UNDERCOVER remembered in "Classics Outside of the Classroom" story in VOYA

I began blogging some nine books ago, right around the release date of Undercover. This was my most autobiographical young adult story, a tale vaguely based on my own days as a striving high school poet with a love for ice, float, and speed, and with an English teacher who took note of all I was afraid to be.

Today my friend Ed Goldberg (of the blog Two Heads Together, among other things) sent word that Undercover has been remembered by Jennifer Miskec and Katy J. Stein in a February 2013 VOYA article called "Classics Outside of the Classroom."

From the article:

Over the last decade, young adult literature has seen a minor boom in the publication of adaptations of classic literature.  What can be an English teacher's best friends, books like Sharon Draper's version of Romeo and Juliet (Romiette and Julio) makes Verona a little more imaginable; Beth Kephart's Undercover, Cyrano d'Bergerac recast with fifteen-year-old Elisa, makes Cyrano just like one of us.  These adaptations can be a useful bridge between the teen reader's own life and the privileged space of classic literature, because authors modernize—and sometimes even sanitize—the famous stories, making them both familiar and educational for a new audience.

The piece goes on to describe a number of YA literary adaptations, including a beautiful long paragraph dedicated to Undercover.

I am indebted to the authors.  I am indebted, as well, to Ed.  I had always hoped that classroom teachers would discover Undercover and make it part of a broader curricula.

Thank you.

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Experimental Fictions

For those of you who have never gone to a Rahna Reiko Rizzuto reading or enrolled in one of her classes, she's a knock-out green-eyed Italian/Irish-Japanese astrophysics-trained novelist/memoirist who was born in Honolulu and has made the world her home (and left the world with, among other things, Why She Left Us, the novel that won an American Book Award). She's also one of my dearest friends, and every now and then a package will arrive with Reiko's writing scrawled across the front. Saturday that happened. Inside was a book by Christian Peet, a story told through postcards titled Big American Trip. Yes. A story told through postcards. Angry, odd, fantastic comminiques that all add up to a singular voice that may be male, may be female, may be fiction, may be not.

Addressed to the Sweet Grass County Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center in Big Timber, MT, for example, these words: "I do not wish that the world would go by. I do not wish to watch the world leave."

Reading through Trip yesterday afternoon, I thought of all the other deliberately odd books that have won my heart—the out-of-the-boxers that made me want to write a book like Flow, a river's autobiography, and that inspire the work I'm doing now. Carole Maso's Ava, for example—the final words of a dying woman, the unpieced fragments of a life. Michael Ondaatje's pseudo-biography of Buddy Bolden, Coming through Slaughter. John Berger's novel in unchronological letters, From A to X. Markus Zusak's Death-narrated The Book Thief. Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide. Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds. Alexansdar Hemon's The Lazarus Project. Forest Gander's As a Friend.

These books don't hew to the sound bite. These books dare. I've got an entire shelf of them here. I like sitting among them, breaking rules.

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Happy News

"UNDERCOVER," Jill Santopolo, my editor, writes, "just got chosen for the 2009 Texas Lone Star Reading List AND the 2008-09 Tayshas Reading List."

And because that makes me happy, I post the news here. I have heard from other schools (my alma mater, even) that UNDERCOVER is sneaking onto recommended reading lists, and not long ago, while giving a talk, the dear librarian from Upper Darby High School (proud secondary ed proving ground of Tina Fey) made mention of this delightful fact: UNDERCOVER is sometimes being coupled in classrooms there with the original "Cyrano de Bergerac," which inspired some of the story.

I send, then, a virtual hug to these librarians who have so generously made room for UNDERCOVER. In NOTHING BUT GHOSTS, due out in June, I play out my admiration for librarians in full.

For now, right now, I can only say thank you.

Oh, and maybe this would be a good time to mention that an UNDERCOVER paperback is due out in May with a supplement I've loved writing. In that supplement, we meet Elisa a few years on. We read some of her new poetry. We learn the fate of her burgeoning romance with Theo. And Dr. Charmin remains within view.

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