Pink Me

BEA 2013 - a quick photoessay

Oh Book Expo, my favorite event of the year. It's where we get to listen to creators and editors talk about their work and what excites them about it - it's where we pick up books and book-related swag, run into old friends and make new ones standing in line. It's where I get to hug Jack Gantos and be in the same room as Susan Cooper.

I'll have a long recap in the coming days - I took a lot of notes and I did a lot of thinking - but here are a few photo highlights in the meantime. There may be droids.

 

 

I swear, this is me being restrained.

 

Battle Bunny - the rock opera

Not really. Nobody sings. Well, they sing, but it's not... Oh just watch it.

 

 

I know what you're thinking. "Oh, sure, she's always complaining she has no time to read, but she'll spend most of Memorial Day weekend - when she should be barbecuing or binge-watching Arrested Development (Fun fact: I have never watched Arrested Development!) clipping video."

It's true. But I can't help it. I love making videos with my kids. And this one was inspired by the forthcoming Battle Bunny by Jon Scieszka and Mac Barnett, pictures by Matthew Myers.

Actually, I was just looking for an excuse to dress Ezra up in an Afro wig and a pink bed jacket. If you look closely, that's the same jacket Miss Volker wore in our production of Dead End in Norvelt. Jack Gantos was a good sport about our massacre of his Newbery Award-winning book, hope Mac & Jon don't get too mad at us for blowing their framing device.

 

 

Something is wrong with the Internet today - everything is cool

 

I mean, this is cool - this Kickstarter campaign for The Very Hungry Cthulhupillar. It's already fully funded, but for $25 you'll get the hardcover when it comes out. I don't know Eric Carle personally, but I have it on good authority that he has an excellent sense of humor...   

Oh my living room is such a mess and I haven't even been to BEA yet! Middle grade boy books, Spring 2013

 

I know it's a losing battle, keeping the place in some kind of tidy shape, and it's certainly not all the fault of my kids. The books, lord the books. But sometimes I am just in a GET IT ALL OUT OF HERE mood, and such is the mood that descended tonight.

I haven't had the time to read hardly anything lately, so as we picked up books and shelved them or put them in the Back to the Library bag, I got Milo (11) and Ezra (nearly 10) to talk about the books they've read.

 

 

Ezra: Battle Bunny is the result of a ten year old who just watched a whole lot of apocalypse movies making his mark on a cute little Birthday Bunny tale. It's terrifically funny - there's a picture on Battle Bunny's wall that shows a bunny mama leaning over a bunny baby and the ten-year-old added the words "Drink your poison."

NB: The overstimulated ten-year-olds actually responsible for Battle Bunny are Jon Scieszka and Mac Barnett, with illustrations by Matthew Myers... 

Tools of the trade - Two books that are making me better at the things I do

You might think, if you know me from reading Pink Me, that I am a children's or teen librarian. I'm not - at my system we are all generalists. So while I love fixing kids up with great books, the fact is I also enjoy helping grownups. I spend most of my time drumming up copies of just the right David Baldacci, or helping readers find Amish romance novels and car repair manuals.

 

Which, um... Amish romance novels? Right. I'm going to need a finding aid for that.

Trash Can Days by Teddy Steinkellner - review

 

I am sorry that Teddy Steinkellner was dumped in a trashcan in middle school. Truly I am. Nobody deserves to be humiliated like that, and I hope the boys who did it look back on that episode and feel gut-wrenching, ball-twisting shame. I hope they grow up and have children and experience the fear that some little pack of fourteen-year-old pricks is going to do something like that to one of their kids.

And I have to praise a book about middle school that gives us an episode of upside-down in a garbage can. The clarity of the prose, the observational exactness as the garbage juice trickles into the boy's hair - it is necessary to hear this. If it happened, and especially if it is likely to happen again, we need to know what it is like. It's a little like climbing Everest - if a person has been there, they owe it to the rest of us to tell us what it's like.

Read and grow rich - How my kids did on the 1922 SAT-10

 

As the kids were getting ready for bed last night, my husband pulled out Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun and flipped through it.

Unbored is a pretty great book - it has about a million unexpected and funky things for a kid to do: DIY Fiction! Farting Games! Make a Cigar Box Guitar! and it sits on our shelf until somebody pulls it out and has a little fun with it and then puts it back where it'll sit for another 6 months. That book makes a great gift (although if there's a second edition, I'd recommend the illustrations to be a little less hipster/retro. If it were me, I'd get Stephen Gilpin to do 'em. And I might spring for color.).

Anyway, tonight Bob found this page of questions from the 1922 Stanford Achievement Test, and just for fun started reading them out loud. I am always pretty amazed at the random stuff my kids know, and tonight I just had to ask - how do you know that?

So here's a sample of the questions from page 202 of Unbored, and how my kids knew the answers. VERRRY interesting, and a huge validation of leisure reading.

Dark Inside by Jeyn Roberts - review

 

Dark inside, dark outside. Dark on top and down below. Dark in a box. Dark with a fox. Dark in a house. Dark with a mouse. I'm sayin - this book is DARK.

Hee hee hee. I stayed up til 4am to finish it.

Cover that up! Some recent book covers and the books inside them

 

I just finished reading The Sinister Sweetness of Splendid Academy by Nikki Loftin. This is a damn fine book, a creep-up-on-you book. It has a devil-in-the-noonday-sun quality that many have compared to Roald Dahl. Me, I didn't see the Dahl in it so much - there's little to laugh at, for one thing - and I'd compare it more to creepy-banal British village horror. Love that stuff.

The main character in this book carries a heavy emotional burden, and the book, in addition to being a great, suspenseful fairy tale retelling, goes about hip-deep into the braided stream of villainy and its causes. There's a lot of Mayor Mills in Splendid Academy's Principal Trapp.

But look at that cover. Spunky blonde and tubby sidekick - looming, slightly comic haunted-house-looking building in the background? All that alliteration in the title? Does this cover make you expect emotional redemption as a theme?

It didn't for me anyway. I assumed, judging from the cover - and don't say don't do it, we all do it - that this was a book for fans of The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls. I would have handed it to any kid who goes for the new Gothic Humor genre that we're seeing so much of. And don't get me wrong, some of those kids will like it - but it is not Gothic Humor. It's not terribly funny, and it goes very dark. It's a bit reminiscent of Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat, actually.

Weirdly, this is only one of many books I have read recently (and I have read about a dozen books in the past four days) (don't ask) (influenza B) (I don't recommend it) with a cover that is more than a little bit misleading.

Building our house by Jonathan Bean - review

A family of hippie hipsters - or post-hipster hippies if you want to split hairs - move from their Hampden rowhouse to a field outside of Monkton and build a house, two toddlers in tow and a bun in the oven. Does mom wear glasses? Does dad wear plaid? Is their jeep a vintage Willys, are their shoes extra-chunky? Does a cat lurk on the periphery?

Do not hold any of these things against them.