STACKED

books

Put a Bird on it: Cover Trend 2013

|

I know I’ve blogged pretty extensively about cover trends already but another one that’s been popping up and I’ve noted keeps coming around. So of course, I have to note it.

It is the bird.

I keep seeing birds on covers. They’re taking up different shapes and purposes. And for the most part, it’s a trend I’m really digging. It could possibly be from watching too much Portlandia, but I think the covers with the birds have been pretty good!

These are all 2013 titles, and not all of them are out quiet yet. It’s very possible I’m missing some other titles, so feel free to chime in in the comments. All descriptions are from Worldcat or Goodreads.

First, here are three middle grade novels getting the bird cover treatment. It’s pretty amusing they’re all blue, too. 

Texting the Underworld by Ellen Booraem: Conor O’Neill faces his cowardice and visits the underworld to bargain with the Lady who can prevent the imminent death of a family member, but first Ashling, the banshee who brought the news, wants to visit his middle school.

Bird Nerd by Tracy Edward Wymer: Eddie Waymire is not a birdwatcher. He’s a birder. And he’d be the first to tell you that birders do more than watch. They listen, smell, and when necessary they taste. Eddie learned everything there is to know about birding from his dad, including the story of the mythical Golden Eagle. And then, when Eddie started sixth grade, stomach cancer made his dad “fly away” for good. Now Eddie is in seventh grade and lives with his mom, the head janitor at West Plains Middle School. As the school year begins, Eddie tries to impress Gabriela, the new girl in town. But it’s no use. She has no interest in a scrawny seventh grader who everyone calls bird this and bird that. To make matters worse, Eddie is paired with Mouton, an oversized enemy with Tourette syndrome, for the year-long Science Symposium project. Eddie must find a way to survive seventh grade and make the most of his star-crossed life, all while searching for that elusive Golden Eagle. If he can do that, he just might soar higher than ever before.

One Came Home by Amy Timberlake: In 1871 Wisconsin, thirteen-year-old Georgia sets out to find her sister Agatha, presumed dead when remains are found wearing the dress she was last seen in, and before the end of the year gains fame as a sharpshooter and foiler of counterfeiters.

Bird by Crystal Chan: A girl, who was born on the day her brother Bird died, has grown up in a house of silence and secrets; when she meets John, a mysterious new boy in her rural Iowan town, and those secrets start to come out.

Canary by Rachele Alpine:  Kate Franklin’s life changes for the better when her dad lands a job at Beacon Prep, an elite private school with one of the best basketball teams in the state. She begins to date a player on the team and quickly gets caught up in a world of idolatry and entitlement, learning that there are perks to being an athlete. But those perks also come with a price. Another player takes his power too far and Kate is assaulted at a party. Although she knows she should speak out, her dad’s vehemently against it and so, like a canary sent into a mine to test toxicity levels and protect miners, Kate alone breathes the poisonous secrets to protect her dad and the team. The world that Kate was once welcomed into is now her worst enemy, and she must decide whether to stay silent or expose the corruption, destroying her father’s career and bringing down a town’s heroes.

The Chaos of Stars by Kiersten White: Isadora’s family is seriously screwed up. Of course, as the human daughter of Egyptian gods, that pretty much comes with the territory. She’s also stuck with parents who barely notice her, and a house full of relatives who can’t be bothered to remember her name. After all, they are going to be around forever—and she’s a mere mortal. Isadora’s sick of living a life where she’s only worthy of a passing glance, and when she has the chance to move to San Diego with her brother, she jumps on it. But Isadora’s quickly finding that a “normal” life comes with plenty of its own epic complications—and that there’s no such thing as a clean break when it comes to family. Much as she wants to leave her past behind, she can’t shake the ominous dreams that foretell destruction for her entire family. When it turns out there may be truth in her nightmares, Isadora has to decide whether she can abandon her divine heritage after all.

Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos: A sixteen-year-old boy wrestling with depression and anxiety tries to cope by writing poems, reciting Walt Whitman, hugging trees, and figuring out why his sister has been kicked out of the house.

Infinite Sky by C. J. Flood (note: this is a UK book): Iris Dancy’s free-spirited mum has left for Tunisia, her dad’s rarely sober and her brother’s determined to fight anyone with a pair of fists. When a family of travellers move into the overgrown paddock overnight, her dad looks set to finally lose it. Gypsies are parasites he says, but Iris is intrigued. As her dad plans to evict the travelling family, Iris makes friends with their teenage son. Trick Deran is a bare knuckle boxer who says he’s done with fighting, but is he telling the truth? When tools go missing from the shed, the travellers are the first suspects. Iris’s brother, Sam, warns her to stay away from Trick; he’s dangerous, but Iris can no longer blindly follow her brother’s advice. He’s got secrets of his own, and she’s not sure he can be trusted himself. 

The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater: No description yet, but this is the second book in the “Raven Boys” cycle.

Legacy of the Clockwork Key by Kristin Bailey: A orphaned sixteen-year-old servant in Victorian England finds love while unraveling the secrets of a mysterious society of inventors and their most dangerous creation.

Prodigy by Marie Lu: June and Day make their way to Las Vegas where they join the rebel Patriot group and become involved in an assassination plot against the Elector in hopes of saving the Republic.

The Nightmare Affair by Mindee Arnett: Being the only Nightmare at Arkwell Academy, a boarding school for “magickind,” sixteen-year-old Destiny Everhart feeds on the dreams of others, working with a handsome human student to find a killer.

Tandem by Anna Jarzab: Sasha, who lives a quiet life with her grandfather in Chicago but dreams of adventure, is thrilled to be asked to prom by her long-time crush, Grant, but after the dance he abducts her to a parallel universe to impersonate a princess.

Shadowlands by Kate Brian: Rory, a girl in witness protection, thinks the serial killer she turned in has found her and is killing people around her. But as she investigates, she discovers a dark, disturbing truth about her new hometown. 

What do you think of putting a bird on it? Are there others coming out in 2013 featuring our fine feathered friends? I guess I don’t need to mention there are a few books with nothing but feathers, too, do I (looking at you, Antigoddess and Phoenix, among others). 

When You’ve Gotta Go . . .

|

I’ve hesitated to write this post because it’s weird. And because I kept debating the appropriate subject line for it because it’s so weird.

There’s an odd trend I’ve noticed recently in my reading. I mean odd in that, over the course of the last two months, I’ve read this particular incident six separate times, and it’s something that, prior to this series of incidents, I don’t know I remember reading in the past. Or if I did it was so isolated it never made me pay attention. It’s something I don’t know I want to be paying attention to, but now that I’ve noticed it, I can’t stop noticing it. 

I guess you can call it the new vomit.

What is this trend, you ask? Well….it’s when a character pees him or herself. 

In all of the situations I’ve read this scene in — and let me note that two of the books below have this happen twice to their characters in the course of the story — none of the incidents have been related to laughing so hard that holding one’s bladder becomes impossible. No. In every instance, it has been either trauma-related or, in the case of one instance, it was related to a health issue. 

Since I’ve been asked about this and asked to name names about what books have done this, I’ve decided it was time to showcase this bizarre little trend. I’m going to post the covers of the books, the descriptions from WorldCat, and yes, I will highlight when said instances occur in the book to give it some context. It’s possible there could be a little spoiling that happens. I’ve included links to reviews, where relevant, and I think the ones I haven’t yet reviewed are likely sitting in the queue for future review. 

But I’ll be leaving the incontinence out of those reviews since I’m covering it well enough here.

Empty by KM Walton: Deeply depressed after her father cheated on and divorced her mother, seventeen-year-old Adele has gained over seventy pounds and is being bullied and abused at school–to the point of being raped and accused of being the aggressor. Reviewed here. 

When it happens: Del takes Vicodin before a talent show. It loosens her up but it really screws with her brain chemistry. When she’s walking back to her apartment after the disaster of a show, she loses her bladder. Lucky for her, her pants have enough fabric to them to soak up the mess (since they’re pants for a big girl). 

All You Never Wanted by Adele Griffin: Wealthy teen Thea Parott’s jealousy of her older, prettier, more popular sister Alex prompts a series of self-destructive acts that threaten their seemingly-idyllic lives. Reviewed here. 

When it happens: This is actually a significant plot point in the story. When Alex is at her internship — the one she got through her step-father’s connections — she’s so nervous and worried that she pees herself. It’s horrific and embarrassing and a real sign of shame for Alex. 

The Whole Stupid Way We Are by N. Griffin: During a cold winter in Maine, fifteen-year-old Dinah sets off a heart-wrenching chain of events when she tries to help best friend and fellow misfit Skint deal with problems at home, including a father who is suffering from early onset dementia.

When it happens: This might be cheating a little bit, but because my radar has been up on this one, I’m including it. Skint’s father has early onset dementia, and in one of the scenes, his mother cannot handle being his father’s caretaker any longer. She makes a scene, and during it, she shouts about how she can no longer handle him peeing himself. 

Scowler by Daniel Kraus: In the midst of a 1981 meteor shower in Iowa, a homicidal maniac escapes from prison and returns to the farm where his nineteen-year-old son, Ry, must summon three childhood toys–Mr. Furrington, Jesus Christ, and Scowler–to protect himself, his eleven-year-old sister, Sarah, and their mother. This book comes out next month.

When it happens: This book gives readers two horrifying scenes of self-urination. Since both are huge plot spoilers, I’m going to talk around them as much as possible. The first happens in one of the grisliest scenes I’ve ever read before, and it involves someone being forced to pee themselves because they’ve been restrained in such a way they have no choice. This particular scene involves two characters, and it’s the second character who remarks upon the first’s incident. In the second instance of this, it’s that second character who finds himself being the victim of his own incontinence. That instance is out of fear and trauma and horror. And I give Kraus some props for making that almost equally as horrifying to read about as the first instance. 

Charm & Strange by Stephanie Kuehn (description via Goodreads): Andrew Winston Winters is at war with himself. He’s part Win, the lonely teenager exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy. The guy who shuts all his classmates out, no matter the cost. But he’s also part Drew, the angry young boy with violent impulses that control him. The boy who spent a fateful summer with his brother and teenage cousins, only to endure a family secret so painful it led three children to do the unthinkable. Over the course of one night, while stuck at a party deep in the New England woods, Andrew battles the pain of his past and the isolation of his present. Before the sun rises, he’ll either surrender his sanity to the wild thoughts inside his mind or learn that surviving can mean more than not dying. This book comes out in June.

When it happens: It’s very near the beginning of the story. Win is the victim of bullying at school, and it involved him accidentally peeing all over himself. It doesn’t come in the present, but the story opens in the immediate after — and then he’s reminded of the incident by someone he runs into. 

Bruised by Sarah Skilton: When she freezes during a hold-up at the local diner, sixteen-year-old Imogen, a black belt in Tae Kwan Do, has to rebuild her life, including her relationship with her family and with the boy who was with her during the shoot-out. This book comes out next month. 

When it happens: This is another two-for-one deal. In both instances, the main character pees herself out of fear and trauma. The story focuses on a girl dealing with PTSD, and her incidents come when the traumatic event first unfolds, and then it happens again much later in the story when she’s reliving/experiencing memories of it. 

This is my small list of books where a character — usually a big player in the story — pees him or herself. None of these are happy incidents. I mean. Not that they would be, but they aren’t out of laughter. 

Can you think of other recent titles where this has happened? All of the books above have published in the last few months or will be publishing soon. I think it’s such a bizarre and odd little trend. It really does remind me a bit of the stress/fear vomit that seems to make its way into many YA titles. 

(Also, it was very hard to write a post and not make jokes. I mean, rather than piss on others, YA characters are just pissing on themselves instead.)

Riffs on the tale

|

Classic mashups have been hot for a little over a year now. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the first to come out, back in early 2009, but now you can get your classics in about any flavor you want them.

I haven’t read any, so I can’t make a statement for how I feel about them. I’ve been asked a few times, but really, all I can say is that I think that now, they might be over done. Little Vampire Women, put out very recently by HarperTeen, is the first of many that the publisher wants to aim at teens, who have latched on to popular adult titles like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer.

What’s your take on the trend? Does it do a good thing by exposing people to classics in a new way or is it destroying timeless work?

I guess the real question is this: what’s the one you would most like to read? I’d love to read a mashup of Moby Dick. Oh, or maybe Leaves of Grass (what would be possible?). It’s one of my all-time favorite books, and I’d love to see how it could be mashed. But what goes well with a white whale?

Trend Spotting: Cult Societies

|


I talked about the suicide trend in teen lit earlier. Here’s another one that keeps popping up again and again, with definite mixed results: cults. More specifically, plural-marriage-accepting-religiously-fundamentalist cults. Here’s a quick over view of three of those titles, along with what works and what just doesn’t.

Last week, Michelle Dominguez Greene released her Keep Sweet with Simon Pulse. Keep Sweet follows Alva Jane as she falls in love with a boy within her Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints group in rural Uta (approximately an hour outside Moab, if that helps with setting up the story more). Of course, as readers we know this is going to be a problem because the boy was not decreed to be her husband by the Prophet.

Alva chooses to not “keep sweet” and escape her situation. Unfortunately, it takes over 100 pages to find Alva interesting in the least, and it seems as though her switch from being a believer in the Prophet and her religion is sudden and abrupt. Quite frankly, Alva chose to “keep sweet” for most of her life, and it takes little to change her. It’s the beating of another woman that makes her snap, but it wasn’t convincing to me as a reader. Here’s your spoiler warning, guys, so stop reading this paragraph if you don’t want this one ruined for you: within — I kid you not — five pages, she escapes, runs away to Moab, gets picked up by a couple going to California, stops in a gas station to see her sect was raided, makes the news, and then the folks who picked them up say (this is the icing): “Okay, I figure you are the girls they mentioned in the newscast.” The people who picked them up, along with everyone else in the sect, are utterly flat, voiceless, and nothing but air in the story. I mean, that’s some of the worst dialog I’ve read in a long time.

I found Keep Sweet a disappointment. It lacked on plot, and when the plot began to thicken, the writing and lack of development made it fall completely flat. The last chapter was utterly unrealistic, despite having a good premise. In my ideal world, this book would have about eight more chapters, with more development, more believability, and more character insight. It could have been a knock out. I think most readers will leave this one feeling cheated.

I feel comfortable making those comments because last year, Carol Lynch Williams released what I think was the strongest book of this ilk: The Chosen One.

It’s been over a year since I read this one, but I remember that the main character, Kyra, escapes to read at the bookmobile that often sits at the edge of the compound where she, too, lives with a polygamist-practicing family. She wants out, and it seems quite clear throughout the book this isn’t where she wants to be in her life.

This book was sparse, and it works. Williams develops a character — and she chooses not to overextend herself and develop more than a couple of characters — and a situation. In rereading my GoodReads notes, I mentioned that the characters aren’t especially well developed because of the sparse writing and that this was the important point in her story line. We know in this particular cult that who you are does not matter. It’s what you do. It is not a judgmental scenario in the same way that Greene’s is. Rather, we know Kyra’s not happy and wants to get out. Although Greene seeks to prove the same point about girls being simply there to provide children for the profit, her decision to dig into character development and fall flat while doing so (especially with characters like Brenda) weakens and buries that issue.

The Chosen One, I noted, was satisfying and fast-paced. This one seemed aimed at the younger end of teen readers, too. I think Greene’s may have aimed higher, especially with the end note about FLDS. It was published last May by St. Martins Griffin.

Sister Wife by Shelley Hrdlitschka was the first book published with this theme (at least during the “trend” — I know others were published before this one) by Orca in October 2008.

Again, it’s been a year or more since I read this one, but thanks to GoodReads, I’m able to pull some memories together. To quote myself (oh I’ve always wanted to do that!), “My biggest problems were poor pacing (the end seems to skip years over pages), uninteresting characters, and unrealistic plot lines (the faith lines were so loose and sketchy, even in the polygamist setting, it was hard for me to really believe any of that backdrop). I think the stone setting and interaction among those within Unity and those outside was strange — in the polygamist stories we hear in the news, there is security and the places are compounds not easily broken into or out of. While certainly the story isn’t meant to be a strict telling of any of the real situations, I thought it had a lot of basis in reality and could have been better pushed in that direction. I just couldn’t get into this one because there were too many questions in my mind and none were really related to the characters themselves but on the writing/story choices.”

I did note that it deserved praise for the unique premise and situations that I hadn’t stumbled upon quite yet. And to be fair, knowing now this was an Orca publication, the pacing and the more shallow plot development makes sense. This publisher aims at the reluctant reader market, and I think this *is* a book that will appeal to them.

What struck me as most interesting in the trend of these books is they all have the same basic story line and characters — a girl, unhappy, tries to escape. We know that girls shoulder a lot of the weight in polygamist sects, but you know what I want? I’d eat up a book from the male’s perspective. What about a male who is fighting for power and control? What about a male trying to escape? There’s plenty of juice here, writers, and I’m eager to read it. It’s clear the trend’s big because of the news and the images we see in the news, but I’d like something with more twist to it.

That said, if you are looking for a good read, you have choices. I think of the three, The Chosen One holds the most promise, and perhaps that’s in part due to Williams’s experience in writing for the teen market.