This 'n' That

I have a few different things to natter on about today. Well, three.

• You guys, you guys! KidlitCon '11 is in the works! September 16-17 in Seattle. More deets needed? Check out Chasing Ray for the lowdown. I love this conference and I've been at every one so far. The best part is meeting all the cool people I know in cyberspace.
• So what's the final word on the #48HBC? See MotherReader's wrap-up post for a global view. As for me, my final donation tally is 11 books read x $5 per book, and 23 comments left x $1 per comment, for a grand total of (drumroll) 78 dollars to Make Way for Books, a Tucson-based literacy organization. Who ever heard of donating 78 dollars? I'm making it an even 80.
• Finally, this made me happy: an SLJ interview with Sir Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors on the planet even before he started writing books specifically for children and teens. Quotes like this are why: "Amazingly, I find that children understand rather more than their parents think they do." So true.

Final Hunger Games Title!

And it's . . . Mockingjay. Aaaand the cover is off to your right. It releases August 24th, and trust me, there are not going to be any ARCs for this.

Now comes the rabid speculation. How will Kat and Peeta (feh, I know not this Gale you speak of) and the other revolutionaries bring down the corrupt Capitol government? Who will bite it? Because I wouldn't put it past Suzanne Collins to kill off somebody beloved and important. I have my money on Kat, but that's because I'm a terrible, heartless excuse for a human being.

In other news, has anyone seen my dignity? I think it fled after I let out a fangirl squeal fit to shatter glass when I saw the news on Tasha "Kid's Lit" Saecker's Twitter feed.

Eh, not like I was using it anyway.

The Next Big Thing Has Feathers

Some time back, a blogger posted the question, what's the Next Big Thing? We're tired of vampires, so who gets the next ride on the hot-topic carousel? We said it would be werewolves, mummies, and zombies. Well, we got a little of each (though I'm still waiting for the swoony romantic novel with the bandage problems), but now it seems that angels are next on the list. An editor ponders the appeal over at PW:

“The young books like [Sharon Creech's The Unfinished Angel] are using angels to suggest the world can be a better place,” said Kate Jackson, editor-in-chief of HarperCollins Children's Books. In YA books, however, she believes angels “are a symbol of forbidden love. What's more forbidden than having a romance with someone who's not human?”

Not to mention he's got a really powerful boss.

I joke, but there do seem to be some swoony possibilities in angels. About ten years ago, there was a little explosion of angels in romance novels. At the time, I couldn't fathom it, but now it makes sense. There's the fearsome goodness, for one. There's the hint of superpowers. There's the feeling that your love interest has a higher calling, and is involved in Big Things. Hopefully for the story, this means that you get mixed up in Big Things too. (Of course, all that's upended when the angel in question is fallen, and that's even more fun.) And anybody's who's seen Mischa Collins as the angel Castiel on the TV show "Supernatural" (you're welcome) knows that being angelic doesn't mean you're all fair and pasty and go around strumming the harp all day.

Will the vampires turn to dust? (Ha, see what I did there?) I'm sure all those trends from the first paragraph will hang on for awhile, especially as the New Moon adaptation comes out this fall. And of course, there is the caveat to every trend--a really good book, even if it's waaaay out there, is going to find its readers.

Myself, I'm hoping that the upcoming angel books will also be books that ask questions about faith, religion, and morality without being so heavy you could tie them to the feet of your worst enemy and toss them in the East River. What would you most like to see in the upcoming angel books?

The Squeaky Wheel

. . . has gotten greased, as they say. (Do they? Aw, now I'm picturing wheels in leather and heels singing "You're the One That I Want" and yes, it has been a long day, how could you tell?)

ANYWAY. Remember how the whole entire internet (or least the portion of it that I frequent) was up in arms over the Liar cover?

Bloomsbury got the hint. Behold!

Before:













After:













I love this new cover--not just because it's much more representative of Micah as Justine has described her, but because it recreates what was right with the first cover while fixing what was wrong. The first cover design was a great thought--the wide, scared eyes, the mouth covered up. What is she lying about? Why is she so freaked? Curious-making!

Both of those have been retained, and now you feel as if it might really show Micah there--with the addition that she is clearly covering up her own mouth, instead of someone possibly covering it for her. (Yes, I do have a nasty little mind.)

Not to mention that where the girl on the first cover looked about thirteen or fourteen, this one looks about sixteen or seventeen. I don't know how old Micah is, but the book is described as a twisty thriller, so I'm thinking it might skew older.

Plus, she's beautiful. Seriously. Really eye-catching.

But this wasn't just about one book. Liar was the tip of this iceberg issue, which was really the perception that people won't buy books with black people (or Asian, or Latino) on the cover. As Justine herself notes:

I also hope we can prove (again) that it’s simply not true that a YA cover with a black face on the cover won’t sell. But let’s also put it to the test with books written by people of color. You don’t have to wait to grab your copy of Coe Booth’s Kendra or any of the many fabulous books recommended by Color Online etc.

Chaos Walking Prequel Story!

Bless his little heart, Patrick Ness wrote a prequel story to The Knife of Never Letting Go and posted on the Booktrust website for all of us. You can read it without having read the book first--it spoils only a very little bit. But I'd still read Knife first.

Thanks to the adbooks listserv for the link.

What's New

In my webby wanderings, I ran across YALit.com. Started by a YA librarian and still maintained apparently by hand and the graciousness of publishers that send the webmasters their catalogs,
this is a website that collects and sends forth new YA titles, alerting you to all the good stuff as it comes out. How freakin' handy is that?

I've already discovered a sequel to Neal Schusterman's Everlost. This one is titled Everwild and is coming out in November. Whee!!

Do we have to discuss how much I love that it includes RSS feeds? Keri Adams and Stefan Hayden, you are made of 100% undiluted awesome.

Wintergirls Behind the Scenes Video

Like everyone else in the YA fan community, I can't wait to read Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson's newest release. Cuz, dude, Laurie Halse Anderson! But also because it's about one of those subjects that's near, if not exactly dear, to my heart: depression that young women (and even some young men) attempt to control by destroying themselves through food, or the lack thereof.

Now, eating-disorder books are a dime a dozen in the teen area of your local public library, and it takes some real shiny writing to stand out from that herd. But, to repeat, Laurie Halse Anderson. I have faith, y'all.

In the video below, Anderson talks a little bit about how and why she wrote the book.


Thanks to Cheryl Rainfield.

New Award on the Horizon

YALSA's adding another award to the Printz, the Alex, and new-kid-on-the-block Morris. This one doesn't have a snappy title yet, but it's for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults.

This one made me blink a little. We've got great nonfic for kids of all ages (even some awesome early-reader nonfic, as evidenced by the inclusion of Wolf Snail on the Geisel award list this past January), but once you get up into the YA zone, it gets pretty thin on the ground. Most libraries, in fact, shelve teen nonfic together with adult nonfic.

On the other hand, maybe that's exactly why we should have an award. I'll keep an eye on this one.

Thanks to AbbyLibrarian on Twitter, again.

This Merits a Squee

Breaking(ish) news! The official title for the Hunger Games sequel is . . . *drumroll* . . . Chasing Fire! More importantly, we've also got an official release date, which is September 8th. Drop into the Publisher's Weekly article for more.

Squee!

Thanks to Presenting Lenore for the heads-up.

Gives the Term Electronic Book a Whole New Meaning

100 Scope Notes posted a review of a book called Skeleton Creek a few days back. Now the book itself sounds pretty neat, but what really caught my attention was how the author used a mixture of old-fashioned text on paper and new-fangled Internet video to tell his story.

Interesting. I remember a book maybe last year or 2007 that worked together with a website, and the 39 Clues series is famously utilizing all sorts of things, online and offline, to hook kids in. What do you guys think? Will we be seeing this a lot more often, or will it remain a gadget and a hook?

And my question is, what happens if/when the website or the videos go down? How will that affect the reading of the book?

Ursula K. LeGuin Interview

Have I mentioned how much I love retellings?

Well, I do.

Have I mentioned that I took Latin in college, on purpose, and had to translate the entire second book of The Aeneid from Latin into English, plus read the whole thing (in English)?

Well, I did.

Have I mentioned that Ursula K. LeGuin is retelling the second half of The Aeneid from the point-of-view of Lavinia, otherwise known as That One Girl Aeneas Had to Marry to Get the Throne of Rome But We All Know He Still Loved Dido and Who Cares About That Girl Anyway? (Although most people just refer to her as Lavinia, if they remember her at all.)

Well, no, cuz I just found out. Here, have an interview. Quoteage:

So in writing this I was not trying to set a wrong right or give voice to a woman who was unjustly deprived of her voice, it's just that she was my way into Virgil's world, in a way. As a woman I could think, well, what did Lavinia feel about all this? How did she see it? What was her life like? She was sort of my key to open the door.

Intriguing. I may want to re-read The Aeneid after Lavinia. But if I reach for the Latin-English dictionary, shoot me.

And the Fangirl Goes Squee!

You guys, I'm sitting on a very, very cold, hard tile floor in the Anchorage (oh, yeah, you heard me, as in Alaska) airport, with slow internet (but hey, it's free so I'm not complaining too much), and I was just going to glance at my Google Reader and THEN.

Robin McKinley posted a snippet from her new book, Chalice. The post itself is about a week old but it's new to me, so . . .

EEE!

Mysterious, evocative, hinting of a whole new world to discover, and juuuuust a lil' creepy. It's out September 18. Eee, eee, eee!

And now my butt is numb but it's worth it.

Happy-Making!

I have awake since about 4 am, a combination of stomach upset and stress from a work situation, both of which are enormous amounts of fun, I can assure you.

Since I was up anyway, I decided to watch all the links and videos on my Bloglines that I can't watch at work because a) the library computers don't have flash and b) for some reason people don't respect a librarian who is giggling like an idiot at the reference desk. Yeah, I don't get it either.

Anyway, here's a few happy-making things.

1. This book. Eeee!

2. Gallagher Girls 3 has a release date. True, it's in 2009 (June 9, to be exact), but it's only 363 days away!

3. You know you want to spend most of your morning playing this. You're welcome.

Slightly Longer BEA report

So I said I'd make a longer report today, after the pain had ebbed. Well, it hasn't, but I'm still reporting, because I'm just that dedicated. Also, I'll probably forget all this stuff if I don't list it now.

Clearly I had fun. I'm really not kidding about the two-foot-tall stack o' ARCs, and I think I was actually kinda conservative. (Of course, I think I'm doing good if I get my bead-addicted self out of JoAnn Fabric under a hundred dollars, so make of that what you will.) I mentioned a couple of my finds yesterday. I also got some books signed.

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother
Cecil Castelluci's Janes in Love
MT Anderson's Kingdom of the Waves (AKA Octavian Nothing II) (Ooo! And there's going to be another Whales on Stilts title!)
Adam Rex's Frankenstein Takes the Cake
David Carter's Yellow Square (well, not the actual book, but a one-page promotional foldout thingee that I may frame.)

All these authors were very cool and funny and personable, even when I could actually see their fingers start to fall off after signing umpty-ump books for umpty-ump gushing fangirls like myself.

Chocolate kisses to the all the publisher types I talked to, especially the following:

Flux
Kane/Miller
Feiwel and Friends
First Second
Harper Collins

Whether I was shamelessly begging for ARCs or just burbling about current titles, you were enthusiastic and knowledgeable and generally great to talk to.

Of course, the best part of any conference is the colleagues you meet, whose names you never get because you're too busy talking about other stuff. So hi to the teen/adult librarian from Ohio, a fellow line-waiter for Cory Doctorow, who tried to convince me that I missed the Midwest. Also in that line, a very cool gal who appreciated my shirt so much she immortalized it on digital film. Finally, the bookseller/art major in the Adam Rex line who traded titles and Lemony Snicket chat.

I wish I'd been able to go all three days, but I'm glad I got even this one.

Note to self: Take small bags. Big bag does not equal good. Big bag holds more books. More books is more weight. More weight is not being able to move your shoulders for three days. Mmmkay? Mmmkay.

The Arrival in New York Magazine

Shaun Tan's The Arrival is being excerpted in the New York Magazine this week. Go see! It looks so cool!