It begins today! First of all — a big thank you to BookChick readers, New Media Minute viewers, fans and friends! I’m giving away a box of chocolate from Bittersweet Cafe to whoever writes the best ode to chocolate in the comments below. It can be a line, a poem, a haiku. Details in the video! Contest ends Dec. 23.
I feel like I could write a recommendation every day for a different Elizabeth Scott novel. She is that prolific and that good. Scott is the author of six young adult novels and has three more coming out next year. Her output is a tremendous feat, because her books are wonderful, including the recent ”Stealing Heaven.”
It’s the story of reluctant 18-year-old thief Dani, who’s been trained by her mom from a very early age for a life of crime. Dani’s had enough silver for a lifetime though and doesn’t want to spend any more time pretending to be a maid, or breaking in through a dog door, or plotting how to nick the silver in the fancy house down the street. But her mom can’t resist. Silver is a siren song to her, so she continues to live a life on the road, taking Dani from town to town, never settling down, always plotting where to steal. Then they land in the beach town of Heaven for a few weeks, where Dani makes friends for the first time and also meets a guy.
Ah, but the path to young love is never easy. Because guess what? He’s a man in blue. Talk about conflict — the thief falls for the cop.
Read this book!!!
I’ve been having a grand old time here on The BookChick.com talking about books I love and I will definitely keep doing that. BUT, I’ll interrupt our regularly scheduled program for a brief moment to tell you all that I AM GOING TO BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR! The details are here on my official Web site DaisyWhitney.com (my alter ego — hee hee). The short story is Little Brown is going to publish my young adult novel THE MOCKINGBIRDS and its sequel! I am thrilled beyond words! And I guess now I have to start blogging. Oh, wait, I do that already! Though now I will need to step it up, so tell me all the sites, blogs, places I should be frequenting for teens who read!
You know those summer reading lists they give you at the end of the school year? Kafka and Orwell and so on? Well, throw it out. Because here’s the real summer must-read list for teens!
Now go to the library, the book store, your best friend and read!!!
The list was compiled this list with the help of four writing friends: Trish Doller, Suzanne Young, Courtney Summers and Mandy Morgan. And no, Courtney didn’t pick her own book for the list. I picked it! The list includes books published in 2008 and 2009.
I loved Lisa Unger’s Beautiful Lies so much that I had to share it. I gave it to my friend Brett Rounsaville and he loved it so much he gave it away on Twitter to George Poppe, who loved it so much he suggested we create a contest to give the book away to yet another person! So here’s the contest: we want your best 5-word lie. You can post a comment here or send to lies@amtrekker.com by April 24. Brett, George and I will pick the winner and then send the book along. It’s your turn to lie and be rewarded for it!
Generally, I’m a fan of instant gratification. Since the Kindle is all about the big IG, I’m a fan of the Kindle now, too. I’ve had the Kindle 2 for about 48 hours so far and here’s what I like. The ability to sample a book and read a chapter or two on the device before buying is wonderful. Sure, I can do the same thing in the bookstore, but with the Kindle sample feature I can read in my home before buying, rather than in the aisle of a bookstore before buying. Of course, the books are all cheaper on the Kindle and that’s a clear advantage. Another benefit of the e-reader is it contains all your recommendations and preferences from your Amazon account. So when I visited the Amazon store on the Kindle, the book Love is Hell was recommended to me based on my past purchases. I downloaded a sample of the book and was so hooked that when I reached the end of the free pages I immediately hit buy and was rewarded with the rest of the book in literally about two seconds. The downloads are that fast.
But, the downside is you can’t share books. And I’m not talking about DRM issues here. I mean you can’t pass along a book to a friend. You own the books on the Kindle, they live on the Kindle and you can’t drop them off at a friend’s house so she can read them too. Another drawback is I often don’t know what page I’m on in a book while reading on the Kindle. Pages aren’t numbered the same way, so it’s hard to gage your pace in the story.
Finally, I can’t cheat! I like to sometimes flip ahead and get a little snippet of the middle or even the end of the story and I can’t do that easily on the Kindle.
Still, I like having one and as a matter of fact, I’m going to go read more Love is Hell right now.
I have a big thing for ghost love stories. I think it’s the inherent impossibility of the relationship. Right? I mean a human and a ghost can’t really be together in meaningful way. In Lisa Schroeder’s young adult novel I Heart You, You Haunt Me, Ava is haunted by the notion that she was responsible for her boyfriend’s death, then she’s haunted by him. He appears in mirrors, turns on music, and even tosses her panties around. But she can’t see him, can’t touch, can’t feel him, she can’t even hear him. She loves that he’s near and that a part of him hasn’t gone to the grave because she’s still desperately in love with him. But alas, loving a ghost isn’t easy. But reading this novel is. It’s written in verse, is wonderfully short, and can be read and savored all in a day.
When I was on girls getaway vacation in Mexico two years ago I finished reading Water for Elephants on the beach one afternoon. I read the last line, closed the book, and immediately picked up the next book I had with me and started reading The Next Thing on My List. My girlfriend Michelle gave me a shocked look. How could I move on so quickly — with literally no time in between — from one book to the next?
It’s just what I do. I love reading so much that if I’m in a reading state of place or mind I want to keep doing that. So I move on to the next one. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love a book. That doesn’t mean it didn’t linger with me. It just means there’s a hell of a lot of books in the world and I want to get to more, more, more!
What do you do? Can you move seamlessly from finishing one book to starting another without skipping a beat? Do you need a day or two, an hour or two, or a second or to to let it linger?
While we’re on the topic of affair novels, here’s another one that turns the sub-genre on its head. In Getting Rid of Matthew, Helen finally convinces her lover to ditch his wife, but as soon as he moves out – whoops! She doesn’t want him anymore. So rather than chronicle falling in love and winning the guy, this clever novel recounts the all-too-real ways we lose interest in people – did he really leave his socks on the couch again? Has his hair always looked that bad? – and how we kick them out. But what if you happen to develop an unexpected friendship with the wife, the woman you made a cuckold of? Well, then you’ve got a tasty set of ingredients for a quick, smart, dramatic and unexpected read.
By their nature affairs are designed to be dissatisfying. They scratch an itch that can’t fully be scratched. That’s why they’re a tricky proposition in fiction too. How do you write a satisfying ending in an affair novel? Which relationship do you break up and at what cost? Most affair novels opt for an easy way out – no one gets caught or someone gets caught but then she’s pregnant by her husband so all is forgiven. Lauren Fox’s Still Life with Husband doesn’t take the easy way out. Fox uncovers a fresh ending and a new twist to the affair story, one that is uniquely rewarding for the reader, especially because of the fine writing in which it’s wrapped.
