Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

It’s time for another installment of 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks . . . For those new to our series, this is where we all stop in every Sunday to report seven (more or less is fine) Good Things that happened to you (or that you read or saw or experienced or . . . well, you get the picture) this week. Absolutely anyone is welcome to contribute.

Hi, everyone . . . Eisha is unable to contribute this week, ’cause she’s visiting family — including her stinkin’ cute punkin’ head brand-spankin’-new nephew, Miles. And, in fact, as I was typing my list here, I got some photos of Eisha and Miles in my email folder. I hope Eisha and her sister-in-law don’t mind me sharing one. If you follow our Sunday 7 Kicks lists, you know Eisha’s in love with him and this is the first time she’s met him! So, check out that photo at the bottom of my list. How beautiful is that? . . . And Eisha’s visit to Tennessee to meet Miles leads me to Numero Uno on my 7 Kicks list:

1) Eisha came to visit us this week! Here is a pic of us after a big, ‘ol wonderfully fattening and rather greasy meal of Southern food, which Eisha says she’s missed (many thanks to the nice waitress who took the photo and whose name we never got). Those are my kiddos; Ada looks like she’s hiding, and Miriam has lots of ketchup* residue on her face, but they’re stinkin’ cute, if I must say so myself. And I must. So, for those who have ever wondered if this is, indeed, one huge conspiracy and the blog is really being run by one person who likes to pretend she’s two, here’s yet another photo of us in the flesh . . . We really enjoyed Eisha’s visit, and my eldest, Miriam (age three), is in love with her. Yup, pretty much thinks the sun rises and sets in Eisha and wishes she didn’t live so far, far away. But we were all very grateful for her visit.

*How the blazes do you spell that word anyway? Is it “ketchup” if you’re Southern and “catsup” if you’re not?

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{Note: Today’s Poetry Friday round-up is being handled here by the honorable Ms. Herold at Big A, little a} . . .

Don’t you just love illustrator Margaret Chodos-Irvine? I do. She just gets better and better with each book, too.

Her newest illustrated title, Only You, just came out (April ’07; Harcourt Children’s Books; my source: library copy), and it’s my Poetry Friday entry for today, because it’s a lyrical, rhymed picture book text about parental love, written by Robin Cruise (who also authored last year’s Little Mamá Forgets, reviewed here by Yours Truly). As Booklist put it so well, “There’s no shortage of lyrical books that recount the way parents feel about their children. This one has the advantage of illustrations by Chodos-Irvine.”

As for the rhyming text, it’s lilting and comforting, as an effective bed-time story should be (it doesn’t set out to be a bed-timer, but the book shows all the ways a parent and child show love for one another, thus making it a great, soothing, quiet way to end a child’s day). This could also be one of those bestsellers that gets passed around from parent to new parent, what with the very subject’s built-in sentimentality. Read the rest of this entry »

Eisha is actually on her way to Tennessee to meet her brand-spankin’-new punkin head nephew, Miles, and will be making a visit to the Danielson household (that’s me) as well (woo hoo!), but I’m still speaking for the both of us here in this short note about blogger interviews.

We have had a lot of fun chatting with The Blue Rose Girls, and we’re still not done (did you see our interviews with Elaine, Alvina, Anna, Meghan, and Linda?). We’re excited to be bringing you an interview with Grace Lin this coming Monday, and two weeks after that, we’ll feature author Libby Koponen. I think we’ll be sad to say goodbye to our Blue Rose Girls series, but we’re glad they graced our site with interviews and we’ve enjoyed them all.

Two quick notes, then, about the blogger interviews: Since there will be a one-week lapse between Grace’s and Libby’s interviews, we will take a temporary break from the savagely smart Blue Rose Girls to bring you the savagely smart Colleen Mondor from Chasing Ray. She’s agreed to be highlighted in our ongoing blogger interview series, and we’re looking forward to her telling us all about the upcoming Summer Blog Blast Tour, a week-long series of interviews with YA authors and at multiple blogs. It’s gonna be swell, I tell ya.

Second quick note: When we interview bloggers such as The Blue Rose Girls who not only blog but also write and/or illustrate books, we always tack on a few extra questions about their work as authors and illustrators. We’re kicking ourselves that we didn’t ask Blue Rose blogger Alvina Ling more about her work as an editor, which is just as important as authoring and illustrating, of course (we had simply gotten into the habit of doing that for authors and illustrators only, and we weren’t thinking). Mitali Perkins also made a great comment at Alvina’s interview, stating that she, for one, would love to see a full list of books edited by Alvina. That would be the precise moment we smacked ourselves on our collective head and thought the same thing, as well as wondered why we didn’t tack on some extra questions for her. Shame on us. So, I have since that time asked Alvina if she actually could produce such a list, and she said she’d be happy to in the near future (she’s got quite a bit on her plate right now). Thanks, Alvina. We look forward to that.

And, as for extra questions for Alvina (she also said she’d be happy to do follow-up questions), what are some things you’d like to know about the work of editors — or, specifically, her work as an editor? Eisha and I can compose questions, but we thought we’d bounce it off you all, too. Perhaps in the near future, we can have a follow-up interview of sorts with the talented Ms. Ling . . . If you have any general editor and/or specific Alvina questions, drop them in the comment box. Cheers!

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 »

I didn’t set out to do a princess-y picture book round-up here, but as fate would have it, I came across two new ones at once, one published by a giant publishing company (Scholastic) and the other published by the lesser-known yet stout-hearted Charlesbridge Publishing. And, fear not: these are not your run-of-the-mill princesses. They have quite a bit of spunk and sauciness — one of them to a fault, to say the least. Let’s get right to it . . .

I love a well-crafted, contemporary, tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale, and just check out that cover. Princess Justina Albertina’s nanny is holding a sign with that very sub-title, “A Cautionary Tale.” Pretty funny, since the princess is back there raising hell at the drawbridge. And flip the book over, and you’ll see Princess Justina’s crest with the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” a Latin phrase meaning “Thus ever it be with tyrants” (the phrase is attributed to Brutus at the assassination of Julius Caesar). Hmmm . . . you get the idea immediately that you’re in for one presumptuous, pushy protagonist. Indeed, the Princess is loud-mouthed, haughty, and just flat-out spoiled to death (and Chesworth accentuates that with his rather porcine rendition of her). There’s much humor here as her nanny suffers her fits (“She caused a ruckus and a rumpus and a horrible hubbub,” we’re told more than once, giving her nanny repeated headaches). She goes so far as to cover the earth trying to find her the perfect pet; this, the princess whines, is her current demand. She heads to a lagoon for a polka-dotted puffer fish, buys her a two-headed dog, takes a raft to Brazil and finds a talking toucan librarian, finds a purple-crested duchess monkey in the jungles of Africa, and more. The ill-mannered Princess Justina manages to scare or blatantly piss off each potential pet (the fish is “no fun” and she wants a pet who notices her; she tries to ride the dog, practically killing him in the process; she declares that the clever toucan is too “stupid” to say her name; and, she frightens the bejeesus out of the African monkey with her meanest possible face). Read the rest of this entry »

This week we continue our series of blogger interviews with The Blue Rose Girls by talking to illustrator Linda Wingerter. It’s been great fun to chat with the multi-faceted Linda, who seems to live and breathe the arts (and also roller derby and fire-spinning).

She is one of the seven Blue Rose Girls, but she also has her own individual blog, Antimonia. When we asked her if there were any regular features at Antimonia, Linda said that, nah, “it just flows along with the waves of life.” This seems like an apt description for Linda herself, who is, as her blog explains, “keenly interested in chance connections and found objects; currently conducting a life experiment in following synchronicity. I like anything that cultivates coincidence, and any place or event that is a crossroads of random people” (“antimonia” itself means “the mutual incompatibility, real or apparent, of two laws; equally rational but contradictory,” she explained). Linda added, “there are so many things I love — painting, fire spinning, roller derby, writing, puppeteering, etc that they are often in conflict with each other and my life seems to lack focus. But I’ve always had a feeling that they all are a pieces of a larger, more extraordinary whole. My blog is a way of looking at all these things, like a map, with the hope of finding the big picture.” Linda also broke her dominant hand while skating in November of last year and very candidly discusses her healing from that, both physically and otherwise, at Antimonia.

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It’s time for another installment of 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks . . . For those new to our series, this is where we all stop in every Sunday to report seven (more or less is fine) Good Things that happened to you (or that you read or saw or experienced or . . . well, you get the picture) this week.

1* Last weekend, when we were househunting in Ithaca, the husband’s soon-to-be employer couldn’t get us a room at the usual hotel because of some festival that was going on… so they put us up in a spa resort! With a giant chess board outside! And I-swear-to-god the most amazing mattress I’ve ever slept on. Didn’t have time to try out the free-to-guests sauna, but I’ve never seen what the benefit of sitting around sweating is supposed to be anyway.

2* While staying at said resort, we saw a deer grazing on the lawn through our window Saturday night. And we saw four very brazen deer nonchalantly grazing right next to the highway as we drove home on Sunday afternoon.

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Here’s the continuing middle-grade novel round-up, the first book here being for the younger set and the other being for your slightly older middle-grader (I’ve mentioned before that I hate the category game, but I feel like I need to point that out).

And both titles feature some unforgettable heroines, so let’s get right to it then. Without further ado, meet Moxy. Meet Cadence . . .

Nine-year-old Moxy Maxwell may not have actually started her required summer reading — Stuart Little, of course — but she’s at least had it on her person practically all summer. It’s “spent a considerable amount of the summer soaking up sun and water,” as she has carried it with her everywhere: in her backpack, on her lap, and in the car on the way to rehearse her water-ballet daisy petal routine, where it then promptly fell into the pool. “It was also true that Moxy’s mother had found Stuart Little on the porch under the broken leg of the wicker coffee table more than once.” When the book opens, it’s late August — specifically, it’s the day before school begins — and Moxy’s mother warns her: If she does not stay in her room and read all of the book, “there were going to be ‘consequences.'”

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{Note: Today’s Poetry Friday round-up can be found here at a wrung sponge} . . .

So, I seem to be going through a bit of a flux-phase. Over the past few months I’ve finished my MLS, my husband has gotten a job that necessitates a move to a whole other state, I’ve become an aunt… Maybe that’s why lately I’ve been really thinking about who I am vs. who I want to be, what I do vs. what I wish I were doing, etc. Not quite mid-life crisis, but… close.

Hence, this poem has a lot of meaning for me right now:

“I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone” by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Annemarie S. Kidder).

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

Man, I just love Rilke. I wish I read German so I could really actually read Rilke. Maybe that’s one of the things I should try to do next…

Read the rest of the poem here.

This week we continue our series of blogger interviews with The Blue Rose Girls (on — surprise! — a day you might have least expected it) by talking to author/illustrator Meghan McCarthy. Just like it did when we chatted with bloggers Robin Brande, Anna Alter, and several other folks, it feels a bit awkward to ask the first blogger interview question — “What do you do for a living?” — when chatting with Meghan. If you keep up with picture books today, you’ve likely heard of Meghan and so you very well know what she does: she creates energetic, spirited, rather spastic (that’s a compliment) picture books — both fiction and nonfiction — with bold colors and animated characters and with much humor that is, as Publishers Weekly put it, “right on target for mischievous younger readers.”

We think it’s safe to say that Meghan is a large part of the spunk and feist (We just made up that word. She’s feisty is what we mean — the good kind of feisty; not the troublesome kind) and dynamic energy of The Blue Rose Girls. We think this — from Meghan’s Aliens Are Coming! site — says it all. This is under “About Me” on the “About the Author” page of the site: Read the rest of this entry »