Maurice Sendak 1928-2012

Thank you, Mr. Sendak.

Catching Up

Well, The Girl in the Park has been in the nation’s bookstores for two weeks now. Hopefully, every last copy has found a good, loving home. A huge thank you to everyone who bought one. And a ginormous thank you to everyone who participated in the Random Buzzers program and helped get the word out. Throughout my working life, I have always made it a point to work with people who love books, because they’re the best company. (And you usually get free books.)

Having yakked incessantly about my book (The Girl in the Park, got a starred review in PW, in stores now), I’d like to talk about some other books.

Sarah Mlynowski has a new middle grade series out called Whatever After. It’s about a brother and sister who get mixed up in the Snow White story. If you read her fabulous book, Ten Things We Did (And Probably Shouldn’t Have), you know Sarah is a sharp, sharp, funny writer. I’m always looking for good books for the middle grade readers in my life, so I’ll definitely be checking this one out.

Also out soon is the next installment of one of my favorite series, Rachel Vail’s Justin Case. Anxious, overthinks-everything Justin may be in third grade, but he is someone I totally relate to. The new book is called Justin Case: Shells, Smells, and the Horrible Flip-Flops of Doom. (This may be my favorite title of the year.) Justin is headed into fourth grade, but he has to survive summer first! Many, many writers do “diary books.” Not every writer has the wit and timing and heart to make them work. Rachel Vail absolutely does.

And finally, if you want to read more from ME, you can check out two pieces I did for Marshal Zeringue’s terrific blog. One is What Writers Are Reading. The other is My Book The Movie, where I cast The Girl in the Park.

Oh—and everyone wish me luck. I’m going to a reading by Robert Caro tonight and I am hoping to meet the great man himself and get my copy of The Passage of Power signed!

Meeting Barry Lyga and Meagan Brothers

How cool are Barry Lyga and Meagan Brothers? So cool that I am willing to show a picture of me looking like a happy striped balloon just to prove I met them at Books of Wonder this Sunday. We are all holding one another’s books. My idea, I thought it would be charming. (No, just confusing!) But I also wanted to show I am a fan, because I am. I’ve loved Barry’s work since The Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl. His new book, I Hunt Killers, is so wonderfully intense and scary. Anybody who puts a severed finger in the first chapter of his book is my kind of writer. I’ve just started Meagan’s Supergirl Mixtapes. In this case, you can absolutely tell a book by its cover. (Barry is holding it, if you want to check it out.) It’s smart and original and real. A pleasure to read.

I had a great time at Books of Wonder. The audience was great, the questions fantastic. Although, as always at that store, I spent too much money!

Books of Wonder, April 29th

I’ll be talking about The Girl in the Park at New York’s fabulous Books of Wonder on Sunday, April 29th, 1 to 3 pm. I’ll be joining Barry Lyga and Meagan Brothers. Books of Wonder is located at 18 West 18th Street. Hope to see you there!

In Defense of Lena Dunham

Okay, stop. Everybody…stop. The backlash has gone on long enough. In fact, it’s gone on longer than Girls has. And, really, it needs to stop.

For me, Lena Dunham’s film Tiny Furniture effectively ruined all other portrayals of Upper Middle Class White Angst . You can call them Woody Allen movies, Nora Ephron movies, Wes Anderson movies, all movies made, may I say, for and about people like myself. No other movie was as ruthlessly honest about the privileges and the cluelessness of the favored class. No other movie made me wonder how we can give so much to children—and let them grow so little. The people in that film were clever, well educated, well meaning, but stunted, aristocratic, and directionless. You could see them standing behind Marie Antoinette at the guillotine.

The penultimate scene where the heroine—a word you have to use ironically here—ditches her college friend who represents independence and self-sufficiency to choose the path of eternal adolescence is brutal. I felt like Dunham was saying, You think she’s spoiled, ridiculous, and cowardly? Yep, she is. And I’m not going to flatter any of us by saying she’ll change.

So now Dunham has brought us Girls. Immediately, some columnist demanded to know why they were not Women. Because they’re not, that’s the point. Amidst all the praise—which was overboard and probably created as many problems for Dunham as opportunities—were complaints that the characters were privileged. Clueless. Immature. Obsessed with issues most of us either cannot afford or solved long ago.

Um, yes. But you know, I never really related to Tony Soprano or Carrie Bradshaw either.

Now the complaint is that Girls is not diverse. Someone told me that Lena Dunham made the asinine comment that since the film Precious did not represent her, why should her show represent African American women? For the record, she did not sat this. Unfortunately, Lesley Arfin, a writer for the show, did. And I really wish she hadn’t. It will affect how I watch the show. It’s one thing to depict clueless people. It’s another to actually be clueless—and yeah, kind of racist—under the guise of aggrieved snark.

Many people point to the first scene of Girls where the parents cut off their daughter’s money spigot after supporting her for two years. Hannah is horrified. This is submitted as evidence that Dunham is hopelessly entitled. No, she just understands people who are. That’s why she started the series with that scene. To show us who Hannah is now, where she needs to go, and what stands in her way.

We don’t like stories of privilege? Strike F. Scott Fitzgerald and Noel Coward from the list!

I remain convinced that Dunham gets it. If her characters knew people who were not like them, they would not exist in a bubble. And the bubble, like the city in Sex and the City, is a character in the show. Their privilege is part of the point. HBO shows are traditionally about insular groups. The Sopranos were the mafia. Sex and the City, vapid and unreal gals on the loose in NYC. Game of Thrones, grungy medieval types who whack one another with swords and have a lot of sex. David Simon of The Wire and Treme is one of the very few to break this mold.

Not everyone can be David Simon. I don’t know how compelling Dunham can make her privileged little people over time. But she’s smart. And funny. And astute. And I want her to have the chance to try.

BOOK DAY!

The Girl in the Park is in stores. Okay, the stores are not yet open. But…ack! It’s in stores!

Deep breath, deep breath, deep breath.

11 Books I Loved As a Kid—And Still Do

Were books better when we were kids? Or did we just read them at a time when our hearts and souls were wide open? I still have my copies of Paula Danziger and Harriet the Spy. And I still think they’re great books. I adore them in a happy, uncritical way I could never adore the works of, say, Jonathan Franzen. The other day, I noticed that B&N was promoting Judy Blume on the NOOK and it almost made me run out and buy a device. Just so I could relive Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret and It’s Not the End of the World.

So, in the spirit of celebration and nostalgia, I list 11 books that rocked my world. In no particular order, they are…

1. My Darling, My Hamburger.

“It was Marie Kazinski who asked how to stop a boy if he wants to go all the way,” Maggie whispered.

I remember finding a copy of My Darling, My Hamburger, just after my first novel, The True Meaning of Cleavage, was published. Reading the first page, I realized that I would never, ever write as well as Paul Zindel—and that was fine. Just to be in the same profession was an honor. It’s great when your childhood idols live up to your memory.

2. Blubber

It was very humbling to go back to this book and realize how much er, “homage” I have paid to Judy Blume in my own work. What’s brilliant about this story of a fat girl who is bullied is that it’s told, not from the victim’s point of view, but from the perspective of a perfectly nice girl who gets pulled into the bullies’ circle. Jill Brenner’s irritation with the hapless “Blubber” rings so true, as does her own misery and regret when the bullies turn on her.

3. Harriet the Spy

There is no heroine in all fiction I identify with more than Harriet the Spy. I love the original cover for this book, the black and white drawing of Harriet striding down the street, notebook in hand, eyes peering through her dark rimmed glasses at the idiocies around her.

4. The Cat Ate My Gym Suit

I hate my father. I hate school. I hate being fat. I hate the principal because he wanted to fire Ms. Finney, my English teacher.

No list of mine could be complete without something from Paula Danziger. Her books may not have the timeless brilliance of Judy Blume, but her characters are funny, messy, and confused in a way I could truly relate to as a kid. She was one of the first women writers I read who dared to make the reader laugh. And I’ve never forgotten the power of that.

5. The Long Secret

This sequel to Harriet the Spy often gets overlooked. The center is quiet, “mousy” Beth Ellen and her utterly insane family. It’s dark for a YA book; Beth Ellen’s socialite mother and her friends are so heinous and irredeemable. But it’s great to reread as an adult, because the comedy is so bizarre. I’ve always remembered what Beth Ellen’s grandmother observation that shy people are often angry people. “There are times,” she says, “when we must express what feel, even if it is anger. If you can feel it and not express it…it might be better, but you must try to know what you feel. If we don’t know what we feel, we get into trouble.”

6. Forever

I still remember sneaking this book off my best friend’s older sister’s shelf and flipping through it to find “the good parts.” Which, I’ll be honest, I did not completely understand. “Ralph? What?” That was my first clue that not everything was covered by the basic birds and the bees speech. These matters became much clearer when I read…

7. Flowers in the Attic

Incest! Poison! Ballet! V.C. Andrews’ deliciously over ripe gothic tale—with its many sequels—was the Twilight of my day. I was once at a lunch with Wendy Mass, Carolyn Mackler, Rachel Vail, and Anne Brashares and every single one of us remembered this story of beautiful children locked in the attic by their greedy mother and religious fanatic grandmother as a “literary milestone” in our adolescence.

8. A Summer to Die

I did not read Lois Lowry’s classic The Giver until I was an adult. But I did read her novel of Meg, a girl who’s “sometimes angry over nothing, often miserable about everything.” One of the people who makes Meg most miserable is her seemingly perfect sister, Molly. I loved the ugliness of Meg’s feelings about life, feelings that don’t become any less complicated when Molly gets cancer and Meg has to face losing the sister she resents so much.

9. The Great Brain series

Confession: I was not a Little House girl. I tried to play Laura and Mary with my friends, but secretly, I wanted to belong to the Fitzgerald clan, wear britches and suspenders, and live in turn of the century Utah. I loved the stories of J.D.’s helpless quest to keep up with his brilliant brother Tom’s scheming. I still remember the chapter where T.D. charges the townspeople money to see their newfangled water closet flush.

10. Eloise

I still want to be the girl who lives at The Plaza with her nanny, her pug, and her pet turtle.

11. The Chocolate War

They murdered him.

Robert Cormier’s dark, dark novel of a boy who tries to stand up to the powerful elite at his school is one of the most amazing visions of how delicious power is and how hard it is to defy  those who abuse it. This is not a feel-good story about the underdog who triumphs over bullies and the crowd cheers. Jerry Renault’s story has no real happy ending.  And Archie Costello is one of the most original, vile, and yes, sexy, villains in literature.

So there’s my list. Please share yours!

The Girl in the Park Trailer

Recently someone asked if there was a trailer for The Girl in the Park. I thought, “What? Trailer? No, movies have trailers. Books do not have trailers. Okay, maybe James Patterson’s books have trailers. But my books?”

But I had vastly underestimated the creativity of today’s YA readers. I love this trailer so much. The use of Clueless and Pretty Little Liars is inspired. The music is great. Frankly, the trailer is so cool, I can’t believe it’s about my book. A huge thank you to Sonia Munguia and Cassie Walz.

You can see the trailer here.

Three More Dead Kids

I will apologize up front. This post is going to get a little ranty. I wrote The Girl in the Park because I could not get the murder of Jennifer Levin out of my mind. When I was young, the fact that a girl my age had been killed—by someone our age—was shocking to me. It is still shocking to me.

Even more shocking? Kids even younger than Jennifer Levin are now being murdered. In school. And we seem unable to do anything about it.

Since the shooting in Chardon, Ohio, we have three more children who went to school and never came home because some jerk was able to get his hands on a gun and make himself feel better by shooting people.

Those children’s names were Daniel Parmertor, Demetrius Hewlin, and Russell King. Two of them were 16. One was 17. I don’t want to call them young men, because that sounds as if they were old enough to get shot. As if they were in the military. They weren’t. They were in school. They were students. Children.

Does jerk sound harsh? I guess it does. Some people have suggested the Ohio shooter was bullied. A few days after the shooting, Marlo Thomas wrote in the Huffington Post: “Tragedy in Ohio: When the Bullied Strike Back.” Implying that the Ohio shooter finally rose up in a righteous rage and shot three people who had tormented him for years.

I applaud Ms. Thomas for fighting bullying. But I think she’s wrong about the Chardon shooter.

Ever since Columbine, we like to think that school shootings are a toxic byproduct of bullying. If you end bullying, you’ll end school shootings. Bullying is evil and must be fought as evil. It should not be fought because it causes kids to snap and start shooting people. Most school shooting cases are a lot more complicated than that. Recent evidence has indicated the Columbine shooters weren’t quite the victimized geeks portrayed in the media. (For more, read David Cullen’s excellent book, Columbine, or his piece in Slate.) And while some kids have said the Chardon shooter was bullied, there are many other factors to this story. He grew up in a violent home. He was in a school for kids  struggling with mental or emotional issues. He had recently broken up with his girlfriend, who may or may not have been dating one of the boys who was killed.

He had a lot of reasons to be angry. A lot of kids do. Even if you ended bullying tomorrow, you would not stop kids from feeling alone or angry or depressed. But we could do a lot more to stop those kids from getting guns and using them to express their rage and despair.

You are not allowed to have guns in Ohio until you are 21. This 17-year-old got a  .22-caliber handgun. How? He went to his grandfather’s barn and took it. His grandfather had taught him how to use it. And unfortunately, this very caring man never thought that his grandson would use it for anything but target practice and hunting in the woods. So he did not keep that gun in a locked, secure place.

Opponents of gun control say we have laws. Opponents of gun control say that only bad people misuse guns and the rest of us need guns to protect ourselves from those bad people. Some of them want more guns in schools, guns in daycare, guns in churches.

Does anyone else think this sounds like a nightmare? Does anyone think the way we handle guns now is making us safe?

According to a recent report from the Children’s Defense fund,  3,042 children and teens died from gunfire in America in 2007.

That’s one child every three hours.

Eight children every day.

Fifty-eight children every week.

Imagine your classroom. Imagine every three hours, one kid in your classroom dies. Then another, and another, and another. It wouldn’t even take a week for that classroom to be empty.

And almost six times as many children—17,523—suffered non-fatal gun injuries.

Is this what we want?

Reviews, Reviews

Oh, it’s review time! That lovely point in a book’s life when the critics weigh in with their opinions. They put them in print. And online. And other places people can actually see them.

Sorry, hyperventilating…be right back.

Okay, I’m back.

Reviews are a good thing. I know this. Reviews mean that people are paying attention. You have made something and someone who does not love you, like you, or even know you has bothered to read it and form an opinion about it. If you had told me when I was ten that this would happen to me on a regular basis, my head would have exploded from happiness.

But still—there is the moment when a review for a new book comes in when I clap my hand to my eyes, peek between two fingers, and pray it doesn’t leave my intestines all over the floor.

I’ll just get it out of the way and say the reviews so far for The Girl in the Park have been very kind. You can see them by clicking on the My Books section of this site. PW gave it a starred review—thank you very, very much, PW! And VOYA has always been wonderful and supportive of my books. In general, I find critics of YA literature to be very generous, thoughtful people. (No, I am not just sucking up!) I’ve rarely read a truly nasty, mean spirited review from this crowd.

Which doesn’t mean I’ve never gotten slammed. One adult novel I wrote provoked intense hatred among Amazon buyers. One review was titled “Torture—pure torture!” Another reviewer wrote, “I don’t know who bribed the reviewers on the back cover or some of the other reviewers from this website!”

And so on. Those were not such fun days.

(Just so you know, reviewers are not bribed. Writers do not have that kind of money unless they are J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyers, and their readers couldn’t care less what reviewers say. They just want to get their hands on that next book!)

Reviews bring up that basic life issue: should we care what other people think? On the one hand: of course not! Chart your own path! March to our own drummer! Waddle to your own beat!

On the other hand, people probably aren’t going to rush out and buy a book with “the most boring piece of dreck I’ve ever read” emblazoned on the cover. We take people’s opinion into consideration every day, whether it’s how we dress, worrying about a test, or fretting that we’ve upset a friend by saying something boneheaded. And I don’t think that’s a disaster—as long as you don’t get so paralyzed by anxiety you can’t actually leave the house. (Not that that’s ever happened to me. Okay, once or twice.)

Speaking of reviews, I want to recommend a great book I just read: Wonder by R.J. Palacio. A friend passed it to me because the 10 year old hero has a cleft palate, as I did—and a whole lot of other facial issues. His parents have home schooled him in the past. But now August Pullman is starting 5th grade in a regular school. And he doesn’t have an easy time of it. In the beginning, a lot of his classmates can’t handle the way he looks. Some of them are cruel; others are just clueless. August has to figure out: how much do other people’s opinions matter? What power do they have over him? The answers to those questions evolve throughout the book in a very believable, real way. Ms. Palacio isn’t afraid to go for the drama—she wouldn’t be a very fun writer if she were. But she always keeps it real. The kids who are hurtful to August are not all evil. August is not a saint. These are real kids—and that’s what makes the pain and the joy in Wonder so satisfying. If you’re struggling to find your place, having trouble accepting someone who’s a little different, or you know anyone who fits those descriptions, read Wonder. To find out more about the book, go to rjpalacio.com