Merry Wanderer of the Night [Search results for better world books] 

Maybe something else good came out of Sleeping Naked is Green, or maybe this is something I've been thinking about for awhile and the book just got me thinking about actually doing something about it. I read. A lot. And I buy a lot of books, which means my paper use is astronomical. I mean really, I look around my house and I see it everywhere. So how do I reconcile the fact that I use all of this paper but still consider myself a green activist?

One way to think about it is that everyone has their vice. Some people have gas guzzlers, some people buy a lot of coffee at Starbucks and use the paper cups instead of bringing their own, and some people buy a lot of imported foods. I just happen to be a reader, and if it wasn't this it would be something else. But that doesn't mean there aren't things I can do to make my vice, say, my hobby, a little nicer on the environment. I have some ideas on how I can do this, and maybe you have some ideas too (I'd love to hear them!).

Here are few things I'm asking myself to do.
1. Simply buy less books. Only buy books you know you will read, no matter how discounted they are, what deal is going on, or how popular a book is. Do your research before you buy, and keep a list of books you hear about. If you continually return to that book as something you want to read then go for it.
2. Buy books used whenever possible, and if the book is unavailable in a local used bookstore but you still want to buy it, order it from a company that has green shipping like Better World Books. Used books are just fantastic. They're usually cheaper, they're better for the environment because it's recycling, and used bookstores are just fun to browse. I've also found that almost anything that is a year old or more can be found on Better World Books, which is a great organization. They have eco-friendly shipping and they help fund global literacy!
3. Use that library card. For books I want to read once, or I'm not sure I want to buy, I need to start using the library. There are so many books I have that I shouldn't have bought. I just read them once, I'm never going to look at them again, I just wanted to read the story and now I'm done. Why did I not use the library?
4. Sell, give away, or donate books that I am no longer using. I might try to give away some of my books on here, and then whatever is left I'll try to sell and donate the remainders. I'm just sick of some of these books taking up space in my house, and even if I don't get anything out of them (monetarily) I would still love to have that extra space and now I'm not wasting the book.
5. Walk or bike to the bookstore and library. If I'm able to obtain the book in Iowa City than it's best to get there without a car. If I do go to the bookstore in the car, then I need to put it with my other car errands/work.

What are some of your ideas for greening your reading?

This week the geeks were asked to assess their hoarding behavior - specifically:

Share with us your habits, tendencies or obsessions when it comes to hoarding behavior.

• Post a photo (or two or three) of your books to-be-read
• Share your buying or book accumulating habits - how bad of a problem do YOU have?!?!?
• Do you keep all the books you've read, or do you give them away or sell them?
• Can you walk past a bookstore and not go in? If you go in, do you impulsively purchase?

Bart from Bart's Bookshelf did a photo montage of his TBR books and 'fessed up that he buys about two books for every one he reads. He also laughed at the idea of walking past a bookstore without entering!

Trisha from Eclectic Eccentric showed us an amazing collection of books in her library. She admits she is obsessive (she apparently came home with more than 100 books from the BEA!), but she is working on it - giving away books to her library and getting ready to sell some in a garage sale. Trisha's TBR pile numbers around 535 - whew, I feel better already!

Kerrie from Mysteries in Paradise created an awesome graphic for her Mount TBR (which would provide her with great reading for about 10 years). Kerrie has a great attitude towards her hoarding behavior - she refuses to feel guilty!

Molly from the Restless Reader doesn't limit her hoarding behavior to just books - she collects magazines too. But living in a small apartment in NYC helps her keep things under control!

Zee from Notes from the North stores her books all over the world! She seems to have inherited her hoarding behavior from her parents who apparently have a library in the thousands...

Iris from Iris on Books writes:

My dream, ever since I was a little girl, has been to have a huge library of books when I grew up. And since I started living on my own, I seem to have made an effort to fulfil that dream. I am not quite ready to give it up.
And Melissa at The Blog of Melissa Pilakowski has a great motivation to hoard books:

Unlike my other hoarding obsessions—sunglasses, shoes, office supplies, costume jewelry—collecting books does come with a perk. As a teacher, I get a tax deduction every April for the books I put in my classroom library.
Check out the great stacks of books posted on Erotic Horizon, The Book Coop, and It's All About Books.

All the entries were wonderful - if you haven't already done so, please go visit them (you can find all the links here).

Thank you to all who played along this week - I know I, for one, felt so much better knowing my problem is not all that bad!!

So, I wasn't going to say anything about the WSJ article. I said my piece on Twitter, I've read many, many posts about the subject and kind of felt that everyone had said all their was to say about the subject and said it very well.

BUT

Then, I started noticing that there are a lot of people rebutting the rebuttal. There are people defending her article and I listened to her defend herself on a radio show (you can listen here) . She talks about how she comes across as anti-reading. She's sad that people are saying that parents do not have the right to have a say in what their kids read.

I don't think that. I don't think that at all.

I'm very anti-censorship. I'm very, very anti-censorship. BUT a parent has the right, has the complete right to be involved in what their children are reading. A parent has the right to make an informed and educated decision with their child and decide that a child isn't emotionally ready for a particular book. That is your right as a parent. A mother called in on the radio show with Meghan and said that she was horrified to learn that her 10 year old daughter and her friends were reading Breaking Dawn and she told her daughter that she was not allowed to read it. So she completely supports the WSJ article. But here's the thing. That book was not written for a 10 year old audience. Stephenie Meyer herself mentioned that she wouldn't let her youngest son read her book because she thought he was too young for it, even though he had read the other Twilight books. You are the parent. You have that right with your own child.

I read those #YASaves tweets on Twitter. I tweeted my own. I was a part of that Twitter conversation for hours. This debate is not about censorship. Not the way you mean. This debate is about whether these books are being written because they 'sell'. To you, this is a debate about consumerism. That because these books are edgy, daring, and gritty, people are reading them. And even though I know the odds of you reading this are slim, I'm here to tell you that YOU ARE WRONG.

Books like Scars, Thirteen Reasons Why, Shine, But I Love Him, and those other books dealing with 'dark' subject matter are not written OR read because they are 'edgy'. They are written and they are read because they save lives. The Twitter hashtag was NOT about why it's cool to read Young Adult novels, was not simply about why people read those dark and gritty novels. Did you read any of those tweets? Did you pay attention to the hashtag? YASaves. SAVES. Those tweets were heartfelt out pourings of emotions. Those tweets were people coming together and talking about which YA books SAVED THEIR LIVES. I'm not talking about books that kept them from being bored, or got them better grades in school. Some of those 'dark' and 'lurid' books out there that you are so quick to brush off as commercial and unnecessary are saving the lives of teenagers EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

THAT is why people got so upset about your article. To me, it's pretty obvious that you are pro-reading. You are a children's book reviewer and you are actually taking the time to talk about books. You are pro-reading. But you are anti-reality. Your condescending comments about how people 'claim' that these darker toned YA books 'validate' the teenage experience clearly illustrate that you don't get it. As does your radio interview where you talk about how surprised you are to be attacked by so many people about this subject.

You claim that your post was merely a way to point out the 'trend' in YA that wasn't there 30 or 40 years ago, that you were simply making a calm and rational argument, to announce the trend. But that isn't true. Not entirely. If that's all you were doing, you would not have linked vampire themed novels with books dealing with self-harm and suicide. Because they are very, very different kinds of books, very different kinds of dark. So what you have done, is not say that you are anti-book or anti-reading. What you have done is say that you would rather live in a world like the 50s, where bad things happened every single day, but no one talked about it. The main difference between now and then is not that it happens more often now, but that now people TALK about it. People come forward and say I am stronger than the silence.

Meghan, I want you to send an email to these authors you are brushing off as unimportant and commercially sensational. These authors you have condescendingly claimed try to validate the teenage experience. Ask them. Ask them to share with you their reader response. Ask THEM what teens are telling them about the impact of their book. You are going to hear something from them. Something that should soften your heart and open your mind. Each of these authors who write these books you call dark and lurid are going to tell you that they have received letter upon letter, year after year, day after day thanking them because their book saved their life.

These books are SAVING LIVES. So, send a letter or email to Cherly Rainfield (that's her own arm on the cover of Scars you know. That book is written through her experiences and her own pains.) Talk to Laurie Halse Anderson, Ellen Hopkins, Sherman Alexie, Chris Crutcher, Stephanie Kuuehnert and Jay Asher. Do you know what the common theme you are going to find? Redemption. Hope. LIFE. These books save lives. Not in the arbitrary or abstract. In REALITY. People pick up these books, realize they are not alone and they seek help. They stop their destructive behaviors. They tell the truth. They LIVE.

THAT is why the YA Universe is so upset about your article. NOT because we think parents don't have the right to have a say in what their kids read. NOT because we think that every single book is a perfect fit for every single kid. NOT because we think you think that no one should be allowed to read anything other than rainbows and lollipops. NOT because we enjoy depravity and get thrills from reading books about disparity. People are upset because you don't GET it. You are missing the point. The justification isn't that these books 'validate' the teen experience. These books ARE the teen experience.

These books teach teens that they are not alone, that their experiences are valid, that the bad things that have happened to them are NOT THEIR FAULT, that there is still hope, that things get better. These books help these kids hold on, seek help, and they teach compassion. I have never been bullied. But, because of books like Thirteen Reasons Why I am able to understand what bullying does to a kid and you had better believe that I'm going to pass that lesson along to my own

Meghan, before you condemn an entire body of writing, you should talk to the people who write it and the people they are trying to reach. Maybe, instead of simply defending your stance and trying to prove that you really are in the 'right' here, you should try listening to what the people are saying. These books save lives. Real lives of real kids. If this is really your opinion, and you are going to stand by it this strongly, maybe you should be the one to talk, individually, to these writers, like Cheryl, who write from personal experience, and go to these teenagers, individually whose lives have been saved by the powerful messages they've read and tell them that it's too dark. Tell them that their experiences don't really belong in books. And then you can come back and tell us that you still believe you are in the right. Listen to teenagers, the very people you feel you are trying to protect tell you why this book is necessary and then come back and tell me that this book that is saving lives isn't really good enough. Try it. I dare you.

I that Vasilly had done a post on what books she had to read this semester at her blog 1330v. I thought this was such a great idea I had to steal the idea to use here! I'm taking seven classes this semester but two of them are business classes and therefor not really that interesting, so I'll just skip those books (the classes are Nonprofit Organizational Effectiveness I and Foundations of Entrepreneurship in case you were wondering).

I'm taking a class called Film and Literature that is all about visual essays. For this class we're going to watch a film essay every week and have other essays that we read. I was really excited when I saw the book list for this class because it included some books I've wanted to buy for awhile. This includes The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present

and The Lost Origins of the Essay

. These are both humongous essay collections that will take me forever to get through, so I'm really excited I'll be required to read from them this semester. We're also reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South

. I'm not really sure what this one is about other than it deals with sharecroppers from the South. The final book for this class is The Pleasure of the Text

by Roland Barthes. This one appears to be about why people read, it's a very small book, only 80 pages so I'm interested to see what it's about.

The second English class I'm taking is Literature and the Book: Renaissance Texts as Technology. There are no books for this class but we will do a lot of readings online. I'm planning on using my nook to take the pdf's with me to class so I'll be sure to let everyone know how that goes. Even though we don't have books I know we're going to read Shakespeare, Donne, and Spenser, as well as texts about how reading formats have changed. I looked at the syllabus for this class yesterday and we're taking seven field trips!

The final English class I'm taking is Advanced Nonfiction Writing: Nature Writing. An opening just came up in this class yesterday and I was thrilled because I waited all summer for it to happen. I love nature writing and I'm excited to do some of my own. I'm also excited because while this class meets twice a week, only one meeting is actually in a classroom. The other meeting every week is at an outdoor location. For this class we're reading Nature Writing: The Tradition in English

, which appears to be an anthology of nature writing. A quick glance at some of the writers has me excited because they include Thoreau and Annie Dillard who I know I enjoy.

I'm taking an anthropology class that we're using the textbook Introduction to Physical Anthropology

for. I don't have much to say about that one. I'm also taking piano lessons but as far as I know there isn't a book for that yet.

I'd also just like to mention where I purchased the majority of my books. I rent expensive textbooks but for my book for English classes I just Better World Books. I'm mentioning this simply because I support this company. They offer free shipping in the United States and they use the money they get from the books to support global literacy organizations. If you have to buy textbooks anyway you might as well support a great organization as well.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

My personal reading preferences have almost always veered toward the books dealing with tough issues. Even as a kid, these books full of heartache and pain and suffering and hurts drew me. So I thought that this would be a really easy post to write. The 'issue' books are what I'm drawn towards, what I read the most, so it should be really easy to explain why that is. But alas. 'Tis not so.

Because honestly, I can't say exactly why I'm so drawn to these books. I have been reading them since before I really thought about the differences in genres, before I considered that they were 'tough' or 'issue' books. For me, when I was a kid, there were really only types of books, books I hadn't read but really wanted to, books I hadn't read and was so not interested in, and books I read over and over and over and over. I pay much attention to genres until I was a little bit older.

So why do I like these books dealing with such painful subject matter? I don't know, but I have a few ideas. Part of me is drawn to them, because they are not my life. My life isn't perfect, but if you compare it to the rest of the world, even the rest of the United States, I've been blessed. I'm smart, I got good grades, was a good student, never did drugs or drank, didn't hang out with anyone who did either, never got into 'trouble' with a boy, have never been bullied, never went hungry, always had a roof over my head, my parents and I fought a lot and I wasn't very happy as a teenager but I always knew that they really did love me and were there to protect me, and my extended family is huge and incredibly loving, I had some really great friends and I didn't lose anyone really close to me until I was in college when my Grandpa died of cancer. I did struggle with some stuff in high school. My life wasn't perfect, but compared to most, I was in a really good place. And even when I was being a teenager and feeling full of the anger and sadness, I knew that.

So these books that deal with severe drug abuse, eating disorders, neglectful parents, self harm and eating disorders, rape, abuse, death, suicide and more take me to a place completely foreign to me. But I feel it. The emotional connection I have to books like this astound me. And I learn from them. When you have never struggled with something, it is easy to fall into judgment toward those who have. For a variety of reasons, I have never tried drugs or alcohol. At all. And I've never even been tempted. They don't appeal to me in any way, and they never have. I feel like we've reached a point where everyone knows that drugs=SERIOUSLY BAD. So I used to genuinely wonder why anyone would try them. I honestly couldn't understand it. And although I tried really hard not to be judgmental, a tiny part of me was always there thinking, Really? Really? But then, I read (among other things) Ballads of Suburbia by Stephanie Kuehnert. And I could see it. It completely changed the way I saw things and allowed me to safely become part of a world I had never before even glimpsed. It definitely didn't make me want to try drugs, but it made me better able to understand the place mentally and emotionally someone might be in that would make them reach for them.

Abusive relationships are another thing that I didn't understand. Why don't they just leave? I used to think that all the time. All the time. I come from a family of very strong willed women, on both sides, and allowing someone to treat you like last week's garbage is something I couldn't comprehend. I have a cousin whose boyfriend tried to hit her once, and she broke one of those huge old fashioned telephones over his head... But then I started reading books that deal with abusive relationships. And, I can't pretend to truly understand them, even still, and part of my is now pleadingly thinking, Why won't they just leave, but part of me also understands them better now. It's not that easy and the abusers make sure that it's not.

Laurie Halse Anderson has also written some brilliant books. In Speak, Melinda has lost her voice after being raped at a party by a much older boy and the whole school just thinks of her as that annoying little kid who calls the cops, and no one thinks to wonder why. In Twisted, Tyler is 16 and feels like he has the whole world on his shoulders. The back blurb for this one is utterly perfect — Everyone told him to be a man. No one told him how. This is one of the most authentic and real Male POVs written by a woman I've ever read. Wintergirls is a story of a severe eating disorder and LHA captures the deeper emotions perfectly. Eating Disorders aren't really about food or weight, not really. And they are about more than control too. And Anderson manages to capture all of this, to bring it to light and to really make the reader feel everything alongside Lia.

In Homecoming, Dicey's mentally ill mother leaves her four children in a mall parking lot and young Dicey is now responsible for keeping them together, keeping them safe and fed and getting them to someone who can help. When She Hollers is about a thirteen year old girl who is being raped by her stepfather and her mother doesn't want to see it. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is about life on an Indian Reservation and what happens when you try to straddle both worlds only to find that you now belong in neither place. Want to Go Private? warns about the dangers of internet predators and can be applied to predators in all areas of life.

Other books like Revolution or Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie deal with the death or illness of a younger brother, something that terrifies me, because I have four of them. The Sky is Everywhere is about the sudden death of a beloved older sister, something else that I have. In If I Stay, Mia's whole family is suddenly killed in a car accident, leaving her to make the choice to stay alone or leave to join them. In Jellicoe Road, nearly every character has something going on that makes your heart ache. In Saving Francesca, Francesca needs to learn how to cope with depression, both her mother's and her own. Tom in The Piper's Son has had a really crappy couple of years and he's in a really bad place when the book starts that he needs to find his way out of. Where the Red Fern Grows, my absolute favorite book from childhood makes me sob every time those dogs die.

I suppose throughout writing this post I've answered my own question. I'm drawn to these books for two reasons. One, because I've never lived through anything like this and these books allow me to talk a walk through someone else's shoes for a while, to gain a better understanding and appreciation for what they went through. But also, and this is probably the stronger of the two, I read these books because they make me feel. Nothing wrings out my emotions so thoroughly like reading about the struggles and challenges of a character in a truly well written book. My emotions get so completely tied into these stories that I genuinely mourn the lost characters, my heart aches with their pains, and I am well and truly saddened when I close the book because these people who I have suffered with aren't actually real.

Stories that make me feel that strongly are always my favorites. There is something special about a book that can make me cry, those gulping heaving sobs that are so incredibly unattractive, that unashamed and completely broken crying. A lot of books make me tear up, or sniffle, even cry almost pretty for a page or two. But it takes a special kind of book, a unique strength to the characters, the writing and the storytelling to completely break me. And those are the stories that stay with me for the longest. Those are the stories that I love. And that is why I love these books dealing with heavy topics, why I'm drawn to issue books, the tough stuff. Because it's raw and real and emotional and so completely ready to become a part of me.

For the second day of Book Blogger Appreciation Week I was paired with Melody of Melody's Reading Corner to do an interview swap. Melody's blog is new to me but I'm excited to start reading it more regularly! Here are Melody's answers to my questions.

Ash: Do you like to eat or drink anything while you read?
Melody: While I’d love to munch on snacks (my favourite snack is chips!) and drink green tea while reading, I try not to do so whenever I can as there is the risk of dirtying my books.

Ash: We've read a few of the same books this year and I noticed some of them were YA titles. Why do you think adults are attracted to reading young adult books? What attracts you to them?
Melody: There was once a bookstore assistant who asked me why I read YA books when I should be reading adult theme books. Her question had sparked some thoughts in me then and I remember telling her this: “I enjoy reading books. Books, to me are a great escapism and also another channel where I can broaden my horizons. I believe we have things to learn and think about from any books, no matter if it is a literary fiction or a children’s book. Also, I find some YA books cover important topics and contain some wonderful messages and I like it that they create awareness and make young adults think.”
I am not sure about other readers, but I do think my above reply are just some of the few reasons why adults would pick up YA books and read them.

Ash: I noticed in your review guidelines you said you do not read nonfiction or memoir. What turns you away from those genres?
Melody: I used to read non-fiction and memoirs some years back, but they have all taken a back seat since the day I started my blog and reading so many wonderful reviews on fictions. I have a huge TBR pile due to that and thus my current main focus is on them. I will still read a non-fiction or memoir from time to time, but that will have to depend if the topic interests me or not.

Ash: You've been blogging for a long time! About four years it looks like. How has the blogging world changed since you started and how have you changed as a blogger? What do you recommend other bloggers do to create such great longevity?
Melody: I started blogging in July 2006, and at that time I was not aware of the book blogging community. I started my blog because I think it is an excellent place where I can record the books I read and how I felt about them without misplacing it like a journal. At that time, I didn’t even care if anyone read it until I received my very first comment from a fellow blogger. It then made me realise that there are people who read my blog and from there onwards, I strive to work hard on my writing. And as for the rest, as they say, is history.

Besides the above, I have to say being a blogger has definitely widen my reading horizons as there are so many wonderful bookbloggers and recommendations out there, waiting for my exploration! It is through reading these blogs that made me read out of my comfort zone, and I cannot imagine how many books I have missed during my pre-blogging days! That said, it is always better to be late than never, right?

As for ways for creating longevity for blogs, I don’t have any good recommendations except that to blog whatever you like and also to take some time in visiting and commenting on other blogs. After all what other ways to start a friendship other than saying hello and reading a new book blog you have visited? That said, I need to remind myself to comment as much as possible but sometimes, it sure is hard when you have about 250+ blogs to read and you can only read and comment so much in a day, but I will try to remedy that!

Ash: Is there any specific message you want your readers to take away from your blog?
Melody: Have fun and be yourself.


Ash: What are your three favorite books you've read in the past year?
Melody: Just three? That’s a hard one since I had read a few good books in the past year. Anyway, here are just a few which I loved (not in any order):

1) Ritual by Mo Hayder
2) Skin by Mo Hayder (Now can you tell I’m a huge fan of her?)
3) Fallen Skies by Philippa Gregory
4) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
5) The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
6) The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
7) Sweethearts by Sara Zarr
8) The Lost Hours by Karen White
9) Stolen by Lucy Christopher
>10) The Ghost Writer by John Harwood

I could go on and on, but I think listing 10 books will suffice (after all I have added 7 books instead of listing only three to the list, haven’t I?).


Ash: Are you from a family of readers, or is reading something that sets you apart from other people in your family?
Melody: This is sad but true that I am the only reader in my family. My parents read the papers but rarely books, and as for my husband he mostly read books which are related to his work. My younger sister doesn’t have the interest of reading books, so that left only me. Though they are not as much as a voracious reader as I, they are supportive of my reading habits (read: buying books and occupying much of our room space) and I am thankful for that.


Ash: If you were to start a blog about anything besides books, what would it be?
Melody: I absolutely have no idea! Frankly speaking, I cannot think of anything else besides blogging about books and my reading. I don’t think anyone would want to read about my personal life anyway, haha.

You can read my answers to Melody's questions at her blog, Melody's Reading Corner!

Today, our Memory Monday guest is Jennifer Sommersby. I've been chatting with Jenn on Twitter for a while now, I absolutely love reading her blog and she is just so much fun to talk to. I was so excited when she told me that she liked my Memory Monday posts and that she would be willing to participate! So, her she is folks! Here's Jenn!

Bio: Jennifer Sommersby's first book, a YA urban fantasy about a circus-dwelling, 17-year-old girl who learns that she is heir to a 3000-year-old magical book, is called Sleight: Book One of the AVRA-K. An American ex-pat, she lives in the Great White North (western Canada) with her family and collection of pets.
Memories: When Ashley so graciously invited me to write a piece for Memory Mondays, my mind was set aflutter. Talk about a book that made an impact on me as a kid? There were so many! I decided, rather than to break it down to just one, that I would cover a few with relating anecdotes to illuminate the joy that books brought to me as a wee, word-hungry ankle biter.

We all love Dr. Seuss (and if you don’t, you might want to see someone about that). Who doesn’t have a special place for the man who was first credited with use of the word nerd? I mean, GENIUS, people! Despite the fact that Seuss had a decades-long affair outside of his marriage, a tryst that eventually led to his wife’s suicide and his nuptials to his lover a year following his wife’s death, Seuss was a wordsmith of unmatched prowess. He understood words and sounds in a way that has revolutionized the learning-to-read process for generations of kids. My favorites? The Lorax and The Sneetches. And for my thirty-eighth birthday, my BFF bought me Oh! The Places You’ll Go. Perfect present for ALL occasions, especially for
high school and college graduates. Oh, and people turning thirty-eight. It’s so inspiring, though be warned—it can trigger wanderlust.

My mom bought me the coolest set of science books (nerd alert!), the series called “Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science.” Did you guys have those? I don’t know how many were published, but I had at least a dozen—and I still have them on the shelf in my son’s bedroom. Titles such as A Drop of Blood, Flash Crash Rumble and Roll, and Your Skin and Mine survived through my childhood, that of my little sister (who is now twenty-seven), and all of my kids, inviting us to investigate topics that aren’t otherwise covered in novels or TV shows or, nowadays, video games. I spent endless hours going through these books, feeling very smart because I learned how a scab formed and about the mechanics of thunderstorms and why some kids had darker skin than me (not tough considering I have had a sickly pall to my skin pretty much my entire life). I was a know-it-all as a kid. That continues until today, thanks to these books.

And on to fiction. I seem to have an affinity for it. But it’s sort of funny how it started, beyond my obsession with my sister’s sky-blue Smith-Corona electric typewriter. (“Clickity-clicky — click!” went the keys…). I had this thing for small books. Not the page count, necessarily, but the actual physical size of the book. The smaller, the better. I liked small things: closets that could be made into hideouts, picnic tables covered in blankets to make my own house, that cabin Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer stays in with Yukon Cornelius and the elf who wants to be a dentist. The Audubon Field Guide to North American Birds, Western Region, while not fiction, was narrow and thin and fit in a pocket, perfect for field work. Did I read it? No. Did the size make me happy? Yes. Well, that and its awesome orange vinyl cover.

Sorry. Digressing again. My mom—she was never stingy with buying me books—picked up a series of classics in paperback form, and the dimensions of the books themselves couldn’t have been more than 4x4 inches. They were these little squares of literary history, and I read them because…I liked their shape. Around the World in Eighty Days was my favorite, although Little Women came in close second. (Oh, don’t even get me started on how my BFF Beth Ann and I would act out the parts from Louisa May Alcott’s ageless tale—she was Meg, the well-mannered, polite, always proper young lady; I was, and am to this day, Jo—feisty, word — loving, dreamy Jo.) I read Gulliver’s Travels and Treasure Island and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and all as a side effect of my attachment to the shape of the books. Weird, I know. If anyone’s good with past-life regression or Jungian psychology, perhaps you have a theory about my affection for small things.

No discussion of influential childhood books would be complete without a shout-out to Beverly Cleary. The elementary school I went to, Alameda Grade, in Portland, Oregon, was situated in the very neighborhood where some of Cleary’s stories were set. I used to ride my bike and roller skate up and down Klickitat Street, just like Henry Huggins, as my house was only a few blocks away. I must’ve been nine or ten when Cleary visited our school for Literacy Day (Ezra Jack Keats of The Snowy Day fame visited one year, as well). The whole school dressed up as characters from any one of Cleary’s novels and marched through the
neighborhood with Mrs. Cleary our Mistress of Ceremonies for the day’s events. It was a big to-do, obviously. Thirty-odd years later, I’m still talking about it. Thank you, Beverly, for being such a big part of my childhood!

And my last mention for Memory Monday—I would feel disloyal if I didn’t pay homage— Judy Blume. Need I say more? For those of you born in the late ’80s or the ’90s, maybe you haven’t discovered Blume’s genius. She wrote whimsical, fun stories for younger readers: Superfudge, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Freckle Juice. Her books for older readers (Deenie, Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret, Blubber, Forever) told stories in which the characters asked and answered questions I was too embarrassed or afraid to address. Her protagonists faced real-world hardships that were engrossing and often heartrending. I read and re-read many of her titles as I went from that tomboy climbing trees and riding BMX bikes to the pre-teen and teenager who cared about Guess jeans and what Mickey S. thought of her new haircut.

It is still amazing to me, the influence that books have had on my life. They’re like a good friend, always there waiting to be called upon, and as cliché as that sounds, books don’t care how bitchy I am or if my hair is a mess and in need of a color, or if I’ve filed the taxes for the year or unloaded the dishwasher. Books don’t judge if I didn’t donate enough to the food drive or if I screamed at that stupid woman in traffic (she totally deserved it…just sayin’). The consumption of books, and now the creation of my own books, are constants in a life that is forever in a state of flux. Life won’t be nearly long enough for me to get my fill of good
stories. I’m guessing you feel the same way, or you wouldn’t be here visiting Ashley’s terrific blog. Thanks for the chat. Now, go READ something!
Thank you so much Jenn! I loved this post! So much! If any of you readers are interested in guest posting for Memory Monday, in my blog!

I love Contemporary fiction. That should be a given. I'm hosting a month long event devoted entirely to Contemporary and I talk about it. All the time. So telling you why it is that I love Contemporary should be easy, right? A no brainer? When something is your favorite, you should be able to talk about why, right?

And yet... I find myself unable to really put my finger on exactly why it is that I love Contemporary so much. I've tried before and everything I've said is true. For me, Contemporary is more emotional, it's more connective and more believable. But really, when it comes right down to it — I don't really have a specific reason I can lay out for you. I just... like it better.

I read books because I love them. And a large part of why I love to read is because they make me feel. And Contemporary makes me feel more than any other genre. But more than that, what it makes me feel is more real. When I read an intense dystopian, I'm horrified, my heart pounds and you get that 'peek through the fingers' feeling. But when I put the book down, I know that this is a world created by an author to taunt and torment and terrify and I take comfort that no matter how screwed up my world is, at least it's not there yet. It's the same with a fantasy novel. Voldemort loses his ability to incite terror once I've put the book down and remember that nasty snake things can't actually be reborn from the blood of their magical enemies.

But with Contemporary, I don't have that. I'm not offered that way out, because a truly well written Contemporary is writing about real life. It might not be your real life, but on some level, it's life for some of us and it could be life for one of us. Kids get abducted, abused, hurt, bullied and tormented every single day. I can't take brush off the sad/mad/righteous rage/wrath/vengeful madness that comes after reading a Contemporary book about a parent hurting their children because it's 'only happening in a book' because it isn't only happening in a book. The horrors of drug addiction, manipulation, death eating disorders, low self worth, suicide don't go away just because I set the book down. They are part of our world, whether we like it or not and that means that the feelings I get while reading those books stick around, long after the book has been put away.

But it's not just the sad, hurtful or angry emotions that linger either. There are some books out there so incredibly full of love and life and light and hope that it simply fills my whole being. Most of those books have suffering or problems in them too. And that's okay. That's life. Everyone has suffered something at some point, at many points. But the struggles and the hurts aren't always the focal point of the story. Some of these books where love is the overwhelming emotion just slay me. And I'm not even talking romantic love (although that has it's place too).

Contemporary is just... more. Often, the fantasy or dystopian novels are more intense, more pulse racing, heart bounding, flip through the pages so fast because you are holding your breath until you know what happens next and you are running out of oxygen and OHMYGOODNESS just let me find out what happens next!!!! And I love that feeling. Don't get me wrong. I LOVE it. But there is something more to a story where your heart just stops because you can't believe a kid so young would have to go through something like that, where you can't breathe because your lungs have forgotten how to pull in oxygen because you hurt for these characters so much.

And let me tell you — When you find that book, when you find that book that pulls you so deeply into the lives and stories of these characters that you wonder why you aren't meeting up with them for lunch every Tuesday, it does something to you. I think that's part of why Harry Potter has been so incredibly successful — By setting the story in a Contemporary world that simply has magic hidden under the surface, Harry, Ron and Hermione really could become your new best friends.

Let me try to illustrate exactly what I mean — When I was a kid, I read Where the Red Fern Grows a hundred million times (alright, so I'm exaggerating, it was probably closer to 45). I'm sure you all know how this story ends, but it broke me. Seriously, broke me into pieces. It's been my favorite book for forever, because it was the first book to ever hit me like that. When Billy realizes that Old Dan is seriously injured, he sinks his axe blade deep into the trunk of a tree, hangs his lantern off the blade and picks up his dog so he can carry him home. At the very end of the story of that summer, Billy and his family move from the mountains into town and Billy, now reminiscing from 50 years down the road has never been back, but he wonders if now he could return and find that old rusty lantern and the blade of that axe, since the wooden handle would have rotted long ago. I honestly and truly used to believe that I could go to the Ozarks for Billy and find his axe, that I could walk the trails, somehow figure out exactly where he had lived and I could stumble across that axe and lantern. I knew it was a story. I knew it wasn't real, that Billy had never actually been a real person and Old Dan and Little Ann never hunted anywhere except an old man's imagination. But that didn't matter. I just knew that if I could get there, I would find that axe.

I have never, in all my years of reading had a paranormal, fantasy, dystopian or science fiction (etc and etc) novel hit me that hard, move me that much. But it happens to me again and again with Contemporary. I no longer believe that I could walk into the setting of the novel and meet the characters, but a small part of me weeps every time I finish a book like this, because I realize that they will only ever exist on paper.

And that is what Contemporary does to me. That is why I love it above all other genres. And that is why I will work my hardest to introduce others to Contemporary. Because going through life, never connecting that deeply to a story? Well it's a crying shame.

I was immediately intrigued by Marilyn Johnson's new book This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. After all, I want to go to library school and when I was in high school I used to make comic books where I was the superhero. So the idea shown on the cover, a librarian with a cape off to save the world, was attractive to me. Once I started reading I was surprised to find out that Johnson isn't a librarian herself, but rather a librarian stalker like me. Except that I plan on becoming a librarian and as far as I could tell she did not. I think the book was even better (at least for me) written from the perspective of a non-librarian because it made it more interesting for an outsider. In this book Johnson talks about the changing world of libraries, the problems with digital records and the plus sides to them, the stereotype of the librarian, and what librarians do outside their jobs. And I'll admit this right away, the book made me even more positive that library school is what I want to do in two years.

The book is divided into 12 essays, really, about different aspects of libraries and librarians. One of my favorites was How to Change the World, which talked about librarians that work in other countries and with students from around the world, specifically underprivileged countries to help their nations advance in society through technology. As a blogger I really enjoyed The Blog People, which is all about librarian bloggers (several I'd never heard of even though I follow a lot of librarian blogs). She also touches on the danger of blogging for librarians, particularly young librarians. Even though many librarians know the Internet is the future of libraries and want to further that research, there is still resistance from other librarians. Follow That Tattooed Librarian was also an entertaining look at the stereotype of librarians as old, crotchety ladies when there are plenty of librarians that don't fit that stereotype one bit (Hello! Time Traveler's Wife anyone?).

I read this book at the same time as Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, and while Scrolling Forward as insightful and certainly made me feel like I knew more about digitization, Johnson was just so much better at making things exciting! Her descriptions alone deserve an A++; "This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them" (39). That is just great. This didn't feel like a how to guide on librarianship, it felt like a documentary in which the most exciting possibilities of the career were explored. I've seen a lot of reviews that complain about her extended discussion of the game Second Life. Apparently this game is pretty popular within some groups of librarians and Johnson was obviously a little obsessed with the game when she was writing this, but I just didn't care. Everything else was just so awesome, so perfect, that John could have ranted on about Second Life for another 25 pages and I would have listened to her. Because she completely captured my sentiments about libraries by the end of the book; "We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortor libraries. But another library, the ninetieth in the system, is growing explosively in cyberspace" (187).

This book deserves an A.

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Please help us welcome back Mette Ivie Harrison! She wrote us a phenomenal guest post last week that also includes a giveaway of The Princess and the Hound. Make sure you check it out!
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Although your Princess books may not be a direct retelling of any one fairy tale fairy tale, there is a distinct fairy tale feeling to each of them, which is different from the way a traditional fantasy reads. Was this intentional, or just something that happened as you wrote?

I studied German literature in college, and I have always loved fairy tales. I wanted very much to get the feel of a fairy tale in these novels. It's part never-never land and part Germany in the Middle Ages and part my idea of the perfect romance world all combined. I think I still imagine that the world is full of people who are trying to be heroes, wherever and whenever they live.

As to intention, I wonder sometimes how much of any creative endeavor is really intentional and how much of it is simply the unconscious being let out freely. I don't outline my novels and I just have an idea of where the story might go, then let things play out on the page. My characters don't seem to be the kind who do what I tell them to do. Or maybe my unconscious just has better ideas than my conscious mind has. I think that I may be one of those people who is often thinking about how the world used to be and comparing it to the way it is now. I don't wish for that back, but I believe that people have not changed much over the centuries. Evolution just doesn't work that fast. So my characters are people in the same way that a contemporary novel's characters would be. I probably have lots of anachronisms, though I try not to write modern people back in time. I try to think how modern people would act if raised in the past and given the limited choices that existed in the past. How would they grow up? How would they think? How would they find a way to be heroic?

There were moments in each of the 3 Princess books where each of our heroines feel uncomfortable in their skin. Is this an idea you included in the books intentionally?

I don't know that I thought of it quite like that, but I suppose the teen experience is very much about figuring out how to feel comfortable in your skin. I know I felt very uncomfortable in my skin as a teen. Physically, I always felt like I was that fat kid in high school who couldn't run a mile and felt ridiculously self-conscious in a swim suit, despite the fact that I was on the swim team. Psychically, I was trying to figure out who my "group" was, who I belonged to tribally. I think I eventually found a circle of friends who remain friends of mine to this day, but it was a long road and it took the courage of refusing to be false to myself. I showed who I was and that was the only way I could find my real people.

This story of figuring out who you are is a pretty universal one, and it's not just for teens, though maybe that's the first time it happens. In fact, The Princess and the Hound wasn't originally meant to be YA. I didn't know what it was, to be honest, and at least one editor rejected it because George was simply too old and he got married at the end of the book, which some YA novels shy away from. I think I write on the seam of YA and adult, which is why a lot of adults like my books, too. And really, aren't adults constantly reinventing themselves? I think if we aren't, we are stagnant. I have been taking adult piano lessons for the last four years, trying to reimagine myself as a musician (still not working). I also discovered triathlon competitions about 7 years ago and it turns out I'm really good at them. One of the things I do every day is yoga and I spend at least a minute trying to accept myself in the skin I am in, my body as it is, with all its flaws and its power.

You have a new book coming out, Tris and Izzie (that I'm crazy excited about), a retelling of the the German story, Tristan and Isolde. Is there anything about your new book that you can share with us?

Tris and Izzie is about a teen girl who doesn't know that she has magic. She has a boyfriend Mark King who is the basketball star and she thinks she is happy. But she tries to figure out how to make a love potion for her friend Brangane who obviously is in love with a guy who doesn't notice her. But it all goes wrong. She ends up falling in love at first sight with Tristan, the guy who was supposed to be Brangane's, and then she has to figure out how to be true to herself while the world around her is changing. There's a hidden magical world and lots of danger and a past she has forgotten and well, lots of other cool stuff.

I've been thinking a lot about what I hate about romance lately, and there's a certain irony in the fact that I hate love triangles and I hate love at first sight romances and I hate it when girlfriends compete for the same guy. But those are all important parts of this story. I hope that I use those old ideas in a new way that makes this story feel very contemporary. I spent many years reading only literary novels for grad school, and I read fantasy on the weekends, on the sly. I didn't dare to even check the books out of the library for fear my professors would find out. I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the distinction between literary novels and genre novels. But I think I have finally become comfortable with the reality that I like my stories to have magic in them of some kind. It's not just that the stakes are higher. It's that I feel like there are certain experiences in life that are magical, and we don't have the right language to describe those experiences unless we turn to the supernatural. Romance is one of those experiences. It feels like it is part of another world, like we become different when we experience it.

None of your characters have the traditional 'Happily Ever After'. Although the books may end mostly happy, or hopeful, that semi-generic 'Happily Ever After' feeling is missing. I've read some of your posts and discussions about romance in stories, and I have a pretty strong hunch that this was intentional. Care to expound?

You should have read the first drafts. These are actually much happier endings than the versions I originally wrote. My editor convinced me to be slightly more optimistic. For example, at the end of The Princess and the Bear, I originally wrote that the bear gives up the ability to be human and she has to live as a bear the rest of her life. It made for a very odd wedding scene. I guess I don't much believe in HEA of the kind where they ride off into the sunset. The funny thing is, I consider myself to be a fierce feminist and yet a failry traditional wife and mom. I stayed home with the kids, but I have a PhD. So there's lots of weird combinations in my stories.

I love romance and I write romance. I am a romantic. I love romance movies. I love Jane Austen. But I think the punch of the romance is taken away if it's too easy, if that makes any sense. Real romance is about choosing to be with the person you are with, not events overtaking you and you having no other choice. That's my opinion, anyway. The best romance is when both sides are strong characters who have important things to do in their lives unrelated to the romance. I didn't give up who I was when I got married and had kids. It can be tempting to let go of yourself, but I have trained my kids that I am a writer as well as a mom. Since they were babies, there was a strict nap time rule. If they weren't sleepy, didn't matter, I got some time to myself. I think the same goes for real-life romance. It is desperately important, but it's not the only thing that's important in the world.

Although the story is very much your own, Mira, Mirror is a retelling, of sorts, of Snow White. How did you decide to tell the story of the mirror and the Queen rather than have Snow White be your main character?

Mira, Mirror began as a sort of experiment. A friend of mine said that you can't write a novel with an inanimate object as the viewpoint character. I took it as a challenge and tried to think of the most interesting inanimate object I could. The mirror in the Snow White fairy tale came to mind fairy soon, and I knew there would be magic in it. It was one of my first attempts to write YA fantasy, and when I brought it to my group, they all said that I had finally found what I should spend my life writing. They felt like it was just so unique and no one else could tell a fairy tale like that. It's not a retelling really and it's not a twisted fairy tale. I don't know quite what to call it. But in this case, I never intended for Snow White or the Queen to be main characters. It was always about the set up to the fairy tale and then the aftermath. In the original version, however, the mirror had never been human. It had a face and could talk, but it had learned everything it knew about humanity from the evil Queen. To make her more relatable, I gave her a backstory and then a quest to be human again.

Having written both a retelling and a fairy tale-esque story, which do you prefer? What are the limitations and benefits of each telling? What are your thoughts about writing for each of these very closely related genres?
One of the advantages of a retelling is that there is already a certain shape to the story, almost as if you had a first draft written for you by someone else, and you only had to fix it up as a second draft. There is less fear of the blank page, if that makes sense. The blank page is always a terrible thing to face. Where does the story go? What happens next? No one knows except you, the author. This probably tells you way too much about what my first drafts look like. They are often not a lot like what the second draft is like. Maybe I should call those first drafts "exploratory" drafts. I get to know the general world and characters, but all of the events change and often not one word remains the same. Well, maybe one or two.

Ironically, I spent about four years writing stories largely in first person, some in present tense. The Princess and the Hound was the first story I wrote where I tried to do a third person point of view. I had no idea if it was working or not, but it has been really successful. There's a certain fairy tale style in my writing that has a distance and an elevated language that is natural to me after years in grad school in German literature. It's updated, though, with a really intense psychological depth that you often get only in first person YA narratives. I am trying to combine the two. My readers will have to say if I've done it successfully.

Silly/Random

~ Rapunzel is named after lettuce; what odd thing would you be named after if you were in a fairy tale?
The number seven. I am obsessed with numbers and that is my favorite one. ~ Using that name, give us a line from your life as a fairy tale:
"Once upon a time there was a girl named Seven. She lived with her mother and father, One and Two, and her older sisters, Three, Four, Five, and Six."

~ Best fairy tale villain and why?
It's always been the stepmother from Cinderella, because she has no magic and she still has all this power. I love the idea of writing a novel someday about the stepmother who refuses to even see the magic when it's right in front of her face.

~ Favorite tale from childhood? Favorite tale as an adult? Least favorites?
I loved Hansel and Gretel as a kid. I think the idea of a gingerbread house really appealed to me. I liked to eat. A lot. I think I hate that fairy tale now because the parents are so disturbing. I like what Adam Gidwitz does to the story in A Tale Dark and Grimm.

As an adult, my idea of "fairy tale" has expanded. Right now, I'm quite taken with the idea of retelling The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. Also, An Ideal Husband as An Ideal Boyfriend. I love Oscar Wilde. In fact, whoever is my favorite author at the moment is the author I want to do a retelling of. Oh, yes, Jane Austen is on the list, too. And Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. And Goethe's Faust.

~ If you could be any fairy tale character, or live through any fairy tale "happening," who/what would it be?
I think I'd like to be Jack the Giant Killer. It's interesting how girl-centered fairy tales are always about getting married and boy-centered fairy tales are always about adventures and killing people. But maybe Jack could meet a lady giant and fall in love with her? And that find out that if they kiss, she turns evil? Wait, that's Buffy, isn't it?

~ Would you rather:
- — eat magic beans or golden eggs?
As a vegan, I suppose I'll have to pick magic beans.

--style 50ft long hair or polish 100 pairs of glass slippers?
Long hair isn't so bad. You just keep it in a braid all the time. And I hate high heels. I own a couple of pairs for weddings, but almost all my shoes are flats. I think I have a strangely unfeminine dislike of shoes.

- — have a fairy godmother or a Prince Charming?
I guess I'll say Prince Charming, because I think every girl should be her own fairy godmother, in the end.
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What a wonderful interview! It's always great to hear the stories behind the books! It makes for truly fascinating reading! Thank you again Mette, so very much for being a part of Fairy Tale Fortnight!

I don't normally read science fiction books or fantasy books or books that are really good for building houses. And honestly when I first heard about The Passage

, the blockbuster of the summer, I wasn't interested at all. I first heard about it on Books on the Nightstand back when there was still snow on the ground, and they kept talking about this book that wasn't coming out until June that was about "vampires" and the government and one little girl who could save it all. Okay I thought, and I care why? So what possessed me to buy this book, this humongous book about a military experiment gone wrong, is still a mystery to me. But I did buy it, and I started it the day I got it, and I could not put it down. The story starts out with Amy Harper Bellafonte, a six-year-old girl who is left in the world alone. She has never been to school but is very smart, although it's hard to tell sometimes because she never speaks.

An FBI agent named Wolgast is supposed to take her, kidnap her basically, for the government. But as he is driving with her he gets a feeling that what is happening just is not right. He becomes obsessed with protecting her from this screwed up world they live in, in the not so distant future I might add. While the premise to the story is actually really interesting, it's really not science fiction, what really drew me into this book was the writing. The totally fabulous writing. Really, Justin Cronin is an awesome writer.

The scene started changing then. Grey felt movement all around him, like the earth was stretching; something was different about the snow, the snow had started moving, and when he lifted his face to look, it wasn't snow he saw anymore but rabbits: thousands and thousands of fluffy white rabbits, all the rabbits in the world, bunched so closely together that a person could walk across the yard and never touch the ground; the yard was full of rabbits. And they turned their soft faces toward him, pointed their little black eyes at him, because they knew him, knew what he had done, not to Roy but to the other ones, the boys with their knapsacks walking home from school, the stragglers, the ones who were alone; and that was when Grey knew that it wasn't his daddy anymore, lying in the blood. (82)

When I came to that passage (no pun intended!) I just knew this book was more than what it appeared. It's so hard to put it into words without turning people away from it. I mean, there are these vampire things but they're really not vampires at all. Not the way we know them at least, and they're not really even referred to as vampires until about halfway through the book. So this not vampire fiction. Just put down that cross and garlic.

Now, after I've gone on about how great this book is, let me say that it wasn't perfect. It's wonderful and amazing for the first half of the book, and then the main character just kind of disappears. And we have to learn about these new people for two hundred pages, all the while wondering what happened to the perfectly nice characters we met at the beginning of the book. I felt like I was just reading to find out if the old characters would come back again or not. I think that section could have been chopped down a lot. This could have easily been a 500 page novel, which is less scary though still big. Also, I didn't realize that this was the first book in a trilogy so when I reached the end I was a bit disappointed. Now I can't wait for the next book to come out... but I have to wait about two years for it. It's like Harry Potter all over again!

So the verdict is this: Read The Passage, soak up the first 300-some pages and bask in their wonderfulness, speed through the bits that get a little boring, and then when it starts to get better again remember that it's the beginning of a trilogy so the end is a little messy. Never fear, you just have to wait for what happens next. I give this book a B.

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Ballads of Suburbia by Stephanie Kuehnert came in the mail for me one day, completely unexpected. It was signed and shipped from Stephanie herself and I have no idea why. I searched through my emails, couldn't find any mention of the book, but it had been on my watch/tbr pile for a while, and it was signed, so I was happy and added it to the pile, waiting to be read. It waited for a couple of months before I finally picked it up.

I wish I had read it immediately.

This is one of those books that forces a person to redefine and reevaluate the way they view their world. At least, that's what it did to me. I've been waiting a while now to write this review because there is so much to be said about this book, and I don't feel at all qualified to say it.

It's a story about Kara, a teenage girl who doesn't really seem to fit in anywhere, doesn't make friends easily and doesn't deal with internal pain very well. When her best (and only friend) moves away, she has no one left but her younger brother Liam who doesn't really trust her, because they used to be close, and then she ditched him for the best friend. But they start to get closer, and then Kara meets Maya. She's confident, vibrant and flamboyant, pretty much everything Kara is not. They bond quickly and Maya takes Kara with her to Scoville Park, where she is introduced to an entirely new world and where she feels, for the first time in forever, that she has friends, that she fits in, and here, she can be cool.

But the crowd that hangs out at Scoville Park is not exactly the crowd that mommies and daddies want their kiddies hanging out with. They drink, smoke, do drugs-some 'basic' high school fair (pot) and some much, much harder (heroin and acid) and get into all kinds of trouble. But Kara, who has been secretly cutting for years to feel in control of her life finally feels like she's found a place to belong.

This leads me to the only thing about this book that I can find fault with. Every single teenage character in this book (and I do mean every single one) that gets more than two sentences of face time spends the entire novel drunk/stoned/high/strung out/tripping/hungover or some combination of them all. I know that there are some teenagers who did go through high school like that. And, it makes sense that if you are living like that, the people you hang out with are likely to be living like that too. I get it. Really, I do. But it is something so completely foreign to me, something that is as completely and totally different from my own high school (and life) experiences as you can possibly get, that I had a hard time with that. It just felt a little over the top, a little extreme.

But then again, this is coming from the girl who has never even tasted alcohol, has never picked up a cigarette, never even been tempted to try drugs. None of these are things that appeal to me. Partly because I'm supremely fond of my brain, and very aware that any and all drug use diminishes brain capacity, and also because I don't like the idea of giving up that much control to a substance. I freely admit, I need more control over my life than that.

So, although I struggled with the level of constant drug abuse, it is also such an integral part of the novel, and given what these characters experienced is so completely different from what I, or anyone I know, went through at that age, it really forced me to reexamine the way I view the world and the people in it. These characters are filled with so much pain. I wasn't always a happy person in high school, in fact the emotion I was most familiar with for most of my growing up years is anger, but I've never met a cast of characters with so much emotional turmoil before and the pain practically bleeds from the pages. But, surprisingly, somehow, there is a lot of love included in that pain. This group of friends — flawed, suffering, somewhat stupid — is there for each other, and you know that at their core, they would go through Hell to protect each other. Which is why it's all the more heartbreaking when things start to break them apart, when they start to splinter.

I read this book through a perpetual ache in my chest, wanting them to find help, wanting them to understand that there is hope in the world, a life better than drinking and drugs can offer you. Every time Kara cut herself because she couldn't handles the pressure, my heart bled along with her arms. I wanted them to want something better for themselves, to understand that each of them deserved better than what they were giving themselves.

My absolute favorite part of this book was the way Stephanie told the story. It begins with the epilogue. Kara has been gone for four years now, having left the area after a night in Scoville with her 'boyfriend' Aidan leaves her almost dead in the park from a heroin overdose. She decides it is finally time to tell her story, and so begins her Ballad. The story is told mostly by Kara, but her narrative is broken up by the Ballads, or stories of the other characters. They take a few pages to express their hurts, their pain, their suffering. They write about the life experiences that made them who they are, that brought them to their present state. And although the story on its own, Kara's story is powerful in and of itself, I believe that the heart of the story would be missing without these added narratives. There is something about hearing about these disappointments straight from the characters who experiences them that gives the story a raw honesty that really reached into me. They each titled their own story, and these short titles really capture the tone of the story, and the characters themselves. And, as if that weren't enough, Stephanie has includes a single lyric with each ballad, each new section, a lyric that captures and hints at the tone each new section, each ballad will take us through. And the lyrics are perfect, almost as if the songs themselves were written for each of these characters.

I can't express enough how much this book moved me. These characters are so incredibly real to me, so rich and raw, their stories so moving, that I don't know how you can read this book and not be touched. I don't know how you can spend time with these people and not be left with an ache in your chest because you know there are people like them in real life, suffering, waiting, heading toward death or a life full of nothing. I ache for them. Still. It's been over a month since I read this book and I still find my heart aching every time I think about this book, every time I glance at my bookshelf and see the spine. This is an important book, and it doesn't get nearly the attention and love that it deserves. People, this book needs to be read. So what are you waiting for? Go do it.

This week's top ten list at The Broke and Bookish is favorite book characters. I think this is incredibly challenging to think about. It's easy to think of books I love but to remember specific characters is a little harder for me.

1. Mr. Slinger from Lily's Purple Plastic Purse. This is probably my favorite children's book and I just love Lily, the little mouse the book is about. Even though Lily is adorable and cute no one is better than her teacher Mr. Slinger. Mr. Slinger is kind of a hippie, he makes yummy cheesy snacks, and he loves to teach. When Lily has some problems in class Mr. Slinger tucks a note in her purse that says, "Today was hard. Tomorrow will be better" (I'm paraphrasing because my books are all packed right now). Every time I read that page I get a little choked up, at 20 it's still one of my favorite books to read on a bad day.
2. Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I really identified with Charlie when I read this book. He was a freshman in high school, kind of weird, loved to read, and was just trying to figure life out. I was a about a year younger than him when I read this book but I felt like I was having all the same experiences, which made the book extra special for me. Charlie was also so honest about his thoughts and since he was a "wallflower" he noticed really specific things about the world. When I finished this book I felt like I took a little bit of Charlie with me.
3. Hagrid from Harry Potter. I immediately took to Hagrid when I read Harry Potter. I loved how he was so big and frightening, but was such a nice guy. He's so idealistic and I'm always amazed by the things he does know and the the things he doesn't know. And Hagrid always had Harry, Ron, and Hermoine's best interests at heart.
4. Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird. She is tough and super smart. When Scout stands up to the members of the Klu Klux Klan my heart swoons because she has no idea what she really did. And she loves her dad unconditionally and worries about him like a parent does about a child. Scout is a great role model for young girls.
5. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre. These two go together for me, you can't have one without the other. I feel like they both change every time I read the book and their relationship becomes increasingly more complicated. From an initial viewing I love how simple their love appears and how sweet it is, but Mr. Rochester is abrasive and Jane is needy, which makes the relationship more difficult than I thought when I first read the book.
6. Marcus from About a Boy. I love Marcus! He is definitely one of my favorite book characters and movie characters. He is so young but has such a realistic view of the world, probably because he's mom is a little messed up. I feel for him because I was a little weirdo too, but I admire him because he works so hard to make his mom feel better even though he really has no control over her.
7. Katniss from The Hunger Games. Katniss is kind of like Scout for me. She is so tough and badass. She never complains about the horrible situation she is put in, she just goes with it and thinks about ways to make everything work for her and those she cares about.
8. Dumbledore from Harry Potter. When Dumbledore died I cried for hours. I wore a RIP Dumbledore bracelet for months. It was a horrible experience, but that just shows what a huge effect he had on me. I grieved over him like I would any person I know in real life.
9. Henry De Tamble for The Time Traveler's Wife. When I read The Time Traveler's Wife I was at a place in my life where I felt like nothing was in my control so I really identified with Henry. He works in a library, listens to punk rock, and wears sweaters, which makes him more like me. Similar to Katniss, Henry makes the situation work for him even though it's horrible and he loves Clare so much he does everything he can to protect her. I find him to be very admirable.
10. Diana from The Luxe Series. Oh, Diana. I just love her more as the series goes on. She is so unafraid of being outside of the norm, outside of society. She lives her life for herself and no one else. Sure, she's a bit annoying sometimes over her boy problems but I don't think she reacts any differently than I would. I just love her.

What are some of your favorite book characters?

Today's interview is with a writing duo. Yvonne and Sandy have written quite a few books together and while I've only read two of them so far, they have both been lots of fun to read, and exactly what I was looking for at the time. Lots of fun, a little bit of fluff and just overall enjoyable.

What is it like writing as a team? How do you get past disagreements on pieces of the story?

We've been writing as a team for over a decade, and it’s still fun. The toughest part is picking one of many ideas floating like balloons over our heads, and focusing on just one.

Over the span of 10 books, we’ve had to develop a three-stage technique to shoot down each other’s ideas in a way that isn’t hurtful:
1. Listen to the entire idea, nodding and smiling;
2. Offer lukewarm praise; and
3. Present new idea so obviously superior that the first one is instantly forgotten.

Seriously, though, you can’t get too attached to your ideas when you’re a team. You have to trust than another, better one will come along, because it always does.

How did the two of you meet? How did you decide to become writing partners?

We met as teens working in a public library. We were friends for years—and even roommates after college—and the idea of writing together never occurred to us. But one day, Yvonne went looking for a non-fiction book for her nieces to answer their questions about relationships with boys, friends and family. She couldn't find a book with the right, light-hearted tone, so she suggested we write one. That led to Totally Me: The Teenage Girl’s Survival Guide. It was a natural fit, since we've spent our entire friendship talking about relationships with boys, friends and family.

Have either of you written alone? Or written with a different partner?

We've only collaborated with each other. In some cases one of us has written “more” of a particular book than the other person, depending on our schedules. But we developed our voice together, so I doubt anyone could tell who wrote what. In fact, sometimes we compliment each other on our own lines, forgetting we wrote them!

What are the differences to writing alone vs as a team and what are some advantages/disadvantages to both styles.

A huge advantage to collaborating is simply the “we're in it together” feeling. It’s nice to share the highs and lows of publishing, and the weight of deadlines. The only disadvantage—other than the loss of full creative control!—is that you have two schedules to coordinate. We have other jobs and commitments and they don’t always sync up as we’d like.

Why Contemporary?

We started out that way and just kept going. Spending time with our teen friends keeps us grounded in the present and we’re intrigued by the challenges they face.

But to be honest, we have always wanted to give paranormal a try and soon... we will! Expect something a little different from Collins-Rideout in a few months.

I've heard talk that *Love, Inc.* is actually a series. Is there any truth to that rumor? If so, is there any information you can share with us?

Yes! We just released the sequel to Love, Inc. It’s called Trade Secrets, and it will soon be available across all electronic platforms. You can already find it on Amazon

Here’s a short overview:

Kali Esposito and her best friends Syd and Zahra revive Love, Inc. to help the lovelorn break-up, make-up or take-up with someone new. A die-hard romantic, Kali can turn the most socially-challenged clients into confident charmers and the “Kali Method” takes Love, Inc. to new heights. But when a competitor corrupts her method to turn regular guys into players, Kali must reclaim Love, Inc.’s trade secrets before every girl in Austin gets her heart broken.

Speaking of sequels/series, are they harder to write than the first book? Do you *like* them or do you prefer writing a standalone story?

The challenge with sequels is trying to recap the first book for new readers without boring returning readers, who already know the back story. But on the whole, sequels are easier to write in that you’ve already developed the key characters, and their world. Our favorite book of all is the third book in the Vivien Leigh Reid series: Diva in Control. By that point, we’d hit our stride and could just enjoy getting poor Leigh into trouble. We’d still love to do a sequel to The Black Sheep. Judy is our most obnoxious villain ever—she deserves another outing.

What made you decide to self-publish Trade Secrets? Will you continue to self-publish all your future books? Will Trade Secrets also be released in a hard copy edition (I'd love to have a hardcover to match Love, Inc!)

It all started when Sandy bought a Kobo for her mom for Christmas... and kept it for herself. If a hard-core book lover like Sandy can fall for an e-reader, it can happen to anyone.

So we started researching e-publishing, and it just seemed to suit our needs. First, you can get books out faster. We have always wanted to write more than one book a year, and also, different types of books. Now, with e-publishing, it’s a lot easier to follow your heart—as long as you hire experts to rein you in! We’re pretty excited by this new opportunity and expect to e-pub our next few books. But we've been around the book biz long enough to know that you have to stay flexible.

If there’s enough interest in paper copies of Trade Secrets, we’ll look into making that option available.

Is there anything you can share with us about your current work in progress or upcoming stories?

We’re working on a bunch of projects right now, including a paranormal novel, and possibly, if people enjoy Trade Secrets, more from our Love, Inc. trio. It seems like their story wouldn't complete without another cycle of revenge hits, led by Sydney Stark.

We love hearing from readers, so please join us on twitter @collins_rideout or visit our websites: collinsrideout.com and loveincbook.com

Thank you both, so very much! I loved hearing from you and I'm definitely excited to read Trade Secrets! Hopefully, I will have a review up soon! I haven't had a chance to read the book yet, but I do have some copies to giveaway!! Yvonne and Sandy have generously offered copies of three of their novels as giveaway prizes! Enter below! The hard copies are US/CND only but the ecopies are International!
*edit — I can't believe I forgot the Rafflecopter widget! SO sorry! I will still allow those who entered through the comments to maintain that as their entry, because this is my error, but anyone entering now needs to use the widget!*

Liesel Meminger steals books. It's hard to really classify her as a thief though, because she steals books from Nazi book-burnings-- and I could totally understand the desire to steal a book in a world where everything is censored. Liesel wants to know more about the world and what is happening, and she is experiencing the war unlike others her age because she is friends with a Jewish man who her family hides in their basement. All of these things are happening while Liesel learns how to read in The Book Thief

. Even though I know how to read, I was once again reminded how powerful books are and how important they are. After reading The Book Thief I wanted to see two things during my time in Germany. The book burning memorial in Berlin and Dachau concentration camp in Munich, the latter is strongly related to this book because Dachau is mentioned pretty frequently. Reading The Book Thief gave those things an added weight because I could imagine the characters from the book while I was looking at those sights.

The book is narrated by Death, which as you might guess makes it extremely bizarre. You actually sympathize with Death because you can tell he isn't choosing to take these people's lives, he is just doing as he is ordered. You can tell he is upset about what is happening, and he is tired from all the taking he has to do. In some ways I think this shows how people in Nazi Germany felt at the time-- like they were somehow forced to act in a way to support the Nazi party even if they didn't agree with it (possibly because they felt their lives would be taken from them).

Entrance to Dachau Concentration Camp.

I feel like this book has been widely read and discussed, but I'd like to talk about a personal experience with it. When I went to Dachau I expected to be overcome by emotion, but I wasn't. I don't know what other schools are like, but I have a difficult time remembering a year of elementary and high school where I did not learn about the Holocaust in an English or history class. Our education makes us deeply aware of what happened-- to the point where it becomes to difficult to look at the place where it happened and not be a little immune to it all. I did not feel unemotional or immune during The Book Thief. I was upset, crying, could not believe that this happened. I connected much better with this story than I did with any memorial I saw in Germany. I think that is a great testament to the power of books, which is what this book is all about. Going to the place where it happened, walking through a museum, they are important and wonderful things to do, but nothing makes me understand the Holocaust better than reading stories about it.

"I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant."

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Joining us now we have Bonnie from A Backwards Story interviewing Sarah Porter, author of the 2011 debut Lost Voices.
Check it out!

Sara Porter’s debut novel, Lost Voices, is the first in a trilogy... about MERMAIDS. While not directly re-telling any single tale, Porter weaves together mermaid lore from several places while creating her own world. The most creative twist is the fact that mermaids were once human girls, reincarnated after “dying” and have siren-like tendencies. For a teaser of Lost Voices and to learn more about the novel, please visit A Backwards Story. A full review is scheduled to post on ABS June 21th to celebrate the first day of summer. Lost Voices comes out two weeks later on July 4, 2011, so please add it to Goodreads and your TBR now!

1) What were your favorite fairy tales growing up? What drew you to them?
I grew up with this old book of Russian fairy tales that someone gave my mom’s dad when he was a kid back in 1911, and I adored them. They were long and dark and complicated and painful, and I think they’re very true to life. A lot of them follow a storyline where the protagonist betrays his or her magical beloved and has to go through a long journey and a series of ordeals to win that lost love back. In fact many of us do have to undertake a long (emotional) journey before we’re ready to truly love.
Those stories are embedded in my mind. I still see life through the lens they revealed to me.

2) What made you decide to write Lost Voices? What brought everything together for you?
It’s hard for me to say where it all came from. One source was a talk I had with a friend on the beach, where we improvised a story about a punk mermaid who lived apart from the others. And I wrote an earlier story in graduate school that used some of the same ideas as Lost Voices. In it, mermaids were orphaned girls who could swim through the earth and steal other girl-children away. When I actually started writing Lost Voices, I was unemployed and stuck on another book, and the story just kind of picked me up and carried me. I wrote a draft in four months.

3) Was it hard coming up with your own lore when you began world-building? How did you bring everything together? The mermaids felt so real!
Thank you. They feel real to me, too. The mermaid lore actually develops a lot more in the second volume of the trilogy, Waking Storms, when my heroine Luce begins to learn about the history of the mermaids and why they’re so driven to kill.
But I wouldn’t say it’s hard to come up with the lore or the world. The hardest part of becoming a writer is getting yourself to the place where the stories come to you by themselves. Once you’re finally there, it’s all a lot easier. I knew from the beginning that the mermaids were the lost girls who’d flowed away to sea.

4) Can you tell us more about your overall goals for the trilogy?
That’s hard to do without giving too much away! But Luce has a long way to go, and things will get much worse for her before they can start to get better. The trilogy is really about a choice we all face: we can stay stuck in our pain and keep repeating the same reactions to that pain, the way the mermaids keep sinking ships. Or we can look for creative ways to break the cycle and move on. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to do, but ultimately that’s what Luce has to accomplish.

5) What other ideas are you working on right now?
I only work on one idea at a time, because I can only live in one imaginary world at a time! But I do have a novel for adults sitting around half-finished; it’s sort of a horror novel about sentient objects, called Boudoir, and as soon as I complete The Lost Voices Trilogy, I want to get back to it. And I’m playing with the idea of a young adult novel based on some of those old Russian fairy tales, too.

6) What are some of your favorite fairy tale inspired novels and/or authors?
Well, it’s not YA at all, but I really love Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina. It starts out seeming realistic and then gets creepier and more fairy-talish as it goes along. The heroine’s boyfriend gives her a hairy black dress that eats into her skin, and that she can’t take it off. And Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was fantastic and really captured the odd logic of the fairy world. That’s a book I think a lot of YA fans would adore! Most of my favorite books have kind of a fairy tale quality about them even if they’re not directly inspired.

7) If you could live out any fairy tale, what would it be and why?
Hmm. Maybe I’d like to be the Frog Princess. She’s such a badass.
In fact I think we all live out fairy tales all the time, whether we want to or not. Not necessarily the happily-ever-after parts, but the struggling-to-make-our-way-through-forces-that-are-bigger-than-we-are parts.

8) What's your favorite Disney rendition of a fairy tale? What makes it so special?
Dumbodoesn’t count, does it? Then I think I’ll go with “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” section of Fantasia. It conveys so much of the feeling of being overwhelmed by magic, caught up in a dream.

9) Rapunzel is named after lettuce; what odd thing would you be named after if you were in a fairy tale?
Sparrow. I totally identify with little hoppy, dust-colored birds.

I am so excited to have a guest post today with Sarah Ockler! She has a really fun post today, in the spirit of love for all genres, which I totally adored and even though Contemporary is my favorite, I do read and love many other genres and I love this post talking about the common threads between all genres.

Contemporary Realism vs. Paranormal & Fantasy: Smackdown or Lovefest?

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As an author of contemporary realistic teen fiction, I'm often asked about the imbalance in the bookstores between contemporary titles and paranormals — yes, those sparkly black covers of awesome. Some have asked me why I write contemporary instead of chasing the fantasy "trend." Others want me to convince them to read one over the other, or defend my own favorites, or talk about why contemporary is so much better.

Some of this is in jest, of course. All in good fun. But sometimes it does feel like there's a bit of rivalry going on, doesn't it?

I'm not sure why. To me, fantasy isn't a "trend" anymore than realism *isn't*, and the only thing that's "so much better" is that teens and adults are reading tons of YA — way more than we used to. A big part of that is availability and choice. Even as recently as ten years ago, bookstores might've only had one YA shelf, or the teen fiction might've been mixed in with the younger children's stuff. Now, it's so popular that it usually has it's own section, and that section includes rows of ever-expanding shelves — plenty of room for magic *and* reality.

My favorite local indie, the Tattered Cover, just expanded its YA section, and they host young adult and middle grade authors almost every month — contemporary, fantasy, scifi, dystopian, romance, mystery — we're all represented, and we're all awesome.: -) Walking down those long shelves stuffed with sparkly black covers, pink ones, white ones, scenic ones, close up kissing ones, monster ones… it just makes me insanely happy to have so many choices for my ever-growing TBR list.

So what about the original question? Smackdown or lovefest?

I say lovefest. I love contemporary realism. I love fantasy, paranormal, and scifi. I love it all. Because in young adult fiction, contemporary realism and paranormal / fantasy are just two sides of the same coin. The difference is in the execution. Maybe your boyfriend broke up with you because the scent of your blood makes him want to tear you apart with his pointy little fangs. Or maybe he just likes another girl. Maybe your parents are getting divorced because Mom discovered that dad is a dark elf plotting to take over the world. Or maybe he just leaves the toilet seat up. These are silly examples, but the point is, the underlying emotional strife is the same. Both types of story explore complex emotions and issues like changing friendships, death, sexuality, sex, heartbreak, addiction, family problems, physical challenges, violence, and economic hardship, to name a few. Both feature multi-layered characters forced by difficult — sometimes life-threatening — external situations to dig deep to uncover their own hidden strengths. Both have the twists and turns and surprises that often come when teens experience new situations for the first time. And let's not overlook the best part — all the kissing. Sexy vampires, beautiful witches, six-pack-ab-rockin' shapeshifters, and plain old regular humans… there's plenty of romance to swoon over in most young adult fiction. Team Kissing, are you with me? Yes!

So whether you're typically into contemporary realism or paranormal, whether you like your boys human or bloodsucking, whether you go gaga for girls with wings or wands or just plain old pom poms, whether you're reading about transgender issues or trans-species ones, whether you like escaping to the beaches of California or the halls of Hogwarts, I encourage you to read a bit more of… well… everything. This is a lovefest, after all. Let's show some love!

Need a few recommendations? Check out the newly posted Best Teen Books of 2011 over at Kirkus. Editor Vicky Smith says, "With shelves fairly groaning under the weight of paranormal love triangles, it may be easy to think that books for teens are all the same these days. Not so, we are delighted to report. In sifting through the piles of great books published for teens this year, I was happy to discover soulful romance of the utterly normal kind, deliciously frothy historical novels, piercingly intelligent nonfiction, thrillingly inventive fantasy and science fiction and some great kickass horror, as well as some books that may leave you weeping with laughter."

Some of my faves from the list are Misfit, Winter Town, Virtuosity, Anna Dressed in Blood, and Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and many more are on my TBR list. There's something for everyone over there. Happy reading!
~ Sarah Ockler

Author of Twenty Boy Summer, Fixing Delilah, and the upcoming Bittersweet (which features the special magic of cupcakes and hockey boys… mmmmm...)

Thank you again Sarah, so very much! I love it!:)

And for all my awesome readers, Sarah has been generous enough to donate a signed paperback of Fixing Delilah to one luck winner! This is a phenomenal book, absolutely amazing, and I'm already excited for whoever wins this one!

Enter Below. Like all Just Contemporary Giveaways, it will end Dec 10th. This is also only open to US/CN.

I read John D'Agata's essay in The Believer this past Spring where he talks about suicide and environmental factors in Las Vegas. At the time I didn't know that he was coming out with a book on the exact same subject, so when I found out that this essay I loved in The Believer was actually a book length essay I was immediately intrigued. About a Mountain

is about D'Agata's experience in Las Vegas exploring Yucca Mountain, a spot where nuclear waste was going to be stored. He explores what the world would look like in the future for the people who would have to deal with the effects of storing nuclear waste there. He works at a suicide hotline and explores the high suicide rate in Las Vegas and in doing so, explores the culture of Las Vegas and outside of Las Vegas.

I've been to Las Vegas several times (especially considering I'm not yet 21) but haven't read a whole lot about it. It's an interesting to place to know more about, but I was initially upset with D'Agata's original essay in The Believer because I felt it was a little dangerous to characterize a city by its suicide rate and further trying to make an explanation for it. Maybe, probably, this made me uncomfortable because I come from a place where suicide is quite frequent and through high school I was judged for being a part of that place. I was less bothered by that in the book, but I think maybe that is just because I accepted it from the essay. One of the greatest things about this book is that D'Agata is coming to Yucca Mountain with very little knowledge, which makes it very easy for the reader to learn right along with him. This is a technique a lot of my favorite essays and books employ. Rather than being talked at by an expert, we get to learn along with the author. For something as outrageous as Yucca Mountain that learning process can be extremely powerful.

D'Agata is considered in expert on the essay form and the evolution of it-- so you really have to respect him for that alone. However, I felt this book was a little indulgent at times. I really disliked when he strung sentences on and on and described one thing multiple ways for pages and pages. The book is not very long, but with the amount of time he spends saying the same thing 100 ways it could have been much shorter. I enjoyed this book, and I think to really get a grasp on Yucca Mountain you have to read the book, but I felt the essay in The Believer was much more cohesive and better written.

I give this book a B.

Additionally, the last three books I've reviewed have somehow dealt with environmental issues and at this point you can probably surmise this is something I'm passionate about. In fact, I'm so passionate about it I've decided to start a bi-weekly podcast about books that deal with environmental issues. Even if you're not that interested in the environment I can assume you have an interest in books- so please give my podcast a try! We're still in the beginning phases but you can check out our introductory podcast at GreenReads and while you're there leave us a comment, some ideas, or just follow us so you know when our first real episode goes up.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

With us today we have Janette Rallison, author of My Fair Godmother and My Unfair Godmother, among many others. She has five children who keep her well supplied with plot ideas, sometimes even making cameo appearances in her novels. She likes to write romantic comedy because there is enough angst in real life, but theres a drastic shortage on both humor and romance.
You can find her online here:
Blog | Goodreads | Twitter | Website Stick around to find out how you can win some Awesome, courtesy of Janette!

~Follow up: where did the idea for the series (and Chrissy) come from?
Authors get asked to write a lot of things for friends and family members. I’ve done my share of school talent show skits, camp skits, etc. My Fair Godmother started out as a half an hour skit for my daughter’s church group. In fact, my daughter was the original Chrysanthemum Everstar. I had imagined the fairy as a no-nonsense, cynical, over-worked person. (Think Florence the sassy maid on the Jeffersons) But my daughter played the part as a dingy shopping diva, and Chrissy has been that way ever since.

~Why fairy tales? What is it that calls to you, personally, as a writer, and why do you think readers connect to them the way they do?
Writing about fairy tales is great for a lot of reasons. We’ve all heard them, so we have a common frame of reference, but also, many of us wanted to be those fairy tale heroines. When I was little and people asked me what I was going to be when I grew up, I told them I wanted to be a princess. Alas, the whole royalty thing didn’t work out, but perhaps that’s for the best. When you think about Cinderella and Snow White, they had to do a whole lot of cleaning and cooking before they got to put on a tiara. I’ll stick with my dishwasher, washing machine, microwave, and hunky electrical engineer.

~What’s your favorite scene you’ve ever written?
That’s hard to choose, because I’ve written a lot of books. My Unfair Godmother is number 17, I have a dragon book that’s coming out this fall, and I have two other books I’m working on right now. The Snow White scene in My Fair Godmother is one of my favorites though. I actually laughed out loud when I wrote it, and that usually doesn’t happen. The trailer scene from Just One Wish is also a favorite. Not only do Steve and Annika square off in a very creative way, but I also get to insult writers in the process.

~Can you tell us about anything you’re working on now?
I have a dragon slayer book coming out in the fall, I’m polishing up a time travel/dystopia book, and I have about fifty pages left to write on a paranormal romance. The climax takes place in Egypt and so I had finally convinced my husband that we needed to go to Egypt for research. Yeah, I guess with all the political strife over there right now, that’s one trip we won’t be making.

Quickfire, Silly and Random stuff:

~Rapunzel is named after lettuce; what odd thing would you be named after if you were in a fairy tale?
Did they have pizza in fairy tales? (maybe only the Italian ones...) I’ll go with strawberries. I love them.

~ Using that name, give us a line from your life as a fairy tale:
Strawberry was teased mercilessly as a child. “What sort of stupid name is Strawberry?” The other village children asked.
Strawberry ran off to find a tower to hide in. After all, it had worked out pretty well for Rapunzel.

~Best fairy tale villain and why?
The evil queen from Snow White. She had power, riches, and fame—yet all she cared about was beauty. That’s devotion to an ideal. The cosmetic industry would have loved this woman.

~Favorite tale from childhood? Favorite tale as an adult? Least favorites?
Cinderella has always been my favorite fairy tale. Rags to riches, handsome prince, a ball where you get to wear poofy evening gowns—what’s not to love about that?
Rumpelstiltskin is probably my least favorite fairy tale. What sort of woman trades her firstborn child for a roomful of gold? What sort of King threatens to kill a woman twice if she can’t spin straw into gold and then says, “Hey, I’ll marry you if you can do it a third time”? Is that a match that is going to live happily ever after? I think not.
And why in the world does Rumpelstiltskin ask the queen to guess his name, and then stand around a campfire singing it out loud? Would that ever really happen?
I guess that’s one of the reasons I used Rumpelstiltskin in My Unfair Godmother. It was a challenge to make the fairy tale make sense. I think I did a fair job. (Pun intended)

~If you could be any fairy tale character, or live through any fairy tale "happening," who/what would it be?
I’d choose to be Beauty from Beauty and the Beast. She had cute little magical servants to do the hard work, and all she had to do was fall in love with a hairy guy.

~Would you rather:
- — live under a bridge with a troll, or all alone in a high tower?
A high tower—they have a better view. Besides, it’s hard to write with trolls around.

- — ride everywhere in a pumpkin carriage (messy) or walk everywhere in glass shoes (uncomfortable)?
I can’t walk in high heels, let alone glass heels, so I’ll have to go for the pumpkin.

- — be forced to spin straw into gold for hours on end, or dance every night until your shoes are worn through?
Dance, definitely. That’s my definition of a good night.

Thanks so much for stopping by and being a part of Fairy Tale Fortnight, Janette!

Janette has offered a Prize Pack for 1 lucky winner, consisting of a signed ARC of her latest book, My Unfair Godmother, as well as a signed copy of How To Take the Ex Out of Ex-Boyfriend, which starts with the FTF-appropriate line "I bet you Cinderella didn't get along with Prince Charming's friends... ";)

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Raw Blue by Kirsty Eagar is a book you may not be terribly familiar with. So far, only released as an Australian title, it's hard to find a copy in the US. I first heard about the book from Linds at Bibliophile Brouhaha. (<- — that is an important link... You should click it & read it.) She talks about this book all the time, both on Twitter and her blog. I'm really passionate about the books that I absolutely love, so I'm a bit of a sucker for people who are intensely passionate about favorite books, and it automatically makes me more excited to read them. So, when Linds asked if I wanted to borrow her copy of this book, I was thrilled.

Carly is suffering. She's dropped out of University to spend her mornings surfing and her evenings working in a kitchen so she can afford to surf. She's shy and skittish and you know something has happened to her that's left her scarred. While surfing, she meets Ryan, a guy a bit older than her with some murky pieces in his past, but somehow, Carly finds herself drawn to him anyway. And as she spends more time with Ryan, more time facing her own demons and more time being herself, she slowly starts to heal, and wow is this powerful.

I am going to admit that there are two things holding me back from being as enamored of this book as Linds and many of the other bloggers I've seen mention it. The first is something that I cannot blame on anything except myself, and that is my expectations. I fully expected to love this book, because Linds and I agree on a lot of other books, and because everyone seems to love it. It's a tough, hard-hitting contemporary, something I'm very drawn to, and all the parts and pieces were there for me to just be blown away by this book (and, umm, the author is Australian. And dude, there must be something in the water over there, because these authors rock!) But, I had heard the book compared to Melina Marchetta* (something that is dangerous, as we see, because it makes my expectations impossible to meet) and while Eagar's writing is very emotional and very powerful, it didn't hit me the same way as Marchetta's writing does, so I was initially disappointed, waiting for the magic of Melina to kick in. When that didn't happen I was disappointed, and it wasn't until I gave myself a mental kick that I started to read it as an Eagar book, not the next Marchetta, which immediately increased my enjoyment of the book. I really want to reread this one, both so that I can revisit the story, but also because I think the book deserves a fair chance from me from the beginning.

The other complaint I had with this story is slightly spoilery. So, I'm warning you right now. Honestly, it's something that I had figured out from the back cover, and then again within the first 50 pages or so. But still, you've been warned. From the way Carly acts, you know she's been sexually assaulted at some point. And, it's scarred her, because that's what something like that does. And it hurts, it really and truly hurts. You can feel Carly's scars and it so broke my heart over and over again. I understand that being able to accept sex as a positive and loving thing is important to the healing process after an attack that like. But in my opinion, it wasn't handled here as well as it could have been. Especially with Ryan (which means I'm skipping the almosts from before). When she's with Ryan, after they start sleeping together, I thought things progressed beautifully. They were a great couple and Ryan was amazing with and for her, and he really helped her heal. But, they slept together on the first date, and this first date came after they'd only talked to each other a few times on the beach. I have a hard time believing that someone who has been through what Carly has would welcome sex on a first date and be healed by it. It just didn't feel right to me. It felt like the insta-love thing that so much of the paranormal fiction is guilty of. I know that some people are going to disagree with me here. I get that. I understand it. But I kinda also don't care. You are coming from it where you are, and I'm coming from it where I am. Everyone has had different experiences that allow them to view the world differently, and this is mine. I don't think you can have meaningful sex when you barely know someone, and I didn't feel like Carly and Ryan were given the chance to know each other before making that choice.

I'm cringing here now, because it feels like that's a whole lot of negativity above. But that's not the case! Not the case at all. Those were the only two things I didn't love about this book, and although it's a long section, that's mostly because I talk to much and sometimes over-explain things. But really, this book is pretty much brilliant. Eagar's characterization is spot on. Carly is suffering, and the suffering from her assault is compounded by this idea that she is now unclean or unworthy. And that is made worse again because she doesn't have a strong or supportive family to turn to, which also breaks my heart. But she finds surrogates in surfing and the friends she makes there. It's not perfect, but she starts to recognize truths about the world and herself, and she slowly starts to heal.

I love that overall, Eagar made Ryan's part in Carly's healing authentic and realistic. He wasn't a cure all, didn't come with a magic wand and he wasn't able to take away all of Carly's pain. Most of that she had to deal with on her own. Ryan is there for her, at all times, and he extends his support to her in anyway she needs, anyway she's willing and really, that right there just made my heart fill for this guy. He's seriously great. It kinda makes me wish for more older guys in YA.:)

So here's the thing. I know that there were those two things I marked as complaints about this book. But I don't think you should let that deter you in any way from finding any possibility of grabbing yourself a copy of this book, or in helping us to give some of these US publishers a little nudge, asking them to bring Ms. Eagar over to the states. Because this is a book worth reading. Go read some of the posts Linds has up on her blog. Her passion and commitment to this book is truly impressive and it's obvious that she loves it and believes in it. And you know what? She's absolutely right. There is so much that this book has to offer. So much that we can learn from these characters that it's a shame more people aren't familiar with it. It's a book I'm going to do my darndest to get the chance to read again, and it's one that I don't think is going to leave me for a long time. It makes you think, makes you wonder, makes your insides bleed, and then, somehow helps you up, washes your face and makes you stronger and better able to face the world.

*Footnote — One of my pet peeves is actually reviews that use other books or authors as comparisons in their review, especially when they end up making that comparison write their review for them. So, my apologies that I'm doing it here, but it's the only way I could accurately describe why I was disappointed in what would otherwise have been phenomenal writing.