdog Millionaire. So let me just get that out of the way. If you enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire, if you were not so distracted by its images of radiant children amid filthy squalor and nearly hopeless generational poverty that you were unable to enjoy the story, you will appreciate this book.

That doesn't look right. I guess I should say I loved that movie, love Vikas Swarup. I love India, and I didn't think that Slumdog Millionaire was about poverty. Not that poverty isn't an important subject. Sigh. I give up. Why don't I just review She Thief.

She Thief is the story of Demi and Baz, boy and girl, best friends, orphans, about 11-12 years old, living in the slums of a hot, crowded Latin American city. I was thinking São Paulo until I realized they called people Señor. So, B.A.? Bogotá? Quito? Like that.

The Carrie Diaries by Candace Bushnell - review

Now, here's something I didn't know and wouldn't have guessed - Carrie Bradshaw and I are about the same age. Maybe she was a senior when I was in tenth grade. But still. Jimmy Carter was President when she was in high school; her friend drives a Gremlin; they sing along to the B-52s in the car. Preppy style has not yet hit in its full force, but she lives in Connecticut, and there are girls who dress like that already. Naturally, she hates them.

I wouldn't have guessed that Carrie and I were the same age, because the Carrie I know is the Carrie of the TV show - I know SJP clacking around New York City in absurd outfits. That show was on from 1998 to 2004, during which time Carrie should have aged from about 34 to 40. I lived in NYC during most of that time too. I spent those years getting divorced, getting remarried, getting a graduate degree, and getting pregnant - twice. Carrie spent those years drinking sweetened martinis and frenching people like Alanis Morissette and Mikhail Baryshnikov. No wonder I thought she was 28.

Big Nate: In a class by himself by Lincoln Peirce - review

You can tell by the way Big Nate is packaged that somebody - probably lots of somebodies - are hoping that Nate will slot directly into the "If you liked Diary of a Wimpy Kid" list. I won't keep you in suspense. It will. 

You may be familiar with Nate Wright from the Big Nate comic strip that may or may not run in your local paper. Well, here, he gets his own book. Not a collection of comic strips, an honest-to-Pete chapter book about a day in the life of the sometimes unlucky but awfully confident Nate. Nate's first-person narrative is largely written in prose, but with dialogue and actions depicted in comic panels and illustrations, along with pages from Nate's own comics.

The format, in short, is exactly like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. And there are other similarities as well. I think because both Wimpy Kid and Big Nate were daily (or semi-daily) comic strips for a long time before their authors tackled a chapter book, Lincoln Peirce and Jeff Kinney know their boys very well. They have put them into so many situations that they've internalized how each will respond (Quick! Peirce! Nate meets the bad vampires from Twilight! And... go!). There's a believability about these characters that comes from their authors knowing them inside and out.

Also, and this is both harder than it sounds and more important, Kinney and Peirce both draw their characters with a great deal of confidence and consistency. That comes from practice, too. And each panel is drawn, rather than one character blank drawn, and then pasted into many panels with different sets of eyes. That works for Tom Tomorrow, but not in a kids' book.

What's different, though, is Nate. Nate may be awful to his teachers, and maybe not so nice to his big sister and his dad (Nate's mom is never even mentioned, which validates his single-dad family as perfectly normal and Not Tragic), but he is not conniving or thoughtless like Greg Heffley can be. Nate can't even bring himself to forge a note from his father. He has good pals - they distribute noogies and whap each other with their notebooks and make fun of each other, but at the end of the day they do not inflict pain upon each other.

(I should say that I wrote a very ambivalent review of Diary of a Wimpy Kid when it first came out. I still deplore that kid's inconsiderate soul, but I agree with the author that no kid is looking at Greg Heffley as a role model. I should also say that Jeff Kinney was remarkably graceful about that review.) 

And if you like boys, as I do, you will get a giggle out of his poetry celebrating Cheez Doodles and his list of nicknames for his homeroom teacher, Ms. Godfrey. "Pass the Gravy" is the funniest of these, in my opinion.

Haiku, by Nate Wright

You have Cheez Doodles
Fresh. Crunchy. Puffalicious.
Give me one right now.

He's got energy and aspirations, and the attention span of a gnat. He's observant and expressive but average in many ways. Nate knows that his time will come, and he knows that middle school is NOT THAT TIME.

Fat Vampire by Adam Rex - review

Fat Vampire by Adam Rex

Adam Rex is astonishingly talented. He's a poet and a painter. He's a writer and a sculptor and a young man carving pumpkins. He's a New World Man. In The True Meaning of Smekday, he was funny in a kind of stop-short-and-read-it-again way - much like I've sometimes wanted to rewind Sesame Street ("Was that a cut at Dr. Laura?" "Is that muppet supposed to be Amanda Palmer?") He managed, in Smekday, to be funny in a way that makes adults laugh without becoming inaccessible to children.

But what really impressed me in that book was his deft description of the evolution of trust and friendship between his two main characters, Tip and J.Lo. (Jeez, just typing those names makes me want to read it again.) The book was, quite surreptitiously, all about their relationship, and yet it was never boring, not squishy, and did not drag. On the contrary, it zipped right along, with many interesting novelties along the way.

That same talent for invisibly stitching intricate character development into a taut plot is put to good use in Fat Vampire, Adam Rex's first novel for teen readers. In it, our boy Adam backs off on the jokes (although, my god, there is still plenty of wake-up-the-husband-and-read-him-a-paragraph funny in here) in favor of a powerful, line-by-line depiction of high school. And I think I am not spoiling anything when I say - OUCH. A typical high school in the Philadelphia suburbs is our setting, and our more-than-typically-isolated teenage protagonists are Sejal, a middle-class exchange student from Calcutta, and Doug, the titular fat vampire.

Who would have gotten a stupid giggle out of "titular." As do we all. 

Doug is fifteen forever. Man. For many of us, that is our version of hell - no vampirism necessary. Certainly it is for Doug, the kind of geeky, overweight, self-conscious kid who by necessity is living for the day that he leaves for college. Had been living for it, anyway. Now that he's a vampire, he'll never lose the baby fat, never grow tall. In addition, he is not clear on how to do the cool vampire shit - can't turn into a bat at will, can't turn into a wolf at all, and he is still pretty stoogey when it comes to finding blood. Biting cows and whatnot, when it turns out that the cool vampire at school just finds a girl who's "into it" and is on his merry way.

Sejal is in the U.S. partly to shake an addiction to online social networking that blew up into real-world tragedy. Perhaps not surprisingly, the cultural disconnect that she experiences is easier to bridge than the gulf created by her online life, which she has jettisoned, along with her luggage, at the airport. It is an irony of high school proportions that Sejal's goals, though quite a bit loftier than Doug's - she wants to be good - are infinitely easier to attain.

Adam Rex captures both the soap-bubble sensitivity and the steamroller self-centeredness of teenagers, and conveys it through dialogue and gesture. Actions speak louder than words, and dialogue speaks louder than narrative - witness our introduction to the kids who sit under the tree at lunch:

"Hi," said a girl with long, slender arms. "I'm Ophelia. Cat's probably told you about me."

Ding. We know who Ophelia is.

"The airport lost my bag," said Sejal, "but Cat and I wear the same size."
"That's sad," said Sophie. "About your bag. You probably had all kinds of beautiful kimonos or robes or whatever."

Ding. We know who Sophie is.

Understated, but by no means underwritten. And pulling off "understated" in a novel set in high school, with its intricate social system of checks and balances, unspoken snubs and devastating faux pas... well, that's quite a trick.

Here's another trick: it's a high school vampire novel written for teens that never says the T-word, although if I am not mistaken, it blames Stephenie Meyer. That's ok. I blame Stephenie Meyer too.

The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity by Mac Barnett, with illustrations by Adam Rex - review

The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity by Mac Barnett, with illustrations by Adam Rex

I read a lot of funny middle-grade boy books. I, in fact, have something of a subspecialty in "If you liked Diary of a Wimpy Kid." SIGH. *I* didn't even like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Although the author sent me a really nice email thanking me for my extremely ambivalent review. Jeff Kinney = classy guy. No matter what you think of Greg Heffley.

So I end up using the words "goofy," "silly," "cute," and, when I'm feeling not-so-inspired, "funny," in my reviews kind of a lot. Every now and then I have a chance to bust out "witty." Not that often. Binky the Space Cat got a "witty" from me, for its winking and generous portrayal of Binky, an overweight housecat training to be an astronaut. The True Meaning of Smekday I called witty. Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant (which probably also got an "urbane"). And - not coincidentally - these are three of my hands-down favorite middle-grade books EVAR.

Joined now by this first book in what I hope will be a long long long (think Hardy Boys, Barnett - hope you're not doing anything for the next ten or twelve years) series of detective novels starring preteen everyman Steve Brixton and his honorary brother and actual best friend, Dana.

WITTY. This book. Wit to the Tee. There is a prom limo. There is a thug who is "nasty, brutish," and (you guessed it) "short." Mac Barnett even takes a swipe at the ALA's READ posters - truly, truly a man after my own fuggin' heart.

Our protagonist, Steve, a naturally bright kid to begin with, has been thoroughly schooled in the habits and techniques of solving mysteries by his heroes, Shawn and Kevin Bailey, cleancut, midcentury all-American boys who are not only ace teen sleuths but also varsity athletes! The Bailey Brothers' tips (haymaker punches, complicated knots, How To Spot a Scoundrel (hint: they limp)) come in handy when Steve tries to check out an old library book and is suddenly surrounded by a SWAT team of secret library agents!

Except - not only are Shawn and Kevin fictional, they're also conspicuously Golden Age. In the few instances when their advice isn't actually dangerous (Have to jump out of a second-story window? Roll when you hit the ground! Need a hiding place? Behind an airplane propellor is a good spot!), it's ludicrously old-fashioned.

Nice disguise, huh? Luckily, Steve is resourceful and knowledgeable and persistent - and heals fast - plus, all his experience reading detective novels has sharpened his deductive reasoning to a fine point.

The chapters are short, the funny is abundant, and the clues are all there. I'll bet my mom (an inveterate mystery reader) would have figured it out. But neither I nor my 8-year-old did. Listen: I kept reading this book even after the kids were in bed, my husband was out watching the Browns get creamed again (sorry honey) and I had those horny Southern vampires all cued up on the DVD player. I totally needed to see how it ended.

Oh wait - did I forget to mention Adam Rex's illustrations? Again? Adam Rex is brilliant. (I can't wait to read the forthcoming Fat Vampire - Laura, where's my copy?) Adam Rex's illustrations push this thing over the edge - from well-written serial fiction, exceptional grist for the mill of the middle-grade reader's imagination - to something that you could absolutely give as a gift. The cover and spine are exciting and packed full of things to look at, while echoing the format of older hardcover series fiction.

What I need now is MORE.

Diary of a Chav, a novel by Grace Dent - review

Diary of a Chav, (aka Diva Without a Cause), by Grace Dent

Shiraz Bailey Wood is a wannabe ghetto fabulous fifteen year old in Essex. That's Essex, near London, not Essex, near Baltimore, although they are weirdly similar. OUR Essex is a blue-collar community with a reputation for teen pregnancy, lottery addiction, and recreational drug use. It also smells like poo, due to the proximity of the county's sewage treatment plant. (That's according to my colleague TinkerCinderBellaHontas, who grew up there, so don't email me.)

Shiraz's Essex is pretty similar. Her mom, who works at Essex's version of the OTB, cooks nothing that is not processed. Her family watches reality TV to the exclusion of anything else. Her favorite outfit is her pink tracksuit, accessorized with her biggest gold hoops.

And Shiraz speaks in this incessant drawly slang - half Cockney, half what is euphemistically called "urban". It's hilarious, it really is. For a school assignment, she has to write a letter of complaint.

"I have just spent two weeks of sheer unmitigated hell in a half-finished hotel, what was advertised as 'the most stunning jewel in the crown of this fabulous island.' Well if this is your most stunning jewel mate, you ain't got much bling bruv, 'cos this place was a right state and you are a proper liberty sending anyone there."

The whole book kind of reads like a stand-up comedy character gone long-form. Which we've seen - Jeff Foxworthy has a whole slew of "redneck" books. Belzer has written a few novels, pretty much AS Detective John Munch. I used to entertain people with my excellent South Baltimore accent at parties ("Aoh yeah hon, all's zere wen 'at sugar plant sploded - it was sew laut ah fought we's unner attack bah da British again!"*), and I will bet you real money that Grace Dent has been doing her Shiraz impersonation for years. She loves this girl, like you love a trashy cousin who doesn't yet realize there's more to life than chain restaurants, reality TV, and the mall; and in the course of Shizza's year, Dent begins to gently (and not so gently - the mashed rat in the bhaji is pretty rude!) remove her pavé-rhinestone blinkers.

It's so funny, and in the end, it's big-hearted and lovely. The slang will be an impediment for some readers, but there's an equally funny glossary in the back. For example: about the incomprehensible British TV series Last of the Summer Wine, Shiraz says "This is the most boring 'comedy' in the universe... despite never being funny, it is on every week and always has been and always will be until the end of time due to the cast making a pact with Lucifer in 1982 and becoming immortal."

I for one really appreciate that explanation.

*Oh yes, friend - I was there when the sugar plant exploded. It was so loud I thought we were under attack by the British again!"

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah - review

AvLong Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

Just a quick review. Ishmael Beah's memoir of his time as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone is somewhat outside my usual scope for Pink Me. It's not terribly new, and it's usually shelved as adult nonfiction. I'm including it only because I read it recently, and it frequently appears on summer reading lists for middle and high school students.

I know there's some controversy about whether or not Ishmael Beah has been entirely truthful in this memoir - but I do not care. There's some controversy about whether or not lots of people are truthful in their autobiographies. I once read Zsa Zsa Gabor's autobiography (get it on audio if you can, it's a scream), and she claimed to have been deflowered by Kemal Ataturk.

Ok I know there's a difference. Zsa Zsa Gabor did not, as far as I know, grow up to work for the U.N. But what I'm saying is, unreliable narrator or no, A Long Way Gone is the clearest window into the terrible experience of being a boy soldier that I've read, and for that reason I recommend it for classroom use in high school. I believe that teens should read books that are inspiring and show what good exists in the world, but I believe that without contrast, without an appreciation of exactly how bad we can be, noble actions cannot be appreciated either.

I would also argue - loudly - that this book be paired with one of Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana books. It becomes easy to perceive Africa as full of horrific violence and abysmal poverty, because middle-class, stable Africa rarely makes the news, and McCall Smith accurately depicts Botswana in all its rather boring beauty. Unless we can see the people in Beah's book as people just like us, what happens to Beah and his friends and his family retains an air of fiction, whether it be true or not.

If you liked the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer - book list

If. You Liked. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. There. I said it.

I have put together this list I don't know how many times in the past couple of years, and I guess I just have to bite the bully (get it? like Twilight shoves all the other books around?) and admit that: 1) People want to read Twilight and 2) People LIKE Twilight.

I mean, why am I such a snob about these books anyway? What was I reading when I was eleven? I'll tell you what I was reading when I was eleven. No wait, read this book - Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading by Lizzie Skurnick - and you will know what I was reading when I was eleven. And I turned out ok. Reasonably ok. Ok shut up - am I exploring my nascent sexuality with my twin brother or luring my arch-enemy into a leech-infested pool? No. I am not. That was a rhetorical question by the way.

And maybe that's setting the bar kind of low, but I think it is some kind of proof that young readers of Twilight are not going to grow up and fall in love with pale, stalker-y older men. Pale, stalker-y older men are in fact CREEPY in real life, and almost all young women are viscerally and instinctively aware of this. We can trust our girls. (Hi, Olivia! We can trust you, right?)

There's still the issue, recently pointed out by someone at the Princeton Romance Writers Conference (and I am too lazy to go looking for it so I am going to paraphrase), that these paranormal romance novels represent something of a throwback to the old doctor/nurse kind of power differential that turned so many of us against romance novels to begin with (think Mr. Rochester and his employee - Jane - in Jane Eyre). Nowadays, romance novels feature women who are just as strong as, and on equal social footing with, the men, but in Twilight et al, the male character is by definition more powerful than the girl - he's immortal! he can change into an animal! or, uh, sparkle!

But that I don't know what to do about. EXCEPT. To recommend the following pretty good books as follow up reads for people who enjoyed the romance, the drama, the imaginative world of Twilight. Some of these books feature characters with supernatural powers or are set in alternate or future worlds, but some do not. There's at least one cute boy in each, but none of them has a female protagonist as wimpy as Bella.

The Luxe by Anna Godberson. Soapy and irresistably fancy, dripping with drama. Look at that dress!

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I reviewed it here earlier. Catching Fire, the next book in the series, has just been published.

Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception by Maggie Stiefvater. An extremely cute boy, some psychic torment, a well-written, lovely setting, and a harp. It's all good.

Prom Nights from Hell. Stories by Stephenie Meyer, Meg Cabot, Lauren Myracle, and other writers who are all about what it is to be a girl.

Prom Dates from Hell (Maggie Quinn: Girl vs Evil, Book 1) by Rosemary Clements-Moore. Good-looking teens, more dramatic than it looks, snappy dialogue. I reviewed the third book in this series a couple weeks ago.

Tithe by Holly Black. Anything by Holly Black, in fact.

Margo Lanagan's Black, White, and Red books. Dark, with a side of strange, drizzled with a stylish-sexy port wine reduction.

The somewhat overlooked Troll Bridge by Jane Yolen and her son, Adam Stempel. Music, magic, peril, attitude.

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray. The first in the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, about drama and magic in a Victorian boarding school.

Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause. Ms. Klause has been writing about the allure of the supernatural boy for longer than anyone, and in this one, the boy's a werewolf. Grrr!

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr

Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith

Peeps by Scott Westerfeld

Graceling by Kristin Cashore. Horses, swords, special powers, a fiery heroine, and a gorgeous guy. The sequel, Fire, will be out in early October.

and what the heck... you know what else any red-blooded reader of the Twilight books will like?

Flowers in the Attic, by V.C. Andrews. It's wrong. It's hot. It's so hot that it's wrong and it's so wrong that it's hot. And you just know "V.C. Andrews" is a pseudonym. Who do you think it is really? Wonder if that's what Salinger's been up to all this time.

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd, edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci - review

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd, edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci

Ok I'm not even fifty pages into this and I need to email everyone I know RIGHT NOW. (That's me paraphrasing Cordelia in the first ever episode of Buffy - AS IF YOU DIDN'T KNOW THAT). The first story is about what would happen if you were at ComicCon? and you were a Klingon? and you got real hammered and you woke up with your pants off in a room with a Jedi? You MAY have had to have seen the Seth-Rogen-on-Seth-Rogen fight scene in Fanboys to truly grok the matter-antimatter reaction that such a coupling implies.

And I CAN'T believe that just last week I wrote a completely, slobberingly geeked-out review of Highway to Hell, and I'm using all the same references again. Lame, lame, lame, lame, LAME!

Deep breath. No, okay, sorry I'm JUST too excited. All the little icons on the cover? First of all they're by eBoy, who does cool vinyl toys you can get at Atomic Pop and kidrobot, and that's cool - not geek cool, COOL. Second of all... they're the contributors! (Not the unkillable cheerleader or the knight or the old-school vampire, the more normal-looking people) Cecil Castellucci is wearing a Squidfire t-shirt, or at least that ought to be a Squidfire t-shirt. Scott Westerfeld is sporting green goggles like he's just been out machining the brass engine couplings on his armor-plated zeppelin.

HIS story is a situational analysis: two people, a briefcase full of cash, a bottle of vodka, two guns and a pair of handcuffs in a private compartment on a speeding train. What happens? Well that all depends on the alignment of the two people, now, doesn't it? He even includes a grid. Awww. Like anyone reading this book needs an explanation of Lawful vs. Chaotic.

It really should be called "Geekgasmic". There are all these Easter eggs scattered throughout: comics, jokes about furries, numerous bowls of M&Ms, and gratuitous Dr. Who references.

Oh my god you guys - and in the author bios, each person runs down his or her geek cred.

These people are FRRREAKS.

A LOT of them have been DMs. Greg and Cynthia Leitich Smith had the Starship Enterprise on their wedding cake. Libba Bray, who wrote the mystical Regency boarding school trilogy that started with A Great and Terrible Beauty, and whom I always pictured as, like, a collector of cameo brooches and lace jabots, apparently went as Columbia to Rocky Horror for TWO YEARS.

The stories are about geeks and geekiness, and they pull no punches. Very few of the geeks in this book are Secretly Hott Geeks, which is refreshing. Gamer geeks, sci-fi geeks, and Trekkers are represented, but so are literature geeks, a pep geek, and even a Golden Age geek. A surprising number of these stories are quite sensitive, but not in a LOTR climax kind of way, more in a Han-Solo-about-to-get-turned-into-a-penny kind of way.

Short story anthologies are always fantastic to hand to people who are not sure what or who to read next. Teens fall into this category at least as often as adults do, but there are precious few YA anthologies. This is the first I've seen in a while that features realistic fiction. With Geektastic, Black and Castellucci are doing teens a big service, introducing them to the likes of Barry Lyga, John Green, David Levithan, and other members of their herd.

Labels: fiction, superstar books, YA

Becoming Billie Holiday by Carole Boston Weatherford - review

Becoming Billie Holiday by Carole Boston Weatherford

‘Becoming Billie Holiday’ begins with a quote by Tony Bennett: “When you listen to her, it’s almost like an audio tape of her biography.”

This book could be that biography. Nearly one hundred first-person narrative poems detail Holiday’s life from birth until age 25, the age at which she debuted her signature song “Strange Fruit.” The poems borrow their titles from Holiday’s songs, a brilliant device that provides the reader with a haunting built-in soundtrack.

As in her previous book, ‘Birmingham, 1963,’ Weatherford’s language is straightforward and accessible – almost conversational. She captures Holiday’s jazzy, candid voice so adroitly that at times the poems seem like they could have been lifted wholesale from Holiday’s autobiography, ‘Lady Sings the Blues.’

Floyd Cooper’s sepia-toned, nostalgic mixed-media illustrations provide an emotional counterpoint to the text. Resembling old photographs seen through a lens of aching hindsight, they make explicit the pain that Weatherford studiously avoids giving full voice to in her poems. For, although Holiday’s early life was one of relentless rejection, discrimination, and poverty, the author stays true to her subject, and maintains a resolute and defiant tone, albeit one tinged with regret.

Prostitution, rape, jail time, violence, and minor drug use are described in the book, but it ends on the proverbial high note, before the singer’s drug use, alcoholism, and early death. This captivating book places the reader solidly into Holiday’s world, and is suitable for independent reading as well as a variety of classroom uses.

Labels: biography, black kids, diversity, poetry, superstar books