Book Event: Brave New Teenagers featuring...me!

You may remember last summer I attended a Book Event at the New York Public Library, titled Girl Power? Teenage Heroines in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. I loved the event so much and had so much to think about it I covered it in three parts on my blog: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

The presentation was built out from presenter Katherine Broad's research as part of her PhD, as well as the book she was co-editing with two others, all about YA dystopian lit. Back in the fall, I got an e-mail out of the blue from Kate, asking me to participate in the book release party! I was stunned, and honored, and the big day is finally here!

If you're going to be in New York City tonight, I invite you to come listen to me for a few minutes, as well as some other very smart people, at the Brave New Teenagers event at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave) to celebrate the release of Contemporary Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers edited by Balaka Basu,Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz. I'll be speaking for about five minutes about why I spent so much time blogging about dystopian lit before I took my semi-leave-of-absence from the blog (especially in light of the new job, which, BTW, is awesome, and I'm even doing some YA marketing now, so double-awesome).

Event: Girlpower? Teenage Heroines in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (Part 3)

(If you missed them, please check out parts one and two!)

Finally, it was time for questions! I got the ball rolling, noting that I thought it was interesting that Tally was the more progressive of the two characters when laid out side-by-side like this, yet Tally came into being five years or so before Katniss, and I wondered if Broad saw anything of significance in that we went "backwards," so to speak. She responded that Tally as a character-type certainly never had a chance to be cemented like Katniss has been, due to The Hunger Games' explosive popularity. Tally seems to be unique, unfortunately, and Broad didn't have any other texts to reference for characters like Tally. Uglies may be the only contemporary YA dystopian story with a progressive character like Tally.

Next question was about whether either author had written about their goals in writing these stories and characters. Broad mentioned Scott Westerfeld's Blog and how he has said many times that he was interested in writing about rebellion, and that Westerfeld has edited an anthology of other writers writing about his work, from which we can infer at the very least which opinions on his work he considers worth looking into, even if they weren't his exact intention. Suzanne Collins, on the other hand, doesn't keep a blog and has said less about her goals in writing The Hunger Games, other than the famous story of how she was flipping between coverage of the Iraq War and reality television.

Another audience member wanted Broad's opinion on The Hunger Games movie, as the plot seems more straightforward in the film, and she wondered how it might influence the audience's perception of the story. Broad noted that since the books are from Katniss' perspective, not only do we have her constant inner dialogue, but we never get to leave her point of view. Because so much of the romance plot in the first book is from Katniss' inner turmoil about it, Broad felt that in the movie it was actually less pronounced. Additionally, in the film the idea of the brewing revolution is amplified, because we get to cut away from the Games as see more of the Capitol, President Snow, and the general political state of Panem, meaning that from a revolutionary perspective, the movie might be even more interesting than the book.

And then possibly my favorite questioner brought up issues of race and heteronormativity, first asking about the intersection of girlpower and the predominantly white narrative (perhaps best exemplified by the uproar over casting a Black actor as Rue, though personally I would have added the uproar over casting a blond white woman for a character described as having olive skin and brown hair), and then wondering if YA fiction for women is experimental enough to challenge the heteronormative narrative. First, Broad acknowledges that YA dystopian fiction, and YA lit in general, is very whitewashed (a topic regular readers of this blog are surely familiar with at this point). Hunger Games has some awareness of race, but it's not foregrounded (and I wish Broad had taken time here to point out that in some ways race is completely eliminated from the picture in Uglies, as Tally notes that, at least after the Pretty surgery, everyone is the same shade of tan). Readers bring in assumptions of whiteness, and in order to fight that assumption authors need to do more than offer vague cues of "olive" or "dark" skin.

Second, in order to challenge a heteronormative narrative (I just like repeating that phrase), it requires an active, conscious step, that few (if any) books are making now. She also took this time to bring up how there is no disability in these stories. There is a lot of potential for the genre to explore and challenge assumptions of race, sexuality, able-bodiness, etc, but the drive to cash in on this super hot genre may limit the drive to challenge and experiment.

And what did I think of the whole presentation?

There was a boatload of details here - seriously, even though this summary has spanned over three posts, I still have un-tapped notes. And, due to the speed of the presentation, I'm sure that I missed more than a few details. Hopefully none ended up misrepresenting Broad's point of view.

When it comes to analyzing The Hunger Games, I never would have thought to look at it through the lens of its romantic subplot - because you all know how anti-romance I am in general, and especially anti-romance in view of The Hunger Games. But like I said in my first post on this subject, I think when you look at the trilogy as a whole, for better or for worse, the romance becomes increasingly important as the story goes along. It's not nearly as prominent as some dystopian stories that have followed (I swear sometimes "dystopian" has become a synonym for "angsty teen love triangle"), but it definitely affects the narrative in a big way by the time we get to Mockingjay. Broad's analysis of Katniss's "happy ending" in Mockingjay was absolutely spot-on in terms of why it disappointed me. Not necessarily because it was a betrayal of the character (though I don't think Katniss of The Hunger Games would recognize the Katniss of Mockingjay's epilogue), but because it's an ending I've seen over and over again, and I didn't want this character that truly had some revolutionary potential to fall into such a trope.

A few times I felt Broad left out a few important details in her analysis. For example, Katniss ends up having lots of thoughts about babies in Catching Fire. Now, anyone who has read Catching Fire knows exactly where those thoughts come from - Peeta has once again constructed a story to try to ensure Katniss' survival, and has told all of Panem that she is pregnant. Not once was this plot point mentioned in the presentation, so it felt like Katniss just spontaneously went from thinking "I'll never have children" to obsessing over hers and/or Peeta's future babies in Catching Fire.

Looking at the Uglies portion of the talk, I can totally understand why this may have been tangential to the topic, but I really would have liked to hear a bit about the remarkable relationship between Tally and Shay, both how it conforms to tropes (such as girls competing against each other, especially for the love of a man), but also how it defies those tropes (Tally and Shay keep coming back to each other, protecting each other even after apparently unforgivable failures in friendship). I think an argument could be made that Shay's friendship had far more of an impact on Tally than her relationships with David or Zane (man, do I wish we had a female-equivalent to "bromance" because I would totally use it for Tally and Shay).

Overall, however, I'm super excited that there's some academia out there on Uglies now - I wrote my senior thesis on the series and, while I haven't exactly been looking, I haven't seen any other scholarly writing on it since. As mentioned previously, Broad has a book coming out this winter from Routledge - Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults, and looking at the list of essays in it just makes me salivate. The site lists the publication date as November 30th and I can only hope publication doesn't get pushed back! Sounds like an amazing contribution to the academic literature on young adult fiction.

Event: Girlpower? Teenage Heroines in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (Part Two)

(If you missed it, check out Part 1!)

Here's where Broad began to really dig into the two texts, filled with spoilers and plot summaries (and she had a ton to say, all of it very interesting, that I won't recap fully here in the interests of brevity and the fact that much of this talk forms the basis of a chapter in a book Broad is co-editing for release this winter). As an aside, I was mildly amused by her summary of Catching Fire: "They're thrown into another Game." She pretty much moved directly from The Hunger Games to Mockingjay with only a line for Catching Fire. Which I'm not sure I can fault her for. I happen to love Catching Fire, and think it brings us some important character moments, but in retrospect it really is setting us up for the big battles of Mockingjay.

While on many levels, The Hunger Games trilogy is obviously an action/adventure dystopian story, on another level it's a love story, tracing Katniss' feelings for Peeta and Gale. The courtship(s) within the love triangle directly shape the narrative potential. Now initially this is the sort of commentary that gets my hackles up, but looking at the series in its entirety, it's kind of hard to argue that this is the direction Collins ultimately went in. And Broad makes some interesting arguments how even early on in the first book The Hunger Games falls into traditional romance tropes - for example, in traditional romance literature, the heroine often shows a disinterest in love and is changed over time by the hero. He convinces her that she craves love, while she gets to remain "pure" by stating she has no interest in such base emotions (and, it's implied, the carnal actions that come along with such emotions that Western society has often told women we shouldn't crave). Katniss fits that to a T, as she starts out being so adamant against marriage and children, and then the book concludes with disturbing (to me) references of how Peeta convinced her to have children.

Ultimately, Katniss isn't a character who makes a lot of choices. In terms of the romantic narrative, Katniss ends up with the boy that follows her back home. The men make the choices for her and Katniss follows along. While Katniss in many ways served to inspire a great revolution for the fictional universe, her ultimate choice to fall back into the modern-day status quo of marriage and children forces us to ask what has really changed by the end? Katniss hasn't presented any sort of alternative story for young women reading of her adventures, and in fact has fallen into a long line of adventuresome girl stories where the endings find them "less active, less assertive, and tamed by marriage."

And right there, I think Broad has put to words why I was just so disappointed with the ending of Mockingjay. Yes, within a fictional context, Katniss has won her freedom - to enjoy something she spent the first two books she wanted no part of. It falls back onto tropes of how young women just don't really know what they want and they'll eventually change their mind about things like raising children. And while overall clearly Katniss has a better future than what she would have had before the revolution, from a contemporary standpoint, getting married and having children as a happy ending doesn't look revolutionary at all.
In short, girls stories often end with marriage. Stories of empowered young women must subvert that, bringing us to Uglies.
In my view, when viewed through the romantic narrative lens that Broad used, Tally actually initially has a lot of regressive traits, rather than progressive. While the Tally/Shay BFF relationship is awesome, Tally spends three books being driven between ideologies by David or Zane. David drives Tally's first revolutionary act, to defy Cutter and protect the Smoke. Then, as Broad points out, Tally agrees to undergo the Pretty surgery and essentially go undercover only after David tells her she is beautiful without the surgery. Of course, the surgery is very successful and Tally forgets herself, essentially becoming a Pretty damsel in distress. It's Zane, and his drive to be Bubbly, that "enables Tally's revolutionary tendencies."

So, in my view, it's only in the latter half of Pretties that Tally becomes an empowered hero, when she starts to think her way out of being a Bubblehead. And not only does she think her way out, she realizes that while kissing new people and being in love is one way to stay Bubbly, other things like her trek through the woods can produce the same response. As Broad says, romance doesn't equal personal transformation. Tally ends up embracing change on her own, even if it was inspired by a boy.

At the end of Specials, Tally creates a revolutionary place for herself, not just in the context of her world, but in the context of ours as well. And while she is out there in the wilderness with David, it's not a romantic getaway for them, and she even made the decision before re-connecting with David. Broad states that Tally "asserts a place for herself defined by actions, not gender."

In conclusion, when examining YA dystopian fiction, readers should look at how the fiction imagines the results of adolescents striving to be something more and do something different. Do these rebellious characters get to keep that streak even as they grow up? In a setting that relies on traditional gender roles, how does the hero react against them? In Katniss, we see someone who lost her rebellious streak and falls into very traditional gender roles. Tally on the other hand is going to be a rebel of some kind for the forseeable future, in an action hero role that ultimately defies most feminine literary tropes.

There's one final upcoming post, covering questions and my own reactions to Broad's presentation! Check out part three!

Event: Girlpower? Teenage Heroines in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (Part 1)

I forget when or where exactly I ran across the press release for this event, but on Tuesday the New York Public Library presented a lecture from the  Wertheim Study, titled Girlpower?: Teenage Heroines in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction.

I pretty much loved every word of that. It was like it was made just for me! So I took a long, late lunch break from work to listen to Katherine Broad present this lecture, based on part of her PhD dissertation about the romance trope in feminist Utopian literature.

(Swoon)

Now, this talk was so interesting and exciting that I kind of got ahead of myself and created one huge massive post. So in the interest of not breaking anyone, this is going to be divided into three parts - first, some background on the genre and the title Broad chose for the presentation. Second will be her dissection of the texts, and the third will be the questions from the audience and my thoughts!

The audience definitely skewed older for this talk - looking around the room I was almost the youngest there. There were a trio of people in the back row that looked like they might have been on the upper-end of the teenage spectrum, and then someone brought their six year old along. It's always so weird to still find myself as the youngest in the room so often.

Anyway.

Broad focused on two of my favorite dystopian works ever, Uglies and The Hunger Games, so I had a lot to chew on as she breezed through her presentation (in fact, that would be my biggest critique of the whole thing - I'm betting Broad had a time limit and wanted to make sure she fit in all of the fascinating bits of her paper into the presentation so at times she just sped through the lecture, making note taking very difficult at times). Another interesting demographic note - Broad polled the audience briefly to see who had read the two series, or at least seen the movie of The Hunger Games. I wasn't surprised that only a fraction of the audience had read Uglies, but the answer wasn't even close to unanimous for readers/viewers of The Hunger Games. There are people interested enough in YA to sit through a scholarly discussion of it on a sunny Tuesday afternoon but haven't read The Hunger Games? My mind boggled.

Broad came out of the gate with fighting words, noting that both Katniss and Tally have been celebrated as feminist heroines, but in fact Katniss ends up with a pretty conservative plotline overall, as she grows up, settles down, marries and has children. Tally is actually the one with far more potential as a strong feminist role model.

I would never argue against Tally as a feminist role model, but to say Katniss isn't one?! Whoa. I needed to know more.

The presentation started with some interesting insights into the origination of Utopian and dystopian genres. For example, did you know that Utopian stories do not require the society to be perfect? Just has to be better than our current society is, and is often concerned with the process and outcome of progressive social change. Dystopias, of course, are the flip side of the coin - but may not be as different as they seem at first glance. After all, most Dystopian stories (especially those aimed at the YA reader), end with a Utopian setting, as social change has been implemented (or is in the process of being implemented), and the dystopian society won't merely be better than it was before, but will clearly be better than our contemporary society. Both Mockingjay and Specials demonstrate this (and we see more of it in Extras, the fourth Uglies book).

The dissection of Utopia/dystopia was followed by a dissection of Broad's choice of title for the presentation: Girlpower. As someone who spent her formative years in the 90s, I definitely remember the girl power movement, and even at a tender age it didn't sit entirely right with me. Yeah, it sounds awesome, you can't argue with the idea that girls should have more power and be recognized for their awesomeness, but I really didn't want to be a Spice Girl when I grew up. And in fact, Broad cited an article that mentions the Spice Girls by name, noting that the girlpower movement grew out of Riot Grrrl music, and co-opted the idea of feminine power into something non-threatening: like the Spice Girls. So, that's the question of the title: Katniss and Tally are both held up as role models of female power, but are they truly powerful or have they been de-fanged and dressing up the idea of "powerful women" in the same-old packaging?

Come back on Monday to see part 2, digging into the texts of The Hunger Games and Uglies!

Book Thoughts: Why I'm Not Worried about Boys (or Men)

Image via Wikipedia

Ooh, provocative title is provocative ;-)

Last night was another meeting of the #YALitChat on Twitter. And part of me really wanted to join in, because I loved the authors being highlighted (Michael Grant, Scott Westerfeld, and Jay Asher). The other part of me wanted to avoid the internet for a couple of hours because the topic of the evening just grated my nerves in the worst possible way.

The topic? Why men write YA.

If nothing else, this was annoying because it's not a topic worthy of a two hour chat, because I can answer it in three words: they want to.

And I think it became quite clear that it wasn't a hot topic because while there were some great conversations going on, few of them that I saw actually addressed what was the main topic of the night!

Instead, there was a lot of hand wringing over what do boys want to read, and whether it's important to have male authors in order to appeal to them.

Which makes me roll my eyes, because I spent years in English classes reading nothing but male authors and fighting like hell to get to read women. For more on this, I direct you to Maureen Johnson.

I'm not saying what's good for the goose is good for the gander - that because my education sucked boys should now be forced to read nothing but Little Women and Little House on the Prairie and Twilight. That doesn't help anybody.

What bothers me is seeing authors talk about writing specifically what appeals to "boys" and what appeals to "girls." First of all, it sets up gender as a binary, which current scholarship on gender and sexuality doesn't support. Second, even if gender is binary, it implies that all boys want the same thing, and all girls want something totally different.

At one point I jumped into the chat when Scott Westerfeld asked if "the shift from paranormal romance to dystopian been correlated to more boys reading?" I replied that recent dystopian novels have all looked awfully romancey to me (which could be a whole other post - anyone interested in my thoughts on Whither?). I'd love to see a straight up dystopia again, in the vein of Uglies or the first book of The Hunger Games. Instead a lot of these books are paranormal romances, but with dictatorial governments rather than vampires or fairies or angels. Sarwat Chadda, of the awesome Billi SanGreal books, asked me if I thought dystopian was "real" or something bigged up by publishers. After fangirling for a second over a REAL LIVE AUTHOR actually asking MY OPINION on something, we got into a great discussion about dystopian lit, and paranormal, and paranormal romances, that culminated with Dawn Metcalf coming up with the best ACT vocab comparison of the night: "romance" is to "paranormal" as "lemony" is to "fresh."

However the most illuminating part of the dystopian/romance part of the convo was when fellow chatter mimicross said, in response to my point on dystopians becoming more like romance, "Well, if world is ending, what would you want to be doing?" And this got me back to my thinking on boy books vs. girl books. Because when I was in high school, I hated romances. Part of this was because I was more interested in dating other girls at the time and wasn't finding many books that addressed that, but even after I started dating my first girlfriend I wasn't all that romantically inclined (this may be why the relationship didn't even last a month...). Writing a book that is supposed to appeal to "girls" is likely to backfire on someone like me - I want explosions and guts and car chases. And I know plenty of boys and men that prefer more relationship-oriented books (maybe not straight-up romances...or maybe they're just embarassed to discuss such an 'un-manly' topic with me!).

It was especially troubling to hear authors talking like this. I expect the marketing department to worry about who is going to end up reading a book - it's their job to get it into the hands of the most profitable demographic. But as writers, why don't we concentrate first on writing an appealing story - and if you want to think about marketing, think about the type of person you want to read the book - is this for someone quiet and nerdy, someone brash and hyperactive? What about brash and nerdy? These are qualities that aren't attached to gender.

Ultimately my opinion of the night boils down to Twitter being a terrible place to have a nuanced chat - something that came up earlier in the day during the new #GayYA chat, where all of us were unfailingly aware of how limiting those 140 characters were (and the one time outside of a specifically feminist space I've heard people throwing around terms like "cisgendered"!) #YALitChat is great for promoting an author or a broad subject (why a genre is popular, how to break into the business), but delicate subjects related to gender should probably be left to overly-long blog posts.

Book Events: My BEA Post

Hey...long time no see, eh? Sorry for going AWOL on the blog for the past month (though if you've been following me on Twitter you know I haven't died...yet). Figured that before I return to regular posting, I'd write up an explanatory post...that can also function as a BEA post, since that's a large part of why I wasn't blogging.

'But BEA was just last week!' You may find yourself saying. 'It only lasted a few days! Why would it take you away for a month?'

For those who don't know, my day job is actually in books. Not quite publishing, but remainder wholesale. Consumers generally know these books as the bargain books you see on display at your large chain bookstores. We have a showroom in NYC and my fancy title (seriously, I'm getting it on business cards this week) is showroom manager. We keep books on display in the showroom year round, and when BEA comes to town instead of exhibiting at the massive Javits Center, we get extra books into the showroom, have a few extra salespeople come into town, and set up our appointments in the office.

Since during the actual show most of our customers want to be over at Javits, most of our appointments are made for the week (and weekend...ugh) before BEA. Which means that I need to have the showroom set up and looking pretty two weeks before BEA....and then work straight through until the end of the show. Long days with lots of manual labor meant that by the time I got home in the evening and then even on the weekends, I didn't want to do much more than sleep. So instead of writing some half-assed blog posts...I thought I'd just take a few days...maybe a week off.

And that turned into a month.

But I haven't totally slacked off this past month - even though I abandoned Goodreads for awhile, I have still been reading. I've also been considering re-tooling how I do posts here - there might be fewer reviews in favor of more general posts about writing or trends or style...I don't know. It's still very nebulous in my head, but I'm trying to figure it out, so I hope you'll bear with me if you start seeing some more experimental posts on here (there's a reason this blog was titled 'Bookish Blather' - to give me permission to rattle on about more than just straight up book reviews!).

So, sorry about that, y'all. Things should get back on track now that it's pretty much summer and I don't have to worry about a trade show until November (and that one's in Chicago! Less work for me!). Regular posting will resume on Wednesday. In the meantime, consider this an open post to ask/discuss whatever you want! Any questions about the remainder/bargain book business? What I've been reading? Did you go to BEA and get some awesome ARCs?

Book Events: Great Books for Teens and Tweens at Books of Wonder

Last time I was at Books of Wonder it was a madhouse. On Sunday it was pretty much the total opposite, and totally awesome!

I was unfamiliar with most of the authors in attendance, the only one I'd even heard of was Jonathan Maberry, who wrote Rot and Ruin which I highlighted last week in my Fall releases post. So I went to the event just for him, but Matthew Myklusch, Catherine Jinks and Gitty Daneshvari all had great presentations and interesting books as well!

As the audience was filtering in before the panel got started, I got to have a great chat with Debbie, a fellow audience member who happens to be a kids/YA literary agent, and Catherine Jinks about blogging and whether it helps for getting a job in the industry. Debbie and I plugged Scott Westerfeld's excellent blog for Catherine as an example of an author's blog, and I introduced Debbie to Justine Larbalestier's books (I specifically recommended Liar).

Then it was time for the panel to start!

Matthew spoke first about his debut book Jack Blank and the Imagine Nation, about an orphaned boy who has no idea who he is - he was dropped off at a truly depressing orphanage in a basket with just 'Jack' written on the handle. He begins to develop super powers, and discovers he's actually from a place called Imagine Nation, where all of the fantastic things in our world originate. It turns out that Jack's abilities will either make him the greatest hero, or the greatest threat, the world has ever seen. Matthew read from the prologue, and it felt reminiscent of a Roald Dahl story or the first Harry Potter book - rather dark and bleak and some unseen narrator that assures us that from this humble beginning an epic story will emerge.

Catherine spoke next about The Genius Wars, the conclusion of a trilogy. The idea for the first book sprang from a conversation with her brother and her husband, regarding a Professor Gangrene figure of her nephew's. The question was posed "Where do these people get their degrees?" The answer, of course, is the University of Evil. Her reading selection was a little hard to follow, since I know nothing about the books, but I'm interested in the fact that one of the main character's friends is a girl with Cerebral Palsy.

It was kind of interesting hearing from authors who are all over the place in terms of series/trilogies of books. Gitty was talking about the second book in her School of Fear series. The characters all have real fears she suffered from as a child, including a terrible fear of spiders that led her to spraying RAID in her hair every night to keep spiders from nesting there as she slept. Ugh! In the second book, the kids are returning for their second year at a school for kids with crippling fears. She read for us a scene where the kids are trying to convince their principal that they are totally cured and don't need to go back for a second year. It sounds really funny with a great dose of sarcasm.

Jonathan Maberry, it turns out, has written roughly a billion books, but Rot and Ruin is his first YA, and again we're at the first in a series. He spoke a little bit about why zombie stories are actually totally safe to read if you're someone who's totally freaked out by the idea of zombies - because zombie stories aren't actually about the zombies. Instead, the zombie acts as a metaphor and presents an immediate threat to your characters, which is then the catalyst for change. He said this threat or crisis has been the center of storytelling going all the way back to Gilgamesh (who I have a special affinity for, after performing excerpts from the epic in forensics in college. Just about the only time they got me to compete in poetry!) He then asked how many of us had seen Night of the Living Dead - I was sitting in the front so I didn't see how many people behind me raised their hands, but apparently all of the zombie fans were sitting in the same half of the room, which reminded me of Zombies vs. Unicorns debate. He then read from Rot and Ruin, and can I just say that I am SO GLAD I bought a copy for myself because I was getting chills just from the short excerpt he read, with the main character and his older brother talking about how all zombies were once somebody's family.

Then it was question and answer time, and I opened with a question specifically for Jonathan, but I told the other authors they could chime in if they liked. In my opinion it was the most important question of the day: fast or slow zombies? Jonthan prefers slow in books and fast in movies, and apparently tackles the issue later in this series (or maybe it was the end of Rot and Ruin? Listening and taking notes hasn't always been my strong suit). Matthew also said he prefers slow zombies, as they give more time to develop your characters. Catherine says she has a zombie appear at the end of her next book, the sequel to The Reformed Vampire Support Group and he's a very slow, very sad zombie. Slow zombies have pathos she decided. Gitty begged off, saying she had no opinion on zombies.

An audience member says that when she was a kid, kid's books were rather trauma-free, but all of the books we were discussing today had some sort of trauma, whether extreme phobias or fighting evil or zombies, and she wondered how the authors' books were being received. Jonathan answered that since kids today have more understanding and/or awareness of what's happening in the world through all of the readily-available technology, authors would be doing a disservice if they wrote a sugar-coated world. Gitty chimed in that her book isn't actually scary, since she's such a wimp she wouldn't be able to write a truly scary story. Catherine and Matthew both said that any "trauma" in their books is diffused through humor. Another audience member commented that perhaps the issues and trauma aren't new, but rather we're more willing to talk about it today than we were fifteen or twenty years ago. Jonathan responded that he, at least, isn't writing about fear, but rather people's responses to it and over coming those fears. He said that when he's talking to people about his adult thrillers they always ask why he's writing about monsters, and he says he doesn't write about monsters, but instead writes about people and how they defeat those monsters.

The Books of Wonder employee who was acting as our MC asked the next question, wondering, since all of the authors were at one point or another in writing a series, how much of the end they knew when they were starting. And here's where the panel began to get really fun, because it turned more into a conversation rather than each author giving their answer in isolation. Matthew said he's a big planner and knows the broad strokes of the story, comparing writing to a road trip. He's the sort of traveler who would need the entire atlas and GPS to get to his destination. However, he's not so inflexible that he doesn't listen to his characters, and will allow the to pull him off the beaten track. Catherine has written several series as this point, but never sets out to write a series, in part because she fears that she will never get all of them published. Her first series became one because the character wouldn't leave her alone, while with Genius Wars she realized that the character was left in limbo at the end of book one, and at the end of book two the character also still needed a major sense of resolution about his relationship with another character. Gitty says she always outlines and writes a "dreadful" first draft. For Jonathan, Rot and Ruin is his third series. The first one was pitched as a closed trilogy, while his second was an open ended series, where each book is a contained "episode" without an overarching plot tying multiple books together (likened it to the James Bond movies). He also said that when he has to switch gears and go to another set of characters for another series, he almost has to have a grief period - for example, the characters in Rot and Ruin feel so real he doesn't want to leave! Here Catherine had to jump in again to note that sometimes the exact opposite happens and you just can't wait to leave these characters forever! Matthew picked up next, noting that some stories just fit one series type better than the other. For the Jack Blank books, he sold the series as a trilogy, but he made sure that this book, at least, finishes up part of the story, so it sounds like it's not one of those annoying cliffhanger series.

Peter Glassman, the owner of Books of Wonder, came up next, saying that what the authors had been saying about series was really showing how series and children's literature have evolved. The first children's series was Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, where each book was a self-contained story, and that was the tradition for decades until Tolkein came along with Lord of the Rings - which wasn't intended to be a trilogy, but the publisher split the book up figuring people wouldn't want to buy a 1500 page novel.

The final question of the afternoon was about what comes next. Matthew has Jack Blank and the Secret War publishing next and is currently writing the conclusion. Catherine is starting an entirely new series that is apparently set in a computer first person shooter game and the character meets a virus (she says her pitching skills her terrible, but I know I'm already curious). Gitty is plugging away on the third School of Fear title, and Jonathan "never sleeps" as he's working on at least three different projects, including a few mini-series for Marvel comics.

Thanks to all of the authors for coming out on a gray afternoon, and thanks to Books of Wonder for putting together an excellent panel of authors! Check back later this week for my review of Rot and Ruin and a truly awesome giveaway!

Book Events: Zombies Vs. Unicorns Debate at Symphony Space

Seeing as I follow one of its editors and her spouse on Twitter, I've been hearing buzz about this Zombies Vs. Unicorns book for awhile, but I'll admit I felt no great compulsion to run out and buy it. I am an unrepentant zombie fan, sure, but unicorns? Not so interested.

And then I heard that not only were several of the authors going to do an appearance in NYC, but they were going to have a debate. As a former speech geek (closely related to debate, though I never actually went to the dark side), I knew I had to see this. And, well, since there was going to be a signing afterwards, I might as well pick up a copy for myself, right? If it sucked, I could always try to give it away on the blog, right? (Spoiler alert: I'm not giving away this copy!)

As our tickets were being taken we were given instructions: zombie fans sit to the left, unicorn fans sit to the right. We were also given nifty buttons so we could show the world our allegiance! The audience seemed about evenly split. The panelists were, for Team Zombie Maureen Johnson, Scott Westerfeld and Libba Bray. Representing Team Unicorn: Holly Black, Naomi Novik and Alaya Dawn Johnson (who is really Team Zombie, but confessed to some high school debate experience so when Team Unicorn realized they were at a disadvantage they recruited her as a double agent). Justine Larbalestier was on hand to serve as the totally impartial moderator. She came out wearing an anti-unicorn T-shirt and shuffling like a zombie until Scott reminded her that she was supposed to be impartial. Also I must note Justine was wearing kickass cowboy boots. They had crossbows on them! Sooooooo jealous. (I wish I had pictures, but my digital camera has disappeared and my cell phone takes epically BAD pictures. They really were awesome though.)

Team Unicorn may or may not have won the coin toss to go first, but Alaya ended up speaking first, in a really weird pro-Unicorn argument that had something to do with how seagulls are like unicorns and how everyone wants zombies in their living rooms? It wasn't the strongest argument.

Maureen Johnson came out next, dressed up in her finest debate duds, and broke out into a populist faux-Sarah Palin pro-zombie speech, with the help of Zombie Joe as her "translator." Zombies are mavericks! They just keep coming at'cha, like a real American! And unicorns are French. At the end it looked like Zombie Joe may not have been adequately fed before the debate. I think he took a chunk out of Maureen's hand...

Naomi Novik was next for Team Unicorn, and she came prepared with visual aids! Her argument basically was, unicorns are made for crushing evil, zombies are 100% evil and shed body parts (ew). QED, unicorns win. Her final unicorn poster was also quite sparkly

Scott Westerfeld's pro-zombie argument involved looking at the literary fruits of the two species, comparing A Unicorn is Born to Max Brooks' zombie classic, World War Z. The excerpts from A Unicorn is Born may be some of the most frightening and nauseating things I've ever heard. Apparently it goes into the details of unicorn sex, though we were spared that. Instead we got to hear Scott's interpretation of the Battle of Yonkers. It was much better than unicorns. And as a former speech geek, I have to congratulate Scott on his excellent time allocation. He was given 2 minutes for his presentation, and right at the 1 minute warning he was switching smoothly from A Unicorn is Born to World War Z.

During all of this Maureen has been slowly fading. When Scott takes his seat next to her, it looks like she bites his hand!

Holly Black, as the captain of Team Unicorn, now gets 5 minutes to sum up her side's argument. She tries to bribe us with packets of glitter - one hit me on the head! She also described unicorns as sparkling "like a suicidal Edward Cullen" which may be my favorite simile EVER.

Scott isn't looking too great at this point, either. He and Maureen are both kind of slumped over with glazed looks in their eyes. Rude audience members? Or is something more nefarious afoot?

Team Zombie's captain, Libba Bray, one-ups Holly's bribery attempt by having a MUSICAL NUMBER for her closing argument. Highlights from her bluesy/gospel song: the most famous undead person ever - Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead and told his followers to eat of his flesh and drink of his blood. Also, after everything the zombies have been through, they have the right to sing the blues. Another famous zombie? The scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz - he did ask for brains, after all!

As Libba's time winds down, Zombie Joe reappears from the wings. The sound of his shuffling sparks something in Maureen and Scott! They stand and all three shamble over to Libba - Maureen and Scott have turned into zombies and they're carrying the team captain away!

Okay, not really. Well, they did pick up Libba and carry her off the stage, but no one was actually turned into a zombie over the course of the debate.

At the end of it all, Justine was waffling over whether we should just say everyone's a winner or if we, the audience, needed to applaud to declare a winner. I shouted out that we needed a winner, so the two halves of the audience cheered in turn for their respective teams. Justine claimed it was a tie, but I'm darn sure Team Zombie was louder!

There was a Q&A session afterwards, but with so many people on the panel it was hard to get all of the questions and answers written down, so I'll just share some of the highlights.

"How did you discover your affinity for unicorns or zombies?"

Libba: claims she was a creepy kid who loved horror stories and always loved zombies. Her first viewing of Dawn of the Dead was at a drive in theater in a small town in Texas, which she says is the absolute best way to see a zombie movie.

Maureen: her mom was a nurse and would share the gory details of her medical thrillers with young Maureen, so she's always been interested in the first infected/patient zero aspect of stories. Seeing Shaun of the Dead was her zombie epiphany.

Holly: was drawn to the natural history aspect of unicorns - we have centuries of stories and text books talking about unicorns as if they were real creatures. Why does she hate zombies so much? She was totally creeped out after watching Night of the Living Dead and the trauma was solidified by the fact that she had to walk to school through a graveyard the next day.

How long did it take to put the book together?
Justine: Took way longer than she thought it would. It was supposed to have been easy, but instead she found she had to bully and beg people to turn stuff in.
Libba: Thought writing for a themed anthology would be easier than writing on her own. Ended up essentially writing two stories - the first one was filled with grown ups and just wasn't going to work for a YA anthology, so even though it was a great story, she had to turn around and write something completely different!

The Zombies vs. Unicorns debate moves to Baltimore tonight as part of the Baltimore Book Festival. This time it's Justine, Scott and Carrie Ryan on Team Zombie and Holly, Kathleen Duey and Diana Peterfreund on Team Unicorn. If the NYC debate was any indicator, it sure to be a hilarious evening!

Book Events: Books of Wonder Midnight Mockingjay Release

Once again, this is a spoiler-free Mockingjay post. Want to discuss the book? Check out the comments on yesterday's post.


My first encounter with Books of Wonder was back when The Hunger Games was released in fall of 2008, so it was only natural that I would return to the store for the release of Mockingjay - especially when it was revealed that we'd have the party with Suzanne Collins herself in attendance! How awesome!

Because I'm an adult and thus supposed to be a productive member of society, I couldn't get my party on until after 5. The party didn't start until 8, and of course we wouldn't get our hands on the book until midnight, but there were folks parked in front of the store from 3:30 on. I arrived at 5:10 and quickly hopped in line. To the right is my crappy cell phone view of the line. I guessed that I would be the 30th person or so to receive a book - with a lot of teens and younger kids already in line it was hard to tell who was there just for their kid or to claim a book for themselves! Unfortunately, my number turned out to be double that, thanks to poor line-manners throughout the evening.

The weather was overcast and occasionally drizzly - but I was fine since I was under some scaffolding. All I could think of was how happy I was that the heat had finally broken though - I can't imagine what it would have been like to be standing on that line in the 80-90 degree heat NYC has been having for the past few months!

Everyone in line was chatty, which made the wait much more bearable. Some people had come more prepared for the wait than others, however. I dubbed this the Mockingjay internet cafe. By eight o'clock, the line stretched all the way down the block! I don't know what the final count was for the night, but I heard Peter Glassman, owner of Books of Wonder, say it was going to be anywhere from 700 to 1500. Certainly more than 300 people showed up, as I saw tickets to get our books stamped numbered that high.




Finally, promptly at 8 (thanks for that, Books of Wonder!), the doors opened and we were ushered inside, divided into two lines, one for those of us who pre-paid, and the other for people buying on site. All of the pre-release buzz from Books of Wonder had been urging us to pre-pay because that line would go quicker and so we'd get lower numbers for the signing/stamping. Apparently Monday was opposite-day, however, because the pre-pay line was incredibly slow. Second bummer of the night (the first being the blatant line jumping). However, there was some entertainment for us standing on line - jugglers! What do jugglers have to do with the Hunger Games? The only thing I can think of is the metaphor of bread and circuses (or panem et circenses in Latin) and so we took the circuses part literally, bringing in the jugglers and magic tricks. The face painting you can make a pretty direct correlation with the camouflage and the make up and the morphlings from Catching Fire, and the tarot cards are tied to fate, so there was a variety of stuff to try to do once you finally made it through the line to pick up your raffle tickets, signing ticket number, book voucher, and some printouts of Hunger Games crosswords and word searches as well as non-Hunger Games related promotional swag to fill out the bags.

Books of Wonder isn't the biggest store to begin with, and I hate to say it, but it really felt like they weren't prepared for the crowd and the activities. What do I mean by that? Sure, we could all physically fit in the store, and the process of handing out books was incredibly efficient (despite being #58, I was out of the store by 12:15). However, the face painting and tarot lines effectively left you standing in one place for literally hours. This was a combination of very elaborate set ups (the face painting was quite intricate, done by a guy who works with MAC cosmetics) and the tarot readings were running 15 minutes each at one point, and confusion about where lines were so people would (hopefully inadvertently) jump the line.

The people in attendance were great - there were some awesome costumes and T-shirt designs there! I was a fan of this Team Gale/Peeta duo.

And if you've followed any blog coverage of the party, you've undoubtedly seen this girl taking over the blogosphere. Cinna would be proud!






By 10:30 or so, the crowd was starting to get restless. The gallery area, where Suzanne would eventually would be reading and signing, was slowly taken over by people giving up on the activities and just sitting down to chat or read. I tweeted that it felt like we were settling in for a long siege, with nothing left to do but wait! The jugglers and the magicians had to call it quits because people kept encroaching on their space. I stood in line for almost an hour to get my tarot cards read, which in retrospect was totally not worth it. I've never had my cards read, but it's a good thing I don't hold much faith in those things, otherwise I'd be certain my career path is headed for destruction! Depressing.

A little before 11:30, owner Peter Glassman came out to talk a little bit about the store's relationship with Suzanne Collins - she first visited the store when she was a first-time fantasy author with Gregor the Overlander, and she's been a friend of the store ever since. Then one of Suzanne's editors, the famed David Levithan (yep, he edits and he writes. A multi-talented guy!) came out to introduce Suzanne. Then! The big moment! The reading!!!

What a treat. We got to hear selections from both Catching Fire and Mockingjay. Why? Because since Katniss is from Appalachia, Suzanne reads her with an accent. She read Katniss' interview before the Hunger Games of Catching Fire, when her dress turns into the mockingjay, to acclimate us to the accent so we wouldn't miss a thing.

It is pure luck I got a picture this good. I was actually quite a ways back and had a few tall, fidgety people standing in front of me. This is the only picture that doesn't have a shoulder or someone's hair in it.

See? Hair. But! Suzanne with an actual copy of Mockingjay!

When Suzanne came out, the room lit up like it was a red carpet, with everyone pulling out their cameras to snap as many pictures as possible. I'll admit, I was standing on my tip toes and holding my camera over heads to get a good shot. But when Suzanne got into Mockingjay, you could hear a pin drop - until she started dropping major plot points, then you could hear gasps circling the room. I think I saw one girl crying.

After the reading, we were ushered out of the gallery and the brutally efficient book distribution and stamping process began! Like I said, by 12:15 I had my book and gratefully exited the store into the cool night air. You wouldn't normally think of NYC as having fresh air, but it felt wonderful after hours of being stuck in that store! I met up with my husband, who offered to sit with me on the subway to make sure I wouldn't miss my stop in the excitement, and read until 4:45 in the morning, occasionally having to fend off my cat. He's easily excited and didn't like seeing me get so emotional! He kept climbing onto my lap, even going over my shoulder on the couch once, to make sure I didn't have to read about Katniss' ordeals all alone.

Books of Wonder did the best with what resources (space) they had, but while they kept bragging about how they had handled Harry Potter release parties, I don't see how that space is viable for big release parties. Perhaps the kids were having tons of fun, but I think the adults were getting a little fed up with the lack of space. In the future, I'll continue to attend signings and panels at Books of Wonder, but I think for actual parties I'll be heading elsewhere in the city.

Afternoon update: Need more to read? I'm today's featured blogger for There's a Book's When I Was Young series! Read more on my Animorphs obsession. And those who've finished Mockingjay should definitely check out the discussion going on here. Some really interesting thoughts - I bet this conversation will last for awhile!

Book Events: Lend Your Voice Community Sourced Audio Book, recorded in DC

[Edit: 1 PM: Uploading this so it's audible directly through Blogger is making me want to tear my hair out. I've recently started a new blog on Tumblr for all my non-book related thoughts, and they allow me to directly upload audio, so you can listen by going here. Sorry for the inconvenience!]

There wasn't room to fit this particular highlight into my ALA recap post - I had to draw the line somewhere, and since I didn't have the audio for this bit yet, I figured I would hold off until I had something real to share!

During the weekend of ALA, I learned via Twitter that Random House Audio was teaming up with the Digital Book Mobile for an event called LEND YOUR VOICE. The event invited everyone to come participate in a community sourced audio book of one of my favorite stories ever, The Wizard of Oz. I love The Wizard of Oz; I love to perform - I totally had to jump on this bandwagon!

Katherine Flemming, the Random House rep working the recording equipment, was awesome. When she saw I was a blogger (everyone had to fill out short bio sheets and sign a disclaimer acknowledging no one was making money off of this), she said in my intro I could plug my blog and offered to send this audio clip to me. Thanks Katherine!

It was short and sweet and over way too fast - I could have stayed and read another 100 pages (if only so I could keep taking advantage of their frigid air conditioning. It was glorious walking inside the mobile recording studio and almost physically painful to step back out into the heat and humidity!).

All sorts of people participated in the recording. Immediately before me, two young girls split a section. And going through the official Flickr photostream I saw that they got a few big time authors in on this as well! I'm going to be in the same audio book as rock star author Libba Bray!


Thanks so much to Katherine Fleming everyone at Random House Audio and the Digital Bookmobile who made this thing happen. I can't wait until the final audio book is released.

Photos in this post courtesy of the Digital Bookmobile's Flickr photostream.

Book Events: Mockingjay Midnight Release Party in NYC!

I could hardly hold in my excitement at work yesterday afternoon when I saw that Books of Wonder, the awesome indie bookstore dedicated solely to kids' books here in NYC, is hosting a midnight release party for Mockingjay, the conclusion to The Hunger Games trilogy!

And what a party it sounds like it'll be. It goes from 8:00 PM on August 23rd until 1:30 AM on the 24th. Suzanne Collins herself will be there to read the opening just before midnight! I think I might just DIE from excitement. Next pay day I'm totally heading down to Books of Wonder to reserve my copy so I can be in the faster moving line at midnight.

And yes, the release just happens to be in the middle of the work week. No, I don't expect this to hinder my ability to read the book on release day. I'm hoping the Starbucks down the street from Books of Wonder is open 24 hours so I can grab a huge iced white mocha to help keep me awake. I'll probably make a squee-tastic/bragging post whenever I finish the book, and then pass out for a few hours before I have to go to work, with a real review coming whenever my brain is no longer mush.

Any NY-area readers going to make it to the release party? Let me know and we can arrange some kind of meetup at the party so I don't have to hang out by myself for hours!

Book Events: ALA in DC!

ALA and I go way back...all the way to 2002, when my mom and I made a road trip from Michigan to Atlanta just so I could attend the conference and speak at the Best Books for Young Adults teen panel the year Cindy (from Bookends) chaired the panel. Oh, she also arranged for me to meet my idol, Sara Ryan, at the same conference. That was an epic adventure, in and of itself.

ALA was a ton of fun back then, and again in 2005 when it was slightly closer to home in Chicago and I served as a chaperon for a new group of teen panelists. So when I heard ALA was again going to be somewhat close to me, this time in DC, I jumped at the chance to go. I'd never really visited DC before, and I haven't taken a vacation that wasn't family oriented in years, so this was going to be a multi-tasking vacation.

I got into DC an hour late on Friday, arriving at three. I'd been watching Twitter during the whole bus ride and saw everyone complaining about the heat and humidity, but it really wasn't any different than NYC, so I shrugged it off. It was definitely hot, but the humidity on Friday was nothing (summers on Lake Michigan were brutal, humidity-wise). Since the exhibits didn't open until after 5, I decided to play tourist, and made my first stop the Smithsonian Museum of American History - specifically the pop culture exhibit.

Hint for pop culture junkies planning a DC trip: skip the museum until they've finished the renovations. There were no more than ten things on display, which disappointed me immensely. Though I did achieve a childhood dream and finally get to see the famous Ruby Slippers

I've wanted to see these for ages, so I'm glad that itch got scratched.

I also got to see Kermit and the Fonz's jacket. Both were smaller than I would have thought.

There were some other interesting exhibits - I checked out the flag that inspired the national anthem, and the exhibit of first ladies' gowns. I also sat in on a cool presentation about the student protests during the civil rights movement - a young museum employee was role playing that we were back in the 60s and we were all at a protest planning meeting, learning how to effectively protest. That may have been the highlight of the museum!

But then...it was time to hightail it back up to the convention center to hit the exhibits!

Well, I did make one small detour...

Can you blame me?

At the convention center, of course, there were books galore. Here's a partial glimpse at the exhibit floor: 

But there's also tons of other things going on. ALA has exhibits dedicated to all sorts of library services, from furniture to book carts to shelves to cataloging services.

There are also contests so you can win some of this stuff for your library. There was quite a line on Friday night to take a crack at Wii bowling.

The exhibits were only open for a few hours on Friday night, but a lot of people were crammed in there. Want an idea of how many people showed up just Friday night?

The DC convention center had a lot of great things going for it; adequate exit signage was not among them. Also, if you're going to have employees directing people to other stairs, maybe they should be positioned somewhere other than the bottom of the escalator?

Saturday I was up early with more sightseeing plans...that ended up going slightly awry thanks to my inability to keep track of maps. Long story short: I walked the length of the mall 1.5 times in two hours Saturday morning in search of the Holocaust museum. I did get some great morning pictures, though...

  And I really loved this quotation on one of the walls of the WWII memorial: 

"Women who stepped up were measured as citizens of the nation, not as women... This was a people's war, and everyone was in it." Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby.

No, I don't know why my camera decided half of my pictures needed to have a strange blue tint. Ignore it.

No pictures from inside the Holocaust Museum - which was a deeply moving experience. The information wasn't anything earth-shattering for me, since I'm pretty well read on the Holocaust, but actually seeing some of the tools of torture was sending chills up my spine. Walking under a replica of the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign from Auschwitz totally freaked me out.

So after thoroughly depressing myself, I headed back to the convention center to make a concentrated go at picking up as many books as I possibly could. When I arrived, I was greeted with the sight of a bunch of librarians glued to a TV - not even ALA was safe from World Cup fever!

I wasn't near a TV when the US lost, so I have no idea how these poor librarians took the news. 

Sunday I don't have any pictures for, which is unfortunate because of how awesome it was. Sunday afternoon is when I finally got to hook up with Lynn and Cindy, who you'll probably recall I've spoken about on here before. Long story short, they were my librarians dating from way back when I was in middle school and I consider myself incredibly lucky to still count them among my friends - not only because they are awesome, awesome ladies, but they were willing to let me tag along during their first chance on the exhibit floor and introduced me to pretty much everyone they know.

Also fun: knowing that I got to a highly anticipated book before either of them. Cindy did a literal double take when I told her that not only had I already finished Monsters of Men by Sunday (I picked it up first thing Friday night), but I'd also started reading Sapphique. Lynn was even funnier, trying to wrench my copy of Sapphique from my hands when I showed it to her. I made sure they both got copies for themselves before the end of the day, so no blood was shed nor ARCs torn in half.

The one big disappointment of the weekend? I was so busy running around sight seeing and networking that I didn't get to meet any of my fellow book bloggers! I think we were all mesmerized by the shiny, shiny books, since I've seen from other blogs I'm not the only one who had this problem.

As for all those shiny, shiny books - want to see them?

This is the picture I Tweeted from the convention center on Sunday:   My suitcase is literally straining at the seams, and my poor purse couldn't handle any more weight so I stuffed it inside my new totebag along with other books that wouldn't fit in my suitcase.

Here's the "unboxing" of my suitcase, which I didn't dare tackle until tonight:

Here's the suitcase as it was when I first opened it...totally stuffed.

Here's some of the books pulled out, along with the books that were packed in my purse and tote bag...and my cat Gopher, because he can't resist suitcases.

 And here's my final display! In an attempt to stay organized and keep myself from reading too far ahead, the front row has the books that are already published or will be published soon, while the back row is filled with books being published in November, December and March 2011 (totally random, but two books from different publishers are labeled as 3/11 titles). I'm sure I'm going to cheat (after all, I've already finished Monsters of Men and Sapphique which are due to be published much later this year), but at least this way I need to make an effort to cheat!

Oh, and this actually isn't even the final tally. Several publishers volunteered to send me boxes of books after the conference. Can't wait until those start arriving!

ALA was definitely a fun and worthwhile trip for a book nerd like me. I was a little unsure how I'd be greeted, being a non-librarian, but everyone seemed to love having a book blogger around! So, to everyone I met at ALA, thanks for making this blogger feel welcome and part of the club.

And to my readers - thanks for staying to the end of this super long post! Were any of you at ALA? Share your experiences (or links to your conference reports) in the comments!

Nerds Heart YA Discussion: Comparison and Winner!

After Lorin and I discussed The World is Mine and Donut Days, we compared the two books before finally settling on the winner that will proceed to the next round of the tournament!

Angela


So as for the monumental task of starting to compare these books - like I mentioned before, we have two protagonists who are trying to define themselves as separate from their parents (even though The World is Mine has multiple narrators, I considered Blue the main protagonist since he got more chapters to narrate and his big plans were what drove the plot). While on the surface they seem like two totally different books, at their heart the stories are quite similar. It's the outer trappings that take the stories in wildly different directions - urban vs. suburban settings, watching friendships fall apart (The World is Mine) vs. friendships coming back together (Donut Days).

Lorin

The issue in comparing any two books is not in picking which one I prefer, it's in trying to pin down the why. Thinking about it, I realized that while Emma and Blue's problems aren't terribly different, Donut Days had much more heart than The World is Mine, and that's what makes the big difference for me. I'm not trying to disparage the goal of breaking into entertainment - I know that creative fields require just as much work as any other career. But Blue doesn't seem to have any larger goal than "coming up" and getting power for the sake of getting powerful. Add to that, he wasn't the most sympathetic character, and it all sums up to making it harder for me to care about his struggles (especially since some of them could have been so easily solved).

Angela

Every once in awhile it looked like Blue was going to connect with a deeper goal - I was encouraged when he was researching other entertainment entrepreneurs and when he was looking to the former NFL/music exec as a mentor, but yes, ultimately it seemed like all he wanted was to improve his own standing rather than connect with a larger community. He didn't want to throw awesome parties for the sake of the party goers - he just wanted the reputation as an awesome party planner, and he was even willing to sacrifice his friends (and the friends of friends) in order to achieve that

Lorin

Emma could be bratty, but I felt like she was concerned with more than just herself and her own issues. She was angry at her parents, but mostly she was worried about them. She was angry with Nat, but she also recognized that she missed her friend. She was angry with her much of her congregation, but still concerned that they weren't taken advantage of. It just all made me care much more.

Angela

I pretty much agree with everything you're saying about Emma.

Lorin

I do want to make sure I'm not just drawn to Emma more than Blue because my experiences more closely match hers than they do Blue's.

Angela

I also had to really think and make sure I wasn't just leaning towards Donut Days because it was easier for me to relate to. I also don't want to put some sort of value judgement on Blue's goals vs. Emma's - I'm afraid I'm sounding like all books must have some great moral message in order to be considered valuable, which isn't at all how I feel. I just think Blue's methods of achieving his goals fell flat, and since I could never empathize with him I was never invested in his goal. Add this to the weaknesses I felt with the writing (over-explanation of the slang, the abrupt ending), and The World is Mine just didn't hold up well for me. Emma could be bratty, but I could empathize even with her brattiness because we could see exactly where it was coming from - she clearly values science over faith, doesn't hold the Bible as infallible, and thinks her parents have unreasonable expectations. Even if I didn't agree with her positions or her reasoning, at least I could understand where she was coming from. I never quite felt I understood Blue and his shortcomings in the same way.

Lorin

We're in agreement. The World is Mine had a lot going for it, but couldn't hold its own up against Donut Days.

Congrats to Donut Days and author Laura Zielin. Also, thanks to the Nerds Heart YA tournament for allowing me to take part, and a huuuuuuuuuge thanks to Lorin for being such an awesome and fun co-judge!

Nerds Heart YA Discussion: The World is Mine by Lyah B. LeFlore

Today's the big day, the first day results are being posted for the first round of the Nerds Heart YA tournament, all about underrepresented, diverse YA books. I had the pleasure of judging this round with Lorin of Arch Thinking, pitting The World is Mine against Donut Days by Laura Zielin. Continue reading for our discussion about The World is Mine, then continue on to Arch Thinking for our Donut Days discussion. At noon Eastern time we'll post our comparison of the two books and declare a final winner!

Angela

Let's start by talking about The World is Mine. I liked the variety of characters in the book and how we got to spend a little bit of time in everyone's head and see what was important to them and why they were in on Blue's venture. I also really, really liked seeing a book where the majority of the characters are non-white, but they aren't all down-on-their-luck drug dealers or anything. There's a variety of socio-economic statuses, a variety of academic success, etc.  

However, I have to admit that the slang really, really irritated me. Not the presence of it, but the way the author had to *explain* it to us. I lost track of how many times a slang word was followed by "which in our world means..." And while I liked the inclusion of the rap/hip hop lyrics at the beginning of the chapters, they were integrated awkwardly into the text: "Like Kanye's famous line, Mo' money mo' problems." The grammar felt really artificial there. Overall it felt like the book wasn't written for teens who are living lives like Blue and his friends, but for the kids in the suburbs who want to mimic the "urban lifestyle."

I was also totally frustrated by the cliffhanger ending. I felt like there was absolutely no resolution for any of the plot threads.

Lorin

The ending! I was so annoyed when I read the last page. It really bugs me when books don't even pretend to be anything more than a way to make you buy the next book.

I think you hit the nail on the head regarding the audience for this book. And I think this made the dialogue feel stilted. Which was too bad because I really liked most of the characters. It helped that we spent time with many of them, which I agree that I liked. But I was also charmed by some of the other characters, like Blue's dad and Whiteboy's landlady. They came across as really genuine people whose problems I care about. Which brings me back to the ending - I guess it's a good thing that I want to know what happens next, but I think the author has lost my trust. If every book is a cliffhanger, I'm going to get jaded and stop caring.

Angela

I kept comparing the cliffhanger ending to the endings of Hunger Games and Catching Fire in my head, only because those are the two biggest cliffhangers I've seen recently. Those worked because something major was resolved - IE, the titular Hunger Games, but in the last few pages, a *new* twist was added, so you not only felt one story was completed, but there was another one to look forward to. I wanted something resolved - a truly successful party, the issue of  Mamie's track - so I had a complete story to reflect on before building anticipation for the next story.

Lorin 

The thing I thought about a lot when I read this book was how most of Blue's problems were of his own making. Some weren't (like the issue about college) but the problems with Collin and Mamie were. I get that it's a personality flaw but I did want to scold the boy half the time. I just wish he had been a little more self-aware.  

Angela

Blue...I kinda wanted to kick him in the face sometimes. He was totally dismissive of and just a little bit sexist towards Mamie. The sexism came in for me because he seemed unable to refer to her without labeling her as the *girl* DJ. It was irritating because while I can handle a flawed protagonist (in fact, the best ones are far from perfect), he had some glaring personality flaws that made him downright unlikeable sometimes. His problems with Collin seemed to mostly stem from an inability to listen - which I totally bought because Blue was caught up in his big dreams and who wants to listen to reality then?! But he was rather vile about Mamie, and was creeping me out a bit towards the end when he was wondering how long Jade was "gonna make a brother wait." Independently, that bit with Jade would just be typical male posturing, but combined with the Mamie issues it was clear Blue's got some messed up issues with women.  

Lorin

I hadn't really picked up on Blue's women issues until you pointed it out, but I definitely see what you mean. (Interestingly, his mom isn't really a developed character in the book - Collin's off-screen mom is more fully developed. I wonder if the author will make more of this in her next installment.) Mostly though, I just thought his ego was bigger than he was - and from what I've heard of his favorite role model, Diddy, that's probably pretty accurate.

Summary:

-     Good variety of characters

-     Interesting structure

-     Unsympathetic main character (but sympathetic supporting characters)

-     Annoying cliffhanger ending

Remember: check out Arch Thinking for our Donut Days thoughts, then come back at noon for our comparison and final decision!