WOOHOOS PILED ON WOOHOOS!!

     Remember I told you guys about National Portfolio Day?  Well, it paid off!  My daughter just got an email that she's been accepted into the School of Visual Arts in New York, her first-choice art school!!!  What a HUGE accomplishment.  My husband and I are bursting with pride.  For a long time I doubted that Amy would ever work hard at anything - her low self-esteem has always made her afraid to try because she was so afraid to fail.  But, beginning less than two years ago, she finally found something she truly wanted, and she went after it.  And she WON.  For a crucial year and a half, she had the benefit of private lessons with an exceptionally gifted and inspirational art teacher.  Look him up online: Julian Tejera, who worked with Amy until he moved to California at the end of this past summer.  If you'd like to help me thank him by, say, commissioning a portrait from him, please do!  His depth of knowledge is vast for someone in his late 20's, and it's matched by both his talent and his kindness.  I expect that he'll be in great demand as a portraitist one day, so why not get in on the ground floor now, while it's still a bargain?  Tell him I sent you.
     Anyway.  I digress.  Yes, Julian is awesome, but my daughter earned every bit of her success by dint of her own hard work and dedication over the last couple of years.  She lifted up her grade-point average, worked diligently on her drawing and painting skills, and wrote an awesome college essay about - who else?  Julian.
     Seeing how proud she is of her achievement - well.  This is one of the best days I've had in a very long time.


p.s.  Don't worry. My kids are still idiots.  I wouldn't have it any other way.

SOMETHING NEWISH

 


 My most recent book giveaway produced three contestants: my friend Yvonne V, who (I'm sure) commented briefly to help me start things off  (and whose debut YA novel, PANDEMIC, can now be pre-ordered from Amazon and will be buyable in brick-and-mortar bookstores in May, and I insist that you do one or the other because it will be brilliant);  BookNut, the winner, a most welcome second member of my blog's Pakistan Fan Club; and Sharksmart, who didn't win, but who did such an admirable job as runner-up that I decided to send her a consolation prize out of my stash of YA and MG novels I've already read.  After some consultation with her, I guessed that she would like Meg Rosoff's HOW I LIVE NOW (which, as you've probably heard, is currently being made into a movie), so I sent her my copy, and Eureka!!  I was right!  I've been emailing back and forth with Sharksmart, who is really a recent college graduate named Dana, and she sent me an unsolicited review of the book, and I liked it so much that I decided to post it on my blog. So, voila! My first guest review post! And I believe that in future, I'll offer this option to all winners of my book giveaway contests, because it's very nice of you to read my blog and all, but you probably wouldn't mind hearing from someone else once in a while, am I right?  I'm a firm believer in spreading the love. Thank you, Dana, for helping me kick off something newish!  Without further ado:

               DANA'S REVIEW OF MEG ROSOFF'S 'HOW I LIVE NOW'

“How I Live Now” begins with 15 year-old Daisy’s father and stepmother shipping her off to the England to live with her aunt and cousins on an isolated farm. Just as she’s starting to embrace her eccentric cousins and feel loved, World War III breaks out and changes everything.

 

The plot of “How I Live Now,” isn’t all that original or complex, but what this novel lacks in plot is more than made up for in stunning writing and characters. The narrative is an enthralling blend of stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences and a conversational tone that makes it seem like Daisy is sitting with the reader and telling them the story—and she’s the type of story-teller where her voice and her story flow so well that you don’t want her to stop (i.e. this book is hard to put down!). Unusual capitalization made the writing unique and more expressive by creating proper nouns (“She stared at me with the Family Stare, the one that normal people don’t ever do…” pg 61), and by adding emphasis (…”I got another one of those feelings you’re not supposed to get from your cousin and I wondered What Was Happening Here...” pg 44). The descriptions are always vivid and often poetic, such as when Daisy experiences “a feeling flying between us in a crazy jagged way like a bird caught in a room” when she sits next to Edmond with her leg against his (pg 44).

 

Daisy is great as a character. She has a lot of snarky and witty lines, and doesn’t “get nearly enough credit in life for all the things [she manages] not to say” (pg 77). She also genuinely sounds like a young teen when she thinks about things, such as how fun it is—despite a war going on—that her aunt has left her and her cousins with no adult supervision. The cousins were great too: Osbert is the self-important older brother. Piper, the youngest, is an adorable pixie. Isaac and Edmond are twins, the former quiet with a special connection to animals, the latter sweet and caring. The three younger cousins have a telepathic-like ability, and Daisy and Edmond form a telepathic-like bond as they grow closer.

 

I read some reviews for this book where people were grossed out by, or didn’t understand the author’s inclusion of, Daisy and Edmond’s sexual relationship since they’re cousins, but it didn’t bother me. Daisy herself recognizes that it's something they're not supposed to do, but says that she was “coming around to the belief that whether you liked it or not, Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just have to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop” (pg 47). I think the author’s point was that, in certain situations, such as in the midst of war, you don’t always control what happens, and you just need to go with it and do what seems right at the time even if it isn’t “right” in the usual sense.

 

When the war starts to encroach on their isolated farm and ultimately separates the cousins (Piper and Daisy are sent to one farm, Isaac and Edmond another, while Osbert gets some sort of military job), life quickly goes from inconvenienced-by-the-war to dire and desperate. Daisy and Piper end up surviving in the wilderness on their own while trying to find the farm Edmond and Isaac were sent to. One night, they’re woken by screams in their heads which, because of the telepathic connection between the kids, is an obvious indication that something horrific is happening around, or to, Edmond and Isaac. The rest of the story deals with finding out who survives and what happened in the aftermath of the war. The last few chapters are a very poignant and heartbreaking demonstration of how war affects people and their relationships, though the novel does end on a hopeful note.

 

Overall, a very powerful story with characters who stay with you even after you’re finished.

 

 

 

CRAZY LITTLE THING CALLED LIFE

     So I'd finally kind of gotten myself into a blog rhythm: don't worry about it during the week; mull things over during the weekend; do a post on Sunday nights. But did I follow that routine last week? No, I did not, because Life intervened. Not Life in the form of Thanksgiving weekend; Life in the form of my actual job (the one that brings me paychecks).
     Trying to avoid going into too much boring detail, I'll say that I discovered last Wednesday that, dating back to the beginning of April, I had somehow managed to miss a major development in one of my cases, which in turn led to my being many months late if I was going to try to file a brief. And then on Friday, after consulting with colleagues, I reached the conclusion that I kind of have to file a brief, which meant that (1) I had to figure out what I wanted to say and to write it within a ridiculously short window of time, and (2) I was going to have to provide an explanation to the Court of why the brief was being filed so crazy-late, and this was going to entail my confessing to my idiotic mistake (see above). And if any of this sounds to you like a good time, then I'm a little worried about you, to be honest.
     So, I spent much of the weekend just trying to read enough of the material to begin to get myself up to speed and formulate a game plan, and since then I've basically spent 8 hours a day at work trying to run a marathon. Reading/highlighting/thinking/scribbling notes/writing. Rinse. repeat. And I kind of hate the intensity, but a part of me kind of loves it too. My goal was to finish it today. Now my goal is to finish it tomorrow. I lie awake in bed composing devastating arguments in my head.
     The bright side is that this is something real, and that being completely absorbed in it keeps me - for a few days, anyway - from obsessing about not getting responses to my outstanding queries to agents.  The bad news is that my presence on social media, which barely has a pulse under the best of circumstances, has slowed to nothing. And that I've already lost my blogging rhythm, so early into the game. Will try to do better after the brief has been filed. And if anyone has actually missed me: thanks. I've missed you too.

JENNIFER HUBBARD: UNTIL IT HURTS TO STOP

     I met Jennifer Hubbard at an SCBWI conference this past June, and in August I interviewed her for this blog.  There, I noted that Hubbard's third published YA novel, UNTIL IT HURTS TO STOP, was due to be published by Viking in September 2013, and that I couldn't wait to meet Maggie, its protagonist, when that happened.  I must confess that it's taken me until the end of November to meet Maggie (my fault, not hers!), and the pleasure it brought me exceeded all my expectations.  In fact, this book was not only a gripping read; it dealt with the topic of bullying in such a deep and powerful way that I think it should be on the required reading list at every high school in the country.
     Seventeen-year-old Maggie Cameron was bullied mercilessly in junior high school by Raleigh and her posse, apparently targeted for no better reason than that Raleigh had sniffed out her vulnerability.  All through seventh and eighth grade, Maggie lived her school days in a constant state of terror, never knowing when or how the next attack would strike.  Her intensely vivid flashbacks illustrate that for her, she had survived the equivalent of two years in a war zone.
     Maggie's reprieve arrived in the form of Raleigh's family's relocation to Italy after her eighth-grade graduation.  In the years since, Maggie has been able to relax her constant vigil - but only to a degree.  She is not about to win any popularity contests, but she's managed to form two close friendships: with Sylvie, to whom she can talk about almost anything, and with Nick, whose stepfather has taught him and Maggie hiking and mountaineering skills.  Over the past few months, Nick's stepfather has dropped out of their increasingly ambitious hikes, due to problems with his knees, and Nick and Maggie's solo outdoor ventures have brought her a kind of joy she's never felt before.  Now, she's tentatively beginning to try to sort out how much of the joy stems from the sense of accomplishment and power that climbing a mountain can bring, and how much stems from being with Nick.  But what good does it do to try to decipher how she feels about Nick when no boy could possibly ever be attracted to her?  Because if there was one thing Raleigh and Company made crystal clear to Maggie, it was that she was permanently, incurably unlovable.
     And then.. Maggie's worst nightmares comes true.  Raleigh is suddenly here, back from Italy, attending Maggie's high school, and Maggie's fragile new sense of safety and security is swept away like a mountain climber halfway to the summit being overpowered and swept to his death by a deadly gust of wind.
     Every word of dialogue in this book rings true, from the kindness and compassion Nick and Maggie show each other, to the cruelty Raleigh once inflicted on her hapless victim, to everything in between.  Because Hubbard gives us plenty of nuanced and conflicted secondary characters: Adriana, who used to be Raleigh's sidekick back in the dark days, but who now seems to want to be something different; Vanessa, who's girly and popular but whom Maggie would probably like anyway, if she weren't much too interested in Nick; and Sylvie, who pulls back from Maggie just when Maggie needs her most.  And, because it's actually not all about Maggie, we learn that Nick has his own personal Raleigh - one even harder to fight back against, because it's his emotionally abusive father, no longer a part of Nick's household but still very much a part of Nick's psyche.
     Hubbard told me in her interview that she wanted this book to explore, not so much bullying itself, but its aftermath, and that's indeed what it does.  No one is spared.  I've heard it said that when people become addicted to drugs or alcohol, they stop growing emotionally, so they remain arrested at the age at which their addiction began.  In a similar way, Hubbard suggests, victims of abuse become so traumatized that their development is arrested too.  Perhaps because Maggie has loving and supportive parents, she doesn't respond to her victimization by identifying with her tormenter and becoming one herself.  She does, however, discover to her horror that because of the trauma she's experienced, she seems not to have developed a normal level of empathy.  Her damaged view of the world is polarized between Me - the one everything is wrong with - and Not-Me - the people for whom life is smooth and easy, and whose inner lives therefore don't require much attention.  It's only when Maggie unwittingly jeopardizes both her friendship with Sylvie, and the possibility of having something more than friendship with Nick, that she must face the fact that no one goes through life without having to deal with fear, loss, and insecurity, and that from time to time everyone needs a helping hand.
    I plan to get in touch with my local school board to recommend adding UNTIL IT HURTS TO STOP to its high-school curriculum.  It not only conveys truths about relationships and power that would benefit all teens; its characters are utterly believable, its story line is memorable, and the writing is so good that it's almost invisible.  This is Hubbard's best book yet, and the most wonderful part of it all is that I feel absolutely certain that there are even better ones still to come.  Maggie finds her power in this book, and so does Jennifer Hubbard.

NATIONAL PORTFOLIO DAY

     You are sworn to secrecy, okay?  Because, while my husband and I were permitted to accompany (i.e., drive) our daughter to National Portfolio Day in New York today, and were (amazingly) even granted clearance to see what was in her portfolio, I am obviously forbidden from sharing any of it with outsiders.  But I'm going to anyway, so DO NOT betray my trust!
     So. National Portfolio Day, for anyone who does not have artistic offspring, is a day when representatives from 40 or 50 art schools show up at a mammoth convention center to review the portfolios of the senior-level prospective art students who bring them to be critiqued.  There must have been a thousand kids at the Javits Center today, maybe more, and an equal number of accompanying parents, most of them standing in line at one school's booth, holding a place for their kids, while the kids stood on line for another school.  This is how I learned that behind every accomplished young artist stands at least one awesomely supportive parent, swallowing his  fears about how the hell his kid is going to support herself, and doing everything possible to just help her achieve her dreams.  Here is my lovely daughter, turning her back on me when she saw me trying to take a picture of her:

     Okay, now here comes the really Top Secret part.  You remember that you're sworn to secrecy, right?  Well then, here are a few of my favorite items from her portfolio.  A still life:

 

A sketch entitled "Scream:"

 

 

And the aptly titled "Me Picking My Nose:"

 

 

 

     Uh-oh.  She just walked into the kitchen.  Gotta go!  But if you tell anyone about this, you're gonna swim with the fishes.

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.
    

AH WILDERNESS!

     Now, I know there are some haters who don't think of New Jersey as The Great Outdoors. My post tonight is for their benefit - and for yours, because I have every confidence that YOU'RE not one of the haters, right? A couple of hours ago my dogs began looking out of the window and going absolutely berserk. I let them out in the back yard, and they proceeded to go even more berserk, so I followed them out to see what was going on. And there, on my next-door neighbors' front lawn, a flock of wild turkeys stood, utterly ignoring my dogs, looking casually around as if they were the property's new owners.
     I was too stunned at first to do anything but stare at them and call my husband out from watching football to come stare at them too. It wasn't until the turkeys began to mosey off the lawn and down the street that it dawned on me to grab my cell phone and follow them. Here's what happened:

They crossed the street -

And found another neighbor's lawn -

Where they made themselves at home -

Until they decided it was time to move on -

Up the block -

And beyond.

     FYI - when a wild turkey who's been daydreaming suddenly realizes that the other members of his flock have started to move on without him, he chases after them, squealing "Eeee!  Eeee!" and sounding very much like a preverbal human child.    
     Yeah. This all happened. So the next person who makes a "Which exit?" joke around me better be hungry for a knuckle sandwich, you know what's I'm saying?