Art by Linear13 on Deviantart
Firstly: Happy new year! (Even though my family does not celebrate the Lunar New Year, I figured today was an appropriate day to actually blog about a new year!)
Secondly: Wow, it’s been…a long time since I’ve blogged anything substantial.
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Damn, John Green. I mean…damn.
This is what happens when you have a youthful face, a teenaged brother, and young-looking parents: people assume you’re still in school. Once I ordered una cerveza when my family and I went on vacation together to Cancún last year, but the waiter came back with a 7Up. When I sent it back asked for a beer, he looked to my parents to see if it was okay with them. Mind you, the drinking age is 18 in Mexico.
*Omona is pretty much the Korean equivalent of “Oh my goodness!”
I don't believe in fashion. I believe in costume. Life is too short to be the same person every day.Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door
Lola is a girl after my own heart. ♥
I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
This is why I love Austen so: not the romances, not the manners porn, not the “out of countenance”-ing, but this. Words to live by, Miss Eliza Bennet!
It’s that time of year again, as 2011 draws to a close, when JJ picks her Best Reads books. This year’s been a bit of a mixed bag for me, and despite the spate of new and shiny YA titles with attendant romances and cool dystopian/fantasy/sci-fi settings that came out in 2011, the books that have stayed with me have been adult, YA contemporary (with literary bent), or even a bit of non-fiction.
What does this all mean? I have absolutely no idea. Am I getting a little fatigued with high-concept YA? I might be. There’s a lot of flash and pizzazz out there that’s pretty neat and awesome, but perhaps I’m more in the mood for something smaller in scope, something pure in its emotional simplicity. (This rather echoes my feelings about current Doctor Who, actually, but my thoughts about New New Who I will table for another day. I am, however, rather excited for this year’s Christmas special.)
Anyway, here’s a list I’ve cobbled together of the reads that have stayed with me. As per usual, they are not ranked but shoved into their own arbitrary categories.
Truly Magical: The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Most Self-Indulgent Fangirl Read (That Is Also Full of Excellent and True Writing Advice): The Writer’s Tale by Russell T. Davies
My Feminist Bible: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
Just Rip My Heart Out Through My Gut, Will You? The Lovers Dictionary by David Levithan and Where She Went by Gayle Forman
Best New (to JJ) Writer: Nova Ren Suma with her novel Imaginary Girls
Most Swoonworthy: Heart’s Blood by Juliet Marillier
The Ones That Got Away: The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson and Legend by Marie Lu*
Favourite YA Couple: Alan and Sin from Sarah Rees Brennan’s The Demon’s Surrender
Best Book JJ Read Over the Holiday That Didn’t Make Last Year’s List: Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly
Most Absorbing Worldbuilding: Eon and Eona by Alison Goodman
Hottest Fictional Character EVER: Dr. Pellinore Warthrop from The Monstrumologist
Allison Rushby's six episodes in an original e-serial, pitched as DOWNTON ABBEY for the New Adult market where triplets, estranged since birth, are suddenly brought together and forced to compete for their inheritance, to Dan Weiss at St. Martin's, with Vicki Lame editing, for publication in 2012, by Sara Megibow at Nelson Literary Agency.
Exciting news! In-house Cap’n Sweet Valley has been working on an initiative to start publishing a series of e-originals that we are calling e-serials. What are e-serials?
An e-serial is a series of digital-only discrete dramatic novella-length “episodes” that advance an overall “season” narrative arc through 4-6 installments, published in at regular intervals at a low price.
We are conceptualizing e-serials as a loose bridge between a full length novel and a TV show. An e-serial episode is analogous to a one hour drama, one installment of a season of dramas. We’ve already started this experiment with The Sweet Life, which will be an e-serial featuring the continuing lives of the Wakefield twins–now 30 years old and living in California–and look forward to finding more stories to develop!
This is obviously a new and experimental format, but all the criteria for what makes a good novel still hold: high-concept hook, great writing, great characters. We’re excited to have Allison Rushby onboard with us for this!
In Nora Zelevansky’s hilarious debut, Semi-Charmed Life, an Upper West Side naïf, Beatrice Bernstein, gets swept up in the seeming magical life of socialite Veruca Pfeffernoose, while ghost-writing her blog. Veruca’s glitteringly opulent world soon seduces Beatrice away from her own insular, arty family with a promise of fancy parties, travel outside Manhattan (gasp!), and one desperately cute guy. But when her new glitzy lifestyle starts to take on dark undertones, Beatrice has to decide who she is–once and for all. With her own magical touch, Zelevansky deftly explores the world of rarified Manhattan in this sparkling modern fairy tale of first love, finding one’s voice, and growing up.
I know I’ve been fairly quiet on the new adult front lately, but that’s mostly because we’ve been working, working, working with no real news to report. However! Here’s a tangible piece! When I last updated you on what we had acquired, it was title THE PFEFFERNOOSE CHRONICLES, but now it has a brand new, shiny title as well as accompanying gorgeous cover!
My colleague Vicki edited it (and I think she’s done a bang-up job). SEMI-CHARMED LIFE will be published in July 2012, and we couldn’t be more excited!
More news to come (on this, and other titles) later. We’ve been working, we swear.
Lately I’ve been mulling over a question that seems to crop up in a lot of what I read for both work and pleasure, namely whether or not a definition of YA exists. Of course YA exists, but what it is seems to be a fluid idea, shaped by many different considerations: age of protagonist, marketing concerns, and the most controversial of all–reading level.
This morning on Twitter I posed the question of whether YA was a genre, a reading level, or a marketing category and the responses I got were great. People had varying opinions, of course, but what struck me was that in this roiling, frothing discussion, general a consensus was rising to the top:
YA is not a reading level; it is a specific perspective and aesthetic sensibility.
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