All Manner of This and That

The Bar Harbor Book Festival rocked, although not exactly the way some might have expected. As is typical of first-year ventures, it didn't draw much of a crowd, so we ran workshops for ourselves. But since there were 25 of us, it turned into the world's most intimate and helpful writers' conference.

Nothing beats hearing someone else describe the level of self-hatred they sink to while drafting. Not to mention the amount of obsessive email-checking.


I got to meet other Maine kidlit writers, always a plus. The lady at left with the great t-shirt is Deva Fagan, whose MG fantasy Fortune's Folly now has a place of honor on my To Be Read pile. Deva's a fellow blogger at The Enchanted Inkpot. I had a great time chatting with Megan Frazer, Erin Dionne, Robin MacCready, Kekla Magoon, and Bethany Hegedus, whose works also grace the now-tottering TBR pile.

Kudos to Carrie Jones for organizing this. And watch for it next year!

Wafting off into the wild world of book marketing, the estimable Kirkus Reviews authored a very sweet tweet on August 31: "The most tragically overlooked book of 2008: THE UNNAMEABLES, by Ellen Booraem. Reviewed 9/1/08: http://tinyurl.com/nojcy4." I'm not sure who overlooked ol' Medford, but whoever it is should consider themselves tweaked. Or tweeted, anyway. Kirkus has been a good friend to the The Unnameables, having starred it and highlighted it every chance it got. I'm very grateful.

They get results, too. I learned about the tweet from a comment on GoodReads, and then in a blog review on Librarilly Blonde.

The Horn Book, meanwhile, included The Unnameables on its list of "talented newcomers," which was sweet of them, too.

I think I win the "links per line of type" prize, if there is one. There should be, don't you think?

Bone Marrow

Watch out...I'm going to gripe for absolutely no good reason.

The weather is gorgeous--blue skies, sweet zephyrs, crisp air...and yet I am unsatisfied. The summer simply wasn't warm enough for long enough, and I don't have the resistance to cold that I usually do. The heat just didn't make it into my bone marrow. I'm wandering around in turtleneck, sweater, and fleece vest when it's 65 out...yesterday, almost 70.

I blame the Republicans.

Just kidding. (Although that's what the political climate feels like these days, isn't it?)

For the record, I thought Obama's health care speech rocked. I'm sorry he's hedging about the public option, and don't for a minute think he's going to stand up for it, which I wish he would. But I'll be OK with regional cooperatives, I guess. I'd even go for the trigger option if I were sure the trigger would set the standards of practice high enough to ever be ...er, pulled. (That "trigger" metaphor is a hard one to work with.)

We had a very nice Labor Day weekend, including a reprise of our neighborhood picnic from last year. Same deal...one measley attempt at game-playing, otherwise five delightful hours of talk, food, and drink. The weather was perfect except, as I may have mentioned, too friggin' cold.

This coming weekend I'm going to the Bar Harbor Book Festival, a new event author Carrie Jones has organized with an eye to encouraging literacy. I'm all for that. My bio didn't make it onto the web site for some reason, but I'm on the author list and schedule so that's what counts. I'll be reading at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, and doing a world-building workshop at 2:30. Hope to see you there!

September Book Review

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@Barrie Summy

As usual, it's like a curtain dropped here. The last hurricane sucked all the warm air and humidity out to sea, and now even a steady sun has trouble raising the temperature out of the sixties. Although I'm sad that summer's over, and wishing it had been a better one weatherwise, I'm ready to hunker down, work, and read. If you're in the same mood, a thriller by Stieg Larsson is a good way to acclimate to the new reality. And don't forget to click on the icon for more bloggy book reviews!

The Girl Who Played with Fire
By Stieg Larsson
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2009

God, I wish Stieg Larsson were still alive and writing.

Larsson, editor-in-chief of the Swedish magazine Expo and an expert on right-wing extremism, died of a heart attack in 2004, leaving behind the manuscripts for three of a planned ten-book series of thrillers. The first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was a huge hit when it came out in Europe a year after his death, and the English translation met similar acclaim in 2008.

Now the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, is out in English, following the career of Lisbeth Salander, a bizarre but thoroughly engaging character from the first book.

Expect to stay up late.

Dragon Tattoo introduced us to Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist who has been convicted of libeling a billionaire industrialist. While waiting to serve his short prison sentence, he’s hired to write a memoir and investigate the disappearance of his subject’s niece forty years earlier. He brings in Salander, a private investigator, computer whiz, and pierced and tattooed misfit, to help him out. The two endanger themselves to uncover the hideously seamy circumstances behind the niece’s fate.

The politics and intrigue in these books ring true for very good reason: Larsson’s real life was not far different from Mikael Blomkvist’s. He was noted internationally as a tireless foe of rightist organizations, and reportedly was subject to death threats as a result.

His Blomkvist is a fine, compelling character, although nothing unique for a thriller. Salander is something else again, Larsson’s vision of what Pippi Longstocking would be like as an adult. Longstocking, the beloved pigtailed character in Astrid Lindgren’s series of children’s books, is exceptionally strong, smart, and self-reliant but exceptionally anti-social if you cross her.

That’s Salander to a tee, and she may be my favorite character in contemporary literature. She’s a scary-smart, a kick-ass heroine, yet as confused and vulnerable as it’s possible to be without spending life in a fetal position. It all fits together in one wonderful mass of human complexity.

In Played with Fire, Salander takes her turn as main character, with Blomkvist riding shotgun. We learn much, much more about “All the Evil,” the terrible childhood events that sent Salander into the Swedish mental health system and, eventually, into the hands of the sadistic guardian we met in the previous book.

All is not what it seems in Salander’s past, as the Stockholm police discover when she becomes prime suspect in a triple murder. The girl depicted in social service records hardly resembles the real girl at all. Why is that? You’ll find out, probably at 2 a.m.

Both of these books have their oddities, mostly in structure. Dragon Tattoo’s libeled industrialist plotline, although interesting and necessary to the series, slows things in the beginning and still has loose ends to be tidied up when the main event is over. That’s a disadvantage in a book that’s otherwise as tight as a drum.

The first half of Played with Fire is a more compelling read than the early pages of Dragon Tattoo, which has to fill us in on the libel suit before it gets moving. The second half, although still a blazing page-turner, goes overboard on Salander’s grievances against the world, and risks turning into a polemic. What happens to her at the end is just a tad too far-fetched, almost played for humor but not quite.

Nevertheless, I’d bring Stieg Larsson back from the dead any day. And I’m holding my breath for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the next and—sadly—the final book in the series.

Foggy Blogging

I'm back, and ready to blog.

But you've heard that before, haven't you?

It's been a crazy summer here at Castle Ne'er-do-well. Like everyone on the East Coast, we froze in a fog through most of July. The weather broke in a big, impressive way on August 1 for the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta--a sparkling day, which we and our neighbors enjoyed by kayaking out to Hog Island to watch the fleet go by. I think that was my second time in a kayak all summer--the barometer of a bad season.

But I wasn't worried, even when the weather started a rollercoaster ride of freezing and fair after the sailboats went home. I knew our friends Linda and Michael were coming up from Rhode Island on the 15th, with their 24-year record of bringing us stupendous weather. Sure enough, the skies cleared as they drove up last Saturday, and we were hot and happy all week until the fog enveloped us Friday, when we wanted to do indoor stuff anyway. I kayaked three times in that one week. My friend Shelly and her son Graham are coming up from Connecticut today and Hurricane Bill is expected to suck the fog out to sea with him, so I anticipate further kayak adventures tomorrow and maybe Wednesday. That could be about it, because my kayaking buddies Lisa and Peg, who live down the road in the summer, head home to Minnesota Thursday.

Fortunately, the bad weather made it a pleasure to sit inside and work--often a conflict this time of year in Maine. I feel I have to spend as much time as possible outside listening to the wind in the leaves--the world's most relaxing and renewing sound--because the leaves dry up and change tone around mid-September, beginning the long slog to June. This time, I had no trouble staying inside at the keyboard, and finished revising THE FILIOLIi (now called SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS) around the end of July. My editor Kathy Dawson liked the changes, calloo-callay, although I suspect she's going to want more.

Just now it's foggy and muggy and I'm sitting at the dining room table with Brionna Blodgett, a member of my writers group at the school who, remarkably, wanted to keep going on her story this summer. She's pounding away on a school laptop as I write this, periodically raising her head to discuss some conundrum or other. She also was working full time with the Brooklin Youth Corps, going to basketball camp, babysitting, and heaven knows what--when do these kids have time to lie in the grass and watch the clouds?

Or, this summer, the fog.

July Book Review

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@Barrie Summy

One nice thing about incessant rain--lots of time for reading! Here's this month's installment of the Book Review Club, a blog round-up organized by Barrie Summy. Don't forget to click the icon for more reviews. (The icon may not work until a it's a decent hour of the morning in California, where Barrie lives.)

Number the Stars
By Lois Lowry
Yearling, Random House Children’s Books, 1990

I’m reading The Book Thief right now, Marcus Zusak’s remarkable young-adult novel about a German girl caught up in the Holocaust. It’s narrated by Death, the one with the most to gain. I’m not quite half-way through it and am absorbed.

Last week in Bangor, though, I overtaxed my new bionic knee on a shopping spree at Staples, and had no choice but to go across to Borders for a cup of coffee and a pretzel. You can’t just sit there, so I bought a book to read; Number the Stars, the 1990 Newbery Award-winner by Lois Lowry.

This is a slim book physically, especially in a Yearling paperback. It is far from slim in spirit, however. I’ve read other slim books by Lowry—the lovely Gossamer, and her slim-ish second Newbery winner, The Giver. I don’t know how she packs so much information, insight, and food for thought into so few words.

Much as I’m loving The Book Thief, I expect that Number the Stars will stay with me longer. Lowry’s characters aren’t as conflicted and dramatic as Zusak’s—they are pleasant, everyday Danes, painted in restful colors, who react to horror with courage they kept stored in their bones. They could be you and me—their bravery is approachable, within our reach.

The protagonist is Annemarie Johansen, a ten-year-old who lives in Copenhagen. Her best friend, Ellen Rosen, lives down the hall, and their mothers are best friends, too. The Rosens are Jewish; the Johansens are not.

The book’s first scene shows Annemarie and Ellen racing down the sidewalk, two kids with nothing more on their minds than whose legs are longer. They’re stopped and questioned by the Nazi soldiers on the corner. We feel a twinge of dread. Thirty-four pages later, it’s midnight, the Rosens have disappeared, Ellen is pretending to be Annemarie’s sister, and Nazis are banging on the Johansens’ door. The stakes creep higher and higher until one night Annemarie finds herself running through the Danish woods, risking her life to save the Rosens and others.

This is not a tumultuous, edge-of-the-chair kind of book. It gently draws you in and pulls you along. You feel you have had Annemarie’s experience, not just read about it. That’s what a novel’s supposed to do, and few of them do it this well.

Thanks, stupid knee.

Additional information

I forgot several important facts in the new post below.

1. Rob found tadpoles in the path between the raised beds in the veggie garden, where the water is an inch or two deep.

2. The Unnameables is on Education.com's summer reading list for middle school kids, and in the June Hall of Fame at teensreadtoo. As reported on The Enchanted Inkpot, it's on the American Booksellers Association Spring/Summer 2009 Indie Next List for Reading Groups and, closer to home, the 2009 Cream of the Crop list compiled by the Southern Maine Library District. Sorry about all the links.

3. It's raining again.

The Rain in Maine

I know that somewhere in the world people are suffering from drought. And yet I feel the urge to whine. Maine has had roughly five dry days this month, and the coast is the worst. Yesterday, the temperature never got above 55 degrees F. Our corn isn't planted. The spinach has rotted. My zinnias, cosmos and dahlias are outgrowing their pots because we haven't had a chance to fertilize and turn over their sites.

And here, on the left, is our front hall. The laundry's been out there for three days and is dampish. Whine, whine, whine.

In other news, my next-door neighbor Cope (neighborhood hostess at Christmas and Labor Day) had her hip replaced and several days later nearly died of anemia. Friends and neighbors have been cooking things and sitting with her in the hospital to give her husband, Greg, as much of a break as possible. (He stayed on a cot in her room in the ICU, good heart that he is.) Greg designed my web site.

I'm happy to report that Cope is home now, exhausted but, in her words, "the queen." Greg's working from home for a couple of days. One neighbor took them lentil soup last night. I'm cooking Thursday. Not sure what's happening tonight and tomorrow, but The Neighborhood will provide.

In still other news, the Brooklin Youth Corps season started yesterday, spirit undampened. We have somewhere between eleven and thirteen kids, depending on who's coming and going for which family responsibility or music camp. Rent a Wreck in Hampden kindly gave us a whoppingly cut rate on two rental vans, one bright red and one burgundy. They have a group picture of last year's Youth Corps on their wall.

I do love Maine. Even when it rains.