Another Series of Improbable Events

The second book I started reading on my trip (and had to finish after I got home) was The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place by E. L. Konigsburg. Konigsburg has won the Newbery Medal twice, for From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler , which I remember liking when I read it years ago, and The View From Saturday. I liked that book, too, though I found it very adult oriented.

But what about 19 Schuyler Place? you may ask. Well. Well. Well, The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place starts out with one of those wise- beyond-their-years narrators. Adults (myself included)love wise-beyond-their-years narrators, mainly, I think, because we meet so few wise-beyond-their-years kids in real life. So I liked Margaret Rose. But then the mean girls at camp entered the story. And the eccentric uncles. And the big bad lawyers who were going to destroy the uncles' backyard. It just seemed as if I'd read it all before. Then Margaret Rose does all these improbable things to save the day. And more unlikely things happen, too. I just didn't buy it.

There was also lots of talk about art and literature. I have nothing against art and literature talk in kids' books. Really. I'm all for it, in fact. Can't have too much of it. It just seemed so educational here. Not that I'm against education, either. But in a work of fiction, the educational stuff isn't supposed to sound educational.

I liked Margaret Rose, and I would have liked to have read a story about her having a crush on the camp handyman. That was a situation that seemed filled with possibilities but it wasn't pursued all that much.

This is a companion book to Silent to the Bone, which I haven't read. But I will.

My Travel Reading

In twelve plus hours of travel I only read one and a half books. How lame is that?

The one I finished in the car was Target by Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, which has been named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. A best book for 2004, by the way, which means I met my goal of reading something very currant.

Well, Target is sort of a Speak for guys. It's about a teenage boy dealing with the aftermath of having been raped by two strange men who attacked him on the street. He's devastated by the experience, of course, and is consumed with anxiety because he's afraid that somehow he did something that made him a "target." On top of that, he was so stunned by what was happening to him that he didn't put up a fight at the time of the attack, even though he was a big kid. This leads the investigating cop and the reporter who covers the story to suggest that he didn't really object or was having some kind of conflict with a male lover. (He was seriously beaten, by the way.) The emergency room doctor is repulsed by what happened to him and his parents are ashamed. He can barely speak or eat, and is clearly wasting away.

This is an interesting setup. However, a series of improbable events leads to the conclusion. He changes schools and happens to meet a wiseguy African American kid who takes an interest in him as well as an overweight girl and a gay boy. The connections just don't seem very likely.

Plus, this is the 21st Century. It seems unlikely that so many of the adults who should have been helping him--police, doctor, parents--would have such unenlightened attitudes. One or two, maybe. But everyone? Having the adults shunning their responsibilities toward the main character makes it possible for the kids in his life to take over, of course. Still, it seems like an artificial situation.

Grady, the main character, is suffering horribly and readers ought to feel for him. But it's hard to believe that someone in such bad shape would be ignored by all the seemingly decent, middle class adults around him.

Target is a readable but not believable book for older teen readers.

My Plans for the Immediate Future

Meaning the next few days. Tomorrow I leave for a three-day trip, the first and last day of which will involve six hours in a car. Though I will get stuck doing my share of the driving, that will leave me with some chunks of time for reading. So in my quest to keep up with what's going on in the kidlit world, I made a trip to the library Saturday and picked up a bunch of books from the YA section with "New" labels on them. They had to say "New" with a date sometime in 2004. Sometimes libraries will trick you by putting a new label on and leaving it on long, long past the time anyone would have considered the book new. I am on to them.

So I already have a stack of books out in the car, a few of which I hope to polish off while I'm riding in the car with nothing to do but listen to the AM radio station one of the other drivers is...sadly...devoted to.

Reading in the car is a big, exciting deal for me because up until maybe five or six years ago I couldn't read in a moving vehicle. Yup. Travel sickness. Then, on a long trip, perhaps along the whole east coast, maybe just to Virginia, I don't know, I "trained" myself to read. The trick, I've learned, is to try not to read while the car is speeding up or slowing down. I'm passing that on.

I try not to be bitter about all the years of reading time that were lost while I couldn't read in a car without wanting to toss my cookies.

How I Spent My Holiday Weekend

Well, I didn't see any fireworks but I did see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. And I actually liked it. Can you believe it? Because I really didn't care for the first movie at all.

The Prisoner of Azkaban happens to be my favorite of the Potter books because I really liked Sirius. (Imagine how I feel about the most recent one--Order of the This or That). Even so, not being a Potter uber-fan I couldn't remember every detail. This actually added to my viewing pleasure because there were surprises for me. For instance, I'd forgotten all the messing around with time at the end. I enjoyed that part of the movie quite a bit.

I saw two good previews, too. One was for The Polar Express, a classy-looking animated version of the picture book. The other was for A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I thought also looked good.

Speaking of the Lemony one, I've been told that there is a baby on my street whose pediatrician's daughter is married to the one and only Lemony Snicket. It's almost as if...it's almost as if I have a connection to him, isn't it?

Keeping Up on What's Happening

As I said in yesterday's post, I see no reason in the world why older books shouldn't be discussed in the media. However, I do worry that I, myself, don't keep up to date the way I should. I mean, I ought to more than that there's a new Harry Potter book in the works and that the title has been released, right?

So to help me keep up on what's happening, last month I subscribed to teenreads.com's and kidsreads.com's newsletters. These are both sites I've linked to many times over the years. I'm hoping that having them nudge me each month with something in my e-mail will keep me au courant. (Sure hope I spelled that right.)

Anyway, teenreads.com reports that Janet Tashjian has a sequel to The Gospel According to Larry called Vote for Larry. Now, I wasn't a wild fan of the first Larry book. I found it a little preachy (mmm, maybe a lot preachy) even though I very much liked the anti-consumer sermon. However, I am very much in the minority. The Gospel According to Larry was well-reviewed and I'm aware that it was popular with a lot of teen readers. And since they are the people the book was written for, their opinion should count more than mine.

So Vote for Larry should be worth a look. Even I will look at it.

Perhaps Someone Should Try This in Other Cities?

I was ego-surfing this spring (something I don't do all that often because, really, I don't find that much about me) when I stumbled upon a review of one of my books in a publication called YoungSaintLouis.com.This is a 'zine that describes itself as a local newspaper for kids between the ages of 8 and 13 living in the St. Louis area and a tool adults can use to help kids become better readers. In addition to news articles on kids in the area, it has book and movie reviews, games, and articles on things to do in St. Louis. For adults it has lesson plans around the articles in the current issue, which I thought was interesting.

As a writer, I found the book reviews interesting, too, because the staff members don't limit themselves to new releases. This month's issue includes a review of A Long Way From Chicago by Richard Peck, which has been out for a few years. But it's a very decent book (yes, I actually liked it) and why shouldn't it be brought to the attention of people who've never heard of it or may have missed it when it was fresh off the press?

There's lots of talk among book people about the short window of opportunity for selling new books. We're talking months, here. I think that's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. People in the book business believe they have only a few months to bring a book to the publics' attention so that's what they do--spend a few months on a book and move on to something else. But publications like YoungSaintLouis.com can keep titles out in front of the public indefinitely. So long as journalists read something and want to write about it, they can.

Repeat After Me, "There is only one Georgia Nicholson."

I have gone on record here several times as being a huge fan of the Georgia Nicholson books by Louise Rennison, who has her own fanlisting site--whatever that is. Louise endows Georgia with a voice, an attitude, a world view... How can I describe what Rennison does with Georgia other then to use Georgia's own words? It's "fabby, fab, fab."

Oh, wait. I'm off track. I'm not talking about the Georgia Nicholson books (though I am happy to say there is a fourth book in the series, Away Laughing on a Fast Camel, that I haven't read yet). No, folks, what I'm talking about today is LBD It's a Girl Thing by Grace Dent, which sounds so much like the Georgia Nicholson books that VOYA said of it "Move over Georgia and Angus, the LBD is taking over!" No! No!

I will admit that I didn't give this book a chance. I only read twelve pages and then stopped because it just seemed like too much of what I'd read before--the lame, out-of-it dad, the girlfriends, the voice. If I'd never read Louise Rennison's books, I'm sure I would have loved this. But since I had...

Oh, No! What Have I Done?

I've joined two listservs! Or maybe just one, since only one of them, Child_Lithasconfirmed that I'm in. I'm even receiving e-mails from the group. That appears to be how listservs work.

I say "appears" because, really, I only have a clue.

Well, I am excited about getting to talk to some more kidlit people. Since I hardly know any kidlit people, at all, you can see why this is a big deal for me. I hope they don't mind that I never seem to like much of anything I read. The listserv I joined is described as being a little on the academic side. A little more rigorous intellectual effort would be good for me, I'm sure. You can never think too much, right? Gee, I hope I can think enough for these guys.

There is a problem with doing this, though. A listserv is a way for a lot of people to e-mail each other. (I guess, because, remember, I only have a clue.) So I'll be getting e-mails off and on all day. Many of which I'll want to respond to. Plus I go to Readerville off and on all day, too. And I have a number of blogs I like to check out each day to see what's going on in the world. Plus I have my workout schedule. Plus I like to update my own blog a few times a week, at least.

What I'm driving at is that it looks to me as if my writing career is pretty much over. I don't have time for it. Wait! I could stop calling my mother! That will buy me more time. Yeah. I guess I'll do that.

A Four Dollar and Twenty Cent Fine. Yikes.

When the overdue notice arrived last week from my local library I knew without even opening it what it was for--two of the Adventures of the Bailey School Kids by Marcia Thornton Jones and Debbie Dadey. I think I'd had them for months because they'd been overdue once before, and I'd paid up and renewed them.

Why was it taking me so long to read these skinny little things? Well, I'd originally had three of them. I took them out of the library because I was interested in writing a book for the same age group (which I haven't done anything about this summer) and wanted to see what other authors were doing. I read one of the books and, ah, didn't exactly find it to be my taste. I guess that's the best way I can think of to put it. So I was having a hard time bringing myself to read the last two. When the overdue notice arrived, I finally read one more book while I was on the treadmill. I gave up after that.

There are close to fifty Bailey School Kids, and the authors crank out other series, also. The two Bailey books I read and the similarity in the other titles suggests that these books follow a strict formula: a group of interchangeable kids suspect that adults in their town are witches, knights, Dracula, etc. and do some lame stuff to prove their point. In one of the books I read it was clear by the end that they were wrong. In the other it wasn't, though maybe I just didn't get it. That's a real possibility since I don't get these books at all.

Now, I am a big believer that a book a kid likes isn't necessarily going to be a book an adult likes, and I'm fine with that. Still...Oh, my gosh.

Since I like to try to be fair, I'm going to point out that I found only really positive reader reviews for these books at Amazon, and they were recommended to me by a library aid at an elementary school I was visiting this past spring.

Still...Oh, my gosh.

I Have a Bad Feeling About This

As a general rule it doesn't bother me too much to have a book manuscript off with my editor because while she's got it I don't have to work on it, right? But after a month or so passes with no word, especially no, "Oh, my stars and garters, Gail, it's the finest thing I've ever read! How do you do it?" I begin to get anxious. Especially if a deadline looms. Or is past, as often happens.

To make a long story short (too late!) I e-mailed my editor today just to see how things were going. She was just lovely in her reply but said nothing that could possibly be interpreted as "Oh, my stars and garters, Gail, etc. etc." It will be sometime next week before I get a serious response.

I'd better finish those two short stories I've been revising and send them out somewhere before then because I suspect July and August are going to be tres horrible and I won't be touching them again until fall. And what's more, I still haven't finished cleaning my desk after the last writing binge. And I wanted to go visit a bookstore I've never been to. Oh, man. I don't know how I'm going to sleep tonight.