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Audience Pick!

Title: Catalyst
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 4.5/5
Why I Read It: Because you told me to!

Summary: High school senior Kate is at the top of her class. She could attend just about any school, but it’s MIT she wants. All that matters is getting that acceptance package, but that’s okay because Kate’s got everything under control. After a fire in her neighborhood, Kate’s father the reverend opens up their house—more specifically Kate’s room—to the one girl from school she can’t stand, and suddenly Kate’s not so in control anymore.

Review: LHA hit the overachieving nail on the head with Kate’s character. This woman can WRITE. On just about every page of this book, I found myself marveling at a turn of phrase. Case in point:

I shiver and hustle to my sad excuse of a motor vehicle, a Yugo named Bert.

I usually drive to school on autopilot. Not today—leaving late has landed me smack in the middle of rush-hour traffic. This is bad. Bert fears traffic. Bert is a wuss, a tissue box on tires with a bulimic hunger for motor oil. I pet the dashboard as I turn onto the main road, and promise him a filter change if he can get me to school without overheating.

I was completely and utterly in love with this book…until one plot point threw me out of the story world because it affected me so much. I don’t want to give spoilers, but does anyone who’s read this know what I mean? Maybe it’s just me.

Even so, I loved this book, and I think you will too.

Borrow: Your local library | Swap
Buy: Your local bookstore | Powell’s | Amazon

Did you like this book? Try:

• Speak—My rating: 5/5
• Twisted
• Fever 1793—My rating: 4/5
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Technorati just started hosting original content, so I threw my hat in the ring as one of the authors for the Entertainment channel. The topic areas for that channel are Celebrity, Film, Gaming, Music, and TV. Nothing for books. Let alone YA.

So my first post is geared towards helping adult readers see the YA light: 5 Books to Recapture Your Youth.

I highlighted five YA books that adults would enjoy. Here’s what I chose, in no particular order:

• Jellicoe Road
• Jack Tumor
• The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
• Feed
• Broken Soup

For all but the last title, I’ve recommended it to a non-YA reader, and they’ve enjoyed it. I also tried to pick recent works to show how YA has grown up in recent years. It was all very scientific, you see. But I’m curious as to what other YA aficionados would have picked.

Your Turn: Which five YA books would you recommend to an uninitiated adult?

Photo by m7780a82.

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Title: Catching Fire
Author: Suzanne Collins
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 5/5
Why I Read It: I read The Hunger Games (the first in the series) earlier this year and loved, loved, loved it.

Summary: After surviving a fight to the death, Katniss Everdeen has to adjust to her new life of privilege while everyone she knows and loves still struggles to put food on the table. Not to mention she’ll have to figure out what to do about the two young men in love with her.

Review: The worst part about this book was coming to the last page and realizing I have to wait a whole freaking YEAR before the next book comes out.

This woman sure do write good. Best love triangle I’ve ever read. How does she make me sway from Team Gale to Team Peeta and back again, over and over?

The suspense of the 75th Hunger Games consumed me. I had about 20 pages to go when I had to leave for work one morning in order to make it to an early meeting. So I stuck it in my bag and brought it to work with me.

That day was absolute TORTURE. I had meetings all morning, with no time to go back to my desk in between. Then at lunch, I had only a couple minutes to read before my afternoon meetings started. And again, no time at my desk between meetings. WHY ME?!?

Finally, FINALLY my last meeting was over and it was time to go home. On the way to the car, I threw the keys to my partner and pulled the book out of my bag. When I got in the car, I propped the book open on my knees and started reading. THEN I put my seatbelt on. It’s all about priorities, people.

Suzanne Collins, if there’s anything I can do to help you focus on writing over the next few months, you just let me know. I can walk dogs, babysit kids, formulate a magical body spray that will make bathing unnecessary. You name it.

Borrow: Your local library | Swap
Buy: Your local bookstore | Powell’s | Amazon

Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Shiver
• Going Bovine
• Graceling—My rating: 5/5
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

I’ve just hit a string of awesome books. Reviews are forthcoming, but the titles don’t really matter. What matters is that the writing is so good, it hurts.

Let me explain. I’m currently slogging away at my third attempt to rewrite last year’s NaNoWriMo first draft. Meanwhile, this year’s NaNoWriMo is reading the revisions over my shoulder, biding its time to kick my work in progress out of the way. So when I’m reading and a brilliant piece of writing makes me stop in awe, my very next thought is: “I’ll never be this good.”

Sure, no one’s that good on their first draft. What about their third draft? Does Laurie Halse Anderson see inklings of her final masterpiece by the third draft? Because in my third draft, no inklings. The voice isn’t fresh. The style is middle-of-the-road. And as I discovered in a writing workshop this weekend, my descriptions are practically nonexistent. When I do add description, it’s certainly nowhere along the lines of what I most admire:

I shiver and hustle to my sad excuse of a motor vehicle, a Yugo named Bert.

I usually drive to school on autopilot. Not today—leaving late has landed me smack in the middle of rush-hour traffic. This is bad. Bert fears traffic. Bert is a wuss, a tissue box on tires with a bulimic hunger for motor oil. I pet the dashboard as I turn onto the main road, and promise him a filter change if he can get me to school without overheating.

A bulimic hunger for motor oil? Dang.

Maybe I shouldn’t be comparing myself to the likes of LHA and Suzanne Collins and Melina Marchetta. But I want to write something that I think is great. If I think what I’ve created is just okay, why bother putting it out into the world?

If I’m being honest with myself, my writing is sometimes good, sometimes mediocre, sometimes bad. I can find the mediocre and bad patches and fix them. But how do you take yourself from good to great?

In my book reviews, I try to articulate what I admired and didn’t enjoy about each book, in the hopes that the process will help me with my own writing (and yours as well). And it is helping, for me at least. But not enough. I need to do something more proactive to take my writing to the next level. But I have no idea how to do that. Help!

Your Turn: What steps have you taken to get your writing to the next level?

Photo by timcmak.

Can you trust me? Compare our taste!

Title: The Carbon Diaries, 2015
Author: Saci Lloyd
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3.5/5
Why I Read It: When a Texas librarian says she really can’t recommend a book enough, you listen.

Summary: By 2015, global warming is a reality no one can ignore. And unfortunately for 16-year-old Londoner Laura, the UK becomes the first country to mandate carbon rationing. Which means cutting back on her punk rock band practice and taking the bus to school, not to mention all the fights at home about who’s been using up too many carbon credits.

Review: Props for timing on this one. This is the kind of book I’d love to write. So yeah, I was pretty much seething with jealousy when I started reading it.

But Laura’s snark soon distracted me.

We had a power outage in the night. The house is so cold now, it feels like 200 years of evil chill creeping into my bones. Reminds me of the Great Storm. Power outages give me the creeps—you know when you go to switch the light on and it’s dead? It was so freezing I went shopping to Waitrose with Mum and Dad just to keep my blood moving.

Super-strange experience. It was all dark in there cos they’d switched off loads of lights and the aircon and those fans that waft baking bread smells around. It was just like a big warehouse. It was pretty funny, all the nice middle-class people pretending they weren’t panic buying and that it was completely normal for them to be pushing six carts around, totally bulging with stuff. The staff kept making people put things back at the checkout cos they’d gone over their CO points.

My mother nearly had a fight with this other woman over a multipack of garlic and basil pasta.

Laura’s language is clever, fresh. (Or maybe that’s how all British teens talk?)

The only thing I didn’t love is that sometimes when characters were sharing information about the state of the world, I felt a teensy bit preached to. In some of those situations, I would rather see something not be 100% explained, leaving a little to the reader’s imagination.

But even so, I loved this book like a trip to Ibiza during carbon rationing. And I’m very much looking forward to the sequel coming out next year!

Borrow: Your local library | Swap
Buy: Your local bookstore | Powell’s | Amazon

Did You Like This Book? Try:

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• The Rock and the River
• The Knife That Killed Me
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