Authors

Banned Book Week – Sept. 25th-Oct.2nd

/ still a dreamer

Did you know that the American Library Association (ALA) – who bestows the John Newbury Medal and Randolph Caldecott Medal (among others) – holds an Annual Banned Book Week? I was very interested in this and went to their web site which has extensive sections on not just their greatest concern – the 1st Amendment – but also lists of the books in question sorted by different criteria.

Among their lists are: the 100 most challenged/banned classics, and the details of who banned/burned/and/or challenged them and why; the most challenged/banned books sorted by decade, author, year, plus statistics.  Some books are banned by entire countries, entire states in our own United States, by schools, religious groups and others. Who would have thought that so many people on the planet thought they had a right to tell us what we can and can’t read?

Looking just at children’s books for a moment, here is a partial list from among 100 books for all age audiences banned or challenged in the last decade – Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling (Harry’s number 1!); His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman; Captain Underpants (series), by Dave Pilkey; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain; Forever, by Judy Blume; Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous; Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar: In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak; Bridge To Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson; Junie B. Jones (series), by Barbara Park; A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle; Goosebumps (series), by R.L. Stine; Are You There, God?  It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume and oh-so-many more.

What are they kidding me?! Be afraid, people, be very afraid … clearly there are lots of others out there who think they know what’s best for you, me and our children. I am alternately scared, disgusted and outraged. Well, the good thing is that the ALA has this extensive web site which supports intellectual freedom and the upholding of the First Amendment. On the ALA OIF (Office of Intellectual Freedom) section of their site, there are ideas, resources and activities for teachers and parents who believe in the freedom to learn, and various events for the week.

Think you should decide what you and/or your children reads? This may be a site you want to check out.

Blue Diary – Alice Hoffman

/ still a dreamer

I may have written this elsewhere on my blog about Alice Hoffman, but I will say it again. She never disappoints as an author, and she is a master of the well-crafted, cannot-put-it-down novel.

Blue Diary is the latest of Alice Hoffman’s that I’ve read – just finished it, in fact, and I feel like I want to pick it up and read it again; I didn’t want it to end, and I feel like another reading will further enrich my experience in Monroe, MA. Hoffman’s characters are so real – so relatable. They are people you know, flawed, struggling, yet with their own — sometimes surprising — depths of strength.

A family man with a wife and child who adore him, a worker in the small town relied upon for his excellent services, and a volunteer fireman honored because he is often the first to go into a fire fearlessly and rescue someone trapped. Yet on one morning the police arrive – his own friends – and take him away in handcuffs for a crime he allegedly committed 13 years ago in a different state under a different name. How has this happened?

I suppose in a way you can say this is a murder mystery, but it is so much more than that. It is an examination of the hearts and souls of the people whose lives Ethan Ford has touched,  and those of their friends and loved ones as things start to come apart at the seams, and also of those whose lives he has ruined. It is a mystery that needs sorting out by many different people. Over the course of Blue Diary, the mystery is revealed, played out through the many characters we get to know and care about.

The second chapter in Part One, simply entitled “True,” is from the POV of Kat, neighbor and 12 year old friend of Ethan Ford’s son, Collie. She says, “The first thing I noticed was that he could walk past a mirror without casting a reflection. My grandmother always told me that a mirror can shine back a person’s dishonesty, but what did it mean for a man to have no reflection at all?” This is not a tale of vampires, or the supernatural, but an insight of a child who can appraise a truth. Something no one else has quite been able to grasp, though past inklings come to light for some. Masterfully woven into the main plot are several sub-plots, all wonderfully intriguing.

And then there’s Hoffman’s writing itself. Her writing has been described as “lush” and “luminous” and these are accurate. Her way with words is so incredibly rich, I never want to leave her world – whichever book’s world she has enticed me to enter. Perhaps it’s why I’m inclined to want to read this again immediately after just finishing it. Her descriptions of place, of experience, of emotion are so compelling that I am there. It’s an amazing gift, and I don’t know of that many authors I’ve read that share it so consistently, novel after novel. Blue Diary is a terrific read.

So what next? What can follow such an engrossing story? Or should I just enjoy it again?

Frozen in Space – Post NJ SCBWI Conference

/ still a dreamer / 2 Comments

It’s hard to believe that just one week ago today life as we knew it had totally changed for a period of 48 magical hours. Stressful – but magical hours. Friday, June 4th and Saturday, June 5th was the NJ SCBWI Annual Conference, held this year at the Princeton Regency Hyatt.

The Hyatt atrium, empty above, was abuzz with NJ SCBWI Conference participants – editors, agents, speakers, attendees, organizers, volunteers and a very helpful Hyatt staff. That area with tables of four at the forefront was our registration area with an endless stream of people coming in to be greeted and given their materials. The fairy-lighted area to the rear left and below was our open buffet dinner area Friday night, and the step-up areas with small tables at rear right were filled with agents and editors giving critiques. On the lower level, workshops, first page sessions and intensives were going on, all opening to a wide center aisle where illustrators had displayed their work in a juried art show. Upstairs, outside of the dining areas, a portfolio display, book signing and auction took turns  over the two days.

It was a jam-packed, enlightening two days, preceded by days and weeks of stressful preparations and anticipation. NJ SCBWI‘s first year in the Hyatt was a great success, thanks to RA, Kathy Temean and Assistant RA, Laurie Wallmark, bolstered by volunteers at every turn.

So how come it’s taken one full week to blog about this inspiring event? Initially, exhaustion. I know I’m not the only one who simply crashed on Sunday. I barely had the energy, though I did it anyway, to start preparation of an MS with a couple illustrations to send to the agent who critiqued me. Tired as I was on Sunday, I elected to wait until Monday with some more rest behind me to make sure I sounded literate. And sent that off. Then starting the work of revising another MS which was critiqued by that agent and also the editors in a First Page Session for a submission.

What made it more difficult for me … and I suspect for others in my shoes … is that Monday morning I have to fold up my dream and tuck it away neatly while I go back to work. Problem was that this time, that dream was not about to stay folded away neatly, nor was it going to wait ’til the end of the day when I could give it some attention. Nope. It kept teasing and wheedling and enticing and trying its best to make me stop working and pay it some serious attention. “Look at me!” said my dream. “You know you want to!”

I was still tired for a good part of the week, but worse off, I was frozen in space.

Both needing and wanting to work, I was feeling a pull stronger than ever to turn around and work on my manuscript and a new very rough dummy.  (I do love my work, but as I’m self-employed, if I don’t do it, no one else does and I don’t make any money!) Half the time I felt like the rope in a tug of war. Of course, I ultimately and ever-so-responsibly settled down and attended to my graphics work, and came up with some pretty cool stuff, and started my children’s book work after dinner.

However, I notice that dream has developed quite a mouth on it.

Okay, it’s Friday. You talkin’ to me? Let’s do it!

Reservation Blues – Sherman Alexie

/ still a dreamer

There’s plenty written about Reservation Blues, including that written by Alexie himself, so I’m not going to write any summaries or anything like that other than what appealed to me, personally. And that’s a lot. First, I realized I’m going to have to buy the book to have my own copy, as what I read belongs to my local library. That’s so I can go back in and visit from time to time.

I am moved by Alexie’s writing style – in some ways, almost a stream of consciousness, but we all know one doesn’t get published by going with only that. It’s HOW he writes that I’m drawn to – the fluidity, the interjections of things that may seem unrelated or perhaps we just never connected before. Like Big Mom and her relationship to the slaughtered horses … how they brought their songs back to her in the forms of others – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Marvin Gaye, (the latter two whom I was very fortunate to have seen in concert), and then they returned to earth. Is it so surprising that Robert Johnson, who bartered away his freedom, should come to Big Mom? Or that Thomas Builds-the-Fire should let Johnson’s guitar pass through his hands and Victor to become ensnared by it?

I read Reservation Blues and wished I knew Big Mom. Everyone needs Big Mom – loving, giving, spiritual, a healer, and yet objective, claiming to no particular situational outcome for anyone. I wish I couldn’t hear the horses scream … a too-piercing song. But Big Mom’s there to mourn for them and to keep their songs alive. And I am thankful. Woven into the story, the violent massacre tells part of the tribe’s history.

I am drawn in by Alexie’s subtleties,  such as the harmonica that Big Mom made for Robert Johnson and tossed to him. “He could feel a movement inside the wood, something familiar.” Was it his music, or was even Big Mom not powerful enough to out The Gentleman? Is it why Johnson decided to stay in Wellpinit? It was only one line that may have gone unnoticed but Reservation Blues seems packed with such subtleties, such fluid turns of the wrist. It’s a style I like, kind of filled with asides that maybe you get, maybe you don’t.

Reservation Blues follows a core group of characters that have strengths and weaknesses, their acceptance of life and their desires to escape or rail against it. Some of them survive the adversities, some don’t. And those who do, some better, some not so well. And if it’s hard to like Victor? a note from Junior to Big Mom tells us why he’s not as bad as he seems. But Victor’s weak and Johnson’s guitar has him in thrall. Again, maybe smaller points in the novel … maybe ones that encompass the whole story in one vignette.

And there’s magic – things that couldn’t be real, such as Junior’s appearance to Victor in the car, the guitar talking, the strings catching fire – or could they? Woven into the story, they become so believable they cannot be extricated. For me anyway. I surrender and I believe. And I follow the band Coyote Springs and its evolution, how it helps me get to know who’s in it, who they meet, where real hell is, where it’s not.

Does Reservation Blues depict life on the reservation today? I have no doubt. It doesn’t give the reader any kind of romantic view of the American Indian such as Alexie says seems common to some white people, New Agers, etc. The view is sometimes painful, sometimes simply life, sometimes just of people like the rest of us dealing with what every day brings. But it’s a different life than that of the rest of us – one with a different history, a different set of memories and tradition, and different challenges – not ours. And I like Alexie’s telling of it. He connects me. And I like how he does it.

What I’ve Been Reading …

/ still a dreamer / 2 Comments

Or perhaps I should say what I’ve been reading, but haven’t been blogging about. It seems there are just times when blogging about books isn’t as compelling as reading them and moving on to the next one. Here’s my book list over the last few months from the most recent back …

Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli – what a wonderful, extraordinarily well-written YA novel.  Truly this book deserves to be written about at great length, (and I’m sure has been elsewhere on the web), but as this being only the second of Jerry Spinelli’s books I’ve read, I must say how impressed I am. Told in the first person by a child who only knows his name to be stop thief, the tale takes place in 1939 during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. How the lives of everyone changed as the Jackboots settled in the city, as Jews and others were herded into the newly-created ghetto and later forced onto trains, as people slowly starved, as smugglers were hung, and friends made and lost is what the author describes. Stop thief goes through many transformations during this time, including being given a history as a gypsy to try and protect him, and observes the horrors of the Nazi occupation. Yet somehow, these horrors became an integral part of everyday life in ways I cannot imagine, and the story is seamlessly told through the eyes of this child. Milkweed is so different from The Book Thief, and seemed so much more accessible to me, for lack of a better word. I highly recommend it.

Bunnicula, The Howliday Inn and The Celery Stalks at Midnight by James Howe (and Deborah Howe in Bunnicula only) – I had expected more of Bunnicula, the vampire bunny, but in these three consecutive middle grade mysteries, each becomes better than the previous with funny dog and cat characters trying to solve them. The best of the three for me was The Howliday Inn, as it was the most complex and the humor was getting better, too.

Great Joy – Kate DiCamillo and illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline – I picked this picture book up for the magnificent illustrations, but was disappointed in the story. And I really do enjoy DiCamillo’s writing. Something was missing for me, but the illos were fabulous.

Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins – this YA novel is a Newbery winner. For me, it wasn’t as absorbing as many of the other YA novels I’ve been reading, but it was a very true-to-life depiction of  that awkward time when kids grow into adolescents. It takes place in the 60’s, and shows the growth of several young boys and girls and their relationships. Not heavy on plot, but nice – and nicely drawn –  characters.

Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman – this was unexpected as I hadn’t realized it would be a graphic novel/picture book! For some reason I had expected a YA novel like The Graveyard Book (yet to be read). However, I loved the story and the fabulous illustrations by Dave McKean, who also did Coraline, and which really make this book come alive.

Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen – a story of an abused woman, who finally reaches out to get help to save her life, taking her son with her as well. This help takes place in being given another identity and being relocated in another part of the country by a little publicized agency who specializes in helping abused women. However, Fran Benedetto cannot escape her police officer husband forever as he wants his 10 year old son back, and somewhere, in an untold story behind hers, is searching for both of them. This book is hard to put down, and recounts, through her eyes, the “accidents” that she can no longer bear nor justify to others, and her new life which almost seems normal. The abuse is harrowing and painful to read at times, and her new life is always overshadowed for the reader with the anxiety of Bobby finding her. A good read.

Heaven Eyes by David Almond – a YA novel by one of my favorite authors. Almond’s characters and plots are so uniquely his own. There is a magic threading through all of his stories which happens to resonate with something in me every time without fail. Heaven Eyes is a child who is living with an elderly man who saved her from the muck outside a deserted industrial site. Three runaways from an orphanage up the river land on the edge of the brackish mud adjacent to where she lives, and their intertwining stories unfold slowly to reveal a deeply disturbed man and a child who’s been given a history not based in reality. The three orphans are well-drawn characters in their own right with their own history, and find drama and revelation in their encounter with Heaven Eyes and Grandpa. Ultimately, they  must decide to stay in an unreal environment or hope to return to the world from which they came, bringing Heaven Eyes and her spirituality with them. A Fantastic read, (and I’m truly not doing it justice here.)

No Small Thing by Natalie Ghent – a middle-grade novel about 3 children who acquire an unwanted pony during very rough times for their family. Their mother tries to keep it together after their father walked out on them, profoundly affecting them all. It is a story in part about the responsibilities of owning a pet, but also of the children’s relationships, caring for one another and managing their lives together. Some good spots, but for me, was just OK.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Hunting Ground by Patricia Briggs – from the Alpha and Omega Series. Fabulous. The first Briggs novel I read was Moon Called, and this is a storyteller whose books I cannot put down!

During this time I am reading one or more metaphysical books on an ongoing basis, but that, for another time …