A VOYA Perfect Ten 2016: THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU (and kind reviews)

I have become, like so many of you, a close watcher of the news. A woman waking up, panicked, in the middle of the night, wondering what will happen next to our communities, our environment, our economy, our trust in one another, our understanding of true versus false.

Returning from a birthday meal with my father, I checked in again, on the headlines. I didn't expect to find (within my email) news of the personal sort.

But, goodness, I am grateful for it. Thank you, VOYA, for the Perfect Ten 2016 citation. I quote here from the letter:

... This Is the Story of You—has been awarded the distinction of being a VOYA Perfect Ten 2016.  Each year, VOYA Magazine compiles reviews of titles that were awarded a 5Q and a 5P into our annual Perfect Tens list.  VOYA’s unique rating system is the only one that weighs both literary quality and teen appeal equally, a distinction that is of great interest and use to those charged with ordering and collecting reading materials for teens.

This list is relied upon by librarians and educators around the country (and the world) in their selection of titles to add to library and classroom collections.  It is an invaluable tool to our readership, and a lofty honor to those authors and publishers whose titles are selected.

The full reviews of all of the Perfect Ten honorees are included in ordering databases/systems of some of the largest book wholesalers and library jobbers in the country, for both public and school libraries.  The complete listing of this year’s Perfect Ten reviews will be available to all on our website (www.voyamagazine.com), including the full reviews and book cover graphics.  VOYA will be publicizing this year’s list via Facebook and Twitter. We are also publishing these reviews in our sister journal, Teacher Librarian.

As reviews editor, I understand how difficult it is for a title to receive a perfect 10 rating from one of our reviewers.  In fact, out of more than 1,100 titles reviewed last year, only 33 titles were awarded this honor.  That’s less than 3% of all titles reviewed.  Our reviewers are cautioned to consider and re-consider a number of issues before deciding on a 5Q 5P rating assignment for a book.  It is not a designation given lightly—nor is it given by novices.  Our reviewers are seasoned library and education professionals who work directly with young adult readers and have a broad base of understanding and appreciation for YA literature.

In sum, a VOYA Perfect Ten is a laudable accomplishment that very few titles can claim.  Congratulations again, and thank you for allowing VOYA to be part of celebrating your outstanding contribution to YA literature.

I would like to take this moment in time to thank as well Florinda and Sarah for their extremely kind reviews/citations of Story. The 3R's blog had this to say. Sarah Laurence, meanwhile, named Story one of the Best Contemporary YA novels of the year, here.

We live in bracing times. These acts of kindness, toward a story I wrote, are welcome glimmers of light.

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Sarah Laurence reflects (so kindly) on THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU

Sarah Laurence, who posts beautiful images from her coastal-Maine life and wide imagination on her popular blog, has been so kind to me in my journey as a young adult novelist. Asking for and reading the books, thinking about them, making powerful and important observations, introducing me to her friend, Cathy Fiebach, of Main Point Books in Bryn Mawr, PA, where I'll be doing the first area signing of the book featured above at 2 PM on April 30.

This is what Sarah does for others' books—even as she writes her own.

In the quiet months leading up to the launch (this coming Tuesday) of This Is the Story of You, Sarah asked for a copy. Yesterday she shared her thoughts.

I hope she knows how much this means to me.

I'm sharing just a fragment of Sarah's Story post here, so that you'll be forced to read the rest on Sarah's blog itself. I hope you stay there for awhile, and poke around to see what else Sarah has to say about words, stories, and place.

This is a Story of You is a modern parable of the horrors of climate change. When a storm cuts off an island from the Jersey Shore, 17-year-old Mira must fight for survival with only a stray cat for company. Earlier that day, her single mom had driven her disabled brother to the mainland hospital for emergency treatment. As the storm rages and the sea floods their beachside cottage, Mira must decide what to save and how to stay alive. If that weren't scary enough, a mysterious intruder is lurking outside, and without power or cellular service, Mira can't call for help.

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One Thing Stolen. Today is the (second) day. It's also the day My Spectaculars and I meet Jeff Hobbs via Skype.

One Thing Stolen has had a two-step launch—last Tuesday, this Tuesday—and that seems to fit this old amateur dancer just fine.

Today I want to thank all of you who have been so kind to this book in its early days—who took the reading risk, who made room for Nadia and Maggie, and Katherine, Florence and West Philadelphia, neuroscience and a raging flood, who wrote words of encouragement. I don't write books that fit into established patterns, and there are, of course, consequences. But I can't imagine doing books or this life any other way, and I'm so grateful to be on this journey with you. I'm grateful, too, to the entire Chronicle Books team and to my editor Tamra Tuller.

In lieu of a launch party for One Thing Stolen, I'll be traveling to a few local venues to talk either about this book or about the writing life. The events are here, below. If you are out and about, I'd love to see you.

April 18, 2015
Little Flower High School Teen Writers & Readers Festival
Little Flower High
Philadelphia, PA

April 23, 2015
Let Us Be Honest
A New Directions in Writing Memoir Workshop
Residence Inn
Pentagon City, VA
details here

May 3, 2015, 1 PM
Schulykill River/FLOW presentation
Ryerss Museum
7370 Central Avenue
Philadelphia, PA

May 20, 2105, 7 PM
Body, Mind, Heart, Soul:
The Whole Self in Contemporary YA
IW Gregorio, Beth Kephart, Margo Rabb, Tiffany Schmidt
Children's Book World
Haverford, PA

June 5 - 7, various times
Moravian College Writers Conference
Keynote Address, Panel, Conversation with A.S. King
Foy Hall
Priscilla Payne Hurd Campus
More information here

June 27, 1 - 5 PM
Arcadia University
Creative Writing Summer Weekend
Master Class/Reading/Q&A
450 South Easton Road
Glenside, PA 19038
More information here

Finally, I'm grateful for these recent reviews, fragments presented here. To read all official trade reviews as well as some early blog reviews, press releases, and the official teaching guide, please go here.

BookPage
One Thing Stolen explores themes of destruction and rejuvenation, emphasizing the possibilities and hope found in disaster. This is a unique and engrossing exploration of how characters deal with the pain and beauty of the real world. — Annie Metcalf 

Sarah Laurence
One This Stolen offers no easy solutions but still leaves the reader with hope. I'd strongly recommend this literary novel to adults and to teenagers who are interested in psychology, art, history and Italy. Kephart does a marvelous job with a difficult topic.— Sarah Laurence

And now I am off to Penn, to teach my immaculate Spectaculars and to meet a few prospective Quakers who sound spectacular in their own specific ways. We're hosting the superlative Jeff Hobbs via Skype today. Jeff's The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace is a seminal reflection on possibilities and choices (my thoughts on it here), and he's going to tell us how it came to be.

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Everything I Never Told You/Celeste Ng and Citizen: An American Lyric/Claudia Rankine

There are books that fill you with the clamor of something new—the risk of them, the innovation.

There are books that silence you—how honest and aching and true, how beautifully levered down into the soul.

This morning I am silenced by Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng's impeccable first novel about a daughter whose inexplicable death cracks open the vault of a family's secrets and regrets. A novel about children submitting to their parents' dreams for them, and the woeful consequences. Bill Wolfe had named this his favorite book of the year. Sarah Laurence had put it on her list. So many others, too. Believe anyone who tells you that you must read this book. Believe me. You must.

Ng is a master of the omniscient voice. A brilliant webber of divergent perspectives. A calm creator of sentences. A woman capable of writing with enormous clarity and tenderness about racism, silence, the terrible burdens of doing one's duty, the steep weight of holding that science book in your hand because your mother wants you to, the wretchedness of being the less-loved child. How do you take a heartbreaking story and still leave the reader with hope? You do it by writing through a powerful knowing not just of the past but of the future, too.

I am one of those people who writes in her books—outlining, defining, questioning. I did not write inside Ng's pages, preferring to keep them pristine. I turned back the ear of but one, knowing it would be the page that I shared, the thing that lies most at the heart of this novel. That word "different" and how we use it or abuse it in our lives.

Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked out a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn't think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again. 

I was reading Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric the same time that I was reading Ng. I was thinking of how many times I have likely gotten it wrong in my own language—despite all these years now with my own Salvadoran husband, all these years fighting labels in life and on the page. Even those of us who should fully understand the nuances of prejudicial language can, horrifyingly, get it wrong, and will again. I mean to take nothing away from Ng's magnificent novel by including words from Rankine in this post, but they do, I believe, go together. They must—both these books—be read.

You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James School on White Plains Road and the girl sitting in the seat behind asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written. Sister Evelyn is in the habit of taping the 100s and the failing grades to the coat closet doors. The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown hair. You can't remember her name: Mary? Catherine?

You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.

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Going Over: a 2014 Booklist Editors' Choice and, among two committed readers, a "best of"

Thank you, Booklist Editors, for including Going Over as one of 16 novels for older readers in your 2014 Editor's Choice books.

And thank you, Serena Agusto-Cox and Sarah Laurence, for being such interesting and committed readers—of many genres, of many books—and of sharing the stories you find with the rest of us. I'm honored to be on your year-end lists, among books that I, too, loved.

Serena Agusto-Cox, for those of you who might not know, is a poet and, beginning in 2015, a reader/writer offering her impressive skills through Poetic Book Tours. She blogs, intelligently and generously, about books here.

Sarah Laurence, meanwhile, is an artist and writer and reviewer, represented by Laura Geringer. I've always been intrigued by her take on books and have always be so very grateful that she has taken time to read and reflect on my own.




 

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a robust and thoughtful tween list from Sarah Laurence; some nice news for GOING OVER

I got behind on this day—a book to read and review, some client care, a trip to the dentist, some forever inadequate taming of the jungle of my garden (oh my), and lunch with a friend whose capacious mind is thrilling, frankly, to be near. What he knows. What he thinks. I sit back and listen.

It is not until just now, then, that I have a moment to thank Sarah Lamport Laurence for a list of tween books that has a lot of people talking. People are looking for Sarah's kind of thinking about books all the time, and today she put together a most valued collection of recommended reads for tween readers. I am honored to find both Dangerous Neighbors and Undercover included.

Additionally I am grateful to Junior Library Guild for making today its Going Over day. And I am thankful to Indigo for placing my Berlin novel on its Best Teen Books of 2014 So Far list.

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Dear Teen Me, Grown-up Pottery Love, and Going Over/Dr. Radway Kindness

Oh, those beautiful pottery ladies. There I was, minding my own clay business, when I saw Karen the Good, who also goes by Queen of Wayne, sneak by. What is that lady doing? I wondered, then went back to trying to figure out how to make my latest project stable.

The next time I looked up, the ladies had gathered around and they were singing. They were singing a birthday song.

How I love them all.

(Bill, the honorary pottery lady, took the photo of the group, but I love him, too.)

So a huge thank you to my friends, and to Karen, for remembering—and for singing—so poignantly well. And the timing is—well—something else, for just this morning I had been remembering a surprise party my mother had thrown for me when I was sixteen years old. Somehow she'd gotten Jim Clancy, Radnor High basketball star, to my basement, along with ice skaters and other friends. I had not had the slightest inkling that something was in the works. I miss my mother on many days, and always on my birthday, and there were the ladies, on this day, stepping in.

So who was the teen me? I write of her here, on Dear Teen Me, today. The piece begins like this:

You do not have to be good. You don’t have to try so hard. You don’t have to stay so very still inside that box that you have built up for yourself.

Life is meant for living.

Listen.

On a day in which so much kindness overflows that I hardly know what to do, or how many ways I can say thank you, I share these beautiful things as well:

Shelf Awareness shared the Going Over trailer as the Trailer of the Day, here.

Sarah Laurence reviewed Going Over so incredibly beautifully here.

And Melissa Firman very kindly makes room for, and says such nice things about, Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, here.

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Main Point Books and When Women Were Birds/Terry Tempest Williams: Reflections

This past Monday I stepped inside a brand-new independent bookstore.

Let me repeat that: a brand-new independent bookstore.

Main Point Books of Bryn Mawr provides a little extra proof (for those who doubt) that both books and those who love them are still very much with us here, in our twenty-first century. Cathy Fiebach, the store's owner and a Penn alum, has placed her shop right next door to a cupcake house (oh, those cupcakes), on the main drag of Lancaster Avenue. She has created a warm and welcoming space, a shop that, during my longish stay (in the company of the writer Sarah Laurence), was bustling with readers of all ages, and with conversations of the typography and paper sort. What do you love? What do you read? What do you have?

Find me a story.

I bought When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice by a writer who has always intrigued me, Terry Tempest Williams. Williams combines ferocity with a very particular brand of lyricism. She lives her life large (as an activist, an environmentalist) and writes it with care, and in this case her prompt—her exploration—concerns the blank journals her mother bequeathed to her.

On the very first page, we learn of the shock of that blankness. It is shortly after the passing of Terry's mother:

On the next full moon I found myself alone in the family home. I kept expecting Mother to appear. Her absence became her presence. It was the right time to read her journals. They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful clothbound books; some floral, some paisley, others in solid colors. The spines of each were perfectly aligned against the lip of the shelves. I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It, too, was empty, as was the fourth, the fifth, the sixth—shelf after shelf after shelf, all my mother's journals were blank.

What do those journals mean? What mystery do they hold, what lesson do they teach, what room do they make for Terry? Over and over again, Terry examines the possible, refutes the obvious, rejects the simple, and in doing say she tells the rough story of her own life—her Mormonism, her love of country, her marriage, her explorations beyond marriage, her one night in a jail, and a frightening diagnosis. Over and again she designates and signifies the blank journals, and then, again, she looks past her own momentary understanding.

When Women Were Birds is often stunning. It can, at times, feel rhetorical, or deliberately obfuscating, or overly mythical—but that is the point. This book offers fifty-four variations on voice, and no easy answers. It is memoir—personal and unifying, wild and precise, needled together by this simple fact, Williams' words:

Each day we begin with the empty page.

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Small Damages: the cover story and a blogger's thoughtful response

How does a book get a cover?  How does a story emerge as a bright concentrate of itself?

Melissa Walker has been asking authors this question for a long time, and I'm lucky on two counts—Melissa (an author supreme) is my friend, and she has kindly asked me.  I tell the story of the Small Damages cover (and lessons I learned before the Small Damages cover) over on the Barnes and Noble Community Blog, with all thanks to dear Melissa.

I was just about to post this when Cynthia Pittman, a Facebook friend, pointed me toward another act of supreme generosity on this warm July day.  That generosity comes from Sarah Laurence, a so-intelligent, thoughtful reader who is also a writer who is also an artist who is also a woman who has learned to live a magnificently balanced life as a creative artist, mom, wife, and lover of the world beyond.  Sarah read Small Damages lately, and she had this to say.

Melissa and Sarah:  thank you.

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I Want

I have about a half hour of typing in me each day before the arm goes numb (except for the last finger, which simply hurts like heck).  But I have ten daily hours, at least, of corporate work (yesterday was 14) and sometimes I write blog posts, and sometimes (though less so these days) emails, and every now and then I write a sentence or two of a novel.  I go around saying ouch ouch ouch ouch.  I'm just an old creak.  That's what I am.

What I would really like to do is sit back and read the work of others.  Just, like, sit here and read.  Monday evening, ahead of an event downtown, I slipped inside the cozy sleeve of a bookstore and swooned.  Oh, there they were, be still my heart—all those books that I have been craving (real books, real paper).  The Charles Frazier.  The Alexandra Fuller.  The Erin Morgenstern.  The Diana Abu Jaber.  The Chad Harbach.  I came home with the Harbach, only because the new Michael Ondaatje wouldn't be released until the next day.  (They had it in the store, I know they did, but the crafty lady at the front desk made like they didn't.)  

Oh, I want to read.  Oh, what writer doesn't.  Oh, yes.  My life is blessed.  But.  I just really want to sit and read.  I want to use this blog to celebrate the work of others.  I want to get the balance right.

Let me close by celebrating Miss Sarah Laurence, a multiply talented writer, critic, painter, photographer (and mom) who, despite being in the middle of writing a few books herself, took the time to read You Are My Only and to write so intelligently about it.  I won't hijack any of her words.  I'll just send you here.  Talk about balance, Sarah.  It's just so perfect.

Thank you.

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Sarah Laurence takes us to the ponds of Maine...and Undercover

Don't spend a second more on my blog today. Head here, to Sarah Laurence's beautiful blog—rich with her photographs and musings on books and the writing life. This week she's featuring an interview with me (my favorite teen books, my assessment of teen readers, a never-before-seen photo of me in high school, among other things) and a review of Undercover. But more than that, she's sharing her own lovely sensibility. I urge you to take a look.

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