Jessy won our giveaway of Low Red Moon by Ivy Devlin and has claimed her prize. Congrats!
Archives for October 2010
In My Mailbox (8)
Welcome to In My Mailbox, the weekly meme hosted by Kristy at The Story Siren. It’s a showcase of what books I got this week, either for review, from the library, or I purchased.
Empty by Suzanne Weyr (out now from Scholastic). Abby’s reviewed this one and it sounds like a really good speculative/realistic book.
You Are Not Here by Samantha Schutz (out now from Scholastic). This one is a surprise but it sounds pretty good — and you’ll see this cover again pretty soon in a cover feature.
From the library (or as I should probably say, Cybils books to read):
Heist Society by Ally Carter
Nothing Like You by Laura Strasnik
Stolen by Lucy Christopher
Purchases (or, I guess I like buying craft books):
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amigurumi: I’m working through a crochet book I bought a couple weeks ago, pattern by pattern right now. It’s got 6 patterns, and I’ve done 3, so I need a few simple things for when I finish it. I really want to make amigurumi!
Other mailbox goods:
I purchased a canvas bag to support the Cybils (and haul the reading load) and it’s really nice! I also got my Hunger Games Blog Tour prizes in the mail. I won 2 pins and a water bottle. Both of those will be going into a giant cabinet I have of awesome summer reading prizes for the kids at work.
Speaking of Cybils…:
Make sure you go nominate books for The Cybils! You don’t need to be a blogger, a librarian, a teacher, or anything. You may only nominate one in each category, and all you need is the 13-digit ISBN, which you can find on Amazon.com. They must be books published between October 16, 2009 and October 15, 2010. Since I’m a panelist and will be reading gads and gads of books in the next couple of months, I’d like to read some stuff I’ve been itching to read or some stuff I really liked the first time I read it. If you’re stuck on titles to nominate for the YA category, here’s a few suggestions (conveniently linked to their Amazon pages with ISBNs) I’m deleting them as they’re earning nods:
- Draw the Dark
- No and Me
- Friend is Not a Verb
- Tell Us We’re Home
- Jump
- Blindsided
- Extraordinary Secrets of April, May, and June
- Nobel Genes
- Butterfly
- John Belushi is Dead
- Love Drugged
Hopefully that gives you an idea or two! Be prepared for tons more YA reviews in the next few months….and then I promise I’m going to offer up a lot more adult and non-fiction book reviews.
Twitter-view with Jessica Warman
Yesterday, you read my review of Jessica Warman’s new book, Where the Truth Lies. Today, we have a Twitterview with the author, who shares insight into her writing process, her passions, and whether what she shares about the private school life is close to reality or not.
What’s your writing process like? Writing is meditation for me. It takes me to a place of complete concentration and inner stillness.
Do you have a writing playlist? What’s included on it? I need total silence to write. Any distraction – phone, music, TV – drives me nuts.
If you were to compare WHERE THE TRUTH LIES to a book, a film, and a television show, what would those be? I honestly have no idea. I can’t think of many stories that it’s similar to.
If you could have written any book in the world, what would it have been? Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Best book ever. Wallace was a genius. Unfortunately, I am not.
In BREATHLESS, your main character is a swimmer and in WHERE THE TRUTH LIES, the main character is a singer. What are your biggest passions? Aside from writing, running is my passion. I had a chance to explore that further in my upcoming novel Between, in which the main character is an avid runner.
Both of your books are focused on prep school life. You attended prep school, so dish: how close or far from reality are your settings? They’re actually very close to reality. Many of the events in Breathless, and a few from Where the Truth Lies, were taken from real life.
What’s the most embarrassing thing to happen to you? I was twenty years old before I learned that reindeer were real animals, not mythical creatures like unicorns. I don’t know how that fact slipped by me for so long.
Have you ever had a secret as deep as Emily? No, thank goodness!
How has social media impacted your relationship with your readers? I love that it gives me a chance to interact more freely with readers. Nothing makes my day better than getting an email from a reader who has truly enjoyed one of my books.
One of my favorite parts in your writing is silence, indicated with “…” “…”. This technique stood out. What made you decide to do that? That technique is borrowed from the late, great David Foster Wallace. I hope he wouldn’t mind my using it!
What’s your favorite ice cream flavor? Mmmm… Chocolate peanut butter.
If you were going to prison forever, say, because of some breaking and entering or vandalism, what would you want as your last meal? Sushi.
With what character in WHERE THE TRUTH LIES do you most identify? Probably Renee. Like her, I was pretty rebellious in high school!
What’s next for you? My third book, Between, comes out next year. I could not be more excited about it. I loved every single minute that I spent working on it.
Thanks for stopping by, Jessica!
September’s AudioSynced
Don’t forget! Go share your links on Abby’s AudioSynced this morning. I once again failed to listen to a book, but guess what you’ll be seeing here next month?
Where the Truth Lies by Jessica Warman + Giveaway
Emily Meckler’s life is, in short, charmed. She’s going to a private boarding school where her father is the president, and she gets to live with some of her best friends in the dorm. But when her junior year of high school resumes after a short break, things that once looked perfectly rosy take a nose dive with the arrival of the mysterious and utterly magnetic Del Sugar. Her school never lets in students mid-year, and since she didn’t hear a word about this from her father during break, Emily begins thinking something very strange is afoot, and she wants to get to the bottom of it.
What sounds like a girl-meets-mysterious-boy story is actually much more layered: turns out that everything Emily has come to believe about herself and her family may be lies. And we’re not just talking little white lies: these are the sorts of lies that may change her entire life.
Jessica Warman’s Breathless was one of the titles I dove into last fall upon its release because of the premise of secrets, family drama, and a little prep school suave. Although I ultimately had some issues with the book (similar to what I had with this particular one), the writing here is top notch. Warman has a very literary styling to her writing which requires the reader to slow down and engage. And engage I did; I was immediately drawn into Emily who, on the surface, comes off as a typical girl who has everything. But the further I fell into the real Emily, the more I had revelations similar to her — everyone has a deeper story than what’s explained on the surface.
Where the Truth Lies is a companion to Breathless but it is not essential to read her first novel to read this one. Instead, it’s much like the smooth connection Wendy Mass makes between her 11 Birthdays and Finally: we have a character who is related to the previous characters. This connection gave me a huge ah-ha moment and made me think that Warman was pretty clever. But those who don’t have that moment will not be missing out on anything essential to the story.
Warman’s prep school drama has great appeal to fans of realistic and contemporary fiction. We are dropped amid a world of wealth, privilege, drugs, sex, and secrets; it’s everything you imagine this sort of world to be where teens are left to live in dorm rooms away from their parents. Emily will fall in love with the off-limits Del who can convince her of everything, including breaking and entering into her own home. But oh, this will have so many consequences for her, and we’re not just talking about the sort that requires time writing the same line 500 times.
As much as I dug the drama (and I did), there were some issues that I struggled with through this book. First, the pacing and time passage in this book, much like in Breathless is a bit wonky; we meet Emily part way through junior year, but somehow there is a pregnancy that doesn’t quite time out appropriately. The book ends near the middle of her senior year, I think, and it seems that there are periods of time between that simply don’t exist. While I appreciate that we weren’t dragged into periods of nothingness in the novel, there was a sense of some plot points missing that could have been worked up a little more. Likewise, some of the characters who were initially really compelling (including Franny) seem to drop out of the story too quickly for my tastes. It didn’t quite make sense to me why we knew she had a hair pulling disorder if we never got much more of her. I also wish I had learned a little more why Emily became suddenly interested in a friendship with Renee, a known drug user/seller, after initially writing her off. Perhaps this is for a second volume or a third book that pulls these characters in again.
Where the Truth Lies will appeal to fans of Nina de Gramont’s edgy prep school story Gossip of the Starlings. These are darn near perfect readalikes for me, as both are full of scandal, unraveling secrets, illegal activity, and quite lovely writing. Fans of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and even Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons will find a lot to like here, as will fans of books along the lines of Gossip Girls, Pretty Little Liars, and Anna Godbersen’s The Luxe series. This is for more mature readers, for sure. I think this book will also have wide appeal to adults.
While I rarely comment on book covers fitting the book (haha), I just want to say that this is one of the most perfect captures of how I imagine the main character. Emily is a red head with long messy tresses, and she strikes me as a bit of an artsy dresser. In addition, the smoky element of the sky fits in perfectly with the smoke and water images that haunt Emily at night. Well played!
Want your own copy? Fill out the form below, and we’ll pick a winner at the end of the month.
*Review copy received from BEA, but this post is part of the Bloomsbury Tour.
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