Blog Archive: December 2008

Susan at Wizards Wireless has a great post about authors who reuse characters and plot devices so consistently you can predict the plot before you open their next book. Susan breaks down the Harry Potter books, Amelia Bedelia, and L. M. Montgomery novels, and she invites readers to join in with their familiar favorites.

Lloyd Alexander is my personal love-to-hate author in this regard. When I was a kid, I totally loved his books, particularly the Prydain Chronicles and the Westmark trilogy (and I still do). But having read those series several times over and then moving onto his stand-alone novels, each time I open one of his books I'm overcome with déjà vu.

Sam Riddleburger blogged about this very issue last year after the publication of The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio and posed the question why did Lloyd Alexander essentially rewrite the same story again and again. There are some great comments on that post, and Jason Fisher responded at length on his own blog. If this matter has ever haunted you as it has me, check out both posts.

(I started to write out my own character/plot analysis, but it was so similar to Sam's I decided not to bother. That itself should be evidence of how consistent/repetitive Alexander was.)

That said, I believe Lloyd Alexander's books are well worth reading. The Prydain Chronicles (among them the Newbery Honor-winning The Black Cauldron and the Newbery Award-winning The High King) stand up as a top-notch high fantasy series, forty years after publication. The Westmark trilogy, as well as being a great adventure series, is fascinating for its treatment of governmental revolution. The Rope Trick has one of the strangest endings I've ever read in a children's book... which actually, I guess, depending on how you like your endings, may or may not be a strong selling point.

However, the Vesper Holly books—which I think of as Sherlock Holmes meets Indiana Jones but with a smart, brave young woman as the hero—are the only Alexander books I know that break the mold.

How about you? Head over to Wizards Wireless and share your thoughts. (I know some of my friends could probably write a Baby-Sitters Club synopsis in their sleep!)

Whenever I go to someone else's house, I love to see what books they have on their shelves. In the case of my mother-in-law, it's an eclectic assortment of literary and commercial fiction, children's literature, and nonfiction. So the past few days I've been reading The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights, by Deborah Rudacille, and Second Glance, by Jodi Picoult.

Interestingly, the epigraph for The Riddle of Gender is "Pied Beauty", which I shared back in September. I also really liked the epigraph for Second Glance, attributed to Samuel Coleridge Taylor:
 

What if you slept?

And what if
in your sleep
you dreamed?

And what if
in your dream
you went to heaven
and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower?

And what if
when you awoke
you had that flower in your hand?

Ah, what then?

It reminds me of many a childhood fantasy book that would almost have readers believe "it was all just a dream"—were it not for mud on the shoes, a bruised knee, a jingle bell under the Christmas tree. I always liked that reassurance that, in spite of the big old "fiction" label on the spine, the story was real.

What a disappointment it was to learn that Oz was but a dream to Dorothy Gale! And what a relief when she returned there for another thirteen books. Not a dream after all, thank God.

I think that's why so many readers feel cheated by Life of Pi, Atonement, and other novels with wildly unreliable narrators. We want so hard to believe. We want to wake up from our reading trance and find relics of what we've read left in our hands.

Catch this week's Poetry Friday round-up at The Miss Rumphius Effect!

Editorial Ass discusses the pros and cons of publishing paperback originals as an alternative to hardcovers in these tough financial times. I found this article interesting from my different perspectives as librarian and prospective author.

From my public librarian standpoint, paperback originals are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I like hardcovers because they are far sturdier than paperbacks and can handle much heavier circulation. On the other hand, unless a book is very popular or on a school reading list (this includes award-winners), a hardcover book is not likely to circulate heavily—like, enough to fall apart within a few years.

Therefore, in my opinion, it might as well reap the benefits of being a paperback: greater visibility/browsability on our paperback carousels, greater portability for patrons who don't like to lug heavy books, and greater affordability if we need additional or replacement copies. Paperbacks (I'm talking fiction) circulate more heavily than hardcovers, and circulation is the way libraries define a book's success.

The main caveat is that unless they're part of a very heavily promoted series or imprint (e.g., Aladdin MIX) that puts them on our radar, the books must be reviewed, and reviewed positively, in journals such as Kirkus, School Library Journal, Booklist, and VOYA for my library to order them. (Other libraries may treat paperback originals differently.)

From the perspective of a prospective author, I have mixed feelings as well. As EA notes, there's this nose-wrinkling in the industry that if a book was published as a paperback original, it's because your publishing house didn't take the book "seriously."

I have to admit, I've been guilty of nose-wrinkling myself—which was why I was so surprised that three of the first four YA books from Flux to garner starred reviews from major publications were—you guessed it—paperback originals: The Shape of Water, by Anne Spollen, Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception, by Maggie Stiefvater, and The Way He Lived, by Emily Wing Smith. (Hopefully I've got that right... And the fourth, published in hardcover, was Everything You Want, by Barbara Shoup.) So, obviously there's no obvious correlation there between literary quality and binding.

And if a paperback's affordability makes it that much more likely for customers to buy my (hypothetical) book? Well, it's hard to say no to that. Sure, a hardcover looks good and feels good. But, having worked in a library for several years now, I've come to view both hardcovers and paperbacks as ephemeral objects. There's no other way to approach the fact that something like 98% of books go out of print within a few years. Knowing I'm unlikely to be one of those authors whose books are in print 20/50/100 years from original publication makes it seem to matter a little less.

Finally, speaking as both librarian and prospective author, if in these tough financial times we're faced with the choice of either severely cutting down the number of books published period or publishing many more trade books as paperback originals than as hardcovers, I prefer the latter. As a librarian, I prefer many voices to few. And as a prospective author, I'd like mine to be one of them.

(Via Cynsations.)

It's been a strange fall, rife with self-examination and self-exposure, and it's left me feeling raw and ragged and generally vulnerable—but also somehow stronger. Sometimes I wish I had better defenses, not just to keep the world out but to keep the tender parts of me in. But I know no other way to live, no other way to write the story of my life.

Without further ado, here's this week's happy skippy original poem...
 

Sharpen Your Pencil

Pick up a new pencil,
glossy yellow but useless,
graphite encased by cedar.

Into the sharpener press
the blunt end, and twist
against the razor within.

First goes the sunny veneer,
flaking to the table as gold
dust, unresisting. Easy.

Twist! The blade bites
into cedar, scraping a thin
curl. It falls with a whisper.

Twist! Slice deeper.
File the armor till sap
bleeds from the ragged splinters.

Twist! Claw up the wood,
layer by layer till there’s nothing
to protect the soft, gray core—

exposed, fragile, already
losing traces of itself
on every surface it touches.

A moment’s careless pressure,
and snap! A piece is lost
forever.

             But that’s the only way—
this whittling and wearing and breaking,
spiraling ever nearer to death.
There is no other way to write.
 

You'll find this week's Poetry Friday round-up at Author Amok!

One of my favorite recent reads was Getting the Girl: A Guide to Private Investigation, Surveillance, and Cookery, by Susan Juby. Based on this one and Another Kind of Cowboy, I'm rather a fan of Juby's writing; it's elegant, she does great things with voice, and oh my lord is she funny. Getting the Girl, a sort of sociological teen mystery narrated by ninth grade shrimp and mack daddy Sherman Mack, has moments of brilliant hilarity and sweetness. Bookshelves of Doom has a nice review of it if you want to know more.

I'm bringing it up now, though, because of one wonderful little detail. Well, two. First, Sherman's mom makes her living as a bartender. Second, her hobby? Burlesque dancing.

"Wow," thought I while reading along, "have I ever read another book for young people in which a character's mother was a burlesque dancer?" And then I answered myself, "Verily, no. I know more burlesque dancers in real life than I do in literature." (The latter figure is still rather small, I should say.)

Anyway, that led me to consider the professions of parents throughout children's and teen fiction. Most of us work pretty run-of-the-mill jobs, so it makes sense that most fictional parents would, too. I tend to populate my own stories with parents who are real estate agents, factory workers, truck drivers, professors, bookkeepers—the kinds of jobs my friends' parents had when I was growing up. That means that when a character's mother is, for example, a bartender and burlesque dancer, I sit up and pay attention.

Some other parents in realistic children's/teen fiction with particularly interesting jobs (and it's telling, how difficult it was to come up with these):

• Comfort Snowberger's parents in Each Little Bird That Sings, by Deborah Wiles, run a funeral parlor.
• Meg's father in A True and Faithful Narrative, by Katherine Sturtevant, is a bookseller in Restoration England, which means that he also writes the books!
• Mr. and Mrs. Murry in A Wrinkle and Time, etc., by Madeleine L'Engle are scientists dealing with the extraordinary: tesseracts, time travel, subcellular organisms! Then Calvin O'Keefe comes along studying the regenerative properties of starfish. Wow! Nothing boring there.
• Katy's father in Beige, by Cecil Castellucci, is a punk rocker.
• Vince's father in Son of the Mob, by Gordon Korman, is... well... you know.
• Moose's father in Al Capone Does My Shirts, by Gennifer Choldenko, is an electrician at Alcatraz.
• Dewey's father in The Green Glass Sea, by Ellen Klages, is a mathematician working on the "gadget" at Los Alamos.
• Hugo's father in The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, is a clockmaker and inventor.

Can you think of any others?