CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

There’s a great post today on Guys Lit Wire, a blog about books for boys. Do teenage boys need books with weak female characters? links to a YouTube discussion where two older males bemoan that boys can’t be heroes any more. In praising a new title, Nick of Time by Ted Bell, the speakers make a point of saying how great it is that the female characters are passive so that the boys can rescue them.

This discussion is rebutted confidently by ‘Colleen’:

‘There are a couple of things that bother me about this discussion (between two adult men without a teenager in sight by the way). First it is that for a boy to feel heroic he must rescue a girl - and the girl also needs to be rescued. I’m sure the sociologists would have a field day over all this but I can’t believe that anyone in the 21st century would believe that such antiquated notions of what it means to be a hero have any place in a worthwhile discussion. Save the world - yes! Save the animals, save the environment, save whatever needs saving in your books. But the girl MUST be saved by the boy for the boy to feel powerful? How do these gentlemen think it makes the girl feel to have to wait to be saved? Have they ever thought about that at all?’

Colleen also provides a ‘top of the head’ list of titles where boys are both strong and heroic.

It’s a terrific discussion for a boys’ lit blog, with plenty of comments coming in.

Having just commented on Laurie Halse Anderson’s ALAN award yesterday, news has come through of a cool competiton she is running - and yes, Australians can enter.

In February, in the very early days of this blog, we ran a post on hooking kids into books and talked about book trailers (check out the tag cloud to access it). Now Laurie is running a book trailer competition for her book Speak or her newest title Twisted, which became available here on 1 June. Both titles deal with fairly meaty issues so are are best suited to mature readers.

Full details of the competition are on Laurie’s blog. Don’t be put off by the North American emphasis in the details - we’ve been in touch with Laurie and she’s be thrilled to receive entries from Australia or indeed anywhere else. Sounds like fun, so let your creative readers know. With school holidays just around the corner for most states, the timing is perfect.

Entries close on 31 August.

To visit Laurie’s website click here.

The US-based weblog Chasing Ray is coordinating the annual Summer Blog Blast this week. Last year lots of our Australian YA authors participated in this blogging feast. The 2008 Blast stays a little closer to home with a list of UK and US writers taking part.

How does it work? A number of litblogs host an author for a day. For example, today (US time, remember) David Almond will log on to Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast and Susan Beth Pfeffer (always good value) will be at Interactive Reader. Tomorrow SBP hops onto the YA YA YAs .

Others taking part include Laurie Halse Anderson, Barry Lyga and Elizabeth Scott.

The full program for the week is here. And the beauty of blogs is that the posts and comments remain, so if there’s no time this week to check out what is being discussed, there’s always next week.

More than a dozen blogs, all passionate about discussing YA books and writers, are taking part in the Summer Blog Blast. These include Finding Wonderland, Fuse #8, shaken & stirred, Bookshelves of Doom, Writing and Ruminating, Bildungsroman, HipWriterMama, A Chair, A Fireplace and A Tea Cozy and Miss Erin.

Gen X and Gen Y we know about, but a long article in Newsweek magazine this week is talking about Gen R. And it’s good news for readers.

Generation R (R is for Reader) talks about the boom in YA publishing, and how it’s not all about Harry Potter. David Levithan is quoted as saying we are in a ’second golden age’ for young adult books - ‘the most exciting time for young-adult literature since the late 1960s and 1970s when ‘The Chocolate War’ [by Robert Cormier] and ‘Forever’ [by Judy Blume] were published.’

We knew that, but it’s great that Newsweek is spreading the word.

Simmone Howell, she of the award-winning Notes from the Teenage Underground, has been in touch to alert us to some Australian YA author blogs. Just what we wanted to hear. Simmone suggests we look at:

• Kirsty Murray (Magic Casements)
• Penni Russon (Eglantine’s Cake)
• Lili Wilkinson (Thinkings of a Lili)
• James Roy (headvsdesk)
• Catherine Bateson (CattyRox)
• Adam Ford (self-described poet, novelist, zinemaker, artist, editor, showoff)
• Sherryl Clark (Books and Writing)
• and of course, her own blog, post-teen trauma.

In the hunting, we came across Gabrielle Wang’s A Passing Whisper, Carole Wilkinson’s self-named blog, Scot Gardner’s Jingo Lingo, Nicki Greenberg’s There’s a bug in my inkbottle and Margo Lanagan’s Among Amid While. And Simon Haynes has a Hal Spacejock blog for the many fans of that popular series.

So they are out there - please keep the suggestions coming and we will build up a pretty useful list. Thanks again, Simmone.

How authors find the time to blog as well as create highly readable YA fiction is a bit of a mystery, but writing is writing, and a few of our favourites have great blogs out there to keep readers up to date with their latest news.

Susan Beth Pfeffer (Life as We Knew It) has a self-deprecating wit that is always a delight to read. Yes, her posts can be a tad long, but invariably contain several gems. Over the past few months we have shared in the gestation of LAWKI’s sequel, the dead & the gone, due here in a few weeks.

Other author blogs worth a look include cynsations, the informative blog of Cynthia Leititch Smith (Tantalize); Justine Larbalestier (Magic’s Child) , while Scott Westerfeld (Peeps) keeps us up to date with his travels, new writing and particularly the many and varied covers of the international editions of his work.

Most YA writers, however, are where their audience is - in social networking sites such as MySpace. John Green (Looking for Alaska), David Levithan (Are We There Yet?) and Ned Vizzini (It’s a Kind of Funny Story) all have their MySpace presence where they connect with their readers.

And LiveJournal has an online community called yawriterblogs, where you will find Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak), Sarah Dessen (Just Listen) and Alex Flinn (Breathing Underwater) amongst a number of other North American names.

But apart from Justine and honorary Australian Scott, there doesn’t seem to be a huge blog presence amongst local YA authors. If you know of any good ones, please tell us about them.

Justine Larbalestier - Australian author, New York resident - ponders this question on her most recent blog entry, sparking an interesting debate. Justine’s most recent titles are set in New York and Sydney and feature a potent mix of teenagers and magic. But, as Justine says, the whole notion of the ‘teenager’ is a relatively modern construct and YA is a problematic genre in that it is the only one defined by its audience. So what makes a novel YA? Read what Justine has to say and see if you agree. What a great discussion topic for a teacher-librarian or English teacher to initiate with their classes.