And this is what my bookish girls are up to at the start of summer:

K is jumping on the Percy Jackson bandwagon and is in the middle of listening to her dad read her The Lightning Thief. She says, “It’s great!” and “I like Annabeth a LOT.”

A attempted to read The Apothecary by Maile Meloy, but bailed on it about a third of the way through. Partly because it wasn’t gelling with her — her biggest complaint: “I knew what was going to happen before it happened!” — and partly because the lure of Percy Jackson is just too strong. She’s picked up the series, and is happily ensconced in it again. For what it’s worth, I’m almost done with The Apothecary, and I quite like it.

I picked up The Bad Queen by Carolyn Meyer on a whim for C, because she’s expressed interest in Marie Antoinette before. She really liked this one, reading it twice and declaring that she MUST own this one. It’s ruined all other reading for her for a while.

And M has been spending the weeks since graduating vegging on Tumblr (yes, she is a fangirl). She has picked up The Monk and the Philosopher, by Jean Francois Revel, which she says is “really, really smart” so she just reads a little bit at a time.

Oh: and I just realized I never updated about my book group. While we got a mention on our chalkboard,

it was a dismal failure. I had one girl show up to the 3-5th grade one. And we managed to wrangle in someone else (who is going to be in Europe all summer, so it was pretty pointless). And NO ONE showed up for the 6-8th grade book group, which prompted an interesting discussion with C on the lack of readers in her age group. She contended that there are two things going on: 1) the kids she knows, at least, are pretty  determined to read only what they “like”, and they’re not very interested in branching out. Which is part of the reason series books do SO well. And why there are so many dystopian/paranormal/whatever read-alikes. And 2) the girls only read “girl” books and the boys only read “boy” books. So, even though my first book, Cold Fury, has immense crossover appeal (I mean, really: it’s about the mafia for heaven’s sake), boys won’t pick it up because there’s a girl on the cover. And my second book, Okay for Now (which is brilliant, but I can’t even get C to read it), won’t do well because it’s about a boy.

I find all of this incredibly frustrating. It’s not that I expected it all to be wildly successful the first meeting, but I  kind of hoped there’d be more. And I’m a bit wary about this second meeting on Saturday. What if no one shows up again? Do I throw in the towel? How do I market this better (it doesn’t help that our marketing person at work is more than overwhelmed!)? Is it really as hopeless as C says it is?

What do you think?