snowy book by Sara Zarr

I am not a fan of book reviews. Reading them, I mean. I would rather read the books. So when I write book reviews, I try to make mine as non-New York Times Book Review or Washington Post Book Review as possible. I think this time I have even outdone myself, since no self respecting New York Times Book Review reviewer would just cut and paste some emails she sent to the author and call them a review. Well, here’s the truth: this is not a review. This is a love letter to Sara Zarr’s latest novel.

actual email (with a few edits for clarity and general blogginess) to Sara Zarr, written at 2:03 a.m. on May 7th, after finishing ARC (Advanced Reader’s Copy) for How to Save a Life, Zarr’s latest book, which comes out Tuesday October 11.

Dear Sara,

In high school, I used my babysitting money to pay for a subscription to Writer’s Digest. And I remember one ad that said, I can come into your house and steal. (it was sort of sinister). But the gist was, a writer has power. To make you laugh, or cry.

I started crying about halfway (if that) through reading HTSAL and have been blubbering ever since.

(Did you cry while writing it?)

I went through a (not full) Kleenex box. I didn’t stop. I started at 11:30 and didn’t look up until 1:15. A.M. Fortunately, I can go in to work late in the morning if need be.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE your book. From the minute Mandy’s character said “all the magazines had ‘the’ in front of them, ‘The Economist…” I was in love.  (I never thought about that…that magazines could be categorized by an article. But truly, magazines like People, Star, Hello! are very different from The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker…) Right away, Mandy, who up to that point seemed like a bit of a ditz, had a real voice, not just the things her mother told her about to how to catch a man. Here she was, in a world so different from her own, trying to make sense of this new habitat. Even the magazines are different…

I remember your blog posts (and tweets, I’m pretty sure there were tweets) about being in Denver and thinking you should move to Denver.

I love that the fonts are different, and how each font really reflects each girl. I love that Alex wrote back and said “stop writing me!” (and how we discover that he wrote that.) I loved how Mandy parroted her mother but wanted something different, and that’s why she decided to not have an abortion, to instead try to save a life, to maybe change her own. I loved the letters that Mandy wrote, long hand, because I used to be queen of the long hand letter and miss that form of communication so much.

And Ravi…what a dear dear boy. I love that Jill decked him in the beginning.

I imagined the store where Mandy worked, Margins, as the Barnes and Noble that I worked at before I left to go to library school, in Seven Corners, Virginia. When I worked at a different B&N in downtown Pittsburgh, I remember a guy swiping my books back in the kids’ department, but I could never catch him, prove anything.

The relationships in this book were so true, the language was so natural. I feel like you took a lot of big risks, this was a book that could have been one big cliche. But you made it honest. You did right by the story.

And even though I am hormonal, and stressed, you gave me a way out of my own crap for a couple of hours. And I needed that, so badly. (Even though I do wish I hadn’t used all my Kleenex…) (Well, I’m sure I still have some in the bathroom.)

I thought the Bible being the box for the watch was a great prop. And Dylan, all hip, afraid of the cops at the pawn shops. So different from Ravi. “Clark.” That was a classic scene. “No, uh, I was thinking of William Clark, you know, of Lewis and Clark, the explorers?”

You done good. I promise to blog about it, but I wanted to write to you, too, since I already had (was that only yesterday? It seems like a lifetime ago.)

All cried out,

Suzi

actual email to Sara Zarr, the day before.

Sara,

It’s strange, because I don’t know you, not really, but I felt like I needed to tell you (ask permission after the fact?) that I flipped to the end of your book. It’s a habit I have if the book seems like it might break my heart. Almost all Grisham novels also get this treatment. After writing that, I can see some people might see that as pejorative and I didn’t mean it that way.

And it’s so beautiful and I probably was close to a cry anyways after a confusing chat with my mother, but I am blubbering. It is so beautiful. I didn’t get all of it, and that’s okay, b/c I don’t want to spoil the whole thing, but I know that I will love the middle, now that I’ve sampled the top and bottom layers.

Also, I adore the cover. It’s been staring at me all week, saying “why are you not reading me?” as I’ve been scurrying around, trying to not fail at my own deadlines.

I’m really intrigued now to find out who Kent is, and who the guy Jill meets for coffee at the end is.

Suzi

The story of this blogger’s year: I have been too busy trying to not fail at my own deadlines since May. But I want you to know that if you miss this book, you’re missing something wonderful.

“It is not down in any map; true places never are…”

(Herman Melville)

So, here we are. We’re closed Sunday, I’m off on Monday, so starting…NOW, it’s Europe week for “One World, Many Stories” at my library. The “Oktoberfest in July” is on Tuesday–the next two days will be full of putting pretzels in little wax bags and stapling them.

Still have no clue how we’re doing the root beer taste test, or the crafts. But the crafts involve magazine pictures from Europe, so some sort of collage project.

I’ll post the book list on Tuesday. Meanwhile, what books would you put on a list of books that take place in Europe for children? I did picture books, younger grades, and middle grades.

See you Tuesday!

Books I’m not reading this week, an occasional feature.

Note: these are not bad books. I am merely not reading them. I am releasing them back to their home libraries, the shelves where someone else can pluck them and enjoy them. Who knows, you might find one you want to check out, and won’t you be glad I’m not reading it?

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Yes, I know. EVERYONE is reading it. Well, everyone is reading The Paris Wife, and I’m not reading that book either. (I may read The Paris Wife in the fall. It just seemed like it was heading for a train wreck and I can’t read books like that in the summer.) The Elegance… looks a little too complicated, and one friend on twitter said, “do the characters in The Elegance… ever stop trying to prove how smart they are?” I’m also not reading the latest Traveling Pants book (Sisterhood Everlasting) for a similar reason. Too heavy.  (I know, it seems totally against the whole Traveling Pants franchise, but I’m telling you, keep a hanky handy.) I made it through the first disc saying, no, tell me no, you can’t start the book this way and Brashares, darn her, did.

What can you do with an old red shoe? by Anna Alter. The cutest book on recycling I’ve ever seen. I came across it this morning because someone recommended Alter’s more recent book, A Photo for Greta and our consortium doesn’t have any copies yet. For shame! (Our particular library doesn’t order books during the summer in Children’s because we have this little affair called Summer Reading. We have over 1200 readers signed up from birth to twelfth grade.) So I’ll make a note of it for in the fall order. But I don’t need to take it home because a) it was a quick read and b) I do not have time for crafts projects in the summer.

The Little Women Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly. I actually put this on hold when I was checking the catalog record a few weeks ago, and read the first chapter. But since then, I have become sensitive to the whole pregnant women, young children issue that rears its ugly head every so often. So when on the first page Jo, Jo! uses these words to describe her new daughter, I know this is not right now the book for me.

“And now, just when I had thought that part of my life was done, comes the most precious little gift that I had ever dared to dream of.”

Jo, I expected more of you.

I hope you are finding wonderful books to read. I’m too tired to tell you about them now, though. I am taking some lovely books home tonight, including:

The Schwa was here / Neal Schusterman
Penny Dreadful / Laurel Snyder
My year with Eleanor / Noelle Hancock
Heart of the City (about NEW YORK!) / Ariel Sabar.

Great Scott!

Today on the Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac, Anita Silvey tells us about the elevator operator at #2 Park Street, Boston, who became the inspiration for Dr. Seuss’s most famous character, the Cat in the Hat.

You might think *that* would be the piece of information that would tickle me to pieces and have me go all over the Internet to find out more information about Herr Docktor Seuss. You would be wrong.

No, the tidbit that caught my fancy was this, about William Spaulding, Houghton Mifflin Reading Division head, and his army buddy Theodore Geisel:

Wanting to outstrip his competitor, Scott Foresman, who published the bestselling Dick and Jane series, Spaulding believed there was another way to approach the teaching of reading. He told Seuss that if he could wed what he knew—how to entertain children—with what reading specialists believed, reading instruction in the United States could be revolutionized.

I have been piecing together children’s publishing history. You might say it is my current hobby. I’d been reading Leonard Marcus‘s Dear Genius and every Charlotte Zolotow book (books that she wrote, books that she published), thinking I wanted to write a paper on Charlotte Zolotow as an editor at Harper & Row. I gave myself a deadline for a rough draft. And on the day of my deadline, I hadn’t written more than a few sentences and I kept wondering on the bits and pieces that I knew about Virginia Kirkus, who was the first children’s editor at Harper & Bros, in 1926.

It was a quiet Saturday afternoon at the reference desk, so I just started doing any search I could think of to find more bits and pieces. Soon I had printed pages and pages of information.  So now I have an ambition: to write a paper, maybe a book, on VK. I have no idea when I’ll write this paper, since Summer Reading is upon us, my sister is getting married in August and I don’t have any NEW information about VK, except that her papers are at Vassar. From all the information I’ve gleaned, Vassar is closed for the summer.

Here is what I know, more or less: VK was the first children’s editor at Harper & Bros from 1926 to 1932.  She was a teacher before that, and a freelance journalist.

I have been using the tidbits I have with the tidbits in Minders of Make Believe, (Leonard Marcus, again).  I have been taking copious notes on the chapter called “Sisters in crisis and in conflict: the 1930s.” And all this time, I had been wondering what had happened to Scott, whose name I had seen here and there but knew was no longer a working publisher.

So when I saw that name, Scott, in Anita’s post this morning, I let my fingers do the walking and came across an obituary in the New York Times of William Rufus Scott. His publishing house, W.R. Scott, was the one where Margaret Wise Brown was Children’s editor for a while. (Thanks again, to Anita, a few weeks ago, when she wrote about Caps for Sale.)

And relief, what relief, that Scott Foresman was NOT the house that published Caps for Sale…wouldn’t that be awful, to have Margaret Wise Brown on staff in one era and be publishing Dick and Jane in another?

More to come, it’s time to start cataloging for the day.

I still didn’t get eaten by zombies…

Wow, the last post for this blog is from November, of 2010. And the reference in the title is a post I wrote in 2009 before going to ALA in Chicago.

Since then, big things have happened!! Such as…I got published! My first piece is in a column called Balance Point in Serials Review, a journal for Serials Librarians. I wrote about children’s magazines, where they are and where they are going in this digital environment. I was thrilled to learn that magazines are still read and subscribed to, though they aren’t used in the same ways as when I was a girl. Information for papers is found online, either through databases, or just search engines. A far cry from The Readers to Periodical Literature, which I used in high school, college, and possibly into library school. Serials Review is hosted online by Elsivier, which is mostly used by academic libraries. I have yet to put my hot hands on a copy of the actual journal, but the editor of the column sent me a PDF of the article, which I immediately sent off to my parents. (Of course they loved it.)

AND, I’ll be presenting at PALA (the Pennsylvania Library Association) in the fall, using research from my article and more. I’ve expanded the subject matter to magazines for all ages. The presentation is called, “Not Dead Yet: Print Magazines in the Digital Era.”

The sunny side of all this magazine research (not that there was a cloudy side) is that wow, who knew, I am in love with magazines, and they are a viable thing to research in a library context.

Right now, I’m surviving the first week of Summer Reading. It’s crazy busy one minute, slow the next, and then people show up at the reference desk in clumps. We generally get around 2,000 kids signed up to our program each summer, so it’s all hands on deck, which often means two people at the Children’s Reference desk, plus a teen volunteer.

Other excitement:

• My new favorite blog is Anita Silvey’s Book a Day Almanac.
• I’m doing research (in my ha! spare time) on Virginia Kirkus, who not only started the Kirkus Reviews but also was Harper Collins’ first Children’s editor, from 1926 to 1932, back when the company was Harper & Bros. She also was the first editor to publish Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Little House in the Big Woods. (Not the first editor to accept the manuscript, but that’s a story for another day.)

Written after my morning (glory) walk…

While I moaned last Sunday about having lost two hours and six dollars when I was done watching “Morning Glory,” the latest movie starring Diane Keaton, Harrison Ford, and Rachel McAdams, there was one moment that was worth that expense.

It was the moment after Harrison Ford says, “you’ll know when to go live.” Ford’s character, a has-been news anchor turned reluctant breakfast television host, lured Rachel’s character upstate to the governor’s summer house on false pretenses (a sauerkraut festival? really? but we bought it, hook, line and sinker.) Back in the studio, you see the earnest weather man scrambling, carrying multiple weathervanes, preparing to do the story he’s pitched every day for a week, everyone scrambling to find some story, any story, to cover the gaping hole that was meant for a feature on the sauerkraut festival and then you see the story unfold at the governor’s summer house, majestically… (no, I’m not one of THOSE reviewers. You will have to go see the movie for this one majestic moment, or I’ll tell you in person if you are not a moviegoer. Put it on your Netflix queue, or go pay six dollars. Because even if the script paid too much attention to Rachel’s romantic foibles and not enough on the main relationship, the one between Rachel and Harrison, the acting in this movie was superb.)

I was reminded of this moment in the movie on my morning walk, because I walk past the Pittsburgh Seminary, which has a weather vane atop its clock tower. I don’t suppose it’s an actual working weather vane, but it is the kind of tower jewelery you see on a church building, either a cross or a rooster. And the reason a clock tower would have a rooster for its top? Because Jesus said to Peter, “Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.” (Matthew 26:34, KJV)

Indulge me for a minute, while I go down this unrelated stream of thoughts: why did I use the King James Version, with its dusty, archaic language? I’m so glad you asked! It is one of the few English versions that is in public domain, that is to say, there are no copyright violations for using it in a creative piece. (Although I used such a small piece that if I had quoted the New International Version, I would not be in copyright violation, but you’re indulging me, remember?)  I also used it because it is the version that uses the word cock in such a way that you might not giggle at it. As I started writing this piece, I was going to use the word cock where I put rooster, but in my mind Samantha Jones was giggling. Does everything come back to Sex and the City, in the end?

But back to the movie. Harrison Ford, ever the curmudgeon who goes a little soft, never disappoints. When I emailed her about this movie, one of my friends referred to a Christine Lavin song, which I haven’t heard. (What a treat to discover on YouTube, eh?) I don’t have time for it now, as I must run off to ready for work.

Moral: if you think about a movie five days after you saw it, it was worth the six dollars and fifty cents and the two hours.

[Author's note: it has been ages since I have wanted my walk to end just so I could get home, fire up the laptop, and write. Huzzah!]

Catalog race…19 problem books in 1 hr!

Saturdays have become (or always have been?) the day of the week when I deal with problem books. Last week it was catalog records. This week it was checking books that were either cataloged by other libraries, or needed to be imported because of one or another issue.

Stick a fork in me, I’m DONE!

So here are the five books I put aside to look at further:

Beyond the family tree: a book you can use to get the interview process going with relatives if you are trying to do an oral history…questions, forms, colorful typography, cool design…what more can you ask for? A bargain at $15.95.

The dragonfly effect: quick, effective, and powerful ways to use social media to drive social change. So this is how you leverage Facebook or Twitter or [your favorite social network] to start a blood drive, or something bigger. Bonus: I just found out Mark Z. (of Facebook) has a sister, Randi, who does PR for FB. There you go.

50 modern artists you should know. I am a sucker for any book of artists. For two seconds my freshman year of college, I considered being an art history major. Folks that are household names (Van Gogh, Monet, O’Keefe, Pollack) are in here, side by side with folks I’d never heard of (Moore, Twombly, Barney, Beuys.) This is not a book to give to your art history major, as the book is a QUICK intro, but if you’re a “wanna be” like me, it gives you enough that you’ll want more. And I learned in the glossary the actual meaning of “installation art”: installations are three-dimensional works of art. Well, I sort of knew that, but now I know the actual definition. YAY!

Deanna Favre (yes, Brett’s wife) wrote a book! With a guy whose last name is also the name of an Ivy League school, Shane Stanford. The Cure for the Chronic Life: overcoming the hopelessness that holds you back actually looks a lot less hokey than most of the books you find in the 248. 4′s (Christian life and practice) in most public libraries. Looks to be a 40 day guide, so maybe something good for Lent. Any book that uses a book called “Mad Church Disease” as an example of how we are screwed up about how we think about church can’t be bad. It looks like the sort of book Anne Lamott might like.

And this one, it was painful to not explore, as I am such a patient. The empowered patient: how to get the right diagnosis, buy the cheapest drugs, beat your insurance company, and get the best medical care every time. How can you not love a book where the first chapter is “How to be a ‘bad patient.’” (As in, question your doctor.) The second chapter is how to fire your bad doctor after you’ve found “Dr. Right.”

And the book that was the hardest to put aside, that I broke down and looked at a little bit: Masters: Collage. Collage is one of my favorite hobbies. ‘Nuff said.

And now, my dear ones, it is time to turn off the computers, head on out to enjoy the wonderful weather I understand we had all day. (Darn those windowless cataloging offices!)