Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

I’m going to keep this short, because it almost pains me to post on top of Eisha’s and Adrienne’s very fun post from yesterday. Scroll down a bit if you missed it then and take in the conversation, dear readers.

I’m over at Guys Lit Wire today with a bit about Marc Tyler Nobleman and illustrator Ross MacDonald’s new picture book biography, Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman, released just this week by Knopf Books for Young Readers — and already met with a handful of starred reviews. It’s all about Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the two unsung heroes who created Superman. And I conducted a short Q & A with Nobleman as well; I didn’t give him the usually rather lengthy and Pivot-y 7-Imp treatment, since I’m guesting at another blog, but I did chat with him a bit about his new book — as well as his next project, a book for older readers about the uncredited co-creator and original writer of Batman.

Plus, you can find out who exactly a pionerd is if you go read what Marc has to say. “Pionerd” is currently my new favorite word.

Here’s the link. Enjoy!

eisha: Hey, all. I talked the fabulous Adrienne of What Adrienne Thinks About That into co-reviewing The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson with me. Here’s the result. It’ll be cross-posted on both our blogs today (here’s the link to hers). We tried to avoid major spoilers, to keep it safe for anyone who hasn’t read it. We mostly succeeded. We also managed to work in references to a bunch of other similarly-themed YA books, so this is almost a reading list post. Yay! Enjoy.

adrienne: I go about almost nothing systematically, least of all my reading, which, for someone who considers herself a student of literature, is completely haphazard. My approach is to keep around large numbers of books I am interested in for one reason or another and then to wander from one book to another with no goal other than to consume as many as I possibly can while putting minimal effort into things like eating and cleaning my house. Over the last few months, though, I can’t help but notice that much of my reading has consisted of reading whatever Eisha’s been reading a couple weeks after she’s read it. I think there are two reasons for this: 1. Eisha is awesome, and 2. we both like the supernatural. (Speaking of which, Eisha, have you seen how the truth is going to be out there again this summer? So exciting–and OMG I love Scully’s new hair.) Anyway, this is how I read Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, and Daniel Waters’ Generation Dead. It’s also how I wound up reading The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson, a crafty bit of science fiction that hits the same territory as Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain and Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion in a way that won’t threaten people who are put off by the phrase “science fiction.” This sci fi deception begins with a splendiferous cover that screams “I’M COOL! I’M COOL!” in soothing blues and greens while staying completely true to the story and its themes.

Eisha, I’m going on. Want to hit us with a summary? Should we use Jules’ marquee tag to post a spoiler alert? Do you agree that Henry Holt and Co. should give jacket designer Meredith Pratt a raise and more covers to design? WHAT ABOUT SCULLY’S NEW HAIR????

eisha: You flatter me. But it’s true, we do have similar tastes in books (and apparently in defunct-TV-shows-making-a-big-screen-comeback, too – YAY!), so I totally love that you keep biting my reading list. Now we have SO MANY BOOKS TO TALK ABOUT. I’ll try to stick to Jenna Fox for now, though.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jules: We’re so nerdy-excited to be featuring author and artist Laini Taylor and her Laini’s Ladies today. And that’s ’cause dang-it-all if she isn’t just a huge inspiration to us all. For serious, check out the art page at her site: Collage. Oil paints. Stamps. Paper dolls. Mosaics. Clay. Garden art. Mixed media and digital art work. Drawings. Stationery. And her beautiful Laini’s Ladies, which are the focus of this kicks feature today.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, baby. We need to talk. I just finished your new book, Snuff, and there’s some things I need to say to you. It’s not going to be easy, so, just… *sniff*… just listen, okay?

I’m sorry, Chuck. You know I’ve loved you for a long time – hell, I feel like I’ve been with you forever – but I think, honestly, maybe we’ve grown apart. I’ve suspected it for a while now, but after this last book… I’m sorry. I just can’t do this anymore.

The thing is, I wouldn’t have read this book at all if I hadn’t already been in love with you. Remember the first time? Fight Club? God, that was amazing. Back then, that whole repetitive, minimalist thing you do seemed so bold, so dangerous. So hot. And I seriously, no kidding, learned so much about men from that book.

And then Survivor – whoa. Maybe even better. I loved everything you had to say about the commodification of religion. And Fertility is a great heroine. The way Tender kept listing all those horrific cleaning tips didn’t feel like a gimmick; it actually made sense for a character who’d been raised to be a wage-slave for his religious cult, cut off from any sense of his own humanity. Being raised a Jehovah’s Witness, myself, I totally related.

Invisible Monsters was pretty good. I didn’t full-on LOVE it like I did the first two, but it was still pretty amazing, and so different. A supermodel with half her face shotgunned off, on the lam with her tranny brother and her ex-cop maybe-gay ex-boyfriend… I do remember thinking it was a weird book for a straight man to write. Ha.

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Hey, ya’ll. We’ve got a new Poet Laureate: Kay Ryan. I suppose a lot of people will be posting her stuff today, so I won’t do a big thing about her. I’ll just say that I haven’t read that much of her stuff yet, but what I’ve read so far I generally like. Some of it I really love. She’s got a sharp sort of wit, a coolly detached voice, and a deceptive brevity that seems more straightforward than it is. Here’s an example, “Full Measure:”

You will get your full measure.
But, as when asking fairies for favors,
there is a trick: it comes in a block.
And of course one block is not
like another. Some respond to water,
giving everything wet a little flavor.
Some succumb to heat like butter.

You can read the rest here. This poem is especially resonant with me right now. I’m one of those people who has a strong creative impulse, but so far hasn’t really found an expressive medium in which I feel confident. I’ve tried quite a few: dance, theatre, writing, photography, guitar… but I didn’t excel at any of them. So I feel like my block is still mostly untouched, just sitting there, waiting for me to figure out how to get at it.

It’s probably something I just wouldn’t expect. Like, découpage.

Anyway. Congrats to Kay Ryan: thanks for sharing your full measure with us.

The inimitable Kelly Fineman is handling this week’s round-up, bless her. Go see.

Hey, folks. We’ve got a super-spectacular treat (for us) today. We have the extreme pleasure of tri-reviewing with the vivacious TadMack (a.k.a. author Tanita S. Davis) of… well, of lots of blogs, but we’re maybe most fond of Finding Wonderland, one of the other awesome two-girl book blogs we keep tabs on.

The book we’re talking about is Out of the Wild, Sarah Beth Durst’s follow-up to last year’s fun middle-grade modern fantasy, Into the Wild.

If you’ve read Into the Wild, you’ll remember that 12-year-old Julie Marchen, daughter of Rapunzel, lives with a bunch of escaped fairy tale characters and has to help keep guard over The Wild, the enchanted forest that is the source of all our favorite stories. It gets loose anyway, and she barely manages to rein it back in and save the citizens of her town from becoming characters themselves, having to re-enact the fairy tales over and over for eternity. But to do so, she had to leave her mother’s Prince – the father she’s never known – still trapped in his story.

In Out of the Wild, he is, without apparent explanation, freed by The Wild and deposited into Julie’s bedroom. While Rapunzel and the other escaped characters have had 500 years or so to acclimate to the real world and learn to blend in, Prince is still every inch the fairy tale hero. So when some weird stuff starts to go down, involving a kidnapped princess and a rogue fairy turning people into pumpkins, he jumps into action to save the day. But here’s the thing: every time one of the reformed characters does something fairy-tale-ish in this world, they make The Wild grow. So Julie takes off after Prince to try to control the damage his heroics are doing to their ability to keep it contained. Before too long it becomes clear that someone must have set these events in motion in a deliberate attempt to free The Wild, and Julie & Co. have to use every trick at their disposal to figure out how to stop it from taking over the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, guess what? Anyone else remember when illustrator Frank Dormer created a Mad Tea Party image specifically for us and how ga-ga we were over it? We promptly put it on this page of our site, the one that lists our illustrator interviews and lists all the artists and illustrators we’ve featured in one way or another here at 7-Imp. If you’re like us and haven’t had your coffee yet and are too tired to click and look, let us show you here what the top of that page looks like:

Loveliness.

Well, every Sunday we feature the art work of different illustrators/artists, and a couple weeks ago, we featured Argentinian illustrator Fernando Falcone. We opened that feature with his Mad Tea Party image, created in ’06, posted here at his site in all its terrifying and arresting beauty. (That makes us sound a bit like a bad Calvin Klein ad, but…well, just look at it.) We boldly asked him, despite not speaking Spanish ourselves, if we could include that image in the header of another one of our blog’s pages, and he said YES, dear friends! So, we have one more kickin’ Mad Tea Party image to add to our collection — with a brunette Alice, nonetheless.

We decided to include it on our Author Interviews page. Isn’t it just perfect? Oh, still no coffee yet? Here’s what it looks like:

We extend precisely one kerjillion thanks to Mr. Falcone for the use of that illustration.

Many thanks to Jules’ husband, our personal tech support, for manuevering these images into those headers and making ’em look so great there.

AND…a whole heapin’ bunch of thanks to Little Willow, who pointed Falcone out to us in the first place. She’s got our back and is all the time pointing us in the direction of great Alice images.

We hope to eventually have a Mad Tea Party image we’re absolutely in love with for each page of our blog (though we’ll always leave the classic Tenniel on the very front page). And no rush. We’ll get there one day. These things of beauty take time.

P.S. For fun: Jules re-discovered an old email the other day in which someone pointed out another Mad Tea Party image — one by illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi, created when he was in high school, complete with Elton John as the Mad Hatter. Wanna see? Go here, and scroll down.

Jules: Yep, we’re having an identity crisis here at 7-Imp. Actually, we had one. Ultimately, it’s turned out to be a really good thing.

So, here’s my deal: Blogging has always been something I’ve done for fun; that means it has to fall behind my family and my work. My workload has recently doubled, and I’ve had to re-prioritize. I simply don’t have time to post a review of almost every book I read, which is pretty much what I have been doing for almost two years now.

To summarize: When I didn’t work so many hours, things looked like this —

1. My family and friends.
2. Work that pays.
3. Blogging.

Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Sunday, everyone!

So, what do you do when there are tentacles in your hallway?

Jules: We’re featuring the illustrations of artist and freelance illustrator Jen Corace this week, and we’re excited to be doing so. Some of you may have seen this Spring’s Little Hoot, released by Chronicle Books, another pairing of Jen and author Amy Krouse Rosenthal (who also created Little Pea in ’05). I’m actually not terribly familiar with Little Pea (I read it once and liked it is about all I can say on that), but I’ve got a copy of Little Hoot, and it’s . . . well, a hoot. Go check it out. When Betsy Bird reviewed it in January, she wrote: “Here’s the deal with illustrator Jen Corace… uh… she’s awesome. Not very descriptive but whatcha gonna do? Maybe it’s her design background and alternative feel, but when Corace illustrates a book, that book has done been illustrated, consarn it.” We couldn’t agree more.

Let’s pause for another moment of Jen awesome-ness: Read the rest of this entry »

Once again, The Poets Upstairs have come through for me in my time of need. I was just thinking how I felt like I was in a Poetry Friday rut, just lazily digging up old favorites instead of seeking out new stuff. And *poof* – without me even saying anything, Dana lent me a book of poetry by one of her professors, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. The book, Black Swan, opens with an amazing piece, “Leda,” that simply begged to be shared with you all. From that headspin of a first line to the sharp irony of the last, it charges the old myth with a fierce energy. The taut, vivid imagery puts you there in that swampy Florida heat. You know this girl. And you could just about cry for her.

By the way, I can’t help but notice that I was also reminded of Leda by Dana’s poem “Nesting,” featured back in April. Does this mean something? Do I have a Leda problem? Do I need to start watching out for swans? And while we’re on the subject… seriously, how was that supposed to even work? Is their… equipment… you know, compatible?

Sorry, that was random. And gross. Back to Poetry Friday now. Here’s the opening of “Leda:”

Imagine Leda black–
skinny legs—–peach-switch
scarred—–vaselined to gleaming
like magnolia leaves—–Imagine
a teenager—–hips asway like moss
switchin’ down a dirt road
Florida orange blossom
water behind her ears
her tight sheath-skirt
azalea pink

Please read the rest of the poem here. Even though they left out the cool line-spacing that’s used in the book. And there are a couple of typos, which saddens me more than I can express. It’s still awesome.

Lisa Schellman is keeping a vigilant eye on this week’s Poetry Friday roundup. Thanks, Lisa.