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Twitter-view: Suzanne Young

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We’re back with another round of Twitter-view. This time, the lovely Suzanne Young, author of The Naughty List series and the forthcoming A Need So Beautiful (Balzer & Bray, 2011) stopped by to talk a little summer heat, cute boys, and more.
You used to teach middle school. What got you into writing? I’ve been writing short stories since 7th grade & never stopped. After moving to Oregon I wrote my first novel.

How did THE NAUGHTY LIST come about?

IMing with a friend, I made a joke about ninja cheerleaders throwing sparkly death stars. Then I figured out they were tracking cheating boyfriends.

What inspires your writing? Random ideas pop in my head, scenes, & conversations. Mostly it’s about super hot guys if I’m being honest

In THE NAUGHTY LIST, you purposefully avoid a lot of foul language. Are you
that way in real life?

Um.. no. Not at all. I cuss a lot, but I thought it would be cute if Tessa didn’t even though others do. She creates her own reality.

Your first books were the Naughty List series (which I really liked). Can
you talk about your forthcoming A NEED SO BEAUTIFUL, due in Summer 2011?

A NEED SO BEAUTIFUL comes out 6/1-it’s about a girl who’s compelled to do good deeds,but every time she does, her existence begins to fade

When you sit down to write, what are your essentials?

Reese’s Pieces, Diet Pepsi and something salty. OH! And a computer.

Who are some of your favorite writers / who do you look to for inspiration?

Super into Cassandra Clare right now. I also adore Carrie Ryan & Lili St. Crow. Stephanie Perkins new book blew me away .She’s right up there.

Do you GoogleStalk yourself? I have google alerts, but I never get anything good!! I’m waiting for something scandalous or awesome to pop up.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Wasn’t my 1st or 2nd book that got published. Hell, it wasn’t even my 3rd. It was my 5th & Need so Beautiful is my 9th. So keep writing books!

It’s hot in the midwest in August. It’s nice in the northwest. But if you were in the midwest, how would you stay cool?

I’m not really a great swimmer, so I wouldn’t really jump in a lake, but a backyard BBQ with frosty beverages sounds about right.

How has being involved in Twitter/Goodreads/Blogging helped you as a writer?

I feel more connected with my audience. I love when people send me questions or the occasional “NO. HE. DIDN’T!”

What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?

I don’t really like ice cream…. Sorry! If I’m eating frozen it’s probably Italian Ice.

What’s the worst thing you ever did as a teenager?

I maybe…. Sort of… possibly… egged a girl’s car. I might have.

What’s one totally embarrassing thing about you or that you’ve done that you would never tell anyone else?

Can’t say the REALLY embarrassing 1, but I broke my finger while acting as the white rabbit in a play in college. Me & Backflips don’t mix.
Thanks for stopping by, Suzanne!
We’ll be back again next month with another Twitter-view — keep your eyes peeled!

Somebody Everybody Listens to by Suzanne Supplee

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Retta Lee Jones has a dream to leave her small town in Tennessee and make it big as a country music singer down in Nashville. Now that she’s graduated high school and her friends are going to be going to colleges out of town, she knows it’ll be harder being the only one to stay. But with the nudging of her good friends, she decides to take the $500ish dollars she has saved up from working at the diner and use it to strike out on her own in the big city of country music. She has a voice, but will she have the will power?

With a little help from the local grump, she borrows a beat down car and makes the trip with promises to be back in September if things didn’t work out. But when she runs into a little car trouble, Ricky Dean saves her with his mechanic skills and puts her to work as his secretary so she can make a little money. A gig at a local hotel and doing open mics at the Mockingbird Cafe, though, might be the recipe for seeing her name in the big lights sooner than Retta’d ever imagined.

Somebody Everybody Listens To is a sweet story about perseverance and about growing up. Retta is a fun lead character in this story, and she is 100% authentic as both a teenager, a dreamer, and a southern girl. The book is chock full of allusions and stories about country music legends, as each chapter opens with a small biography of a well-known country star, when and where they were born, their road to fame, their first jobs, and something significant that happened in their personal lives. This mimics exactly how the story works out for Retta: we know when and where Retta is born, and as the story progresses, we see how she gets her first big break, and then we discover some of the big road bumps that jostle her.

Supplee, whose Artichoke’s Heart I’ve also read, has a really enjoyable writing style that has wide appeal: her characters are full of heart, and her prose moves smoothly and at a good pace. She doesn’t get too caught up in details nor does she weigh the story down with too many characters. There’s a nice balance of lead and ancillary characters in her story: just enough to know Retta intimately but enough other characters to know that there is more going on in the world than just Retta. I thought Ricky Dean and Bobby McGee play in well, as does Retta’s best friend Brenda. We also learn that Retta would not have been the only one left in their small town — and I think that this entire feeling Retta and Brenda develop mirrors what a lot of people who just finished high school feel.

Although Retta is ultimately successful in Nashville, it’s the kind of success that is believable in just a couple of months. She’s not a multimillionaire, and at the very end, we actually don’t know what Retta chooses to do. We can speculate, and I think that Supplee does her readers a huge service by leaving the ending open a little bit.

This book will work well for middle and high school students, as it is entirely clean and free of any issues relating to drugs, alcohol, or sex. Retta doesn’t as much as kiss anyone in the book either: this is a story of her following her dreams of success as a singer. Fans of country music will dig this, as will fans of a coming-of-age story. Hand this off to fans of Supplee’s Artichoke’s Heart, Lisa Greenwald’s My Life in Pink and Green, and fans of Wendy Mass. And as a bonus to readers, the author’s provided her writing playlist, so readers can make their own listening list that will fit the mood of this book perfectly.

Also, how cool is it this book has a blurb from Dolly Parton?

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

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Like everyone else in the blogosphere, we believe we can add something to the discussion of the last and final book in the “Hunger Games” trilogy by the genius Suzanne Collins. Here’s our take on some of the issues in Mockingjay, as we don’t necessarily agree, despite both enjoying this book and the rest of the series.

*Spoilers are included, so please beware

One of the things I loved best about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was the fact that I read it at the exact same time as thousands of other people across the world. Reading, an inherently solitary act, became – in a way – a social act as well. I felt like my own excitement mingled with the world’s – the build-up to the release, the feeling of finally holding the book, turning the first page and delving in – and it made the whole experience that much richer.

I haven’t felt the same level of excitement since then, but Mockingjay came pretty close. It had been three years since I felt so enthused about a book’s release, and the feeling was almost intoxicating. I tell you this because this is the mood I was in when I began reading Mockingjay, and the mood was sustained through the four hours it took me to finish.
All the things that I expected were here: lots of action, lots of death, an explanation of President Snow’s blood-scented breath, questions answered and a few left unresolved. Even with such an action-propelled book, Collins still managed to give us new characters we care about and build upon the ones we already knew. I often complain about young adult literature’s sacrifice of things like character and setting in favor of a fast plot, but Collins has struck a good balance.
A week after finishing the book, the thing that sticks with me most is hijacked Peeta. Even for those of us who feel confident that our relationships (romantic or otherwise) are based on love, sometimes we all worry that the person who claimed to care so much for us is going to wake up one day and not remember what is it they thought they liked so much about us. While I think this could have come across as a cheap ploy to cause romantic strife, it reads naturally and believably in Collins’ hands. Even more than Finnick’s or Prim’s death, this is what I remember. 
Peeta’s return to himself (and to Katniss) isn’t rushed like so many things in the series are. It’s slow, deliberate, takes effort, and isn’t fully complete by the end of the book. We as readers aren’t sure that it ever will be complete. One of the things that bugged me so much about the romance between Katniss and Peeta in the first two books is that Katniss never knew how Peeta really felt – whether he was putting on a show or expressing genuine emotion. (Personally, I could never be with someone who left me guessing so much, which is why I was so strongly Team Gale.) Peeta’s hijacking allows us to see that his feelings for her are real. Not only that, but his love is strong enough that he fights to regain it. Even more than the romantic angle, though, it’s a really good piece of character development.
I had some quibbles with the end. I didn’t buy that so many people would agree to a reinstatement of the Hunger Games. I know why Collins wanted that in there, but I felt her point could have been made more subtly. (Perhaps something less horrific than another Hunger Games, something that would have been more believable as justice rather than revenge, thus making it more of a grey area, would have worked better for me.) I felt the writing off of Gale was rushed, and that Katniss’ decision of Peeta should have stood alone without her one or two sentence explanation at the end. (If a decision is truly in keeping with character development, it shouldn’t require an explanation – that’s what we readers get to do!) I wanted more backstory about Panem. Above all, I was disappointed that Katniss wasn’t involved in the final battle and that her trial occurred off-page.
These quibbles are really just nitpicks, though. For me, reading is ultimately an emotional act. I can be clinical about a book and tell you honestly whether its plot was derivative or its characters too two-dimensional or its writing sloppy. (Not that Mockingjay falls into any of these categories.) But really, I base my judgment of a book on how I feel when I walk away. Mockingjay engrossed me from start to finish. The action was exciting and felt natural, I was fully invested in the characters and their fate, my heart rate increased at all the right points, and I didn’t feel like Collins had cheated me or that the hype had been for nothing when I finished. It’s not a perfect book, and it’s not on my all-time favorites list, but it’s still really damn good.

I’ve got to get off my chest immediately that Catching Fire bored me. I read it the day it came out, and I reread it in an attempt to make myself like it a week ago, but I still felt the same way. It’s not that it’s not a good book or that the tension doesn’t develop more. It just felt a little bit like cheating to me, as the Quarter Quell happens, and it feels like The Hunger Games rehashed a little bit.

I was excited when my expectations for that were shattered at the beginning of Mockingjay, when Katniss decides to bite the bullet and be the symbol for all things anti-government. Kind of, at least.

If I were to rate this series, Mockingjay would be my second favorite, but it still didn’t quite captivate me the same way that The Hunger Games did, and here’s why: Katniss. Katniss throughout this book felt like a bit of a whiner to me. For the first two books, she’s a strong, independent and absolutely astonishing main character. She’s a revolution, if you will. But when Katniss steps up to truly take on the part of the revolution, she becomes a little too whiny for my tastes.

Not only that, but we know she’s been told straight out that when she’s not being fed lines or moves and she acts on her own accord, she’s a much more interesting, strong, and brilliant person. Yet, throughout the book, Katniss doesn’t WANT to act of her own accord. This is particularly evident, I think, in the end when she returns to her old home and proceeds to spend an inordinate amount of time sitting around and being inactive. Obviously she has a lot on her mind, but it felt to me she’d rather feel sorry for herself and wait to be told how to act than to be the Katniss we knew and loved. I just felt let down that she couldn’t listen to the fact she’s such a powerhouse; I saw Katniss as more of a person to take that compliment and move with it.

Alas.

I did quite enjoy the growth of Prim throughout this book, but it left me longing for more of it in the other two books. I liked her a lot as a character and seeing her come into her own was worth the wait. And Gale? Loved seeing his transformation. As far as Peeta went, I thought he was perhaps the most dynamic character in Mockingjay, as we got a glimpse of someone truly impacted by the games to the point of (imho) PTSD.

I’m a little sad Katniss ended up with Peeta. I was Team Gale, if I had to pick one, if for no other reason than the fact they’d been buddies forever. But I’ll also say that the romance in this book never worked for me, as I like it a little hotter and heavier, but for a book aimed at teens of all ages (it’s on a middle school awards list in Illinois, even), I think it strikes a good balance of reality and fantasy.

Overall, I thought that the third volume answered a lot of questions burning from the other two, but it didn’t *quite* live up to what I was hoping for. I still wish I could know more about Panem and how it came to be, and I wish that Katniss would have grown a little more as a character, rather than wither. The anti-war and government message grated a bit on me, as well, but I don’t believe it’s as much as political statement as other readers may have believed. Maybe that says something about me, too.

What did you think? Share your comments with us, and feel free to post spoilers in the comments.

Tell Me a Secret by Holly Cupala

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Ever read a book that was much better than the blurb let on? For me, Holly Cupala’s debut Tell Me a Secret outlived every expectation I had of it thanks to a blurb that sounded a bit too convoluted and confused for me. I won’t repaste it here for you, but you can find the blurb on GoodReads. For me, the entire “let go of the past to get on with the future” sounded too cliche, not to mention the fact that it seemed the main character had a secret in a pregnancy. And something about a dead sister haunting her.

But this book gave me much more than I expected.

Rand — Miranda is her given name — drops us into her life five years after the night her sister died. Enter a mother who is an utter control freak about everything and a father who just goes along with mom. Xanda — Alexandra is HER given name — was Rand’s sister and a complete rebel. She did what she wanted when she wanted, no worries about consequences. The night she died, she’d been in the car with her boyfriend Andre, a guy she met through her father and whom her mother thought was nothing but bad news. Maybe he was.

But Rand’s been moving on, living her life a bit in the shadow of her sister. She was always the good kid, but she’d always envied her sister’s carefree manner. When she begins a relationship with Kamran, though, things begin to slip. She’s pregnant. Rand wants to tell Kamran, but the story slips to her friend in a manner that makes it appear that she wants to hurry up and marry Kamran in order to give the baby a normal manner.

But her friend….ain’t her friend.

Soon word spreads that Rand expects Kamran to drop his goals and marry her, and it takes no time for Kamran to drop out of her life. And need I mention what happens when news gets to her mom and dad (who, too, found out through the grapevine, rather than Rand herself)? Let’s just say that perhaps Rand’s life mirrors the life that her sister led before she died.

Tell Me A Secret was more than a pregnant girl story for me. I fell in love with Rand as a character and felt she was fully fleshed. She was sympathetic and each of the punches life dealt her took me back to the experience I had while reading Courtney Summers’s Some Girls Are: my stomach ached, my heart sank, and I had more than one moment when I wanted to just strangle the people in Rand’s life. Rand’s mother in particular had me furious, and while I understood some of her motivations, her attitude toward Rand’s pregnancy and the belief that she should not be allowed a future burned me with rage.

And then the secrets begin unraveling, and the motivations driving the characters became clearer and clearer. Cupala does a marvelous job of building tension in her character development and pushes the plot through this.

Cupala’s book is, for the most part, perfectly paced: Rand’s pregnancy gives readers enough time to find out who she really is while she simultaneously discovers who she is herself. However, post delivery, I struggled with pacing, as it felt at times to drag (which I understood in the context of being within Rand’s mind and situation) and then at times to resolve a little too quickly. We learn in the end that what had been “the truth” about Xanda, as well as the truth about some of the other people in Rand’s life.

There is another part of the book that really resonated with me as a reader, and that was Rand’s engagement with the internet. When she finds out she is pregnant, she seeks solace online in a web forum, where she really discovers who she is. In the midst, she learns about other people and about the challenges others have to overcome in life. At the end of the novel (though for me, I figured it out earlier), we see one of her closest web confidants may be closer to her than she realizes.

Tell Me A Secret will appeal to fans of Courtney Summers, Gail Giles, Lauren Oliver, and other similar writers of heart-wrenching contemporary fiction. There is enough suspense to keep the reader interested without making this an issue novel (which, I assure you, it is NOT, despite the teen pregnancy). I think Cupala has created quite a knockout debut, and I can’t wait to see what she offers next.

Going back to my original statement: when I read the blurb of this book, I was not expecting something so engaging. It seemed like too many elements pulled together with a big “secret” about Rand’s pregnancy. But Rand’s pregnancy is not the secret: the secret has to do with something outside of her and, to an extent, outside of her sister and her death. While Xanda plays a large part in the story, she also doesn’t play a part at all. She’s playing the part in Rand’s mind. And while she does need to let go of the past to move on to the future, I think that line was just a little too nice and shiny for a book that is really anything but.

The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney

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I love a good book that has abundant, smart use of literary allusion, especially of titles like To Kill a Mockingbird that aren’t your traditional white man titles. The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney had a lot to like for me, despite some of the issues I had primarily with the main character, Alex. But if you’re looking for your readalong to titles like The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks, Chris Lynch’s Inexcusable, or Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, this might be your winner.

We begin with a bang: Alex wakes up and doesn’t know where she is, but she knows she’s lying in bed with a boy she doesn’t know well. She’ll just sneak away quietly, since she doesn’t WANT to know why she is where she is. That’s when she notices the two condom wrappers in the garbage and the can of coke that wasn’t recycled. Then it hits her — she did something last night she didn’t want to do.

When she returns to her room after hearing Carter, the mystery boy, tell her what fun he had last night, her roommates immediately tell her she’s been raped and needs to get justice. The Themis Academy doesn’t believe any of their students would ever do anything bad, so they don’t really tackle things like rape cases (all their students are perfect, don’t you know). Instead, her roommates urge her to seek justice from The Mockingbirds, a student-run group that tries student cases that would otherwise go unnoticed by school administration.

In the meanwhile and during the preparation and trial, Alex begins spending more and more time with Martin, a science geek who was also around the night of the incident. He makes her feel safe and secure, particularly as she continues experiencing flashbacks from her night with Carter. Is she sure it was rape, or was she a consenting participant?

The Mockingbirds had a great premise and I think hits on some important issues in a way that makes Alex a character who is more than her issue. However, I found Alex a bit of an irritating character: throughout the end of the book, she is heralded as a hero for standing up and speaking out. Unfortunately, I don’t buy it. Alex never seemed convinced she was raped, and when she mentions it (somewhat off-handedly, I think) to her roommates, they jump to get her to act. I think they’re in it for selfish gains — T. S. does it to spend more time with Alex’s older sister (and get herself a good word with the board of the Mockingbirds) and Maia does it because it’ll give her experience for law school. And Alex just rode the wave. She never quite came together for me and as such, it was hard for me to feel much sympathy for her.

I had a hard time buying that there was not a single adult around who would help out. When Alex confesses what happened to a teacher she trusted (and whom I felt she used her because of her connections to Juliard), the teacher doesn’t even offer to help. In a story set in contemporary times, especially at a private, coed high school, this was impossible for me to wrap my head around. With over 320 pages, too, we only ever got one mention of a mother and father. While I understand they’re not there, I couldn’t quite buy that they’d never check in on their daughter or their daughter, who was clearly traumatized from the rape, never once sought their help. I get she didn’t want to have to leave the school, but, it didn’t gel for me.

That brings me to the real issue I had, I suppose, which was that this was never a high school story. This is a college story but written down for the young adult reader. Whitney provides us a great author’s note about her own experiences, and I felt that that was the reason I couldn’t buy this as a high school story. Her experiences happened in college, prior to today’s overprotective college campus environments that have multitudes of student resources for helping victims of things like rape; for a modern story set at a private boarding high school, it was harder to buy. I also want to know how all of these high school kids were getting all the alcohol and why no one was ever performing room checks for these things.

But I digress.

I found Alex’s role as a victim quite refreshing. Where Speak and Inexcusable are heavily issue-driven, I felt that Whitney’s book was much more about the justice group, The Mockingbirds. I found the organization intriguing and I wanted to know more and more, much in the way Alex did. I loved that they sought justice and the punishment they placed upon the wrongdoer involved giving up something they loved. These were savvy kids.

Likewise, Alex’s interest were wide and varied. I found her fully fleshed in this manner, as she was driven academically and musically. She had goals, and she didn’t let what happened to her railroad her from achieving them. Her budding romance with Martin was sweet, and I found her perspective about how it’s okay to be a geek also enjoyable.

This is a title worth reading and discussing. I think that it’d be an interesting read post-classic, too, to talk about how a classic can inform and develop a whole new story, changing the entire premise but still retaining a clear connection to the original. The Mockingbirds will have pretty good appeal, particularly for older high school readers and those who are fans of the previously mentioned titles. Although I had some qualms, I’d still rate this pretty high in the world of young adult lit because it is refreshing and it is important.

Daisy Whitney’s debut hits stores in November.