Book Review Club: November

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@Barrie Summy

Phew! Running around like a madwoman today, but now it’s time to take a deep breath and contemplate the simple joys. Don’t forget to click the icon at the top for more reviews!

 Red Sled

By Lita Judge

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

November 2011

When a writer (speaking strictly hypothetically) is up to her neck in the complexities of the teen years plus magic plus mayhem, it's a blessing when something comes along that alters the perspective. For me right now, that’s RED SLED, a brand new picture book by New Hampshire writer/illustrator Lita Judge.

This book has a simple plot and practically no words. It’s a book someone has thought about, hard, and pared down to essentials. It’s beautiful.

Here’s the plot: A child in a white snowsuit and red hat trudges home for the night, leaving a red sled outside his/her cozy cabin in a white wilderness. A bear borrows the sled, and before long is plummeting downhill with a collection of friends from a moose to a mouse. Some of the animals are giddy; others are terrified. They crash gleefully at the bottom of their hill, then return the sled. Next day, puzzled by all the paw-prints, the child waits for nightfall and peeps out to see what’s happening.

On the last page, a delirious pile of animals and red-hatted kid scuds downhill into the snowy night.

The text consists of “hmm?” (twice), “whoa” (twice), and “alley oop” (once), plus a marvelous, thoughtful collection of sounds: “gadung, gadung” when the sled hits some bumps, or “ssssffft” as it glides past on a straightaway. My favorite is “fluoomp…ft,” which is the noise a pile of animals makes when crashing into some snow.

A parent would enjoy reading this aloud with sound effects, but a child also could enjoy it alone. No wonder it got starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal.

I’m indebted to Melissa Stewart and the New England chapter of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) for letting me know about RED SLED. The author is recovering from an auto-immune disease (here’s her blog post on the subject), and is unable to help promote her book. So the word went out on the NESCBWI drums that others should step in. I’m happy to do so, and urge you to help spread the news any way you can. Judge’s web site is http://www.litajudge.com/, if you want more information (or a peek at her other illustrations, which you definitely should see).

This is a book to treasure regardless of circumstances. But if you’re immersed in complexities, it’s a lifeline.

Book review on the way!

Hello there, book review club! Today's schedule got a bit wonky, so I won't be posting my review until early afternoon. See you then!

And another thing...

Look at me, blogging again!

Blogging amidst all the kt literary jollification yesterday, I forgot to mention that Bobbie Pyron featured the dog Callie and me on her website. Very cute blog idea. Callie needed some good news, having spent much of the past three weeks in her Cone of Shame from her vet surgery.

Also, there are a couple of tidbits of good news. First, SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS has been accepted for Scholastic Book Clubs and Book Fairs, starting this coming winter. THE UNNAMEABLES, meanwhile, is on the reading list for the Youngstown State University English Festival, which brings some 3,000 teens to campus every march to discuss the books on the list, among other activities.

I'm so pumped about this stuff.

Athleticism

So, ten writers get together with their agent in a pair of cabins within spitting distance of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

Here's how they spend the morning:

The photo was taken by Kate Schafer Testerman, the agent in question. Ten clients of KT Literary, including me, gathered with her this weekend to hobnob and eat and guffaw. I'm the one with her back to the camera. It may look as if I'm industriously writing, but I'm checking the weather forecast.

Actually, we did get out to the park right after the photo. We saw elk and an alluvial fan, plus a whole bunch of snow, which closed the road to the Continental Divide. I took a bunch of pictures, but can't upload them until I get home. That should be around the 19th, after I wander around Santa Fe for a while with my friend Shelly.

The elk are amazing--this time of year, they wander right into town, no regard whatsoever for humans or buildings or cars. Also saw magpies and bright blue jays, far brighter than out east.

Right now we're around the fire digesting a great Mexican dinner. It doesn't get better.

Book Review Club for October

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@Barrie Summy

Gotta love a man who buys you research books. This one was one of my birthday presents from Rob, who watched me struggling to read one physics book after another (okay, actually it was only two) over the summer. This one actually was fun. Who can argue with nanobots?

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Physics of the Future:
How Science Will Shape Our Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
By Michio Kaku
2011, Doubleday

Michio Kaku has an entertaining life. When he can spare time from being a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, he hosts a Science Channel show and two radio programs, as well as writing book after book after book trying to make the rest of us understand how modern science affects us and our future.

Researching this one, he traveled around having cool and useful experiences: Matching wits with a robot here, riding in a self-piloted sports car there. He interviewed some three hundred scientists.

The guy helped found string field theory, and yet he has the common touch. He built an atom smasher in his garage in high school, blowing out every fuse in the house whenever he turned it on. At the same time he credits Flash Gordon with awakening his interest in science and the world of the future. He quotes Einstein on one page and Data the Star Trek android on the next. He’s fun to read; one suspects he’d be even more fun as a dinner companion.

The best thing about this book is the way it’s organized. Eight chapters are devoted to individual “futures”: those of the computer, artificial intelligence, medicine, nanotechnology, energy, space travel, wealth, and humanity. Each chapter has a section on “the near future” (the present to 2030), mid-century (2030-2070), and the far future (2070-2100). This drives home the point that, in many disciplines, humanity has already planted the seeds for a Jetson-like future existence in which our houses respond to voice commands and we drive to work in self-piloted hover-cars.

It all seems so plausible. And, in places, unsettling. Take internet contact lenses, for example. Already, combat forces can train on base by putting on a helmet that projects battlefield images over the existing terrain. It’s not that much of a leap to contact lenses equipped with computer chips that would enable you to surf the net or turn on a movie just by blinking your eye.

As someone regularly called upon to swear at her computer, I can imagine nothing more unsettling. Imagine: At a business lunch with your boss, you have a glass of wine and forget how to blink right. Just as your boss is confiding top-secret corporate strategy, all of a sudden Ralph Fiennes appears before you dressed as Lord Voldemort. That’s the sort of thing that makes a person choke on her chef salad.

The book’s last chapter envisions a typical morning in 2100, from the moment when a computer program named Molly projects its friendly face on the wall screen to wake you and send you into the bathroom to brush your teeth and have your daily molecular analysis, searching for potential disease.

Will the predictions come true? Maybe not. Kaku points out that, in 1964, At&T spent $100 million perfecting a TV screen for telephones, of which they sold a grand total of a hundred. He blames the Cave Man (or Cave Woman) Principle: Our wants, needs, and desires haven’t changed in 100,000 years. If there’s a conflict between new technology and our Cave Man instincts, technology will lose.

Just as our ancestors demanded that a successful hunter provide “proof of the kill” (a hunk of dead animal), we demand hard copy instead of trusting a bunch of electrons. That’s why computers have not resulted in the much-predicted “paperless office.”

Years ago, I freelanced from an attic apartment in Providence, RI, where summertime heat and humidity can be brutal. Interviewing a corporate executive on a sweaty day, I was grateful he or she couldn’t see what I was wearing—or, more accurately, not wearing. My cave woman instincts definitely would not have embraced a picture-phone.

A self-piloted sports car, though. Cool.

A Nip in the Air

It's been an exciting week at Castle Ne'er-do'well. I got a Kindle. The dog had surgery. The air is full of revving-up noises from the October 1 Bangor Book Festival. It's frikkin' freezing out, although six months ago this would have felt warm. I have tomatoes, zucchini, and blackberries in the freezer.

The Kindle is a cunnin' little thing, despite my Luddite tendencies. I got it because I'll be traveling a bit and also I'd like to read my manuscripts without sitting at the computer or manhandling a largish stack of paper on the dining room table. Supposedly you can take notes on stuff you're reading. We'll see how useful that turns out to be. But my goodness, aren't they trying hard to be clever? I was impressed right off by the fact that the USB connection nestles into the power adapter.

The dog, one Calamity Jane Booraem-Shillady, is gray around the muzzle and developing noncancerous fatty tumors in various spots (one of them unmentionable in polite society and undoing a decade of "sit" training). Thursday morning, when Rob was away canoing (naturally--heaven forbid this should happen with a full staff), I discovered that dear Callie had chewed off the bottom fifth of the tumor on her front right ankle. I disinfected it and wrapped it up, but by afternoon it was still bleeding and I was on the phone to the vet. Upshot: It was infected and growing too much.Yesterday morning, the little dear had $700 worth of surgery. Now she has a classy-looking bandage, a dazed expression, and one of those Elizabethan cone things to keep her from chewing at her stitches. Also an impoverished household.

TMI ALERT (skip this if squeamish): The little dear also has a grass-eating fetish, which would be fine if she just threw it up immediately or passed it along through like a normal dog. But no. Our choices are 1) she keeps it fermenting in her gut for three or four weeks, then throws it up at 3 a.m. on the floor at the foot of our bed, where it smells like Death on Eggs, or 2) she gets a blockage and has to visit the emergency room. When I took her in for surgery yesterday, I mentioned that she hadn't pooped for 24 hours. "Hmm," said the vet. And, sure enough, when he'd finished removing her tumor he also extracted a plug of grass from the relevant oriface. Another 24 hours and she would have been writhing in pain, so that's the silver lining to this cloudy tale. END OF TMI.

The Bangor Book Festival takes place September 30 and October 1. (The Maine Edge, an alternative paper, is interviewing the authors involved. Here's my interview.)  I'll be talking about character development and doing a reading/discussion for teens with Carrie Jones. The festival will be in various venues this year, as I understand it--public library, children's museum, perhaps others. More information will be forthcoming, but definitely mark your calendar...just look at that list of authors!

I conclude with pix of my favorite season-changing event: The Blue Hill Fair, which takes place on Labor Day Weekend. I tended the county Democrats' booth in the morning and ate french fries and watched sheepdog trials and livestock shows in the afternoon. Bliss.





A couple of farm kids leave the show ring with their charges. Behind them, the judge awaits the next group.

 

A sheepdog drives his charges through a gate. One sheepdog (not sure it was this one) got a perfect score, which involved sending a flock of sheep through two or three gates, across a bridge, and into a pen, as well as clockwise and counter clockwise around the show ring.



What every writer (and teacher and parent and human being) loves to see.



September Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

I’m a day late (and I’m always a dollar short, so that’s nothing new). Thanks to Labor Day and the sudden drop in summertime scheduling, I got this week thoroughly fouled up and thought yesterday was Tuesday. Today, oddly, feels like Friday, possibly because it’s raining for the third day in a row. Hmmm … curl up with a good book?

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Wicked Appetite
By Janet Evanovich
St. Martin’s Press, 2010

There are times when only a Janet Evanovich will do, and a rainy Maine day usually is one of them. She’s written so many of her signature comedy-romance-thrillers—almost forty, at last count—that if you haven’t tripped over one of them already you will soon. And when that day comes you’d be well advised to stay right there on the floor and start reading.

Don’t start with this one, though.

It could be that I’m over-Evanoviched, so familiar with her formula that I’ve finally gone sour on her. Or maybe, as I thought when I read WICKED APPETITE a week or so ago, she’s reached the too-familiar stage when she’s so hot that nobody edits her anymore. (Not at all familiar to me, obviously. But Neil Gaiman commented a while back that editors aren’t as likely to challenge him now that he’s a hotshot, so he’s under more pressure to do his own quality-control.)

I cut my Evanovich teeth on the numbered Stephanie Plum novels, starting with ONE FOR THE MONEY. As of November, they’re up to EXPLOSIVE EIGHTEEN. It was always fun revisiting hapless New Jersey bounty-hunter Plum, her sidekick Lula the ex-hooker, her nutty Grandma Mazur, and her TWO love interests, Morelli the cop and Ranger the mysterious high-tech security consultant. The books are hysterical in places, sexy in others, with a comfortable level of nail-biting. Nevertheless, somewhere around ELEVEN ON TOP I stopped salivating and started just picking them up sporadically whenever I tripped over them. As I said, that’s easy to do—they’re everywhere.

Apparently there are a few unnumbered Stephanie Plums, with titles such as PLUM SPOOKY and PLUM LUCKY, and apparently they have a supernatural element. This book—a birthday present because it’s set in my old stomping grounds near Boston—is the start of a new series in which a couple of Stephanie’s unnumbered otherworldly friends harass a brand-new protagonist, uber-baker Lizzy Tucker. Also migrating from New Jersey is a highly intelligent monkey who keeps farting and giving people the finger.

It’s a quick read with lots of laughs and steamily delayed sexual gratification, Evanovich’s stock in trade. The supernatural plot is silly and sometimes too obviously engineered for comedy, but that I can forgive, even enjoy. The finale, however, is a wet firecracker, with the real conclusion clearly to come in later books. This is something new—as I recall, the Plum books always came to a satisfying conclusion—and struck me as cynical and slap-dash. Thinking about it now makes me sad and kind of tired.

I have to say, though, that a friend of mine read this one a few months back and saw nothing wrong with it. Maybe I am Evanoviched out. That really would be sad.