Sandpiper, short take on

I found this to be a quick read, mainly because Wittlinger (again) does a great job with the voice of her characters. Sandpiper is the third of her books I've read and they are all compulsively READABLE and cover important issues without being heavy-handed or didactic. They are real.

Oral sex is addressed without vulgarity, open and honestly, though I was a little surprised to have that in my face BOOM! so soon on page two. Piper is aware of her sexual power -- and how it changes her relationship with her dad, his inability to deal. I've never read that in a book before.

Piper's poems were believably from a teenager's pen and relevant. Not syrupy. I liked the nods to other poets.

The only thing that irked me were Derek's corny lines. The note he left: "It's your turn now, Sandy. See you soon!" He talks like a Soc from The Outsiders.

The dawnzer is a lamp. It gives lee light.

NPR did an interview with Beverly Cleary, who grew up in Portland, Oregon and based many of her books there. Yay Portland!

FYI: The children's library in Portland's Central Library (one of my favorite buildings) is dedicated to Cleary and there's a sculpture garden in Grant Park with Ramona, Henry Huggins and Ribsy.

What's your favorite Beverly Cleary book?

I've always loved Socks (because it's about a cat and I liked how they cleaned Socks up after his fight and forgot about their dumb baby for a while) (you see, I've NEVER been a baby person) but my favorite Ramona was always Ramona Quimby, Age 8 when she got a whole egg broken on her head. I still have all my old Dell Yearling paperbacks, $2.50 a pop.

May Announcement

Votes are in!

The May book is Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins.

BTW, I finished Looking for Alaska last night and added a comment on that post if you want to comment. If you are a commenting sort of person.

Tally up the votes!

Looking for a movie?

According to IMDB.com, Looking for Alaska is going to be a movie. I still haven't read it, but when I do, I fully intend to join the message boards and argue about whom should play Miles.

Did I use "whom" correctly there?

Also, courtesy Bookslut.com, here's an article about sex in YA books. I sell lots of these books at work -- those young Southern Belles gotta get their info somewhere...

That time again

POLL OVER!

Among May's possible books is the 2005 Newbery Medal winner, Criss Cross.

Discussion for Sandpiper begins April 15th.

Recommendations: YA books that are really long

I have an 11-year-old friend who is consuming books like teenage boys consume pizza. She's looking for book recommendations, and her mom is hoping they'll be long enough to keep her busy for longer than a day. She loves just about anything she reads. Some favorites: The Tale of Desperaux, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Wicked, and she just finished The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. I'm pretty sure she's already read the Redwall series, and she went through all the Harry Potters in about a month. Any ideas to keep her busy?

The Final Reckoning

Be sure to vote for the April book -- scroll down a couple entries. That poll will close in a day or two.

Planning ahead

Poll over!

Sendak's Opera ready to go -

Sendak reads from Brundibar (NYTimes).

Did anyone read it? I'd love to see the opera.

For the few

As far as I know, only three people read Black Hole. I debated not doing a poll, but I want to see how it comes out.

That was quick

The March book is Looking for Alaska!

NOTE: Be sure to get the copy by John Green, not the book of the same title by Peter Jenkins. You want the book about Alaska the person, not Alaska the great wiiiiide wiiiiild whiiiiiiite way.

ADDENDUM: I just realized this book is set in Birmingham, AL; I'll let you all know if Green's representation of setting is accurate -- ie. sweltering and gross.

I court not the votes of the fickle mob. - Horace

Okay, some explanation is in order.

First of all, Eunice's bribe did not come into my possession by the agreed time. As a result, Criss Cross is not on the list.

Really, though, I thought about it and with all the Newbery hubbubble, figured it would be somewhat difficult to get our hands on copies of the book. Library hold lists are long and even if you wanted to purchase a copy, bookstores are likely to be out of stock (if they carried it at all) and backorders will be in effect. So, I did the drawing as I normally do, no shenanigans, and Criss Cross did not pop up; it will remain on the wish list. Reardless, the books we are voting between look wonderful and I'm having a hard time deciding which to vote for.

Non-Amazon Reviews:
+ An Innocent Soldier at Arthur Levine and The Horn Book.
+ Looking for Alaska at Teenreads.com and at Reading Rants.
+ The Wish List at Bookmunch.

News from Bloomers

Bloomers called me out of the wild blue to ask me to see a play with her, since David skived off last minute. She wanted to prod me on my way to a new job, and we got a chance to talk a little about the ALA committee. She is very excited about Criss Cross. And she has a pair of those ear bag warmer things. I know that's a random detail, but can you see her? Ear bags! She managed the earrings and the ear bags with surprisingly deft fingers.

Two important things to share:

1. She expressed, once again, how much she loved having us Simmons grads in her classes, what a good group we were, etc. She sends her love.

2. She's a Grandma!! At last! Wee Jacob came early, and healthy despite the earliness.

The Winners

Here, find listed all the winners and honor books for the 2006 ALSC Awards. Lynne Rae Perkins (Criss Cross) and Chris Raschka (The Hello, Goodbye Window, written by Norton Juster) got the early Monday morning phone calls this year. Both these books were on Bloomers's list; I wonder if she wanted them to win?

Actually, the Horn Book ALA Awards site has nicer formatting and it explains each medal with a blurb.

Please feel free to add whatever looks interesting to the Wish List. I will set up a poll for March's book later this week.

A new award debuted this year, the Theodor Seuss Geisel Medal. It recognizes the best beginning reader books.

Winner:
Henry and Mudge and the Great Grandpas written by Cynthia Rylant and illustrated by Sucie Stevenson (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)

A Hole That Is Black

Ahhh, Black Hole. A black hole, indeed. I found this book disturbing, fascinating, intriguing, and freaky, all at the same time. I couldn’t put it down, but almost in a car-accident-and-I’m-rubbernecking kind of way. This is going to be a diarrhea post. I’m just going to say everything that’s on my mind about the book. Feel free to start your own post if you want to steer the discussion in one particular direction, especially one that I’ve not considered.

• The characters seemed pretty consistent. I felt for Keith and his earnestness.
• I wanted more of a story that followed the beginning, middle, and end rules. Is the ending of Keith’s story (cuddling with Eliza in the motel, exchanging “I love you”s, and then he says “I’m gone”) and Chris’s story (floating in the water, alone on the beach) copouts for Burns? Do the endings mean anything? Do the readers deserve more? Do we deserve to know more about what happens to these two, what decisions they make regarding their future? They are both in limbo, in an unstable state, when we leave them. That might be purposeful (their whole lives are unstable), but I was curious to know more, to know how they survived and how they lived.
• The story jumped around a little too much. I think we could have seen some of the flashback scenes as they were really happening, instead of as they were remembered in a character’s mind. I think I could definitely tell that this was pieced together over a time period instead of written from beginning to end, as most novels. Also, looking back, I’m a little confused about the order of events. In the second “chapter,” Keith finds a female skin in the woods. In the third chapter, Chris appears to be living in the woods already and sheds her skin. But those events seem totally out of order (in the next chapter or two, Chris goes skinny dipping and doesn’t even realize she’s showing symptoms of the bug). Is this just a result of the piecing-together, or did I miss the significance?
• Even though it’s a graphic novel, it still needed to be proofread. There were misspellings (Rob’s last name is spelled two different ways), misplaced commas, missing commas, incorrect possessives (“it’s” instead of “its”), etc., that I found a little distracting.
• The whole book was extremely sexual, with all the vaginal imagery and the actual sex scenes. Even the slit in the frog’s body at the very beginning was extremely sexual. I’m sure the significance of the imagery is that “the bug” was passed through sexual contact, but is there more significance than that? Just that everything comes back to sex, to intimacy, to the human body? There was some phallic imagery, too, if I recall, but certainly not as much as the vaginal stuff (the cut on Chris’s foot that keeps coming back).
• Did Keith know what he was doing when he slept with Eliza? Did he realize that her tail was a symptom of the bug, or did he just think she was “different”? Was he so desperate for love/affection/belonging/getting laid that he willingly “caught” the bug?
• When Eliza was telling Keith how she came to live with those guys in the house and then have her artwork trashed (which she did herself), she was saying how she couldn’t bear to live with her stepdad for another year. So we hear about the different options she tried, including sleeping in the woods with friends. And then one frame shows her come across a guy strung up on a tree, dead (leading to her decision of not living in the woods). What was the significance of that? I had thought all the weirdness of the skeletal figures was that one guy (Rick – and they were probably harmless?) and all the murders were Dave. So did that murdered guy in the tree mean anything? Also, at the beginning of the book, the people around the campfire are talking about how that one girl Lana disappeared and how Roy found that arm. But that was before Dave was obsessed with Chris, so were there really other murders going on in the woods? If there was more than just what Dave did, I felt like I didn’t know enough about it and I was cheated a little bit.
• I found the AIDS metaphor pretty real and current today, with the alienation, the thought that it could never happen to you (the way Keith’s friends are making fun of the yearbook they find), the need to escape but yet not really being able to... Did it simplify the disease at all?
• Was the love between Chris and Rob real? Was the love between Keith and Eliza real? Were they all just desperate to find someone who would accept them, someone who would love them, someone who was also sick, someone who wouldn’t judge them, someone with whom they could escape?

I know that’s a lot to muddle through, but this book is a lot to digest. So I’m just throwing it all out there. Anyone care to pick up a topic and discuss?

Go Bloomers, go!

Here's the booktalk list. She must have listed them in the order she presented them, which must have been nice for her audience. Of course, one can only wonder what her segues could have been, because this list doesn't seem to have a useful order.
Enjoy, dears.

Transformations in Style and Content: Selected Children’s Books of Distinction in 2005

Banyai, Istvan. The Other Side. Chronicle.

Juster, Norton. The Hello, Goodbye Window. Illustrated by Chris Raschka. Hyperion.

Myers, Christopher. Lies and Other Tall Tales. Collected by Zora Neale Hurston. HarperCollins.

Grey, Mini. Traction Man is Here! Knopf.

Meddaugh, Susan. The Witch’s Walking Stick. Houghton.

Philobolus. The Human Alphabet. Photos by John Kane. Roaring Brook.

Woodson, Jacqueline. Show Way. Illustrated by Hudson Talbott. Putnam.

Lester, Julius. The Old African. Illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. Dial.

Lester, Julius. Days of Tears. Hyperion.

Nelson, Marilyn. A Wreath for Emmett Till. Houghton.

Barbour, Karen. Mr. Williams. Holt.

Sidman, Joyce. Song of the Water Boatman and Other Pond Poems. Illustrated by Beckie Prange. Houghton.

Rosen, Michael. Michael Rosen’s Sad Book. Illustrated by Quentin Blake. Candlewick.

Poole, Josephine. Anne Frank. Illustrated by Angela Barrett. Knopf.

Muth, Jon. Zen Shorts. Scholastic.

Say, Allen. The Kamishibai Man. Houghton.

Young, Ed. Beyong the Great Mountais: A Visual Poem about China. Chronicle.

Shulevitz, Uri. The Travels of Benjamin Tudela. Farrar.

Bartoletti, Susan. Hitler Youth. Scholastic.

Erdich, Louise. The Game of Silence. HarperCollins.

Lanagan, Margo. Black Juice. HarperCollins.

Zevin, Gabrielle. Elsewhere. Farrar.

Gerstein, Mordecai. The Old Country. Roaring Brook.

Birdsall, Jeanne. The Penderwicks. Knopf.

McKay, Hilary. Permanent Rose. McElderry.

Yancey, Rick. The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp. Bloomsbury.

Perkins, Lynn Rae. CrissCross. Greenwillow.

Lynch, Chris. Inexcusable. Atheneum.

Partridge, Elizabeth. John Lennon: All I Want is the Truth. Viking.

Marsalis, Wynton. Jazz ABZ. Illustrations by Paul Rodgers. Candlewick.

Sabuda, Robert, and Matthew Reinhart. Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs. Candlewick.

Seeger, Laura Vaccaro. Walter Was Worried. Roaring Brook.

Jenkins, Emily. That New Animal. Illustrated by Pierre Pratt. Farrar.

Best, Cari. Are You Going to Be Good? Illustrated by G. Brian Karas. Farrar.

Bee, William. Whatever. Candlewick.

Agee, John. Terrific. Hyperion.

Girmay, Aracelis. changing, changing. George Braziller.

Votes are In

...or at least six of them are, and that's a great turnout!

February's book is Full Service by Will Weaver, one of The Horn Book's Best Books of 2005.

Embarrasingly, the only other book on the list I've even looked at is Prehistoric Actual Size by Steve Jenkins, though I plan to read Hilary McKay's third Casson family book Permanent Rose and The Minister's Daughter by Julie Hearn. I may add one of those to the Wish List...

My copy of Black Hole arrived yesterday (along with the ReadyMade book, hooray hooray) and that is one solid chunk of a tome! Not as thick as Blankets but quite substantial. Can't wait to start.

Aack!

It IS January (!) so we need to get a February book chosen ASAP! There are eleven books on the wish list. The three that were randomly pulled (see here):



To offset the Amazon bent, here are some other blurbs about the books from Teenreads.com:

+ Full Service
+ Going, Going
+ Zazoo

I'm looking forward to the new year and chatting books up with our two new members! (Can you introduce yourselves?)

Any thoughts on the best book we read this year? I have to say Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place and So B. It top my list.

Voting time - Autobiography of My Dead Brother

(Lingo taken from Slang of the Fifties.)