Interview with Annabel Monaghan, author of new YA novel, A Girl Named Digit

You know that feeling you get from holding a new book in your hands, excited by the promise of the first few pages?  That’s how I felt when I first read A Girl Named Digit by Annabel Monaghan.  It was a Saturday morning.  My Kindle and I crept downstairs in the dim morning light and hid under a blanket on the far end of the couch in the sunroom, pretending that we were still asleep.  In that way, I disappeared from my family’s radar for the better part of the morning, and by the time they found me and begged for breakfast, I was already hooked on Digit.

            

And that was good news, because before reading her novel, I was already hooked on Annabel Monaghan.

Annabel and I met in a novel writing workshop at Sarah Lawrence College in the Fall of 2010.  She was there to workshop a project called Digit, and since her novel was completed and the rest of ours were not, we read her manuscript first.  In person, Annabel is funny and self-deprecating and humble and smart.  She’s the one you want to sit next to in class so that you can pass notes back and forth and give each other meaningful eye rolls, as if a continuing education course at a local college is the same setting as your high school biology lab.  (Which, in a way, it is.) By week two, we had our own little inside jokes. As I sank into my couch, I desperately hoped that her book would live up to the real her. Continue reading here.

Loved the Hunger Games? Other Great YA Books that Adults Should Be Reading

Confession: I read children’s books. For fun. Like, all the time. Did you get hooked on Harry Potter? Torn apart by Twilight? Did you Hunger for more of The Hunger Games? Did you think, well, I’ll only do it this one time, because they’re making the series into movies and everybody’s reading them? Well, that’s nothing.

When I‘m on a YA bender – and, hello world, I’m on one now! -- I read at least one teen title a week.

For me, reading YA is like having a candy bar in the middle of my lifelong diet. Filled with nougaty goodness, it’s easy to digest and damned satisfying. And, when I’m done, I don’t have to discuss it with my book club.

Reading YA is like temporarily leaving your grown-up, responsible day job to cut class and hang out in the food court at the mall with your new BFF.

It’s, like, totally ahmayzing.

So, without further ado, here are some of my top picks for grown-ups who sometimes wish they could recapture their teen years or who just like reading about adolescence. Maybe you have an adolescent in your house and you can share titles. Maybe you don’t. It doesn’t matter to me either way. I’m a book pusher and this is just good stuff.

Read the rest on the Huffington Post...

Once Bitten

Do you know what makes me feel old? Vampire books.

Betcha didn’t see that coming. Truth is, neither did I.

A few weeks ago, I walked into Borders and started browsing. I made my way through the “New and Noteworthy” paperbacks, beyond The New York Times bestsellers, and past the 3-for-2 sale table. But nothing was calling my name.

I ended up wandering into the back where the YA/Teen section lives, realizing I hadn’t done that for a while. You see, my love for teen fiction runs almost as deep as my love for my own offspring. And it’s been around a lot longer.

But it’s hard to be completely faithful, you know. I’m a very busy person, and I can’t make room in my life for everyone all the time.

I swear, I only turned my back on it for a moment. A few months, at the very most.

And now I’m feeling guilty. Because, based on what I witnessed in Borders, it appears that I have been paying too much attention to my young children and not enough time to my first love. In the short time that I have been away from her, my teenager fiction has grown angry and dark.

In bookstores like Borders and Barnes and Noble, the brightly-covered “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” series and tartan-plaid and striped “Clique” titles have been shelved, along with anything else that might be considered “too cute” to teens. Instead, Goth-like paper candelabras hang theatrically over a huge new section of tables and displays promoting all things…vampire.

Almost every book in the section has a black cover (or blackish purple, or purplish black, give or take a touch of midnight blue) and uses what I can only describe as vampire font (something Vlad the Impaler and Dracula might choose were they to email each other). The craze started by Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” has picked up speed at an alarming rate. The proliferation of teenage vampire serials is bloody frightening.

To begin, there’s the Christopher Pike “Thirst” series, promoting “Human urges. Fatal consequences.” There’s Richelle Mead’s “Vampire Academy” (five books in all, so far), “The House of Night” novels by Kristin and PC Cast, and Smith’s “The Vampire Diaries.” In Alyson Noel’s “Immortals” series, it appears that the main characters are not vampires themselves, but I have a feeling they run into some, since they have “traveled through countless past lives – and fought off the world’s darkest enemies – so they could be together forever.”

Isn’t that sweet?

My personal favorite is “Intertwined” by Gena Showalter. The cover art is cool, and just check out this blurb: “Most sixteen-year-olds have friends. Aden Stone has four human souls living inside him. One can time-travel. One can raise the dead. One can tell the future. And one can possess another human.” I mean, talk about over-scheduling your teenager! Really. Someone has to tell this guy that he doesn’t have to be all things to all people. These days, I hear The Ivy League is looking for kids who excel at one thing.

Like just being a vampire.

Moving on.

As far as I can tell, there are at least six “Vampire Kisses” novels by Ellen Schreiber, who used to write fun, peppy things like “Teenage Mermaid” and “Comedy Girl” before realizing that what teens want these days are not fishy teens or funny teens but dead and/or possessed and/or ghost teens. So she wisely jumped on the bandwagon and is probably making a lot more money by doing so, if you don’t mind me saying.

In short, vampires are to teens what Chick Lit was to housewives a few years ago: an overnight publishing sensation.

I’m totally and completely out of the loop on this phenomenon. It’s not like I didn’t know about the “Twilight” series, it’s just that I sooooo didn’t care. I read the first 250 pages of “Twilight” and put it down, much to the (vocal and somewhat hostile) displeasure of my 6th grade students (and even some of my grown-up friends). Team Jacob or Team Edward? Whatever. And that’s the part that makes me feel disconnected, because I just don’t care about these vampire books, nor about the vampire blockbuster movies that spin off them, nor about the teens that become famous for playing vampires and werewolves in these movies.

Which brings me to “People” magazine.

Who are these supposedly-famous people in “People?”

I even asked my husband, Brett, if he could identify anyone in the latest issue. We had flipped through half of it without recognizing a single face.

“I recognize him,” Brett pointed with satisfaction.

“Yeah, but…” I began.

“What? He counts.”

“That’s the president.” I said. “Of the United States.”

“He’s in the magazine and I recognize him.” He smiled. “I passed your little test.”

“Ugh!” I groaned, turning the page and seeing fangs.

“What?”

“There are even werewolves in “People” magazine!”

“What do people see in such creatures?” Brett wondered, adding, “I wonder if the Obamas let their daughters read those types of books and see the “Twilight” movies.”

Good questions, actually.

Ones that I was now on the verge of calling them to ask. Right there from the teen section of Borders. With all these vampires staring at me, canines exposed.

Until I saw it. On the display shelf.

VC Andrews’ “Flowers in the Attic.”

Amidst the new millennium’s immortals and other, dark netherwordly creatures, there was a repackaged, black-covered homage to my youth. Hands trembling, I picked it up to find that it was actually the complete, 5-book Dollanganger series, including “Petals on the Wind” and “If There Be Thorns.”

The first of these books, published in 1979, was so popular that it shot to the top of the bestseller’s list in only 2 weeks and remained there for almost 4 months. So much pressure was put on the author to meet demands for a sequel that the publication date for the second was pushed up by several months. These books caused a stir. They were a teen sensation.

There was even a movie version, back when I knew who the people in “People” magazine were.

I loved theses gothic horror novels.

They made my heart beat fast.

As I sat there on the floor of the YA section in Borders, clutching one of my favorite teen series of all time, the world became whole again. Because, it turns out that I’m not out of touch with what’s hip and cool with teens. I just experienced it already, three decades ago, with a different sort of hero and heroine and a different sort of forbidden love.

Remember getting swept up like that?

Let’s hope that every teen experiences that sensation, of reading something so exciting, so fundamentally nourishing in its content that she cannot tear herself away. For a few stolen moments, the real world becomes less important than the world inside those pages.

Teenaged vampires. Huh.

It’s a trend I can really sink my teeth into after all.

Bookstalking 101: Summer Reading for Kids

Are you ready for summer reading, boys and girls? Moms and dads? Children of all ages? I am. And I’m going to tell you what to read this summer, because I’m pushy like that. And also because I care.

First of all, let’s start with the kids. The school summer reading lists are coming out, marking my favorite time of year. There’s nothing I like better than a slightly clueless 12 year old roaming a bookstore with his or her mom or dad in tow. Why is this? Because I love books. And I love giving advice. Combine the two, and you’ve got my favorite pastime: giving people advice about what to read.

I’m a little bit embarrassed to admit this, but I actually stalk families at Borders.

“Don’t say that you stalk them,” Brett told me while reading a draft of this article. “That’s kinda creepy.”

“But that’s what I do! Like, in a friendly, helpful kind of way. I’m a bookstalker.”

“Yeah. See, that’s creepy. Call it something else. Like Booktalker.”

“I don’t like that. It sounds too much like horse whisperer.”

So, what I mean is that, occasionally, I “follow” families around the aisles in the back of the store and listen in just to get a sense of whether or not my services are needed. And if so, I pounce.

Imagine me hiding behind a copy of the latest Secrets of My Hollywood Life by Jen Calonita (a must read if you are a 10-14 year old girl, btw. So good!). I am pretending to be absorbed with the text, like Clark Kent with his newspaper, on the verge of fighting crime as Superman. Only I’m a female, and I don’t wear glasses. Plus, I would look weird in all that spandex. But you get the idea.

“I think this one seems good,” a mom might say to her son, clearly exasperated after ten minutes of failed attempts with different titles. “Get this one.”

The child crinkles his nose at it, as if the book smells like moldy cheese. He’s not convinced that this is what he wants to read during rest hour at camp.
Besides which, “this one” is a 400 page monster of a classic with words printed so closely together that even I might fall asleep by page 7. This boy must be saved! It’s time for the Bookstalker.

“Hi, there,” I’ll begin, putting on my most friendly, wide-eyed facial expression. “I know a lot about these books. Maybe I can help. Tell me what you like to read.” It’s usually as easy as that.

The mom smiles and relaxes as she hands me the school’s summer reading list. The child is so stunned that he drops the tome that he was holding onto my toes. But that’s the price you pay as a bookstalker. Sometimes, matching kids with appropriate texts can hurt just a little bit.

Now, I must admit that I am pretty well-read in the YA genre (young adult, natch), having spent over a decade as a middle school English teacher. And although I am no longer teaching middle school, I do meet regularly with a bunch of enthusiastic (and by that, I mean loud) 13-year old girls for a monthly book group. We eat home-baked goods while throwing jellybeans at each other, and I try to get them to talk about the book. It’s fun. Really.

And when I’m not reading YA lit with them, I’m reading it with my grad students. As professor to these 25 teachers and teachers-to-be, I lead discussions each week about new, noteworthy and classic titles in the genre. The adults don’t throw jellybeans like the kids do, surprising as that may be. But they do have just as strong opinions about the Twilight series.

If you are a middle schooler, or a parent of such a creature, listen up, because I’m only gonna say it once.

Obviously, read the entire Lightning Thief series. The fifth and final installment just came out on May 5th, and the movie version of the first book will be released next year. The author, Rick Riordan, spoke at the Scarsdale Middle School in March, so he’s become a bit of an institution already around here. It’s what we in the business of bookstalking call a “no-brainer.” If you like those, read Kiki Strike or The Mysterious Benedict Society. Read Susan Beth Pheffer’s Life as We Knew It because my teen book group loved it. If you are interested in questions about life and death, read Elsewhere and Heaven Looks a lot Like the Mall (both of which I would call Lovely Bones lite). Read Diary of a Wimpy Kid for laughs and The Graveyard Book if you want to get spooked.

If you are a girl going into 8th grade, read Dairy Queen by Catherine Murdoch, and when you finish it, read the sequel. Read anything and everything by Sonya Sones. Read Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. (Not my book group girls – please, read it with me in September! Wait! Don’t cheat! I’m serious! And don’t throw that at me!) Read Wintergirls or Thirteen Reasons Why if you like to get depressed, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. And if you are an older boy (8th -9th grade and up), read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian because Sherman Alexie rocks, or Cory Doctorow’s Litle Brother (a sort of play-on-words of Orwell’s Big one).

And, yes, I know I sound ridiculous saying “rocks” about an author.

If you want to read along with me this summer, I am going to read The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. It’s destined to be the next runaway hit for teens. I can’t wait to put on the sunscreen, lie on a beach chair, and dig in to this futuristic, dystopian tale.

Don’t worry, grown-ups. It’s your turn next week.