Reading Kidlit: Kids’ Books & the Kindle
In the era of the iPad, Amazon’s Kindle appears clunky and drab. The thumb tap keyboard is passe, the gray screen drab, and the lack of touchscreen so 2006. Yet, in some ways, the Kindle one-ups the iPad–lacking interactivity, the Kindle forces users to focus only on the text, provides a quick and easy way (via the OED and Wikipedia) to check a word meaning or make sense of a reference, offers a text to speech function, and has a battery life of around a week with wi-fi turned off. But...
Read MoreShades of Grey: A review (at SFWP.org)
My review of Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde has been published over the the Santa Fe Writers Project. There’s something compelling about a Jasper Fforde novel, something that sucks you into the story, tossing you alg until the end when it finally grinds you up and spits you out before you even know what’s happened. Fforde is a true satirist, not just pulling apart the way we tell stories, but pulling apart accepted critical conventions and putting them back together again,...
Read MoreReading YA: TV Parents Are Cool Again. So Why Are Book Parents Absent?
I know, I know, it’s been more than a week since I posted! But things on the Peta front are much better thanks to my interweb hiatus–I’ve finished draft 3.5 of the novel, had a marvelous birthday and wedding anniversary, and caught up on some much needed sleep. But YA news waits for no one, and it seems a lot has happened in the past week or so–including an interesting piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. According to WSJ’s Amy Chozick, television...
Read MoreReading: Frightening Fairy Tales or Sanitized Stories?
Fairy tales are a familiar part of most childhoods. All over the world, parents tell their children about Cinderella or Cendrillon or Yeh-Hsien or even the Egyptian Cinderella, Rhodopis. At least, they used to. According to a January 2009 article in The Telegraph, parents are skipping the once popular tales in favor of simpler, safer stories such as Eric Carle’s 1969 classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Why? Because fairy tales are scary, not PC, and outdated. Too Frightening for...
Read MoreReading Kid Lit: Are We Stripping Away Necessary Realities?
In some ways, being a kid is like living in a hamster ball: you’re seen but not heard see more than everyone else realizes; and when things get prickly, it’s pretty easy to roll the ball into a more convenient locale ‘til everything’s sorted. Recent years have shown a surge in edgy, almost razor sharp issue-tackling YA, with books running the gamut from teen-mother-abandons-new-baby (Amy Efaw’s After) to drug use and suicide (John Green’s Looking For Alaska). But kid lit–what...
Read MoreToo Much Pop Culture? A Look at Lise Haines’ Girl in the Arena
Is there such a thing as too much pop culture? Can characters drink too much Coke, play too much Xbox, and eat too many power bars? (*cough* Tom Clancy, *cough*) Or does the instant reader familiarity and cheat relatability make this level detail of worthwhile? Read more @ PopMatters…
Read More