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Reader’s Advisory Week @ Stacked

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It’s here!

After months of thinking about and planning for a week-long series of posts all about reader’s advisory, it’s finally here this week. I’ve talked at length about the importance of and value of reader’s advisory not just in the library world, but in the reading world more broadly. Reader’s advisory is a skill set, and it’s one that you can learn regardless of your educational background or career.

The goal of reader’s advisory week is to not only offer up means through which you can learn how to be a better reader’s advisor, but it’s also to highlight some of the really neat ways other people have done reader’s advisory and to talk about some of the other aspects of RA that aren’t always talked about as much as they could be.

We’ll have three guest posts this week, including two from librarians talking about some of the RA techniques and tools they’ve used, and one from a teacher who will discuss how she’s used RA inside and outside her classroom. I’ve also got a few posts about weeding, about backlist, and about other resources and tools you can use to become a better, more thoughtful, and more effective reader’s advisor.

I’d love for a rich discussion with these posts, so feel free to jump in at any time and offer your own thoughts or ideas. Likewise, if reader’s advisory interests you now or after you learn a little more about what this fancy term actually means, you should join us this Thursday — and every first and third Thursday of the month from 8 to 9 pm Eastern — for the #readadv chat on Twitter, hosted by Sophie Brookover, Liz Burns, and myself. All are welcome, not just those who have RA as part of their job description. If you’re a reader and you want to learn how to make connections among books or how to best recommend books to others, join us. We want your insight, too.

Reader’s advisory is something all readers can do, and it’s my hope this week helps not only show the number of ways RA is done and demystifies some of the process, but also inspires you to dive in and try some things out yourself.

Friday Notes

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Welcome to Friday afternoon. I have a couple of posts up at Book Riot this week I wanted to share, as well as some other sundry links that aren’t going to be relevant next week when the Links of Note post goes up. So you’re getting them early.

Yesterday, I took over for one of our vacationing rioters and wrote the Book Fetish post for the week. It’s a roundup of cool bookish items you can buy, and it made me glad I do not do this piece regularly because I would be broke. I’ve got you covered from shoulders to feet, quite literally.

I wrote a post today, too, that’s basically a roundup of the things I think about in relation to YA Lit and the sorts of articles or studies I’d love to see done and written about. I think I’ve read one too many “I’m a grownup who reads YA” or “Why grown ups should read YA” posts — I’d like something a little different and something much more interesting. Here’s what I’ve got, and if you have ideas you’re interested in, you should leave a comment over there. Perhaps we’ll inspire someone to tackle any or all of these ideas.

Other Hangovers




Do you like us on Facebook? We run our posts through a feed over there for anyone who prefers reading through that medium, but we do post other content as well.

For example, this week we rounded up a few giveaways going on that we thought would interest readers. And if you don’t want to like us, that’s okay, since I’ll repost those giveaways here for your clicking and entering enjoyment:

  • First, you can win a copy of Jason Vanhee’s Engines of the Broken World from us! The form to do that is right here. That giveaway is open through the end of October. 
  • You can win a copy of Trish Doller’s Where the Stars Still Shine from us, too. Actually, I have two copies of this one to give away. I’m going to pick a winner on Monday, and you can enter here. 
  • Win a copy of CK Kelly Martin’s Yesterday and newly released sequel Tomorrow over at The Book Town. We’ll be giving away a copy of both later this month, but go enter here, as well. 
  • Remember when Meg Medina was uninvited from a school visit because of her book? Angie has an excellent interview with Medina at her blog, as well as a give away of Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. There aren’t a lot of entries, so your chances of winning are pretty good (and this is a book worth reading). 
Next week, we’ll be running our reader’s advisory series, and it is awesome. I cannot wait to share the guest posts we’ve got and other content we’ve been working hard to get together. This isn’t a series strictly for librarians; anyone who wants to be better at recommending books for people who ask will benefit. You’ll see what others do and how it is they do it.
And though it’s still a month away, we’ll be running a contemporary YA week again this year. The guests writing are an excellent range of writers and will be hitting on many of the topics that many of you suggested earlier this year. I cannot wait to share.

The Midnight Dress by Karen Foxlee

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Fifteen year old Rose Lovell has just moved to Leonora, a small town in Queensland, Australia, with her wandering father. They’ve been on the move since her mother died when Rose was six. Her father, who’s had a drinking problem for many years, finds sporadic jobs, but he mostly leaves them after a few months, packing everything up and moving on to the next place. Leonora is just the next town in the neverending string of stops, and Rose doesn’t intend to put down any roots or make any friends.

Pearl Kelly, though, knows nothing about Rose’s determination to avoid all human entanglements, and she insinuates herself into Rose’s life, practically forcing her into a friendship. Pearl is beautiful and sweet and kind and naive, and Rose can’t help but love her. Their friendship develops slowly, sweetly, and Rose begins to think that maybe there is a life for her here in Leonora.

Pearl convinces Rose to attend the Harvest Festival put on by their high school, which means she’ll need a dress. Not just any dress, either – one made by the local eccentric, old Edie Baker. Some speculate that Edie is a witch, living in her remote house full of strange, old things. But whatever else Edie is, she is firstly a dressmaker, and the price of a dress for Rose is simply Rose’s assistance in making it. As Rose helps make the dress – the midnight dress – Edie tells stories of her life, dating back to before World War II, which make the book a story-within-a-story.

It’s Rose’s relationship with these two girls/women – Pearl and Edie – that drives the story, though we get snippets of her relationship with her father, with a boy in her grade, and a few others. Hanging over the entire book is a tragedy, one foreshadowed from the very first page. Something terrible has happened in Leonora, we learn, and it has something to do with Rose, Pearl, Edie, and the dress.

The Midnight Dress is one of those books that a lot of people describe as magical – and some claim to have magical realism – but in reality, has no magic at all. It’s the quality of the writing that drives this description, I think. I don’t necessarily mean that it’s outstanding (though I believe it is). Rather, the way Foxlee tells her story makes it seem as if it’s all occurring in a completely fabricated place, where senses are heightened, emotions are felt more deeply, and wonderful (and terrible) things happen in a way they never could in our own everyday lives. There’s an insular feel to the story, as if the characters exist outside of the world inhabited by the readers, and we are only allowed a glimpse.

I don’t think Foxlee’s story is unusual in this regard, but she certainly does it very well. The techniques of alternating viewpoints and frequent switches in time contribute to this feel. It makes the story incredibly gripping, but in a very different way from a thriller or a romance. When the story was done, I felt as if I were emerging from a kind of fog. I had to go to work a few tracks before the end, and I could not get my mind off the story for the entire work day. This is quite unusual for me with audiobooks, which I usually listen to with about 90% of my attention.

An audiobook that can do this to me is obviously very well-narrated. Sometimes accents can get on my nerves, but Olivia Mackenzie-Smith is a native Australian and she sounds completely genuine. Her Pearl sounds naive, enthusiastic, and kind, while her Rose is just the perfect amount of bitter and, slowly, hopeful. She drops her voice for the male characters without making them sound like caricatures. It’s a very well-done production.

It doesn’t feel much like a YA book to me, though. It was initially published for the adult market in Australia and then bought for YA readers in the United States. There’s a certain distance to the characters, which prevents the reader (or listener) from really getting into their heads. I ached for them, but I didn’t ever feel like I was them. The narrative very much seemed like an adult telling the girls’ story – perhaps even Edie herself. It felt quite refreshing to read a book that seemed more adult, actually, which I don’t do much of lately. A lot of adult books follow this one’s structure as well – split timelines and a story within a story, with a mystery wrapped up in it all. I’d be curious to read what other people thought about the book’s “YA-ness.”

One final thought: the book is set in 1986, and an event that occurs in that year plays a minor – but ultimately very important – role. There are mentions of the Soviet Union and a lack of cell phones. The time period also makes it possible for Edie to have lived through World War I – and remember it – and still be alive and well enough to sew a dress in 1986. This would be impossible to do in 2013. I think the year is justified for the story, but it doesn’t really feel much like an historical book.

Guest Post: Swati Avasthi on Friendship in YA

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Earlier this week, I posted my review of Swati Avasthi’s Chasing Shadows and today she’s here with a really fantastic post about friendship in adolescence and in YA lit. 



In YA there’s an illusion – that
the relationships formed in the books we read are endless. That high
school romances and friendships survive the transition to college, to
the working world, to whatever paths the characters take after high
school is over.
I am a self-proclaimed, unabashed geek.
I love sentence structure, can get passionate about the
ill-semi-colon and swear that CMS is the One Format to Rule them All.
In high school, I wouldn’t have claimed my identity so fearlessly
– I didn’t know who I was; I was a bit of a floater (I lettered 5
times and was the editor of the literary magazine – I couldn’t be
placed neatly into a box). But I never skipped classes, rarely
turned in late work, put my hand up and participated – the works.
One day, during a free period, a friend
broke down and told me that she’d been raped. As she was crying I
skipped my next class – a suspendable offense in my school — and
we talked all through it until she felt better for that day. When I
ran into the teacher whose class I’d skipped, I made no excuses. I
was unapologetic, remorseless but honest – a friend needed my help
and yes, I’d do it again if I needed to. He wanted details. But I
wouldn’t cave because I knew one thing about myself: I was a good
friend.
In a time of life when I had no idea
who I was as a person, who I wanted to be growing up, and who I was
as a girlfriend, I knew that one truth. I came of age as a friend.
More than boyfriends, more than atheletics, more than even writing,
the thing I was sure of was my friendships.
Friendship stories (as compared to
romances) are underdone in YA. I don’t feel like I need a whole lot
of evidence to prove that – there’s a whole section for
paranormal romance in Barnes and Noble and nothing equivalent for
friendships. And often when friendships are portrayed in YA, they
are portrayed like I had thought of them as a teen – endless,
important, fixed. I was loyal to a fault.
But friendships are much more
complicated than that, especially when you are young, especially when
you are in transition, which most teens are. Only one of my friends
from high school (and not the one I skipped class for) is still my
friend. College changes everything. It changes who you are and
sometimes, your friends change too and sometimes they don’t.
Sometimes, they get left behind.
CHASING SHADOWS, my second novel, is
about three friends who are inseparable. Fast, strong, freerunners,
Corey, Holly and Savitri are one unit. When Corey is shot and
killed, Holly and Savitri have to remake themselves in the shadow of
a gunman, and in so doing, their friendship starts to fracture.
Holly wants to go after the killer and Savitri, who had wanted to go
away for college, no longer knows how to save Holly as she comes
unglued. How far do you go for your friends? At what point is being
a good friend about walking away?
It is a novel about how, when we change
because of something we can lose the people we are and the friends we
have.
My best friend from high school is
still a very close friend of mine. But it didn’t happen easily.
And there were times when I thought our friendship wouldn’t make
the transitions it needed to as we went to college, got married, and
had our own children. To keep a friendship, we have to let go of
some of it – to let it change as we do, to let it evolve, and wax
and wane sometimes.

Jane Resh Thomas says that lying to
children is a sin. My job is to tell the truth as I understand it
and the truth for me about friendships is that sometimes they don’t
survive. And when they do, it is through letting them grow and
change. It is not without struggles in which we define who we are as
friends: what actions and beliefs we value most in ourselves and
others. It’s not without conflict and drama, because this is about
coming of age and self discovery, which can have casualties. In
other words, it is the stuff of fiction. History is written by the
victors; fiction is written by those who struggle.
***
Swati Avasthi is the author of two YA novels: CHASING SHADOWS which is a Junior library guild selection, and received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus, and SPLIT which received the International Reading Association Award, Cybils Award, a silver Parent’s Choice award and made numerous “best of lists” including YALSA, CCBC and Bank Street. 
Swati got her MFA from University of Minnesota and teaches at Hamline University and lives in Minneapolis with her two dogs, two kids and one husband, though he is worth two.

PLA Conference Excitement

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I’m really thrilled to announce that this year at the Public Library Association Conference, I’ll be presenting on two topics.

First, I’ll be presenting with Katie Salo, Angie Manfredi, and Andrea Sowers on the topic of teen programming. This will be a standard program session, but attendees will walk away not only with ideas to try for teen programming in the library (including on passive programming), but I think between the four of us, you’ll get a sense that not everything will be successful and that is okay.

Today I got news that my ConverStation — a fancy word for a Conversation Starter — with Sophie Brookover was accepted, as well. We’ll be talking about “new adult” fiction. It will not be a rehash of our ALA conversation, though some topics will lend themselves to discussion. Part of this is because “new adult” is a rapidly changing topic and we’ve been thinking and talking about this for months now. The other reason is that Sophie and I, along with Liz Burns, have authored an article to be published early next year in The Horn Book Magazine on the topic, and while working through the topic in print, we’ve had some real “ah ha” moments.

I’m excited to not only be able to have both of these opportunities, but because PLA is a much smaller, more focused conference than ALA is, I’m eager for really valuable discussion both about these topics and others. There’s also something really satisfying in being able to present with some of your core professional colleagues on topics you talk about privately on a regular basis. It’s never about the being on stage and presenting — it’s about the discussions that come after with other people who give you a lot more food for thought.