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All righty then:  Today, as my patient husband films me for a YAMO book trailer (then listens to me say, loudly, that I don't think I can bear to use any image that contains any fraction of my own face in it), we're also closing in on the final post in the You Are My Only Treasure Hunt extravaganza. 

This time, we're looking for a guest visitation (for "visitation" is how this all must feel to these generous bloggers who have given me some real estate on their fine blogs) that talks about how bad I am at titling (some) things.  This post is housed at the psychodelically-hued home of a certain chick who loves lit.  I met this wonderful person at the BEA this past summer.  She was part of the awesome gang of many who surprised me with a YAMO blast a month or so again.  The post you are looking for begins like this:

Those who know me know that I’m only intermittently good at devising titles.

Undercover was called Come Back to Me, for example, until Laura Geringer asked me to please think again on that one. Still Love in Strange Places was named by my son moments before the W.W. Norton catalog was going on press. Nothing but Ghosts was my title, thank you very much, though there was a slight (we ignored it!) problem—I’d used the word ghosts in a previous book title (Ghosts in the Garden). The Heart is Not a Size and House of Dance were titles of my making, and I proudly claim them.

Words on the contest itself, for those who might be new to this (wild, wild) game:

I've written five guest posts about the making of this book.  Those posts are appearing in the blogosphere.  Your job (should you choose to accept it) is to find those five entries and then post them collectively on your own blog.  Send the link to me, in a comment box on my blog, and your name will be entered into a drawing. 

Two winners will be selected. Each will win these two things: A signed copy of You Are My Only AND a critique (by yours truly) of the first 2,000 words of a work-in-progress. As many of you know, I teach memoir at the University of Pennsylvania and served as the inaugural readergirlz author in residence. I have written in multiple genres and critique adult fiction for major U.S. newspapers. Your manuscript can, I am hinting, be in any genre, save for a screenplay, about which I have absolutely zero expertise.

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and warms my heart on this day.  There are books that don't appear to be the right match for this reader, or for that one.  How do we thank those who look beyond those concerns and begin to read anyway?  That is what Aquafortis did.  She tells the story here.

(Breaking my heart with her final words.)

And great thanks too, to Elizabeth Mosier, for the phone call today—the chance to talk out loud about this book and where it came from and what it means to me.  Those conversations are so appreciated, especially with a reader and writer as talented as Libby.

Thank you, both.

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"Kephart’s prose is poetry in motion—creating beauty out of everyday moments. This disquieting yet emotionally satisfying novel (written for young adults but a linguistic pleasure for any reader) alternates the stories of Emmy, desperate to find her missing baby, and homeschooled 14-year-old Sophie. The surprise is not in how these two soulful voices are connected but in the way they weave together to the book’s finely spun ending." — Darcy Jacobs, Family Circle (November 2011)

"This has a very different style from classic child-abduction melodramas such as Mazer’s Taking Terri Mueller (BCCB 6/83) and Ehrlich’s Where It Stops, Nobody Knows (BCCB 1/89); Kephart’s writing is a thing of beauty in its own right, and Sophie’s story earns its frequent and apt allusions to Rapunzel with its own fai

5 Comments on You Are My Only: The Radnor Memorial Library Launch Party, Family Circle, BCCB, last added: 10/9/2011

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Florinda said, on 10/6/2011 7:55:00 PM

This sounds like a wonderful evening! If only I didn't live 3000 miles away...

Wendy said, on 10/6/2011 8:53:00 PM

I oh wish, wish, wish I lived closer so I could be there to share in the joy! But, know I am there in heart and spirit!!

Serena said, on 10/7/2011 8:38:00 AM

Alas driving 2 hours with a baby is probably not the best option! I hope you have a great time at the launch!

Beth F said, on 10/9/2011 3:12:00 AM

Hummm. We're invited to Halloween party in Spring City that weekend. I wonder if we could come down a day early. Thinking, thinking.

Lilian Nattel said, on 10/9/2011 1:01:00 PM

I'm sure it will be wonderful!

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Colleen Mondor has written an extraordinarily thoughtful post today on the quandary she faced when reviewing You Are My Only.  I won't try to summarize that here.  I will simply suggest that you follow this trail to see what Colleen had to say, what she faced, what she decided to do.

And how graciously she tells us about her process.

For my part, I wish to say this:  Aunt Cloris and Aunt Helen, the two YAMO characters that stand at the heart of Colleen's quandary, lived in my imagination for ten full years.  They represent goodness of an extra-exceptional kind.  They love purely and they love deeply, not just each other, but the boy they have raised as their own and the young teen, Sophie, who moves in next door.  They are not brazen intellectuals.  They are not reformists.  They are not people who live their lives as an overt instruction to others.  They just look out and see what must get done, and with every resource they have (and as two elderly ladies in a poorer part of town, they don't have much) they get that needed thing done.

I did not create Cloris and Helen to make a point about lifestyle preferences, I am saying; that would have never occurred to me and it would have never worked.  Nor would it ever occur to me that potential readers might shy away from a story that has a Cloris and a Helen tucked within it.  Didn't even cross my mind.  Never kept me up at night.  Cloris and Helen are human beings organically summoned from my own life.  They are modeled on people for whom I've felt great affection and admiration.  They are heroines to me.  They needed their story told.

I don't look at people and see difference.  I don't judge another's choices, politics, religion, fashion, upbringing, IQ.  Kindness is what matters to me.  Kindness is the distinguishing factor, the thing that must be sought.  It is that rare thing, that genius thing; it trumps all else.  I know what kindness is because I have been the frequent beneficiary of it.  I know why it matters because I wouldn't still be here without it.

I find prejudice of any kind terrifying.  I want to live in a world in which we all agree on that.

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Can we take a moment to thank Egmont for publishing another Beth Kephart exquisite novel? Thank you, Egmont!

You Are My Only will be released October 25th, and I encourage you then to find Beth's newest book. In this realistic fiction novel, you'll breath despair along with several suppressed characters. You'll turn pages and yearn for them each to find hope. One story tells of a young mother's loss of her baby, while the second winds a tale of a teen sequestered from society. How the works intertwine is brilliant. From beginning to end, images and movements echo and resonate back and forth between the stories. At the reveal, I actually stopped reading, stunned by the moment of truth.


As always, I was mesmerized by Beth's rich writing. Even in the smallest detail:

"There is a bird making a tree branch heavy, her gray belly bottom like the high back of the sun."

"Outside the wind sneaks up under the loose skirt of the roof tiles..."

Nesting in the story are sweet truths of life that you can grapple with and then possibly hold.

"Tragedy and blessing," Miss Cloris says. "Sometimes they're the same one thing."

"What do you suppose any of us, Sophie, wish to be remembered for? For the things that tried to stop us or the ways we carried on?"

I'm still thinking over the latter. I'm challenged to find the truth that I would ultimately hold.

You Are My Only is current, relevant, and gracefully written with gripping realism. There is no shrinking back. Thank you, Beth, for staying truly dedicated to the fine art of writing.

You Are My Only
by Beth Kephart
EgmontUSA

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I'm going to spend this beautiful day in the company of the students and faculty of the Country Day School of the Sacred Heart, which chose Dangerous Neighbors as its summer read. 

Before I head out, I wanted to share these few things:

First, readers of this blog know how moved I was by the Logan Schweiter Fundraiser, which took place at Club La Maison.  Today, at Generocity.org, in a story called "A Spectacular Act of Love," I report on the remarkable efforts of literally hundreds of people who together raised an extraordinary amount of money on behalf of a young local teen still recovering from a near drowning following a storm.

Second, yesterday morning I had a chance to read the Vanity Fair story "The Book on Publishing," which can also be found on Nook and Kindle reading apps at vfr.com/go/ebooks.  This extended essay by Keith Gessen takes an instructive look behind the scenes of one of the largest book auctions in recent history, which yielded Chad Harbach, a first-time author, a $665,000 advance from legendary editor Michael Pietsch for the novel (ten years in the making) called The Art of Fielding.  Anyone who ever wondered just how major parts of the industry work will have questions answered here.

Finally, a bouquet of gratitude to Medieval Bookworm, for her eloquent words about You Are My Only, and a thank you to Caribousmom for letting me know those words exist.  I am, as always, very grateful. 

To the Country Day School I now go.

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I have been the recipient of extraordinary kindness.  My eyes are full. 

These words were said.

That's all I can say.

You'll understand.

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The ever-provocative Dwight Garner opines about the productivity of Important Novelists in today's New York Times, expressing a desire for work that yields "heat as well as light"�and a frustration with "the long gestation period [that] is pretty typical for America's corps of young, elite celebrity novelists."  Says Garner (who cites Eugenides, Franzen, Tartt, Chabon, and David Foster Wallace among the slower working novelists):

Obviously, some of this is about personal style. There have always been prolific writers as well as slow-moving, blocked, gin-addled or silent ones. It’s worth suggesting, though, that something more meaningful may be going on here; these long spans between books may indicate a desalinating tidal change in the place novelists occupy in our culture. Suddenly our important writers seem less like color commentators, sifting through the emotional, sexual and intellectual detritus of how we live today, and more like a mountaintop Moses, handing down the granite tablets every decade or so to a bemused and stooped populace.

The economics of novel writing (how many must teach, for example, to survive) and the tugs on a novelist's time (book tours, interviews) clearly, Garner notes, run interference in a writer's life.  It's likely that other things are also to blame—life itself, for example, by which I mean the need for a writer to live deeply so that he or she might know even more deeply.  Then there are the demands of research—how long, one wonders, did David Foster Wallace have to steep himself in the arcania of tax code before he could even begin to find the story inside The Pale King?

As I read Garner's piece, I reflected—as I often do—on my own "productivity."  I published my first book in 1998; by the end of next summer, with the publication of Small Damages with the rocking house Philomel, fourteen of my books will sit across the room from me on the shelf.

Some would categorize that effort as prolific.  In fact, I feel anything but.  I may have published my first book in 1998, but I was writing long before that, and many of my books—Small Damages being a prime example—went through ten years of work, more than eighty drafts, and two genres before it became the story it was always meant to be.  Still Love in Strange Places (W.W. Norton), published as a memoir, was for a decade a novel about El Salvador before I spent three years turning the fiction into fact.  You Are My Only, which will launch in a month, was three very different books (written for adults) before I wrote it as a young adult novel.  And I am, at this very moment, utterly overhauling a novel for adults that I was so sure was cooked to order six months ago.  I am, in some ways, starting from scratch.

Writing has never been, for me, a straightforward process.  Publishing has been anything but.  I am trying to suggest that as writers we work and work (when time allows, when the day job on occasion eases up), but we rarely control the outcome itself.  The story comes on us, at us.  It dawns, it reveals, it retracts.  It's there for a moment, and then it scuttles away, and as much as we would like to put ourselves on a publishing schedule, our imaginations are countries unto themselves.

Today I wake, for example, to a scene that has eluded me for weeks.  The same darned scene.  The same patch in the same

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Earlier this week, during my Facebook travels, I took note of a bit of news—a long-time correspondent-reviewer-friend (Ed) was starting a blog with his beloved (Susan).  Need to check that out, I said to myself, and in this blessed afternoon of quiet (I've been reading Leah Hager Cohen's The Grief of Others and hope to report on that tomorrow), I turned the computer on to see what Ed and Susan have been up to.

Their blog is called Two Heads Together.  I quote its purpose here: "...we're two avid readers who just happen to be librarians.  We deal with books all day long and then go home to read.  Geeks?  Maybe.  Lovers of books?  Definitely.  We've decided to begin this blog because we see so many wonderful books become orphans either because of lack of support from publishers or lack of word of mouth."

It's a lovely idea, I thought—to dedicate a blog to authors and books that might not be getting the Grand Tour treatment.  I was so very moved, then, when I realized that the blog's first post was dedicated to a suite of books by yours truly, and includes a truly kind review of You Are My Only.

Reading this blog post brought to tears to my eyes; it also revived for me a memory:  I was in Atlantic City, a one-night getaway with my husband, when an email came into Blackberry.  It was from a man named Ed, who had been trying valiantly to get a copy of one of my earlier books for review.  I am half blind at this point in my life and typed back what I'm sure was an error-rich message: Send your address; I'll make sure that you get one.  It probably read like this:  tbey sooe xxarrdss! I'll ,sru pfru u git 2.

Ed's been a dear friend in the book journey life ever since.  And Susan, I feel I know you and have always valued you.  Even if you did purportedly steal a copy of Dangerous Neighbors from Ed's own generous hands.

Thank you, both.

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Deep thanks to my friends for pointing the way to two separate Kirkus Reviews of You Are My Only.  The first can be found here, penned by Leila Roy of Bookshelves of Doom, on the Kirkus blog. 

The second review, excerpted below, is the generous "official" Kirkus Review below. 

Again, I know how lucky I am.

The heartbreaking tale of a kidnapped child and her bereft mother unfolds in alternating narratives in this intense and lovely novel.

... the ripped-from-the-headlines plot is here treated with tenderness and depth. Kephart's deft employ of descriptive language—"Past the door is scuffle and howl, the slow and the fast moving. I see it through the window glass, the glass all scratched with black diamonds"�is extremely effective in setting mood and creating imagery.

Though the initial draw may be the sensational subject matter, readers will come away with much more.(Fiction. 12 & up)

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There are an extraordinary number of BBAW posts going up around the blogosphere today; you'll find many conversations sparking around the idea of community.  You all know how I feel about that, and how grateful I am for my rooting in among you. Today I'd like to formally thank one more special person and blogger (and author!) who is both wise and kind—Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray—who took the time to read You Are My Only last week and had this to say.

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I woke up yesterday thinking the day would be like most others—a scramble of corporate work, some exercise, laundry folded on the fly, an hour or two spent with a novel-in-progress, some texting with my son, Wednesday night salsa at MIXX.  It started out that way, that's for sure, but the pattern got broken mid-way through.  Things started to show up on my Facebook wall.  You-better-take-a-look-at....-emails were coming through.  What's going on? people were asking.  I don't know, I said.  Because for a long time I didn't.

I'm still mystified, to be honest, by all the kindness that came my way during the course of yesterday—all the kindness that exists in this world.  I'm mystified, and I'm eternally grateful. I am also feeling desperately inadequate because I have failed to capture it all.  I had planned, yesterday, to thank some very special people who have been supporting me and my work for years.  In the shuffle and shift and bewilderment of my day, I did not do that.

Today is the day that I stop and thank the readers and writers who have quietly written to me of their support.  Today is the day I thank those who read this book early and posted their thoughts.  I never want this blog to be all about me.  It is my privilege, here, to write about others, their books, their dreams; to write about my city; to write about people doing good.  In cross posting these early blogger reviews of You Are My Only, I am celebrating those who took the time—those who care.  I am telling them what I hope they already feel and know:  That I am hugely grateful.  If I have not captured your voice here, it is only because I don't know.  Because years ago I stopped googling my own name—the only solution for one as naturally obsessive and easily worried as me. 

And so then please find below the excerpts from some recent blog posts that I hope you will read in their entirety. Posts from bloggers whom you should visit daily.   Caribousmom is here—that exquistely smart reviewer with whom I first connected over The Elegance of the Hedgehog and whom I later met in person in New York; I've loved her ever since.  Becca of Bookstack, an indelible presence and so-smart reviewer and long time blog world friend is here.  There's a Book and My Friend Amy are here—their support so entirely unspeakable.  Hippies Beauty and Books. Oh my, is here, as is The Reading Zone.  These join the rocking surprise gonzo You Are My Only promotion featured here, on Chick Loves Lit and on Bookalicious, the equally stealthy and gonzo Melissa Sarno of This Too  giveaway,  Florinda, Kay's Bookshelf, and Books, Thoughts, and a Few Adventures.

Thank you.  All.  I'm about to start reading a new book called Child Wonder.  I hope to write of that soon here—to return to the universe some of the what has been sent my way.

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There will, inevitably, be mistakes in this post.  That is because I am literally shaking.  My hands are numb.  My throat is tight.  Don't call me, because I'll start crying.

I am the girl in that picture, here.  Wearing funky pants and silly hairy, my whole self just a little bit blurry.

I haven't changed much.  I still have my self-doubts, my disappointments, my too-big dreams.  I can still get cranky from time to time, I can never get my hair right, and I can still write sentences that (upon waking to them the next day) shame me.  We writers out here — we are just writers.  And sometimes things go well and sometimes they don't, and if we had to do it all alone—if I had to do it all alone—well, I am pretty darned sure that my career would have stopped long ago.  I wouldn't have stopped writing.  But I might not have books in lovely covers to share.

I owe everything—everything—to the good hearts out here who have looked up from their own projects, their own days, their own children, their own blogs and said, You have a place with us here.

Today my world broke open that much wider.  Today—yesterday—the day before—the days before that—readers—friends!— reached in and turned on a light.  I have so many to thank.  It's just so inadequate, that phrase, thank you.

In a day or two, there will be a treasure hunt, a series of blog posts, distributed across the net, that I wrote to help tell the story of the story behind You Are My Only.  I will announce the details of that in time.

But all this time that I have been working with the dear hearts on this treasure hunt, those dear hearts took the party so much wider—very sneakily preparing what has become one gigantic early party for this book.  These party planners know that I never google my own name, and so perhaps that set them free. Still, I have no idea how they did this much without me even guessing that anything more was afoot.

To attend this party, you must first visit the master schemer, the beautiful heart, the lovely lady behind There's a Book, the one and only 1st Daughter.  You must at the exact same time visit the one and only, ever invincible, always dear and wise and stunning, always surprising My Friend Amy.  Soon, when I stop shaking, I will share those links that have been sent my way.  Every single one of which means the world to me.

Please don't think that I am kidding about my shaking over here.  And what I just wrote in a comment box to the 1st Daughter is true: The first thing that happened when I saw all of this is just now is that I said to myself, Beth, You have to call Mom.  But Mom's in heaven, and she's looking down.  She sends her love to all of you.

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Look.  I'm going to be honest with you.  You book bloggers out there are bringing me to my knees in gratitude.  You have no idea what your words, your enthusiasm, your deeply felt embraces mean—right now, always.  Every single blog post takes time.  Time to construct the thoughts, to find those links, to read the words through, to make them right, to get it all out there.  Time away from something else (so many things) that might be done.  I know how much time matters—how there is never enough of it—and I am so grateful that you have gifted me with so much of yours.

I speak of all of you out there who have been so supportive of You Are My Only, of this blog, of this odd book life of mine.  And today I speak to Florinda of the fabulous 3Rs, who wrote this beautiful post just now.  In honor of who she is, and of how she stood at my side at the BEA this past summer, and of all that she does as a book blogger and reviewer (her own blog was a long-list nominee for the BBAW), I am replaying a little video that we made during a happy moment this past summer.  We had this conversation on behalf of the Armchair BEA initiative that has now been nominated as part of the 2011 Book Bloggers Appreciation Week.

Florinda, then and now, I thank you.

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I want to talk for a moment about connections—about the way one thing leads to the next.

The story starts with this blog, begun in a vacuum in 2007, begun with absolutely no idea of what a blog might reap, or what a blog should be.  (As you can probably tell, I am still figuring that out.)

Somewhere along the way, somehow, the magnificent My Friend Amy found her way here.  And because My Friend Amy had, scores of others did, too.  My Friend Amy is that kind of gal.

Among the My Friend Amy coterie was one Melissa Sarno, now a dear, amazing, smart, funny, treasured friend.  Melissa is a writer and producer for a toy company by day, as she will tell you on her exceedingly intelligent blog.  She is a fiction writer by (extremely late) night.  In between she keeps me laughing with her tales and her adventures, her threats to visit upon me the world's best pairing of cookies and wine, say, or a perilously stacked cone of ice cream.  Twice Melissa has stood before me live and in person at the BEA.  Always I learn from her.

Last week, Melissa was away.  Yesterday she was at certain tennis match.  This morning, I turned on this computer to find Melissa right here, with me, undertaking a Stealth (which is to say surprise) In Anticipation of You Are My Only giveaway.  It's pretty big.  It's so Melissa.  It threw me for a Coney-Island-Roller-Coaster-quality loop.  Please take a moment to visit her blog and see what she has in store for you.

Melissa, you rock.  The next triple scoop is on me.  Plus the world's best malbec.

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and why they matter in works of art.  I was thinking, as I read, that the New York Times Book Review should hire Amy as a weekly essayist.  She is just that good.  I was thinking, too, about how lucky I am to count Amy as a faithful reader and so entirely generous friend.

Thank you, Amy, for these words.  Thank you, indeed, for everything.

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and as always I learn. And as always I am grateful.

Her words are here. 

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"You okay up there?" Arlen calls to me.

"Just fine," I call back. The sun has come up like a squint on the horizon. Most everything we travel by is pink. The glass in the shops. The windshields on cars. The glint flecks in the sidewalks and on the streets.  I haven't seen a cop drive by. I've seen no posters on the trees.  No one and nothing but me and Arlen searching for Baby. We take a ninety-degree angle hard and wobble our way back to a glide. My elbows hurt more than my fingers.

"How about you? You okay?" I call over my shoulder.

"Time is of the essence," Arlen says.

— You Are My Only (Laura Geringer Books/Egmont USA), forthcoming October 25, 2011

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I am what the savvy might term a slow adopter. I tend to like things as they are.  My movies on the big screen.  My books between their covers.  My conversations in person, face to face.

That is not this world.

And if I am less than knowledgeable about Facebook (I am, perhaps, one of its least organized and aware members), have failed to take on Twitter, am not inclined toward Google +, only just yesterday did justice to my LinkedIn profile (how shabby my former presence was), and make more mistakes in typing Blackberry texts than any living writer, I am coming around to the way the world works.

I have an iPad 2 and I use it to read the New York Times (except the Times magazine, which I still prefer to hold), to catch up with the Inquirer, to read the occasional Kindle or iBook.  (The New Yorker and Food and Wine and Vanity Fair still come, old style, to my house.)  My email friends are legion.  I'm an old-time blogger (holding my ground here, refusing to vanish).  And lately I've been thinking about (not dreading, but embracing) the new ways in which the publishing industry works.  Why not an Amazon single, for example, if the audience is already primed for it?  And why not a book with multi-media illustrations—something web friendly, something e-alive?

It's the middle of August.  The days have been long.  I prefer autumn to summer.  I look toward the new season with hope for my October 25 release, You Are My Only, with eagerness to connect with some of you at a variety of talks, and with the high suspicion that I'm about to change the way I go about making of (some) books.  

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I have been so grateful to those of you who have written to me about YOU ARE MY ONLY.  You do this author's heart a whole lot of good.

It occurred to me that it might be helpful to answer some questions in a broader format, and so I have prepared this new permanent page for the blog, featuring a Q and A, a list of upcoming appearances, a glimpse of an early review, and contact information.

It can all be found here.

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Because I finished working through the last of the copy edits of You Are My Only this week, and because I have lately been hearing from a few early readers (and I thank them from the bottom of my heart), and because this photograph reminds me of Autumn, one of my characters, it occurred to me to post this small excerpt from the book, due out from Egmont USA in October.

I hear the creak of a bed. I hear another blow of giggles. Finally Granger walks to the curtain and snaps it back, and there Autumn is, standing on her own thin cot in a gray T-shirt and a red puff skirt, throwing a ridiculous curtsy. Through the small round of the window behind her, the sun comes in and where it hits her hair, there’s a burst of yellow orange.

“What happened to you?” she asks me.

“Be nice,” Bettina tells her.

“It’s a question,” Autumn says, “is all.” And now she curtsies again, pinches the red puff up into her skinny fingers, cracks her legs at her knees, and says, her voice gone solemn, “Welcome to State.”

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Just eleven when abducted by a known meth-addicted sex offender, Jaycee Dugard endured eighteen years of deepest horror.  By thirteen she was pregnant.  At fourteen, without medical care, she gave birth to what would be the first of her two daughters by this monster of a man. She had but a fifth grader's education, and yet, in an environment Diane Sawyer properly calls "degranged," Jaycee homeschooled her little girls—teaching them what she knew, protecting them from a brand of evil that seems, frankly, impossible.

Our own troubles are no troubles when we read of stories like Jaycee's, now being published by Simon & Schuster as a A Stolen Life.  Her kidnapping haunted me years ago, when it first made headlines, and her rescue deeply played into my imagination as I wrote about Sophie's struggle to break free in You Are My Only.  I have spent some of this early morning watching the video clips from Diane Sawyer's  two-hour interview with Jaycee, which will air this evening, and I have been so deeply moved by the beauty of this young woman. Jaycee Dugard is a survivor, she says, and not a victim.  She looks for what is good.  She is a mother raising girls of whom she is deeply, rightly protective.

Dignity and grace.  Dugard newly defines these words.

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I knew Dear Reader was a happening place months ago, when I was invited to stand in as a guest columnist for Suzanne Beecher.  Dear Reader is where a book-reading community gets built, where book clubs find their inspiration, and where conversations gather speed and force.  For my own guest column, I wrote about the young people I've met in my time as a young adult novelist—the passions they stir and the things they teach, the many ways that I am hopeful for and with them.

It was a special opportunity, and so I did something I've never done before—offered all six of my young adult books (the seventh,the Seville-based Small Damages, won't be out until next summer) as a summer giveaway.  And oh, what a response we have had.  I've heard from school principals and librarians, grandmothers and moms, fathers and grandfathers, uncles and aunts.  I've heard from young writers and young readers, students on the verge of college and students on the verge of applying to master's degree programs.  I've received notes from all across the country and all around the world.  Many readers have asked for YA books featuring a male teen; I'm 6,000 words into writing one of those.  Many described their particular passions, their favorite books.

I had originally thought that I would give all six books to a single winner, sweepstakes style, but as I read these notes through and considered the huge volume of mail, it occurred to me that there were some very right and particular titles for some very particular readers.  Here, then, are the winners, with the lines or thoughts that triggered my own "I have just the book for them" responses.  Please know, all of you, that I read and considered and valued and had a very hard time choosing winners.  I hope you'll look for books that sound interesting to you and let me know what you think.

Undercover, my first young adult novel, about a young, Cyrano-like poet and her discovery of her own beauty, to 14-year-old Kyla Rich, who wrote, "My 12-year-old sister and I love to read. .... you can never read too much, especially with how much you can learn from reading: Learn about the world, about scholarly things that you'd learn in school, or, sometimes, about yourself. I never really knew why I read so much or why I liked it but, as I read your Dear Reader, I realized why. I read to understand, to know beyond myself. Exactly what you said in your Dear Reader. I guess that might be another reason I write. My sister and I are writers, unpublished of course, and we write to craft the kind of books we like to read, to give someone joy, to help someone, maybe even start a craze. We write for even that ONE person who likes our books, even if it is just one. At least someone cares enough to read." 

House of Dance, about Rosie's quest to find a final gift for her grandfather (and her discovery of a wonderful cast of ballroom dancers), to Patricia Corcoran, who wrote, "I'm 63 years old and have read for as long as I can remember. Except for when I was growing up, I didn't read Young Adult books. I don't know why, but I didn't. About 3 years ago, I started reading them and thoroughly enjoy the ones I've read so far. I have 2 grandchildren, Gregory who is 9 and Emily who

3 Comments on Meet the Dear Reader Giveaway Winners, last added: 7/8/2011

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Q said, on 7/7/2011 10:29:00 AM

Good picks. :)

Caroline Starr Rose said, on 7/7/2011 12:00:00 PM

Last week I ran into a woman I used to teach with years ago. She told me about Dear Reader and that it's run by a high school classmate of hers. Small world!

Susan Taylor Brown said, on 7/8/2011 3:47:00 PM

Love the way you chose these. Very generous.

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Many exquisite things trundle and waltz by my home on Memorial Day weekend. There is, for example, the annual carriage parade. There are the dogs of the famous dog cotillion. And then there are my fabulous, witty, smart, and loving neighbors—so entirely and brilliantly in love.

Exquisite things waltz into my world as well, and this morning I would like to send my heartfelt thank you to Florinda, for this especially moving post about our time together at BEA. Caribousmom, I thank you, too, for including You Are My Only in your Book Buzz: Fall Reads; you've assembled an immaculate list of titles, and I'm so grateful to have my book included on that list.

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