A review by Alyssa

Secret Bonus Task #2: Write me a book review!

The review should include the following:

• title
• author
• genre
• 3 or more sentences describing what the book is about
• 3 or more sentences telling me what you thought of the book

If you liked the book, I'll post your review on the blog. If you didn't, you can still write one--that kind of information is very useful for booksellers, so we can know what different kinds of people thought about the book. You'll still complete the task even if you didn't like the book.

You can bring your review to the store, or you can email it to p1ratewench@hotmail.com. You have until Friday, July 3rd. GO!

(And if you need some tips on writing a review, check out the one below or email me.)

Shiver

by Maggie Stiefvater

Young Adult Fantasy

Due August 2009

Review by Alyssa Kirk

This is a satisfying love story for paranormal groupies, especially Team Jacob fans looking for the werewolf to woo the girl.

The book opens with Grace, our likeable protagonist, being attacked by a pack of wolves but she’s gallantly rescued by a yellow-eyed pack member. Years roll by and her fascination with wolves only increases. As she watches the woods, her yellow-eyed wolf stares back, but any attempts to approach him send him disappearing into the forest.

For a brief few months each year, Sam is human, however he doesn’t have enough nerve to approach Grace whether he’s human or wolf until a near death experience brings him to her doorstep. Love blooms and despite the difficulties, Sam and Grace will do anything to stay together.

As if fighting to keep Sam human isn’t problematic enough, wolves are attacking, students are disappearing and Sam and Grace must stop a rampaging werewolf before he strikes again.

Some might be put off by the point of view. Each chapter switches from first person Grace to first person Sam. But if you stick with it, the transitions become less jarring and awkward. The story blends heart-wrenching and romantic, and if my brother’s hadn’t been in the room, at times I would have shed a few tears. The pace slows occasionally but by that time I cared enough for the characters and their struggles to continue reading.

Definitely more romance than action, which is usually not my preference, Shiver still managed to keep my interest. Stiefvater keeps the love story more sweet romance than hot and sexy which makes it an option for younger readers or those who just don’t care for the more explicit stuff, and she puts a new and interesting twist on the werewolf lore. I vote for Shiver as a solid paranormal romance read and the ending doesn’t disappoint.

Sarah Dessen video!

Welp, here it is! My first video blog. It's really more of a poorly edited series of clips from Sarah's reading on Sunday, but there you go. Enjoy!

Good books for a multicultural classroom

Today, in one of my classes, we had a Children's Book Fair. Each student had to bring in one example of a racist/controversial book and one example of a book that treats cultural differences in a better way. I made a little list of my favorite "good" books:

The Upside Down Boy by Juan Felipe Herrera
Bee-Bim Bop by Linda Sue Park
A Shelter in Our Car by Monica Gunning
Grandfather's Journey by Allen Say
The Rough-Face Girl by Rafe Martin
Now Hiring: White House Dog by Gina Bazer
Goodbye, 382 Shin Dang Dong by Frances Park
Zlata's Diary by Zlata Filipovic
The Name Jar by Yangsook Choi

Sarah Dessen

Wow, what a great event today! It was a little risky booking an event at dinnertime on Father's Day, but we had an amazing group of readers who asked really great questions. Here are some photos from the event--please email me (Jake) at p1rateWench@hotmail.com if you would like a copy of any of them. : ) There will also be a video with parts of the reading and Q&A session as soon as I get it all edited. Thank you for coming!

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Natalie and Sarah
Nora and Sarah
A total groupie named Jake and Sarah
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Official Rules and Secret Bonus Task!

The Summer Reading Challenge has begun!

Here is a summary of the rules:

1. Come in and get your Reading Record at A Great Good Place for Books.

2. Read. Keep track of the NUMBER OF HOURS that you have read each day. Not the number of books, the number of hours. For each full hour, write down the title of a book you read in that hour and have your mom/dad/camp counselor sign the Reading Record for that hour.

3. When you've finished all 10 hours, you get to move to the next level. Come into the store and get your prize and a new Reading Record.

4. Keep checking this blog for Secret Bonus Tasks! There will be a new one each week, and you'll get a prize for finishing it.

5. The Summer Reading Challenge ends on August 14th. Make sure you've turned in all your finished Reading Records by then!


This week's Secret Bonus Task is:

Draw a picture of your favorite character. The character can be from a children's book, a chapter book, a graphic novel, or any other kind of book. Hand it in by June 26th to get your secret prize.

Summer Reading Challenge Begins!

Attention Montclairians (and others)!

Tomorrow, the Summer Reading Challenge begins!

Beginning at 9 a.m. you can stop in at the store and pick up the Official Rules and your first Reading Record. Tomorrow I'll be posting the rules on the blog, along with the first SECRET BONUS TASK. Good luck!

SKIPPYJON JONES

Today I got an awesome package in the mail: three t-shirts from our Penguin rep, Steve Kent. Since they were all way too big, I had to get a little creative. The result:

Hey all, on Monday my new video camera will be delivered and I will officially be a video blogger. I already know the topics of my first two videos:

--a promotional video for the store website (www.ggpbooks.com)
--an interview with Michael Gyulai, who promoted his self-published book (Midnight in Rome) through Twitter and other social media sites and later got a publishing contract because he sold so many copies

Some other ideas that I had:

--a montage of clips where authors say what they think about blogs and Twitter
--book reviews starring customers and GGP staff

What would you like to see in a bookseller's video blog?

my3books

I just discovered a brand new blog called my3books (www.my3books.com), in which a book rep named John Mesjak spotlights 3 books at a time. He represents a lot of publishers and sells thousands of books per year, and he'll be focusing on the ones that he considers remarkable:

"I’ve been looking for a way to pull out just a few of those books at a time - to restore a more human-readable scale to the process - and focus on some of the really great ones. So here begins a series of posts that will each zoom in on three books - three from the same publisher, or three on a theme, or three by the same author, whatever."

I've added www.my3books.com to the blog feed (at the bottom right of the sidebar) but I'll also try to mention any great posts when I see them. For now, here's my own little list of three great Young Adult dystopian science fiction books.

What is dystopian science fiction? According to Wikipedia, dystopia is: "the vision of a society in which conditions of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence, disease, pollution, and/or the abridgement of human rights, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and other kinds of pain." Dystopian science fiction applies these conditions to a future version of the world, usually including some technology or social/political structure that could conceivably be in our future.


Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen hardcover, ISBN 978-0765319852, $17.95)
Seventeen-year-old Marcus knows all the tricks to bypass his school's security, but when San Francisco is hit by a terrorist attack he finds himself in Gitmo-by-the-Bay under suspicion of terrorist activities. Marcus must decide whether to believe in the system or fight it--and face the consequences. This is a frighteningly real look at the not-so-distant future of technology, seen through the eyes of a school-skipping, video-game-playing techno-geek.


The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic hardcover, ISBN 978-0439023481, $17.99)
Readers of this blog know that this is my favorite book of all time. Katniss Everdeen has been supporting her family for years by hunting and trading illegally. When she becomes District 12's female tribute to the Hunger Games, she knows she must be the lone survivor or her family will fall apart. But winning the Hunger Games means the deaths of the other tributes. This book is full of non-stop action. It is an emotional rollercoaster. It is the best book EVER.


Skinned by Robin Wasserman (Simon Pulse paperback forthcoming, ISBN 978-1416974499, $9.99)
Most dystopian science fiction is action-packed and full of technical jargon. This one isn't. It's more of a moral and ethical look at the future of medicine, and how far we will eventually go to keep our loved ones in our lives. Lia wakes up in the hospital with vivid memories of the car accident that should have killed her. A few days go by before she realizes that, in a way, it did--her brain has been scanned and downloaded into a mechanical body that looks only vaguely like her old one. Is she human? Is she still Lia? These are questions that she must ask herself, even as her friends and family are asking them too.

Favorites

I say the word "favorite" a lot. I can't help it. I get so enthusiastic about books. But yesterday I was talking to the wondrous Sarah Wingfield, our Random House Children's Book rep, and I repeated that Flavia de Luce is my favorite character in literature...but is she? After a significant amount of thought, I have decided that, yes, Flavia de Luce really is my favorite character in literature. She had some competition, though, from these wondrous ladies:

1. Flavia de Luce, from The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
2. Mum from the Tapestry series by Henry Neff
3. Lisbeth Salander from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series by Stieg Larsson

I also love:

Skippyjon Jones
Quentin Compson from The Sound and the Fury (why?? I don't know!)
Bridget Jones!

Which characters do YOU love?

Wherever Nina Lies

Lately I've been reading a lot of books with similar themes: high school girl disappears, leaves clues that only one person can interpret, friends/sibling attempt to find girl by following clues. Some examples: Paper Towns by John Green, The Amanda Project: Invisible I by Stella Lennon, one other one that is on the tip of my tongue...anyway, here's another one. I really liked it.



Wherever Nina Lies
by Lynn Weingarten
Young Adult Fiction
Available now in hardcover

Ellie is a normal teenager: she gets decent grades, has a wonderful best friend named Amanda, works as a barista in a local coffee shop. But she can't stop thinking about her sister Nina, who disappeared without a trace two years earlier. Ellie's mother refuses to acknowledge the fact that Nina is missing. Amanda is starting to get bored with Ellie's sadness. When a clue to Nina's whereabouts appears out of nowhere, Ellie must decide if she'll follow the trail alone or let Nina go--and then she meets Sean. I liked this book. I thought that it was a lot more realistic than many of the teenager-solving-mystery-and-having-simultaneous-romance stories. Ellie is a very believable character who says and does the things that teenagers do, and she experiences doubts and misgivings that a lot of teenaged detectives don't.

Swine flu and reviews

It's a good thing I got the flu BEFORE I went to BEA, because apparently all the YA authors gave it to each other. Say yes to immunity! And now, for a couple reviews:

The Healing Wars Book 1: The Shifter
by Janice Hardy
Young Adult Fantasy
Due October 6, 2009

Nya is a Taker, which means that she has the ability to absorb the pain of others just by touching their skin. What sets her apart from Healers, however, is the fact that she can't deposit the pain into the magical stone pynvium, and must hold it inside herself until she can shift it into someone else. Shifting, however, is considered a myth--and if the leaders of her community discovers her ability she will be forced to work as an assassin. When her sister, a Healer, disappears, Nya's investigation reveals that something terrible is happening on her island. She may be forced to use her power in ways she'd never dreamed of. This book was exactly what I was in the mood for last week. I meant to save it for the flight to BEA, but I ended up finishing it before I left. The world that Janice Hardy has created is complex without being confusing, and her characters are well-developed but accessible. THE SHIFTER is the first book of a trilogy, and I can't wait to read the rest.


The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
by Alan Bradley
Adult Mystery
Available now in hardcover

Flavia de Luce, the heroine of this 1950's-era mystery, is possibly my favorite character of all time. Eleven years old, she is an aspiring chemist with a passion for poisons. She spends most of her time in her ancestor's Victorian chemistry lab in the attic until a dead body turns up in the garden. Flavia must solve the murder before her father is convicted. My favorite part of this book is Flavia's outlook on the world: she is incredibly smart and analytical, but at the same time she is eleven years old with all the frustration and unfairness that comes with the territory. Her relationship with her older sisters is downright hysterical, and I kept wanting to run to my computer and share quotes with the world. (Unfortunately, I was on a plane so that wasn't possible.) Whether you are a precocious 11-year-old or a 70-year-old philatelist or a 30-year-old chemist or a 24-year-old bookseller, you will LOVE this book.


Fire
by Kristin Cashore
Young Adult Fantasy
Due October 2009

This is the long-awaited prequel to Graceling, which was one of my favorite books of 2008. I admit I was a little concerned that it would disappoint, simply because I loved Katsa so much that I couldn't imagine a book without her in it. Fire, however, is an equally compelling character, and having read both books I'd be hard pressed to say which is my favorite. I don't want to say much about the plot because part of the glory of this book is the way the reader pieces together the details. Suffice it to say that it took me forever to read Fire because I had to read every sentence twice: first to get the meaning, and then again because I wanted to appreciate the way Kristin Cashore writes. She is so good at identifying normal emotions and making them beautiful. Every one of her sentences is like a poem. I can't wait for Bitterblue, the next book.

How NOT to participate in an author tea

At every roundtable author event, there is invariably one person who wants the author to notice her the most. To get this kind of attention, she volunteers dozens of personal anecdotes and asks all sorts of questions that tend to lead back to a discussion about her. By the end of the event, the other people at the table know WAY too much about her and not enough about the author. Here are some things I noticed firsthand at roundtable events. Notice that these are things you should AVOID when sitting at a table with one author and several civilians.

--DO NOT treat the discussion as a way to promote your business to a captive audience. Example: a scripted five-minute verbal resume followed by an attempt to get the author to sign up for something.

--DO NOT register your daughter, your daughter's friend, and your daughter's friend's friend. If the event is for booksellers, do not pretend that your kid is a bookseller. There is a long waiting list for the event and your prepubescent child would rather be somewhere else. You are taking up seats that belong to people who deserve them. Besides, it's obvious that YOU are the fangirl in this situation.

--If the author is talking about her latest book, DO NOT monopolize the conversation to talk about a previous book and then mention offhand that you thought the new book sucked. There is NO CALL FOR THAT KIND OF COMMENT. It is not constructive, and it is not the point of this event. Also, it is rude and will lead to public rants about you on the internet.

--If there is a half-second pause in the conversation, this does not mean that it's your turn to jump in with a comment like, "You know the part where the main character's brother dies? That was really powerful." There are several reasons why you should not do this: 1) that half-second pause is what happens when people are trying to figure out who is going to ask the next question. IT IS NOT YOUR TURN TO TALK. 2) You just ruined the ending, you psycho. 3) It's nice that you liked that part, but no one cares. Probably not even the author since you just mentioned how much her other book sucked.

--Seriously? Let someone else talk. Please.