Where Things Come Back/John Corey Whaley: Reflections

How much do any of us need to know about a book before we decide to make it our own? I cannot predict myself.  I'll buy a book on a whim, or because I like the cover.  I'll buy it because a blogger I respect suggested that maybe I should, or because it got a rave review, or because someone I know is on the fence and I want to know how I'd decide.  I buy books in an instant, and I've been known to take my time.  But eventually I get around to buying books.

Where Things Come Back, John Corey Whaley's book, has been on my radar screen for a very long time.  It won the 2012 Printz Award and the William C. Morris YA Award.  My friend Ruta Sepetys loved it, and she doesn't go wrong.  Publishers Weekly, in its starred review, called it a "taut and well-constructed thriller."

I need to read more thrillers.

And so this weekend, while at the Chester County Book and Music Company with my friends Kate Walton, Amy King, and Joanne Fritz, I asked Joanne (who happens to work at CCBM) if she could locate a copy of Whaley's famous book.  There are more than 28,000 square feet at CCBM, but Joanne, being a whiz, returned in a second, book in hand.  Yesterday I lay on a couch and read.

Everyone knows how happy I am when authors take risk.  When they write outside category, defy logic, or dare to craft something we have not quite seen before.  Where Things Come Back is one of those books—nearly uncategorize-able (I'm not sure I'd call it a thriller), never super eager to broadcast its ambitions, willing to take some time and to confuse readers, even, so that it can eventually make its point and (this is important) have its fun.  This is a story in which many seemingly disparate parts do ultimately make a whole.  A brand of religion is involved, a probably extinct bird, a kidnapping, some insanity, best friends, young divorce, misdirected prosleytizing, and the angel Gabriel.  Gabriel is also the kid brother of our narrator.  Some people (in the novel) get the two confused.

I admire the time Whaley takes with this book, the no-hurry he is in to explain all these parts, or to promise us cohesion.  His narrator is so likable that we're going for this ride.  The story is so unusual that we stay.  The suspense here—the thrill—is seeing if Whaley is actually going to pull this off.

No spoiler here:  he does.

There are words today, for all of us.  I quote them here.  Then I encourage you to go to my friend Kate Walton's blog and read her plea for greater kindness, for less aloneness.  We should all print her piece and keep it near.

From Whaley:

... I wanted to be offered help from people because they cared about me, not because they felt some strange social obligation to do so.  I wanted the world to sit back, listen up, and let me explain to it that when someone is sad and hopeless, the last thing they need to feel is that they are the only ones in the world with that feeling.

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self promotion? friendship? what do we really want, as writers?

I'm going to be downright honest with you.  Launching a book prickles me over.  I hail from failed Girl Scout Cookies sales roots, after all.  I ripple with panic (more than a pebble's toss worth) every time I have to price a corporate project (and that's my business, my family's livelihood).  I send announcement e-mails out about my books in full-force cringe.  I am graciously invited into bookstores and then apologize to any friend who might want to come.  I'm sure you're busy, I'll say.  Don't feel you have to come.

It's an itchy enterprise, this book thing.  I want my books to succeed, and I especially want Small Damages to succeed because I am working with such exceptional people at Philomel and I cannot let them down.  I worry about unhappy reviews and reviewers for their sake.  I worry about sales because people I love have believed in me, and I want to deliver for them.

Still, I struggle with self-promotion.  I struggle to find balance.  I want to look out, beyond myself— reporting on the books of others (only the books I love, obviously, for I am not quite sure what any blogger gains from reporting on books that were not loved), reflecting on the world at large, honoring neighbors, children, family, friends.  I want to connect in a very real way with people.  I want to generate positivity against the dark clouds of 2012—the heat of summer, the terror in a theater, the buried secrets of a certain university and an assistant football coach, the final ebbing away of loved ones.

Yesterday, as you know from the identical picture in the previous-to-this-one post, I launched Small Damages at Chester County Book and Music Company, a store that brought us all so much for three full decades but is now on a month-to-month lease.  It is the Kindle, not the economy in general, that some believe hurt this gigantic independent. The Kindle, a machine.  Bookstores are about community.  Machines most often aren't.  We writers and readers are losing, in CCBM, a glowing, active hearth, and we will be so much the poorer for this.

Yesterday was a Saturday in mid-summer.  I am who I am, no actual rock star (despite my pumpkin-dashed-with-paprika pants).  Nonetheless, A.S. King drove all the way from where she lives (I call it a castle, she swears that it isn't) and K.M. Walton flew in from down the road (on fairy wings, with sparkle), and Joanne Fritz sat among us, and we talked, until a teen reader and her mom and, then, two friends joined in.  Maybe some people would want to be surrounded by crowds at a book launch.  I could not have been happier than this—the intimacy of the conversation, the honest exchange, the talk that went on and on until Amy and Kate and I looked at our respective time-announcing gadgets and realized that dinner in our households was about to begin.  Amy, Kate, and I are writers first.  We live the writing life.  We had stories to tell, no bravada behind which to hide, no desire to be anything but ourselves.  We loved our teen reader and her mom for encouraging a life with books.  We loved Joanne and CCBM for making room for us there.  We loved the two best friends who went home armed with their own piles of books.  We loved spending time not wanting to be, but being.

I signed my very first copy of Small Damages to a teen reader named Julia.  I laughed until I ached with Kate and Amy.  I went home counting my luck for being in this odd but beautiful business of publishing.  And then I took a walk in the neighborhood that is home to me and felt the breeze kicking up through my hair.

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at Chester County Books with A.S. King, K.M. Walton, and Julia

Thanks to Joanne Fritz for being our hostess with the mostest this afternoon at your beautiful, please-tell-us-it-will-be there-forever store.  Where else can we sit like we did and laugh long and hard, long after we stopped talking about Small Damages?  And how lucky am I that A.S. King (we'll call her Amy) and K.M. Walton (we'll call her Kate) spent this afternoon with me?

Right answer:  Extremely lucky.

And what about Julia—our teen reader?  She's something else.

I wore orange pants, just so none of us could forget this afternoon.  I know that I never will. 

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A Small Damages Reading, An Embrace of Chester County Book and Music Company

I was shocked and of course deeply saddened when I learned last week that Chester County Book and Music Company—the grand lady of independents in my part of the world, a vast store, encyclopedic in scope, and intimate in nature—was now occupying its West Chester store on a month-to-month basis.  It will remain active, we are told, at least through the fall.  But the future beyond that is cloudy, unsure.  And we readers and writers are devastated.

Chester County is where it always happened.  It's where the big-name authors came, the celebrities, the locals, the book clubs, the university students from down the road, the mothers on an afternoon out.  It's where the staff, many of them long-timers, read passionately and recommended enthusiastically—in person and by way of placards all around the store.  A.S. King was there on a rainy night, and we gathered around.  K.M. Walton threw her launch party there and hundreds, I mean hundreds, rallied.  Kate Moses and I once sat in the near dark on a very rainy night and met the likes of Kathye Fetsko Petrie.  I met Ilene Wong, thanks to CCBM.  I met a band of students from West Chester University, saw again old teachers and city friends.

What will we do without our store?  How many nights did I come home with a bag of books that I had bought strictly and solely on staff recommendations (and they were almost always right)?  How many books in this book-crowded house of mine first lived at CCBM?

And what can we say to thank those who made CCBM what it is, those who must now look for new jobs to do, new ways to channel their passion for stories?

Joanne Fritz, who spent many years behind the desk and in the aisles of CCBM, was the first to get in touch with me about Small Damages, months and months ago.  It is thanks to her that I will be at CCBM this coming Saturday, fitting, I think, that my first event for Small Damages be held here.  Perhaps I'll see you there, but more importantly, perhaps you'll find time, between now and this fall, to make your way to this great store and thank it for all it has given to all of us throughout these many years.

SMALL DAMAGES signing
Chester County Book and Music Company

975 Paoli Pike  West Chester, PA 19380

West Chester, PA

2 PM

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CRACKED: The K.M. Walton Book Launch

I love book launch parties, and last night's party for K.M. Walton (at the Chester County Book & Music Company) was nothing short of spectacular.  I believe the entire state of Pennsylvania showed up, and then some.  I know there was love in the room.  You would have thought we were attending a basketball game, given all the whooping going on, the whistling and cheering. It takes a long time to write a book, a long time to publish it, and then there's that stretch of awful lonesome when you don't know who will care about what you've done, or if anyone will buy it.

If you don't stop to celebrate, then you've missed the best part of the deal.  With a CRACKED cake and cupcakes, with a buffet table and street teams, with signature hunters lined up for miles, and with that sunshine smile on her lovely face, K.M. Walton celebrated in style. 

And here we are—just a few of the thousands—celebrating with her.  You've got Kathye Fetsko Petrie, Ilene Wong, A.S. King, and yours truly in the mix.  You've also got one of the nicest gestures I've seen at a book launch party—a table celebrating the books of K.M. Walton's friends. 

Here's to a long life for CRACKED.  Happy First Book Week, Kate.

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A few upcoming events

Just a few things, should they be of interest:

Tomorrow evening, November 7, beginning at 6:30 PM, I'll be at the Haub Executive Center of St. Joseph's University talking about the future of young adult literature, reading from You Are My Only, and convening (and cavorting) with some early readers of the book.  A huge thank you to April Lindner and Ann Green, as well as to Jane Satterfield, who introduced me to April more than a year ago.

On Wednesday, November 9, starting at 7:00 PM, I'll be in West Chester, at the fabulous Chester County Book & Music Company (West Goshen Center) for a You Are My Only reading.  Last week I read from Emmy's chapters.  That night I plan to read from Sophie's.  Whatever happens, I'll be grateful to be inside this fantastaic independent bookstores.  A big thank you to Thea Kotroba.

Finally—and this won't happen for a few months yet, but I'm so excited about it that I want to share early word—some of the very best in the business will be gathering at The Spiral Bookcase, another indie!, in Manayunk, PA, next March 24 for an afternoon extravaganza of teen literature.  We're still working out the details, but know this:  Susan Campbell Bartoletti, A.S. King, April Lindner, Keri Mikulski, Elizabeth Mosier, and I will join together for an afternoon that promises to be all kinds of wonderful.

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Whenever I want to feel happy,

I look back on my portraits of Miss Eva.

Come on, now.  Tell me you are smiling, too.  I know you are.  Could a child be more joyful?

Today I worked very hard with my gimpy arm in this ugly half-cast.  Corporate work, mostly.  Emails here and there.  Lots of things to do, plenty of them.  And then, at one point, I stood up.  I had just spelled Frankfurt as Frankford and decided enough was enough.  I walked the first 80 pages of my adult novel out of this room (the novel that had been 270 pages, before I tossed it entire).  Went to another room.  Sat on the couch inside gray, rainy shadows.

I did not know if my skinny 80 pages, 19,000 words, would work.  I sat for two hours holding my breath.

I am breathing now. 

And so my mood improves, and Miss Eva improves it even more, and in precisely an hour from now I'm going to get even happier, because I'll be where A.S. King will be, reading from her brand-new novel, Everybody Sees the Ants.

We have challenged each other to a game of ping pong, Mrs. King and me.  Right now, though, the ball is in her court.

Find her there, Chester County Book and Music Company.  West Chester.  7 PM.

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