Family Circle Momster Recommends YAMO as Teen Read Week Read

Today on Momster, which is powered by Family Circle, You Are My Only joins Liesl & Po (Lauren Oliver), The Apothecary (Maile Meloy and Ian Schoenherr), Wimpy Kid # 6 and the 39 Clues series as a recommended teen week tween read and makes me very, very happy here.

I am pretty over the moon about this.  




Darcy Jacobs, I need to hug you.

Read more...

The Rise of the Illustrated Young Adult Novel

I had heard so much that was so good about A Monster Calls, the Patrick Ness novel inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd, that last night, when my arms were too achy to type a single letter more, I downloaded the book onto my iPad2.

Had I known that this book was so beautifully illustrated, I would have gone out to the store and bought myself a copy instead, so that I could, from time to time, look at these extraordinarily interesting, wildly textured Jim Kay drawings.  A Monster Calls would be a very different book without these images, just as Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, the Ransom Riggs books enlivened by surreal old photographs, would not be the book it is had not a publishing house decided that teens, too (and the adults who inevitably read teen books) need, every now and then, to stop and see the world not through words but through images.  Maile Meloy's new historical YA book, The Apothecary, is due out soon—a book that (if the preview pages on Amazon are accurate) features some very beautiful illustrations by Ian Schoenherr.  And let's not forget The Boneshaker by Kate Milford, with its beautiful Andrea Offermann images. (And, of course, there are so many, many more.)

A Monster Calls reminds me, in so many ways, of the great Roald Dahl story The BFG.  Dahl's books, illustrated by Quentin Blake, sit beside The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer) on my shelf—books that take me back to some of my favorite mother-son reading days.  We loved the stories.  We loved the illustrations, too.  We loved the entire package.

Maybe we have Brian Selznick to thank for this return to the visual—to ageless picture books.  Maybe it was just plain time.  I only (with absolute surety) know this:  I recently completed a young adult novel amplified by (in my eyes) gorgeous illustrations. I can't wait to see where that project goes, and on what kind of journey it takes me.

Read more...

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It/Maile Meloy: Reflections

Though there was a period of time when I wrote and published short stories (in literary magazines like Alaska Quarterly Review or Sonora Review or International Quarterly), I never fooled myself into thinking I'd mastered the form.  In short stories big things (or ideas or discoveries or defeats) happen in small spaces; back story is many times a trick of innuendo; there's no The Passage-sized lean toward what is really going to happen.  Writers of short fiction have no veils behind which to hide.  The stories must leap, the dialogue must spark, the concluding lines must hit with the force of (good) poetry.

I've had an intense and welcome time, therefore, reading Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, Maile Meloy's national bestselling collection of eleven short stories.  Many of Meloy's characters are hardcore ambivalents, perfectly represented by or reflected in the words of the A.R. Ammons poem from which the collection's title is taken.  She gives us brothers who feud and perhaps hate each other, and yet cannot let each other go; lovers who don't love so much as need; near romance lanced by fateful uncertainty; tragedy muted only by recusal.  Many of these stories take place against big skies or in lonesome territory, at the top of mountains, or in the chambers of a hotel.  They give us people who talk like people who likely exist, but we (or at least I) have not met them before.

I have friends who teach dialogue at universities.  The dialogue in Meloy's stories should be taught.  A line or two, and we know who these characters are, we know what version of the truth they are stalking, we know whether or not they'll be able to convince or satisfy themselves.  Big things are at stake; small moments, often, reveal them.  And in those stories in which more familiar tragedies have occurred (the rape and murder, for example, of the protagonist's daughter in "The Girlfriend"), Meloy contorts the familiar idea of the story line, crafting characters haunted and chilled.

With the exception of perhaps one or two entries (I was not a fan, for example, of the somewhat supernatural "Liliana"), Meloy's stories aren't just wonderful individually; they are bound thematically, they equal more than their sum.  This says something, I think, about Meloy's purity as an artist—her willingness and ability to write toward the vast unspeakable and return with the remarkably well said.

Read more...

How do you choose the books you are going to read? she asked

A few days ago, when Amy Riley and I were taking a wee break from techno talk (Beth:  HTML code?  Amy (long distance):  Okay.  I'm doing it with you.  Are you on the Feedburner screen?  Do you see the box next to the words ....?), I told her that I'd just returned from the bookstore with an armload of new books.  She, being a great reader herself, asked me which ones.  I listed Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic, Maile Meloy's Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, John Green's Looking for Alaska, and Jane Mendelsohn's American Music.

There was a bit of a pause, as Amy searched (I imagine) for some pattern in my selections.  "Interesting," she said at last.  "How do you choose what you are going to read?"

In answering the question I realized just how many influences weigh upon me.  The fact that I work in multiple genres, that I teach, and that I care a whole lot about language has me scurrying after the books I hope will teach me—in every genre.  The fact that I sometimes wonder why the rest of the world reads what it reads (e.g., The Help, Girl in Translation, Loving Frank) gets me curious enough to buy.  Blogs influence me (hence my purchase of My Name is Mary Sutter).  Friends do (Kate Moses has led me to The Names of Things; Jane Satterfield to The Importance of Music to Girls).  Reviews do (The New York Times Book Review led me to Forest Gander's As a Friend, Kim Echlin's The Disappeared, and Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds).  I trust imprints, like Graywolf, because they publish friends like Alyson Hagy and so I read and not surprisingly love Jessica Francis Kane's The Report.  I trust editor friends like Laura Geringer, Jill Santopolo, and Alane Mason, and so I read, respectively, Virgin Territory, Between Shades of Gray, and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives and Nothing Happened and Then it Did.  Many, many authors send me their books, and I do all I can to read them.  On lovely afternoons, I drift through bookstores and find titles that appeal, and some of my favorite books have come to me this way:  Michael Ondaatje's work, The Book Thief, The Cellist of Sarajevo, to name just a few.

This time around, my reasons were thus:  Maile Meloy because my writing friends adore her work and because I've been impressed by earlier stories.  John Green because he is John Green.  Richard Russo because I always meant to read him and because bloggers I respect insist.  Libba Bray because two minutes in her presence and I adored her.  Jane Mendelsohn because I absolutely loved her first novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, which begins: "The sky is flesh. The great blue belly arches up above the water and bends behind the line of the horizon...."

Marketers would love to know the why behind book selling.  Pundits speculate (interestingly, following the recent New York Times story suggesting that book trailers are highly influential, my in box was full of readers saying they never watch trailers).  I can only tell you what I do.  I wonder what your methods are.

Read more...