Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

{Note: For a listing of the other interviews in the Summer Blog Blast Tour featured at other blogs today, scroll down to the very bottom of this post}.

1). Though her writing is terrifically poetic, she doesn’t particularly like most poetry.
2). The Catcher in the Rye makes her shudder.
3). She adores the writing of Robert Cormier.
4). She’s a rather cheery person, despite the “dark” label repeatedly attached to her writing.
5). The love she has for her dog rivals the burning intensity of the sun (as Eisha would put it).
6). She vividly remembers the feelings and simple pleasures of childhood.
7). She loves writing for young adult audiences and finds them very forgiving readers, but the issue of labelling her books and to whom they get marketed (“YA” or “Adult”) has haunted most of her career. In short, she’s weary of the entire topic. If you meet her on the street, best not ask her about it. We don’t blame her.

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{Note: For a listing of the other interviews in the Summer Blog Blast Tour featured at other blogs today, scroll down to the very bottom of this post}.

Visit YA author Brent Hartinger’s web site, and you’ll read in large print: “I am Brent Hartinger, and I live to write.” And in having the opportunity to chat with him here at 7-Imp for this week’s Summer Blog Blast Tour, it’s evident to us that this passion for writing pervades all he does. (He’s also really fun and, as YA & Kids Book Central put it in a 2005 interview, “a heck of an interesting guy”). As Rosemary Ponnekanti wrote in this recent article in Tacoma, Washington’s News Tribune, “Plays. Screenplays. Gay teen novels, straight teen novels. Teaching, speaking, gay support groups -– Tacoma writer Brent Hartinger’s career has run quite a gamut.”

And if, as a fan, you visit his site (“Brent’s Brain”), you will be rewarded with all kinds of information about Brent and his writing. Accessibility seems to be his middle name and a large part of his endearing charm. Yes, visit “Brent’s Brain” and get full access to all his lobes, frontal and otherwise. There’s his bio; a link to events; a listing of his books; his “deep dark past” and his story about discovering, as a teen, that he was gay; an entire page devoted to “being gay” (“It’s a cliché to say it, but I’ve always known I was gay”); a page which links to his blogs and MySpace presence; a press room and media coverage page; a page of FAQs about his novel (“questions that haunt me”); and even more. (To boot, there are even squishy brain sounds when you click on links in the form of brain lobes). Read the rest of this entry �

Time: Monday, 12:35 a.m.

Books Finished: 5. Read Defect by Will Weaver this afternoon, and Grand & Humble by Brent Hartinger this evening.

Pages Read: 1213

Time Spent Actually Reading: 15.25 hours.

Time Spent Blogging About It: 2 hours.

Unicorn Sightings: none.

Pathetic. I thought I would rock at this. I mean, seriously, sitting around reading is pretty much how I spend every weekend. Why was it so hard this time? Here’s what I think: because reading is what I usually do to procrastinate whatever I should be doing but don’t really want to, like cleaning or packing or whatever. When reading becomes the thing I’m supposed to be doing, my whole equilibrium is thrown. Good to know for next year.

But hey, I read some good books. Wanna hear about them?

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As you probably know, the 2007 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards for Excellence in Children’s Literature were announced this week. We were pleased to see the list of winners and honor recipients and were in happy agreement.

Fiction and Poetry Winners:

* The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party (Candlewick) by M. T. Anderson — co-reviewed here at 7-Imp (followed by our recent-ish interview with Anderson)

Picture Book Winners:

Fiction — * Dog and Bear: Two Friends, Three Stories (Porter/Roaring Brook) written and illustrated by Laura Vaccaro Seeger — reviewed here by Jules

Nonfiction — * The Strongest Man in the World: Louis Cyr (Groundwood) written and illustrated by Nicolas Debon Read the rest of this entry �

— Billie Marie in Billie Standish Was Here by Nancy Crocker

Nancy Crocker, author of the 2006 picture book Betty Lou Blue (illustrated by Boris Kulikov and reviewed here at
7-Imp by Yours Truly), has a new novel coming to a shelf near you this June (published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers). This is her first novel, an emotionally compelling YA story about the intense and profoundly powerful ability of one person to shape the course of a young girl’s life. And if this is the first novel that springs from the mind of Nancy Crocker, I can hardly wait to see what she brings us next.

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Laura Miller at Salon.com in her review of Un Lun Dun (Random House; February 2007; library copy) wrote those words you see in the post title: “China Miéville just may take adults back to their slack-jawed, book-drunk days of youth.” I love that too much to not share it. This is a vigorously original and inventive fantasy YA novel (that, incidentally — as every reviewer will tell you — will leave Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett fans very, very happy). I haven’t read anything like this in a long time, something which is packed with such indelible images that I will not for a long time forget the very experience of reading it. Best of all, as Miller puts it, Miéville “trains a healthy skepticism on those familiar and inherently conservative fantasy tropes about people who are born special and the need to slavishly follow ancient texts and rituals.” This fiddling with the conventions of fantasy narratives was one of the reasons this book was such a kick, so compelling — and humorous. Apparently, I’m not the only one to think so, as the novel is #10 on The New York Times Children’s Bestseller List and #2 of the Book Sense Spring Children’s Picks List.

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In Harlem Summer, Walter Dean Myers’ new novel (Scholastic; March 2007; library copy), we are welcomed into the steamin’ hot New York City borough of Harlem in the summer of 1925. Sixteen-year-old Mark Purvis just wants to land a record contract and play his sax in a hot jazz band. But when his family’s land down South is sold for back taxes, it’s Mark who is expected to get a job and contribute to the family’s income. His “snooty” Aunt Carolyn (whose “lips stuck out like she was holding a strawberry in her mouth”) finds him a summer job on 14th Street at The Crisis magazine, who needed “a Bright Young Man to work in its advertising department” for four days (from the chapter entitled “How the Ruination of My Whole Summer Started and I Began to Be a New Negro When I Wasn’t Really Through Being the Old Negro I Used to Be” — and, yes, all the chapter titles are that wonderfully long-winded). The Crisis magazine was founded in 1910, published by the then-newly-formed NAACP, and edited by the civil rights leader, poet, scholar, educator, and sociologist Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, who — along with many other well-known figures of The Harlem Renaissance — appears in this novel.

Miss Fauset, Mark’s immediate supervisor, explains to him that the folks at the magazine represent what is being called the New Negro: “Dr. DuBois has said that the Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional people.” Mark is baffled and simply bummed that he has to wear a jacket and tie to work. Eventually, Mark meets such luminaries as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Alfred Knopf, A’Lelia Walker, Effie Lee Newsome, Ethel Waters, and DuBois himself. To Mark, “it didn’t seem that exciting . . . I lived in Harlem and I figured that was about as black as you could get without being in Africa.” Read the rest of this entry �

Jump back, ’cause Stephanie Hemphill has poured her heart and soul and many years of research and hero worship into this fictionalized verse portrait of Sylvia Plath, entitled Your Own, Sylvia (Random House Children’s Books; March 2007; review copy). It’s quite daring and ambitious (“to imitate Plath’s form to tell her story could be bold-hearted courage, the sincerest form of flattery, or foolhardiness; perhaps all three by turns,” wrote KLIATT), telling us about Plath’s life through Hemphill’s own original poetry, many re-imagined in the style of Plath’s poems, and with Plath’s imagery scattered throughout the novel as well. But Hemphill pulls it off and passionately invites the reader in to get to know Sylvia; these are meticulously-crafted poems — and in many forms, from villanelles to rhymed couplets to lots of free verse and even one abecedarian — that serve as a wonderful introduction to Sylvia’s life. But even ardent Sylvia fans who need no convincing will enjoy this portrait and glimpsing Sylvia anew through the eyes of those who surrounded her in her short life.

It might be a tad confusing, so let me clarify right off the bat: The poems are based on the real, live life of the real, live Sylvia Plath, but they are fictionalized. Read the rest of this entry �

Why that post title? Because, as Publishers Weekly put it, Margo Rabb’s first YA novel, Cures for Heartbreak (Random House; February 2007), “gives readers a keenly insightful study of grief.” And — as you might guess about a book that, at its core, revolves around bereavement — it’s “endlessly poignant” (in the words of Michael Chabon), but then, throughout the novel, Rabb will turn right around and counter the desolation and poignancy with moments of truly funny dark humor. And not a single note of the novel strikes a false note, so all the sadness, all the grief, and all the humor is very real.

This absorbing character study of a novel is centered on Mia, a freshman at the Bronx High School of Science. Her mother dies quite suddenly — twelve days after diagnosis — of cancer (melanoma). She and her sister, Alex, and her father find themselves suddenly having to prepare for a funeral, and Mia, in particular, has difficulty with the realization that she doesn’t exactly know how to go about grieving (her sometimes antagonistic relationship with her older sister doesn’t help the tension in their home). Read the rest of this entry �

First things first — just look at that cover. Yes, I made that image big for a reason. Beautiful cover art by Kinuko Y. Craft. Must take a moment to ooh and aah over it, as we don’t see a lot of detailed covers like this anymore. If you like, take a moment to visit Craft’s site. She, apparently, is the illustrator for most of Patricia A. McKillip’s books. The young lady pictured is Jena, but we’ll get to her in a moment.

Now, onward then. As VOYA points out, teens have been a huge part of the fan base for those titles of Juliet Marillier’s that have been marketed as “adult”; her first book, Daughter of the Forest (2000), was an Alex Award winner. This is Marillier’s first novel marketed explicity as “YA.” It was first published in Australia in July of 2006, and it won the 2006 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Marillier did her homework for this novel, set in Romania, and travelled to Transylvania, which she describes in an Author’s Note: “I had a rich and unforgettable taste of life on the Transylvanian plateau, surrounded by some of the grandest mountains and wildest forest in the world” (photos can be seen here at her site where the author states that viewing those pictures can give the reader a good idea of the world she takes us to in the novel).

What drew me to this novel was the mere mention that it was laced with fairy tale elements. Indeed, Marillier gives a respectful nod to The Brothers Grimm’s The Frog Prince and The Twelve Dancing Princesses (I even caught some references to their Little Snow White towards the novel’s close). And what a twist Marillier provides — The Frog Prince provides one of only a few of The Brothers Grimm’s heroines (the princess), as Jack Zipes points out in 1997’s Happily Ever After; however, the tale reinforces the notion of an obedient, subservient, self-sacrificing wife. Oh, snap snap! says Marillier (well, she would if she were, uh, into urban slang, I suppose). Instead, she brings us the clever, strong, and determined Jena. Read the rest of this entry �