You may have noticed that I haven't been posting much lately.

I have many reasons (not excuses, mind -- reasons!).

Reason #1:  OH MY GOD THE CYBILS.  Lots and lots more to read still, including the massive box of S&S books that arrived today.

Reason #2:  I've discovered the world of vintage sewing patterns.  (There are loads more links at A Dress A Day.)  So much of my time online lately has been spent wandering and reading and, yes, buying.  And then there's the sewing.  This is the third dress I've made recently (I posed to match the lady on the pattern envelope.  Why do they stand like that?):

Reason #3:  Josh and I recently spent an afternoon rolling out characters for the Star Wars roleplaying game.  So when I haven't been reading for the Cybils or sewing or tracking down more dress patterns, I've been totally geeking out about the Star Wars universe.  (I'm playing a character who is super-strong, super-nimble, super-hot, and completely lacking in common sense.  And Josh is playing someone who's wicked stinky and very smart.  So that'll be fun.)

Reason#4:  Tallboy #2.  I'm just finishing up with the formatting, and it's on track to ship on December 1st.  I'll get a pre-order form up tomorrow or Friday, but here's the cover:

The Sweetheart of Prosper County, by Jill Alexander:

Mostly invisible 15-year-old Austin Gray doesn't want to spend yet another year watching the parade go by.  She doesn't want to stand on the curb being harassed by loser-bullies like jerkface Dean Ottmer -- she wants to be IN the parade, smugly waving at loser-bullies like Dean Ottmer.  So she sets out to be the Future Farmers of America Sweetheart.  Which means she needs to raise an animal.  And then there's that whole hunting requirement as well...

As usual, Feiwel & Friends has done a great job of capturing the essence of a book with their cover art.  Super cute, sweet, funny, quirky, and how could anyone not love a rooster named Charles Dickens?  HOWEVER.  There are so many characters and so many Big Issues that I didn't feel that there was any room to breathe -- everything and everyone was introduced, but there wasn't much depth of character, they didn't really develop, and the issues weren't really explored.  Like I said, cute and sweet, though.

The King's Rose, by Alisa M. Libby:

Although 15-year-old Catherine Howard has been groomed by her family for something far more ambitious than a simple marriage to a nice, rich noble, she is still terrified when she catches the eye of King Henry VIII.  After all, her cousin was Anne Boleyn.  Granted, Catherine knows -- like everyone else -- that her cousin was a witch and that she deserved to die, but... still.  And while being queen will be nice, she'll be an old man's queen -- which will leave no room in her life for romance or for passion.  Or will it?

I really enjoyed this one.  While I never connected emotionally with Catherine (Which I think is due to My Stuff, since, well, why get attached when you know someone isn't going to be around very long?), I found her voice compelling and sympathetic, the political maneuvering fascinating, the descriptions of the period vivid, and the slowly-growing peril felt wonderfully tense and claustrophobic.  All that goodness, and the Author's Note made me appreciate the book all the more -- partly because Libby explained what she'd invented and what she'd based on fact, and because her affection and sympathy for Catherine Howard shone through and affected me, making me feel so sorry for this young girl who was used by everyone around her and who, even in death, was eclipsed by her more flamboyant, fiery cousin.

I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I want to be you Class President, by Josh Lieb:

12-year-old Oliver Watson is so dumb that, on rare occasions, people look at him sideways and wonder, "Is that really possible?  Could ANYONE really be THAT STUPID?"  What no one knows (except a few trusted employees) is the answer to both of those questions (at least in this case) is a big fat NO.  Oliver uses the dumb act to disguise his true Evil Genius self.  From his secret Evil Lair underneath his parents' house, he controls multi-national corporations, politicians, much of the media, and, of course, the teachers at his middle school.  What he wants now, though, is something insignificant, something that should be very easy to accomplish -- he wants to show his despised father up by getting elected class president.  Which, even taking into account his father's annoying PBS-brand idealism and his own carefully-crafted paste-eating persona, will turn out to be his most frustrating Evil Plan yet.

I had mixed feelings on this one.  On the one hand, it was hilarious.  Example?  In one of his many wonderful footnotes, Oliver refers to Machiavelli as "A dead Italian who wrote an early self-help book."  On the other, I felt it fell into the This Book Was Published as a MG/YA Book Because the Protagonist Is Twelve, But Really, It's a Humor Book Mostly For Grown-Ups.  Which is fine.  Because I totally did enjoy it.  And there certainly are middle-schoolers who'll enjoy it (I'll definitely give it to my Artemis Fowl fans).

But, you know.  Oliver, while awesomely, evilly funny, isn't exactly a three-dimensional character -- again, think Artemis Fowl -- and while it makes sense that his musical and literary taste would be more mature than the average twelve-year-old's, I found it odd that his musical and literary taste seemed to be more in tune with someone of my generation or older.  Captain Beefheart?  Really?  Raymond Carver?  Okay.  I could have let that go if there hadn't been a scene featuring a (non-genius) classmate of Oliver's wearing Knight Rider pajamas.  I realize that there was a recent attempt to bring it back, but... yeah.  It tanked so fast that I doubt ANYONE was selling pajamas.  And that just felt sloppy to me.  Or at least supremely unrealistic.  Of course, I may be taking this a tad too seriously as the scene in question also involved our antihero torturing the KITT-loving kid by hanging him up like a marionette and making him dance to Oliver's Guitar Hero moves.

So.  Wicked funny, but not, you know, Raymond Carver.  Not that it was trying to be.

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Book source:  The Alexander, borrowed from my local library; the Libby, ILLed from my local library; the Lieb, review copy from the publisher.  All three books are Cybils nominees.

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I'm part of the Amazon Affiliate program.  Which I'd assume would be apparent by the ad in the sidebar, but assuming that you're bright enough to understand that is not enough for the FTC.  So, I will spell it out:  if you click through to Amazon and buy something, I get money.  Why, you ask? Well, gosh.  How else will I will I ever buy that beautiful dress with the puffed sleeves?

From the prologue:

I can look at this page, this news about the trial and all the background noise around it, and I can say that this is my life, and also the life of a lot of other young and old and church-going and non-church-going and hard-working and not-so-hard-working people who live in Tillmon County and places just like it.  It's my life, but it's their life too.  We're in this together, however we might feel about each other at any particular moment.  And remembering that makes me think, at least for a little while, that maybe I've found the point.

Tillmon County Fire is a collection of connected stories that describe, one after the other and in many voices, the lead up to and the aftermath of a fire in the community. 

The narrators of each story -- a young man who finds God at summer camp; a 17-year-old who doesn't think much of his non-interest in his girlfriend until he sets eyes on the new guy from New York; the girlfriend, who has troubles and dreams she's never shared with her distracted boyfriend; the new guy from New York; a trumpet player; his autistic twin brother; a pregnant girl who works in the hardware store, among others -- speak in clear, distinct voices (and different fonts) that, while separate and individual, form a chorus, even though they don't realize it themselves.

I loved the format, and I felt that the different fonts worked -- in some cases, it would have felt gimmicky, but not here.  The writing was too strong for that.  I always enjoy seeing the same setting and the same event from different perspectives, and Tillmon County Fire not only achieved that, but made it feel real. 

I did think that the Postscript detracted from the book.  It felt tacked-on and unnecessary.  I didn't feel that I needed the story of Aiden's early life, as his story and his actions during the trial made it very clear that, like everyone else, he's a complicated person:  not evil, not perfect.  The Postscript made it feel too easy, too pat -- that suddenly every bad decision he made could be somehow traced back to that event.  I felt like it lessened him somehow.

Overall, though, I enjoyed it very much -- I'll be looking for more from Pamela Ehrenberg, and I hope specifically that there's more short fiction in her writing future.

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Book source:  Cybils nominee; review copy from the publisher.

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Crossposted at Guys Lit Wire.

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I'm part of the Amazon Affiliate program.  Which I'd assume would be apparent by the ad in the sidebar, but assuming that you're bright enough to understand that is not enough for the FTC.  So, I will spell it out:  if you click through to Amazon and buy something, I get money.  Why, you ask?  Well, gosh.  How else will I ever buy an Oompa-Loompa?

...to anyone who had to put up with my Twitter freakout last night, which consisted of many tweets along these lines:

I blame Courtney Summers for recommending the Scariest Movie EVER:

Just so you know how completely pathetic I am:  I watched the trailer through my fingers.

Just so you know what a total jerkface my husband is:  after the movie was over, he went outside and tiptoed around to different windows, tap-tap-tapping them until I hid in the middle of the house where there are no windows.

Just so you know how I really felt about the movie:  I called my father to tell him that he HAD to go out and buy it, because it was utterly awesome and had great effects, good acting and a great storyline and because even though it made me so scared I thought I was going to barf, I adored it.  (Then I stayed on the phone with him until Josh got tired of waiting for me to walk by another window and came back inside.)

I hate the cover art on this one.  I've been sitting here, looking at it, trying to come up with a less harsh way of saying that, but... no.  There isn't a less harsh way of saying it.  I.  Hate.  The.  Cover.  It looks to me like someone slapped it together in seven minutes, and I don't understand if the kid on the front is angry or dancing.  Or doing an angry dance. 

Not that an angry dance is a bad thing.

Anyway.  Don't judge a book, etc., etc.

Angry Management is a trio of novellas about characters from Chris Crutcher's previous books.  Some you'll remember (Sarah Byrnes), and some you very likely won't (Matt Miller, who literally got one line in Deadline). 

The stories are tied together loosely -- all of the characters are in Mr. Nak's (from Ironman) Anger Management group.  Each story begins with Mr. Nak's first impressions of the students:  Sarah Byrnes and Angus Bethune; Montana West and Trey Chase; Matt Miller and Marcus James.

I love Chris Crutcher.  I love Chris Crutcher's books.

I did not love Angry Management.

And I was surprised and disappointed at just how much I did not love Angry Management.

I felt, in the first story, that Angus and Sarah were defined by their pasts.  While I understand that to a great extent, Who You Are is something that is Formed By Your Past, I felt that I never got a sense of either of them OTHER THAN what was in their past.  A good amount of their dialogue felt stilted and unreal -- something very unusual in a Crutcher book -- and the getting-to-know-you portion of their conversation felt like a big infodump.  Because of all that, they both -- Sarah especially -- felt two-dimensional.  The story as a whole felt hurried and like a shallow treatment of characters who deserved better.

The second story felt like a retread of material in other books.  When I wrote about Deadline, I said that readers would recognize themes and character types, but that it felt right and comfortable and like a revisit.  And I said that while the author had previously written about those themes, he still found new ways of looking at them and new aspects to explore.  There is a difference between a retread and a revisit.  Chris Crutcher has told this story before, and he's told it better.  Again, the characters felt two-dimensional and the dialogue didn't feel real.  The antagonist wasn't just two-dimensional, he was one-dimensional.  And it felt preachy.  Which is a hard thing for me to take, even when I agree with what is being preached.

In the third story, pretty much everything I've already said applies, except, in addition, I never saw Marcus James as a person.  I saw him as a symbol.  And that didn't sit right with me.  Even more than in the previous story, I felt that this one came off as extremely preachy:  by the end of the story, I felt that none of the narrators were speaking in their own voices -- they were speaking in Chris Crutcher's.

I very much appreciate the idea that, as in real life, the stories and the realities of these characters haven't ended.  I just didn't feel that these stories did the characters, the author -- or that idea -- justice.

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Book source:  My local library.

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I read this book for the 2009 Cybils.  (Though, of course, I would have gotten to it eventually anyway.)