Category: Books

Recently, it was advertised that Roxane Gay would be judging a fiction contest for the Masters Review.  There was an informative few sentences as to what kind of stories Ms. Gay likes and didn’t like.  Among the things she didn’t like: stories about writers, and stories about white couples in sad relationships.  I chortled, and decided not to enter that contest because the piece I had ready would have trended too closely to the sad relationship trope.  Then, this arrived in the mail.  I’m sorry to say that Roxane Gay’s comments were still too fresh in my mind.  It’s a story of a white couple in a sad relationship.  Even without Gay’s comments, I think I might have still compared it unfavorably to an earlier One Story about a white couple in a sad relationship.  That one–“Queen Elizabeth”–I really enjoyed.   This one, not so much.

I was finishing up Mock Printz reading this month.  I will attend two Mock Printz discussion groups in January.  (For those of you not in the know, the Printz Award is the YA equivalent of the Newberry Medal).

Picture Books:  Juana & Lucas
Middle Grade: Frazzled (and not because it’s the only one)
YA: The Sun is Also a Star
Young Nonfiction: Animals by the Numbers

Ape & Armidillo Take Over the World
James Strum
Read for Librarian Book Group
I think if I were a kid today, I’d totally be into these TOON books.

The Princess and the Warrior
Duncan Tonatiuh
Read for Librarian Book Group
More of Tonatiuh’s really fun illustrations (love those ears that look like 3s) and the story of how two mountains came to be.

Maybe Something Beautiful
Campoy/Howell
Read for Librarian Book Group
A girl makes something a little beautiful and suddenly everyone is pitching in to brighten the neighborhood.

A Child of Books
Jeffers/Winston
Read for Librarian Book Group
I enjoyed how the text morphed into many things.

Juana & Lucas
Juana Medina
Read for Librarian Book Group
Juana loves her dog Lucas.  But she doesn’t want to learn English. Very fun early chapter book.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we in the United States started learning another language when Juana does?

Frazzled: Everyday Disasters and Impending Doom
Booki Vivat
Read for Librarian Book Group
Abbie Wu is starting middle school and it’s a problem.  All sorts of things about middle school are hard, from picking an elective to navigating the school lunch room.  It’s also a problem that no one else sees what a big problem it is.  The level of drama resonated strongly, I loved the illustrations and am incredibly jealous of author Booki Vivat’s neat handwriting.

The Sun is Also a Star
Nicola Yoon
Read for Mock Printz
O! Such a wonderful swoony love story! I practically sells itself:  Girl meets boy , boy says they are going to fall in love, cue a day wandering through New York City.  The twist?  It’s her last day in America. Her family is being deported back to Jamaica.  He’s on his way to interview for college to please his Korean parents.  We see glimpses of the lives of the people they encounter as their story winds its way to its conclusion.  Yoon is a crazy romantic, and it shows, in the best ways.

The Reader
Traci Chee
Read for Mock Printz
After happily gobbling down Nicola Yoon’s The Sun is Also a Star, I ran smack into this book, which took me 12 days to get through. Granted, I’m not the biggest fan of fantasy, but I am a big fan of stories that move along.  This one takes its time to get going.  And when it gets going, it’s more of an amble.  There’s also a very detailed map at the beginning which seems to have little relevance to the narrative.  It was page 125 before I successfully located a place name mentioned in the story on the map.

I think it was a mistake to use multiple perspectives to tell the tale, and a mistake to wait so long before switching narrators.  Though the way the different stories came together at the end was interesting, at that point I didn’t care.

In addition, books eligible for the Printz Award must stand on their own, which I don’t think this one (Book One of the Sea of Ink and Gold Series) qualifies.

The publisher seems to have great hopes for this novel. It’s got the series announcement on the front cover, the annoying edges that make it hard to turn the page, and many effects–drops of ink, faded text–scattered throughout the book. Plus that mostly useless detailed map.  I’m interested to see who the fans of this are, and what about this story appeals to them.

The Head of the Saint
Socorro Acioli
Read for Mock Printz
Fantastically weird story of a young man who, in fulfilling the last wish of his mother, travels to his father’s hometown and takes refuge in the head of a statue of Saint Anthony  That there’s a statue-sized head available for shelter is strange, but even weirder is that, when inside the head, the young man can hear women’s prayers to Saint Anthony.  All sorts of things happen after that.

Our Chemical Hearts
Krystal Sutherland
Read for Librarian Book Group
What happens when the right girl appears at the wrong time?  Henry Page is a high school senior who has never been in love.  Nothing about the drama of teen romance has seemed appealing to him until Grace Town walks into his classroom.   Grace is amazing, but also clearly going through something.  Their attraction is palpable, but complicated.

For the vast majority of people, their first love isn’t someone they will spend much of their life with. I appreciated the story’s exploration of when that amazing first love finally happens, and when it doesn’t go quite as the first-love narrative proscribes.

I found the level of parental chill annoying enough to be distracting.  Henry Page and his two best friends all have incredibly laid-back parents, unlike real life, when friend groups inevitably include some people whose parents are sticklers about curfew, drinking and girl/boyfriends staying the night.  There were also a ton of pop-culture references, which are a particularly annoying peccadillo, as I know in five years this book will be dated and in 10 years, from another time entirely.  Which is too bad, because I think it’s a kind of book that I don’t run across often.

Beware That Girl
Teresa Toten
Read for Librarian Book Group
Things I liked:  psychological thriller for the teen set, by which I mean the gross stuff is present, but lightly touched on. Interesting characters and a plot that clips along.  Katie O’Brian had just the right amount of scrappy and manipulation.

Things that didn’t work well for me:  I wasn’t convinced by the end, especially given what had happened a few chapters before.  There was no need to render the housekeeper’s speech in dialect, it was very distracting and came off as marginalizing.  I think I read the word dry-swallow (in reference to pills) more times in this book than I have in all other print sources this year.  This is the second book in two months I’ve read with main characters perspective told in first and third person.  This technique is, thus far, jarring, and feels like an attempt to avoid making the voices distinct.  It also feels very trendy.

Biggest Flirts
Jennifer Echols
There’s a particular phase in ones life where two people in mutual like can’t keep their hands off of each other.  This often happens in adolescence and results in headlocks, much wrestling and the like.  Echols nicely captures that phase of like/like in this book.  I enjoyed her spot-on depictions of back-to-school band. The standing.  The sweat.  The boredom.  I also enjoyed Tia, with her purposeful noncommittal nature.     Thanks to friend Sara for recommending this book.

ps.  Book cover gripe:  Tia is half Puerto Rican.  Was it too much to ask to get a cover model who looks like she might be something beside Celtic?

Animals by the Numbers
Steven Jenkins
Read for Librarian Book Group
Many infographics of animal facts.  They are quite fond of the pie chart, which isn’t the best way to present information, (humans have trouble dissecting degrees of pie in pie charts) but there are also bar charts and many fun facts.  The tongue one was my favorite.

This is one of those stories where I can see the misfortune that will befall the protagonist coming from the first page. It also seemed like an excerpt from a novel, rather than a short story on its own.

Bonus points for unique setting, though.

This story blew me away!  Megan Cummins had things going on several levels and I read the story while practically cackling at how good it was.

Note that we will not be hearing great voices like Megan Cummins in the revamped OTS, which will only feature stories written by actual teenagers.

Conference logistics in general were much smoother this year.  It seems Literary Arts learned from the 2015 debacle.  The venues were spread over a large portion of the Park Blocks, and there were more of them, which alleviated the crush of people that made last year’s event uncomfortable.

If you had registered for a workshop (I had) you could even check in at an alternate location.  My workshop with Kari Luna took place in a classroom at Northwest Film Academy.  I was amused by this diagram.

After my workshop, I attended a session titled “Sports Hour,” mostly because I wanted to see Jason Reynolds and Karen Karbo.  Though Lisa Congdon’s The Joy of Swimming also sounded like an excellent book.

Jason Reynolds in his silver shoes.  Just like his character in Ghost.

Lisa Congdon also possesses a mouth, you just can’t see it due to microphone.

Karen Karbo’s wrote the book Hound of the Sea with surfer Garret McNamara.  She had a lot of good stories.  She was not as tense as she looks in this photo.

It was weird seeing Geoff Norcross, as he’s a radio dude.  I learned his sport is crew.

Next was the session “Women First” with Chandler O’Leary, Jessica Spring and Laurie Notaro.  Elly Blue was the moderator and she informed us of the real title of this was “Feminists First,” but that somehow didn’t make it into the program.  We heard about the book Dead Feminists and Laurie Notaro discussed her novel Crossing the Horizon.  I enjoyed the way moderator Elly Blue handled the question and answer period.  Instead of inviting people to the microphone, she asked for people to raise their hands and then called on one person at a time.  This made for a better selection of participants, rather than just the people who could get to the microphone fastest.

The “Out Past Curfew” panel was my favorite.  It helped that I’d read books by (nearly) all the authors.  It also helped that Jay Asher and Jennifer Niven are friends in real life as are Nicola Yoon and David Arnold.  There was great rapport among the panelists and Alicia Tate’s moderation contributed to a spirited and convivial conversation.

The best part was when a young audience member asked  a question about how best to become a writer.  David Arnold invited her onstage, so she could see what it’s like to be on a panel of authors.  Everyone gave their advice (“write stories you want to read,” “write all the time,” “read all the time.”) Jay Asher brought down the house with his advice of, “Writing is a lot about who you know.  So when it comes time to start submitting your things for publication, be sure to say you sat on an author panel with Jay Asher, Jennifer Niven, Niciola Yoon and David Arnold.”

Jennifer Niven made sure there was a selfie of the panel and the audience. She made sure to get all three sides of the room.

My last panel of the day was called “Family Drama” and included Peter Rock, Paula Stokes, Cat Winters, and was moderated by Alison Kastner.  They discussed different aspects of writing their books

Overall, I can say that Literary Arts learned a lot from 2015 and put on a very good conference this year.  Hooray!

The story of a woman with a BRF who enters a hands-on-a-RV contest was perhaps one of my favorite reads this year.  It was saucy in the best ways.