YA BOOK GIVEAWAYS THIS WEEK
Check out this post for our HUGE giveaway of FIVE copies of World After by Susan Ee: http://childrenspublishing.blogspot.com/2013/12/giveaway-of-world-after-5-copies-by.html
YA BOOK GIVEAWAYS LAST WEEK: WINNERS
One or Two Things I Learned About Love
by Dyan Sheldon
Signed Hardcover Giveaway
Candlewick
Released 12/10/2013
Winner – EllCee
If this first love is true love, why can’t Hildy hang out with her friends without feeling guilty? Dyan Sheldon takes on the possessive side of summer romance with humor and insight.
Hildy has only had two-and-a-half dates in her whole life, and she isn’t counting the half. It’s starting to look as if she’s never going to have a third date, or be kissed, or know a boy who is more than just a friend. Then, on an ordinary day, she meets Connor of the meltthat-ice-cap smile — and a summer that was going to be ordinary as toast turns into Hildy’s summer of love. But love for Hildy is a little more complicated than the songs and movies have led her to believe. It’s not so much girl-meets-boy-and loses-her-heart as boy-meets-girland-loses-his-mind. Part cautionary tale and part romantic comedy, Dyan Sheldon’s wry, diary-style novel weighs in on all ends of the relationship scale in a story of first love.
Author Question: What is your favorite thing about One or Two Things I Learned About Love?
That’s quite a question, not that I noticed how tricky it is until I actually sat down to answer it. At first I thought: This is too hard. There’s no way I can pick one thing that I like best about this novel. Novels are like cats and people, it’s not a single thing that you like, it’s everything together. However, I did think that if I were asked that same question about a book I’d read and not a book I’d actually written it would be a lot easier. So I started thinking about some of my most-loved books. The CURIOUS INCIDENT OF The DOG IN THE NIGHT; The WOMAN IN WHITE; CATCH-22; I CAPTURE THE CASTLE; PATCHWORK PLANET; STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG; The LONG GOODBYE etc. And then I started thinking about TV shows and films that I can watch over and over again. And I finally realized exactly what it is that I like about them: the characters. I am not a plot person, not as a writer and not as a reader. If a book (or film or TV show) is about nothing principally plot-centric, I don’t last more than twenty minutes. A plot is a plot. You can have a dozen books (or more) with the same plot, and what will separate the one you never forget from the one you never remember are the characters. They’re what makes a story come to life.
And it’s no different with my own book. The dinosaur joke in ONE OR TWO THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT LOVE always makes me smile, but at the end of the day my favorite thing is the characters. Not just Hildy, whose story this is, but all the peripheral characters — her parents and sisters and grandmother; her friends (I especially love Ely and Louie) and the customers who come to the vegetable stand; even poor Connor (who is not evil, just severely misguided with problems of his own). Hildy would be very lonely without them, and so would the novel.
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YOUNG ADULT NOVELS NEW IN STORES NEXT WEEK
Cy In Chains
by David L Dudley
Hardcover
Clarion Books
Released 12/17/2013
Cy Williams, thirteen, has always known that he and the other black folks on Strong’s plantation have to obey white men, no question. Sure, he’s free, as black people have been since his grandfather’s day, but in rural Georgia, that means they’re free to be whipped, abused, even killed. Almost four years later, Cy yearns for that freedom, such as it was. Now he’s a chain gang laborer, forced to do backbreaking work, penned in and shackled like an animal, brutalized, beaten, and humiliated by the boss of the camp and his hired overseers. For Cy and the boys he’s chained to, there’s no way out, no way back. And then hope begins to grow in him, along with strength and courage he didn’t know he had. Cy is sure that a chance at freedom is worth any risk, any sacrifice. This powerful, moving story opens a window on a painful chapter in the history of race relations.
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What We Lost In the Dark
by Jacquelyn Mitchard
Hardcover
Soho Teen
Released 12/17/2013
Allie Kim’s fatal allergy to sunlight, XP, still confines her to the night. Now that she’s lost her best friend Juliet to an apparent suicide, the night has never felt darker–even with Rob at her side.
Allie knows why Juliet killed herself: to escape the clutches of Garrett Tabor, whom the trio saw committing an unspeakable crime. Garrett is untouchable; The Tabors founded the world-famous XP clinic that keeps Allie and Rob alive and their small Minnesota town on the map.
Allie can’t rest until Garrett is brought to justice. But her obsession jeopardizes everything she holds dear. Not even Parkour can distract her; nothing reminds her more that Juliet is gone. When Rob introduces Allie to the wildly dangerous sport of nighttime deep diving, Allie assumes he’s only trying to derail her investigation… until they uncover the horror terrible secret Garrett Tabor has hidden under Lake Superior.
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