Telegrams from ALA Part IV: Freaks of Nature

And so much for posting images of the covers so you could judge them. I walked away with over 20 books/ARC/galleys and I have the bruises on my shoulder to prove it. I read two books on the train, and both were delicious.

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr is like reading the long lost cousin of a Holly Black novel. The mood feels borrowed--like you're filling in the blanks using what you've already imagined from reading other urban fantasy--and the characters aren't the minature masterpieces that Holly Black creates--honestly, that woman sketches characters the way those guys at Faneuil Hall write your name on a grain of rice. Tiny details. Stunning precision.

But Marr's novel is notable because it offers an alternative to the borderline-rape-wish romantic plots of many urban fantasy novels. It's that whole what's-the-difference-between-seduction-and-rape issue. We all know no means no, but does yes always mean yes? What if you've consumed fairy wine and danced to fairy music? What if you're bound by an ancient curse?

Marr's novel stars a Catholic High School girl chosen by a fairy king to be a fairy queen. But this girl, Aislinn, doesn't just pretend to resist his irresistable charms. She breaks out the salt, the holy water, and the pepper spray. And when that doesn't work, she engages in no-holds-barred negotiations for power.

I thought I was detecting a women's studies major undercurrent, and then I read this interview, in which Marr talks about issues of "volition." She's obviously 100% savvy about the messages we're sending young women when we make it seem attractive to be bound by ancient curses to dangerous, mercurial (and devestatingly sexy) men.

But she does it in the most non-preachy way possible: she creates an even more attractive, totally mortal, totally respectful male character to compete with said fairy king. Sure, it's just another woman's fantasy of a man, but at least it's a women's studies major's fantasy of a man.

My only remaining question: does the title intentionally reference that landmark of New England slang, the use of "wicked" as a qualifier? Or is it just a juxtaposition of two words describing fairies?
The second book was one I've been dying to get my hands on ever since I heard it existed. It's called Evolution, Me, & Other Freaks of Nature, by Robin Brande, and it's the best representation of psycho Christian teenagers since Saved.

Driving the plot is the youth group of a super-church (the kind with bowling allies and food courts). The teens in this group get their marching orders from a minister zealous to root out evil in the form of Biology teachers and possibly homosexual high school kids. But Mena, our main character, has recently been kicked out of the group (for some initially unknown sin), so she is suddenly on the other side of the looking glass. And she doesn't like what she sees.

Now that her old friends are calling her Judas and hip-checking her in the hallways, Mena makes friends with her adorably nerdy lab partner and his magnetic big sister, who is the editor of the school newspaper and who happens to be just as zealous as the minister, but with a radically different political agenda. So the question is, does Mena have to "choose sides" or can she find some middle ground? And should she tell the newspaper editor every damning thing she knows?

The narrative reveals how difficult it is for Christian teens to have normal high school social lives without a) lying to their parents or b) getting mocked by their peers. No wonder they band together. But of course, the book also demonstrates that real friendships often transcend social barriers. It's a relief to be around people who are like us, but we only evolve when we interact with people who are different.

I kind of wish this book mixed up the format a little. The plot is full of blog posts, letters, newspaper articles, and science reports, so why not change the design on certain pages and show us the "primary documents," so to speak? And OK, while I'm criticizing things, the pastor of the super church is definitely a caricature. But the symapthetic portrait of his daughter, Bethany, mostly makes up for that. I wish there could have been a scene between Mena and Bethany ...

Alright, I'm going to stop before I start writing fan fiction here. Maybe there will be a sequel ... about Mena and her lab partner dating across religious differences ... No, for real, I'm stopping.

Telegrams from ALA Part III: Author Readings

So Monday I stalked Cecil Castellucci, who everyone apparently calls "Ceci." What's funny is that I first pegged her for one of her own fans. I was waiting for her to read at the live author's stage or whatever they were calling it (probably not that, because it begs the question, where's the dead author's stage?), and I saw this pipsqueak woman with hair died in chunks of black and whitish blue, big shoes that made tromping noises, and a black messenger bag that looked like it weighed as much as she did. I was like, Oh, that is so obviously what I would expect a Cecil Castellucci fan to look like. And then it turned out to be Cecil Castellucci.And then to add to the fact that I've been badmouthing her new book Beige, stalking her at ALA, and sporting a copy of The Plain Janes like it's a brand-name handbag, I volunteered to help her with her spontaneous reader's theater performance of The Plain Janes. I played "arty" or "main Jane." In my defense, I am a huge fan of Boy Proof and, now The Plain Janes, so it's not like I don't support her. I just also like to spy on her and hold her work to really high standards.

For those who aren't stalking Cecil, The Plain Janes is the first in a new series of graphic novels for young women--they're obvious "quick picks" with characters that will appeal to the kind of girls who let me sit at their lunch table in high school: highlighters for nail polish, Kool Ade for hair dye, black ribbons for chokers, and Tae Kwon Do masters for boyfriends. Those kind of girls. I read the entire first installment while in line to get True to the Game signed by Teri Woods. (She wrote, for the future patrons of my imaginary library, who I obviously think are theives: "Please stop stealing the books out the library. Please, OK. Believe. Teri Woods.")

Anyway, the point of this post is that I like to listen to authors read their work because then I can decide whether I would invite them to speak at my school. Which is like window shopping, becuase I don't have a school. But I would definitely invite Cecil Castellucci to my imaginary school.

I would maybe invite Carolyn Mackler, because her book The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things has universal girl appeal. I think it's the frank treatment of the relationship between Virginia and Froggy: he comes over after school to feel her up but doesn't acknowledge her in public, which she accepts because her weight makes her think she's not worthy of a more attentive boyfriend. However, Mackler was very young Mom, which is cool, but I wanted her to have more street appeal. She's the kind of person who skips over the bad words in her own novel.

I don't think I would invite Nick Hornby, even though he has a non-American accent, because I have my doubts about the appeal of Slam, his foray into YA lit. Don't get me wrong: it's a funny and totally relateable topic: teenage fatherhood. But it's also a nightmare. I mean, the part Hornby read on Monday included commentary on the way diapers smell. It's not exactly escapist literature, and I don't know how many teenage boys are scanning the shelves for a naturalistic portrait of young parenthood. (If you can call a Tony Hawk poster that transports the main character into the future "naturalistic.")

I didn't get to hear Catherine Gilbert Murdock speak/read, so I can't say if I would invite her or not. But if I had read The Off Season before I attended the conference, (instead I read 78% of it last night between 12 and 3 a.m.), I would have dropped everything and been there. Because it's one of the best books I've read this year--better than Dairy Queen. I would kill to know if Murdock had the sequel planned when she wrote the first one. Because all the issues you care about at the end of book 1 (will D.J. and Brian stay together even though they play on rival football teams? Will Amber and D.J. ever be comfortable around each other again now that Amber has confessed her crush?) seem monumentally unimportant by the end of book 2.

Because Murdock doesn't just resolve the conflicts in the first book: she rotates your perspective so that you see the conflicts from a totally different angle. You do a 180. And it's cathartic the way books about abandoned horses were cathartic when I was in third grade. Murdock makes you care about the fate of every member of this family of football-loving Wisconsin cattle farmers. And despite the fact that it's set in just the kind of setting that usually renders a book unsaleable to my urban audience (farms), I think I could get them to read it, because this girl is a brilliant athlete and there's something universal about the sports team experience. Much as I hate to admit it.

So to bring this full-circle, The Off Season is the kind of book that makes me feel OK about not really praising Beige. Because it's really important to have genuine praise leftover for the likes of Catherine Gilbert Murdock.

Telegrams from ALA Part II: Printz Awards

Look! I'm on Brotherhood 2.0! Of course, I'm sitting about 2/3 of the way back in a hall that sat, like, 300 people, so even I can't distinguish my bushy head. But I'm there.



John Green spoke at the Printz Award reception, because he was an honorable mention this year, and his speech was the second most super. The first most super was M.T. Anderson's. In fact, M.T. Anderson was the whole reason I was there, because he astounds me.

I remember book-talking Feed at Woonsocket High School: I started by saying that the story takes place in the near future, and people are getting "feeds" instealled so they can access the internet mentally. That's right: they check e-mail, chat, watch movies, listen to music, get bombarded by banner ads, etc. in their minds.

And the classful of freshmen, who had been sitting there comatose through my description of a book by Jess Mowry and The Bell Jar (which I admit was a long shot, although I said it was like Smashed or Katie.com with penny loafers and electroshock therapy), reacted instantly with a chorus of "Cool! I want that!" I stared at them in amazement--they wanted the Internet in their brains? -- until finally one boy, sitting in the corner with his desk at an angle that said I am so not one of you, just spat, "Yo. That's whack."

And that sort of silenced them.

Anyway, it wasn't the reaction I was expecting, but in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have been surprised.

So M.T. Anderson's speech was so brilliant and poetic that I can't properly summarize it. I hope there's a transcript floating around somewhere. But his point was the racism isn't a thing of the past. He wrote The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. !: The Pox Party because he wanted to demonstrate how the ideas swirling around the American Revolution are still swirling and still relevant. And if you haven't read the book--it does have an intimidating title--you should know that he somehow renders the familiar American history unfamiliar--strange, absurd, exotic, and shocking. It's like a carnivale version of 1776.

He said that historical fiction sometimes makes us feel "safe and righteous": "We seem superior to the dead. For one thing, they're dead. We're alive. We must know something they don't." Then he said that the question we should ask is: "What are we doing that our grandchildren ... will look at and gasp?" And his example of something gasp-worthy was "standardized" tests. He talked about how his girlfriend worked in an urban school where, during the week of standardized testing, number of students were shot. So how can you compare her kids' scores to the scores of safe, well-fed, comfortable middle class suburban kids? Fire off a couple rounds over their heads and then have them take the test. Then you can make comparisons.

John Green, who was honorable mention for An Abundance of Katherines, talked about the inspiration behind the Arab character in his book, a real-live roommate of his, also named Hassan. He talked about how Hassan used to rant against Fox News coverage of the war in Iraq and told this really funny story about misinterpreted graffiti that I know I'm going to screw up, so you'll just have to wait til a transcript of the speech is posted here.

I think an alternate title for the speech (not that I know what the original title is) could be "Against Narrative," because in the same way that Susan Sontag attacked the idea that images must have to say something in "Against Interpretation," I think John Green attacked the idea that stories have to make sense. He said that the problem with narrative is that we'd rather believe "lies that make sense than truth that doesn't." In other words, by creating believable stories, we make reality less believable--at a time when it's really important to face the truth.

Not that he was really attacking narrative. Just saying that we need to question it. And I may be taking this farther than he did in his speech, but obviously, it got me thinking.

Telegrams from ALA Part I: Gaming

OK, the real reason I didn't post these during ALA is because my laptop is permanently on the fritz. But pretend I was submitting these over a literal wire, and that's why they're delayed. It's so much more romantic that way.

The most compelling workshop I attended was also the one that I least wanted to have anything to do with. It was about holding a video game tournament in your library, which I had no intention of ever doing. But it was the only kid-related workshop during that time slot, and I wanted to get my money's worth.

So it turned out to be fabulous. The presenters were Eli Neiburger and Erin Helmrich from the Ann Arbour District Library, where there's a whole gaming season with eagerly awaited weekend-long tournaments for a range of ages. Not only did the presenters succeed in eviscerating my prejudice against video games in libraries, they offered a beautiful model for promoting teen programming (it's all about branding) and a plan for taking over the world.

I don't want to steal their thunder, since one of them has a book coming out next month, but check the powerpoint (in PDF) to get a glimpse of how brilliant and organized their tournaments are (People, they have commentators, post-game interviews, instant replay on the big screen ... like it's a football game or American Idol ... so cool) and check this basic "menu" of resources for getting started.

And here are my favorite points:

• "We can't be all things to all people, but we should have something for everyone." In other words, the question isn't whether or not we should have something for gamers. It's a question of how we can most effectively serve them with our budget. And the answer is ...


• Buy the software and equipment for game tournaments rather than building a circulating collection of video games. A single game reaches a max of 52 people a year, assuming you check it out for a week, while a tournament brings in more than 50 kids each time it's held.


• The introduction of the wii has also made gaming more accessible. For the first time, it's bringing in seniors who want to simulate bowling--not just teens and twenties who want to crash race cars. We better get ready for the influx of new users.


• And this was my favorite point: you don't have to know anything about gaming to start a program like this. What you do have to do is reach out to people in the gaming community--which might include local teens, college students, or people who work in another department of the library.

It was interesting, because after the workshop, there were a series of annoying questions that were all along the lines of: but what if you don't know anything about gaming? I mean, the presenters had to find 5 or 6 different ways to say: find someone in the gaming community to provide leadership.

It reminded me of the challenge of Spanish-language outreach among libraries where none of the employees speak Spanish. Still, the librarians want to come up with their own initiatives rather than letting the local community take charge. I'm beginning to believe that the secret to success if often giving up a measure of control.