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I have not read tomorrow's contestants in The Battle of the Kids' Books.  They are Endangered! by Eliot Schrefer and Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage.  The judge is Kathi Appelt.

Unfortunately for me, the two largest public libraries close to me do not own Endangered!  Yeah!  I know!  It's a National Book Award Finalist, for golly sakes!  They both own Three Times Lucky, but obviously the word is out that this is an awesome book because it is on hold at my hometown library and out at the "other" library.

(And, with huge apologies to all the booksellers out there who do such awesome work keeping literature alive, I only buy books that I have learned to love.  It's a cheapster thing.)

So I have read a few reviews and I have investigated the judge.  And, even though I am totally unqualified to make a prediction, I will!  I predict that the small-town girl will beat out the orphaned chimpanzee. 

Who can resist a message in a bottle?

I predict that tomorrow, Three Times Lucky will move on to the next round.  I predict this for three reasons. 

Reason 1:  Kathi Appelt's own work leans toward small-town and rural characters.
Reason 2:  Sassy orphans beat out orphaned animals most of the time.
Reason 3:  The American South is more appealing than the Congo, especially now.

But the New York Times review of Endangered! gives me pause.
There just might be a surfeit of small-town mysteries in children's books right now.  The suspense and tension of Sophie's attempt to save her small bonobo friend may tip the scales in Endangerd!'s favor.

He looks so frightened.  I want to save him, myself.

I wish I had a chance to read just one of these books!!!

I have nothing to lose!  I stand by my prediction. Three Times Lucky will win tomorrow.  (maybe)

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I was so grateful for the opportunity to give the keynote address at the Publishing Perspectives Conference, YA: What's Next, held at the hospitable Scholastic auditorium in New York City this past Wednesday.

Today the fine folks at Publishing Perspectives share the text in full, along with the illustrations by William R. Sulit.  These illustrations were modeled with 3D software, all with the exception of the beautiful face and hands, which belong to my niece (daughter of my famous I Triple E brother), Miranda.

In her keynote address from the YA: What’s Next? publishing conference, author Beth Kephart makes an impassioned case for YA books that are heartfelt, authentic and empowering.......

(Just added:  gratitude for a week of kindness toward Small Damages.)

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New York City was at its hospitable best yesterday.  Through the windows of a train I watched the sun both rise and set on Manhattan.  In between I opined on the future of YA at the Publishing Perspectives Conference, saw old friends (Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Jennifer Brown, Laura Geringer, Melissa Sarno, Dennis Abrams, Ed Nawotka), made new ones, did a little Amen shout as Doris Janhsen, David Levithan, Francine Lucidon, Eliot Schrefer, and Dennis Abrams (pictured above), reminded people what publishing is really about, or should be about:  good books.  By mid-afternoon, I was sitting with the remarkable team at Gotham, discussing the future of Handling the Truth.  I was thinking—truth—how lucky I am.  (Then got even luckier sneaking in a little stolen time with Jessica Shoffel of Philomel and my own son, at 30th Street Station.)

It took every bit of driving craftswomanship I have (and there isn't much) to get to Anne Lamott's talk (and promotion of her new book on prayer, Help Thanks Wow) at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church by the 7:30 start.  My father had saved a seat for me in the balcony, and a lucky thing that was, for there were at least 1,000 people gathered in this church where I grew up, wed, and baptized my son.  Anne does what I cannot do.  Talks without a plan ("I have prepared nothing," she began), works her way toward a theme, gets grace right out there, where it belongs, and triggers a bout of group hysteria with a single word (Okay) and a prop (my father's pen).

And so we laughed.  And so it was ten before I finally got home, after a day that had begun at 3 AM.  The mail had been brought in.  There was a card, the smart, precise handwriting of an amazing writer whom I love.  Alyson Hagy, you of the million things to do, you of the bad bronchitis, Good Lord, girl, you didn't have to.  But I love this from you.  I will treasure it, always.

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Sometimes book juries convene and read and talk and get things right, and this year the National Book Award judges cited three books that I loved for special recognition. 

I am eager to read all the books on all the lists this year.  But for now I want to celebrate the honoring of Patricia McCormick for her smart, powerful, daring Never Fall Down (my interview with Patty will soon run on Publishing Perspectives) and Eliot Schrefer for his important Endangered. 

In nonfiction, the remarkable House of Stone by Anthony Shadid is a most-deserving nominee.  I have highlighted (in this entry) my own thoughts about these books, from posts produced earlier this year. 

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Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers, and Louise Erdrich led the list of fiction finalists for the National Book Awards this year.

Follow the links below to read free samples of the finalists in every category–who is your favorite?

The finalists were announced on MSNBC this year, a new twist for the prestigious award. The winners will be revealed at a gala ceremony on November 14 in New York City at Cipriani Wall Street.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Who says you need to be Ed Emerley to make fingerprints dance?  A canny bit of book promotion, this title is out this year but I certainly hadn’t heard of it until now (Laurence King Publishers, anyone?).  Now I’ll need to see it for myself.  It’s Let’s Make Some Great Fingerprint Art by Marion Deuchars.  Thanks to Julian Hector for the link!

Altogether now . . . awwwwwwwwww.

Okay, book trailer time.  Full discloser, Mr. Eliot Schrefer is in my writing group and I read this book, Endangered, in manuscript form.  The man can write.  I mean, really write.  I don’t see much YA in a given year, but I saw this and it was glorious.  But, in the words of the immortal LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p75AP5ABuE8&feature=embed

Or, if you’d just rather watch Eliot get covered in apes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nILY_hhsKvE&feature=embed

Then there’s Mr. Jarrett Krosoczka. Or, as I like to think of him, the hardest working man in show business.  Now I only assume this, but surely he teaches other authors how to use social networking and technology to connect with fans, yes?  I only wonder since he’s sort of really good at it.  Example A: a recap of a webcast his did with kids recently.  Theme song and all:

Example B: The comics that were made during the workshop.  I rest my case.

Finally, my off-topic video that isn’t very off-topic.  If I’m going to be honest, I almost opened the post today with this bad lip-reading of Twilight.  What can I say?  It made me laugh very very hard (on the second segment anyway).  Forgive me if there’s a political ad before it.

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Hold a book in your lap and it will take you some place.  If you let it take you.

This morning I have sat with Eliot Schrefer's Endangered, which is to say that I've been living in the Congo.  That skittering spectrum of butterflies.  That sizzle of manioc and wild garlic.  Those high, rattling screams of animals, and of war. 

Sophie, our guide, is a teen whose American father lives in Miami, and whose mother has stayed behind in her own country to lead a bonobo sanctuary.  In the opening pages, Sophie saves an orphaned bonobo from a cruel fate by buying him from a starving pedestrian.  It's not the right way to save this endangered species, but it is the only way, and soon Sophie, now at living for the summer at her mother's sanctuary, becomes this scrawny, mangled Otto's best friend. 

Paradise is, however, short-lived.  A coup has occurred.  All madness breaks out in a part of the world whose mineral resources make it wealthy beyond compare, but whose people have learned to live with little and survive on less.  Sophie will have to journey through a war-torn country to safety.  She will have to earn the trust of bonobos, find a way to eat, determine what matters most, keep her Otto safe, allow Otto to protect her.  She will have to understand love and its limits.  Along the way Schrefer's readers come to know a part of the world and a species of animal that deserves our knowing—and attention.

Schrefer comes by his love for bonobos honestly, having spent some time in the Congo himself.  (He has the photos to prove it!)  He (and his book) exude, as well, great purpose—elevating readerly compassion with a determined heroine, hinting at the complexity of life in a fragile country, making it clear that survival comes, always, at great cost.  It's the perfect conversation book, the perfect story for a classroom, the perfect ticket to the Congo.

Three final things:

The photographs above are not of bonobos, but they are the closest I had in my own photo library (images snapped in Berlin last summer).

I loved reading, in the acknowledgments, that my friend and former editor Jill Santopolo had a hand in shaping Eliot's book.  Everything that Jill touches sparkles. 

If you want to see pictures of Eliot debuting his book at Children's Book World this past Friday, go here. 

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Last Friday evening I joined David Levithan, Eliot Schrefer, Jennifer R. Hubbard, and Ellen Hopkins for an evening of books and talk at Children's Book World, Haverford, PA.  That was then, celebrated here.

Today I'm celebrating Every Day, the new novel from which David read that evening.  You can tell from the way a writer reads how invested he or she is in the work.  David Levithan is fully invested. 

He has a right to be.  With Every Day he has crafted a book with an original premise, placed a likable narrator named A at its heart, and wondered what it would be like to wake up each morning in the body of another.  To be a boy, then a girl.  To be angry, then peaceful.  To be forsaken, to be depressed, to be the football king, to be his twin.  To be all these things on the outside, a succession of traits and 'tudes, while all along holding utterly true to the inherent A-ness of A.  To be an impermanent self falling permanently in love.  What would that be like?  And could anyone in the world love this body-swapping soul so much that appearances won't ultimately matter?

The plot carries forward.  Love is at risk.  One of the borrowed bodies gets a little miffed, exposing a raw seam in the universe.  Every Day is clever, but it's more than that. It is a portal—enveloping and philosophical.  It asks questions that have no answers and forces us to live with that.

Why is David Levithan so popular that he had to stand on a Friday night in a Main Line bookstore to see all the way back to the last row in the crowd?  Why do his fans know his birthday, in a snap, and tout his novels with religious fervor, and send the T-shirt makers into a LeviFan frenzy?  It has something to do with who David Levithan is.  It has to do with his transcending kindness, a quality that A believes (rightly) is so much more powerful than simply being nice.  David Levithan writes from a moral center.  He encourages his readers to think brightly, like this (the xxx's here to avoid spoiling anything for future readers):

Every person is a possibility.  The hopeless romantics feel it most acutely, but even for others, the only way to keep going is to see every person as a possibility.  The more I see the xxx that the world reflects back at him, the more of a possibility he seems.  His possibility is grounded in the things that mean the most to me. Kindness.  Creativity.  Engagement in the world.  Engagement in the possibilities of the people around him.

 Possibility.  It's almost political.

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My house has officially succumbed to books.  Bowed its head, elbowed out its own frame, said yes.  Yes, Beth, you can have the newest pubbed books by David Levithan (Every Day) and Eliot Schrefer (Endangered) co-mingling with the galleys for This Close (short stories by your dear friend Jessica Francis Kane), and alongside these please add a dollop of Mary McCarthy's The Stones of Florence, a book on the history of eggs, three maps of Florence (one laminated), one old diary, several Florence guides, many tomes on domes, not to mention weather forecasts, three unread New Yorkers (unread, save for the back pages), and while all of that is going on, please add more to your iPad Kindle because having not yet read your e-versions of Code Name Verity (Elizabeth E. Wein), Salvage the Bones, and The Marriage Artist is no shame at all.  Also, while you are at it, imagine A.S. King's Ask the Passengers (not yet released) sitting near.  Just do it, Kephart.  Do it.

So what did I do, in the midst of this?  I took a walk with my best friend from college days, Ellen.  We headed out to Valley Forge National Park, where my mother is buried and where Ellen and I often meet to talk life, not books.  It was a ripe September day, crisp as a green apple.

I want it all, always.

I manage it poorly, more times than not.

Today, no books again.  Instead, a trip to the city, to see my glorious, happy, smart, successful son.  No prize greater than his glorifying smile.

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We think it's pretty special out here when generosity, talent, humility, spark, and through-and-through writerliness live within one person.  The fact that all that (and more) defines David Levithan—Scholastic editor, mold-smithering author, and genuine conversationalist—explains, at least in part, his ricocheting popularity.

Last evening, at Children's Book World in Haverford, PA, David shared his stage with the wildly popular Ellen Hopkins, the delightful Eliot Schrefer, my new and powerfully talented friend Jennifer R. Hubbard, and me.  We each read briefly.  Eliot took our breaths away with baby bonobo photos.  A very generous CBW plied us with special treats, even customized cookies.  And writerly/readerly teens do what they do so well—let us into their world with questions and thoughts.

A.S. King, we're all coming right back there for you on October 30, to celebrate your much-anticipated new book, Ask the Passengers.  Please bring your duplicate.  We love her.  K.M. Walton, we are indebted, always, to your immaculate kindness and talent (and your photographs; thank you for the last one!).  To my many friends (and client/friend!) who slipped into the crowd, thank you.

I have come home with some glorious new books to read.  I'll start with Every Day, David Levithan's newest.  Many times in the past few weeks I have had to stop myself from buying the book.  Sometimes waiting for that moment is worth it.

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Today, another short note, a simple reminder:

I have the great privilege of joining David Levithan, Ellen Hopkins, Eliot Schrefer, and Jennifer Hubbard this coming Friday, 7 PM, at Children's Book World in Haverford, PA.  CBW is billing us as the Fab Five, and I have Philomel publicist (every author's dream publicist and my good friend) Jessica Shoffel to thank for making me Feel So Fab.

I hope that you will join us. The photograph above was taken during the Publishing Perspectives "What Makes a Children's Book Great?" conference held earlier this summer, where I had so much fun joining moderator Dennis Abrams on the author panel.  The smart and savvy notables from left to right are Roger Horn (The Horn Book), Pamela Paul (New York Times), David Levithan (Scholastic editor and author phenom), and my good friend Jennifer Brown, a former school teacher, editor, reviewer, and jury panelist (not to mention head of children's books for Shelf Awareness) whom I always rightly refer to as this country's ambassador for children's books. 

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