10 Questions for Jennifer Nielsen

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I got an inkling to see if I could snag Jennifer Nielsen for my interview series when we shortlisted her for the Cybils Middle Grade Science Fiction/Fantasy award. And then when The False Prince won? I seriously considered it. But then I read The Runaway King last month and that sealed the deal. Thankfully, in between her busy touring schedule (plus moving!) she found time to answer my questions. Obviously, there will be spoilers for both The False Prince and The Runaway King ahead.

MF: Tell us how you came up with the idea for Sage/Jaron and his story. What inspired it?
JN: The seeds for the story had been in my mind for a long time, but I could never find the right hero to bear the weight of the story. Sage (a name I’ll use interchangeably with Jaron) was found in a song by Eddie Vedder called “Guaranteed.” The lines of the song said, “I knew all the rules, but the rules did not know me, guaranteed.” And from that line, Sage was born.

MF: I’ve always wondered this about fantasy writers: how did you go about creating a whole world for your story to be set in?
JN: I started with the kingdom of Carthya and knew I wanted to build into the world some factors that would make it harder for Jaron to win. So I wanted it small, landlocked, and surrounded by unfriendly countries. Other details from the map got filled in as I planned for specific plot events that I knew would happen. Some things that may not seem significant from that map become more important later on.

MF: The Runaway King has a slightly different feel to it than The False Prince did. What were the differences and challenges with writing this one (as compared to the first)?
JN: The False Prince is really a game of wits, and challenges Sage mentally. The Runaway King is his physical test, and I push him to his limits there. The challenge I felt in writing this one was to avoid the mid-book slump that sometimes happens in trilogies. So I needed a story that could still stand on its own, but one that also linked the first and third books together.

MF: There are so many little things to love in this series. Do you have a favorite character or scene?
JN: In The Runaway King, I really love when Jaron returns to his castle at the end of the book. To me, that’s a profound scene as he realizes that he finally has the respect of his people. When I wrote it, I had the image in my mind of Frodo in the final Lord of the Rings movie, when Aragorn and all the kingdom bows to Frodo. That’s when Frodo finally feels the love for what he’d done. I think the same expression would’ve been on Jaron’s face when he comes home.

MF: If you had to choose one, which would it be: pirates or thieves?
JN:  Thieves. They’re every bit as dangerous, but have to be more subtle, which I find interesting.

MF: Since this is a series, did you have any idea what was going to happen in the later books when you started writing The False Prince?
JN:  I had a general idea for each book that I wanted to write, though most of the details have evolved along the way. That’s a fun discovery though, of knowing where I was going, but getting to figure out how to get there.

MF: Did you always intend to write for middle grade and YA audiences, or did you just fall into it?
JN: No, I actually started out trying to write adult women’s suspense, and it just wasn’t that good. About six months before the final Harry Potter book came out, I saw an online fan fiction challenge to write the last book – to wrap up all the threads in our own story concept. I had been a huge fan of the books and so I took the challenge, just to see if I could do it for myself. I had more fun in those few weeks than I’d ever had before and emerged from the process realizing I’d been writing in the wrong genre. I’d been searching for a long time for my voice as a writer – but to find it, I needed to write for young people
MF: Who, or what, inspires you to write?
JN: Story prompts are with me all the time. I could never write them all, but some stick with me more than others, and if I let them linger, eventually a character will emerge and begin pestering me (such as Sage). For me, writing is like finally scratching the itch in that hard to reach place.

MF: What’s the last book you read and loved, and why did you love it?
JN: One of my favorite recent reads was Robin LaFevers’ GRAVE MERCY. It’s a wonderful book, beautifully written, and steeped in the history of its setting. I am counting the minutes before I can get the next in that series, DARK TRIUMPH.

MF: So, if you can tell us: what’s in store for Jaron in the next installment?
JN: Trouble. Lots and lots of trouble. But knowing Jaron, you wouldn’t expect anything else, right?

MF: Right! Thank you so much for your time!

Eighty Days

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Nelly Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World
by Matthew Goodman
ages: adult
First sentence: “She was a young woman in a plaid coat and cap, neither tall nor short, dark nor fair, not quite pretty enough to turn a head: the sort of woman, who could, if necessary, lose herself in a crowd.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy received from my place of employment.

I think I’d heard of Nelly Bly before reading Matt Phelan’s Around the World, but I’m not sure where or why I knew of her. I do remember that I was interested in her story after finishing that graphic novel, so when I chanced upon this ARC at work, I picked it up, curious to know more about Bly and her trip around the world.

It turns out that Bly wasn’t the only one traveling around the world. A competitor of her sponsoring newspaper sent their own reporter — Elizabeth Bislund, who in many ways was the opposite of Bly: elegant, refined, pretty, literary — on a trip in the opposite direction, making it a race not only against time, but against each other.

The thing I liked most about this book, I think, was that Goodman not only thoroughly examined these two women, and their histories and how they became to be newspaper women, but the history of the time. He gave me, as a reader, a sense of this time of anticipation, sitting on the cusp of the modern world. And the fact that both Bly and Bisland could do something like travel around the world in less than 80 days, by themselves.

I found myself rooting for one or the other (I honestly didn’t know, though I could guess, which one won), finding myself liking one or the other at any given time during the book. Bly was more plucky, for lack of a better world, going around the world with one suitcase, and whole lot more drive than Bisland. She was, on the other hand, extremely patriotic — she viewed the world through a U.S.-colored lens, and found everything else lacking, something which grated on me. Bisland was the more open-minded traveler, less determined to “win” and more willing to look at the world on its own terms (which were, admittedly, decidedly British in the 1880s). For that, I think she was the better off.

Perhaps, most revealing, was the epilogue, where Goodman sketched out the rest of these women’s lives. There is a price for fame, fleeting as it is, and Bly paid it.

It’s an interesting work of history, engaging and well-written, and I thoroughly enjoyed spending time learning about both this remarkable time and these fascinating women.

March 2013 Wrap-Up

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Happy Easter! May you all be enjoying lovely spring days, and family, and lots of time to read!

And now for the March round-up…. I read quite a few excellent books this month, at least four of which I could have picked. But I think that my absolute favorite this month was:

Giants Beware! for spunk, heart, and pure awesomeness.

The rest:

YA:

The Madness Underneath
No Crystal Stair
Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl

Tokyo Heist

Tiger Lily 

Prophecy

Audiobook:

Pride and Prejudice
Madame Bovary (DNF)

Middle Grade:

Eva of the Farm

Looking for Me

Jinx
The Runaway King

A Tangle of Knots

Non-fiction:

Temple Grandin

Graphic Novel:

Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales: One Dead Spy

Adult Fiction:

Tell the Wolves I’m Home

 What great books did you read this month??

Tiger Lily

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by Jodi Lynn Anderson
ages: 12+
First sentence: “She stands on the cliffs, near the old crumbling stone house.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

I am not a fan of Peter Pan. I find it sexist, annoying, and underdeveloped. And so, a retelling of the story wasn’t on my radar as something I really needed (or wanted) to read.

But this (this month’s YAckers pick) retelling, from Tiger Lily’s point of view, not only gives the Peter Pan story some depth, it softens the immaturity of Pan, and gives power to both Tiger Lily and Tinker Bell (though Wendy still comes off as a brat), which is something I admired.

Tiger Lily is the daughter of the Sky People’s shaman. She doesn’t quite fit in: she’s brusk and boyish, preferring the quiet of the woods to the busy-ness of her people. She is willing to follow tradition, and be a part of the community, so when she’s engaged to a brute of a man, she doesn’t argue. But then, quite by accident, she meets Peter. Peter, with his magnetic personality, impulsiveness, and winning smile. Tiger Lily doesn’t mean to fall in love. She doesn’t mean to get so involved in his life that she’s willing to give up everything she has. And yet, she finds Peter irresistible and can’t stay away.

The most unique thing about this book, I think, is that while it’s Tiger Lily’s story, Tinker Bell is the narrator.  It seemed like an odd choice at first, but as the story went on, I understood the choice. First, it gave the reader insight into Tink’s character — no longer is she “just” the fairy, but rather a vital and integral part of the story. Second, a story from Tiger Lily’s point of view would lack…. elegance. She wasn’t a terribly aware person, and probably didn’t know what she was feeling half the time. Tink was more aware, more knowledgeable about what was going on, and thus a more reliable narrator.

The other thing I really enjoyed was what Anderson did with the minor characters. Aside from Wendy, who doesn’t show up until 2/3 of the way through the book and basically serves no purpose, the rest of the minor characters — from the shaman Tik Tok; to Tiger Lily’s friend Pine Sap; to Hook and (especially) Smee — were given rich back stories and explanations behind their actions. It’s wonderfully faithful to the original story, while being it’s own creation.

Additionally, the writing was lovely. At it’s heart, it’s a story of first love, and Anderson captures all the turbulence of that perfectly. I didn’t think I wanted to read this one, but in the end, I’m so glad I did.

SLJs Battle of the (Kids’) Books, Week 3 (Part 2)

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Round 2, Match 3: Starry River of the Sky vs. Splendors & Glooms
What judge Thanhha Lai has to say about Starry River:

“Starry River drops readers into ancient China, yet its timeless theme of finding one’s self by returning to one’s roots will be understood by any video-game junkie living in, let’s say, Dallas.”

And about  Splendors:

“Readers then step into the enchanting horror of icy Strachan’s Ghyll, where a puppet, a witch, two kids and a villain come together for a good vs. evil battle that rivals any video game.  In this verbal version, the sentences alone will remind a certain junkie of what words can do—as entertainment.”

Her choice? Splendors. Do I agree? Yes. Although I enjoyed Starry River, between these two, Splendors is the richer, deeper novel.

Jonathan asks the most intriguing question in the commentary, though: ” Is there a subtle bias at work that favors young adult novels over middle grade novels?”

Possibly. Because, as adults (who are judging this), I think we crave the complexity in the story that a YA novel usually provides over a middle grade one. With the exception of Bomb and Starry River (up to now), the winners have been the complex, deeper novels, with richer narratives. It’ll be interesting to see if that trend holds (it probably will this year).

Round 2, Match 4: No Crystal Stair vs. Seraphina
What judge Paul Griffin had to say about No Crystal Stair:

“Lewis Michaux’s legacy is one of courage.  It’s in the literacy and fearless love he gave to his neighbors.  Part of Vaunda’s legacy will be that she showed us that love with selflessness.”

 And about Seraphina:

 Rachel never lets up on the tension, and this 450-page novel reads like a 200-page thriller.  I can see our YA friends trying to read it all in one sitting.  I know I did.

His decision? No Crystal Stair. Do I agree? NO! Actually, for the first time, I can see Roger Sutton‘s point about judges being wimps and not actually choosing. Griffin flipped. a. coin. to get the winner (at least he didn’t pretend!), and while I agree both of these books are excellent, I think Seraphina is the stronger novel. But perhaps that’s my bias for fantasy leaking out.

Between the two, though? I’m calling Splendors & Glooms to reach the final. Maybe I’ll be surprised.

Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl

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by Jesse Andrews
ages: 14+
First sentence: “I have no idea how to write this stupid book.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

Greg Gaines’ Method For Making It Through High School Unscathed: be friends with everyone. Or, rather: be friendly with everyone, but not get in really good with anyone. That way, he can coast through, unconnected, and basically unscathed. His only real “friend” (“coworker is more like it”) is Earl, with whom he makes films. They’re seniors, and while they’re not very good filmmakers they do okay, and life is good.

That is, until his mom gets Involved. See, the daughter of one of her friends, Rachel — whom Greg kind of knows from Hebrew school — develops leukemia and Greg’s mom thinks he should Be Her Friend in this Trying Time. Which is the last thing he wants. And yet, because of his mother’s Powers of Persuasion (and because he’s generally a decent enough kid), he and Earl end up a part of Rachel’s life. (Or what’s left of it. That’s not a spoiler: it says in the title that she’s dying.)

While I was reading, I came to think of this one as the anti-cancer-book cancer book. There was no Deeper Meaning. There were no Life Lessons. There was no Heartbreaking Moment. There were no tears. It took everything you expect from a kid-has-cancer-and-dies book and turned it on its head. In fact, it was aggressively ordinary. Greg is an ordinary kid (who strongly reminded me of a good friend’s son) who was just going through the motions, doing stuff he liked, not really a bad kid, but not really an ambitious one either. Earl is about the same, except he’s trying to manage things on top of an absolutely horrid living environment. (Which is just accepted as horrid, without any commentary). Rachel’s not even that extraordinary, either: she has cancer, sure, and maybe she’s dying, but what she really wants to do is hang out with her friends.

But, even in spite of its ordinariness (maybe because of it), Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl has hilarious moments. It’s uneven; not all of it is as brilliant as a few passages (again with the ordinary), but when it was on, in all it’s foul, 17-year-old boy glory, it was On. Snort soda through the nose funny.

It wasn’t my absolute favorite book of all time, but I thoroughly admire what Andrews did in this novel. (I tried to work donkey balls in somehow, but I just couldn’t make it work. Bummer.)

SLJ Battle of the (Kids’) Books, Week 3

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I missed last week due to a vacation, but there are THINGS To Say this week. And since I’m home, I can say them.

Round 2, Match 1 (last week, I know): Bomb vs. Code Name Verity
Leave it to Donna Jo Napoli to make the tough decisions. What she said about Bomb (if you haven’t read this, you need to. Now. It has the potential to win this thing.):

“It deftly weaves together the individuals, giving their backgrounds and the relevant factors that led them to be willing to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in New Mexico – the secret enclave where the bomb was developed.  We come to understand why some of those men betrayed the United States by giving information to the Soviets; they feared that the bomb’s being in the hands of only one nation would lead to too much of an imbalance of power, and they admired the philosophy (if not the actuality) of communism.”

And what she said about Code Name Verity (I was trying to explain to my friend that THIS is the magic of the book, as she abandoned it halfway, skipping to the end):

“So many things we learn in the first part of the book are revealed as false in the second part.  But we don’t feel tricked, because the author gets us so deeply inside Julie that the revelations only make us say, “Of course.”  This is the mark of a master story-teller.  I couldn’t put this book down.”

Which did she choose? Bomb. Do I agree? Well… much like Liz, I was heartbroken with the loss of my beloved Code Name Verity. But I agree with Napoli: Bomb is an important book, and because of that, I’m glad it’s moving on.

Round 2, Match 2: Endangered vs. The Fault in Our Stars
What judge Martine Leavitt had to say about Endangered (and why I REALLY need to read it!):

“You like adventure stories? Animal stories? War/dystopian stories? This book has it all. Sophie survives in the sanctuary with the bonobos for several weeks until she is no longer safe there. She begins a journey through the Congo to find her mother at the site where the bonobos are released into the wild. There are a lot of guns in the book. There are lots of bugs in this book. Deliciously horrible. You are never allowed to stop worrying about Otto. You are never allowed to stop loving him. You are never allowed to put the book down.”

 And about TFiOS:

“Somehow John Green writes the most romantic romance-story-that-is-not-a-romance-story ever.”

 Her decision? TFiOS. Of course. (I liked this quote: “The fault in the stars of Eliot Schrefer is that his book came up against The Fault in Our Stars. I wouldn’t want my book to come up against a John Green book in a dark alley.”) And of course, I agree.

I think the match between these two is going to be the toughest to call. But I’m going to go with TFiOS to head into the final.

Jinx

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by Sage Blackwood
ages: 9+
First sentence: “In the Urwald you grow up fast or not at all.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

The setting: the Urwald, a forest of no uncertain danger. There are trolls, werewolves, witches, and wizards out there and no one — NO ONE — left the Path unless they were asking for trouble. Needless to say, there is magic here. The Urwald has no king, and belongs to no country, in spite of what the two neighboring kingdoms seem to think.

The main character: Jinx, a boy who lives in one of the clearings, being raised by his stepparents (mother died; dad remarried; dad died; stepmother remarried), who don’t particularly want him. So, his stepfather takes him off the path, presumably to leave him there. Except they run into Simon, a wizard of some power. He’s not as Powerful (or Evil) as the Bonemaster (whom, everyone knows, sucks your soul out with a straw), but he’s powerful enough to stop Jinx’s stepdad and take Jinx as a sort of serving boy/apprentice.

The other characters: One of the most delightful things about this enchanting novel were the characters. There is the mysterious, yet somehow comforting, Simon and his spitfire wife, Sophie. There’s the cackling witch (I swear I could hear her) Dame Glammer, who traveled by butter churn. There were the friends (of sorts) that Jinx met when he finally (not that I minded the set up; it was so cleverly imagined) got around to Questing, Reven (whose curse was that he could not say who he was) and Elfwyn (whose curse is that she always has to tell the Truth). And then there was the Urwald itself, written in such a way to be a character in itself.

It’s not an action-packed page-turner of a middle grade fantasy, and I appreciated that. It was a slow reveal, a world to revel in, characters to enjoy a journey with. And if there’s a sequel, I will happily follow Jinx through whatever adventure he has next.

Two Middle Grade Verse Books

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I read these two back to back while getting my hair done a while ago. And since they were so similar in style and tone, I figured I needed to review them together.

Eva of the Farm
by: Dia Calhoun
ages: 9+
First sentence: “On top of the hill, I lean against the deer fence and write a poem in the sky.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

Twelve-year-old Eva lives on her family farm in Eastern Washington. For the most part, she’s been happy, but tough times have hit the area, and things are Changing for her. Her best friend’s family lost their farm and had to move to Seattle, and they’ve grown apart in the months since. And since finding out her family’s finances — not to mention the mounting medical bills from her younger brother’s illness — were more than precarious, Eva’s been trying to find ways to help, to find Hope in her life again.

For the most part, the book is a lovely verse novel. I liked that Calhoun tackled the plight of small farmers, and how hard it is to keep the small family farm going in this era of Big Farm. I enjoyed the imagery, and I especially liked the relationship Eva has with the Bead Woman, and the things about Hope and Love she learns. The thing that didn’t work for me was the poetry within the poetry. See, Eva’s a poet, and her poetry played a big role. But I almost felt like it was overkill: to have a novel in verse, and then throw in extra poetry. It just didn’t work for me. (And, yes, I skipped all the poems.)

But, otherwise, it’s a lovely little book.

Looking For Me
by: Betsy R. Rosenthal
ages: 9+
First sentence: “I’m just plain Edith.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

This one is a slim historical book about a large Jewish family in Baltimore based on the author’s mother’s life. Edith is number four in a family of 12 children, growing up during the Depression. Her father is remote, trying to make ends Follow my blog with Bloglovinmeet running a diner. Edith doesn’t really know who she is: she’s always being bossed around by her older siblings and being expected to take care of her younger ones. She doesn’t think she’s the brightest person (she doesn’t know all the big words, and she can’t spell terribly well). But she has a good heart.
 
While enjoyable, Looking for Me lacked the emotional punch that I wanted from this story. Maybe it had something to do with the form — though usually, verse novels don’t turn me off — but, I wanted more from this one. There’s a death that wracks the family, but I felt… nothing. I wanted to feel pain and hurt, and hope when Edith began recovering, but I was kept at a distance by the novel, and I found that ultimately disappointing. Also, while she got the business and crowdedness of a big family, she missed, somehow, the deep friendship and love that exists in a family that large.

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t brilliant either.

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No Crystal Stair

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by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
ages: 12+
First sentence: “Everybody keeps saying be satisfied with Jesus’s lvoe, and he will give us our daily bread.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

The subtitle for this one goes like this: “A documentary novel of the life and work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem bookseller.” It’s not really  nonfiction, though it looks and feels like nonfiction (with documents and pictures and “interivews” from people). It’s about someone I feel like I should have known about: Lewis Michaux, the owner of National Memorial Bookstore that was a fixture in Harlem until it went out of business in the mid-1970s. Many of the major players of both the black literary world and the Civil Rights movement spent time in Michaux’s bookstore, thinking and talking and reading.

The book follows Lewis and his family — his parents, and a couple of his brothers — through most of the 20th century, beginning in 1906, through his many failed ventures to his inception and success in the bookstore. It’s fascinating to read and think about: Lewis’s big thing was that black people can’t stop being Negros — that is, defined by white people — until they know their history. Which means: they need to read. And read about their people.

It got me thinking about the need for this even today. I’m not sure the issue has gone away, even though we don’t talk about it in those terms. People need to read about the Other (boys about girls, whites about people of color), but people also need to read about themselves, to know their history, and by knowing thier history, they can know who they are. Lewis really was a visionary in that regard.

The only thing I didn’t like about the book was that it was a “novel.” It’s mostly factual (the author’s note at the end talks about what is and what isn’t), but the fact that it’s categorized as fiction disappointed me. I know it was done for practical reasons — there wasn’t enough information out there about Lewis to make a non-fiction book out of — but, I felt kind of let down by the novelization.

That doesn’t mean the book isn’t worth reading; it is. It got me thinking, and that’s the best thing a book can do.