YA New York

So Random House has created an online MASH game to go with the paperback release of E. Lockhart’s The Boy Book, which is a sequel to The Boyfriend List.

I always loved and hated MASH when I was a kid. (If you missed this bus, we used to make these paper flower-like things, and we’d write boys’ names, occupations, house types, cars and the number of kids we’d have on the inside. The outside flaps would be different colors, and we’d count to a random number until we determined the entire path of a girl’s life with bad origami.)

I still love/hate it. Because, according to the folks at Random House, I am going to marry Tom Petty, have one child, and be a housewife in an apartment in Boston. I’m not sure how I feel about all that. I mean, Tom Petty is way older than me, and how are we going to raise a child together if he’s like, seventy years old when the kid is ten? Also, he’s lived in LA for years and years. What would compel him to move to Boston? Or me?

E. Lockhart, on the other hand, has a more interesting destiny: She’s going marry Robert Downey, Jr. and be a Broadway star in Bangladesh! I don’t know if that’s awesome or weird. It’s definitely one of the two. But it does make me sad that neither of us will end up living in the YA Mansion here in Brooklyn.

Anyway, while we’re on the topic of E. Lockhart, I have to very strongly recommend The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, which is in my opinion Ms. Lockhart’s best work yet.

Frankie (a girl, just in case you were confused) is a sophomore in boarding school who discovers a secret society and sort of infiltrates it. The book is hilarious, touching, and has a sneaky little bit of social criticism going for it, too.

The novel is in stores now and has been since March, so I won’t go on about it for too long. But it’s probably my favorite release of 2008 thus far. As in, number one on the top ten list. You should know that I have impeccable taste, which means that I’m never wrong, which means that this is the best book of the year. In other words, why haven’t you read it yet?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Ephemera. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.