Staving Off the Battlestar Galactica Twitchies: Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Though this book's been out for a couple of years, I just heard about it from Bookshelves of Doom, and it sounded like good methadone for The Hunger Games series.

I had no idea it would help me get through the next 24 hours until the series finale of Battlestar Galactica.

Like The Hunger Games, Unwind is set in a futuristic, post-war United States. Only here, the "Heartland Wars," were fought between pro-life and pro-choice factions, who eventually settle upon a highly untidy compromise.

Abortion becomes completely illegal, but when children are between the ages of 13 and 18, their parents or guardians can choose to have them "unwound." Unwinding doesn't end a "life" because, technically, the child's parts are surgically implanted into a living human being - organs, limbs, skin, hair - 99.4% of the kid will wind up somewhere else. Transplanting and grafting have become so technologically advanced that the sky's the limit. Need a lung? They can do that. Want a new arm, a different color eyes, a full head of hair? They can do that.

Kids who get unwound tend to fall into a few different categories: juvenile delinquents, wards of the state, unwanted children, and, children born into certain religious sects, called "tithes."

In Unwind, Shusterman follows a number of these kids on a journey that ought to lead immediately to a "harvest camp," but doesn't. One way or another, the kids here escape, go AWOL, and either through their own ingenuity or the kindness of strangers, end up somewhere quite different. I don't want to say too much more about the book, because it's quite twisty and suspenseful, but this leads us to Battlestar Galactica.

Let's just say that there's a character in the book called The Admiral.

And he's taken it upon himself to shepherd a number of scared, refugee kids slated for certain doom. And he puts them up in a place that's secure, though harsh and physically demanding. And his face is marked with scars, and he has perfectly straight, white teeth, and he is possessed of a demeanor that is stern, yet eminently warm and understanding. He has known great pain and great loss, and is somewhat damaged as a result. He doesn't always trust the right people, but he has an instinct for character.

I could not read Unwind without imagining The Admiral as anyone other than Edward James Olmos, aka, Admiral Adama. And that made the book all the better.

I don't know if Shusterman is a BSG fan, but if he is, this is a great homage (a tribute, and most definitely NOT a rip-off). If he's not, well, then he should be. I think he'd dig it the most.

It's a terrific book that delivers big action while at the same time providing nuanced ideas about where life begins, where it ends, and what it all means.

So say we all.

Battle Royale: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Do young readers like dystopian fiction because they're morbid little buggers, or do they like it because it's the most consistently solid and inventive little sub-genre in the YA universe? Lois Lowry, Scott Westerfeld, Nancy Farmer, M.T. Anderson have all done terrific work with the subject matter, but Suzanne Collins's new series introduces readers to an even grittier, scarier, more complicated world.

The Hunger Games is set in a futuristic United States that looks more like the Dark Ages. The country has been divided into twelve territories, each singly devoted to producing particular goods and services for the convenience and comfort of those in the wealthy, dictatorial capital. After a failed revolution, those in the territories suffer more than ever, and as a reminder of their defeat, each year the Capital demands a tribute of two children from each territory, their names drawn from a bowl.

The children are then whisked away to the Capital, styled into pint-sized warriors, and then pitched into a fight to the death that's televised nationwide. Twenty-four tributes enter the battlefield, only one leaves. While some territories groom their tributes from an early age, others are unlucky, malnourished, weak, and very young (your name starts going into the hat at 11).

Katniss is a wily and hard-hearted 16-year-old from the poorest territory of Panem, roughly defined as our Appalachia. When her younger sister's name is drawn for the tribute, Katniss volunteers herself instead, and is forced into an uneasy alliance with Peeta, the other tribute from Panem.

The Hunger Games is a gripping, brutal book that succeeds because it neither underestimates its readers nor devolves into gratuitous gore. The story is sophisticated enough to appeal to an adult audience as well - I liked it better than most of the "adult" fiction I read this year, and had a hard time putting it down to do things like eat and not miss my bus stop.

One word of warning: it's best if you, unlike me, know that this is only the first book in a series going in. My reaction upon finishing The Hunger Games amused Brady to no end:

"End of Book One? END OF BOOK ONE?!?!?"

Good Eatin': A La Carte by Tanita S. Davis

A La Carte by Tanita S. Davis

Davis's first novel about a teenage girl with culinary aspirations is as warm, sweet, and comforting as a piece of homemade gingerbread.

Okay, that was a cheesy way to begin this, but after reading the wonderful A La Carte, I've got food on the brain, and anyways, it's true.

Lainey isn't a unique YA protagonist because she has ambitious goals for herself, or even because her dream of being a chef with her own vegetarian cooking show is so unusual (as Lainey says at the beginning of the book, "Do you know how many African-American female chefs there aren't?"), but because she's so clearly well-suited for and up to the challenge.

Her mother is a chef-partner at a local soul food-French/Asian fusion restaurant, and Lainey spends a lot of time there, whipping egg whites, chopping onions, and slowly but surely, earning her right to saute with the big dogs. And when she's not there, chances are good that she's at home testing out a recipe for vegetable latkes or poring over her old Julia Child videos (Saint Julia, Lainey calls her).

Of course, Lainey's dreams have come at a price - she's almost totally isolated from anyone her own age, and her only friend is the hot-and-cold Simeon, who only seems to come around when he needs a favor. With anyone else, Lainey is prickly and stand-offish, but she finds herself completely helpless to resist the charms of her childhood friend. And as Simeon's requests become increasingly erratic and more troubling, Lainey finds herself driven away from the people in her life who truly care about her. Though Lainey's self-imposed desert island and her doormat behavior where Simeon is concerned are frustrating, these things also make her a believable character readers can truly root for.

And did I mention the food? Each chapter ends with a recipe, each of them more delicious-sounding than the last. And these aren't the kind of glorified nachos, mini-pizzas, and brownies recipes that usually bloat the pages of cookbooks for teens. They're challenging, "think like a chef," a la Tom Colicchio, recipes that invite experimentation and improvisation, and yet they're also perfectly within the range of a curious young cook. And what's more, they're healthy, vegetarian, and not from a box.

A La Carte is a terrific read, and was recently nominated for a Cybil for Best Young Adult Novel. Well deserved.

Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Tragedy: Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Two weeks after Hannah Baker commits suicide, her classmate and one-time crush Clay Jensen receives a box of cassette tapes in the mail, tapes Hannah sent out the day she died. Clay puts in the first tape, and hears Hannah's voice:

"I hope you're ready because I'm about to tell you the story of my life. More specifically, why my life ended And if you're listening to these tapes, you're one of the reasons why."

Hannah goes on to give two instructions: everyone has to listen, and everyone has to pass the tapes on to the next person on the list. "Hopefully," she adds, "neither one will be easy for you."

And it isn't.

Hannah unfolds a series of slights and betrayals, each one more serious and troubling than the last, and each implicating another person in Hannah's death.

Although the haunting premise might lead the reader to expect a mystery, the story stays firmly rooted in the world of high school.

It's a story about how Hannah perceived those slights, disappointments, and betrayals, which probably didn't mean much to their perpetrators, and how they affected her. But more than anything, it's a story about the dark, tunnel-vision world of a suicidal person who doesn't want to be rescued -- or doesn't believe she can be. Hannah doesn't kill herself to teach anyone a lesson, or expose any hidden scandal. Hannah kills herself because she wants to die.

In the book, it's easy to look at the incidents Hannah pinpoints as those that led to her suicide and think of people you know who have moved past worse. And it's easy to let many of Hannah's friends and classmates off the hook. They couldn't have known, so they couldn't have helped. However, that's not the point.

By incorporating Hannah's voice, Asher examines a suicidal person's frame of mind, and the ways that isolated incidents matter, as well as the ways that they don't. Asher also turns this premise into a way of exploring the guilt and remorse of those impacted by a friend or family member's suicide, with Hannah's tapes pointing towards a common survivors' experience -- what was the moment, the missed opportunity, when you could have made that person change their mind?

The approach is a daring one, and it usually works, though at times the conceit of the tapes glamorizes teen suicide more than I'm sure Asher intended. However, Thirteen Reasons Why is a haunting and thought-provoking book, tightly written and difficult to put down.

Weekly Geeks #3: Favorite Childhood Reads

Of course, I read a lot of Judy Blume and E.B. White and Roald Dahl when I was little, but for the latest Weekly Geeks challenge to write about our childhood favorites, I decided to dig out some of the more obscure, weird, hard-to-find titles that I loved as a child. Remember any of these?

Overlooked and Forgotten Childhood Gems

1. The Owlstone Crown by X.J. Kennedy
Still one of my favorite books, even after all these years.

Timothy and Verity Tibb are orphans who live on a farm with the evil Grimbles, who force them to farm parsnips in the dead of winter, and spend countless hours sticking labels onto bottles of a quack home remedy made of... parsnips. Life is bleak. Until one night they are visited by Lewis O. Ladybug, an insect private investigator, who tells the kids that their grandparents are alive, if not well, and living in a parallel universe. The kids sneak over to Other Earth, determined to rescue their grandparents, and the world from an evil dictator named Raoul Owlstone.

This book has great characters, an amazingly inventive plot, and references to stuff like Hamlet and Ross MacDonald that I didn't catch until I was much older.

2. The Island Keeper by Henry Mazer
Rich, overweight, spoiled, and generally useless, Cleo runs away from home to escape her overbearing family and memories of her dead sister. Cheesy set-up, typical 80s kid lit trauma-drama, but it gets better.

There's supposed to be a cabin there. But when she arrives, she finds it's burned down. She stocks up on food from a camping store, but her supply is quickly ransacked by animals. Her canoe is destroyed, winter is coming, and suddenly, what started as a somewhat bratty adolescent rebellion becomes very high stakes.

3. The Sara Summer by Mary Dowling Hahn
A book about Emily, a boring, well-behaved preteen girl who makes a "bad" friend. Emily is drawn to Sara's charisma, fearlessness, disregard for authority, but she also feels a little uncomfortable around her; however, she's also too spineless to stand up to Sara when she goes too far. What I liked most about this book is that it doesn't come to any easy conclusions about these kinds of friendships -- Emily isn't simply dragged down by Sara's influence, she also learns some valuable things from her.

4. Invisible Lissa by Natalie Honeycutt
Kind of like Blubber, only told from the point of view of the girl who is ostracized by her classmates when they form an exclusive club called FUNCHY (which stands for "fun lunches"). In a scene that I remember vividly, the narrator wants to stay home from school so badly that she sucks down the remains of a medicine lollipop left over from when she had strep throat. Invisible Lissa perfectly captures the arbitrary cruelty of elementary and middle school cliques, and really deserves to come back into print.

5. Autumn Street by Lois Lowry
As I once wrote in a post about this relatively obscure Lois Lowry book, "I don't want to live in a world where future generations can't read Autumn Street and be emotionally scarred by it."

6. With Magical Horses to Ride by Winifred Morris
Sadly, I remember very little about this book despite the fact that I checked it out at least twice a year from my local library between 1985 and 1987. Basically, it's about a girl who hangs out in a cemetery with a boy she thinks is an elf. Also, there is a bunch of stuff about tarot cards, and my parents would have totally taken this book away from me if they'd known what wicked sorcery it contained.

7. The Hawkeye and Amy series by M. Masters
Kind of the poor man's Encyclopedia Brown, the Hawkeye and Amy books followed a similar format. The twist, however, was that the answers to each case were printed backwards and you had to hold the book up to a mirror to read them.

I Guess It's Just My Week To Be Grumbly About YA Lit

You Know Where To Find Me by Rachel Cohn

It almost causes me physical pain to speak ill of a Rachel Cohn book when it was her writing that sucked me in to the awesome renaissance of YA lit in the first place. Unfortunately, Cohn's You Know Where To Find Me is several steps down from thoughtful, funny, and unpredictable work like Gingerbread, The Steps, and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.

The book centers around Miles, better known as "8 Mile" at her predominantly African-American school -- "white trash with the wide load, capable of an occasional decent rap." Like many of Cohn's characters, Miles belongs to a non-traditional family, and this one is particularly complicated.

It begins with Jim, a middle-aged gay man who decides he wants to be a father, so he and his lover have a daughter through a surrogate. Then, the lover commits suicide, leaving Jim to raise Laura on his own. Shortly after this, the lover's twin sister shows up on Jim's doorstep with the infant Miles. Miles and Laura are raised together, almost like sisters, and the best of friends until Laura, like her biological father, commits suicide.

All of this takes place in the book's first chapter.

The rest of the book follows Miles as she contends with Laura's death, her feelings of inadequacy and ugliness, and also with her own burgeoning addiction to prescription drugs -- hydros, Perks, and Oxys, if it's a special occasion. She struggles with her weight, is considering dropping out of school before her senior year, and is in love with her best friend, though he's in love with someone else.

There's a lot going on here. Too much.

Add to that a subplot, conducted mainly through dialogue, involving Washington, D.C.'s mind-boggling electoral situation of taxation without representation. In her previous books, Cohn has occasionally thrown out a line or two that is clearly her, expressed through her characters. Here, she abandons all restraint and uses her characters to go off on tirades against religion, neo-con politics, the electoral process, and all manner of other things.

Let me be clear -- it's not Cohn's beliefs that offend me here, it's the clumsiness with which she instills them in her characters. It's incredibly jarring to read dialogue like the following coming out of a character's mouth:

"But he has, in fact, traded support on certain measures with several Maryland representatives in order to line up their recommendations for a retrocession measure to study whether D.C. could become part of Maryland. Retrocession would allow for a capital city around the Mall for the federal government, but extend Maryland's borders inside the District so that its citizens are granted the same state's rights -- and responsibilities -- as citizens in any other state."

It's not the fact that these words are coming out of a teenager's mouth that makes them unbelievable. It's that people don't talk like this unless they're the kind of people with jobs that require them to hire speech writers.

Again, I'm a fan of all of Cohn's other books, and would enthusiastically recommend them to anyone. But You Know Where to Find Me takes on too many themes, and addresses them sloppily.

Teen Vampire Taste Test, Part 2: Wherein I Do Not Get It

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

"What is this shit?" -Greil Marcus, on Bob Dylan's Self-Portrait

I'm not one of those people who believes that YA literature is a slum for writers who can't cut it writing for adults. Writing for teens is hard -- cases in point, Michael Chabon and Carl Hiassen, both fine writers whose attempts at YA were only moderately good. And I don't believe that teen readers tolerate crap books any more than adults do. That said, I'm completely baffled by the popularity of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series.

For those who are unfamiliar with the series, it is about an ordinary teenage girl who moves to Forks, Washington to live with her father. There, she falls in love with a vampire named Edward, becomes entangled in his strange adopted vampire family, and finds herself in grave danger as a result.

And I disliked it more intensely than I have ever disliked any book, with the possible exception of The Scarlet Letter.

My reasons:

1. It is incredibly boring. It takes about 200 pages for the vampire love story to kick in, and up until that point, Twilight is just a really unmemorable high school story.

2. Bella is quite possibly the dullest 17-year-old girl who ever lived. Her only remarkable trait is that she falls down a lot, and she reminds me of Anne (aka Bland) from Arrested Development.

3. The relationship between Edward and Bella is creepily intense, but entirely without passion. The source of their attraction seems to be that he's very pretty, and that she smells very good to him. After he rescues her from a few sticky situations, he becomes very protective and possessive, sometimes to the point of sitting in her room and watching her sleep. I think there's a name for that, when your boyfriend starts isolating you from your friends and won't let you out of his sight, and I don't think it's "love."

4. The book's big climax is unnecessarily elaborate and convoluted. I have no idea why an evil vampire would go to such lengths to kill Bella, when she could easily be done in by a frayed electrical cord or perhaps a plastic bag left laying around.

I would have found explicit sex or wanton drug abuse or splattery violence less offensive that the implied message of the relatively "wholesome" Twilight, which is:

1. Girls are helpless, and need to be rescued... almost constantly.

2. Teenage girls should strive for unhealthily obsessive relationships because that's what true love is.

I can't discount the opinions of hundreds of thousands of readers who clearly adore this series. However, I have no idea why people like it when it is clearly awful.

Teen Vampire Taste Test, Part the First: The Society of S Series by Susan Hubbard

The Society of S and The Year of Disappearances by Susan Hubbard

Now that Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series has amassed a Prisoner of Azkaban-sized following, I got curious about how the series stood up to its contemporaries. And while Meyer doesn't have any serious challengers to the teen vampire throne these days, I wondered if she should.

So first up, The Society of S series.

Ariella and her father, Raphael, live in Saratoga Springs, depicted with such a strongly gothic sensibility that it took a chapter or two to become clear that the book was set in the present, and not the 1880s. Ariella's mother disappeared shortly after giving birth, and since then, the girl's life has been extraordinarily sheltered. While her education includes Latin and the writings of Bertram Russell, she's never had a friend her own age or bought her own clothes at the mall... or eaten meat.

As Ariella begins taking stabs at a normal teenage life, she begins to suspect that she's different from other people. There's no single moment of revelation. The pieces come together over the first half of the book from her own observations, her internet research, and the stories about the past that Raphael tells her in starts and fits.

Ariella eventually discovers that she's a half-breed, part vampire and part human. While some vampire sects support the colonization of the human race, her own family belongs to the Sanguinists -- a sect of ethical vampires who do not feed on humans.

Perhaps it moves too slowly, but Hubbard's writing is so lush and lovely that I didn't mind, and I'm not usually one to be distracted from other shortcomings by nice prose.

Unfortunately, action is a problem for Hubbard because once she gets going -- here, with the grisly murder of Ariella's best friend -- the story takes off on a wild, uneven trajectory that isn't reined in until the last chapters.

This is a problem in both books. Although the premise of the series is engaging and the world of the Sanguinists is inventive, I was consistently bothered by the directions Hubbard chooses to take her characters.

Despite some missteps in the middle, The Society of S finishes strong, and leaves a lot of intriguing loose ends to be explored in the next book.

Unfortunately, The Year of Disappearances doesn't do much with this incredible set-up. Instead of learning more about herself and her unique condition by interacting with other vampire characters, Hubbard inexplicably sends the 14-year-old Ariella off to college in this book. Hubbard also weaves plotlines involving politics, environmentalism, and bio-terrorism into the fabric of the vampire sects. Much of it works better than I'd expected, but it's simply too much for one book, and spread too thin.

Though the book's violence is minimal, the body count is high. But whether the characters make it to the book's end or not, it hardly matters. The cast has gotten a little too big by this point, and the supporting characters, a little too disposable. I wouldn't suggest getting too attached to any of them.

The Society of S succeeds as a stand-alone, and is definitely worth checking out. However, the forthcoming Year of Disappearances is messy, scatter-shot, and really only for those invested in the series.

Stimulus/Response: Sweethearts by Sara Zarr

Sweethearts by Sara Zarr

I've learned to live with it.

The taste of peppermint makes me sneeze, the sound of Anthony Bourdain's voice makes me fall asleep, and reading Sara Zarr makes me burst into tears.

I've given up on trying to understand the first two things, but I've been giving some thought to the Sara Zarr situation. I don't have much in common with the protagonists of either Story of a Girl or Sweethearts, and I can't particularly identify with their experiences. However, Zarr is so masterful at conveying a teenage (and more generally, human) sense of isolation, frustration, confusion, and powerlessness that it's impossible not to identify with those feelings, if not with the circumstances that gave rise to them.

At the beginning of Sweethearts, we meet Jennifer Harris in elementary school, an overweight girl with a lisp, a 10-year-old who washes her own clothes in the apartment laundry room while her mom's between work and nursing school so the other kids don't tell her she stinks, an outcast who's tormented by everyone in her grade.

Except for Cameron Quick.

The two outcasts bond together, but it's not the usual kind of outcast childhood friendship, born out of exclusion from every other corner. They take care of each other, understand each other, and what's more, they truly love each other.

And then one day, Cameron disappears. The teacher tells her he moved, the bullies tell her he died, and Jennifer's mother won't say anything to confirm or deny either suggestion.

Flash forward eight years. Jennifer Harris is gone, and Jenna Vaughan has taken her place. Jenna has lost the weight and the lisp, she's enrolled in a new school, her mother has remarried a genuinely decent man, and the outcast Jennifer has been replaced by a pretty, popular teenage girl. Still, Jenna isn't comfortable with her new self, and she holds her new friends at bay with clever small talk and a happy, uncomplicated demeanor.

And then, Cameron Quick comes back, and everything changes.

Jenna is now old enough to ask hard questions, and begins to understand more about the harrowing circumstances of Cameron's home life then, and why they were kept from her. And she's also forced to reexamine painful and frightening memories in their shared past, as well as her own transformation to the person she is now. How much can people change? Can you ever really escape yourself? The answers here are hard, but also hard-won.

When I read pre-pub descriptions of Sweethearts, I was skeptical. The plot just seemed too bizarre to be realistic, and yet, it is. I tried to find a passage from Sweethearts to demonstrate what makes it so emotionally powerful, but that's not how Zarr works. As in Story of a Girl the language is fairly unadorned, and there's no one paragraph that encapsulates it all.

The book's exceptional resonance is accumulated gradually, painfully, and realistically, and in the end, it feels like you've experienced the long-repressed build to a good cry alongside the protagonist, rather than the emotionally manipulative line that sets you off.

Zarr's books will appeal to fans of Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You, The Truth About Forever) and Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak, Prom), but her ability to strike deep, immediately recognizable chords of feeling in her readers sets her above even these YA fiction stars.

Into the Woods

LA's a heckuva town, but sometimes the endless miles of strip malls and roving hordes of paparazzi get you down. In such times, the only thing to do is to call up some friends and light out for the territories, Huck-style, and spend a little time halfway up a mountain where the air is thin and the trees are the size of skyscrapers.

That said, our trip to the woods was, at times, predictably literary. Mary spent her down time in between hiking and cooking mountain pies nose-deep in Dorothy Allison's Cavedweller, and my head lamp spent most of its time illuminating Dashiell Hammett short stories (instead of the dense French social theory I had vowed to revisit while we were there).

And then there was the campfire brainstorming session in which we and our co-woodspersons came up with perhaps the greatest children's literary franchise since Harry Potter. It is, in fact, so groovy that I am unwilling to describe it on a website, lest some nogoodnik steal our awesome.

So until then I'll leave y'all with the following photo of our blogmistress swaggering through the woods, confident in the knowledge that librarians rock and that we'll soon be swimming in the profits from the tote bags, action figures, and coloring books that will no doubt be pouring into our bank accounts as soon as Scholastic gets on board with our granola-fueled kid-lit shenanigans.

The Hosebeast of Haute Couture

The Collection by Gioia Diliberto
Different Like Coco by Elizabeth Matthews

Between these two recent books on the life of Coco Chanel, one an illustrated biography for small children and one a work of fiction, for historical accuracy, I'd put my money on the novel.

Understandably, biographies intended for a juvenile audience will need to omit some of their subjects' more scandalous moments, but it verges on irresponsible to whitewash the life of a Nazi-sympathizing, child labor law-breaking monster, no matter how pretty her clothes were. Other criticisms have been leveled at Different Like Coco, and Gwen's recent post covers them pretty well. In any case, as a female role model for small children, Coco Chanel probably ranks somewhere slightly above Leona Helmsly and the Bratz.

But enough of that unpleasantness, because Diliberto's The Collection is a perfectly delightful book that I highly recommend to everyone.

Set in 1919, the novel follows the naive Isabelle Varlet to Paris where she gets a job in Chanel's burgeoning Paris atelier, and quickly promotes to second in charge of a workroom. Isabelle is a talented seamstress and Paris agrees with her; however, her pilgrimage to the city is motivated more by the death of her fiance, a shy provincial baker, than by ambition.

Along with the other seamstresses, Isabelle works ten hour days, six days a week to get Chanel's fall collection ready. But along with those duties, she's also subjected to impossible clients, backstabbing co-workers, and the mercurial tempers of Mademoiselle. While the plot is a little bit thin, Diliberto is a master at well-placed historical detail, and the flurried activity of the Paris fashion world is captivating enough to carry the story.

And Diliberto's portrayal of Mademoiselle is extremely well-done, both shrill and shrewd. Much is also made of Chanel's shortcomings as a designer. Unable to draw or sew very well, she often appears as a brilliant hack. But credit where it's due, the character of Chanel also has terrific confidence in her vision and an unparalleled eye. She casts off designs and dismisses her competitors with the shrugged off comment, "Nobody wants to look like that anymore."

The Collection succeeds because Diliberto creates such a compelling uber-bitch. She's awful in all ways, but at the same time, Isabelle would rather work on her clothes than anyone else's, and it's easy to see why.

Happy Roald Dahl Day!

While on our honeymoon in England, Potts and I picked up a collection of Roald Dahl's short stories to read on the train from Falmouth to London. We came upon one story that involved a beekeeper, his wife, and their frail infant daughter. The baby refuses to eat until the beekeeper comes up with a very creepy plan to make her gain weight. And to this day in the Potts/McCoy household, one of us need only utter the title of this story to make the other break out in shudders: "Royal Jelly."

So here's to the works of Roald Dahl, skeeving out children and adults alike for over fifty years, in the best way possible.

From The Witches:

"Grandmamma," I said, "if it's a dark night, how can a witch smell the difference between a child and a grown-up."
"Because grown-ups don't give out stink-waves," she said. "Only children do that."
"But I don't really give out stink-waves, do I?" I said. "I'm not giving them out at this very moment, am I?"
"Not to me you aren't," my grandmother said. "To me you are smelling like raspberries and cream. But to a witch you would be smelling absolutely disgusting."
"What would I be smelling of?" I asked.
"Dogs' droppings," my grandmother said.
I reeled. I was stunned. "Dogs' droppings!" I cried. "I am not smelling of dogs' droppings! I don't believe it! I won't believe it!"
"What's more," my grandmother said, speaking with a touch of relish, "to a witch you'd be smelling of fresh dogs' droppings."
"That simply is not true!" I cried. "I know I am not smelling of dogs' droppings, stale or fresh!"
"There's no point in arguing about it," my grandmother said. "It's a fact of life."

To celebrate Dahl Day yourself, take a quiz, use the word 'gobblefunk' in a sentence, or read up on Dahl's short stories for adults. And check out "Royal Jelly." Eek.

In other news, not everyone is happy about Roald Dahl Day.

The Jug, the Pen, the Slammer, the Can

A children's novel with a hardboiled narrator and prison slang? I'm there.

Harry Sue by Sue Stauffacher is about a tough as nails girl desperate to get "sent up" so she can join her mother behind bars. She lives with her grandmother, who runs what is quite possibly the most negligent daycare center in the world, and spends a good bit of her time defending Grandma's charges (aka "the crumb snatchers") from her. This interferes with Harry Sue's JD aspirations, as does her particularly good heart.

Maybe it's just me, but this sounds (potentially) like a cross between Louis Sachar's kiddie jailbreak tale, Holes, and Rian Johnson's high school noir, Brick.

Here's a little snippet:

"Time was running out on my becoming a juvenile delinquent. The really impressive cons started their rap sheets by nine or ten. Unfortunately, I had a heart condition that needed fixing before I could begin a serious crime spree.

Yes, Fish, my heart was as lumpy and soft as a rotten tomato. I couldn't stand to see things hurt, especially anything weak and defenseless. Watching Jolly Roger and his road dogs pull the legs off a spider made me grind my teeth down worse than if I slept with a mouth full of sandpaper. When those boys clicked the little kids on the bus, I had to sit on my hands just to keep from breaking theirs.

In the joint, where I was headed, I'd need a heart filled with cement and covered in riveted steel. I was working on it. But so far, I wasn't making much progress."

Thanks to Leila at Bookshelves of Doom for pointing this one out as her Recommendations from Under the Radar pick.

Who's Yer Daddy?

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Percy Jackson doesn't exactly have the makings of a hero. He's ADHD, dyslexic, and has never lasted an entire year at any school. He's not bad - chaos just seems to erupt around him.

But at his most recent school, a boarding facility for troubled youth, things are a little weirder than usual. Any school year when your math teacher tries to kill you on a class field trip qualifies as a little out of the ordinary. Then, Percy discovers that his best friend, Grover, is a satyr, that his Latin teacher is a centaur, and that he has to leave school immediately for the safe haven of Camp Half-Blood.

Because Percy is a demigod, the bastard son of Poseidon, and not a few Furies, hell hounds, and major deities want him dead.

At Camp Half-Blood, Percy meets the children of Dionysus, Athena, and all of Ares's horrible, violent little brats. But his time there is fairly short, because bad things are stirring on Mount Olympus that could lead to all-out celestial warfare. And though he's only just come into his powers, and barely understands them, Percy is sent out with Grover and Annabeth, one of Athena's daughters, to save humanity and the heavens.

The story of a young chosen hero, his two best friends, a brainy girl and a doofy boy, sent off on a quest to save the world and defeat great evil may sound a little familiar. However, The Lightning Thief owes more to Neil Gaiman than to J.K. Rowling, kind of an American Gods for the preteen set. But while it's a bit derivative, it's very funny, very exciting, and very well-written. The Lightning Thief has a distinctive, fresh voice that will appeal to Rowling fans, and never feels like a rip-off.

This is the first in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. The second and third titles, The Sea of Monsters and The Titan's Curse were released in 2006 and this May, respectively.

This Is Why They Invented The Internet

Some enterprising soul has rigged up a Choose Your Own Adventure over at OKCupid.

It is a zombie choose your own adventure.

And now my life is complete...er, literally. Dang zombies.

Your Score: Red Shirt

You killed 18 zombies and earned 14 manliness points!

You've contributed heavily to the excitement of the story, but ultimately died in the end. What can I say? I guess you weren't the main character.

Take another swing at the zombies?

Nagging Questions Answered

J.K. Rowling answers a lot of questions about Deathly Hallows and the whole series in general.

Most surprising revelation? The Thatchers and the Riddles = second cousins.

Well, not really, but it would explain a lot.

5 Great Books About or Involving Libraries

1. Matilda by Roald Dahl: I know Matilda has a really awful home life in this book, but I love that at the age of 4, this genius child toddles down to her local library to read Hemingway.

2. The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken: This bittersweet tale of the romance between a librarian and teenage giant is affecting, and not as "ripped from the Fark headlines" as it sounds.

3. Help! I'm a Prisoner in the Library by Eth Clifford: Again, as a child, the idea of being locked overnight in a public library sounded like absolute heaven. Now, if it was the L.A. Central Library, that probably would have freaked me out a little, but a nice small town library... what better place to be stranded in a snow storm?

4. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith: Francie is a bookish child who spends a lot of time at the Brooklyn Library, and the passages about her visits there should be read by every librarian as instruction on how NOT to do the job.

5. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami: Now, I haven't read this one, but I intend to and I feel like, since it's Murakami, it's a pretty safe bet to recommend. Besides, check this out:

"The novel, Murakami's 10th and his first big one since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in 1997, features a 15-year-old boy who runs away from his Tokyo home shortly before his father's body is discovered in a pool of blood and heads for distant Takamatsu. There he meets a mysterious librarian, who may or may not be his long-lost mother, and a sexy hairdresser, who may or may not be his vanished elder sister. Filling out the cast is an old man who lost his memory in an apparent UFO encounter but gained the power to converse with cats." (from Time magazine review)

That sounds like good readin' to me.

Fantasy + History + Disaster Fiction = Whoa.

Stormwitch by Susan Vaught

Hurricane Camille, fantasy, historical fiction, the Civil Rights movement, Dr. King, African history, Freedom Summer, Amiri Baraka, Jim Crow, Amazon warriors, the KKK, and voodoo. All in one book. Written for a YA audience. I read this book straight through in a two hour sitting, and then my head exploded out of sheer admiration.

Then I put my head back together again so I could tell y'all about it.

The year is 1969, and 16-year-old Ruba is forced to leave her beloved Haiti after her grandmother, Ba, dies. She moves to Pass Christian, MS to live with her paternal grandmother, who tells her not to wander too far from home and to keep her head down when she talks to white people. In Haiti, Ruba was a storm warrior alongside Ba; together, they conjured, danced, and drove back hurricanes and controlled the weather. Ruba is descended from Amazon warrior women - she doesn't keep her head down for anyone.

Ruba's confidence, pride, and power attract the attention of local Klansmen, who are determined to teach the "juju girl" a lesson. But Ruba scarcely has time to contend with them because there's a storm in the air, and her senses tell her it's an evil one that could kill them all unless she stays to fight it. You all know of it as Hurricane Camille.

Vaught does a good job of characterizing the differences in ideals between older and younger African-Americans, and in allowing the generations to learn from one another. At the beginning of the book, Ruba thinks Grandma Jones is a complacent fool, but as she learns more about the role Jones played during Freedom Summer, she begins to reconsider. Likewise, Grandma Jones's attitude towards Ruba and her firebrand friends also changes throughout the course of the book.

Crossing fantasy with historical fiction, Stormwitch is a truly inventive, ambitious, and impressive novel that can be enjoyed by adults and young adults alike.

Obligatory Spoiler-Free Harry Potter Post

Last night at 3:30am, we finished The Book That Must Not Be Named here at the Potts/McCoy house. Today, I have a Harry Potter hangover.

This entails a generally bloated feeling caused by drinking too much caffeine and eating too much sugar to stay awake. Other perks include a messed up sleep schedule, an aching lower back, and general feelings of bloodshot bleariness.

I was worried for the first 300 pages, because I was not enjoying the book. I did not experience the general sense of delight that has come in the past from watching the gang return to Hogwarts. It's pretty bleak, in a Frodo and Sam journey to Mordor boring kind of way.

However, the last half of the book darn near makes up for it. A good, exciting, and fitting end to the series, with a startlingly high body count, too. A few tears were shed, and a few moments of silence were taken during the course of the night.

And now I have my life back, at least until the Blogathon next Saturday. This was just practice for getting up early and staying up all night.

Oh, Ms. Cecil, You Magnificent Dame

Beige by Cecil Castellucci

It's hard to imagine artsy nerd rocker Cecil Castellucci blending into a crowd. However, when she first moved to Los Angeles and found herself surrounded by the city's larger than life characters, she felt completely "beige" by comparison. What would it be like, she wondered, "if you were plopped into a scene that wasn't yours," a kid immersed in the So Cal punk scene when she'd rather be reading?

Castellucci's previous books have focused on cool L.A. kids who are outsiders by choice, so a book about a character who is decidedly uncool is something of a departure. The narrator, Katy, is the product of a punk rock drummer and an 18-year-old junkie - music brought them together, but heroin tore them apart. Katy's mom turns her life around, and is in the process of working on her dissertation when the book begins. But instead of going to Peru to do research with Mom, Katy is shipped to Los Angeles for the summer to stay with her newly sober dad, Beau Ratner, aka the Rat, drummer for the famously unfamous band, Suck.

While most teenagers would leap at the chance, Katy is more of a Rory Gilmore type, a girl who defies genetics to become tidy and obedient and good. And to her, the Rat is a slob who smells like cigarettes and needs to get a real job, though of course, she's too polite to say any of this to his face. Despite her plans, however, it's just not possible to stay locked in your apartment with a pile of library books. Los Angeles beckons, and it's a weird, crazy, beautiful place if you give it a chance.

Castellucci writes characters who are not only cool, but also do cool things. Whether that's volunteering at the Egyptian Theatre or going to an all-ages show at the Armenian Cultural Center, or silk screening your own band posters, her characters are always much more than the sum of their angst. What's more, she's amazing at allowing teenagers characters to change gracefully. Nothing seems rushed or fake.

If you're feeling beige or if you just need more Fugazi in your life, check out the punk rock playlists from Cecil and her friends here. Also, she'll be reading at Skylight Books this Saturday at 5pm. I've heard her read before, and she is simply adorable. I wouldn't miss it, and you shouldn't either.