CONTEST RESULT!

     Thanks to those who entered my giveaway contest for WRECKED!  My favorite comment came from Jess at DMS.  So Jess, email me your mailing address at muranosb(at)gmail(dot)com, and the book is yours!  Congrats!

ROOMIES GIVEAWAY CONTEST

  

      I posted here last Sunday about having gone to a reading/signing for ROOMIES, by Sara Zarr and Tara Altebrando.  (But I don't think I mentioned what an awesome job I did driving into the Village, finding a great parking space, and hardly getting lost at all on my way to McNally-Jackson Bookstore.  Believe me, for someone with my lack of directional skills, this counts as a major accomplishment.)  I said in that post that I was going to run a giveaway contest as soon as I finished reading my own personalized first edition.  And do I keep my promises?  You'd better believe it.
     I'm not going to say very much about ROOMIES, because I want to offer whoever wins the book in this contest the chance to send me his/her own review so that I can post it here, with credits.  But I will say that if you don't win the book, you should buy it anyway, because it's delightful.  The word that's been running through my head when I think about ROOMIES is "bagatelle," but I wanted to make sure I was using it correctly in this context, so I looked it up in online dictionaries.  And guess what?  One of the Merriam-Webster definitions is, "a short literary or musical piece in light style."  I NAILED IT!  Other than the fact that, at 279 pages, ROOMIES probably doesn't qualify as "short,"  the word conveys what I meant to say, and pretty much what the authors were saying at the reading, which is: they wrote this book for fun, in between their more serious works.  They were playing.  Which is not to say that serious issues don't get touched on, or that serious things haven't happened or don't happen to the main characters, but the book is nonetheless written "in light style."  It's about the summer spent by two young women on opposite coasts who have just graduated high school, will be freshmen at Berkeley in the fall, and have learned that they've been assigned to share a dorm room.  They've never met, and they're about to live together.  Technically, until the very last line, Elizabeth and Lauren are not actually roomies; they are prospective roomies.  And, knowing the very little bit that I do about psychological theory, I would say that the situation puts them in the perfect position to serve as each other's transitional objects during this summer when everything is about to change.
     Okay! Enough of my blathering! ON TO THE CONTEST!!
     Here's how it goes: If you want to enter, leave a comment to this post describing the best or worst experience you've ever had with a roommate.  Pseudonyms are probably the way to go here, but otherwise, the more details, the better.  You don't have to have shared a dorm room with the roommate in question - he or she can have been a sibling, a bunkmate at camp, or a romantic partner whom you've since unfriended on Facebook. Post your comment between now and next Saturday, the 25th, at midnight East Coast time.  The winner I choose, no matter where s/he lives, will receive my almost-pristine autographed copy of ROOMIES.  And by the way, if you show me proof that you've linked to this blog post in any form of social media, I will think of you kindly when it comes to judging entries.
     Ready... set...  GO!!

REALITY BOY - REAL GIVEAWAY CONTEST

    I love A.S. King for many reasons. Here's a partial list:
     
     1. She writes wonderful, gripping, hilarious, quirky, deadly serious YA novels about extremely real characters dealing with very important issues, without ever letting the issues overshadow the characters.  I've talked about her and her books a lot on this blog.  She is unique and fearless, and her books have earned many starred reviews and won many prestigious awards.  She is on her way to the top of the profession.
      2.  When I (Nobody from Nowhere) asked her, just out of the blue, she let me interview her for this blog last year and was very patient with my questions, as obtuse as she seemed to think some of them were.  And before the interview actually happened, she emailed back and forth with me for a while, taking the time to ask me about my own writing and to offer me writerly encouragement.  I mean, who does that??
      3.  She doesn't watch television.  So I'm not the only one.
      4.  She chose me as the winner of a limerick contest that she ran on Twitter a few months ago.  About virginity, as a matter of fact.  And as a prize, she sent me a book called "Losing It" which contained one of her stories.
      5.  I own a great recipe for corn chowder that she once posted to her blog, or Facebook, or Twitter - I don't remember which one, since I stalk her on so many media.  Used the recipe today, in fact, only quintupled (I won't bore you with the story of how I ended up getting 40 ears of corn for free).
      6.  I met her two nights ago at the very cool Clinton Book Shop, and was not surprised to learn that she's as warm and down-to-earth in person as she seems to be in social media.  (Did NOT get my picture taken with her, though.  Nobody else was doing that there, and it seemed like it would have been really inappropriate for me to ask.)  One of the things she mentioned is how thrilled a young girl had been that day when she'd replied to her on Twitter, "as if I were John Green or something!"  See, A.S. King doesn't even know that she is John Green.
     7.  She has the same first name as my daughter.

     I'll stop the list there, though I could go on.  But there's a point here: A.S. King's latest novel, REALITY BOY, has just been released (Little, Brown, 2013) and is already clad in starred reviews, and I am giving away a freshly-autographed hardcover copy to a lucky contest winner.

     I'll quote here from some of the starred reviews.  Publishers Weekly: "A nuanced portrayal... This is a story about healing."  School Library Journal: "King's trademarks - attuned first-person narrative, convincing dialogue, realistic language, and fitting quirkiness - connect effectively in this disturbing, yet hopeful novel."  Kirkus Reviews: "Heart-pounding and heartbreaking... A compulsively readable portrait of two imperfect teens learning to trust each other and themselves."

     To be completely honest, I'm sort of hiding behind the starred reviews as a way of avoiding reviewing the book myself.  It's deceptively simple to describe the plot: 16-year-old Gerald Faust's whole life has been defined by his family's stint on a fake-nanny reality TV show a decade ago, and by his own role on that show as the designated family-wrecker.  Due to his unique form of response to this situation, highly popular as it was among TV viewers, Gerald is still known to his peers as The Crapper.  Due to his more recent activities, he's also known as someone occasionally capable of acts of horrendous violence.  Now a high school junior in special ed classes, he possesses an anger management coach; no friends; and a lifelong belief that everyone on the show was right about him.  He's going to end up either in prison, or dead.  And then he meets this girl.
    
     But what is the book about?  That's what I'm struggling with.  Is it about healing, as PW says?  About the power of love, a la Kirkus?  About our society's obsession with celebrity and our schizophrenic attitudes toward the celebrities themselves?  About the dangerous unreality of "reality" TV, and the false perceptions it creates?  About what happens to kids who grow up subjected to parental neglect as well as to physical and emotional abuse from a sibling?  Is it about how victims of violence often end up being perpetrators? Or is it about all of the above?  And if it's all of the above, isn't that approximately 30% too many themes for one YA novel?
    
     Despite this quibble of mine, REALITY BOY is a great read.  I also believe that it's an important book, in large part because it was written by an important author.  I would like people to read it and figure out what they think it's about.  And in furtherance of that goal, I'm hereby sponsoring a contest, with an autographed copy of this book as a prize.   SO: in order to enter the contest, which will run from now until next Sunday, Nov. 17th, at midnight Eastern time, leave a comment to this post answering the following question:  Name a literary protagonist who possesses at least one truly ugly trait but whom you nonetheless care deeply about, and explain why you do.
     GO!

     P.S.  And by the way, in honor of Veterans' Day: In EVERYBODY SEES THE ANTS, A.S. King engages in one of the strangest and most moving discussions of the impact of military service on future generations that I have ever seen.

     P.P.S. And here is what Laurie Halse Anderson has to say about honoring veterans, including her father.
    

ROSE UNDER FIRE: BOOK REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY CONTEST

     Elizabeth Wein is the author of CODE NAME VERITY, which I've reviewed here on this blog.  As soon as I learned months ago that Wein was following that book up with a not-sequel-exactly, I pre-ordered ROSE UNDER FIRE.  I was mostly through reading it when I wandered onto Wein's website and discovered that she was going to be doing an East Coast book tour and that today she would be at Children's Book World in Haverford, PA.  And since that was her closest stop to where I live, I decided to drive the two hours each way just to be able to see her.  Which I did.

                                        

 

(I'm the doofus on the left with my eyes closed)

 

GIVEAWAY CONTEST: R.J. PALACIO'S WONDER

All righty then. Here I go with the first of my giveaway contest series, and the prize is well worth your contest entry: my own virtually pristine copy (I treat my books well) of this bestselling MG novel, published last year by Knopf.  It's an easy contest for me to begin the series with - easy peasy, as Maddie from CODE NAME VERITY would say - because I've already reviewed the book on this blog.  I should add, though, that as I just learned today, Auggie's facial deformity is due to Treacher-Collins Syndrome, which is a very real condition and which Palacio obviously researched extensively in order to be able to create such a compelling version of it in Auggie.
     So.  Are we ready?  The correct response, as my son and I have learned during our epic crossword-puzzle matches: "I was born ready."  Okay, let's go.  Here's the question:
                
As a child, what were you told (other than not to stare) about people who were "different" in some way?  Looking back now, what do you think about that advice?

That's it!  This contest will run until next Sunday night at midnight Eastern time, or until however long I choose to extend it beyond then.  The person who submits the answer I like the most will win my copy of the book, regardless of where in the world he or she lives.  LET'S DO THIS THING!!

CAN IT BE??? ANOTHER GIVEAWAY???

     That's right!  I had such a good time running a giveaway contest for Kami Kinard's book that I am now immediately segueing into ANOTHER giveaway!!  Too good to be true, you say?  Well, there is one catch: I'm giving this book away because I didn't like it.
     I bought a hardcover copy of John Corey Whaley's novel, "Where Things Come Back," because I saw that it had won a Printz Award as well as a William C. Morris Debut Award, which of course seemed promising.  I struggled to get through it, however, and came away with the feeling that the YA world must be fairly desperate for boy books.  But I am not here to pan this novel or to bias you against it.  Au contraire!  I am here to tell you that PLENTY of others like this book, and that perhaps you will too!  Kirkus Reviews, for example, calls it a poignant and hilarious story of loss and redemption which "explores the process of grief, second chances, and even the meaning of life."  Well, I ask you: how much more comprehensive can one get??  Yeah.  Exactly. 
     So here are my rules for the contest:  Read whatever you want to about this book and its author. Then, leave a comment that convinces me that you have absolutely no respect for my opinion.  Prove to me that this book will, at the very least, find a loving home on your shelf, and perhaps even change your life.  Make me see that small towns in Arkansas, disappearing brothers, and extinct woodpeckers are, to you, the stuff of dreams.  If I consider your comment the most persuasive one I receive, the book is yours.  Contest ends at midnight EST on July 31st.  My copy of the book is in like-new condition, and its fate lies in your hands.