Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Starcrossed: 100 % Naughty-Bit Free




No uncomfortable human or canine tissues are featured in Mark Schreiber's Starcrossed, the latest Flux title to land in our warehouse (and soon at a bookstore near you). Yes, some tattoos are removed, and I admit, astrology is relied upon more heavily than some will be comfortable with. And there are crop circles. And stolen bicycles. But otherwise, this is an entirely wholesome book, full of good, clean, scrotum-free fun. Really.

Nobody knows anything, really

It is nice to be reminded from time to time that much of publishing is a series of educated guesses based on what little information we have and our instincts about what readers might want. While reading Publishers Lunch, I encountered a reminder. I noticed the other day that another editor and I probably traded authors. I don't mean traded like baseball cards, more like ships passing in the night. Essentially, it looks like we both were looking at the same two projects and we both passed on one project and bid for another--just not the same one and not from the author we'd already worked with. There's no easy way to verify this (don't know the other editor), but I'm pretty sure it's true.

This is actually a more pleasant version of another Publishers-Lunch-based reminder, the one where a manuscript you hated and dismissed as unpublishable sells for a fabulous sum at auction. Those keep me up nights, too.

These stories are especially useful to have on hand when people outside of publishing ask "So, how much time do you spend focus-grouping those kids' books?" It's not quite as funny as the Stephen Cobert-esque "focus-group-in-your-gut" answer.

Monday, February 26, 2007

You can't count on me

So, here's that unreliable narrator post . . .

I distinctly remember two books--actually, one book and a trilogy--from late elementary school: the novel I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier and a trilogy by John Christopher called The Tripod Trilogy. I loved those books equally, but now I think I see that they stood on opposite sides of a certain kind of developmental divide.

The Tripods Trilogy takes place in a distant future where mysterious totalitarian alien robots (the tripods) have enslaved humanity and pushed it back to a pre-Industrial Revolution agrarian existence. The books are told in first person by a boy (13? I don't remember) who, along with two others, endeavors to resist the tripods. It's a wonderfully spare yet vivid and gripping sort of dystopian science fiction, and I loved it.

I Am the Cheese is also first person, told by a 14 year old boy, but it was set in what I felt like was contemporary America (not really, it was published in 1977 and I was reading it in the late 80s). Now, I think the best way to describe it is a boy's-eye view of a Graham Greene Cold-War spy novel. It's basically the story of a child coming to terms with his father's involvement in espionage and suffering the consequences. Kinda. I still can't describe it well.

Anyway, I still see distinct similarities that begin to explain why I loved both books at almost the same time. They were both first-person books with ample adventure and characters a bit older than I was. They both have a slightly subversive undertone--a distrust of authority that I found appealing.

But the differences are striking, too. My best friend, Mike Rost, also read the Tripod books, and we spent a lot of time talking about them, discussing the movie version we'd like to make, which character we'd like to be, etc. Not so for I Am the Cheese. I don't think I discussed this book with anyone. It was a private enjoyment (and not simply for the very slight hint of sex it harbored), and even in private, I never identified with Adam Farmer, the book's narrator, in the way I did with the tripod book's narrator. Now I also notice that the evil in the Tripods, though mysterious in nature (what was in those tripods?), is identifiable, uncomplicated in its evil, and alien, whereas in I Am the Cheese, the enemy is not only mysterious but unidentified, probably familiar, and extremely complicated.

When I look at it now, the first line of I Am the Cheese holds a big clue: "I am riding the bicycle, and I am on Route 31 in Monument, Massachusetts . . . " It's the simplest kind of sentence, simpler than most senstences in the Tripods books. Basically, here I am and here is what I am doing. But by the time you get to the end of the book, you know this sentence is, at best, only half true, even thought the narrator believes he's telling the whole truth. This was the first time I'd encountered this kind of storytelling (or the first time I'd noticed), where the author and the narrator are telling the reader distinctly different stories.

The "I" who tells the stories in the Tripod books is telling the story straight; there's nothing that the author wants you to know that the narrator isn't telling you. Satisfaction comes from immersion in the story, from looking at the world through the narrator's eyes as much as possible. Geometrically speaking, it's a straight line between the three principals: author, fictional narrative "I," and the reader.

In Cormier's novel, the "I" believes he's telling the story straight, but the author hopes that you, eventually, see a story that the narrator does not--or at least to be very unsure of what you've just read (which was about as far as I got, the first time I read it). Satisfaction comes from resisting immersion in the narrator's story, from remaining aware enough to recognize oddities and evidence of patterns. Geometrically, you cannot count on being able to draw a straight line from you, the reader through the narrator and into the author--at best, it's a wobbly triangle.

I see now that the Tripods Trilogy belonged to my pre-adolescent self, whereas the cryptic, confused appeal of I Am the Cheese was the harbinger of the horror of adolesence. (Thank God I didn't see it that way then. I'd have been an even bigger prat than I already was.)

I already said I love unreliability in YA narrators, but it's not because I think they're more advanced or more difficult to write or because I think it's good for anyone's critical thinking skills. Certainly not because I think they necessarily sell better. I love narrative unreliability because I think it is the perfect vehicle for capturing the chaos of adolescence. It's right for the genre in the way third-person omniscient is right for high fantasy. I think it reveals a distinct space between childhood and adulthood where reliability and trust are radically redefined or eliminated all together.

I'm inclined, now, to think of adolescence as a Tower of Babel moment or series of such moments. Think about it: some time before high school (toward the end of fifth grade if you were like me) God or some other not entirely benevolent entity notices that if you were to continue on this path uninterrupted, you will become a godlike being: understanding, intelligent, and rational but also guileless, innocent, and highly uncynical. And for better or worse, the entity believes this is unacceptable (or maybe just boring), and so he has created adolescence, which, in the course of preventing you from remaining your innocent, idealized fifth-grade self, causes three things to happen: it makes you generally incomprehensible to the world for a period of several years; it makes you realize that there is much less that you can truly rely on than you ever imagined; and it makes you realize that you are, more often than not, completely on your own when it comes to making sense of the world and of yourself. No one, especially not a good YA author, is going to make this last one easier for you.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Edward Abbey, YA author



Flux author and new-to-Blogger blogger Brian Mandabach inaugurated his blog's new home by invoking Edward Abbey, thus continuing the weird psychic connection he and I seem to have (when I first read Brian's book I was listening to music, and it was like he was predicting the next song on my iPod with his many musical references).


When I was a YA, I devoured Edward Abbey, particularly his novels (The Monkey Wrench Gang was my favorite) and his book of disconnected thoughts, Voice Crying in the Wilderness. Abbey wrote about adults, but his adults always seemed be trying to escape the adult world for a more visceral existence in a way that resonated for 14-year-old me (to "light out for the territory" as Brian Mandabach would probably say, borrowing from Hemingway Twain). I spent hours reading and rereading George Washington Heyduke's escape into the Maze, the impenetrable canyon desert of Utah that Abbey conjured so well. It really appealed to me.
Anyway, check out Brian's blog here and his old one on MySpace.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

The Other Sister in School Library Journal


(I'm sorry for what I said about them hating Ringo. He really was a crap drummer.)



The Other Sister by S.T. Underdahl
"... This vivid, realistic portrait of a family in transition will hold readers' interest to the very last page." -Deborah Vose, Highlands Elementary School, Braintree, MA


Congrats, "S.T."!

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

I love it when a plan comes together


Sometimes half-baked Friday-afternoon ideas work out. The Fat Girl did.

In addition to acquiring books through the normal author/agent-manuscript channels, I'm always looking for reprint opportunities, particularly with books that have gone out of print but deserve an opportunity to be rediscovered by a new audience (this is a particular advantage of rapid audience turnover).

Last November, Horn Book editor Roger Sutton blogged about Chris Lynch's wonderful novel, Inexcusable, a book which affected me for days after I read it. In his blog about Lynch's novel, Sutton mentioned another, older book with a "fabulously unreliable narrator," The Fat Girl by Marilyn Sachs. I coveted more of these unreliable narrators for Flux (still do; there's a whole other blog entry someday about why I like unreliable YA) and was reading all I could, so naturally I tried to find Sachs' novel. I couldn't; it was out of print. My excitement increased. I found a used copy (twice the cover price for a massacred old paperback), read it, loved it, and decided we needed to publish it (and fortunately my superiors agreed).

To make a long story short, Ms. Sachs was easy to reach and eventually agreeable (in the course of negotiation, we had a wonderful conversation about Jane Austen, and she very graciously sent me a signed copy of her then-new book, First Impressions). And now, today, an early copy of the actual Flux edition of The Fat Girl landed on my desk. I'm obviously very excited, but perhaps not nearly as much as Flux publicist Brian, who may actually do a Green Brothers Happy Dance when he gets his copies.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Where are you, James Joyce?

It's protect-our-precious-children-from-naughty-words month here on the interwebs, and it knows no boundaries: first an Eve Ensler play that I though had been around too long to cause any more fuss and now a newly annointed Newbery winner. This was all over the news last week, and I think all the good jokes have been told. ("Mommy, what's a hoo-ha?"). And now this story about the 2006 Newbery winner and its use of the word "scrotum" is, at the moment, the most forwarded piece on the NYTimes.com, and it even managed to rise to the notice of Gawker.com (though they've decided it's YA).

I'm going to resist the urge to defend specifically works I haven't read (I haven't read The Higher Power of Lucky, only articles about it) or ones that, in the manner of their being assaulted, are completely vindicated and widely promoted (attacking the Vagina Monologues in 2007? So, you've been in a cave for the last decade, eh?). But in the Times article, Higher Power of Lucky author Susan Patron makes such a beautiful case for the word that I want to rush out and buy the book. She says: “The word is just so delicious. The sound of the word to Lucky is so evocative. It’s one of those words that’s so interesting because of the sound of the word.”

It makes me believe in the future of humanity when I read statements like this. This is an author who gets it.

James Joyce tie in? Oh, yeah. In 1932, a US Federal court ruled that Ulysses was not, in fact, obscene, and in my mind Joyce owns the word "scrotum" (from the first chapter of Ulysses): "The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea."

In fact, now that I read the passage from The Higher Power of Lucky with the word, I wonder if Ms. Patron isn't channeling Joyce herself (from the Times, again): “'Scrotum' sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

Lovely! Someone get the woman a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy.

-Andrew Karre

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Why does SLJ hate Ringo?

Why? (Look at the cover)

Not only did they drop his name, but they erased him from the painting on the cover and moved George into his place.

At least they were subversive enough to leave Paul's cigarette (perhaps a subtle comment on Clement Hurd's participation in the Joseph Stalin Smoking Cessation Program?)

Flux News. I report. You decide.

(Sorry, I just had to come to Ringo's defense.)