Event Report: The Greater Houston Teen Book Convention

This past Saturday, April 11, the annual Greater Houston Teen Book Con was held at Alief Taylor High School, sponsored by the Alief Education Foundation, Blue Willow Bookshop, Follet Library Resources, Mackin Educational Resources, Escue & Associates, and more.

One thing I thought this book convention did especially well was their selection of authors.  There was a nice mix of big names, steadily working authors, and newbies.  Debut author Henry Turner's ASK THE DARK even came out the week of the event.  There was also a diverse mix of authors, which is particularly important in Houston, currently the most diverse city in the US.  Our students need to see that someone like them can have a career as an author.  As Ally Carter said in "The Secrets That Bind Us" panel, just knowing S.E. Hinton was a teen girl from Oklahoma opened her mind to the possibility of writing professionally, and every kid deserves that.  The diverse authors included Jason Rynolds, Aisha Saeed (Vice President of We Need Diverse Books), Lydia Kang, David Levithan, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, and Jen Wang.

I noticed a few areas for improvement.  One of the panels I attended was crowded and another was extremely crowded.  I like the idea of teens getting to see as many authors as possible, but I think more smaller panels would help spread people out.  Most of the panels included five authors.  Another was that they stopped selling refreshments before the closing speech, at which point the event was supposed to go on for another two hours.  I know I wanted to buy a bottle of water and just used the vending machines instead.  I think many people could've still used a drink and a small snack at that point.  I do give the event props for having multiple food trucks during the lunch hours.  That was delicious.

I was a little late getting to the event because I had trouble finding Alief Taylor High School.  (David Levithan assured me that his escort got lost on the way too.)  The first panel I attended was "The Secrets That Bind Us" with Ally Carter, Henry Turner (who has the voice of a late-night DJ), Lindsay Cummings, and Justine Larbalestier.  They briefly introduced their books and then launched into a Q&A.  I was particularly interested in Cummings' story - she was bedridden for three years and did little other than read and write.  She wrote THE MURDER COMPLEX when she was eighteen because MOCKINGJAY made her so angry.  (I read it for this year's Cybils; it's a good book.)  They had a variety of opinions on plot twists.  Turner works his out in revision; Carter likes them best if they surprise even her; and Cummings plans them first because they're her favorite part.  None of them liked rereading their work.  When Carter needs to remember a continuity detail, she likes to ask Twitter and ask her fans to tell her if she's mentioned something before.

Review: Team Human

By Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan
Available now from HarperTeen (HarperCollins)
Review copy

I was pumped for this release long before I got my hands on it.  A book by Justine Larbalestier and the divinely hilarious Sarah Rees Brennan?  And in a world where taglines exist mostly to be made fun of, "Friends don't let friends date vampires" is a winner.

At first I was totally on board with Mel Kuan.  She thinks the vampires are boring.  Most of them don't have jobs, aside from modeling perhaps.  They just sort of go about being vampires.  And that means never enjoying a sunny day . . . or laughing.  Larbalestier and Brennan's twist on the vampire is an inventive and fitting one.  Their emotions are dulled in order to help them survive the centuries.  That means never ever experiencing the extreme of laughter.  It drives some vamps to suicide.  It certainly wouldn't suit Mel, a jokester who thrives on laughter.

Their other twist comes in the transformation to a vampire.  Prospective vamps have an eight in ten chance of it going right.  One in ten flat out dies; another one in ten turns into a zombie.  It's definitely something to consider before crossing over.  If you're average, you get eternity.  If you're unlucky, it's death or worse.  Even more than in other novels, becoming a vampire is not a move one should undertake lightly.  Because TEAM HUMAN has good worldbuilding, there's an entire system devoted to transitioning.  Prospective vamps have to undergo counseling and tour a zombie facility.

Mel's world is shaken when vampiric Francis enrolls in her high school.  Pretty soon he's dating  her best friend Cathy, a dreamer who loves poetry and history.  Francis knows quite a bit about both.  After all, he's had plenty of time to study poetry and he's lived history.  Mel's objections to Francis work best when she focuses on how old he is and that vampires still drink human blood even if they don't swan about murdering people.  It's weird and kind of gross.  Not to mention Cathy has her whole life ahead of her.  As many people say in YA romance reviews, you don't want to be stuck with your first boyfriend for eternity.

But Mel goes too far in expressing her dislike of vamps.  She uses loaded language in order to make Francis uncomfortable.  When she meets Kit, who was raised by vampires, she talks about his family in an uncomplimentary way to his face.  Eventually, Kit does call her out on her behavior.  It was a moment that made me cheer.  And I would wholeheartedly embrace that moment, but the book is TEAM HUMAN.  Why am I cheering for Team Vampire?  Surely Team Human can mount a better defense than this.

But TEAM HUMAN isn't entirely about Mel and Cathy's romantic woes.  Their friend Anna's father ran away with a vampire over summer and her mother is acting extra strange.  She asks Mel to look into the situation.  Cue Mel snooping whenever she isn't trying to drive Francis off.

TEAM HUMAN had me in stitches.  I enjoyed both of the central relationships.  I loved how firm the characters were about who they were and how resistant they were to peer pressure.  I feared for Mel as her investigation took a turn for the sinister.  But Team Vampire still seems pretty darn spiffy.

Fantasy

Fantasy with Libba Bray, Justine Larbalestier, Lisa McMann, and Rick Yancey

This was the shortest of the panels, since lunch ran long. It began with Lisa McMann turning a broken rose into a jacket decoration and each of the authors telling something about themselves and their books, Lisa's being WAKE and FADE.



Justine Larbalestier pointed out her Australian heritage, marking her as the one in the panel with an accent. (Carrie Jones had a cute Maine accent and Shana Burg had a nice Boston one.) Of course, it soon became a competition to see who had the most hot guys and dead bodies in their book. (Winner seemed to be Justine, who's LIAR contained both, whereas the others seemed to tend toward one or the other.)



But this mini-contest led to the authors discovering an important fact: the responsiveness of the audience. Libba Bray discovered she could conduct the audience's roars of appreciation.

Being brave (she did wear a cow suit in the GOING BOVINE trailer, which I point out in my interview), Libba offered the following advice to teens: don't let a guy or girl talk you into doing LSD and then going to see Aliens.



And no, it didn't come as surprise to anyone when the authors admitted that they hadn't been popular in high school. (I believe Justine put it, "We're writers.") However, high school was good for one thing: writing stuff that would get rejected. Generally, they all had darlings they hoped would eventually get published. (WAKE was one for Lisa.) On the other hand, some of those earlier books will never see the light of day. For Rick Yancey, it was his second book.

Fortunately, Libba misheard him and thought he said sex book. Rick joked that it might sell if he rewrote it with sex, but nope, it was just his second book. (His newest, THE MONSTRUMOLOGIST, isn't a sex book either.)



They also discussed their reading audiences, mostly boys versus girls. Lisa likes that her covers and content are fairly gender neutral. But none of them seemed to want to limit their audience; they wanted their books to entertain and reach as many people as possible. Once again, it was a very amusing panel. It made me very sad I missed Libba's keynote address, since she was cracking a joke a minute.