I have a feeling that Kimberly’s vacation will look a little more like the picture above than mine will be.
We’re taking the next few weeks off to dig into our reading piles and generally let the rest of this (not so great) year crumble and fall apart. We’ll be back to our regular schedule beginning Monday, January 9. Any news or things of interest that we stumble across in the meantime might bring us back, but otherwise, we’ll see you next year!
Pictured above is my teenage bedroom. I lived in a basement room, complete with glittery tile floor from the 60s and wood paneling. I made that room mine, though, with art — most made by me or friends — and with bright colors. You can see at this point, I was into guitar (I think that was freshman and sophomore year), Ani DiFranco, and had one of those “bad hair day” cat posters. On my dresser, which was the changing table my mom bought for me as a baby and which I repurposed, I kept friends’ photos, as well as a small portion of my CDs. The poster right above my bed was from an 8th grade art class project I’d done with three of my good friends at the time and it remained one of my favorite possessions for many, many years.
Why am I writing about my teen bedroom?
Because I want to see your teen bedrooms if you’re part of the YA community.
I started thinking about what a picture says about a person, and I began thinking even more about what our teen bedrooms said about us at a very specific time in our lives, when our rooms were our sacred spaces. Where we got to have our true selves shine through.
Are you a YA author? An editor? An agent? A critic? I’d love to see a photo of your teen bedroom. I’ve gotten a couple of killer submissions already, including one from a Very Well-Known YA Author You’ll All Know (!!) and I’d love to build a huge, fun post of your bedrooms.
I’ll collect photos through the middle of August. You can send the photo, along with a bio of who you are and what you do, to kelly@stackedbooks.org. Then I’ll build a beautiful gallery here on STACKED so we can all enjoy the peeks at where we came from and what we were into during that time.
I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of fairy tale retellings. I loved the premise for Rhiannon Thomas’ A Wicked Thing, which focuses on what happens after Sleeping Beauty wakes to find that 100 years have passed and everyone she knew is dead – oh, and she’s supposed to marry the stranger who woke her up.
Aurora’s happily ever after doesn’t start when the prince kisses her. Rather, she’s bewildered by the fact that everyone believes he is her true love, since that was never a part of the story she knew. The story has been embellished over the 100 years she’s been sleeping, and now everyone expects her to marry the prince and help stabilize the kingdom, which has seen many, many kings since Aurora pricked her finger. The current king and queen essentially put her under house arrest, giving her no choice in the matter.
The royal family aren’t the only ones who want to use Aurora for their own ends. There’s a visiting prince who suggests another path for Aurora, but she’s not sure it’s the right one either. She meets a revolutionary boy who wants to overthrow the king (who is quite heavy-handed in his villainy) and use Aurora to help make that happen. And then there’s the evil witch who cursed her in the first place, who has her own designs on Aurora. She’s being pulled in so many directions and she’s not sure she can trust anyone – only herself.
Thomas does a good job portraying just how alone Aurora feels. No doubt many people who know the original or Disney story of Sleeping Beauty have wondered how Aurora must have handled the realization that her entire family and all her friends are dead, and Thomas provides a good explanation. There’s a little bit of magic beyond the initial curse here, too (the “wicked thing” reference in the title), that I felt was a little underdeveloped. Ultimately, the main conflict is what Aurora will decide to do – who will she side with? Is there anyone she can ally with who wants what is best for her, not just to use her to accomplish their own goals? Is it possible for her to have any true friends?
The path Aurora eventually chooses is the only right one, and I was satisfied by it, though it does leave things a bit open-ended. Luckily, there is a sequel! I wouldn’t call this an outstanding example of a fairy tale retelling, but it’s an intriguing one, it’s competently written, and it should satisfy most readers. I look forward to seeing where Thomas takes Aurora next.
We’ll be back next week to our regular programming. For now, we’ll be hitting the books, reading, and relaxing as the long holiday weekend winds down.
We can all agree: libraries are magical.
They’re places of knowledge. Of enjoyment. Of growth. The library is a welcoming, encouraging environment.
We can all also agree to this: not everyone has a library.
A fellow Book Rioter shared a link a couple of weeks ago about a small town in rural, impoverished California which has no library — the students in the local schools, especially, were missing out on reading opportunities because they lack the resources and access to them. It’s a clear case of “free ebooks” not solving the underlying problem plaguing many who are part of the lower class. If you don’t have the tools, the ereaders, the internet, and you don’t have a physical library, then you have nothing to work with.
The longer I thought about this situation, the more I realized that sharing the call for books for this library felt vital. More than that, I wanted to put out the call and ask if you, STACKED readers, would take up the charge in helping publicize this call for books, as well as help stock this library so when students arrive back at school in the fall, they’re overwhelmed with choice?
From Margaret Elysia Garcia’s original post:
I live in a town of 1200 people in the Northern Sierra Nevada –where it meets the Cascade Range near Mt. Lassen National Park and about two hours drive northwest of Reno, NV. Two hundred of that population is students. Over the years as the population dwindled after mines closed, then mills–nothing except tourism and retirement have emerged as ‘industries.’ Many businesses have closed down and with it many things we take for granted—like libraries.
The local junior/senior high school has not been able to purchase new books since the 90s. Some of the “check outs” for old books are in the 1980s. There are no books by people of color in the library. Hardly any books by women are in the few book cases except your standard Austen and Lee. It’s an uninviting place. There hasn’t been a librarian for nearly a decade. And volunteers weren’t allowed. The last eight years students couldn’t even check out books.
[…]
I’ve lived here 13 years. I’ve watched kids succumb to despair. Our suicide and alcohol abuse is rampant as it is in many small rural communities. 75% of our county is beautiful national forest. 44% of jobs are government jobs—mostly forest service. There used to be mills but they closed down in the 90s. So much of that other 56% is underemployed and unemployed. It’s a beautiful place to live but it’s also a scary place for the mind to atrophy. We have a median income of under 30K. At the local elementary school 2/3 of students qualify for free lunch. Getting the picture?
Things though, as she notes, are changing. This will be the first year that the school will have a library again. It’s actually one library that will serve two separate schools: Greenville Junior/Senior High School and Indian Valley Academy. Both schools have principals that are supportive of bringing the library up to date, but they lack a budget to bring it up to the 21st center.
More from Margaret’s post:
We need racially diverse books. We need graphic novels. We need women’s studies. We need science. We need series. We need film. We need comics. We need music. We need biographies of important people. Looking for Young Adult. Classics. We want zines! Contemporary. Poetry. Everything that would make a difference in a young person’s life. Writers send us YOUR BOOK. We have many non-readers who we’d love to turn on to reading. We need a way to take this tiny area and bring it into the 21st century. We have a whole bunch of kids who don’t like to read because all they’ve ever been given is things that are either dull , dated, or dumbed down.
The students who are excelling are doing so because they have supportive parents at home and access to books and tablets elsewhere. But most students are without.
What Margaret would like is for people to send her Just One Book. By donating a single book to the library, you’ll help build it from the ground up. All of the information for where to send books is available here, at the bottom of her initial post.
Margaret has been awesomely keeping the project updated on her blog, which you can read about and see pictures of here and here.
I reached out to ask whether there was a wish list or anything, and indeed, teachers at the schools helped build a wish list of titles for the library collection. You can access the entire list here.
If you can do so, I hope you’re willing to send a book or two to this powerful cause. But if sending a book or choosing a title seems like it might be too much work, I am happy to collect money via Paypal, the same way I did with the #1000BlackGirlBooks project, to send the library a huge collection of titles. I’ll mine booklists put together by professionals to send inclusive titles, to send feminist titles, to send great comics, and more. Since collection development and teen lit are my specialties, I feel more than capable of ensuring that a lot of really great, exciting, interesting stuff gets sent that way.
I will collect financial donations through Paypal through July 10. If you’d like to help, you can send your donation to my email address [which will be deleted from this post on July 10]: kellybjensen /*/at\*\ gmail.com. Remove the fancy slashes and dots.
We were able to raise $3000 for #1000BlackGirlBooks together, and we were able to send 1000 copies of Some Girls Are to Charleston, South Carolina last summer. Can we rally together and make this small library something spectacular?
Even if you don’t donate cash, sending them, as Margaret notes, “Just One Book,” will help them get there. If you can’t do either, share this post and/or Margarets so the word gets spread.
It’s heartbreaking to hear stories like this. But it is incredible to see motivated people wanting to do best for their communities and the kids in it. Here’s a chance for us as book lovers to lend a hand.