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books

Getting past the easy reach

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As I’ve been working on writing my book and hitting these mental milestones (40,000 words felt like a lot, then it felt like a lot to rework my outline, then it felt like I’d hit a mountaintop at 55,000 words and counting), I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we talk about and promote books to readers.

Then in today’s Shelf Awareness, I saw this about the “book grapevine.” Click through and read it because it isn’t long.

In short, the book gets great promotion on the ground level, then it gets promotion from a big-name person in the field or industry, that word gets to a reader who then suggests the book to, in this case, a book seller (and you can swap book seller for librarian or teacher or any other reader advocate), who then reads the book and they themselves do ground-level promotion of the title, too.

It gets the word about a particular book out there and does so fast. This is fantastic, especially for books that are really good (as is the book in this particular instance).

I blogged a few months ago about the value of and importance of good reader’s advisory. One of the things I am striving for in writing my own book — a guide for readers and librarians and teachers and anyone else who promotes books with readers — is to make really strong reader’s advisory recommendations. This means I have done a lot of reading, and not just of the books themselves, but I have kept my eye out on book reviews for titles I know I won’t get to. These are books that pop up on my radar as titles that would reach a certain type of reader looking for a certain type of book. I read these reviews with interest, not only for the reviewer’s take on the title, but also their own comparisons of the title. Because I love seeing how different people approach recommending books, too.

Thinking back on the idea of the “book grapevine” and thinking about how there are a lot of people who simply aren’t big readers or who happen to take the chance to read a book outside their comfort zone for whatever reason, I wonder how many times we go for the very easy reach.

You know what I’m talking about.

The easy reach is that book which requires little thinking to recommend. It’s the book that everyone is talking about or it’s the book by an author who everybody knows or who is at least recognized as a “big name” within their respected genre.

Often, these are the books which do end up on best seller lists or are books that have a sizable chunk of publicity behind them or end up in the right hands at the right time and those right hands happen to be other leaders or well-known names in the genre who can then speak to the title’s strengths and merits. These books have value to them and readers often find themselves loving them. Don’t get me wrong on that.

But they’re also easy reaches because they’re the books that already have a stamp of approval on them, either through their marketing effort or through who has heralded them.

This isn’t to say that easy reaches aren’t good books for many readers. They often are. Many times, they can be an awesome introduction to a genre or an excellent way to lure readers in who may otherwise be reluctant for any number of reasons.

But book grapevine? I’m not so sure. It’s not really a grapevine if the book is the easy reach.

The point of this post and the point of my thinking about it is that we need to be better about getting out of the comfort zone. Sure, know those best sellers. Know the books that your readers are asking for. But it’s as important — if not more important — to know about those other books. The ones that aren’t getting a lot of press for them or that are backlist titles and have sort of fallen out of the sphere of memory in light of those shiny new titles and those easy reaches. It’s important to go beyond the end cap titles and explore the shelves. To browse. To discover.

Readers who become the best reader’s advisors and the strongest advocates for reading and books are those who seek out the books which aren’t the easy reaches. They’re the ones who can see the value in those titles and know that they’re the books which WILL reach many readers because of their strengths or accolades or the endorsement from well-knowns (Oprah, for example, or in the YA field it’s someone like John Green). That’s not to discredit the books or those speaking on their behalf.

It’s just that they are easy reaches.

I challenge you to go out on a branch if you’re a reader. Try something new. Try something that’s been out for a few years. Try for a book that’s a debut and not getting a ton of attention. Look for those books and read them, then think about the appeal factors in those books that would line up with what another reader would want. Recommend those books. Readers aren’t always looking for the newest titles or the shiniest ones. Nor are they always looking for those easy reaches.

Sometimes a reader wants the right book for them. The more you read, the more you reach out, the more you explore, the easier it is to figure out that sometimes, it’s not all about the Dan Browns, the Stephanie Meyers, or any other number of big name, easily recognizable authors. It’s hard and time consuming but it is worthwhile. It’s satisfying, both for you as a reader and those readers into whose hands you will press that just right title.

When you get beyond the buzzed titles and you instead work to meet reader with right book — that’s the true book grapevine. Because when that reader finishes the book, they’ll pass it along to the next right reader, too.

17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma

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It all starts when Lauren sees the missing poster for Abby. When she knows she can find her, when she knows that Abby is talking to her.

Lauren never knew Abby before seeing the poster.

Then it’s Fiona. Fiona, the girl whose parents owned the carriage house she and her mother lived in. Fiona, who used to babysit Lauren periodically, and who decided one night she’d had enough and she was leaving. Running away. Locking Lauren in the closet so she could get away. Causing Lauren emotional trauma and not to mention physical discomfort and embarrassment.

It was always Fiona, from the start. It wasn’t Abby who was the first girl who went missing that Lauren knew she saw. Who haunted her.

But it’s not just Fiona and Abby. It’s Natalie. Then it’s Shyann. And Isabeth. And Madison. And Yoon-Mi. Maura. Kendra. All of these girls — all of these missing girls — Lauren can talk to. She knows their stories. She knows where they are.

The thing they all have in common, all of the girls, is that they’re 17.

And they’re gone.

There’s also the dream. The one which takes place in the same house Lauren grew up in, that she knows so well. Except now it’s filled with these girls — each of them has space in there. Each of them can talk to her. The house is warm. Smoky. Almost burning. Fiona always seemed to have a bit of control there. Even if it was Lauren’s dream, even if she was the one walking and talking and experiencing, somehow she was still under Fiona’s direction. As if Fiona was the person in charge of the house. As if Fiona was the person in charge of Lauren’s thoughts.

What could go wrong when Lauren chooses, then, to reach out to the families of these missing girls? When she is herself turning 17 and worried that her fate is just like that of those girls she knows are missing. The girls she knows and sees.

Nova Ren Suma’s 17 & Gone is a masterful exploration of the lines of madness. Paired with pitch-perfect prose that simultaneously propels the reader forward because of its fluidity and yet begs the reader to slow down and appreciate the singular choices in word and syntax, 17 & Gone is the kind of book you want to read at least twice. First, for the story. Second (and third and fourth) to see what parts of the story you missed the time before. What parts of the language, the turns of phrase, the evocative prose make those multiple readings and interpretations possible.

If you don’t want to be spoiled, I suggest skipping down to the final paragraph. But before doing that, it’s worth noting that I don’t necessarily think this is the kind of book that can be spoiled because it is so rich in possibilities and in interpretations that one person’s take isn’t the singular means of understanding it.

17 & Gone is, at heart, an exploration of mental illness. Lauren suffers from schizophrenia. Or at least, that’s what the psych ward wants to label her as, but they can’t quite put that diagnosis on her. Because schizophrenia requires more than a series of episodes; it’s the kind of illness that doesn’t manifest the same way in every individual. In this case, Lauren’s symptoms involve a few things. First, she fixates. These missing girls, the ones she believes she can see and talk to, are the product of her own research and fascination with the idea of missing girls. In other words, she’s spent a long time looking around the internet for girls who have been labeled as endangered missings. She’s learned their stories and absorbed them into her mind. They’ve become part of her. That she meets them in the house, the one she knows, is indicative of her letting them into her space. Into the world that is intimately hers.

But if only it were that simple. Suma doesn’t make it easy, and that is why this book — why her story telling more broadly — is so stand out.

Fiona, the second girl who enters Lauren’s mind, is actually someone Lauren knew in real life. She left an impression on Lauren. When Fiona chose to leave home, to run away with strange men, she caused trauma to Lauren that was long-standing. It happened in her own home. It happened in that intimate, safe space. That is why Fiona has control in the dreams, why it is she is the one running the operation. She’s the one who contributed to the rift in Lauren’s mind.

But if only it were that simple.

Fiona may not be one of those girls. One of the ones Lauren fixates on. What Suma forces the reader to do in this story is wonder: what’s real and what’s imaginary? What are the lines between the moments of mental insanity and the supernatural? The surreal? Is there maybe something to consider that people who suffer from such debilitating mental illnesses are themselves experiencing some kind of othering? Are they seeing and experiencing a world through an entirely different way than those who don’t? Can they interact with ghosts? The specters? How is it we can know what is and isn’t normal, what is and isn’t stable anyway?

Because what happens when Lauren gets out of the psych ward is that she sets fire to the place where Abby was last seen. And she finds a relic belonging to Abby. Abby is still alive.

Lauren solves the mystery in the real world and found the missing girl. So. What about the others?

One of the biggest challenges with reading this book — and it’s a challenge that’s not a criticism but a challenge of the story in and of itself — is that Lauren is very hard to know. Because things aren’t all right in her world and in her mind, readers are outside her thinking. They’re in the position that her boyfriend and her mother are. Readers are, in a sense, powerless to figuring out what is really going on because Lauren is, too. Because she can’t make sense of her world in the way that we do. At times, this is frustrating to the reader. You want to shake her and tell her to wake up. That what she’s doing isn’t okay. That meddling in the lives of people who are grieving isn’t good. But the thing is, we don’t even know the extent to which Lauren has done this. She shares the story of going and seeing Abby’s grandparents. That is the only way we know she’s done this. We don’t know about the letters she’s sent to other families.

She doesn’t tell the reader because she cannot tell the reader. She cannot lead us through because she cannot lead herself through.

Suma’s 17 & Gone could best be called magical realism, as it’s grounded in our world and the experiences present in our world, but our world looks, tastes, smells, and works with a question of whether or not it is our world at all. This is a novel about being on the precipice of becoming an adult and moving toward that great unknown. To the world where girls are missing and ghost shaped and malleable and yet so fully formed, real, and there. There’s then the question of whether it’s a world where Fiona gets to direct or Lauren gets to be the one in charge. What of our histories can define us or mold us or ultimately offer insight into our deepest, darkest, toughest-to-access selves?

17 & Gone is a marvelous, sumptuous, literary novel that is not easy to forget. Readers who loved Suma’s Imaginary Girls will see many similarities in story telling and be satisfied. It’s a knock out of a book. This is a novel about what it means to be lost and what it might mean to be found. Suma leaves readers with more questions than answers, but that makes this book so damn special. That’s what makes a reader want to go back, to experience again, and to reconsider the first thoughts they had. 17 & Gone is a book you want to talk about.

17 & Gone is available today. In full disclosure, Nova and I have a professional relationship — she and I presented together at Kid Lit Con. 

Doing Our Part: YALSA Award and Selection List Nominations

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Remember last year when I blogged about how anyone can suggest titles for YALSA’s award and selection lists? And I explained how to do it and why it’s important?

Here’s a reminder. Please read it if you haven’t.

I wanted to put out a little more information about the committee I am a part of this year. As you may or may not know, I am a member of this Outstanding Books for the College Bound (OBCB). Here is our charge and on that site, you’ll also see the list from the prior committee. If you are too lazy to click the link, it reads:

The books on this list offer opportunities to discover new ideas, and provide an introduction to the fascinating variety of subjects within an academic discipline. Readers will gain an understanding of our diverse world and build a foundation to deepen their response to that world. This list is developed every five years.
A YALSA committee of public, secondary school, and academic librarians sellects the list.  Revised every five years as a tool for several audiences (students preparing for college, educators, librarians, and parents) it offers opportunities for independent reading and lifelong learning. Use it to round out your reading as you prepare for college entrance exams and courses, to strengthen your knowledge in a variety of subject areas and enhance appreciation for different cultures and times.

The OBCB is a committee that comes together only once every five years. So this list is updated every five years. Meaning — there is a lot of stuff to read and consider for the list when it is revisited and revised.

But you can be a part of this process, and I BEG you to help out. If you know of books that fit the charge, that you think the committee should at least consider (and note — it doesn’t mean the title will ever be nominated but it will at least be looked at and considered), please suggest it here. I am focusing on reading books falling into a couple of the categories of our committee, Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences. I feel like I am getting a really neat education of stuff I have always been interested in and in things I never knew about before.

Who can suggest titles? Anyone who reads. You just cannot be the author of the book or related to the publisher/house. Details are on the form.

If you haven’t spent a few minutes suggesting titles for any lists yet this year, get to it. I plan on sitting down one weekend and filling out a ton of suggestions for books I’ve read and loved this year. I urge you to do this, too.

Haunted at 17: Revealing What Stirred Me

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Nova Ren Suma is doing this really amazing series as part of her promotion for 17 & Gone, and she’s opened it up to anyone who is interested in taking part. It’s called haunted at 17, and the premise is what it sounds like: the thing (or things) that haunted you at 17.

I’m sharing this post today in anticipation of tomorrow’s review of the book — and spoiler, I loved it.

This is among the scariest stories of my life, the thing that haunted me at 17. That I can still access it, still revisit it whenever I want to, is part of why I want to take part in this and share it all together.

Me (middle), at 17, one of the best summers of my life.

I was 16, he was 15, and both of us were writing things. Lots of things. Poetry. Political debate pieces. Speeches. Short stories.

He lived in Pennsylvania. I lived in Illinois.

It was March 15, 2001.

This is a post about the thing that haunted me at 17, not the thing that happened when I was 16, but the thing that happened at 16 is the thing that caused me to write things like this in my Livejournal at 17. The Livejournal that, today, I still can find on the internet. That I can read through and remember what it felt like — really felt like — to write things like this:

At 17, I asked for phone cards for my birthday, for Christmas, for any occasion meriting a gift. I signed up for every single one of those “freebies” websites that exist where I could exchange my post office box number for a 5 minute free phone card. I snatched free minutes I could — when my family wasn’t home — to use our corded phone, my stashed phone cards, and I’d call him.

We could talk for three or four minutes. Enough to say things like, Hi, I care about you, We’ll talk again soon, God it’s great to hear your voice, Can’t wait to talk to you again.

Every night, we’d stay up late on the internet. Share our words, both those we wrote because we liked to write and those which we wrote to one another. The ones where we shared our heaviest thoughts with one another.

At 17, I spent the summer away from home. I took a playwriting class out of state, at a University, where I had no one watching over me. Where there were no adults babysitting and hovering.

Where, when my roommate would hop in the shower on weekends, I’d call him and talk to him like any girl who has a boyfriend would do when she was away from him. Where my roommate and I could talk about how great it was to go out with a boy who just got you and who loved you for who you were at the level you were at (she’d been with her boyfriend for two and a half years, which was admirable for someone in high school).

What haunted me at 17 was knowing I had a boyfriend I met on the internet and only ever knew from the internet. Who I never told anyone about at school. Who I never told any of my family about, even though my mom had met her boyfriend the same exact way. Who I never knew if I’d ever really meet, if he ever would be the person I thought he was or the kind of person who could love me (because he, too, had to think to himself whether or not I was anything like I was when we talked late at night or even in those joy-filled phone calls).

But more than that: what do you do when your boyfriend lives that far away from you and you are older and you are planning college and that college choice isn’t near him?

At 17, you’re at the edge of being an adult. A fully-formed, free and independent human being who can make choices for yourself. But, when you’re 17 and it’s 2002 and no one knows you’ve got a boyfriend you met on the internet a year before, it’s impossible to express the thoughts that haunt the back of your mind. Is it real? Can it last? What’s the point when your life is going one way and you’re not going to choose the course of your future based on a boy (because you listen to Tori Amos and Ani and you are a feminist and you are stubborn and determined, dammit).

Your Livejournal at 17 is littered with things like this. You’re sorta planning a life around someone you don’t know if you know. And you’re sorta planning your own life apart from that because, what if it’s not real? What if it’s not sustainable? 
Scarier: what if it is real? What if you throw away the chance at something rock solid, something powerful because it the other possibility haunts you more? 
***
It wasn’t until 2004 or 2005 — I can’t remember which — when I confessed this all to my best friend in the backseat of her car, eyes red and puffy from crying, as she navigated the dark and narrow roads between our college and the hospital emergency room. When the boy I loved was in a drug-induced haze because he’d had awful tooth pain and needed an immediate prescription.
My friend had asked me if I thought it was weird she had met her current boyfriend on the internet. And that she’d actually met him from the internet in high school but they’d broken up a couple of times and now that they were both out of their homes and able to be independent they wanted to give it another go.
***
When that same friend stood up at my wedding and gave a toast, she was the only one in the room who knew that the boy I married was the same boy I met on the internet in 2001. 
***
What haunted me at 17 — that not knowing whether or not you could establish a true and honest relationship on the internet, the not knowing whether or not you could find the person you were meant to spend your life with that way, the not knowing whether to plan for a future that might include that person or not include that person — is the very thing that now I can finally and truthfully own. I guess this is the first time most of the people in my life, if they read this, will learn. 
It feels good to own it now because it’s really sort of amazing. 
And what makes this story have a happy ending, besides the fact I’m married to him, no longer having tears in my favorite class in high school (with the only teacher I ever opened up to about this, through a project she assigned about what it was we wanted for ourselves and our futures), no longer using prepaid phone cards, no longer pouring my heart out in Livejournal because it felt like the only safe space in the world for me to share that is that now, these stories happen every day. 

YAlien Invasion

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With the popularity of science fiction on the rise in the YA world, Kelly and I have been on the lookout for titles featuring aliens. Since today is Alien Abduction Day, we thought we’d honor our alien soon-to-be-overlords with a booklist.
(Stumper assistance: I read a particularly memorable book as a teen that involved a teenage girl getting involved romantically with an alien boy, but he was secretly only romancing her so he could take her back to his planet where she’d be repeatedly impregnated with alien babies to help save their dwindling population. At the last moment, he decides to leave without her because you know, they are in love. What is the title of this book?!)
The titles below were all published within the last five years and all feature aliens in some way, whether it’s a starring role or an ancillary one. Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments. Descriptions come from either Worldcat or Goodreads.

The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey (2013): Cassie Sullivan, the survivor of an alien invasion, must rescue her
young brother from the enemy with help from a boy who may be one of them.
Adaptation by Malinda Lo (2012): In the aftermath of a series of plane crashes caused by birds,
seventeen-year-old Reese and her debate-team partner, David, receive
medical treatment at a secret government facility and become tangled in a
conspiracy that is, according to Reese’s friend Julian, connected with
aliens and UFOs. Kelly’s review
I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore (2010): In rural Ohio, friendships and a beautiful girl prove distracting to a
fifteen-year-old who has hidden on Earth for ten years waiting to
develop the Legacies, or powers, he will need to rejoin the other six
surviving Garde members and fight the Mogadorians who destroyed their
planet, Lorien. Kelly’s review

 
Stuck on Earth by David Klass (2010): On a secret mission to evaluate whether the human race should be
annihilated, a space alien inhabits the body of a bullied
fourteen-year-old boy.
First Day on Earth by Cecil Castellucci (2011): Mal lives on the fringes of high school. Angry. Misunderstood. Yet loving the world — or, at least, an idea of the world. Then he meets Hooper. Who says he’s from another planet. And may be going home very soon. Kelly’s review
Neptune’s Tears by Susan Waggoner (2013): It’s 2218 and Zee McAdams is in her second year as a healing empath
at a busy London hospital. When a mysterious young man arrives for
treatment, Zee’s hard won calm is pierced. She will need all her courage
if she’s to follow her heart, especially when David reveals a
devastating secret.
(This one is spoilery. Highlight it to read it)Ultraviolet by R. J. Anderson (2011):  Almost seventeen-year-old Alison, who has synesthesia, finds herself in a
psychiatric facility accused of killing a classmate whose body cannot
be found. Kimberly’s review

 

Obsidian by Jennifer L. Armentrout (2012): When seventeen-year-old Katy moves to West Virginia she expects to be
bored, until she meets her neighbor who just happens to be an alien.
Alien Invasion and Other Inconveniences by Brian Yansky (2010): When a race of aliens quickly takes over the earth, leaving most people
dead, high-schooler Jesse finds himself a slave to an inept alien
leader–a situation that brightens as Jesse develops telepathic powers
and attracts the attention of two beautiful girls. Kimberly’s review
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (2008): Pursued by power-hungry Prentiss and mad minister Aaron, young Todd and
Viola set out across New World searching for answers about his colony’s
true past and seeking a way to warn the ship bringing hopeful settlers
from Old World. Kimberly’s review
 
A Long, Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan (2011): Sixteen-year-old Rosalinda Fitzroy, heir to the multiplanetary
corporation UniCorp, is awakened after sixty years in stasis to find
that everyone she knew has died and as she tries to make a new life for
herself, learns she is the target of a robot assassin. Kelly’s review
How I Stole Johnny Depp’s Alien Girlfriend by Gary Ghislain (2011): Fourteen-year-old David, the son of a famous French psychologist, falls
in love with Zelda, a new patient who believes she is from outer space,
and soon they are tearing through Paris in search of her chosen one,
Johnny Depp, so that she can take him to her home planet, Vahalal.
Bonus Middle Grade Title
The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex (2007): In the chaotic turmoil that follows the Boov invasion of Earth,
eleven-year-old Gratuity Tucci finds herself driving her mother’s car to
Florida, where all of the humans are being relocated, with her cat and a
renegade extraterrestiral named J. Lo as her copilots. Kimberly’s review