Best of my blogs

Okay, I’ve been trying to think of a way to share all the cool books I’m learning about by reading different authors’ and reading blogs. I think I’m getting a little carried away with all this blogging, but this is some good stuff. You can find links to the blogs I follow on the right side of the page. Here are some highlights from this week.

We’ve talked about great first lines before.  I have to thank blogger David Elzy at Guys Lit Wire for this gem.  The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys by Scott William Carter begins like this:  “If I’m going to tell you how I killed this kid, I can’t start on the day it happened.  It won’t make any sense, and you’ll just think I was some psycho teenage boy with glue for brains.”  How can you not want to know what comes next? 

I also discovered nearly-to-be published writer and English teacher Beth Revis this week.  She has dedicated this week of blogging to exploring dystopia in YA literature.  Say dis-what?  Vocab lesson.  A dystopia is the opposite of utopia.  A utopia is a perfect world with no problems whatsoever.  How boring (at least for books).  A dystopia, on the other hand, is an imagined future world that has gone wrong,  sometimes way wrong.  I enjoyed reading this genre before I knew what either dystopia or utopia meant.  I see a lot of you reading it, too:  The Hunger Games, The Bar Code Tattoo, The Maze Runner, The Giver, Uglies.  Reading Beth’s blog this week led me to this fantastic list of dystopian novels.  I’ve read about a fifth of the series on his list.  Several are on my current books to be read list, but some are entirely new.  Aren’t you glad to know I won’t run out of ideas of books to read anytime soon?  How about you?

Thanks to the Goddess of Young Adult Literature, I discovered Countdown by Deborah Wiles, which stretches the boundaries of narrative fiction.  It combines the typical trials of growing up (zits, boys, parents) with the scary headlines of the 1960’s (Civil Rights, Cuban Missile Crisis).  The narrative is interrupted by the words and images of the day:  songs, speeches, headlines, photographs. 

The most exciting news to me is that I am now one of the honory merfolk.  (I think that makes me a mermaid.)  Check out the new book by Tera Lynn Childs called Forgive My Fins.  I’ll see you at the bookstore on June 1.

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