All Fall Down & See How They Run by Ally Carter

February 10, 2016 |

Ally Carter’s Heist Society series is one of my favorites, so I knew that I’d want to give Embassy Row a whirl. Her books all promise twisty plots peopled with interesting characters, and they’re led by girl protagonists who are smart and a little prickly. All Fall Down introduces us to Grace Blakely, who is the prickliest of them all so far (and I mean that in a good way). Her mother was shot and killed three years ago, and Grace knows that it was a scarred man who did it – she saw him do it. The only thing is, no one believes her. She spent some time in a mental hospital, and now she’s been sent to live with her grandfather in Adria, a fictional European country. He’s the American ambassador to Adria and it’s important for Grace to be on her best behavior when living on Embassy Row with him. This, of course, is something Grace is not particularly interested in.

Carter does a really good job of portraying Grace, who narrates the story in first person. She’s traumatized by what she saw, she’s frustrated that no one believes her, and she sticks to her guns, though she does try to downplay it a bit since she’s supposed to be “healed” by now, three years later. But ultimately, she’s not someone to be controlled, and I love that about her. The setting is fascinating, allowing Carter to explore some real-world international politics while also inventing some her own. Much of the supporting cast is multinational (kids of other ambassadors and their staffers), which adds to the interest. And because this is an Ally Carter series, there’s plenty of mystery and intrigue. The central plot of All Fall Down involves Grace trying to find the person whom she believes killed her mother. She discovers it has to do with some fishy things that are going on in Adria on Embassy Row, and before too long she’s caught up in something way over her head. There are plenty of surprises, and the reveal at the end of the first book is heart-wrenching.

See How They Run (I love these titles) finds Grace still reeling from the revelations of the first book, but Carter wastes no time plunging her into another mystery, this one involving a centuries-old secret society of Adrian women. We learn a lot more about Adria’s history and there’s some good stuff about how women are often left out of the history books – and how the Adrian women have combated this over the years. This one is a bit slower than the first, but it makes up for it with a killer ending that I really should have seen coming but didn’t. I had to listen to it twice because I was so dumbfounded.

Narrator Eileen Stevens does a fantastic job. She makes Grace sound like an actual teenager – her voice isn’t so high that she sounds like an eight year old, but neither does she sound like a mom. When Grace is on an emotional edge, she makes us feel that too; it’s easy to get inside her head. Stevens is also great at voicing older women (and men too!). Much of the humor in the book (and Carter always laces her books with a hefty dose of it) is derived from the way Stevens reads some of the dialogue; this is one I definitely recommend on audio.

I think teens who liked Jennifer Lynn Barnes The Fixer would find a lot to like in the Embassy Row series (the covers are even nearly identical) – they’re both teen-oriented political thrillers with hefty doses of old family secrets that make great page-turners. I wonder if these two series will give rise to more teen political thrillers.

The Divine (in) Every Body: A Guest Post from Tanita S. Davis

February 8, 2016 |

I’m so excited to share this guest post today from Tanita S. Davis, author of several books, including Mare’s War, Happy Families, and Peas and Carrots (out tomorrow, February 9). After I read Peas and Carrots, I couldn’t stop thinking about the interesting elements about body representation brought up in the story and I asked if Tanita would talk to that. This post will rerun over on the Size Acceptance in YA Tumblr, as well, because it is so good.

My first teaching job out of college took me to a group home where I worked one-on-one with students ages 12-18. As part of their extended classroom, I often accompanied the female students to after-hours community sponsored outings intended to give them wider life experiences. One day I accompanied them to a yoga studio in a tony winery town. Enthusiastic about the trip, I initially urged the girls to try and take the yogic instruction seriously, to appreciate the opportunity to get in touch with their bodies in a new and different way. All of us were strangers to yoga practice, but I read them a few explanations and descriptions of it, and thought we were prepared. However, I found that when we got to the studio I, and the twelve young women with me, seemed vastly, wildly out of place. The instructors and volunteers for that night were in dedicated yoga clothing, young, sylph-bodied and white. I became hyperaware of my own heavy belly and ponderous breasts camouflaged in my 4x T-shirt, of the round butts and full thighs of the girls with me displayed in tank tops and cut-off sweats. The majority of my girls were full-bodied and curvy, and of African American ancestry. And despite yoga’s claims of inclusiveness and openness and the instructor’s I-salute-the-oneness-of-whatever-goddess-within-you, it was clear that we weren’t part of the oneness, the whiteness, of everyone else who was there.

Aware my girls were watching, I shelved my discomfort and …yogaed. Or, tried. It was, by some standards, a pretty thorough disaster. The instructor seemed unable to simply describe the poses we were meant to take, but kept on calling them by name – as if we knew what a cow or a cobra was supposed to be. Her distress at our perceived lack of fitness was evident, as she continued to repeat, “Our bodies are made to move, but don’t force them, girls, don’t force them.” There were thuds and snorts as one after the other, the girls attempted poses, fell out of them, and lay on the floor in cheerful defeat. “Okay, this is wack,” someone announced, and our quiet snickers turned to guffaws as we got up and tried again. The instructor tried to enable us to find our composure, periodically chiming a calming bell, but we couldn’t get our stuff together to save our lives. We laughed, fell, got up, laughed, and laughed again. “Don’t hurt yourself,” the instructor murmured to me as I struggled to continue to model “mature adult” behavior and hold the required poses. At my disbelieving huff – surely I wasn’t that bad – one of my students comforted me, “That’s okay. Black people don’t really do yoga anyway.”

“We’re black, though, and we’re doing yoga,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but we’re just playing,” she assured me. “This doesn’t count.”

Huh.

Suddenly I stopped laughing.

This does count, I wanted to insist. We can do this, too.

But… I didn’t quite believe it.

“I didn’t think black people really did yoga.”

Foster Lady inhales slowly and then breathes out. “Black people are just people, Dess. People of all kinds do whatever they feel like doing.” She exhales and smiles, bringing her arms and legs down again, standing still. “I feel like doing yoga.” – PEAS AND CARROTS, by Tanita S. Davis, Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2016

In PEAS AND CARROTS Dess encounters her foster mother’s size the moment they meet, but it is seeing her big legs holding that large body in strong stillness on a yoga mat that creates, for Dess, an instant of shocking, anomalous behavior that demands explanation. Dess is full of vaguely authoritarian beliefs on the capabilities of black bodies, the limits of behavior for black people, and those beliefs don’t extend to swimming or yoga, or working with weights, or even eating vegetables for breakfast, despite what she discovers in her new foster family. She finds the Carters beyond belief, and their unswerving dedication to being just who they are, regardless of expectation, is nothing she’s ever experienced before. There is power in being who you are, and owning it – a power and a comfort I wish I could bequeath to every young reader.

A lot of first-person voices in young adult lit voice character assumptions and beliefs but writers don’t always find ways to comprehensively deconstruct those beliefs in a way that feels organic to the narrative. I wanted to be thorough with all of the opinions that Dess expressed. I wanted to give the reader space to turn over each and examine it – through observation, but also more directly through conversations Dess had with Foster Lady, I wanted to make sure that the reader could come away saying, specifically, yes, black bodies, every body, CAN.

It was, in some ways, an incomplete accomplishment. Writers control little but their words in the publishing process, and I gave what input I could on the cover, which went through many iterations before arriving at the brightly engaging hardcover image, depicting two relatively slim-bodied girls. I’m happy with it on a number of levels, even as I hope someday that acceptance of black female bodies, even in a work intended for young readers, will better illustrate the normalized inclusion of big bodies, and black bodies as part of the whole – as different as peas and carrots, but taken as a normal part of the diverse whole that makes up who we are.

***

Tanita grew up with foster siblings, worked at a summer camp, and taught at a group home school and an elementary classroom, so she’s frequently hung around a mob of kids and teens. A bookworm, introvert, and a tea addict, you can usually find her hiding behind a mug as big as her head. She was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Mare’s War, which was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. Her most recent novel, Peas and Carrots, is out from Knopf this month. Tanita lives in Northern California with her Tech Boy and feels rather queenly referring to herself in the third person.

This Week at Book Riot

February 5, 2016 |

Over on Book Riot this week…

Here’s the last “What’s Up in YA?” post! Starting on the 15th, this will be launching into a newsletter, which you can subscribe to right in the post itself. Highlights include book awards, fat phobia, and the state of YA adaptations.

For this week’s “3 On A YA Theme,” I talked about books set in Alaska.

Perhaps one of my favorite posts to write and think about was this discussion and round-up of LGBTQ titles for middle grade readers.

Triple Take

February 3, 2016 |

Cover designers love this image. Kelly wrote about it back in 2011, and it’s popped up again this year on Kathleen Tessaro’s Rare Objects, this time with the cigarette left in. The woman is placed within a mirror or picture frame in Tessaro’s book, which looks a little odd to me – but that may be just because I’m so used to seeing her in a more 3-dimensional setting. Regardless, it does make the cover a little too busy for my taste, taking away from the woman’s face, which is the natural focal point and needs no framing. The lighting on the woman’s face also seems brighter; perhaps that’s a lens flare on the right-hand side of the cover.

I do wonder why this image seems so popular. The expression on the woman’s face is neutral, but still arresting, and it does evoke an instant historical feel. All three books are set around World War II: Cooper’s in the late 1930s, Cunningham’s in 1944, and Tessaro’s in 1933. The man just behind the woman and the couple dancing in the background set a scene that makes the reader want to know more – is the woman at a party? Is the man her brother, her fiance, a stranger? Why is she looking at the camera in such a way?

Even with a photo of this caliber (and I do think it’s a pretty great one for a cover image), overuse can cause weariness or unhelpful comparisons. I don’t think I’d be able to read Tessaro’s book without thinking of Cooper’s, even subconsciously. The two audiences are different – Cooper’s book is for teens and Tessaro’s for adults – so for most readers this won’t be a problem, but for the crossover ones like me, it can get distracting. What do you think of different cover designers using the same image over and over like this?

5 Reasons To Pick Up The V Word (Out Today!)

February 2, 2016 |

I’m so, so excited to share that today is the big day that The V-Word: True Stories About First Time Sex, edited by Amber J. Keyser is out in the world. It was two years ago, almost exactly, I got the email that it would be happening, and I was honored when Amber asked me to take part in this collection.

I’ve read the entire book cover-to-cover and think it’s a powerful look at virginity and sexuality for teen girls. It’s mature and honest and raw, but it’s not explicit or sensationalized by any means. Not only are the stories themselves good and cover a wide range of experiences, voices, and sexualities, but the back matter on this book is killer (I say that not just because I contributed to part of that).

In honor of The V-Word‘s release, here are my top five reasons why you should pick it up and put it on your shelves, especially if you work in a library, a school, or with teenagers in some capacity.

1. You can read about the first time I had sex (unless you’re family and I am telling you don’t do it).

Writing this essay was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And it wasn’t so much hard from the standpoint of knowing that a lot of people would know about the first time I had sex and all of the details of it, but more, it was scary because I unpacked a lot of baggage surrounding sex and more specifically my body.

My essay is about the importance of choice and choosing when it is you’re ready to have sex. It’s about how when you think you’ve made a decision and then deciding it’s not the decision you really want to make. It’s also about how you can believe you’ll never be a person who has sex and then one day … you do.

I’ve been told that my essay is “unexpectedly funny,” which might be the best phrasing I’ve ever heard used to describe my writing. I’m proud of this piece, and I like to think it’s going to be relatable to many, many girls; it’s a piece of work I wish I could have given to my 14 or 15 year old self and in many ways, it’s a love letter to me as a teenager saying that things will be good and work out.

2. A Question & Answer section about female sexuality and the media, especially YA books.

I’m so proud of this contribution I got to make to the back matter of this book. Amber and I had a great back-and-forth exchange about how sex is represented in the media, and I talked at length about the kinds of books that are showcasing female sexuality well, as well as what we might be missing.

These were not easy questions, and I spent a lot of time researching, reading, and writing at length about what we’re doing well and what we suck at when it comes to talking about teen girls and sexuality. I spent a good chunk of time talking about choice (and how it’s just as valid to choose not to have sex as it is to have it), about masturbation (can we talk about why it’s “female masturbation” when referring to girls doing it and just “masturbation” when referring to boys?), and much, much more.

3. This is a female space.

Something I am passionate about is girls stories and girls voices. No one would say otherwise, of course, but this book truly highlights the importance of both. I grew up without any kind of resources like this, and one of the things I talked about in my essay was how a lot of my sex education came from living in a dorm room. I met girls and guys who knew way more than me, who were much more experienced than me, and who also opened my eyes to how girls are viewed sexually (my piece, not to give too much away, begins with a male friend and I coming close to having an experience and him talking to me about how he valued me too much as a virgin to take that from me — so much to unpack in that statement, right?).

Here’s the thing: we don’t talk with and to girls about sex enough, and when we do, it’s too often from the context of “do it and be safe” or “don’t do it at all.” This book explores the nuances, as well as the variety of experiences, sensations, and questions girls have about sex and their bodies. This is a million times more informative, insightful, and truthful than a sex ed class is because all of the women in this collection are sharing their own stories.

None — zero — of the stories are at all the same.

I have a confession to make here, and maybe it’s one I shouldn’t make because it offers a glimpse into a side of me I don’t share often and one that I fight so hard against. When Amber began talking with me about this anthology, she shared two sample essays. As I read them, I thought to myself my story is so boring and no one will be interested and wow, I am as boring as I thought I was and why do all of these other women have such fascinating, wild accounts to share?

But those questions are why my story is important. And of course, with as many stories as there are in here, those thoughts I had have no merit except that they showcase the very reasons why The V-Word is important. All of our stories are valid, no matter what they look like or don’t look like.

4. Excellent reviews, including a star from Publishers Weekly!

This book has gotten a ton of great reviews. I’m particularly taken with the star it got from Publishers Weekly, and I also appreciate the thoughtful comments about my Q&A with Amber in the SLJ review. (There’s also a great BCCB review, which isn’t available online).

5. Teen-centric non-fiction is where diversity is at.

I’ll never forget when Malinda Lo posted a picture of the non-fiction section at Barnes & Noble and noted that it was the most diverse section in the YA category. Not only is that still a reality, but that diversity in non-fiction is also reflected within the collection itself.

I’m making an effort this year not to call things “diverse,” but instead use the term “inclusive.” And this book is utterly inclusive, not only across the racial and gender spectrums, but also across sexualities. This is a collection teens will see themselves in in so many powerful and important ways.

Likewise, a collection of essays that’s inclusive is a way for teen readers to know that all of their voices and stories matter.

I’m honored to be part of this collection and thrilled it’s a real thing on shelves. Thank you, Amber, for extending an invitation to me so early on and all of your hard work making this book a reality.

You can pick up The V-Word from any of your favorite booksellers.