I'm a guest star!

As you may or may not know, I've been doing a small side job proofreading for an e-publisher for almost two years. I just finished up my third book by a wonderful author, Jeff Salter, and he was kind enough to ask me to guest star on his blog, Four Foxes One Hound. I was honored and said yes. Click on the link to see the result.

http://fourfoxesonehound.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/guest-fox-traci-pollitt/

Happy Thursday!

Schooled by Gordon Korman

So imagine that you've lived your whole life on a commune called Garland Farms. It's just you and your grandmother, although there used to be other people there, too. Suddenly one day, your grandmother falls out of a tree while picking plums (don't ask). She breaks her hip, and after being released from the police for driving without a license (don't ask), you learn that not only will she have to have surgery, she'll need to go to rehab for at least six weeks. Which means you have to go live somewhere else. Because you're only a kid, too young to live alone.

Thus begins Schooled, the tale of Capricorn "Cap"Anderson. Lucky for Cap, the social worker assigned to his case is none other than Flora Donnelly, aka Floramundi - a former resident of Garland Farms herself. She knows exactly what Cap will be facing as a former hippie herself. The "outside" world will be a very harsh place for a peace-loving, vegetarian hippie such as Cap, who has been quite sheltered all his life.

Rather than place Cap with a foster family, Flora takes him home herself. Her daughter, Sophie, is horrified. As a high school student more worried about dating than grades, Sophie sees Cap as everything that's wrong with her mother - too much of a bleeding heart.

The kids at Claverage Middle School see him as a time-traveler, or possibly someone that has beamed in from outer space. No one wants to talk to him or be his friend, until a plan by uber-popular jock Zach backfires. Suddenly, everyone wants to help Cap, wants to be his friend, and wants nothing to do with Zach. It's a harsh lesson for the guy who was going to make eighth grade his year. When Zach finally teams up with the class loser that he'd originally intended to pick on, their plan has some disastrous results.

This was my second book from the middle school Battle of the Books list, and I would say I liked it better than Wonder. It's funny how many similarities there were though: both are about boys who are thrust into a mainstream school for the first time, both have been home-schooled up to that point, both have been protected by well-meaning yet short-sighted parents, and both have a distinctly different appearance from their fellow students.

I thought Schooled was a bit more realistic in some aspects, less so in others. But overall, I would definitely recommend this book to kids, maybe even some adults.

My battle with the Battle of the Books lists

I had my annual performance review the other week, and my boss has set some pretty high goals for me for the coming year. I, of course, set myself some, too, the most daring one being to tackle the reading lists for the Battle of the Books for both fifth grade and middle school students.

If you've never heard of BOB, think of the old Brain Game. It's a bit like that, but with literature as your only category. When I first started talking to one of my young patrons about BOB, I asked which book she was responsible for. She gave me an odd look, and I said something like, "That's how it works, right? You read one of the titles, and you're the go-to person for questions on that book?" The answer I got floored me. "Oh no!" this young brainiac replied. "You have to read and know ALL the books."

Oh.

Wow.

There are somewhere around 25-30 books on the current list.

Wow.

That's a lot of books. And while I do read a lot myself, it might take me a couple of months at least to get through that many. And then have to answer questions on any/all of them?

WOW.

Anyway, I've decided that I'm going to read each and every book on both lists. I've already got one under my belt, Wonder by A.J. Palacio. A great book about August "Auggie" Pullman, a little boy who's been through a lot, thanks to losing the genetic lottery. August has had surgeries to repair his cleft palate, which was probably the most minor of his problems. His eyes are too low, as well as his ears - which look more like little pieces of cauliflower than ordinary human ears. His hearing isn't great, and he'll probably need hearing aids. He's small for his age, and has been home schooled his whole life; his parents thought it wouldn't be fair to him to send him to "regular" school with all his hospitalizations. As August puts it, "I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse."

Then August has a bombshell dropped on him: his parents have decided he's well enough to start attending Beecher Prep. He'll be a brand new fifth grader, just like all the other kids entering fifth grade. Except that August isn't like all the other kids, and not just in his looks.

There are some nice dynamics here, and I really like the anti-bullying message. It's done with a fairly light touch as well as some humor. I thought the relationships in August's family were well-done, showing that parents don't always agree with each other, that they're human beings with feelings too. Then there's his big sister, Olivia. I really thought Palacio did an awesome job writing from the perspective of a sibling who has always been willing to stand back in the shadows, knowing that her special-needs brother comes first. When Via (as the entire family calls her) enters high school, though, she sees her chance for a new start, one that puts her as most important. It's tough reading her conflict at times; it's clear she loves her baby brother, but it's just as clear that she's suffered because of him, too.

While I really did like the book, I will admit to finding myself a bit skeptical that kids would warm up to August as they did. Granted, it doesn't happen overnight, but still...would real kids in this sometimes very cruel real world do the things these characters did? I kinda doubt it. I want to hope that they would, though, and perhaps if those kids read this book, they will.

One down, many, many more titles to go.

Naked City edited by Ellen Datlow

Finished! Finally...

Overall, not bad. A few stories were nice, a few were good enough that I will add those authors to my find-something-else-by-them list, and many were just "meh" - passable reading, but nothing to write home about.

I really enjoyed "Noble Rot" by Holly Black and "King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree" by Elizabeth Bear. I'd never read anything by these ladies before, and both had a wonderful way of telling her tale.

Only other honorable mention is "Underbridge" by Peter S. Beagle; he's got a character a character Cut'n-Shoot, who supposedly got the moniker from a Texas town. This is completely true, as I used to have to drive thru Cut and Shoot, TX to get to my parents' place when they lived just outside of Houston. It's a tiny town (Wikipedia says it's only 2.7 square miles, and that sounds about right), the sort that has one stoplight and one bar. And the parking lot of said bar is full of pretty much nothing but pickup trucks, and almost all of them have gun racks in the back window. Yes, there were always guns in the racks. While I'm sure the people of Cut and Shoot are nice enough folk, I tried to make sure that I drove through during the day, dusk at the latest.

As for the head-scratchers, there were a few of those, too. I liked "The Colliers' Venus (1893)" by Caitlin R. Kiernan well enough at first glance, but then it veered off into her usual "what's going on here?" territory. Le sigh. "The Skinny Girl" by Lucius Shepard was in the same vein: seemed pretty decent at first, but by the end, I wasn't really sure what happened.

Why do I pick up this sort of book, when it's obvious that I don't always like the stories? Well, because they are stories; it's a nice way to find a new author (I think it's really hard to write short stories, so if one comes off well, I know that writer's got some chops) and it's something that's easy to read at night - no getting so caught up in the story that I might end up sacrificing sleep to finish up.

"Marginal" titles

I've been working my way through Naked City, a collection of urban fantasy short stories, and I came across this turn of phrase in "The Projected Girl" by Lavie Tidhar. Here's a bit more of the original paragraph, so you get the full gist of the thing:

"D'you know," he said, as if imparting a great truth to his young audience, "these are marginal titles. A boy like you - you should be reading Agnon, Grossman, Oz, Appelfeld. Serious literature, not this trash."

Oh, how reading this brought back memories! Long ago, when I was still working in a used book store, I had a co-worker who was always on me about what I was reading. I was very much into horror at the time: vampires, werewolves, and lots of other scary stuff. I also picked up a lot of the paranormal romance authors, mostly because I didn't mind the spice and I could usually get my vamp/were fix easier with that genre. And I picked up other stuff that was fun, too, humor (this was the store where I discovered Jill Connor Browne and her Sweet Potato Queens), some philosophy (never did really get it), and once upon a time, an awesome book about female exploitation in slasher flicks (a book that spurred me to finally track down and watch I Spit on Your Grave...). In other words, I was reading for fun.

Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth from aforementioned co-worker, who kept saying that he/she didn't understand why I read such "trash" (and yes, I'm trying to protect the identity of this person). Why, oh why, would I waste my time on such garbage? I was an English major, for crying out loud - where was the serious literature? Why wasn't I continuing my studies of the greats? Why wouldn't I, at the very least, pick up a modern literary title? In other words, why was a reading such "marginal" work?

I'll tell you why: I enjoyed it. Honestly, I had read a lot of great stuff while working on my bachelor's. But that time was over, and I just wanted to read...well, what I wanted to read. And what I chose was light, fluffy stuff. OK, maybe not that fluffy, considering some of it was pretty good horror, but I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. I didn't want to be reading anything terribly deep. I didn't want to have to parse a sentence. I didn't want to lay out the motives of the protagonist. I just did not want to be reading "serious literature" at that time. This is what I explained to the co-worker. He/she was aghast, and actually said something to the effect that he/she was worried for my "literary soul".

Um, seriously? Can we say "pretentious"?

It's been many years since this episode, and I've read many, many books since then. As I've gotten older, I have gone back and started reading some "serious literature" again. I've read a few authors that I somehow never read (despite being an English major), and I've been reading a lot more non-fiction, perhaps trying to keep my grey matter working at its peak. But this has been my choice.

And when I want, I read lots of those "marginal" titles. What can I say? I like to be entertained.

A Fistful of Collars by Spencer Quinn

Just finished up the fifth book in the Chet and Bernie series by Spencer Quinn, A Fistful of Collars. Still a cute series about The Little Detective Agency, so named for Bernie Little. Chet is his dog and partner. The mystery is done pretty well, the characters are engaging, and Chet is...well, Chet.

While I like the idea of the story being told from a first-person perspective - namely Chet's POV - I found myself a bit annoyed at times this go-round. Yes, the author totally nails what it must be like to be in a dog's head: lots of jumping around from subject to subject, confusion over what certain sayings mean, how smells are so good and what they're like, lots of naps.

But this time I really noticed that often these quick jumps in POV were done so that we, the readers, weren't privileged to information that was obviously being related/revealed to the human characters. And that sort of had me a bit peeved. IMHO, one should never notice a literary "trick", regardless of what that trick is. Here, it's obviously what amounts to a jump-cut in Chet's POV so that we're kept in the dark. I get that Chet doesn't always pay attention (and who would when there's bacon around?) but this time it was often glaringly obvious what was happening.

Didn't make the book any less enjoyable, I suppose, as I raced through it. I do hope that the author doesn't use the construction quite so much in the next book, though, or at the very least, hides it to some extent. And I really hope we get to learn more about the pup who has been seen around the neighborhood, the one who looks suspiciously like Chet...

New directions, new beginnings, new and improved?

As I'm sure you've noticed by now, I'm not doing so well at keeping up with the book reviews. In fact, at this point I'd be surprised if any of you have stuck with this blog, as I post so infrequently. I always say I'll do better, and it doesn't happen.

So I've decided to simply...




take it in a new direction.

You thought I was going to say I was giving it up, didn't you? Truth be told, I did consider it. But I like the idea of my thoughts/opinions being out here too much to just throw in the towel. However, that realization got me to thinking of what I might want to do with this thing. Obviously the review thing didn't really work out. And the "let me tell you about what's coming out this week/month" thing didn't work, either. (What? You don't remember that? Don't feel bad...it was a while back and it didn't last long).

What to do, what to do.

Why not do what I do best? Just talk about books in general, and what I'm reading, trends I see in the business, etc? Sort of like what I do at the library; now you can ALL be my patrons!

The plan now is this: I will try to blog at least 4 days/week, and it will be about books. The posts may not be long, but I will post often. I'd love to get some discussion going on the topics I muse about, so please, feel free to leave comments!

Keep your fingers crossed that this change is successful, and that it even brings in some new readers/followers. If not, then yeah, I'll probably have to give serious consideration to shutting this down...