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I was recently looking for a vampire book for early readers. My Sister the Vampire No. 1, Switched by Sienna Mercer (a total mystery woman as far as the Internet is concerned) was not what I needed. (Yes, I should have checked the reading age on the back of the book.) But it was a light, entertaining read that would make a great car/vacation book for those 8- to 12-year-old kids whose moms expect them to read in the car and on vacation.

Switched deals with that most cliched of middle school situations, the new girl at school. But super pink cheerleader Olivia Abbott soon discovers that there's a very pale Goth girl at Franklin Grove Middle School who looks exactly like her, has the same birthday as she does, and was adopted as she was. Holy Hayley and Lindsey! They're twinners!

What Olivia doesn't realize, though, is that they aren't quite identical. Ivy plays for another team. When the head of the local teen bitch posse refers to Ivy and her Goth friends as "the walking dead," she only thinks she's speaking metaphorically.

Switched will be fun for readers who already know something about vampire lore and can enjoy the vampiric word play used to describe stereotypical school and teen situations. They'll also enjoy knowing something that one of the main characters doesn't know and the other doesn't reveal until late in the story. This is the first book in a series, so I don't know how well later books will go over once the secret is out.

This one, though, could make good recreational reading for a young one seeking relief from improving books assigned at school.

When I was a young 'un back during the last ice age, we didn't read cliche-ridden, didactic historical novels designed to forcefeed us facts about significant events or teach us meaningful lessons about man's inhumanity to man. No, indeedy, my little lads. We read historical fiction for the thrills! Ah, how many dateless Friday nights we spent as teenagers reading about spunky, if not outright outcast, girls racing across war-torn Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. Or girls fending for themselves during almost any period of English history. Or generation after generation of young people dealing with the disasters of one historical period after another in family novels that covered a century or more of time.

If we were able to bowl over our eighth grade social studies teachers with our knowledge of British monarchs, that was just the icing on the cake. But getting educated wasn't the point. We were feral readers! We weren't reading off any official book list! Book lists hadn't been invented!

By the time I got to page two of How the Hangman Lost His Heart by K.M. Grant, I knew that at last I had found the kind of historical novel that had led me to take all those college history courses. Hangman is a very wry and wonderful twist on those books I devoted so much of my adolescence to reading.

For instance, it has a traditional heroic leading man in Colonel Francis Towneley. He's a handsome, aristocratic soldier who has supported Bonnie Prince Charlie in his attempt to take the English thrown from George II. (This is the George II who you may have been reading about this weekend in accounts of British royalty in the military because George II was the last British monarch to lead troops in battle.) Colonel Towneley is everything a historical romance leading man should be. Unfortunately, he is hanged, drawn, and quartered in the first chapter. His niece Alice possesses loads of spunk, and she meets the very hangman who did Uncle Frank in when she collects his body. She can't get his head, though, because it has been cut from his body and needs to be exposed on a pike for a while as a lesson to other Catholics who think they'd rather not have a Protestant king.

But that night Alice decides she just can't leave good Uncle Frank's head bodyless and exposed to the elements, and she sets off to save him. Er, it. She runs into trouble and throws in her lot with the hangman, who may be missing some teeth, is definitely married and illiterate, and doesn't know how to ride a horse. They are being pursued by (among others) a handsome young soldier who is poor, afraid of heights, and brow-beaten by his major.

This is a wonderfully balanced book. It is not a historical novel that has only a setting. It does have a detailed setting in time and place. But it also has a great story. It has wonderful, developed characters. It has a traditional theme of man (and woman) against society. And this third-person narrative has plenty of subtle, dark humor.

If you really, really must have a lesson of some kind with your historical fiction, there's a lovely one here about the difference between unconditional and romantic love.

K.M. Grant totally lucked out because the real Colonel Francis Towneley, the last man hanged, drawn, and quartered in England, was her ancestor. In fact, you can read a very nice account at her blog of her family gathering at the chapel at Towneley Hall on All Soul's Day to pray for the Towneley dead, including Uncle Frank.

How the Hangman Lost His Heart received a starred review from The Horn Book in its January/February issue. Otherwise, I'm not hearing as much about it as I would expect to.

I was a facilitator at a session of the Internet and Society conference put on by the Berkman Center yesterday. I had a great time. It was a little overwhelming. My working group was called, appropriately enough UNIVERSITY and its library and I led the session with David Weinberger and Cathy Norton from the Woods Hole Institute Library. I must admit I felt a little out of my league (library director! author & technologist! um…. Jessamyn!) but I’ve never let that stop me before. I also learned that being the youngest and greenest member of a facilitating team means that you get the full-on “why don’t YOU do the introductions?” offer which I trepidatiously accepted. Of course, since I’m stuck somewhere between the digital native and digital immigrant personas, I also followed the IRC backchannel, my IM buddy list, Twitter, wrote on the chalkboard, took a few pictures, and tried to pay attention to things like the schedule and the pre-set list of tasks. I think it went well, but I felt like I had been river rafting by the end of it. A few people told me they thought it went well. You can see the list of what we came up with, in these Flickr photos (oooh very 1.0!).

The rest of the day was lunch [getting to talk to the head of network security at Harvard and his very very fascinating job] a second session [UNIVERSITY vs. RIAA with Wendy Selzer and Doc Searls and Lewis Hyde which turned into a few hothead professors and one or two industry/network guys and a few Free Culture students really just talking past each other in ways that were interesting but somewhat frustrating to listen to in an unstructured environment] and then dinner with a good friend of mine who works for One Laptop Per Child his friend just in from Oxford and a super interesting guy from Connexions. We ate pizza and messed around with the OLPC laptops and rehashed some of the “knowledge beyond authority” concepts that washed over us during the day.

It was neat to be at an academic conference where the speakers could toss around some fairly high-level vocabulary and jargon and be pretty sure that people in the audience could keep up. It was great to be someplace where all the technology just worked. It was fun to sit next to Dan Gillmor at the wrap-up and realize that he multitasks pretty much just like I do, but his inbox is fuller. I didn’t do a lot of actual blogging at the conference — well none really — but I did write a few things down. A lot of the pithy sayings that stuck with me were things that David Weinberger said. He’s great to be in a room with, very self-effacing, very friendly, very “hey I’m just like you” but also extremely well-spoken on many society and technology topics that I think a lot of us have trouble putting effectively into words. A few random notes from me, sorry they are a little stream-of-consciousness. I didn’t really have time to both attend the conference and blog the conference. In some ways I’m amazed that people can actually do that. I’m typing this up from my Mom’s house, with a cat in my lap and a cup of coffee, really feeling that I need thirty minutes or so of downtime to effectively rehash a day of solid uptime.

The general gist: knowledge beyond authority, truth beyond power, what is university’s responsiblity?

What about university as client?

What about teachers? is their digital identy as “digital immigrants”

DW: “Do libraries succeed by being where people go? Or, do libraries succeed by going where people are?”

DW (about the import of having a PhD): ending a conversation with saying ‘I have a PhD’ never worked well and it REALLY doesn’t work now

From a speaker at the wrap-up: The elephant in the room that limited the conversation was profit, there is an assumption that there is something primary and supreme about business that must be assumed to be given prominence and deference in the discussion about how to effect change (many people mentioned this)

DW from the wrap-up, about community knowledge and mailing lists: “The knowledge is in the list, the knowledge is smarter than every person on the list!”

I also got to shake hands and say hi to a few more people I’ve known sort of just through the Internet including Ethan Zuckerman (go start reading his blog right now please) and Matthew Battles who has written one of my favorite books about libraries.

I’m going to be a facilitator for a working group at the Berkman Center’s Internet & Society Conference, titled University: Knowledge Beyond Authority. I’m in a group with David Weinberger and Cathy Norton, a librarian at the Woods Hole Institute. We’ll be talking about the “Library of University” and what the heck is going on with it in the digital age. If you’re in the Boston area, or would consider being there, the conference is (almost) free and mostly takes place on June 1st. If you go, please do say hello.