The Scholastic Spring 2014 Librarian Preview

I'm proud to have edited three great novels that span ALL OF TIME in the Scholastic Spring Librarian Preview, which you can see here:

• The Great Greene Heist, by Varian Johnson, at 6:48 in the middle-grade section:  A contemporary Ocean's 11 set in a middle school, with a sweet romance, a sharp sense of humor, and a wonderful diverse cast.
• Divided We Fall, by Trent Reedy, at 5:54 in the YA presentation:  In this novel set in the not-too-distant future, Danny Wright finds himself caught between his state and his country, his governor and his president -- and soon enough, in a second American civil war.
• Curses and Smoke, by Vicky Alvear Shecter, at 6:54 in YA: In 79 AD, a rich girl and a rebellious slave fall in love in the shadows of Pompeii.  

If you're a book blogger, a teacher, or a librarian, please look out for galleys of all of these at upcoming conferences or on NetGalley. Thanks! 

The Scholastic Spring 2013 Preview!

The online existence of this preview will be old news to many, but good news to more:  Behold the lineup of Scholastic's Spring 2013 books! We recorded it a little bit differently this time, so you get a glimpse inside many of the editors' offices, including mine*, where I talk about the books:

• The Path of Names by Ari Goelman, at 13:46 in middle grade -- The ONLY Jewish summer-camp fantasy you'll ever read or need:  Diana Wynne Jones meets Chaim Potok in the Poconos, with a wholly original magic and some of the smartest, most believably snarky 12-year-olds ever to appear in a novel. Out in May.
• Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg, at 8:00 in YA -- This has pretty much everything I'm looking for in a novel these days:  An original, provocative premise; wonderful characters; a smart, funny, relateable voice; believable consequences to its action; the courage of its convictions in following through on its ideas and story; and pleasure in reading, provoking thought long after. Also: THIS IS NOT JUST A BOOK FOR GAY PEOPLE. STRAIGHT PEOPLE SHOULD READ IT AND WILL LOVE IT TOO. (I feel the need to make that point.) Out in June. 
• The Fire Horse Girl by Kay Honeyman, immediately after it -- This book satisfied every single teen-girl reader part of me:  the headstrong heroine, who was sometimes lonely because of her iconoclasm; the fascinating historical background of Angel Island and San Francisco in the age of the tongs; terrific adventures; a romance whose tiny gestures I could reread again and again. In stores now!

There will be more to say about all of these books in the course of the year. In the meantime, won't you please check the preview out to see them now?

Librarian Preview

* Fun fact: The KID LIT Missouri license plate you can see over my shoulder belonged to my grandfather.

A Brief Ramble on Character and Self Consistency

Lord, I love Zadie Smith's essays, like this wonderful piece in last week's New Yorker on Joni Mitchell, changing artistic tastes, changing selves, and artistic continuity:

Who could have understood Abraham? He is discontinuous with himself. The girl who hated Joni and the woman who loves her seem to me similarly divorced from each other, two people who happen to have shared the same body. It's the feeling we get sometimes when we find a diary we wrote, as teenagers, or sit at dinner listening to an old friend tell some story about us of which we have no memory. It's an everyday sensation for most of us, yet it proves a tricky sort of problem for those people who hope to make art. For though we know and recognize discontinuity in our own lives, when it comes to art we are deeply committed to the idea of continuity. I find myself to be radically discontinuous with myself -- but how does one re-create this principle in fiction? What is a character if not a continuous, consistent personality? If you put Abraham in a novel, a lot of people who throw that novel across the room. What's his motivation? How can he love his son and yet be prepared to kill him? Abraham is offensive to us. It is by reading and watching consistent people on the page, stage, and screen that we are reassured of our own consistency.

This made me think of the fact that often the moments I love most in fiction or film are the moments where a character does something that is seemingly inconsistent with his or her outward character, but completely consistent with his or her inward self, which we've glimpsed throughout the proceedings . . . a sacrifice, an unexpectedly marvelous dance, a moment of honesty or tenderness they weren't capable of at the beginning. It is often the revelation of that character's strength through the demonstration of their vulnerability, and it shows us layers, dimensions, complexity, reality, all the things I like best.

That said, I disagree a little with the last few sentences of the paragraph I quote above because I don't find Abraham inconsistent at all; his obedience to his god simply outranks his love for his son, which could certainly be found offensive if you disagree with those rankings, but which is not a matter of discontinuity. And I think I like watching consistent fictional people not because I am like them, but because their dependability, the cleanliness of their consistency, anchors and comforts me in my own wild ups and downs. One of the great joys of fiction is that it can be neater than life; the best fiction either organizes the reader's emotions completely, I think, or just barely manages the messiness of reality. 

Agree? Disagree? In my inconstancy, I'm open to persuasion.

Finally, this essay also reminded me of this extraordinary version of "Both Sides Now" -- made famous in the Emma Thompson weeping scene in "Love, Actually" -- which almost makes me cry every time I hear it with its texture of pain and wisdom. It is worth stopping what you're doing to breathe and to listen:

Postscript: Stephanie Trimberger's Book Signing

A few weeks ago, I posted a request for the good people of the Pacific Northwest to come out and support Stephanie Trimberger at her book signing for The Ruby Heart. Said people responded in force, and you can see Stephanie, her father, Arthur, and footage from the event in this wonderful MSN.com video here. Have Kleenex at the ready:

"Harry Potter" editors make dream come true

See This: "Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective"

The Guggenheim Museum in New York right now has an extraordinary exhibit called "Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective." Ms. Dijkstra is a Dutch photographer who takes large-format pictures of human beings at moments of change and transition, and their humanity is so much on display, so rich and beautiful and specific and true, that these single images feel like entire character studies. She specializes in pictures of children and teenagers, like this one above. . . . The instability of the way this boy is standing, his slightness and off-centeredness; the vulnerability established by his near-nakedness and his size vs. the endless sea behind him; his watchful gaze, not fully trusting or warming to the photographer -- and rightly, as she's caught so much of him; and the promise of the man inside him, learning how to look strong, how much of himself he should give away:  I find this image (and nearly every other picture in the show) both wonderful and heartbreaking in its ability to see and capture all of that. I want to read novels about all of her people.

The show included five video installations that likewise focus on individuals, in locations ranging from a dance club to an art museum, against simple backgrounds, so their actions and words speak for themselves. This one, for instance, "Ruth Drawing Picasso," was nearly six minutes of a single shot of a girl making her own sketch of a Picasso painting (this visitor-shot excerpt is just 42 seconds):

And as boring as that may sound, the film kept me fascinated for all six minutes, simply because it felt so wonderfully rare and fresh to do nothing but look at another human being for a sustained period of time, as Ms. Dijkstra does. More than that, Ruth doesn't seem self-conscious about being watched, as many of the kids in the dance-club videos do (and as I always do on camera); she sighs, draws a line, scratches it out, gropes for a pencil, looks around at her friends, looks up at the painting and down at her paper again, draws another line. . . . It's such an honest portrait of the creative process, and of a human being in general, that I felt my heart warm toward Ruth for all of her particularities, including those I recognized in myself. Thus the exhibition did what the best art (to me) always does:  It made me love the world more, and the people in it, in all of our vulnerable, pained, ephemeral glory, and made me feel thankful we're all here together -- with Ms. Dijkstra and her camera to capture us.

At the Guggenheim, Fifth Avenue and 89th St., through October 8.

The Scholastic Fall 2012 Librarian Preview + Giveaway

Now live and in your computer! It's your chance to see me and many of my Scholastic colleagues talking about the books we're publishing and love. Here's the whole thing, just under an hour long:



Or you can go to the preview page to view the preview by age range or formats. My books are, in the middle-grade section:

• Stealing Air by Trent Reedy (with a special appearance by Trent himself!)
• The Encyclopedia of Me by Karen Rivers (a book that came to me as a SQUID!)
• The Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda (presented jointly with Arthur, who represents Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities by Mike Jung)

And in YA, Amber House, by Kelly Moore, Tucker Reed, and Larkin Reed, a very smart mother-and-daughter team.

I'll give away two galleys of each of them, to eight commenters chosen at random. Your task, commenters: Tell my fiance & me where we should go on vacation this summer. We can't decide.

Making the Leap

I posted a link to this on Twitter, but it was so delightful I wanted to share it here too:

Not only is it a scene straight out of a middle-grade novel, but what a perfect metaphor for the courage it takes to do so many things -- to start off, or speak up, or stay still -- and the pleasure and accomplishment of moving through that fear. My goal today:  to be as badass as this fourth-grader.

A Blogiversary!

Today is March 4, and that means it is the seven-years-and-one-month blogiversary of Brooklyn Arden. I will allow these fine gentlemen to express my feelings on the occasion:

Some other things to celebrate:

• Words in the Dust by Trent Reedy was named a Golden Kite Honor Book for Fiction by the SCBWI!
• My Plot + Structure Master Class for the Inland Empire SCBWI went well on Saturday, and while my brain felt finely fricasseed afterward, it has now recovered!
• I just ordered a second printing of Second Sight!
• It is Sunday night and I just watched an episode of Sherlock I have never seen in full! (It was "A Study in Pink," and it was delightful.) 

Here's wishing you all many Kool, exclamation-point worthy good things this week.

How I Spent My February Vacation

Thanks to the magic of frequent-flyer miles and my good friend Donna Freitas, I ran away to Barcelona! If you'd like to see pictures, you can check them out here.

(The lovely thing about the Internet for vacation photos:  I can enthuse about Gaudi and goofy Catalan words for as long as I like, and you can ignore me as much as you like. We both win!)

A brief video of a brooch I would not want to wear, from the Dali museum in Figueras:

And, for the hell of it, another video of some food I did actually eat. The restaurant was called the "Buffet Giratorio," which I found delightful. It was amazingly hypnotic just to sit there and watch it go by.

(These video selections, and this post as a whole, are brought to you by my jetlag. Also my smartphone, which is why the quality is not great.)

I read Bossypants by Tina Fey, a short biography of the aforementioned Gaudi, and about 150 pages of The Art of Fielding on the trip. The Gaudi biography was disappointing, because I wanted it to go inside his head and explain his bravery and vision and imagination, and it's well-nigh impossible to do that with a genius. But Bossypants is terrific about all the joys and contradictions of being a woman in the modern age, even if (especially if, I suppose) you're as awesome as Tina Fey, and it's hilarious as well.

The business part of the trip:  Donna is the author of this also thoroughly delightful book, coming out in June, edited by moi. It is exactly the book I would have wanted to read as a preteenager obsessed with gymnastics, and our "business" consisted of discussing the fact that not one but TWO Newbery Medal winners have now blurbed it. Yay!



If you'd like to win a galley of it, let's see -- tell me what international city you'd most like to run away to and why, and I will do a random drawing before the end of the month.

Now it is back to work for me. Here is wishing you unexpected joys like mosaic-covered dragons and all-you-can-eat raw fish on conveyor belts wherever you are.