The Next Big Thing!

The lovely Lisa Gail Green tagged me for The Next Big Thing! (It's a meme in which a succession of authors answer the same round of questions about their books.) I admit I've done this before, but it's fun, so there.

What is the title of your next book?

TEXTING THE UNDERWORLD comes out August 15! It's been getting great reviews (a Kirkus star!) but I'm a nervous wreck anyway. The launch party is August 1 (Blue Hill Public Library, 7 p.m.) and I start a three-week blog tour  August 5 at The Children's Book Review. (I'll post the complete tour schedule next week.) 

What it’s about: Conor O’Neill always thought spiders—and his little sister, Glennie—were the worst kind of monsters life had in store. That was before an inexperienced young banshee named Ashling showed up in his bedroom.

The arrival of a banshee, as Conor soon learns, means only one thing: Someone in his family is going to die. Not only will Ashling not tell him who it is, it turns out that she’s so fascinated by the world above that she insists on going to middle school with him.

The more Ashling gets involved in his life, the harder it becomes to keep her identity a secret from his friends and teachers—and the more Conor worries about his family. If he wants to keep them safe, he’s going to have to do the scariest thing he’s ever done:  Pay a visit to the underworld.

If only there were an app for that.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The banshee from Walt Disney's "Darby O'Gill and the Little People."
 I hasten to say that my banshee is a red-headed girl. Most of the time.

I was leafing through Abbey Lubbers, Banshees & Boggarts, an illustrated encyclopedia of folklore collected by the late Katharine Briggs. I came upon a full-page illustration of a banshee, and she wasn’t what I expected. (My banshee experience started and ended with "Darby O’Gill and the Little People," a Walt Disney film that scared the pants off me when I was a kid.) According to Briggs, banshees weren’t always evil old hags—sometimes they were the spirits of young girls who died too soon.  Ashling the banshee popped into my head right then and there, and I had the plot mapped out in three hours.

What genre does your book fall under?

It’s middle-grade fantasy. Depending on who you talk to, “middle grade” ranges from age eight to age fourteen. You can decide for yourself whether banshees and a trip to the underworld constitute "fantasy."

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

CJ Adams (“The Odd Life of Timothy Green”) would be a great Conor, and Elle Fanning would be lovely as Ashling. (She’d have to dye her hair red.) "Modern Family" star Rico Rodriguez is the perfed Javier. The other major character is Grump, Conor’s grandfather, a banshee expert who’s kind of a loveable curmudgeon. Gotta be Clint Eastwood.

CJ Adams (right), Elle Fanning, and Rico Rodriguez (in case you needed telling) 

Who is publishing your book?

Dial Books for Young Readers, a Penguin imprint.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Let’s see. I started it in the summer of 2010, and got going on it seriously in the fall. I had a first draft to my editor in June 2011, and we finished revisions a little less than a year later.  There were a lot of empty months in there while my editor was considering my various proposals and I was working on other things.  

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

On the surface it was just the idea of a young banshee. But also various family members and friends had died over the previous decade, and I had some thoughts about death that made this book even more interesting to me.

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

There’s a mysterious connection between Conor and Ashling that becomes clear only when they finally visit the afterlife.

While she’s visiting Conor, Ashling’s chief source of information about the world is an old Trivial Pursuit game.

It turns out the Underworld does get a cell phone signal. Also internet.  

And now (*drum roll*), I join Lisa in tagging Lena Goldfinch, author of SONGSTONE, AIRE, and THE LANGUAGE OF SOULS. 

June Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

Tra-la, it's June. The garden's half in and so am I. But here's a book to lighten the load, and also to silence that pesky little voice that says you didn't do it justice in teenhood.

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

By Mark Twain

Originally published in 1885

Kindle edition, March 2011

Here’s a confession: I didn’t read Huckleberry Finn when everyone else did, back in middle school or high school. I’ve also never read Moby Dick, and I probably won't catch up with that one. (In college I read everything else Melville wrote, so I figure I’m exempt.)  I still have hope for War and Peace.

What drove me from Huck Finn in my youth was the escaping slave Jim, whose dialect just took too much effort. ( An important lesson to us all—especially me, considering that my first book features a guy who often ta-a-alks like thi-i-is.)

Jim confronts Huck's "ghost" in an
 E.W. Kemple
illustration for the first edition.

Here’s what Jim says when he thinks he’s confronting Huck as a ghost: “You go en git in de river agin, whah you b’longs, en doan ’do nuffin to Ole Jim, ’at ’us awluz yo’ fren’.”  I didn’t want any part of that when I was a kid.

Also, I think I was uncomfortable with the N-word, which is sprinkled through this text. Although I don’t approve of banning books under any circumstances, or preventing kids from reading any of them ever, it’s clear why this one is a challenge for parents and teachers today. It definitely requires context and a lot of conversation. Both very good things.

All that said, halfway through this reading I announced to whoever was in the room (most likely the dog) that Huck Finn is the best American novel ever written. I bogged down later, but really this is a masterpiece. I started reading it this time around because I’d downloaded it free and I was away from home with my Kindle. I figured I’d dip into it before bed, and suddenly it was two hours later.

Huck is a marvelous character—a young reprobate, happiest lying flat on his back in the shade with a full stomach and a pipe in his mouth. And yet he is a total sweetheart, pretty much a friend to all and without the mischievous spark of his pal Tom Sawyer, hero of the Twain book that introduced Huck to the world. Despite a ramshackle upbringing with a horror of a drunken, thieving father, he is quick to recognize his sins and attempt to atone for them.

It’s this last characteristic that Twain uses to great comic and cosmic effect.

The action takes place along the southern Mississippi River before the Civil War, when slavery was in full cry. On the lam from his evil father, Huck ends up on a raft with Jim, who hopes to escape to the free territories of the west. Along the way, they have adventures with a rich, funny, pungent collection of con-men, robbers, murders, aristocrats, and common folk.

Here’s the thing: Huck has been taught that slavery is the good and right way of things. He thinks helping a slave escape is a crime, even a sin that will condemn his soul to hell. Because he’s a nice guy and really likes Jim, though, his instinct is to help his friend out and keep him safe. There’s a fascinating battle going on inside of Huck, and we get to watch it play out.

It’s genius. In 1885, twenty years after the end of the Civil War,  Huck’s struggle to dehumanize Jim—and his failure—must have hit home like a howitzer shell.

Most of the book is hysterical, too, although I have to say that I could have done without the reintroduction of Tom Sawyer three-quarters of the way through. His ridiculous attempt to add swashbuckling complications to a simple rescue of Jim goes on way too long, and that’s where the book bogged down for me.  I can’t help thinking that Tom’s there not for the advancement of literature but just because he was such a popular character with readers.

Hey, something had to pay for all those white suits.

If you, like me, managed to escape reading this book in middle school, I urge you to give it another try. Even if you did read it back then, you might want to pick it up again as an adult. It has pleasures and insights you might have missed during the Hormone Years.

Dear FCC: This book was free, and I downloaded it of my own free will. Neither Mark Twain nor his publisher gives two hoots what I have to say about it.

May Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

It's spring, and we're all rushing out the door to dig up the garden and soak up the sun. If you have a moment for reading--a body's gotta rest, right?--I strongly recommend this and its companion book. 

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Ghoulish Song

By William Alexander

Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2013

The authors I envy most are those who achieve what I guess I’ll call “texture”: a magical weave of darkness, wild imagination, humor, and heart. William Alexander is one of these, and his skills are evident in GHOULISH SONG.

This is a companion book to GOBLIN SECRETS, which won the National Book Award last year. Both are set in Zombay, a town divided between rich and poor, seamless and seamy, mechanical and magical.  The river  that splits the city is spanned by the Fiddleway, a marvelous bridge that is the crux of both books. It’s so broad that people have built houses on it, and its clock tower can be seen from almost everywhere. It’s a sanctuary for criminals, but also its central street is lined with musicians. Goblins--who specialize in masks and theater--live there if anywhere.

Kaile, our heroine, lives in Southside, the dusty, teeming, jumble-built poor side of town, home to witches and charms and curses. When we meet her, she seems a nice enough kid but unconnected to the world. She has good reason—her family, hardworking proprietors of a bakery and alehouse, doesn’t have time to express affection or listen to one another. Kaile keeps her thoughts to herself and does her work, waiting for a word of approval that never comes.

When a goblin gives her a flute carved from somebody’s bone, she grasps at it as a way to reconnect with the one family member who reached out to her: her grandfather, a musician who died recently.  Unfortunately, playing the flute separates her from her shadow, which is bad news for a couple of reasons.

For one, Kaile’s shadow stays by her side, now a separate being who doesn’t like her that much. For two, nobody else can see the shadow, and a girl without a shadow is officially dead, a walking ghoul. Her family sings her funeral song and that’s it—she and her shadow are on their own in the dusty South Side streets.

Kaile sets out to discover the flute’s history and whether she can undo its curse. Her adventures eventually take her to the Fiddleway, where she learns that music is more than an entertainment: It’s a force that can either bind or pull apart. It will be her job to save her city by making sure it does the former.

There are so many wonders in these books: witches, goblins, and a ghoul made of drowned people’s bones; a Guard captain with mechanical legs, hands, and eyes; the city clock, on whose face a glass sun follows a glass moon across the sky.  Kaile’s shadow is a gem of a creation, functioning as companion, alter-ego, and conscience, but also as guide. After all, who knows us as well as our shadows? (And it turns out we treat them horribly.)

The events in the two books are concurrent—we catch glimpses of the GOBLIN SECRETS characters in Kaile’s story, and the two plots end with the same event. You could read either one first. Alexander has said he’s working on a sequel to both. That’s a relief, because although each book is a complete and satisfying story, we have a lot more to learn about Zombay and its clock tower.

Dear FCC: I bought this book. The author is a colleague at The Enchanted Inkpot, but if I hadn’t loved his book I wouldn’t have written about it.

The Next Big Thing! Right here on my blog!

Looky here--a post in between book reviews! That crinkling sound--is that Hell freezing over? (Or I guess I should say "the Underworld.")

Anyway, Erin Dionne (author of the upcoming MOXIE AND THE ART OF RULE-BREAKING) tagged me for The Next Big Thing, a blog tour that started in Australia and has been edging its way around the world one author at a time. I'm thrilled to take my turn answering questions about my new book. Read through to the end to find out where we go next!

What is the title of your next book?

TEXTING THE UNDERWORLD comes out August 15 and I’m already bouncing around like a ninny.

What it’s about: Perpetual scaredy-cat Conor O’Neill has the fright of his life when a banshee named Ashling shows up in his bedroom. Like all banshees, Ashling is a harbinger of death, and she’s sure someone in Conor’s family is about to require her services. But she’s new at this banshee business, and first she insists on going to middle school. Even as Conor desperately tries to hide her identity from his classmates and teachers, he realizes there’s no way to avoid paying a visit to the underworld if he wants to keep his family safe.

Fortunately, he has a cell phone, and his computer-geek friend, Javier, will be holding down the home front. Here’s my editor’s favorite exchange between Javier and Conor:

 “Got your cell?”

“Yeah . . . Don’t see what good it’ll do me.”

“I’ll text you if anything happens that you should know.”

“Text me? Javier, we’ll be in the afterlife.”

“You never know. Maybe they get a signal.”

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Banshee illustration
by Yvonne Gilbert,
Abbey Lubbers, Banshees & Boggarts

I was leafing through Abbey Lubbers, Banshees & Boggarts, an illustrated encyclopedia of folklore collected by the late Katharine Briggs. I came upon a full-page illustration of a banshee, and she wasn’t what I expected. (My banshee experience started and ended with "Darby O’Gill and the Little People," a Walt Disney film that scared the pants off me when I was a kid.) According to Briggs, banshees weren’t always evil old hags—sometimes they were the spirits of young girls who died too soon.  Ashling the banshee popped into my head right then and there, and I had the plot mapped out in three hours.

What genre does your book fall under?

It’s middle-grade fantasy. Depending on who you talk to, “middle grade” ranges from age eight to age fourteen. You can decide for yourself whether banshees and a trip to the underworld constitute "fantasy."

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

CJ Adams (“The Odd Life of Timothy Green”) would be a great Conor, and Elle Fanning would be good as Ashling. (She’d have to dye her hair red.) The other major character is Grump, Conor’s grandfather, a banshee expert who’s kind of a loveable curmudgeon. Gotta be Clint Eastwood.

Who is publishing your book?

Dial Books for Young Readers, a Penguin imprint.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Let’s see. I started it in the summer of 2010, and got going on it seriously in the fall. I had a first draft to my editor in June 2011, and we finished revisions a little less than a year later.  There were a lot of empty months in there while my editor was considering my various proposals and I was working on other things.  

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

On the surface it was just the idea of a young banshee. But also various family members and friends had died over the previous decade, and I had some thoughts about death that made this book even more interesting to me.

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

There’s a mysterious connection between Conor and Ashling that becomes clear only when they finally visit the afterlife.

While she’s visiting Conor, Ashling’s chief source of information about the world is an old Trivial Pursuit game.

It turns out the Underworld does get a cell phone signal. Also internet.  

And now (*drum roll*), I hereby tag Lisa Gail Green, author of the upcoming THE BINDING STONE. Take it away, Lisa!

March Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

Until this morning, it snowed steadily for about 36 hours with absolutely no accumulation to show for it. Yep, it's March. If you're not reading voraciously now, you are way, way too contented with life. 

Here's a little March escapism. And don't forget to click the icon for more reviews!

Revel

By Maurissa Guibord

Delacorte Press, 2013

Full disclosure: Maurissa Guibord is a friend, and her publisher sent me a galley so I could interview her for The Enchanted Inkpot.

Teen Me would have been thrilled. This is the kind of book she would have devoured and instantly re-read. Then it would have been rinse and repeat every few months until she could recite half of the text.

Here’s why: Characters and creatures out of Greek mythology, some enticing, others terrifying. A couple of love interests, both tormented, one supernatural. Humor. A mystery that starts on page one and just keeps getting juicier.

Who knew gills could be sexy? (I’ve got your interest now, right?)

The plot is unique, as far as I know.

Orphaned Delia makes her way from Kansas to the strange island where her mother grew up, hoping to connect with her grandmother and find out the truth behind her mother’s deathbed ramblings. (“Don’t let them take the baby” being one. Brrr.)

When she reaches Trespass Island, she finds she’s not welcome.  Then she finds she’s more welcome than she wants to be. She meets a young fisherman who seems to be attracted to her but keeps backing off in an odd, unhappy way. Everyone talks about the Revel, but no one will tell her what it is.

And then there’s the pale young man from the sea who seems to be obsessed with her.

There are mysteries everywhere: Why doesn't Trespass appear on any maps? How come its inhabitants seem to be trapped there, surrounded by what seem to be sea monsters? Why did Delia’s mother leave? She'd always said she was terrified of water, so why are there pictures of her happily paddling in the sea?

Sometimes Delia is standing on the shore one minute, and up to her knees in water the next--what's that all about?

Guibord unravels the puzzles slowly and seamlessly. The answers are deeply satisfying, although sometimes heartbreaking. By the time we get our answers, we’re thoroughly invested in all the characters, from Delia’s intrepid grandmother to the slightly ditzy teenagers dolling themselves up for Revel.

Delia’s fate is especially cool. And, Ms. Guibord, it just screams for a sequel.

Poor Teen Me. How she would have loved this book.

February Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

"Scattered flurries" are accumulating on the ground as I write this--a joyful sight in a snowless Maine winter, although I doubt it will be deep enough to ski on it. Nothing for it but to settle down by the woodstove with a good book. Not sure this one will cheer you up--better try it with a sun lamp. 

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The Casual Vacancy

By J.K. Rowling

Little, Brown & Company, 2012

Every Christmas, my man Rob and I give each other nothing but books, all purchased from our crackerjack independent bookstore, Blue Hill Books. Although the staff there know our tastes and are remarkably astute advice-givers, I also take the precaution of mentioning (loudly, and with heft) what it is I’m hoping to read.

This year, as Samantha and I chatted over the front counter, I said I really didn’t think I could handle THE CASUAL VACANCY, the first book for adults by celebrated Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. This lodged in her overtaxed holiday brain as “Ellen wants that book,” and so she instructed Rob.

You’ve probably read the excoriating reviews this book received, so you know I was expecting the worst: Drab, depressing characters going nowhere in a badly written novel.  I actually considered returning it, but then I flipped a few pages.

And by gorry, the writing grabbed me, with that odd mix of coziness and cynicism common to a lot of British novelists of a half-century ago or more: Kingley Amis, for example, or Muriel Spark. Not to modern tastes, perhaps, but for a throw-back like me it was manna.

Here’s one small-town character’s reaction to the book’s catalyst, the death of Parish Councilor Barry Fairbrother:

Naturally Shirley had known, as they slid stock words and phrases back and forth between them like beads on an abacus, that Howard must be as brimful of ecstasy as she was; but to express these feelings out loud, when the news of the death was still fresh in the air, would have been tantamount to dancing naked and shrieking obscenities, and Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.

Okay, that’s one of the world’s longest sentences, but I’m sucked right in by the abacus imagery and the dancing-naked/clothed-in-decorum juxtaposition, not to mention the insight into this awful marriage.

The book does have serious problems. Oddly, considering that the characters are so well drawn, I had a heck of a time keeping them straight in my head. There are so many of them, and all of them with equal weight—nobody’s the protagonist, except maybe the dead guy. Halfway through the book, I still couldn’t remember who was married to whom and had which kids. It made me determined to re-read Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth century novelist who did the same type of casting but still managed to keep everyone screamingly distinct.  

Although Rowling’s wry humor is well represented, there’s no arguing that her book is relentlessly depressing. And you struggle to like any of the small-minded, drug-addled, unhappily mated characters. I kept thinking of E.F. Benson, whose Lucia novels of the 1920s and 30s followed the machinations of a bunch of provincial social climbers. Lucia and friends start out in the first chapter as barely likeable figures of satire, but Benson slowly falls in love with them—especially Lucia—and starts giving them some qualities that will make us love them, too.

Rowling doesn't seem to have fallen in love with these characters, although she’s more sympathetic to the miserable teens than to the damaged and damaging adults.   

I’m not sure this book would have been published if it hadn't had Rowling’s name on it--not because it's bad, but because it's delightfully old-fashioned. I also don't think it would have been so badly reviewed if everybody hadn't been expecting a more adult Harry Potter.

Despite the difficulties, I’m glad I read it--partly because I really did admire the writing, and technique was not the Potter novels’ strong suit. But also it gives me hope that, having rid her system of the unused profanities and angst she’d built up up through seven kids’ fantasies, Rowling will write a real winner the next time.

January Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

Happy New Year! And here's the first 2013 meeting of the Book Review Club--crank up the woodstove! And don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews.

The Star of Kazan

By Eva Ibbotson

Puffin Books 2004

Eva Ibbotson is my hero. She published her first middle-grade fantasy at age 50, and by the time she died at 85 she’d done twelve of them, along with seven books for young adults or adults.

Before this I’d only read The Secret of Platform 13. (Interestingly, it came out just two or three years before Platform 9 3/4 gained fame. Asked if she thought JK Rowling had cribbed from her, Ibbotson said kindly, “we all steal from each other,” or words to that effect.) (I can’t find the quote.)

Although Platform 13 is wonderful and is among Ibbotson’s most celebrated works, it didn’t blow me away as much as I’d expected. On the other hand, whether because of my mood or the season or some astrological influence, The Star of Kazan hit me right where I live.  Published in 2004, six years before its author’s death, it is the work of a master.

Ibbotson was born in Vienna in 1925 to Jewish parents, and her family prudently made its way to England in the 1930s. The Star of Kazan takes us to an ideal Vienna, before World War I. It’s a child’s dream, painted lovingly from the food to the parks to the Lipizzaner stallions. But it’s an adventure, not a travelogue: her twelve-year-old heroine, Annika, has a deep-seated yearning that takes her away from lovely Vienna, to the brink of disaster and back again.

Annika is a foundling, raised in a fond but odd adopted household consisting of three siblings, all professors, and their kindly but no-nonsense cook and housekeeper. Annika grows up learning to cook and keep house, but also tutored by the professors in their fields of art, music, and science. She goes to school, has friends and good neighbors and a pleasant routine broken by the occasional treat. One of the neighbors is an extremely old woman she visits regularly, a former music hall star who clings to a trunk full of costumes and the reproductions of jewels she sold when fame left her behind.

Despite her idyllic life, Annika dreams of her unknown mother, whom she imagines as a beautiful aristocrat searching the world for her lost daughter.

Imagine her joy when just such a woman turns up at the professors’ door and sweeps Annika off to the north country and an ancestral, moated pile of house called Spittal. (Okay, first hint—this is not Barbie’s dream home.) There, she finds mysteries that she refuses to be troubled by: the missing portraits and carpets, the demoralized family and servants, the decaying farm, the fact that her mother keeps promising some wonderful event that will improve all their lives.

Probably the most admirable of Ibbotson’s feats is the fact that the reader spends more than half the book watching the circumstances become increasingly Dickensian, and yet we completely believe it when this otherwise smart, canny child refuses to catch on. It’s the richness of detail that does it—by the time the glamorous mother shows up, we have thoroughly lived Annika’s wonderful life, and we know that she’ll give it all up—and more—for the knowledge that her birth mother loves her.

And it’s the voice: a third person narrator who never departs from a child’s point of view. Here, for example, is our introduction to Annika at age 12:

As soon as she woke, Annika opened her attic window and looked out at the square. She did this every morning; she liked to see that everything was in order, and today it was. The pigeons were still roosting on General Brenner’s head, the fountain had been turned on, and Josef was putting the café tables out on the pavement, which meant it was going to be a fine day. A door opened in the ramshackle little house on the opposite corner and her friend Stefan came out and set off across the cobbles with a can to fetch the milk. He was the middle one of five flaxen-haired boys, and his mother, Frau Bodek, was expecting a sixth child any day. She had said that if it was another boy she was going to give it away.

One paragraph in, we know that Annika likes things orderly and routine, she’s not a snob, and she pays attention when mothers talk about giving away their children. Stay tuned.

I might just mention that the Puffin paperback in my possession is enlivened by the Kevin Hawkes cover and illustrations. Hawkes is from Maine. Naturally.

I’ve only just gotten started on Ibbotson’s books, and I’m pumped. Next up: The Ogre of Oglefort.

Dear FCC: I bought this book with my very own money, because Kevin Hawkes was at the Bangor Book Festival signing books and I liked the cover.