The Page Is Long And Filled With White Matter

The page is long and filled with white matter when you're trying to write your way to the next page. It's a chasm of white, waiting to be traversed.

June is Pride Month! Pride Crafts 2016 Edition

Pride is a little more than a month away so I'm putting on my rainbow-colored hat and digging in for some good teen, tween and kid crafts that provide for good times and a subtle bit of learning or reflection all at the same time.

Whether 18 or 8, i'm determined to incorporate Michael Hall's 2015 picture book Red: A Crayon's Story into my craft hour. Beautifully illustrated story about diversity, how we are all unique human beings and what happens after we stop trying to find labels to fit who we are.

In keeping with the diversity theme, I'm re-purposing the so-so-easy paper doll craft for Diverse Paper Dolls. The craft is all about coloring and decorating so it will be interesting to see if kids/tweens/teens even notice if all the dolls are the same shape or if they color them all the same or differently.

More fun to come...

Yet Another Book Challenge With A Young Adult Lit Twist

When did online Book Challenges become a big thing?

If there's one thing I love to do when struggling to finish a book its dawdle online reading about books. So it was to my surprise that all these book challenges escaped me until last year when I signed up for the Diverse Books Challenge.

With each January 1st wouldn't you know the book challenge universe continues to expand into genres and online reading groups. I was jazzed to be pointed to Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge by a colleague. In its second year, Book Riot's challenge combines elements of Bingo into your book challenge, directing readers with assigned tasks for their book selections (Read a book about religion, read a book about politics, read a book over 500 pages, to type a few). My colleague and her co-workers have turned it into a competition.

Loved it.

But this was a book challenge that seems geared toward adult readers. Some of the assigned tasks weren't necessarily conducive to those of us who read mostly Young Adult fiction and non-fiction. I wanted a Book Riot Read Harder Challenge for YA readers. While I pride myself on being a kick-ass, semi-decent librarian, my cursory online searches came up with nothing.

So I shamelessly stole Book Riot's idea and applied it to the world of Young Adult Literature:

Thank you Book Riot!

A Book Review Starring "Anna and the Swallow Man" by Gabriel Sarit

First off, welcome me back!

It's been a wee bit of a whole lifetime ago since my last post due to this adorable little treat that landed into the world of oxygen on August 17th, 2015. In the meantime, in what felt akin to a very long obstacle course, I managed to complete my reading as a member of the Stonewall Youth Awards Committee too, which meant a lot of great reading but no blogging.



What a treat it's going to be to write about "Anna and the Swallow Man" upon my return.





THE SHORT VERSION:
Set in 1939 Krakow, Poland, seven year old Anna is suddenly alone in the world when her father disappears. A chance encounter with a tall, dark, looming man known only as "The Swallow Man" sets her on a seemingly aimless journey of survival throughout Poland and into Russia and back again while she learns from him the tools she'll need to exist while living in the heart of wartime Eastern Europe.

THE LONG VERSION:
Spare, dark, eloquent. Deliberately written. Rich characters illuminate a highly original tale of wartime survival. Such great ambiguity to characters and plot that I so appreciate about the literary side of young adult fiction. There are great, eloquent hints about who the Swallow Man is, and he really is the great mystery of the novel, but he never sits down to explain himself, that trust in the reader I appreciated above all else.

How uncommon it is to read a young adult novel that brims with it's own unique tone, so much so that I had a hard time deciding who the audience is for this book, which while a conundrum wouldn't prevent me from adding it to my collection.

From the start it has the feel of children's fiction. The main character is seven. The prose is spare enough that the violence and coldheartedness of wartime while present, isn't pointed or explicit. But two thirds of the way in, Anna encounters violence and adult behavior that even if it's spare storytelling is very specific. Throughout the story I kept asking myself who this novel is for, who do I recommend it to. I'm still not entirely sure.

Words can save your life. Knowledge can cause good but also harm. Such beautiful themes woven deftly throughout the story, both in plot and in how the author chose to tell his story, the words he used, the phrases he put together. It doesn't make for the easiest of reads, it's not at all a skimmable read, but a rich and unforgettable one nonetheless.

(Review of an Advanced Reader Copy)

A Book Review Starring "Lost Boi" by Sassafras Lowrey

The short version:
Imagine the Peter Pan fairy tale reimagined with Pan as a genderqueer leader of homeless genderqueer kids living in their abandoned warehouse Neverland and engaging in leather play. Pan finds Wendi, an orphan living in a group home, and invites her to come be Mommy to the lost bois of Neverland.

The long version:
Let me preface my review by saying Lost Boi is my first foray into genderqueer fiction. After meeting some readers outside the library who asked about queer fiction, it compelled me to do a little digging about a genre that I'd been thinking about only in a very casual way.

My first tack was to look online for queer booklists but soon discovered that much in the way of "queer booklists" used the term "queer" as an umbrella term to include LGBT and Q. I knew I was really on the hunt for genderqueer, or non-binary, and found much fewer lists, much less lists geared toward Young Adult literature. Like the emergence of Transgender Young Adult Fiction three or so years ago, you can feel we're at the birth of a new genre and it shows in how few prominent genderqueer titles there are being published (which is to say I don't necessarily include self-published or e-published books in this group).

Now for Lost Boi: dark and compelling, original, explicit, not for the faint or younger reader. Lowrey does a fantastic job of establishing and maintaining hir own unique tone that posits fairy tale into a very adult world that's replete with homelessness, drug use, S/M and leather play not to mention graphic sex and bondage. Yet she's created an adult fairy tale language full of splendid imagery and detail that establishes this very specific world and people. Not plot heavy, more a memory tale told from one of lost boi's perspectives and is heavy on place and character description.

While not a traditional narrative in which we would find characters described and developed over the course of the story, ze manages to draw some great empathy for hir characters while sticking to hir brand of storytelling. Hir characters were sympathetic while maintaining their hard earned edges. The few glimpses we get about the characters' backstories are specific, brutal and concrete and suffice to paint a vivid portrait of the people we meet along the way.

While it's cataloged as Adult Fiction at my library, and rightly so, the story certainly has an audience with older young adults (let's not get started on the New Adult terminology that sort of drives me nuts and leads me to a tangent that involves advocating for the expanded definition of "Young Adult"). The story's focus is all on young adults likely ranging in age from mid-teens to twenties (Lowrey does an excellent job of, among other things, using ambiguity throughout: encompassing a variety of details such as age and not limited to gender, which seemed to me a salient point, if I were going to draw conclusions). At my library, for example, we have a significant contingent of homeless LGBT patrons who might be quite familiar with much of the darker or brutal aspects throughout the story.

Lowrey also did a fantastic job when it came to hir usage of genderqueer terminology. For someone who had never read any genderqueer fiction, I was able to understand and navigate the ambiguity and complexity of genderqueer vocabulary.  In reading and contemplating hir work I visited, and encourage others to visit, her website, to give readers like myself the vocabulary she, as a genderqueer writer, uses to identify herself. While I'm certainly at the beginning of genderqueer fiction reading, having her website gave me a much needed basic vocabulary to describe and discuss both hir work and perhaps genderqueer fiction overall going forward.

Looking forward to seeing what genderqueer fiction has in its future. We are, after all, only at the beginning.

Playlists For Young Adult Novels

We are knee deep in "Read To The Rhythm" our music and rhythm themed Summer Reading Club theme. And though here in California the school year begins in the middle of summer, I'm going to ride the summer wave all the way into September, when it remains hot as hell with only the distant cool breezes of Halloween at night to remind us that we do indeed have an autumn around here.

This year's Summer Reading Club theme is the jackpot for this Mama (that's me in the third person, as I'm due with the second kid any moment now).  It combines my love of discovering new tunes with my love of young adult literature.

And I discovered my favorite way to combine my love of both is to create (and beg my teen patrons to join me in creating) music playlists inspired by young adult novels! You can take your playlists in any direction you like.

I chose to create Ipod inspired playlists like these. But you could use simple clip art of boomboxes or paste a list with the book image onto a CD painted black (to resemble an old school lp) or print song/artist titles onto music notes, cut them out and paste them onto the books themselves.

Point is, you've got options.







What's the appeal for our contingent of Reluctant YA Librarians, you ask? On the face of it, this requires way too much initiate and effort. True. BUT. Apparently I'm not alone in my love for book-inspired playlists because there are a bevy of Young Adult Authors who have created and posted their own playlists comprised of songs that inspired them while they were writing their novels.

Samples of author-created playlists 

AUTHOR-CREATED PLAYLISTS

Book Riot's (always a great, underappreciated resource) February, 2015 list of some pretty hot authors and links to their playlists.

Francesca Lia Block created a soundtrack for her groundbreaking Weetzie Bat.

Kirstin Conn-Mills created a playlist for her music-themed book "Beautiful Music For Ugly Children" on playlist.net, a site that's all about creating personal playlists.

Over at "The Unofficial Addiction Book Fan Club" (I'm still trying to digest the name of the site) they have the motherlode of author-created playlists.

And over at epicreads.com they have kindly culled all the music references from Michelle Falkoff's 2015 novel "Playlist For The Dead".

A Book Review Starring "Juniors" by Kaui Hart Lemmings

(this is a review of an Advanced Reader Copy)

The Short Version:
Part Hawaiian Lea Lane is the new junior at private, privileged Punahou School on Oahu, Hawaii. After her actress mother accepts a role on a TV show shooting on the island, they return to the island Lea only knew as a kid. This time she's the new girl, struggling to fit in among these beautiful, wealthy teens with her best friend from childhood, Danny, her only true friend. But when her mother accepts an offer from an old friend to move into the guest house on their estate, Lea gravitates to her mother's friend's kids, brother and sister Will and Whitney, and finds herself wanting to be accepted into their world, unaware of the consequences.

The Long Version:
Let me preface my review by saying I loved Hemming's debut novel, "The Descendants" and also the movie it was based on. Her acerbic wit (I'm a big fan of acerbic) and great dramatic flow made her first adult novel engrossing and endearing. She had a flare for great younger characters, their behavior and mannerisms and way of speaking, and wrote one of my favorite literary young adults, the secondary character of Sid.

This is Hemming's first young adult novel, and another, equally endearing version of Sid exists here in the form of secondary character Danny. Hemming's characters are what drive her story here too, when the plotting feels otherwise predictable and familiar, you hook your wagon to main character Lea, identifying with her adolescent insecurities and verbal stumbling.

Juniors is at it's heart a teenage melodrama about trying to fit in and be accepted. It's about that particular year in high school when you've been around belong enough to not be new and unaware of the social petrie dish but haven't yet experimented with the confidence of being on the cusp of graduation and leaving for parts unknown. The strength of her writing is in depicting many of the insecurities and traits of teenage girls: the competitiveness, the self-doubt and self-deprecation, cutting one another up behind their backs, jealousy. In Lea she's done a great job in personifying those qualities, even when you wish she'd wake up even a little before the last thirty pages.

The book succeeds in being a pretty textbook melodrama, it moves you, you know you're being emotionally manipulated but don't mind because the author is pretty confident in moving you along (even when you know exactly where you're going). That's not necessarily a bad thing. The result is an enjoyable, quick read that slightly elevates the teen melodrama with wit, some decent character development and, by the end, an endearing ending that speaks to how teens grow a little more and understand a little more a little at a time.