Insta(gram)-Love

Opinion

Last week, as a response to an author's tweet (guys, this upset me so much that I can't remember who it was--I blocked it out, I suspect) insinuating that people who didn't shop their local independent bookstore were, basically, cheap and lazy, I had a bit of a mini-rant I had to get out on Twitter.

I've been chewing on whether to post it here, because I know that this is a sensitive issue. Honestly, it's a sticky one for me, since I work primarily with small, independent business and try to support them as much as I can.

With that said, there are some loaded assumptions that come with the sorts of flip comments like the one I saw. It assumes the people live in an area with bookstores, with libraries and have transportation access to get to those places. Those are pretty big assumptions.

May 24

May 24 Stream-It Saturday: Terriers (TV)

Television

In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday.

Check out all my previous recommendations over here.

Once upon a time, there was a weird and wonderful show on FX that no one watched called Terriers. It had a loyal following of approximately ten people. Sadly, television networks expect a slightly larger audience than that, and Terriers was canceled after a single season.

May 22

May 22 Guest Review: Journey to the River-Sea by Eva Ibbotson

Anushree Nande

This kind of fun will never fail to delight.

— Philip Pullman

Eva Ibbotson was an Austrian-born British writer. My first introduction to her was Journey to the River-Sea, and her later books, though still pretty good, could never match up to the magic and charm of the first, a book I still re-read today and enjoy as much.

Orphans form a large part of Ibbotson’s stories, which are usually set in the turn of the century England or Vienna. Journey to the River-Sea however is set in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazonian forest in Brazil. It is a different time and a different world. Electricity and the telegraph have already been discovered, but there are still many discoveries to be made and expeditions to be conducted in far-flung, exotic places, where the locals are still referred to as savages.

May 13

May 13 Recommendation Tuesday: Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas

View all of the past recommendations over here.

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

Wouldn't we all look guilty, if someone searched hard enough?

Have you ever read a book that you wanted everyone you know to read so you can talk about it with them?

Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas, which Racquel over at The Book Barbies has recommended rather aggressively for some time now, is one of those books.

Dangerous Girls opens with a 911 call on Aruba. A group of privileged teenagers on spring break report that they've found their friend stabbed to death, blood covering her room and the glass door broken. Elise, the dead girl, is the best friend of narrator Anna, a relative newcomer to this ultra-wealthy crowd, with her "new money" contrasting with the old New England wealth of many of her friends, including Elise. Before she knows it, Anna is arrested and awaiting trial for her best friend's murder.

As Anna's fighting the charges, the non-linear narrative explores the complicated nature of friendship, the very idea of truth, and how easy it is for court of public opinion to depict anyone as a monster.

May 12

May 12 Going Over by Beth Kephart: Is Beautiful Writing Enough?

‘Be careful, Ada.’ Of course I’m careful. I’m in love.

What can I tell you, what should you know? There is a line between us, a wall. It is wide as a river; it has teeth. It is barbed and trenched and tripped and lit and piped and meshed and bricked—155 kilometers of wrong.

Despite Beth Kephart being a highly-regarded YA author (and finalist for the National Book Award), I had not picked up one of her books prior to her most recent, Going Over.

The writing in Going Over is excellent, and I can see why Kephart's novels are so highly regarded. With that said, the beautiful writing at times out-shined the storytelling and in some respects got in the way of Going Over's narrative.

Because the wall does not belong to West Berlin, and neither does the ground where I stand when I’m painting. I am a public enemy, a property defacer. I am an artist in love with a boy.

As is popular at the moment, Going Over adopts the dual narrator style, with half of the story being told from the first-person perspective of Ada, who lives in 1980s West Berlin. She paints graffiti by night and dreams of her Stefan, son of her grandmother's friend who lives in East Berlin, "going over" the wall so the young couple can be together once and for all.

The second point-of-view is that of Stefan.

You have to wait. You have to be absolutely sure. Love is the biggest thing, of course. But there are other considerations.

But, rather than first person, it's in a second person style, creating a distance from Stefan's perspective.

May 10

May 10 Stream-It Saturday: Dance Academy (TV)

Television

In my continuing selfless service to the world (ahem), I'm always looking for the next awesome thing to stream. And, of course, I must share my finds with you fabulous folks. Hence, Stream-It Saturday. Check out all my previous recommendations over here.

This week's recommendation was pretty much inevitable: ABC Australia's charming half-hour teen ballet drama, Dance Academy.

Here's the deal: Dance Academy is set in Sydney, Australia at an elite school for aspiring dancers. Just getting into the school is intensely competitive, and it's a feeder for the National Ballet Company. Over three years, the students train in hopes of being one of two or three students selected to join the Company. It's intense and brutal, physically. Amidst all that competition and training, these are still teenagers dealing with all the stuff that teenagers deal with. And, it's also a boarding school story, since they live at the school at which they train.

May 7

May 7 Recommendation Roundup: April 2014

Recommendation Roundup, Books

Clearly, I had a much better reading month than my CEFS compatriots, with a number of books I quite enjoyed.

By far, my most surprising read was Zac & Mia, which is one of those review copies that I downloaded on impulse because the folks at Harper Collins have me auto-approved for their books. Little did I know that it had won the Text Prize in Australia a couple of years ago, because that would've been my first clue that it was a good one. It's getting a lot of comparisons to The Fault in Our Stars, but I'm not sure that's an apt one, though the subject matter is similar. If I were to compare it stylistically to a "cancer book," I'd probably say it's more similar to The Probability of Miracles by Wendy Wunder, but that's not that best comparison either. It's actually just unique, with a distinctive voice and style.

May 6

May 6 Recommendation Tuesday: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

If she was going to die, she might as well die sarcastic.

Do you love vampire books?

Are you burned out on vampires?

Do you think that you'd never, ever love a vampire book?

Are modern-day vampires too sparkly and innocuous for you?

If you answered "yes" to any of the above, then I have a recommendation for you!

I suppose I should feel a smidgen guilty for recommending a "big" book on Recommendation Tuesday, but I don't because Holly Black's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is one of the more original, captivating novels I've read in a long time.

Better yet. it's a darn near perfect audiobook, mixing in atmospheric music and Chistine Lakin's understated, but effective narration.

May 2

May 2 Guest Review: Far from You by Lisa Schroeder, by Ashton

I feel like the more I read novels in verse the more I like them.

I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump since last year when I read Love and Leftovers for this very blog. So imagine my surprise when I managed to finish Far From You by Lisa Schroeder in nearly two hours. The novel flows together so seamlessly that I was surprised when it ended.

May 2

May 2 Using Verse for “Adult” Content, by Gabrielle Prendergast (Guest Post)

Anyone who writes in verse gets used to answering this question: “Why do you write in verse?” There are a lot of reasons of course, but one that I often talk about concerns the depiction of edgier material in books aimed at young readers.

Like it or not, our kids take drugs, self-harm, think about suicide, get abused, suffer from mental illness, are victims and perpetrators of violence, and lose friends. All of these dark topics are suitable for young readers, but may need to be presented in subtler ways than in adult literature. Verse is a way of achieving that. Its reliance on metaphor, sparse language, and contained form allow these issues to be explored without overwhelming the readers with heaviness.

Take sex for example. Not a dark theme (it’s fun and healthy!) but one that frequently raises eyebrows in relation to books for young readers. But again, like it or not, young people, teenagers, even pre-teens have sex drives and sex lives. Many YA books have a “fade to black” policy when it comes to sex. Characters might have sex, but rarely are the scenes depicted in any detail.

May 1

May 1 Verse Novel Throwback Thursday: Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff, by Racquel of The Book Barbies (Guest Post)

You ever laughed so hard
nobody in the world could hurt you for a minute,
no matter what they tried to do to you?

Make Lemonade by Virgina Euwer Wolff is an oldie (a 1993 release) but certainly a goodie novel. I read it during the 7th grade when I was learning English and I had zero idea what a verse novel is. At the time, I figured I either stumbled upon 1) a novel that’s meant for my basic and simple reading level or 2) a poetry book. Seven years and definition of a verse novel later, I’ve now learned what a verse novel and read other verse novels but Make Lemonade remains special.

Viginia Euwer Wolff's groundbreaking novel, written in free verse, tells the story of fourteen-year-old LaVaughn, who is determined to go to college--she just needs the money to get there.
When she answers a babysitting ad, LaVaughn meets Jolly, a seventeen-year-old single mother with two kids by different fathers. As she helps Jolly make lemonade out of the lemons her life has given her, LaVaughn learns some lessons outside the classroom.

Apr 30

Apr 30 Accidental Inspiration (Or What Happened When a Wrench Landed in My Verse Novel), by Sarah Tregay

My next book, Fan Art, will hit shelves on June 17th. Like Love and Leftovers, it is a contemporary young adult romance, and unlike Love and Leftovers, it is written in prose.

Fan Art didn’t start off that way. It began as a short story in verse, and later turned into a proposal for a novel. But the day after my editor said, “Yes, we’d be interested,” I received a second phone call. In order to reach more readers, Fan Art was not to be a novel in verse. I understood. A LGBT love story and a verse novel was narrowing the market too much.

Apr 30

Apr 30 Verse Week Giveaway - Love & Leftovers by Sarah Tregay

Books, Announcements, Verse Week

Apr 30

Apr 30 diVERSEity: Verse Novels with People of Color as Main Characters, by Skila Brown (Guest Post)

As we celebrate verse novels all this week, let’s take a moment to highlight those stories that feature a person of color as the main character. This is not a complete list, but a list of some of the best.

If you have favorites not listed below, tell us about them in the comments!

The Good Braider by Terry Farish

Viola leaves war-torn Sudan for a new life in the United States. Such a great story of strength and loss of innocence. Beautiful cover! Beautiful writing!

Apr 29

Apr 29 Recommendation Tuesday: Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

This week's Recommendation Tuesday is part of our Verse Novel Week celebration! View all of the past recommendations over here.

And the pomegranates,
like memories, are bittersweet
as we huddle together,
remembering just how good
life used to be.

— Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

When I get ready to put together Verse Novel Week each year, I always try to (rather foolishly) get caught up on verse novels I've missed and check out as many as I can find from the library. This year, my pile reached fairly ridiculous proportions, but at the top was Guadalupe Garcia McCall's Under the Mesquite, which came highly recommended by Nafiza, who has excellent taste.

Under the Mesquite is one of those books that will just suck you into its words and rhythm, and the verse format adds so much to that feeling as Garcia McCall weaves together Mexican American immigrant Lupita's story of family, loss and hope.

Apr 29

Apr 29 Why Verse Novels Can Be About Anything, by Stasia Ward Kehoe (Guest Post)

Verse Week, Books

Being verse novelist can make one feel defensive. The form is subject to a lot of questions, such as:

WHAT is a verse novel?
HOW can you tell a story in poems?
WHY don’t you just write “normally”?

Imagine someone wanting Eminem to define “rap.” Demanding of Joss Whedon, “How come you don’t write stage plays instead of screenplays” or of dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, “How can you express narrative through movement without words”? What might the late Andy Warhol have said to somehow who asked why he didn’t just paint “realistically”?

Apr 28

Apr 28 Review: The Crossover by Kwame Alexander, Guest Post by Allie of In Bed with Books

Kwame Alexander's newest novel, THE CROSSOVER, is a verse tour de force. It's told through poems by the main character, Josh Bell a.k.a. Filthy McNasty. He and his twin brother Jordan (JB) are talented basketball players, but jealousy threatens to split them apart when JB gets a girlfriend.

I love how many levels of story are woven into this novel.

THE CROSSOVER is the kind of book I never would've picked up when I was younger because I didn't like sports. There is the sports story promised by the cover, all leading up to a big championship game, but it is far from the only plotline. Nor is it the most important plotline. That's reserved for all the family stuff.

Apr 28

Apr 28 Podcast #22: Celebrating Verse Novels (& Friday Night Lights) with Author Lisa Schroeder

Podcast: Season Two, Podcast

We are thrilled that our annual Verse Novel Week podcast features none-other than one of our very favorite authors, Lisa Schroeder.

Not only do we chat extensively about writing in verse and some of our favorite elements of verse novels, but because Lisa is as big of Friday Night Lights fan as I am (true story: I found out about Lisa's books because she wrote an awesome post about FNL that the entire world sent me), we chat about that show a bit as well. As one does...

Lisa Schroeder is the author of six teen novels (four of which are fully in verse, one that's half verse and another that includes poetry as an important storytelling device) including THE BRIDGE FROM ME TO YOU; I HEART YOU, YOU HAUNT ME and CHASING BROOKLYN; and the Oregon Book Award finalist THE DAY BEFORE.

Apr 27

Apr 27 Kicking Off 3rd Annual Verse Novel Week!