Review: Sketchy

Book One of the Bea Catcher Chronicles
By Olivia Samms
Available now from Amazon Children's
Review copy

Olivia Samms' debut novel is an interesting blend of paranormal, mystery, and contemporary issue novels.  Bea Washington is an addict who has been clean for a little more than three months.  She's trying to regain her balance after getting out of rehab and starting over in a public school.  But she has a secret ability - when she sketches, she can draw images from peoples' minds.  There's a serial rapist murderer on a spree, and local cheerleader Willa Pressman survived.  Bea quickly realizes Willa knows more than she's telling police.

SKETCHY has a dynamic premise and interesting characters.  Bea got hooked on drugs pretty young, and it's hard for her to stay clean.  The temptation is pretty constant.  But she is resisting.  Throwing herself into the mystery helps her have something to focus on.  There's also a great deal of personal guilt driving her to find the perpetrator.   Bea is well aware of many of her faults and mistakes, but she doesn't let them define her.  And sometimes she is blind to them - she's a teenager, perfect self awareness would be unreal.  Most hilariously, she wonders why her parents don't trust her again after three whole months of sobriety.

The side characters are well done too.  Willa must have a reason for not telling the truth, so there's a mystery to unravel there.  And Bea reconnects with an old friend from art camp, Chris.  He listens to Bea and helps out, but he's got his own goals too.  He's a photographer who has her model for him in return.  There are also two police detectives who keep running into Bea, one of whom is much more willing to listen to her when she tells them things she couldn't possibly know.

The mystery isn't the strongest aspect of SKETCHY.  I guessed who the killer was pretty easily.  But there are some nice touches.  I enjoyed how involved the cops were.  Bea can't just solve the case through mystical means.  Evidence is needed to arrest people and take them to trial.  Finding out who the killer is is important, but so is proving it.  (But Bea could make things easier on herself by making more of an effort to be civil to the cops.  At least the one that doesn't flirt with her.)

I think SKETCHY is a brilliant start to a series.  The characters are flawed people, but they have many good qualities.  There's also some interesting social dynamics at play.  (For instance, Bea is biracial.  Her father is black and her mother is white.)  Plus, SKETCHY ends with a massive hook for the next book in the Bea Catcher Chronicles.  Be warned, SKETCHY is upper YA - if the drug addiction, rape, and murder didn't give it away.

Movie Monday: I want to see Monsters University

Monsters, Inc. is my favorite Pixar movie.  I almost didn't see it in theaters.  Right before it went away, my mom and I decided to go see it because we had a spare night.  We loved it.  Will I risk missing Monsters University in theaters?  Definitely not.  Plus, early word is fantastic.

Monsters University opens June 21st.

Review: The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist

By Margarita Engle
Available now from Harcourt (Houghton Mifflin)
Review copy

THE LIGHTNING DREAMER: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist is the story of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, called Tula.  She grows up to be a poet, novelist, and playwright who combined abolitionist and feminist views in her writing.  As Margarita Engle wrote in her historical note, Tula "helped readers question the way they viewed slavery, interracial marriage, and the broader issue of voluntary marriage" (171, ARC).  Engle's novel in verse goes back to when Tula was a child to explore how she became interested in storytelling and radical subjects.

Using poetry to tell the story of a poet is a terrific choice.  The poems alternate between character's voices and the verse feels like the rhythm of internal thoughts.  It lends immediacy and potency to the emotions felt by the narrators.  It's also a good way to bring many points of view to the story without the head hopping becoming too confusing.  And the subjects addressed are full of nuance.  Tula's immediate concern is her impending marriage.  She's fourteen, old enough.  Marriage means giving up her freedom.  She isn't even supposed to be literate, but her brother and nuns helped her.

Tula's Mamá is one of villains of the novel.  She wants Tula to marry an old, rich man and will likely use the money from the marriage to buy slaves.  But the marriage is what she thinks is best for her daughter.  "Tula needs a wealthy husband/now,/right now,/before she tries to choose her own,/the way I did, without any regard/for her family's/finances" (79, ARC).

Engle, a Newbury Honor recipient, has strong control of the language.  Look at the excerpt above - the emphasis on time, on family versus family finances.  But it's not distracting language.  They're easy to read and clear, delivering a complex history in bites perfect for a young audience.

I found THE LIGHTNING DREAMER fascinating, even though I had never heard of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda before.  Her story is sometimes harrowing and often inspiring.  I looked up some of her work as soon as I finished THE LIGHTNING DREAMER, eager to read her poetry.  I think the weakest part of the novel was a love triangle with a boy named Sab who was already in love with a girl named Carlota, which comes into play near the end of the novel.  Turns out they where made up based on speculation that the characters in Tula's first novel Sab where based on real people she'd met while exiled to a country estate.  It's not a terrible bit, but somewhat sappy compared to the rest.

THE LIGHTNING DREAMER is a lyrical, poignant look at an influential woman and artist.  This is the sort of book that could be broccoli (as in, "Eat your vegetables!"), but the style makes it quite palatable.  (Note: I actually love broccoli, but you know what I mean.)

Be sure to check out Clear Eyes, Full Shelves' Novel in Verse Week.

Interview with Brent Hartinger

Brent with actress Nikki Blonsky (Hairspray)

Today I have a special treat for you guys!  An interview with Brent Hartinger, the author of THE ELEPHANT OF SURPRISE, which I reviewed earlier today.  I previously reviewed his novel PROJECT SWEET LIFE.  Brent is most well known for writing GEOGRAPHY CLUB about a group of kids who start a club for LGBTQ teens under a boring name to keep people away.  (And this interview will have pictures once I convince Blogger it doesn't hate me.)

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1.  LGBTQ-themed YA novels have come a long way since GEOGRAPHY CLUB's publication ten years ago.  Where do you hope the genre will be ten years from now?
 
This is a great question! The fact is, the genre has changed sooooo much from ten years ago that's it's probably impossible to answer what it'll be like in ten years.

But I know what I *hope* it will be: I hope gay characters and LGBT themes will be a complete non-issue. They'll be lots of different LGBT characters -- especially different races, different classes, and different cultures. They'll be leading LGBT characters in not just literary fiction, but also humor books and genre stuff and popular fiction -- true bestsellers, I mean, like The Hunger Games or Harry Potter or Twilight.

Oh, and when I say "LGBT," I definitely mean "lesbian" and "bisexual" too. Those two groups especially are still way under-represented in YA, relative to their numbers. I hope people will look back and say, "Gay characters used to be controversial? Why?!"

All this said, I hope LGBT surprises me in some way too. I hope some of the books takes some incredible turn that no one, including me, ever expected.
   
2.  Was it hard to write in Russel's voice again after several years?

Honestly, Russel came back to me pretty quickly. That was the least difficult part of THE ELEPHANT OF SURPRISE.

The hard part was probably the subject matter. The story in a nutshell?  Russel is bored and wants more adventure in his life. So he begins a wildly passionate romance with a mysterious guy he first meets scrounging food in a Dumpster. The guy's a "freegan," someone who's voluntarily choosing to be homeless. He and his friends eat roadkill and squat in houses and explore abandoned buildings. He's got this whole, fantastic philosophy worked out. Okay, so "romance" and "Dumpster diving" are not themes you usually see associated together, right? And that was exactly the point! I wanted to do something really unusual and attention-getting and *different* -- not like a thousand other YA books you've read before.

But I knew two things from the very beginning: First, that my readers would "get it." I think they know that when you read a "Brent Hartinger" book, things won't necessarily be "normal." Russel's last big romance was with a burn survivor who has a huge scar covering half of his face. And my readers totally love Otto (I do too). But with this new book, I also knew it might be something of a hard sell to the larger world. It's not about a girl who turns out to be a princess. I would have to work hard to make the case that a guy who eats out of Dumpsters and breaks into abandoned buildings can be a figure of great mystery and romance.

I think/hope I pulled it off -- I tried to do it with humor. You can get away with a lot if your main character is funny. But I had to give this all a lot of thought, to figure out how to get the casual reader to come along on this journey with me.

Brent with Cameron Deane Stewart in character as Russel

3.  GEOGRAPHY CLUB has been made into a movie, coming out soon.  Once you knew it was really going to happen, what was your greatest fear about your work being adapted?  Your greatest hope?
 
I never worried too much about whether or not it was faithful to the book (and the resulting movie is in some ways, and it also isn't at all in others). I've been in this business for a long time, and I know how movie adaptations work. I was just thrilled it finally happened, because it took a long time -- it was once almost a big-budget movie, then a micro-budget indie movie, then a TV series. In the end, it's a modestly budgeted indie film, which is probably what it should have been all along.

Anyway, I wanted it to at least be "good," and I wanted it to be a success, because the more of a success the movie is, the more interest there is in my books (which don't change whether the movie is faithful or not). I already know the movie's good -- I saw it a couple of weeks ago -- but I still don't know how successful it will be.

4.  You self-published THE ELEPHANT OF SURPRISE along with reprints of the second two Russel Middlebrook novels, originally published by an imprint of HarperCollins. What are some of the challenges of self-publishing?
 
You know, I didn't really want to self-publish. But I'd been frustrated with HarperCollins -- I'd had six different editors in six years. So I left. But I kept getting all these emails from people who wanted the books available (two were out-of-print). But I knew no other publisher would be interested, since HarperCollins still had the rights to the first book.

So I self-published new ebook and paperback editions of those two books. I didn't get rich, but they did surprisingly well. That's when I decided to do a fourth book as a self-published original. I hired my first editor and my first copy-editor. So the process wasn't *that* different than being traditionally published ... except I didn't get paid in advance, and I did a lot more of the work myself.

First of all, there are all the technical challenges, which are legion. You have to learn typesetting, coding, graphic design, copy-editing, proof-reading, book promotion, and on and on. But probably the biggest challenge is just getting attention for your book. People mock traditional publishing, but they act as "quality control." There are now hundreds of thousands of self-published titles out there, and let's face it: a lot of them are very bad. Traditional publishers tell bookstores and the media: "we think this book is so good we were willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars publishing it!" And the media listen.

So I don't know if I would have done this if I didn't have something of a name and a following, and if one of the books in the series wasn't being turned into a movie. I think that made it a little easier to get the word out. But it was still a lot harder than when HarperCollins was doing it.

The good news is that I paid for my production costs (which were $3000) a week before the book's official release date, just in advance orders. So now I think I'll probably make at least as much off THE ELEPHANT OF SURPRISE than I did from most of those books published by HarperCollins. I hope so, because I killed myself putting this thing together.

5.  Do you have any other books coming out soon? 

A few years back, I co-founded a website (AfterElton.com, now called TheBacklot.com). My partners and I sold the website to MTV a few years later, and then I worked there until about 2010. Which was great for me financially. But unfortunately, it really got in the way of my writing.

But I've been really productive since then. I have a movie that I wrote that (I think) will go into production this spring -- that should be out in 2014. I have a sci-fi book that I'm about half finished with and that I'm hoping to place with Kindle Serials. And I have a fantasy series that just went out to publishers from my agent. Plus, I have a couple of other screenplays that I've been actively pitching.

The fact is, there is *nothing* I'd rather be doing than writing books and screenplays.

Review: The Elephant of Surprise

Book Four in the Russel Middlebrook series
By Brent Hartinger
Available now from Buddha Kitty Books
Review copy

Russel, Min, and Gunnar are back in their first outing since 2007's SPLIT SCREEN (now known as DOUBLE FEATURE).  I haven't read DOUBLE FEATURE since 2007 so I was afraid I wouldn't remember anything.  Luckily, THE ELEPHANT OF SURPRISE begins with a "Previously" reintroducing the characters and their dilemmas.  With that brief reminder, diving into the book was quite easy.

Russel thinks that he's finally over Kevin.  But he keeps spotting things that make him think Kevin might not be such a bad guy.  Min thinks her girlfriend, Leah, is keeping secrets and enlists Russel and Gunnar to help her find out the truth.  Gunnar, meanwhile, has started a strange photoblog that he's quite devoted to.  Then the friends meet a group of freegans - people who only live off of what they can get for free.   Russel is instantly attracted to Wade, one of the groups leaders.

I liked that each of the friends got their own storyline, even though Russel's is the primary one and takes up the majority of the book.  I also liked that THE ELEPHANT OF SURPRISE brings on of the series' main storylines to a close.  I didn't like where Min's story went, however.  I felt like her plot got dropped part of the way through the novel, which makes me sad because I love her and her sharp sense of humor.

The freegans where an interesting touch to the story.  I certainly don't find their lifestyle appealing, but there are some valid points in their philosophy and it's easy to see why Russel is interested in learning more - beyond impressing the cute boy.  It also pays off in ways I didn't expect, giving THE ELEPHANT OF SURPRISE the biggest and most exciting climax of the four novels.

THE ELEPHANT OF SURPRISE fits in well with the rest of the Russel Middlebrook series, almost as if there wasn't a large gap between the release of books three and four.  It's a cute story and an easy read.  There's a diverse cast and the side characters have a nice amount of development.  I love how important Gunnar is now, the little weirdo.  He's come a long way from the kid who though he was actually joining a Geography Club.  GEOGRAPHY CLUB will always be the standout entry in the series, but I don't think THE ELEPHANT OF SURPRISE will be a disappointment to fans.