Posts on books

I've latched onto a couple of interesting discussions taking place in the Kidlitosphere in the past 24 hours. Take a look...

• Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect asks why we read. Her question is spurred by a profoundly irritating, borderline offensive review of Twilight in The Atlantic, "What Girls Want," by Caitlin Flanagan. The column is rife with gross generalizations and ignorance of teen literature, not to mention multi-directional sexism and heterosexism. Even if I weren't a person who hates being told what I think, what I feel, what I'm like, or who I am (does anyone?), I'd still want to remind Ms. Flanagan that one person's experiences do not a broad-sweeping phenomenon make.
• Liz at A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy asks what personal area of expertise results in a "fail" moment when the book you're reading gets it wrong. For me, it's dog ownership and librarianship. And, I suppose local information. (I still haven't gotten over James Howe sending that giraffe to the nonexistent zoo in Kalamazoo!)

The UK Guardian's Bad Sex in Fiction Award has been announced! This year's winner is a book called Shire Hell, by Rachel Johnson. John Updike was also awarded a lifetime achievement award.

You can read (and possibly cringe over) excerpts from some of the short-listed books online. I'd share some here, but, well, this is a family blog.

Here's a scattering/smattering of blog articles I've enjoyed this week:

• Leila at Bookshelves of Doom interviews Kathleen Duey. Duey wrote Skin Hunger, the first in a pretty darn dark fantasy trilogy. I loved it, and it was short-listed for the National Book Award in 2007. The second volume, Sacred Scars is apparently off to the copyeditor, which means it will be on the shelves in only... wait... what's that? It won't be on shelves until Fall 2009? Evil, evil, evil snail's pace of publishing!
• Molly at Bowen Press notes the similarities in the marketing of The Phantom of the Opera and Twilight. The similarities are so glaring, it's a wonder no one's pointed them out before.
• Speaking of Twilight, Carlie at Librarilly Blonde calls Stephenie Meyer on her assertion that "no one was supposed to read these but me." I'm with Carlie. Writing itself is generally a highly personal endeavor, but once you start querying agents and editors, you're assuming (or, at the very least, hoping) other people will want to read your book, too. Maybe Meyer didn't expect the books to be such a blockbuster, but considering her mega-advances? I have to imagine she got a clue pretty early on.
• At the Carolrhoda blog, Andrew Karre discusses the importance of "naughty bits" in books for children and teens to make them appealingly subversive... or subversively appealing... whichever.
• Hosted by Cynsations, Gail Langer Karwoski gives children's authors and illustrators the ABCs of School Visits. This article is going in my file for that magical, miracle, maybe day I can call myself a published children's author.

Since Carey turned me on to The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education, by Grace Llewellyn, I've adopted a pretty critical stance toward formal education. (Actually, my husband would probably tell you this is a vast understatement.) Subbing in the Chicago Public Schools for six months and dealing with inane school assignments at the library for three years have not improved my opinion.*

I was very successful in school, and school did benefit me in certain ways, but I cannot say that it was a very happy experience over all or that I think my time couldn't have been spent more productively elsewhere. My real life as a teen was outside of school: Girl Scouts, art classes, camping and camp counseling, church choir, church youth group, GLBTQ youth group. Going to the theatre with my parents, riding bikes and hanging out in the woods with my friends, writing stories in my notebooks, baby-sitting, riding my bike to the library, sketching in the park, learning to cook.

I realize I was very lucky. I grew up in an area where there were lots of outside-of-school opportunities and you didn't need a car to get everywhere. I had smart, supportive parents. And I'm a pretty driven person who does well with self-directed learning and self-discipline. In other words, while unschooling may not be the right thing for every kid in every situation, I think I would have been an ideal candidate.

I think most smart adults become autodidacts once they get their diplomas—taking up a new musical instrument or developing their skill on an old one, learning a new art or craft, studying a foreign language, traveling the world, writing books, making films, reading about everything under the sun. It stretches the definition of autodidactism, but I think taking community center classes should count, too, because they're voluntary and you do most of the work independently. No one is grading you. It's all up to your own interest and self-discipline.

Don't you ever wonder what you could have done if you'd had all those hours you spent in classroom drudgery to pursue your interests? I didn't need formal schooling to become a librarian, writer, or web designer. I might even have found my path sooner without school in the way.

Anyway, enough kvetching about my misspent youth. (It's all grist for the mill, after all.) The other day Collecting Children's Books mentioned a book called The Day I Became an Autodidact and the Advice, Adventures, and Acrimonies That Befell Me Thereafter, by Kendall Hailey. It's the memoir of a teen girl who left formal schooling in high school and pursued autodidactism. Clearly I needed to read it.

I started it today and am already in love. The narrative voice is charmingly old-fashioned (though it was published in 1988), and there's so much humor to it. I've wished it wasn't a library book so I could go through with a highlighter. There are so many gems. Some snippets that have stuck out to me already...

Upon receiving a summer reading list:

I read (rarely skimming) everything school tells me to from the middle of September to the middle of June, but the summer is mine. And being told what to read during summer suddenly made me realize that I don't really like being told what to read during the fall, winter, and spring either. (foreword)

Upon reading about the life of Tolstoy:

It turns out that to be a great literary genius, not only do you not have to go to college, you don't even have to be very good at educating yourself. I always like to begin a new phase of life on a comforting note. (p. 4-5)

Upon finishing Anna Karenina:

His novel has aroused in me many doubts about how we can hope to do good things. I dreamed last night that the only way I wouldn't feel guilty spending my life being a writer would be to cure cancer first—and even then I would still feel a little guilty. (p. 5)

On sleep:

I hate sleep and I hate how much time I spend doing it, but, quite frankly, I think it is the only thing that keeps human beings from going mad: the illusion that life is not one continuous stream, but the more manageable concept of days. A day, contemplated in its entirety, is hard enough to deal with. A life, contemplated in its entirety, is an impossible concept. (p. 10)

I could go on, but you get the picture. I look forward to reading more!

*No offense intended to the teachers out there. I know you do the best you can with what you've got for curriculum, NCLB standards, etc. And there are tons of families out there that could never pull off unschooling, and those kids need you! But is school everything it could/should be? I don't think so.

Back in September, Lee Wind posted a blurb for a new young adult book called Mousetraps (Carolrhoda, 2008), by Pat Schmatz. Intrigued, I added it to my to-read list. Fast-forward a month to the SCBWI Wisconsin conference. Who’s one of the very first people I meet? Pat Schmatz. Small world!

I bought Mousetraps, Pat signed it, I read it, I dug it. I asked Pat if she’d be interested in a blog interview (my first!), and here we are. But first, a little more about Mousetraps.

Maxie’s junior year of high school begins with a surprise: Rick is back. Rick, the boy she was best friends with, before he became a bully magnet. Rick, who moved away in seventh grade after he was brutally gay bashed.

Rick wants to rekindle his friendship with Maxie, but she’s not so sure. Rick’s as much of a target as ever. And there’s something different about him these days. There’s a look he gets in his eyes sometimes, cold and hard, that scares her.

Maxie is a sensitive, yet matter-of-fact, narrator who occasionally dips into the poetic but never dives into melodrama, even when things get dark—and they do get dark. She’s a cartoonist—way back when, Rick designed crazy, Rube Goldberg-esque mousetraps, and she drew them—and her lively drawings (penned in real life by Bill Hauser) are integrated perfectly with the text.

Mousetraps also touches on nontraditional families, interracial relationships, and a bit of romance. I especially appreciated that Rick experiences homophobic bullying irrespective of his sexual identity. He’s clear proof that homophobia hurts everyone, not just individuals who are GLBTQ.

The notoriously difficult-to-impress Kirkus Reviews says of Mousetraps, “Rick and Maxie’s thought-provoking story, juxtaposed against Hauser’s renderings of Maxie’s cartoons, is unexpectedly, richly dark, with no easy answers. Both chilling and sweet.”

Now, without further ado, here’s Pat!

LC: Coming dangerously close to the dreaded “where do you get your ideas” question, I was wondering if you could pinpoint the initial germ that evolved into Mousetraps.

PS: I kind of hate to admit it, but Mousetraps started in my mind the day of Columbine. I was home for lunch and Columbine was on the news, and even as I was watching the event transpire on TV, I had an impression of Rick. From that day on, I was completely obsessed with the topic and read everything I could get my hands on, and the whole time, I had Rick’s voice in my head.

LC: Rick could have been only a martyr or psychopath; instead, he’s a fully-realized, sympathetic character. What were the challenges in shaping him without veering into Jekyll/Hyde territory?

PS: First of all, thanks for saying that about Rick. I have huge affection for that character, and he’d hate to be seen as a martyr or a psychopath. When I read news stories about school shootings, I never see those kids as one-sided, no matter how the media portrays them. I suppose that’s because I’ve known enough people, personally, who have survived these kinds of challenges that I know they aren’t one-sided, or even two-sided, and the character of Rick is a conglomerate of several kids I have known well.

LC: Since 2000, we’ve seen a number of dark teen novels responding to the Jonesboro and Columbine school massacres of 1998 and 1999 (e.g., Todd Strasser’s Give a Boy a Gun, Walter Dean Myers’ Shooter, Nancy Garden’s End Game). Mousetraps, too, could have ended in tragedy. What made you steer toward a more hopeful conclusion?

PS: I wrote six sharply different conclusions to Mousetraps over the nine years I worked on it. One editor a few years ago rejected the book, but in her editorial letter she suggested yet another option for the ending, and I gave it a try. That took me in a totally different direction.

I still see all of the conclusions as continuing to be Real and True in some sort of parallel simultaneous universes. We have crossroads moments where we can step this way or that way, and like the mousetraps, whichever direction we choose sets off an entirely new chain of events. So experimenting with the different conclusions was like imagining…what if, in this moment, this character stepped this way instead of that way? Either choice is emotionally possible, and my job as the author is to be true to the chain of events that would follow.

Finally, the ending I chose—with a lot of help and guidance from my editor, Shannon Barefield—felt right. Also, it was the clearest choice for the story that I wanted to tell, which is Maxie’s story—although of course Rick has a huge part in it.

LC: How do you think homophobia and bullying in America's schools have changed since you were a teen, if at all?

PS: When I was a teen, this stuff wasn’t called “homophobic,” or even “bullying.” We all just knew that some kids were mean, and some kids got picked on. Now that we have words for it, and we use them, I’d like to think things are at least potentially different. Kids actually know to say things like, “the biggest homophobes are usually gay themselves,”—that was a comeback and a concept that didn’t exist when I was a teen. Also, people like Maxie’s uncles do exist, as out gay fully-functioning adults, and they not only can help kids maneuver their way through this stuff but are visible as role models. Bullying still happens, probably as bad as ever, but I do think the kids who are getting bullied have a better chance to get support and backing. Even if an individual kid isn’t getting adequate protection, s/he can find the concept of support on line, in books, and even on the news. That’s a big plus.

LC: Did you envision Mousetraps as an illustrated novel from the beginning?

PS: Not at first, but the better I got to know Maxie, the more I saw her drawings in my head. For a while I was hoping to have Mousetraps be a graphic novel but I didn’t have the skills to do the drawings myself. The design team at Lerner worked with me on the current form, sort of a hybrid.

LC: Please tell us about your path to publication and about your first two books, Circle the Truth (Carolrhoda, 2007) and Mrs. Estronsky and the UFO (Blue Works, 2001).

PS: Mrs. Estronsky is a middle-grade novel about a girl who sees a UFO with her piano teacher. I sent that one out, time after time, using Writer’s Market as a guide. Of course I was thrilled when Windstorm Creative picked it up for their youth division, Blue Works.

Meanwhile, I became involved in the Minneapolis writing community, which led me to Andrea Cascardi of Transatlantic Literary Agency. I sent her the manuscripts for both Mousetraps and Circle the Truth, a younger YA about a boy in a blended family who, as he questions truth and reality in his life and his home, finds that those lines keep shifting. Andrea agreed to represent me, gave me some terrific editorial advice on the manuscripts, and then started to send out the revised versions. Each manuscript went to a number of houses over a three-year period before Carolrhoda made an offer on Circle, and then contracted for Mousetraps as well.

LC: How did you stay positive through the long submission process?

PS: It wasn’t so much a matter of staying positive, as staying busy. I started Circle the Truth immediately after finishing the first draft of Mousetraps, so my focus was there. Also, I was getting enough positive feedback—nice rejection letters, a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, and the huge boost of getting Andrea as my agent—to keep me rolling.

LC: You grew up in rural Wisconsin and live there today. In what ways does that setting and culture manifest in your books?

PS: Mrs. Estronsky and the UFO is completely grounded in rural Wisconsin. I wrote it when I was living in California and was incredibly homesick for the upper Midwest. As a child, I spent a lot of time alone outdoors and I still tend to see the world through that lens. Although the next two books both take place in urban settings, weather and season play a definite emotional role in each story. Also, all three books take place in the upper Midwest, which certainly has a particular cultural flavor.

LC: Can you expand on that, for readers who have never had the pleasure of living in the upper Midwest?

PS: I find the upper Midwest—both rural and urban—to have a particular kindness, something almost like innocence. That’s not quite the right word, but it’s a related concept…and so characters with a gentle sort of progressive political sensibility, like Maxie’s parents and the Unks, and Toby’s family in Circle the Truth, can be found everywhere. Also, the region tends to be very weather-focused, even in the cities, and many people are involved in outdoor sports like ice fishing or skiing. And of course, there is always the snow that must be moved one way or another, and people have different ideas about how that should be done. I don’t know if that particular discussion is peculiar to the upper Midwest, but it seems like snow blowers are more universal, for instance, on the east coast.

LC: Mousetraps and Circle the Truth have a very different feel. Maxie narrates Mousetraps in matter-of-fact first person, while Circle the Truth is told in a more lyrical third person voice. What do you find to be the challenges of writing in first versus third person? How do you decide which to use?

PS: I tried both books in both first and third person, and in each case tried to find the voice that best suited the story. I find first person much more difficult in general. Crazy-making, actually, because the narrator is so strictly limited in what s/he can perceive and how those perceptions can be expressed. But it does allow for a more natural voice, and I like that.

LC: Who are your favorite/most influential authors?

PS: S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders is my most influential book, and my most loved. Other influential books include A Wrinkle in Time by L’Engle, Henry 3 by Krumgold, The Forgotten Door by Key, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee.

As a kid, I loved everything by Beverly Clearly, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jim Kjelgaard, and Mark Twain. As an adult, my favorite authors include Markus Zusak, Anne Patchett, Stephen King, Kate DiCamillo, and E.L. Konigsburg.

LC: What can we hope to see from you next?

PS: I’ve been working for several years on a YA novel called Bluefish. I haven’t hit it quite right yet, but I think I’m getting there. I also have an as-yet untitled adult novel and a picture book in the works.

Steve Berman, author of Vintage: A Ghost Story (which I greatly enjoyed and reviewed here), was interviewed by Fanboys of the Universe. Take a listen and you'll hear some passages from the book, the story behind the story, and Berman's thoughts on the higher-than-average appeal of speculative fiction for queer readers. Great interview, Steve!

What's with the proliferation of haiku picture books? And if we're going to have so dang many, can't we make them a little better? A little more, say, poetic?

Earlier today I read a review of an upcoming haiku picture book. The haiku quoted in the review was about as interesting, vivid, and emotional as this one I'm making up on the spot:

It's Sunday evening.
I made biscuits and gravy.
I'll go eat them now.

Except this author probably took more than ten seconds to write it. And got paid to do so.

Any idiot can write seventeen syllables and call it a haiku. But you better say something special in those seventeen syllables.

A haiku should have
more flavor than yesterday's
leftovers, you know?

As if that weren't enough, this week I've read another two reviews of "House That Jack Built" take-offs. Clearly, no one heard me the first time.

Thanks again to everyone who suggested "adult" books for me read! I've now got way more suggestions than I'll be able to read in November alone, but one of the best things about books? No expiration dates. Here's what I'm planning for starters.

Rereads:
- The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
- My Name Is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok
- The Hundred Secret Senses, by Amy Tan

New reads:
- Little, Big, by John Crowley
- Lisey's Story, by Stephen King
- So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell
- I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
- something by Rex Stout
- Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

Oh boy. I have bitten off more than I can chew, haven't I? I can't wait!

I'm tickled by the announcement in PW Children's Bookshelf that Cavendish is launching a line of classics. In this case, "classics" doesn't mean works in the public domain. It means contemporary classics that are still under copyright but have gone out of print.

Since librarians and other book-lovers are always lamenting the disappearance of old favorites, especially in this age of the shrinking backlist, this is very good news indeed. Among the titles Cavendish is reviving are M. E. Kerr's If I Love You, Am I Trapped Forever? and (personal favorite of mine) Jamie Gilson's Thirteen Ways to Sink a Sub.

This is truly a labor of love. I mean, presumably Cavendish expects to make some money from this line, but they're tracking down all sorts of rights and artwork to make this happen while looking at a pretty strictly library and indie bookstore market. Here's what they say on their contact page:

If you are an author with an out-of print title that you would like considered for Marshall Cavendish Classics, please let us know... Because we have to be highly selective, we are looking for books that are recognizable by most children’s media specialists. These are books that will have won awards, received starred reviews, or that have authors or illustrators of some repute in the children’s book field.

I wonder if they're also open to bribery from the public. And I wonder if any other publishing houses will follow suit.

In this graphic novel by Hope Larson (Atheneum 2008), Abby—age 13 or so—is drawn to her late-arriving bunk mate, Shasta, who claims to have been struck by lightning. Problem is Shasta’s an all-around weirdo. She’s abrasive. She’s geeky. She has secrets. She’s scornful of Abby’s other more mainstream, boy-crazy friends. Sensitive Abby is torn between her old friends and her new geeky pals, made harder when Abby falls for Teal, a sweet, bespectacled Dungeon Master—and Shasta threatens to steal him away.

The art is gorgeous: bold, fluid lines, captivating, expressive characters. The story is realistic and compelling. I remember there was a flurry of favorable blog reviews for Larson’s Gray Horses two years ago, but the story left me nonplussed. Chiggers makes up it. There is some of Gray Horses’ whimsy in the mysterious sparks Shasta seems to attract, but the main focus is Abby’s struggle to navigate the treacherous waters of adolescent society and find happiness in herself. Recommended for middle school on up.

You can read a preview of Chiggers online at New York Magazine and an interview with Hope Larson at Comic Book Resources.