Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Last September, Betsy Bird wrote a smashing piece at ForeWord Magazine’s “Shelf Space” column about books, as she put it, “that refuse to be neatly arranged under a single category. They straddle the genres.” The new titles I’m covering today could fall into this category, I think, but more simply, I think they are examples of what Eisha noted last week when we guest-blogged over at School Library Journal’s Practically Paradise. When I asked Eisha if she has a favorite current trend of children’s lit, here’s what she wrote:

I love that more and more middle grade and YA novels are incorporating heavy amounts of illustrations to support the story, bending the genre lines between straight novels, picture books, and graphic novels.

To that I add the ever-so eloquent, word. Word up, even.

Today I’m going to mention some new illustrated titles I think are worthy of our attention. They’re not necessarily all middle grade or YA, as Eisha mentioned, but they are the types of books that aren’t normally as heavy on illustration as these titles are.

If you’re a big kidlitosphere reader, I’m sure you’ve heard about these new TOON Books from The Little Lit Library (a division of Raw Junior, LLC), launched by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman. These are technically what are called emerging reader titles anymore, but the idea here is that these are comics (designed for children ages four and up), which beginning readers can read to themselves. “The artistic and literary qualities that we hope are at the core of the TOON Books are often lacking in standard easy-to-read books, which tend to be made with good intentions but little creative impulse,” said Mouly in this interview from the wonderful new Notes from the Horn Book. “How is a child going to learn to read if she is presented with books that offer none of the pleasures of reading?” Read the rest of this entry �

On Saturday, we (Eisha and Adrienne of What Adrienne Thinks About That) attended the Third Annual Teen Book Festival in Rochester, NY. We had a fabulous time, and thought we’d co-blog about it and share the highlights with you. This will be cross-posted on both 7-Imp and WATAT, for your viewing pleasure.

The event started with a red-carpet arrival for the authors, which we totally missed ’cause, um, it was Saturday morning and, you know. We had to get coffee at Adrienne’s favorite place, the Leaf and Bean. Which totally exceeded all expectations.

Anyway.

Then there was a general assembly, with the organizer Stephanie introducing all the authors on a stage that was flanked by members of the Garrison Excelsior 501st Legions, in full Star Wars regalia. It was particularly fitting that Timothy Zahn was almost totally obscured by the faux-Queen Amidala’s headdress (seen here). There was a “lightning round” of questions, led by two teen volunteers, where they asked a question and the authors passed the mike down the row giving short answers.

Then each author was put in his/her own room for three “breakout sessions,” and you could choose any three to attend. In between sessions one and two, there was pizza for lunch in the cafeteria (delivered – not actual cafeteria food). And at the end, there were books and merch for sale in the gym, with all the authors available for autographs.

It was extremely well-attended, with teens bussed in from all over, and tons of local librarians, teachers, and teens volunteering to keep the whole thing running smoothly.

For a full description of the event and complete list of the authors in attendance, see the website for TBF LIVE! 2008.

eisha: Well, first, I just want to say thanks, Adrienne, for inviting me to this totally excellent event. I’m sort of in awe at the assemblage of talent they had going there.

adrienne: Yes, thanks for driving up! This is my third year at TBF, and it’s so much fun. I always have a hard time deciding which authors to go see.

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Happy Saturday, dear readers. I’m going to get right to it today: Here is my attempt to catch up on some book reviews, both titles from last year. I’m, uh, really slooooooooow sometimes, but better late than never.

If dark humor is your thing — and I mean moments of incredible pathos that rattle your heart in your chest a bit while, somehow, also make you laugh simultaneously — here’s a new title for you, Gone and Back Again (Soft Skull Press, 2007) by Jonathon Scott Fuqua (based loosely on “the author’s own strange childhood,” according to his site). Fuqua is the award-winning author of four YA novels, a graphic novel (also geared at adults), and one book for young children. This is his first novel for adults, though I say it has tremendous cross-over appeal to teens.

Middle-schooler Caley; his brother, Fulton; and his sister, Louise, are being dragged from town to town by his mother, who has “changed after the divorce. It was like her goodness and affectionateness seemed to be hibernating or were gone.” Caley, whose father is capable of moments of undeniable cruelty and a master of the fine art of guilt-tripping, must acclimate himself to life with his mother’s new boyfriend, Henrico, “who was a total jerk to us kids.” His mother occasionally attempts to convey affection but mostly fails (“I wanted my mom to be like a mom instad of just a woman we sometimes saw”). “For me,” Caley tells the reader, “life was like a train passing into a tunnel just before an avalanche falls and blocks the way out.” Thus, Caley starts his “days of badness,” drinking and stealing: “I was the kind of kid who, even if you wanted to, you didn’t care about.”

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jules: It’s another multi-blog One-Shot World Tour Day (our most recent one being a visit to Australia with our Margo Lanagan interview last August, though I could have sworn we participated in another One-Shot Day. Ah well, moving on . . . ). Today several blogs will be writing about Canadian authors, and I thought I’d talk a bit about an illustrator whose work I think is one-to-watch, and that would be Jessica Meserve. Granted, she was born in New Hampshire, apparently, but she now lives in Edmonton, Canada. Just humor me here. I really want to tell you about this book.

As I mentioned in this recent post about Jessica’s debut title (Small Sister; Clarion Books; May 2007), Meserve studied illustration at Edinburgh College of Art, worked in publishing as a children’s book designer, and is now freelance illustrating. And Jessica’s done the illustrations for a new early chapter-book from Candlewick, Daisy Dawson Is on Her Way! by British author Steve Voake (just released yesterday, according to this link).

And I’d like to say that this book will so entirely wrap you around its finger and not let you go. Fortunately for us all, the front jacket flap says that “Steve Voake introduces beginning readers to a little girl with a big heart.” Yes, that emphasis is mine, and color me jumping-up-and-down, since that statement indicates we might have a series on our hands here.

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Check it out, ya’ll: we’ve got Sara Zarr in da house. That’s right, National Book Award finalist, Cybils nominee, generally kick-ass writer for young adults, Sara Zarr.

She first hit the scene with Story of a Girl, which won rave reviews and landed her in the NBA nominee camp for its gritty, funny, touching, and – yeah, why not? – inspiring depiction of a girl who makes a really bad decision and has to figure out how to live with the ugly consequences. But unlike a lot of teen novels, in this case the consequences of having sex at 13 with the wrong boy aren’t tangible (pregnancy, STD) – instead, Deanna has to deal with becoming a legendary “slut” in her small town, falling from her father’s favor, and wondering if she’ll ever be asked on a normal date by a nice boy. As School Library Journal said in a starred review, “This is realistic fiction at its best. Zarr’s storytelling is excellent; Deanna’s reactions to the painful things said to her will resonate with any reader who has felt like an outsider.”

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Jules: Well, hello there on this Monday. I’m going to take a break from Nonfiction Monday today, as Eisha and I are trying to get caught up a bit here on reviews of a couple titles from last year. For no particular reason, other than sometimes just being slow, we have yet to talk about these two YA titles that we dug and dug hard.

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Last August saw the release of Robin Brande’s first novel, Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature, released by Alfred A. Knopf. This “ambitious YA debut” (Publishers Weekly) was met with critical acclaim and was chosen as a 2008 ALA Best Book for Young Adults; a Fall 2007 Book Sense Children’s Pick; and a 2008 NCSS/CBC (National Council for the Social Studies and Children’s Book Council) Notable Children’s Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies.

The novel tells the story of high school freshman Mena Reece. She’s cleared her conscience by doing what she considered the right thing (regarding a young man named Denny Pierce) by her friends, her church, and her family — but, as a result, none of them are speaking to her. Needless to say, her school year is not starting off well (“My life might really improve if I could just stop feeling so committed to the truth”). She does make one friend in her science lab partner, Casey, who happens to be brilliant as well as, Mena comes to realize, funny and cute and entirely not afraid to be himself. Since her former best friends have cut her off (“Ahh, that’s sweet—you made a new little gay friend already,” one of them tells her snidely), Casey’s pretty much all Mena has right now. And when her science teacher, Ms. Shepherd, begins a unit on the topic of evolution, Mena finds herself both fascinated by and caught up in a new controversy between those former best friends from the conservative church her family attends and those aligning themselves with Ms. Shepherd, trying to keep intelligent design from being taught in the school. As a result, Mena undergoes her own personal evolution, as she considers the subjects of religion, science, indoctrination, faith, freedom, and much more.

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Last summer, Knopf Books released Tonya Bolden’s Take-off: American All-Girl Bands during WWII, and it’s taken me this long to review it. But that’s not because it lacks in any way: It’s a well-researched, engagingly-written piece of nonfiction. In fact, Bolden composes her narrative in true hep cat style, incorporating swing slang and a distinctive rhythm to her prose (in the introduction, while addressing the gap women filled after so many men were drafted into World War II, she writes, “{w}hat was a woman with a beat to do—a woman who’d rather riff than rivet? With scads of cats drafted and volunteering for military service, more chicks jumped at the chance to bandstand.”)

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Jules here, piping up to talk a bit about my valentine reads for this week, the ones to which I say, Be Mine. And if you yourself are in the mood for some stories about that complicated thing called love, then here are two recommendations for you.

First, there’s David Levithan’s new short story collection, How They Met, and Other Stories (Random House; January ’08; review copy). The rest of the world knows already that Levithan writes well about love (Boy Meets Boy and The Realm of Possibility), but this is actually my first Levithan read. Hey, a girl’s gotta start somewhere. Me likey, too. This is a collection of eighteen short stories, each one about love — straight, gay, sane, not-so-sane, old-fashioned and heart-tuggin’, young, old, you-name-it. Apparently, Levithan started writing a story for his friends as a Valentine’s Day gift every year, and now we have them in one spot in How They Met. “Not all of these stories are official valentine stories — I can, it seems, write about love and its follies year-round,” he writes in the opening author’s note. And he also goes way back to his very first story, written in high school, and also tells us, “instead of trying to rewrite them as I’d write them now, I decided to leave them as I wrote them in high school, give or take some punctuation and an awkward last line.” Hmmm, bold. I like that, too.

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I picked up this book based solely on that wonderful cover by Zachary Flagg Baldus (who, amusingly enough, describes the book in this manner at his site: “young gal gets popular FAST when she shows up at the dance looking HOT”). My late-afternoon request yesterday to feature the illustration sans text was a success, too; Zachary gave me permission to post it, and I’ve included it at the bottom of this review (go see his art-filled site, too. Prints for all that you see there are available, he tells me, but he can tell us more later. I found myself clicking on every image at his site, and I lined him up for a future Sunday feature). My infatuation with the cover art wouldn’t have lasted longer than that well-designed cover, whose dress plays prominently in the book, if it hadn’t been for Liz Gallagher’s ability to create memorable characters and a very real sense of place in this, her first novel, The Opposite of Invisible (Wendy Lamb Books; January ’08; review copy).

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It’s a new year, and new titles may be rolling in (both review copies as well as new additions to my local library’s shelves), but I’m still catching up with 2007. Here are reviews of three YA titles I read and enjoyed over the holidays. Let’s get right to it.

In the Fall of last year, Scottish author James Jauncey presented this taut, edge-of-your-seat dystopian thriller to the world of YA lit, and it seems to be vying for most under-the-radar title of the year, according to my web search. Jauncey had me at the book’s opening where he quotes, before the book begins, the brilliant composer Arvo Pärt (“If you approach silence with love, music may result”), but I digress. Set in the Scottish Highlands at a time in “the not-too-distant future” during a violent war over land ownership reform (and based on Scotland’s very real Land Reform Act of 2003), we meet eighteen-year-old John MacNeil, who is the sole witness to a bloody massacre at the hands of the despotic government, in conflict with terrorists who oppose their tyrranical reign. After eventually returning to the scene of the violence, he finds Ninian, a young, mentally-disabled boy, terrified into silence (John later learns Ninian has Fragile X Syndrome). The two flee into the mountains, pursued by soldiers and up against the harsh winter landscape, with John’s goal being to find his own father and return Ninian to whomever his family may be, eventually discovering the boy has strong ties to the rebel cause, ties John couldn’t have possibly imagined.

The heart of the story is John, a complex hero and rather tortured soul. Read the rest of this entry �