Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

{Friendly Warning: Some plot spoilers below} . . .

In author and English teacher Jake Wizner’s first book, a YA novel entitled Spanking Shakespeare (Random House; September 2007; review copy) — also a Fall 2007 Book Sense Teen Pick — we meet Shakespeare Shapiro. It’s his senior year of high school. He’s never had a girlfriend; he’s never kissed a girl; his brother, Gandhi (yes, Gandhi), who is two years younger, has a girlfriend, will lose his virginity before Shakespeare, and is terrifically popular at school; and he has only two close friends: “Neil Wasserman, whose favorite thing to do is discuss his bowel movements; and Katie Marks, who favorite thing to do is tell me how pathetic I am.” And then there’s his name:

“It’s hard to imagine what my parents were thinking when they decided to name me Shakespeare. They were probably drunk . . . I’ve given up asking them about it because neither of them is able to remember anything anymore, and the stories they come up with always leave me feeling like it might not be so bad to dig a hole in the backyard and hide out there until I leave for college next year. That is, if I get into college.” Read the rest of this entry �

{Note: Please see the post below this one for today’s Robert’s Snow schedule}

Hi there. It’s post number three here in our fledgling tri-review series, in which we discuss the merits and/or pitfalls of a new title with a blogger whom we have invited to come play with us (these things are way more like book discussions than traditional reviews, as you can tell by the length of these posts). We kicked the series off with a discussion of Cat Weatherill’s Snowbone with Betsy Bird, a.k.a. Fuse #8; continued with a discussion of Gabrielle Zevin’s Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac with Jen Robinson; and are currently enjoying a discussion of Mo Willems’ Elephant & Piggie beginning readers with none other than MotherReader (to be posted soon) . . .

And this week we’re happy to have Roger Sutton, Horn Book editor and blogger, with us to discuss Perry Moore’s new novel, Hero. We’d like to thank Roger for joining us to discuss the new book.

{Note: Beware — Plot spoilers included below}.

Jules: Hero, the first novel by film producer, screenplay writer, and director Perry Moore and just released last month, is “the coming of age story of the world’s first gay superhero,” as the publisher (Hyperion) likes to put it. (And I have to quickly share Fuse’s thoughts on the matter in her post about Moore’s September book release party, because it made me laugh out loud: “And though I didn’t know it before I read the book, I LOVE gay teen superheroes! They’re the bestest superheroes out there”).

Read the rest of this entry �

{Note: Please see the post below for today’s Robert’s Snow schedule!}

Hi, everyone. If you missed our earlier announcement, 7-Imp is currently guest blogging at ForeWord Magazine at their Shelf Space column (“Booksellers and Librarians talk about what’s in their reading room and what’s on the horizon”) for the next few weeks. Eisha took week one with some YA novel reviews, and this week I’ve got reviews of four middle-grade/early YA novels up. It’s called “Middle-Grade Novel Round-Up: Or, The Only Place You’ll See Joey Pigza, Camels, a Tangled Mass of Fairy Tale Green, and Banjos in One Post,” and it’s here. The novels I review are:

* Camel Rider by Prue Mason (Charlesbridge; June 2007; review copy);

* Into the Wild by Sarah Beth Durst (Razorbill/Penguin Young Readers; June 2007; review copy);

* Louisiana’s Song by Kerry Madden (Viking Juvenile; May 2007; review copy); and

* . . . I kicked things off with I Am Not Joey Pigza by Jack Gantos (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; July 2007; review copy). I reviewed this back in September, but for this piece, I took portions of that review and added a few comments that Jack Gantos made at the recent Southern Festival of Books about the writing of this novel.

Here’s the link again if you want to go take a gander. Enjoy!

{Note: Please see the below post for today’s Robert’s Snow schedule!} . . .

What happens when the creator of the Animorphs series tackles a free verse novel? Well, something quite lovely after all.

In Home of the Brave (Feiwel & Friends; August 2007; review copy), Katherine Applegate’s first stand-alone literary novel, she tells the story of Kek, who once lived in Africa with his mother, father, and brother but lost the latter two in the midst of war in Sudan. After time at a refugee camp, he is reunited with his aunt and cousin, Ganwar, already living in America as refugees, and befriends a cow at a nearby farm, which reminds him of home (“You can have your dogs and cats,/ your gerbils and hamsters/ and sleek sparkling fish./ But you will have lived/ just half a life/ if you never love a cow”). The popularity of free verse and its constant abuse could be an altogether different post, but I think this one mostly works.

Read the rest of this entry �

Hi, everyone. Just a quick note to say that we will be guest blogging at ForeWord Magazine in their Shelf Space column (“Booksellers and Librarians talk about what’s in their reading room and what’s on the horizon”) for the next few weeks. Eisha took week one, and I’ll take another . . . and we plan to co-write some pieces, too.

Here is Eisha’s write-up, which was posted yesterday. It’s entitled, “Those Crazy Kids: Depression Remains a Hot Topic in Young Adult Fiction,” and in it she discusses her impressions of a few recent titles that feature clinically depressed characters, including It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini (Hyperion, 2006); Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007); Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007); and Get Well Soon by Julie Halpern (Feiwel & Friends, 2007).

We are looking forward to the rest of our articles over at ForeWord. If you’re not familiar with them, you can read all about it here. Bottom line: They are a bi-monthly review journal of books from independent presses. In early September, they launched a new web site featuring blogs from publishing insiders and librarians and booksellers. Their inaugural bloggers were Michael Cairns and Betsy Bird, a.k.a. Fuse. We’re honored to be working with them.

Happy Saturday to all . . .

For the most part, we tend to cover only new titles here at 7-Imp (which mostly bums me out, but hey, we gotta have a focus; it’s hard enough to keep up), but I’m a bit slow in getting to one, published at the end of last year, that I want to make sure we tell you about, despite the fact that I’m, uh, approximately one year behind on the review. To boot, you can consider it an attempt on my part to try to compensate for the fact that we probably don’t cover enough historical fiction here at 7-Imp.

Here’s a book summary, taken straight from Grey’s site, so as not to goof and reveal too many plot spoilers:

“Milan, 1497. The height of the Renaissance. And for young Giacomo, servant to the famous Leonardo da Vinci, it’s the most difficult time of all. His master has been working on the Last Supper, his greatest painting ever, for the past two years. But has he finished it? He’s barely started! And the all-powerful Duke of Milan is after the artist to have it done by the time of the Pope’s visit next Easter. If Leonardo won’t hurry up, however, there’s a rumor that a young genius — Michelangelo — may be invited to finish it instead. Which means that Leonardo won’t be paid, and his debts are now so large that Milan’s shopkeepers are planning drastic measures against him.

It’s all down to Giacomo, and whether he can come up with a brilliant solution. But will his Master go for it? After all, Leonardo still doesn’t seem to trust him. He refuses to teach Giacomo how to paint, and he does not offer to help him find his true parents, or to explain the significance of the medallion, ring, and cross that he was carrying when Leonardo saved his life. But with the secret arrival of a powerful stranger, Giacomo is about to discover much more than the answers he has been looking for. And he will also receive an invitation to help arrange a meeting that could change his life — and the future course of history.”

Read the rest of this entry �

I know I’m going to look insufferably and nerdily overachieving here, but I’m using my turn for this Poetry Friday to highlight three poetry books across the board, so to speak — picture book, middle-grade, and YA (actually, the Grandits book is more squarely aimed at teens, but it’d work just dandy for a middle-school reader as well). That’s because I can’t choose which to highlight today, not to mention I’ve been feeling rather behind on reviews lately. Here goes:

How has it taken me over three-quarters of the year to find this title? It’s wonderful. Portions of it were previously published in 1960, but here it is now with warm, ebullient illustrations from Melissa Iwai. In this rhyming text, Kuskin — winner of the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry, among many other honors — offers the child reader a series of imaginative hypothetical questions: “If you could be green/ would you be a lawn/ or a lean green bean/ and the stalk it’s on?/ Would you be a leaf/ on a leafy tree?/ Tell me, lean green one,/ what would you be?” . . . The other hypothetical questions proposed to the reader involve being square, soft, loud, small, red, fierce, blue, and bright (“Tell me, quite bright one,/ what would you be?”) with a slightly surreal mind-bender proposed at the end. It’s a book to delight and engage in, to share with a group of children at story time, and ponder the world around and the qualities of it. And, as the Booklist review pointed out, Kuskin uses the sound of her words and their meaning to great effect (“If you could be small/ would you be a mouse/ or a mouse’s child/ or a mouse’s house/ or a mouse’s house’s/ front door key?”). Iwai’s imaginative acrylic paintings are soft, fanciful when they need to be and playful-with-perspective in just the right spots. A lively pre-school book, to share either one-on-one or in an interactive story time hour.

This is a follow-up title to Grandits’ 2004 anthology of original concrete poems, entitled Technically, It’s Not My Fault, also published by Clarion Books (which I’ve not read but Eisha enjoyed), this title following Jessie, a high schooler with fervent opinions about her pesky younger brother, Robert (who narrated the first anthology); designing her own clothes; volleyball; her cat; “stupid pep rallies” (“I’m not feeling peppy, and the pep rally isn’t helping”); and much more. Book and magazine designer Grandits scores with these visually-enticing poems whose very shapes echo their subject matter, the words and type and design coming together to make a poem and a picture — an hourglass for “Allergic to Time,” a graph which charts out Jessie’s day in “My Absolutely Bad Cranky Day,” and the spray of a shower in “All My Important Thinking Gets Done in the Shower.” Read the rest of this entry �

We’re here to discuss Gabrielle Zevin’s second YA novel, her first one being 2005’s Elsewhere (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a 2006 ALA Notable Book and a Quill Book Award nominee, in which the afterlife is portrayed as a place where its inhabitants age in reverse until they reach infancy and are then sent back to Earth and reborn. She has also written one book for adults, Margarettown, and several screenplays.

In this novel, we meet seventeen-year-old Naomi, who takes a tumble down her high school steps one day after losing a coin toss with her best friend and co-editor of the yearbook, Will, over who should go back into the building to get the yearbook’s camera. She wakes to find that the past four years of her memory have been wiped clean and that she’s being assisted in the ambulance by a rather handsome fellow student about whom she knows nothing. Thus begins her journey of self-discovery as she tries to put back the puzzle pieces of her life, trying to remember Ace, her boyfriend; the complicated relationship she had with Will; why her parents are divorced; and why it takes her father a good while to tell her he’s now engaged. There’s also the issue of her mother’s new family, including a half-sister Naomi doesn’t remember at all.

We’re happy to host Jen Robinson for this, our second tri-review, the first one being fairly recently with Betsy Bird of A Fuse #8 Production and linked here, if you missed it. It was a pleasure to chat with Jen about this book. She’s a very astute reader, that one. Not to mention she graciously put up with our busy schedules while this was composed (we started this review one month ago!).

Watch Out: Some spoilers in the review below . . .

Jules: Jen, we’re excited to have you tri-reviewing with us! What did you think of the novel? I, for one, really enjoyed it, though I admit it took some convincing for me to swallow the premise. I was scared of the whole amnesia set-up – in a this-is-a-bad-soap-opera-narrative kind of way. But kudos to Zevin for making it work. It quickly became entirely believable for me, and I was really wrapped up in what I thought were such honest and perceptive characterizations. And, of course, Zevin is using memory loss as a way to explore issues of – the very nature of – identity; I guess making it a temporary and partial amnesia worked better for me. A full-fledged one might have been harder to swallow. And, though I’m getting ahead of myself here, I found the ending to be pitch-perfect and perfectly charming. Yes, I used the over-rated “charming” in a review, but it really fits here.

Did you like it? And how did it compare to Elsewhere for you? I have yet to read that one, though the premise sounds fabulous to me. Read the rest of this entry �

I really like short stories. But short story collections based around a theme, especially in books aimed at young adults, can be really hard to pull off. They can seem gimmicky and didactic, kind of “here’s what some out-of-touch executive type thinks teens want to read about.” I was wary of this particular title, Such a Pretty Face: Short Stories about Beauty, for just those reasons. I worried that it might be a series of tales about self-conscious “typical teens” overly preoccupied with their weight/skin/hair/shoe size/etc. I’m pleased to report that this was not the case. This collection really does work, thanks to the incredible assemblage of talented authors and the editorial stylings of Ann Angel*.

The stories all feature teenage protagonists and explore different facets of the concept of beauty. There’s a lot of variety in tone and style, ranging from poignant (“Red Rover, Red Rover” by Chris Lynch, about a hospitalized boy who’s in love with a nurse he’s never actually seen), empowering (“What I Look Like” by Jamie Pittel**, in which a girl experiments with her appearance as she establishes her own distinct identity), romantic (“Bella in Five Acts” by Tim Wynne-Jones, about an undersized boy and a beautiful, suicidal girl), and wacky (“Bad Hair Day” by Lauren Myracle, in which a homecoming queen is beset by a supernatural chin hair).

One of the more bittersweet offerings is “Bingo” by Anita Riggio, about a depressed boy whose bubbly best friend tries to save him from himself:

Read the rest of this entry �

{Note: For the rest of today’s Radar-Books schedule, scroll down to the bottom of this post} . . .

It’s arguable whether or not Nancy Crocker’s first novel, Billie Standish Was Here (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), qualifies as a Radar-Book, as in a book which has been entirely too overlooked. In the grand scheme of things, it’s still a fairly young novel, having been released just this past June, not to mention it has received consistently good reviews: “Set in the late 1960s and early ‘70’s, this tender, touching account of intergenerational friendship provides rich historical context for two memorable female characters who redefine the meaning of family and love” (starred review in Kirkus Reviews), and “{t}his story is beautiful, painful, and complex, and the descriptions of people, events, and emotions are graphic and tangible” from School Library Journal. It was even chosen as a Summer 2007 Children’s Book Sense Pick.

But I’m still declaring it under the radar, because it didn’t get a whole heapin’ dose of blog buzz: The only other blog review I knew of was Kelly Herold’s from July, and I just found this one at a blog called Hypothetically Speaking.

Plus, to be perfectly honest, it is a great excuse for me to interview the author, Nancy Crocker, pictured above.

It’s the summer of 1968 in the small town of Cumberland, Missouri, and Billie — from whose perspective the entire novel is told — is eleven years old. Not only does she not register in her parents’ radar on any level whatsoever (other than providing her food and shelter, as if she’s simply a pet to feed), but the town, way past its heyday, suddenly seems even lonelier than normal after a long period of “bone-soaking rain.” School has ended for the summer. Daily, Billie finds herself alone in her room, as usual, her parents never there. When they are there, she is ashamed and afraid to speak up, doing so making her feel flat-out strange (after her mother makes one particularly hateful comment to Billie, she winces: “When she caught me off guard she could still make me wonder just when it was that she decided to stop taking care of me altogether”). After venturing out one day, she sees and hears no one, wondering why the town seems abandoned and feeling as if she might shrink. As she’s about to turn back for home, she sees and speaks to the neighbor across the street, Lydia Jenkins (“{s}he looked like every grandma in the world”) and learns that the town members are afraid the levee may break. Though everyone else seems to be off working to shore up levees against the river, Billie’s parents, Lydia tells her, are still working in the field every day, as always, Billie’s father having remembered that when the levee broke in ’51, there was enough time to sandbag before the water got to town. Eventually, Billie comes to learn that Miss Lydia is the only other person besides her family to stick around, and a friendship with her is born out of circumstance.

Here’s what else I wrote about Billie Standish in my review this past May of an advance proof of the novel: Read the rest of this entry �