Richelle Mead, author of the bestselling Vampire Academy and its sequel, Frostbite, just sent a nice blurb for Maggie Stiefvater's forthcoming debut: Lament."With her lyrical writing, Maggie Stiefvater reimagines myth and legend to bring the world of Faerie to our own."
"Maine people inspire novelist Carrie Jones" declares an article in today's Bangor Daily News. Check it out and then hit Teens Read Too and see Tasha's starred review of the book. Highlights:"How to tell you about this book??... It is powerful, hardcore, and utterly breathtaking. It made me cry and laugh and scream. Carrie Jones doesn’t hold back and makes us realize how lucky we are to have a life that isn’t infiltrated with hardship. This was one of the few books that actually made me cry."
"Saddle up."
From Melissa Fox, Book Nut
".... The real success of the book is the letter form it's written in. Because each letter has Lili pouring her heart out to John Wayne, telling him her deepest thoughts, fears, and secrets, the reader feels a connection to Lili, sympathizes with her in a way that otherwise they wouldn't be able to. In addition, starting each chapter with a classic quote from John Wayne, Jones captures the essence of the great movie star, and one girl's idolization of him. It seems a bit odd, given the young-hip-new culture of today's teenagers, that one girl would idolize a western movie star from the 1940s, but it works, and works well. "
And Tanita S. Davis, Finding Wonderland
".... Carrie Jones' third novel Girl, Hero, is both painfully realistic and, peopled as it is with an endearingly bizarre cast of characters, a touch surreal. John Wayne casts a long shadow in this novel (as he does on the very cool cover), but he's not nearly as memorable as Liliana herself, whose scary, sad and funny Freshman year is a testament to the power of acceptance, hope and perseverance, and touches the hero within all of us. ..."
From Melissa Fox, Book Nut
".... The real success of the book is the letter form it's written in. Because each letter has Lili pouring her heart out to John Wayne, telling him her deepest thoughts, fears, and secrets, the reader feels a connection to Lili, sympathizes with her in a way that otherwise they wouldn't be able to. In addition, starting each chapter with a classic quote from John Wayne, Jones captures the essence of the great movie star, and one girl's idolization of him. It seems a bit odd, given the young-hip-new culture of today's teenagers, that one girl would idolize a western movie star from the 1940s, but it works, and works well. "
And Tanita S. Davis, Finding Wonderland
".... Carrie Jones' third novel Girl, Hero, is both painfully realistic and, peopled as it is with an endearingly bizarre cast of characters, a touch surreal. John Wayne casts a long shadow in this novel (as he does on the very cool cover), but he's not nearly as memorable as Liliana herself, whose scary, sad and funny Freshman year is a testament to the power of acceptance, hope and perseverance, and touches the hero within all of us. ..."
"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."
Bloomsday, June 16, 1904, is the day in which all of James Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses takes place, and it's cause for celebration in Ireland and around the world. There are innumerable ways to celebrate the occasion--from readings, to tracing Leopold and Stephen's routes, to consumption of delicacies like the aforementioned mutton kidneys or, for the less offal inclined, Gorgonzola sandwiches and Burgundy. I think authors, though, would do well to commemorate also the landmark US court ruling handed down by John M. Woolsey that paved the way not only for the publication of Ulysses in this country but for all sorts of works of art with content some might judge offensive.* So, raise a pint of stout for James Joyce, and be grateful.
* I have read all of Ulysses exactly once, and it boggles my mind that anyone bothered to get exercised over the "scandalous" passages. First, they're incredibly tame by today's standards and second, you have to get through passages like chapter three (which begins “Ineluctable modality of the visible” and only gets less clear from there). Anyone who reads Ulysses for titillation deserves what jollies he or she can find.
UPDATE: Oh, I guess we're not entirely over obscenity in Ulysses.
Check out this post over at Cynthia Leitich Smith's blog for the latest on Varian Johnson and Jo Whittemore.
Confessions of a Bibliovore read and reviewed a number of Flux books in her 48-hour Book Challenge, including Into the Wildewood, The Shape of Water, Jump the Cracks, Band Geek Love, and Love (and Other Uses for Duct Tape). I particularly love her comment about Anne Spollen's wonderful The Shape of Water : "I kept reading this novel not because I wanted to find out what happened, but because I couldn't pull myself out of Magda's surreal inner life." We've heard a lot this from readers (one teen reader wrote on BN.com that "You sort of can't stop thinking about the girl in this book").
Leila Roy of Bookshelves of Doom just a posted a fine review of Shoup's Everything You Want. Head on over for the full review (and add her to your feed reader. It's one of my favorite blogs and sources for shamelessly literate T-shirts). Here's the gist: "I really enjoyed this one . . . . Definitely recommended to older fans of Sarah Dessen and other contemporary realistic fiction."A.S. King, author of The Dust of 100 Dogs has a great post on writing over at the Mystic-Lit blog. Do have a look.
"Frankly, I learned to write with my middle finger up. I'd had it with the changing fads I never fit into. I didn't want to do what the how-to books told me to do. I didn't aim or outline. I didn't learn a formula for fiction. I didn't read the right books for pleasure. I didn't join internet writing groups. I stayed away from advice and articles and books about writing. This wasn't about selling. It was about learning. So I wrote – what I wanted to write – with my middle finger extended."
And, for anyone who's interested in seeing what Ms. King's writing looks like when she's got her central digit fully extended, here's a tiny bit Dust.
7 – The Invasion of Doctor Lambert
The psychologist my mother sent me to was a nice guy, I guess. He was about six foot three with a soft, rounded plump in the middle, and he wore a pair of round framed glasses that he would occasionally push up with his middle finger.
My first visit was the slowest fifty minutes I ever lived through. I didn't want to say too much, so I let him ask the usual questions between bouts of silence.
"Saffron, why do you think you're here?"
"Because my mother is worried about me." Short and sweet – try not to show too much angst while already popping his fingernails off, one by one, with an awl.
"Why?"
"Because she wants me to be a doctor."
"And you don't want that?"
"No."
"What do you want to be?" he asked, realizing how condescending he sounded a second too late. "I mean, what are you interested in?"
"Lots of stuff."
"Like what?"
I listed a few things. I talked about my favorite classes, history and advanced chemistry, but didn't name any one thing, then said, "I know what I want to do. I just want to do it, that's all. I don't want to talk about it for months and months before I do it."
"But you can't just go to college without planning," he said quite seriously. "You have to talk about it with someone."
"It's not college."
He smiled at me. He had trustworthy eyes, a brown sort of hazel, with a twinkle. They nearly made me want to stop seeing myself whipping him with his own severed forearm.
"Let's talk about school for a minute."
"What about it?"
"Your mother says you do very well."
"I do. It's easy."
"So, you're bored, then?"
"Yeah. You could say that," I said, looking around his disheveled office. "What's that?"
He turned around to see what I was looking at, and explained, "It's an eighteenth-century chest brought from Europe by my great grandfather."
"Are those brass?" Brass catches like Emer's chest.
"I believe so. Have you seen one before?"
"In museums and stuff," I lied.
