Pepper Roux... 14 year old male version of Amelie?

I was just catching up on taking notes for some BFYA candidates (and nominees) and started thinking that Pepper Roux (of Geraldine McCaughrean's fabulously entertaining The Death-Defying Pepper Roux) really reminded me of someone.  Especially with the match-making and the writing of fake, though kind of amazing and endearing, newspaper articles.  Sounds kind of like... Amelie, no?

Research trip to Eugene = a success

Last Wednesday, I took off on the Coast Starlight--known for being one of the most scenic train rides in the United States or, known as the train that Sheldon and the gang take up to Berkeley on an episode of the Big Bang Theory--headed for Eugene, OR to do some detailed research for my work-in-progress YA manuscript.  It wasn't the kind of research that involves libraries (though of course I couldn't resist visiting the fantastic Eugene Public Library two days in a row, and the Lane County Historical Society) but more about reminding myself why Eugene is so unique, and why I've chosen to set my book there.  I wanted to make sure I got the details right--from the oddly decorated houses in the Whiteaker neighborhood, to the vegan pizza restaurant from which the characters get their take-out, to the other places the characters might have gone that were definitely there in 2006.  It was a good thing I checked, because since I'd last been in Eugene (summer of 2003), several "institutions" had been bought out or gone out of business.  Good to know!

Anyway, it was a really delightful trip that made me so excited to start edits on my book.  It also helped that my early readers are finally coming through with feedback on draft one.  Of course, I had to take breaks from all my challenging, burdensome research.

And... the highlights!

- Probably had the best soup of my life at Pizza Research Institute.  As in, I am contemplating writing in to Bon Appetit for the recipe.

- Chatted with a friendly anarchist at Bad Egg Books, a radical lending library.

- Saw The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Diary of a Wimpy Kid - to take breaks from all the walking

- Ran part of Pre's trail.  I wish I could've run the entire thing (4-ish miles) but I had to run 2 miles just to get there and running more than 5 miles after already having walked 5 seemed... like a bad idea.

- Trekked out to Springfield for roller derby - Emerald City Roller Girls!

- Took plenty of pictures.  (It's research!  The best kind!)

Now, I only have to integrate all my notes (and you know, turn ideas into paragraphs, pages, etc.) into my book, fix everything else that's wrong with it, and, start looking for agents, round two!  Oh, and continue to read a book a day, and read and review the 5 books for the ABNA contest.  And relocate and buy a car and unpack.

Geez, this is looking like a lot.  Especially with baseball season starting on Sunday!

the University of Chicago YA world just keeps on growing

As a University of Chicago alum and (unpublished as of yet) YA writer, I'm always excited to hear about YA projects from fellow graduates.  I just started reading Swati Avasthi's Split, a BFYA nominee, and noticed that part of the book is set in Hyde Park.  Either Avasthi grew up in Hyde Park or she attended the University.  Not to rag on Hyde Park (I lived there for 8 years and love it) but it's sort of unlikely that you would know it well enough to write about it without having some connection to the U of C.  Sure enough, I just visited Avasthi's website and lo and behold, she received her B.A. from the U of C.

Recently, there was an article in the alumni magazine about Stephen Barbara (A.B. '02), literary agent at Foundry, getting some pretty sweet book deals for fellow alums Lauren Oliver (her pen name) and Leila Sales.  Oliver's book has already spent 2 weeks on the New York Times Best-seller list, while Sales's book won't be out until the fall.  There's also Anna Jarzab, whose debut YA novel All the Unquiet Things came out a few months ago; she received her Master's from the U of C.

I wonder if there are more YA authors who graduated from the University of Chicago.  I'll try not to become insanely jealous of all of them.

Reading Roger, and not so much hook-laden commercial YA fiction

I've been thinking about Roger Sutton's post the other day, about how YA hardcover is bursting at the seams with high-concept books that once upon a time were "what we called paperbacks."  I have to say that as a librarian, I am not bothered at all by the huge amounts of heavily commercial, hook-laden, slickly produced fiction.  I found that my teens read it in droves, but then also abandoned the same books a few years later as they fell out of favor for the latest commercial YA fiction.  Yes, Lauren Conrad, I'm talking about you.  In my last year there, I saw the Gossip Girl series beginning to languish on the shelf.  And yet I can't tell you how many times I had to replace worn copies of Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.  I know that ten, twenty years from now, this will endure while the others will not.  (Unless they get updates a la the Sweet Valley High, and soon, the BSC series.)

But it's fair to say that I became pretty disillusioned when I started subscribing to Publishers Marketplace in the midst of finding an agent for my first book.  Every Monday morning, skimming through the previous week's sales, my heart would sink as I read the listings.  It seemed that every single book that was sold was overly commercial and derivative, at least for debut authors.  Where are the John Greens, the Sarah Dessens, the Laurie Halse Andersons of the future?  I hope they find their way out onto the shelves, amidst the zombie-fallen angel-vampire books.

Research trip

Next week I'm taking myself (and my books, it looks like) on a whirlwind getaway... or something like that.  I'm trying to turn my Nanowrimo project from last fall into the genuine article: a real, shoppable YA manuscript, this time with a hook (I'm not so sure my last book had a hook, or a real plot, but anyway!).  It turns out that when you write a book in a month, you can't take breaks for research.  Which just means that the research will have to come later.

My latest project, with constantly changing titles (including one that was the title of a John Farnham song), partially takes place in Eugene, Oregon (in the Whiteaker neighborhood).  It also takes place in an unnamed Chicago suburb.  Of course, that part was easy to write, since I worked in one every day and knew the area very well.  But it's been something like 6 years since I spent a summer in Eugene and my memory's a little hazy.  I recall bungalows painted in bright colors, lots of Tibetan flags, Rastafarians, college students on the 8 year plan, etc.  The book is set in 2006, so I can take some liberties.  I just hope that Eugene hasn't changed.  It was the one place I traveled within the United States that felt truly unique, somehow untouched by all the changes and modernization.  Sure, it had strip malls somewhere, but I hardly noticed them.  Eugene had this unique energy and it radiated through most of the people I met there.  I hope I can find it again.

Anyway, the whole idea of traveling somewhere especially for book research is kind of exciting, right?  It would help if I knew exactly what I was looking for.  I guess it's those details that connect the place to the story, that make it feel specific and real.  I can't wait to take hundreds of photographs to keep the details real and firm in my memory, long after the trip.  Or that somehow, I'll have the time and resources to actually integrate them into the story while I'm there.

Here's hoping the place I'm staying has plenty of outlets.  I'm going to need 'em.

Book Review - How to Ruin Your Boyfriend's Reputation by Simone Elkeles

I know these books flew off the shelves at my former library.  And I cracked up at Simone Elkeles's presentation at a recent conference - she's one funny lady.  And still, I had not read any of her books.  What is wrong with me?

Oh right, they were never in at my library.  Well, I finally had a chance to read one, and went with the BFYA-eligible How to Ruin Your Boyfriend's Reputation.  Man, was I missing out!  I was feeling under the weather last Saturday night and in lieu of going out to a party, I settled down with the book.  Amy, the series' protagonist reminded so much of Mia Thermopolis.  She was silly but real and so easy to relate to.  Then again, she was doing something I'm not sure even Mia would be brave enough to do - spend 10 days in an Israeli Defense Forces boot camp!  But, like my old pal Mia, she did this for love.  What teenage girl isn't willing to do whatever it takes to be with her man?  In this case, Amy wants to be near her boyfriend Avi, who is serving for the IDF, as part of a requirement for all Israeli citizens.  (Sidenote: Amy is a Jewish American but her father's family lives in Israel.)

Of course, things never go easy in Amy's world, so it's no surprise that when she gets to the boot camp, their toilets are mere holes in the ground, and down go her designer sunglasses.  Eeep!  That's just the beginning of the troubles she has in this by turns hilarious and heartwarming story.

Missing my library system

One of the joys of being on a YALSA selection committee, of course, is that publishers send you books.  Boxes and boxes and boxes of them.  One of the unfortunate things about moving is: you keep having to change your address.  Which is why I had my books sent to my parents' house in this time of transition between Chicago --> California --> ??.  Now that I know I'll be moving to the Boston area soon, it's a relief that my books are already going to Massachusetts.  But it also means that while I'm in California, my books are 2,000+ miles away.

Which means I've been going to the library a lot.  While Marin county is indeed a gorgeous place to spend your winter, it's sort of lacking in its library system.  Going from a huuuuuge library system like the Metropolitan Library System to MARINet is, well, a let-down.  I went from being able to get almost any book I wanted (that was released) in a matter of days, to patiently waiting weeks for books that have already been out for a month, or in the case of Melina Marchetta's Finnikin of the Rock, more than a month!  As of two days ago when I last checked (system appears to be down at the moment), not one library in the system owned this book.  Meanwhile, there are 16 copies in the MLS system.  Back in Massachusetts, 40+ books (and more every day, it seems) are piling up, just waiting to be read.

So, I've been making many trips a week to the local library to pick up my requests.  Up next:

ARCS/newly released titles that I can't wait to read (but are sadly back in Mass.):

For the Win by Cory Doctorow
Spotting for Nellie by Pamela Lowell
The Line by Terri Hall
and the aforementioned Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta

Time to read!

Book Review - The Vinyl Princess by Yvonne Prinz

Well, I’m probably too biased to be evaluating a book like this.  This is precisely the kind of book that’s crafted to the appeal of someone who watched Empire Records 200 times as a teenager, goes to record stores thinking Penny Lane’s line from Almost Famous about visiting all her friends, and who's college radio show was written up in the Chicago Reader.  But I'm guess I'll just have to suck it up and do it!

Summer's the only time that 16-year-old Allie gets to work full-time at Bob and Bob's Records in Berkeley, the same place she works part-time during the school year.  The college kids have fled town, leaving her with only the locals, and what colorful locals they are.  There are all the usuals you'd expect in independent music stores: the homeless, the quiet nerdy guys, the cute quiet guys, etc.  It's Allie's heaven, and not just because of the cute quiet guys.  No, it's being surrounded by music all day long.  But that's not all - this summer she's going to start a revolution, vinyl-style, debuting a blog where she shows off her vinyl knowledge, or rather, shares it with like-minded folks all over the world.  And then there's her zine...

Prinz, who co-founded Amoeba Music, really captured the feel of a town like Berkeley in the summer.  As a former/recovered music buff, I totally believed every shared sentiment about the music listening/loving experience as conveyed through Allie (and her co-workers, Zach).  I loved the range of music knowledge that was shared, as it gave even me some ideas for stuff I’d want to hear, and it didn’t feel at all like name-checking for name-checking’s sake.  Also, as someone who’s been to Amoeba Records one too many times in the last few months, I can guarantee that the author has plenty of credibility on this front.

Even for someone who’s not completely obsessed with music, there’s a lot to like here.  The side plot about Allie’s divorced mother looking for love (and trying too hard) adds some humorous moments and balances very well with Allie’s own quest, and they actually end up mirroring each other by the end.

The best part?  There's an actual Vinyl Princess blog that still gets updated!

The worst part?  I have a feeling I'm about to blow a lot of money at Amoeba Records in the near future...

ARC review - Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs by Ron Koertge

Wow, a verse novel that isn’t super emotional (most seem to involve a death or some intense event) but rather super fun and really explores other forms as well.  I LOVED it, and I hadn’t even read the book that precedes it (Shakespeare Bats Cleanup), so I wasn’t coming in biased.  Fourteen year old Kevin, a baseball player with aspirations, a poet in his free time, is a great male voice that defies stereotype.  He’s a jock but not a jock, a poet but someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously and isn’t emo-ing out all over the place.  He’s a breath of fresh air, as much as this book was.  At times, funny, shy, embarrassed, confused, basically the whole range of teenage emotions (okay, maybe no self-loathing).  

The book follows his team through the playoffs, his adjustment to the idea of his widowed father dating someone, and his confused feelings for his girlfriend Mira and his friend/crush Amy.

Koertge has a really great balance of poems in here - the ones moving the narrative forward, the dueling poems with Amy, and a few ones that capture the emotion that comes with losing his mother.  “I Know What Dad’s Going Through” (p. 25) is so poignant and simple, no over-the-top emotions at all, just hitting the truth: “Sadness is a big dark bus with a schedule of its own.  But when it pulls up and the door opens with a hiss, you pretty much have to get on,” it begins.

I cracked up at the back and forth Dracula and Frankenstein poems that he and Amy sent to each other, and could see teachers using these poems in classrooms to teach poetry.  I don’t even like poetry that much (sorry!) but reading Amy and Kevin discuss poetry, I wanted to it.  Their poems were hilarious and kept the book very light, quick, and fun to read.

There was nothing that I didn’t like about this book, or found flawed.  Except this: it was too short!

Of course I wimped myself

In honor of the soon-to-be-released Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie, I wimped myself today.  Try it!