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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Twenty-one Questions with Alma Alexander

September 28th, 2009

cybermage So. Alma Alexander’s Worldweavers trilogy was completed earlier this year with the release of Cybermage. I was fortunate enough to interview her after the book came out, but have been tragically derelict in my duties when it comes to this here website. Hopefully I can make it up to you a bit now, by posting the interview along with a brief description of Alma’s awesome work.

If you’ve been reading the Worldweavers series up until now, you know that our heroine, Thea, was long considered to be a magical dunce. In her world, where magical talent is the norm for humans, Thea showed no aptitude for the arts until she was shipped off to Wandless Academy. At that point it became apparent that she’s not only a magician, but a rare powerful one, whose talent lies in the supposedly un-magical area of computers.

In Cybermage, Thea and her friends meet the famous scientist Nikola Tesla at various times in his life, whilst attempting to keep an important magical object out of the hands of a race called the Alphiri.

The book, Alma’s tenth, is awesome, and I heartily recommend the entire series to you. It’s funny, interesting, dramatic and also exceptionally creative.

Without further delay, I bring you Twenty-one Questions with Alma Alexander:

Question One

Me: You write under the name Alma Alexander, but you seem to be pretty free about your given name [Alma Hromic Deckert]. Why do you use a pseudonym?

Alma: Because when The Secrets of Jin-Shei was being published, my agent phoned me up and said they wanted a pseudonym. They wanted a name that was easier to pronounce. It was presented to me as a dealbreaker. My middle name is Alexandra so I went with that, so it felt more like me. [Alma's maiden name, Hromic, is pronounced H-rome-ich.] Read the rest of this entry »

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Daughters of the Sea: Hannah by Kathryn Lasky

September 18th, 2009

hannahklasky Mermaids are in. They’ve been in for awhile now, did you know? I’m telling you, there are mermaids just about everywhere you look.

And no, I honestly don’t think I’m giving much away by revealing that Hannah, the first book in the Daughters of the Sea series, is about mermaids.

I mean, look at that picture. Mermaid alert!

Having said all that, this particular tome is an interesting read. Hannah is an orphan who, at the tender age of fourteen, is turned loose from a Boston orphanage to find her own way in the world. Unfortunately, her own way takes her to Kansas, where she becomes terribly ill.

Because mermaids aren’t supposed to go so far from the sea.

Although, of course, she doesn’t know yet that she is a mermaid. We know it, because of the cover and the fact that normal people don’t shed salt wherever they go. But Hannah doesn’t.

Anyway, she is promptly sent back to Boston, where she becomes a scullery maid for one of the city’s wealthiest families. The situation makes for an interesting plot, mermaid or no. I found myself thinking of Sara Crewe several times while reading the novel: a little princess, reduced to a mere scullery maid.

But it is through Hannah’s work that she’s able to discover certain things about herself. Like her natural ability to play the harp. Or to swim. Or to draw the attentions of a particularly attractive gentleman.

After reading Hannah, I’m quite eager to see what’s in store for us next. My only concern is that the book seems a bit young (perhaps because of the humongous print?), but by young I mean Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, not Golden Books. In other words, Lasky’s work is definitely within the YA realm.

Next time you’re browsing at your local bookshop, do take a peek at Hannah. If you’re like me, you’ll read the entire thing in about forty-five minutes. And then you can come tell us what you think, aye?

PS. No, really. Mermaids. They are the now thing. Agree? Disagree? I want to hear your opinions.

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Preview: The Vampire Is Just Not That Into You

September 9th, 2009

I happen to have read He’s Just Not That Into You, years ago, when I was doing a roundup of dating advice books. (They mostly suck, and the popular book mentioned above is … err … okay, honestly? It’s no exception to the rule.)

Thankfully, Scholastic’s twist on the dating book is so awesome that I now have something I can honestly recommend to friends with relationship woes. The Vampire Is Just Not That Into You by “Vlad Mezrich” debuts next month, and it’s chock full of fantastic advice about how to make a vamp love you (and what to do when he inevitably leaves you or tries to eat you).

When Scholastic sent me their book list and I saw this title, I was all, “No! No more vampires! No dating books about vampires. What is the world coming to???”

Thankfully, any time David Levithan is involved with a project you can count on either (a) hilarity, or (b) hilarity, or (c) both.

My biggest complaint? The book is being published as a paperback and then being sold for only $7.99. If a girl is silly enough to want to date a vampire, she should pony up a few more bucks for some good advice. This should be a hardcover at the very least. Preferably covered in 24-carat gold leaf.

Anyway. Coming next month, to a bookstore near you. Buy it, read it, come back here and discuss it.

PS. This is the Last Vampire Book Ever. More on that when the tome’s pub date rolls around.

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Back from San Francisco …

August 27th, 2009

Hello, darling readers.

I’ve done shockingly little reading this week. Well, okay. I did read Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd, which was hard to understand because I was the wrong kind of nerd when I was in high school. What I mean to say is, I didn’t play D&D or watch anything with “star” in the title. I was the president of the Latin Club. Also, I was into several different kinds of debate. Political nerds just aren’t the same, though.

Anyway, the reason I didn’t post or read is that I was in California. I drank coffee and shopped at used bookstores and hung out with Yvonne Prinz, whose upcoming book The Vinyl Princess is super awesome. I spent a bit of time interviewing her, but we also ate shaved fennel and talked about movie stars (Joseph Gordon Levitt: hot. Tom Cruise: not.) and swapped music trivia. Well, actually, Yvonne, who not only wrote a YA book about a delightful music geek girl but is also the co-owner/founder of Amoeba Music — pics to come — had much more musical trivia to share. I just sort of listened and tried to remember the names she was throwing at me.

Right. So, now I’m back. Flew in on the red-eye this morning. Expect to hear from me soon. Probably with more info on Geektastic, because even if I’ve never been to a sci fi/fantasy convention, I at least know who “The Doctor” is.

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Fall project:

August 20th, 2009

It would seem there is a mysterious vault at the Brooklyn Public Library, according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times blog, City Room.

The linked article discusses books that have been relegated to a back room because they have been deemed too offensive for the public. There are few requests (eleven since 2005, one of which was to John Green’s Looking for Alaska).

People have objected to the book, as you probably know, for denigrating religion. That seems weird to me, as it grapples with a teen who believes in Some Kind of God and is actually trying to figure out what that God means to him. And, you know, John Green is Christian. Silly people. I know there was a bit of a furor over Looking for Alaska, but it just seems completely unwarranted.

Of course, the panel that reviews books for … removal … generally sides with the book. Don’t worry: John Green will stay on the shelves. New Yorkers aren’t dumb enough to remove a fantastic read like Looking For Alaska from their general collections.

Anyway, I’ve decided that one of my projects this fall will be to make an appointment to visit the Brooklyn Public Library’s Hunt Room. I want to see which books have been relegated to their vault of objectionable material. And I’ll write here about it, of course. (Although I’m guessing folks will be flooding to the Hunt Room now that there’s an article about it.)

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