Librarilly Blonde

Agentarilly Blonde

2010-08-17T23:49:00.000-04:00

Confessions of an Unemployed Librarian is no more! I have rejoined the ranks of the working. But not as a librarian.

I've started work as an assistant at the Jane Rotrosen Agency. Publishing, as many know, has been a longtime interest of mine, and I am very blessed to have found a position in a literary agency that in the long term will teach me how to take on my own clients and guide them to great careers. In the short term, I'll be responsible for filing, reading queries, tracking submissions, and all kinds of other duties that help to keep an agency running. Glamorous? No, but it's needed and I'm a no-task-is-too-small sort of worker. I firmly believe that getting really good at doing the small things makes learning the big things that much easier.

So what does that mean for this blog?

1. I'm going on hiatus for at least three months as I get into the swing of things at my job. The reading needs of an agent are very different from that of a librarian and I'm trying to balance it so that I get the big titles in my realm of knowledge while still providing the best service I can to our clients. (Translation: Their manuscripts come before my reading the book that won last year's Printz.) Also? I am EXHAUSTED, both mentally and physically. This is a welcome and anticipated, but taxing, shift in my life. Or, as my life's motto has always been: Work hard, play hard, sleep hard.

2. A change of pace and theme when I return. I'll be reading and enjoying YA, of course, along with our agency's clients. Maybe I'll do query readings for YA and women's fiction. Maybe I'll find the next Tom Clancy. Who knows?

3. But I will quickly answer your agency-specific questions:

Yes, you can submit your query as per agency guidelines. The agency is interested in, and I quote from our web page, "romance, mystery, suspense, thriller, women's fiction, memoirs, and YA." On a more personal note, I can say that while I adore the YA authors we currently represent, we are always looking for more to join the agency family.
Yes, you can direct it to me. I cannot make any guarantees other than "I will read your query."
Yes, I'd be happy to talk to groups of librarians, teachers, or students about what I do. Contact me via email or twitter (carliebeth).

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

2010-08-06T11:02:00.000-04:00

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown, May 2010) is amazing. No two ways about it. It's also taken the #1 spot as the scariest book I've read this year.

What it's about: Nailer Lopez is employed as a ship breaker on a light crew. All day, he and his team work on wrecked ships in the Gulf of Mexico, salvaging what they can. Light crews, as opposed to heavy crews (not dark crews), are in the business of salvaging copper and other lightweight materials from the ships of yesterday. It's dangerous, it's toxic, and Nailer knows that as soon as he hits his growth spurt, he's done for in terms of being able to work on his crew. The people who live on his beach are mostly laborers, short on leisure time, money, and most importantly, loyalty. Then Nailer and his friend find the greatest treasure of their lives. After a hurricane, and we're talking a hurricane that makes Katrina look like a light drizzle, they find a wrecked boat full of riches. Only two things stand in the way of Nailer's life of luxury: His violent, greedy father and the girl, dubbed Lucky Girl, that he finds aboard the wreck. Keeping one step ahead of his father is a full-time job for Nailer, who knows that if Lucky Girl is discovered before she can find her people, she's as good as dead.

Salvaged thoughts: My only reservation about Ship Breaker is something that comes from entirely inside my own head, not the book itself. I really, really worry that this book is going to get pigeonholed as a "boy book," action and adventure and light on everything else. It has some amazing action, don't get me wrong, but it's so much more. With the Gulf Coast oil spill, it's timely, which is a very frightening thought considering that the lead time on novels is 18 months, give or take. The worldbuilding is extraordinary. Bacigalupi uses a third person voice that's anchored in events of the present. He doesn't bother providing much background on Nailer's world all in one or two data dumps, just throws in details as Nailer sees them. As a result, the details add up and you get to see that not only is Nailer living in an environmentally damaged world, but it's a world that's run by some really super-corrupt, super-evil people. Of course, Nailer doesn't take the time to think about this super corruption because he has much more important things to think about, like his daily survival. The book can be appreciated as a straightforward environmental thriller, sure, but it's also literary and horrifying in a psychological way. And lest you think I focus on the scary stuff, I also have to say that I found Nailer to be an inspiring character. He is morally upright and, in the immortal words of Dumbledore, makes the right choice between what is right and what is easy. He lives with so much uncertainty and violence, but triumphs over them when faced with tough decisions.

I could be entirely wrong about this pigeonholing. I hope I am. I'd love to see this book honored during the YALSA awards in January.

In other thoughts, 2010 has been a good year for adult authors writing YA between this and The Carrie Diaries, yes?

Review at io9 || Paolo Bacigalupi's blog || Review at Kids Lit

Been there, read that, bought the t-shirt

2010-08-04T17:21:00.003-04:00

"Let's go to Hot Topic," I said to Liz B. as we wandered the Willowbrook Mall on Sunday. I don't buy clothes there because I'm simply not cool enough to wear them, but I do love their stationery and accessories. We agreed that if nothing else, we could poke fun at the sparkly vampire beach towels (although, I confess, I really want a Team Carlisle shirt).

We enter the store and I hear her say, "Carlie, look at this!"

She was holding this t-shirt. (I don't have an image to post here; just click the link.)

There was squeeing.

I hadn't realized that there'd be Hunger Games apparel in anticipation of the release of Mockingjay. For the movie, sure, because movies are multi-million dollar projects with bigger marketing plans than books, even books like Mockingjay with its 1.5-million copy first print run. But this time, there are multiple t-shirts for a BOOK. A BOOK, people! This is awesome.

For those who prefer black t-shirts, Hot Topic made a white-on-black "Down with the Capitol" design, one that says "District 12 Tribute," a Hunger Games cover art shirt for those of us with a more simple, classic style, and my personal favorite in sentiment if not design, one that says "Girl on Fire."

Personally, I'll be wearing my "Team Peeta" shirt to whatever book release party I go to, though to be fair I'm also "Team it's okay with me if Katniss says no to both Peeta and Gale and devotes her life to rebuilding Panem rather than romance."

This is not a review of The Handmaid's Tale

2010-07-15T01:24:00.003-04:00

There were going to be reviews this week, and my thoughts on Ellen Wittlinger's wonderful editorial in this month's Horn Book, but instead I have been selected for the great honor of hosting some sort of disgusting virus for an indeterminate amount of time. All I really feel like doing is lying in bed, playing solitaire, and watching Beavis and Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection. So instead of a review, here's a silly blog quiz where you can paste in an entry and it will tell you which literary great your writing most closely resembles.

I write like
Margaret Atwood

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Mimi's Dada Catifesto by Shelley Jackson

2010-07-03T10:00:00.008-04:00

I wish this book had been around when I first read Rats Saw God. I mean, not that there's ever a bad time to go back and read Rats Saw God, but since I knew very little about dadaism then, this would have helped immensely. And made me smile, to boot.

Mimi's Dada Catifesto by Shelley Jackson is narrated by Mimi, a poor alley cat with an artist's soul. The other cats don't understand Mimi's need not just for a human who will feed her stomach, but who will feed her curiosity and need to create art. Her perfect human is Mr. Dada. After all, a man who balances a very tasty-looking fish on top of his head while yelling nonsense syllables must have the artist soul Mimi seeks in her human. Mr. Dada is a hard nut to crack, but Mimi has a plan to burrow her way into his heart. She'll leave him a Dadaist message that explains why he's the one and only human for her. Guiding her in her quest for a human are Laszlo, the logical pigeon, and a couple of cockroaches that reminded me of the mice in Babe.

The art accompanying Mimi's story provides an amazing visual backdrop to her Dadaist dreams. Jackson shows what Dadaist art is, isn't, and can be while making the form completely accessible to readers like me who can barely remember the difference between Manet and Monet. Young readers also get encouragement to create their own Dadaist art in the form of "Incredibly Great Poems" and galleries of found objects. The pictures often have a scattered look to them, which I think adds to the idea of Dada art coming from seemingly random things.

Mimi has starred reviews in Booklist and Kirkus. Not that she'd expect any less.

review from the Sacramento Book Review ||

Birthmarked by Caragh M. O'brien

2010-06-30T00:07:00.010-04:00

I read Birthmarked by Caragh M. O'Brien (Holt, 2010) because Melissa Rabey told me to, and the only thing I trust more than her taste in clothes is her taste in books. Once again, Melissa proves she can pick a winner, something both trendy and stylish.

The premise: Gaia (first syllable is pronounced like "guy," not "gay"), sixteen, is the apprentice to her mother, the sector's midwife. Gaia and her parents are mostly happy with their simple life outside the walled city called the Enclave. Gaia looks forward to learning more about midwifery. Every month, the first three babies born that month are brought, or "advanced," to the Enclave. Gaia doesn't like this ritual but she knows it's the law. She doesn't think that anyone has done much to act against the law until she comes home one night to an interrogation. Her parents are gone, arrested, and she must carry on her mother's work by herself in order to make a living. She can't deal with the lack of information about her parents and finds an underground group that can help her enter the Enclave. While in the Enclave, she performs an extraordinary feat: She delivers a full-term healthy baby from the body of an executed prisoner. Now she is simultaneously hero and criminal. Either way, she knows she has to get to her parents and rescue them from the Enclave. An unexpected ally in the form of an attractive young soldier with his own dark past joins Gaia when she is asked to break a code that could give the Enclave the key to saving many of its residents from genetic diseases.

What you'll love about it: Gaia kicks ass! Okay, well, she kicks ass as much as any other human would in her situation. In the face of danger she stands up for herself even when she's scared. It's not enough for the love interest to be hot; he was to be able to keep up with her. Gaia has an admirable sense of loyalty to those she loves and to the profession of midwifery. Through most of the book, she is hunted and has to think on her feet. She also comes face-to-face with the cruelty behind the Enclave's government. It does upset her, but it also inspires her to learn more about her own past and what her parents' work in their town did that got them arrested. I see more than one Katniss Everdeen comparison in the future.

Most likely to succeed? I know this book has a few things against it in terms of making the big sales: a striking but not bright-on-black cover, straightforward science fiction, no paranormal creatures to romance with. It has quite a lot, though, in its favor: A well-built dystopian world, fascinating and damaged people, and captivating writing that mixes action neatly with world-building. And as we know in the literary world, good writing trumps all. I'd love to see this show up on the Morris Award shortlist, as it definitely shows excellence by a first author.

Caragh M. O'Brien's website || review at The Compulsive Reader || review at Shut Up, I'm Reading

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book I: The Mysterious Howling

2010-06-23T11:00:00.001-04:00

When I think of the delightful Maryrose Wood, the first book that always comes to mind is Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love, which I love to recommend when I'm asked about romances appropriate for middle schoolers. So it's hard for me, in a way, to think of Maryrose as a writer of gothic MG. (Old dawg, new tricks, you know the drill.) I need to get over myself, and fast, because this new book of hers is gothic and Snickensian (Snicket+Dickens) and a fabulous read.

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book I: The Mysterious Howling (Balzer & Bray, March 2010) centers around Miss Penelope Lumley, a recent alumna of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females. She answers an ad for a governess and is thrilled to find that the job is at a beautiful estate. Sure, the residents are a little oblique as to what the actual governess duties will be, but Penelope can tolerate that. Then she meets the children.

They were raised by wolves. No, really.

Employing a little quick thinking and some animal psychology, Penelope is able to communicate with the children and later gain their trust and love. Not everyone in Ashton Place is as enamored of the children as she is, though. In fact, someone seems to be looking for a reason to send the children back into the wild. Penelope, however, is having none of that, and one should never underestimate the tenacity and smarts of a Swanburne graduate.

There is nothing about this book that isn't pure delight. Penelope's neuroses in the beginning of the book are charming (and all too familiar to me!), and she admirably works through her uncertainties by employing logic and a strong sense of what is right. The children are intelligent and kind at heart without falling into the trap of being overly precocious or smarter than the adults. Wood sets up a mystery at the end of the book because she's evil and now I have to wait for the next book, I mean, a good writer who is building a larger overreaching plot for the Incorrigible Children series. I love the timelessness of the setting and the story. I also think that with its four starred reviews, we could be looking at a Newbery contender.

review at Welcome to my Tweendom || review at KidsReads.com

The Duff by Kody Keplinger

2010-06-19T15:25:00.010-04:00

You know it's been a good BEA when weeks later, you're still unearthing yourself from the galleys. I'm hoping to get out some reviews of at least a few of my BEA haul, but we'll see.

First up: The Duff by Kody Keplinger (Poppy, September 2010). I will knock people down to get to advance copies of anything Poppy prints, and The Duff did not disappoint. I got a copy after hearing Cindy Egan, queen of Poppy, speak about it. Duff, she explained, is an acronym for designated ugly fat friend. The book is narrated by Bianca, who knows her two closest friends are gorgeous but never really thought of herself as fat and ugly until it's pointed out to her by Wesley Rush, a gorgeous sex-crazed egomaniac. Bianca wants nothing to do with Wesley, who insists on calling her Duffy. Too bad for her, they've got killer sexual chemistry. What starts for them as a sex-without-strings relationship evolves into a friendship when Bianca finds that not only is Wesley's life not perfect, but he's happy to listen to her about her own troubles. Then Bianca starts dating with the boy she's crushed on for years. So why is she still pining for Wesley?

What's good: The emotional complexity. Bianca's front of sarcasm hides her insecurities from almost everyone, and her relationship with Wesley doesn't morph into instant awesomeness once she realizes the trouble he hides. The female relationships were very positive, too, even when Bianca and her two BFFs drift apart for a while. Despite feeling like the Duff, Bianca's friends don't do anything that makes her think she's less than beautiful and cherished. I don't love the cover and I thought there were some cliched sentences and phrases that screamed "amateur writer," but the potential of the book to spark discussion far outweighs these blemishes.

I also saw in Variety that McG (producer of one of my favorite shows, Supernatural) is looking to produce the movie version. I think there are definitely cinematic qualities to the book, so I'll be interested to see what happens with it.

Kody Keplinger's website || review at Good Books & Good Wine || I don't have copies to give away but if you want mine and you're the first person to ask, you can have it.

Rush, big time

2010-06-13T00:38:00.008-04:00

A lot of people, now that I'm a confident, outgoing, stylish adult with a killer shoe collection and a makeup box to put Carmindy to shame, believe that I must have been popular in high school. Truth be told, I was neither super popular nor super unpopular. I wasn't the prettiest girl around, but no one turned to stone when they looked at me, either. I had friends, interests, activities, boyfriends from time to time, etc. I was mostly average.

The one thing about me that stood out was my devotion to all things band geek. I was a percussionist (and went on to get a degree in percussion), a drum major for the marching band, briefly sang in the choir, played in the school orchestra and jazz band, did well at Solo and Ensemble, you get the picture. And any high school drummer who devotes time to the instrument eventually hears the musical stylings of Neil Peart and is nothing short of hella impressed. When I first heard a recording of Rush at band camp in seventh grade, I was hooked. I had to run right out and get that recording of A Show of Hands so I could listen again and again to the drum solo track, "The Rhythm Method." Turned out that "The Rhythm Method" was a gateway drug. By the time I was a freshman in high school I had found all of Rush's albums on my own, and if you were the person who wanted to borrow Chronicles from the Niles Public Library that summer, I am really, really sorry.

Rush stayed with me through boyfriends and college and moving and grad school and more boyfriends and a husband and more moving and into my career. Rush was the first concert I ever saw (not saying how old I am, but it was the Counterparts tour, and if you're the person who stole my concert t-shirt out of the laundry at Lawrence, you're going to Hades). I made one of my first friends in college when Jeremy, seeing me walking down the hall in my Rush t-shirt, fell to his knees and said, "A girl Rush fan! A pretty girl Rush fan! Wow." Yes, female Rush fans are few and far between, but look at it this way: I never have to wait in line for the bathroom at their concerts.

Being a Rush fan for over half my life, you can imagine my happiness when I saw that Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, a documentary following the band's 35+ year career, was coming to theaters nearby for a one night engagement. Here's the trailer:

In short: Three geeky guys form a band, band puts out millions of records, the guys stay geeky, and now that people like Stephen Colbert have a big hand in pop culture, it's cool to like Rush. What keeps Rush relevant? Lyrics that resonate with their intelligent, mostly marginalized audience, and more musical technique in one finger than most bands will gain in a lifetime. The movie also has a 100 percent fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com. Missed it in the theaters? It'll be available on DVD June 29.

Even if you fall into the camp of "the sound of Geddy Lee's voice makes my ears bleed," consider Netflixing the movie. It's a fascinating look at what Rush has meant to today's pop culture leaders...and what they meant to yesterday's band geeks.

In a dark, dark Furnace...

2010-06-09T21:59:00.003-04:00

Still alive, just working on a lot of projects that I prefer not to discuss at this time. But!

It's going to be a long, dark rest of 2010 until Solitary: Escape From Furnace 2 comes out in December. To tide you (and me) over, here's an Escape from Furnace LOLCat, made especially by Courtney of Otaku Goddess, who is also a Furnace fan.

9781591585060

2010-03-02T14:19:00.009-05:00

No, it's not a phone number. Nor is it the number of excuses I've made for not blogging lately (though it's probably pretty close). Before I reveal this number's importance, I'll rewind a little.

Every now and again on this blog, or in comments to friends, I've said things to the extent of, "I will be a normal human being again when I'm not busy with the Chinese Democracy Project," or, "Sorry, can't talk, I'm on a deadline for the Chinese Democracy Project." That usually elicits a response of, "I didn't know you were interested in Chinese politics." I'm not, but I am interested in rock music. In rock music, Chinese Democracy is the name of the newest Guns N' Roses album, an album that famously took Axl Rose about 20 years to make. Less famously, I embarked on a project that took 4 years to make. That was way longer than I'd originally intended, so in homage to GN'R, I named my project after theirs. My project, however, was not an album, but a book, namely, this book:

and the number in the subject is, as I'm sure all avid readers know by now, its ISBN.

Isn't that a great cover, btw? Major win for the design people at Libraries Unlimited.

I haven't talked much about writing this book because there was a point in the writing process where I wasn't sure it was going to be published. I had huge problems with making the page count because this is strictly a reader's advisory guide, not a library services guide like Jack Martin's or a look at the history of GLBTQ YA literature like Michael Cart and Christine Jenkins's. By keeping the focus tight on YA books and following what I perceived to be the Genreflecting series vision, I sort of wrote myself into a corner. I had originally envisioned writing about movies, tv shows, music, and books, but that meant taking the focus off YA literature. It also meant that I had to be very judicious about what adult books I added. The Genreflecting series already has a book on GLBTQ literature for adults and I was charged with writing a companion, not a competing, title. What I ended up doing was writing in the introduction and chapters about how pop culture has some effect on GLBTQ YA lit and the people who read it. For examples...and more...you can read the book.

The book, which will be out on March 30, is available for pre-purchase through my publisher, Libraries Unlimited, Amazon.com, and major book distributors (B&T, Ingram, etc.).

The Girls by Lori Lansens

2010-01-18T09:08:00.003-05:00

The Girls by Lori Lansens is one of those books I kept moving down in my to-read pile. Not because it didn't look like a great book, but because I just had to read other books for other reasons. I had a little time to spare while visiting family, though, so I got to read it (finally!). It's an adult book, but one that I think could have very high appeal to teen readers as well.

Rose Darlen is mostly the narrator of this book. She's writing her autobiography. That's not an uncommon thing to do, but Rose is somewhat of an uncommon person. She and her sister, Ruby, are craniopagus twins, joined at the head. Separation was never an option, because they share an essential vein. They come into the world on the day of a tornado that takes the life of a local boy, an event that ties them unwillingly to one of their neighbors. Rose and Ruby are raised by the nurse that delivered them and her adoring husband, who they refer to as Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash. Lovey and Stash do everything in their power to always treat the girls as two separate people and encourage others to do the same. The Girls goes somewhat against the grain of what's popular in YA lit right now (not that it was ever intended to be a popular YA book, imho): Rose and Ruby are extraordinary people, but they get the most joy and meaning from ordinary events and things. In that way, it reminded me a lot of my all-time favorite book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

What impressed me the most about this book was Lansens's ability to write distinctly in the two girls' voices. Lots of books are told in two voices, but few are told in the voices of two people who are so close physically and emotionally. Rose, whose goal in life was to become a writer, writes like someone who reads, with lusher phrases and a larger vocabulary. Ruby is no less intelligent than Rose, but her dislike of reading in favor of television leads her to more forthright language. I didn't always like the characters as people, but I found them fascinating from beginning to end. Definitely a great life-story book, even if said life is outside the realm of experience of almost every one of its readers.

books are always a Hot Topic

2010-01-13T15:56:00.003-05:00

Am I the last person in the world to know that Hot Topic is now carrying Percy Jackson and the Olympians merchandise? I probably am. But check this out:

Bright orange Camp Half-Blood shirts!

Trident shirt!

Personally, I'm not much of a t-shirt wearer, but I would absolutely love for them to carry gold ballpoint pens with "Riptide" written (or engraved?) on them. Bonus points if there's a way to Velcro it into your pocket.

Cannot wait for the movie.

Into the Wild Nerd Yonder: intelligent, wise, magical, and strong

2010-01-03T17:22:00.002-05:00

Into the Wild Nerd Yonder by Julie Halpern is one of those books that I wish had been around when I was in high school. It's centered on Jessie, an average (not in a bad way!) sophomore who finds her circle of friends changing. Her two BFF's, Bizza and Char, have suddenly gone mall punk. They've developed a minor obsession with Jessie's brother's punk band and are using Jessie rather than being her friends. Bizza even hooks up with Van, the boy she knows Jessie has crushed on for years. Jessie's brother has gone from punk to preppy, even dating a popular girl. Jessie feels a little like she's lost her center, even though she maintains her love of audiobooks and making crazy print skirts. Where's a girl to drift? In this case, it's toward the nerds.

Though she resists their initial advances, Jessie finds herself enjoying the company of a group of Dungeons and Dragons players. Popular they're not, but Jessie finds them refreshingly honest, which is very much what she needs after the way Char and Bizza have treated her. There's even...gasp...a cute boy in the D&D group! It's not that Jessie isn't enjoying her time with her new friends, but she worries about her social standing and what it means for her longtime friendships and crushes if she develops new ones. Is it "once a nerd, always a nerd?"

I know I was prejudiced toward this book because it has a pink cover, but I also picked it up because I'm conversant in Nerd. Even if the cover had been blue, I'd still recommend it. Jessie is smart and funny, but not to the point where it sounds like the author just wants to be the next Joss Whedon. Halpern also does an excellent job of balancing Jessie's feelings about her friends. I saw how badly her friends were treating her, but I didn't want her to be lonely and alienated, either. She also has a really positive relationship with her brother, which warmed my heart. The way Jessie reacts to her changing friendships felt realistic to me. She's defined herself a lot by her friends, but doesn't give up on herself or fall into a pit of despair when she grows apart from them. I'd say this was a winner, but one doesn't really win a game of D&D, so I'll just say it rolled a 20.

My pile of Kindle-ing

2009-12-20T15:12:00.003-05:00

It happens to the best of us. We hear about a shiny new product, figure our lives are still okay without it, and go on with things. Then we get said product and wonder how we ever lived.

Such is the case with my Kindle.

(Disclaimer: Though I am an Amazon Affiliate because I like being able to get a new DVD every now and again, in this case I am just a satisfied customer.)

When you live in an apartment and own a lot of books, space becomes a major issue. When your husband threatens to divorce you if he has to move any more of your books, that's also a major issue. For me, the Kindle solved both those major problems; I can fit my entire library on there with room to spare, and I can carry it in my purse. And since I've had a lot of questions about it, here are my answers:

No, not every book is available for the Kindle, and the Kindle cannot read e-pub format books. But I figure that Amazon has 400,000+ books available for the Kindle. I'm not going to get bored anytime soon.
You have to read your Kindle under the same conditions you'd read a paper book, in terms of lighting. The Kindle is not backlit, because reading on a backlit screen for long periods of time is very hard on the eyes. I'm also a loyal iPhone user, and believe me, I spent the first 24 hours of my Kindle ownership poking the screen and listening to Mr. Carlie yell, "It's not an iPod! It doesn't have a touch screen!" Of course, there is a Kindle for iPhone app, which allows me to read my downloaded books on my phone and then sync the two so my Kindle catches up to where I've read on my phone. I heart technology.
I can hold a drink in one hand and read on my Kindle in the other and not worry about getting food on the pages. This is important!
Yes, Kindle books are $9.99. Sometimes they're more, sometimes less. Lots of classics are available for free.
You don't have to have internet at home to use the Kindle. In fact, you don't even need to own a computer. It works over a 3G network, just like cell phones.
No, I don't think the Kindle, or any other e-book reader, is going to kill the publishing industry because...

Let's think about this for a minute. THE hot new electronic toy to have is a device dedicated to reading. When was the last time that happened? Sure, the Kindle plays MP3s, but it's way too small in terms of capacity to hold a music collection. One significant person in my life who travels a lot adores his Kindle because it means he doesn't have to pack heavy books in his luggage. I like that I can read one-handed if I have to ride the subway standing up. People who love to read but have limited space don't have to worry about their volume of book ownership. Since the font size on the Kindle is adjustable (though the Kindle only has one font), people who are visually impaired don't have to wait for large-print versions of books. And those who like to mark their books (not I, but there are some) can still make notes and bookmarks via the keyboard.

There's even a discussion about the Kindle at Jezebel here.

I know lots of people have found various faults with the Kindle, but I personally love mine. Like Urban Decay Primer Potion and the Tide pen, it's changed my life for the better.

The Help: You need it

2009-12-10T13:22:00.009-05:00

I know it probably makes me uncool to blog about a huge bestseller, but I was never one of the cool kids, anyway.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is a book that I might normally pass up. It's historical fiction, set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi. It's also most definitely women's fiction, which I've never thought was my thing. What got me to pick it up? First, I got it as a gift. Thanks, Mom! Second, the people I talked to who had read it said that what made The Help stand out were the voices. I'm a sucker for a great voice, so I picked up the book and now there's a day missing from my life (in a good way).

To be precise, the book has three voices: Skeeter, a white recent college graduate who is living at home in Jackson with no boyfriend and no job; Minny, an outspoken black maid with a talent for cooking; and Aibileen, also a black maid, who is devout and kind. When Skeeter is rejected for a job at Harper & Row, she is advised to work on her writing and really think about the stories she wants to tell. This leads to Skeeter investigating what happened to her beloved maid, Constantine, who stopped writing to Skeeter while she was away at college. In the course of finding out what happened to Constantine, Skeeter grows closer to Aibileen and decides that the stories she wants to tell are the stories of black maids who work for white families in Jackson. In the era of Jim Crow laws, just getting the maids together to tell these stories for the book endangers their livelihood. The women must meet in secret and when Skeeter's best friend Hilly gets wind of Skeeter's writing the book, she sets out to make things miserable for Skeeter. While Skeeter and Aibileen work hard to keep the book a secret, Minny is keeping a secret of her own: Her employer, Miss Celia, will do anything to keep her husband from knowing that she's hired Minny.

The voices make this book unforgettable, definitely, but I think there's another aspect to it, and that is that Stockett treats great human kindness as well as cruelty with equal care. She also stays far away from two of my biggest pet peeves in historical fiction, which are characters who rebel with twenty-first century sensibility in a time when they knew full well what the consequences could be for doing so, and forgetting that not everyone is super affected by every major historical event that comes along. Stockett always keeps her focus on the people, which I feel should be the focus of all good works of fiction. She gave her characters fascinating yet real lives, so they only needed each other to make for a great book. The setting is just as vivid as the characters, and it made me very glad to live in a time of air conditioning. No breakneck adventure, no zombie apocalypse, no torrid doomed romance, just an absorbing, thought-provoking story of three lives.

Holes Goes to Hell

2009-12-04T00:24:00.006-05:00

Know how much I wanted to read this book? I bought it. (Alas, my local library system doesn't own it and I never got an advance copy.) Not only that, I paid retail for it. I don't remember the last time I paid retail for a book. I have to say, this was well worth every cent.

Lockdown: Escape from Furnace by Alexander Gordon Smith (FSG, 2009)

The premise: Fourteen-year-old Alex has led a life of petty crime for the past two years, stealing money and valuables from empty houses. Stealing gives him a thrill, until the night he and his friend Toby break into the wrong house. Alex and Toby are caught not by the cops, but by three men who seem to be right out of a sci-fi movie. To Alex's horror, they kill Toby and frame Alex for his murder. And there's no standard juvenile detention facility for Alex, either. He's sent to serve his sentence in Furnace, the worst correctional facility since Camp Green Lake. It's a state-of-the-art prison built a mile underground into solid rock. No sunlight, minimal air, no fresh water.

The worst part of Furnace isn't the heat, or the tiny cell, or even the prison gangs. It's the monster skinless dogs who can rip you to shreds in about five seconds. Or maybe it's the wheezers, who come during the night. Once they mark you, you're in for a fate worse than death. You won't find any senior citizen inmates in Furnace. No one lasts that long.

Alex refuses to give up on himself, no matter how bleak Furnace is. He clings to his innocence and he's determined to find a way out.

My personal thoughts: This book hits all of my favorite book buttons. First, an institutional setting. I don't know why, but I love books that take place in prisons and hospitals. Second, the action is bloody and unforgiving. Many Darren Shan references are made by both the author and the characters. Darren Shan is the first author I thought of when reading this book. Both authors use breakneck speed and incredibly creepy half-sized creatures, and neither shies away from describing every gory detail and injury. (Translation: This book is not for the faint of stomach.) They also both remember that a book can have all the blood and gore of all the Saw movies put together, but no reader is going to get past page ten if the protagonist doesn't have some heart and charm. No matter how frightened he is by the prison, Alex retains his sense of right and wrong. He is a thief, yes, but not a violent criminal. Nor is he someone who wishes ill on his fellow inmates or harm them without provocation. I wanted to see Alex succeed, but I also couldn't wait to see what kind of prison atrocity Smith would spring on us next. It's a page-turner, no doubt, and I almost wish I'd waited to read this until book 2 was out.

Lockdown is the first in a planned five-part series. I don't know if I can take the suspense!

Lockdown's page at Macmillan US || Alexander Gordon Smith's website || author interview at The Discriminating Fangirl || Jen Robinson's review

Listen up: Tender Morsels

2009-11-17T21:38:00.010-05:00

Now that I'm finally caught up on my Printz Honor books from last year, I will say this: Not only is the world of YA literature a better place because Margo Lanagan is in it, but I want to know what goes on in her head all day.

<--- Australian cover, because I like it British cover, because it rocks and says, "This girl lost her pearl earring while she was kicking ass and taking names." --->

Tender Morsels (that's a link to the print book, but this review is of the audio version) is a retelling of one of my favorite fairy tales, "Snow White and Rose Red." Only you know that when Margo Lanagan touches a story, it turns to gold. She roots the story in brutality; the Snow White character, Branza, and her Rose Red sister, Urdda, are conceived via incest and rape, respectively. Despite the violence others visit on her, Liga, their mother, is kind and wants a peaceful life for Branza and Urda. With the help of a little magic, she wakes up one morning in a brighter, gentler version of her town, and raises her girls to their teen years. Then Urdda passes through a portal to an alternate version of her town. Time flows differently in this new world, and when Urda comes back, she finds that years have passed in the life she knew.

Since the Snow White and Rose Red story wouldn't be complete without the bear and the dwarf, Lanagan tells their stories and makes them so much more than just the cranky man and the cursed prince. There's a witch involved, but she's not the evil witch of most fairy tales. These are complex people with lives and loves whose stories are told with the most amazing turns of phrase. It's a book that's not afraid to address all of the emotions that make us human, even the ugly ones.

Listen to a clip here.

The readers, Anne Flosnik and Michael Page, alternate the male and female voices with accents that make you feel like you're lost in a fairy tale land, wandering forests and fields. There's such a huge range of emotion in this book that it really speaks to their talents that these readers kept me captivated through both the dark and light parts of the tale. They convey wisdom from the older characters and love and wonder from the younger ones. It's a long book, 12 CDs around 45-60 minutes each, but I'm glad I listened to it. When listening, we can't help but substitute our own voices, and the audio version of Tender Morsels really helped me imagine the brutal, amazing world Lanagan created.

Review copy courtesy of Brilliance Audio.

I read bad books so you don't have to

2009-10-23T11:23:00.014-04:00

For the past few weeks, I've had to cut back on blogging because I've been busy with, among other things, an internship at a well-known NYC literary agency. It's an agency where I'd love to work someday, and I love the intern work. Getting my first "job" in publishing, though, has really changed the way I think about and read YA literature and how it gets into the hands of readers, and also why librarians ask the questions they do about publishers' mindsets.

On an average day at my internship, I might read 8 query letters. Queries, in short, are a one-page letter from an author to a potential agent selling the agent the idea of the book. A query's job is to make the agent say, "This sounds intriguing. I'd like to read this book." Now, do some math. If the average agent gets 8 queries a day, multiplied by the number of agents at the agency (let's say there are 5), that's 40 queries a day, multiplied by 7 days a week = 280 queries a week, 14,560 queries a year. It takes a lot to stand out among 14,000+ other book ideas. If there's one thing I've learned here, it's that good writing can make any plot or character appealing. I've also learned that a query and the first fifty pages of the novel it describes aren't always equal. Some queries that seemed so-so to me have turned into 50 pages that made me hassle the author (not really, but I wanted to) for more. In short, I get to see a lot of ideas both good and bad, and trust me, those who complain that "there are no good books anymore" need to see the slush pile. I'll SHOW them where the no-good books end up.

In order to be good at your publishing job, you do have to read, but because I'm now enjoying a longer commute and longer hours, I'm not reading as much unless the author is a client of the agency. I'm still reviewing for Kirkus and VOYA but I'm not going to print those reviews here, obviously. Future reviews will include Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan and How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford. After I get some much-needed sleep.

Listen up: Carter Finally Gets It

2009-10-06T21:00:00.006-04:00

Brilliance Audio has this cool new program where they send out review copies of their audiobooks, and when I got the box of Fall 2009 titles, I didn't know what to listen to first. With the help of my to-read list and a recommendation from my good friend Liz B, I picked up Carter Finally Gets It by Brent Crawford, which on the surface sounds like everything no one wants right now.

Besides being realistic fiction, Carter is set in the suburbs where the weather varies. The main character is from a white, middle-class family with two happily married parents and an older sister who sometimes antagonizes him, but generally isn't too bad. Carter is not the smartest or dumbest or handsomest or ugliest kid in the class. He has friends, but he's not super-popular. If you press me, I'll tell you that the book doesn't even have a plot; it's just a series of events and mishaps in Carter's freshman year. No vampires. No zombies. Nothing hi-tech. It's everything that could make for a boring book, but as Miss Snark always said: Good writing trumps all. In this case, good writing plus a great voice performance trump all.

Reader Nick Podehl's calling in life is to be a fourteen-year-old boy. Carter is a boy with a rich, dynamic inner monologue, and Podehl beautifully captures Carter's highs as well as his lows. Podehl also brings delight when he reads in the voices of Carter's friends and family, particularly the girls. Crawford's characters are real and recognizable to any reader, and when Podehl reads through the speech of fourteen-year-old girls caught up in fourteen-year-old boy/girl politics, you'll feel like you're in the hallway at a high school.

Carter reminded me a lot of another favorite guy-centered realistic book: Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie by David Lubar. It's got that sort of appeal where teens will read it and laugh, and adults will read it and laugh...and then cringe.

retailer info page at Brilliance Audio || Brent Crawford's website || The New York Post finally gets it || audiobook review at Green Bean Teen Queen

Review copy courtesy of Brilliance Audio.

Refresh, Refresh: The waiting is the hardest part

2009-10-05T19:38:00.005-04:00

I don't review a lot of graphic novels because my knowledge of art can generously be described as "lacking," but when I heard about Danica Novgorodoff's graphic retelling of Benjamin Percy's short story "Refresh, Refresh," I knew it was one I wanted to read.

Refresh, Refresh follows three teen boys, Cody, Josh, and Gordon, whose fathers are serving in the Marines. Stuck in their small Oregon town, they form a fight club so they can strengthen themselves against their enemies. They party, they go camping, they cause more trouble than they solve, and they refresh, refresh their email, hoping for a message from their fathers. Seasons pass and the boys, seniors in high school, make important decisions about their futures. Cody is sure he wants to become a Marine and fight terrorists, and Josh takes flak from his friends when he confesses that he'd rather go to college than join the armed forces. All three boys also feel stress at home, because they've become the men of their respective houses.

I'm sure this is a book that will be mentioned when the inevitable, "Do you know any books about teens whose fathers have gone off to war?" readers' advisory question is asked, but Refresh, Refresh is not just a book about a parent at war. It's about grieving someone who may or may not be dead, and it's about three boys trying to move forward with their lives when uncertainty holds them back. In trying to become strong, Cody, Josh, and Gordon show their biggest weaknesses and how isolated they feel in their own families and among their peers. Novogodoff uses a fair amount of dialogue at the beginning of the book, but the last ten pages are almost entirely wordless. It doesn't end on the happiest note, but it does end realistically, something this reader appreciated.

review at Pop Candy || Danica Novgorodoff's Refresh, Refresh site || Author interview at Comic Book Resources || review at Reading Rants!

review copy courtesy of First Second Books

A fabulous Orlando vacation

2009-09-18T00:03:00.002-04:00

Completely off the topic of book reviews, has anyone else wondered lately what's become of everyone's favorite blond elf-boy, Orlando Bloom? For about 5 years there he was everywhere, from Extras:

to invading the daily comic strip FoxTrot in the collection Orlando Bloom Has Ruined Everything.

In my neverending serendipity, it looks like the Huffington Post wondered the same thing today, and they've got a very interesting explanation as to the trajectory of Bloom's career: The surprising and unfair cinematic demise of Orlando Bloom.

(I disagree about Troy, though. The overarching problem in Troy is that it is a movie best watched with the sound off. Bloom was just one cog in that wheel.)

Kissed by the Devil

2009-09-17T15:55:00.012-04:00

It wasn't supposed to work.

When I heard about The Devil's Kiss by Sarwat Chadda (Hyperion, 2009) during Book Expo, I had my doubts. A book about a girl Templar? I'd already read three Templar books this year and none of them were terribly appealing. A girl who spends her days training to hunt ghuls, as the job of the modern Templar is to protect humanity from the supernatural? Eh, I'd seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It sounded like a recipe for disaster, but I was so very wrong.

It works. Oh my, does it work. It's absolute proof that good writing can conquer all.

The premise: Billi (short for Bilquis) SanGreal has trained all her life to be a member of the Knights Templar, who work underground in the 20th century as demon hunters. Billi is nearing the point where she will swear fealty to the Templars forever. Despite the Templar training, she is still completely recognizable as a teenage girl at odds with her strict father after her mother's death. Billi's oldest friend is Kay, a powerful Oracle who couldn't fistfight his way out of a paper bag. For the past year, Kay has been honing his psychic powers in Jerusalem, and he's come back with some pretty annoying abilities. Billi, frustrated with Kay and wanting to get away from the Templars, falls for Michael. Michael is smart, hot, and interested in Billi. In fact, he's almost too good to be true.

Kay and Billi discover that Kay has drawn the Angel of Death to earth via a cursed mirror, and that means trouble for humanity. Kay is a great psychic, no doubt, but we're talking the Angel of Death, bringer of everyone's favorite of the Ten Plagues. It's the biggest, most evil thing Billi and the Templars have ever fought, and they don't know if this is a battle they can win.

Why you'll love it: With a girl who can kick some serious demon booty at the center of the plot, it would have been easy for this to be another sassy supernatural book with a pink cover. Chadda instead takes a more serious tone, crafting a stubborn and admirable character in Billi. There's barely a technology reference to be found; there are mentions of a cell phone but this book could take place anytime after 1999 or so. I was very impressed by Chadda's use of language, too. He's foregone slang in favor of plain yet effective dialogue, classic plot lines, and well-paced action scenes. The names of the Templars are a tribute to Arthurian legends: Gwaine, Percival, Kay, Arthur, etc. Templar history is covered without being dumped on the reader, and it's delivered in a way that might even inspire readers to learn more about the Templars. In terms of topic this is a timely book, but it's one that's going to last. Diversity, adventure, sexual tension, some pretty good insults, and family angst never go out of literary style.

Sarwat Chadda's website || Liz B's review ||

The Librarilly Blonde Authorcrush Series, Part 2: Tim Tharp

2009-09-16T15:06:00.009-04:00

Welcome to the second in an indeterminate number of installments in the Librarilly Blonde Authorcrush Series. What constitutes an authorcrush? See this post.

Today's honoree: Tim Tharp

The attraction: Southern settings and first-person narration that will blow you away.

The books:

Knigh ts of the Hill Country (Knopf, 2006). I didn't read this until it was nominated for a spot on Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults, and then I couldn't shut up about it. I can take or leave sports books, generally. I figured this would be another football hero story, maybe with some girl angst. There is a football hero story and girl angst, but to label this book with only those words would do it a great injustice. Using slow pacing and subtle details, Tharp lays out the story of Hampton Green, whose greatest successes come on the football field. He's part of the five-time championship Kennisaw Knights and has a talent and instinct for the game. Everyone in town expects that Kennisaw will win another state championship, but Hampton knows something they don't: His best friend and fellow teammate, Blaine, is fighting an injury that could end his football career. This knowledge and the pain make Blaine increasingly bitter, to the point where he's not afraid to get in fights and engage in behavior unbecoming of a Knight. Blaine means the world to Hampton, who is also trying to deal with his mother's new boyfriend, but Hampton doesn't know how much longer he can rein Blaine in.

The Spectacular Now (Knopf, 2008) is...spectacular. I reviewed this last December and you can read my thoughts here.

What draws Tharp's books together, and what makes me squee in my authorcrush, is the way Tharp captures everyday emotions and the subtleties of boys who participate in seriously un-subtle behaviors. Hampton, for all he can do on the football field, is insecure in his academic and social abilities. Sutter tries to hide his insecurities in loud, drunken behavior. Both characters, however, think and feel deeply about their friends and families. These are the type of books I'm absolutely dying to see more of: Emotionally invested stories with male main characters. Tharp's books (somewhat like Christopher Krovatin's) understand that teenage boys, crude and stinky as they may be, also feel a range of emotions that deserve to appear in YA fiction. Emotions are not things to be afraid of in guy-centric YA, and Tharp understands that. He knows that for a book to make an impact and stay there, it has to hit the heart. So, basically, if I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, I'd want to write like Tim Tharp.

Previous authors in the Authorcrush Series:

Christopher Krovatin

Peer pressure potato peel pie

2009-09-15T15:00:00.010-04:00

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial, 2008) is a book I only read because of peer pressure. Everywhere I went, it seemed that people were talking about it. It's not the sort of book I seek out: epistolary, historical, some romance...those are three of my strikes. Because I am a literary lemming, I got out my library card and requested it. Skipping the flap copy, I dove right in.

Picture it: London, 1946. Juliet Ashton is a writer who made a name for herself writing columns under a pen name for the London Spectator. She's proud of her success, but a series of letters to her editor, Sidney Stark, show that she's at a crossroads. What should she write next? While Juliet ponders this, she receives a letter from a Mr. Dawsey Adams of St. Martin's Parish, Guernsey. Dawsey has a book of Juliet's, a collection of essays by Charles Lamb, and he just had to write to see if she knew where he could get more of Mr. Lamb's work.

A book that revolves around people who love books has to be good, right?

The letters between Juliet and Dawsey evolve into Juliet's correspondence with the members of the Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Society, which formed not as a literary society but as a cover for a group of people being out after curfew on their German-occupied island. Through their letters, Juliet learns that the people of Guernsey survived near-starvation and being cut off from the news during the war. In much the way that people form friendships over the internet today, Juliet forms bonds with the readers (and writers) of Guernsey. Her letters to her publisher and best friend are observant, funny, and inspiring. Guernsey goes on to become the idea for Juliet's next book, and the people are the kind of friends she's wanted all her life.

Before I read this book I couldn't have found Guernsey on a map, but now I'm intrigued by its story. For me, this was a "good writing trumps all" book, because even though I'm not the average reader of women's fiction or historical fiction, I stayed with this book because of the voices. The way Juliet fell in love with the people of Guernsey reinforces the power of the written word. The peripheral characters were most interesting for what they didn't relate to Juliet as much as what they did. (And I loved the character who wanted to be Miss Marple and decided she would knit and observe the world.) Books brought these people together, and books are how they relate to each other. That is something anyone who loves to read, librarian or not, can understand.

The Unnameables: Thinking the unthinkable

2009-09-14T15:06:00.001-04:00

Sometimes a book just walks into your life at the right time.

First, I saw this tweet on the Kirkus Twitter. The most tragically overlooked book of 2008? If Vicky Smith says it is so, then it's probably true.

Second, my husband was working from home one day and over lunch we got into a discussion of Project Runway. Though I can't sew a stitch, I love clothes and I always enjoy seeing the PR challenges. He, being, well, a guy, can't understand the PR allure.

"Why make these crazy clothes that aren't even practical?" he asked.

"I like to think of the PR challenges more as art, and art doesn't always have to be wearable."

"But what's the point of clothing that isn't wearable?"

The Unnameables by Ellen Booraem (Harcourt, 2008) tackles just this kind of question. It's set on an island in a time that is, well, right about now. The people of the island formed their government and society around a book: A Frugal Compendium of Home Arts and Farme Chores by Capability C. Craft (1680) as Amended and Annotated by the Island Council of Names (1718-1809). On the island, occupation and name are the two most important things in the world. Your surname comes from your occupation, hence the island has names like Carpenter and Glazer and Potter, but no Weasley, Malfoy or Chang. Things in nature are named for their function, too. A bee, for example, is a Honeybug, and a maple tree is a Sap Tree.

In the midst of all this practicality is Medford Runyuin, who was rescued from a shipwreck as a baby and raised by Boyce Carver. Boyce has taught Medford the carving occupation, which Medford enjoys. His talent at carving, however, is also Medford's biggest shame: He's using his carving talents to make things that have no purpose. Useless Objects, they're called on the island. Useless Objects cannot have names, and making Unnameable things is grounds for exile.

Enter the Goatman. (Come on, do I really have to say anything else? There's a Goatman!) Thanks to his wanderings, Medford knows that this is not the first time a Goatman has come to the island. Revealing this knowledge is...you guessed it, a really good way for Medford to get kicked out of the only home he's ever known. Only it's not so easy to hide a Goatman who can control the wind.

Kirkus was totally right about The Unnameables. I hadn't heard of it before I read that tweet, and it was tragically overlooked. Booream's characters live in modern years but they speak, for the most part, like they're still in 1809. It's a third-person MG allegory, a look at what can happen if we all forget that the arts are just as important a part of life as the practical things. The language can be a little hard to get through at first, but readers who stick with it will enjoy Medford's company and his sense of humor. It reminded me a lot of The Giver, with the adolescent transition into a career and the one boy who is separated from his peers by his simply having emotions.

Don't overlook this one. To do so is simply Unnameable.

Ellen Booraem's website || Kirkus review

Just take those old books off the shelf

2009-09-07T21:17:00.021-04:00

Though I might be the last person on the planet to read Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading by Lizzie Skurnick, I've been a fan of Skurnick's Fine Lines feature at Jezebel almost since it debuted. Fine Lines is one of those terrific ideas where you read it, kick yourself, and say, "Why didn't I think of that?" For non-Jezebel readers, Fine Lines is a weekly feature that recaps a classic YA novel from the 1960's, '70's, or '80's (I know, right? Genius!), and Shelf Discovery is the book of recaps. It also has guest contributions from authors including Meg Cabot, Cecily von Ziegesar, Jennifer Weiner, and Margo Rabb.

Skurnick, the original Book Thief, writes from her personal collection of vintage YA novels, dividing the book into chapters like "She's at that Age: Girls on the Verge" and "You Heard it Here First: Very Afterschool Specials," highlighting ten books per chapter, give or take. Because this book is a memoir and not an analysis of reading, Skurnick recaps the books that are near and dear to her heart...which are also books that are near and dear to the hearts of many Gen X women. Those are the people Skurnick speaks to, rather than the librarians and academics of YA literature. Reading her writing makes me feel like I'm talking to a really cool, smart friend who understands how much these books formed our worlds when we were teens (and younger). We're older and wiser now, and we can look at things like Harriet Welsch's growing empathy in Harriet the Spy and the ultimately bleak endings of Blubber and The Cat Ate My Gymsuit with an eye for literary technique, but ultimately, we are still ten years old and reading these books, reacting to them viscerally and re-reading with hunger. Reading Skurnick makes me unafraid to giggle and gasp and OMG as I read Go Ask Alice and Flowers in the Attic. I confess I've only read about half the books in Shelf Discovery, but Skurnick's writing makes me want to go pick up many more. (Except Island of the Blue Dolphins. No force on this earth will ever make me believe that book is anything but deathly boring.)

After I read, I got to thinking about the roles that parents, friends, and imagination play in these novels of decades past. The part of me newly indoctrinated into the children's publishing business wonders how many of these books could be published today, just as they are save for a few technology and fashion updates. Then again, in some of these books, technology updates would wreck the plot. A lot has changed in terms of pop culture, technology, parenting, and the idea of independence, which are all things that govern the background of YA literature. The books in Shelf Discovery all give indication as to some of the people who are writing, editing, and selling YA today. Which gives me hope for the genre. Well, not just hope...knowledge that a passion for books will pass on to future generations.

Now what I'd really love to see a the version of Shelf Discovery in 2020.

Methland by Nick Reding

2009-09-03T22:15:00.002-04:00

Lately I have this crazy way of picking out books to review: If it looks interesting, I pick it up. I'm a bit of a crime buff and I usually read nonfiction when reading adult books. That brings me to today's review, for Methland by Nick Reding.

For four years, Reding tracked the effects of meth in Oelwein, Iowa, which has been referred to as the meth capital of the world. Of course, about 70 other towns have this distinction, too, but this is Oelwein's story. Many of Oelwein's residents work in agriculture, and came to meth because it gave them the stamina to last through multiple shifts in agriculture factories, shifts they needed to stay afloat financially. Meth has two properties that make it a problem that can swallow a small, economically disadvantaged town: It's easy to make and one of the most addictive substances on the planet. Reding doesn't spare a lot of details about meth's effects on the body and what can happen when meth manufacturing goes terribly wrong. (Given that meth manufacturers make meth from cold pills and hazardous chemicals with highly flammable residue, this occurrence is not uncommon.) Reding's protagonist is Nathan Lein, a county prosecutor who deals with the fallout from local -- which becomes national and international -- drug use and trafficking.

Even though I have never lived in a small town or known anyone affected by meth, I felt the desperation Reding writes about in terms of small-town economies and how the battle against meth is constantly uphill. Oelwein was home to one of the country's first meth empires, built by a woman who couldn't kick meth even after years in federal prison. What makes this book a success is Reding's appeal to the heart rather than to the mind. He shows readers how laws meant to stop the production of meth have done practically nothing. He makes us feel the strain on Oelwein's population and knows that there's no one singular cause for its meth problem. In parts I wanted more, but I also realize that it's hard to fit four years' worth of research into one 275-page book.

Methlandbook.com || NY Times review || Methland page at Bloomsbury USA

Reading the book is, like, so 2008

2009-08-27T19:45:00.004-04:00

I'd like to thank Entertainment Weekly for undoing the work of lots of great book reviewers out there in their review of Catching Fire. Concerning this review, EW's incompetency is simply astounding.

Honestly, I don't care that EW gave the book a "C." The letter grades that EW assigns books, movies, and music are really more a ballpark estimate to me than anything else. What ticks me off is that the reviewer doesn't appear to have read The Hunger Games OR Catching Fire, yet complains that the book lacks "the erotic energy that makes Twilight, for instance, so creepily alluring." (I wish I could make that up. I'm a little skeeved out just reading it.)

Really, EW? That was low. It's a comparison of apples and pineapples. Catching Fire isn't meant to have erotic energy. It's a post-apocalyptic adventure. It's not meant to be "creepily alluring." I'm willing to bet that the reviewer, Jennifer Reese, has never read a YA novel other than TSVB. Of course, she doesnt need to, because TSVB is representative of the entire genre, right? I mean, according to her review standards, I can give Julie and Julia the same letter grade/review that I give Methland because they're both memoirs, right? And I can say that Methland is an inferior book because it's not happy and about food, yes?

I'm all for comparing similar books in a review. That's good reader's advisory and it's an essential part of developing a book's marketing plan. What brings down the quality of a review is expecting one book to be representative of an entire genre, as EW has done, and complaining when books in that genre aren't all the same. It's not fair for to give Catching Fire a bad review because it's not what Ms Reese wanted it to be. You might as well get mad at a pair of pumps for not being a pair of Wellington boots.

Now I need to go shoe shopping.

The Librarilly Blonde Authorcrush Series, Part 1: Christopher Krovatin

2009-08-24T23:54:00.021-04:00

Welcome to part 1 of a new, maybe regular feature on Librarilly Blonde: The Authorcrush Series.

Each of the posts in the Authorcrush Series will spotlight a writer who I, well, have a crush on as an author. Authors may be male or female (or neither, or both) and write in any genre, but what they all have in common is some aspect of their writing, their in-personality, or both that makes me swoon like an eighth-grade girl with a crush. Hence the name. Authors who are part of this series also get this endorsement from me: I would pay retail for any of their books.

The first honoree: Christopher Krovatin

The attraction: Raw honesty and male characters with feelings.

The books:

Heavy Metal and You (Scholastic, 2006) is the surprisingly sweet story of Sam, a metalhead who falls in love with straitlaced theater aficionado Melissa. I confess, I was totally late to the Heavy Metal and You party because, well, you know how it is when there are more books than hours in a day. In fact, I didn't read it until after I saw Krovatin speak at the NJLA conference this past spring. I was impressed with how thoughtful yet unpretentious he was about his writing. To make things even more awesome, he liked heavy metal music! To date, I have met exactly one other librarian who likes heavy metal and hard rock as much as I do. We are few and far between in the profession and I couldn't help but admire a well-spoken YA author who also understands the deep need for the existence of Slayer, Celtic Frost, and Iron Maiden. Though the rocky romance was fun to read, I fell hard for the way Krovatin explores boys' feelings and how much he loves heavy metal and its fans. Heavy metal fans, though they look scary, are actually some of the most accepting, laid-back people around. As observed on GraphJam:

Thinking that my authorcrush might have come simply from the joy of finding another person in the YA world who likes their drums fast and their lyrics dark, I picked up Krovatin's second book.

Venomous (Atheneum, 2008) tackles yet another complex male main character, this one with an anger problem. Locke, sixteen, knows that his brand of anger is a little more vicious than everyone else's. He tries to control it but he finds that he's losing more and more of himself to it. It's got graphic interludes, where Locke tries to give a face and backstory to his venom. As he did in Heavy Metal and You, Krovatin did a great job exploring the wide range of emotions contained in one young man who scares the hell out of everyone who doesn't scare the hell out of him first. When the venom starts affecting the people Locke loves, he enlists outside help to keep it in check. Also there's kissing and a Goth girl with a dark past.
I loved Venomous even though "venomous" is one of my Ten Words I Can Never Spell Correctly (and still can't even after writing this book review).

Editing to add: There's going to be a comic book based on Venomous!

As I've read his books, I've developed a crush on the way Krovatin isn't afraid to give emotions to male characters. They fall in love, they fight with their friends, they hurt, they're happy, and sometimes they rock out. We (as in the YA lit community we) hear all the time that boys don't read, boys want adventure, boys don't want feelings in their books, blah blah blah and I love that Krovatin has basically said phooey to all of those. The adventures his male characters have are adventures of the heart and mind, ones that take place over just a few city blocks which are occupied by, you know, boys. Who don't read.

If you ever get the chance to hear Chris Krovatin speak, go do it. When he talks, people listen. I was particularly interested in his work with Revolver Magazine, which I read to keep up on all the metal bands that have actually produced music since 1995. (I'm the Heavy Metal/Old School sort, though I find I'm enjoying Killswitch Engage these days.)

Guest post: Natashya Wilson of Harlequin Teen

2009-08-17T11:40:00.004-04:00

Unless you've been living in a cave with no books, you know that paranormal romance has really taken off in the teen market. Of course, what every librarian knows is that romance has been popular with teens since the dawn of time. Every librarian also knows the Harlequin brand, even if he or she doesn't read or buy romance. So when I read articles like this one in USA Today, my personal reaction was, "Harlequin is doing teen books? Excellent." I may not know my romance as well as others, but I did know that Harlequin would take the genre seriously and I was very interested to see what they would come up with.

Normally, I never turn my blog over to guest posters, but it's a little different when that guest is Natashya Wilson, senior editor at Harlequin TEEN. I asked her to talk about some of the questions that librarians are frequently asked about YA romance and new series: What's the content like? What's the audience? What are the imprint's plans for the future? Here is her post. It's long, but worth reading.

---

Sex, Language and Harlequin TEEN

by Natashya Wilson, senior editor

Harlequin has a new YA imprint, Harlequin TEEN! we announced. And people speculated---what would it be like? Sweet romances? Steamy, sexy teen reads? Would adults buy a YA with the Harlequin name on it for their teens? Would teens pick up something from Harlequin? We at Harlequin TEEN are betting yes, and I would like to tell you more about the type of content you’ll find in our books.

Harlequin TEEN is a single title imprint focused on delivering a variety of entertaining, commercial reads targeted at teen girls, ages 13-18. Because it is not a series in the sense of our traditional romance series, we do not have specific guidelines about sexual and language content, and those elements vary from book to book and author to author. However, we are not seeking shocking, graphic reads, and you’ll find the content of our titles very much in line with many other popular single-title YA releases in the market today.

The majority of our list is relatively “clean,” as in sex and swear-word free. However, we do have the occasional title that includes or mentions sex and/or might contain a few swear words. If a story does include sex, it must be a natural part of plot and character development, not gratuitous, and not described in graphic detail. “Bad” language may appear when using a euphemism or alternate word would sound unnatural or out of character. We don’t seek out books that include profanity or sex, but if it works in context, we won’t insist an author take it out, either. Our goal is to deliver authentic, satisfying stories about memorable characters and situations. Just like most other mainstream YA publishers.

So what are our books about? My Soul to Take by Rachel Vincent (August 2009) features a heroine who discovers she is a banshee. Intertwined by Gena Showalter (September 2009) features a teen hero with four souls trapped in his body. Elphame’s Choice by P. C. Cast (October 2009), a reprint of our 2004 Luna title, features a goddess-blessed heroine destined to leave her home and save a banished people. Elphame does include a sex scene, but it is a natural part of the plot and character progression and the book would be less without it.

Our 2010 lineup includes a girl who discovers she is half-faery, a police chief’s daughter on the trail of a mysterious graffiti artist, and a teen dating expert who gives her peers advice through her Web site. We’ve got a loner-turned-rebel-leader fighting for justice in a future world, more Soul Screamers banshees, a teen witch, the next Intertwined novel, and ghosts. And more! And sex and profanity are almost entirely absent.

The name Harlequin has become synonymous with romance, and we’re aware that many people (including many who have never read a Harlequin!) have preconceived ideas about what a “Harlequin” is. Unfortunately, those who aren’t familiar with our series tend to assume they are all about sex and titillation—I assure you, they are not. We’re proud of the power of our name, and decided to use it for Harlequin TEEN despite the potential challenge of getting past those preconceptions. We are certain our YA editorial will speak for itself, and will soon be as accepted as titles from any other publishing house in the general marketplace.

While all of our titles currently do include romances or romantic elements, all have a wider scope than a traditional relationship-driven plot. As with all books Harlequin publishes, it is important to Harlequin TEEN to publish books that will surprise and delight readers, stories that will resonate and be remembered after the covers are closed.So what about sex and language in YA novels? What do you think is acceptable, how do you gauge the appropriateness of a read for your purposes? How can we at Harlequin TEEN best inform you about the content of our books? We want to hear from you! And we hope to see you at the next stop on our blog tour, In Bed with Books on 8/19!

Harlequin Teen giveaway winners

2009-08-17T11:21:00.006-04:00

Henry says:

Kelly J. (commenter #19) and Karen W. (commenter #27) from this post each win a copy of this book.

And his sister Beezus says:

Mark (commenter #1) and Jen P (commenter #3) each win a copy of this book.

Because cats won't wear t-shirts, I (Carlie) will tell you that the t-shirts from this post go to JoAnn (commenter #7) and Lillibeth (commenter #2)

Congratulations to all! I'll be in touch with the winners via email. Because Henry and Beezus were more interested in sitting on windowsills and eating their kibble than picking numbers, winners were chosen by the True Random Number Generator.

Harlequin Teen t-shirt giveaway

2009-08-14T15:03:00.006-04:00

Yes, you read that right. I just received an email from Harlequin Teen, and they told me that they will not only send books to the winners of the book giveaway (all you have to do to enter is leave a comment here), but they have one of each of these t-shirts to give away, too.

If you want to win one, just leave a comment on this post (and leave your email address so I can get your address to get you the prize). Henry will choose winners at random. You're welcome to enter to win a book, a shirt, or both, so you can be both well-read and well-dressed.

Harlequin Teen Books Giveaway

2009-08-14T00:01:00.012-04:00

How would you like to win free books?

I had the opportunity to meet Natashya Wilson, publisher of Harlequin Teen, at Newark Airport (of all places) after last year's YALSA YA Lit Symposium while we waited for rides home. She's been keeping me up to date on exciting things going on with the Harlequin Teen brand and imprint, things she will tell all of you in person when she makes her guest post here on Monday, August 17.

In the meantime, I have two Harlequin Teen books to give away!

First, there's My Soul to Take by Rachel Vincent. From Harlequin's description:

A scream bursts from her throat, and someone dies. Kaylee Cavanaugh doesn't know why she is compelled to scream—she knows only that she can’t stop it. And now, just as she's started dating the hottest guy in school, classmates are dying—and Kaylee keeps screaming...

Then, I have Intertwined by Gena Showalter. From Harlequin's description:

Aden Stone has friends. They just happen to be the four human souls living inside him. Everyone thinks he's crazy, but he doesn't mind. For months he's been having visions of a beautiful girl—a girl who will either save him or destroy him. Together they'll enter a dark world of intrigue and danger . . . but not everyone will come out alive.

One or both of these can be yours! Here are the rules: Leave a comment saying which book or books you'd like. On Monday, August 17, I will have Henry pick the winners at random from the comments to this post and announce the winners at the same time as Natashya's guest post.

Here is a picture of Henry enjoying a YA novel:

I promise you. He's very fair.

So comment, and one or both of these books can be yours! Stop back here on Monday to see what Natashya has to say about Harlequin Teen and its future in the market. (I also asked her to answer a couple of frequently asked-by-librarians questions.)

Editing to add: Thanks to the very generous people at Harlequin, I now have TWO copies of each book to give away. Very exciting!

The Magicians: Like Quidditch, only real

2009-08-13T13:30:00.001-04:00

Next on the list of Books I Wanted To Review In June But Didn't Get To: The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Everyone in the Columbia course this year got a copy.

If I were Twittering this review, it might go something like this:

Teen boy goes to magic school, graduates, goes to magical land 1st seen in fiction.

Problem: That wouldn't do a very good job of explaining this pretty cool book that, although it's published for adults, I think could easily cross over into the older teen market.

About the book: Angsty high school senior Quentin Coldwater has a most unusual experience when he goes for a college interview. The interview doesn't go as planned, but Quentin soon finds that he's got a college opportunity that's way beyond the Ivy League. After a series of headspinning tests, Quentin is admitted to Brakebills College, a school for magic in upstate New York. Brakebills is ten times as hard as any Ivy League school, and ten times as dangerous. Upon graduation, Quentin and his friends move to Manhattan, where their magical abilities enable them to lead a life of leisure. They also make the most exciting discovery of their lives: The magical land of Fillory, which they all know from the novels they read as children, is real. And they're going there.

Why you'll love it: It's escape-from-the-world fantasy for grownups. Grossman pokes fun at all the great children's lit that takes place in magical lands and incorporates it into Quentin's world. Quentin is hardly the most likeable character around (think Harry from Order of the Phoenix, with fewer caps), but I found myself so caught up in the Brakebills environment that I didn't care. Grossman does an amazing job with setting and imagining fantastic lands and creatures. He also twists the happily-ever-after. After graduation, Quentin and his friends aren't ready to begin adult lives; they're just as lost and confused as ever about what, if anything, to do with their futures. Love and sex are the source of sadness and anger rather than giddy happiness. Magic is not a cure-all for anything, though it does help maintain a certain lifestyle. This blend of urban and traditional fantasy, plus the beautiful cover, gives the book pretty wide appeal. (And you know it's got to be good if it's fantasy and I'm taking the time to recommend it.)

Lev Grossman's website || LA Books Examiner interview || review in the Washington Post Book World

And you may ask yourself, well, how did it get there?

2009-08-12T12:44:00.005-04:00

Via Roger Williams at the Publish or Perish Literary Agency, here's an article that I found very interesting: The secrets of the Amazon bestseller list. If you wonder how an author's online presence affects book sales (or not), and how important is the Kindle to the bestseller list (or not), check this out.

The article opens:

It's almost a philosophical riddle: Do sales drive the best-seller list, or do best-sellers get all the sales because buyers see them on the list?
As much as we'd like to believe that the crowd picks the best books, a strong presence in retail locations -- front-of-store positioning and tempting discounts -- still counts a great deal in determining how well a title sells.

One of the hardest things for me to reconcile lately is switching my brain from libraryland to retail in terms of how books get into the hands of readers, and seeing that bestsellers are often made, not born. Libraries are unique in that their collections rely heavily on peer reviews of books. I keep forgetting, after my years of library work, that not everyone in the world reads Kirkus, PW, or Booklist to make their buying decisions. This isn't a bad thing; it's just the nature of the beast. Librarians buy books for libraries in much different ways than retail consumers buy books for their personal collections. The question of bestsellers is very chicken-and-egg, and it's one that I think librarians can benefit from understanding. Amazon itself is also a different entity with different buying rules than brick-and-mortar chains. Anyway, read it. It's full of answers to (some of) the questions that keep me up at night.

What I watch now: Make It or Break It

2009-08-12T11:45:00.001-04:00

I am the least graceful, least athletically gifted person I know (I did a massive faceplant while running this week...on the sidewalk two blocks from where I live), but I love movies that involve cheerleading, gymnastics, or beauty pageants. I pretty much have Miss Congeniality memorized and I know that the music during Haley's floor routine in Stick It is "Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn't Get Sued" by Fall Out Boy, from their album From Under the Cork Tree.

With no access to regular TV during the Columbia Publishing Course and a schedule that didn't exactly accommodate prime time schedules, I wanted a fluffy summer show that I could watch easily online. I thought the most interesting of the bunch, given my aforementioned affection for fiction involving gymnastics, was ABC Family's Make It or Break It.

Make It or Break It centers on four teenage girls with dreams of national, and perhaps Olympic, medals. Payson Keeler is clearly the best of the lot, the one with the greatest chance to get to the Olympics. She has a lot of determination and focus, but she is also kind and vulnerable where her loved ones are concerned. Lauren Tanner is the one everyone loves to hate. She's got two talents: balance beam and backstabbing. Kaylie Cruz is all heart, flow, and grace, but her coach wonders if she's got the fire to really make it to the top. The newcomer, Emily Kmetko, is mostly self-taught, making her her own worst enemy in the gym. The interaction between all of them is strong, maybe even strongest during Lauren's manipulative frenemy moments. Overall, it's Emily's show, so viewers want to see her come from her background of training on playgrounds to national champion. Question is: Will she be able to get over her inhibitions in time to retrain herself to get to Nationals? The secondary characters, save for their coach and Emily's mom, are not as interesting, but I get the feeling viewers aren't there as much for the parent characters.

The Sweetheart of Prosper County: Do the funky chicken

2009-08-11T10:00:00.002-04:00

Back in June, I went to a panel at BEA where editors talked about their lead YA titles for Fall 2009. During a panel that mostly focused on speculative fiction (including the fourth YA book about the Knights Templar published in a year...publishing trends are so interesting!), Liz Szbala of Feiwel and Friends mentioned a book I couldn't wait to get my hands on: The Sweetheart of Prosper County by Jill S. Alexander. Lucky for me, Feiwel had extra copies of the book and gave them out after the panel.

About the book: There's a rooster on the cover. What's not to love?

Kidding. There's more to it. During the annual No-Jesus Christmas Parade, Austin Gray, almost fifteen, decides that she's tired of being a parade watcher. She wants to be a parade participant. Specifically, she wants to be a hood ornament, a local Sweetheart elected by a club like the Rodeo Club or, in Austin's case, the Future Farmers of America. To be a part of the FFA and have the chance to be sweetheart, she'll have to raise a farm animal and learn to hunt or fish. Her farm animal of choice? Poultry. Specifically, a black Bantam Rosecomb rooster who she names Charles Dickens. Austin is convinced that Charles Dickens will help make her into the person she wants to be: popular, beautiful, and independent. When she's sweetheart and riding on top of the car in the parade, bully Dean Ottmer will stop making fun of her and her mother will stop being so strict. Only, you and I know it doesn't always work out that way.

Why you'll love it: Except for a few trips to Disney World, I have never traveled anywhere south of Maryland. Yes, Teri Lesesne, that means I've never been to Texas. But? That didn't matter. Alexander did a wonderful job of describing Austin's small eastern Texas town and the characters who live there. The big theme of this book is independence, which comes in a few forms: Austin's rearing of Charles Dickens, participating in her best friend Maribel's quincineara, figuring out what to do about Dean Ottmer, and getting her mother to finally talk about her father's death. On a personal level, I liked the general lack of romance as a plot. There's some goo-goo eyes and hand-holding with a cute boy, but Austin, her family, and her goals are always the focal point. It is, for want of better words, a sweet book about a girl who is a sister doing it for herself. (Sorry, Annie Lennox.)

They really, really like me!

2009-08-10T17:29:00.002-04:00

Back during the Columbia Publishing Course, when my blogging and reading was spotty at best, I was tickled to get an email saying that Librarilly Blonde was highlighted in an article at OnlineCollege.com. The article is 100 Best Blogs for School Librarians, and even if I didn't get a mention in it I'd still say, "Go forth and read!" because it's full of great resources. It mentions some blogs I've enjoyed for a while, including Engadget, Paper Cuts, and of course, Unshelved.

Front and Center: It shoots, it scores

2009-08-09T18:04:00.004-04:00

Sometimes (but not often) I am wrong about books.

When I first heard about Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock, I was convinced it would be the most boring thing since a drive through Indiana. "The main character is so normal! She goes to the mall!" I was told. So what? Turns out, that normal main character had a hell of a voice and something to talk about other than her love interest. Due to its stellar writing, Dairy Queen ended up as one of my favorite books of 2007. I thought the 2008 sequel, The Off Season, was even better.

Front and Center (Houghton, October 2009, many thanks to Laura Sinton at HMH for sending me a copy) is the final book in Murdock's trilogy about small-town sports star D.J. Schwenk. It begins just after the events of The Off Season, so D.J. is gearing up for her favorite sport: basketball. D.J. plays center but knows she's got the athletic skills to play point guard. What's holding her back from the coveted point guard position is her lack of ability to voice what she's thinking. The point guard's job is to act as a sort of director on the court, and D.J. would rather die than shout instructions in front of all her teammates. When her coach calls her into his office for what D.J. thinks will be a talking-to about, well, her lack of talking, he springs a surprise on her: Even though she's only a junior, colleges are already stepping up to recruit her. If she wants a scholarship, which is the only way she knows she can afford to go to college, D.J. will have to make her college decision in the next few weeks.

D.J.'s familiar with the college ball process, having two older brothers who play Division I football. After seeing a disastrous end to a University of Minnesota basketball game, however, she's pretty sure she wants nothing to do with Division I women's basketball. Going to a Division III college will take off a lot of the pressure and that way if she screws up, well, it's just Division III, right?

All of this sounds good on paper, but there's one thing D.J. isn't factoring in: Athletics are her calling. She might not be the most outstanding student, but she has sports in her blood and coaching in her brain. Everyone sees this except D.J. herself, and it takes a lot of nagging, a lot of love, and a physics genius who can't play basketball to make her see what she's worth.

Don't laugh, but I think Front and Center is a perfect readalike for another favorite book of mine from 2007: Dramarama by E. Lockhart. D.J. is the complete opposite of Sadye: an introvert, terrified of being on stage, anything but outspoken. What both books have in common is their message, which is that you have to follow your true talents even if they scare you, even if they take you in a different direction than the one you planned. The best thing about the Dairy Queen series is how meticulous Murdock is about taking us through D.J.'s thoughts and internal processes. She great use of first-person narration and shows us how D.J., who doesn't say anything out loud to anyone if she can help it, grows from someone who does everything she's told without question to someone who thinks not just for, but about, herself and her personal goals.

I'm sad that this series has come to a close, but I'm thrilled with the way it ended and I can't wait to see what Murdock will offer next for YA readers.

The Librarilly Blonde of the Joke

2009-08-07T17:26:00.013-04:00

Q: Why are blonde jokes so short?

A: So brunettes can remember them.

Blonde is not just a hair color. It's an identity. Of course, not all blondes are the same, but there is a minor societal fascination with people with blonde hair. Evil people were easy to spot in Harry Potter. Why? Because they were blonde (Fleur Delacour being the exception, but let's not forget how much Ginny disliked her). Kiki Strike stood out in the crowd with her white-blonde hair. Katniss Everdeen is torn between two deserving men, one blond and one brunette. On a personal note, the question I am asked most often, and mostly in hair salons, is "Is that your natural hair color?" (Yes, it is. I am too cheap and lazy to color my hair.)

Given all of this, not reading The Blonde of the Joke by Bennett Madison (HarperCollins, August 2009) was not an option.

About the book: Val is a quiet social nobody until bold Francie Knight, teller of unfunny blonde jokes, blondes her way into Val's life. The two connect instantly, and Francie draws Val into her life of shoplifting and look-at-me clothes. Their goal at the mall is to steal everything and search for the Most Beautiful Thing, the Holy Grail of shoplifted objects. Despite all their time together, Francie always seems to hold Val at arm's length. She disappears for weeks without notice and has some crazy mood swings. Val worries, but she also has other things to worry about in her life, like her dying brother. As the school year progresses and Val and Francie steal more, Val sees that there's more to being the blonde of the relationship than just the color of her hair...which can easily be changed.

Why you'll love it: I'm going to start carrying a copy of this book everywhere I go for the sole purpose of being able to say, "You're wrong," when people (in bookstores, in libraries, online) complain that there's no YA of substance anywhere, and definitely no decent realistic fiction. The Blonde of the Joke is set in the real world but has a just-beyond-reality feeling, with very dark humor and some downright weird peripheral characters. The ways that Francie changes Val will have readers wondering how strong a person Val is on her own and what she's really looking for in all the things she steals from the mall. Val's dysfuctional relationships are heartbreaking, but also telling of the kind of person that she is: dissatisfied and soul-searching. The mall becomes not just a place for Val to steal, but a place to acquire things that can't be bought or stolen. This quirky story is one that will leave you thinking and guessing for days after you finish it.

Catch Fire on your blog

2009-08-07T14:32:00.002-04:00

For those of you who are, like me, really excited about the upcoming release of Catching Fire, Scholastic has some cool downloads and widgets you can post in the meantime. Hey, just because I've read the book already doesn't mean I don't want to buy it in hardcover, or that I'm not excited about it coming out. Look at these!

Suzanne Collins reading an excerpt of Catching Fire:

And a countdown clock:

More downloads are available at the Scholastic Hunger Games site. Go forth and adorn your blog!

A Sweet book: Stella Madison

2009-08-06T13:48:00.007-04:00

I confess, I'm not doing too well with this unemployment thing because I'm an ESTJ and there's nothing we like better than structure and plans for the future. I will say this, however: Having the time to catch up on my reading is kind of nice. I'm knocking out a book a day or so, and the next few posts will be reviews. On to today's book!

Disclaimer: I have had the pleasure of calling Lara Zeises my friend for a number of years, so I am a little prejudiced in favor of this book. My prejudices, however, don't change the fact that The Sweet Life of Stella Madison (Delacorte, July 2009, copy courtesy of Delacorte) is a fantastic summer book, and it is the book to sink your teeth into if you just can't read another vampire book right now.

About the book: Back when I reviewed Robin Brande's Fat Cat, I confessed that I really am not a fan of cooking. I'm a fan of eating, sure, but I believe that food always tastes better when someone else cooks it. Stella Madison, almost 18, is a girl after my own heart. The daughter of two foodies, one a world-renowned chef, Stella would rather eat hamburgers than foie gras. Unfortunately, escaping from food is not an option. It's not just that Stella has to eat in order to live, but she's also landed an internship at the local paper, where her editor thinks she's got what it takes to be an ace restaurant reviewer. When she's not eating, writing, hanging out with her two best friends, or working at her mom's restaurant, the Open Kitchen, Stella is trying to figure out her relationships. She's currently dating Max, who is kind, funny, and crazy about her. All is great with Max until Stella meets Jeremy, who is hot, elusive, twenty-one, hot, a chef in training, and...yeah, hot. Max and Jeremy are two different sides of Stella, and she's at an odds on which one to choose.

Why you'll love it: Stella is refreshingly normal and relateable, but she's also well-rounded. She's not the prettiest or thinnest or richest girl in town, but she's smart and has interests outside herself and her boyfriend. I think what I like best about Stella is that in the presence of Jeremy, she often doesn't know what to say or do. She doesn't have a perfect witty comeback for everything, but she doesn't have to. Lara also knows that real life, even if it's a real life that doesn't involve YA literature superdramas like sex and drugs, makes for great reading. Complex family stories are Lara's specialty, and she doesn't disappoint here; Stella has to deal with her parents' dating dilemmas as well as her own. The romance is sexy and there's plenty of making out (Stella *is* 18, after all), but the interpersonal relationships are what really matter, making this a good choice for those younger readers who are dying for romances.

What's the only caveat of this book? Don't read it while you're hungry.

review at Bookends (Booklist blog) || Liz's review

Article in SLJ: When Harry Met Bella

2009-08-01T18:55:00.004-04:00

The August issue of School Library Journal is now available online, so I get to announce that Liz B. and I wrote this month's cover story: When Harry Met Bella, which is about one of our favorite topics: Fanfiction. We wrote answers to some common questions about fanfiction, including "How legal is all of this, anyway?" and listed some of our favorite fanfiction sites. Let me tell you, it was NOT easy to get it all into 2,000 words. I think the first draft of the article was twice that long, and that was without the sidebars.

Once you've read the article, if you've got questions about fanfiction, I'm happy to answer them.

Read my advice in the Summer YALS

2009-07-28T00:13:00.002-04:00

Young Adult Library Services (YALS) is the quarterly print journal of YALSA, and it's sent to all members of YALSA in good standing. One of the features YALS runs every issue is the "YA Q&A: Expert advice on tough teen services questions." I answered those tough questions for the Summer 2009 YALS on the subject of reviewing. I was inspired to submit an idea for this section because so many of my newer librarian colleagues and the library students I've lectured ask how I got the jobs I have reviewing for Kirkus and VOYA. This month, I spill it all. The questions I answer include:

How do I get a reviewing gig at a professional journal?
What are the elements of a great professional book review?
What are the words and phrases I should avoid when writing reviews?

Although the journal is for librarians, you don't have to be one to get inspired to write more stylish, elegant, and snappy reviews. I know that reviews can take on many forms and are written for different audiences, but I hope that perhaps some of you who are not and do not write for librarians can find useful tips for your own blog work.

CPC magazine workshop

2009-07-24T13:16:00.004-04:00

Although most of the students at the Columbia Publishing Course want careers in book publishing, we do have a fair number who want to go into magazines. Weeks 5 and 6 of the course focus entirely on magazine production and sales, culminating in a 5-day workshop in which groups of 10 people are assigned a magazine genre and given the task of putting together a prospectus for a new magazine.

I was lucky enough to get my first choice genre, men's magazines. I knew most of the men in the course wanted that as their first choice, but I saw it this way: I spent years of my life as a percussionist, which meant hours a day in the company of men (and perhaps not the most mature men you've met). This couldn't be any worse than college. My group was 7 men and 3 women, and my job was Circulation Director. Magazine circulation isn't a career I want to pursue, but I found the lessons beneficial. There's so much to know and understand about the business side of book and magazine publishing, things I never learned as a librarian but are crucial to know even if you want a career in editorial. Over the week, I learned that it's circulation's job to work out the numbers in terms of newsstand versus subscription sales, the magazine's demographic, who your major competitors are (which has more to do with the content of your magazine and less with the genre, surprisingly), and how much it's going to cost you to get readers. It's kind of a scary economic model, really. Despite my lack of knowledge and experience in magazine business, I had a great time during the week. My group found its voice early and even when we stumbled in terms of content, we still believed that we had a great potential product. I think one of the hardest things was separating ourselves from what's already in the market. Sure, we all like GQ and Esquire, but what could we do in our content and advertising to get new readers who wouldn't say, "I don't need this magazine because I can read about this content in magazines I already get?"

Today is the last day of the CPC, so as of Monday Librarilly Blonde will return to its regularly scheduled book reviews and library discussions. Hmm, what to write about first...?

Preparing for August, or "What's there to read?"

2009-07-19T01:46:00.004-04:00

The Columbia Publishing Course magazine workshop (which will get its own post at a later date) is over, so with one week left to the course I'm starting to plan my August reading list. This is a list that may get longer or shorter depending on how soon I am able to find a job in my new field. In the meantime, here's how it's stacking up.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. I saw the movie and liked it, but I'm sure I'll like the book more.
Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
Ruined: A Ghost Story by Paula Morris
Swoon by Nina Malkin
Hush Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

These are just what's at the top of my very tall pile. My lack of local jobs is your blog reviews gain! I'm also going to catch up on seasons 3 and 4 of 30 Rock and start watching Prison Break like I always meant to.

Once I renew my library card I'm planning Chris Krovatin Day at Librarilly Blonde. But it's really more My Giant Authorcrush On Chris Krovatin, Who Doesn't Know I Exist, Day. His books are Heavy Metal and You and Venomous, if you'd like to get a head start on the reading.

BBYA? Not in the frame of mind to talk about it right now because instead of going to ALA I was doing the magazine workshop, but I get the vague impression that my opinion (basically, keep BBYA as is and think very carefully about the economics of reading and publishing before establishing that reader's choice award) is one of the less popular ones around.

Happy Bastille Day!

2009-07-14T17:39:00.003-04:00

I'm in the middle of the Columbia Publishing Course magazine workshop (my job: Circulation Director, more numbers!), so I don't have anything of substance to post. It is Bastille Day, however, so here's a video of my favorite band singing the praises of revolution.

The Ex-Librarian's Club Vol. 1: YALSA'S Worst Idea

2009-07-09T14:40:00.000-04:00

Because the Columbia Publishing Course magazine workshop begins on the Sunday of ALA Annual, I am not going to the conference this year. This upsets me because I've had to leave the Printz committee AND I don't get to eat the filet mignon they were going to feed me at the 2009 Movers and Shakers Luncheon. I also won't have the opportunity to attend any of the YALSA board sessions. If you're going, you can see more information on the YALSA wiki here. With your ALA member number and password, you can also see the Board documents in the "for members only" section of the site. Thanks to Jen over at Reading Rants, I saw a board document which I found deeply disturbing. It calls for the disbanding of Best Books for Young Adults and replacing it with a sort of reader's choice award. Personally, I say bring on the reader's choice lists. I think they're a great idea. I don't, however, think they're a great idea if it means taking away BBYA in the process. BBYA is 40 years old, and I think it's needed now more than ever because publishers are printing more YA novels than ever.

The need for BBYA as a vetted list done by a panel of YA literature experts with input from teens can best be summed up by the life of Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link.

Pretty Monsters is one of my favorite YA books of 2008. It's a beautiful, macabre collection of short stories, all with a weird, semi-supernatural twist. In Link's stories, a handbag contains a faery world. A group of friends form a fandom over a show that has no set broadcast time or channel. It got starred reviews and acclaim from Link's peers, as it should have. Those things, however, are forgotten as we move on to the next book. Pretty Monsters wasn't eligible for the Morris and it didn't get a nod at the Printz, but it did deservedly make BBYA. Now, it's got a spot on a list that librarians use for collection development, a list with an available archive.

Pretty Monsters would fade without BBYA. It's certainly not popular. It's published by a big house, but it wasn't a lead title. Short story collections, though they have a special place in my heart, are not popular with teen readers. The books that make BBYA are the ones we look back on as a profession and remember. They're the ones that stood out in a year when thousands of books were published. The BBYA committee makes an effort to read a range of genres and formats from both large and small publishers. They recognize quality and potential popularity in books that don't have big print runs or expensive marketing campaigns and they give those books a lasting home. Because books go out of print fast, and because it's easy for us to get saturated with YA titles, BBYA serves as a reminder of the great books of a year, ones on which we can build our collections and ones which are setting today's standard of YA lit.

One of the arguments in favor of disbanding BBYA is that a reader's choice award would allow more people to participate in the booklist selection process. I think there's room for a popularity contest, but why should BBYA have to suffer for the sake of wider participation? We already have rewards for popular books in place. Although not everyone can be a member of BBYA (and why should they get to be?), anyone can nominate a book for BBYA, anyone can contact any committee member about any book, and anyone attending ALA can attend the BBYA sessions. BBYA isn't done in a vacuum.

Cindy Dobrez and Lynn Rutan wrote more about this at the Bookends blog: Replacing BBYA: What do you think? They have some great points about the work BBYA does and how it cannot be replaced by a popular choice award. Also, check out Alex Flinn's blog post about what BBYA did for her first novel, Breathing Underwater.

Please, YALSA, instate that popular choice award. Open it to all librarians and give everyone a vote. I'm all for more chances for YALSA participation. But keep BBYA, because the need for it is greater than ever before.

Bright future in sales

2009-07-03T12:42:00.003-04:00

At the writing of this post, I have slept about 9 hours in the past 2 days. Such is the way of life during book prospectus week at the Columbia Publishing Course. During this week, the class is split into ten groups, which must, by the end of the week, put together a prospectus for their publishing company. They elect a CEO/Publisher and nine executives, each responsible for a different aspect of the company's overall plan. As I mentioned before, I took the role of Director of Trade and Special Sales, a role that I wouldn't have necessarily chosen for myself but I'm glad I got. Learning about returns, profit and loss margins (though putting together the actual p&l for each book was someone else's job), how print runs are decided, and how books get into consumers' hands was really interesting. Book workshop week also meant a string of 18-hour-days, and I think I am not the only one in the program who, after the last long night of the program, was considering a career as a bus driver.

One thing I found very useful in my sales position was my booktalking experience. It's the job of the sales director to pitch the company's list to buyers, which means working with the editorial department on coming up with just the perfect hook for each title. In this case, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to pitch my (just for school, not real) imprint's titles to Sessalee Hensley, who is the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble. Can I say that I totally want to be this woman when I grow up? There is no one who knows more about selling books than she does. Naturally, everyone was nervous about the sales meeting, but I used this line of logic: For years a big part of my job was pitching books to middle-school students. Not only could I pitch six books in ten minutes instead of our allotted twenty if I had to, nothing Sessalee could do or say would be worse than anything any eighth-grader has done or said during any of my booktalking sessions. With this knowledge in hand, I have to say I had a great time doing the pitches.

Sales pitches done, it was time to rework some numbers, because you know that when Barnes and Noble wants to buy 30% of your first print run, you're probably going to end up printing and selling more books than you'd planned. Long nights in tutoring sessions plus lots of help from our awesome visiting professional staff means that I think I have a basic understanding of how sales departments work, knowledge I didn't have a week ago.

I'm still a little fuzzy from the week, but with my newfound understanding of the numbers side of publishing, I have some blog and journal entries to respond to. That's coming after I finish editing an article for SLJ.

We all use math every day

2009-06-28T11:30:00.016-04:00

In the words of a famous television math professor:

We all use math every day. To predict weather. To tell time. To handle money. Math is more than formulas and equations. It's logic. It's rationality. It's using your mind to solve the biggest mysteries we know.

Math is the reason I've been away for a few days. We're now on Day 3 of the book workshop. Basically, during the workshop, we split up into groups, form a publishing company, and buy and sell and market titles. My job within the company? Trade Sales Manager. That's right. I, who became a librarian because I was told there was no math, am now Numbers Girl. It's the job of the sales manager to predict sales based on numbers of comparable titles, to know the market and what's selling now. Sales has to know where the gaps are on our lists and how we can fill them. It's not the job I would have chosen for myself and it's not making me love math and calculations, but I find I'm learning a great new skill set, which is what I came to the course for in the first place. Sales is, as Charlie Eppes might say, using your mind to solve the biggest mystery in publishing, that is, how many copies of a book we can sell.

Like math, sales is not a job you always have to build from the ground up. There are formulas and precedents, and you use existing books to try to predict how well your book will do. Today there will be an auction for a book, and later this week I'm going to pitch our books to a buyer. (Which, for my fellow librarians, is pretty much booktalking, but to grownups, with much higher stakes.) I think of it as learning a new language. Though I still can't remember what F&G stands for.

Columbia Publishing Course, Days 5-9

2009-06-23T17:57:00.008-04:00

Days 6-7 were free. Next!

I continue to be absolutely floored by the speakers. Highlights of the past few days have included:

Megan Tingley (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers). Megan's presentation was on children's publishing, and as someone who doesn't know as much about picture books as I ought to, I was happy to hear her talk about authors and artists like Todd Parr and Darren Shan. (Let's not forget that from approximately 2001 to 2007, Darren Shan positively owned the YA horror market.)
Chip Kidd (Knopf) had us all in stitches. My seat partner laughed so hard during Kidd's presentation that she cried. Besides the funny, we got to see a montage of the process of some of the book covers Kidd has done. He also talked about the production of the cover art of his own book, The Learners. (It's about the Milgram Behavioral experiments, for those who are interested. I am!) I have all the artistic ability of a toddler, but Kidd made me want to work in book design.
Carolyn Pittis (HarperCollins) talked about global marketing strategies. Wow. Just. Wow. She crammed a phenomenal amount of information on sales, tracking, marketing, and new technologies into that two-hour presentation. It was quite energizing, and you know, I think there's actually a lot that fits into where public libraries can go in the future.

Tomorrow we have our meetings with individual editors, who will be looking over our reader's reports on the unbound manuscripts we all received. Many different kinds of crazy awesome this week there will be, says Yoda.

If you don't read this, you're not an Alpha

2009-06-23T09:30:00.002-04:00

If I love books with pink covers, and I love books with sparkly covers, what could I do with a book with a pink sparkly cover but love it?

I picked up a copy of Alphas, the first book in the Alphas series (coming in October, 2009) by Lisi Harrison, best known for penning the Clique series. Over the weekend, I was fretting about my Columbia homework, so I picked it up as a diversion, figuring it'd be fun and fluffy. I got some fluff, sure, but I also got what I'm sure to be the next big thing in YA: Science fiction meets chick lit.

And it was a hell of a good time.

The premise of Alphas: Many will apply, few will be accepted. Eccentric entertainment mogul Shira Brazille has opened Alphas Academy, located somewhere amid a tropical paradise. Alphas Academy serves to train the brightest and most beautiful of the generation with classes tailored to each girl's talent. Enter Skye, a dancer, Allie, a singer/poet/eco-aware vegan, and Charlie, an inventor and engineer. The three of them are part of the Jackie O house, where they live with Thalia, their muse, and sneak out at night to try to meet the only boys living on Alpha Island.

It looks like heaven, but it's kind of like the Hunger Games. Of one hundred girls, one will be left standing, and there are some nasty twists. Of Skye, Allie, and Charlie, one is a spy, one is facing being kicked out of Alphas Academy, and one is a complete faker attending Alphas Academy because they think she's someone else.

Readers will love this book because it's a genre mashup. Since it's a Clique spinoff, there are some brand names mentioned, but a lot of it disappears at Alphas Academy and is replaced with its own Academy brands. There's a terrifying theme of control. The girls are competitive and can be catty, but they also unite for a common cause. Smarts and talent are celebrated at Alphas Academy, but the very nature of the institution divides its students. It also comes complete with a cliffhanger ending. I should also mention that you need not have any familiarity with the Clique series in order to read Alphas. There are a few Clique references at the beginning, but it's easy to get into the story even if you don't understand them.

Article to read: Grown up girls...

2009-06-22T10:35:00.000-04:00

Finally, an article about YA lit written by someone who knows about YA lit! (Please take note of this, Wall St. Journal, Atlantic Monthly.) Sarah Ockler, author of the wonderful 20 Boy Summer, has a piece in Woman Around Town that you all might enjoy reading: Grown up girls come out of the YA book closet. She nails some of the reasons why adult women love YA lit, like "YA spans the shelves with diverse sub-genres" (though I'd also love to see a heading that says "YA spans the shelves with diverse formats") and "YA authors write to compete." I mean, not that we needed more reasons to recommend YA lit to adults, but it never hurts to have them.

Columbia Publishing Course, Day 4

2009-06-17T22:21:00.000-04:00

Lectures: 9 a.m.-noon, from Peter DeGiglio (Bloomsbury) about the math of publishing. This was incredibly intense and also fascinating. He crammed about six months' worth of learning into three hours. Profits, losses, printing, costs, royalties, cuts...amazing. Actually, the most amazing part is that he explained everything in words even I, who became a librarian because I was told there was no math, could understand.

2-4:30 p.m.: Agents' panel, with Scott Moyers (Wylie), Ira Silverberg (Sterling Lord) and Amy Williams (McCormick & Williams). When you're moving from librarianship to publishing, something I see much more in reverse, the obvious thing is to go into school and library marketing. I am not opposed to this, but what I think I really want to do is agent. These three speakers were very inspiring, knowledgeable and funny but also serious about their business. Listening to Amy Williams talk during the sherry hour after the session was enlightening and reinforced my want to agent. But I'm not applying for her assistantship because her agency doesn't sell YA or MG.

7:30-9:15 p.m.: Sloane Crosley, publicist for Vintage Books and author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake . She read from her book and talked about publicity versus marketing, and what it takes to be part of a great publicity department. Very funny, relaxed, and I would love to spend a day just following her around at her job.

Thoughts from today's lessonss:

- I am rethinking book bloggers. Not in terms of publicity but in terms of math, and in terms of how important bloggers think they are versus how important they actually are, which is a question that has two different answers depending on whether you're discussing children's or adult literature. But the thing is, I might not ever get around to actually blogging about this because, well, I'd rather blog about books than blog about blogging about books.

- I might be the only person here who has no desire to ever write a book. I find I am only passionate about other people's books. But I suppose that's what makes for a good editor or agent, right?

Some math I forgot to mention: Given the number of titles published in a year, it would still take Harriet Klausner quite a number of years just to read all the books published in 2009 alone. Makes me feel a little better to know that "so many books, so little time" is scientific fact.

Put a stake in it!

2009-06-15T22:10:00.001-04:00

Today's PW Shelftalker blog had a wonderful post (with sad, sad comments) on nine-year-olds reading The Sparkly Vampire Book: What to Do, What to Do? The question of what to do revolves around dealing with nine-year-olds who come in wanting to read TSVB for no reason other than "my friends are reading it."

I wholly sympathize with Josie Leavitt's dilemma, as I have lectured a few times on what I like to call The Curse of Harry Potter. I also refer to it as Trickle-Down Readonomics. It goes something like this: Popular books trickle down in age. HP is YA, but now no parent will admit if their child was older than 8 when he read the very adult, violent, good versus evil, fantastic Harry Potter books, full of long words. Now TSVB has become the victim of Trickle-Down Readonomics. Why? Maybe the big sisters of these 9-year-olds were hanging around the house reading it. Maybe they've seen the movie (why?) and they want to read the popular, inescapable books. After all, kids always want to seem older. And if the older kids are reading this big huge black book with a pretty design on the cover, well, THEY WANT IT NOW.

One of the arguments in favor of letting TSVB trickle down is "Well, it's innocent! There's no sex! It's all about chastity!" I find this ridiculously superficial and a faulty argument at best. Abstaining from sex until marriage is not the hallmark of an innocent relationship or an innocent book. Why does TSVB get the "It's innocent!" argument because it doesn't have sex? There's more to innocence than sex. I would argue that the romance in TSVB is not innocent because of how abusive Edward is towards Bella. (I know many others feel differently, but this is my blog and I have always seen Edward as an abuser.) Yes, young readers, it's okay, if a man keeps you from your family and friends and you want to cause serious self-harm when he temporarily breaks up with you, it's okay because you didn't have sex! Since when is an abusive relationship innocent?

Leavitt also talks about the problem of Trickle-Down Readonomics squishing the great books written specifically for the age group that wants the age-inappropriate book. If the nine-year-olds want TSVB, why on earth would they want the less sparkly Clementine? In bookstores and libraries, those two books are shelved nowhere near each other. Why should they be? In their trip to TSVB, those nine-year-olds aren't going to be standing anywhere near the wonderful books that exist for kids their age. The nine-year-olds in Leavitt's store are very lucky to have an enthusiastic, knowledgeable bookseller there to guide them. Not every nine-year-old in a bookstore is. Those customers buy what looks cool and hope for the best. If we're lucky, they buy Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls (love, love, love and I need to write a review on the first 3 books!). If not, they end up with, I dunno, the House of Night books or whatever's facing out on the shelf next to TSVB. Maybe they'll come up with a book they'll love, maybe not, but what they're pretty much guaranteed to come up with is something they'll enjoy better in a few years. What they're probably NOT buying are the oldies-but-goodies, like personal favorite Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth unless they have someone (bookseller, librarian) to help them navigate the stacks.

I can sort of see why Harry Potter trickled down, though I personally don't recommend it to anyone younger than sixth grade. At its opening, it's a fun adventure-in-magic-school story. By book three, though, the layers have built so thick and dark that the book beyond its surface is best enjoyed by readers with more life experience. IMNSHO. I still think third-graders are better served by books other than Harry Potter.

Columbia Publishing Course, Days 1 & 2

2009-06-15T21:42:00.001-04:00

No, I do not plan on blogging the entire thing.

Days one and two of the Columbia Publishing Course have been both exhilarating and exhausting. So far, I've heard lectures from Michael Pietsch (Little, Brown), John Fagan (Viking), and Bob Gottlieb (Knopf). The one thing I've really taken away from their lectures is that you must be enthusiastic in publishing. If you can't love editing and the industry, you need to get out and you need to get out immediately. Being an editor is a 24/7 job. It's not just about reading, it's about selling and believing in what you publish. Individually:

I was personally dying to hear Pietsch talk because I am fascinated by Little, Brown's publishing model. Ounce for ounce, they are the most successful out there. Their secret? Discretion. Mostly. It was nice to hear, also, that SOMEONE out there besides me doesn't believe that publishing is dying. Please. Hasn't publishing died like 50 times already?
Fagan's speech was about paperback publishing, both paperback reprinting and original paperbacks. He talked about the different lives books can lead in hardcover and paperback and the very delicate balance that always must be achieved in marketing, shipping, etc. in order to maintain profit.
Gottleib's lecture was wonderfully funny and wise. He, too, exemplified the enthusiasm we all have to show if we want to be editors, talking about editing as a service profession.

Also, there's some pretty good chocolate cake in the cafeteria.

I've met a few people who want to work with children's and YA books, and I'm sure when Megan Tingley comes to lecture we'll have a fascinating discussion on Twilight and YA.

I have classes every day at 9 a.m., 2 p.m., and 7 p.m. These people don't fool around, yo. Most of my classmates want to work in book publishing, but there are a few magazine enthusiasts as well. I haven't met anyone else who wants to be a literary agent, but I haven't met everyone in the course, either.

Tomorrow's lecturers include two authors and the president of Grove/Atlantic. As Neil Gaiman would say, "Whee! Thump."

All summer in a day

2009-06-09T11:37:00.001-04:00

What's a librarian to do with no job, no job prospects, and years of experience in librarianship?

Change professions.

This summer, I'm very excited (and very scared) to be taking the Columbia Publishing Course, formerly the Radcliffe Publishing Course, which includes one of my heroes, Arthur A. Levine, among its alumni. Since I've had some questions as to what the CPC is, I'll explain as best I can.

The CPC is publishing industry boot camp. They cram a year's worth of information on book, magazine, and new media publishing into six weeks. It's not the only publishing graduate course in the country; similar programs are offered at NYU and the University of Denver (see more on those here). They accept 100 people per year, most of whom are recent college graduates. Lecturers include current industry professionals; the opening day lecturer is David Young, Chairman of Hachette Book Group. There are also two hands-on workshops for book and magazine publishing. Part of me is absolutely dying to do the magazine workshop at Lucky but alas, I am only stylish when it comes to beauty products and jewelry. (Also I'm short and curvy, two more strikes against working at a fashion magazine.) Anyway, this is more than just "how to edit," it's "how to edit, agent, market, promote, distribute, and generally survive." In preparation for this course I've been reading a lot of industry blogs and completing the advance assignments, which cover marketing and acquisitions.

All of this means I'll be on hiatus, save for possibly blogging about the CPC, for the rest of June and all of July. If I'm lucky enough to have spare time to read, I'll be reading books for Kirkus and re-reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And also The Ask and the Answer, which I was beyond thrilled to receive last week.

Will I come back to libraries? I don't know. I'm certainly not opposed to it, but right now I'm going to pursue this publishing thing and see how it turns out. Right now I'm most interested in agenting, but perhaps Columbia will show me that I have a talent for an aspect of publishing I never even considered. Stay tuned for future revelations.

YALSA e-chat

2009-06-06T11:36:00.000-04:00

I'm going, even if it's just to lurk: Teen librarians, YALSA, and the economy chat on June 9 (Tuesday) at 8:00 p.m. EDT.

This interests me from a grownup more than a teen perspective. With all this talk about serving teens in a bad economy and what YALSA can do for you, I am most interested to learn if there's anyone else out there who has actually lost a full-time, professional, YA librarian position. All the grants and conference support are no good if we don't have jobs to professionally develop. I know that personally, I'm facing a career change because of my job loss. I wonder if anyone else, especially anyone who's been in this profession more than five years, is having some of the same thoughts.

The copyright in the Rye

2009-06-04T11:36:00.000-04:00

Today's publishing lesson: If it isn't yours and it's still under copyright, don't sell it.

Seems obvious to you and me, but the latest debacle in the industry goes something like this: An author calling himself J.D. California wants to publish a book called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, about Holden Caulfield as a man in his mid-70s. J.D. Salinger is suing.

-CNN: Lawsuit targets "rip-off" of "Catcher in the Rye"
-BBC news: Salinger sues over Rye "sequel"
-New York Times: Planned ‘Rye’ Sequel Draws Salinger Suit
-Huffington Post: Right Or Wrong: J.D. Salinger Wants Holden To Stay "Forever Young" (Warning: If you've ever written fanfiction of any kind at any point in your life, this one will make you roll your eyes.)

Parody is protected by fair use laws, but this looks like a continuation (or where I come from, fanfiction), rather than a parody. Sigh. Some people never learn.

Buffy the literature slayer

2009-06-01T09:43:00.000-04:00

Back from Book Expo, over the cold, and counting down the panicked days until my job ends and the Columbia Publishing Course begins. And did I mention I have HOMEWORK? I haven't had homework since library school! More on the Columbia course later. On to today's question/rant/musings.

Sometimes I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer was both the best and worst thing that ever happened to YA literature. Yes, I know it was a TV show and not a book, save for the Season 8 comics that Dark Horse is printing.

Please don't think that I think Buffy was a bad show, or that it wasn't influential in teen pop culture. I quite enjoyed the seasons I watched (1-4) and do have plans to finish watching to the end of the series via DVD. Eventually. Teens with superpowers were a very hot trend during the run of Buffy. I love Joss Whedon's wit and wisdom and do quote it from time to time. Buffy holds a place in the Great Teen TV Shows Hall of Fame, no doubt, but all of us who work with teens know that their perception of popularity, of hot shows, of important shows, changes every week. Every day, even.

Here's the sad fact we have to face, and if you're a Buffy fan who's my age, meaning you were an older teen or younger adult during the show's run and a fan of the series, one we must accept:

Buffy has been off the air for six years. It ran from 1997-2003. Today's fifteen-year-olds were born in 1994. That means, as far as they're concerned, the show barely existed. Sure, there are teens that are fans of the show, but either I'm oversensitive or they're showing up a lot more in teen literature than they do in real life. (Anyone studied this? I am totally using unscientific anecdata here.) Buffy is no longer the be-all end-all of teen shows, but sometimes I think that the teen literature world is slow to catch on to this fact. I know books are often a year behind pop culture, but this is much more than a year. I'm sure there's at least one book coming down the pipeline somewhere with devoted Gilmore Girls fans as the characters. (I know I've read one which mentioned a group of girls who were fans of Jensen Ackles, but I don't think the writer did her research because the group always got together on Thursday nights to watch DVDs...during Supernatural.)

Hey, I didn't say I LIKED acknowledging that fact. But it is a fact. Every generation has the shows that shape it, but every generation's shows can and do come to an end. Buffy has come to an end, and in five years no teens will have memory of its first run. It might not even show in reruns anymore and have to live solely on DVD. And those of us who serve teens and try to provide the latest and greatest in reading and pop culture for them must move on, though Buffy will always have a special place in our hearts.

Partying across the river

2009-05-27T09:43:00.000-04:00

It'll be quiet around here for the next few days, because I'll be at Book Expo America. I'm attending the Library Journal Day of Dialog on Thursday, then the exhibits and the YA Editors' Buzz panel on Friday. On Saturday, I'm probably going to stay home and recover and do my homework for the Columbia Publishing Course, because this cold I have is not going away, grrr.

In the meantime, check out this article by my friend and fellow librarian Karen Brooks-Reese: Zombies Rise in Teen Lit. Because zombies are totally the new black.

I've Caught Fire

2009-05-20T09:39:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a day like any other until I arrived home from work. Because, you see, when I arrived home from work there was an envelope by my door with this return address:

"Oh, cool, a new book," I thought. The awesome people in publicity at Scholastic send me books on a regular basis, so I figured this was another standard mailing. Then I saw this sticker on the lower corner of the envelope:

Then my thoughts went from "Oh, cool, a new book," to "OMG OMG OMG NO WAY!" with a side of hyperventilation. I threw my mail on my living room floor, retrieved Henry, who'd gone for a stroll in the hallway outside my apartment, and opened the envelope. Inside was this letter

and it was kind of like getting your letter of acceptance from your dream college. I read the important words, squeed, and dove for the rest of the contents. I still didn't believe there could be a copy of Catching Fire in there. I mean, I've been planning my entire Book Expo experience around the time Scholastic put out the Catching Fire galleys, especially because I couldn't go to Suzanne Collins's signing. It had to be promotional materials. A CD maybe. Bookmarks. Pamphlets. Publication date is September 1. No one was getting the actual book before BEA, right?

Wrong.

I cancelled my exciting Laundry And Chinese Food plans for the evening, made sure the cats had food and water, and settled down to read.

If you're expecting to be as blown away by Catching Fire as you were by The Hunger Games, you're in luck. There's a catch, however: Remember how you felt watching The Empire Strikes Back? That's the feeling you get while reading Catching Fire. The pacing of this book is slower, with a focus more on character development and world building than on action. If you've come for the action, though, don't give up; there's plenty of it here.

When we last saw Katniss Everdeen, she was headed into a life of fame and luxury as one of the winners of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games. She knew she was also headed into a life of trouble because of the way she saved her own life and the life of her competitor/boyfriend Peeta Mellark at the end of the Games. Because of what she did, she now fears for her own safety as well as the safety of her family and friends. Even worse, the time for the post-Hunger Games Victory Tour has arrived. That means Katniss will spend a lot of time traveling with Peeta. Katniss and Peeta must maintain the outward appearance of love, which saved their lives during the Hunger Games. Problem is, since the end of the Hunger Games their day-to-day relationship is lukewarm at best, with neither able to speak with the other about anything of consequence. Remember Gale, Katniss's best friend and hunting partner from District 12? He doesn't really want to talk to her, either. There's barely time to think about Gale, however, when Katniss begins to hear rumors of a Panem rebellion against the Capitol, a rebellion for which Katniss and her actions during the Hunger Games are the symbols.

Now, Katniss has a lot of decisions to make, ones that affect not just her, but the entire country of Panem. Defiance or acquiescence? Physical comfort or peace of mind? And most importantly, Peeta or Gale? Will she even survive long enough to make that decision?

In my opinion, this book does everything the second book in a trilogy should do. It solidifies the reader's vision of District 12's environment and gives us insight to the lives of people in the other eleven districts. It gives us a sadder-but-wiser Katniss who still retains that sense of "the world is all about me" that we expect from teen main characters. Peripheral characters get their own personalities. One of the things I liked best about books 4 and 5 in the Harry Potter series was the expanded, more jaded world view and the way Harry began to see that the wizarding world wasn't just divided into good people and Death Eaters. Katniss has some of the same revelations Harry did (minus the Death Eaters, of course). Catching Fire has its own storyline and some incredible revelations about Panem, its history, and its people, but it also sets us up to dive headlong into the final book. It's absolutely terrifying and thrilling, but it leaves us...let's say it leaves us not without hope.

In the course of reading this book I consumed part of a whole wheat baguette spread with goat cheese, 5 grilled jumbo shrimp, 1 grilled scallop, 2 redskin potatoes, 3 small Dove dark chocolate eggs left over from Easter, 1 coffee cake muffin, an iced latte, and 3 16-oz glasses of water. And that was only because I forgot about the grapes and toaster waffles in the freezer.

Robin Brande on food and beauty

2009-05-18T09:38:00.000-04:00

Librarians know that the coolest thing in the world is getting to chat with authors, whether it's in person or online. Thanks to the miracles of technology (read: Google, Technorati, Twitter, email), I got to interview Robin Brande, author of the upcoming Fat Cat, which I loved and you will too. Robin, who is hilarious and much better about answering her email than I am, graciously took the time to answer some of my burning questions on, among other things, what makes a person "hot" and what I should have for dinner. Read on!

Carlie: Which came first: The idea for FAT CAT or an interest in natural foods/eating vegetarian?

Robin: It’s interesting, Carlie. Whenever the topic of food and weight and my own history come up, I tend to be either secretive and cagey, or to totally spill my guts although tomorrow I may send you a frantic e-mail: “NO! DELETE! DELETE!” But here goes::

I have alternated in my life among being average, fat, and very fat. The last time I was skinny was in fourth grade. Then my boobs came in in fifth, and it was all over. (See, that’s one of the parts you’re going to have to delete.)

For most of my life, food and weight have been constantly on my mind. I love to bake, love to eat, love to read books about baking and eating—but then there’s this other side of me that is secretly a nutrition and health freak, and so you can imagine the war going on in my brain.

When I was in junior high and high school I was a big fan of all the diets I’d see in Cosmo or Glamour or wherever. The week-long beets diet was especially spectacular, what with the way it turned my pee and poop bright red. Thrilling.

Then once I hit college—when I was superfat—I’d alternate between months of gorging on things like sweet and sour pork and a pint of Baskin Robbins (that was my Wednesday night treat—something to look forward to every week), and then weeks (or days) of “getting serious” and trying some new diet I’d make up. My favorite was the “trail mix diet,” where I decided since I love M&Ms, peanuts, and raisins so much, I’d just eat those—and only those—for a whole week. Gained five pounds. Excellent.

In my adult years I finally found a love for exercise, and that keeps most of the major pudge off, but I still love tortilla chips and chocolate chip cookies and other snacks way too much to get back to my fourth grade form. Which, let’s admit, is impossible anyway, since back then I had no notion of hips.

So the idea for FAT CAT, as you can see, came from my own life. The difference between Cat and me is that she’s smart and scientific, whereas I think eating M&Ms might solve the problem.

So when I embarked on writing the book, I decided to make myself my own science experiment, just like Cat did. In the process I read tons and tons of books on food and nutrition, I made all sorts of changes to my diet, and I finally actually figured out a healthy way of eating and living. Yes, I still need the tortilla chips and cookies every now and then—who doesn’t?—but I’m trying to keep it all under reasonable control, in part because now I have this book coming out and I’d better fairly represent it, don’t you think?

(Alternate answer: I don’t really care about food or eating, Carlie. I’m just one of those lucky people. I basically just made the whole book up.)

CW: Since an interest in science plays a big part in your books, can you talk about your background in science (if you have one)?

RB: Again with the confession: I have absolutely zero background in science. I used to hate it more than I can say. Then somewhere in these past few years a little switch got dislodged in my brain, and now I watch all these science shows like Nova and Nature, I read the science section of the New York Times, I watch science documentaries—what happened to me? I used to only read People and watch Top Chef. (Okay, still do that.)

In short, can’t explain it. I just think science is totally fascinating and cool, and I really admire kids who get the bug early.

CW: The back of FAT CAT reads: Cat After: Smart. Funny. Hot. The idea of what makes a "hot" girl is often an extreme; you have to be tanned, fake hair, fake nails, a size 2, etc. What do you envision the "After" Cat as looking like? What does it mean to you for a girl to be "hot?"

RB: Ugh, hate the things you just described. Personally, I think hotness comes from within, and is a much more natural process than going to the tanning salon and getting the fake hotness sprayed on.

This morning when I was out walking the dogs on the nearby university campus, I saw this college girl walking toward the sports facilities. And she had the most incredible, muscular arms. I had to stop her and say something. “Oh, my gosh, your arms! They’re fabulous! Are you a swimmer?” She smiled and confirmed she was. Now that kind of look is HOT. Healthy, strong, natural.

CW: Reading FAT CAT made me hungry. What should I make for dinner (with recipe, please)?

RB: Mmm, so many yummy possibilities. My current favorite thing is to cut up a bunch of little potatoes and roast them in the oven with just a layer of water in the bottom of the pan—you don’t need oil. Put some salt and pepper on them, heap up a big plateful, dip in ketchup and fancy mustard and even horseradish if you can take it.

Then mix up a huge salad full of all sorts of fun and interesting things—plain salads are so boring and will never make you crave them. Lately I’ve been taking three or four handfuls of pre-washed baby greens, then adding artichoke hearts, asparagus I’ve either steamed or roasted in the oven (again, just in water and with salt and pepper), beets (yes, I’ve forgiven beets), sunflower seeds, raisins—really, anything that captures my fancy. Then I toss it with about a tablespoon of Annie’s Naturals Goddess Dressing (a real endorsement—no kickbacks), made with tahini and apple cider vinegar—I’m telling you, it’s as decadent as all those big heavy meals I used to eat pre-FAT CAT, and yet eating this way makes me feel SO much better. I am a changed woman because of writing that book. Another reason why I love my job!

CW: What are you working on now, and what can we expect from you in the future?

RB: I’m working on another science book—surprise! But as usual, it’s science balanced with comedy and romance, because we all need some c & r. Can’t say anything more about it yet. And besides, I’ve spilled my guts quite enough for one interview, don’t you think?
---

Carlie's note: It should be said here that of all household duties, I loathe cooking the most (although I love to eat). I know lots of people find it relaxing and creative, but I find it frustrating drudgery. Even with my supreme hatred of cooking, Fat Cat made me want to not only enter my kitchen, but to cook in it! That, my friends, is a powerful book.

If we start it, who will continue it?

2009-05-14T11:12:00.000-04:00

This post at the YALSA blog has my alarm bells ringing: Start Something New With YALSA. Quoting the post:

Recently, members of the YALSA Board discussed how the Division defines “young adult.” Specifically the Board wondered if more attention should be paid to the older or younger age edges of the group that makes up what we call young adult. In that discussion, the group realized that it could be useful if YALSA looked at ways to support librarians that serve older teens (including those in college and the work force) and those in their early 20s.

I don't like even the remote possibility of YALSA encouraging the idea of expanding the YA age definition, and I'll tell you why:

I think YA librarians taking on the 18-25ers is a great way for YA librarians to do more work for the same amount of pay and to devalue the work we're already doing. Speaking for myself, in my YA positions I have always had my hands full with the 12-18-year-olds. Doing collection development and library services just for those ages is full time and then some. Being a good YA librarian, to me, means keeping up on pop culture trends, reading a ton of books, maintaining a collection, having interesting, relevant programs, knowing about college and career advisory sources for high schoolers, visiting schools, you get the picture. If we take on the duties of great service to 18-25-year-olds, something for the 12-18-year-olds is going to have to go because we're now making more bricks with less straw. If YA services takes on older young adults, that means less money for books for middle and high school students (and how much crossover will there be between YA and adult collections?). It means less time for the YA librarian to visit schools, never mind attending workshops and conferences.

By saying, "Yes, I already work with the 12-18 group but now I want to expand it to 12-25," YA librarians are sending the message that we don't already have enough to do with our time. We're devaluing the services we already give by saying that it's super easy to get all our work done in the time allotted to us and we're totally willing to do even more work for the same amount of pay. How many YA librarians are also children's librarians or adult librarians? How many YA librarians are doing jobs that should be done by two people? Offering to expand the YA librarian's job to include up to age 25 sends the message to our directors that we're willing to take on more work than we can realistically do well. Aside from this, by adding 18-25 to the YA definition, we're saying that the reference, recreational, and reader's advisory needs of that age group are closer to the reference needs of middle schoolers than they are to those of adults.

I acknowledge that the idea of 25 being the new 18 exists, though I find it silly. At 18, you're an adult for all legal and educational intents and purposes. I know because I watch TV and read YA lit that college is the new high school. I know that the 18-34 demographic is a big moneymaker for television advertisers and Apple computers. None of this, however, means that I am willing to take on more work for the same amount of money. If the 18-to-25 age group is a concern for YA librarians either individually or as an organization, then this is something to be addressed by both YA and adult services librarians. I know that many of my colleagues are making an effort to reach this age group, and that's great; it's an age group long overlooked in public library services. I do not, however, think that the idea of services being offered as part of YA and handled exclusively by YA librarians is a good one. Time should equal money. If we're not going to get more of either of those when we take on a new demographic in YA services, then how can we be expected to perform those services well?

The skinny on two books about fat

2009-05-12T23:11:00.000-04:00

I don't know why, but I love YA body image books. All of them. I guess they just appeal to my inner teenager. One trend I'm following, erm, hungrily is that of body image books that don't focus on eating disorders or extreme athleticism. Lately, I'm seeing more books that focus on ideas of beauty and health, topics I think teens relate to, without being gloom and doom. (Of course, there's a place for gloom and doom, these books just don't happen to be it.) Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults is doing a "Bodies" list this year, too, which makes me insanely happy. Today, I want to recommend two very enjoyable novels about bodies and health that show exactly what YA can do with body image plots.

Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have is Allen Zadoff's first YA novel, coming in September, 2009, from Egmont USA. Andrew Zansky (semi-autobiographical novel, perhaps?) is sure of his place in his school's social strata. He's a Model UN geek, the second-fattest kid in school, and a genius at figuring out how to get out of gym class. He's also got a mad crush on the new girl, April, who knows him as the son of the locally famous caterer. Andrew figures he's in for a year of the same-old, same-old, scratching the 48 off the size tag on his Levis and praying he'll fit into the new desks in homeroom, until he's recruited to play center for the football team. Now he's part of the jock clique, and more importantly, a member of a team. He's finally got the chance not only to prove to April that he's alive, but to do something other than what everyone else expects of him. Strangely, Andrew finds himself enjoying football for both the physical and friendship benefits. His size is an asset and having a brain doesn't hurt, either. Everything doesn't go perfectly, of course, because this is a novel and not a half-hour sitcom, but Andrew's problems are resolved without the author resorting to trite life lessons. The word I like to use to describe this book is tragicomedy. Andrew is smart and funny, but he doesn't pretend that all in his life is fine and dandy, either. He acknowledges that he is the cause of many of his weight problems but he also has things to think about other than weight. The mix of football scenes plus the humor make this a book that should be fairly popular.

Fat Cat is the latest offering from Robin Brande, author of one of my favorite 2007 books, Evolution, Me, and Other Freaks of Nature. As in Evolution, there's a big plot point revolving around science. Catherine, a.k.a. Cat, is enrolled in an advanced science class with a year-long individual study requirement. Inspired by a picture of hunting hominids, Cat decides to engage in a 200-day return to the way olden times of living. That means no cell phone, no internet (which is sort of a pattern in Robin Brande's books, yes?), no driving anywhere she doesn't absolutely have to be, no hair dryer, makeup, and no processed food, including Cat's beloved daily Diet Cokes. The first days of the experiment are sheer hell, but as the year progresses, Cat finds herself in a new relationship with food and exercise. Cat's main source of support is her awesome best friend, the creative Amanda. No frenemies here; Amanda is the true best friend we all want. With Amanda's help, Cat rediscovers her love of cooking and transforms it into a part-time business. And of course, there's a love story. Or more appropriately, a love-hate story. The great thing about Fat Cat is the focus on healthy eating and exercise as science with side benefits, rather than a front-and-center body issues book. Yes, Cat does lose weight, but let's be fair, most people would if they made the changes to her life that she does. Though Cat has her pages of angst, overall this is a "happy" book that really makes readers think about food and physical well-being.

LIAR, LIAR

2009-05-07T23:10:00.000-04:00

I can't believe she went there. Eeeewwww. Awesome.

Okay, now that I have that out of my system, on to today's review, which is for Liar by Justine Larbalestier (review copy courtesy of Bloomsbury USA, book is coming in October, 2009). If you've been around a while, you know I think highly of Justine both personally and professionally, and this book lives up to everything I've come to expect from her as a writer and more.

Micah, the protagonist of Liar, is exactly that. Like her dad, she's always had an unsteady relationship with the truth. At her progressive NYC private school, she's a loner who's known for her eccentricity and, yes, lying. She's secretly dating Zach, a popular basketball player who's also her running partner. At least, that's what she tells us. Besides being her secret boyfriend, Zach is also dead. He was violently murdered. Micah is sure she didn't do it, but there are holes in the stories she tells the police, her family, and her classmates. As the investigation continues, Micah has trouble keeping track of all her lies (even though she likes to have a little truth in all of them). There is one major truth about her, though, that she keeps hidden from everyone except her family. It's the truth that led to most of her lies, and possibly to the one truth that no one would ever believe. She's alienated from her classmates as is, but if they find out what's really behind her longtime illness, one she's inherited from her father, she'll be alienated from the entire world. (It's also one I didn't figure out until I was told. I'm often gullible while reading.)

If you've come to this book looking for something funny, like How to Ditch Your Fairy, you're SOL. There is nothing funny about Liar, but I think that's why I love it. It's a thriller, downright gross in some places, and completely terrifying. It's also an interesting look at the use of first-person POV. We all know that all first-person narrators are unreliable, but here Justine has taken unreliability and played it as Micah's defining trait. To make things even more interesting, the reader can never be certain what is a lie and what's the truth, giving the suspense a new level. How much of what she tells us about her classmates is real? What about her romance with Zach? Is everything Micah tells us a lie? The world may never know, but that's just another reason to love the book. And I wouldn't lie to you about that.

Review: The September Sisters

2009-05-05T23:09:00.000-04:00

Today's review: The September Sisters by Jillian Cantor (HarperCollins, 2009). Copy courtesy of Sarah Shealy at Blue Slip Media.

I have to say, I'm loving this swing back towards traditional mystery in YA. This isn't a whodunit so much as a portrait of a family suffering from a lack of closure. The narrator, Abigail, takes the reader back through her eighth grade year, which begins not long after her younger sister, Becky, disappears. Becky and Abby's relationship is imperfect to the point of being antagonistic, which I personally love (can you tell I have younger sisters?). Where Becky always seemed to be the favored child before, her disappearance has elevated her to the level of angel in just about everyone's eyes but Abby's. For months, Abby's family has no closure. There is no trace of Becky. The police suspect Abby's parents, specifically her mother. At a time when Abby needs her parents, specifically her mother, more than ever, they are distant and depressed, more concerned with their missing child than the one who is right in front of their eyes. Abby navigates loss and grief on her own as she is thrown into the idea that adults are far from perfect.

On a personal level, I'm still a little weirded out by YA novels where the protagonists have obsessions with their parents' lives, but that's because I'm old-school when it comes to parents in YA literature. (What's the saying? There will never be a shortage of children's books that reassure adults how much their children need them?) The adults here are largely imperfect but they're also not terrible people. Abby, who's so far led a normal life, now has to deal with major changes (boys, body, friends) on her own because her parents are preoccupied with Becky's disappearance. The readers who want tearjerkers with sad romance and symbolism will absolutely love this. Although there is resolution in the end for Abby's family and Abby herself where her romance is concerned, the resolution is not achieved without a lot of heartache.

Jillian Cantor's website || interview at The Story Siren

Candor, candidly

2009-05-03T09:42:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the first-ever librarian and reviewer preview for Egmont USA (which is pronounced EGG-mahnt, in case you were wondering). Though Egmont is new in town, they've already got the popular kids clamoring to sit at their table. Their fall list has a really nice mix of genres and formats for all ages, picture books through YA. I had a difficult time deciding which of their books I want to read first, but because I like dystopias, I went for Candor by Pam Bachorz, coming in September, 2009.

The ironically named town of Candor is based on Celebration, Florida, the town that Disney built. In Candor, everyone eats healthy food. The kids respect their parents. Houses are always painted and have neatly trimmed lawns and white picket fences. Everyone and everything is perfect, and the king of all the perfect kids is Oscar Banks, the son of the town's founder. In truth, Oscar is the least perfect kid, but he's perfect at keeping up appearances. Oscar knows that the reason everyone in Candor is so docile, and the kids so dedicated to school and the "right" activities, is because they're all being controlled with subliminal messages. The Messages are Oscar's way to make a profit, helping rich kids escape Candor. He's got to be careful, though, because those who are caught working against Candor are subjected to complete mind erasure.

All is status quo until Oscar meets Nia, an artist with a mind of her own. Despite the Messages that are supposed to keep Nia in line and make her forget about art, Nia continues to draw and defy. Oscar can't help himself: He falls in love. Falling for Nia might be the most dangerous thing Oscar has ever done. If it were up to the Messages, Oscar wouldn't so much as hold Nia's hand. But Oscar has been working against the Messages for years and he's not about to stop now.

Think of this as The Stepford Wives for YA. The settings are very similar, perfect towns with sinister undertones. Oscar's constant struggle between his own will and the Messages does slow the book down a little in the middle, but his devotion to Nia and his plans for the future of Candor step up the pace towards the end. Bachorz raises a lot of questions about the meaning of the word "perfection" through a narrator who can't even be wholly honest with himself, much less the reader. Candor is not an action-packed dystopian thriller like Uglies or Gone, but it's definitely thought-provoking. I can see its appeal to fans of The Compound; the two have a lot in common.

Dirty books done dirt cheap

2009-05-01T09:41:00.000-04:00

There's been a fair amount of YA lit pearl-clutching in the media this week. Amid all the "Twilight isn't good for girls" whining, I must turn your attention to the clutchiest of all clutching, from the first name in second-rate journalism, the New York Post.

In the Post, Andrea Peyser laments the publication of Jake Wizner's latest YA novel, Castration Celebration: Dirty Teen Tale is a Cut Below. As one who's actually read Castration Celebration, it is my educated guess that Ms Peyser read the first ten pages and the last ten pages, then made haste to her keyboard to lament the state of today's YA publications. Oh yes, teens have all sorts of deviant sex, she knows, but what is it doing in a...gasp...book? I want to know why YA librarians are struggling to keep their jobs, but Ms Peyser got paid to write a review of a YA novel she didn't even read all the way through. Had she bothered to do so, she'd know that CC is an over-the-top modern melodrama, part script and part romance, and the amount of actual sex in the book is, by my recall, almost nil. (There might be a sex scene near the end, but if there is, I've forgotten it.) Buried in all the silly talk of castration are teens trying to deal with hormonal insanity, family breakups and the loss of friends. These same teens who write castration plays also go above and beyond their call of duty to support a friend in need. Not that Ms Peyser would know that, of course; it happens in the middle of the book. Oh, and taking a potshot at Jake Wizner? NOT ON. Authors are not their books.

If you want the weekend edition of the Dumb Statements About YA Lit Tribune, go here: Did You Notice The Difference Between Classic Young Adult Books And New Young Adult Books? from the ill-constructed and poorly written Gossip in the City. Those darn YA books just don't have good messages anymore! I mean, really, it's simply impossible to find a book about discovering who you are through travel, or loyalty and talent. And you'll never, ever find literary books about science and religion, heck no.

Honestly, are these people visiting the same bookstores I am? Because if all you see in a teen section is The Clique (and I enjoy the Clique books!), you're either willfully blind or your bookstore needs new management.

What I write that isn't a blog entry

2009-05-01T09:38:00.000-04:00

It's been a crazy, absent week around here because of the New Jersey Library Association conference, where I developed an authorcrush on Chris Krovatin, but I'm back and book reviews are coming! First, though, you can check out what I've been writing when I haven't been preparing for the conference (or reading, or working on my book, or...)

This week, I made my final post for ForeWord Magazine's Shelf Space blog: They're evil! They're brilliant! They're reviewers! Professional reviews are an important but often misunderstood part of collection development. I interviewed Linda Benson from VOYA and Vicky Smith from Kirkus about the people and processes behind professional reviews.

I also have an article in the May 1 issue of School Library Journal: The Original Handhelds: Magazines that teens can't resist. Don't tell anyone, but I actually had fun researching this article because I got to go to Barnes and Noble and sit in the cafe while paging through a stack of glossy magazines. Many thanks go to Laura Leonard of the Hillsdale Public Library, Sophie Brookover of Eastern Regional High School, and Kimberly Paone of the Elizabeth Public Library for their advice and anecdotes on magazines.

Books for Holocaust Remembrance Week

2009-04-24T09:35:00.000-04:00

My post at Foreword's Shelf Space blog this week is all about outstanding Holocaust nonfiction: Beyond Maus and Night. It's not my usual area of interest, but I am lucky enough to have a very good friend at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum library who gave me some wonderful advice and recommendations.

Next week is my last Shelf Space post, and I'll be...surprising you all!

Loving Hate List

2009-04-23T21:37:00.000-04:00

For a little while, I'm back to reviewing YA books, and this is one I'm really glad to have the opportunity to write about.

I was sold on Hate List by Jennifer Brown (coming in September of 2009) the minute I heard about it at a recent preview at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. It starts four months after a school shooting. Hate List's narrator, Val, is an incoming senior. She is simultaneously a hero and a pariah, because although she saved a classmate's life during the shooting, she was dating the shooter, Nick, at the time of the incident. To further complicate Val's post-shooting life, the police found a notebook she and Nick shared, which contained the Hate List. The Hate List is, well, what it sounds like: a list of people who angered Nick and Val. What Val saw as a place to write down her rants, the police see as the list of people Nick and Val wanted to kill. Val is guilty in the eyes of the police, her family, and most of her classmates, but she knows that although a lot of her classmates pissed her off, she would never have killed them. She's been medicated and institutionalized, hit the lowest lows in her life, and now she's ready to go back to school. Though she tries to be invisible, all her classmates are deeply affected by the shooting and therefore deeply affected in the way they feel towards Val. In addition to her troubles at school, Val has trouble at home. Her parents fight a lot and neither one of them seems to see her as anything other than a threat to herself and society.

I've read a few other school-shooting books, and I have to say that this one really stands out in the crowd. Other books often try to sell the reader some kind of political or social platform, but Jennifer Brown is selling us a look at grief, closure, and how a crisis can change people. Val gives us a look at Nick that we wouldn't see in a third-person novel, and that is missed by almost everyone else. Nick is complex. Val is constantly overwhelmed and knocked down by trying to balance her feelings with everyone else's. Though Val keeps her friends at arm's length, we get a clear picture of what they think and who they are. Like all good YA first-person narrators, Val is self-centered and unable to judge others with any degree of wisdom. Her inward focus is what makes her story great. As an adult reader, I could see where the adults were coming from in regards to the way they treated Val, but I also wholly bought Val's heartbreak and path to healing. I did see a few minor flaws, but with its timely subject and writing that makes us empathize rather than react, this is a book that should have a home in most teen collections.

Two's company, three's literature

2009-04-20T09:35:00.000-04:00

Leah of BenBella Books was kind enough to send me a copy of In the Hunt, their recent essay collection on Supernatural. Since I'm only midway through the book there won't be a review right this minute, but there was one essay that made me blink and, of course, reach for the keyboard.

This essay, called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jo the Monster Killer discusses an episode of Buffy called The Zeppo. Though it's been a while since I've seen this ep and I'm fuzzy on the details, I do know that the basic plot is "everybody forgets Xander." The author of the essay discusses the similarities between Xander and Dean Winchester in the realm of traditional masculinity. I don't disagree with that, but if I had the chance to write an essay much longer than this blog entry about the ways Xander and Dean parallel each other, I'd go with this oversimplified explanation:

Margaret Cho once said in a standup routine that in every group of three female friends, there's always the smart one, the nice one, and, um, the flirt. I feel the same way Cho does, but my saying is a little different. I say that in every group of three literary/television/movie friends, there's always the body, the mind, and the soul. Xander and Dean, like Ron Weasley and Luke Skywalker, both serve as the soul. Buffy and Harry are the bodies, the ones with special strengths, the ones chosen to fulfill great prophecies. Willow and Hermione are Research Girls. Ron and Xander are the ones who love almost unconditionally and are, all things considered, the ones with the stable emotions when all around them is chaos. Though it seems like the heroes can function just fine without these sidekicks, the truth is that the heroes would be lost without them. Do we really think that Harry would know up from down in the wizarding world without Ron? It's often the soul that brings a sense of bravery to the group, but not bravery in a let's-break-stuff sort of way. The soul always knows what the right thing to do is, even it's hard (thanks, Dumbledore!), and they do that right thing without question.

This mind-body-soul is a little hard to see at first in Supernatural, because the series only has two main characters, rather than the three we see all the time in Buffy or Harry Potter. What tricks us in SPN is that the third main character is not a person but a car. For those unfamiliar with SPN (and why??), two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, travel the country in a black 1967 Chevy Impala, lovingly referred to by fans as the Metallicar. The car was passed down to Dean by their father, and he often treats the car better than he treats his (human) brother. In the Winchester clan, Sam is the mind, the one prone to abstract thinking. The car is the body because, um, it's a muscle car. Dean is the soul, the one prone to sacrifice and doing things because he believes they're in the best interests of those he loves. Although Dean is marketed as the suave type, he's a creampuff when it comes to Sam and the car. It's all part of his charm, just like a viewer can't help but being charmed by Xander's dedication to the Scooby gang. Could Buffy and Harry accomplish slayings and fighting the Dark Lord on their own? Likewise, could Sam Winchester have gone along with his destiny and led a demon army? I suppose they could, but they'd be awfully boring.

Support Teen Literature Day 2009

2009-04-15T09:33:00.001-04:00

Thursday, April 16, 2009, is the third annual Support Teen Literature Day. To me, and to most of you I'm sure, every day is Support Teen Literature Day. This is an extra-special something, though. Read more of my thoughts on STLD at ForeWord Magazine's Shelf Space blog: Support Teen Literature Day.

Update on #amazonfail

2009-04-15T09:33:00.000-04:00

It was a glitch! No, it was a hacker! No, it was policy! No, it was censorship! No, it was...all of these and none of these.

In any event, it looks like the 57,310 books who were stripped of their sales rankings have been restored. Here are some links for you:

-Amazon restores rankings for gay-themed books from USAToday

-Heather Corinna: Amazon's de-ranking is not just a glitch (Guardian UK)

-Amazon worker details company's error (MediaBistro)

-For those that (like me) enjoy their AmazonFail with a little bit of social-network gossip and a lot of bite, read On Amazon Failure, Meta-Trolls, and Bantown

-Jezebel.com's roundup of AmazonFail links

adding: Amazonfail: How Metadata and Sex Broke the Amazon Book Search from InfoToday

Error or not, glitch or not, discrimination or not, it was a scary thing to witness, because all of this shows the power that metadata has on Amazon's book sales. The part of me that wanted to be a cataloger in library school found all of this fascinating from a search-results perspective. AmazonGate also gives librarians a really simple explanation as to why library catalog search results are often so different from Amazon search results. (Hey, we have to take the bad with the good, right?)

Something is rotten in the state of Washington

2009-04-13T11:27:00.001-04:00

"Adult book." To me, it's any book not published for a YA (or younger) audience. Shows where my mind has been of late. To Amazon, however, it seems to be most books with GLBT content. The authorblog world is atwitter with complaints that many books with GLBT content, regardless of how sexually explicit or not they are, are being stripped of their Amazon.com sales rankings.

People, this is really, really uncool. In a very small nutshell, books without Amazon sales rankings don't exist on Amazon. That means when you search for a subject (and oh, how we librarians love our searching!) on Amazon, it will show books that have sales rankings first. Author Heather Corrinna shows us the current results for a search on all of Amazon for the word "homosexuality."

Those are some strange-looking results, no? It seems that not 100% of GLBT-positive books have been stripped of their rankings. Boy Meets Boy still has its ranking and appears on page 3 of the search results for "homosexuality." A search for "Rainbow Road" brings up three other Alex Sanchez books but does not bring up Rainbow Road, which has been stripped of its sales ranking. You can find it IF you do a search for "Rainbow Road Sanchez."

I don't know how Amazon is deciding which books get sales rankings and which ones don't, so I thought I'd run a few popular YA authors of GLBT literature through Amazon searches and see how they shook out. Sex and violence as subjects don't seem to be limited across the board, given that Adam Rapp's books are certainly easy enough to find in a search for "Adam Rapp." (I just picked him because I know his books have controversial content and wanted a test subject.) A search on "Ellen Wittlinger" shows all of her books from Hard Love to Parrotfish. Julie Anne Peters is a mixed bag; grl2grl has no sales ranking. Neither does Between Mom and Jo. Luna and Keeping You a Secret, however, still have sales rankings. Gay America: Struggle for Equality by Linas Alsenas has no sales ranking and doesn't show up in an Amazon search on "Gay America," and if you search for the title with the author, it won't show the in-print, reviewed, available version of the book, only a used one for about $70.

Here are some more links and news you can read:

-Is this book (or its author) too gay for an Amazon? by Heather Corinna

-Amazon de-ranks so-called adult books, including National Book Award winner, from the LA Times Jacket Copy blog

-Amazon Follies by author Mark Probst

-Meta Writers has a compiled list of books whose sales rankings have been removed

-Amazon criticized for de-ranking 'adult' books from CNet News

-Jezebel.com is keeping a comprehensive list of all books losing their sales rankings

-Twitter hashtags: #amazonfail and #glitchmyass

Will this be big news beyond the end of this week? I have no idea. Maybe Amazon will see the incredible stupid and restore sales rankings to all books and materials. And maybe while they're doing that, they'll redesign their reader's advisory algorithm so it doesn't think I want a copy of Twilight every time I look at the record for a YA novel. Stay tuned.

Everywhere but here

2009-04-13T11:27:00.000-04:00

This month, I have the honor of being the guest blogger at ForeWord Magazine's Shelf Space blog. My first post went up yesterday: Forever in debt to his priceless advice, which compiles books and CDs on Kurt Cobain and the grunge era. Other posts coming this month are...a surprise!

I'm also plotting out a post for the YALSA blog on my employment situation, and what's to come of that. I did find out on Tuesday that I was accepted to the 2009 Columbia Publishing Course, so there may be a little reflection on what, exactly, a person can do with an MLIS and...counting...eight years of service as a YA librarian.

And a random question for the masses: Am I the only one who read, loved, and wish she'd kept her copy of The Against Taffy Sinclair Club by Betsy Haynes?

I heart this interview

2009-04-06T11:25:00.000-04:00

I know it's been quiet around Librarilly Blonde lately, but that's because I've been buried in review books, wrapping up some projects before my job ends in June, stalking my mailbox, and preparing for the New Jersey Library Association conference (more on that later).

When I'm not doing those things, however, I'm reading I Heart Daily, a very cool Stuff We Like blog run in part by Melissa Walker, who wrote the delightful Violet on the Runway. Last Wednesday (I'm slow sometimes), I Heart Daily ran an awesome interview with Christina Kelly, whose writing I first read in Sassy magazine when I was in sixth grade. Kelly talks with I Heart Daily about one of Sassy's most memorable covers, which is pictured above, and her memories of Kurt Cobain. Read it here: Flashback: Kurt, Courtney and Sassy Magazine.

Related things you might heart if you heart all things Nirvana and Sassy: Journals of Kurt Cobain || Cobain Unseen by Charles R. Cross || With the Lights Out (box set of Nirvana's recordings) || How Sassy Changed My Life by Kara Jesella and Marissa Meltzer

and Mom, if you're reading this, I'm still mad at you for throwing out all my Sassys when I was in college.

The one where I pretend to be Nancy Pearl

2009-04-03T11:24:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I had the opportunity to be the special call-in guest on G4 Interactive, a webcast done for fans of manga, anime, and gaming...meaning, the audience of G4 TV, which is mostly males 14-35. This might not be my usual reader's advisory audience, but I am so glad I got to do this and share some YA titles with G4 fans and talk a little bit about gaming in libraries.

(If you think you're hearing double, you are! The host is my sister Courtney, a.k.a. Teggy, who was kind enough to ask me to guest on her show.)

Seasons don't Beat the Reaper

2009-03-29T11:21:00.000-04:00

As much as I love YA lit, every now and again I just have to escape from that world with an adult book. Yes, here's my secret: I love adult literary fiction. Thanks to the wonderful people at Hachette Book Group's adult publicity department, I acquired a promotional copy of Beat the Reaper by first-time novelist Josh Bazell. It took me a long time to pick up, but once I picked it up I couldn't put it down. Lucky for the book, Numb3rs was pre-empted by the NCAA tournament this weekend.

The plot: This is not a book that is supposed to work, given all its elements of weird. Lest we get too caught up in current literary trends, there is not a single supernatural creature in this book, which scores big points with me. What makes this book weird is, well, everything else that goes on. The central character is Dr. Peter Brown, formerly known as Pietro Brwna, a former, and very talented, mob hitman. He's currently in witness protection, working at Manhattan Catholic Hospital. Take his word for it: ManCat is not a place you want to go when you're well, never mind when you're sick. It's just another day of making rounds when he enters the room of Eddy Squillante, a mafia member who recognizes him immediately. Squillante's in for some major surgery and doesn't know he's got a hack for a doctor. What he does know is that he's hit pay dirt. Before Peter/Pietro can stop him, Squillante's put in a call to the mob. If he dies during surgery, his hit men will be on Peter/Pietro regardless of who's at fault for his death.

Why you'll love it: With all its crazy side plots and the back-and-forth movement through Pietro's memories and his current dilemma, not to mention the footnotes, you'd think this book would just get too tangled in itself. Instead, it's simultaneously horrific and hilarious and kind of gross. Pietro has strong morals and has zero compunctions about causing violence if he believes it will benefit the smaller and weaker. Tied into Pietro's story are notes on north Jersey/NYC mafia history, a romance, and the unsanitary side of medicine. It's House meets The Sopranos sprinkled with bitter humor.

Is this a YA novel by any stretch of the imagination? No. But it's exactly what I needed, and what I was looking for. I'm a fan of Chuck Palahniuk and this is a great next-read for his readers.

Review in the NY Times || Interview with Josh Bazell at Three Guys One Book || Interview in New York Magazine

Avoiding kids' writing scams

2009-03-24T22:21:00.000-04:00

Back in this post, I talked about one of my favorite blogs, Writer Beware. The part of me that loves crime shows also loves the coverage Writer Beware offers of publishing scams. "Agents" who run off with people's money. "Traditional" publishers who charge for their services. Publishers who will publish your book for free, honest, but want you to buy a ridiculous number of your own book, or spend money for their editing services. Publishing as an industry is not the most transparent thing out there, and there are crooks who take advantage of this. As you'll learn while reading Writer Beware, there are many shady publishing practices that don't LOOK shady at first glance but turn out to be no good when you scratch the surface.

One of these no-good schemes was recently profiled in the Guardian: Nothing to write home about. The short version of the story goes something like this: 10-year-old girl finds out via mail that her writing has been chosen for publication in a book! Girl's mom finds out that most everyone else in her daughter's class got the same letter and in fact, the company publishes between 60 and 80 percent of everything it receives. The company encourages parents to spend insane amounts of money on the book in which their child's writing appears, a book that will never appear in libraries or bookstores. But isn't it worth spending the money just to see that child's writing in print?

No. It really isn't. Because it's pretty much a scam. Even though it will cost the child nothing to have her writing appear in this book, that the writing appears at all is essentially meaningless. The publisher is willing to take but not give money, and they're certainly not willing to edit and/or help the child improve her writing. The parents would be better off going to some place like Lulu.com, a reputable vanity press that doesn't try to disguise itself as anything else, and getting a book of their child's writing. At least that way they'd know all the costs up front and no fake certificates of meritorious writing are involved. It's important to note, too, that this "Your poetry/story is going to be published in this book you can pay an exorbitant amount of money for!" is not a new thing. I remember a girl in my seventh-grade writing class that also got her poem "published." When she read her poem out loud to the class, all I could think was, "That poem isn't very good." Clearly, I was destined to review for Kirkus from a very young age. My early career path as a critic aside, I always had the thought that there was something going on other than the oh-so-great quality of her poem. When I grew up and learned the basics of how writing gets published, I was able to confirm my 'tween inklings.

With the pressure parents feel to raise "perfect" children, it's easy for them to get caught up in the idea that their kids will grow up to be the next J.K. Rowling. Indeed, the Guardian article addresses "pester power" that fuels publishing scams like this one. And from what I see around the internet, growing up does not necessarily mean that everyone who wants to write learns that all publishers are created equal.

If you like Writer Beware (and why wouldn't you?), I definitely recommend reading the archives of Miss Snark's blog. From Miss Snark, I learned two of the most important tenets of publishing: 1. Money should always flow in the direction of the writer and 2. Good writing trumps all.

People I want to be when I grow up

2009-03-20T22:19:00.000-04:00

Publishers Weekly has a nice writeup about Wendy Lamb in today's Talkback: A Fifth Anniversary for Wendy Lamb Books. What I find most heartening is that the success of WLB shows that there is a flourishing market for literary YA. Congratulations, Wendy, and may you have many more anniversaries.

Loving and losing

2009-03-19T22:18:00.000-04:00

If it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, then I am becoming an expert on love.

BCCLS, my employer since February, 2006, is changing the role that consultants play in the larger operation of the system. It's sort of confusing, but the way BCCLS works, in short, is that there are 75 libraries and a group of 13 librarians and IT specialists who work in an office. The librarians serve as consultants on various aspects of frontline library services, and the IT specialists do magic. More and more, libraries are demanding technology training for their staff, training on the cataloging program we use, and IT support. What are they demanding a lot less of? Support for young adult services. Combined with budget cuts, this brings me to some very bad news:

I will not have a job as of July 1, 2009. BCCLS is eliminating the YA Services Librarian position.

When I got the news, I cried in front of everyone in the office because I was so upset and you know, I'm not really ashamed that I did that. What every one of you know (I hope), and what everyone I work with knows, is that I love this job and care deeply about doing it well. It was the job I'd hoped to land since I got accepted to library school. Does it drive me crazy from time to time? Sure. All of our jobs drive us crazy from time to time. Despite the crazy, it was the opportunity for me to do what I always wanted, which was serving librarians who serve teens. Teen librarians almost always work alone in their buildings and are often misunderstood by staff who don't see much value in teen services. If I could be someone who could make them stronger in their careers, then I would accomplish something. I like to think that in my time here I have accomplished more than I ever thought I would on the day I accepted the position.

As of right now, I don't have another full-time or part-time library job to go to. I still love YA literature, so I will continue with my Printz Award committee duties and writing for Kirkus, VOYA, and School Library Journal. I'm also turning an article in to YALS this weekend, working on a book for ALA Editions, kicking around a proposal for another YA lit book, and offering my services to libraries as a consultant, assuming no one opens a YA or adult services position anytime soon. As for the future...I have a few ideas, but nothing is definite yet.

This blog isn't going anywhere, so please feel free to keep reading if you like it here. Just be forewarned that in addition to my musings on literature, you may be subjected to the occasional Confessions of an Unemployed YA Librarian.

Maximum entertainment

2009-03-19T21:28:00.000-04:00

Has the world finally reached Twilight saturation? Perhaps, because it seems like there's a lot of talk these days about James Patterson's Maximum Ride series and Catherine Hardwicke's possibly directing the movie.

-Popwatch Blog: Will Maximum Ride be the next Twilight? (No. Not any more than Twilight was the next Harry Potter. Let's make a deal, people. I won't call Watchmen "the next Dark Knight" if you stop calling every movie based on a YA novel "the next [whatever popular YA franchise came before it].")

-MTV Movies blog: ‘Twilight’ Director Takes A ‘Maximum Ride’ For Teen Fantasy Pic

-Hollywood Reporter: Catherine Hardwicke eyes "Maximum Ride"

Melissa Rabey for the 2011 Printz

2009-03-18T21:28:00.000-04:00

Ballots for the ALA elections have started going out, so now I will take the time to shamelessly pimp someone I voted for.

Melissa Rabey, whose blog is Librarian By Day, is one of the most organized, thoughtful people I know. This year, she's running for a spot on the 2011 Printz committee, so if you've got a vote to spare, give it to her! Every day, she busts her butt to serve the teen patrons of the C. Burr Artz branch of the Frederick Co. (MD) Public Library as best she knows how. She is a font of knowledge in the realms of history, fashion, and pop culture and will even bring her expertise in historical fiction to the YALSA Genre Galaxy preconference in Chicago this June. She also has years of experience on YALSA committees, including Popular Paperbacks and Organization & Bylaws.

Most importantly, Melissa is my good friend of many years, fellow America's Next Top Model addict, and owned by an adorable cat. She can hem pants, review books, and discuss classic movies all at once. She's an asset to YALSA and someone who will be fantastic on the Printz. Give her a vote, won't you?

...But I know it when I see it

2009-03-17T21:26:00.000-04:00

Via YALSA-BK and the news, I've been following the saga of the West Bend, WI, library and the town debate over YA books that contain GLBTQ content (the one most often named in the news is Geography Club by Brent Hartinger) belong in the YA section of the library, which services 6th-12th grade. I've actually read the story with more interest than rage. That was, until I listened to this radio interview (link is "West Bend Library Issue") with the woman who filed the complaint against the GLBTQ suggested booklist for teens. During the listener call-in, the complainant, Ginny Maziarka, said that she'd met with West Bend's YA librarian and read the "explicit" parts aloud. When asked by the DJ how old the YA librarian, Kristin Pekoll, is, Maziarka responded that Pekoll was in her late 20s. Then comes the irritating part.

Maziarka had the gall to ask Pekoll if (and I paraphrase here) if these were the kind of books that she would take home and read to her children. Pekoll responded, "That is irrelevant to this discussion." Ms Pekoll: GOOD FOR YOU. That was absolutely the right and professional answer to give. Your delivering that answer does the profession good. I don't know how the rest of you feel about this, but my personal life is not up for discussion with my patrons. None of ours should be, regardless of the community we serve.

First, what an incredibly rude question for Ms Maziarka & Co. to ask. That's the kind of question my mother taught me to respond to with a smile and an "I'll forgive you for asking that question if you will forgive me for not responding." Second, and I know this may come as a shock to some, but the number of children one has is completely irrelevant to whether or not one can do a great job as a YA librarian. I've known wonderful YA librarians with no children. I've known terrible YA librarians with two or three children. Ms Pekoll's reproductive status and her parenting choices (if she decides to parent) are no one's business but hers. I wonder if the would-be censors asked the male library director if he had kids, or would read these books to his kids. I bet not. Okay, off that soapbox; it's just a topic that's close to my heart and I had to rant.

The most fundamental problem Ms Maziarka & Co. have, in my opinion, is that although she knows the YA section is supposed to serve people in sixth to twelfth grade, she refuses to acknowledge that anyone over the age of eleven is reading the books. YA is published for people approximately 12-18 years old and despite what the media likes to tell us, there are older teens who love YA. I also find the excuse of "there's nothing on Geography Club that would indicate its content" a little silly. Is there no printing on the book jacket? Every hardcover copy of Geography Club I've ever seen has flap copy written on it. Every review ever written about this book, several of which are easily readable on Amazon or Barnes&Noble.com, discusses the content. With all that information readily available, I'm not buying the argument.

Listen to the whole interview. The callers that call in clearly haven't got a clue as to how the internet differs from books, or how collection development works. The DJ and Ms Maziarka are trying to rile people up. Frankly, I'm not riled because it's patently obvious they, like their listeners, also haven't got a clue as to how collection development, accessibility to materials in libraries, literature awards, writing for teens, bookselling and library law, etc. works. Sometimes I think that the lack of knowledge and education in those who want to control what other people can access at the library is a greater threat than their opposition to "objectionable" content itself.

At the end of the interview, Ms Maziarka stated that she believed West Bend to be a faith-based community. If that is so, then I have faith that the library will keep books like Geography Club in YA where they belong and will leave parenting in the hands of individual parents, not one small group.

Moving and shaking our way to better collections

2009-03-15T21:25:00.000-04:00

First, the squee: I was named to Library Journal's Movers and Shakers 2009.

Second, the story behind the story: I was IMing with my friend Tina, also a YA librarian, and she said, "The [M&S feature] was a bit Meyer heavy." For once in my life, I disagreed about there being an overload of Stephenie Meyer's work in pop culture. The story behind how BCCLS came to have 50+ copies of The Host is a really important one and I need to tell it because it's a prime example of a slightly unorthodox, but crucial, part of collection development.

Little, Brown's adult division was kind enough to send me an advance of The Host last February after I missed getting a copy at ALA Midwinter 2008. When I received it, I took it down the hall to Ruth (BCCLS's adult fiction guru) and said, "This is a book that the adult services librarians in BCCLS need to know about, if they don't already. It won't be on sale until May, but it's going to be an instant bestseller. Stephenie Meyer's popularity is really going up."

Ruth looked at me and said, "Okay. Who's Stephenie Meyer?"

It was a perfectly legitimate question for Ruth to ask. She deals with adult books and is extremely knowledgeable about them. She's certainly not opposed to reading YA, but she didn't know who the big-name YA authors are outside of J.K. Rowling. And why should she? Selecting and knowing YA isn't her job and the books she enjoys reading outside of work aren't YA for the most part (yet, haha). It occurred to me in that moment that sometimes it was too easy for me to live in my YA vacuum where everyone I talked to and everyone whose blog I read knew tons about YA. Try as the media might to make us believe it, Stephenie Meyer is not as popular, strictly in numerical terms, as J.K. Rowling. So I lent Ruth the galley and ran back to my computer to post to BCCLSShelf, the listserv we use for adult and A/V collection development. There was no way Ruth was going to be the only adult services librarian with the "Who's Stephenie Meyer?" question. Remember, this was many months before the release of the Twilight movie. I wrote to my adult services colleagues explaining Stephenie Meyer's popularity with teens and how The Host, while an adult book, was going to find a huge audience with teens and adults alike.

On the morning of The Host's release, there were almost fifty copies available in 73 BCCLS libraries. People, that is awesome. Do I count myself as the sole reason so many libraries were ready to check it out? Absolutely not. But I hope that maybe one or two (or ten) libraries used my email as a jump start to buying and cataloging the book and having it available on its street date.

Professional journals are indispensable when doing collection development, but buzz, pop culture attention, and advertising are extremely powerful things and those, not professional journals, are what make a lot of people walk into our libraries and request books. The power of sparkly vampires is not to be underestimated.

Big news in small packages

2009-03-10T22:01:00.001-04:00

Books, Bits, and Bytes has a very useful YA Lit 2.0 presentation to check out.

Karen Cushman made "Corpus Bones!" the coolest non-four-letter curse ever, and she has shared this announcement:

...at long last the arrival of karencushman.com.

Yes, I am moving into the 21st century but I am only going as a tourist.

Karen, welcome to 21st-century reader's advisory and book discussion. You are always welcome, and we're happy to get you a cup of tea (or coffee, or whatever your preferred drink is).

As we welcome Karen to the online childrens/YA literature fold, we say goodbye (mostly) to someone else. When I was new to the NYC area and networking to learn more about my colleagues (and hoping that my publishing colleagues might fix me up with a galley or two), I had the pleasure of meeting Mimi Kayden of HarperCollins Children's Books. She has now announced her retirement, and all of us remember how she made our careers better by simply doing her job. Thank you for everything you've done for the librarian community, Mimi, and I hope your retirement is full of sunny beaches, fruity drinks, and cabana boys.

On the reading front, check out this NYTimes piece on Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, a sleeper realistic fiction hit that didn't get the press it deserved in the wake of OMGVAMPIRES: A Story of a Teenager's Suicide Quietly Becomes a Best Seller.

Because my sister loves me very much, she bought me this t-shirt for my birthday.

The Eleventh Stack blog of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh has an entry this week on one of my favorite topics: great YA books for adult readers. See it here: Books Beyond the Ages.

HarperCollins has launched a new blog aimed at librarians: Library Love Fest

Meme: Five things I'm addicted to

2009-03-10T21:24:00.000-04:00

Trisha tagged me for a fun meme: Five things I'm addicted to. I will probably ~~fall~~ saunter vaguely downwards a little bit in your esteem after you read this, but to know me and my bad pop-culture taste is to love me.

1. Solitary. Without a doubt, this is the scariest reality show on television. It's nauseating, mind-bending, and completely draws you in from the beginning. Concept: Nine people live in total isolation in 10x10 pods. We're talking no books, no music, no human contact, not even a picture on the wall. Their environment is controlled by Val, an omnipotent computer who is responsible for the distribution of food, light, sleep, and seemingly impossible, torturous tests. Sleep-deprived and hungry, contestants have to do mentally and physically demanding tasks like making a formation of 400 dominoes without knocking any of them over until the last one is in place. Contestants may quit at any time by pushing a red button located underneath Val, and what's sort of neat to watch and contemplate is the fact that no one can make a contestant quit except him/herself. If this show is half as difficult as it looks, I wouldn't last three hours.

Watch all three seasons on Hulu and follow the TWoP discussion

2. My Butler Bag. This is seriously the best damn purse ever made. I don't know about the rest of you, but my cell phone never rings unless I'm driving, and I can always find my iPod except when I want to listen to it, and the shade of lipstick I pull out of my purse (you can usually find me carrying 3-5 shades at any given time) is never the one I'm wearing. And I really hate how gum always gets squished and gross at the bottom of my bag. This bag solves all those problems. Butler Bags come with their insides all nicely compartmentalized so you never have to go digging in your bag to find what you're looking for. They're also made of very good quality leather, the kind that starts stiff and crinkles and gets softer as you use it. I have the Hybrid bag, and it's big enough to hold all the crap I usually carry around plus two paperback (or one hardcover) books, AND my #3 addiction...

3. My Samsung NC-10 netbook. It's not that I don't love my 15" MacBook Pro, it's that a 15" MacBook Pro weighs six pounds and is kind of large and doesn't have the world's best battery life. I'm hoping to do a little more traveling this year and need a laptop that was more portable than my MBP, but I didn't need (or want) one with lots of bells and whistles. My Samsung, which is pink and named Mimi, came with Windows XP, 1GB of RAM (which I upgraded to 2GB), 3 USB ports, an SD card reader, and a 160GB hard drive. I think the keyboard is sized at 92 or 93 percent, and all the keys are where you'd expect them to be, which is often a concern when buying a netbook. (There are both right and left Shift keys, and the Enter button is sized larger than the letter keys, etc.) Did I mention it's pink? It's PINK.

4. Guitar Hero: Metallica. Yes, I know it won't be out until the 29th, but I love it just based on the song listing. Metallica! Motorhead! It's the greatest hits of mullet rock! On the nights when I look at my pile of YA books and just don't feel like reading any more, I put in GH3: Legends of Rock and am working my way through five-starring every song on Hard. (Coming soon: a post on What Makes for a Good Guitar Hero Player. Hint: Years of piano lessons help.)

5. Jo Malone perfume. If you've never seen me wearing my glasses, you probably don't know that I have really, really bad eyesight. I've been wearing glasses since kindergarten and it wasn't until fairly recently that optical companies made soft contact lenses in a power strong enough for me to wear. In compensation for this poor eyesight, I have really good hearing and a good sense of smell. I love learning about and sampling different kinds of perfume, and Jo Malone is one of the best, imo, in terms of throw, not drying down to an icky chemical scent that's impossible to wash off. Today I'm wearing Sweet Lime and Cedar, but I also love Pomegranate Noir and Blue Agava and Cacao. The best thing about Jo Malone? Travel candles. Why didn't I think of that?

If you see this and you'd like to participate, consider yourself tagged (especially if you're Liz or Melissa).

Read it, wear it, give it

2009-03-10T21:22:00.000-04:00

Thanks to ~~the evilest woman I know~~ my very dear friend Molly, I started buying some of my perfume through a small company called Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. One of BPAL's schticks is perfume lines based around books and poetry. For some time now they've offered perfumes inspired by the works of most recent Newbery winner Neil Gaiman. Ever the ones to use their powers for good, the people at Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab and their non-perfume-items sister store, Black Phoenix Trading Post have started a shop-for-charity project you might find of interest. From BPAL's recent email:

What have we here?

New jewelry?!

The hell you say!

Black Phoenix Trading Post is OVERJOYED to present the first in a series of lockets and pendants inspired by the short stories of Neil Gaiman! This is a charitable, not-for-profit venture: proceeds from every single piece go to Match It For Pratchett, which is raising money to match Terry Pratchett's $1,000,000.00 donation to the Alzheimer's Research Trust.

Thank you so much, Neil, for giving us so many years of joy, wonder, and inspiration, and for the pleasure of working with you on this project!

And as all of us in the YA lit world know, Terry Pratchett won a Printz Honor for his book Nation. My personal favorite of the Gaiman scent locket pendants is inspired by one of his YA stories, "The Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire," which appears in Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales edited by Deborah Noyes. I'd post a picture but the only ones I can get are framed in the BPAL logo. But go look!

So the gist of all of this is: buy yourself or a friend/loved one some beautiful jewelry, know that the proceeds are going to a good cause, and while you're waiting for the jewelry to arrive, read a Gaiman or Pratchett book. Or look at the cover of the March School Library Journal, because my lord, that picture is gorgeous.

(Not a BPAL employee, just a satisfied customer.)

Hungry new fans?

2009-03-05T21:59:00.000-05:00

You know what makes me smile about this piece? The fact that it's at Bloody Disgusting. Here's a site dedicated to blogging all there is about horror and science fiction movies, movies not targeted to teens, and they're excited about the Hunger Games movie. While I'd ask if they were really sure that it was Stephenie Meyer who made movie house execs take notice of The Hunger Games (a book with a 200,000 first printing went unnoticed by movie execs? Really?), I'm a little squee at the fact that these jaded horror movie fans are excited about a YA book and its future movie.

I know some people will question the blogger's enthusiasm coming for a "Battle Royale meets Running Man" book, rather than it coming for The Hunger Games on its own merits, but that's ridiculous. Selling The Hunger Games as "Battle Royale meets Running Man" is simply good reader's advisory and a good way to draw new readers to the book, and maybe the genre.

Lifestyles of the rich and well-read

2009-03-04T21:57:00.000-05:00

This week's media coverage of YA literature is brought to you in part by an opinion piece in the Tufts University Observer: Falling for Young Adult Literature.

I had high hopes for this piece, because it appears to be written by someone who has not only read more than two YA books in the past five years, but actually enjoys them. You all know I'm a big advocate for those over 18 reading YA.

The biggest problem with this piece (and yes, I know it's an opinion piece; that's why I have a blog, so I can disagree with opinion pieces) is a problem that YA librarians see every day when doing RA, collection development, and professional reading: YA literature is held to a different standard than adult literature. Not once does Ms Surya complain about the small, subpar selection of adult novels that has dominated the adult section of the bookstore for years, but the truth is that the percentage of great vs crappy adult novels is about the same as great vs. crappy YA novels. About three thousand YA novels come out every year. Every year, there are fights over what will win the Printz and every year, there are books that are quickly forgotten. Such is the way of reading and publishing.

I quote:

As a response to this recent sales explosion, publishers have started churning out YA books faster than Stephen King novels. A large chunk of the YA genre shows a trend toward developing books with poor writing, repetitive or clichéd plots, and an unnatural, unhealthy focus on romance.

What's wrong with this statement? A few things, if you ask me. First, she says "faster than Stephen King novels" like it's a bad thing. From what I've read and seen online, Stephen King is a dedicated, thoughtful writer and contributor to the art of writing. Also, what Ms Surya calls a trend of developing bad books is entirely a matter of opinion. Cliched plots? There are only 12 plots in all of literature. Poor writing? What makes for poor writing? Even I in my jaded years of reading YA have arguments (friendly ones!) with my colleagues about what good writing is and is not. Last, but not least, what exactly is an unnatural focus on romance, and do these unnatural books really make up a "large chunk of YA?" Books like Gossip Girl, states Surya, "are sad and inaccurate portrayals of teenagers today. Their characters are engulfed in worlds of beauty, fashion, and premature sex— two-dimensional universes that unfairly stereotype teenagers. These authors fail to provide us with any kind of critical lens for our lives, reducing us to mere piles of Gucci and fluff." I think the unfair one here is Ms Surya, who fails to recognize that not all books about teens set out to portray their lives with middle-class accuracy. Books like Gossip Girl are meant to be over-the-top and escapist. They're meant to give a different slice of life. This goes back to the problem of holding YA to a different standard, both moral and quality in this case, than adult literature. Ms Surya seems to think that it is an author's responsibility, and especially a YA author's responsibility, to "provide us with any kind of critical lens for our lives" when in fact, this is not the job of a YA author or the YA genre. An author's job is to tell his or her story. Period. Authors, regardless of what age group they write for owe nothing to their audience except a story.

At the end, Ms Surya reassures us that though the YA market is seemingly dominated by crap, there is still hope in authors like Libba Bray. Well, that's nice. The closing paragraph of the piece begins:

I don’t just want to hear about the girl that I am—I want to know about the woman I will become or, more importantly, the woman I want to become. Books are meant to do more than indulge our fantasies.

That's all fine and good for Ms Surya, and to be fair this is her opinion piece, but isn't this statement a slap in the face to those of us who like to read to indulge our fantasies? Truth is, there is no wrong way to read. Books mean different things to everyone and everyone reads for a different reason. Think of books in the same vein as movies. Some movies are meant to make you laugh, others to make you cry, others to make you think or scream. Books are the same. One art form is not better or more meaningful than the other.

When you read, in the immortal words of Hannah Montana, you can have the best of both worlds. I say we embrace the Gossip Girl and read for whatever reason is closest to our hearts. Even if our hearts contain nothing but Gucci and fluff.

In which I meme about YA

2009-03-03T21:55:00.000-05:00

A group of YA librarians on Facebook put together a list of 100 "top" teen novels. "Top" goes in quotes because they freely admit this is something wholly unscientific. It's just meant to see what you've read and have a little fun.

Feel free to copy and repost this in your own blog.

The following list of books teens love, books teens should read, and
books adults who serve teens should know about was compiled IN
ABSOLUTELY NO SCIENTIFIC MANNER and should be taken with a very large
grain of salt.

Instructions:
Put an "X" next to the books you've read
Put a "+" next to the books you LOVE
Put a "#" next to the books you plan on reading
Tally your "X"s at the bottom
Share with your friends!

1. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy / Douglas Adams X
2. Kit's Wilderness / David Almond
3. Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian / Sherman Alexie X+
4. Speak / Laurie Halse Anderson X+
5. Feed / M.T. Anderson X
6. Flowers in the Attic / V.C. Andrews X
7. 13 Reasons Why / Jay Asher X
8. Am I Blue? / Marion Dane Bauer (editor) X
9. Audrey Wait! / Robin Benway X
10. Weetzie Bat / Francesca Lia Block X
11. Tangerine / Edward Bloor X
12. Forever / Judy Blume X
13. What I Saw and How I Lied / Judy Blundell X
14. Tyrell / Coe Booth X+
15. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants / Ann Brashares X
16. A Great and Terrible Beauty / Libba Bray X
17. The Princess Diaries / Meg Cabot X
18. The Stranger / Albert Camus
19. Ender's Game / Orson Scott Card
20. Postcards from No Man's Land / Aidan Chambers
21. Perks of Being a Wallflower / Stephen Chbosky X+
22. And Then There Were None / Agatha Christie
23. Gingerbread / Rachel Cohn
24. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist / Rachel Cohn and David Levithan X
25. Artemis Fowl (series) / Eoin Colfer X+
26. The Hunger Games / Suzanne Collins X+
27. The Midwife's Apprentice / Karen Cushman X
28. The Truth About Forever / Sarah Dessen X
29. Little Brother / Cory Doctorow X+
30. A Northern Light / Jennifer Donnelly
31. Tears of a Tiger / Sharon Draper X
32. The House of the Scorpion / Nancy Farmer X+
33. Breathing Underwater / Alex Flinn X
34. Stardust / Neil Gaiman
35. Annie on My Mind / Nancy Garden X
36. What Happened to Cass McBride / Gail Giles X
37. Fat Kid Rules the World / K.L. Going
38. Lord of the Flies / William Golding X
39. Looking for Alaska / John Green X
40. Bronx Masquerade / Nikki Grimes X
41. Out of the Dust / Karen Hesse X
42. Hoot / Carl Hiaasen X
43. The Outsiders / S.E. Hinton X
44. Crank / Ellen Hopkins X
45 The First Part Last / Angela Johnson X+
46. Blood and Chocolate / Annette Curtis Klause X
47. Arrow's Flight / Mercedes Lackey
48. Hattie Big Sky / Kirby Larson
49. To Kill a Mockingbird / Harper Lee
50. Boy Meets Boy / David Levithan X
51. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks / E. Lockhart X
52. The Giver / Lois Lowry X
53. Number the Stars / Lois Lowry X
54. Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie / David Lubar X+
55. Inexcusable / Chris Lynch X
56. The Earth, My Butt and Other Big, Round Things / Carolyn Mackler X
57. Dragonsong / Anne McCaffrey X
58. White Darkness / Geraldine McCaughrean
59. Sold / Patricia McCormick
60. Jellicoe Road / Melina Marchetta *
61. Wicked Lovely / Melissa Marr X
62. Twilight / Stephenie Meyer X
63. Dairy Queen / Catherine Murdock X+
64. Fallen Angels / Walter Dean Myers
65. Monster / Walter Dean Myers X
66. Step From Heaven / An Na
67. Mama Day / Gloria Naylor
68. The Keys to the Kingdom (series) / Garth Nix
69. Sabriel / Garth Nix X+
70. Airborn / Kenneth Oppel X
71. Eragon / Christopher Paolini
72. Hatchet / Gary Paulsen X
73. Life As We Knew It / Susan Beth Pfeffer X+
74. The Golden Compass / Phillip Pullman X
75. Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging / Louise Rennison X+
76. The Lightning Thief / Rick Riordan X+
77. Always Running: La Vida Loca / Luis Rodriguez X
78. how i live now / Meg Rosoff X
79. Harry Potter (series) / J.K. Rowling XXXXXXX+ (one for each book)
80. Holes / Louis Sachar X
81. Catcher in the Rye / J. D. Salinger X
82. Push / Sapphire X
83. Persepolis / Marjane Satrapi X
84. Unwind / Neil Shusterman
85. Coldest Winter Ever / Sister Souljah X
86. Stargirl / Jerry Spinelli X
87. Chanda's Secrets / Allan Stratton
88. Tale of One Bad Rat / Brian Talbot X
89. Rats Saw God / Rob Thomas X
90. Lord of the Rings / J.R.R. Tolkien XXX (one for each book)
91. Stuck in Neutral / Terry Trueman X
92. Gossip Girl / Cecily Von Ziegesar X
93. Uglies / Scott Westerfeld X+
94. Every Time a Rainbow Dies / Rita Williams-Garcia
95. Pedro and Me / Judd Winick X
96. Hard Love / Ellen Wittlinger X
97. American Born Chinese / Gene Luen Yang X+
98. Elsewhere / Gabrielle Zevin X+
99. I am the Messenger / Markus Zusak X+
100. The Book Thief / Markus Zusak X+

My total Xs: 77 of 100. Not bad. Notice the WIDE GAP in fantasy and historical fiction! And also in the books I was supposed to read in school but somehow never got assigned. (I think I am one of thirty people in the world who got through high school without ever being assigned To Kill a Mockingbird. Maybe I'll read it someday, and maybe I won't.)

Authors and prizes and marketing, oh my!

2009-03-03T21:53:00.000-05:00

Today, it's all about other people.

From the Boston Globe, Faith and Good Works: Mormon writers find their niche in wholesome young adult genre. Once again, the press tells us what we YA librarians and readers have known all along: There's a place in YA for just about everyone. YA is no more all "sex, drugs and vampires" than it is squeaky-clean puppy love, but both can easily be found in the genre. YA readers welcome sex or no sex, as long as the writing is appealing. And the article interviews Martine Leavitt, author of one of the best books I read in 2008: Keturah and Lord Death.

The 2008 LA Times Book Prize finalists were announced at their Jacket Copy blog. The Young Adult Literature category is pretty diverse: There's fiction, nonfiction, a graphic work, characters who aren't white, and The Graveyard Book.

My friend Kerri at the Mulberry Street Branch of NYPL sent me a flyer for what looks like a fabulous event. On March 18, from 6-7:45 P.M., David Levithan will host a YA author panel. Panelists and other author guests include Libba Bray, Rachel Cohn, Eireann Corrigan (winner of the Garden State Teen Book Award) Justine Larbalestier, Barry Lyga, and Scott Westerfeld. Space is limited, so you have to call to reserve a seat. If you want more information, you can reach Kimberly Spring at 212-966-3424 or email the library at mulberry_branch@nypl.org.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I never get over the internal fangirl squee when I realize that an author whose work I love knows I exist. OMG Nancy Werlin knows I exist! Now that I'm over the squee, I wanted to share with you some very interesting information that Nancy shared with me: When Impossible comes out in paperback, it will be cross-marketed as an adult novel. I have only one word for this: Awesome! I can only hope that Impossible is the first of many books that will be cross-marketed this way. YA for all!

Those of you who buy popular music from your libraries, don't forget that U2's No Line on the Horizon is out today. It's already #1 in Amazon music and on iTunes.

Back to reading and writing reviews!

Kidz Bop: Ain't nothing like the real thing

2009-02-27T23:25:00.001-05:00

Earlier this week I noticed that my good friend Liz B was ranting on her Twitter about the greatest abomination ever visited on pop culture: Kidz Bop. Because this was not the first time I've talked to librarians about the trials and tribulations of collecting popular music, I promised I would blog about it, so here I am.

Here's a How to Make Your Own Kidz Bop tutorial: Download whatever song is playing on the Top 40 station right now. Replace the choruses with children singing. Now replace most, if not all, of the solo lines with a child singing. Child singing on key is optional. Now, take out any lyrics that might be deemed offensive. What "offensive" means is up to you. Replace them with either silly, "kid-friendly" words or delete them entirely, depending on how you can get it to fit into the music. Put the song back together! Voila!

Let's get the positive out of the way first: If there's one good thing about Kidz Bop, it's that they're beneficial to children's music development. Just as it's important for babies to see pictures of other babies in board books, it's important for children to hear the sound of other children singing. From the perspective of a former music educator, I can see some of the reasoning behind the series. From the perspective of a librarian and someone who enjoys popular music, I think they're a waste of money.

First, the lyrics. Generally, the songs picked for Kidz Bop aren't that dirty to begin with. It's not like they're re-recording Eminem. About the most-inappropriate-for-six-year-olds song they re-record is along the lines of Maroon 5's "Makes me Wonder" or Pussycat Dolls' "When I Grow Up." The songs are, however, often high-concept. The latest volume of Kidz Bop, for example, includes their version of Coldplay's "Viva La Vida". By changing or omitting the lyrics, you don't change its "appropriateness," you change the meaning of the song. You change everything the artist wanted to say through his or her lyrics.

Second, the musicality. Kids voices, yes, I get it. But you know, there's plenty of good children's music out there, sung by both adults and children. Maybe it's not on Top 40 stations, but what percentage of music is? Also, most children sing off-key. That's just the way it is. So why glorify it? Speaking as one who has good pitch, the off-key singing drives me insane. A song is also more than just its lyrics. While Kidz Bop keeps the same basic melodies, it sometimes changes the orchestration, blend, and balance. All of these things are important to building a song and dismissing them means dismissing a big part of the reason why the song exists in the first place.

I know the arguments for having Kidz Bop. "Kids want to listen to the popular music that their big brothers and sisters listen to!" "They want popular music!" "They want to be cool!" I understand all of this, I really do. Music is important to all of us, even if we lack the ability to produce it ourselves. But Kidz Bop, for me, isn't much different than what might happened if we decided fourth-graders needed to read John Green. We'd have to make the book shorter, perkier, take out the dirty words, etc., and it would all be completely pointless because in doing so, we'd change the meaning of Green's work and basically say that the work he put into creating the novel is worthless. Teens deserve to have their own books, good books, and teens and adults deserve to have their own music. No matter how much some people (not myself) may wish it so, not everything is for children, or can be for children. Public libraries buying the sanitized versions of albums is not "serving the public," or making the library "safe for children," it's ignoring artistic intent and it's lazy music selection. The books have rude words, so why can't the music? My colleagues, please, save money on Kidz Bop and spend it on Shari Lewis or Sharon, Lois & Bram.

What would Emma read?

2009-02-27T23:23:00.000-05:00

I'm always looking for YA titles set in the Midwest, and What Would Emma Do? by Eileen Cook fits the bill and then some. Read Melissa's review at Librarian By Day.

Ten non-library blogs librarians should read

2009-02-20T23:24:00.000-05:00

TMI. We usually use this term to tell our friends when they're sharing too much about their personal lives, but I think the trap of "too much information" is one that librarians fall into on a daily basis. We can't help it. Librarians want lots of information, all the time. The problem is that there are so many great library and reading/book blogs that we can, and often do, spend all our time just reading blogs from and about our colleagues. These are valuable blogs, no doubt, but we can always benefit from diversifying our knowledge. Librarians know their book and library services blogs inside and out and often in their sleep, but I want to offer up some non-library, non-book blogs that I find interesting, fun, and strangely beneficial to my day-to-day work.

apophenia. This is the one blog I always recommend to anyone who wants to know more about teens and social networking. danah boyd is one of the country's leading authorities on the subject, and her writing is both in-depth and easy for those of us who aren't fluent in Academicese to understand.

Cake Wrecks. Everyone loves cake, right? (Please say yes.) And everyone loves a beautifully decorated cake, right? You know what everyone loves more? Badly professionally decorated cakes. We're talking spelling errors, frosting disasters, and the Just Plain Heinous. You will laugh. And then you'll cry. I don't even go in my kitchen unless I have to wash the dishes and I love this blog, so don't worry if you're not a foodie.

The Consumerist. Subtitled "Shoppers Bite Back," it's not Economics for Dummies, it's Retail And You. The Consumerist is part of the Gawker media empire, so it's got a sarcastic tone that carries a lot of truth and a lot of information about retail, credit, taxes, debt, real estate, and all the other daily economic concerns that, well, are driving up library usage.

Freakonomics. The authors of the fascinating Freakonomics now blog for the New York Times about everything from thugs to the Kindle 2 to baseball. And that's just this week.

GeekSugar. GeekSugar is like your cool older sister, dispensing interesting information about technology, gadgets, and geek fashion in a relatable way. More than just gadget news, GeekSugar also explains complicated programs in plain English and offers helpful tech tips for the everyday user (like "How to make your own iPhone ringtones in GarageBand" and "How to attract more blog readers").

I Can Has Cheezburger? or, if you're a dog person, I Has a Hotdog!. The concept was simple: Post funny and/or adorable pictures of cats, and put in captions that express what the cat in the picture is probably thinking. Next thing you know, LOLCats and LOLDogs are a cultural phenomenon, imitated and duplicated at places like LOLBrarians.

Indie Rock Cafe. It's important that libraries have indie music in their collections. It's one of those "If you build it, they will come" things. But what's a librarian whose taste is more Led Zeppelin than Arcade Fire to do? Read Indie Rock Cafe. Even if you've never heard of any of the bands they cover, you'll quickly learn who's hot in the indie rock world, meaning who's going to be hot at your library. Maybe you'll even discover a new favorite band.

Plagiarism Today. Whenever I visit schools, I always end up talking to at least one person about plagiarism. How to avoid it, tips on getting students to recognize what it is and not do it, etc. PT is run by a non-lawyer who's interested in copyright issues. One favorite section of mine is "How to Find Plagiarism," and the Copyright Myths section alone is worth the time you take visiting the site.

The TV Addict. Even though their "Twelve Reasons to Stay Home on Friday Night" completely ignores my favorite show, Numb3rs, I love the TV Addict for their unashamed devotion to the art of TV storytelling, both good and bad. Plus, they're huge fans of Supernatural and you know how I feel about people like that. They post interviews, pictures, podcasts, news, rants, and quick rundowns of what they're watching. Or, as I like to say, they watch TV so you don't have to. (Don't get me wrong, I like TV, but with reading for the Printz TV has taken a back seat this year.)

Writer Beware. Okay, so I'm cheating. But it's my blog and I'll cheat if I want to. In all seriousness, this is a blog I wish every librarian would read for a few reasons. One: We get asked a lot of questions about publishing. Two: Lots of librarians would also like to be writers. Three: Writing and publishing (and librarianship) as an industry seems to have this reputation among the masses of being a haven of creativity and nice people. Truth is, there ARE lots of creative and nice people in publishing, but there are also a lot of dishonest people who prey on aspiring writers. A.C. Crispin and Victoria Strauss, both accomplished science fiction writers, take no crap from any scammer, and they make it all public.

Honorable mentions for this list go to Apartment Therapy, Shiny Shiny, Metal Sucks!, and ShoppingBlog.

Feel free to comment with your favorite non-library, non-book blogs!

I meant to do some reading

2009-02-18T23:23:00.000-05:00

...but Henry had other ideas.

Now THERE'S a "Read" poster for you.

Read me in Publishers Weekly

2009-02-16T23:20:00.000-05:00

Nothing tickles a book blogger more than the opportunity to express our ideas in a professional journal. This week, I've done just that: What they don't know won't hurt them: Persuading adults to read YA literature is this week's PW Soapbox.

As regular readers know, I'm a big advocate of getting YA lit into the hands of adults, so having this chance to write for PW was a Very Good Thing. Now if only I could convince all the adults out there that there's more to YA lit than The Big Three Series That Must Not Be Named...