The First Annual Jody-intz Awards

Today the American Library Association announced this year’s award-winning books for children and young adults. The ALA held a very exciting ceremony for writers and librarians, and I followed along with them on Twitter and watched the podcast of the event while occasionally drifting into pleasant daydreams where I get that call in the morning (someday in the future when I actually have a published book) from the ALA committee. You may have heard of these awards: the Caldecott Medal, for the most distinguished picture book; the Newbery for the best children’s book (which is typically defined as a book written for readers aged 8 to 12); and the Printz, for the best novel written for young adults. Because I write for young adults and love to read books written for young adults, the Printz is the award I’m most interested in.

While I was waiting for the winner to be announced (and/or falling into lala, coveted-medal-on-my-book-cover, fantasy land) I started making a list of the awards I’d give if anyone at the ALA ever asked me for my opinion.

So here it is, without further ado, the first annual Jody-intz Awards (and at the end, I’ll tell you which book actually won the Printz.):

1. Best Page-Turner. This award goes to the book I read in one long sitting/walking from room to room with it because I could not bear to put it down for one second and then stayed up half the night to finish it. Drum Roll. Ashes by Ilsa Bick, the addictive and heart-stopping tale of an allegedly dying girl who goes on a camping trip when an electromagnetic pulse pulses the world, kills most of humanity, and turns the remainder into flesh-eating zombies. This book is also a runner up for the Biggest Cliff-hanger/Oh Crud, Now I Have to Wait for the Sequel Award. Also receives an honorable mention for Book That Most Inspires You To Hoard Canned Goods. Warning: Clear out your schedule before turning to the first page.
2. Coolest Premise. The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler. Two teens living in the olden days of 1995 log online and discover their Facebook pages fifteen years in the future. What else is there to say about that? A very cool idea that I wish I’d thought of. (P.S. The book lives up to the hype too.)
3. Most Original Voice. I read a ton of YA books so it’s surprising when I come across a voice I’ve never heard before. The winner in this category is Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff. The main character is a kid called Kid who tells the story of a warehouse fire in Brooklyn and the growing relationship with a kid named Scout. Oh, and by the way, the reader never learns the genders of either Kid or Scout.
4. Best Teen Love Story—A three-way tie between Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins, Wanderlove by Kirsten Hubbard, and If I Stay by Gayle Forman. If you love love stories and either hated Twilight and crave an alternative or loved Twilight and crave an alternative, read any of these. Or all of these. Sigh.
5. Best World I’d Love to Fall Into. Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. This book could be a runner up in the Best Love Story category too, now that I think about it. The setting is a remote island where every year killer horses rise up out of the sea and the townspeople risk their lives to race them. This is one of those old-fashioned books that takes its time, developing the cast of complicated and quirky characters and building the intricate plot. When I knew I was coming to the end, I read slower so I could stay in the fully realized, luscious world just a little bit longer.
6. I guess I should follow up this award with one for World I Wouldn’t Want to Fall Into. And this honor easily goes to Ashfall, by Mike Mullin. Yeah, let’s just say it’s a bleak landscape after the super volcano hidden under Yellowstone erupts and destroys most of the country. (Runner up in the page turners and canned good categories too.)
7. New Writer to Watch. This is a tie between Jennifer Castle, author of the beautifully written novel The Beginning of After, about a girl coping in the year after her parents die (note: it is NOT as dark as it sounds), and Emily M. Danforth, author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, about a girl coping with her realization that she is a lesbian (note: it is not as dark as it sounds). Because both writers know how to tell a really good story and I can't wait to see what books they write next.
8. Awesome Series. There are so many to pick from in this category because, if you’ve spent any time perusing the YA section in your local bookstore (which I hope you do), series are very big these days. The award goes to Ally Condie’s Matched series, a thought-provoking, dystopian story of a girl growing up in what seems to be a perfect world. The sequel, Crossed, accomplishes what all writers of successful series dream of: it ups the ante while at the same time carrying through everything loyal readers of the first book loved.
9. Writer I Wish I Could Be. Another tie. First, Sara Zarr, author of this year’s moving and brilliant How To Save a Life (and for her entire body of work –Story of a Girl and Sweethearts and Once Was Lost—all I can say is I bow down to her talent. Ditto to Lauren Myracle for her moving and brilliant novel (that should have won a National Book Award!) Shine. (Love her other novels too, especially Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks and had the great honor of meeting Lauren at a book signing. Full disclosure: a picture of the two of us is my screen-saver on my cellphone.)
10. Novel That Changed the Way I View the World. Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley. The story of a boy in a small dying town whose brother goes missing, and a disturbed kid obsessed with the Book of Enoch, and the appearance of the thought to be extinct Lazarus bird. You might just discover the meaning of life in this one.

And maybe that’s what the ALA committee was thinking when they awarded it this year’s Printz Award.

Ah Love

Remember your first love? Remember that electric charge that shot through your fingertips when his hand brushed against yours? Remember waiting by the phone for his call? (For those under thirtyish: phones used to be attached to the wall, usually in the kitchen. If you were lucky, it had a long boingy cord you could stretch into another room so you could talk with some degree of privacy and not suffer your little brothers dancing around you chanting Jody’s got a boyfriend Jody’s got a boyfriend.) And remember when he dumped you for a girl named Stacy and you buried yourself under your covers and cried into your pillow until you had no tears left to shed and then you would torment yourself by accidentally on purpose running into him (and that twit, Stacy)?

Ah. Young love. There is nothing more wondrous and painful. And if you want to experience it again, in all its heartbreaking and dramatic glory, I’ve got the book for you.

But first, an aside about that still-bugging me article in the Wall Street Journal by Meghan Cox Gurdon. I heard her on NPR debating YA author Lauren Myracle, and I have to admit that she—Gurdon—sounded more reasonable and intelligent than I had assumed. But still. There is something that ticks me off about one person deciding what is appropriate reading material for an entire group. Kids (like, uh, people) are different. Some can handle more mature material and some aren’t emotionally ready for it yet. Some are exposed to far worse things in their own lives than ANYTHING they could read in a book. I’m sorry if there are some people out there who don’t understand that or don’t want to believe it. And I still maintain that kids will be drawn to the books they are ready for when they are ready to read them. In the end, they can always close the book. And as a former English teacher and mother of two teens, I can guarantee you, they will. I can also guarantee that when we tell kids NOT to read a book, it makes it all the more likely they will seek it out. This dates me, but the censored, “trashy” book when I was a teen was the series Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews. (Which also happens to be about young love, albeit of the twisted, incestuous variety.) Everyone I knew was reading these books, passing them around like they were illegal drugs under the cafeteria tables in our Catholic high school.

Love comes in many forms. And kids, who are trying to figure things out about the world of love, can safely and cathartically experience it in books. It might disturb adults that a teen’s first experience will be of four pale waifs locked in an attic by their evil selfish mother, but I’m going to assume that none of us rabid readers of VC Andrews thought that turning to our brother in times of crisis was a swell idea.

But okay. Let’s talk about a good book about love. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins. What makes a good book about love, you may be asking? Well, first, I think it has to have realistic, complex characters and not the one-dimensional variety of perfect, handsome boys with hard-planed chests. I don’t even know what this means exactly, but I’ve been coming across this description over and over again since I first read it in Twilight. Yes. Edward Cullen has a hard-planed chest. That’s also ice cold. Not sure why this is appealing to teen girls. I think I’d rather run my hands over a warm, hard-planed chest. But maybe that’s just me.

I don’t know what kind of chest Cricket Bell, the handsome boy in Lola and Boy Next Door, has. But I do know that he’s a brilliant inventor. He’s shy. He’s fiercely devoted to his twin sister who is an Olympic level figure skater. And his upstairs bedroom window is directly across from Lola’s upstairs bedroom window. Lola is a costume designer and creative wig wearer with a complicated family. Her two dads are over-protective, but only because they don’t like her boyfriend. It’s not Cricket. It’s Max, and Lola is crazy in love with him even though he’s much older and sometimes mocks her fashion style. Also, she’s still ticked off at Cricket for breaking her heart several years ago. And even though he was her first love, she’s not holding onto any feelings for him. Really. She’s over him. She loves Max now.

Perkins gives us a love triangle with real people (not vampires and werewolves) and no easy answers. Lola and the Boy Next Door is sweet and angsty, just like young love. It’ll be out in September so make a note to look for it in then. In the meantime, check out Perkins’ first book Anna and the French Kiss. It’s a perfect summer beach read that’ll have you time-traveling back to your teen years before twitty Stacy came into the picture and stole your first love.

Imaginary Spaces

A million years ago I heard Louis Sachar, Newbery author of one of my favorite books, Holes, speak at a conference. He started his talk by asking the audience what they thought was the most important aspect to consider when writing a book. People around me shouted out: “Characters, plot, theme!” But Sachar surprised us (or me, at least) by saying it was setting. At the time I thought of setting as background stuff, potentially boring description. Who cares where the characters are? What's important is what they're saying and doing. But Sachar went on to explain that setting is everything. In fact, in all of his books the setting is practically a character itself. Holes, for example, can’t take place anywhere except at Camp Green Lake. And his middle school series Sideways Stories at Wayside School can only happen in that bizarrely constructed school building.

I don’t know if I totally agree that setting is THE most important aspect of a book, but I definitely think it’s right up there with the other elements. Your characters can’t be floating around unmoored. They must move through a physical space somewhere. And done right a setting can come alive. Carolyn See in her writing manual Making a Literary Life talks about how certain people in our lives—the people we love or feel conflicted about or maybe even hate—family members, friends from childhood, the teacher who humiliated you in front of class in ninth grade—these people become our characters. At least variations of these people tend to show up in some form or another in the characters we create.

I think it’s the same with setting. Many of my Cicada stories take place at a college suspiciously like the one I attended. It’s the typical college campus in my head, with stone buildings and slate roofs. Sidewalks crisscrossing green lawns. An old pub in the center where they used to serve beer. The neighborhoods where my characters live are lined with the streets I walked when I was ten. There’s the park with the pond where we used to skate in the winter. There’s the patch of woods across the street I used to cut through to get to my piano lessons. The houses where my characters live are old. The kitchens are small. The bedrooms look out over the backyard. There is always an entryway where a mirror hangs on the wall.

I’m glad I’ve lived in several places over the years. And I’m glad I’ve moved away from them. Somehow you can see a place more clearly after you’ve left it. I’m not sure I could write about a place I’ve never been.

But maybe that’s not true. Just as the characters I’ve created are not totally based on people I’ve known, the settings I’ve plopped them into aren’t actually places where I’ve lived either. True, there might be a patch of woods across the street, but my pretend woods stretch on for miles. There’s a cave like the one I stumbled through near the Natural Bridge in Kentucky, the one where I almost had a panic attack in total darkness worrying that my kids would fall into an unseen crevice. There’s a stream that rushes along like the one that borders the town where I live now, but it’s also shallow in spots, like the one I tromped through at girl scout camp when I was twelve.

I just read a great YA novel that takes place in Paris, Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins.

It’s a sweet, angsty romance about a girl who’s sent to finish her senior year at an American boarding school in Paris. The girl is funny and clever, a want-to-be film critic who’s floundering at first with the language and culture and missing the goings on at home. The boy is half British and cute and afraid of heights. But it’s Paris that is the third character in this story. I heard that the author never visited the city before she wrote the book, which is just amazing to me. Of course, I’ve never been to Paris, so maybe she got some details wrong. Somehow I don’t think so.

That’s one of the cool things about being a writer. You get to use your imagination to create a world. Whether it is a real place or one that just feels like it should be.