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BookCrossing. It's that thing where people set books free in public places, hoping to hear back from them when the finder registers them on the website; BookCrossers also exchange books online, sometimes but not always supplied by publishers. I've never sent a book into the wild myself, but my books have been Crossed, so to speak, and it's been a positive experience for me.
It's on my mind because I'm speaking at the UK BookCrossing UnConvention in Edinburgh on Saturday. It's also on my mind because I talked about the practice on Radio Scotland's Book Cafe a couple of weeks ago, along with enthusiastic BookCrosser and UnConvention organiser Liz Broomfield.
I was playing the odd role of devil's and angel's advocate in the discussion. After all, I wouldn't be speaking at the UnCon if I was against the whole thing, but the interviewer wanted to know: was BookCrossing a bad thing for writers? It's one more way of cutting our earnings, after all, and heaven knows there are already enough ways of doing that.
There are a few answers to this from BookCrossers. Firstly (they say), they try books they'd never otherwise consider, and expanding the readership of books can only be a good thing. Secondly, if they love your book, Crossers will often end up buying it, for themselves or as gifts. Thirdly - and here's what I like - part of the deal, with books passed round web 'Bookrings', is that you get an online review. And reviews in the regular press are almost as hard to come by as royalties from Tesco.
I confess I'm keen on it, and not just because the BookCrossers have been largely nice to me and my books. All their arguments have merit, but more than that, I like their enthusiasm. I like that they are passionate about books. I can't help feeling that as long as there are people like BookCrossers around, books won't die the death that's often foretold.
Of course, I also hope that BookCrossers love books enough to understand that there won't be as many of them around in the future - at least, books not written by Jordan - if writers can't earn a living.
But I know a lot of writers are against the whole idea. I'd love to hear some views. Then I could put on my General and Allied Writers Militant Union hat on Saturday, as well as my Kiss-Me-Quick-BookCrossers one.
And I couldn't think of an illustration for this post. Which is why I've been a chancer and just posted a picture of one of my covers, Bad Faith. Sorry.

I am always on the look-out for a good immigration story. The topic is a big one in our curriculum. Imagine my delight upon having The Dragon's Child A Story of Angel Island, by Laurence and Kathleen Yep delivered by my fab colleague Jen.

A young boy, Gim Lew, is living with his family in his father's village in China. Father doesn't stay with them, however. He is a Guest of the Golden Mountain. In other words, he lives in America. He comes back periodically, brings money, and takes the sons away. Gim Lew first met his father two years ago, when he was seven years old. His father is a dragon, and the boy is nothing like him.

Gim Lew has a stutter and uses his left hand as well. He is just getting hit with the bamboo rod by his Uncle Jing, when word comes that his father has returned. His father is the most important man in the village, and as he usually brings gifts from San Fransisco, everyone is excited about his arrival. The New Year is just over, and most people could use the extra food that celebrations bring.

Gim Lew is shy around his father. His stutter is more pronounced, and he struggles to communicate with this important man. Imagine his surprise when he finds out that he too, is to return to the Golden Mountain with his father. Eventhough he does not want to go, he knows he must. The situation in China is precarious. If bandits do not get paid, they destroy villages. If the weather fails and the crops die, families will have nothing to eat if money is not sent.

Father soon starts preparing the boy for the "test". Gim Lew must learn every answer to any question that American immigration might ask of him. He is only ten. Can he overcome his shyness and his stutter to please his father?

Laurence and Kathleen Yep tell of the start of a journey and the stay at Angel Island. This story is a piece of their family history, though fictionalized. Readers get a clear view of a Chinese village, and of Shanghai as well. The journey on the ship is not glamorous, and one can only imagine the heat and stench of the hold. Even though Gim Lew's father is an American citizen, and therefore his children are too, the racism he faces everytime that he travels is intense and predictable.

The text is chock full of details that will enrich many a lesson on social justice, immigration, and family. There is a fourteen page essay after the conclusion of the book that details some of the hardships and legislation faced by the Chinese (and American Chinese) from the mid 1800s until the mid 1900s. Also included are some family photographs, and photos of the ships and of Angel Island.

A moving piece of historical fiction.

When Zoe Sharp gets recruited for the swanky Allbright Academy by none other than Secretary of State Martha Evergood, she says that she will not attend without her twin brother J.D. and her older sister Franny. All of them are relatively freaked out by the 2 days of testing, but thanks to Zoe's moxie, they all end up on the picturesque campus, and are thinking that this opportunity is too good to be true.

Franny is bothered at first by the perfection of the place. Everyone seems flawless in appearance and in habits. Who has every heard of a perfectly clean dorm that houses 6th-12th graders? But eventually she gets over it. She is realizing her potential and changing her ways with the help of her PD (personal development) counselor. Her grades are climbing, her room is neat, and she wants her friends to do as well as she is doing. Cal looks amazing, compared to when Franny first met her, and she's much more positive, and Brooklyn is changing his name to Brook and cutting off his dreads so that people will take him seriously.

Franny, Cal and Brooklyn are a threesome whenever it's possible. They sign up for the same field trips and the same PE option. One day while they are on their PE hike, Cal doubles over in pain. Franny, Brooklyn and Cal try to carry her back to the dorms for help. It turns out Cal's appendix has burst and she needs emergency surgery. Cal is out of the picture for weeks.

When Cal comes back, she is different. Very different. And she has a theory about why this is. Is Allbright Academy exerting control over it's students? How is this being accomplished?

Franny, Cal and Brooklyn are soon knee deep in a mystery that has enormous repercussions. Can a school drug its students and get away with it?

Diane Stanley has written and fun, intriguing and fast paced mystery with a hook every kid who has ever gone to school will love. The cover is spot on, and I've had many middle schoolers reach for my arc over the last week. Mystery lovers, and fans of boarding school fiction will approve!

Publishers Weekly reports that Harper has launched a new service for its authors that allows them to have a Web precense without having to create and host their own site (or pay someone to do that stuff for them).

The pages will have bio info, tblogs, photos and personalized links to outside sites. Consumers can also connect with other fans through these author pages.

[Full diclosure: Possible drawbacks: will they look cookie cutter? Will it be as easy to read a bunch of blogs as it is on LJ? Will fans be able to find you? And what about peole who have published with more than one publisher - such as moi? - will HC allow mention of those other books? Still, it seems a good idea.





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The Theft and the Miracle by Rebecca Wade. Katherine Tegan Books (an imprint of Harper Collins). $16.99.

Mystery watch 2007 continues unabated. The latest entry for possible inclusion in my Great Mysteries to Watch Out For: “The Theft and the Miracle” by Rebecca Wade. This one had a lot of built in potential. The possibility of supernatural elements. An appealing heroine. Suspense. Fear. An unnameable threat. And for at least half the story I was on board. The book has a lot of promise to it, but delivering happens to be another matter entirely. In the end, you’ll agree that while Rebecca Wade deserves to wield a pen, her fledgling effort cannot sustain the weight of its own narrative. A great premise and set of ideas that ultimately falls apart.

There’s nothing out-and-out wrong with Hannah’s life. Let’s get that straight right now. I mean, she’s a little overweight and her skin isn’t all the fabulous. There’s are girls in her school that are prettier and more popular that she is, but at least she’s got her best friend Sam by her side at all times. Yep, life is pretty normal for Hannah until the day she gets caught in the rain and shelters in a church to wait it out. The local cathedral is the pride and joy of the town, no question, and resting at its heart is a carved image of the Madonna and Child. Without realizing what she’s doing Hannah starts to draw the statue in a kind of trance. Then the next day the Baby Jesus is stolen and all hell (so to speak) breaks loose. Someone’s destroyed Hannah’s house in search of something. There are mysterious strangers following her. But most of all, the Baby Jesus is missing and Hannah, it seems, is the only person who can track it down. What she doesn't realize is that the mystery of the theft and the mystery of who Hannah really is are inextricably tied together.

Let me say right here that Hannah is a great character. She’s self-conscious like any and all adolescents (pre and post) but she still has a sense of humor. It is my personal belief that anyone who can realistically sustain their humanity through that particular age is someone worth knowing. Author Rebecca Wade knows how to use humor too. I was quite attached to sections where Hannah’s in the church and sees “strange modern signs, which seemed to be warnings against exploding lunchboxes but in fact were only forbidding flash photography.” Plus there are lots of great ideas in this book. You can say a lot about a character by showing rather than telling. For example, Hannah has drawn the big brother she never had (because her mother miscarried) for years. “… she had drawn him many times, at each stage in his life, or rather the life he might have had.” And heck, how many children’s books can you name off the top of your head that casually discuss the word “Satanism”? I’m sure that if this book weren’t so unapologetically Christian (that comes up later) selections of this sort might have been cut out. As they stand, they’re there but mighty unexpected.

Wade sets up her mysteries fabulously too. There’s a rather believable section that requires Hannah and Sam to decode a seemingly ordinary notice posted on their school’s wall. Plus the reason why Hannah is being pursued by creepy unknown characters is believable. Yet while Wade sets up her mysteries well enough, she just doesn’t know how to solve them. There’s nothing wrong with the set-ups in this book. It’s the explanations that come later that are a bit garbled.

Consider this a bit of a spoiler alert for anyone who’d rather not know the rest of the tale.

It’s the book’s tone, you see. It’s off. You think you’re reading a fun realistic mystery story and then you get sideswiped by a ton of religious meanings and goings on. About the time I ran across an odd fellow sporting a card that said, “Gabriel Jones. (Arch.) Practical Assistance Offered In All Areas. No Job Too Great,” I was incredulous. Wait… what? I mean, sure there was a mild miracle in the very first chapter of the book. But about the moment Gabriel (uh-huh) shows up the story is suffused in angels. I have nothing against angels, of course. Madeline L’Engle made them worthy kidlit fodder. But you can’t just start throwing angels into a book out of the blue. It feels, in a way, like the book has split itself into two. The first half is this cool mystery with possible time travel and subtle supernatural elements. Then the second half is blatant, with angels waltzing about the joint and the plot falling apart. Besides, I don’t know how some people are going to feel about the villain saying stuff like, “I can show you the secrets of the great masters. Leonardo, Michelangelo, they knew the mystic power of darkness.” Really? Did you really want to go there? In this book the Wiccans can be cool but Michaelangelo’s the spawn of the devil? Didn’t he, I dunno, paint the Sistine Chapel? That’s the problem with the villains you find here. They draw inspiration from the oddest sources.

Speaking of the villain, this is another problem with the book. You’re never quite sure what they're trying to achieve or what power is being bandied about. You see, much of this story centers on the fact that Hannah unknowingly has a broken finger from the Christ statue. And if the stolen Christ child statue gets its finger back then it’ll be bad for the good guys because…. no idea. Because then the villain wins, I guess. At one point the antagonist is taunting Hannah and offering her the usual power beyond that of mortal men, etc. But this isn’t Darth Vader offering Luke the chance to join him. You knew what that was all about. Here the villain offers vague powers to a girl who doesn’t really need them anyway. And then, AND THEN, when we get to the end of the book the Christ child statue has…. wait for it…. cured Hannah’s acne. So odd.

“The Theft and the Miracle,” started out strong and then just sort of slowly collapsed under its own weight. It’s a real pity too since I was looking forward to having a new mystery to pump up to my library patrons. Just between you and me? I think Rebecca Wade has loads of talent. She just needs to reign her expansive ideas in a little and focus more on what makes a novel interesting. She’s perfectly competent on characters, dialogue, humor, and foreshadowing. It’s just the plots that need some wrangling. Here’s me looking forward to her next book then.

Notes on the Cover: A curious marketing ploy. First of all, the same cover for this book was used in both the British and American publications. It isn’t the original image, however. A quick glance at the galley shows the same image, but with one significant difference. In the ARC, just under the title, an image appears of the Madonna and Child. The Madonna is doting, but where Baby Jesus should be there's only a bare blank outline and white gap. It's kind of cool and I wonder now why it was removed. Maybe the publishers were hoping the original picture could tap into residual "DaVinci Code" goodwill. Then, as time went on, they decided that tying this book into a distinct religious image might limit its potential audience. Maybe. There’s always the fact that mysterious guys in cloaks always make for good covers anyway. I do like the final result. Mary and Jesus made a nice touch, but this was the cover I felt drawn to in the bookstore.

Letters from Rapunzel by Sara Holmes. Harper Collins. $15.99.

Gail Carson Levine has a lot to answer for.

When Our Lady of “Ella Enchanted” proved that biggie awards could go to fairy tale-inspired fantasies, this knowledge launched an unprecedented variety of fairy tale freakouts. As we speak we are still in the midst of a kind of folktale maelstrom, so you’ll forgive me if my initial sideways glance at “Letters from Rapunzel,” appeared to produce just more of the same. The winner of the 2004 Ursula Nordstrom Fiction Contest (run by Harper Collins for those first-time never-before-published types), Ms. Sara Lewis Holmes won it fair and square and this here book is the result. Despite its cover and title, the book is not, in fact, one of the fairytale ilk. Using the Rapunzel motif, Holmes paints a picture of a family whose patriarch is suffering from chronic depression. Balancing out its painful subject matter with its heroine’s wit, whimsy, and disconnect from reality, “Letters from Rapunzel” manages a delicate balancing act that comes to a happy end for both character and reader.

She’s been sending letters to an unknown post office box ever since her father disappeared from her life. For Rapunzel (the name she chooses to give herself) life was fine until her dad went through a new bout of crippling depression and had to be taken away to recover. What does that mean for our heroine? It means trying to put up with teachers and principals who think that just because you aced some test they gave out, you’re a genius. A genius, mind you, who’d rather write letters to a stranger than end up in some lousy class for smart kids where Andrew, the boy she hates, is waiting to torment her. As for the letters, Rapunzel started writing them when she found a letter from her father written to an unknown address. Hoping against hope that maybe she’ll be able to contact someone who can help her dad shrug off his “evil spell”, Rapunzel does everything she can to contact her mysterious someone. Yet when she meets only silence and an increase in her own problems, it takes some detective work and self-possession to get to the bottom of what exactly happened to Rapunzel’s father.

To whip together both fairytale and realistic elements like this is a risk. It would be all too easy for the book of this sort to make a sideways stumble towards the land of twee. Cute references to the story of Rapunzel in the midst of a family drama? The danger that it could become too sweet is immense. I’m still not entirely certain that it was wise to equate Rapunzel’s father’s depression with the moniker “an evil spell”, but at least the author makes it clear that when it comes to equating reality with fantasy, our heroine isn’t the most reliable of narrators. The story is also an interesting take on the usually staid and solid “problem books”.

A librarian making a list of books dealing with mental illnesses might just slip this title under the “Depression” category without a second thought. I do think that it’s lighter and, I dare say, more interesting than a lot of books on this topic for kids out there. That is not a criticism. If every book written on depression rendered the reader (forgive me) depressed, a fair share of kids would be disinclined to delve in that area. Holmes has had the sense then to imbue her book with some fun. I initially resisted it, but I ended up liking the heroine. When handed a charming science assignment that requires her to find ten different ways to rescue the character of Rapunzel from her tower using simple machines, our heroine is inventive enough to say, “but hey, the assignment didn’t say we had to keep her alive, did it?” Hence method number one, “Use a giant lever to pry her out. Be prepared for the funeral.” Holmes doesn’t overdo the humor, letting it float the top of a page here and there without breaking up the action or appearing where it might be inappropriate. For example, the ritual that comes with birthdays, wherein the birthdayee feels older, is described as, “just a cake-and-icing-induced hallucination.”

The letter element is, of course, the hook. It’s a booktalking point. The idea of mysterious letters sent into the vast unknown is a bit old-fashioned in this high tech day and age. That might account for books like this and “The Mailbox” by Audrey Shafer that play on the mystery and allure of sending mail to unknown personages. The book also splits apart continually into little asides that serve to break up the text. I’m beginning to suspect that this is some kind of new trend in children’s book publishing since I’m seeing it in a lot of other books as well. Kirsten’s Miller’s “Kiki Strike” did it. “The Thing About Georgie” by Lisa Graff has lots of them. And in this particular book you’re likely to trip over one of Rapunzel's “Fairy-Tale Fortunes” or school assignment every three pages or so. Does it hurt the book in the end? Not necessarily. It’s just hard to get into a story or take it seriously when you’re constantly being jerked out of the central tale as frequently as is found here. It makes for more enjoyable reading, perhaps, but does it make for a worthwhile read?

You will be happy to hear that “Letters from Rapunzel”, doesn’t have any easy answers. No miracles or unlikely coincidences spring up. It is not, I should add, a book that Holmes should stop with. While well told, the book feels like a novel found in an author’s early career. And as it’s not the only Rapunzel-like story out this year, feel free to also check out “Into the Wild” by Sarah Beth Durst and “Into the Woods” by Lyn Gardner for your standard retellings of classic folktales (and their skewed results). This may even make a good crossover title for those kids who only like fantasy and need some kind of fantastical hook to lure them into the scary realm of realistic fiction. Fun and smart enough for your consideration.

Notes on the Cover: Looks to me as if Harper Collins wants to have its cake and eat it too. Deliberately playing up the Rapunzelish elements on the right, the left-hand side of the image is downright mod. A kind of suburban kitch. I’d have appreciated this more if the Rapunzel-like girl actually bore some resemblance to our heroine at large. As it is, plenty of kids will be suckered into thinking this to be a kind of fantasy novel. Sneaky, Harper. Very very sneaky.