NYC Teen Author Festival

February 26th, 2010

nycteenauthorfestival Get out your calendars, my friends, for the NYC Teen Author Festival is upon us. It starts Monday, March 15, and just about every author you can think of will be there.

Libba Bray, Natalie Standiford, Barnabas Miller and Dan Ehrenraft will serenade us as their band, Tiger Beat, performs on March 18.

There will be workshops, and signings, and lots of YA wackiness. David Levithan, author and editor extraordinaire, has outdone himself. I scanned the list of events and almost passed out from the unbelievable awesomeness.

Everyone will be there. In addition to David and the members of Tiger Beat, you can expect to see John Green, E. Lockhart, Sarah Mlynowski, Barry Lyga, Diana Peterfreund, Melissa Walker, Sarah Dessen … and many, many others. More than I can list.

Suffice it to say, this will be the best YA week of the year. So book your flights and your hotel rooms, and check out the NYC Teen Author Festival Facebook page for detailed info on the who, what, when and where.

Hope to see you there!

Much love,
brina

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Preview: Seth Baumgartner’s Love Manifesto by Eric Luper

February 20th, 2010

sethbaumgartner This book isn’t set to come out until June, but by then I will have forgotten how absolutely, completely wonderful it is. I have just finished reading my review copy, and I’ve decided I cannot wait a single minute to tell you all about Seth Baumgartner’s Love Manifesto.

Eric Luper is like the Nick Hornby of teen authors, I’ve decided. Are you familiar with Nick Hornby? Because if you’re not, you should be. He wrote High Fidelity, which was made into a movie with John Cusack. The movie is okay, but the novel is a vivid peek inside the mind (and heart) of a man who is suffering from some serious post-breakup insanity.

Why, you ask, am I bringing up some lad lit author named Nick Hornby when I’m supposed to be telling you about a book by Eric Luper? Well, it’s because I consider High Fidelity to be the gold standard of books about guys who are unhappy in love. And Seth Baumgartner’s Love Manifesto is, without a doubt, the gold standard of books about teen guys who are unhappy in love. Read the rest of this entry »

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Scarlett Fever by Maureen Johnson

February 16th, 2010

scarlettfever Today is Maureen Johnson’s birthday. Happy birthday, MoJo! Your most recent book lifted me right out of Brooklyn and plopped me down in Oz. Or, more accurately, into the fairy tale version of New York where Scarlett Martin and her wacky family live.

Here is what you folks who may be reading this here blog should know about Scarlett Fever: It is the second installment of a series of novels about a 15-year-old girl (named Scarlett, natch) whose family owns a rundown NYC hotel. In the first book (Suite Scarlett), our heroine got a job working for a crazy lady (crazy awesome, that is) named Amy Amberson. Mrs. Amberson is very wealthy, very eccentric, and — I almost hate to admit this — very cool. She’s also a former actress who has just started her own talent agency, and in this second novel she has Scarlett running around town trying to keep the talent happy. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Best Of, Part the Third

February 10th, 2010

If it takes me until May of next year, I will compile the most complete list on the Internet of the best YA books of the 2000s, so help me God.

Anyway, my next pick for Best of the 2000s is obvious, so brace yourselves: It’s the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling.

Some of you are moaning. Others are cheering. Others are tired and want to take a nap.

I was one of those people who refused to read Harry Potter because it was popular. Indeed, up until about 2003 I had a pretty negative attitude towards teen fiction in general, in spite of the fact that I was already a Meg Cabot fan.

Then one day I realized that I should probably just get on with it. And I did. I gulped the first two books down in one sitting, and then went to the grocery store in the middle of the night to buy the next three. By the time I was done with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a week later, I was well on my way to being Queen of Harry Potter Predictions. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Vinyl Princess by Yvonne Prinz

February 1st, 2010

vinylprincessMy first thought reading this awesome tome in August of last year: No one in the world could possibly have such an encyclopedic knowledge of music. No one, that is, except for the cofounder of Amoeba Music, Yvonne Prinz. If you’ve ever been to the Bay Area, and you care even a little bit about music, you’ve been to Amoeba.

It’s a freakin’ oasis. And a place not unlike Amoeba — on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley — is where we meet The Vinyl Princess. Her real name is Allie. Actually, her real name is Alberta. But that’s a long story.

Okay, so here’s the story: Allie loves vinyl. She loves records. She detests MP3s. And so, in the break between her junior and senior years of high school, she starts her very own blog, The Vinyl Princess.

The book itself is a love story, of sorts. There are guys in bands, hot guys who drop by the record store, guys Allie’s mom dates, guys Allies’ best friend dates … it’s just a big ol’ barrel of boys, this book.

Some of them, of course, are jerks. I’ll leave you to figure that part out on your own.

What’s really outstanding about Prinz’s novel, though, is the music. You need to be a music lover to enjoy The Vinyl Princess, but don’t even try to be as knowledgeable as our heroine. She knows it all, and Prinz’s entire book could serve as a sort of top 10,000 list.

I’ve been meaning to post this review for ages, ever since I had the honor of meeting Yvonne in August. I also have a (partial) interview with her that I intend to post ASAP (i.e. before the world ends). For now, please go read and enjoy Yvonne’s latest, and I’ll be back with more … eventually.

Much love,
brina

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Best of the ’00s, continued

January 29th, 2010

Meg Cabot.

meg cabot

Meg Cabot!

You know I adore her writing. You know I consider her to be the High Priestess of YA.

The first time I read a Meg Cabot book must have been the end of 2000 or beginning of 2001. I was sick, and I’d had to leave college right before my last semester. My dear friend Jami B. mailed me a care package including The Princess Diaries and a pink plastic tiara.

I put on the tiara and read the book in one sitting. Mia Thermopolis enchanted me. A princess who doesn’t want to be a princess??? How could it get any better?

As time passed, I collected pretty much every single thing Meg has ever had published. The woman is a powerhouse. I don’t know how she does it, but she is unbelievably prolific, and her style is very much her own. She’s big on texture, which is my favorite thing about creative writing. She consistently serves up e-mails, instant messages, text messages, journal entries, receipts, even airline tickets. I wish more authors were good at the whole artifact thing, because it’s such a joy to be reading a book and stumble upon, I don’t know, a picture of a cat drawn onto a menu in Italian. Read the rest of this entry »

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Best of …

January 18th, 2010

I’m a bit late. Okay, a lot late. The horrible decade that was the 2000s has been over for several weeks now. But I have a lot to say about the really good stuff that happened in that soon-to-be-forgotten decade.

The best thing that happened, if you ask me, is that young adult literature exploded. You can walk into almost any Barnes and Noble now and find a whole section devoted to YA fiction.

gossipgirl I don’t imagine I’ll be able to write this all in one sitting, so I’m just going to start at the beginning, which for me was Gossip Girl.

It was 2003, I think, when I was working at a small daily paper in southern Connecticut, that an editor dropped a stack of Gossip Girl novels on my desk. I worked for the city desk, meaning I mostly wrote obits and covered breaking news stories about important happenings, like the local post office getting its own little postal ATM.

But Jim, the amazing and wonderful features editor, knew I had better things to do with my time. Like read Cecily von Ziegesar’s highly addictive and seriously trashy novels about wealthy teenaged girls on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Cecily, when I met her, took umbrage at my calling her books “trashy.” But I meant it in a good way. What she wrote wasn’t saccharine sweet, like the Sweet Valley High and Babysitters Club books I had grown up reading. No, Cecily ventured into dangerous territory. She wrote about booze and drugs and sex and fashion and the general cattiness of New York’s upper crust. Read the rest of this entry »

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Going Bovine by Libba Bray

December 7th, 2009

bovineI’ve read quite a few books this year, but Libba Bray’s newest is pretty much as good as it gets. Going Bovine is the sad yet hilarious story of Cameron, who is dying of mad cow disease (aka Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, aka bovine spongiform encephalopathy).

The thing is, Libba is one of the world’s funniest people (see her blog, Maureen Johnson’s vlogs with her, etc.), but that didn’t fully shine through in her Gemma Doyle trilogy, which was big on the drama but not quite as big on the absurd.

Bovine is a good old-fashioned road trip story in which the hero must save the world in order to save himself; what makes it unique is that it’s completely insane and will have you snort-laughing for hours. See, this book is about a kid with mad cow disease who meets punk rock angels and giants made of fire and who becomes friends with the world’s most bizarre sidekick — a Hispanic hypochondriac dwarf — not to mention a Norse god disguised as a yard gnome. Oh, and he visits a place called the Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack And Bowl.

Suffice it to say, I have now read Going Bovine twice, and I still think it’s the funniest, smartest, most interesting thing I’ve seen this year. Not to mention the weirdest. If Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams had all collaborated, they still wouldn’t have been able to top Libba’s masterpiece. Go read it now, please.

If you need more convincing, please watch the trailer, in which Libba wears a cow costume and describes her latest work as “the feel-good mad cow disease string theory book of September 2009.”

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Buy a vase; support an author!

November 15th, 2009

Lauren Mechling, the fantastic author of Dream Girl and co-author of the Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber series, recently contributed a short story to the project Significant Objects.

(Premise: Thrift store finds inspire writers to create works of short fiction. The objects are then sold on eBay, accompanied by the short stories. So if you place a bid and win, you get both the vase Lauren wrote about and a copy of her story.) One hundred authors contributed to this project, including Lauren and Meg Cabot.

PS. Lauren and Meg are the only YA writers whose names jumped off the page at me, so if I’ve missed someone, please feel free to post a link in the comments.

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Oct. 15 author event UES

October 9th, 2009

Check it out. Next Thursday, at Barnes and Noble on 86th and Lex, Michael Grant, Carrie Ryan, Scott Westerfeld. More info here.

And yes, I’ve got reviews coming for you soon. Thing is, I’ve spent the last month reading thousands of pages of trashy historical romance. Don’t worry. I’m almost done, and it will be a good five years (at least) before I walk the romance road again.

Seven thousand pages. Seven.

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