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Enter the alternate world of 1914 Europe, where mechanical machinery is in odds with gentically engineered beasts. Leviathan is a fun, exciting YA steampunk tale where science fiction meets fantasy. Once again Scott Westerfeld has created a fantastic world that will take readers away to imaginative places. Read more of my review at YA Books Central.

In anticipation of a "Post-Apocalyptic Teen Fiction" panel I'm attending on Thursday (look for a post early next week,) I've been catching up on Scott Westerfeld's "Uglies" series. I'm in the middle of the first book right now and loving it. It's a... Read the rest of this post

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. Illustrated by Keith Thompson. Simon Pulse, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. Publication Date October 2009. Reviewed from ARC from BEA.

The Plot: Prince Aleksander, 15, is the only child of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie. He is awaken in the middle of the night and flees the palace; his parents have been murdered and, while he is not a direct heir, his life is in danger. Alek is a "clanker" -- part of the world that is all about machines.

Deryn Sharp, also 15, is pretending to be a boy named Dylan to get a chance to fly with the British Air Service. But she's not learning how to fly machines. Deryn is a "Darwinist" -- the part of the world that has created living creatures to fly, to use for messages, as pets.

The assassination of Alek's parents starts a World War. As Alek runs for his life, and Deryn finds danger and adventure on the flying living ship Leviathan, their paths grow closer and closer.

The Good: If you know what "steampunk" is, skip forward in the review. If you don't, here it is, quickly: alternate universe science fiction, set in the past, with fantastical machines; a glorified Victorian age, as it were. OK, yes, I'm sure others have better explanations but that is my quick one. The ARC of Leviathan provides a definition; and while it may just be there for reviewers like me, I hope it stays for readers who may not have heard of "steampunk" and just need that brief explanation. From the ARC: "Steampunk is a genre of science fiction set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used -- usually the nineteenth century, and often set in Victorian-era England -- but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions."

I know what steampunk is; but I haven't really read much of it. For someone like me -- so, I assume, many kids and teens -- this works as a great introduction into steampunk. And if you want to recommend some other steampunk titles to me, please do so.

Westerfeld uses two types of technological inventions. In the Austro-Hungary Empire/Germany, it's about mechanics and machines, all more developed and different from what was in our timeline. For example, instead of tanks with tractor treads there are "walkers", fortified tank-like structures that "walk". In the British Empire and France, instead of mechanical technology, it's scientific technology, with Darwin not being the father of evolution but the father of DNA manipulation, the creation of entirely new creatures for things such as flying airships and messenger lizards and attack bats. One can quickly see that philosophy is involved here, also; making with ones hands versus playing with life.

What also works well is Thompson's illustrations. Both the clankers and Darwinists have machines and creatures we've never heard of; instead of Westerfeld wasting words with trying to describe them (and losing people like me who would be all "um. ok. let's skip to action and dialogue, ok?") we get to actually see what these machines look like (OH, we think, that's how big it is, there are the turrets, that is how it works).

Alek may be a Prince; he may be rich; but right now he's a teenager on the run, and because his father married someone beneath him, Alek cannot inherit. That doesn't mean Alek is ignored with his father's death. Far from it, which is why right now he's adjusting to life without servants. Alek is always sympathetic, even as he does impulsive things. With Alek, we are hunted, staying one step ahead of bigger ships, plunging through forests in a sweaty, noisy walker.

Meanwhile, Deryn is full of adventures, trying so hard to be the boy she pretends to be. She embraces it, charging into danger, having to be the best. We are flying in the sky, enjoying the freedoms, trying not to let it slip that she's a girl, thrilling to battles with aeroplanes.

Alek and Deryn are on two distinct adventures; the reader knows that ultimately they will overlap, because hello, we cannot have two heroes in one book who never meet! It's not till the book is halfway through that we get that meet and greet; before then, we get to know and sympathize with two very different people (and look forward to the meeting.) And yes, the meeting is everything a reader wants. By that point, we are cheering both teens, sympathize with both the clankers and the Darwinists, and wonder how the heck two such opposites can get along.

Westerfeld's end note explains some of the historical changes in this alternate history; for example, that Franz Ferdinand and Sophie didn't leave behind a fifteen year old son named Aleksander. They did leave behind three young children, Sophie, Maximilian, and Ernst; and according to Wikipedia, in the 1930s they were living in Austria, opposed the Nazis, and ended up in Dachau. I cannot find much more than that online; except all three survived. If anyone can recommend a book that covers this in more detail, I'd appreciate it.

Back on topic.

A great adventure pick; and a great book for science fiction readers who don't want fantasy (i.e., unicorns and elves), thank you very much. If a dragon shows up here, it's going to be man-made and engineered. This is book for younger teens; but older teens will enjoy it, also.

Why younger teens? Easy. When a teenage girl is pretending to be a boy and never worries about her period? It's a book that is being marketed to the younger set.

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© Elizabeth Burns of A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy

Like Scott Westerfeld’s writing? Then you might be excited to know that you can download his Uglies ebook for free this month. The ebook is in PDF format. You just have to sign up with your email address, birthday, and zip or postal code on the Simon and Schuster site, and you’re good.

Westerfeld says that the first chapter of his new book Leviathan is included in the ebook, along with an illustration you probably haven’t seen before.

What great book promotion!

So tell me–are you going to download the ebook? I am. (smiling)

Maureen Johnson's blog and tweets are always worthy of your time, but this account of her dinner with Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld is possibly, one of the funniest, laugh-out-loud things I have read in a long time.

Okay, so we’ve all read vampire novels. You know, Twilight (excellent!!), that kind of thing. But Peeps gives us a new angle on the whole vampire theme. In Peeps, vampirism is a disease, actually a parasite, transmitted through saliva. Cal, an otherwise average kid in his early twenties, has had the misfortune to be infected with the parasite after a wild night with an enigmatic woman named Morgan. But he’s one of the lucky ones. The ordinary symptoms of the parasite are insanity, bloodlust, and intense aversion to light and to the things the infected person once liked. Cal is just a carrier, one of the lucky 1% of “peeps”- parasite positives- whose only symptoms are an extended lifespan, superior reflexes and strength, and intense cravings for meat.

Before Cal knew he had the parasite, though, he infected several girlfriends. So now, he’s a member of a secret organization, the Night Watch, dedicated to eradicating the parasite. But when Cal discovers a secret basement with a peep-cat, even though cats are not supposed to be a host for the parasite, and other mysterious occurrences, the Night Watch is stunned. Something odd is going on, and it’s up to Cal to find out what.

This is a fairly entertaining book. Granted, not one of Scott-la’s best works, but not his worst either. The first two-thirds of the book were awesome, but then I kind of lost interest and the ending was pretty lame. I still have to say, though, worth reading. I especially liked the way the book included information about real-life parasites (although don’t read these if you have a weak stomach!) It’s got that typical Scott-la style that makes you want to keep reading, even when you get to the lame ending.

I rate this book three-and-a-half daggers, and I will be reading the sequel, The Last Days.



Yours,
Tay-la

Ask a teen librarian to name her top ten teen books and there's apt to be a long pause while she flips through her mental reading record, but eventually Terri gave us an answer. In no particular order, Terri's Top Ten....

1. Laura Wiess's SUCH A PRETTY GIRL left me breathless and shaken. With her dad in jail Meredith finally feels safe, then he gets out early and he wants to get "close" to her like he was before. You'll never forget this book.

2. In WHO'S YOUR DADDY? Lila, Meryl and Caressa are three boyfriend-less best friends. Hoping to change their luck they hold a "dumb supper" and get more than they ever imagined. No one writes relationships and humor like Lynda Sandoval.

3. Not only is John Green's LOOKING FOR ALASKA one of the best coming of age novels EVER, it's partly responsible for getting me my job as a teen librarian.

4. This is, without question, my favorite book to booktalk. I always get a great reaction from kids. I'll just give you the short and sweet: Teens between the ages of 13-17 can be retroactively aborted. Dubbed unwinds, they supposedly "live on" by having every last part of their body medically donated. Some of them aren't willing to accept that fate and go on the run, this is their story. UNWIND by Neal Schusterman is a must read for EVERYONE.

5. Gail Giles is one of my all time favorite authors. She writes raw, real and gritty stories. There's no happily-ever-afters, but her characterizations are incredible. SHATTERING GLASS is my favorite of her books. Check out this opening paragraph. "Simon Glass was easy to hate. I never knew exactly why, there was too much to pick from. I guess, really, we each hated him for a different reason, but we didn't realize it until the day we killed him." 'Nuff said.

6. I loved Gabrielle Zevin's ELSEWHERE because it was so unique. When Liz dies she finds herself on a ship to Elsewhere where she lives her life in reverse until she's reborn as a baby.

7. I adore Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. Think Harry Potter, but faster paced with more humor. Percy Jackson is the half-blood son of a Greek God and all along he just thought he was a troublemaker with ADD. Get hooked with book 1: THE LIGHTNING THIEF. 8. I LOVE Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Underworld series so when I learned she was crossing over to YA I was giddy. Her debut, THE SUMMONING, was not a disappointment--necromancers, wizards, werewolves and evil psychologists, oh my!

9. Meg Cabot's MEDIATOR and 1-800-WHERE-R-U paranormal series, originally written under the name Jenny Carroll, is the series that made me fall in love with YAs and got me started writing.

10. Scott Westerfeld rocks! While most people rave about his UGLIES series, I actually liked his MIDNIGHTERS series even better. Don't get me wrong, I love Tally, but I preferred the dark, dangerous tone and the superheroish powers the MIDNIGHTERS find in a secret, blue hour.

11--

Terri tried to keep her list going to include other books like--THE BOOK THIEF, ABSOLUTELY POSTIVELY NOT, SAINT IGGY, FREAK SHOW, the KISSING COFFINS series and LIFE AS WE KNEW IT, but we finally yanked the keyboard from her.

Tune back in tomorrow when we'll get to know Trinity Michaels, the teen psychic from SLEEPLESS a little better.

The July issue of Locus Magazine, a magazine about SF/fantasy publishing, focused on young adult fantasy fiction. It contains essays by Neil Gaiman; Holly Black; Sarah Beth Durst; Justine Larbalestier; Scott Westerfeld; Graham Joyce; and more.

How did I miss this? Well, I don’t frequent magazine stores. Still, this is exciting. I wonder if I can still get my hands on a copy. Maybe eBay? How about you–have you checked it out?

I just discovered this through Sarah Beth Durst’s blog which I discovered through Bookshelves of Doom

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen, 2008).ISBN-13: 978-0765319852Hardcover: 382 p. List Price: $17.95***** (5 out of 5 stars: excellent; nearly flawless; a must-have for all libraries serving youth)“What’s the big deal? Would you r

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Authors Offer Summer Reading Tips for Kids...

Check out this interview from WABC-TV featuring three authors who share tips for getting kids to read over the summer. Picture book author Jane O'Connor (Fancy Nancy), middle-grade author MAC (Anna Smudge: Professional Shrink) , and YA author Scott Westerfeld (Uglies) are interviewed.



My favorite tip came from MAC, a new author who recently sold out of her debut novel at its sneak preview during NY Comic Con, who advises parents to run over the video game console with the vacuum cleaner. Here's her book cover.

Well, Carpe Librum took all of the pendants and ornaments I brought for them to choose from, so I've been busy making some more. I just finished two today (I do have a day job) and I'm very happy with them.

I love the work of David Lucas. One of my favorite picture books ever is his Halibut Jackson. Whale is his newest book and I've had the art as my screensaver ever since it was available. I see it - and love it - every day, so I was thrilled to find a copy I could cut up without guilt. Here's the first pendant - front. . .and back. . .Olive, the Other Reindeer is a really fun Christmas story with groovy art by J. Otto Seibold. This is my favorite image and line from the book - can you imagine how excited I was that it was the perfect size for an ornament? Here's the front. . .and the back. . .Both are available now in my Etsy shop.

Alan's been on the road all week promoting Something Rotten (which just went on sale today!) so I've had to take care of all kinds of things myself. Can you hear the violins?

We're all heading to Carpe Librum for the Something Rotten launch party on Sunday. They also want to buy some of my pendants and I promised nice packaging - so I had to do my labels myself. Alan is the VP of Graphic Design here at Gratz Industries so I floundered around quite a bit. I used Illustrator to make the stripes, but I spent a good hour going through my big Illustrator book and still couldn't figure out how to crop out a square, so I had to upload the stripes into Photoshop to do that. Of course, I couldn't figure out how to lay out a sheet of labels and add text to a doc in Photoshop. I tried it in Quark but I can't remember how to do anything there either, so I finally managed to finish the thing in (horrors!) MS Word. Alan HATES Word so he mocked me a bit when he found out that's what I had resorted to. Buy - hey - it got the job done. So here is my new fancy-schmancy packaging for my pendants. Nice, eh?
And what goes inside? Carpe Librum does really well with the classic authors and illustrators, so they're getting Richard Scarry (from Richard Scarry's Great Big Air Book)
Raggedy Ann by Johnny Gruelle and The Fuzzy Duckling, a Little Golden Book by Jane Werner, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen.I'm also making up some holiday ornaments, starting with a few from How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Here are the first three I've done (still missing their hanging loops)and here's my favorite - frontand back.The pictures are too yellow - but that's because our camera doesn't adjust for tungsten light. Or if it does I have no idea how to do it. But they're still much better than what I usually take. Why? Because I took Greg's advice and built a white box using the directions found here. I've had this page bookmarked for several months now, but Greg's comment got me to actually make it. Here it is.And if you think this looks ghetto, you should see my soldering setup. I use a wooden clothespin to hold the pendant. The wood won't scratch the glass. I use a vice-grip clamped to the clothespin to weight the thing down. Then I rest the whole setup in my lap so it's easy to shift to any angle. That's right - I solder in my lap. I know that's a bad idea, but until I get a decent clamp like this or this that's the easiest way for me to work.

The fourth book in the Uglies 'trilogy', Extras, takes place in post-'mind-rain' Japan a couple of years after Tally Youngblood destroyed the Pretties system. Japan, along with the rest of the world, is adapting to the freedom of thought that people had so long been deprived of. New cultural norms have emerged, and Japan's 'reputation economy' is one of these. It ties wealth and fame together at a whole new level, making most everybody want fame more than anything else.

Enter fifteen-year-old Aya Fuse, who's just as desirous of fame as the next person. She's a kicker, and always has Moggle (her hovercam) by her side. She is constantly searching for a great story to kick, one that might take her out of panic-making obscurity. One that might make her famous. But with a face rank of 451,369 (out of a million), there is little chance of that happening. That is, until she stumbles upon the story of a lifetime. But she gets more than she bargained for when she kicks it, and fame ends up being difficult. And, in her case, dangerous.

For an Uglies/Pretties/Specials fan such as myself, it was awesome to return to Westerfeld's creepy future earth. I couldn't help but notice that the reputation economy makes a lot sense. Which is creepy. We're already fame obsessed enough as it is.

Extras is really quite a wonderful book. It was well tied-in with the three preceding books, but has enough new developments so as not to be repetitive. Aya is a great character. She's endearing but imperfect. And sometimes you get really mad at her.

Which means, of course, that Westerfeld has done his job very well.

Five daggers out of five.

Wanting to mag-lev surf*...

*What is mag-lev surfing, you ask? I don't think I'll tell you. Read the book.

_________________________________________________________

Dude, Extras is awesome.

And, as many of you probably know (on account of the link from his blog), we saw Scott Westerfeld talk/sign books... it was pretty darn cool, yo. Justine Larbalestier was also there (author of the Magic or Madness trilogy), which was also pretty darn cool, yo.

So... five out of five. Yep.

I give this wonderful book, the full 5 daggers.

The next three Chicken Soup with Rice pendants are up on Etsy. I have four more to make from this book but I'm waiting on delivery of more glass. I hope to have them finished and up by this weekend.

Speaking of cutting up books - check out these works by a real master. . .

The artist is Thomas Allen and he does amazing work. This one with the ship is called Swell. The one below is Bookend.

Stacked (hee hee)

Uplift. Look at that wonderful shadow!Teeter

And my favorite. . .Stress.

Right now Jo and I are watching Where the Wild Things Are. . .and other Maurice Sendak Stories. I also own the Really Rosie CD by Carole King and all the Todd McFarlane Wild Thing action figures. We have a great big stuffed Wild Thing (Bernard) on the chair in our bedroom. The most treasured piece of art we have is promotional poster from Candlewick Press from their very first season in the US, featuring Sendak's illustrations from I Saw Esau. Do you think maybe I'm a Maurice Sendak fan?

Indeed I am. I've been thinking for a while about making some jewelry featuring art from favorite children's books and when I saw an irreparably damaged copy of Chicken Soup with Rice at the fundraising rummage sale for Jo's school, I knew just what book I was going to start with.Please don't send me hate mail for cutting up a book. Anyone who works in publishing (like I do) or at libraries (like many of our friends do) knows just how many books are thrown away, pulped, and recycled every day. If I can breathe new life into a book that's in such bad shape that it has to be held together with a rubber band - I'm not going to feel bad about it at all.

So here's what I did. I searched through the book with a 1 x 3 window to see what kinds of images leaped out at me. That was very fun and made me feel like I was looking at the pictures the way children do - really looking at the tiny details. Then I looked for text to complement those images. Finally I checked the backs of those pages to see if I was cutting into equally awesome images and text. I'm not making copies here - so sometimes I had to make tough decisions.After I had my snips I sandwiched them between two high-quality microscope slides and soldered around the edges. I put a piece of bright white paper between them so there's no show-through between the pages - though if you look closely you can see a bit from the back side of each page. Each pendant has a snip of art on the front and a snip of text on the back, so it looks great from both sides. I soldered a jump ring on the top and strung them on black satin cord - which really sets off the text and the black lines of the illustrations. And done! I've made five of a planned nine pendants and I'll be listing them all at my Etsy shop this week. Next up? I think it's going to be Whale by David Lucas.

“Sugoi-desuuuuu….”

“Oh my…”

“I have no idea what to say.”

“I agree with Hoshi. Sugoi.”

“Well, since nobody is going to talk, I’ll just say here’s the new Warrior of the Storms Page. Tons of new stuff. Have fun.”

Take a peek at Sally Jean's website to see her creations. Her collage work, jewelry and Don't forget to check her links too. I am hooked....going to go back and visit soon.

The booth across from us at BEA belonged to Kodansha America (which OUP distributes.) On Friday afternoon Ayako Brodek, author of Origami Jewelry, gave a demonstration of her origami jewelry-making techniques. Barely looking at her hands, Brodek swiftly folded swan after swan. I think it is a bit like knitting after a while, the motion becomes meditative and relaxing. Check out the pictures below to see Brodek at work. (more…)

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