STACKED

books

Links of Note: May 4, 2013

|

Via Flavorwire, the caption for this image is the best part: a librarian helps a young hooligan.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I am so glad to say it finally feels like spring here in Wisconsin. We had snow even through last week, so a string of warm days — with sunshine — has been beyond welcome. But rather than write an essay about how glad I am to see spring, I’ll instead share some of the best and most interesting things from around the internet the last couple of weeks. As always, if there’s something I may have missed worth reading, leave a link for me to check out.

  • We talk a lot about YA covers here, but have you thought about what kids themselves think about cover trends or what covers might be saying about the books meant for them? The Bank Street Center for Children’s Lit posed this very question to 6th graders set loose on a bookstore chain. The results are fascinating. Of course, go back and read Part I and Part II of this discussion of covers and representation, too. 
  • I’ve blogged before about the differences between contemporary YA and historical YA fiction. Michael Cart delves into this very topic himself, too, and it’s well worth reading. Also, for anyone who has any interest in the development or history of YA needs to read Cart’s books because they are foundational. 
  • “And then she was pretty. The end.” I’m not sure I agree with everything in this post, but the conversation about beauty and appearance in YA fiction is well-worth reading and thinking about. 
  • I still don’t think it’s true that “new adult” is here to stay. I’m still firmly in the camp these are crossover titles. That’s all they need to be. 
  • What should we call girl pain? This is a really interesting discussion about Hollywood and the problems that many of the females who grew up with fame are now dealing with. I remember this article VIVIDLY and reading it in high school (it came out when I was a senior). And now seeing the careers and personal traumas these girls have had — it’s eye-opening. I like the wider angle of what do we do about this or call it brought up by the original poster. 

The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr

|

Anyone who has ever created something or pursued a passion knows that sometimes you hit that flow and nothing else in the world exists. What you’re doing is the best thing there is and it fills you with everything you need. 

Anyone who has ever created something or pursued a passion also knows that it can be the MOST SOUL CRUSHING THING IN THE WORLD. That you’re never good enough, that you’ll never be good enough, that it’s all just a fleeting sort of thing that you get lucky at doing well once in a while. You struggle with being true and honest to yourself, while you’re putting something out there to be consumed by others in some capacity. 

Zarr’s novel The Lucy Variations is about that.

Lucy is a champion pianist and has been her entire life. It runs in her family’s blood. She’s talented, she’s made the rounds of the world performing, and people know who she is. Her grandpa and her mother have given her every single opportunity to pursue this talent and they helped groom her so that she has a world-class reputation. 

Up until eight months ago, she went along with the game. She was happy — or at least thought she was. But when she’s in Prague on a big stage and she learns that her family has been keeping her sick grandmother’s condition from her, she leaves. She gets up, doesn’t perform, and walks onto the streets of Prague. Her grandmother, who had given her the kind of unconditional love and confidence she needed, was dying and her family kept this from her because to them, her performance was more important. It’s then that her grandfather, the patriarch of the family and of the performance gene all together, says she’s done. That Lucy can never perform again. 

She’d disgraced the entire family by failing to perform, and she could not come back. 

Lucy accepts this fate until the long-time piano teacher she and her brother Gus shared dies in their home. Lucy tried to save her, but the teacher was gone before she could. When grandpa and mother come back to their home to a dead teacher, it’s no big deal. They have her body taken away and immediately look for a new teacher for Gus, so that he can continue on his track to be the next big performer himself. The death of the long-time teacher can’t get in the way of him being at his best. Will enters their lives and while he’s a good teacher to Gus, he’s really interested in helping Lucy come back around to playing. He doesn’t pressure her, but he simply asks if she’d ever consider playing again. It’s that simple question of whether or not she’d consider playing again — whether or not LUCY would consider playing again — that sets the entire story into motion.

This is a question Lucy never considers for herself. Because she was told she couldn’t. Her grandfather said it was over for her and there was no going back. But Lucy does consider it, and she decides she does want to play again. Except rather than play for an audience and rather than play for the praise and glory that she did in the past, Lucy wants to play for herself. She wants to relearn what it’s like to love the thing she does and the thing that she has mad talent for. As simple as it sounds to reignite that passion, it is anything but. Will’s question forces Lucy to realize that playing should be something SHE chooses to do, a passion to which she dedicates HER time because it matters to HER. 

For her life up until then, she never realized the power of ownership of talent, of skill, and how she can chose the course of the future for herself. Her grandpa and her mother had been owning it for her. 

Complicating this are Lucy’s feelings toward other people. Whereas it’s easy to see how much she dislikes and even fears both her mother and her grandfather, what’s less clear is why she’s attached and attracted to Lit teacher and then Will. As the story progresses though, and we start to understand the complicated feelings Lucy has toward performance, we understand her feelings toward these two older men are simply projection of her desire to love and believe her art for herself in the way that these two mentors have done for her. Both have offered her the sort of support and confidence to go in the direction of her own interests and passions and desires in a way that no one else ever has. It’s not that easy to understand though because Will’s belief in Lucy is too much for her to take. He’s pulled strings, and he’s broken her trust when she opens up to him about wanting to play again. Will used his own connections in the industry to make sure that Lucy’s interest in piano again can be accommodated. That she can jump right back in where she left off. This is, she realizes, the last thing in the world she wants. She doesn’t want to be someone’s prodigy or someone else’s creation or prize. She wants to perform and play because she loves to do it. Because it brings her joy. Not because someone else simply believes she has the ability to go far with it. 

Zarr excels at making her characters dynamic, and I appreciate how unashamed she is in making it clear that Lucy comes from privilege. Because rather than make it a way for the reader to dislike and resent Lucy, her inability to fully trust and love her own skills and talents at their own level makes her very relatable. No amount of money or resources can change how human the creative struggle is. This balances well with the grandfather, who is unlikable and sees art as nothing but a way to get ahead and make a name for oneself. It’s, of course, how his family came to have their reputation. Zarr furthers this through what seem like much tinier plot points, including Lucy’s regular lateness to class, which causes her Lit teacher to treat her not as a special snowflake, but as a student who is being disruptive and, well, privileged. And when Lucy has to confront this because she’s copied bits and pieces of her own teacher’s scholarship on Alice Munro for her class project, she has a huge awakening and ah ha moment about how MUCH privilege she really has had. No one just gets what they get; they have to work for it. Of course, that working for it is precisely the struggle and the purpose of the story.

The structure of The Lucy Variations is brilliant. It’s not entirely linear, but rather, it’s built like a symphony. It’s layered and complex, building to a high, then drawing back to a scene from the past. It mimics not just the way a song sounds and the way a song plays, but it precisely mimics the creative process and the struggle therein. It’s good when it’s good, and it’s ugly when it is ugly. This book is also written in third person, which removes the reader from the characters. But rather than be distancing, this choice is the right one. It makes the reader better understand Lucy’s struggle because it’s being explored almost objectively. And, of course, since creativity is anything BUT objective, it hits even harder. It’s up and down. It’s good and it’s bad. There is nothing objective about feelings and passions and desires. They’re dynamic. 

The hardest thing to learn is to pursue something because you love it and not because someone else tells you that you’re good at it. And even during those times you know you’re good at it and you know you like it, there are periods when you question why and whether or not it’s all simply luck. Zarr nails these ups and downs and these challenges and rewards through Lucy. The Lucy Variations is a book I don’t think I’ll be forgetting any time soon because it spoke to my own heart. I think it’ll speak to the heart of anyone who has ever questioned why they’re doing something. Is it for yourself or is it for an audience? When do you push forward and when do you step back and say it’s time to move on.

Even though nothing particularly sad happens in the story — despite there being some sad moments — I welled up a couple of times because of how raw and tender the emotional and mental honesty is. What Lucy struggles with is something that never goes away, but it’s something you come to accept and honor as part of creating and living. Zarr cuts to the core of what it means to BE. 

The Lucy Variations is DAMN good. This book will resonate with fans of strong contemporary novels that explore the arts and family relationships. Sarah Ockler fans and fans of Siobhan Vivian will find much to enjoy in Zarr’s latest, as will Zarr’s already-devoted readership. 

Review copy received from the publisher. The Lucy Variations will be available May 7, and we’ll have an interview with Sara Zarr next week.

Get Genrefied: Verse Novels

|

Angela’s genre this month for her reader’s advisory challenge is one of my favorites, even though it’s not technically a genre. It’s the verse novel. Like graphic novels — which we will talk about later this year — verse novels are a format. They’re also a style of telling a story. Rather than making use of traditional prose, verse novels are narrative poetry. There’s not one specific means or style of writing the verse either; it can range from free verse (with no guidelines for construction of words) to verse written in a strict style with specific stanza limitations. Sometimes, the verse rhymes but most of the time it does not. 

Verse novels can take on a very visual aspect to them, depending upon the author and how he or she chooses to build and construct the verse. Anyone who has opened one of Ellen Hopkins’s novels, for example, can see she purposefully builds her verse to have a visual layer on top of the language itself (Identical is a strong example of how she does this). 

Since novels written in verse are constructed with a format and style in mind, rather than a genre, they can range from contemporary stories to historical, and they can include mysteries, fantasy, science fiction, and more. Non-fiction can be written in verse, as well, and Margarita Engle is one author who has published a number of YA non-fiction books in verse. 

Despite being written in poetry, verse novels can be quite appealing to more reluctant readers because they’re less intimidating to look at visually and because — for the most part — they read fairly quickly. There are exceptions to this, of course, but the format is one which has wide appeal across a spectrum of readers.

Below are recent — and not-so-recent — YA novels in verse. These showcase the range of voices and genres where readers may experience the verse format. All descriptions are from WorldCat, and this list is not exhaustive, so we welcome your comments with additional titles, particularly books which might be coming out later this year. I’ve included just a single title per author, but I have noted where the author has additional verse titles.

Karma by Cathy Ostlere: In 1984, following her mother’s suicide, 15-year-old Maya and her Sikh father travel to New Delhi from Canada to place her mother’s ashes in their final resting place. On the night of their arrival, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated, Maya and her father are separated when the city erupts in chaos, and Maya must rely on Sandeep, a boy she has just met, for survival.

Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs by Ron Koertge: Fourteen-year-old Kevin Boland, poet and first baseman, is torn between his cute girlfriend Mira and Amy, who is funny, plays Chopin on the piano, and is also a poet. Shakespeare Bats Cleanup is the first book in this two-book series, and it’s also written in verse (and you don’t have to read them both to get the story).

The Day Before by Lisa Schroeder: Sixteen-year-old Amber, hoping to spend one perfect day alone at the beach before her world is turned upside down, meets and feels a strong connection to Cade, who is looking for his own escape, for a very different reason. As of this writing, Schroeder has written all of the rest of her titles in verse, as well, except for Falling For You. 





Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff: In order to earn money for college, fourteen-year-old LaVaughn babysits for a teenage mother. This is the first book in a trilogy.

Song of the Sparrow by Lisa Ann Sandell: In fifth-century Britain, nine years after the destruction of their home on the island of Shalott brings her to live with her father and brothers in the military encampments of Arthur’s army, seventeen-year-old Elaine describes her changing perceptions of war and the people around her as she becomes increasingly involved in the bitter struggle against the invading Saxons.

The Watch That Ends the Night by Allan Wolf: Recreates the 1912 sinking of the Titanic as observed by millionaire John Jacob Astor, a beautiful young Lebanese refugee finding first love, “Unsinkable” Molly Brown, Captain Smith, and others including the iceberg itself.

The Geography of Girlhood by Kirsten Smith: Novel in poetry about a girl navigating the unknown, the difficult limbo between youth and adulthood. A novel written in verse follows Penny Morrow in her transition from middle school to high school as her father remarries, she acquires a new stepbrother, and she experiences her first dance, first kiss, and other hazards of growing up. Smith’s recent novel, Tricks, features the voice of a character written in verse, as well.

Tricks by Ellen Hopkins: Five troubled teenagers fall into prostitution as they search for freedom, safety, community, family, and love. As of this writing, all of Hopkins’s books are written in verse. 

What My Mother Doesn’t Know by Sonya Sones: Fourteen-year-old Robin Murphy is so unpopular at high school that his name is slang for “loser,” and so when he begins dating the beautiful and popular Sophie her reputation plummets, but he finds acceptance as a student in a drawing class at Harvard. This is the first book in a series of two, the second titled What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know. Sones also wrote One of Those Hideous Books Where The Mother Dies, which is also written in verse. Later in 2013, Sonya Sones will release a new novel-in-verse titled To Be Perfectly Honest.

All the Broken Pieces by Ann Burg: Two years after being airlifted out of Vietnam in 1975, Matt Pin is haunted by the terrible secret he left behind and, now, in a loving adoptive home in the United States, a series of profound events forces him to confront his past.

Because I Am Furniture by Thalia Chaltas: The youngest of three siblings, fourteen-year-old Anke feels both relieved and neglected that her father abuses her brother and sister but ignores her, but when she catches him with one of her friends, she finally becomes angry enough to take action. Displacement, Chaltas’s other novel, is also written in verse.

Sold by Patricia McCormick: Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi leaves her poor mountain home in Nepal thinking that she is to work in the city as a maid only to find that she has been sold into the sex slave trade in India and that there is no hope of escape.

Love & Leftovers by Sarah Tregay: When her father starts dating a man, fifteen-year-old Marcie’s depressed mother takes her to New Hampshire but just as Marcie starts falling for a great guy her father brings her back to Iowa, where all of her relationships have become strained.

Wicked Girls by Stephanie Hemphill: A fictionalized account, told in verse, of the Salem witch trials, told from the perspective of three of the real young women living in Salem in 1692–Mercy Lewis, Margaret Walcott, and Ann Putnam, Jr. Hemphill’s prior titles, Your Own, Sylvia and Things Left Unsaid are also written in verse, as is her more recent title, Sisters of Glass.

Psyche in a Dress by Francesca Lia Block: A young woman, Psyche, searches for her lost love and questions her true self in a modern retelling of Greek myths.

Glimpse by Carol Lynch Williams: Living with their mother who earns money as a prostitute, two sisters take care of each other and when the older one attempts suicide, the younger one tries to uncover the reason. Williams’s Waiting is also written in verse.

Hidden by Helen Frost: When fourteen-year-olds Wren and Darra meet at a Michigan summer camp, both are overwhelmed by memories from six years earlier when Darra’s father stole a car, unaware that Wren was hiding in the back. Frost’s other books, including Crossing Stones, The Braid, and Diamond Willow are written in verse. 

Three Rivers Rising by Jame Richards: Sixteen-year-old Celestia spends every summer with her family at a resort at Lake Conemaugh, an Allegheny Mountain reservoir held in place by a 70-foot dam. Tired of the society crowd, Celestia much prefers to swim and fish with Peter, the hotel’s hired boy. It’s a friendship she must keep secret from her parents, and when companionship turns to romance, it’s a love that could get Celestia disowned. These affairs of the heart become all the more wrenching on a single, tragic day in May of 1889.

Audition by Stasia Ward Kehoe: When sixteen-year-old Sara, from a small Vermont town, wins a scholarship to study ballet in New Jersey, her ambivalence about her future increases even as her dancing improves.

Exposed by Kimberly Marcus: High school senior Liz, a gifted photographer, can no longer see things clearly after her best friend accuses Liz’s older brother of a terrible crime.

Family by Micol Ostow: In the 1960s, seventeen-year-old Melinda leaves an abusive home for San Francisco, meets the charismatic Henry, and follows him to his desert commune where sex and drugs are free, but soon his “family” becomes violent against rich and powerful people and she is compelled to join in. Told in episodic verse, this is a fictionalized exploration of cult dynamics, loosely based on the Manson Family murders of 1969.



After the Kiss by Tera Elan McVoy: In alternating chapters, two high school senior girls in Atlanta reveal their thoughts and frustrations as they go through their final semester of high school. 

Shark Girl by Kelly Bingham: After a shark attack causes the amputation of her right arm, fifteen-year-old Jane, an aspiring artist, struggles to come to terms with her loss and the changes it imposes on her day-to-day life and her plans for the future. Bingham wrote a companion novel to this one, titled Formerly Shark Girl.

You Are Not Here by Samantha Schutz: Annaleah’s grief over the tragic death of seventeen-year-old Brian is compounded by the fact that her friends did not like him, while his friends and both of their families knew nothing of their intimate relationship.



Becoming Billie Holiday by Carole Boston Weatherford: Jazz vocalist Billie Holiday looks back on her early years in this fictional memoir written in verse.

My Book of Life by Angel by Martine Leavitt: 16-year-old Angel struggles to free herself from the trap of prostitution in which she is caught.

Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall: Throughout her high school years, as her mother battles cancer, Lupita takes on more responsibility for her house and seven younger siblings, while finding refuge in acting and writing poetry. Includes glossary of Spanish terms. 

Want some more reading about verse novels? Then check out the following:

  • Also, keep the blog and web resource Verse Novels on your radar. We’re taking part today in their year-long Thursday feature that aims to have verse novels highlighted throughout the blogging world.

Show Me the Awesome: 30 Days of Self Promotion

|

design by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Remember our call for posts about self-promotion and librarianship a few weeks ago?  This is the official starting line, and for every post we receive on the topic, we’ll link it up here for easy, ready access. We’ll update this post as close to daily as possible.

While we have a lineup of official people taking part in the series, anyone is welcome to blog on the topic of self promotion. You can talk about a program you did and loved. You can talk about how you perform strong reader’s advisory with teens. You can talk about the grander idea of self promotion itself. There’s nothing off limits, as long as you’re talking about libraries and self promotion or librarianship and self promotion in some capacity.

If you do post something and want it shared, leave a link and we’ll spread the word. All are welcome to use the graphic above with a post, as long as credit as listed above is given.

A huge thank you goes out to Sophie Brookover for coordinating this huge project, to John LeMasney for the graphic, and an advanced thank you to everyone who decided to take on the pitch and write about this very important, very timely, and very relevant topic.

Here’s to 30 Days of Awesome through the month of May. Show us what you’ve got.

  • Amy talks about finding the awesome within her — this is such a great post, especially for anyone who ever feels down on themselves about anything in life. 
  • Anna talks about all of her duties as a librarian and how she manages them. Because we all joke about “other duties as assigned.” 
  • Check out this amazing programming idea — StoryWalk. 
  • Betsy Bird’s talking about how when you have a background in youth services, you can do anything. 

Three Cybils Reviews: The Clunkers

|

I really enjoyed being on Round 2 of the graphic novels category for the Cybils this past year, and part of what made it so nice is that I had nearly double the number of books to read (not a hardship for graphic novels). With ten books, you get a nice variety of topics, targeted age groups, and artistic styles. With ten books, there are also bound to be a few clunkers. These three titles didn’t impress me for various reasons – sometimes it boiled down to my own personal reading tastes, sometimes not.

Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales: Big Bad Ironclad! by Nathan Hale

Big Bad Ironclad is about the ironclad steam warships that both the North and South used in the Civil War, and the pioneering men who designed, used, and fought in them. I like history and historical fiction a lot – when it’s about certain
topics. The Civil War? Fascinating! The naval history of the Civil War?
Not so much. The story is told in a jocular style, with some people represented as animals and a few (obvious) liberties taken with the facts for laughs. It’s clearly meant to be funny, but the humor fell mostly flat for me. 
I also quickly tired of the Nathan Hale gimmick (Nathan Hale is both the name of the author/illustrator and the name of an American spy who was hanged during the Revolutionary War. Spy Nathan Hale tells this story to his would-be executioners – though it hasn’t happened yet in his timeline – as a way to put off his execution, much like Scheherazade). For kids interested in naval history (and I know there are many), this should fit the bill, and I know the humor will be a good fit for other readers, but this just isn’t for me.

Marathon by Boaz Yakin and Joe Infurnari

This story of Eucles, the Athenian man who ran the first “marathon” from Sparta to Athens in 490 BC, has such high appeal, but the art prevents it from really succeeding. The book’s main focus is Eucles’ run, but it also relates a lot of his childhood as well as necessary context for the fighting between the Greeks and the Persians. It skips around in time and place a lot and multiple characters are introduced. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but the art is so sketchy that it’s impossible to understand what is going on. Characters cannot be distinguished from one another and there’s no real sense of place or time. The art may be stylistically very good, but it doesn’t work as a vehicle for storytelling. The only reason I was able to understand some of what went on is because I knew some of the story already.

Ichiro by Ryan Inzana

Ichiro’s American father was a soldier who died overseas many years ago in the Iraq war, and his father’s father has cultivated in Ichiro a love of war and a distrust and even hate for anything non-American. (Ichiro has a shirt he is rather fond of that reads “Kill ’em all and let God sort them out.”) Then Ichiro’s Japanese mother takes him to live with her father in Japan, and it is there that Ichiro first starts to explore his Japanese heritage and reject some of the ideas his American grandfather has inculcated in him. His adventure truly begins, however, when he falls through a hole in the ground into a fantasy realm of warring gods…and this is where the story lost me.

Inzana uses these mythological elements to explore the complex ways that race, war, and heritage impact our lives, but it doesn’t quite work for me. I found these sections a bit jumbled, though the message is earnest and important. (Some may say the book is a little too message-heavy.) I did enjoy the art, with its bold colors and clean lines (always the kind of art I like best). I think there’s a lot to unpack here, which may be better appreciated with multiple readings. Still, it was not a favorite.