STACKED

books

Cover Talk: Trend Within a Trend?

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Obscured or cropped images of girls on the covers of YA books is no new trend, but I’ve noticed a different sort of twist on the idea on a couple of covers lately.

   

XVI by Julia Karr
Delirium by Lauren Oliver

Both of these covers seem to have two layers of images, where the top layer consists of a solid color, which is then partially carved away to spell out the title as well as reveal an image of a girl in the bottom layer.  The technique makes the girl do double-duty: she’s a snippet of the protagonist (we assume) as well as the way we read the title.  Additionally, both of these books are dystopias and both are published around the same time (Delirium on February 1 and XVI on January 6).

I’m almost positive I’ve seen other books with similar cover designs.  What do you think – eye-catching or not?

CSN Giveaway Winner!

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Remember that giveaway we ran back in December of 2010?  We’ve finally chosen a winner…and it’s our first entrant, Beth S.!  I plugged the numbers into random.org and it really spit back number 1.  Thanks everyone who participated.

Guest Post: Laura Arnold on Titles to Watch

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Today we have a very special guest blog with us: Laura Arnold, senior editor at Razorbill. She’s here to share some of her favorite recent and forthcoming YA titles — the ones you need on your radar.

Hi everyone! I’m very excited to be writing a guest blog post here. Kelly and I were friends in college, lost touch after graduation, and reconnected several years later on Facebook when I was looking at her profile and realized, “Hey, she’s a librarian who specializes in YA!” and Kelly realized, “Hey, she’s a children’s book editor!” So here I am.

I worked for several years at HarperCollins, where I learned so much and worked with amazing people, and I recently joined the fantastic team at Razorbill as a senior editor. I focus primarily on teen and middle-grade fiction, but make the occasional exception for a super cool nonfiction or picture book project.

She said, “Write about whatever you want,” so I’m going to be very casual and chatty and just tell you about some 2011 books for teens that are going to rock your socks off…

Technically Tempestuous (HarperTeen) went on sale at the tail end of 2010, but this gorgeous book is a conclusion to a trilogy that I just love, Lesley Livingston’s Wondrous Strange series. If you haven’t discovered these books yet, I hope you’ll give them a try. They’re urban faerie paranormal romances, yes, and I know you’ve seen that before—but the characters are so vibrant and original and the strand of Shakespeare that winds through the complex, rich plots is so lyrical. I think you’ll find them to be extremely different from the sea of paranormal you’ve undoubtedly been experiencing.

Across the Universe (Penguin/Razorbill) by Beth Revis is a book I was eyeing long before I came to work at Razorbill, which publishes it. It can be pitched as “Titanic meets Brave New World,” and it’s a romance/murder mystery set on a future space ship. It’s awesome. Again, I know you’re seeing a glut of dystopian in the YA sphere (or if you haven’t yet, get ready, because every publisher has ‘em coming out like dominoes) but this novel is very deep and different. It also has one of the best first chapters I’ve ever read in my life.

Starcrossed (HarperTeen) by Josephine Angelini…Modern-day Nantucket. Ancient Greek mythology. Super sexy romance. Superhuman powers. I’m not going to say anything more because the plot is too special to give away. This book will go on sale May 31, and it is going to explode like a, well, supernova. You heard it here first.

I’d like to give another Razorbill shout-out to the Strange Angels series by Lili St. Crow. For those of you who like your vampires with a dash of kickass, you’ll love this Buffy-esque heroine, Dru Anderson. These books are smart and sexy—no wilting violet here! Book 5 in the series, Reckoning, comes out this fall. Okay okay, and one more Razorbill book (not from 2011) that you should go find is The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove, Lauren Kate’s first book, published before Fallen, is Macbeth set in high school.

Cold Kiss (HarperTeen) by Amy Garvey. A friend of mine edited this novel, and it’s a book that had everyone who read the manuscript coming into work the next day clutching it (or their e-reader) to their chest and saying, “OMG, this was so good.” Beautiful, beautiful writing and a story that will grab your heart. It’s about a girl who resurrects her dead boyfriend and must deal with the repercussions thereafter.

The Way We Fall (Hyperion) by Megan Crewe. I’m not sure if I’m allowed/supposed to admit this, but I lost this book at auction last year. However, it sold to a rockstar editor who’s another friend of mine, so I didn’t gnash my teeth too violently. (Only a little bit.) This one is dystopian (what did I tell you about the lineup the publishers have in store for you?), but the kind of creepy, spooky dystopian where it starts out in a very recognizable and normal modern day but then … something happens. The scariness of what happens is counterbalanced by the beauty and simplicity of the prose. I think this novel will be a memorable one.

The Fitzosbornes in Exile (Knopf) by Michelle Cooper. And now for something completely different…if you like Gothic novels, historical fiction, or the classic I Capture the Castle, you’ll love The FitzOsbornes in Exile and its predecessor (which I recommend reading first) A Brief History of Montmaray. It’s about a girl who lives off the coast of Spain and France on a tiny (fictional) island of which she is a princess. But don’t go thinking tiaras. These books are set in the 1930s, right before the outbreak of World War II, and they’re filled with spying, danger, and of course coming of age.

Have you read any of these? Are they on your radar? I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!

Thanks for stopping by, Laura. And you can keep your eyes here for a giveaway of Starcrossed when pub date draws a little nearer, too!

Leftovers by Laura Wiess

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As is probably very apparent, I don’t read much contemporary YA. I prefer my stories with magic or mystery (or both). Then I saw three contemporary books by Laura Wiess – small, lightweight paperbacks with oh so smooth covers and a single image on the front. They just felt so good in my hands, I decided (after a perusal of the summaries) to give them a shot.

I started with Such a Pretty Girl (a fast and disturbing read about a teenager who’s been sexually assaulted by her father) and moved immediately on to Leftovers. The title refers to the two protagonists, Blair and Ardith, best friends in 9th grade who are the “leftovers” of their families. Blair is the daughter of a high-powered defense attorney with aspirations to a judgeship. Ardith’s parents have turned their home into the local party house, hosting bashes for underage teens every weekend where drugs, alcohol, and sex all flow free. Both girls are alternately ignored or used by their parents as well as adults and their peers at school.

The book’s synopsis will tell you that Blair and Ardith have done something terrible, and they have – but what they’ve done is not revealed until the very end of the book. The bulk of Leftovers consists of the girls telling an initially unknown person in alternating chapters of the events that led up to the terrible act. Some of the events may seem unrelated at first, but they all coalesce at the end and the effect is a powerful one.

Whenever an author decides to tell a story using more than one voice, she’s taking a risk. Will the two voices be distinct enough? Will both be equally interesting and engaging? Wiess succeeds in this regard – Blair and Ardith are sufficiently different that I could recognize who was relating which part of the story without being told. Wiess uses the same font for both girls; different fonts are not necessary to tell them apart.

But alternating points of view is the not the riskiest technique Wiess uses: the majority of the story is told in second person. As Blair and Ardith relate their sections of the tale, they refer to themselves as “you” instead of “I.” Therefore, it is not Blair or Ardith who is experiencing these events and having these thoughts, it is you, the reader. You’re the one who feels the pain and fear and hope and desperation and love of our narrators. The second person technique places the reader squarely in the footsteps of the girls and works wonderfully as a device for stirring empathy.

Wiess has a great knack for really getting the reader into these girls’ heads. Blair and Ardith are both in awful situations (including violence, sexual assault, and neglect), situations which I have never been in, but I still found it easy to relate to both of them. I credit the choice of second person for a lot of this and Wiess’ writing for the rest. The girls’ love for each other and pain over what has happened in their lives are so believable, I became deeply invested in their story. This is vital when we know ahead of time that the girls have done something awful – we need that sympathy and we need to feel it strongly.

Leftovers has its weaknesses. This is only the second book by Wiess I’ve read, but she reuses a lot of the same minor plot devices from Such a Pretty Girl: the girls are vegetarians and make a point of letting the reader know it; there’s a sympathetic police officer; both girls are in a parochial school where 9th grade is still in middle school; and so on. I’m concerned that over time, the voices of the teenage girls Wiess uses may blend together because of these factors.

Still, Leftovers is a marked improvement over Such a Pretty Girl, which I also enjoyed. The characters are more fully-formed (even if the adults remain a bit one-dimensional), the themes are deeper, and the plot is tighter.  If all contemporary YA books were written with this level of skill and intensity, I might read a lot more of them.

Trapped by Michael Northrop

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Imagine for a second the worst snow storm you’ve ever experienced. Then imagine something ten times worse. You think it might be impossible, but as a midwesterner, I promise you it is. That is what Michael Northrop’s Trapped is about, seasoned with the flavorings of the classic film The Breakfast Club.

Everyone went to school the day the storm began; even though the news spoke of doom and gloom, everyone assumed that it was over-hyped media sensationalism and that the storm could not possible be that bad. These kids live in rural New England and are used to storms coming through regularly. Scotty, our main character, continues planning for practice later in the day, even though it’s likely to get canceled — that is, until Pete and Jason, his best friends, convince him that he should come help them work on Jason’s flammenwerfer in the shop after school closes rather than hit the court. I won’t tell you what this flammenwefer is because I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time when I got to this in the book. Best experienced first hand.

As the day goes on, administration gets worried at the rate of snow and the worsening road conditions, so everyone is being sent home early. All after school activities are canceled. Scotty would be content to head home but being easily swayed as he is, he sticks around with Pete and Jason (concocting some creative storytelling to the teachers who question them) and eventually, they’re all locked inside.

And they discover that they aren’t the only teens left there alone. Let’s just say that being stuck inside your school during the worst snow storm on record isn’t the place you want to be.

Trapped is part survival story and part comedy. It’s realistic and has a fresh, funny, and strong voice through Scotty. Northrop’s writing is smooth and conversational, and it is spot-on guy speak. He manages to squeeze in a million very funny references and allusions and while at times it can become over-the-top, that’s perfectly fitting with Scotty’s personality. In a book that’s focus is on this big event, there’s little time for strong character development from the beginning, so having this voice was essential to drawing the reader in and keeping them hooked.

Since this is a modern setting, you’re probably wondering why the kids don’t just call home or hop on the internet. Well, when the storm hit, power lines went down — they were iced over and snapped. That killed the computers and the lights. Anyone who has been inside a thick walled building like a school knows, too, that cell phone reception is dicey on a sunny day, so the weather certainly contributed to their inability to reach out. Likewise, all of the kids became aware that even if they could reach out, they had no idea what value it would have: they didn’t know whether their parents were home from work before the storm hit or dead in a ditch some where. They certainly couldn’t come out and save them. Again, speaking from snow survival experience, all of these things were really plausible to me and I think any person who lives in a snowy environment will understand and accept these things without question.

If you’re familiar at all with The Breakfast Club, you’ll get a good idea of what happens to these teens trapped inside. They all have very different backgrounds and personality quirks, and it’s through Scotty’s perspective we get them. Add to that the snowpocalypse and you have an even more fascinating story of personal dynamics.

Although I loved this book — the fresh voice and plot in particular — the entire last chapter bummed me out. I suppose it had to happen as it did, but for me as a reader, I felt almost cheated. Perhaps had the book been longer I’d have been okay with it, but because I had gotten to know Scotty and trust him well enough, I wanted something less satisfying.

This is a fast paced story, and it’ll have strong appeal for more reluctant readers who will attach easily to Scotty. Hand this book to your guy readers, though there’s also little doubt on the appeal to girl readers. For fans of witty main characters, survival stories, and books that tackle those questions that live on everyone’s minds (“What would happen if we got snowed into school?”), this is a no-brainer. While reading this, I couldn’t help but think that this is the kind of book made for teen creative writing classes; Northrop’s story line is one that we’ve all thought about and gets to the heart of the idea of taking those questions and fears and writing about them.

And this probably can go without saying, but fans of The Breakfast Club will no doubt see the parallels here and embrace them. That was precisely what drew me in.